politics
Yeah, about those oil company profits
So, Exxon Mobil broke corporate records last week, posting a $9 billion profit on $100 billion in revenue in the third quarter. Right on cue, Democrats demanded that Washington confiscate some of those profits. Are they predictable or what?
[...]
Want to know who is making a bigger windfall than oil companies are making from the prices paid by the poor gasoline consumer? It’s good old Uncle Sam and his 51 little brothers.
Refining costs and profits combined make up about 15 percent of the cost of a gallon of gasoline, according to the U.S. Energy Department. State and local taxes make up almost double that, about 27 percent. (New Hampshire’s 18 cents per gallon fuel tax accounted for 7.2 percent of last week’s average gas price of $2.49 a gallon.)
State and local gas tax collections exceed oil industry profits by a large margin, according to a Tax Foundation study released last week. Since 1977, consumers have paid $1.34 trillion in gas taxes — more than twice the profits of all major U.S. oil companies combined during that same period. Last year, state and federal gas taxes took in $58.4 billion. Major U.S. oil company profits last year totaled $42.6 billion.
Want to make an immediate dent in gas prices? Cut gas taxes. But of course cutting the fat from local, state, and federal bureaucracies isn't the answer. It's confiscation of private industry profits! [Emphasis added. --R]
Lying about the war non-lie
Harry Reid pulled the Senate into closed session Tuesday, claiming that "The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this Administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq." But the Minority Leader's statement was as demonstrably false as his stunt was transparently political.
What Mr. Reid's pose is "really all about" is the emergence of the Clare Boothe Luce Democrats. We're referring to the 20th-century playwright, and wife of Time magazine founder Henry Luce, who was most famous for declaring that Franklin D. Roosevelt had "lied us into war" with the Nazis and Tojo. So intense was the hatred of FDR among some Republicans that they held fast to this slander for years, with many taking their paranoia to their graves.
We are now seeing the spectacle of Bush-hating Democrats adopting a similar slander against the current President regarding the Iraq War. The indictment by Patrick Fitzgerald of Vice Presidential aide I. Lewis Libby has become their latest opening to promote this fiction, notwithstanding the mountains of contrary evidence. Excellent article, with point-by-point facts which rebuff the "Bush lied" crowd, as well as exposing the outright hypocrisy of leading Democrats.
Join the Axis of Alitists!
Okay, so if I can't have Janice Rogers Brown, then Sam Alito is a fine choice. The son of an immigrant and a public school teacher is already under fire from the Dems and radical left --notice how it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the two--according to Hugh.
War with Jihadistan update
The Federalist Patriot, 05-43 Digest:
Al-Qa'ida murdered almost 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil in about an hour back in 2001--almost all of them civilians. The reason no additional American civilians have died in attacks on our homeland is that 150,000 uniformed American Patriots have formed a formidable front on al-Qa'ida's turf, a very inhospitable region of the world. These Patriots are a proud breed--Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coastguardsmen--and they have chosen to stand in harm's way in order to defend their families, their friends, their country.
In doing so, more than 2,000 of these brave souls have been killed.
This week, every mass media outlet took a break from their "CIA leak" promotion to run headlines and lead stories about the Iraq death toll reaching 2,000 (1,567 killed in action since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 19 March 2003)--as if the death of American Patriot number 1,999 was somehow less important. Typical was this headline from The New York Times: "2,000 Dead: As Iraq Tours Stretch On, A Grim Mark." But not a whisper in the Leftmedia about the 3,870 Iraqi security forces killed in the last six months alone, in defense of their emerging democracy.
For The Patriot, every death of a member of our Armed Forces is equally devastating, and we mourn each one. Not a day passes without our prayers for both those standing in harm's way, and their families.
The "dezinformatsia" machines promote this "milestone" for one reason only--to foment additional dissent and rally support against the Bush administration's national-security strategy, which is to protect our homeland by taking the battle with Jihadis to their turf. In doing so, the Leftmedia has reduced the sacrifice of these young Patriots to nothing more than political fodder for their appeasement agenda.
