Griper Blade: Commies, Corporations, Environment, and Biostitutes

About a week ago, Senators John Kerry and Lindsey Graham teamed up to push bipartisanship on the next big legislative fight after healthcare reform -- climate legislation. In an op-ed in the New York Times, the two argued in favor of a plan to allow industries to buy and sell the ability to pollute. It's pretty simple, really; the government sets an allowable emissions standard for an industry and companies that pollute below that standard can sell their excess polluting capacity to those who don't. This creates a financial incentive to run cleaner operations, since dirtier practices cost money, while greener manufacturing actually makes money. That's the short version, but it's really not all that much more complicated than that.

This op-ed is, of course, the worst thing Lindsey Graham has ever done. He's working with Democrats to actually govern -- rather than trying to prevent the Senate from governing -- and this is literally treason. Never mind that, as Steve Benen pointed out recently, Graham is an extremely conservative Senator and "only 17 senators are to his right." Graham is now a wussypants liberal elitist. Probably a Communist, maybe a fascist. Someone ought to check his birth certificate to make sure he wasn't born in Kenya.

"Even climate change skeptics should recognize that reducing our dependence on foreign oil and increasing our energy efficiency strengthens our national security," Kerry and Graham wrote. "Both of us served in the military. We know that sending nearly $800 million a day to sometimes-hostile oil-producing countries threatens our security. In the same way, many scientists warn that failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will lead to global instability and poverty that could put our nation at risk."

Anyone who'd write something like that clearly hates America... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]