Marxist

[I Am Right]

EPA Employees Silenced for Criticizing Cap and Trade
by William La Jeunesse
, FOXNews.com

When Zabel and Williams released a video on the Internet expressing their concerns over the Obama administration’s plans to use a cap and trade program to fight climate change, they were told to keep it to themselves.

Laurie Williams and husband Alan Zabel worked for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for more than 20 years, and they know more about climate change than most politicians. But when the couple released a video on the Internet expressing their concerns over the Obama administration’s plans to use cap-and-trade legislation to fight climate change, they were told to keep it to themselves.

Williams and Zabel oppose cap and trade -- a controversial government allowance program in which companies are issued emissions limits, or caps, which they can then trade -- as a means to fight climate change.

On their own time, Williams and Zabel made a video expressing these opinions.

VIDEO: EPA Employees Speak Out Against Cap and Trade

"Cap-and-trade with offsets provides a false sense of progress and puts money in the pockets of investors," Zabel said in the video. "We think that these restrictions might not be constitutional," he said.

Their bosses in San Francisco approved the effort by Williams and Zabel to release the tape, but after an editorial they wrote appeared in the Washington Post, EPA Director Lisa Jackson ordered the pair to remove the video or face disciplinary action.

Specifically, the administration's chief environmental official did not want Williams or Zabel mentioning their four decades with the EPA -- time spent studying cap and trade.

"The people who understand the problems with the cap and trade with offsets bill are not being heard," Williams told Fox News.

The EPA issued a statement saying it welcomes free expression provided employees adhere to ethics rules. The agency reportedly doesn't object to the content of the video but requires Williams and Zabel to make it clearer that they are speaking for themselves and not the EPA.

But some Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee want an investigation into what – if any -- regulations Zabel and Williams violated.

Critics argue the action contradicts the president's support for open government.

"It's censorship," Jeff Ruch, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, told Fox News.

"If the Obama administration believes in transparency it is precisely in these cases they need to prove it."

[soonerscuba]

Just to prove I'm smarter than I Am Right...

This is how a link works, chimps can be trained to do it. (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/17/epa-employees-silenced-criticizing-cap-trade/)

[oudivesherpa]

How come I didn't see this on CNN, ABC, CBS or NBC?

[I Am Right]

Just to prove I'm smarter than I Am Right...

This is how a link works, chimps can be trained to do it. (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/17/epa-employees-silenced-criticizing-cap-trade/)

This is how you read. Chimps can be trained to do it.

[Pogue Mahone]

And then there's this:

"EPA has nearly 18,000 employees and all of them are free to -- and many do -- publicly express their views on issues of the day, including issues that are central to EPA's mission," according to a statement from EPA General Counsel Scott Fulton.

The issue, according to EPA, is when agency employees use their profession "to accent the credibility of your personal opinion," said EPA spokeswoman Adora Andy. "This is really not out of the ordinary at EPA."

Marxist? Hyperbole ruins this attempt at making a point.

[I Am Right]

How come I didn't see this on CNN, ABC, CBS or NBC?

ah---never mind

[I Am Right]

And then there's this:

"EPA has nearly 18,000 employees and all of them are free to -- and many do -- publicly express their views on issues of the day, including issues that are central to EPA's mission," according to a statement from EPA General Counsel Scott Fulton.

The issue, according to EPA, is when agency employees use their profession "to accent the credibility of your personal opinion," said EPA spokeswoman Adora Andy. "This is really not out of the ordinary at EPA."

Marxist? Hyperbole ruins this attempt at making a point.

I'm not the one who is sophomoric, I just report, you can read.

[Pogue Mahone]

They knew the rules against using their position as an advocacy tool.

And this Fox story clearly shows they haven't been "silenced" like the headline says.

I'm sure Obama has a direct role in this, that Marxist.

[swardboy]

The agency reportedly doesn't object to the content of the video but requires Williams and Zabel to make it clearer that they are speaking for themselves and not the EPA.

And just what moron couldn't understand this??

[Pogue Mahone]

And while you're standing up for them, finish the job and support this, too:

"In the video, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel ... suggest phased-in increases in carbon prices for businesses and monthly rebates to consumers."

I know how this board loves a good government rebate.

[I Am Right]

Blood Brother
By Christopher Orlet on 11.17.09 @ 6:06AM

Trotsky: A Biography
By Robert Service
(Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 648 pages, $35)

For decades, Western intellectuals have judged him the Good Marxist. His assassination by Joseph Stalin's agents was further proof -- if further proofs were needed -- of his honorable intentions. If only Leon Trotsky, rather than Stalin, had emerged as Vladimir Lenin's successor, how differently the history of the Soviet Union, indeed, the whole history of communism, might have read.

