From: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDk0MTlkNDVlYmIyNTlmNTQwZDAxNzk4MTZmOWQwY2M=

An Instructive Candidacy
What Sarah Palin taught us about ourselves.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Soon this depressing campaign will be over, and we can reflect on what we learned from our two-month introduction to Sarah Palin.

Clearly, it is more than we would have ever wished to know about ourselves.

First, there turns out to be no standard of objectivity in contemporary journalism. Palin’s career as a city councilwoman, mayor, and governor of Alaska was never seen as comparable to, or — indeed, in terms of executive experience — more extensive than, Barack Obama’s own legislative background in Illinois and Washington. Somehow we forgot that a mother of five taking on the Alaskan oil industry and the entrenched male hierarchy was somewhat more challenging than Barack Obama navigating the sympathetic left-wing identity politics of Chicago.

So we seem to have forgotten that the standards of censure of her vice-presidential candidacy were not applied equally to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. The media at times seems unaware of this embarrassment, namely that their condemnation of Sarah Palin as inexperienced equally might apply to Barack Obama — and to such a degree that by default we were offered the lame apology (reiterated by Colin Powell himself) that Obama’s current impressive campaigning, not his meager political accomplishments, was already an indication of a successful tenure as president. The result is that we now know more about the Palin pregnancies — both of mother and daughter — that we do the relationships of Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, and Father Pfleger with our possible next president.

Indeed, the media itself — in private, I think — would admit that while have learned almost everything about Tasergate and the Bridge to Nowhere, we assume that at some future date a publicity-starved, megalomaniac Rev. Wright will soon offer his post-election memoirs, detailing just how close he and a President Obama were. Or we will learn Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, as long-time friends, in fact, did communicate via phone and e-mail well after Ayers had told the world, about the time of 9/11, that he, like our present-terrorist enemies, likewise wished he had engaged in more bombing attacks against the United States government. And the media never wondered whether a Palin’s falling out with those who ran Alaska might have been more of a touchstone to character than Obama’s own falling in with those who ran Chicago.

While Gov. Palin’s frequent college transfers and Idaho degree are an item of snickering among pundits, none of them can claim to care much about Barack Obama’s own undergraduate career. To suggest that he release his undergraduate transcript is near blasphemy; to scribble that Sarah Palin’s Down Syndrome child was not her own is journalism as we now know it. To care that Joe Biden is vain, with bleached teeth, the apparent recipient of some sort of strange facial tightening tonic, and hair plugs is deservedly mean and petty; to sneer that the Alaskan mom of five bought a new wardrobe to run for Vice President is, of course, vital proof for the American voter of her vanity and shallowness.

Second, there does not seem to be much left of feminism any more. Of course, feminists once gave liberal pro-choice Bill Clinton a pass for his serial womanizing of vulnerable subordinates, and Oval Office antics with a young female intern. But they gave the game away entirely when they went after Gov. Palin for her looks, accent, pregnancies, and religion, culminating in assessments of her from being no real woman at all to an ingrate — piggy-backing on the pioneer work of self-acclaimed mavericks like themselves.

Feminism, it turns out, is no longer about equal opportunity and equal compensation, but, in fact, little more than a strain of contemporary elitist identity politics, and support for unquestioned abortion. Had Gov. Sarah Palin just been a mother of a single child at Vassar rather than of five in Alaska, married to a novelist rather than a snow-machiner, an advocate of pro-choice, who shot pictures of Alaskan ferns rather than shot moose — feminists would have hailed her as a principled kindred soul, and trumpeted her struggles against Alaskan male grandees.

So there was something creepy about droves of irate women, in lock-step blasting Sarah Palin from the corridors of New York and Washington, when most of them were the recipients of the traditional spoils of either family connections, inherited money, or the advantages that accrue from insider power marriages. Indeed, very few of Palin’s critics on their own could have emerged from a small-town in Alaska, with an intact marriage and five children, to run the state of Alaska.

We have come to understand that — for a TV anchorwoman, op-ed columnist, or professor — it would be a nightmare to birth a Down Syndrome child in her mid-forties, or to have had her pregnant unwed teen actually deliver her baby. In the world outside Sarah Palin’s Wasilla, these are career-ending blunders that abort the next job promotion or book tour— or the future career of a prepped young daughter on her way to the Ivy League.

Third, from the match-up of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, we discovered that our media does not know anything about the nature of wisdom — how it is found or how it is to be adjudicated. For the last eight weeks, Palin has been demonized as a dunce because she did not, in the fashion of the class toady with his hand constantly up in the first row, impress in flash-card recall, the glasses-on-his-nose Charlie Gibson, or clinched-toothed Katie Couric.

Meanwhile Joe Biden has just been Ol’ Joe Biden — which means not that he can get away with the occasional gaffe, but that can say things so outrageous, so silly, and so empty that, had they come out of the mouth of Sarah Palin, she would have long ago been forced to have stepped aside from the ticket.

Factual knowledge? Biden, in the midst of a financial meltdown on Wall Street, apparently thinks that the last time it happened in 1929, we heard FDR rally us on television. And such made-up nonsense came in the form, as many of Biden’s gaffes do, of a rebuke to the supposedly obtuse George W. Bush.

Sobriety? Biden now admits that dangerous powers abroad will immediately test a President Obama. He warns that the results of such a crisis will be very disappointing to the American electorate, and thus Team Obama/Biden will need loyal supporters to rally as their polls sink. Yet remember that Biden himself has been a fierce and opportunistic critic of Bush, who despite a frenzy of congressional demagoguery, initiated the successful surge and ignored the very polls that the for-the-war/against-the-war Biden so carefully tracked. More importantly, if an Ahmadinejad, Chavez, or Putin ever had any doubts about carving out new spheres of uncontested influence, they may entertain very few now.

Veracity? If one were to think that Biden’s past brushes with plagiarism, inflated bios, and falsehood were exceptional rather than characteristic, the last two months confirmed otherwise. For all the false recall, it is hard to remember anything he said in his Palin debate that was true, whether describing the status of Hezbollah in Lebanon or his own past remarks about the wisdom of burning coal.

Silliness? Imagine the following outbursts, mutatis mutandis, from the mouth of a Sarah Palin — “John McAmerica,” “a Palin-McCain administration,” “Senator George Obama,” “Congressman Joe Biden,” who is both “good looking,” and “drop-dead gorgeous.” Or “I guarantee you, John McCain ain’t taking my shotguns. . . . If he tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem. I like that little over and under, you know? I’m not bad with it. So give me a break.”

Or “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Or “Mitt Romney is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Quite frankly he might have been a better pick than me.”

The list could go on ad nauseam. But we got the picture. Biden has devolved from the ridiculous to the unhinged, confident that in-house journalism would understand that the law graduate with 36 years in the Senate was simply being Joe, while a Sarah Palin, who flinched when asked to parse the Bush Doctrine, was a Neanderthal creationist. I thought by now the You-tubed exchange of a Congressional Finance Committee hearing between the pompous Harvard Law School graduate Barney Frank and the conniving Harvard Law School graduate Franklin Raines — at the proverbial moment of conception of the financial meltdown — would have put to rest the notion that graduation from law school was any proof of either wisdom or morality.

I don’t know whether Sarah Palin would make a great vice president. But I did learn that by the standard of John Kerry’s pick of John Edwards, and now Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden, as running mates, she is wise and ethical beyond their measure.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

 

Mr. Elder,

I am shocked that you oppose Barack Obama and belong to the Republican Party. We must get over ourselves and realize there is room at the top for everyone and we must get there by helping each other — instead of agreeing with policies and old politics that are proven not to work.

To endorse John McCain, a person who will not make it easier for the underprivileged, is just too much. How can a fellow black American feel this way?

Your Former Supporter

 

Dear Former Supporter,

Do you have any Republican friends, let alone black ones? If so, how many of them want to make it harder "for the underprivileged"?

You also might want to familiarize yourself with the history of the Democratic and Republican parties, and see which party has stood up longer for the rights of people of color. Do you know that Democrats opposed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution — abolishing slavery, granting citizenship rights to newly freed slaves, and guaranteeing the right to vote (at least on paper) to blacks, respectively? Do you know that most of the politicians who stood for segregation were Southern Democrats? Do you know that the Ku Klux Klan was founded by Democrats, one of whose goals was to stop the spread of the Republican Party? Do you know that, as a percentage of the party, more Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Do you know that inner-city parents want vouchers — the right to determine where their children go to school? Do you know most Democrats, including Barack Obama, oppose this? Republicans, for the most part, support vouchers. Where vouchers have been tried, kids appear to perform better, with higher parental satisfaction. You tell me, how many things are more important than a child's education?

