RUSH: Now, we’ve just honored some great people on Earth Day, but here is a story from some newspaper called The Bulletin. It is an American paper, I guess it’s Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Bulletin. ‘Today is Earth Day, a holiday created to honor the planet and to raise the consciousness of
By the way, the Unabomber was an environmentalist as well. So was the Son of Sam. So is the most recently added name to the FBI’s top ten most wanted list an environmentalist. But Mr. Einhorn ‘concealed his crime for 18 months by stuffing Ms. Maddux’s body in a trunk that he kept in his apartment. The foul odor of the decomposing corpse coming from Mr. Einhorn’s Powelton Village apartment caused neighbors to complain. In 1979, police found the trunk stored in a closet in Mr. Einhorn’s apartment. Ira Einhorn, member of the counterculture pantheon, one of the founders of the environmentalist movement, icon of the liberal intelligentsia, was charged with murder. But it was not just a simple murder, it was a gruesome case of domestic violence. At the bail hearing, Mr. Einhorn was praised by a contingent of luminaries — all testifying to his character. There were Ivy League professors, an Episcopalian minister and corporate executives who worked with Mr. Einhorn raising funds. They all stated under oath that he was a man of the greatest integrity.’
Arlen Specter was Mr. Einhorn’s attorney. ‘He managed to get the bail set at the unheard of amount of $40,000 for the suspected murderer. Only 10 percent was needed to free him. Barbara Bronfman, heiress to the Seagram liquor fortune, paid it. Proclaiming his innocence, Mr. Einhorn told all that he was framed. He said it was the CIA or the FBI who committed the murder and they were trying to frame him for it because of his political activities. Some will note that another notorious Philadelphia murderer, Mumia Abu-Jamal, used this defense a few years later. Like Mumia, Mr. Einhorn had no shortage of leftist followers. Mr. Einhorn skipped bail and left Philadelphia in 1981.’ Founder, environmentalist movement and Earth Day. Just like the Unabomber, murderers, just like the most recent addition to the FBI’s top ten most wanted list, a leftist environmentalist. And yet Janet Napolitano, head of the Department of Homeland Security, sends out this memo warning of returning veterans who might commit acts of terror in the United States.
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RUSH: I got some e-mails from people who want the rest of the Ira Einhorn story. Here’s the rest of the Ira Einhorn story: ‘More than a decade passed when the DA’s office tried Mr. Einhorn in absentia after being unable to locate him. He was convicted in 1993. Several years after the absentia conviction, in 1997, Mr. Einhorn was located. He was living in France with a new girlfriend — a Swedish woman. The District Attorney’s office in Philadelphia immediately asked to have him extradited. However, the humane French refused to extradite Mr. Einhorn. French officals cited the use of capital punishment in Pennsylvania and the conviction in absentia as reasons for their refusal. Mr. Einhorn was able to convince the French courts not to extradite him until he received the promise of a new trial. A Pennsylvania legislator, Dan O’Brien, introduced a bill in the Pennsylvania General Assembly that allowed granting Mr. Einhorn a new trial, if he asked for it, and if the French extradited him. The bill did not vacate the original verdict. When France began extradition, Mr. Einhorn’s representatives requested the European Court of Human Rights to review the case. The request was denied. He was extradited to Pennsylvania in July 2001. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison October 17, 2002.’
We’re talking here, if you just joined us, about the founder of Earth Day. But as the writer, Michael Tremoglie, at the Philadelphia Bulletin says, ‘There is a little mentioned irony about the Einhorn saga. Ira Einhorn was arrested for murder March 28, 1979, the day the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident occurred. Ira Einhorn, environmentalist, was charged with murder during the same period as one of the greatest environmental accidents in United States history. But the real irony is that more people died in the apartment of Ira Einhorn, co-founder of Earth Day than at Three Mile Island. The environmentalist killed more people than the so-called environmental disaster. Happy Earth Day.’
And not to leave this out, Investor’s Business Daily, with a great editorial today called, ‘Save Capitalism,’ they say, ‘Wednesday’s airwaves, print media, cable news shows and Webosphere will be filled with nonsense about the scourge of capitalism, corporations and humanity. All of it will ignore the real truth. … Every year Steven Hayward, a scholar at the Pacific Research Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, compiles his Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. And every year, his findings contradict the alarmists’ warnings that the world is on the edge of environmental cataclysm. From evidence ‘that tropical rain forests may now be expanding faster than they are being cut down’ to the improving health of US ocean fisheries to better outdoor air quality in American cities with the worst air pollution, Hayward shows there’s more to be optimistic about than there is to be troubled about. The Environmental Protection Agency has also published its own Report on the environment. Last year’s report, the most recent, indicates outdoor air quality has improved, there’s been a net gain in wetland acreage, public-source drinking-water problems are uncommon and forest land is expanding after declining for a century.
‘Of the estimated 1 billion people who will observe Earth Day worldwide this year, few will know about the progress that has been made. Fewer still will know how it was made. The media, uninterested in looking at the real story, will simply credit the environmental movement for the improvements,’ when in fact it has been capitalism. Greener is richer.