Say Anything Blog

Lona Manning

Wolf Blitzer wants to know “should the Iraqis be selling oil to the United States at a discounted price?” On Sunday’s “Late Edition” on CNN he asked if the U.S. should get Iraqi oil at a discount “given the hundreds of billions of dollars the United States has spent to rebuild that country and try to bring some stability to the Iraqis.”

Blitzer was interviewing Douglas Holtz-Eakin, “a senior economic adviser to the McCain campaign.”

[...]

The full exchange is below.

BLITZER: Would it be wise, because Iraq is now exporting a lot and pumping a lot of oil, much more than it was, with the relative quiet that’s developed in certain parts of the country over the past year. They’re exporting; they’re pumping more oil.

Should the Iraqis be selling oil to the United States at a discounted price?

HOLTZ-EAKIN: Oil should occur on the world market at market prices.

BLITZER: Why not—given the hundreds of billions of dollars the United States has spent to rebuild that country and try to bring some stability to the Iraqis, why not have them export oil to the United States at a reduced price? They would still make some money, but they wouldn’t make as much as they are making right now.

HOLTZ-EAKIN: Look, as senator McCain, who has gone there and seen the conditions on the ground eight times, correctly pointed out, we had to bring a new strategy to Iraq.

We had to get some peace, a path to prosperity for the Iraqis. But that path doesn’t lie in the U.S. being dependent on Middle Eastern oil. The entire strategy was built around getting the United States to be able to exit with peace and build energy security for ourselves at home.

BLITZER: So, just to be precise, Senator McCain believes the Iraqis should export oil to the United States at the going international price, which, right now, is about $135 a barrel?

HOLTZ-EAKIN: Senator McCain believes there should be an international oil market but he believes the United States should not be self-dependent on that from the Iraqis or anyone else.

In spite of the obvious irony in Blitzer’s question, there is a much deeper issue here, and both sides in this exchange are trying to obscure it.
When Blitzer talks about a “discount”, he is exhibiting the protectionist, mob-style thinking that characterizes the left’s perception of business.
Likewise, when McCain’s economic adviser talks about the oil being sold at “market price”, he illustrates his ignorance(willful or otherwise) of the reality of the situation.
We have made huge infrastructure loans to the Iraqis, and their revived oil income can now be tapped for amortization of those loans.  It’s just a matter of setting the terms in a way that works for both parties.
It’s not a discount, and the McCain guy should acknowledge that having the Iraqis pay us back for our investment in their country is a legitimate outcome of the revival of their oil industry.  I’m not talking about the oil companies that will be doing the actual work, because that will be part of their deal; I’m talking about repaying the generosity of the American people.  IMO, those payments should go to defraying the military costs first, but even social programs that actually worked could benefit. The main thing should be lightening the tax burden on the American people.

Rick Moran

David Hazony of Commentary highlights a poll by the John F. Kennedy School of Government where Israeli Arabs were querried on where they would like to live if given the choice of anywhere on earth.

The Arabs picked Israel in overwhelming numbers:

According to the poll, 77 percent would rather live in Israel than any other country on earth.

[...]

For an “oppressed” people, Israeli Arabs seem relatively content. And as Hazony points out, when so many are willing to fight and defend Israel, that also says something about how they feel regarding their home.

No, life is not perfect for Israeli Arabs I’m sure. But considering the way that Jews are treated in Arab countries, the Israeli Arabs should count themselves lucky indeed.

Despite the continuing efforts of the Jew-hating lefties to paint Israel as a terrorist nation, the truth is something completely different.

Find it here

McCain-Soros Toppled GOP Candidates

by Aryeh Spero

“The Republicans lost because they were too conservative.” “No, not conservative enough.” “They lost because they disappointed the religious right.” “No, because they are too tied to the religious right.”

Many of us feel the loss was due to what I call “McCain-Soros.”



Ever since the passage of McCain-Feingold, money has poured into organizations such as MoveOn.org, which in turn demonizes Republicans, painting a portrait of them as the incarnation of evil. The ads have had as their goal one thing: leaving a sour taste in the mouth of the electorate over anything Republican, conservative or religious. It has worked. The soft Republican, such as Sen. Lincoln Chaffee, went down with the tough Republican, such as Sen. Rick Santorum.

