Treason and Patriotism

by Gary Bauer

America’s leftists have often had a difficult time recognizing treasonous acts among their own. Hanoi Jane Fonda sided with the Communist North Vietnamese and defamed American POWs, and the Left embraced her as its spokeswoman. Sean Penn consorted with anti-American despots, and the Left in Hollywood gave him an Oscar.


So it was surprising this week to learn that a leading liberal columnist finally got the nerve to call out those who work to undermine their nation’s security. This week New York Times polemicist Paul Krugman boldly decried U.S. lawmakers for the “unforgiveable” offense of ignoring an “existential threat” to “future generations of Americans.”


Sadly, Krugman was not holding liberal lawmakers accountable for their willful blindness to the threat of Islamic terrorism. Instead, Krugman accused the 212 members of the House of Representatives (mostly Republicans) who voted against the Waxman-Markey energy tax bill of “treason -- treason against the planet.”

Never mind that an increasing body of evidence calls into question the science of global warming. Conservatives sinned against what has become liberal orthodoxy, so they deserved the harshest response possible.


Krugman ought to recognize treasonous acts when he sees them. After all, the actions of his employer, the Times, could have been defined as treasonous when in 2006 the newspaper revealed the details of a secret government program to monitor the financial transactions of suspected terrorists.


Unreported in the New York Times (other than in a reader comment in a jokes section) was news of authentic treason in the United States. A Maryland couple has been indicted for spying for the Cuban government. Walter Kendall Myers, who worked for the State Department, and his wife were recently arrested after a three-year investigation.


Their alleged 30 years of spying included delivering government secrets to Cuban agents by using shortwave radio, swapping carts with sensitive information at a grocery stores and at least one face-to-face encounter with El Comandante himself.


Prosecutors said the Myers talked to an undercover FBI agent about how they would like to sail “home” to Cuba one day. If the Myers had managed to do so, they might have come across the steady stream of Cubans risking their lives in the perilous Mexican gulf waters to obtain a shot at freedom in America.


Our president seems to share the Left’s ambivalence about the country whose people elected him to lead it. In his tours of Europe and the Middle East, Obama has regularly apologized for America and all its sins, real and imagined, while seeing little to dislike about the rest of the world, especially those parts that breed homicide bombers.


In Cairo, Obama saw fit to compare the situation of religious minorities in the Muslim world with that of Muslims in America. But whereas Christians and Jews throughout the Islamic world are often executed or forced to convert, the only restriction Obama could find on American Muslims is that they are prohibited -- as are all Americans -- from donating to charities linked to terrorist organizations.


It is no wonder our president is of two minds about his country. Obama has always surrounded himself with people who see the worst in America. Bill Ayers participated in terrorist bombings of police departments, the U.S. capital and the Pentagon. Obama mentor and pastor Jeremiah Wright routinely blamed the American government for conspiracies including the spread of AIDS and the 9-11 attacks. These baseless rants usually included a chorus of “God d---, America!”


Michelle Obama said her husband’s political success marked the first time she had ever been proud of her country. But most Americans don’t love their country according to how they are doing personally. They love it because of the democratic values it stands for and stands upon, and the opportunities it provides them.


Obama’s reactions to events in Iran and Honduras tell us something about what he thinks of those values. During the beginning stages of the Iranian pro-democracy protests, Obama hesitated to “meddle” or criticize the Ahmadinejad regime. For days he desperately tried to “avoid alienating the ayatollah,” as the Washington Post commented.


Meanwhile in Honduras this week, Obama did not hesitate to act. When former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya attempted to amend the nation’s constitution, without the permission of the Honduran Congress, to allow him to seek reelection after his term expires, the Honduran Supreme Court declared Zelaya’s action illegal. Then, acting on the court’s orders, the Honduran military intervened, ousted the wanna-be dictator and gave him a one-way ticket out of the country, then immediately turned the country over to its civilian leadership and the Honduran Congress swore in its speaker, Roberto Micheletti, as the new president.


If there ever was such a thing as a “legitimate coup,” this may have been it. But President Barack Obama declared that the United States still considers Manuel Zelaya to be the president of Honduras and assailed the coup that forced him into exile as “not legal.”
Our president has thus far been unwilling to stand up for democratic values abroad. But most Americans will celebrate those values this weekend nonetheless, and will honor the sacrifices made to sustain us, sacrifices that continue today.


In fact, across this country and around the world, our men and women in the U.S. military will stand a post in Afghanistan, Iraq, South Korea, Japan, Germany and elsewhere, defending the helpless and protecting our people, dedicated to the democratic principles that made this nation great.


America has been a shining city on a hill, and our founding documents, like the Declaration of Independence, have breathed life into the hearts of oppressed peoples around the world. In celebrating the birth of this unique nation, it’s a good time to recite the words of freedom, found in our Declaration, which offer hope to all who hear them:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer is president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families.

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Former presidential candidate Mr. Gary Bauer is president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families.

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The Cap and Tax Fiction

Democrats off-loading economics to pass climate change bill.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has put cap-and-trade legislation on a forced march through the House, and the bill may get a full vote as early as Friday. It looks as if the Democrats will have to destroy the discipline of economics to get it done.

