Good Riddance, Bob Bennett

Another edition of bullet pointed links to articles I haven't had time to write up but which are good.

• Peter Suderman of Reason.com looks at Paul Ryan, one of my favorite congressmen, and wonders if he's a serious reformer or just another compromised small government hypocrite. You decide.

• Harvard economist and former Reagan advisor, Martin Feldstein, argues in favor of an extension of the Bush tax cuts. I'm with him, natch.

• Former AG, Michael Mukasey, worries, rightly, that we are returned to a pre-9/11 (read: naive) mindset in treatment of terrorists. This is a problem. Unless you've forgotten history and think that these lucky breaks (panty bomber, failed Times Square bomb) are the new norm.

• To the point of terror and the Obama administration, Charles Krauthammer, one of the smartest opinionators out there, tackles the question of Miranda rights and the interrogation of terror suspects. Like immigration, this question isn't as easy at it seems.

• Another favorite of this blog, John Bolton (aka, The Mustachioed Badass), holds forth on the Greece-precipitated Euro-crisis.

• Meanwhile, Daniel Krauthammer reviews the Senate investigations into Goldman Sachs. I think this is a politically opportunistic show trial with little to no merit. Hopefully it also means Goldmanites will donate less to Obama in 2012. Maybe. Unless you think they'll also take advantage of any new regulatory regime to gain some advantage over competitors. That's probably what will happen. (h/t Scott L.)

• Bob Bennett is gone and I think it's a good thing. The MFM takes the liberal line that this is an example of hysterical conservative extremists over a good, reasonable, and conservative senator. Meanwhile, when Sestak defeats Specter in PA, that--that--will be a triumph over incumbency and a renewal of core American democratic principles. Huzzah for the little guy, or something.

• No weekly links post would be complete without at least one to my fav columnist, Bret Stephens. His column on Turkey carries extra weight for me as we recently traveled to Istanbul. I hope it doesn't turn into Iran; I'd like to go back someday.

• Finally, modern-day hero, General David Petraeus, was recently spoke at an AEI dinner wherein he received the Irving Kristol Award. His speech is (transcript here) is great review of the power of ideas helping to propel the success of The Surge. If you read nothing else from this week's list-o-links, read this.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Eric Holder's Ridiculous Decision To Try KSM In NY, &c.

The WSJ's Review & Outlook editorial for yesterday pretty well sums up all the legal, historical, practical, and terror-fighting implications of Holder's leftist-appeasing move to abolish the military commissions specifically designed to try KSM & others for whom normal evidentiary rules, among other things, would be difficult.

Please spare us talk of the "rule of law." If that was the primary consideration, the U.S. already has a judicial process in place. The current special military tribunals were created by the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which was adopted with bipartisan Congressional support after the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision obliged the executive and legislative branches to approve a detailed plan to prosecute the illegal "enemy combatants" captured since 9/11.

Contrary to liberal myth, military tribunals aren't a break with 200-plus years of American jurisprudence. Eight Nazis who snuck into the U.S. in June 1942 were tried by a similar court and most were hanged within two months. Before the Obama Administration stopped all proceedings earlier this year pending yesterday's decision, the tribunals at Gitmo had earned a reputation for fairness and independence.

No one doubts these men's guilt, but what if--what if--they receive reduced or no sentence because of some procedural rule that ought not apply to enemy combatants?

Then, there's the ridiculous leftists & media (but I repeat myself) response to the mass murder of US soldiers at Ft. Hood by Islamic terrorist-in-US-uniform, Nidal Hasan.

51 people were shot, of which, 13 eventually died, including one unborn child. But to hear the liberal take on things (& that idiot Gen. Casey), the biggest tragedy would be the loss of diversity.

Here's Charles Krauthammer:

One must not speak of such things. Not even now. Not even after we know that Hasan was in communication with a notorious Yemen-based jihad propagandist. As late as Tuesday, the New York Times was running a story on how returning soldiers at Fort Hood had a high level of violence.

What does such violence have to do with Hasan? He was not a returning soldier. And the soldiers who returned home and shot their wives or fellow soldiers didn’t cry “Allahu Akbar!” as they squeezed the trigger.

The delicacy about the religion in question — condescending, politically correct, and deadly — is nothing new. A week after the first (1993) World Trade Center attack, the same New York Times ran the following front-page headline about the arrest of one Mohammed Salameh: “Jersey City Man Is Charged in Bombing of Trade Center.”

