Death By Regulation

"You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war for a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy."

- Winston Churchill

It's disconcerting to hear such appalling words coming out of the mouth of one of the Giants of the 20th Century, isn't it? You're asking yourself, "that's not what Churchill said, right?"

And you would be correct. What he actually said was ".....to wage war against a monstrous tyranny.....", not for it. But in so briefly abusing Churchill's inspirational words, OffHisMeds is making the point that - with the slightest of modifications - laws regulating the Land, Air and Sea can be transformed by a bunch of power hungry clerks with low esteem from resources that normal citizens are allowed to walk upon, cultivate, drink and breathe, into things that are used to destroy society and reduce us all to serfdom.

I am speaking, of course, of the Democrat Party.

In a span of days, the rights of normal citizens to use land, sea and air have come under assault by the Usual Suspects as never before, offering OffHisMeds the opportunity to write a Blog of such pure symmetry. See, Obama and the Democrats have been largely frustrated - despite their absolute congressional majorities and tens of millions of government employees comprised 75% of Democrats - from accomplishing anywhere near the power grab they believe is their birthright.

Their Global Warming initiatives are stalled, Health Care is going nowhere, Cap and Trade is on the ropes; why, even the Stimulus bill has come under attack, and all over such quibbles as the Obama Administration creating 400 non-existent congressional districts to justify giving $787 Billion of your tax dollars to themselves and their cronies. Would somebody please explain the kind of world we live in when a Democrat can't plunder the treasury with impunity, the spotlight safely fixed on more deserving subjects such as Governor Mark Sanford?

OHM has little sympathy for their predicament, mind you. But he does have an almost infinite regard for their adaptability. Unable to achieve their objectives for world domination through the legislative process, Democrats have decided to do it by the simple expedient of declaring that existing law lets them do whatever the hell they want to, transferring policy-making from politicians to Government Lifers.

Sea - Not So Fast With That Duck Pond, Brother

The EPA now wants to regulate all water. I kid you not. As the article attached states: "As confirmed in several recent U.S. Supreme Court cases, federal regulatory authority currently extends only to waters that are navigable or perhaps directly connected to navigable waters. The Senate bill would remove the word "navigable." The significance of the dropped word is that tens of thousands of bodies of water currently managed by the 50 sovereign states would be surrendered to the dictates of bureaucrats at the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/10/leave-our-fish-ponds-alone/

Think it can't happen? Under current EPA regulations, the federal government has for decades abused private property rights by declaring thousands of small pools of standing water on private property to be "wetlands", preventing owners from building or changing their property in any way, and rendering it virtually unsellable. The problem being, of course, that if it is unsellable, it has no worth. And if it has no worth, for all intents and purposes, the Federal Government just stole your property.

Federal, state and municipal governments have also been systematically depriving citizens of the right to use water wells for decades, again, allegedly for the greater good, but that's a crock. Across the country, those same politicians that took away your well and put you on city water - allegedly to protect ground water aquifers - have gleefully allowed utilities and other industries to plunder trillions of gallons of ground water per year. So there you have it: drinking and bathing is harmful to the environment; cooling off a reactor and then dumping the effluent into our rivers is not.

For one final example, the Army Corp of Engineers are the geniuses who straightened the Mississippi and re-engineered the wetlands surrounding New Orleans, resulting in not only contributing to the Hurricane Katrina debacle, but the irreversible erosion of the wetlands which protect the Louisiana coastline.

Air - We're Now Charging You To Breathe

Democrats were getting nowhere linking CO2 emissions and Global Warming, particularly in light of a decade of revelations that the Global Warming lobby had cooked the books on the science, most recently and amusingly when some of their most prominent scientists were outed by their own e-mails on the best ways to game the data and suppress dissenting opinions from other scientists.

What is a motivated bureaucrat to do?

Answer, have the EPA declare CO2 - which all animals exhale with every breath - a pollutant. This would allow the EPA to regulate every aspect of it under existing federal law, thus neatly circumventing the need to propose and pass legislation regarding "global warming". Read all about it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/science/earth/18endanger.html

If you're not worried about the ability of a handful of unelected Government Lifers to circumvent the House, the Senate, the 50 Sovereign States, Voters and the very concept of representative government by mere regulatory fiat, then you deserve the Dictatorship that will result. OHM's only beef is that he'll have to live under it too.

OffHisMeds has written extensively about the intent of the climate legislation and Global Warming initiatives of Democrats for some time now: to mandate the payment of Trillions to foreigners, virtually all of them Bad Actors. This was the essence of the Kyoto Protocols, voted down by the Senate 99-0 during the early Clinton years. The Obama Administration will make it a reality if this initiative is allowed to succeed, turning the rhetoric of his serial ass kissing foreign tours into a reality financed by the few remaining dollars in your savings account.

Land - The Brave and The Free Need Not Apply

The Rich and Politically Well Connected, though, are invited to queue up to the back door, checkbook in hand.

In the 2005 Supreme Court decision Kelo vs. the City of New London, homeowners had their homes confiscated and turned over to a private developer to build a strip mall, office building and other for-profit developments. This was yet the latest obscenity in a decades-long effort by Democrats to expand the concepts of "Eminent Domain", "Condemnation", and the "Taking" of private property, all of which historically had been limited to Public purposes such as roads and utilities.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/6636747.html

Democrats have usurped the whole concept of "Public Use" as the justification for "Takings" to include "economic development". "Public Use" has become nothing more than a code word for rewarding their political patrons with your private property. What makes it more nefarious is that they have also systematically codified such "Takings" to be done at artificially low prices, again to benefit the greedy developer and themselves.

Now comes the word 4 year's later that much of the property confiscated under "Kelo" will not be developed after all, because it can't be done "profitably", per pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, the beneficiary of the Land Grab. And there you have it: with this single act, Pfizer ripped apart the "Public Use" Straw Man that Democrats had constructed to justify treating ordinary citizens the way Railroad Barons treated Farmers.

Think it's an isolated instance? You would be wrong. This morning comes word of another story involving none other than the highly-regarded Mayor Bill White of Houston. Read 'em both:

http://blogs.chron.com/houstonpolitics/2009/01/remainders_and_rejoinders_on_e_1.html
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/6764301.html

Seems the halo of the saintly White has been tarnished just a tad with the revelation that he condemned land owned by two elderly twins as a favor to one of his largest campaign contributors who needed a nice little park to compliment his development. This one has it all: greedy landlords, gross undervaluation by White's cronies, corrupt politicians - and unfortunately for White - feisty property owners willing to go to the mat with the aforementioned landlords and politicians.

The reason this little story is important is that Bill White is almost universally regarded by his constituents as one of the Good Guys: a populist Mayor above corruption, conscientious with the public purse and devoted to the people. The only problem with this narrative is that, during his six years as Mayor, he's proved to be no different from any of his corrupt predecessors, with the exception of being able to maneuver out of the spotlight.

Bottom line, Democrat politicians, bureaucrats and judicial appointees are systematically depriving you of what is arguably the single thing that distinguishes the United States from the Soviet Union: the right to own property.

The common thread of all three of these assaults on our Freedom is that Private Property Rights and Individual Rights are apparently whatever Democrats say they are, Constitution be damned. And while not all of these Commie-Lite policies were initiated during the Obama Administration, most of them were, and the remainder have been kicked into Hyperdrive by him and his Toadies, confirming once again what OffHisMeds has long maintained: Obama is nothing more than a self-interested thief, and the current face of "a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime".

Which is to say, the Democrat Party.