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“When Nancy Pelosi was advising congressmen to back this beast, she said they should not worry about the words of the bill they had not read, but think about four others: ‘jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.’ The legislation offers Pelosi perverse vindication: Waxman-Markey will create a lot of jobs for Wall Street sharps, Big Business rent-seekers, ACORN hucksters, utility-company lobbyists, grant-writers at left-wing organizations, college administrators, light-bulb-policing bureaucrats, and an army of parasitic hangers-on. It’s up to the Senate to stop it.” – Stephen Spruiell and Kevin Williamson

Conservatives in Maryland and Virginia, along with their brothers and sisters in the other states, have a variety of big-government and liberty-menacing and defense-weakening challenges — staring them in the face. And let’s not mince words.  These are all serious threats to our lives today.

But as Michelle Malkin writes here today in her “Back to business: Stop the cap-and-tax bill” - -

    “Which senators to target? Here:

[From today’s Los Angeles Times]‘Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them control 60 Senate seats. But more than a dozen have expressed concern over costs. They include Democrats from industry-heavy Ohio and Michigan, coal-dependent Indiana and oil-rich Louisiana.

Only a few Republicans appear open to emissions limits, notably two moderates from Maine — Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe — and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who championed emissions limits in his presidential campaign (though he has expressed reservations about the House bill).

The Senate bill will emerge from several committees — including the finance, foreign relations, commerce and agriculture committees — with dramatically different memberships and priorities.

The energy committee already has approved its chunk with wide bipartisan support. It includes a requirement to produce more electricity from renewable sources, but also expands drilling — a possible deal-breaker for environmentalists.

Boxer’s committee will center its work on cap and trade. The House bill would cut U.S. emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050. Environmentalists expect Boxer, who said she was ‘looking closely’ at those limits, to strengthen them.’”

National Review’s Stephen Spruiell and Kevin Williamson explain here in “A Garden of Piggish Delights”–

“Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: First, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture — which is to say, for everything. Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life.” (Underscoring Forum’s.)

The two authors go on to list their “top 50″ flaws in the measure.

Conservatives should read the entire list.

Our sense of last week’s Tea Parties is that the participants were quite angry about the cap-and-tax bill that barely passed the House.

Tea Party veterans, however, now need to take in the magnitude of the liberty and economic costs of Waxman-Markey, and the urgency of stopping the measure.

The Obama Railroad needs to be halted before it again rolls over the Congress — undermining future effective opposition.  Stopping cap and tax will make it easier to stop government-medicine proposals which are right down the road.

If we are going to block cap and tax, however, all of us Tea Parties veterans will need to get on top of the measure’s essentials. We will need to get the frightening details of Waxman-Markey to voters outside own circle. And, in addition to telephoning, faxing, emailing, and sending letters, we will need to visit, preferably in groups, the local offices of first our United States Senators — and then of our Representatives.

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