These ads, paid for by George Soros, Peter Lewis and other multi-millionaire leftists are the direct result of, and have been made possible by, the passage of McCain-Feingold, which opened the door to unlimited spending by left-wing fat cats on behalf of liberal candidates and causes. Until its passage, contributions were, basically, limited to the political parties and candidates themselves, but with a cap. Until the passage of McCain-Feingold, a cap was placed on how much Soros could underwrite in his lust for power and influence.

Sen. John McCain (R.-Ariz.) has made it possible for George Soros and other billionaire transnationalists to effect and determine the outcome of our elections and thus U.S. destiny, indeed world destiny. And that is exactly what the wealthy internationalists have always craved.

[...]

Feingold understood, as we now all do, the Achilles’ heel of John McCain. To wit: I am the “cleaner” and wiser Republican. I stand out from the pack. “Take the dirty money out of politics” became McCain’s slogan. He did, and now we have the “clean” money of George Soros and Peter Lewis, so clean that it can be spread around, infinitely, for every left-wing cause. It was noble, a campaign finance “reform,” so befitting of Mr. Noble.

[...]

Democrats since Bill Clinton do one thing: they campaign every day as if it is the day preceding an election. They demonize Republicans, our motives. The message they telegraph is not so much about our policy but our “sinister” goals. It is Halliburton, profiteering from war, mean-spiritedness, dogmatism over compassion. It is 24/7/365.

The purpose of the ads is not to illuminate their political positions. It is to destroy the Republican candidate and officeholder, the persona of the conservative. Through osmosis—after a five year daily barrage of ads on radio, TV and in newspapers—it appears to have worked.

Republicans, on the other hand, don’t begin serious campaigning until the month before the election and have never learned the Goebbles technique so familiar, and comfortable, to Democrats: demonize the person, demonize the group. Do so every day, until respectable people find it offensive to be associated with, let alone vote for, such terrible people. The Muslims are doing it against Israel, against Jews, and they are indeed swaying Europe, prevailing.

The paid-for-by-Soros ads contributed mightily to the Republican defeat. Having won the House and Senate, Democrats can save some money by no longer having to pay for as many ads since they will use their committee positions to demonize and destroy conservatives through Democrat witch hunts under chairmen who have a Torquemada/Inquisition-like intent toward those they are “investigating.” Instead of paid ads, the mainstream media will for free, as news, nightly furnish Americans the audios and visuals from the congressional hearings—the images—that will make anyone associated with the Republican party look like a thief, greedy, a conspirator—Al Capone.

Companies that contributed too much to Republican candidates will be hauled in and scrutinized under a series of bogus charges. The public will love it, for the Democrats and 527s have spent the last few years laying the demonization groundwork regarding companies such as Exxon, Phillip Morris, Merck, Diebold, Halliburton, Wal-Mart: big oil, big tobacco, big pharmaceutical, giant retailers, etc. If “smart,” these companies will mend their ways and learn their lesson regarding who should be the major beneficiary of their contributions. After all, inquisitors simply want and always accept repentance.

So thank you, John McCain, for your tireless efforts in behalf of McCain-Soros, clean money and motives and “reform.” You have helped bring your party down. Thanks for being the gang leader of the “Gang of 14,” which stood in the way of up-or-down confirmation of conservative justices. Hats off to you for redefining torture so that effective interrogation of jihadists is forever impossible. As a reward, you wish, now, to lead the party and become its Presidential nominee and standard bearer. I don’t think so.

The more I investigate McCain, the more firmly I am convinced that I cannot vote for him, as a matter of principle.  He’s a shit sandwich I just refuse to eat.  Vote for conservatives only, if you want your country back!

BTW, I expect this source will be attacked, and there will be attempts to invalidate it, without dealing with the actual results of McCain/Feingold. Fear not; there are well over a million other links in the pipeline.

By Tim Graham

In the latest in a long series of Armed Citizen stories that the media works strenuously to ignore, a man named Nabil Fawzi is the toast of the Detroit area. Courtesy of Cam Edwards once again, see the Detroit News report:

A longtime customer brazenly stood up to a suspected would-be bank robber at a Comerica bank on Monday and detained the man until police showed up.

At about 9 a.m., police said a 54-year-old Washtenaw County man walked into a Comerica branch in the 45400 block of Michigan Avenue and handed the teller a handwritten note demanding money.

It also indicated he was strapped with a bomb, police said in a release.

When the suspect demanded “bands of 50s and 100s,” police said, the clerk hit the bank’s silent alarm and began placing money in a bag.

A teller at an adjacent counter noticed the incident and alerted the longtime customer.

Police said the customer then pulled out a gun, pointed it at the suspect and told him, “You are not robbing this bank.”

