GregNews

GO HERE NOW: http://blog.gregnews.com/

2008-07-27T15:35:00.002-05:00

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BACK TO HAND WRINGING RESPONSES TO TERROR

2008-07-24T17:29:00.004-05:00

This comes from an article regarding the trial of Salim Hamdan. The point has been argued before, but not really as an admission from a member or al Qaeda:

In advance of attacks, Mr. [Ali] Soufan [a top counterterrorism investigator] said, Mr. Hamdan would often be alerted to prepare vehicles for a rapid move, in case of an American retaliation. He added that Mr. Hamdan came to believe that Washington's failure to launch massive retaliations after the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa and the 2000 Cole bombing emboldened Mr. bin Laden. The al Qaeda leader believed the U.S. would never send ground troops to pursue him in Afghanistan, Mr. Soufan said.
Thanks, Clinton administration! Bin Laden said it himself, people follow a strong horse over a weak horse. And, in the late 1990s leading up to 9-11-2001, Bin Laden clearly saw himself as the strong horse, especially because of the lack of a strong response by the US government again and again during a series of brazen attacks throughout the 1990s.

After the 2000 USS Cole bombing, key Clinton figures met to discuss a response to the attack. The meeting included Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, CIA Director George Tenet, Richard Clarke, who was basically the counterterrorism czar, and Attorney General Janet Reno. Richard Clarke was the only Clinton official in that meeting who urged a strong military response. The others demanded more "proof," which is difficult when the perpetrator incinerated himself in the attack, or fretted over our image as strongman before the Muslim community, or, in Janet Reno's case, argued that a military response against Bin Laden's Afghanistan camps might violate international law -- as though a country has no right to bomb the training camps in another country (Afghanistan) ruled by an internationally-unrecognized autocracy (The Taliban) that produce terrorists (Bin Laden) who openly brag about attacking that country.

Indeed, in Richard Miniter's book "Losing Bin Laden," he related an exasperated CIA official, Michael Sheehan, asking of Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them [the Clinton administration] to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"

Apparently so. One can argue Bush's incompetence prior to Gen. Petraeus (historical note -- it took Abraham Lincoln eight tries with seven generals to find his savior general: Irvin McDowell, George McClellan, John Pope, McClellan again, Ambrose Burnside, Joe Hooker, George Meade, Ulysses S. Grant), but one cannot argue with facts. Everyone thought the US would certainly be struck again by terrorists after 9-11. Nobody would have predicted 7 years straight without it. Beyond our technological advantages finally being utilized (what the far left mistakenly terms "domestic spying") it's hard to argue that our strong military responses in Afghanistan and Iraq have not given al Qaeda second thought about their tactics, even as they commit brazen acts of violence against Europe, which never replies with a military response.

And so, one wonders should a President Obama take control, will the foolish over-lawyered hand-wringing on our international image, dealing with terrorism strictly as a law enforcement issue but never as an issue of national defense, etc., simply bring us back to the Clinton era, when we hamstrung our own intelligence and investigative personnel to the point that terrorists struck us at home with ease?

"WISH I HAD WRITTEN IT" OF THE WEEK

2008-07-24T17:27:00.001-05:00

Great letter to the WSJ. I love the comment on our "fourth branch" of government.

"The Lawnmower Men" (Review & Outlook, July 19) proves the point that we no longer have only three branches of government. To the executive, legislative and judicial branches we have added bureaucracy. There are now a myriad of government agencies which have a say in how we may live our lives, and none of the people who run or staff these red-tape factories can be held accountable to the people of the nation through any electoral process.

So the Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate my lawnmower and measure "grams per kilogram of cuttings"? This is the U.S. and here we measure in ounces and pounds; granted illegal drug dealers might not have a problem with this metric nonsense. Is the EPA going to say I can't cut my grass until it reaches a certain height in order to achieve the desired measurements? Will there be an extra tax on foods that tend to create more "emissions"? How about a tax credit for Bean-o? How about they just leave us alone.

We could solve the global energy crisis by hooking up generators to the founding fathers' graves. They should be spinning fast enough to produce enough electricity to fuel the whole country. If they were alive, however, I think I know what they would say about this proposal and all of the other rules dumped upon us: "No regulation without representation!" Though if this bureaucratic trend continues, we might go back to: "Give me liberty or give me death!"

Beth Halgren
Eudora, Kan.

YOUR TAXDOLLARS AT WORK

2008-07-24T17:26:00.001-05:00

Even conservative estimates by the Congressional Budget Office say the cost for this bailout will run to $41.7 billion, with $16.8 billion offset by higher taxes. No one has any idea of the real cost. The most expensive provision gives the Treasury temporary authority to pour money into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The CBO says this could cost $100 billion, or it could cost "nothing." So it threw a dart at the wall and assigned a $25 billion price tag to the Fan and Fred bailout.

Likewise, the bill's $300 billion to refinance and insure distressed loans through the Federal Housing Administration will supposedly cost just a few billion dollars. That assumes few homeowners and lenders will sign up for the program because lenders will have to take a 10% haircut to be eligible. If no one needs this program, why is it there? If lenders do take advantage, they're bound to dump their worst loans on the feds. So as with the Fan and Fred bailout, the FHA guarantee will be either superfluous or much more expensive than we're led to believe.

Alongside these big-ticket items, we suppose the $4 billion tax credit for first-time home buyers, or the $4 billion in "community development" pork grants, or the $180 million for housing counseling are merely routine outrages.

On the other hand, the kid-glove treatment of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is very much worth worrying about. On the floor of the House yesterday, Democrats argued that this bill was the least Congress could do "for the people," given the way the government had "helped" Bear Stearns. The cost borne by Bear Stearns was having its shareholders all but wiped out and half its employees pink-slipped. Countrywide was likewise sold at a fire sale price. Not so these two government-chartered giants.