Do you know that 36 percent of babies aborted are black, while blacks make up 17 percent of live births? Do you know that polls show blacks are more pro-life than are whites? Yet the Democratic Party — to which over 90 percent of blacks belong — is the party of Roe v. Wade, requiring states to legalize abortion on demand. Do you know that Margaret Sanger, the founder of the organization that became Planned Parenthood, believed that poor blacks were inferior and that aborting their babies made our society better? Look it up.

Do you know that blacks stand to benefit more than whites through Social Security privatization, a position opposed by Obama but supported by McCain? Are you even familiar with the issue and what a powerful income-generating vehicle it would be for blacks? If not, take a look at the research done by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute and the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation.

Porous borders enable illegal aliens to enter our country and threaten the jobs and lower the wages of Americans, many of whom are unskilled people of color. Which party is more determined to deal with this — Republicans or Democrats? Obama called the foes of the House anti-illegal immigration bill "ugly and racist." I did not support the bill, but vehemently object to characterizing those who did as "ugly and racist."

You speak of policies that have "proven not to work." What about the "war on poverty" that began in the '60s, the policies that Obama and his party want to continue and expand? Do you know that today 70 percent of black children and over 50 percent of Hispanics are born outside of wedlock? The welfare state — which Democrats want to expand — has played a huge role in discouraging marriage and destabilizing families.

Speaking of helping the "underprivileged," I'd suggest you read a book called "Who Really Cares," by Arthur C. Brooks. A non-Republican professor raised by Democrats, he examined the charitable spending habits of Democrats and Republicans. The results surprised him. Brooks found that Republicans give far more of their money and time for charitable purposes than do Democrats. And the giving is not confined to their churches or other houses of worship. This, by the way, has nothing to do with income. Poor Republicans give more than poor Democrats.

Compassion is not about making people dependent on government. Compassion is about encouraging personal responsibility, and getting people to understand that life is about making choices. Poverty does not cause crime. Crime causes poverty. Poverty does not cause a child to have a child. A child having a child causes poverty. Finishing high school is a choice. Not joining a gang is a choice. Not having a child until you have the maturity and the means to raise that child is a choice.

You ask how can a "fellow black American feel this way"? Quite a statement. You may disagree, but it doesn't make me less caring and compassionate than you are. I'm sure you truly consider yourself open-minded and tolerant. But based on your letter, tolerance ends — especially with "fellow black Americans" — if someone has an opposing point of view.

Larry

Larry Elder is a syndicated radio talk show host and best-selling author. His latest book, "Stupid Black Men: How to Play the Race Card — and Lose," is available now. To find out more about Larry Elder, visit his Web page at www.LarryElder.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

CREATORS SYNDICATE COPYRIGHT 2008 LAURENCE A. ELDER

Why can’t we solve our own problems like we used to?  We went to the moon in under a decade, and now when we need oil, the Democrats just whine about how we have to deal with less and pay more for it.

We Have Only Ourselves to Blame for $4 Gas   [Noel Sheppard]

As oil prices head through the roof, and gasoline jumps over $4 a gallon, Americans feeling the pinch at the pump should recognize that the wealthiest nation on the planet has nothing but itself to blame for the third in a series of energy crises that began when Richard Nixon was still in office.

Having largely ignored the previous two shots across the bow — the first coming in 1973 when OPEC decided to ban sales of oil to nations that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and the second in 1979 after the Islamic Revolution in Iran — the U.S. seems determined to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Shamefully, we are once again in the position of wondering just how high energy prices can go, and at what cost to our economy.

Despite 35 years of empty rhetoric from politicians bemoaning U.S. dependence on foreign oil, legislatively enacted environmental barriers have actually resulted in a 25-percent decline in domestic production since the first ’70s energy crisis — while our usage has increased 20 percent.

Regardless of one’s ideological proclivities, it seems logical that you can’t reduce foreign-oil dependence by cutting production at the same time that demand is rising. Despite how obvious this seems, one of our nation’s two major political parties stubbornly continues to ignore that logic.

What should make Americans on both sides of the aisle even more ashamed is that before the first energy crisis, the United States produced 11.428 million barrels of oil per day. This represented 66 percent of the 17.308 million barrels we consumed that year.

Compare that to 2007, when America produced 8.481 million barrels per day, or only 41 percent of the 20.7 million barrels consumed. Such is the result of the so-called energy policies of seven White Houses and 17 Congresses controlled by both Democrats and Republicans.

Yet, today’s politicians — mostly on the left side of the aisle, of course — have the gall to place all the blame for rising energy prices on increased demand from expanding economies like China and India.

At least those countries are participating in exploration efforts to expand their own supplies. China’s oil production has almost doubled since 1980, while India’s has grown by an astounding 375 percent. At the same time, U.S. production has declined by 22 percent.

We sure do know how to respond to energy crises in this country, don’t we?

Closer to home, our neighbors also ramped up oil production. To the south, Mexico has seen its crude output jump 64 percent since 1980, while Canada’s increased 85 percent.

Did I mention that our production declined by 22 percent in the same period?

Putting this in its proper perspective, if America had responded to the second energy crisis by increasing oil production only at the average rate of our North American neighbors, we’d currently be supplying ourselves with 18.86 million barrels of crude per day, or 91 percent of our usage.

Think oil would be $135 a barrel if that were the case?

Of course, this argument always shifts to questions of where additional production could come from. Assuming there was no environmental/political element, the logical and exceedingly obvious answer is currently being proffered by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions for Winning the Future: Drill Here, Drill Now, and Pay Less.

As the former Speaker said to Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly last Thursday:

[O]pen up the coast to drilling. And open up the Rocky Mountains for shale oil. We have in the Rocky Mountains three times the amount of oil that the Saudis have, three times the amount of the entire Saudi reserve in the Rocky Mountains. The Brazilians are now energy independent in terms of oil, because they found two huge reserves in the Atlantic ocean. It’s currently illegal for Americans to go on American territory in the Atlantic, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific, northern Alaska. It’s illegal for us right now to go after the Rocky Mountain shale oil.

Gingrich was right on the money, for according to an April 2006 study done for the Library of Congress:

Oil shale is prevalent in the western states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. The resource potential of these shales is estimated to be the equivalent of 1.8 trillion barrels of oil in place. . . . In comparison, Saudi Arabia reportedly holds proved reserves of 267 billion barrels.

Something the former Speaker didn’t mention was the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which according to a report just published by the Energy Information Administration in May, has the potential of producing as much as 1.45 million barrels of oil per day.

Predictably, the liberal counter-argument is that such production is years out, and won’t solve today’s supply problems. Such thinking ignores the speculative component to energy prices, and how much today’s bullish consensus about oil is based on the expectation that American production will continue to decline as it has for going on four decades.

With that in mind, anything Congress did today that indicated a change in philosophy concerning U.S. oil production would send shockwaves throughout commodities exchanges across the globe.

Just how much of an impact could such a change in policy have? Well, one of the factors involved in prices being determined on futures exchanges is the current disincentive for oil producers to sell their product today rather than months from now, a condition called “contango.”

As of Friday, the New York Mercantile Exchange price for July delivery was $134.86. By comparison, the November contract closed at $136.04, giving producers $1.16 more to hold their product an additional four months.

Commodities experts for years have claimed this contango acts to restrain the immediately available supply as oil companies opt to sell their product more expensively in the future rather than at today’s prices.

A change in U.S. policy that would clearly result in more supply in the future could act to depress all of the contracts further out thereby encouraging producers to cash in at today’s prices rather than gamble there’ll be higher down the road. If this actually reversed the contango to a “backwardation” — when futures prices for further-out contracts are less than the nearest contract — all oil producers around the world might feel more compelled to raise their output in order to take advantage of today’s high prices.

Yet, maybe more important, as investment bubbles are a function of emotion and momentum, anything that acted to limit the upside of oil prices could cause the bubble to burst in a wave of panic selling as every hedge fund manager and trader on the planet ran for the exits at the same time.

When this happened in March 2000 after NASDAQ’s historic 18-month, 250-percent increase, that index declined by an astounding 40 percent in the next few weeks.

Just imagine what a sudden $50 drop in oil, with a commensurate $1.60 decline in gas prices, could do to an economy that appears teetering on recession.

