Democrats seem much less willing to tout “green,” or environmentally-friendly policies, as we get close to Election Day. Walter Russell Mead, a well-respected conservative-leaning blogger, notices how the Obama campaign’s rhetoric is much less “green” than it was four years ago. (All emphasis in quotes is added).

Despite the fact that both [Presidential] candidates believe in anthropogenic climate change, neither one has discussed plans to address the issue using green policies. Instead, both are attempting to portray themselves as traditional energy’s best friend.

That’s not a surprise for Governor Romney—but it IS for President Obama. Remember when the president said, during his 2008 campaign, that his cap-and-trade proposals would force prices for coal-fueled energy to “necessarily skyrocket?” Well, YouTube remembers.

Fast-forward to 2012. Key battleground states—Pennsylvania, Ohio—benefit from coal production. Moreover, the natural-gas boom, enabled by fracking technology, is helping the economy throughout the Rust Belt.

Now, the New York Times notices that the national Democrats seem to be silently backing away from their aggressive “green” stance of four years ago.

Mr. Obama has supported broad climate change legislation, financed extensive clean energy projects and pushed new regulations to reduce global warming emissions from cars and power plants.

But neither he nor Mr. Romney has laid out during the campaign a legislative or regulatory program to address the fundamental questions arising from one of the most vexing economic, environmental, political and humanitarian issues to face the planet.

When the New York Times points out, before the election, that a Democratic Party candidate for national office doesn’t have much of a green program…well, it’s safe to say that you don’t have much of a green program.

Why the change? Why was the Obama campaign so bold in 2008 but not now? Walter Mead offers some thoughts:

The closer we come to the election, the less we hear about green and the more we hear about brown, about oil and gas drilling. Obama wants to win in November, and he’s clearly made the (correct) choice that he can’t do it if he continues to be the green candidate.

Nearly four years after the greenest president ever entered the Oval Office, the green movement has suffered a series of major defeats—many of them self-inflicted.

I’ve given up counting the number of green-energy firms that took millions of dollars in Porkulus—excuse me, stimulus—money, and then went out of business. (E.g., Solyndra). Millions and millions of money, funded through deficit spending, gone.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has shown itself to be way too hostile to business. Granted, businesses have not always been good to our environment. But, business drives our economy. If business fails, we all fail.

The EPA we currently have seems more intent on punishing entrepreneurs and economic risk takers, than working with the business community to develop a reasoned, balanced approach between economic development and safeguarding the environment. In fact, it appears that the EPA is eager to let the environmental activist foxes run the chicken coop that WE know as the US economy. Have you heard of “sue and settle” before? Well…

Environmental and consumer advocacy groups have found a new way to use the federal regulatory process to force overly burdensome regulations onto business.

It works like this: Environmental and consumer advocacy groups file a lawsuit claiming that the federal government has failed to meet a deadline or has not satisfied some regulatory requirement. The agency can then either choose to defend itself against the lawsuit or settle it. Often times, it settles by putting in place a “court-ordered” regulation desired by the advocacy group, thus circumventing the proper rulemaking channels and basic transparency and accountability standards. This tactic is called “sue and settle,” a name coined by Rep. Colin Peterson (D-MN).

Those most often targeted by this type of litigation are the Environmental Protection Agency; the departments of the Interior, Transportation, Agriculture, and Defense: the Fish & Wildlife Service; and the Army Corps of Engineers. Citizen suit provisions in most major environmental statutes make EPA, Interior, and others that administer environmental laws easy targets.

Through sue and settle, agencies have instituted dozens of large, burdensome rules in recent years, including such controversial regulations as new standards for greenhouse gas emissions from electric utilities and refineries; revisions to the definition of solid waste; and Clean Air Act regulations on oil and gas drilling operations.

To make matters worse, many of the legal fees arising from these cases are paid by U.S. taxpayers. Attorneys’ fees can be paid for out of the Equal Access to Justice Act and the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, both of which are set up in such a way that information on whom and how much money is paid in the settlement process is undisclosed.

“There seems to be a pattern of activist lawsuits followed by EPA settlements resulting in new regulations to comply with the settlement, and impacted industries are kept in the dark,” says Rep. Ben Quayle (R-AZ).

(FYI, the Center for Biological Diversity, America’s most zealous environmental litigators, are based right here in Tucson. So, don’t look for any major, job-producing and benefit-providing companies to come to Tucson anytime soon).

