An Inconvenient Truth: Al Gore is an Energy Guzzler

Energy Guzzled by Al Gore’s Home in Past Year Could Power 232 U.S. Homes for a Month

Gore’s personal electricity consumption up 10%, despite “energy-efficient” home renovations

NASHVILLE - In the year since Al Gore took steps to make his home more energy-efficient, the former Vice President’s home energy use surged more than 10%, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

“A man’s commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home,” said Drew Johnson, President of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. “Al Gore is a hypocrite and a fraud when it comes to his commitment to the environment, judging by his home energy consumption.”

In the past year, Gore’s home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month.

In February 2007, An Inconvenient Truth, a film based on a climate change speech developed by Gore, won an Academy Award for best documentary feature. The next day, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research uncovered that Gore’s Nashville home guzzled 20 times more electricity than the average American household.

After the Tennessee Center for Policy Research exposed Gore’s massive home energy use, the former Vice President scurried to make his home more energy-efficient. Despite adding solar panels, installing a geothermal system, replacing existing light bulbs with more efficient models, and overhauling the home’s windows and ductwork, Gore now consumes more electricity than before the “green” overhaul.

Since taking steps to make his home more environmentally-friendly last June, Gore devours an average of 17,768 kWh per month –1,638 kWh more energy per month than before the renovations – at a cost of $16,533. By comparison, the average American household consumes 11,040 kWh in an entire year, according to the Energy Information Administration.

In the wake of becoming the most well-known global warming alarmist, Gore won an Oscar, a Grammy and the Nobel Peace Prize. In addition, Gore saw his personal wealth increase by an estimated $100 million thanks largely to speaking fees and investments related to global warming hysteria.

“Actions speak louder than words, and Gore’s actions prove that he views climate change not as a serious problem, but as a money-making opportunity,” Johnson said. “Gore is exploiting the public’s concern about the environment to line his pockets and enhance his profile.”

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a Nashville-based free market think tank and watchdog organization, obtained information about Gore’s home energy use through a public records request to the Nashville Electric Service.

Foundation Helps Families and Saves Catholic Schools

The following shows what can be done IF the bishop is committed to Catholic education. Let's hope the Archbishop of Newark and other serial school liquidators, who see the closing of Catholic schools as a quick solution to financial problems (buggery bills?), will take note.

From Newsday
By Bart Jones

Catholic schools are closing around the country, but on Long Island not one has shut its doors since 2005.

The Tomorrow's Hope Foundation may be part of the reason, and part of why declines in enrollment in the Diocese of Rockville Centre have dipped sharply in the last three years.

The not-for-profit foundation, created in 2005 at the urging of Bishop William Murphy, who was concerned about the decline, has raised $4.7 million for student scholarships, including $1 million at this year's annual gala alone, said its executive director, Kathy Brand.

The group has handed out a total 2,900 scholarships to elementary school students, ranging from $500 to $2,000 each year, Brand said. Average annual tuition on Long Island for one child is $3,944.

"Tomorrow's Hope is making an extraordinary difference for the Catholic schools on Long Island," said Sister Joanne Callahan, superintendent of the Diocese of Rockville Centre's school system. She said the program has been key in slowing a decline in enrollment. In the five years prior to the group's founding, the system was losing an average of 1,325 students a year. That has declined to between 500 and 600 students a year, a decrease she called "unbelievable."

The program allows many families to keep their children in Catholic schools. Tricia Nunez, of Hampton Bays, said her family has not taken a vacation in nine years in part so they can pay tuition for her four children to attend Catholic schools.

Her children, 6 to 16, attend Our Lady of the Hamptons Elementary School in Southampton and McGann-Mercy High School in Riverhead. The combined bill is $17,000 a year, she said, but Tomorrow's Hope has helped with $3,000 in scholarships for the youngest children. "It's meant the world to us," Nunez said.

Nationwide, Catholic schools continue to lose students at an alarming rate, said Sr. Dale McDonald of the National Catholic Education Association. Enrollment has dropped from 5.2 million in 1965 to 2.2 million today. This past year alone, 169 Catholic schools closed.

Other groups are doing work similar to Tomorrow's Hope around the country to slow or reverse the decline, but experts said the Long Island organization is off to a fast start -- perhaps partly due to its high-powered board of directors.

It is headed by Lewis Ranieri, a former chairman of Computer Associates International Inc. Its board includes Peter Quick, former president of the American Stock Exchange; former Sen. Alfonse M. D'Amato; and former Rep. Rick Lazio. The group raises money mainly through direct mail, its annual gala and other events. Scholarship recipients are assessed confidentially.

Jose Avila, 39, a graphic designer from Brentwood, said his wife, Carolina, attended Catholic schools from kindergarten to university in their native Colombia, and their dream has been to send their two daughters, Maria, 8, and Sari, 5, to St. Joseph's Academy in Brentwood. But he said it would be impossible without help from Tomorrow's Hope.

"It's been a blessing for us," he said.

Ronald Reagan Closer to Place of Honor in US Capitol

From The Reagan Foundation

Since 1864, each American state has been authorized to send two statues of heroic people from their state to be honored in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol Building in Washington, DC.