Ah yes, those Jersey men — so resentful of New York, so prone to violence.

And Mark Steyn:

“Diversity” is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in “multiculturalism” doesn’t require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing “Muslim” garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn’t until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He was an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress — that’s to say, a “Punjabi suit,” as they call it in Britain, or the shalwar kameez, to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about “diversity” across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up — with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In other words, Major Hasan’s outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage.

Mr. Fatah would seem to be a genuine “multiculturalist”: That’s to say, he’s attuned to often very subtle “diversities” between cultures. Whereas the professional multiculturalist sees the 7-Eleven video and coos, “Aw, look. He’s wearing . . . well, something exotic and colorful, let’s not get hung up on details. Celebrate diversity, right? Can we get him in the front row for the group shot? We may be eligible for a grant.”

The brain-addled “diversity” of General Casey will get some of us killed, and keep all of us cowed. In the days since the killings, the news reports have seemed increasingly like a satirical novel the author’s not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch 22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: If you’re openly in favor of pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put down your e-mails to foreign jihadists as mere confirmation of your long established “research interests.” If you’re psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there’s no terrorism angle, because, in our over-credentialized society, it doesn’t count unless you’re found to be carrying Permit #57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.

Ezra Levant, my comrade in a long battle to restore freedom of speech to Canada, likes to say that the Danish cartoons crisis may one day be seen as a more critical event than 9/11. Not, obviously, in the comparative death tolls but in what each revealed about the state of Western civilization. After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core Western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this last week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a “tragedy” but a national scandal, already fading from view.

It used to be that the pursuit of "diversity" in the form of affirmative action put some less qualified people in school or a job in place of a more qualified applicant. While stupid & unjust, such behavior rarely resulted in the deaths of 13 people and injury of dozens more.

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Charles Krauthammer On Obama's Speech

(h/t Weekly Standard)

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Surveying The Case For McCain (& Against Obama)

NRO Editors, 2 columns by Thomas Sowell, 1 by Rich Lowry, & 1 by Charles Krauthammer:

NRO editors:

This election does not present Americans with a straight-up choice between conservatism and liberalism. This is not so much because John McCain is a moderate, although he is, as because liberals are likely to have effective majorities in both houses of Congress. Thus the choice we face is, in most respects, between a liberalism that is checked and one that is not.

We have no doubt that if McCain is president we will find much to criticize. But we will be confident that we have the right commander-in-chief and that liberals do not have a free hand to remake our country. In this election we support Senator McCain and urge all conservatives to do so as well.

Thomas Sowell - "Obama, Powell, & Popularity":

Among the reasons given by Secretary Powell for supporting Barack Obama is that Obama can restore America’s standing with foreign countries.

The idea that the United States must somehow rehabilitate itself in the eyes of the United Nations or NATO or “world opinion” is staggering, even though it is an idea very popular in the mainstream media.

The first duty of a President of the United States is to protect American interests — of which survival is number one — regardless of what others may say.

[...]

Despite the media hype that we need to rehabilitate ourselves in the eyes of the world, the United States of America remains the number one destination of immigrants from around the world, some of whom take desperate chances with their lives to get here, whether across the waters of the Caribbean or by crossing our dangerous southwest desert.

Even when dozens of governments around the world join the United States in coordinated efforts to fight international terrorism, the media will call our actions “unilateral” if some demagogues in France or Germany spout off against us.

The American nuclear umbrella has enabled Western European nations to escape responsibility for their own military survival for more than half a century.

Lack of responsibility has bred irresponsibility, one sign of which are unionized troops in NATO and NATO bomber pilots who have office hours when they will and will not fly, not to mention NATO troops letting American troops handle the really dangerous fighting in Afghanistan.

Maybe the time is overdue for NATO to try to rehabilitate itself and for Americans to stop trying to be “citizens of the world.”

Needless to say, I don't buy this argument about "rehabilitating America's image abroad." They don't hate us any more now than the "Peace Movement" of the 1980s hated Ronald Reagan. These are the fruits of playing policeman of the world.

Charles Krauthammer - "Further Left than LBJ":

McCain is just the kind of moderate conservative that the Washington/media establishment once loved — the champion of myriad conservative heresies that made him a burr in the side of congressional Republicans and George W. Bush. But now that he is standing in the way of an audacity-of-hope Democratic restoration, erstwhile friends recoil from McCain on the pretense that he has suddenly become right wing.