And, this could be a conservative estimate of how much prices would decline. Given the leverage involved in commodities as opposed to stocks — oil traders need to put up as little as seven percent of the cost of a futures contract instead of the 50 percent required for equities — the precipitous drop that comes once this bubble bursts could be far greater in magnitude than what happened in the few weeks following NASDAQ’s peak.

The question of course is whether this is indeed what most members of Congress want. Consider how many elected officials and presidential candidates have advocated higher oil prices as both a means of curbing demand and encouraging the use of alternative fuels. As National Review’s Jim Geraghty pointed out Wednesday, this seems to be Barack Obama’s view:

Apparently, Obama doesn’t object to $4 a gallon gas per se, just to how rapidly the price increased. Most Americans hate it and want gas prices to go down as rapidly as possible. Obama wants to “help people to make the adjustment” to “new circumstances.”

Geraghty was commenting about the following statement made by Obama on CNBC Tuesday:

CNBC’s John Harwood: So could the (high) oil prices help us?

Barack Obama: I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that this is such a shock to American pocketbooks is not a good thing. But if we take some steps right now to help people make the adjustment, first of all by putting more money in their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more rapidly, particularly U.S. automakers.

Conspicuously absent from the discussion was anything about increasing domestic oil production. Instead, Obama’s answer was consistent with left-leaning thinking for decades: we need to take steps to help people adjust to higher energy prices rather than the economically beneficial alternative of just producing more.

Considering the capitalist foundation of our country, isn’t this a tremendously hypocritical point of view? Why has one political party for nearly four decades viewed energy crises through the narrow prism of learning to adjust to higher prices and declining resources, as opposed to aggressively finding and producing more of what the country and the economy needs?

Such questions seem particularly relevant given how this same party views hunger in our nation and throughout the world. The answer isn’t for those that have less to make an adjustment and adapt to their impoverished condition. “Adjust to having less” is certainly not the Left’s prescription for Americans lacking health insurance.

Democrats want government to increase the supply of food and medical care to those deemed financially incapable of providing for themselves.

Why doesn’t the same hold true for energy? Does the Left just presume that food and medicine are both human necessities government is required to assist the citizenry in obtaining, while energy is a luxury item people can learn to do without?

Curiously, when it pertains to less developed nations than ours, this answer appears to be “No,” for it seems obvious to Democrats — including presidential nominee Obama! — that countries like China and India require an ever-expanding supply of oil in order to meet the needs of their people.

What makes the Left in this country think this is no longer true for America?

— Noel Sheppard is the associate editor of the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters.

yeah...i grew up in the AZ and i voted for him back in the day....

 

Toughest sheriff in US vows no let up in immigration fight

Jun 16 10:16 AM US/Eastern	212 Comments digg_url = 'http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080616141549.vhjwoa2r&show_article=1'; digg_title = 'Toughest+sheriff+in+US+vows+no+let+up+in+immigration+fight'; digg_bodytext = 'He%27s+been+described+as+Hitler+and+a+member+of+the+Klu+Klux+Klan+by+Hispanic+critics+and+immigrant+rights+groups%2C+but+Sheriff+Joe+Arpaio+prefers+to+see+himself+as+an+equal+opportunities+advocate.+%22We+lock+everybody+up%2C%22+he+says.+'; digg_media = 'news'; digg_topic = 'world_news'; digg_bgcolor = '#edf0f4'; digg_skin = 'compact'; digg_window = 'new'; farkItButton("Toughest sheriff in US vows no let up in immigration fight", "http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080616141549.vhjwoa2r");

View larger image Flashback: Sheriff Joe Arpaio Asks Guadalupe For Enforcement Decision

He's been described as Hitler and a member of the Klu Klux Klan by Hispanic critics and immigrant rights groups, but Sheriff Joe Arpaio prefers to see himself as an equal opportunities advocate. "We lock everybody up," he says. Arpaio, the self-styled "toughest sheriff in America" has ruled his fifedom in Arizona's Maricopa County with a steely, zero-tolerance that has enraged human rights activists but delighted headline-writers the world over. Demonstrations and picket lines follow his sweeps of largely Hispanic neighborhoods. He's been criticized by mayors and the governor of Arizona. On a recent Mexican holiday, one group batted around a Joe Arpaio pinata, an effigy filled with sweets that children attempt to split open with a stick. The opprobrium heaped in Arpaio's direction is water off a duck's back: after 16 years in office, the veteran lawman is showing no signs of mellowing. "It just makes me more vigilant and go out more," Arpaio told AFP in an interview. "They ought to shut their mouth, let the system take its course, and if they don't like the laws, go out and get them changed.   "But don't try to intimidate me to stop enforcing the laws. It will never happen ... That's how I take care of business." During nearly two decades, Arpaio has garnered world-wide publicity for creating a tent city in the Arizona desert to house county jail inmates, sending out men and women in chain gangs to pick up trash, and clothing inmates in striped suits and pink underwear. He even offered to accommodate Paris Hilton in one of Maricopa County's jails when the celebrity socialite was sentenced to prison in Los Angeles last year for driving offences. His latest crackdown against illegal immigrants began about 18 months ago. He has nothing against immigrants -- his parents were Italian immigrants ('legal' he adds pointedly) -- or Mexicans, he says. For Arpaio, illegal immigration is a fairness issue. Why should some people wait years for citizenship through the proper channels while others slip across the border? "The minute you crossed the border, you violated the law," Arpaio said. "There's no doubt that illegals are involved in drug trafficking and other crimes. Many of them, maybe the majority, come here to work. "Still, it's illegal to come here. I'm going to continue to enforce the law. I took an oath of office. I'm the bad guy. That's okay. It's alright with me." Arpaio's last sweep sent 200 deputies, helicopters, and an armored car into a one square-mile Latino-dominated town, pulling over anyone with a cracked tail-light or a broken windshield. He rejects claims that his department is targeting anyone with brown skin. "We don't racial profile," he said. "We lock everybody up. I'm an equal opportunity guy." About 16 percent of the 77,000 inmates booked into county jail this year were illegal immigrants. Arpaio believes that by keeping pressure on illegal immigrants, he can drive them from Arizona. "They're heading south, or they're going to California, but they're sure getting out of Arizona," he said. "If you can get them out of Arizona, you can get them out of the United States of America little by little. I'm not saying line up the buses, but put the pressure on them. "Little by little they're going to leave because it's going to be hard to find a job and they're going to go to jail." Workers' rights and immigrants' rights groups say Arpaio's policies have created a climate of fear. Elias Bermudez heads Immigrants Without Borders, an immigrants' rights advocacy group. Arpaio's policies are discriminatory and "not conducive to a county that is 30 percent Hispanic," he said. "He has abused his authority and his elected position to create havoc and a feeling of terror in our community," Bermudez said. "He has capitalized on the fear and vulnerability of people who came into this country without documents, not in defiance of the laws of the United States, but because this country does not have a legal mechanism to seek work with documents. "This is a problem of developed nations against undeveloped nations, and it is a problem that needs solving." Arpaio's sweeps will continue as long as he is sheriff, he says. His public support -- 80 to 90 percent approval ratings in polls -- make it unlikely he will lose a campaign for re-election in the fall. "I get more press in one day than the governor gets," he said. "If you go anywhere in the world, all you have to do is say Arizona,' and they say Sheriff Joe.' "Do you think they know who the governor is? I'm the toughest sheriff in America."   Copyright AFP 2008, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium

 

A good read from yahoo news today.

 

 

 

 

 

Hillary Clinton had a great story to tell over and over again in her stump speech: An uninsured Ohio pregnant woman lost her baby and died because she could not afford a $100 up-front fee.

What a tale! What an indictment. What government bureaucracy could be worse than a health care system where stuff like that is permitted to happen?

But last week the Athens, Ohio, hospital where the incident allegedly happened poked a few holes in the fable: Yes, a woman died two weeks after her baby was stillborn. That much is true. But according to hospital administrators, everything else is fiction: The woman was under the care of obstetricians, she was never refused treatment by the hospital, and oops!, she was, in fact, insured.

"We implore the Clinton campaign to immediately desist from repeating this story," said Rick Castrop, chief executive officer of the O'Bleness Health System.

To anyone with a passing acquaintance with how our health care system works, the story was always unlikely in the extreme: Hospitals in most states cannot refuse lifesaving emergency care, and pregnant women are covered by Medicaid anyway if they have no insurance and can't afford $100.