On the night of 11 September 2001, President Bush told the nation, "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." He set in motion pre-emptive operations, which would become the "Bush Doctrine." Our analysts continue to support the doctrine of pre-emption firmly as the best measured response to the Jihadi threat around the world.
As for those still "Stuck on Stupid", insisting that there were no WMD found in Iraq, here's a partial list of what didn't make it out of Iraq before the invasion: 1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium, 1,700 gallons of chemical-weapon agents, chemical warheads containing the nerve agent cyclosarin, thousands of radioactive materials in powdered form designed for dispersal over population centers, artillery projectiles loaded with binary chemical agents, etc.
As The Patriot noted in October, 2002, our well-placed sources in the region and intelligence sources with the NSA and NRO estimated that the UN Security Council's foot-dragging provided an ample window for Saddam to export some or all of his deadliest WMD materials and components. At that time, we reported that Allied Forces would be unlikely to discover Iraq's WMD stores, noting, "Our sources estimate that Iraq has shipped some or all of its biological stockpiles and nuclear WMD components through Syria to southern Lebanon's heavily fortified Bekaa Valley."
In December of 2002, our senior-level intelligence sources re-confirmed estimates that some of Iraq's biological and nuclear WMD material and components had, in fact, been moved into Syria and Iran. That movement continued until President Bush finally pulled the plug on the UN's ruse.
To that end, we are deeply indebted to our Patriot Armed Forces, who have prevented al-Qa'ida or some other Jihadi terrorist cell from striking a U.S. urban center with WMD. Make no mistake--Islamofascists want to bring America to ruin, and they will use any means at their disposal to do so. Mr. President, stay the course. [Emphasis added. --R]
It's nominating time...again...
Harriet's out. There will be speculation on whether she acted one hundred percent unilaterally, or if this is just the way the administration is spinning it. It doesn't really matter. Now the contemplation begins on who the President will put forth as the replacement for Justice O'Connor. A common refrain from the Left has been that a woman should be nominated, to replace a woman. I have no problem with that. Janice Rogers Brown is my personal pick. A woman, and a minority woman at that. The Left should be quite happy with that, no? Of course not, because Justice Brown is conservative, and based upon her record, mostly an originalist when it comes to constitutional matters. Obviously, this means she is radically out of the mainstream, and not fit for the robes of a Supreme. It would be fun just to watch the Democrats and their radical left backers fall all over themselves trying to figure out how to disparage a black woman being elevated to the highest court in the land.
The Palestinian descent in to barbarism
Many explanations have been given to account for the almost matchless barbarism into which Palestinian society has descended in recent years. One is the effect of Israeli occupation and all that has, in recent years, gone with it: the checkpoints, the closures, the petty harassments, the targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders. I witnessed much of this personally when I lived in Israel, and there can be no discounting the embittering effect that a weeks-long, 18-hour daily military curfew has on the ordinary Palestinians living under it.
Yet the checkpoints and curfews are not gratuitous acts of unkindness by Israel, nor are they artifacts of occupation. On the contrary, in the years when Israel was in full control of the territories there were no checkpoints or curfews, and Palestinians could move freely (and find employment) throughout the country. It was only with the start of the peace process in 1993 and the creation of autonomous Palestinian areas under the control of the late Yasser Arafat that terrorism became a commonplace fact of Israeli life. And it was only then that the checkpoints went up and the clampdowns began in earnest.
In other words, while Palestinian actions go far to explain Israeli behavior, the reverse doesn't hold.
I hope we don't reap what we're sowing
When one pharmaceutical company offered to sell a new pneumococcal vaccine to the government for $58 a dose, the Centers for Disease Control demanded a $10-a-dose discount. Politicians want companies to take all the risk of developing new vaccines, but they don't want the companies to make any money from taking those risks. Then the politicians profess surprise and dismay that there's a vaccine shortage.
We'll accept help from everyone, except...
