Posted on 04/19/2007 11:52:47 AM PDT by areafiftyone
As Earth Day dawns Sunday, Americans should consider the relationship between environmentalists and the former mayor of the capital of Earth. From New York's City Hall, Rudolph W. Giuliani successfully confronted green zealots while advancing science and technology. Here again, Giuliani stands well right of where his detractors might expect.
_The West Nile virus debuted in the Western Hemisphere in the College Point community in the New York borough of Queens in August 1999. Among 62 New York state residents who contracted West Nile encephalitis (brain swelling) that year, seven died.
Rather than study the problem to death, that summer and in 2000, Giuliani launched widespread insecticide spraying against West Nile-carrying mosquitoes. Environmentalists went haywire.
The local No Spray Coalition sued to block fumigation. New York's Green Party callously declared: "These diseases only kill the old and people whose health is already poor."
Giuliani firmly told Newsday that spraying was "perfectly safe." He added:
"There are some people who are engaged in the business of wanting to frighten people out of their minds." In 2000, he told CNN: "The reality is that danger to human life is more important than birds, fish and insects."
Before releasing waterborne larvicide and aerial- and ground-level pesticide, hundreds of Health Department employees used fliers and home visits to urge Queens residents to remain indoors with windows and air ducts closed during nighttime spraying. A 75-person, 24-hour hotline answered 150,000 calls. Doctors and journalists also were briefed.
Giuliani's swift and thorough spraying programs yanked the wings off the mosquitoes that could have turned a manageable West Nile outbreak into a catastrophe.
"Unfortunately, West Nile has spread, largely because other mayors didn't spray when they were cowed by the greens," says John Berlau, author of "Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous to Your Health." "But West Nile could have become an immediate nationwide epidemic if not for the quick action of Giuliani and his Health Department."
Given West Nile's documented human toll, Giuliani did the right thing. In 1999, a Russian flare-up sickened 500 people, killing 40. A 1996 outbreak of West Nile meningitis and encephalitis centered in Bucharest, Romania, infected 90,000 and hospitalized 835. Seventeen died.
_ Environmentalists whined when New York City and Consolidated Edison cooperated to build 10 new electrical generating plants and expand another facility.
"We object to the fact that our neighborhood is being slammed with pollution," East River Environmental Coalition President Susan Steinberg complained to gothamgazette.com. "Con Ed, let me breathe," demanded a placard at an April 2001 protest. One demonstrator's puppet puffed on an asthma nebulizer.
As Giuliani writes in his book, "Leadership": "I, too, would have preferred a public park or beautiful housing to a generator on the East River, but I also had to think about the 12,000 megawatts New Yorkers could consume in an hour on a hot day." Indeed, a 1999 blackout left 300,000 Washington Heights and Inwood residents in the dark for 30 hours.
"My administration's clear priority in this area is to see that the lights stay on and that electricity continues to flow in New York City," Giuliani said in a power-policy address that March. "There is no room for complacency as we prepare for the future."
_ Giuliani also privatized the management of Central Park. While the city still owns Gotham's gorgeous 843-acre rectangle of flora, bike paths, lakes, lawns and stages, the Central Park Conservancy, a nonprofit, operates it.
For New York, this idea was as radical as an American president asking the National Geographic Society to manage Yellowstone National Park.
_ Today, Giuliani advocates broader domestic production to achieve energy independence as a national-security goal. As he told local supporters March 14: "We have to end our reliance on oil from sources that are enemies of the United States." Last June 13, he told a Manhattan Institute luncheon, "We have to diversify. That's our strength." He added, "You can be independent by being diversified." Giuliani embraces Alaskan oil drilling, plus natural gas, clean coal, ethanol and accelerated construction of atomic power plants.
None of this will help America's Mayor with the eco-freaks, but they hate him anyway. These facts, however, pour yet another spade full of earth on the myth that Rudolph W. Giuliani is some sort of liberal.
(New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at deroy.murdock(at)gmail.com.)
Not that you and your ilk care a whit about the truth, but there it is regardless.
Actually those of us on the Rudy Ping List find these postings very helpful. The fact that they upset you as well is just a side benefit.
Have a nice day!