Despite House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman's many payoffs to Members, rural and Blue Dog Democrats remain wary of voting for a bill that will impose crushing costs on their home-district businesses and consumers. The leadership's solution to this problem is to simply claim the bill defies the laws of economics.

Their gambit got a boost this week, when the Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of what has come to be known as the Waxman-Markey bill. According to the CBO, the climate legislation would cost the average household only $175 a year by 2020. Edward Markey, Mr. Waxman's co-author, instantly set to crowing that the cost of upending the entire energy economy would be no more than a postage stamp a day for the average household. Amazing. A closer look at the CBO analysis finds that it contains so many caveats as to render it useless.

Associated Press

Henry Waxman

For starters, the CBO estimate is a one-year snapshot of taxes that will extend to infinity. Under a cap-and-trade system, government sets a cap on the total amount of carbon that can be emitted nationally; companies then buy or sell permits to emit CO2. The cap gets cranked down over time to reduce total carbon emissions.

To get support for his bill, Mr. Waxman was forced to water down the cap in early years to please rural Democrats, and then severely ratchet it up in later years to please liberal Democrats. The CBO's analysis looks solely at the year 2020, before most of the tough restrictions kick in. As the cap is tightened and companies are stripped of initial opportunities to "offset" their emissions, the price of permits will skyrocket beyond the CBO estimate of $28 per ton of carbon. The corporate costs of buying these expensive permits will be passed to consumers.

The biggest doozy in the CBO analysis was its extraordinary decision to look only at the day-to-day costs of operating a trading program, rather than the wider consequences energy restriction would have on the economy. The CBO acknowledges this in a footnote: "The resource cost does not indicate the potential decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap."

The hit to GDP is the real threat in this bill. The whole point of cap and trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas so that Americans will use less. These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars. Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment. Some companies will instead move their operations overseas, with the same result.

When the Heritage Foundation did its analysis of Waxman-Markey, it broadly compared the economy with and without the carbon tax. Under this more comprehensive scenario, it found Waxman-Markey would cost the economy $161 billion in 2020, which is $1,870 for a family of four. As the bill's restrictions kick in, that number rises to $6,800 for a family of four by 2035.

Note also that the CBO analysis is an average for the country as a whole. It doesn't take into account the fact that certain regions and populations will be more severely hit than others -- manufacturing states more than service states; coal producing states more than states that rely on hydro or natural gas. Low-income Americans, who devote more of their disposable income to energy, have more to lose than high-income families.

Even as Democrats have promised that this cap-and-trade legislation won't pinch wallets, behind the scenes they've acknowledged the energy price tsunami that is coming. During the brief few days in which the bill was debated in the House Energy Committee, Republicans offered three amendments: one to suspend the program if gas hit $5 a gallon; one to suspend the program if electricity prices rose 10% over 2009; and one to suspend the program if unemployment rates hit 15%. Democrats defeated all of them.

The reality is that cost estimates for climate legislation are as unreliable as the models predicting climate change. What comes out of the computer is a function of what politicians type in. A better indicator might be what other countries are already experiencing. Britain's Taxpayer Alliance estimates the average family there is paying nearly $1,300 a year in green taxes for carbon-cutting programs in effect only a few years.

Americans should know that those Members who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history. Even Democrats can't repeal that reality.

Cap-and-Tax Hits the Floor This Friday

By Michele Bachmann

It appears the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy tax will be on the House floor for a vote this Friday. This legislation is an economic time bomb for our nation's already struggling economy and despite Democrats’ best attempts to frame it as a necessary measure to stop global warming, cap-and-trade is merely a gigantic tax and huge revenue booster for our federal government to allow them to keep spending and fund more government programs. No matter which analysis of this bill you look at, it means higher costs for all Americans. The CBO predicts that the rise in prices would hit low-income households the hardest as these homes spend a larger fraction of their income on energy needs compared to those with higher incomes. It will especially impact those Americans living in Midwest states who get most of their energy from coal-fired utilities and have large manufacturing sectors. One Minnesota company speaking up against this cap-and-tax bill is Holiday Stationstores, headquartered in Bloomington, MN. They have serious concerns about the low carbon fuel standard in this bill and its effects on the Upper Midwest. They shared their concerns in a letter to Minnesota Congressman Collin Peterson, Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, at the time this bill was reviewed by his committee: "…Minnesota has among the cleanest burning fuels in the United States. However, Minnesota and a number of other Midwest states also rely heavily on transportation fuels that – while cleaner – are considered by some to have a large carbon footprint. “The concept of a low carbon fuel standard itself is especially problematic for Midwest states. Unlike California, which produces much of its own crude, the Midwest relies on crude from Canada.... In Minnesota, for example, more than 80 percent of the state's crude supply comes from Canada. Although it's plentiful, Canadian crude is typically denser and requires more energy to produce than lighter and sweeter crudes. This makes it arguably more carbon intensive than crude derived from places like the Middle East." The ones paying the price for this shortsighted bill are the businesses like Holiday Superstores who will be hit just for staying in business. And even worse, it's you and me who will ultimately feel the pain through skyrocketing energy costs. This plan is wrong in its premise and in its execution. With our economy struggling as it is right now, how can we afford to raise energy costs? To educate yourself on what cap-and-tax really means for you and your family, check out what the Heritage Foundation has to offer.