[I]t was not until Oct. 14, six days after Israel had communicated its willingness to help the earthquake victims "in any way possible," that it finally received a formal response. Yes, aid from Israel would be welcome, provided it was laundered through a third party. "We have established the president's relief fund, and everyone is free to contribute to it," a government spokeswoman coolly acknowledged. "If Israel was to contribute -- that's fine, we would accept it." Israel could help save Pakistani lives, in other words, as long as it wasn't too public about doing so. There mustn't be any embarrassing images of planes with Israeli markings offloading relief supplies at Islamabad's airport.
Those media b-st-rds
If the president were to call for two plus two to equal four, the media would report that such a proposal had the support of only 42 percent of likely voters, and a slippage of even conservative support from 87 percent to 63 percent. Perhaps on the jump page, in the 38th inch of the story in the New York Times, they might get around to quoting a professor of mathematics from MIT to the effect that, in fact, the president was right that two plus two still equals four. But for television and radio break news, the story would end at the polling result, which is bad news for the president.
[...]
One doesn't mind, so much, mainstream journalists being b-st-rds. It's being such dumb b-st-rds that one finds so irksome.
Why the two-parent family is important
Two decades of research produced a consensus among social scientists of both left and right that family structure has a serious impact on children, even when controlling for income, race, and other variables. In other words, we are not talking about a problem of race but about a problem of family formation or, rather, the lack of it. The best outcomes for children--whether in academic performance, avoidance of crime and drugs, or financial and economic success--are almost invariably produced by married biological parents. The worst results are by never-married women.
[...]
The upshot of these studies is that America is confronted by a form of poverty that money alone can't cure. Many of us think social breakdown is a result of racism and poverty. Yes, they are factors, but study after study shows that alterations in norms and values are at the heart of economic and behavioral troubles. That's why so much research boils down to the old rule: If you want to avoid poverty, finish high school, don't have kids in your teens, and get married.
Expanding rights?
Patrick Leahy, U.S. Senator from Vermont, on the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:
Is this a nominee who will protect and expand our constitutional rights, or will she neglect and narrow those rights? Learning the answer will be at the core of what the American people and the Senate need to know from the hearings on this nomination. I call your attention to two words in the first sentence: "and expand". Since when is the Supreme Court charged by the United States Constitution, Senator Leahy, to "expand" constitutional rights? (Oh, that's right, ever since FDR stacked the Court with non-constructionists to get his way with the federal bureaucracy. My mistake.) Expansion of constitutional rights is a duty assigned to the people, through their legislators in Congress and in their state bodies. Congressional rights are "expanded" through constitutional conventions, not through judicial activism. Such ignorance on the part of a majority of the American people is why our elected officials are able to get away with such foolish statements as that uttered above by Senator Leahy. Since basic civics are apparently not getting taught in our public schools any longer, how can we expect our citizens to fully comprehend how their government is supposed to work? Here's a little secret about conservatives and Roe v. Wade, just in case you're wondering: not all conservatives are pro-life. I know this may come as a shock to the mouth-foamers on the Left, and even to those on the Right who like to walk around with blinders on, but it's true. (Personally speaking, this conservative is pro-life.) Yet these same conservatives who are not pro-life oppose Roe v. Wade. Why? Because it came about in precisely the same way Senator Leahy seeks, based on his statement above: judicial fiat. You would find far less vocal opposition from the Right if the right to an abortion was in the Constitution as a result of a constitutional convention, passed by the Congress, and two-thirds of the states. We wouldn't like it, but at least we would know it was there as a result of the process set forth by the Founding Fathers, not arbitrarily created by men in black robes. For the expansion of rights to occur otherwise is to have, as The Federalist Patriot put it, "James Madison is rolling in his grave!"
Why is it that the Left cannot let go of the Vietnam imagery?
One of the many negative consequences of America's defeat in The Vietnam War has been the uncontrolled proliferation of Vietnams since then.