This has been going on for nearly four years now. Solar power, wind power and other green energy technologies are going bust not only in America, but overseas. The Europeans, for example, have seen that wind power is often unreliable and can wreak havoc on bird populations.

Here in the southwest USA, we’ve had a devil of a time making solar power profitable. (Cough cough Solyndra cough cough). Most people won’t outfit their homes with solar panels without hefty government subsidies. Energy from fossil fuels is still way cheaper. AND, when we try to build the large solar farms necessary to make solar more viable, the extreme environmentalists find some snail, dust mite or Mojave Desert tortoise that might be impacted and sue the projects into paralysis.

Voters have had enough. They don’t want to spend years paying high energy costs to fund cap-and-trade schemes and buy carbon credits, while waiting for green energy to finally make economic sense, some day, somewhere way way in the future.

Voters are also starting to figure out that extreme environmentalists aren’t all that concerned if people lose their jobs or can’t pay their energy bills. For many environmentalists, Gaia and Mother Earth takes precedence over you, me and our families and friends. To be clear, most of them are not mean people. They don’t want to see people suffer.

But, they’re willing to let people suffer, in order to (hopefully) reach their bigger environmental goals. If you’re going to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs, right?

Well, dear reader, how does it feel to be one of the eggs? Not too good, right? Gosh, what can we do about it? Well…what a coinky-dink, there’s an election coming up!

Rational Democrats know that. THAT’s why the “green shoots” are being trampled underfoot by Democratic candidates this election season.

Jeff Flake has made a career out of getting under the skin of established political interests. Many of those interests have been from his own party (more on that later). But, Flake has also crossed swords with some of Arizona’s biggest business leaders. (Funny, but I thought that all Republicans were in the pockets of big business).

From Dennis Prager, one of KVOI’s stalwarts of conservative talk:

Jeff Flake’s Non-Supporters
Why don’t people who have thrived under free enterprise support its champions?

Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board reported Friday that the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Arizona, Congressman Jeff Flake, has little support among some powerful big businessmen in Arizona:

In his razor-tight race for Arizona’s open Senate seat, Republican nominee Jeff Flake — a six-term U.S. congressman — recently met behind closed doors with about a dozen leading businessmen in the state, including two powerful and respected CEOs: real-estate developer Mike Ingram and former Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo.

Both businessmen supported Mr. Flake’s opponent in the Republican primary (Mr. Flake won by 40 points), and both are pushing for federal financing of a road project that would stretch from Phoenix to Las Vegas. In the western part of the state, the 300-mile highway would bisect their 34,000-acre Douglas Ranch, where they have plans to develop a luxury hotel and upscale homes. A person who attended the meeting recalls that the two asked Mr. Flake: “We need to know. Are you going to be an Arizona senator or a U.S. senator?”

I’m told that Mr. Flake responded by saying that with the country facing a $16 trillion debt, dealing with that problem was his priority.

Good answer; wrong audience. The two CEOs still haven’t endorsed Mr. Flake. In an interview, Mr. Ingram confirmed the meeting and explained that the business executives in the room “worry that Mr. Flake may not support business compared to [Democrat Rich] Carmona.”

If, by “support business,” you mean “get federal money,” yes, Jeff Flake will probably oppose that. Why? That money comes from US, and we’ve been living on deficit spending for way too long. $16 trillion in debt is beaucoup dollar! Who’s going to pay that debt? (Turn now and look at the pictures of your children and grandchildren).

Jeff Flake has made a career of telling Washington, and those connected to its teats, that the federal government needs to spend less. He’s irritated quite a few people along the way. From Dan Nowicki of the Arizona Republic:

Rep. Jeff Flake may be the closest thing to an outsider inside Congress.

In his nearly 12 years there, Flake, R-Ariz., has earned the ire of powerful Capitol Hill lawmakers by crusading against earmarks and is credited as the driving force behind the current moratorium on the practice. In 2006, Flake led the charge to oust Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, who was facing criminal prosecution, as House majority leader. Flake irritated President George W. Bush’s administration and some fellow Republicans by pushing to ease punitive U.S. travel and economic policies toward Cuba. He frequently has found himself a dissenting vote, sometimes the only one, against massive spending bills.

(Emphasis added).