In 2006, the California Legislature decided to honor Ronald Reagan with one of their two statues. The Reagan Foundation recently announced artist Chas Fagan has been selected to create the statue of President Reagan.

Fagan was selected from among numerous artists who submitted designs and models for the Reagan statue.

“I think Chas Fagan has done a wonderful job of capturing my husband,” said former First Lady Nancy Reagan. “I am honored that this statue will reside in our Capitol for years to come.”

President Reagan’s statue will replace that of Thomas Starr King, a Unitarian minister from San Francisco whose speeches were credited with keeping California in the Union during the Civil War. An occupant of Statuary Hall since 1931, the Starr statue will be moved to a place of honor at the California state capitol in Sacramento.

California’s other statue honors Father Junipero Serra, who established missionary outposts throughout California in the 1700s. When Ronald Reagan was sworn in for his first term as governor of California in 1967, he took the oath of office on a Bible brought to California by Father Serra.

Irish Miracle

From The Wall Street Journal
By Norman Stone

The Irish find themselves for the first time ever being showered with compliments from the English. This writer -- a Scot -- does not really approve of Ireland's independence. They are us, bless them, and their independence has been a bore, a little bit like East Timor's. Friends, family, writers -- all belong to an Ireland that's greater than the sum of its parts.

Now that greatness has been manifested. The Irish have done a miracle and wrecked the latest project of the European Union, in a referendum where general cussedness has been expressed. The proposed changes to the way Europe works amount to a constitution, but the powers-that-be tried to smuggle it through as a treaty. The British were supposed to have a referendum as well but since everyone knows that Europe is just not a popular cause, the government weaseled out of one. The French and Dutch did hold referendums three years back and the formal constitution was turned down.

The Europeans -- at any rate the official classes -- would dearly love to project themselves as a Great Power, American-fashion, and in 2004 produced a constitution. It was prepared in an extraordinarily clumsy way, with vast gatherings presided over by the former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, in a style that Margaret Thatcher found profoundly irritating ("Olympian without being patrician"). The best constitutions either do not exist, as with England, or they are short, as with 1787 in Philadelphia. The Germans had a shot at a constitution in 1848 and invited all their professor doctor doctors to have a say. There are few occasions to bless the arrival of the Prussian army and that was one: The beards were bayoneted.

You might even make a rule about this: The longer the constitution, the shorter its life. The Weimar Republic is a classic case, and it taught the West Germans in 1949 what not to do in such documents; the German basic law is almost a model. The other rule is of course not to let professors of political science anywhere near such documents.

The European constitution is a lengthy and unreadable one because so many different interests had to be squared. Thus for instance, toward the end of the near-five-hundred page effort, the "Sami" or, as they used to be called, Lapps get a look-in.

Now there was a certain obvious sense in getting the European institutions to work better. They go back 50 years or so, and even the present flag is vaguely copied from the banner of the Coal and Steel Community in 1951; the assembly and the court were thought up then, and maybe someone even conceived of an anthem. The founder, Jean Monnet, found it insufferably boring, and you could even make a case that the creative element in Europe was America. The first suggestion of a common European currency came from the deputy secretary general of the Marshall Plan.

The European institutions worked tolerably for a time with six member states, but even then they were not brilliant. They were secretive and lofty, in that French technocratic style that so irritates others, and the best monument to them is the Common Agricultural Policy, born in 1962 and since then notorious for corruption and unreformability. The institutions were again not very efficient when there were only nine members, in the seventies, and Mr. Giscard d'Estaing made another of his blunders when he tried to make the European cause more popular by arranging for the Community to have a popularly elected parliament. Any journalist with a taste for mockery had a wonderful time in the European Parliament, self-important and powerless.

Now, with 27 member states, there is an obvious need to change the rules, and even for allowing national vetoes to be lifted. One absurd example: Greek Cyprus was let in as a member and now has the power to disrupt Europe's negotiations with Turkey, a country 40 times larger, and in a hugely strategic position. It is also the case, under present rules, that the presidency of the Union shifts every six months round capitals -- Paris one minute, Riga or even Valetta in Malta the next. Those small states do not have the wherewithal for the job, and in some cases have appeared ridiculous. Thus, over the Yugoslav crisis some 16 years back, which was billed to be "the hour of Europe," a Mr. Poos appeared from Luxembourg and lectured the Slovenes as to how they had no right to be nationalistic -- Luxembourg, beside which Slovenia looks positively elephantine. Meanwhile, the Germans have become the most important power in the east and south, and they are also the paymasters.

It is all a strange echo of the world of 1918, after Czarist Russia had collapsed, and various new states emerged -- the Ukraine especially, but also the Baltic republics including Finland. Back then the Germans were intent on setting up a satellite empire. In Hitler's time a quarter-century later this was even more the case, with Slovakia and Croatia (and even, though in a muddled way, Kosovo) emerging as Nazi puppet states. Nowadays, the lines on the map can be strangely similar to those of Hitler's day. But of course we are dealing with an altogether different Germany -- a Germany which, for a long time, simply did not want to have a foreign policy. One foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, once rejected a campaign for Germany to have a seat on the U.N. Security Council with the remark that it would be like giving a liqueur chocolate to an alcoholic.