“But I have a bomb,” the suspect said, according to police.

The customer replied: “I don’t care. You are not robbing this bank!”

The customer, who has not been named, then led the suspect to a chair, sat him down and held him at gunpoint until police came.

[...]

Fawzi, a Lebanese immigrant who served in the army during that country’s civil war, runs Mr. Bucks, a check-cashing service based at the gas station. On Friday, he fielded questions and compliments from his customers.

“I heard about that when I was working,” said Nicole Fisher of Ypsilanti. “That’s awesome.”

One man gave Fawzi a thumbs up. “Good work at the bank,” he said.

Cam interviewed Fawzi on Friday night, and you can find it at NRANews.com. We’ll see if any national news outlets ever notice.

Real Americans come in all varieties in our melting pot. This is one of the reasons we have a Second Amendment, and we should defend it against the lefties who would destroy our way of life.

Patrick Casey

At the heart of Barack Obama’s economic proposals—those that he has promised to deliver if he becomes President—is the expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts. He promises to “restore fairness to the tax code”, and provide middle class tax relief. While we can all applaud the objective of more tax relief, Obama plans on ‘paying’ for this by allowing the Bush Tax cuts to expire - a punitive measure against the ‘rich’.

Republicans, now that Lincoln Chafee is out of the Party, need a unified and strong message against such a stupid move. They were handed one earlier today in the form of an interview with the Nobel prize winning economist Robert Mundell in the Wall Street Journal: An Economist Who Matters.

Mundell, Professor of Economics at Columbia University in New York, has served as an adviser to the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the European Commission, several governments in Latin America and Europe, the Federal Reserve Board, the US Treasury and the Government of Canada. He is considered to be the father of the euro - first proposing a common currency in Europe in the 70s—and won his Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1999. His world-wide credentials are impeccable.

His interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Kyle Wingfield this morning is fascinating. For our purposes, let’s focus on what he views as the biggest threat to the world economy at the moment - allowing the Bush Tax Cuts to expire:

Back in America, there’s an election going on. There’s also been a spate of financial problems, not the least of which is a weak dollar. But Mr. Mundell says “the big issue economically . . . is what’s going to happen to taxes.”

Democratic nominee Barack Obama regularly professes disdain for the Bush tax cuts, suggesting that those growth-spurring measures may be scrapped. “If that happens,” Mr. Mundell predicts, “the U.S. will go into a big recession, a nosedive.”

[...]

..."the most important thing that could be done with respect to tax rates now is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Eliminating that uncertainty would be more important than pushing for a further cut—in the income tax rates, anyway.”

[...]

The interview is full of other interesting observations. Mundell feels that the optimum top tax rate in the United States should be 30%, and that the corporate tax rate should be 25%. He also believes that exchange rates should be fixed, much like they were fixed under Breton Woods until Nixon. He would like to see the EU and the Federal Reserve come to some sort of an agreement to keep the euro (whose idea he originated over three decades ago) between $0.90 and $1.30. Mundell also favors making the dollar the dominant currency against which all other currency would be fixed (he feels that the euro is vastly overvalued at present).

[...]

Obama’s populist message to tax the so-called rich and cut the taxes of the middle class relies solely on age-old class envy. But his dirty little secret is that he’s smart enough to know that if the so-called ‘rich’ don’t do well, the middle class doesn’t get paid—and everyone suffers. The GOP must ask people to sit back and think for a moment. To go after the ‘rich’ in order to punish them, be it people who make $100K, $250K, or a million dollars a year, always hurts the people whose lives depend on those ‘rich’ people. Those other lives consist of the middle-class people that are directly employed by the ‘rich’, and middle-class people who are employed by the companies that the ‘rich’ buy goods or services from. And how about the elderly who rely on the income from retirement funds or stock sales to live, and to help their families? They would be hurt by Obama’s so-called “fairness” as well.

[...]

Great stuff.  When you violate basic principles, things go wrong.  Here’s a comment I found particularly interesting:

I found another description of sins that describe the Marxist Left. I especially like the politics without principle…

Wealth without Work
Pleasure without Conscience
Science without Humanity
Knowledge without Character
Politics without Principle
Commerce without Morality
Worship without Sacrifice

Welcome to the world of Obama..

Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi

Posted by: DaveT | June 21, 2008 07:12 PM

Enough said.

By Nicholas J. Kaster

Estonia, liberated from communism in part by music, has embraced supply side economics and economic freedom. This small Baltic nation may have some lessons for America.