But why ruin a good story by checking it out? You lose so many of them that way, as we journalists say.

Two more recent New York Times stories highlight the potential costs for all of us in putting health care into the hands of government bureaucrats. Take Great Britain, for example, home of the vaunted "single-payer" National Health Service. "Free health care for all" is its model, but since health care costs money, the result is the rationing of health care by government bureaucrats for whom cost-efficiency trumps patient autonomy and even human life itself.

Perhaps Hillary should start telling the tale of Debbie Hirst, a British breast cancer patient whose cancer had metastasized. Her oncologist suggested a drug, Avastin, which is widely used in the U.S. and other European nations to prolong the life of cancer patients like her. But bureaucrats had decided that at $120,000 a year, prolonging Debbie Hirst's life would cost just too much money to be worth it. That's bad enough, but because the government is committed to "equal care" for all its patients, the bureaucrats went even further: They told Debbie Hirst that she had to choose between buying Avastin on her own, and receiving any health care from the government at all. She could not, in other words, mortgage her own home to buy a drug to save her own life without being penalized by the loss of all her other cancer care and drugs.

Permitting patients to purchase care the government refused to provide would undermine the system, the bureacrats said. "That way lies the end of the founding principles of the NHS," health secretary Alan Johnson told Parliament. And the system and its founding principles were more important than Debbie Hirst's life.

Meanwhile in Massachussetts, the predictable effects of a more modest universal health insurance mandate is beginning to be seen: huge cost overruns coupled with dramatic increases in wait times for care. Only half of all internists in that state now accept new patients; between 2006 and 2007 the wait for an appointment almost doubled from 33 to 52 days.

"It's a recipe for disaster," Dr. Patricia A. Sereno, state president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, told The New York Times, speaking of the combination of 340,000 newly insured patients with low-reimbursement formulas for primary care physicians.

It's a predictable disaster, of course, seen over and over again around the world: Government-financed health care means government rationing of health care, in a system where the prestige, status, freedom and pay of doctors who care for patients plummets over time.

But don't expect Hillary or Barack to tell that truth any time soon.

(Readers may reach Maggie Gallagher at MaggieBox2004@yahoo.com.)

 That's ok!  Obama likes them too...

Obama endorses Amazon deforestation   [Henry Payne]

The National Post has applauded Barack Obama for embracing the deforestation of the Amazon. Of course, they don’t say it quite that way. But that is the consequence of Obama’s endorsement of government mandating “flex-fuel engines in automobiles in order to break the oil monopoly, as Brazil has done.”

 

Protecting the Amazon, of course, was uber-chic among the political Left before alternative fuels came around. But with Iraq and global warming in the headlines, the Amazon, ironically, is literally being sacrificed to the new green fuel fad.

 

The problems of Brazil’s ethanol mandate has been well-documented by myself here, in the Detroit News, and by others on the Right. But now the Left is also awakening to the horrors they themselves have unleashed in the name of “green.”

 

“Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year,” writes Time magazine, one of the loudest, greenest, pro-alternative-fuel publications. “This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels.”

 

To meet Brazil-American-Euro government mandates for biofuel, notes Time correspondent Michael Grunwald in the “Clean Energy Scam,” vast tracts of forest are being mowed down across the globe: “An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.”

 

Given the essential role forests play as carbon sinks, greens are realizing that the costs of fighting alleged global warming are worse than the disease (Gosh, where might they have heard that before? On Planet Gore?).

 

Writes Grunwald: “Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass looks less green than oil-derived gasoline. Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency.”

 

Of course, all those pointy heads who thought they were smarter than markets (is Zubrin and the national security crowd paying attention?) missed all this when they were designing their grand schemes. "We're all looking at the numbers in an entirely new way," admits the Natural Resources Defense Council's Nathanael Greene, whose pie-in-the-sky "Growing Energy" report in 2004 helped rally greens around biofuels. "The situation is a lot more challenging than a lot of us thought," says University of California, Berkeley, professor Alexander Farrell.

 

Oops. Honey, I broke the ecosystem! My bad!

 

As Time’s cover piece concludes: “It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots. The deforestation of Indonesia has shown that's not the case. It turns out that the carbon lost when wilderness is razed overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels [emphasis mine].”

 

But faddish pols blithely plow ahead. Obama declares Brazil a model, and Hillary — not to be outdone — has unveiled her own Zubrin-esque diktat requiring all stations to offer ethanol by 2017 while mandating 60 billion gallons of the stuff by 2030.

WaPo on Egyptian Food Riots   [Drew Thornley]

In a story on Egypt’s bread crisis, the Washington Post writes, “Wheat prices worldwide have more than doubled in the past year, spurred by increased demand, rising fuel costs and bad weather.” Really, is that all? Nothing at all to do with U.S. biofuel/ethanol policy? Could any of the following be a factor in the higher bread costs in the world’s second-largest wheat importer?

“Inflated corn prices encourage farmers to divert more acreage to corn, which means they plant less soy and wheat, which, in turn, drives up the prices of those commodities. The aggregate price of wheat, corn, soy oil and soy meal in the U.S. will be $61.7 billion higher in the 2007-2008 crop year than it was in 2005-2006.” (Washington Times)

 “In 2008, about 18 percent of grain in the US will go to make ethanol and, according to the Earth Policy Institute, such production over the past two years could have fed nearly 250 million people.” (Christian Science Monitor)

“Corn prices have shot up nearly 30 percent this year amid dwindling stockpiles and surging demand for the grain used to feed livestock and make alternative fuels including ethanol. . . . Worldwide demand for corn to feed livestock and to make biofuel is putting enormous pressure on global supply. And with the U.S. expected to plant less corn, the supply shortage will only worsen. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projected that farmers will plant 86 million acres of corn in 2008, an 8 percent drop from last year. . . .The nation’s 147 ethanol plants now have the capacity to produce 8.5 billion gallons of fuel a year, according to the Renewable Fuels Association. Corn is the basic feedstock for most of the plants and about 20 percent of last year’s 13 billion bushel corn crop was consumed by ethanol production. That percentage is expected to increase to 30 percent for the next crop year, which ends Aug. 31, 2009, according to Terry Francl, a senior economist for the American Farm Bureau Federation.” (Yahoo Finance)

 “. . . land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to biofuels are a major factor in the food crisis. You might put it this way: people are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states.” (New York Times)

“In Haiti, four people were killed in protests last week over a 50 percent rise in the cost of food staples in the past year. From Egypt to Vietnam, price rises of 40 percent or more for rice, wheat, and corn are stirring unrest and forcing governments to take drastic steps, such as blocking grain exports and arresting farmers who hoard surpluses.” (Christian Science Monitor)

This is real, not a prediction of gloom and doom of what’s in store 50 generations down the line. People are actually killing each other and starving over food crises right now. Though we’re not the only ones to blame, the U.S.’s twisted alternative-fuels policy of, literally, burning our crops for fuel is playing an unfortunate part.

 

 

 

Timmay!

The amazon.com review provides a brief list of all the great scientists that have issues with topics about global warming. One is even an ancient ice core expert! I'll put the list at the bottom, after this review.

 

 

Must-Read Global-Warming Book [Sterling Burnett]

About a year ago, Canadian environmentalist and journalist Lawrence Solomon began a series of articles in the National Post examining the credentials of and arguments made by scientists and economists labeled “deniers” by various environmentalists, a number of mainstream environmental reporters, and some politicians. Solomon, true to the finest tenets of his profession, sought the truth concerning whether there was in fact a consensus on the headline-grabbing issue of global warming, or whether in fact any “real” scientists actually dissented from the Al Gore/UN line that global warming is happening, is largely caused by humans, and threatens all manner of catastrophies.

As many people — policy wonks and fellow travelers — on this blog are well aware, dissenting scientists are not in fact rare: There are serious scholars whose views should, but too often do not, inform the debate. Solomon’s columns were important because they brought this message to a wider audience. As Solomon’s knowledge grew, he found that the genre limits of newspaper writing precluded an adequately in-depth exploration of these skeptical scientists’ important observations. Accordingly, selecting some of the scientists discussed in his columns, Solomon has written a book: The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**and those who are too fearful to do so. As a jacket blurb puts it, “What he found shocked him. Solomon discovered that on every “headline” global warming issue, not only were there serious scientists who dissented, consistently the dissenters were by far the more accomplished and eminent scientists.”

