1/19/12 "ME FIRST" POLITICS AND THE MODERN DAY LUDDITES

THE SUN STRUGGLES TO EMERGE FROM THE LAKE SMOKE

THE FERRY BOAT IS BREAKING SOME  ICE EACH MORNING NOW

Thursday, 8:00 AM. –6 degrees F.  Wind W, calm.  There is about 3” of new snow on the ground and lake effect snow continues to fall as the sun struggles valiantly to emerge from the lake smoke.  There should be fewer complaints about the lack of winter now.
        Neighbor and ferry boat captain Sherman says the ferry is breaking thin ice now every morning but he won’t venture a guess as to whether we will have an ice road to the Island this year.  He said 1998 was the last year he can remember that the ferry ran all winter.  The city workers were flooding the ice rink in Reiten Park on the lakef ront  yesterday, I took a photo but somehow lost it.
        By all accounts the Administration, using the State Department as its mouth piece, has denied approval of the oil pipeline from the Alberta oil sands to Houston, citing lack of time for environmental studies.  This project has been studied for three years, has already been rerouted because of some environmental concerns about its route over the Ogallala aquifer, and is a known and well practiced technology. 
        The President’s  tactic is to drag his feet long enough that the pipe line decision will not be a factor in the election campaign, even though doing so may loose the nation the pipeline, its jobs, economic impact and the Canadian oil resource.  This as a sop to the leftist environmentalists who are among his strongest supporters.  This is exactly the kind of “me first” politics that has brought the nation to its economic knees.  And this is not only  an economic issue but one of national security. 
        Had attitudes like the present pervaded our national history the great canals of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries would never have been built, waterpower would never have been harnessed, forests would never have been cut for farmland, coal and iron ore would never have been mined, Rural Electrification would never have happened, the Industrial Revolution would have passed us by; we would not have won WWII, or gone to the moon.  This administration and its left wing environmental supporters are the most reactionary forces of our entire history; modern day Luddites.