Will Governor "Moonbeam" become Governor "Globaloney"

From 1975 to 1983, California was under the governance of a rather strange little man named Jerry Brown, whose father, Pat Brown, had also been California's governor a decade before. Brown seemed as if he had come right from central casting. He was a strange duck who, as governor, rented a spartan apartment right across the street from the Capitol and had taken a vow of poverty and chastity while attending a Jesuit seminary (from which he later dropped out, and in the 1980s, traveled to Japan to study Buddhism); not traits you commonly see in a politician. Brown believed that Californians should stop driving and use mass transit instead. His method for carrying this out was to appoint a totally unqualified flunky named Adriana Gianturco to head the California Department of Transportation (more commonly known as CalTrans). Gianturco ordered a moratorium on the construction of new freeways in California and angered California legislators - both Republican and Democrat - so badly, that they tried to introduce a bill that would halt her pay. Throughout all this, Brown defended Gianturco to the end, and she served as head of CalTrans until 1983, when Brown left office. Brown appointed a California Supreme Court Chief Justice by the name of Rose Bird. Every death penalty case that came before Rose Bird - 61 in all - was commuted by Bird. California voters were so angered by Bird giving the death penalty... ahem... the bird, that they voted her out in 1986 by a margin of 67%-33%. Brown opposed Prop 13 in the 1978 election right up until the day it was approved by California voters, and then he did a 180 and practically claimed he wrote the thing. In 1982, Brown badly botched a crisis involving the Mediterranean Fruit Fly. Rather than saving California's $14 billion dollar fruit crop industry by ordering immediate spraying, he called for millions of trees to instead be stripped of their fruit. After much screaming and gnashing of teeth, and a nationwide threat of a quarantine on California fruit, Brown finally gave in and authorized the spraying that should have happened in the first place. In 1982, as a two-term California governor with total name recognition and momentum, Brown ran for the U.S. Senate, and was handily defeated by then-mayor of San Diego, Pete Wilson, who became governor of California in 1990. Jerry Brown was seemingly put out to pasture for good, having been permanently branded by Chicago columnist, Mike Royko, with the sobriquet, "Governor Moonbeam." You see the painting of Brown I posted? That is the official portrait that he approved to have hung with all the other portraits of California's past governors. It hangs in the Capitol to this very day; I have stood there in the hallway and gazed upon it with my own eyes.

This information should give you a little idea of why I am absolutely flabbergasted that Jerry Brown is not only running for governor of California again in 2010, but that it looks quite likely that he is going to win!

After serving for 8 years as Mayor of Oakland (a loonier city in a loony state), Brown's comeback hit high gear when he rode the 2006 Democrat wave to victory in the California Attorney General's race. It has been during his one term in that state-wide office that Brown has already shown a glimpse of his former incompetence and misguided leftism.

People are still waiting for his office to conduct an investigation of ACORN offices in California that helped investigative reporters James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles (posing as pimp and prostitute, respectively) cheat on taxes and help them open a brothel for underage Central American prostitutes.

And then there is anthropogenic global warming. A couple years ago, California, being the madcap insane asylum that it has become, took the lead on the so-called "cap and trade" nonsense that is still being debated at the national level, and passed a law that is commonly referred to as AB-32, which is California's own global warming abatement law. Naturally, this law was passed before the whole global warming/climate change fraud came crashing down within the last few months, with revelations of Climategate, the Himalayan glacier hoax, and everything else that has come to light since last November. That hasn't stopped the Church of Global Warming - including devout and zealous member G. Edmund "Jerry" Brown, Jr. - from continuing full steam ahead with their statist plans.

There is an initiative that is being proposed for the ballot in November here in California that would call for a freeze on implementation of AB-32 until the unemployment rate in California falls to at least 6.5% - it currently stands at over 12%. Even some leftists and Democrats admit that AB-32 will cause a net loss of jobs in California, and with that 12% unemployment rate, it doesn't make much sense to lose more jobs.

As Attorney General, Jerry Brown is in charge of the wording for the ballot initiatives. Here is how he has summarized this initiative that I just described to you:

Suspends air pollution control laws requiring major polluters to report and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.”

Gosh, could that summary be any more incomplete, incorrect, and inflammatory? Putting aside for a second the language of "major polluters," I would really like Jerry to explain exactly which greenhouse gas emissions "cause global warming." Notice that he did not qualify that statement about causing global warming with "possibly" or even "probably." No, the summary just says greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming as if it is an uncontested fact. Contrary to the science being settled - the statement with which we "deniers" are frequently browbeaten - even Phil Jones of East Anglia University, who is the disgraced scientist at the heart of the Climategate scandal, has now admitted that there hasn't been any significant warming since 1995, and that the Medieval Warming Period which lasted from about 900-1300 A.D. saw warmer average temperatures than we see today.

But why let fact-based dissent get in the way of a good bout of Gaia worship? All one has to do is take a look at the Attorney General's website and you will get a good idea of why AG (and probably soon-to-be Governor) Brown had no qualms about approving this ridiculously worded initiative summary. Allow me to direct you to AG Brown's California taxpayer-funded webpage that says the following:

The planet is heating up. It’s happening not because of natural processes, or gradually over thousands of years. Rather, temperatures are rising quickly and dramatically, climbing with the concentrations of greenhouse pollutants we are pouring into the atmosphere. Global climate change is happening because of human activities.

We are already seeing the effects - disappearing glaciers, shrinking snow pack, droughts, coastal erosion, bigger and more regular storms, and more extreme heat waves. Eleven of the past twelve years are on the list of the twelve warmest years since reliable record keeping began in 1850. Arctic sea ice declined in 2006 by the largest amount ever, losing an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined. The best available science tells us that these and other abrupt disruptions will intensify and spread if we don’t take decisive, dramatic action today.

There are so many things wrong with this, I don't have the strength to address them all, and you, the reader, probably don't have the strength to read it. I do have to point out the absurdity of the poo-pooing of "natural processes" and "thousands of years." Seriously? If average temperatures didn't heat up naturally over thousands of years, then Yosemite Valley would still be full of glacial ice! And again, nowhere in that statement do you see "scientists say," or "many believe," and certainly no acknowledgement of any of the recent scandals that might make one just a teensy bit skeptical. Nothing! Either Jerry Brown really approves of this claptrap, or he is too incompetent to know that it is on the official ca.gov website for his own office - again, for which I and other California taxpayers foot the bill. Either way, it shows Jerry Brown to be just as unqualified to be California's governor today, as he was three decades ago.

Good Day to You, Sir