Self-serving rubbish. McCain is who he always was. Generally speaking, he sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch of Franklin) to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants government to tackle large looming liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. He wants to free up health insurance by beginning to sever its debilitating connection to employment — a ruinous accident of history (arising from World War II wage and price controls) that increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility and saddles American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation.

An eclectic, moderate, generally centrist agenda in a guy almost congenitally given to bipartisanship.

I have a lot of so-called "moderate" friends. They have always complained about the supposed extreme right-wing nature of Republican politics. Alright, guys, you got what you asked for. John McCain is the most moderate candidate since Bill Clinton. He's the Republican party's equivalent of Bill Clinton, minus the womanizing.

Will you vote for him?

Rich Lowry - "Redistribution You Can Believe In":

Obama proposes a dog’s breakfast of tax credits, including a $500 refundable work credit that applies even to people who owe no income taxes. The Internal Revenue Service would cut them a $500 check every year. This essentially is a government payment dressed up as a tax cut. It will be partly funded by new taxes on the top 5 percent. So Obama is redistributing wealth, but in an eminently salable way. Call it “redistributive change we can believe in.”

Obama’s plan wouldn’t, like cuts in marginal tax rates, increase the incentive to work, invest or save. In fact, the opposite. As tax credits phase out, they increase marginal tax rates. But for Obama, his plan is a matter of justice rather than economics.

When in a Democratic primary debate Charlie Gibson of ABC News pointed out to Obama that increasing the capital-gains rate in the past has initially reduced revenue, Obama replied that he wanted the increase “for purposes of fairness.”

But how unfair is the American tax system? It’s already steeply progressive. IRS data show that the top 1 percent of filers paid 40 percent of federal income taxes in 2006. The top 5 percent paid 60 percent. The top half paid 97 percent.

Robbing the rich to bribe the poor. This is Obama's idea of "social justice." Social justice is a joke.

True justice is not taking money from those who earned it and giving it to those who did not.

Thomas Sowell - "A Perfect Storm":

Policies that he proposes under the banner of “change” are almost all policies that have been tried repeatedly in other countries — and failed repeatedly in other countries.

Politicians telling businesses how to operate? That’s been tried in countries around the world, especially during the second half of the 20th century. It has failed so often and so badly that even socialist and communist governments were freeing up their markets by the end of the century.

The economies of China and India began their take-off into high rates of growth when they got rid of precisely the kinds of policies that Obama is advocating for the United States under the magic mantra of “change.”

Putting restrictions on international trade in order to save jobs at home? That was tried here with the Hawley-Smoot tariff during the Great Depression.

Unemployment was 9 percent when that tariff was passed to save jobs, but unemployment went up instead of down, and reached 25 percent before the decade was over.

Higher taxes to “spread the wealth around,” as Obama puts it? The idea of redistributing wealth has turned into the reality of redistributing poverty, in countries where wealth has fled and the production of new wealth has been stifled by a lack of incentives.

Open your eyes, folks.

If you think you've got it bad now under Bush, just wait until you see the craptastic future Obama has in store for you.


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Responses to Krauthammer (UPDATED)

Yesterday's post--dominated by Krauthammer--which discussed the state of conservatism, prompted a number of good responses from readers, two of which I will post here.

First, Matt P. wrote about McCain and doing his job as Senator from the state of Arizona:

The Charles Krauthammer article that you posted reminded me of a conversation that I had recently about "McCain's risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago." The fascinating point that I never heard was about what McCain actually did... his job. He is not being paid by the American taxpayer to campaign for the presidency of the United States. He is being paid to represent the citizens of Arizona as a member of the U.S. Senate. If I decided that I wanted to interview and schmooze for a position on a board of directors somewhere, you better bet that I'm either taking vacation time, doing it outside of work hours or not getting paid for it. You can debate about how productive his time was while he was in DC for the matter, but you cannot dispute the fact that his paycheck shows that he was where should have been.

Careful, Matt P., with those crazy ideas of yours--that politicians should actually do the job for which they are paid.

