The State Assembly on Tuesday did the right thing, of course, in upholding the people's right to control their natural resources. I predicted it would. But it was a damnably closer thing than it should have been. A majority of the Assembly voted, 58 to 38, to override the veto. But 64 votes were needed.
It is no accident that Democrats voted 47 to 3 to support an unaccountable DNR. People like Mark Pocan, Helen Kelda Roys, and Sondy Pope-Roberts.
Just think of it: 58 members of the 99-member Assembly voted to take control of the Department of Natural Resources away from the people who are paying the bills. This is an agency that impacts our lives in so many ways, from campsites to controlling agriculture and industry -- but the people are to have no say in its operation as expressed through their elected (and recallable) officials.
The liberal-progressives cleverly couched their power-grab as removing "politics" from DNR decisions. The reality is they tried to take away an elected governor's appointment of the DNR secretary, subject to legislative ratification, in order to hand control over to the special interests -- the "experts" who know better than any of us knuckle-dragging neanderthals.
All because Spencer Black, the special-interest favorite state senator from the west side of Madison, cannot be elected governor.
Got a complaint for the DNR? Don't like how it's run? If Spencer Black and his Democrats had their way, you would take it to the chairman of the DNR board. Anyone know who that is? Class? Answer in a minute.
Minute's up. the board last month named Jonathan Ela of Madison chairman of the Natural Resources Board. Ela is the name. Once worked for the Sierra Club.
See what I'm talking about? The Sierra Club, not the elected governor, whom you can praise or damn for being too green or too pro-industry, whom you can vote for or against. Jonathan Ela. I didn't vote for him, either.
They want rule by experts
Our liberal/progressive friends always choose control by the "experts" over allowing people to make their own decisions. Control of the DNR is just one theater of combat. The entire health care debate is about who will decide -- us consumers in a competitive marketplace or unelected "experts."
Which, of course, explains the "Climate Change" hoax. "Scientists" determine that the earth's temperature has increased a degree or two, ergo, a passel of bureaucratically determined regulations and restrictions must be imposed. All very "scientific" of course. Can't argue with "science."
It is why liberal-progressives on the Madison Community Development Authority can expropriate the private property of African-Americans at below-market rates so as to build government-financed housing that it considers superior.
It is why liberal-progressives have declared war on any deviance from state-controlled, one-size fits all education. Death to charter schools, death to vouchers, death to virtual schools, and make life hell for the parochial schools.
It is why liberal-progressives want to take "big money" out of political campaigns and replace it with a government-approved stipend, apportioned out so that the right people have enough money and the wrong people don't get too much.
It is why liberal-progressives were gobsmacked by the Tea Party movement. Nancy Pelosi insisted it couldn't be real, that it was Astroturf, these huge assemblages that make Ed Garvey's Fighting Bobfests look like roadside picnics. Or provoked the Rachel Maddows to snark obscenely. Who elected Scott Brown in Massachusetts, of all places.
These people are rescuing Thomas Jefferson from the clutches of my friend John Nichols, who conveniently whitewashes Jefferson's insistence on limited government.
"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government." -- Thomas Jefferson.
Now in retreat, the liberal/progressives demand bipartisanship. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Tunku Varadarajan:
The indignant call for "bipartisanship" today is from people who want to pass health-care legislation over the equally indignant objections of many, many, many Americans. (I'm avoiding the phrase "most Americans" so as not to appear contentious.) Yet in truth, this partisan obstruction has done the "people's business" more elegantly than bipartisanship would, if we take public opinion as a fair measure of what people really want.
Democrats and progressives hate partisanship for the same reason they hate the market: Both are built on the idea of a permanent state of competition that produces the public good only indirectly and through what's called "the invisible hand." Progressives hate the messiness of this, preferring the direct application of reason by the intelligent elite. [The Daily Beast: Why Partisan Bickering Works]
As Elvis would say, Tunku, Tunku very much.
The new Lenin-Marxism
This infatuation with control by an elite few, the "experts" was, of course, most fully realized under Lenin-Marxism.
"I have been over into the future, and it works."
"Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, offered that review of the Soviet Union on his return from a fact-finding mission there," the wonderful Jonah Goldberg tells us. "A year earlier, Steffens had gone to fascist Italy and came back praising Il Duce's miraculous accomplishments."
For some, like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the prettiest flower out there right now is China. ... What unites these people is a form of power worship. These foreign governments and their experts have control over citizens and economics -- sometimes through democratic consent, sometimes not -- that the state doesn't have in America. -- Jonah Goldberg, National Review.
Today's chuckle
Nothing is wasted in China! (Thanks, Duane)