Fannie and Freddie may well be too big to fail, as Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson keeps reminding us. That is true in large part because they were allowed -- no, encouraged -- to grow like Topsy while Congress shielded them from oversight.

-- Wall Street Journal

WERE OBAMA REPUBLICAN

2008-07-22T17:52:00.002-05:00

Along the lines of my post yesterday about the media's shameless backing of Barack Obama, here's another example:

A Top Obama Fund-Raiser Had Ties to Failed Bank
By JOHN R. EMSHWILLER
July 21, 2008; Wall Street Journal Page A10

For the Pritzker family of Chicago, the 2001 collapse of subprime-mortgage lender Superior Bank was an embarrassing failure in a corner of their giant business empire.
Billionaire Penny Pritzker helped run Hinsdale, Ill.-based Superior, overseeing her family's 50% ownership stake. She now serves as Barack Obama's national campaign-finance chairwoman, which means her banking past could prove to be an embarrassment to her -- and perhaps to the campaign.

Superior was seized in 2001 and later closed by federal regulators. Government investigators and consumer advocates have contended that Superior engaged in unsound financial activities and predatory lending practices. Ms. Pritzker, a longtime friend and supporter of Sen. Obama, served for a time as Superior's chairman, and later sat on the board of its holding company.

Sen. Obama has long criticized predatory subprime mortgage lenders and urged strong actions against them.
Just another case of Obama's "Do as I say, not as I do" campaign. But I noticed -- other than this story only appearing in the WSJ, not saturated daily in the NYT and every 10 minutes on CNN -- that this was run on page A10.

Dollars to donuts, had Obama been Republican you can bet this would have made page 1.

RETORTING AL GORE

2008-07-22T17:50:00.000-05:00

Great editorial by Bret Stephens concerning Al Gore's "Kennedyesque" challenge that the United States be "100% zero-carbon electricity in 10 years." The simple fact is it was far more feasible to put a man on the moon than attain Gore's goal, especially when Gore himself opposes both nuclear and hydroelectric power.

In 1995, the U.S. got about 2.2% of its net electricity generation from "renewable" sources, according to the Energy Information Administration. By 2000, the last full year of the Clinton administration, that percentage had dropped to 2.1%. By contrast, the combined share of coal, petroleum and natural gas rose to 70% from 68% during the same time frame.

Now the share of renewables is up slightly, to about 2.3% as of 2006 (the latest year for which the EIA provides figures). The EIA thinks the use of renewables (minus hydropower) could rise to 201 billion kilowatt hours per year in 2018 from the current 65 billion. But the EIA also projects total net generation in 2018 to be 4.4 trillion kilowatt hours per year. That would put the total share of renewables at just over four percent of our electricity needs.

Mr. Gore's argument would be helped if he were also willing to propose huge investments in nuclear power, which emits no carbon dioxide and currently supplies about one-fifth of U.S. electricity needs, and about three-quarters of France's. Britain has just approved eight new nuclear plants, and the German government of Angela Merkel is working to do away with a plan by the previous government to go nuclear-free.

But Mr. Gore makes no mention of nuclear power in his speech, nor of the equally carbon-free hydroelectric power. These are proven technologies -- and useful reminders of what happens when environmentalists get what they wished for.

Mr. Gore's case would also be helped if our experience of renewable sources were a positive one. It isn't. In his useful book "Gusher of Lies," Robert Bryce notes that "in July 2006, wind turbines in California produced power at only about 10% of their capacity; in Texas, one of the most promising states for wind energy, the windmills produced electricity at about 17% of their rated capacity." Like wind power, solar power also suffers from the problem of intermittency, which means that it has to be backed up by conventional sources in order to avoid disruptions. This is especially true of hot summers when the wind doesn't blow and cold winters when the sun doesn't shine.

And then there are biofuels, whose recent vogue, the World Bank believes, may have been responsible for up to 75% of the recent rise in world food prices. Save the planet; starve the poor.

None of this seems to trouble Mr. Gore. He thinks that simply by declaring an emergency he can help achieve Stakhanovite results. He might recall what the Stakhanovite myth (about the man who mined 14 times his quota of coal in six hours) actually did to the Soviet economy.

THE LEFT CAN'T COMPETE WITH FACTS

2008-07-21T18:03:00.001-05:00

The New York Times has declined to publish an op-ed by Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, Drudge reports. Why? According to the explanation by the NYT Op-Ed editor, David "Chicken" Shipley, it just wasn't Obama enough. Chicken Shipley said that if McCain would rewrite it so that it "mirrors Senator Obama's piece" - yes, no joke, he actually wrote that - the NYT would be pleased to run it.

Why refuse to run it? Because in the marketplace of free ideas the left routinely gets it's collective butt kicked. And they know it.

This egregious case of leftward media slant, denying any evidence of victory in Iraq which McCain cites in his op-ed, is proof of that. They simply can't compete. Worse, the NYT and their Copperhead ilk spent so much ink and whining promoting defeatism in Iraq for 5 years that rather then admit wrong and premature commitment to defeat they just avoid the facts on the ground in Iraq. Period.

They redefine diversity, inclusiveness, open-mindedness, enlightenment, intellectualism, all the other leftist buzzwords, etc., to mean that they'll just refuse to acknowledge any opinion that doesn't neatly fit their "progressive" point of view. Well, I'm laughing at their superior intellect.

Because, for conservatives, having the New York Times refuse to publish your opinion is a badge of honor. Shipley, such the schmuck that he is, will probably help McCain by promoting his op-ed, and getting more people to read it, than would have happened had they just run the piece. What a moron.

Here's the McCain op-ed which the NYT was too scared to run.