This new peaceful Germany is one that the Anglo-Saxons always wanted to see -- arguably America's greatest creation, bar Japan -- and she has to deal with big problems -- the Balkans, Russia and the future of Turkey's relationship with Europe. Why make these matters dependent upon the whims of little local politicians in Greek Cyprus or wherever?

Now the Irish, with a referendum, express the general discontent and boredom that the European Union seems to inspire almost everywhere. Some commentators have responded more or less with Bertolt Brecht's line about the East German workers' uprising in 1953: If the people act against the will of the government, then perhaps the government should dissolve the people and elect another in their place. The German foreign minister even said that the Irish could just drop out of the Union for a bit -- an absurd remark.

There have been other lofty tickings-off: How could the Irish be so ungrateful, given what Europe had done for them? But of course the Irish might not see things that way. For instance, free movement of goods and people is not always positive. There has been a crime wave associated with the shift of East European immigrants. Then again, not everyone benefits from the huge rise in property prices which, rightly or wrongly, people associate with the euro; quite the contrary, life becomes very difficult for the young if they do not have parents who can support them. One nasty phenomenon in Spain or Ireland is that the young have to live with their parents and one sign of this is the used contraceptive in the public parks. So it is not altogether surprising that great masses of Irish voters voted against a "Europe" with which they cannot identify.

The sad thing is that Europe deserves better. It is associated with the recovery of a decent Germany, escaping from her awful past and now co-existing on civilized terms with Czechs and Poles and French. Yes, there should have been some briefly worded document to reform the creaking institutions of Europe. But true to form the Europeans mismanaged the entire affair. Having had the original constitution turned down, they should simply have lived with the consequences. Instead, they have behaved in a weaseling and dishonest way that would never have occurred to the great 1950s architects of Europe, men with culture, honesty and a sense of where their extraordinary civilization had gone wrong. Thank God for the Irish.

Mr. Stone is a professor of international relations at Bilking University in Ankara and author of "World War I: A Short History," forthcoming in paperback from Basic Books.

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa - "O Mio Babbino Caro" by Puccini

Sanctuary Ranch Is This Way

No American has done more to facilitate the invasion by millions of illegal aliens from Mexico than has President Bush. His refusal to enforce the law (see post below), his perseverance in attempting to grant amnesty and reward law breakers, and his utter indifference to the rapes, murders and other crimes committed by illegals, along with the costs they pose to local, state and federal taxpayers, clearly mark him as a man of exceptional hospitality.

With this in mind, Sunlit Uplands believes that the First Family will surely want to be the first to offer sanctuary and hospitality to the millions they have invited here. We are therefore publishing a map providing every Mexican directions to the President's Crawford ranch. When you get to Crawford, just stop in at the coffee shop and they will be glad to direct you the rest of the way.

Sanctuary Trail from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to Bush Family Welcome Center, Crawford, Texas

Starting in NUEVO LAREDO, ** on VENEZUELA go toward CESAR LOPEZ DE LARA

Turn Left on CESAR LOPEZ DE LARA(MEX-85)
Continue to follow MEX-85 - go 1.5 mi

Turn Left on 1ER PUENTE ADUANAL - go 0.1 mi

Continue on CONVENT AVE(I-35-BR) - go 0.4 mi

Turn Right on FARRAGUT ST - go 0.2 mi

Turn Left on SANTA URSULA AVE

Turn Right on MATAMOROS ST(I-35 S)

Turn Left on SAN DARIO AVE(I-35 N) - go 0.1 mi

Continue on SAN DARIO AVE(US-83 N)

Take ramp onto I-35 N - go 293.2 mi

Take exit #293A/KILLEEN (TX-317)/FT HOOD (FM-436) onto S HWY BLVD - go 0.4 mi

Turn Left on TX-317 N - go 36.3 mi

Turn Right on 5TH ST(FM-185)

Arrive at the center of CRAWFORD, TX

Mexico Trumps Missouri for Kansas In-State College Tuition

The myriad costs to US taxpayers, depressed wages, crime, and threats to national security posed by the unchecked invasion of illegal aliens across America's southern border, have their roots in the President's refusal to enforce the law.

In 1996, President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. This legislation prevents colleges from granting in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens unless the college offers the same rates to all legal Americans. In violation of this law, there are currently ten states that grant in-state rates to illegal aliens, while requiring students from other states to pay higher tuition.

On June 19, the U. S. Supreme Court will consider a challenge to a Kansas law that allows an illegal from Mexico to pay the lower in-state rate, but denies the same rate to a legal American from Missouri.

The preeminent organization fighting for immigration sanity, NumbersUSA, is urging all Americans to write to their Representatives and Senators and ask them to "take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that federal laws are enforced by the Executive Branch." The organization rightly believes that it is a waste for the Supreme Court to hear a case when the Executive Branch could settle the matter by simply doing their duty and enforcing the law.