Boy, those guys at Power Line!

Boy, those guys at Power Line! Rarely in the field of human endeavor have so few written so much but said so little. They're at it again, this time with the help of the director of media relations for an outfit called the Competitive Enterprise Institute criticizing the Friday column of Nick Coleman. It took the loquacious Scotty and Billy over seventeen hundred words to reply to Coleman: nuh uh! Seventeen hundred words. You know Scott, Power Line readers are not like clients who have to pay you by the word.

At any rate, Coleman writes a column making the point that the social Darwinist hunter gatherers over at the Center of the American Experiment may have had something to do with the federal government's criminally inept preparation before and and rescue efforts after Katrina:

Part of what drowned New Orleans is a political ideology determined to shrink government and ignore scientific evidence of global warming. Well, "stuff" flows downhill, and some of those tainted ideas came straight from Minnesota.

Coleman then points out that one of the former anti-environment "scholars" at the Center was David Riggs, now with the aforementioned Competitive Enterprise Institute. The aforementioned Morrison has a hissy fit and writes a huffy letter to the Star Tribune, a leaden screed that Morrison must know could not be published, but he apparently sent a copy to our correspondent Scott for inclusion with the rest of the bird droppings from the Power Line (birds sit on powerlines, get it?)

At the beginning of the his letter, Morrison draws himself to his full rhetorical height and writes:

Coleman describes the Competitive Enterprise Institute (www.cei.org) as a think tank “whose mission is preventing environmental concerns from interfering with business.” As an organization favoring limited government, our real goal is to create structures in which the values individuals place on environmental quality can be expressed as directly as possible through market forces, rather than being clumsily interpreted through political channels.

Oh, now we get it. The people of New Orleans should have had bake sales, sold chocolate bars, and held pig roasts to raise money to hire Halliburton to build up the levees. Of course! Or they could have done it themselves. Just think of the demand that would have created for shovels!

Face it Morrison, you don't give a rusty rat's ass about the environmental values of all the poor people we saw swimming for safety. The structures you want to create, you moral scrub, are impediments to people like this even expressing their values.

Morrison goes on to tell us that 1) global warming doesn't exist, and 2) doing something about about the global warming that doesn't exist might harm the economy.

In support of his first point, Morrison cites the opinion of three of the darling biostitutes of the Competitive Enterprise Institute: Robert Balling, Sallie Baliunas, and Fred Singer. All three are so intellectually crooked that when they die they will be screwed into the ground.

As to the second point, Spotty recommends Jared Diamond's latest book, Collapse.

Tags: Power Line Nick Coleman Competitive Enterprise Institute Center of the American Experiment