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation "hard" but not "hopeless." Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there," he said on January 10, 2007. "In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that "our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence." But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, "Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress." Even more heartening has been progress that's not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama's determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his "plan for Iraq" in advance of his first "fact finding" trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military's readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five "surge" brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his "plan for Iraq." Perhaps that's because he doesn't want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be "very dangerous."

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we've had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the "Mission Accomplished" banner prematurely.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it. But if we don't win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.

WHEN THEY SAY "FAIR"...

2008-07-21T18:01:00.001-05:00

Washington is teeing up "the rich" for a big tax hike next year, as a way to make them "pay their fair share." Well, the latest IRS data have arrived on who paid what share of income taxes in 2006, and it's going to be hard for the rich to pay any more than they already do. The data show that the 2003 Bush tax cuts caused what may be the biggest increase in tax payments by the rich in American history.

The nearby chart shows that the top 1% of taxpayers, those who earn above $388,806, paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006, the highest share in at least 40 years. The top 10% in income, those earning more than $108,904, paid 71%. Barack Obama says he's going to cut taxes for those at the bottom, but that's also going to be a challenge because Americans with an income below the median paid a record low 2.9% of all income taxes, while the top 50% paid 97.1%. Perhaps he thinks half the country should pay all the taxes to support the other half.

Aha, we are told: The rich paid more taxes because they made a greater share of the money. That is true. The top 1% earned 22% of all reported income. But they also paid a share of taxes not far from double their share of income. In other words, the tax code is already steeply progressive.

We also know from income mobility data that a very large percentage in the top 1% are "new rich," not inheritors of fortunes. There is rapid turnover in the ranks of the highest income earners, so much so that people who started in the top 1% of income in the 1980s and 1990s suffered the largest declines in earnings of any income group over the subsequent decade, according to Treasury Department studies of actual tax returns. It's hard to stay king of the hill in America for long.

The most amazing part of this story is the leap in the number of Americans who declared adjusted gross income of more than $1 million from 2003 to 2006. The ranks of U.S. millionaires nearly doubled to 354,000 from 181,000 in a mere three years after the tax cuts.

This is precisely what supply-siders predicted would happen with lower tax rates on capital gains, dividends and income. The economy and earnings would grow faster, which they did; investors would declare more capital gains and companies would pay out more dividends, which they did; the rich would invest less in tax shelters at lower tax rates, so their tax payments would rise, which did happen.

The idea that this has been a giveaway to the rich is a figment of the left's imagination. Taxes paid by millionaire households more than doubled to $274 billion in 2006 from $136 billion in 2003. No President has ever plied more money from the rich than George W. Bush did with his 2003 tax cuts. These tax payments from the rich explain the very rapid reduction in the budget deficit to 1.9% of GDP in 2006 from 3.5% in 2003.

This year, thanks to the credit mess and slower growth, taxes paid by the rich may fall and the deficit will rise. (The nonstimulating tax rebates will also hurt the deficit.) Mr. Obama proposes to close this deficit by raising tax rates on the rich to their highest levels since the late 1970s. The very groups like the Congressional Budget Office and Tax Policy Center that wrongly predicted that the 2003 investment tax cuts would cost about $1 trillion in lost revenue are now saying that repealing those tax cuts would gain similar amounts. We'll wager it'd gain a lot less.

If Mr. Obama does succeed in raising tax rates on the rich, we'd also wager that the rich share of tax payments would fall. The last time tax rates were as high as the Senator wants them -- the Carter years -- the rich paid only 19% of all income taxes, half of the 40% share they pay today. Why? Because they either worked less, earned less, or they found ways to shelter income from taxes so it was never reported to the IRS as income.

The way to soak the rich is with low tax rates, and last week's IRS data provide more powerful validation of that proposition.

-- Wall Street Journal

GREGNEWS IS NOT HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS...

2008-07-16T12:52:00.001-05:00

OBAMA: OH, THAT SURGE!

2008-07-16T11:03:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama purges Web site critique of surge in Iraq
BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Monday, July 14th 2008, 8:10 PM

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama's campaign scrubbed his presidential Web site over the weekend to remove criticism of the U.S. troop "surge" in Iraq, the Daily News has learned.

The presumed Democratic nominee replaced his Iraq issue Web page, which had described the surge as a "problem" that had barely reduced violence.

"The surge is not working," Obama's old plan stated, citing a lack of Iraqi political cooperation but crediting Sunni sheiks - not U.S. military muscle - for quelling violence in Anbar Province.

The News reported Sunday that insurgent attacks have fallen to the fewest since March 2004.

Obama's campaign posted a new Iraq plan Sunday night, which cites an "improved security situation" paid for with the blood of U.S. troops since the surge began in February 2007.

It praises G.I.s' "hard work, improved counterinsurgency tactics and enormous sacrifice."

Campaign aide Wendy Morigi said Obama is "not softening his criticism of the surge. We regularly update the Web site to reflect changes in current events."

GOP rival John McCain zinged Obama as a flip-flopper. "The major point here is that Sen. Obama refuses to acknowledge that he was wrong," said McCain, adding that Obama "refuses to acknowledge that it [the surge] is succeeding."

FLYPAPER

2008-07-16T11:01:00.001-05:00

The following regards Barack Obama's argument that Iraq is not the central front on the war on terror, rather that Afghanistan/Pakistan is (more to that in a moment).

Of course, the very first problem with this is that Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leadership have plainly stated on several occasions prior to this that Iraq is indeed the central front on the war on terror.

The next problem for Obama, is that those experts on the subject, including those experts who are endorsing Obama, likewise believe that Iraq is the central front for the war on terror.