[..]

For Estonia, the 20th century was a litany of horrors. A victim of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet “nonaggression pact,” the tiny Baltic nation was invaded three times during World War II: first by Soviet Russia in 1940, then by the Nazis in 1941, then again by the Soviets in 1944.

After the war, the Soviets transformed Estonia into a “Soviet Socialist Republic” and attempted to strip the Estonians of their national identity. Through the process known as “Russification,” a half million Russian migrant workers were brought to Estonia. Meanwhile, 70,000 native Estonians fled to the West, while tens of thousands were killed or deported to the Siberian gulag.

The Soviet effort to exterminate Estonian culture even extended to music. In 1947, the Soviets took over the traditional Estonian Song Festival (Laulupidu), which dated back to the mid-19th century. The Soviets forbade the singing of anything other than propaganda songs in honor of Stalin and Lenin, But a clever Estonian composer crafted a song, based on a 100-year old poem, that slipped under the Soviet’s radar. The song ("Land of My Fathers Land that I Love") became an unofficial anthem of protest against the Soviet occupation without the Russians quite figuring it out.

[...]

The Communist attempt at cultural genocide was a failure. The Singing Revolution helped to preserve the national sentiments triggering the political mobilization that finally led to the fall of Communism in the Baltics. Estonian independence was formally recognized in 1991.

[...]

Laar, who became Estonia’s first prime minister in 1992, inherited the bitter fruits of socialism - an economy in shambles and the citizenry dispirited. “In an era of socialism,” Laar wrote, “people were not used to thinking for themselves, taking the initiative or assuming risks.”

This was a problem common to Central and Eastern European countries. In a recent article for the American Spectator, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum observed that “in a very short time, between the late 1980s and mid-1990s, much that had been illegal in that part of the world became legal again.” But the private, charitable, and social institutions that form the fabric of a civil society had not existed for many decades. Without civil society, Abblebaum wrote, citizens “lost of the habit of organizing anything, whether economic activity, entertainment, education, politics, or charity, for themselves.”

Estonia was no exception. As Laar himself noted, citizens “had to be shaken free of the illusion-common in post-communist countries-that somehow someone else would solve their problems for them.” Accordingly, “the government declared that it could only help those who were prepared to do something for themselves.”

To this end, Laar, an acolyte of the late economist Milton Friedman, embarked on a series of radical free market reforms. First, Estonia privatized state assets and established laws that clearly protected property rights. Second, it abolished all import tariffs and became one big free trade zone. In addition, Estonia stopped state subsidies to failing enterprises. Private enterprise had to work efficiently or die. Third, a flax-tax was established, with a uniform rate of 26% regardless of personal income. In January 2005 the personal income tax rate was reduced to 24%. A subsequent reduction to 23% followed in January 2006. The income tax is scheduled to decrease by 1% annually to reach 18% by January 2010.

Supply-side economics is very controversial in the West, but Laar has little doubt of its effectiveness. “The flat-rate tax has been an important part of the Estonian success story,” he said. “its easy to collect and easy to control.” The only losers, he noted, were the tax lawyers.

In the 2008 Index of Economic Freedom compiled by the Heritage Foundation, Estonia ranked as the 12th freest economy in the world, ahead of Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands-an astonishing achievement in a decade and a half. The result has been formidable economic growth, an average of 6% per year since the reforms began. The effects of the Singing Revolution have reverberated across the former Soviet empire, as five nations in the former USSR-Georgia, Latvia, Ukraine, Romania, and Russia itself-followed Estonia’s lead in establishing flat taxes and adopting free market reforms.

Estonia’s embrace of free enterprise, private property, and low taxes were built upon the Reagan-Thatcher vision of the 1980s. The supreme irony, of course, is that, while Estonia (and other Central and Eastern European countries) are taking Reaganism even farther than Reagan could, the U.S. now seems headed down the road of collectivism and higher taxes. As Central European countries are slashing tax rates, Barack Obama promises to raise the U.S. marginal income tax rate and to nearly double the capital gains tax. While the former communist countries are discovering the virtues of privatization, Democrats in the U.S. (and some Republicans too) are seeking a more expansive role for the state.

Watching The Singing Revolution and reflecting on its aftermath, I was struck by the strange new reversal in roles-the former Soviet bloc rushing to embrace free enterprise while the U.S. retreats from economic liberty. In the 1980s, America’s resolve against Soviet tyranny helped to liberate Estonia. Perhaps, in leading by example, Estonia some day can return the favor.

