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COUNTY NEWS

Even though the State results left something to be desired, in Iosco County Republicans won every race except Drain Commissioner, which had no Republican candidate.  Congratulations on all your hard work.  We do have the majority in the State House and Senate which may temper Governor Whitmer's tendencies to excess.  Among her promises were to lower health care premiums (always a good idea), eliminate the "Pension Tax," which always sounds good to us old folks, fix the roads -- something everyone would like, add more people to the health care rolls -- which should be easier if the cost was lower, and lower prescription medication costs.  We wish her well in doing this without raising taxes.

We had Campaign Headquarters in both East Tawas and Oscoda.  We weren't originally able to find a place in Oscoda when Marianne Wheeler stepped up and offered her building.  We all thank her.  In addition, we had a hard working and faithful group of people who manned both headquarters: Jane & Howard Burdett, Dave Chandler, Bonita Coyle, Lorraine Ferguson, Sonia & David Glass, Linda Glomski, Jackie Gonterman, Colleen Hatch, Jane & Dana Hayward, Anne Holden, Sandy Hollabaugh, Mary Kiernan, Sandy Lawlor, Rae McCready, Mary Lou Morgan, Debbie O'Neil, Sharon Porter, Mary Riley, Mary P. Smith, Eugenia Ulrich, Mary Jo Van Maele, Marianne Wheeler and Billie Wright.

At the County Convention on November 9, the decision was made to keep meeting at 7:30 a.m. on the second Friday of the month, alternating between Oscoda and East Tawas, when we meet except for County Conventions scheduled by the State Party.  The Executive Committee was chosen with the At-Large delegates being Jim Stamas, Sue Allor, Nancy Huebel, Gary Rapp, Erica Earl, Robert Huebel, Terry Dutcher, Mark McKulsky, John Moehring and Jay O'Farrell.  The elected members were chosen and officers as well.  They are Dave Chandler - President, Rae McCready - Secretary, Billy Wright, Eugenia Ulrich, Linda Glomski - Vice Chair, Maureen Rudel - Treasurer, Jan Ernst, Judy Fritz, Bonita Coyle and Mary P. Smith.

KAVANAUGH COULD END THEFT BY LAWYER
By Don Surber, October 18, 2018 DonSurber@gmail.com

Three lawyers sued Google on behalf of 129 million people whose privacy Google compromised. The lawyers then settled for $8.5 million or less than 7 cents per person. The trio of lawyers are the worst negotiators since the chief who gave the Dutch Manhattan for $24 worth of costume jewelry.

The lawyers then gypped their clients out of the first quarter of the money, reducing the award to less than a nickel each.

It gets worse.

"But no class members other than the named plaintiffs received any money! Instead, the remainder of the settlement fund was awarded to six organizations that 'promote public awareness and education, and/or…support research, development, and initiatives, related to protecting privacy on the Internet.' Three of the recipients were alma maters of class counsel," Ilya Shapiro reported.

This was a nuisance suit -- a slip-and-fall suit -- that Google settled for pennies on the thousand.

To settle for $700 a victim, Google would have had to pay more than a trillion bucks. Even a buck a client would have cost the company $129 million plus legal fees.

This is piracy by people who are less flamboyant and more ruthless than the pirates of yore.

Somebody should do something about this.

Enter the dragon. Well, the dragon's lawyer.

Ted Frank, director of the Center for Class Action Fairness, which merged with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He's one of the few conservative think-tankers in Washington who actually gets stuff done. He has challenged legal fees the pirates get -- and won.

How good a lawyer is he?

"Previously, Frank clerked for the Honorable Frank H. Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and was a litigator for 10 years until winning a sizable windfall from the 2004 World Series of Poker," according to his bio at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Paloma Gaos and her two fellow class action pirates in the Google case are about to find out whether poker prowess pays off. The Supreme Court will hear the case in oral arguments on October 31.

"If he wins the case, which presents the question of whether class action settlements can consist only of payouts to charity without any direct benefits to class members, he'll dramatically shift incentives for plaintiffs' lawyers purporting to represent million-member classes. In a merits brief filed Monday, Frank is asking for no less than a holding from the Supreme Court that class actions can't be certified unless there's a way to pay class members directly," Westlaw reported.

The first question Justice Brett Kavanaugh should ask Paloma Gaos is, "Do you have the addresses of all your clients?"

The second should be, "Why not?"

They say a lawyer who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.

It beats having 129 million clients. When this is over, someone else should sue the trio for ineffective counsel. Who hires a lawyer to get 7 cents?