Nicaragua threatened to become another Vietnam. Lebanon nearly became another Vietnam. Had Grenada been only slightly larger than a manhole cover and lasted one more hour, it would have become a Caribbean-Style Vietnam. The invasion of Panama was rapidly degenerating into a Narco-Vietnam, right up until we won. Likewise, the First Gulf War was certainly developing into another Vietnam, but then sadly, it ended quickly and with few casualties.
For people of a certain age or political stripe, Vietnam is like Elvis: it's everywhere. For example, during a long wait at a Chinese Buffet in Georgetown in 1987, Ted Kennedy was reported to have exclaimed "QUAGMIRE!" and attempted to surrender to a Spanish-speaking busboy.
And that was probably the smart thing to do, because the lesson of Vietnam is: it is best to lose quickly, so as to avoid a quagmire.
[...]
If you liked what our quick, casualty-saving withdrawal from Somalia did for us at the Khobar Towers, at our embassies in East Africa, at the waterline of the USS Cole, and at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then you'll love what a quick "casualty-saving" withdrawal from Iraq will do for us for the next twenty years. It'll finally make you stop worrying about Vietnam. Read the entire column for Johnson's thirteen edifying points, and stop saying every geopolitical event the United States gets involved in is going to disintegrate in to a Vietnamesque "quagmire."
The hysterical Left
If you want to understand the Left, the best place to start is with an understanding of hysteria. Leading leftists either use hysteria as a political tactic or are actually hysterics.
Take almost any subject the Left discusses and you will find hysteria.
[...]
No event is free of leftist hysteria. On the third day after Katrina, civil rights activist Randall Robinson reported that blacks in New Orleans were resorting to cannibalism. Indeed, most of the news media coverage bordered on the hysterical. Not to mention the hysterical predictions of 10,000-plus dead in New Orleans.
[...]
But the irony in all of this is that the Left sees itself as the side that thinks intellectually and non-emotionally. And that is hysterical.
Informative but not surprising
Stephen Moore, in today's Political Diary:
There's an old saying that the only Marxists left on the planet are found in the faculty lounges at America's elite universities. Now the Leadership Institute has helped quantify the leftwing bias at our premier institutions of higher learning.
Its new report, "Deep Blue Campuses," raked through Federal Election Commission records of political donations in 2004 by university faculty and found -- surprise, surprise -- that the vast preponderance of these donated dollars went to John Kerry for President. This is a free country, and donating to political candidates is, or at least should be, a protected expression of free speech. But this report blows through the facade that the political views of university faculty are in anyway representative of the general community.
For every dollar that the professors at the top 20 elite universities gave to George Bush, they gave $10 to John Kerry. The ratio at Princeton was $302 to Kerry for every dollar given to Bush. The ratio for Harvard was 25 to 1. At Yale and Penn, the ratio was greater than 20 to 1. At Dartmouth there wasn't a single recorded donation to Bush.
These are more lopsided results than one finds in the phony elections in Castro's Cuba and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Universities have become fanatically committed to the idea of "diversity" as an overriding objective on campus -- diversity on the basis of income, religion, disability, race, gender, sexual orientation. But political diversity? When it comes to the kind of diversity that would seem to matter most for promoting debate, intellectual curiosity and free speech, there is apparently little tolerance for differing views. What is demanded is conformity. And our top universities suffer greatly as a result.
Unhealthy hatred
Their unhealthy hatred for Mr. Bush dates back to the 2000 election, which they -- irrationally again -- believe he stole from Mr. Gore. The fact is, Mr. Gore was trying to steal the election himself and almost succeeded, through one of the most egregious perversions of the rule of law in our nation’s history, by the Florida Supreme Court.
But the real source of their animus is even more basic. They resent him because he represents their expulsion from power over the executive branch, which the Clinton eight-year heyday should have ensured them in perpetuity.
You’ll recall that their "entitlement" to the legislative branch was stolen from them in 1994, which is one of the reasons they consider Newt Gingrich another personification of evil. Adding insult to cumulative injury, they’ve also lost their monopoly on the media over the last 15 years.