Indeed.  Read the whole thing.  For those of us who still support the Founding Principles, it’s a real world example of why they work, and why socialism doesn’t work.

By AWR Hawkins

Karl Marx, (1818-1883), believed capitalism was the next to last stage in the evolution to an earthly utopia, which would be ushered in through revolution; a revolution resulting from the tensions that existed between workers and the owners of production. According to Marx, the final stage of this evolution toward utopia would result when workers rose up in revolution to overthrow the business owners who were exploiting them through a capitalistic economy. We know Marx’s “utopia” and other aspects of his philosophy by their more prominent name: communism.

Marx’s predictions grew out of his atheistic worldview; a worldview that made him hostile toward private property and the accumulation of wealth through capitalistic means. Although his perceptions of the exploitation of workers and his solidarity with those workers has been rigorously tested and found wanting by historian Paul Johnson, his support for communism and his hatred of privatization and its corresponding freedoms have been a mainstay of the Left since at least 1917, when Vladimir Lenin took them to heart and threw Russia into revolution.

Like Marx, Lenin pointed to the struggles and dichotomies in Russian society in order to postulate solutions; solutions to problems that were not always there. From roughly 1915 through 1917, Lenin repeatedly decried the exploitation of the Russian workers by the land and business owners. This “crisis” not only justified, according to Lenin’s rhetoric, but demanded a revolution that would take power away from the land owners and give “power to the people.”

Lenin’s revolution against the “greedy” landowners was carried out at the end of a gun.  The gun was necessary because the crisis Lenin saw was not a crisis that every Russian believed to be real. But as Crane Briton has pointed out in his work on revolutionaries, Lenin was willing to use force to move his countrymen toward what he thought was best for them, whether they agreed with him or not.  Lenin’s implementation of Marxism was so stringent, so accurately in tune with Marx’s own predilections for government intervention in every facet of life that Marxism came to be referred to as Marxism/Leninism.

Sadly, this practice of creating a crisis in order to implement a solution has become a staple in today’s Democratic Party. Although each individual Democrat may not hold Marxism/Leninism as his or her political and ideological paradigm, many Democrats in Congress hold to the resulting methodology and have adopted passing legislation as their method for revolution and their solution for every type of crisis known to man, be it healthcare, the environment, gun violence or energy problems. For the Democrats, every crisis is but a segue toward the passage of more and more legislation, furthering the revolution while enslaving the very people they claim to be liberating.

[...]

Therefore, whether one considers Lenin, Clinton, or today’s Obama-led Democrat party, the bottom line is in the end, the people will suffer at the hands of an office holder who uses “crisis revolution” tactics to further their Leftist, legislative agenda. This means we will continue paying excruciatingly high prices in order to give Democrats the opportunity to pull a bait and switch, whereby they can continue to lessen our oil supply by standing in the way of domestic drilling while simultaneously mounting a campaign against the “shameful profits” of American oil companies. Like good Marxists, they do this in order to distract us from the fact that all the class envy and bitterness that undergirds their policies is robbing us of a burgeoning, profitable capitalist society rather than bringing us into a promised utopia.

Read the whole thing.  This is the real agenda of the Dem Party; they are no longer a Party of America.

Find it here

State denies cancer treatment, offers suicide instead

‘To say, we’ll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live, it’s cruel’

State officials have offered a lung cancer patient the option of having the Oregon Health Plan, set up in 1994 to ration health care, pay for an assisted suicide but not for the chemotherapy prescribed by her physician.

The story appears to be a happy ending for Barbara Wagner, who has been notified by a drug manufacturer that it will provide the expensive medication, estimated to cost $4,000 a month, for the first year and then allow her to apply for further treatment, according to a report in the Eugene Register-Guard.

But the word from the state was coverage for palliative care, which would include the state’s assisted suicide program, would be allowed but not coverage for the cancer treatment drugs.

“To say to someone, we’ll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live, it’s cruel,” Wagner told the newspaper. “I get angry. Who do they think they are?”

She said she was devastated when the state health program refused coverage for Tarceva, the drug her doctor ordered for treatment of her lung cancer.

The refusal came in an unsigned letter from LIPA, the company that runs the state program in that part of Oregon.

[...]

“We have been warning for years that this was a possibility in Oregon,” said the “Bioethics Pundit” on the Bioethics blog. “Medicaid is rationed, meaning that some treatments are not covered. But assisted suicide is always covered.”