The following I took from the blogger Mad Irish:

All: Please note that Lee Hamilton, who introduced Sen. Obama at his speech in Washington today, disagrees with Sen. Obama on at least two central issues addressed in his speech today. Specifically, Sen. Obama today denied that Iraq has ever been a “central front in the war on terror,” despite the fact that Hamilton described Iraq as “a central front in the war on terror” in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee while he was co-chairing the Iraq Study Group. Further, three months ago in April 2008, Hamilton said he opposes “target dates” for withdrawal in Iraq -- something Obama is clearly continuing to embrace today with his 16-month timetable:

Obama vs. Hamilton On Iraq As “A Central Front In The War On Terror”

Obama Today: "In fact – as should have been apparent to President Bush and Senator McCain – the central front in the war on terror is not Iraq, and it never was." (Barack Obama, Remarks, Washington, D.C., 7/15/08)

In December 2006, Hamilton Told The Senate Armed Services Committee That Iraq Was “A Central Front In The War On Terror.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “If you asked the 10 members of the commission the question: “Is Iraq the central battlefront in the war on terror,” what answer would you have received?” … Hamilton: ‘I would strike the word “the” and use “a.” It is a central front. Look, al Qaeda today is a important part of the violence, but not as important as sectarian violence. It is a central front in the war on terror, but to make it THE central front overstates it.” (Lee Hamilton, Committee On The Armed Services, U.S. Senate, Testimony, 12/7/06)

Obama vs. Hamilton On Timetables For Iraq Withdrawal

Obama Today Attacked Those Who Oppose Timetables, And Offered His Own 16-Month Timetable: “We Can Safely Redeploy Our Combat Brigades At A Pace That Would Remove Them In 16 Months.” “George Bush and John McCain don’t have a strategy for success in Iraq – they have a strategy for staying in Iraq. They said we couldn’t leave when violence was up, they say we can’t leave when violence is down. They refuse to press the Iraqis to make tough choices, and they label any timetable to redeploy our troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government – not to a terrorist enemy. Theirs is an endless focus on tactics inside Iraq, with no consideration of our strategy to face threats beyond Iraq’s borders. … We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months.” (Barack Obama, Remarks, Washington, D.C., 7/15/08)

Hamilton In April 2008: "I'm not a great fan, incidentally, of target dates in foreign policy as a rule and in Iraq specifically." (MSNBC's "MSNBC Live," 4/11/08)
It's bad enough Barack Obama is attempting to revise history by acting as though he's always been an advocate of the Petraeus Surge (he has, for instance, now scrubbed his campaign website of all comments that were negative regarding the Surge), but that he's dictating policy and offering a plan on Iraq before actually traveling to Iraq and talking to General Petraeus is not just counterproductive but a foolish campaign move too.

A final point regarding the Obama camp's claim that Iraq is not the central front on terror, or only became the central front on terror after the US invaded Iraq -- FLYPAPER.

It was smart strategy to lure our enemies into the open from out of the shadows of Saudi Arabia or the caves of Afghanistan, or mosques in Europe for that matter.

If Democrats are going to get all queasy about 4,000 dead in Iraq, where the terrain is flat and far more friendly to US technology, how would they ever stomach a war in the miserable terrain of the Hindu Kush mountains, where our advantages like helicopter warfare would become neutralized due to climate and terrain?

READ THE WHOLE THING

2008-07-16T10:43:00.002-05:00

The New Reality in Iraq
By FREDERICK W. KAGAN , KIMBERLY KAGAN AND JACK KEANE
July 16, 2008; Page A17 Wall Street Journal

All of the most important objectives of the surge have been accomplished in Iraq. The sectarian civil war is ended; al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has been dealt a devastating blow; and the Sadrist militia and other Iranian-backed militant groups have been disrupted.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government has accomplished almost all of the legislative benchmarks set by the U.S. Congress and the Bush administration. More important, it is gaining wider legitimacy among the population. The attention of Iraqis across the country is focused on the upcoming provincial elections, which will be a pivotal moment in Iraq's development.

The result is that we have an extraordinary – but fleeting – opportunity to advance America's security and the stability of a vital region of the world.

As far as the civil war is concerned, there have been virtually no sectarian killings recorded for the past 10 weeks. Violence is still perpetrated by organized groups, but AQI, the remnant Sunni insurgents and Shiite fighters are now focused on attacking their own members who have defected to our side. This is a measure of their weakness. The Iraqi population is increasingly mobilizing against the perpetrators of violence, flooding American and Iraqi forces with tips about the locations of weapons caches and key militant leaders – Sunnis turning in Sunnis and Shia turning in Shia.

The fighters have not simply hidden their weapons and gone to ground to await the next opportunity to kill each other. The Sunni insurgency, as well as AQI, has been severely disrupted. Coalition and Iraqi forces have killed or detained many key leaders, driven the militants out of every one of Iraq's major cities (including Mosul), and are pursuing the remnants vigorously in rural areas and the desert.

The Shiite militias have also been broken apart, sending thousands of their leaders scurrying for safety in Iran. Iraqi forces continue to hammer Iranian-backed Special Groups and elements of the Sadrist Jaysh al Mahdi that have been fighting with them in Sadr City, Maysan Province and elsewhere. At this time, none of these networks can conduct operations that could seriously destabilize the Iraqi government. But both al Qaeda and the Iranians are working hard to refit their networks.

The larger strategic meaning of these military and political advances must be kept clearly in mind. Iraq remains a critical front in al Qaeda's war against the U.S.

Discussions in the American media about whether AQI is "really" al Qaeda are puerile. AQI's leadership, largely foreign, is part of the global al Qaeda network operating in support of Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden and his lieutenants in Pakistan and around the world send support (including foreign fighters) to Iraq and closely follow the situation there, as their repeated public pronouncements show no less than their actions. Al Qaeda's central leadership is not prepared to lose in Iraq, and has been seeking ways to regain lost ground.