Meanwhile, Matt B. "gets it":

If the GOP even thinks about hanging a McCain lost election around Palin's neck I am officially renouncing my membership and $ from the GOP and going independent. I cant stand these stories about McCain staffers who are infected with Potomac Fever complaining about Palin going off script and possibly costing McCain the election. Let her go off script, she clearly had to "wing it" at the convention and it was one of the most powerful and invigorating speeches I have ever seen and millions went into the GOP war chest in the days following. The whole reason they didnt call the election for Obama 3 months ago is because of Palin. She has rallied the base and alot of people (real americans) identify with her or want to identify her.

It's one thing to lose an election, it's a whole other thing to draw the wrong conclusions from that loss.

If McCain loses, Palin won't be the reason. Like I said yesterday and Matt B. explains clearly above, McCain wouldn't even have a chance without Sarah Palin. People who argue otherwise either a) don't get how elections are won or 2) are trying to cover themselves.

Sarah Palin motivates the base to vote and GOTV. W/o Palin, those people probably stay home. This is more than half of the battle. The other part is either persuading enough "independents" to put you over the top or depressing the other side.

I'm not going to join the MSM chorus declaring the election for Barack Obama because I've counted out John McCain in the past and been proven wrong. This election is still close enough (especially in the battleground states) that if the national trackers close to within 3 points, McCain will have an honest to goodness shot at pulling this thing out.

Plus, no one really has any idea what's really going on with the polls. They're all over the place and they're accounting for all sorts of supposedly new trends. Democrats are telling us, yet again, that this is the year young voters actually turn out to vote. We'll see. I've been hearing that as long as I've been following Presidential elections ("This is the year young Americans make themselves heard!!!1!!").

I don't want to say that I doubt the Obama hipsters, because that would make me cynical about young Americans, but, well, I doubt the hipsters.

Just about anything could happen in this election--Obama landslide, McCain landslide, close win either way, endless litigation of results in several battleground states--and I wouldn't be surprised.

UPDATE 2:49pm BST: Ben T. responds:

Don't you think McCain would have done far better picking Lieberman? The man he really wanted on his ticket? Yes, Palin rallied the base. But to be honest with you it is a base that is increasingly irrelevant. In an age where the middle majority are tired of partisanship, having a split ticket would have gone a long way. Not sure how it would have affected financing or GOTV efforts, but it would have been huge for middle voters.

I don't think McCain would have done better picking Lieberman because I don't think the Republican base would have voted for them. John McCain is already far and away more "centrist" than Barack Obama. Adding Joe Lieberman would have made it a center-left ticket--what Obama and Biden claim to be. The base would have stayed home and Obama's current 5-7 point national advantage would be in the double digits.


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Krauthammer: The Conservative Case For John McCain

I'll take Krauthammer over Hitchens, Adelman, Powell, or Buckley (Chris) any day.

Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I'd rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

First, I'll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The "erratic" temperament issue, for example. As if McCain's risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.

McCain the "erratic" is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.

Nor will I countenance the "dirty campaign" pretense. The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed that McCain supports "cutting Social Security benefits in half." And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.

McCain's critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What's astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.

Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary) conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama's most egregious association -- with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed.

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

There's just no comparison. Obama's own running mate warned this week that Obama's youth and inexperience will invite a crisis -- indeed a crisis "generated" precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he's been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

If McCain loses, I will blame his handling of the campaign, rather than his ideology (conservative), for the loss. One of the things that frustrated me the most was his me-too economic populism on the credit crisis when I thought there was a clear opportunity to strike a Reagan-like note on the power of free markets.

If McCain loses, it won't be because he has been too conservative, as some have alleged. The only example they can point to is his overt over-conservativeness in choosing Palin. You know what? She's just the VP. Presidential candidates have always chosen VPs for their perceived electoral advantages.

Let me lay some more truth on you: If it weren't for Palin, things wouldn't be even this close. Bush won in 2000 and especially in 2004 because he got his base to vote. If McCain has any shot at winning in 2008, it will be because Palin got the conservatives out to vote.

Don't buy the tripe that Palin is the reason McCain is behind or may lose the election. It's just not true.


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Don't Just Take Our Word For It

Thanks to John Fund and the folks at Political Diary (h/t: S. Lybbert) for bringing this fantastic quote to our attention--further illustrating the degree to which the MSM has become a shill for Pope Barack Obama I:

I think that the coverage [Barack Obama] is getting is beyond presidential. It's papal. I mean, a president never has all three anchors on the way with him. . . . If you needed any evidence of how much in the tank the mainstream media are, this is it.