“This isn’t the first time this has happened either,” the blogger wrote. “A few years ago a patient who needed a double organ transplant was denied the treatment but would have been eligible for state-financed assisted suicide. But not to worry. Just keep repeating the mantra: There are no abuses with Oregon’s assisted suicide law. There are no abuses. There are no abuses!

Not surprising at all.

Find it here

Tackling Five Modern Myths Created By Liberals Part 2

By John Hawkins

Correcting the myths created and propagated by the liberals in the mainstream media could be an all day, every day job. In fact, there are organizations like the Media Research Center that do just that.

However, the mainstream media is so biased to the Left and churns out so many inaccuracies each day, that sometimes even truly enormous myths manage to slip through the cracks and become accepted as fact. Last week, I covered five of those big lies. This week, I’m going to take on five more left-wing fantasies that you’ve undoubtedly heard repeated over and over again ad nauseam.

No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq:

This one is such an article of faith on the Left that they actually mock people for saying otherwise, but the reality is far different from what they would have you believe.

Roughly two years ago, Rick Santorum revealed that over 500 WMDs had been found in Iraq. Since then, more have been found although it’s difficult to get an exact count. Despite the fact that the WMDs our troops located were old, as Santorum explained, the finds were very significant,

“One of the things that we asserted was that (Hussein) had not destroyed his stockpiles of weapons from the previous war. We sent in weapons inspectors, as people will recall, not only to look at whether he had current weapons programs in place, but to determine whether he had destroyed the weapons he said he had destroyed. It is very clear that he did not destroy those weapons and that those weapons would have been available and unfortunately still are available to...terrorist organizations that could use them against us or other countries around the world.”

Of course, you can fairly argue that those were old WMDs that varied in their level of effectiveness because of their age, but that’s far different from saying that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction when we invaded.

Tax cuts lead to revenue drops for the federal government:

Liberals regularly claim that revenue from tax cuts must be “made up” somehow, which ignores the fact that government revenue usually goes up after tax cuts.

That was certainly the case after the Bush, Kennedy, and Reagan tax cuts, which makes perfect sense if you understand the Laffer Curve.

[...]

After General Eric Shinseki said we would need 500,000 troops to handle post-war Iraq, he was fired:

Whether Shinseki was right about the number of troops we needed is debatable, given that we obviously didn’t have enough boots-on-the-ground in the immediate aftermath of the war—but are winning today with a far smaller number of soldiers than Shinseki said we should have—but in any case, the United States Department Of Defense has made it absolutely clear that Shinseki wasn’t fired, retired, or removed for his remarks,

Gen. Shinseki was appointed to a four-year term as chief of staff of the Army and served his full term.

[...]

George Bush stole the 2004 election by cheating in Ohio:

This conspiracy theory doesn’t inspire as many tantrums as the Florida controversy in 2000, but there are liberals galore who will tell you that Kerry really won Ohio in 2004 and thus, the election.

The problem with this idea is that the margin in Ohio was so large that it practically precluded the possibility of fraud making the difference. The initial margin was 118,443 votes, which was more than 220 times the difference between Bush and Gore in Florida. If every state—that was won by even half that many votes—became controversial, it’s hard to see how we could ever make it through another election without months of charges and counter-charges to go along with never-ending legal challenges.

[...]

Oil companies gouge consumers to make outsized profits:

Unsurprisingly, given the outrageously high cost of gas and the Left’s penchant for pointing the fickle finger of blame at big corporations, we’ve heard a lot about how big oil is gouging consumers.

However, when you take a look at the actual numbers in California, for example, you find that the “Distribution Costs, Marketing Costs and Profits” for the oil companies make up only 8 cents per gallon of gas.

That doesn’t sound like gouging, does it? But if you believe it does, what would you say about the 70 cents per gallon in taxes that’s paid by California consumers? Additionally, as Karl Rove has pointed out,

(Oil companies) make about 8.3 cents in gross profit per dollar of sales....Electronics make 14.5 cents per dollar and computer equipment makers take in 13.7 cents per dollar, according to the Census Bureau. Microsoft’s margin is 27.5 cents per dollar of sales.

Sure, these oil companies are huge and therefore, even an 8.3% profit adds up to billions of dollars, but when you look at the relatively small percentage that they’re putting in their pockets as compared to the humongous share that the government is raking in, it’s pretty clear that it’s the government, not the oil companies, that is gouging consumers.