I’ll stipulate that many of the things government spends its money on are good things. I’m sure you’ve all heard the ads criticizing Flake for not supporting many different types of federal benefits. (Or, more to the point, not supporting the spending levels that advocates WANT for those benefits.) I’ll concede that most, if not all, government benefit serve some useful purpose.

But, something’s gotta give. Do you really need to see any more charts that show how out-of-control federal spending really is? Or how bleak our fiscal future is, if we don’t change course? There aren’t enough super-rich people to tax more, so that we can pay for every benefit we’ve grown accustomed to receiving. (Even if those super rich pay a LOT more, instead of the “little more” that the Democrats claim to be asking for).

Jeff Flake is one of the few people who’s willing to say what needs to be said about federal spending—cut it !!!—and take the heat for it.

Lots of people don’t like to hear that the flow of federal money is going to slow down. The identities of some of those people might surprise you.

Now, look at your kids and grandkids and think of their futures. More to the point, think of what we’re taking FROM them, with ongoing deficit spending. Then vote.

If you think life will calm way down after Election Day next month, think again. If the Democrats win, they will unleash the hounds of hell—the regulators. And, the United States of America will become Regulation Nation. A nation where virtually everything we do will be touched, in one way or another, by a federal regulator.

Millions of lines of regulatory guidance, covering thousands of pages, have been written by eager Democratic regulators. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and other federal agencies are waiting to exercise the wide-ranging, culture-changing powers that come from the Affordable Care Act (“Obamcare”), the Dodd-Frank bank reform act and other Democrat-friendly laws.

To make matters worse, Democratic activists and their allies (e.g., extreme environmentalists) now have jobs in the federal government or have allies who do. They’re ready to use their wide array of regulatory powers to achieve traditional liberal goals. (E.g., choke the fossil fuel industry to death).

But, they’re waiting. Why? Election Day is next month.

Much of what the Democrats want to do is very unpopular. A majority of Americans oppose the Democrats’ visions for health care, the environment and our economy. Example—the 2010 mid-term elections, where the American people punished the Democrats for passing Obamacare against strong popular opposition to the plan. Also, most Americans don’t want to see energy costs “necessarily skyrocket,” to use the words that President Obama himself used in the 2008 elections, when he talked about the impacts his policies would have on the coal industry—an industry that supplies much of America’s energy. (Check out this YouTube video, starting at about the 30-second mark,to hear the president say it himself.)

Once the election is over, though, if the Democrats keep the White House and the Senate, the regulators will no longer be constrained by the will of the people. They won’t have to worry about pesky voters anymore. They’ll be free to run wild.

Washington Examiner columnist Mark Tapscott writes about the signals the executive branch is sending out—signals that the regulators are waiting for December 2012. (All emphasis is added).

President Obama is among the slickest practitioners ever of the Washington Wink-Wink — what professional politicians in both parties do when they say one thing while planning to do something else entirely.

There was, for example, Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to “cut the federal deficit in half.” And that “net federal spending cut” he would achieve by the end of his first term? Anybody think he didn’t know then that his first term would explode the deficit and spending to historic highs?

Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., the ranking minority member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, sees more of the same from Obama on the Environmental Protection Agency front, which the Oklahoma Republican described in a detailed report he issued yesterday.

Here’s the first wink: “Obama has spent the past year punting on a slew of job-killing EPA regulations that will destroy millions of American jobs and cause energy prices to skyrocket even more,” Inhofe said. “From greenhouse gas regulations to water guidance to the tightening of the ozone standard, the Obama-EPA has delayed the implementation of rule after rule because they don’t want all those pink slips and price spikes to hit until after the election.”

For the second wink, Inhofe quotes Obama’s former White House environmental czar Carol Browner, who recently reassured impatient environmentalists with these words: “I can tell you, having spent two years in the White House with the president, that this is not a fad. The president believes deeply in these issues … there is no doubt in my mind this will be a big part of his to-do list and he will remain committed in the next four years.”

In other words, Browner was saying, just wait, because Obama fears he might not get re-elected if he went ahead with his EPA plans before the election.

Gee, that’s EXACTLY what nervous business owners, entrepreneurs and investors need to hear…a federal regulator reassuring environmentalists that they’ll be happy with what they see Washington do in the next four years.

Wonder why business owners are nervous? They’re starting to see the details of some of the regulations that the Inquisitors…excuse me, regulators have cooked up.