Within Iraq, AQI operatives are still seeking aggressively to re-establish bases from which they can launch more substantial operations in the future. They are failing because of the continuous pressure American and Iraqi forces are putting on them from Baghdad to Mosul. If that pressure is relaxed, they will begin to succeed again.

The Iranian leaders responsible for Iranian policy in Iraq – principally Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and Brigadier General Qassim Soleimani, commander of the Qods Force – also remain determined. They are retraining and re-equipping thousands of fighters who fled the most recent Iraqi and Coalition operations in Basra, Baghdad, and Maysan Provinces.

Past patterns suggest those fighters will return to Iraq and attempt to restart attacks against Coalition Forces in time to disrupt Iraqi elections and to affect America's voting. Their attacks are likely to be more spectacular, but less effective at disrupting Iraqi government and society.

If America remains firm in its commitment to success in Iraq, success is very likely. The AQI and Shiite militias at present do not have the capacity to drive Iraq off course – unless both the U.S. and the Iraqi government make a number of serious mistakes.

The most serious error would be to withdraw American forces too rapidly. That would strengthen the resolve of both al Qaeda and Iran to persevere in their efforts to disrupt the young Iraqi state and weaken the resolve of those Iraqis, particularly in the Iraqi Security Forces, who are betting their lives on continued American assistance.

The blunt fact is this. In Iraq, al Qaeda is on the ropes, and the Shiite militias are badly off-balance. Now is exactly the time to continue the pressure to keep them from regaining their equilibrium. It need not, and probably will not, require large numbers of American casualties to keep this pressure on. But it will require a considerable number of American troops through 2009.

Recent suggestions in Washington that reductions could begin sooner or proceed more rapidly are premature. The current force levels will be needed through the Iraqi provincial elections later this year, and consideration of force reductions makes sense only after those elections are over and the incoming commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, has evaluated the new situation.

The benefits to the U.S. from seeing the fight through to the end far outweigh the likely costs. For one thing, Iraqis have shown their determination to increase their oil output, currently averaging 2.5 million barrels a day, as fast as they can – something that can only happen if their country is secure.

Far more important is the opportunity in our hands today to work with a Muslim country in the heart of the Arab world to inflict the most visible and humiliating defeat possible on al Qaeda. Success in Iraq also makes it possible to establish a strategic partnership with a legitimate, democratic majority-Shia state that is aligned with the U.S. against Iran.

Recent comments by some Iraqi leaders about the current negotiations for a status-of-force agreement – made in the context of an increasingly heated election season in Iraq, and with the desire to improve Iraq's bargaining position in the negotiations – do not call the U.S. partnership into question. As we recently found in Baghdad, even the most outspoken advocates of rapid American force reductions strongly insist on a strategic partnership with America that helps Iraq stand up to Iran. Most of Iraq's military leaders are unequivocal about the need for a continued U.S. force presence.

The Iraqi government and people – whose surging anti-Persian feeling is more obvious every day – have already shown their willingness to push back against Iranian intervention. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's attack on Iranian-backed forces in Basra, followed by Iraqi-led operations in Baghdad, central Iraq and Maysan, is proof of Baghdad's willingness. Helping Iraq to succeed is our best hope of finding a way of resolving our differences with Iran over the long term without coming to blows.

It is time for Americans to recognize it's a whole new ballgame in Iraq. The civil war is over, American troops are not an "irritant" fueling the unrest, and far from becoming dependent upon us, the Iraqi government and the army show more determination every day to run their country and to protect it. But they continue to want and need our assistance.

While victory in war is never certain until the war is over, the odds are strongly with us for once – provided we do the right thing. That is to stand by our best ally in the war against al Qaeda, and the struggle to contain Iran.

-- Mr. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Ms. Kagan is president of the Institute for the Study of War. Mr. Keane is a former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army. All have just returned from their most recent visit to Iraq.

THIGH TOUCHING TORTURE! THE HORROR, THE HORROR!

2008-07-16T10:38:00.001-05:00

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, July 15 -- Salim Ahmed Hamdan, an alleged al-Qaeda driver who faces a historic military trial next week, testified Tuesday that a female interrogator elicited information from him using sexually suggestive behavior that he called "improper."

Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden who is accused in a terrorism conspiracy, told a military court that during questioning in 2002, a female interrogator "came close to me, she came very close, with her whole body towards me. I couldn't do anything. I was afraid of the soldiers."

"Did she touch your thigh?" asked Hamdan's attorney Charles Swift.

"Yes. . . . I said to her, 'What do you want?' " Hamdan said at a pretrial hearing. "She said, 'I want you to answer all of my questions.' "

"Did you answer all of her questions after that?" Swift asked. Hamdan said he did.
Talk about PC run amok. And -- beyond the point that apparently it worked -- are we now going to classify "suggestive behavior" as torture?

In fact, we have no idea as to the context of the "improper" brush of Hamdan's leg, which could have been completely innocent and a total fantasy by Hamdan -- and I can't believe we've really gotten to this point where such trivial matters become "news" -- but one can bet that for a true-believing Islamofascist like Hamdan the very fact that the US military had the audacity to send a female interrogator is, to him and those like him, "improper."

So we're now at the point where rather than ridiculing this sexist, gynophobic, oppressive and illiberal Islamic fundamentalist culture we will instead respect it and submit to it all in the name of cultural awareness, diversity and political correctness. Absolutely bassackwards ridiculous!

WELCOME TO THE 1920s

2008-07-16T10:31:00.000-05:00

Here's Jonah Goldberg on the anti-speculation frenzy driving the populist crowd:

Never mind that there’s no evidence “speculators” — i.e. commodity traders — are doing anything to increase the price of oil. They aren’t hoarding it. No one’s cornering the market. The speculators make money when the price goes down, and they make money when it goes up. In short, they don’t care if oil prices are high or low as long as they guessed correctly.