The list just goes on and on…

Find it here

Putting Obama and the Dems on the Defensive

Patrick Casey

Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats find themselves in a no-win situation.

We awoke this morning to the reports that a compromise has been reached between the Bush Administration and Congress on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The best reporting that I’ve seen on this so far is from the Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman (Deal Set on Domestic Spy Powers). The best (and most humorous) analysis that I’ve see is at RedState by Moe Lane (The FISA Controversy, in tedious Question and Answer form).

It really is a win for the Bush Administration, and a loss for the Democrats, including Barack Obama. The Dems have been screaming for years about this illegal domestic spying program—this bill puts the lie to that theme. It acknowledges that FISA warrants were never before required for eavesdropping suspects overseas, but that with new systems that routes world-wide communications through the United States, it was time to allow for FISA to be updated to reflect the realities of the latest technologies.

The government will be allowed, in circumstances that dictate it, immediate authority to commence wiretaps as long as they notify the FISA Court within 7 days. The Court would then have 30 days to approve a warrant, during which time the surveillance can continue. The FISA bill also offers retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies who assisted the federal government post-9/11. The current lawsuits by liberal groups will be allowed to go forward, but will be dismissed upon the production of evidence that the companies were complying with the request of the federal government and the President.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the problem all along was the liberal base of the Democratic Party, and their minions in Congress:

The outcome was driven largely by the realities of election-year politics. Democrats, particularly more conservative ones, in vulnerable re-election races couldn’t afford to appear to be dodging a big national-security issue. And many believed the law needed to be updated before surveillance orders expired in August. House Democratic leaders struggled for months to find a proposal their entire party could support but couldn’t overcome splits between conservative and liberal Democrats—some of whom are reacting angrily to the deal.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama will have to decide whether to support it and risk the wrath of his party’s left wing, or vote against it and risk losing support from independents. One top Democratic lawmaker said the Democrats delayed the announcement by a couple of days, in part to give the presumptive nominee time to assess his position.

[...]

So Obama and the Democrats are in a no-win situation, no matter how their mainstream media parses it. If they vote against it, they appear even weaker on national security than they already are. If they vote for it, their words and rhetoric are once again proven to be meaningless.

As for the Independents on whom it appears Election 2008 will hinge, words matter. Promises matter. And it’s becoming more and more apparent that the words and the promises of the Democrats’, and in particular Barack Obama’s, mean nothing.

Now, if McCain would just get right on this…

Find it here

CBS, MSNBC Websites Promote Earthquakes’ Tie to Global Warming

By D. S. Hube

An article at CBSNews.com and MSNBC.com utilizes the claims of a scientist with some very questionable ideas and theories. In this case it’s “seismic activity is five times more energetic than 20 years ago” and the reason is due to—you guessed it—global warming.

The research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to continue, unless the problem of “global warming” is comprehensively and urgently addressed.

The analysis of more than 386,000 earthquakes between 1973 and 2007 recorded on the US Geological Survey database proved that the global annual energy of earthquakes on Earth began increasing very fast since 1990.

Dr. [Tom] Chalko said that global seismic activity was increasing faster than any other global warming indicator on Earth and that this increase is extremely alarming.

Who exactly is this Dr. Tom Chalko? And how precisely are earthquakes related to global warming? The blog SansPretense has done a pretty thorough job dissecting Chalko’s claims, as well as investigating some of Chalko’s other “research.” For example, Chalko contributes to a “scientific” journal that’s ... not what many would consider scientific. It’s called the NU Journal of Discovery—the “NU” standing for Natural University. There’s just one problem: There is no Natural University. Take a look at the “university’s” website to see what I mean:

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Is this what the MSM has come to? Are they so determined to enforce the cult of global warming that they’ll use anybody’s research, however questionable?

Read the whole thing.  Carrick: This “Bud’s” for you.

Find it here

Michelle Obama’s pander

Clarice Feldman

James Taranto calls out Michelle Obama for appalling pandering to the lie that the government deliberately injected black men with syphilis in the notorious Tuskegee Study. Yesterday, a New York Times article about her noted that she had killed a research project on the human papillomavirus, because of sensitivity to the widespread mistaken belief in the black community that that such research abuses happen to blacks. 

“The Times’s account suggests that girls in Chicago were denied potentially lifesaving vaccinations because Michelle Obama pandered to racial paranoia instead of standing up for the truth. Is that why they pay her the big bucks?”

