"Green" With Draconian Envy: An Idle Car Is A Connecticut Politician's Workshop by Doug Wrenn

"Green" With Draconian Envy: An Idle Car Is A Connecticut Politician's Workshop

By Doug Wrenn

April 16, 2008

In the Vatican, when the Conclave of the College of Cardinals meets, outside spectators know that a new Pope has been elected when white smoke can be seen emanating from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. In Hartford, when the Useful Idiots of the General Assembly meet under the Big, Tarnished Dome of our Socialist State's Capitol, we will soon know when we stop seeing smoke emanating from vehicle tailpipes in the area, well, in theory, anyway.

S.B. 123, brought to you by the greeniacs gone wild of the Environmental Committee, and co-sponsored by Senator Edward Meyer (D-Guilford), and Representative David Scribner (R-Brookfield), prohibits the idling of a vehicle for more than three minutes (Egg-timer not included). According to an article posted on April 1, 2008, entitled, "Connecticut Bill Intended To Curb Car, Truck Idling," on the web site "Truckflix," at www.truckflix.com, Gov. Rell also supports this ludicrous abomination of a bill. No shock there. Once again, Jodi fiddles while Connecticut burns. I'm just grateful she uncharacteristically didn't convene another committee or task force to arrive at this decision.

The bill is also supported by the American Lung Association and the usual greeniac suspects. Some of the complaints cited as reasons for the creation of the bill include air pollution and the alleged carcinogenic hazard from vehicle exhaust fumes. This of course, brings us back to the same argument that is so often ignored in the tediously incessant smoking debate: if it's so hazardous, why don't you just ban it altogether? The answer of course, is revenue, generated through regulation. Yes of course that's doubletalk, but don't worry, I'll guide you through this maze. I speak fluent liberal.

The devil, however, is in the details, more specifically, the numerous exemptions:

-traffic conditions

-mechanical difficulties

-operating defrost, heat, cooling equipment for health/safety reasons

-operating auxiliary equipment

-when necessary to bring the vehicle to the manufacturer's recommended operating temperature

-When the outdoor temperature is below 20 degrees Fahrenheit (Wouldn't that fall under "health and safety,"as cited above? Also, I think I vaguely recall once hearing "freezing" being defined at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Isn't 20 just a bit on the cool side to finally justify idling the car to turn on the heat to prevent death by exposure?)

-When the vehicle is being inspected or repaired.

-Law enforcement, firefighting, rescue or emergency vehicles "responding" to an emergency. (Question, how does a vehicle simultaneously "respond" and idle?)

-(This one's my favorite!) While at a drive-in establishment. Yes, Virginia, there is no such thing as "fast food." By the way, would you like (non-trans fat) fries with your carcinogens and toxic pollutants?

-Farm vehicles (Presumably to harvest more corn for Ethanol)

Conspicuously absent from this conspicuously poorly written bill, as I have copied it off the General Assembly's web site, and as conspicuously concocted and written by conspicuously socialist-minded legislators with conspicuously way too much spare time on their hands, are the further exemptions of sales representatives and service technicians, and various other workers who often work long hours on the road in their cars and trucks, including to do necessary paperwork, tractor-trailers, particularly those with refrigerated cargo, school and city transit buses, as well as various other types of livery vehicles, ice cream vendors, as well as various other mobile food vendors, oil delivery trucks, trucks that pump pool water, and probably at least another dozen or two exceptions or more I didn't think of. So now the question begs asking: with all these exemptions, why even enact this utterly moronic piece of knee-jerk, lame-brained, feel-good, empty-suit legislative folly in the first place, above and beyond the fact that it is being supported by a loopy, gullible, naïve, dizzy and thoroughly unqualified and inept liberal buffoon of a governor who is as equally humiliating to her state as she is to her party, and who so easily and so often zealously buys into such fallacies and scams as embryonic stem cell research, man-made global warming, and the wonders of Ethanol, not to mention the existence of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the latest reported Elvis sighting, which was supposedly aboard a UFO for purposes of sexual experimentation, and all (thanks for nothing, "Governor Gullible," et al), with the incessantly extracted taxpayers' endangered species of a dime. When this woman (thankfully) some day retires, she can writer her gubernatorial memoirs and call them, "Gullible's Travels." Meanwhile, rest assured that as gasoline encroaches upon four bucks a gallon while our governor and legislators do nothing but insist that we don't idle our cars for more than three minutes at a time, she will and her ilk be the last few remaining people left in this tanking socialist state who can wax romantic about any "travels."

