The American Spectator

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If Slogans Were Jobs

8.15.08 @ 12:01AM

RAINBOW ECONOMY
Re: Peter Ferrara's Flower Power:

Compliments to Mr. Ferrara for his discussion of Mr. Obama's economic plans for us. He would have been even more correct if he had included the Democrat Party as an equal driving force for changing our economic system to a complete command-and-control system.

The Democrat party, and Mr. Obama, are all about solidifying and strengthening political power and not helping people. Mr. Obama, if elected, will nominate, and the Democrats will confirm, the most liberal people possible for judges and then attacks on the Constitution will increase. The ACLU and the environmental non-profit lawyers will lay down a perfect barrage of lawsuits to remove whatever economic freedoms remain in our current days of already extensive regulation.

Dare I say we are looking at a looming socialist/communist/marxist future?
-- Nelson Ward
Cowles, New Mexico

Peter Ferrara wonders how much "the American people will suffer" before they realize that Democrat-style socialism is a sham. The answer is simple: as much as they deserve to, if they willingly vote these redistributionist hacks into, or back into, office.
-- Arnold Ahlert
Boca Raton, Florida

Wow! I have been touting this same eventual outcome since reading and hearing what the messiah and the dumbocrats have been spoon feeding his mindless supporters. There can be no doubt now that Obama is indeed at best a socialist, although given his and his followers inclination to rule certain topics of conversation as off limits lest apostates offend his eminence or question his greatness, it appears to me the road to a liberal/socialist fascism would be on a slippery slope to hell. I agree with Mr. Ferrara that it wouldn't take long for Americans to rise up and kick the messiah and his socialism to the curb, unfortunately the current state of the world has a short learning curve given the Islamic threat, the new Russian bear, etc. In short, I worry we don't have a big enough window to be able to afford playing utopian games with a man who either clearly has no idea what he's doing...or worse.
-- Stuart Reed
Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan

A kudos (it's singular) to Peter Ferrara for coming as close as I've seen in print to Obama's projected attack on the living standards of "ordinary" Americans. There's really only one method of extracting our own oil and gas that the Left oppose, and that's any kind that works -- hence their eternal red herrings of wind and solar pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by.

Ferrara might have gone further, and drawn the obvious conclusion: that those lower living standards are not an unfortunate by-product of the Left's covert aganda, but its very raison d'etre; you see, we don't deserve to live as high on the hog as we've been doing! The Left doesn't want us to have that oil and gas -- the environment is only being used as a pretext.

Never take a Leftist at his own valuation!
-- John Lowry
Terre Haute, Indiana

What a nightmare! Wind, solar, photovoltaic cells, hydrogen, biofuels -- all of them already old, explored, expensive, destructive of environment. I am a retired engineer, 75 years old; my first solar project in 1964 at UCLA was a fake -- it produced limited heating under California sun for a single-story department store at the cost of about 5 times that of electric power. Solar power plants -- we designed and built them, small though they were (about 100 megawatts with the sun in zenith); they covered a lot of land while killing all life under those convex (or was it concave?) mirrors and cost some 1$/kilowatt-hour. Their cost was absorbed by law into the overall production by electric utilities, raising the average cost of kilowatt-hour from 7 cents to 8 cents. We also built wind farms on hilltops (those turbines are veritable cuisinarts for birds -- large ones, too, such as eagles and albatrosses); their cost of some $2 per kilowatt-hour was also by law sunk into the overall costs by utility companies.

Geothermal power -- that technology is older than either wind or solar by several decades; such plants have operated since the 1950's in California, the Philippines, Mexico. The residues of the hot stuff released from the earth contains highly radioactive Strontium and Cesium in addition to Arsenic, all to be buried in land fills. Their cost of about 20 cents per kilowatt-hour is also mixed in the normal electric power cost, thus hiding it from the public scrutiny. Well, how about hydrogen cells? Hydrogen is produced by electrolysis of water, using huge amounts of electric power from coal, oil, gas, or nuclear power plants; then it has to be placed into heavy steel containers under pressure of several thousand pounds. Just like ethanol, hydrogen production is energy-negative; in addition, imagine a head-on collision of two such cars in a city intersection -- some four blocks of apartment buildings rendered into dust. Finally we come to photovoltaic cells - also an old technology. When used on space vehicles to run computers, their cost of some $200 per kilowatt-hour is justified for such a purpose -- but to run our factories, cars, and trucks? Plug-in hybrids? We already have those -- remember golf carts? And the electricity in those plugs -- where will it be produced and how? To call these technologies new is a height of ignorance -- but what else would you expect from our aging and criminally ignorant flower children?
--Marc Jeric
Las Vegas, Nevada

Comprehensive and powerful! I wish Liberals had the courage to read this and study its clarity! Thank you,
-- Tim Dougherty
Granite Bay, California

NOTHING LIKE THEY USED TO BE
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. and Alan B. Somers' In Michael Phelps' Skin:

As this argument must inevitably be compared to golf's advances in technology and the effects it has had on that game (which are drastic and undeniable), golf's progress and current state also argue for the advances of technology. Actually, that is the same with most American sports.

Most true American sports fans see change in a game and have a problem with it -- regardless of the effects. Metal drivers in golf make comparing modern scores to a persimmons player skewed. The dead-ball and the lower pitcher's mound in baseball slip people's mind when they say steroids is the only thing that makes comparing modern stats to the Golden Era's impossible. I would also bet the Air Jordans were a whole lot more comfortable than Cousey's PF Flyers. And take a look at football players in full uniform today compared to 50 years ago.

Letter to the Editor

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