For example, how do The Regulators define the difference between full-time and part-time work? It must be one heck of a definition—it takes them EIGHTEEN PAGES to do it!

One of the most-anticipated new federal regulations governing which companies will be required to provide health insurance under Obamacare has finally landed–with a thud.

In the latest indication of how complicated putting the Affordable Care Act into action will be, the Department of Health and Human Services and Internal Revenue Service issued 18-pages of regulations just to describe what a “full-time employee” is. Of note, to the Feds a full-time employee works an average of just 30 hours a week, not the normally accepted 40 hours.
…
The lengthy 18-page definition caught some in the business world by surprise. “It’s scary,” said Randy Johnson, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce senior vice president for labor, immigration, and employee benefits. “It’s just a small example of two words under our healthcare law of 2,700-pages,” he said, adding: “It says to me things are awfully complicated.”

Johnson noted the new Obamacare ruling to demonstrate how oppressive federal regulations have become on American business. At a press conference to discuss the costs of regulations and state of the economy, Johnson said that Obama has added 11,327 new pages of federal rules and regulations.

Dear readers, you haven’t heard much about what’s in those thousands of pages of new regulations, much less felt their impact. Trust me—if the Democrats win in November, you’ll start feeling it almost immediately.

That last example was from HHS. Senator Inhofe has more details about what EPA has in store for all of us:

Here are just a few of many examples cited by Inhofe of costly new Obama-inspired regulations that EPA will impose on the economy after Nov. 6:

• Greenhouse gas regulations, including the infamous “cow tax.” The EPA will finalize proposed regulations that will virtually eliminate coal use in electricity generation, thus driving consumer electric bills sky-high. This cluster of new regulations will also impose an annual fee on farmers for every ton of greenhouse gases emitted by their animals. The EPA estimates that 37,000 farms and ranches will have to pay on average a $23,000 annual “cow tax.”

• New regulations will so severely reduce permissible ozone emissions that the EPA estimates the cost to the economy will be $90 billion per year. Other studies put the cost as high as $1 trillion. Split the difference between the estimates, and the result still means the loss of millions of jobs.

• New Tier III regulations will cut permissible sulfur emissions by two-thirds. That will add as much as 9 cents to the cost of a gallon of gas, according to Inhofe.

• The EPA’s new coal ash regulation will cost as much as $110 billion over two decades and destroy more than 300,000 jobs, mostly in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Missouri.

Keep in mind—many Democrats have a liberal mindset. A mindset that not only favors regulation and centralized control; it views business as something to be tightly controlled, if not punished. (They also have a mindset to build up government bureaucracies; this allows them to offer lots of patronage jobs that provide good pay).

Let’s be clear here—-things do need change. Our healthcare system needs reform, and we certainly need to avoid another financial collapse like we had in 2008. However, The Regulators we have in Washington now seem way too intent on exercising centralized control over…well, everything! To make matters worse, they seem way too eager to use their positions of public service to beat up on business. THAT will strangle our economy.

Remember all those dreams Tucson has, of being a world center for solar electricity generation. Well, in California, environmentalists are fighting the development of solar farms in one of the world’s most desolate places—the Mojave Desert. Viable solar farms cover lots of ground, and the solar panel arrays can disturb the habitat of desert animals. Yes, you read that right—we are having trouble building solar power farms IN THE VAST, INHOSPITABLE STRETCHES OF THE MOJAVE DESERT!

Tucson is the home base of the Center for Biological Diversity, America’s leading environmental litigation zealots.

Now, imagine you want to build a solar power farm. Would you come to Tucson? Especially if the Center had kindred spirits in the EPA on speed-dial and its Facebook friends list? (Think it through).

Businesses fear regulation…but they fear uncertainty more. The more regulations the government issues, the harder it is for people to do business. You won’t know what you’re permitted to do without government permission. People who are uncertain don’t act. They don’t invest, they don’t hire, they don’t expand their businesses. Does that sound like the basis of a healthy, reviving economy to you?

When regulations govern everything, you create a feeling in the community, in society that you shouldn’t risk doing something on your own. You create an expectation that, before you do ANYTHING meaningful, you need a regulator’s blessing.

Do you want to live in a country where the regulator influences everything you want to do? If you vote Democratic on November 6th, the “Land of the Free” could quickly become the “Land of the Regulated and Constrained.”