A video is circulating online that imagines what modifications the infamous California Air Resources Board (CARB) would make to Santa and his traditional reindeer-drawn sleigh if they had the ability to regulate Christmas, with hilarious results:

CARB and the far-fetched ideas they frequently propose are a frequent target of scorn, but they really make it easy.  When it comes to unintentional humor, CARB is the gift that keeps on giving.

Included in CARB’s re-fit of Santa’s sleigh:

•     Changing the sleigh into a bobsled – much more aerodynamic.

•     Ditching the gifts in the back; they’re really cutting into the sleigh’s “miles per hoofbeat.”

•     Red might be Santa’s traditional color, but according to CARB darker colors attract too much heat.  Pale pink is just like red…almost.

•     To reduce horse- (or in this case reindeer-) power, at least four of the Dasher and Prancer crowd would find themselves unemployed come Christmas.

•     Rudolph is allowed to stay on the team, but only if he swaps his glowing red nose for an energy efficient light blub.

•     Santa should really skip the cookies and milk so he can shed a few pounds.

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This week the EPA celebrates its 40th birthday. In honor of the occasion, they’ve launched a dedicated website called EPA@40, and it’s head, Lisa Jackson, will take off on a week-long party circuit designed to “highlight the impact of [the EPA's] efforts to clean up the air Americans breathe and the water they drink and the communities they live in” as well as her agency’s crusade to attend to “the unfinished business of the environmental movement.”

What started as a way to help the government respond to environmental disasters and spread conservation awareness, however, has metastasized into a bloated, over-reaching disaster of it’s own, championing extensive governmental intervention, curbing freedoms and, most recently, costing hard-working Americans their jobs, all in the name of preserving the environment.

In the midst of an economic downturn, the EPA will once again retool it’s famous, founding Clean Air Act, rewriting the historical legislation to suit Obama’s own bureaucratic needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020. Sounds fantastic, right? Well, it’ll have a devastating effect on the private sector:

Achieving that level of reduction in greenhouse gases won’t be easy or cheap. This immense new burden on the private sector comes at precisely the wrong time for an economy still struggling to create new jobs and reduce near double-digit unemployment…The cost estimates are indeed staggering, according to an econometric study by the Manufacturers Alliance that projects more than 7.3 million lost jobs by 2020. The hardest-hit states include Texas, which would lose 1.7 million jobs, and Louisiana, with 938,000 positions lost. Others include California (846,000), Illinois (396,000) and Pennsylvania (351,000). Total losses would reduce the nation’s gross domestic product by $1.7 trillion, according to the Manufacturers Alliance.”

Of course, these new standards wouldn’t just affect isolated industries or particular states.

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Yesterday’s  E&E News PM had an item, “LOBBYING: UAW joins labor-enviro alliance”, reading in pertinent part:

The United Auto Workers has announced that it will join the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership of labor and environment groups pushing for policies that create green jobs….

The BlueGreen Alliance was formed in 2006 by the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers. The group also includes the Communications Workers of America, Natural Resources Defense Council, Service Employees International Union, Laborers’ International Union of North America, Utility Workers Union of America, American Federation of Teachers, Amalgamated Transit Union and Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association.

Yes. Events in the early days of the Obama administration indicated it was only a matter of time before the UAW would join this enterprise seeking massive further expansion of the state. As I detail in Chapter 7 of Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America, “Obama’s “Baptists and Bootleggers”: Unions and Greens Selling Out America”, “Team Obama is teaming with big business, unions, and green pressure groups in an unholy alliance to advance an agenda relieving you of your wealth and freedoms, to their enrichment, in a collaboration designed to move decisions from individual producers and consumers to the Federal government. As part of this perverse game, the Left pulls for ‘green’ energy production and then blocks that very same production on environmental grounds or until it can use such projects to enrich favored unions and companies.”

Oddly, these groups are pushing for cap-and-trade, in addition to other mandates designed to make the price of energy “necessarily skyrocket”, as Obama so delicately put it.

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“Ever since Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform in 1912, seven presidents — Democrats and Republicans alike — have taken up the cause of reform time and time again,” President Obama said in a statement hailing the Christmas Eve Senate vote to take over 1/6 of the nation’s economy.  “Such efforts have been blocked by special-interests lobbyists who have perpetrated the status quo that works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people.”

Note the date of TR’s “calling” for reform. It’s 1912.  Nationalized health care was part of the platform of the Progressive Party that year and every year thereafter. Americans are more familiar with the name Theodore himself gave to that third party bid. After being shot by a would-be assassin in Milwaukee, TR said it takes more than a single bullet to stop a Bull Moose. Instantly, the colorful sobriquet was applied to the Progressive Party.

What did Theodore himself think of his new-found allies, the Progressives? He was sincerely committed to reform. And he certainly thought he had been cheated out of the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1912. After all, he had won all the state party primaries in the limited number of states that held them. But TR also recognized that some of his Progressive supporters went over the top. For them, he coined the wonderful phrase, “the lunatic fringe.”

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