Mountain Views News          Saturday, March 12, 2016

B6

OPINION 

Mountain Views-News Saturday, March 12, 2016 

 

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN 

Mountain 
Views

News

PUBLISHER/ EDITOR

Susan Henderson

CITY EDITOR

Dean Lee 

EAST VALLEY EDITOR

Joan Schmidt

BUSINESS EDITOR

LaQuetta Shamblee

PRODUCTION

Richard Garcia

SALES

Patricia Colonello

626-355-2737 

626-818-2698

WEBMASTER

John Aveny 

CONTRIBUTORS

Chris Leclerc

Bob Eklund

Howard Hays

Paul Carpenter

Kim Clymer-Kelley

Christopher Nyerges

Peter Dills 

Dr. Tina Paul

Rich Johnson

Merri Jill Finstrom

Lori Koop

Rev. James Snyder

Tina Paul

Mary Carney

Katie Hopkins

Deanne Davis

Despina Arouzman

Greg Welborn

Renee Quenell

Ben Show

Sean Kayden

Marc Garlett

Pat Birdsall (retired)

RICK Jensen

LIBERALS AND THEIR UNINTENDED 
CONSEQUENCES

HOWARD Hays As I See It


“Mary Lou Bruner is a 
real peach.”

- Rachel Dicker, writing 
in US News & World 
Report

I checked out Mary 
Lou Bruner’s picture 
online; a silver-haired 
retired teacher and 
grandmother from East 
Texas with a pleasant 
smile.

 I checked out her views. She believes President 
Obama worked as a gay prostitute to support 
a drug habit. Dinosaurs aren’t around today 
because Noah brought only baby ones aboard 
the ark and there wasn’t enough vegetation to 
feed on after the flood. School shootings arose 
from the teaching of evolution in the classroom. 
JFK was killed by Democrats so they could put 
socialist Lyndon Johnson in power. The United 
Nations is set on reducing world population 
by two-thirds - by famine, disease, WWIII, 
whatever it takes. Islam must be banned to 
thwart its aim of conquering the United States.

 Mary Lou Bruner is the odds-on favorite to 
be elected to the Texas Board of Education this 
May. She came just two points shy of avoiding 
the run-off, receiving 48% of the vote on Super 
Tuesday. 

 On the Board, she will help determine the 
curriculum taught in Texas’ public schools. 
She will also help determine the content of 
textbooks and, with Texas being such a major 
market for publishers, her views will affect 
textbooks used throughout the country.

 As for allowing personal beliefs to 
influence her work on the Board, Ms. 
Bruner makes it clear: “I don’t intend to 
apologize for my opinions because I still 
believe my statements were accurate.” 
Her story was picked up by John Oliver on his 
HBO show, featured in a segment along with 
fellow Texan Robert Morrow.

To suggest Morrow uses Twitter and Facebook 
as others use the walls of public restrooms 
would be unfair; Morrow employs the “n-word”, 
“f-word(s)” and “c-word” with far less restraint 
– while indulging his obsession with certain 
components of male and female anatomy. His 
targets are not just Bill and Hillary but Chelsea, 
as well; not only does he insist our president is 
a closet queen but also Sen. Marco Rubio (R-
FL) and members of the Bush family – while 
former Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) is a “rampaging 
bisexual adulterer”. 

Robert Morrow isn’t headed for any run-off. He 
won his race outright, garnering 54% of the vote 
to become Republican Chair of Travis County 
– Texas’ fifth largest, home to the (relatively 
progressive) state capital of Austin.

 The Texas Republican establishment is having 
fits. In case Morrow doesn’t withdraw prior to 
taking his seat come June, they’re developing 
contingency plans to maybe cut funding for 
the county operation, setting up some parallel 
structure for “official” party business – or 
something. Concerning these moves, Morrow 
told the Austin American-Statesman, “I just 
don’t care”.

 The establishment line is that Morrow’s win 
is likely due to voters’ unfamiliarity with the 
names on the ballot; but it’s not that far-fetched 
to see them electing someone who, albeit a 
potty-mouth, describes himself as “Trump on 
steroids” (though he himself appears leaning 
towards Sen. Ted Cruz).

 The reaction at the state level to Robert 
Morrow’s becoming the face of the GOP 
mirrors the national “establishment” reaction 
to Donald Trump: they seem confounded as to 
how he got where he is, and now that he’s there 
are desperate to find a way of dealing with it.

 As for the rise of Trump, columnist Josh 
Kraushaar in the National Journal blames 
Sen. Al Franken (D-MN). You see, when 
Franken was seated, giving Democrats a 
super-majority in the Senate, the president no 
longer had to “negotiate” with (i.e. relinquish 
control to) minority Republicans – and thus the 
“polarizing” began.

 Writing in the Wall Street Journal, former 
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (who left his state 
an economic basket case) places blame for 
Trump squarely on President Obama. It was 
the president, after all, who brought about this 
“polarization” by pushing through bills like the 
2009 stimulus (which saved us from a full-blown 
depression) and the Affordable Care Act (which 
brought healthcare to 20 million Americans) 
despite knowing full-well that Republicans 
didn’t like them. It was the president who 
insisted the Environmental Protection Agency 
do its job, regardless of whether Congressional 
Republicans wanted it to.

 Keith Ablow on Fox News does place some 
blame for Trump on Republicans, because “we 
let this guy (Obama) occupy the Oval Office for 
eight years” – as if it was their decision to make.