OBAMA EPA'S U.P. ROAD BLOCK MAY BE HEADING TO THE U.S. SUPREME COURT
It’s really about a mine
By Derek Draplin, Nov. 2, 2018

An ongoing legal battle between an Upper Peninsula community and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could be decided by the nation’s highest court.

The California-based Pacific Legal Foundation last week filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court to review a lawsuit involving its client, the Marquette County Road Commission, and the EPA, over a county road project the federal agency blocked.

In 2012, the EPA blocked a plan to build a 21-mile stretch of road called County Road 595 through an undeveloped wetland in the western Upper Peninsula. The road was designed as a shortcut for heavy trucks traveling between the Eagle Mine and its Humboldt Mill in Champion, shortening the trip between the two locations by 78 miles and diverting traffic away from the city of Marquette.

The new copper and nickel mine opened in 2014. In 2011, the Marquette County Road Commission applied to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality for a permit to build the road. The department later approved a plan for submission to the EPA.

The Obama EPA, which vetoed the plan, “offered unsupported and vague objections to the permit application,” Mark Miller, a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation, wrote in a recent op-ed for The Hill. “The Road Commission attempted to remedy these objections, offering to protect and preserve 63 acres of wetlands for every acre of wetlands filled. But the EPA demanded more.”

The road commission filed its initial lawsuit challenging the EPA’s ruling in July 2015, rather than start the permitting process over again. The United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan dismissed the complaint, and the road commission's appeal to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was also turned back. Now after over three years of legal battles, the Pacific Legal Foundation hopes the Supreme Court will rule on what it says is agency overreach.

Lawyers for the legal foundation cite two Supreme Court rulings and the Administrative Procedures Act in their case against the EPA.

Miller argued in the op-ed that the Administrative Procedures Act allows the EPA’s veto to be appealed and reviewed in court.

He also cited precedents from recent Supreme Court rulings in Sackett v. EPA and Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes, which as he wrote, “suggest the Road Commission is right. In those opinions, the high court held unanimously that final agency decisions in the Clean Water Act context are reviewable in court. To hold otherwise, the court said, would allow for federal agency ‘strong-arming’ of regulated parties.”

The EPA said it does not comment on pending litigation.

The road plan had bipartisan support from the Michigan Legislature, support from the community and business groups, and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

The 2004 bill that approved the building of the mine was introduced by Sen. Tom Casperson, R-Escanaba. The bill was passed with bipartisan support by the Legislature and was signed by then Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat.

Casperson told Michigan Capitol Confidential in 2016 that the EPA’s real target wasn’t County Road 595, but the Eagle Mine.

“They had clearly made up their minds ahead of time to block the road from being built. The EPA knew they were going to reject the road project from the very beginning,” Casperson said, citing correspondence, obtained through a FOIA request, between the EPA and U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who at the time served as the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Stand U.P., a group that supports the road plan, claims County Road 595 would help the environment by cutting fuel use by 464,000 gallons per year, since the 100 commercial vehicles that travel daily on the county’s roads would be driving a shorter distance.

The road, it says, “would prevent more than 4,989 tons of air pollution and greenhouse gasses every single year, reducing the air pollution” by 56 percent.

From the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Michigan. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Mackinac Center are properly cited.

GREEN ENERGY IS THE PERFECT SCAM
By Norman Rogers,November 12, 2018

Green energy is an incredible money-making scam. The promoters of green energy make billions of dollars promoting dumb energy schemes that are completely useless. What makes the scam extremely clever is that the scammers have convinced the public that the purpose of their scam is to improve the environment. The scammers pretend to be earnest environmental advocates. Any really good scam needs endorsements from authoritative sounding sources. In the case of green energy, the authoritative sources are in on the scam. The beneficiaries of the green energy scam go way beyond the wind and solar industries.

Non-profit environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, need to be seen as fighting against an urgent looming catastrophe. If they don’t have something dreadful to fight against, no one is going to join their organizations or give them money. Global warming, allegedly caused by carbon dioxide, is the looming catastrophe and green energy is the solution. When the globe failed to warm they renamed the looming catastrophe climate change in place of global warming. Now they blame every instance of bad weather on climate change created by burning coal and oil. What were formerly acts of God are now the fault of the oil and coal companies.

Scientists are a special interest group largely financed by the federal government. Global warming is a magnificent gift to the science industry. The industry has been corrupted by pathological science that is primarily intended to increase flow of money from Washington. Science directed toward discovering truth is out of fashion. The many scientists that are global warming skeptics don’t exist as far as the science industry is concerned.

Government agencies, and the politicians that give the agencies money, have embraced the threat of climate change. It gives them something to do that is more noble, even romantic than highways and making the trains run on time. The government spends billions on subsidizing wind and solar energy.