It is a widely held belief in the fantasy land of victimology that the famous Tuskegeee experiments saw the government inject blacks with syphilis. Usually this urban myth is cited to assert that it is reasonable to believe that the government created AIDS as a targeted disease. The reach of this lie goes far beyond the black community.

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*The Obamas seem to have no interest in the truth of Tuskegee, but in the hope that you do, here is a quick outline.

The experiment began in 1932 and ran until 1972 in which poor black sharecroppers were denied treatment for syphilis. When it began it was with the beneficent end of determining whether the subjects were better off not being treated with the then-existing treatment methods, which were themselves often toxic. But by 1947 penicillin had become the standard treatment for syphilis. At that point Tuskegee could have treated all the men with penicillin or broken off some as a control group and treated the others. The failure of the program and the reason why the government conceded error and paid the survivors and their families was in denying the subjects knowledge of and treatment with penicillin, NOT in injecting them with syphilis.

Further, the failed experiment led to a significant review and reappraisal of biomedical ethics respecting clinical trials, which surely the University of Chicago medical school fellows know, and which Michelle should know about before blocking trials that could benefit the very community she claims to serve.

If he wants to “heal racial divisiveness”, Obama should start with this one.

Find it here

It’s been said that a man who stands on principle is bound to face personal attack. In my line of work, school administration, this has certainly been true as attacks can come literally from out of the blue. A longtime colleague can take you on, seemingly out of the blue with a laundry list of complaints. The next day, an attack might come from a parent whose child isn’t receiving the attention they deserve. Neither may be a real attack but perception is reality and when someone disagrees with us, we can’t help but to get worked up. The key is in choosing the appropriate response for each workplace moment of inevitable stress. Here are some keys when personal attack rises its ugly head in the workplace.

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Just a bit of help for the thinking conservatives on this blog, as we deal with the daily spew of the angry leftie trolls.
Just to be clear, this is personal attack instead of any logical or factual argument. If your opponent is a moron, and you can prove it, that's fair.

Find it here

The Last Liberty?

William D. Zeranski

We’ve reach a point in the political and economic life of America where nearly all liberties have been infringed upon.  Political correctness and multiculturalism have a choke hold on the freedom of speech in the classroom and in the public square, aided and abetted by those in government, MSM and academia.  Laws and government regulations put the citizens’ ownership of property at the mercy of unelected officials.  Basic constitutional rights which, at one time, were considered unassailable are now under constant assault.

So what is really left?  What is that final freedom that allowed the early American to cross rivers and mountains, plant fields of wheat in the Great Plains, and go north to Alaska? That last liberty is the freedom of movement.  And I don’t mean the walk to the neighbor’s house or the bike ride around the block, or the sometimes laborious drive to work, but the freedom to go here and go there.

Think of all the nations in the world where going here or there is not an option; there is no choice in the matter.  Well, after a fashion, all Americans finally stand at the same threshold, simply because of the price of a gallon of gasoline.  There are many Americans, in government and ordinary citizens, who accept, even promote the idea of nationalizing American refineries.

In a land where government controls great swaths of the North American continent and covets the refineries needed to produce the fuel to travel what is left, there is no freedom of movement.  As always, there is a greater invitation for the continual erosion of what freedom remains.

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Fuel, not only makes the American economy go and grow, it allows 21st century Americans to go from here to there, to see and to do, because Heaven is not a cage.

In addition, the ability of our free enterprise economic system to generate wealth is conditioned by the mobility of individual citizens.  Greater mobility means a greater ability to generate prosperity.

Congressman had accused soldiers of killing ‘in cold blood’

With most of the eight Marines charged in the Haditha, Iraq, incident now exonerated, the highest-ranking officer among the accused is considering a lawsuit against Democratic Rep. John Murtha, who fueled the case by declaring the men cold-blooded killers.

In an interview with nationally syndicated radio talk host Michael Savage, the lead attorney for Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani said he and his client will look into suing Murtha and the Time magazine reporter, Tim McGuirk, who first published the accusations by Iraqi insurgents.

But the attorney, Brian Rooney, said nothing will happen immediately because he wants Chessani, described as a devout Christian and the father of six homeschooled children, completely “out of the woods” legally before any action is taken. The government, through Lt. Col. S.M. Sullivan, today filed a notice that it would appeal the case to the next judicial level.

As WND reported, a military judge at Camp Pendleton in California yesterday dismissed charges that Chessani failed to properly investigate the Nov. 19, 2005 incident in which 24 Iraqi men, women and children were killed.

[...]

It’s about time to return fire on the liars.