This, in addition to the NYT's refusal to print Senator McCain's op-ed unless he conform to their preferred policy, well, can we make it any clearer than that? The one redeeming glimmer of a silver lining is the fact that John Q. Public seems to be wise to the machinations of the Democrat Party's media-arm. Per Rasmussen by way of Politico:

In an automated survey of 1000 likely voters, Rasmussen found that 49 percent of respondents believed reporters would favor Obama in their coverage this fall, compared with just 14 percent who expected them to boost Sen. John McCain. The number of Americans who see pro-Obama bias in the press has increased by five percent in the last month.

According to Rasmussen’s numbers, less than a quarter of voters – 24 percent – now trust the press to report on the election without bias

Click this link to get the full Rasmussen report.

So much for objective journalism. Of course, we kind of expected this from the NYT. After all, this is the same New York Times that gave a price break to the Moveon.org slander of General Petraeus last September.

We take some comfort in knowing that the NYT's stock price is at a 20 year low.


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More Superficial Drivel

[ed. note: we originally titled this "Answers To Your Questions." That was before we wrote the post. Once finished, we decided on this, more appropriate title.]

First off (though we don't know why we even have to clarify this), we have never pretended to be a moderate/centrist/non-partisan/post-partisan/bi-partisan blog. We're conservative first. This often leads us to support Republican candidates. How is this a surprise to anyone? We try to be fair and reasonable, but we know enough about bias to understand that objectivity is a pipe dream. Plus, this is an opinion blog, not a reporting blog. We've got no reason to even make a failing attempt at 'just the facts, please ma'am' reporting a la The New York Times. So, please, quit faulting us for not being something we never claimed to be in the first place.

When we bash what seems to our readers to be a far-left opinion. Don't take it personally. We very rarely pick on those precious few of you who choose to read and respond to our posts. We get that none of you advocate the ridiculous things we pan here at OL&L. Most of our readers are conservatives. Most of you who reply are moderate to liberal. To our knowledge, none of you fall into the extreme left camp we frequently lampoon. So, when we go after whacked out leftist/environmentalist ideas or whatever, don't take it personally. We're usually responding to something we read over at the Seattle PI or maybe our bi-weekly scan of the Daily Kos or Huffington Post--not your comments.

We like the idea of drilling independent of its political ramifications. The fact that it could be used politically to help get people we like elected is simply a happy coincidence. Our support of drilling is not so myopic or narrow as some of you seem to believe. We have repeated here (every time we talk about energy issues. check our archive.) that we support drilling along with a carbon tax, nuclear power, and increased R&D funding. What more do you want? We are wary of the economic cost to Americans and American businesses if we attempt large scale transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. It will hinder us competitively in relation to other countries and is an environmental burden we should not bear alone.

When it comes to policy recommendations, we are political realists. We like the idea of a carbon tax, but the likelihood of enacting one by itself is very slim. Coupling it with a reduction in income and corporate taxes improves its chances, but still makes it tough politically. This is why we half-heartedly endorsed McCain's $300 million initiative to award individuals or corporations who developed better battery technology. It's not the broad, market based solution we hoped for and RD mocked, but if McCain is elected President, it has a far better chance of passing Congress than his and our preferred carbon tax.

And all of these things have a better chance of passing if they are lumped together with increased drilling--a policy supported by a significant majority of Americans.

Part of the reason we disagree with some of you about drilling is that we do not entirely agree with the assumptions on which you base your conclusions.

We get the idea of "peak oil." We understand the price distorting effect of a cartel like OPEC. But we think some of these things are overblown. OPEC's influence has been overstated since the trade embargoes of 1979. Since then, their influence has diminished and with the increased supply coming from Canada's oil sands (our largest single supplier), they have been diminished even further. This isn't to say they have no or little effect, simply that their influence is less than you think because it's easy to demonize and hate the terrorist/oil producing countries.

Regarding peak oil and how that plays into this conversation, RD and some of the rest of you don't like the idea of drilling because it prolongs the influence and control OPEC has on the price of oil and therefore the American economy, national security, and our international interest. We don't like the idea of funding Saudi Wahabbists anymore than the rest of you. However, we believe that between the outer continental shelf, ANWR, and non-traditional supplies of oil found in shale-oil and Canada's oil sands, the increased supply will both decrease the price of oil in the long run and the price influence (what is the technical term? control of marginal supply?) of the OPEC cartel. Some estimate that shale-oil and other non-traditional oil reserves are actually several times greater than the oil reserves of OPEC nations. Again, accessing these resources would significantly diminish OPEC's cartel influence.