In a report published in January of 2007 about ozone trends, our own state's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) cited that while some emissions and fuel changes have decreased some excessive ozone concentrations, much of the problem still exists from southern surface level winds pushing ozone precursors from the industrial areas of the mid-Atlantic to Connecticut, and southwest winds at higher elevations blowing similar precursors to us from the industrial Ohio Valley to Connecticut. The bottom line is that all the hot air we get from Hartford won't matter one iota in comparison to the dirty air we're still getting from New Jersey, Ohio, and the like. If these brainless, feel-good, greeniac do-gooders really wanted to reduce carbon emissions, they would do us all a tremendous service by simply shutting their mouths instead of telling us to shut off our cars. Besides, in this state, we can't hang our laundry on outside clothing lines anymore, so who cares if nearby cars are idling? There are no more clothes to soil by exhaust fumes in this Draconian bastion of Big Brotherhood, and I don't mean in the fraternal sense, either.

Sorry, but I lost track. How many people got capped on the mean streets of Hartford this week? I need a program to keep score. There is a real crisis in Hartford right now. It's bad enough that they don't have enough city cops and sometimes have to summon the Staties to come in and do their job for them, but now, there are so many shootings that pretty soon there won't be any more "ducks" to shoot in the gallery. But in the meantime, while the brainchildren of the Big, Tainted Dome refuse to inconvenience parolees with ankle bracelets, and the vulnerable citizens a workable and effective Three Strikes Law, now these rocket scientists want our cops to actually sit for three or more minutes to observe and catch violators of this asinine car-idling ban. Meanwhile, as the bullets are flying from the cock-eyed gang-bangers, who typically "spray and pray" with impunity, and only actually hit a target if their not aiming at it, and thus offing the citizenry in droves, while a slew of $90 dollar infractions will be doled out, and all the while, as those surveilling police officers, otherwise distracted from more significant duties, will be idling their cruisers as well, thus doubling the toxic pollutants spewed into the air from both perpetrator and law enforcer simultaneously, and thereby defeating the entire purpose of reducing vehicle emissions. (Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?) The only irony funnier than this nonsense is to see some of these imbeciles someday leave their political sinecures and actually try to hack it out in the real world. Beyond that, to grimace while recalling that we pay their salaries is a bitter pill that makes me choke even more than having to endure breathing in adjacent idling diesel fumes from the truck next to me while I painfully sit and cough while waiting for a red light to change to, yes, believe it or not…. "green." (Hey, will the timing of some of our traffic light cycles have to be shortened to comply with this law?)

Then of course, we have cell phones. Either being oblivious to, or denying published reports from both the National Safety Council (NSC), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA), cell phone use, regardless with a hands-on, or hands-free device is still a cognitive impairment to driving. Yet, our state legislators, in their infinite wisdom, gave us a bill that allows cell phone use while driving with a hands-free device. Everyone else must pull over to use his or her hands-on cell phones. That, in turn, translates to keeping the conversation to less than three minutes, which could be inconvenient, or shutting off the car, which could be dangerous on a winter day of 21 degrees Fahrenheit under this ridiculous legislation. So the end result is a buffet of options of laws to break: driving while talking on a cell phone, or idling for more than three minutes while talking on a cell phone.

CAUTION: Past experience has determined that greeniacs are hazardous to your health. No wonder Rush Limbaugh calls them "Environmental Whackos." Just examine this random microcosm of their pathetic track record:

-We can't drill for oil off the Florida coast, so now Cuba and China can, the latter of which, to fuel it's military for future use against us.

-In grocery stores, we switched from paper bags to plastic bags to save trees. Now we're going back to paper bags to save the landfills, because plastic, like Herpes, "lasts forever."

-To save energy, we are supposed to switch from bright, safe, but shorter living traditional light bulbs, to dimmer, but longer-lasting, although Mercury-containing bulbs, which require an emergency haz-mat response if broken.

-To supposedly save energy, we are adding Ethanol to our gasoline, which ruins engines long term, cannot be transported through a pipeline, costs more to produce, more to ship, is inflating the prices of meat and dairy products, and cannot yet effectively be suppressed by firefighters if it catches on fire.

-The same federal government that will throw you in prison for disturbing the eggs of an endangered bird has, since 1973, given you carte blanche to kill your children while still nestled in their respective wombs.

-And now these boneheads want us to freeze to death in our cars to save us all from cancer, even though cars won't be banned, other idling cars will be given oodles of exemptions, and the real nasty stuff drifting in from urban industrial centers in Ohio and New Jersey can still continue to kill us with impunity.

Had enough yet?

This is what happens when you have a Democrat Party in the majority, an impotent Republican Party with no platform, nor the desire to ever enact one, nor the chutzpah to apply it if did even have one, and an electorate more consumed with "American Idol" than Connecticut issues, and obsessively enamored with the consummately insignificant doings and stats of the Yankees and Red Sox, while willfully remaining utterly clueless as to the agendas and ideas of conservatives and liberals. So, no, you may not idle your car for more than three minutes. Where does this lunacy end? It doesn't. Think about it. Why should it? Laugh now. Enjoy the chuckles while you can. Wait until Jodi & The Greeniacs form another task force and come to invade your bathroom. By the way, how many squares of toilet paper did you use on that last trip there?

"Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released from vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources."

(Ronald Reagan)

Doug Wrenn