Stein berates, well, everyone over Bush blame
Ben Stein rips in to the media and Angry Left over the Katrina-is-Bush's-fault blame game. You know it must be bad if it's raising Ben's ire.
Passive-Agressive Liberalism
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman actually manages to take his rage over Katrina beyond the usual Angry Left argument of blaming the devil Bush. He also blames the devil Reagan:
The federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?
The obvious objection is that Krugman has a cartoonish view of conservatism, which is anything but uniformly antigovernment (the Brooks/Kristol piece cited in the previous item elaborates this point). And while it's true that Reagan described government as the problem, not the solution, 25 years ago, those words would be shockingly out of character if George W. Bush were to utter them.
The more interesting point is that Krugman's implicit view of liberalism is about 35 years out of date. To put it bluntly, American liberals no longer believes in activist government. Oh, they believe in big government, but that's a matter of feeding existing bureaucracies and interest groups. But suggest doing things differently--welfare reform, Social Security reform, the Patriot Act--and they have nothing to offer but fear, anger and hate.
Among the first complaints we heard when Katrina struck was that the government failed to respond because of (a) Iraq and (b) tax cuts. This is passive-aggressive politics, not activist government. Lyndon B. Johnson cut taxes and waged war both in Vietnam and on poverty. To be sure, LBJ's administration was far from an unqualified success, but the point is that in those days liberals were confident--arguably overconfident--in the power of activist government.
To illustrate the point, consider some of the dour and whiny Democratic campaign slogans of the past two presidential campaigns: Lockbox. Risky scheme. Miserable failure. Two Americas. Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. Let America be America again. This is the problem with the modern Democratic Party: they are out of ideas. It would be one thing to have debates over Social Security reform if there was a comprehensive plan from the Democrats being offered as an alternative. It would be one thing if the Democrats could offer a clear blueprint for waging the war against the Islamofascist terrorists who wish us ill. They are doing neither, choosing instead to whine and complain about the administration and political party that is doing something. Conservatives, when they are being honest, want the Left to bring something to the debate other than empty rhetoric. The current state of affairs isn't good for anyone, as it will lead to complacency and stagnation in the realm of ideas. Persons within the Democratic Party need to have the fortitude to cast off the pockets of the Angry Left which have attached themselves like leeches to a formerly grounded organization. Until that happens, and they begin to offer reasonable alternatives instead of mouth-foaming hot air, they will continue to lose elections.
A unique opportunity in the Big Easy
Brendan Miniter has a piece on OpinionJournal today on the opportunity New Orleans has with rebuilding its educational system, one of the worst in the nation. I can personally testify to how bad things are in some of the schools there; I spent a few days at a single elementary school, troubleshooting some classroom Macintosh-printer set-ups. The school's HVAC system was offline, and had been for weeks. The teachers were mulling along as best they can, keeping the windows cracked so the rooms wouldn't get stuffy, and running fans. You can imagine, however, trying to teach a bunch of third-graders with three or four box fans going at once. Lack of funds was the reason for a less-timely repair of the system. I was there as an independent contactor, called out by the principal, because there was no one on the district's IT staff with any Macintosh knowledge. One aspect of rebuilding the New Orleans public school system that Miniter brings up is something I have long been in favor of: break the back of the teachers' union. The myriad "education" unions in this country have only served to hinder the success of our children in public schools, and that is evident in New Orleans, and most of Louisiana. No, the teachers' union is not the only problem with the school system, but if it is not providing a solution, it's proving a hindrance. As Miniter says, there is a unique opportunity in New Orleans now, and that is to build an educational system from the ground up. The Crescent City has a chance to be a beacon for the rest of the nation. We pray they seize it.
Accepting the blame
Apparently, it's all Rich Galen's fault. Oh, and some is Terry Ebbert's. (Sorry, couldn't resist the last. I'll go back to sorting baby clothes now.)