Awww, how cute, they’re like little Al Gores. Via The Atlantic: Alec Loorz turns 18 at the end of this month. While finishing high school and playing Ultimate Frisbee on weekends, he’s also suing the federal government in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. The Ventura, California, teen and four other juvenile plaintiffs want government
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High School Students Sue Federal Government Over Global Warming…
North Carolina, dubbed “Hollywood East” by doubling as a set for Forrest Gump , The Green Mile , and many other motion pictures, on Tuesday affirmed traditional marriage by an overwhelming majority at the ballot box. Hollywood West vented its displeasure on Twitter accounts. Mia Farrow, who became pregnant with twins as their father remain married to another woman, tweeted, “Oh North Carolina — the disappointment we feel now is nothing compared to the bewilderment & shame your children will feel.” Andy Richter, longtime sidekick to late-night host Conan O’Brien, opined Tuesday night: “Tonight the voters of NC bravely threw themselves under the steamroller of history.” But history is what we have experienced and not what we wish for. Thirty-two states have voted on marriage. Thirty-two states have affirmed marriage as between one man and one woman. Which side, really, has thrown itself “under the steamroller of history”? Echoing Democrat threats to move the party’s national convention from Charlotte, Roseanne Barr tweeted, “[H]ollywood withdraw your productions from NC!” Hollywood, which didn’t withdraw from California after it rejected gay marriage in 2008, has long since withdrawn Rosanne Barr from its productions. This, more than anything voters on the other side of the country did, best explains the rant. Barr last appeared on the silver screen in the mid-1990s, and since the cancellation of her hit television show in 1997, roles on the idiot box have been scarce, too. It’s been six years since she last made a guest acting appearance on primetime television. North Carolina, on the other hand, served as the set for this year’s bestselling movie. In Cleveland County, the set of The Hunger Games ’s “District 12,” 17,779 voters supported Amendment 1 and just 4,406 opposed. More relevant than those figures is this one: 618,574,650 — the number of dollars filmgoers worldwide have forked over to see the movie. An even more relevant number to understanding why filmmakers shot The Hunger Games entirely in North Carolina is $15 million. That’s the estimated tax credit the makers of The Hunger Games will reap from the Tar Heel State. Don’t expect Hollywood to return the tainted money anytime soon. Hollywood hasn’t been generous to North Carolina in the wake of Tuesday’s vote. But North Carolina has been quite generous to Hollywood. The state offers one of the nation’s most enticing tax-incentive programs to production companies. Last year, Tar Heel taxpayers forked over $5,071,322 in tax credits to Journey 2: The Mysterious Island . In its three-season run, the HBO series Eastbound and Down has siphoned $3,740,884 from North Carolina. The CW Network’s One Tree Hill has drained a whopping $27 million from the state’s coffers over the last five years. Even Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment body-slammed the state for $135,401. That was its reward for shooting Raw and Smackdown at arenas in Charlotte and Raleigh in 2010. WWE? WTF? Hollywood welfare, like actual welfare, overflows with abuse. Last month, a Massachusetts court found filmmaker Daniel Adams guilty of defrauding the Bay State out of more than $4 million in tax credits by inflating his costs on The Lightkeepers
It’s bad form to laugh in front of a casket, so I dutifully suppressed the chuckle. The body of my grandfather Raymond Sylvester Lott was in pretty good shape, considering, but his eyebrows were almost completely gone. As with almost every aspect of Gramps’s life, there was a story there. His weekend cabin on the North Fork of the Lewis River was heated by a wood-burning stove. He had tried to get some logs to light, but they were too wet to catch. So of course he added gasoline. The flames exploded everywhere. Gramps was lucky the fire didn’t burn the place to the ground. He escaped to tell the tale, but those patches of hair above his eyes that he had used to punctuate so many jokes and yarns over the years were scorched right off. I have just read dozens of stories from Gramps’s own hand. When he turned 80, my family gave him a notebook decorated in a fishing fly pattern and told him to fill it up with his recollections and cast it back at us. He wrote them up and titled the composition, “The Tales & Yarns of a Life Well Lived.” It traveled with us as we moved from place to place. Finally, this year, I dusted it off and had it transcribed. Now I’m trying to figure out what to do with it all. Maybe you can help me out, dear reader. The memoir does have some historical value, even in its current, highly subjective form. My Great-Grandparents Charles and Anna Lott came from Illinois on a wagon train headed for the California gold rush, but they didn’t make it all the way. Charles got in an argument (“perhaps shaped by alcohol,” Gramps suggests) with the wagon master and he let them off along the way. Their daughter Ida was abducted by Crow Indians in Montana, but they gave her back in trade for some horses. The family eventually settled down in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in Lowell. His mother’s family, the Russells, hailed from Texas. They came to Oregon along with the cattle they drove there, though Grandpa Russell caught tuberculosis and returned to Texas where he was “gathered