And that may be the most infuriating part of all this. The speculators don’t want high oil prices, but Washington does.
Read the rest.

REDEFINING "PRISONER EXCHANGE"

2008-07-16T10:30:00.001-05:00

For the life of me, I'm trying to understand what Israel had to gain in this "prisoner exchange." To be a prisoner exchange, don't all the parties in question have to still be alive? It was really a remains exchange where Israel has to turn over a breathing, living terrorist to boot.

ROSH HANIKRA, Israel (CNN) -- Israeli forensic experts have begun trying to identify the remains of what are believed to be two captured Israeli soldiers, the Israel Defense Forces said.

Hezbollah officials handed over two black coffins to Red Cross officials, who will carry them over the border to Israel.

If forensics experts determine that the remains are those of Staff Sgt. Ehud Goldwasser and Sgt. First Class Eldad Regev, Israel will turn over to Hezbollah five Lebanese prisoners -- including convicted murderer Samir Kuntar, whom many Israelis consider the embodiment of evil.

Israel is also returning the remains of 199 fighters from Lebanon who Israel says were killed in clashes over the years. Nineteen coffins were being transferred onto Red Cross trucks and sent to the Lebanese side, the Israeli military said.

The forensic determination is expected to take several hours.

The Israel Defense Forces said it would not comment on the transfer until it was complete.

"The IDF has yet to complete the process of identifying the soldiers' remains and will therefore make no comments about the process conclusions until those are completed and the families of the soldiers are notified," it said in a statement. Watch as coffins are delivered »

The transfer began shortly before 10 a.m. Israel time (3 a.m. ET) at the Rosh Hanikra crossing in western Galilee, which the army had declared a closed military zone a day earlier.

The swap caps a tireless campaign by the soldiers' families to bring them home. It also ends decades of resistance by the Israeli government, which wanted to use Kuntar as a bargaining chip to obtain information about a missing airman whose plane crashed in Lebanon in 1986.

The Shiite militia Hezbollah cast the swap as a victory for all Lebanese, with one official calling it "an official admission of defeat."

...A member of the Palestine Liberation Front, Kuntar led a group of four men who entered Israel from Lebanon by boat in 1979. They killed a police officer who came across them. Then they took a 28-year-old man and his 4-year-old daughter hostage.

Kuntar shot the father dead at close range in front of his daughter and tossed his body in the sea. He then smashed the girl's head, killing her, too. In addition, a 2-year-old girl from the same family suffocated as her mother tried to stop her from crying while they hid during the violence.

Kuntar was sentenced to 542 years in prison.

...A day before the transfer, Goldwasser's father, Shlomo, held out hope about his son's fate.

"They were kidnapped alive. [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nassrallah swears on it the first day that he announced to the world he kidnapped two soldiers alive," the father said. "If tomorrow he brings them in coffins, it means that he killed them -- his words. It means that they killed them, and if he killed them I am waiting for him to be punished."
The poor father. This is a just exchange? Hezbollah is absolutely correct, this is in fact a victory for them.

REST IN PEACE, TONY SNOW

2008-07-14T21:14:00.004-05:00

Tony Snow was hands down the best presidential press secretary in the modern era. Sharp and concise, he was a rare voice of clearly communicated conservatism in a time when it is desperately needed. God bless his family.

FREDDIE & FANNIE FOLLIES

2008-07-14T21:07:00.000-05:00

Read this essay by Peter Wallison regarding the Freddie Mae/Fannie Mac fiasco. In short, some 80 percent of all housing loans are ultimately owned by either Freddie Mae or Fannie Mac, institutions which are neither here nor there private nor public sector. What's scary is what our government did for housing loans with these two quasi-socialist Frankensteins they now want to do to investment banking. (If you have a subscription you can check out the WSJ's history of columns critical of Freddie Mae/Fannie Mac going back to 2002.)

Although they are owned by shareholders, Fannie and Freddie are government sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, chartered by Congress to perform a government mission: providing a national market for mortgages and enhancing the availability of affordable housing. This, together with a brace of special statutory exemptions and the fact that the U.S. government has always bailed out its GSEs, has led the capital markets to believe, correctly, that the U.S. government will never allow Fannie and Freddie to fail.

The result has been a complete loss of market discipline, uncontrolled growth, and the development of two giant companies whose deteriorated financial condition now threatens the stability of both the U.S. and the world economy. The story of Fannie and Freddie is a cautionary tale about the moral hazard created by government support for private institutions -- a tale we saw played out in the S&L debacle less than 20 years ago, and one we may be about to inflict on ourselves again.

There might have been a time when it was possible to believe that the feds would not stand behind Fannie and Freddie's obligations, but today, the possibility that any holder of their senior debt (or their mortgage-backed securities) would be allowed to suffer a loss is simply unimaginable.

First, because of unprecedented conditions in the capital markets, they are now virtually the only consistent buyers and securitizers of U.S. mortgages. If they could no longer raise the necessary funds to continue this activity, housing finance -- already very weak -- would come to a halt. The consequences for the housing market in the United States would be dire.

The result of a GSE default for the financial markets and the world economy would, if anything, be even worse. Fannie and Freddie's debt securities are held by thousands of U.S. banks -- often in amounts in excess of their capital -- and in large amounts by financial institutions around the world. Many of the world's most important central banks also hold huge inventories of these securities.

If there were ever the slightest doubt that the U.S. would stand behind these obligations, there would be a rush for the exits that would make what occurred in the equity markets last week look like a stately minuet. The value of GSE debt securities would plummet, and with it the capital of virtually all the world's major banks and other financial intermediaries. With weakened capital, lending would decline and further damage already weak economies, perhaps with truly disastrous results.