This book does not attempt to settle the science, or show that humans are or are not responsible for the present warming trend, or settle what we can expect the future harms/benefits of continued warming (or cooling) might be. Rather, the genius of the book is that it shows in a manner accessible to a lay audience that uncertainties concerning each important facet of the “consensus” view on warming abound, and that the dissenting views are at least as plausible (and often more compelling) than the IPCC/Gore camps.



The Deniers, examines what should be the active debates concerning the plausibility of the argument that human CO2 emissions (or CO2 per se) is a driver for climate change, what role the sun may play in warming, what role the present warming trend (and human activities) play in hurricane and tropical/parasitic disease patterns, and the reliability of the climate models, among other issues. In addition, Solomon notes the harsh treatment that many scientists have endured simply because they followed the scientific method, the evidence from their research, and their own consciences, all of which led them to the conclusion that this or that facet of the global-warming consensus view was woefully incomplete or flat-out wrong. This treatment has had the effect intended by global warming scaremongers — to shut down promising areas of research and to silence credible critics. As I put it in an earlier column:

The term skeptic has historically been a badge of honor proudly worn by scientists as indicating their commitment to the idea that in the pursuit of truth, nothing is beyond question, every bit of knowledge is open to improvement and/or refutation as new evidence or better theories emerge. However, in the topsy-turvy field of climate science, “skeptic” is a term of opprobrium and to be labeled a skeptic is to be dismissed as a hack. Being a skeptic concerning global warming today is akin to being a heretic in the Middle Ages — you may not be literally burned at the stake, but your reputation will be put to flames.

In response, many scientists whose research calls into question one or more of the fundamental tenets of global warming orthodoxy, have learned to couch their conclusions carefully. They argue, for instance, that while their research does not match up with this or that point in global warming theory, or would seem to undermine this or that conclusion, they are not denying that humans are causing global warming and they cannot account for the discrepancy between their work and the theory’s predictions. These scientists have learned the hard lesson that when reality and the theory conflict, for professional reasons, they’d better cling to the theory: shades of Galileo recanting his theory that the earth revolves around the sun under pressure from the Inquisition.

Though there are many good books on global warming, The Deniers is among the most effective in showing how science is being fundamentally undermined in the current politicized atmosphere of climate research. In addition, like no other book or paper I know, it provides a concise but thorough overview of the myriad weaknesses of the consensus view, the quality and substance of the criticisms of that view, and the stellar qualifications of those scientists labeled derisively as “deniers.”

This book should be read by anyone who seriously wants to understand where and why substantive debate remains concerning climate change and why there is so much vitriol surrounding what until recently was a relatively quiet, unheralded, or unnoticed (except by its practitioners) field of science. If a person could read only one book this year on climate change, this is the one I’d pick.

Scientists:

Dr. Edward Wegman--former chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences--demolishes the famous "hockey stick" graph that launched the global warming panic.

Dr. David Bromwich--president of the International Commission on Polar Meteorology--says "it's hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now."

Prof. Paul Reiter--Chief of Insects and Infectious Diseases at the famed Pasteur Institute--says "no major scientist with any long record in this field" accepts Al Gore's claim that global warming spreads mosquito-borne diseases.

Prof. Hendrik Tennekes--director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute--states "there exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies" used for global warming forecasts.

Dr. Christopher Landsea--past chairman of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones--says "there are no known scientific studies that show a conclusive physical link between global warming and observed hurricane frequency and intensity."

Dr. Antonino Zichichi--one of the world's foremost physicists, former president of the European Physical Society, who discovered nuclear antimatter--calls global warming models "incoherent and invalid."

Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski--world-renowned expert on the ancient ice cores used in climate research--says the U.N. "based its global-warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false."

Prof. Tom V. Segalstad--head of the Geological Museum, University of Oslo--says "most leading geologists" know the U.N.'s views "of Earth processes are implausible."

Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu--founding director of the International Arctic Research Center, twice named one of the "1,000 Most Cited Scientists," says much "Arctic warming during the last half of the last century is due to natural change."

Dr. Claude Allegre--member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences and French Academy of Science, he was among the first to sound the alarm on the dangers of global warming. His view now: "The cause of this climate change is unknown."

Dr. Richard Lindzen--Professor of Meteorology at M.I.T., member, the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, says global warming alarmists "are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right."

Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov--head of the space research laboratory of the Russian Academy of Science's Pulkovo Observatory and of the International Space Station's Astrometria project says "the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations."

Dr. Richard Tol--Principal researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, at Carnegie Mellon University, calls the most influential global warming report of all time "preposterous . . . alarmist and incompetent."

Dr. Sami Solanki--director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, who argues that changes in the Sun's state, not human activity, may be the principal cause of global warming: "The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures."

Prof. Freeman Dyson--one of the world's most eminent physicists says the models used to justify global warming alarmism are "full of fudge factors" and "do not begin to describe the real world."

Dr. Eigils Friis-Christensen--director of the Danish National Space Centre, vice-president of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, who argues that changes in the Sun's behavior could account for most of the warming attributed by the UN to man-made CO2.

 

Let's just focus on the problems 'gobal warming' may cause.  It saves lives and costs less.

It's interesting to note too, that hurricanes are twice as likely to cause major damage due to expanding development in the US.  Not because the storms are more frequent or stronger.

Read more.... 

 

Global warming: Just deal with it, some scientists say

The disastrous hurricanes of recent years have become the poster children of global warming.

But Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental policy expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wondered whether the billions of dollars of damage was caused by more intense storms or more coastal development.

After analyzing decades of hurricane data, Pielke concluded that rising levels of carbon dioxide had little to do with hurricane damage. Rather, it boiled down to a simple equation: Build more, lose more.

"Everything has been put on the back of carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide cannot carry that weight," he said.

Pielke's analysis, published last month in the journal Natural Hazards Review, is part of a controversial movement that argues global warming over the rest of this century will play a much smaller role in unleashing planetary havoc than most scientists think.

His research has led him to believe that it is cheaper and more effective to adapt to global warming than to fight it.

Instead of spending trillions of dollars to stabilize carbon dioxide levels across the planet -- an enormously complex and expensive proposition -- the world could work on reducing hunger, storm damage and disease now, thereby neutralizing some of the most feared future problems of global warming.

Hans von Storch, director of the Institute of Coastal Research in Germany, said that the world's problems were already so big that the added burdens caused by rising temperatures would be relatively small. It would be like going 160 kilometers per hour on the autobahn when "going 150 . . . is already dangerous," he said.

Consider a United Nations estimate that global warming would increase the number of people at risk of hunger from 777 million in 2020 to 885 million by 2080, a 14% rise, if current development patterns continue.

That increase could be counteracted by spending on better irrigation systems, drought-resistant crops and more-efficient food transport systems, said Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia in England.

"If you're really concerned about drought, those are much more effective strategies than trying to bring down greenhouse gas concentrations," he said.

Downplaying the importance of emissions reductions has raised hackles among scientists around the world, who say that the planet-wide effects of global warming will eventually go beyond humans' ability to deal with it.

"You can't adapt to melting the Greenland ice sheet," said Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University. "You can't adapt to species that have gone extinct."

Other scientists say that time is running out to control carbon dioxide emissions and that the call to adapt is providing a potentially dangerous excuse to delay. If adaptation were so simple, they say, it would have already been done. But the developing world remains wrought with hunger and disease and vulnerable to natural disasters.

Pielke acknowledges that there are enormous political hurdles to overcome with his strategy, and he recognizes that his views have made him and like-minded researchers the new pariahs of global warming.

"I've been accused of taking money from Exxon or being a right-wing hack," he said.

But unlike those who argue that humans are not warming the globe, the new skeptics accept the scientific consensus on the causes and effects of climate change. Their differences are over what to do about it.

"The radical middle -- that's how we talk about ourselves," said Daniel Sarewitz, a public policy expert at Arizona State University who has collaborated with Pielke on climate policy studies.

Pielke, whose career has focused on the politics of science, likes to describe the scattered collection of scientists and policy wonks as the "non-skeptic heretic club."

The science of global warming was laid out in a series of reports last year by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. The reports said that temperatures were likely to climb 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit by century's end if emissions continued to grow.

They detailed a likely future of worsening famine in Africa, expanding floods as sea levels rise as much as 23 inches, and accelerated species extinction. To avoid the worst, the reports warned that emissions must be reduced 50% to 80% by mid-century, keeping temperature rise below 2 degrees.

The cost, according to the U.N. panel, would amount to as much as 3% of world gross domestic product over the next 20 years, or more than $20 trillion.

