Say Anything Blog

“John used to harass me because I would get earmarks—or pork barrel projects—in Mississippi,” he said. “And I would say, ‘Well, yes, John, I’m a senator from Mississippi and we’re the poorest state in the nation.’

“But we’re not anymore, that pork paid off.”

Then Lott made a couple of admissions I found startling.

“But you know what, in my heart I knew he was right,” he said of his pork barrel ways. That’s no way to do business, we shouldn’t be doing all that earmarking—it got completely out of control.

“It got out of control with Republicans and that’s why we are being punished a little bit,” he added. “Because we forgot how we got there, what we believed in, the principles that after 30 years put us in the majority, gave us the White House, the congress, the senate, the house. And then we ran out of ideas...”

Sameh El-Shahat addresses this question in his commentary in The Telegraph.

Yes, we’ve all heard the Bushisms and laughed at them but do you really think somebody supposedly that thick can make it to the top of the most sophisticated political system the world has ever seen?

No, and that is because Mr Bush is far cleverer than most of his predecessors. He may not have been a Rhodes Scholar, but he has the ability to reach out to his people and read them.

Take the Iraq war for example. OK, so he got us into Iraq in the first place. But for Pete’s sake, he’s the leader of the world’s only superpower. He needs to take decisions, even if sometimes they have nasty consequences - which is far better than we do in Europe, where we enjoy dithering not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

Something had to be done about Iraq and our government was all for attacking it too. So let’s not blame G.W. for the war.

And when things did go wrong in Iraq, and there were calls to pull out, Mr Bush just followed his own counsel and doubled his bet with the Surge.

And he was right because Iraq is in a relatively better shape today than it ever was and Al Qa’eda is a shadow of its former self in that country.

This is a man who has the courage of his convictions.

Let’s not forget how Europe does wars.

Usually we wait and wait until the enemy starts attacking, then we let them win a bit, then we fight until we are tired, then we just call the US to come over to clean our mess.

That is what happened in WWI, WWII, and the Balkans.

Bush is just showing us what a bunch of dangerous ditherers we are and we hate him for it. Naturally.

Interesting commentary.  If Bush is a buffoon, it’s probably not for any of the reasons that El-Shahat explores, is all I’m going to say on the matter.

Other than to note that many of the criticisms of Bush fall into the framework of being intellectually lazy.  It’s always easy to point fingers at other people, or to sneer at what they do, especially when you yourself are ignorant of the basic facts.  Once again this illustrates the difference between cynicism (a pretense for intellectualism in some circles) and healthy skepticism.

1. GDP has doubled


2. potable water access doubled


3. access to sewage systems doubled


4. electricity nearly doubled


5. ten times as many phones


6. one hundred times as many cell phones


7. internet access from nonexistent to widely available in cafes


8. thousands of free TV, radio, and newspaper outlets


9. right of speech and assembly and to vote,


10. freedom to purchase cars without paying exorbitant tariffs

Sunday’s poll from Rasumussen is among the dog-bites-man category of news:

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Just 17% of voters nationwide believe that most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage of election campaigns. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that four times as many—68%--believe most reporters try to help the candidate that they want to win.

The perception that reporters are advocates rather than observers is held by 82% of Republicans, 56% of Democrats, and 69% of voters not affiliated with either major party. The skepticism about reporters cuts across income, racial, gender, and age barriers.

The only people the press are fooling with the “objectivity” meme are the liberals who benefit from their slanted news articles, especially in this case Obama supporters.

Image take by the HIREST camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter during the descent of the Phoenix Lander:

Seen is the lander dangling below its parachute during atmospheric entry.  Of course they knew where and when to shoot, and preprogrammed their camera for that location.

H/T to 2Hotel9 for the the link to NASA’s website.

Trouble is that number is about 6 times larger than the “usual” definition of earmarks, of $16.9 billion for 2007.

