Today's Blue Plate Special Of Truth

There's nothing like the combination of fighting spirit, political stamina, and legislative pro-activity on an issue that is an affront to the very ideal of democracy:

Republicans moved aggressively on Wednesday to seize the initiative in the upcoming fight over union-friendly “card check” legislation, simultaneously introducing bills in both the House and Senate that would protect workers’ rights to vote on union representation in private.

“We think it’s an issue where the American people are completely on our side,” Republican Study Committee spokesman Brendan Buck tells Newsmax. “So we want to be sure we’re out there letting them know that [card check] would strip away their rights in the workplace.”

Card check, euphemistically called the Employee Free Choice Act, is a Democratic proposal that would have workers sign cards indicating whether they want a union. The cards would be public documents, thereby eliminating the current system by which workers vote confidentially.

Public figures ranging from former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern to former Bush Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao have slammed card check as undemocratic and dangerous.

Once workers’ votes on unionization become public, they warn, employees could be exposed to intimidation by union toughs.

“The secret ballot is a pillar of American democracy,” Representative Tom Price, R-GA, said Wednesday. Price, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said Democrats want card check to “advance a political agenda.”

Union members vote disproportionately Democratic. Card check is highly coveted by organized labor because it is expected to swell the ranks of unions.

The Republican bill, called the Secret Ballot Protection Act, would prevent the recognition of any union formed via an open, public ballot.

Sounds like hostage-taking, doesn' it?  "Join the union, or else," in so many words.  Followed by, "vote Democrat, or else."  And the damage that an unchecked, mafia-ized Big Labor would do to both the American body politic and the private sector economy - it'd be incalculable.  Gone woud be business innovation and flexibility and productivity.  Business small and large would be ensnared, wrestled to the proverbial ground, and bound & gagged with constrictive restrictions and saddled with ruinous wage & benefit costs.  The balance between management and labor, the boundless prosperity of 1982-2007, and the freedom of workers would all be destroyed.

I've long argued that in the economy of the 21st century, unions are obsolete relics of a bygone era that serve no useful purpose, and certainly nothing like what they were originally created to address.  Instead they are the brownshirts of the Donk Left (Remember the 1996 "Mediscare" campaign?), Red Barry's rabblerousers working toward liberalism's sacred goal of bringing down the American economy in preparation for the final transformation of the U.S. into a one-party communist state.

And congressional Republicans, God bless 'em, are not waiting for the hammer to fall but are framing the issue first (protecting American workers from the Big Labor thugs who would kidnap them) so as to put the Democrats on the PR defensive.  Another plank in a 2010/2012 populist GOP platform that will well-nigh unstoppable.

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In a similar vein, the whistle-blowing chorus against the Global Warming Hoax continues to get bigger and louder.  And its newest members hail from the land of the rising driver of Earth's climate:

Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the United Nations’ view on man-made global warming with a report asserting that “this hypothesis has been substituted for truth.”

Three of the five researchers involved in the report disagree with the view of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that recent warming is due primarily to industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, and say it is instead driven by natural cycles.

The report was issued by the Japan Society of Energy and Resources, an academic group representing scientists from the energy and resource fields that acts as a government advisory panel. The report has been translated from the Japanese by The Register in Britain.

Kanya Kusano, Program Director for the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology, compares computer climate modeling used to support the man-made global warming theory to “ancient astrology.”

He states that the IPCC’s “conclusion that from now on atmospheric temperatures are likely to show a continuous, monotonous increase should be perceived as an unprovable hypothesis.”

Shunichi Akasofu, head of the International Arctic Research Center in Alaska, agrees: “IPCC’s theory that atmospheric temperature has risen since 2000 in correspondence with [carbon dioxide increases] is nothing but a hypothesis.”

Among the points made in the report:

CO2 emissions began to increase significantly after 1946 and are still rising. Therefore, according to the IPCC, global atmospheric temperatures should continue to increase. However, temperatures stopped increasing in 2001.

The global temperature increase up to today is primarily a recovery from the “Little Ice Age” that Earth experienced from 1400 to 1800. This rise peaked in 2000.

Global warming and the “halting of the temperature rise are related to solar activity.” [emphases added] 

As poetic as the old Bhuddist canard of the beat of a butterfly's wing setting off a chain of events triggering the continent-spanning hypercane with super-duper freeze ray capability in The Day After Tomorrow may be, as a scientific climatological model, it bears far more than a passing resemblance to those little nuggets that keep turning up in my cat's litter box on a daily basis.  It doesn't require a phD to grasp that the biggest, the overwhelming single factor outweighing all the others by crushing proportions in the determination of terrestrial climate change or lack thereof is not anything poor, old mankind could EVER do, but that big lamp hanging in the sky, otherwise known as Sol.  Shutting down our modern post-industrial society and reverting back to agrarian, hunter-gathering, cave-dwelling primitivism (other than the Obamunist oberfuehrers whose jobs it would be to keep us there, or else - they never apply their demiurgical commandments to themselves) would not halt climate change in any direction one jot or tittle - but it sure would give Democrats a whooooole lotta power.

Which makes this follow-up all the more telling:

An analysis by the Center for Public Integrity found that more than 770 companies and interest groups hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists in the past year to influence federal policy.

Politico.com notes that since 2003, the number of global warming lobbyists has risen by more than 300%, and “Washington can now boast more than four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress.”

If global warming and modern civilization being the cause of it are the "facts" that greenstremist Elmer Gantreys like Fat Albert claim, why would lobbying even be necessary?  Particularly in a Congress as lopsidedly Donk as this one?

UPDATE: So much for Red Barry's "cap & trade" scheme.  Guess it'll go right along with all the other failed hard-left nonsense he's bulldozing through anyway.  I'd say he's slitting his own throat, only Obamunists don't appear to HAVE necks.