Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   11/05/2019

      Power, fire, anti-Trump hypocrisy

We hope that the convenience (a necessity for food and medicine) of electric power will no longer be arbitrarily cut off. At least until the next dry, windy part of the calendar, as it has always been, climate change aside. What has changed is overgrown forests and the home migration due to CA’s housing limits and prices.

 We saw signs in Idaho and elsewhere: “Environmentalists, this (charred hillside) is on you: log it, thin it or burn it.” Meaning that fanatical opposition and obstruction from the “greenies” have forced the “burn it” option; ironically, a century of reduced logging requires “prescribed burns,” reasonable if selectively applied during calm wind conditions. However, forest policy restricting logging in the vast non-wilderness, non-critical-species-habitat areas produces thousand-plants-per-acre tinderboxes; habitat or not, they burn with but a spark.

So it is that lawmakers, bureaucrats, utility and forestry managers have been “dog whipped” into acceding to the “no cutting anywhere, anytime” absolutists and their well-funded environmental lawyers finding reliably sympathetic judges. Add in the “let nature be nature” forestry ideologues silently cheering the fires ridding their beloved forests of people. 

Decades ago, power lines were built with cleared undergrowth extending on either side of the transmission towers. New equipment, built to high standards, simply never fell apart and, when sparks landed, there was little to ignite.

Threats to the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum, Simi Valley, from fires blown by horrendous winds up through the brush, stopped where goats had cleared foliage to the ground. 

Fires have been synonymous with Southern California as I recall from living there; even then the damage to homes was relatively limited as long as the brush was kept down. When growth was fed by wet years, everyone could see the resulting fuel build. Responsible public officials would have been expected to sound the alarm to clear it around housing. Were even those modest efforts opposed over time? I suspect so.

Witness the rhetoric over executive compensation in PG&E’s budget; I can see the gross offense to citizens’ sense of fairness. However, the amounts involved are, just guessing, in the tens of millions, maybe over $100 million; the amounts are almost insignificant compared to the billions of dollars that have been estimated for foliage removal, repair, and underground placement of power lines.

Billions of dollars are no small change but take a wild guess how much money, from the finite pile we ratepayers provide to PG&E, has been mandated for “renewable” wind and solar power. Including the subsidies for home installations, large solar arrays, thermal generation, and countless wind turbines up and down the state—energy which cannot be stored, ramped up and down to meet demand, or be relied on during cloudy, windless periods—you are talking about many tens of billions of dollars.

No one can honestly say—now that we have the disasters of overgrowth-fueled conflagrations, equipment failures due to age and budget priorities, and the arguably sensible outages—that the money was well spent. And yet, who in Sacramento, outside of our Republican representatives advocating common sense utility and forest policy, is making these observations. Not Governor Newsom or Democrats.

Judges play an oversized role in much of our lives beyond forest policy. President Trump sought to implement immigration policy changes that, truth be told, were in line with our Founder’s vision, the Constitution’s mandates and established legal precedent. Whereas waves of immigrants were admitted based on their being unlikely to become “public charges,” the modern “open borders,” chain-migration fanatics want those coming here to receive unlimited public benefits.

President Trump apparently shocked and offended that crowd by—not cutting off all benefits—imposing limits on the duration of such payments, to be held against those seeking legal status as citizens. To Trump, those coming here as relatives of legal residents or citizens had to prove they had health insurance or would otherwise not access publicly-provided health care for—hope you’re ready—30 days.

Oregon federal judge Michael Simon issued yet another completely outrageous national injunction against Trump’s policy. Of course, rabid pro-immigrant groups like Justice Action Center sued for “unfair impacts,” “separation” and “irreparable harm.” The rest: Judge Simon was appointed and promoted by Obama, and confirmed by mostly Democrats. He was in the law firm Perkins Coie—yes, the facilitator for payments from the DNC and Hillary Clinton to FusionGPS, Christopher Steele and his fraudulent dossier alleging Trump/Russia collusion. Simon also did volunteer work for the ACLU.

While watching a Gene Hackman spy thriller, “Company Business,” I paused the playback to read a wall plaque titled “Central Intelligence Agency CREDO.” Thinking it a prop, I looked it up and found a 1984 document of that title; some excerpts: “We produce timely and high quality intelligence for the President…objective and unbiased evaluation…We perform special intelligence tasks at the request of the President…to the highest standards of integrity, morality and honor…to the spirit and letter of the law. We look to our leaders to stimulate initiative…excellence, and for action.”

In no permutation of that credo, can you find justification for 1) the involvement of Obama’s CIA in spying on the Trump presidential campaign, 2) conspiring and manipulating phony intelligence to undermine Trump’s transition, and most dastardly, 3) working behind the scenes to try to precipitate the impeachment and removal of the legitimately elected, oath-taking President Donald J. Trump. That’s an illegal coup d’état.

Therefore, the “CIA analyst,” acting as a “whistleblower,” is due no anonymity under the law and must be put under oath and answer questions before the citizens. Also, President Trump “is” America’s foreign policy, duly elected for that purpose. Finally, every agreement or relationship with any nation involves “give and take,” or “quid pro quo.” Mulvaney was spot on to say “Get over it” because Trump has absolute authority over foreign policy and corruption, the State Dept aside—through Giuliani if he desires, period.