The heretics support emissions cuts too, but warn that they have been oversold as a solution to coming catastrophe.

Exhibit A is hurricanes.

The spate of recent storms, particularly Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has come to be seen as a harbinger of a warmer world -- a view popularized by Gore's 2006 documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Pielke's new analysis considered 207 hurricanes that hit the United States between 1900 and 2005. He looked at their strength and course and then overlaid them on a modern map that included all development over the years.

He found that the most devastating storm, had it occurred today, would be the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, popularly known as the Big Blow. Its path through the now heavily developed southern tip of Florida would have caused $157 billion in damage, followed by Katrina, whose toll was $81 billion. Six of the top 10 most damaging storms occurred before 1945.

Pielke and his colleagues determined that with each decade, the damage potential for any given storm doubled, on average, because of development.

Malaria, another problem that may worsen with global warming, also has solutions.

Higher temperatures could allow malaria-carrying mosquitoes to move into Africa's highland regions, where people have little natural immunity from the parasite. Still, the extra burden would be a fraction of the millions of cases that afflict the continent each year.

"If you look at Africa, only 2% is above 2,000 meters," said Paul Reiter, an expert on mosquito-borne disease at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He said that far more deaths would come from the malaria parasite's growing resistance to drug treatments.

"We should be more concerned with controlling the disease than trying to change the weather," said Reiter, who recommended heavier use of pesticides to kill mosquitoes -- the same strategy that eradicated malaria in the United States and elsewhere.

The World Health Organization estimates that over the next decade annual malaria deaths could be cut from 1 million to 250,000 for $3.2 billion a year.

But critics say a major flaw in the adaptation strategy is that the effects of global warming will be unpredictable. It may be possible to adapt to some easily identifiable effects, but when the ecology of an entire planet is altered by rising levels of carbon dioxide, nobody understands the full range of potential perils.

Dealing with the effects without cutting emissions is "like mopping up the floor while keeping one of the faucets still running," said Dr. Jonathan Patz, an environmental health scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a member of the U.N. climate panel.

Other scientists say that some changes could be so catastrophic -- such as sudden changes in the ocean currents that control regional climates -- that it would be impossible to adapt to them.

The only way to prevent the unexpected is cutting emissions, said U.N. climate panel member Gary Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan University.

Although most scientists agree that adaptation should play a major role in absorbing the effects of climate change, they say that buying into the heretics' arguments will dig the world into a deeper hole by putting off greenhouse gas reductions until it is too late.

The heretics believe that time works to their benefit, arguing that technological advances over the next 50 years will ultimately make reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere affordable.

Pielke says that even if his critics are right, it is becoming clear that the world lacks the political will to enact global emissions cuts.

China's growing emissions are on pace to double those of the United States in a decade, and the country shows little interest in slowing down. The United States has refused to cap its emissions, and much of Europe is failing to satisfy even the modest terms of the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 landmark treaty on greenhouse gases.

"I would characterize us as realists," Pielke said. "Realists on what is politically possible."
 

Yet another great article....

 

‘Non-Judgmental’ Nonsense
Yes, personal failings do matter in politics.

By Thomas Sowell

What was he thinking? That was the first question that came to mind when the story of New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s involvement with a prostitution ring was reported in the media.

It was also the first question that came to mind when star quarterback Michael Vick ruined his career and lost his freedom over his involvement in illegal dog fighting. It is a question that arises when other very fortunate people risk everything for some trivial satisfaction.

Many in the media refer to Eliot Spitzer as some moral hero who fell from grace. Spitzer was never a moral hero. He was an unscrupulous prosecutor who threw his power around to ruin people, even when he didn’t have any case with which to convict them of anything.

Because he was using his overbearing power against businesses, the anti-business Left idolized him, just as they idolized Ralph Nader before him as some sort of secular saint because Nader attacked General Motors.

What Eliot Spitzer did was not out of character. It was completely in character for someone with the hubris that comes with the ability to misuse his power to make or break innocent people.

After John Whitehead, former head of Goldman Sachs, wrote an oped for the Wall Street Journal criticizing Attorney General Spitzer’s handling of a case involving Maurice Greenberg, Spitzer was quoted by Whitehead as saying: “I will be coming after you. You will pay the price. This is only the beginning and you will pay dearly for what you have done.”

When you start thinking of yourself as a little tin god, able to throw your weight around to bully people into silence, it is a sign of a sense of being exempt from the laws and social rules that apply to other people.

For someone with this kind of hubris to risk his whole political career for a fling with a prostitute is no more surprising than for Michael Vick to throw away millions to indulge his taste for dog fighting or for Leona Helmsley to avoid paying taxes — not because she couldn’t easily afford to pay taxes and still have more money left than she could ever spend — but because she felt above the rules that apply to “the little people.”

What is almost as scary as having someone like Eliot Spitzer holding power is having so many pundits talking as if this is just a “personal” flaw in Governor Spitzer that should not disqualify him for public office.

Spitzer himself spoke of his “personal” failing as if it had nothing to do with his being Governor of New York.

In this age, when it is considered the height of sophistication to be “non-judgmental,” one of the corollaries is that “personal” failings have no relevance to the performance of official duties.

What that amounts to, ultimately, is that character doesn’t matter. In reality, character matters enormously, more so than most things that can be seen, measured, or documented.

Character is what we have to depend on when we entrust power over ourselves, our children, and our society to government officials.

We cannot risk all that for the sake of the fashionable affectation of being more non-judgmental than thou.

Currently, various facts are belatedly beginning to leak out that give us clues to the character of Barack Obama. But to report these facts is being characterized as a “personal” attack.

Barack Obama’s personal and financial association with a man under criminal indictment in Illinois is not just a “personal” matter. Nor is his 20 years of going to a church whose pastor has praised Louis Farrakhan and condemned the United States in both sweeping terms and with obscene language.

The Obama camp likens mentioning such things to criticizing him because of what members of his family might have said or done. But it was said, long ago, that you can pick your friends but not your relatives.

Obama chose to be part of that church for 20 years. He was not born into it. His “personal” character matters, just as Eliot Spitzer’s “personal” character matters — and just as Hillary Clinton’s character would matter if she had any.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Economic Facts and Fallacies.

 

 Cold Water on ‘Global Warming’
Next week, skeptics will gather in Gotham to discuss the cold, hard facts.

By Thomas Sowell

It has almost become something of a joke when some “global warming” conference has to be cancelled because of a snowstorm or bitterly cold weather.

But stampedes and hysteria are no joke — and creating stampedes and hysteria has become a major activity of those hyping a global-warming “crisis.”

They mobilize like-minded people from a variety of occupations, call them all “scientists” and then claim that “all” the experts agree on a global-warming crisis.

Their biggest argument is that there is no argument.

A whole cottage industry has sprung up among people who get grants, government agencies who get appropriations, politicians who get publicity, and the perpetually indignant who get something new to be indignant about. It gives teachers something to talk about in school instead of teaching.

Those who bother to check the facts often find that not all those who are called scientists are really scientists and not all of those who are scientists are specialists in climate. But who bothers to check facts these days?

A new and very different conference on global warming will be held in New York City, under the sponsorship of the Heartland Institute, on March 2nd to March 4th — weather permitting.

It is called an “International Conference on Climate Change” that will examine the question “Global Warming: Crisis or Scam?” Among those present will be professors of climatology, along with scientists in other fields and people from other professions.

They come from universities in England, Hungary, and Australia, as well as from the United States and Canada, and include among other dignitaries the former president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel.

All told, there will be 98 speakers and 400 participants.

The theme of the conference is that “there is no scientific consensus on the causes or likely consequences of global warming.”

Many of the participants in this conference are people who have already expressed skepticism about either the prevailing explanations of current climate change or the dire predictions about future climate change.

These include authors of such books as Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years by Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, and Shattered Consensus, edited by Patrick J. Michaels.

This will be one of the rare opportunities for the media to hear the other side of the story — for those old-fashioned journalists who still believe that their job is to inform the public, rather than promote an agenda.

Several films will be featured at the conference — including The Great Global Warming Swindle, a British television program that is now available on DVD in the United States. It is a devastating debunking of the current “global warming” hysteria.

Nobody denies that there is such a thing as a greenhouse effect. If there were not, the side of the planet facing away from the sun would be freezing every night.

There is not even a lot of controversy over temperature readings. What is fundamentally at issue are the explanations, implications, and extrapolations of these temperature readings.