A day at the range, yes. If it warms up here, me too!
But before that, the tumblindice family will have it’s traditional Earth Day whale blubber bar-b-que.
Baby-back whale ribs—now that’s good eatin’, whale grease down your chin. Smack smack!
(We’ll buy some carbon credits first, of course.)
She was an idiot. Every NYer knew what those trucks looked like when you saw one you got out of the way. There were plenty of people looking to sue the city of NY.
Articles like this, and the rudy supporters reactions, remind so many of us why there are rudy supporters on this board.
You have been so conditioned by living in bastions of liberalism that you actually believe that Rudy is the only politician, liberal OR conservative, who has the guts to stand up to the liberals.
When in fact, as I pointed out, there was nothing particularly unique about Rudy’s response to the outbreak, OR of his response to the complaints about the spraying.
Boston, Mass. was spraying in July of 2000, when the mosquitoes first escaped New York and migrated there. Hardly evidence that they bickered about it, or had long meetings or took too long to attack the problem.
And Deroy is completely wet when he claims that the mosquitoes spread because others wouldn’t spray. The outbreak started IN NEW YORK CITY, and in spite of Rudy’s spraying in 1999, the mosquitoes spread to Boston and other northeastern cities in 2000. They all sprayed, and yet they spread more the next year, and the next, and the next.
The spraying was unable to stop the spread, or significantly alter the pattern of the disease. I’m sure it helped, but Rudy’s spraying didn’t stop anything, and the spread wasn’t because other mayors refused to spray.
In this case, Rudy reacted like just about every other mayor, liberal or conservative, reacted. It’s only people living in liberal New York that look at this as some great “conservative” stand.
Just like how you all think it’s so great that Rudy only let a thoroughly bloated budget grow by 2.6% instead of 5% or more like his predecessor, when a real conservative would have actually CUT the budget, and wouldn’t have left a mountain of debt for the next mayor to deal with. See, out in the real world we have to deal with economic upturns and downturns, and taxes, and providing government services. And somehow we manage to do so without growing our budgets (well, once in a while anyway), and when we only grow by inflation we don’t think we have acheived Nirvana.
Who cares that she was an idiot. I was just noting that he attacked her for getting the TIME wrong. If I knew an idiot was trying to screw the city, I think I’d focus on that, not making fun of her for not remembering exactly when it was she got blasted. His complaint looks petty and meanspirited, while a principled attack against her attempts to sue the city would be, well, principled.
The true facts about his views and about his standings in the Republican primaries is greatly appreciated.
Keep informing us FReepers!
Name another one.
Please stick to the topic of the thread, without gratuitous thread hijacking.
If you want to go by FR polls ( which the majority of FR's membership never participates in ), then Keyes would have been president; he wasn't.
Do you want to be reminded that YOU have posted to LP and while on that site, you trashed Jim Robinson and FR?
And they shall and beyond. LOL
Not true. Someone who was thought of as a Rudy G/F was put in charge of one of the visitors’ bureaus, but not the Central Park Conservancy.
Name another one.
First of all, M. Thatcher, thanks for making CharlesWayneCT's point for him.
Second, perhaps you can recall the mayorship of a guy across the Hudson from New York (I know you New Yawk sophisticates think anything west of the Hudson is unimportant), but Bret Schundler did far more wonderous things in Jersey City than Rudy did in New York. And did it as a pro-life conservative.
And I actually know the guy.
Hope he can get back into active politics again - very creative problem solver.
Central Park Conservancy Names Regina S. Peruggi President Effective May 1, 2001
http://www.centralparknyc.org/4809413/25657
Send me a check for $10,000 and I won't cut my lawn all summer!
I don’t remember her as a “Friend of Rudy.” I was thinking of Crystine Lategano, who went to NYC & Co.
“I don’t remember her as a “Friend of Rudy.” I was thinking of Crystine Lategano, who went to NYC & Co.”
That is a different one that Rooty got a job for. This one is his first wife/cousin.
It’s not like these women have done bad jobs. I mean, after all, Bob Dole was in the Senate while his wife was in the Cabinet. Same with Senator McConnell and his wife, the Secretary of Labor. The Central Park Conservancy is not a City agency.
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