to his ancestors.” Our author puts it like that because Grandpa Russell was one-quarter Indian. “I have always been proud of my 1/16th,” he explains, “but it does me no good whatsoever. It just makes me want to hunt and fish!” His other passion was electricity. As a child he would tinker with electrical equipment in the basement. When I was young, I asked him for a Transformer toy for my birthday. He misunderstood and gave me an electrical transformer instead. For more than 20 years, he worked for Otis Elevator Company. He believes the company pulled strings to keep him out of World War II. He serviced elevators, but his real job was to find a way to keep problem customers happy. At one point, he bribed a customer with some of Otis’s extra gasoline ration cards to stop bellyaching. An able storyteller, Gramps includes a few family mysteries here. Great-Grandma and Grandpa Lott were “running from something,” but no one knows what. Charles wanted to tell his kids on his deathbed, but Anna said, “No, Pa, don’t tell ‘em; I’ll tell them later.” She then suffered a stroke “and never awakened!” For my part, I’ve always figured Lott was an assumed name. When he was looking to buy his cabin, Gramps had to scrape $2,500 together in a week. “I can’t tell you where I got the money but I borrowed some of it somewhere,” he teases. I’m guessing, loan shark. The manuscript is short — a little more than 20,000 words — and it’s not up to professional standards, because it was never meant to be a professional memoir. In the foreword, Gramps warns, “This book will be full of grammatical errors, lousy spelling, and dangling participles!” I wouldn’t release it to the world in its current form, of course. But I keep wondering: What if I cleaned it up a bit? What if I wrote an intro and notes and released it as an e-book? Would anybody be interested?
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Oregon Tale
RedState Morning Briefing May 8, 2012 Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge. 1. Operation Counterweight Comes To Indiana 2. Obama Was Against Disavowing. Before He Was For It. 3. Remember to Vote Yes to Amendment 1 In North Carolina 4. Wisconsin Democrats’ Divided House 5. Tax Code Tweak Might Make CNG for Vehicles More Available ———————————————————————- 1. Operation Counterweight Comes To Indiana Indiana Republicans go to the polls tomorrow to decide whether to re-nominate 80-year-old 36-year Senate veteran Richard Lugar or to pick instead State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, running as the conservative alternative. In the usual course of events, my advice for activists and pundits alike in these races is to not forget that every race is unique, based on the individual candidates, the state or district, and the issue environment of the day. Not every state is Utah or Rhode Island; not every conservative is Marco Rubio or Christine O’Donnell; not every moderate is Chris Christie or Jim Jeffords. Often (but not always), the better candidate wins, whether or not that candidate is the most conservative, the most Establishment-backed, or considered the most ‘electable’ by pundits and political pros. That being said, the conditions of 2012 – specifically, the now-certain nomination of Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate for president – call for conservatives to take a harder line than ever in supporting Operation Counterweight (William Jacobson’s term), in particular to seek in Senate races what David Freddoso has called “an un-bossable Senate.” Party insiders expect conservatives, Tea Party-style outsiders and single-issue social conservatives to show up to vote anyway for a party whose leader is a man many of us distrust on nearly every issue. Politics, they remind us, is compromise. And that’s precisely my point: it is exactly because one side of the party got Romney that the other can less afford to swallow Romney-like figures in the Senate. That doesn’t mean backing the most conservative candidate in every single race without considering any other factor – but it does mean giving more than usual preference to the more conservative and/or less establishment option in Senate races. It’s not about demanding absolute party purity – it’s about recognizing that Romney has sopped up most of our tolerance for impurity already. If you want a Senate that will hold Romney’s feet to the fire, you have to start by replacing men like Dick Lugar and, in Utah, 78-year old Orrin Hatch. Please click here for the rest of the post. 2. Obama Was Against Disavowing. Before He Was For It. You have to love the era of YouTube. Nothing gets past us these days because it’s all on tape! Although somehow people are still questioning what someone said even when it is on tape. Either way, it makes for great moments in campaign years. Take for instance this little diddy that took place on the Romney trail. Please click here for the rest of the post. 3. Remember to Vote Yes to Amendment 1 In North Carolina Today voters in North Carolina will go to the polls to consider Amendment 1, a constitutional amendment to ensure liberal judges and gay rights activists are prohibited from changing the definition of marriage under North Carolina law. Polls suggest the measure will pass. But then polls suggested the Personhood Amendment in Mississippi would also pass and it did not. The Republican Primary is largely over in North Carolina, except in some contested seats. Republicans may not want to turn out. I do hope they turn out to vote for Scott Keadle, however, in his race. And I hope they turn out and join Latino voters and black voters as they did in California to support traditional marriage. In 31 states that have considered constitutional