It started out as a day with so much joy and hope but officials with the Clearwater Marine Aquarium say it ended in heartache.

Just three hours after releasing a bottlenose dolphin back into the wild, it was attacked by sharks and euthanized a short time later.

“We’re at a loss for words,” said Diane Young with the Clearwater Marine Aquarium.

Dunham, as the dolphin was called, turned up last December near Anclote Key. Officials say he was sick and emaciated, but after months of rehab he was ready to be returned to the Gulf.

This is what happens when feel-good liberals get involved with nature, or any other cause, for that matter. They have the best intentions, to be sure, but they end up just spending a lot of money and nothing good comes of it. Imagine how much money they spent rescuing this dolphin, only to see him eaten mere seconds after returning to the ocean. Money down the drain, but hey, at least they feel good about themselves, right?

That’s the problem with knee-jerk liberals. They want to help the homeless, they want to help AIDs victims, they want to help the poor, etc., but all they end up doing is throwing a bunch of money down the toilet and, more often than not, making the problem worse.

As for what should have been done with this dolphin, my suggestion would be that since they spent that much money on the little guy, they should have put him in a place like Sea World or whatever. Make him work it off by doing flips, dives, and whatever cute stuff dolphins do that make hippies think they’re so damn brilliant (the dolphins, not the hippies). He’d have been fed regularly, cared for and, best of all, he wouldn’t have been lunch for a bigger fish.

BTW, I know that leftist animal rights groups and other run-of-the-mill liberals would take issue with keeping the dolphin in captivity, but isn’t it ironic that the things they object to for animals (that they are under someone else’s control, relying on strangers to care for, feed, and shelter them, etc.) are the very things they want for humans in our society? They object to animals being dependent on humans (by being held in captivity), yet they have no problem with making the poor, minorities, or whatever group, into wards of the state.

Here’s the ugly income-tax math. First, Mr. Obama has promised to let the lower Bush tax rates expire after 2010. This would raise the top personal income tax rate to 39.6% from 35%, and the next rate to 36% from 33%. The Bush expiration would also phase out various tax deductions and exemptions, bringing the top marginal rate to as high as 41%.

Then add the Rangel Surtax of one percentage point, starting at $280,000 ($350,000 for couples), plus another percentage point at $400,000 ($500,000 for couples), rising to three points on more than $800,000 ($1 million) in 2011. But wait, there’s more. The surcharge could rise by two more percentage points in 2013 if health-care costs are larger than advertised — which is a near-certainty. Add all of this up and the top marginal tax rate would climb to 46%, which hasn’t been seen in the U.S. since the Reagan tax reform of 1986 cut the top rate to 28% from 50%.

States have also been raising their income tax rates, so in California and New York City the top rate would be around 58%. The Tax Foundation reports that at least half of all states would have combined state-federal tax rates of more than 50%.

(snip)

Another implication of the Rangel plan is that America’s successful small businesses would pay higher tax rates than the Fortune 500, and for that matter than most companies around the world. The corporate federal-state tax rate applied to General Electric and Google is about 39% in the U.S., and the business tax rate is about 25% in the OECD countries. So the U.S. would have close to the most punitive taxes on small business income anywhere on the globe.

Of course, that’s all assuming the best about Obama’s plan. It could be even worse (and probably will be).

You want to know why large companies are pulling up roots and moving overseas? This is your answer. We’ve simply made it too expensive — through taxation, regulation, and labor laws — for these companies to operate here in this country. Liberals don’t understand that. They think that businesses exist for charity purposes or something, that business owners will gladly pay higher taxes and higher wages while losing their shirts. It doesn’t work that way.

No sensible business owner is just going to sit by and watch his profits sink, whether it’s from higher taxes, higher labor, higher supply costs, or increased regulation. They’ll find a way to reduce those costs, and usually the easiest and quickest way to do that is either on the backs of their employees or their customers, or both.

Take, for example, what happens when you raise the minimum wage (I know I’ve been over this a bazillion times, but the hippies still don’t get it). I worked in restaurant management for twenty-odd years, so I’ve seen this time and time again. When the minimum wage goes up, owners cut hours and raise prices to compensate. They may fire longer-term employees who make more than the minimum wage and hire cheaper replacements at the new wage. One way or another, the employee and the customer are the ones that feel the pinch, not the business owner.

The same thing goes for whatever lefty nonsense they try and push. Businesses — whether it’s a one-man, mom and pop operation or a billion-dollar-a-year outfit — will not just sit by and watch their profits shrink. They’re capitalists, not Christians. They’re not in the business of charity. Their taxes go up, they pass that on to the consumer. They have to pay a ton of money because of extra regulations, they’ll pass that cost on to you, too. If they’re required to provide health care or higher wages to their employees, then yup, you guessed it, you pay for that in the end.