Trotsky's estrangement and exile from Stalin's Soviet Union has been the stuff of romantic legend, a myth largely fashioned by Trotsky himself. In his many volumes of autobiography, and in works like The Stalin School of Falsification, Trotsky used his considerable rhetorical skills to disguise his political closeness to Stalin and thereby retain the admiration of thinkers in the West, including some on the right. When H.L. Mencken heard Trotsky's library had burned, he wrote offering to send the exile some books. (Trotsky rudely declined.) Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson and Saul Bellow admired Trotsky both as a man of ideas and a man of action, one who, with the great surrealist AndréBreton, could write A Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art, when not leading the Red Army into battle against the White Russians, the Ukrainians, and the Poles.

Trotsky's latest biographer, Robert Service (author of acclaimed biographies of Lenin and Stalin), suggests it is foolish to take Trotsky at his word. If there is one overarching theme in Service's study, it is that there was very little difference in philosophy between Trotsky and his nemesis Stalin. "The basic agenda of the two men was much more similar than it was dissimilar," he says.

Lebya Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky) was born in 1879, to a well-to-do Jewish farm family in the Pale of Settlement in what is now central Ukraine. Trotsky's father, like many Jewish parents, sent his children off to Lutheran schools to be educated. Unable to break into the professions because of his race, Trotsky takes up one of the few vocations open to young Jewish intellectuals: he becomes a revolutionary. Due largely to his extraordinary literary talents, he quickly moves up the ranks of the budding revolutionary movement, eventually becoming a leader of the October Revolution, and subsequently, commander of the Red Army.

Then, in 1924, Lenin died, and there erupted a battle of succession over who was to succeed as head of state. Lenin at first chose Stalin, a man he considered a safe, steady, plodding bureaucrat, the opposite of a flamboyant, charismatic Napoleonic character like Trotsky. Too late, however, Lenin realized his mistake. Trotsky, however, was not one to admit defeat or go quietly. He charged Stalin with (among other things) making too many compromises with the revolutionary spirit. Trotsky likewise argued that Stalin was uninterested in spreading communism to Germany and China, which was necessary for communism's survival. Service calls Trotsky out on this, saying none of the revolution's leaders believed communism could survive in an isolated state, but that Stalin, following his so-called "Socialism in One Country" thesis, first wanted to consolidate the gains within Russia before trying to export the Revolution. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky blamed his loss in the succession battle on Stalin's greater ruthlessness, and, by 1929, Trotsky found himself expelled from the Soviet Union. "He lost to a man with a superior understanding of Soviet public life," says Service.

Today, Trotsky's defenders whitewash his own ruthless character, preferring to dwell on his extraordinary literary talents, and his prescience with regard to the growing menace of Nazism. Irving Howe describes his writings against Hitlerism as the greatest political polemic written in the 20th century. What's more, they maintain that Trotsky would have murdered far fewer political opponents than Stalin, remembering that Stalin murdered more communists than Hitler.

HOW MIGHT HISTORY have looked had Trotsky succeeded Lenin? "If ever Trotsky had been the paramount leader instead of Stalin, the risks of a bloodbath in Europe would have been drastically increased," writes Service, for the simple reason that Trotsky, a believer in permanent revolution, would have taken more risks than Stalin in encouraging revolution in Germany and elsewhere. (While we are playing What If, former Trotskyite Christopher Hitchens has pointed out that Trotsky's German revolution would have preempted the Nazis coming to power, and thus not only World War II, but the Holocaust as well.)

Judging from his past deeds, Trotsky would have continued to act with savage ruthlessness, that meant forcing peasants onto collectivized farms -- as he vowed to do -- or ordering the execution of dissidents, crushing the Kronstadt worker and sailor rebellion in 1921 (they demanded, among other rights, freedom of speech and the press), or creating a system of hostage taking during the civil war -- all of which he did do.

The reason so many Western intellectuals, right and left, fell -- and continue to fall -- for Trotsky is they were charmed by his charisma, his intellect, and his literary skills ("His autobiography is magical to read," Service admits), as well as fooled by his obscurantism. What's more, they were desperate for any Soviet alternative to Stalin.

The idea that a humane communism could have come out of Trotskyism is pure romanticism, Service says. Yet, Trotskyites maintain even today that the tragedy of Soviet history lay in Trotsky's failure to win the battle of succession for leadership of the Soviet Union. Service's biography will not convince them otherwise. But for those with an open mind, Trotsky: A Biography shows that in the end, Stalin and Trotsky were blood brothers. Blood being the operative word.

[A Sooner in Texas]

Well, at least Trotsky was Marxist. Is this an attempt to finally make the thread title correct?

[Fraggle145]

I'm not the one who is sophomoric, I just report, you can read.

You dont report. You steal.

[I Am Right]

You dont report. You steal.

Good post, Comrade.

[Fraggle145]

Heh Comrade...

Says the captain of groupthink.

[I Am Right]

Heh Comrade...

Says the captain of groupthink.

What?

[Fraggle145]

:D

[TUSooner]

***
Hyperbole ruins this attempt at making a point.

THIS ^^^^

This is why Fox News is Faux News. Conservatism Needs better spokesmen than Fox, Rush, and Beck. (Like someone smart who is not a liar or a hack.)
:mad: :(