Ironically, electric utility companies love wind and solar green energy. They know perfectly well that wind and solar are useless because wind and solar generate electricity erratically and have to be backed up by reliable conventional electric generating plants. The only economic benefit is the fuel saved in the backup plants when wind or solar is actually generating electricity. But the cost of the wind or solar electricity is much higher than the benefit of fuel saved. Thus, the more wind or solar that you have, the more money you lose. But, electric utilities are regulated by public utilities commissions. The amount of profit they are allowed is calculated as a fraction of the utilities’ capital investment. So, the utilities want to make capital investments, even if those investments are wind and solar plants that waste money on a grand scale. The electricity consumers bear the cost and the utilities are allowed a larger profit.

In some parts of the country rooftop solar is fashionable. Homeowners who install rooftop solar often save money because the reduction in cost of electricity from the utility is greater than he cost of the solar electricity. These homeowners brag to their friends about how clever they are, and the purveyors of rooftop solar place advertisements claiming that rooftop solar is cheaper than buying electricity from the electric company. This is part of the scam. Rooftop solar is profitable because it is heavily subsidized and because the electric utility is forced, by the governmental authorities, to provide a connection to back up the solar without compensating remuneration. The real cost of rooftop solar electricity, exclusive of subsidies, is around 30-cents per kilowatt hour and the real benefit is around two cents per kilowatt hour from fuel saved in the utility’s backup plants. The subsidy, financed by taxpayers and electricity consumers, is greater than ninety percent.

Hundreds of thousands of home owners, under the delusion that they have discovered cheaper electricity, are walking and talking advertisements for solar energy.

The biggest victim of the green energy scam is the public in general. Everybody pays more taxes and pays more for energy as a consequence of the scam. But the waste of billions of dollars may not be noticeable when spread over the 320 million Americans. The public has been exposed to relentless propaganda promoting green energy as beneficial and less expensive. The public is the greatest victim, but most people don’t know that they are being victimized, so there is little incentive to organize against the scam.

There are certain other victims such as the coal industry and coal miners. But these groups mostly don’t understand that they are victimized by a scam. Due to the propaganda they may actually believe that burning coal is undesirable and dangerous. Thus, they lack a clear mandate to organize against the scam. (Modern coal generating plants are environmentally clean.)

The manufacturers of fossil fuel generating plants are beneficiaries, not victims. Wind and solar don’t reduce the demand for fossil fuel plants because wind and solar have to be backed up by traditional plants. A campaign against coal, by the Sierra Club, has resulted in the closing of many coal plants. The closed plants are typically replaced by new natural gas plants. Due to the strain imposed on the electric grid by erratic wind and solar there are many commercial opportunities for upgrading the traditional components of the electricity grid. Rather than hurting the manufacturers of fossil fuel generating equipment, the green energy movement actually helps them.

The green energy scam is the perfect scam because the beneficiaries include many influential individuals and institutions, while the victims are dispersed among large numbers of unorganized people. The few concentrated groups of victims, like coal miners, are psychologically handicapped by propaganda that has convinced them that they, rather than the scammers, are at fault.

Wind and solar are truly useless, like having a 6th toe or an appendix. A detailed exposition on the uselessness of wind and solar is given in my book – Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy.

Green energy is often justified on the grounds that it reduces carbon dioxide emissions and thus prevents global warming. Of course, global warming, now called climate change, is itself a scam. The science on which the predictions of global warming doom are based is incredibly weak. But, the weak science is presented as if it is reliable by self-interested parties. In any case, wind and solar are very expensive methods of reducing CO2 emissions. Other, far more practical, strategies for reducing CO2 emissions are available.

Anyone who criticizes the green energy scam is ruthlessly attacked. Critics are often accused of being in the pay of fossil fuel companies. Fossil fuel companies are too timid to risk the wrath of the green movement, so they hardly ever give money to the critics of the green movement. A favorite line of attack is to accuse the critics of using tobacco company tactics to cover up the danger from using fossil fuels. Critics are often depicted as being mental cases, as when Al Gore said that critics of his global warming promotions were like people who think the moon landing was filmed in a Hollywood studio or think that the Earth is flat. James Hansen, often considered that father of the global warming movement, suggested that executives of fossil fuel companies should be sent to jail for crimes against humanity.

Green energy is the perfect scam because it is disguised as a do-good movement and the victims are dispersed, unorganized and disarmed by propaganda. Green energy is endorsed by government agencies, environmental non-profits, and scientific groups. These are people that are often seen as sources of reliable information but that, in reality, work to promote their own parochial interests. This is a scam that needs to be exposed.

Norman Rogers is the author of the book Dumb Energy and writes often about political and environmental issues.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com