“McCain, out of touch, but not nearly as bad a choice as his liberal opponents.”

Not a great campaign slogan.

No way we can choose a different nominee at the convention?

Via Ed Morrissey Jim Geraghty communicated with the McCain campaign over this comment:

I believe we have to secure our borders, and I think most Americans agree with that, because it’s a matter of national security. But we must enact comprehensive immigration reform. We must make it a top agenda item if we don’t do it before, and we probably won’t, a little straight talk, as of January 2009.

Legalistic parsing of his words suggest that he was intending to put comprehensive reform in front of border security.  Geraghty says:

Team McCain tells me the senator’s comments were poorly worded. There’s been no discussion within the campaign of altering their stance on illegal immigration, and as far as everyone on the campaign is concerned, the policy is still, ‘secure the border first.’

LIke others, I doubt this will mollify McCain’s more extreme critics (*cough* Whistler *cough*), however it does caution us that one shouldn’t get too rapped up in random ad lib comments made by candidates after long days on the campaign trail.

My position on it was it was unlikely that McCain would choose such a forum to announce a shift away from his stated position on border security first, then immigration policy reform second.  That’s probably a good principle in adopting interpretations that suggest revolutionary changes in a candidates political posture on a give topic.

That said, I am completely sympathetic to people who are in fact hypersensitive on this issue, given McCain’s long-term sympathy towards granting rights of citizenship to immigrants who came into this country illegally.

I would also say, and this is really my point, that this gaffe illustrations the potential unelectability of McCain.  He has enough skeletons in his closet of this sort,with little real social ability to mollify his critics and keep them mollified.  The use of the “debate is over” in context with global warming was probably more damning to him than his support of cap and trade socialism.  Yet the man remains blind to the impact of his word choices on his presidential bid.

And that in a nutshell is why I think his candidacy is doomed, short of a miracle from God Himself.

A miserable domestic agriculture harvest in 2007 due to heavy floods in August is being fingered for the spike in the price of food and severe food shortages. ‘’Based on the most recent government estimates, total cereal production in 2007 is about three million tonnes, a significant reduction from the four million tonnes of the previous year,’’ states the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The country saw a drastic drop in maize—650,000 tonnes less, 33 percent down from the previous year—and rice—400,000 tonnes less, or 25 percent down from the previous year, adds the Rome-based U.N. agency. ‘’With this low 2007 production, the cereal deficit for the 2007/2008 marketing year is estimated at 1.6 million tonnes.’’

Note that biofuels is conspicuously absent as a cause.

This may be a year in which many things change.  The governments of the worlds insistence in tampering with markets to artificially increase the demand for biofuels plus massive subsidies to farmers has no doubt caused harm.  However, that harm is often overstated:

Ethanol is an easy target for the sensationalists. The pun is more accurate than the accusation: A maze of interrelated factors affect the price of maize and most other foodstuffs. The growing economies of India and China require energy, and demand from these two Asian giants as well as sustained demand from other advanced economies has spurred a long-term rise in oil prices. Higher oil prices bump food prices; it takes energy to raise and transport food.

And that does mention weather and the effects that this has had.

Finally, Angela Merkel ways in, Bad policy, not biofuel, drive food prices

Bad agricultural policies and changing eating habits in developing nations are primarily to blame for rising food prices, not biofuel production as some critics claim, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday.

Environmentalists and humanitarian groups have stepped up campaigning against biofuels, arguing they divert production away from food and animal feed while contributing to sharp rises in the price of cereals and milk products.

But Merkel, whose country is Europe’s largest biofuel producer, said the rise in food prices was not mainly due to biofuels but to “inadequate agricultural policies in developing countries” as well as “insufficient forecasts of changes in nutritional habits” in emerging markets.

“If you travel to India these days, then a main part of the debate is about the ‘second meal’,” Merkel said.

“People are eating twice a day, and if a third of one billion people in India do that, it adds up to 300 million people. That’s a large part of the European Union,” she said.