We are optimistic about oil because we believe that higher prices will drive the market to find more sources of oil like thermal depolymerization which could potentially manufacture oil indefinitely from things like garbage, sewage, and agricultural waste. We also believe that improvements in technology will make more oil more accessible. Higher prices and technology led to large oil field finds in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Brazil and of course drove the development of Canada's oil sands. We do not foresee a peak oil collapse in the near or even mid-term because of these factors. Heck, our faith in the markets is such that we think prices will eventually drive a near-seamless transition from fossil fuel to some other, perhaps yet-to-be discovered energy source. This is what our study of history has shown us.

Within the general framework we outlined the other day, we are of course open to new and different ideas. Hopefully our drilling fetish makes sense to you when considered in light of our assumptions about supply, demand, OPEC, peak oil and the other things we've written about in this post. Or, you could do as Krauthammer suggested Congress was doing (h/t: S. Lybbert) with some of their recent legislative posturing--repealing first the law of supply and then the law of demand because, of course, they're laws so they must have been put in place by some other idiot Congress--probably a Republican one.

The truth is, we blame most of the rising cost of gasoline on the weak dollar. Greenspan, the guy who seems like he wishes we was still in the game, is largely responsible for cutting rates to far and leaving them their too long. If Bernanke follows through on his commitment to raise interest rates and strengthen the dollar, we expect gas prices to fall accordingly.
/superficialdrivel

[cue Raisin's predictable mocking impersonation]

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Incentives You Can Believe In

You'd think there were some sort of backchannel communication and advisement going on between OL&L and the McCain campaign.

There isn't.

Though we have participated in a few blogger conference calls, we can't take credit for McCain's latest policy proposal (h/t: Matt Lybbert)--"a $300 million prize for whoever can develop a better automobile battery, and $5k tax credits for consumers who buy new zero-emission vehicles."

We like the first part better than the last part and we'd like that part even more if it were broader in its incentive to create more cost effective clean technology. That said, we're told by those who watch the tech industry closely that overcoming battery issues is one of the biggest hurdles to harnessing clean technology. As every competition needs a clearly definable finish line, we suppose the battery thing will do.

At least, until RD or someone else can come up with a better one.

*UPDATE 24 June 11:40am EST: Our man Charles Krauthammer on John McCain and his recent energy policy proposals: "McCain is a lot of things, but the man who opposed ethanol in Iowa — as Obama shamelessly endorsed the most abysmally stupid of our energy policies — is no patsy of the energy producers. Americans know that increased production is needed to complement reduced consumption as the only way to get us out from oil shocks, high prices and national security blackmail"

Refusing to even explore--let alone drill--the Outer Continental Shelf, ANWR, and develop our shale-oil deposits is bad, bad policy.


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Give These Guys Gore's Oscar!

Are you like our friends who insist the debate about global warming is over? Do you believe all scientists agree that human created CO2 is causing global warming? Have you convinced yourself the Kyoto Protocol (or something like it) may actually affect global temperatures?

Think again.

Our brother Matt turned us on to a column by Thomas Sowell which referred to a movie entitled "The Great Global Warming Swindle." Our old man quickly followed with a link to the movie. Thanks Dad.

From Mr. Sowell:

Britain's Channel 4 has produced a devastating documentary titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle." It has apparently not been broadcast by any of the networks in the United States. But, fortunately, it is available on the Internet.

Distinguished scientists specializing in climate and climate-related fields talk in plain English and present readily understood graphs showing what a crock the current global warming hysteria is.

Please, dear lemmings, you owe it to yourselves to watch this movie and listen to a voice of reason before you follow Al Gore and the rest of the Apocalyptic Church of the Holy Environment off the edge of a cliff.

The religious parallels don't end with doomsday predictions as we documented here and here. They even sell indulgences!!! This time, from Charles Krauthammer on carbon credits:

In other words, the rich reduce their carbon output by not one ounce. But drawing on the hundreds of millions of net worth in the Kodak Theatre, they pull out lunch money to buy ecological indulgences. The last time the selling of pardons was prevalent--in a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity--Martin Luther lost his temper and launched the Reformation.

