01 Jan 2002 Richard Nixon and Aaron Sorkin: A Love Story, People are the Problem, more

 

Thanks to a Landmark Legal Foundation lawsuit, we now know that the EPA has given more than $300,000 over eight years to the Salt Lake City-based Center for Resource Management for an ongoing project entitled “Golf and the Environment.”

Paul Parker, executive vice president, says the project brings together the golf industry and environmentalists.

We suspect he’s right.

(For more, see http://www.landmarklegal.org/epa_lawsuit.cfm.).

 

“The West Wing” TV show producer Aaron Sorkin asserts that Al Gore should have been elected president because Gore is smarter than Bush ­ demonstrable, Sorkin says, by candidate Gore’s superior résumé.

We take it that Sorkin, had he been old enough in 1960, would have voted for Nixon over Kennedy.

(Sorkin’s résumé isn’t even as good as Bush’s, but if you want to read his views anyway they can be found in the New Yorker at http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?talk/020304ta_talk_friend.)

 

The League of Conservation Voters’ much ballyhooed National “Environmental” Scorecard claims to show which elected officials have a pro-environment voting record.

The LCV rated just 14 votes for the House of Representatives, excluding major environmental issues such as Brownfields restoration and the Pacific Salmon Recovery Act. It did find space to rate a vote on the distribution of overseas family planning funds. The funds themselves were never at risk, but the LCV wanted to make sure the funds were made available to groups performing abortions.

(To see the scorecard, go to http://www.lcv.org/scorecard/index.asp. To see The National Center score the scorecard, go to https://nationalcenter.org/TSR22802.html.)

 

Time magazine, March 11, tells the sweet story of surgeons repairing “a deadly heart valve defect in a 23-week-old fetus.” Sweet, that is, until one notices that Time refers to the fetus as an “it.”

If the fetus isn’t alive, how could the heart valve defect be “deadly”?

 

Does cattle grazing on federal land harm species not found on that land? The Southwest Center for Biological Diversity thinks so. “The very absence of a species is an indication of ongoing harm due to habitat degradation,” says the Center’s Martin Taylor.

By that standard, says reader Paul Engel, Kansas City residents could be asked to vacate the city because a wild buffalo cannot be found within city limits. Likewise, Denver, because of the lack of mountain lions. In fact, under Taylor’s reasoning, humans could be banned from the entire earth.

Maybe that’s the goal.

(For more, visit https://nationalcenter.org/TSR12802.html.)

 

Dr. Fred Singer’s The Week That Was newsletter tells a scary tale. A decade-long Greenpeace campaign against chlorine may have indirectly been responsible for the deaths of seven and the illnesses of thousands in a 1999 E. Coli outbreak in Canada. The local water works manager hadn’t added enough chlorine to the town’s water supply to disinfect it, because he had “heard” that chlorine is bad.

(For more, visit http://www.sepp.org/weekwas/2002/Mar2.htm.)

 

Rabbi Daniel Lapin explains why Europeans can’t stop arguing with us: “Did you ever hear of a parent who resented his children? Rarely. Now did you ever hear of a child who resented – hated! – his parents? It is a paradox that often the more you give to others, the more they resent you.”

(See Rabbi Lapin’s entire commentary at http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-lapin022502.shtml.)

by Amy Ridenour