 To explain a constituency where 
condemnation of the front-runner by past 
standard-bearers Mitt Romney and Sen. John 
McCain (R-AZ) only brings more support to 
that front-runner, one could look back not 
seven but nearly fifty years.

 In Nixon’s day it was the “Southern 
strategy” to get voters to the polls; bringing 
them in by stoking fear over LBJ’s Civil 
Rights and Voting Rights legislation. Under 
Reagan it was the “welfare queen”, conjuring 
images of something other than a white single 
mother in Appalachia.

 Karl Rove took it to another level; increasing 
turnout by warning of gun confiscation and a 
“gay agenda”. With Barack Obama there was 
fear over a Kenyan-Marxist-Muslim whose 
background was somehow “foreign” to the “real 
America”, as Sarah Palin put it.

 That fear has caused the average number 
of firearms held by American gun-owner to 
double from four to eight over the past twenty 
years, according to the Washington Post. But 
at the same time, the percentage of gun-owners 
among us has dropped to 32% - less than a third 
of all Americans, the lowest percentage of gun-
ownership in forty years.

 That 32% might be enough to win a primary 
or even a presidential nomination, but not 
a general election. That’s what’s stoking fear 
among the GOP “establishment” - especially 
when they see their constituency hitching their 
wagons to the likes of a Robert Morrow or 
Donald Trump.

 As for Mary Lou Bruner, she promises to 
work hard seeing that schoolkids are taught 
that climate change is nothing but a “hoax”. 
For that effort alone, as far as this Republican 
“establishment” is concerned, Mary Lou 
remains “a real peach”. 

If the law of unintended consequences was 
actually a law enacted by legislators, it would 
likely be of no consequence at all. Unfortunately 
it’s a force of nature, not of man.

When the government has exerted force to 
raise the minimum wage by fiat outside of 
free markets, the result is immediate higher 
unemployment among minimum wage 
earners.

When seat belts went into effect, the number 
of traffic accidents actually increased. 
Economist Sam Peltzman discovered that 
total fatalities were about the same as before 
the seat belt law. But while the death rate 
for motorists decreased, there was a higher 
death rate among pedestrians and cyclists 
hit by cars. Why? The seat belt gives drivers 
a false sense of extra security, encouraging 
them to drive more recklessly.

This brings us to lawmakers who have decided 
that banning plastic grocery bags or 
nudging people away from using them by 
charging five or ten cents per bag will save 
the occasional sea turtle from eating one, 
thinking it’s a jellyfish.

It’s a lovely thought, isn’t it?

Supporters of these bills will cite thousands 
of bags menacing beaches and hyperopic 
fish. Good-hearted citizens will cheer and 
feel good about “doing something” to save 
the environment, then drive home past 
massive, mostly hidden graveyards of truck 
and car tires.

La-de-dah.

Depending upon your view, it’s either unfortunate 
or no big deal that there’s a direct 
correlation to banning plastic bags and the 
deaths of more than five people each year in 
a city the size of San Francisco.

According to a study by two university professors, 
it’s actually 5.5 people in San Francisco 
who die each year as a direct result of 
the grocery plastic bag ban.

For some people, that’s a fair trade for potentially, 
possibly, maybe saving a turtle.

San Francisco has been leading the fight 
against plastic bags. In 2007, the Environmental 
Department of the City of San Francisco 
reported plastics bags distributed by 
retail stores account for 0.6 percent of litter. 

Six tenths of one percent.

A federal EPA study found plastic bags 
make up four tenths of one percent of our 
country’s municipal waste stream.

Four tenths of one percent.

Back in 2013, Ramesh Ponnuru noted news 
reports from around the country describing 
illnesses 
caused 
by reusable 
grocery bags.

“A reusable 
grocery bag left 
in a hotel bathroom 
caused 
an outbreak of 
norovirus-induced diarrhea and nausea that 
struck nine of 13 members of a girls’ soccer 
team,” Ponnuru reported. “Researchers 
examined reusable bags in California and 
Arizona and found that 51 percent of them 
contained coliform bacteria.”

The most extensive study seems to be that of 
University of Pennsylvania Professor Jonathan 
Klick and George Mason University 
Professor Joshua Wright.

They found that as soon as the ban went 
into effect, emergency-room admissions related 
to E. coli infections increased in San 
Francisco. It’s their study that estimates the 
ban is directly responsible for a 46 percent 
increase in deaths from foodborne illnesses. 

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any 
study measuring the number of sea turtles 
saved per human death.

The difference is that human deaths are preventable 
if humans would just wash and disinfect 
their reusable bags. 97 percent don’t.

Huntington Beach, CA has rescinded their 
plastic bag ban, realizing it’s just “token environmentalism” 
with no real effect except 
more grocery store profits. 

One city council member said, “Our ordinance 
has not had any positive, measurable 
impact on the environment and has only 
caused headaches for citizens and small 
businesses alike.”

Delaware is considering the ill-conceived 
notion of forcing grocery stores to charge 
five cents for every plastic bag distributed. 

The danger is in having citizens believe 
they’re doing something positive when the 
opposite is true, giving them a false sense of 
accomplishment or security, like gun buy-
backs.

Perhaps this is to be presumed in a state run 
by Democrats who think they’re so awesome 
that they have sponsored legislation 
extending their terms in the state house and 
state senate by two years. 

Americans who would actually like term 
limits, not extensions, are obviously not 
currently living the life of the electoral elite.

Rick Jensen is Delaware’s award-winning 
conservative talk show host on WDEL.

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