The truth is often inconvenient, especially to Greens.  The truth is that the billions of dollars Congress allocated in the stimulus package to plant windmills and free us from foreign oil will make us more dependent on foreign oil.  This inconvenient truth is based purely on the numbers.

10% of the power in the United States comes from dams.  Hydroelectricity is carbon neutral, but we have little or no water sheds left to dam up, so the percentage of electricity produced will decline as demand increases.

10% of our power is derived from burning natural gas.  This is good news because we have enough of it to last for the nest 200 years.  The Greens however, have problem with gas because burning it to produce electricity is not carbon neutral.  The government is doing nothing to promote the use of natural gas.

57% of our power comes from burning coal.  This is again good news because we have enough coal in the United States to provide over half of the country’s electricity for the next 190 to 240 years.   The abundance of coal is really bad news for Greens and entirely responsible for their call to reduce CO2 emissions.  The government is now doing every thing it can to stop coal production.

20% of our power comes from nuclear energy, which is completely carbon neutral.  The Greens however, detest nuclear power even more than coal because of a movie Jane Fonder made thirty years ago.  A nuclear power plant hasn't been built in the United States in decades thanks to government intervention.

1% of the nation’s power comes from other forms of generation like burning biomass, wind turbines, and solar power.  There’s a reason for this.  If we covered the entire state of Nevada with windmills and solar panels they wouldn't produce enough electricity to power the cities of Las Vegas and Reno.

There are a great many technological problems that cannot be ideologically solved.  Reducing the huge amount of energy it takes to produce electricity and our inability to save it for a rainy day – literally, are two of them.   The laws of physics cannot be amended to suit environmental sensibilities.

1% of the oil used in the United States is devoted to the production of electricity.  70% of the oil we consume is used for transportation, 24% is used in industry and manufacturing (everything from hand lotion to carbon fibers are made from oil), and 5% is used for commercial and residential purposes.

The numbers are clear.  Billions of dollars in public funds will be spent over the next few years to reduce our oil dependence by 1%.  The same amount of public money could have been used to build a few dozen nuclear or natural gas power plants, something we do very well, that would have reduced our total dependence on coal by 40% and substantially reduced our carbon emissions.

The stimulus bill and proposed cap and trade legislation are not about reducing our dependence of foreign oil or our carbon footprint.  Both are devoted to destroying the coal industry damn the consequences.

^{This 4th voice your discontent and send a check to Governor Palin’s Defense fund at http://www.sarahpalinsdefensefund.com/ and a letter with a voided check to the RNC at http://www.rnc.org/splashpage/index.aspx and the DNC at http://www.democrats.org/.}

      HOWARD: We ARE citizens of an American nation! And our rights are being threatened by a tyrant three thousand miles away!

      MARTIN: Would you tell me please, Mr. Howard, why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away? An elected legislature can trample a man's rights as easily as a king can.

Mel Gibson's character in the movie eloquently framed what the Founding Fathers feared the most in any from of representative government and went to great lengths in the Constitution to prevent…legislative tyranny.

Although they were committed to representative government, the Founders were terrified of direct democracy and the potential for tyranny that it posed.   Tyranny of the majority always begins softly, cloaked in the arms of charity and good intention, driven ultimately by greed.  Following the Bible, the Constitution is based on the premise that people are fundamentally flawed and prone to excess.

To combat the anticipated demand the governed always ultimately have for a minority’s money and property, the Founders used the Constitution to empower local governments (the states) and severely restrict the ability of the federal government to enact law.  The constitution, to this end, clearly and severely limits the authority of two of the three branches of government.

Article I, Section 8 authorizes Congress to engage in only 18 specific legislative/confiscatory activities.

Article I, Section 9 precludes Congress from engaging in 8 specific confiscatory activities.

Article II, Sections 2 and 3 very clearly delineated the very limited powers of the President and grants him no confiscatory authority.

Article III governing the authority of the Supreme Court is restrictive but necessarily vague.  What is not vague is statement in Article III, Section 2 that the “supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”  In other words, Congress has the authority to restrict the type of cases the Supreme Court can hear.

The Founders incorrectly assumed that Congress would guard their prerogatives and stop the Court should it start legislating from the bench.  Congress has never really exercised its constitutional authority over the Court.  They instead use the Court’s proclivity for judicial activism to pass into law things that are either clearly unconstitutional or too unpopular to survive the legislative process.

The Court returns the favor.  Almost every law enacted by Congress over the past 70 years is unconstitutional.  Few, if any, of these laws have ever come before the Court because the Supreme Court alone chooses which cases it will hear.

Over the past 70 years, Congress, in collusion with a succession of Presidents and Supreme Court justices, has progressively shredded the Constitution.  The President and the Court, with Congressional approval, have assumed almost imperial powers.  The road to tyranny has been well paved.  The United States is almost at the brink, the point of no return…almost.

There now remains only a very small window of opportunity to restore Constitutional government.  That opportunity lies in restructuring the composition of Congress.  It is now almost irrelevant who sets in the White House or on the Supreme Court.