Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   5/12/2015

           Water mandates; Islamic cartoons

Tonight’s Tea Party Patriots guest will be Tehama Co. Supervisor Candy Carlson, who represents the 2^nd District.

Some outside-the-box thoughts on the Governor’s across-the-board mandated 25 percent cutback in water usage. Hey, Moonbeam: I got your 25 percent cutback right here! To be honest, I have not heard one logical, fact-based argument as to why Red Bluff residents and water users should have to reduce water usage one iota. That water comes from deep underground—so what’s the problem?

It goes without saying that, for all county residents on wells, our usage is determined primarily by how much money we care to spend on the electricity to pump the wet stuff out of the ground for our personal and property needs. I have Department of Water Resources graphs that show a modest decline in the ground water levels but nothing that’s likely to impact most folks. Furthermore, a property owner—guided by his or her own best interests and desires, limited by the aforementioned costs—has no imperative to even think about abiding with some bureaucrat’s arbitrary number pulled out of his, well, hat.

In other words, what research, what data, what specific conditions are being applied to each water district? What objective analysis has anyone presented that can reliably guide, for instance, the Red Bluff water district to a determination that—due to micro and macro measurements—25, 15, or even 10 percent is the reasonable target? Why any target locally? I’m open to persuasion. However, until I read that our local and state water situation is so severe or serious that foolish and pointless efforts to restore salmon in places where they’ve vanished; or that efforts to manage the delta to protect the bait fish called smelt; or that ludicrous releases of water down streams to flow uselessly into the Pacific Ocean—these water use fanatics have no business mandating anything for anybody.

Until such practices, which use fully half of all available surface water, cease, I won’t believe it’s a real crisis. Similarly, I don’t want to hear one darn word about the human-caused global warming crisis for which we are all mandated to pay, or undergo radical lifestyle changes to “address”—not until the rich, powerful, elitist overlords and advocates give up flying their private jets halfway around the world to attend global warming/climate change/pixie dust meetings.

The terrorist attacks on the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in Texas, together with the mind-boggling reactions by many of the “victim-mongering” left, have shown that the organizer, Pamela Geller, was right. She is the president of American Freedom Defense Initiative and a blogger at Atlasshrugs.com. Look up, by title, “Pamela Geller’s Critics Are Proving Her Point” by David French, “Free Speech vs. Hate Speech?” by John Hinderaker, “Progressives Love Anti-Religious Art—as Long as It’s Anti-Christian” by Jonah Goldberg, “Victim-Blaming Inverts Cause and Effect of Jihadist Terrorism” by Ian Tuttle. Those are all under the “Islam” label, at DonPolson.blogspot.com.

On May 5, I re-posted several examples of the kind of art and cartoons at issue going back to the original Danish cartoons—the often viewed “Muhammed” with a bomb merged in his turban, by Kurt Westergaard—up to some of the Charlie Hebdo images and others. The titles of the posts say much about the controversy: “Make the world safe for ridicule of Islam,” “Islam for laughs,” and “This blog stands for freedom of expression.”

The reason that those asking, “Why display something that offends Muslims?” don’t grasp the real issue is that they apparently think that the sole purpose of the cartoons is to come up with myriad ways to display the middle finger to Islam and its adherents. No, they intend to make serious statements worthy of debate. One could logically ask why, over the last 5 years, have liberal/progressive editorial cartoonists come up with endless ways to mock, insult, caricature and ridicule conservatives, Republicans and Tea Party advocates? The answer: Those cartoonists—as well as leftists in the news media, academia, the entertainment industry, etc—have made observations, formulated arguments/opinions and expressed their perspective of those on the conservative side. They’ve had no regard whatsoever for how offensive they might be.

Also look for “Pamela Geller Calls Out Cowardly Conservatives” at a Breitbart.com link, also on my blog. In either place, you’ll see how the politically correct Internet police make images “disappear.” When the Breitbart interview first showed up, the (former-Muslim-drawn) winner of the “Draw Muhammad” contest topped the article and a dozen or more jpeg images of other entries were interspersed below. The winning cartoon remains at the top: A fierce looking, sword-wielding Muhammad says “YOU CAN’T DRAW ME!” while the pencil-wielding hand says, “THAT’S WHY I DRAW YOU.” The rest of the images link to an “error” message.

Saying that anti-Islam cartoons provoke violent attacks is like saying that baby-killing, late-term abortion doctors provoke violence. At least a cartoon never killed anyone. Such drawings represent ideas worthy of debate and contention—essential, cherished civic freedoms. The problem, as I see it, is that moderate Muslims, who accept a diverse, pluralistic free society, don’t prevail in their own religion—the extremist, murderous, “Allahu Akbar,” Islamic State types do.

Correction: I should have said that Lincoln “advanced the pro-freedom and anti-slavery principles” of the Republican Party.