Thus, because the U.S. government will not allow Fannie and Freddie to default, they should be able to survive. If housing prices turn up again and their losses are stanched (or if they can raise more capital to cover the losses they will suffer in the future), these two companies will get through this period. This is by far the most likely outcome of the current period of stress.

But their survival will not be unalloyed good news. It will chase the wolf from the door only temporarily. Their embedded losses -- made worse by the risky commitments they are probably now making in order to recover their profitability or hide their losses -- will, as in the case of the S&Ls, eventually have to be paid. And of course, if Fannie and Freddie actually become insolvent, the U.S. government is now ready to step up. Considering that these two companies now have something like $5.3 trillion in liabilities, this is no small step.

This is a bad state of affairs; the U.S. government has lost any room to maneuver. Worse still are indications that no lessons have been learned. In the same week when it became apparent that implicit government backing has made the U.S. hostage to the health of two companies that grew out of control, Messrs. Bernanke and Paulson told Congress that they wanted a new regulatory structure for investment banks like Bear Stearns.

In this plan, the Fed would have supervisory authority over these companies and oversee a formal system for their "orderly liquidation." The only reason the Fed might want to regulate the investment banks is that it believes itself to be somehow at risk. The markets, ever clear-eyed, will read this for what it is -- potential Fed backing if the big investment banks get into trouble. In other words, we are now proposing to introduce a government-created moral hazard into investment banking. The resulting loss of market discipline will replicate the experience with the S&Ls and Fannie and Freddie.

According to reports, not an eye blinked in the House Financial Services Committee when the Fed's bid for more power was laid on the table last Thursday. This is fully consistent with the past willingness of Congress to condone -- and even encourage -- unimpeded growth at Fannie and Freddie.

If Congress actually believes that the Fed can assume responsibility for supervising and liquidating the large investment banks -- and yet not become responsible for bailing them out when their enhanced access to capital results in massive losses -- they deserve to wrestle with the future crisis they are now setting in train. But the American people do not.

OBAMA: DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO

2008-07-10T18:05:00.003-05:00

Barack Obama isn't bilingual. Neither are his children. But he's "embarrassed" because the rest of us are just like him. More condescending nonsense from the Obama camp:

[Investors Business Daily] Obama peddled his Ameriphobic nonsense at a town hall meeting Tuesday morning in Powder Springs, Ga. Asked a simple question about what he'd do to stop teenagers from dropping out of school — more of a job for a student body president than a U.S. president — he lost the plot, as the (English-speaking) Australians like to say, venturing into dangerous (for him) no-teleprompter territory.

"I agree that immigrants should learn English," he ranted. "But understand this: Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they'll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. "You know, it's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say (is), 'Merci beaucoup.' "

Does he think that one day the rest of the world will stop speaking English just to keep single-language Americans out of the loop? Is he aware that English, as an example, is the worldwide official air-traffic-control language? Has he ever talked to foreign businessmen — or any businessman at all, for that matter — who have different native tongues, yet speak English to each other so they can be understood? Or is he trying to establish some cosmopolitan street-cred with the hipsters who fawn over him?

English became the global language because Britain spread its mother tongue through colonization and trade. And the U.S. sailed capitalism, ambition, a tireless work habit, fairness, justice, the rule of law and a rigorous military defense against tyranny to the top of the world. It's not fashionable to say so in the circles that Obama travels in, but the power and universality of the English language confirm — and strengthen — America's way of life.
Exactly. The world's citizens don't learn English because they have some enlightened attitude that Americans do not. They learn it because so many of them, for several hundred years, had to in order to be successful and compete. Example, just as a greater percentage of American military and politicians spoke French, say, circa 1780 -- it served a necessity! Today, Europeans learn English because the United States conducts business globally, has an annual Gross Domestic Product of $13 trillion -- grossly more than any other country on the planet -- and because they're (Europeans) more likely to vacation here than we are there.

And here I was told that Obama was supposed to be brilliant. His opening comment, the idea that if we learn Spanish our overwhelming influx of illegal immigrats -- mostly from Mexico -- will be more likely to learn English, is juvanile. If Bush said such a thing, he'd be ridiculed, and justly so.

On the contrary to Obamanomics, the opposite is true. Why bother learning English if everyone speaks Spanish? Were you to move to Japan you'd learn Japanese because you'd have to do so, but you wouldn't bother if they all spoke English, right? Else, what's the point?

And while we're on the topic, why should any American bother learning a European language, especially French? The last time I checked, France wasn't exactly becoming an economic powerhouse. Seems to me, if you're going to make the argument, we better learn Chinese.

Finally, Obama's point doesn't sit well with Americans at large (hat tip to Jim Geraghty)

Eighty-three percent (83%) place a higher priority on encouraging immigrants to speak English as their primary language. Just 13% take the opposite view and say it is more important for Americans to learn other languages.
But what do they know? I mean, how dare they question the hypocrisy of the messianic Rockstar-in-Chief Barack Obama.

GREAT LETTER TO WSJ

2008-07-10T18:04:00.000-05:00

The Metaphysics and Some Politics of Global Warming

Regarding Bret Stephens's "Global Warming as Mass Neurosis" (Global View, July 1): In 1992, at my 25th Harvard College reunion, we got an accurate forecast of the "ideological convenience" driving global warming alarmism. In a discussion of the Rio Summit on environment and development, one of my classmates effused, "Who would have thought that the environment would bring us world government?" In other words, the advent of world-wide "pollution" controls will lead to world government (which all of us statist Harvard grads eagerly await).

On the other hand, climatologist Patrick Michaels has noted that we merely need to "follow the money" to explain global warming enthusiasm among scientists and academicians: Huge amounts of taxpayer dollars are running down the drain of climate research, and the people raking in the bucks are the same ones spouting the global warming nonsense.