That’s why Sarah Palin’s op-ed today is driving the left nuts. She hits pretty damn close to the bullseye, here, and the left can’t handle it. They’d rather go back to calling her and her family names, you betcha.

Liberals want to use government to micro-manage every facet of the economy, and it won’t work. It never has, and it never will. If you want to see what government-run ANYTHING does for a country, take a look at the old Soviet Union. Or Cuba. Or North Korea.

Other links aroudn the blogosphere on this subject:

Hot Air
Macsmind
The Strata-Sphere (here, too)
Sister Toldjah
Stop the ACLU
Gateway Pundit
Protein Wisdom
Blue Crab Boulevard

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

Isn’t it funny that one can commit treason against the planet, but not the United States? I mean, the same paper that carries this insanity-laced column is the same paper that violated national security by publishing secret information in the war against terror. That’s all fine and dandy, I guess, but we dare not oppose global warming, because that’s serious business! Pfft.

Look, Krugman points out the usual “facts” that watermelon* environmentalists like Gore keep repeating, and have been repeating, since they first realized that the environment was their ticket to power and wealth. There’s no truth to any of it. They’ve been wrong on everything they’ve ever said about the environment! They’ve never been correct on a single thing! And yet they want us to just blindly hand over our liberties and our money to them simply because they think they are good people.

They bully people who dare to disagree with them, yet claim that they are the true victims. It’s unbelievably. It’d be funny if it weren’t so serious. Global warming (or climate change, whatever the nuts wanna call it) is just a giant hoax so that people like Gore can get rich and have power. That’s all it is, that’s all it ever was, and that’s all it ever will be. Mankind simply does not have it within his power, short of a global nuclear war, to change the climate of this planet.

(*Watermelon = “green on the outside, red [commie] in the middle”)

And with a track record like this (hat tip to ST), why would we listen to them at all? They’ve done nothing but predict doom-and-gloom for close to forty years (ever since modern-day liberalism reared its head) and they’ve been wrong, not once or twice, but every single time.

These people, they don’t care about the environment one bit. If they did, then they’d all be living like hermits by now. They’d all be in grass/mud huts, riding bicycles, and eating (not smoking) whatever plants they could find. They want the rest of us to live that way, yeah. But them…eh, not so much. It’s about power and control. It always was and it always will be.

Look, everyone wants clean water and clean air. Nobody wants to purposely kill off an entire species just for the heck of it. Nobody wants to see trash and crap littering our streets, our highways, or our neighborhoods. But the way to prevent all of that isn’t with government control, it’s by private ownership. Give people a stake in something, they’ll keep it clean, I promise you.

For example, we just bought a house last fall. The yard was a mess, there were trees dying on the property, and plants and flowers were being choked out by weeds and overgrowth. Because I now own this property, I am taking great care to clean it up and make sure that the grass, trees, plants, and flowers are healthy and thrive. Is it fun? No, I despise doing yard work (always have). Is it cheap? No, it’s actually costing me more than a few bucks. IS it time consuming? You bet. The last thing I want to do on my days off is to be out in the hot sun pulling weeds and picking up sticks, rocks, litter, and God knows what else. So why am I doing it? Because it’s my home, and I want to take care of it. I don’t want to live in a filthy environment, basically.

The same thing applies to the environment. You can’t force people, via government regulations, to care about the world around them. Only a sense of ownership can do that.

Now, don’t take that to mean that you can’t have basic regulations that punish people for deliberately polluting (littering, dumping chemicals or hazardous materials, stuff like that), because of course you should. But you shouldn’t be out there trying to pass laws based on pseudo-science and forcing people to live the way you think they should be living, simply because you think it might help the planet.

That’s not freedom, that’s a dictatorship, which is why I say this entire “global warming” bit is mainly about power and control. There are, undoubtedly, scientists who think this is real (and, indeed, certain parts of it may be, but nowhere near the “we’re all gonna die!!!” scenarios they present) and have good intentions. But the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, as the saying goes. Doing what these people say will mean the end of this country as we know it. Plus, there are many prominent scientists who disagree with them (but are being forced to shut up on the subject, as the earlier link demonstrates).

Of course we should explore alternative forms of energy (mainly so we are independent of foreign sources). Of course we should figure out ways to recycle as much as we can. But we shouldn’t scrap our entire economy and our way of life based on something that might — MIGHT — work, but is unproven.