Fisking Fisters and Fiskers

26Sep/090

Fisking Fisters and Fiskers

As everybody ought to know by now, Cap & Trade and the Green Economy are an enormous boondoggle designed to redistribute wealth, especially given the revelation that the data supporting Global Warmism seems conveniently to disappear when it's asked for. Among the principal beneficiaries would be Al Gore. And there's a new movie called The Age of Stupid, which just premiered in New York City, which inveighs particularly against air travel (from Breitbart.TV):

Interestingly, this movie emerges at exactly the same time that the US taxpayer has loaned half a billion dollars to a Finnish automaker, in whom Al Gore is a major investor.

A tiny car company backed by former Vice President Al Gore has just gotten a $529 million U.S. government loan to help build a hybrid sports car in Finland that will sell for about $89,000.

The award this week to California startup Fisker Automotive Inc. follows a $465 million government loan to Tesla Motors Inc., purveyors of a $109,000 British-built electric Roadster. Tesla is a California startup focusing on all-electric vehicles, with a number of celebrity endorsements that is backed by investors that have contributed to Democratic campaigns.

The awards to Fisker and Tesla have prompted concern from companies that have had their bids for loans rejected, and criticism from groups that question why vehicles aimed at the wealthiest customers are getting loans subsidized by taxpayers.

"This is not for average Americans," said Leslie Paige, a spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste, an anti-tax group in Washington. "This is for people to put something in their driveway that is a conversation piece. It's status symbol thing."

This program ought to be known as Cash for Fuckers. And in all likelihood, it was the US taxpayer who fronted the $109k that it cost the San Francisco airport to install a machine that vends carbon credits at 60 times the cost on the open market.

Via Watts Up With That comes this link to the Sunday Times of London, which notes that since the UN suspended the $100 billion dollar carbon exchange market over allegations of fraud---strangely, since the whole AGW Scare Movement is fraud---the bottom of the steadily plummeting market for offsets has fallen out, dropping from $7 per metric tonne to 20 cents or so, now. It might be interesting to find out who sold off ahead of the UN's announcement, and who receives the money from San Francisco's airport machine, and who put up the $190k in the first place.

Feel like you're getting fisted yet? Well, just make sure it's being done right:

President Obama's "safe schools czar" is a former schoolteacher who has advocated promoting homosexuality in schools, written about his past drug abuse, expressed his contempt for religion and detailed an incident in which he did not report an underage student who told him he was having sex with older men.

Conservatives are up in arms about the appointment of Kevin Jennings, Obama's director of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, saying he is too radical for the job.

Jennings was appointed to the position largely because of his longtime record of working to end bullying and discrimination in schools. In 1990, as a teacher in Massachusetts, he founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which now has over 40 chapters at schools nationwide. He has also published six books on gay rights and education, including one that describes his own experiences as a closeted gay student.

...

In 1997, according to a transcript put together by Brian J. Burt, managing editor of the student-run Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Jennings said he hoped that promoting homosexuality in schools would be considered fine in the future.

"One of our board members" was called to testify before Congress when they had hearings on the promotion of homosexuality in schools," Jennings said. "And we were busy putting out press releases, and saying, "We're not promoting homosexuality, that's not what our program's about. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.... '

"Being finished might someday mean that most straight people, when they would hear that someone was promoting homosexuality, would say 'Yeah, who cares?' because they wouldn't necessarily equate homosexuality with something bad that you would not want to promote."

The group Jennings founded has also been accused of promoting homosexuality in schools. At a GLSEN conference in 2000, co-sponsored with the Massachusetts Department of Education, the group landed in hot water when it was revealed that it had included an educational seminar for kids that graphically described some unorthodox sex techniques.

A state official who spoke to teens at the conference said:

"Fisting (forcing one's entire hand into another person's rectum or vagina) often gets a bad rap....[It's] an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be that close and intimate with...[and] to put you into an exploratory mode."

At the time, Jennings said he had concerns about events at the conference, but he also criticized attendees who filmed it.

"From what I've heard, I have concerns as well," Jennings told the Boston Globe in May 2000. "GLSEN believes that children do have a right to accurate, safer sex education, but this needs to be delivered in an age-appropriate and sensitive manner.

"What troubles me is the people who have the tape know what our mission is, they know that our work is about preventing harassment and they know that session was not the totality of what was offered at a conference with over 50 sessions," he said.

But Peter LaBarbera, President of "Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, said Jennings' reaction was weak and unacceptable.

"He never really apologized. If a conservative group had done that, they would be out of business," LaBarbera said.