But don't worry, we're sure zealots like the hypocritical, private jet-flying, Tennessee mansion energy-burning, Mr. Gore will cook up another environmental crusade you can feel morally superior about and persecute others for not joining.

**Update: At the request of some of our more sensitive readers, we've toned down the pejorative language of this post. Thus, "deluded" has become "convinced" and "whack job" is now "zealot." We apologize that "lemmings" remains in this draft. Our search of the thesaurus could not produce a satisfactory substitute.


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Bush's Historic Veto

He held the line against a Brave New World.

By Charles Krauthammer

When President Bush announced in August 2001 his restrictive funding decision for federal embryonic-stem-cell research, he was widely attacked for an unwarranted intrusion of religion into scientific research. His solicitousness for a 200-cell organism — the early embryo that Bush declared should not be destroyed to produce a harvest of stem cells — was roundly denounced as reactionary and anti-scientific.

And cruel to boot. It was preventing the cure for thousands of people with hopeless and terrible diseases, from diabetes to spinal-cord injury. As John Edwards put it most starkly and egregiously in 2004: If John Kerry becomes president, Christopher Reeve will walk again.

This kind of stem-cell advocacy did not just shamefully inflate its promise. It tended to misrepresent the basis for putting restrictions on embryonic research, insisting that it was nothing more than political enforcement of the religious fundamentalist belief that life begins at conception.

This has always been a tendentious characterization of the argument for restricting stem cell research that relies on the destruction of embryos. I have long supported legal abortion. And I don’t believe that life — meaning the attributes and protections of personhood — begins at conception. Yet many secularly inclined people like me have great trepidation about the inherent dangers of wanton and unrestricted manipulation — to the point of dismemberment — of human embryos.

You don’t need religion to tremble at the thought of unrestricted embryo research. You simply have to have a healthy respect for the human capacity for doing evil in pursuit of the good. Once we have taken the position of many stem-cell advocates that embryos are discardable tissue with no more intrinsic value than a hangnail or an appendix, then all barriers are down. What is to prevent us from producing not just tissues and organs, but human-like organisms for preservation as a source of future body parts on demand?

South Korea enthusiastically embraced unrestricted stem cell research. The subsequent greatly heralded breakthroughs — accompanied by lamentations that America was falling behind — were eventually exposed as a swamp of deception, fraud and coercion.

The slope is very slippery. Which is why, even though I disagreed with where the president drew the line — I would have permitted the use of fertility-clinic embryos that are discarded and going to die anyway — I applauded his insistence that some line must be drawn, that human embryos are not nothing, and that societal values, not just the scientific imperative, should determine how they are treated.

Congress will soon vote to erase Bush’s line. But future generations may nonetheless thank Bush for standing athwart history, if only for a few years. It gave technology enough time to catch up and rescue us from the moral dilemmas of embryonic destruction. It has just been demonstrated that stem cells with enormous potential can be harvested from amniotic fluid.

This is a revolutionary finding. Amniotic fluid surrounds the baby in the womb during pregnancy. It is routinely drawn out by needle in amniocentesis. The procedure carries little risk and is done for legitimate medical purposes that have nothing to do with stem cells. If it nonetheless yields a harvest of stem cells, we have just stumbled upon an endless supply.

And not just endless, but uncontroversial. No embryos are destroyed. The cells are just floating there, as if waiting for science to discover them.

Even better, amniotic fluid might prove to yield an ideal stem cell — not as primitive as embryonic stem cells and therefore less likely to grow uncontrollably into tumors, but also not as developed as adult stem cells and therefore more “pluripotential” in the kinds of tissues it can produce.

If it is proved that these are the Goldilocks of stem cells, history will record the amniotic breakthrough as the turning point in the evolution of stem cell research from a narrow, difficult, delicate and morally dubious enterprise into an uncontroversial one with raw material produced unproblematically every day.

It will have turned out that Bush’s unpopular policy held the line, however arbitrary and temporary, against the wanton trampling of the human embryo just long enough for a morally neutral alternative to emerge.

And it did force the country to at least ponder the moral cost of turning one potential human being into replacement parts for another. Who will be holding the line next time, when another Faustus promises medical nirvana if he is permitted to transgress just one moral boundary?


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