“And if they suddenly consume twice as much food as before and if 100 million Chinese start drinking milk too, then of course our milk quotas become skewed, and much else too,” she said

The truth is the primary causes of rising food and oil prices are systemic in origin.  There is no quick fix.

The best we can do is reduce government interference with the market, rather than mandate (as our Democratic candidates want) more government interference.

This is something I’ve already commented on in this blog.  BBC finally worked it out by themselves:

China has already overtaken the US as the world’s “biggest polluter”, a report to be published next month says.  The research suggests the country’s greenhouse gas emissions have been underestimated, and probably passed those of the US in 2006-2007.

Could you have a better illustration of why climate treaty models that don’t address CO2 emissions from developing nations are deeply flawed?  If human-generated CO2 is such a threat, how does ignoring the primary region where emission rates are increasing make even a little bit of sense???

Even for people who are willing to accept the claims of the global warming advocates, the fact that so many of them supported the Kyoto protocols should give one pause.  If they are this wrong on this one issue, the crucial issue of what do we do about it, what does this say about their judgement of the underlying science?

Thought you guys would get a kick out of this one.

I understand it was shot by a US soldier serving as an advisor for an almost all Iraqi patrol moving into Basra at night time.  Some amazing footage.

In case you guys haven’t heard, the battle is not going well for the Mahdi Army.  They are outnumbered and outgunned and have lost a significant portion of their force strength.

Via Instapundit, it is reported that “Six days after the Iraqi government launched Operation Knights’ Charge in Basrah against the Mahdi Army and other Iranian-backed Shia terror groups, Muqtada al Sadr, the Leader of the Mahdi Army, has called for his fighters to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Iraqi security forces.”

In layman’s terms, that’s called “surrender”.

I have no doubt the battle will go on, there are many who no longer fall Sadr and will wish to martyr themselves pointlessly.  But their ignoring his order to surrender will only further undermine his position beyond what this gamble of his to resist governmental forces has already cost him.

I’m sure the liberals in the crowd can conjure reasons why this is bad news, though.

Harvey over at IMAO reports:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The number of Iraqi citizens not killed by Saddam Hussein has reached 200,000, the U.S. military said on Monday, just days after the fifth anniversary of a war that President George W. Bush says the United States is on track to win.

The U.S. military said in a statement that the grim milestone was reached when 200 civilians were not murdered by Iraq’s tyrannical dictator late on Sunday when no large groups of people were rounded up and shot in the head for making statements critical of their government. No one was wounded in the non-attack.

Non-tragic non-victims of yet another Saddam Hussein non-killing spree.

The non-deaths came on a day when the very dead Uday and Qusay Hussein were unable to pick women at random to rape and slaughter, owing largely to their inability to breathe, circulate blood, or stop being eaten by bugs as their bodies rotted in the ground. [...]

Read the whole thing.

I mean it.

Ed Morrissey over at Hotair reminds us of this nice little letter sent by McCain to Obama, after Obama broke his promise on campaign reform:

I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere. When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership’s preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable. Thank you for disabusing me of such notions with your letter to me dated February 2, 2006, which explained your decision to withdraw from our bipartisan discussions. I’m embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won’t make the same mistake again.

[...]

As I noted, I initially believed you shared that goal. But I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn’t always a priority for every one of us. Good luck to you, Senator.

Sincerely,

John McCain
United States Senate

What is the “new” that Obama wants to bringing to the presidency again?

From Gallup:

PRINCETON, NJ—A sizable proportion of Democrats would vote for John McCain next November if he is matched against the candidate they do not support for the Democratic nomination. This is particularly true for Hillary Clinton supporters, more than a quarter of whom currently say they would vote for McCain if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee.

I would guess this is because Hillary is viewed as more moderate than Obama, so McCain is picking up the moderate Democrat vote.  Shades of McGovern or Mondale?