amendments to uphold traditional marriage, all 31 have passed those amendments. Republicans should go to the polls in North Carolina to make sure North Carolina becomes the 32nd state to uphold traditional marriage. Please click here for the rest of the post. 4. Wisconsin Democrats’ Divided House The Wisconsin Democratic Party had scheduled a unity rally the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow, Democrat voters will go to the polls to pick a candidate to put up against Scott Walker in the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall. Well, it seems the preferred candidate isn’t going to win and the Democrats have said to heck with unity. The Unity Rally is cancelled. It won’t happen. There will be no unity from the party leadership on down. It’s every man and union goon for themselves as they try to unseat Scott Walker. Please click here for the rest of the post. 5. Tax Code Tweak Might Make CNG for Vehicles More Available Rep. William Cassidy (R-LA) common-sense approach to increasing the role of natural gas as a vehicle fuel, without the grandiose involvement of the Federal government. Unlike the Pickens Plan, this plan does not rely on massive government subsidies or direct payments for vehicle conversion. Instead, it would change the definition of “independent producer” in the tax code, to get around their current prohibition from making retail sales exceeding $5 million per year. Please click here for the rest of the post.
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Morning Briefing for May 8, 2012
The “Occupy” movement, which the Obama administration and much of the media have embraced, has implications that reach far beyond the passing sensation it has created. The unwillingness of authorities to put a stop to their organized disruptions of other people’s lives, their trespassing, vandalism and violence is a de facto suspension, if not repeal, of the 14th Amendment’s requirement that the government provide “equal protection of the laws” to all its citizens. How did the “Occupy” movement acquire such immunity from the laws that the rest of us are expected to obey? Simply by shouting politically correct slogans and calling themselves representatives of the 99 percent against the 1 percent. But just when did the 99 percent elect them as their representatives? If in fact 99 percent of the people in the country were like these “Occupy” mobs, we would not have a country. We would have anarchy. Democracy does not mean mob rule. It means majority rule. If the “Occupy” movement, or any other mob, actually represents a majority, then they already have the votes to accomplish legally whatever they are trying to accomplish by illegal means. Mob rule means imposing what the mob wants, regardless of what the majority of voters want. It is the antithesis of democracy. In San Francisco, when the mob smashed the plate-glass window of a small business shop, the owner put up some plywood to replace the glass, and the mob wrote graffiti on his plywood. The consequences? None for the mob, but a citation for the shop owner for not removing the graffiti. When trespassers blocking other people at the University of California, Davis refused to disperse, and locked their arms with one another to prevent the police from being able to physically remove them, the police finally resorted to pepper spray to break up this human logjam. The result? The police have been strongly criticized for enforcing the law. Apparently pepper spray is unpleasant, and people who break the law are not supposed to have unpleasant things done to them. Which is to say, we need to take the “enforcement” out of “law enforcement.” Everybody is not given these exemptions from paying the consequences of their own illegal acts. Only people who are currently in vogue with the elites of the left — in the media, in politics and in academia. The 14th Amendment? What is the Constitution or the laws when it comes to ideological soul mates, especially young soul mates who remind the aging 1960s radicals of their youth? Neither in this or any other issue can the Constitution protect us if we don’t protect the Constitution. When all is said and done, the Constitution is a document, a piece of paper. If we don’t vote out of office, or impeach, those who violate the Constitution, or who refuse to enforce the law, the steady erosion of Constitutional protections will ultimately render it meaningless. Everything will just become a question of whose ox is gored and what is the political expediency of the moment. There has been much concern, rightly expressed, about the rusting of bridges around the country, and the crumbling and corrosion of other parts of the physical infrastructure. But the crumbling of the moral infrastructure is no less deadly. The police cannot maintain law and order, even if the political authorities do not tie their hands in advance or undermine them with second-guessing after the fact. The police are the last line of defense against barbarism, but they are equipped only to handle that minority who are not stopped by the first lines of defense, beginning with the moral principles taught at home and upheld by families, schools, and communities. But if everyone takes the path of least resistance — if politicians pander to particular constituencies and judges give only wrist slaps to particular groups or mobs who are currently in vogue, and educators indoctrinate their students with “non-judgmental” attitudes — then the moral infrastructure corrodes and crumbles. The moral infrastructure is one of the intangibles, without which the tangibles don’t work. Like the physical infrastructure, its neglect in the short run invites disaster in the long run.