The party line of those who say that we are heading for a global warming crisis of epic proportions is that human activities generating carbon dioxide are key factors responsible for the warming that has taken place in recent times.

The problem with this reasoning is that the temperatures rose first and then the carbon dioxide levels rose. Some scientists say that the warming created the increased carbon dioxide, rather than vice versa.

Many natural factors, including variations in the amount of heat put out by the sun, can cause the earth to heat or cool.

The bigger problem is that this has long since become a crusade rather than an exercise in evidence or logic. Too many people are too committed to risk it all on a roll of the dice, which is what turning to empirical evidence is.

Those who have a big stake in global-warming hysteria are unlikely to show up at the conference in New York, and unfortunately that includes much of the media.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Economic Facts and Fallacies.

Populism of the Privileged
Democratic gloom-and-doom offers little change and less hope.

By Victor Davis Hanson

The rhetoric of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton about the sad state of America is reminiscent of the suspect populism of John Edwards, the millionaire lawyer who recently dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.

Barack Obama may have gone to exclusive private schools. He and his wife may both be lawyers who between them have earned four expensive Ivy League degrees. They may make about a million dollars a year, live in an expensive home, and send their kids to prep school. But they are still apparently firsthand witnesses to how the American dream has gone sour. Two other Ivy League lawyers, Hillary and Bill, are multimillionaires who have found America to be a land of riches beyond most people’s imaginations. But Hillary also talks of the tragic lost dream of America.

In these gloom-and-doom narratives by the well-off, we less fortunate Americans are doing almost everything right, but still are not living as well as we deserve to be. The common culprit is a government that is not doing enough good for us, and corporations that do too much bad to us.

In the new pessimistic indictment, the home-mortgage meltdown has not occurred because too many speculative buyers were hoping to flip houses for quick profits. It had nothing to do with misguided attempts of government and lending institutions to put first-time buyers in homes through zero-down payments, interest-only loans, and subprime but adjustable mortgage rates — as part of liberal efforts to increase home-ownership rates.

And there apparently are few Americans who unwisely borrowed against their homes a second and third time to remodel or purchase big-ticket consumer items — on the belief that their equity would always be rising faster than their debts. Nor are we to look at this downturn as part of a historical boom-and-bust cycle in the housing industry — the present low prices and non-performing loans the natural counter-response to the overpriced real estate of the last five years.

Likewise, we’re told that students are failing to graduate from college because there are too few government-guaranteed student loans. We don’t hear that thousands enter public universities without basic reading and mathematical skills — or that their college problems might be due in part to their own misplaced priorities in high school, and in part to an educational system that is mostly therapeutic, offering fluffy courses and self-esteem training rather than rigorous math, science, literature, and history classes. Nor is there ever mention of teachers’ unions, the system of tenure, or a vapid, politically correct curriculum, as explanations for why our students are not competitive in the global marketplace.

We also hear that oil prices are sky high and our own automobile industry is failing due to windfall profits and corporate greed, but there’s no discussion of the fact that oil-rich autocracies like Russia, Venezuela, and the Gulf monarchies have obtained a stranglehold on the global petroleum supply.

For Hillary and Barack, our automobile manufacturing crisis is not the result of uniquely lavish union health and retirement packages for American autoworkers. The government is somehow mostly to blame for Detroit’s meltdown and the energy crisis, not Americans’ own tastes in the 1990s for large gas-guzzlers and big homes, and their concurrent opposition to nuclear power plants, oil drilling off the coasts and in Alaska, and conservation of resources.

Wal-Mart, free trade, and our debt to China also come in for blame. Neither Obama nor Clinton suggests that the middle classes of America have more purchasing power and have accumulated more consumer goods than any people in history. In reality, our acquisitiveness is a result not of corporate greed, but of our fondness for shopping at discounted warehouse mega-stores, whose goods are the result of hard work of hundreds of millions of low-paid Chinese. They not only toil long hours to make our cheap televisions and stereos, but their government lends us the money at low interest — through massive buying of U.S. government bonds — to buy their stuff in the first place.

To the extent that we have any social and legal problems from unchecked illegal immigration, it has nothing to do with the cynicism and corruption of the Mexican government that deliberately exports, exploits, and profits off its own people. The problem is not the fondness for low-paid, off-the-books illegal labor among the upper-middle classes, nor the disdain for the law of illegal immigrants themselves, who crowd to the front of the immigration line. Instead, America’s xenophobia, blame-casting, and insensitive government have made it needlessly rough on 11 million arrivals who otherwise did us a favor by coming.

As Sens. Obama and Clinton try to outdo each other in blaming government for our lack of individual responsibility and promising solutions by raising taxes to give us more government, they offer little change and less hope.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author, most recently, of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

 Yes, most of us are getting rebates this year.

 

From NRO.com:

Rebates for Non-Taxpayers?
No.

By Rich Lowry

Should non-taxpayers get a tax rebate? That had been the revealing sticking point in the Washington debate over an economic stimulus package.

Democrats insisted on spreading the rebate to people who don’t pay the federal income tax for a simple reason — there are so many of them. A literal rebate in the sense of giving back a bit of what people pay in federal income taxes was objectionable because it would exclude the 40 percent of households that pay none at all.

That fact is worth noting because it puts the lie to the notion that the federal tax code is a vampirish scheme by Republican economic elites to privilege the rich at the expense of the poor. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards can barely say the word “taxes” without retailing some version of this tale, which is detached from reality and has been getting steadily more so.

The number of people on the lower end of the income scale who are exempt from federal income taxes has been increasing, while the proportion of the federal income-tax burden borne by higher-end taxpayers has gone up. If this is the fruit of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush class warfare on behalf of the wealthy, the boys down at the yacht club have to be bitterly disappointed.

A study by the Tax Foundation (of all taxes, not just federal income taxes) found that between 1991 and 2004, “the only income group whose share of total taxes increased was the highest income quintile.” According to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 40 percent of taxpayers paid 99.1 percent of federal income taxes in 2004, leaving the other 60 percent to pay .9 percent. The wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers — the focus of so much Democratic ire — pay nearly 40 percent of federal income taxes, and about as much as the entirety of the bottom 95 percent.

People at the lowest end have been escaping federal income taxes entirely. More than 40 million income-tax filers have no income-tax liability. President Bush’s tax cuts increased the number of people in this category by millions. And more than 20 million families pay no income taxes while getting a check from the Treasury thanks to the Earned Income Tax Credit, a bipartisan policy that President Bill Clinton made one of his causes.

Our tax system is hugely redistributive. When all federal, state, and local taxes and spending are taken into account, the lowest 20 percent of households got $8.21 in spending for every dollar of taxes paid in 2004, while the top 40 percent paid more in taxes than they received in spending, according to the Tax Foundation. Overall, more than a trillion dollars was extracted by the U.S. government and handed out further down the income scale.

Democrats counter that the rich pay more in taxes only because they’ve been getting richer. Yes, but no one knows how to stop them from getting richer as long as the economy is growing, and it wouldn’t help anyone to try anyway. By any standard, they pay their fair share. As they pony up almost 40 percent of federal income taxes, the top 1 percent earn a little more than 20 percent of the nation’s income.

Federal income taxes aren’t the whole picture. People lower down on the income scale still have to pay the payroll tax to fund programs like Social Security. Even here, though, the rich bear the heaviest burden. The top 20 percent paid more than 44 percent of payroll taxes in 2004, according to the CBO.

As for the debate over the rebate, if the (dubious) premise is to kick-start the economy by scattering money around, lower-income people paying no income taxes might as well be included, as they are in the White House-congressional deal. But the moment shouldn’t pass without noting what it tells us about the tax system supposedly being skewed toward the rich. It is not, except in the sense that it exacts more taxes from them.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate

 

In a news conference, Deanna Favre announced she will be the starting QB for the Packers this coming Sunday.  Deanna asserts that she is qualified to be starting QB because she has spent the past 16 years married to Brett while he played QB for the Packers.  During this period of time she became familiar with the definition of a corner blitz, and is now completely comfortable with other terminology of the Packers offense  A survey of Packers fans shows that 50% of those polled supported the move.

             

Does this sounds idiotic and unbelievable to you?

             

Well, Hillary Clinton makes the same claims as to why she is qualified to be President and 50% of democrats polled agreed. She has never run a City, County, or State.

             

 When told Hillary Clinton has experience because she has 8 years in the white house, Dick Morris stated "so has the pastry chef".

“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat,” wrote the indispensable O’Rourke.

“God” he explained, is “a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well being of the disadvantaged. ... God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.”

P. J. continues: “Santa Claus is another matter. ... He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without the thought of a quid pro quo.”

“Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one,” O’Rourke concluded. “There is no such thing as Santa Claus.”

 

This is attributed to Jay Leno:  (Even if it's not, its still an ok read....)

 "The other day I was reading Newsweek magazine and came across some poll data I found rather hard to believe. It must be true, given the source, right? The Newsweek poll alleges that 67 percent of Americans are unhappy with the direction the country is headed, and 69 percent of the country is unhappy with the performance of the President. In essence, 2/3's of the citizenry just ain't happy and want a change. So being the knuckle dragger I am, I started thinking, ''What are we so unhappy about?'' Is it that we have electricity and running water 24 hours a day, 7 days a  week? Is our unhappiness the result of having air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter? Could it be that 95.4 percent of these unhappy folks have a job? Maybe it is the ability to walk into a grocery store at any time, and see more food in moments than Darfur has seen in the last year? Maybe it is the ability to drive from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean without having to present identification papers as we move through each state?

Or possibly the hundreds of clean and safe motels we would find along the way that can provide temporary shelter? I guess having thousands of restaurants with varying cuisine from around the world is just not good enough. Or could it be that when we wreck our car, emergency workers show up and provide services to help all, and even send a helicopter to take you to the hospital.

Perhaps you are one of the 70 percent of Americans who own a home. You may be upset with knowing that in the unfortunate case of a fire, a group of trained firefighters will appear in moments and use top notch equipment to extinguish the flames thus saving you, your family and your belongings.

 Or if, while at home watching one of your many flat screen TVs, a burglar or prowler intrudes, an officer equipped with a gun and a bullet-proof vest will come to defend you and your family against attack or loss. This all in the backdrop of a neighborhood free of bombs or militias
raping and pillaging the residents. Neighborhoods where 90 percent of teenagers own cell phones and computers.

 How about the complete religious, social and political freedoms we enjoy that are the envy of everyone in the world? Maybe that is what has 67 percent of you folks
 unhappy.

Fact is, we are the largest group of ungrateful, spoiled brats the world has ever seen. No wonder the world loves the U.S., yet has a great disdain for its citizens. They see us for what we are. The most blessed people in the world who do nothing but complain about what we don't have , and what we hate about the country instead of thanking the good Lord we live here.

I know, I know. What about the President who took us into war and has no plan to get us out? The President who has a measly 31 percent approval rating? Is this the same President who guided the nation in the dark days after 9/11? The President that cut taxes to bring an economy out of recession? Could this be the same guy who has been called every name in the book for succeeding in keeping all the spoiled ungrateful brats safe from terrorist attacks?

The Commander-In Chief of an all-volunteer army that is out there defending you and me? Did you hear how bad the President is on the news or talk show? Did this news affect you so much, make you so unhappy you couldn't take a look around for yourself and see all the good things and be glad?

Think about it...are you upset at the President because he actually caused you personal pain OR is it because the "Media" told you he was failing to kiss your sorry ungrateful behind every day. Make no mistake about it. The troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have volunteered to serve, and in many cases may have died for your freedom. There is currently no draft in this country. They didn't have to go.

They are able to refuse to go and end up with either a ''general'' discharge, an ''other than honorable'' discharge or, worst case scenario, a ''dishonorable'' discharge after a few days in the brig.  So why then the flat-out discontentment in the minds of 69 percent of Americans? Say what you want, but I blame it on the media. If it bleeds, it leads; and they specialize in bad news.

 Everybody will watch a car crash with blood and guts. How many will watch kids selling lemonade at the corner? The media knows this and media outlets are for-profit corporations. They offer what sells, and when criticized, try to defend their actions by "justifying" them in one way or another.  Just ask why they tried to allow a murderer like O.J. Simpson to write a book about "how he didn't kill his wife, but if he did he would have done it this way"...Insane!

Stop buying the negativism you are fed everyday by
the media. Shut off the TV, burn Newsweek, and use the New York Times for the bottom of your bird cage. Then start being grateful for all we have as a country. There is exponentially more good than bad. We are among the most blessed people on Earth, and should thank God several times a day, or at least be thankful and appreciative. "With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, "Are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?"

 Jay Leno
 2007

 

Of Teddy Bears and Cartoons
The unspoken rules.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Here we go again. Thousands of Sudanese Muslims took to the street last week to threaten death to a British schoolteacher in Khartoum.

Her crime? She inadvertently committed the felony of allowing her class to name a teddy bear “Mohammad.”

The teacher, Gillian Gibbons, has been pardoned by Sudan’s president (after initially being sentenced to 15 days in prison) and sent home to England. Yet that happy ending doesn’t erase the reaction in the streets of Khartoum. The tired story behind irrational anger in much of the Muslim world remains the same.

#ad#Watch out if Westerners somewhere are judged blasphemous to Islam when they draw a cartoon, write a novel, make a movie or discuss history.

In their furious reaction, thin-skinned Muslims may issue death threats. And they expect apologies. Sometimes the offense — like the reporting of a Koran flushed down the toilet at Guantanamo Bay — turns out to be false but still causes riots and murdering thousands of miles away.

Likewise, the reaction to this madness is now stereotyped. Often apologies — not condemnation — follow from contrite Westerners. To prevent a recurrence, Western writers, filmmakers, teachers, and religious figures quietly edit their work and restrict their speech — but only when Islam is involved.

So-called moderate Muslims, often residing in Western countries, will usually say they deplore such extremism on the part of radicals. Then they claim such intolerance is simply not typical of Islam. Or that the embarrassing story has been reported in exaggerated fashion by those prejudiced against Muslims.

Few, though, ever explain why it is that Muslims — not Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, or atheists — are in the global news threatening to kill someone over a toy or a cartoon or an opera.

Finally, the uproar dies down — only to break out again in a new place over a new grievance.

There are certain unspoken rules of the game behind all these incidents. The first is the lack of reciprocity. Christ can be mocked in the Middle East without any consequences.

Muslim leaders can venture to the Vatican at Rome, the ancient center of Christianity, to consult with the pope about the necessity of more interfaith understanding. But should a pope or clergyman want to reciprocate by venturing to Mecca, he better convert to Islam first.

New mosques and conversions to Islam are common in the West. But to send missionaries to, or build a new church in, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, or Pakistan is to court death.

Condescension is also required. The demonstrator who waves a sword calling for a beheading is often excused. The poor guy must not be educated, rather than just cruel and dangerous. “We’re so sorry for the little mix-up” is the public Western answer to the shout of “Death to you!”

We also know why all this won’t stop, whether in Pakistan or Sudan — or whether over a cartoon or a teddy bear or who knows what next.

A globalized world means communications are instantaneous. What one person in Denmark draws is broadcast immediately to millions in Islamabad and Khartoum. And they are apparently glued to, but very angry at, the modern world that pops up on their television screens.

The Muslim Middle East has much of the world’s oil. So its excesses are put up with by the rest of the world rather than loudly condemned. But after 9/11 and the bombings in Madrid and London, Islamists screaming for a beheading cannot quite be laughed off. Instead they may be the vanguard of something far worse.

Decades of multiculturalism have brainwashed Europeans and Westerners into believing that Islamic furor must be judged in a special cultural context, or is only understood through some real past grievance, usually dating back to the Crusades.

Sometimes apologists dredge up Timothy McVeigh or violence in Northern Ireland as if to prove that supposed Christian-inspired terrorism is just as much a world danger as jihadism. We know it isn’t, but such moral equivalence sounds liberal and might calm down the mob.

Other times we drag Iraq into the conversation and say the armed removal of Saddam radicalized Muslims — as if the fatwa against Salman Rushdie or 9/11 followed the outbreak of that war.

What would stop this unhealthy teddy-bear syndrome?

Weaning ourselves off imported oil and therefore the need to appease those who have it.

Politely informing Muslims that Westerners believe the norms of free speech and expression are to be uniformly applied. No one religion or region gets a special pass.

Supporting human rights abroad and offering some constitutional alternative in the Middle East to theocracy and dictatorship that both encourage Islamic radicalism.

And remaining militarily strong.

Remember that the fanatic waving his age-old sword in the Khartoum street over a teddy bear shows the same dangerous derangement as the nut in Tehran who may one day want his hand on the Bomb.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of “A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.”

(C) 2007 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.