--Grant W. Schaumburg Jr.
Boston

DON'T BE A PETRO-HATER

2008-07-10T18:02:00.002-05:00

A Bipartisan Fix for the Oil Crisis
By JOSEPH PETROWSKI
July 10, 2008; Page A15 Wall Street Journal

As president of Gulf Oil, New England's largest independent petroleum company, and as someone who has spent his life in and around energy markets, I find the tone and substance of the current debate about our energy policy to be profoundly disappointing.

Partisan sides are using a serious crisis to advance political agendas, create political attack sound bites, and launch hearings to "expose" the culprit. Pick your favorite: speculators, Big Oil, environmentalists, China, India, etc.

This is not leadership.

A fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work, and how an effective government can support the private sector, is delaying remedies that will bring down energy prices now. These remedies are to be found in both supply and demand – and both Democrats and Republicans need to demonstrate their command of this fact. Energy is too important a cornerstone of domestic prosperity and international stability to be used as a debating prop.

To Democrats:

Supply must be increased, and that will require more drilling.

We can responsibly drill. The technology to find, drill and recover oil has evolved tremendously, and careless drillers will fear tort lawyers more than government regulators. The claim that the oil companies are sitting on leases and not drilling defies all logic. With oil at $135 per barrel and drilling rigs renting at $300,000 per day, there are no idle rigs anywhere. Furthermore, economic decline – and war induced by basic resource struggles – are greater threats to the environment and American workers than drilling.

Your claim that any oil we drill for now will not come on line for five years or longer – and will thus have no effect on prices today – is incorrect. Unlike past oil crises, where the spot price of oil (that is, today's price) rose more than forward prices, the oil price for delivery in 2012 is trading at $138 per barrel. The market is sending a clear price signal that our problem is in the future – because we do not have the will to curb demand or increase supply.

How many houses would someone invest in if there were a future guarantee that the price would not decline? It is anticipation of ever-increasing prices that fuels the mania.

The oil market, however, has more than anticipation; it has a well-defined forward price signal. This is a key component of the added $25-$40 per barrel in current oil prices. Congressional hearings and "make it go away" legislation will not stop that. Demonstrate the national will to address the supply and demand issues now and it will.

As forward prices decline, watch how quickly the spot price comes down.

To Republicans:

Efficiency is a huge source of new energy. It is scandalous that we have let the mileage standards decrease over the past 25 years. Whether through mandates or tax policy, active government intervention is needed. Republicans have to stop acting as if the "market" is some pristine state of nature that is not subject to active shaping.

The latest farm bill, ethanol and sugar tariffs, the cost of the Iraq war and Bear Stearns all make that reasoning ring hollow. So when some "free marketeers" attack annual biofuel subsidies of $4 billion, fleet mandates, or government research and development expenditures, it is hard not to view this criticism as at best naïveté, and at worst hypocrisy.

Finally, can we stop with the nonsensical talk of "energy independence," the end of petroleum, and postured, ineffectual boycotts of Exxon Mobil? We cannot, should not and will not be independent in a global economy, and petroleum is not going to disappear.

A more accurate metaphor is the global energy market as a giant bath tub where more withdrawals (Chinese and Indian) are being made every day. The only consistent new supply to that tub is coming from periodically unstable and unfriendly places (Nigeria, Russia, Iran, Venezuela).

Our national interest is to add more energy, use it more efficiently, and diversify its source and type. This will serve to lessen the power of any one choke point (geography, nation or source).

Using market mechanisms and the private sector (admit it, Democrats) alongside an engaged, effective and focused government (admit it, Republicans), true leaders can solve this crisis decisively.

Mr. Petrowski is president of Gulf Oil.

IAEA TRACK RECORD

2008-07-09T17:16:00.004-05:00

GOOD NEWS IS NO NEWS

2008-07-09T17:10:00.002-05:00

The fatal defeatists of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, etc., may all believe we're losing in Iraq, but apparently Iraq's neighbors do not:

[WSJ] The Prime Minister is also making it clear to his Arab neighbors that his government is not about to collapse. Apparently, they believe him: Jordan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have announced plans to break the Arab diplomatic embargo of Iraq and return their ambassadors to Baghdad; the UAE has also forgiven $7 billion of Iraqi debt. Perhaps Saudi Arabia and Egypt will follow.
Ho-hum, more just desserts from the Petraeus surge and not a word from our mainstream media regarding it. Indeed, antiwar liberals as a whole have invested so much in our defeat in Iraq that they choose to ignore any facts of success, especially since good news in Iraq translates to a more competitive campaign from John McCain. And the mainstream media certainly can't have anyone ruining the promotion of their favorate rock-star-in-chief, Barack Obama.

Example: what hardball toics did NBC Today Show co-anchor Meredith Vieira press upon Obama? His shopping habits and that he liked pie over candy and junk food. Tough stuff.

The, ahem, hard-hitting program spent 20 minutes on the Obama family. Can the McCain family expect equal time from NBC? Of course, that might be more difficult since McCain's two sons are both serving in our armed forces, one having served in Iraq.

But back to the lecture at hand, the MSM's obvious antiwar slant in its Iraq coverage.

Gerard Baker of the UK Times explains:

the evidence is now overwhelming that on all fronts, despite inevitable losses from time to time, it is we who are advancing and the enemy who is in retreat. The current mood on both sides of the Atlantic, in fact, represents a kind of curious inversion of the great French soldier's dictum: "Success against the Taleban. Enemy giving way in Iraq. Al-Qaeda on the run. Situation dire. Let's retreat!"

... Since it is remarkable how pervasive this pessimism is, it's worth recapping what has been achieved in the past few years.

Afghanistan has been a signal success. There has been much focus on the latest counter-offensive by the Taleban in the southeast of the country and it would be churlish to minimise the ferocity with which the terrorists are fighting, but it would be much more foolish to understate the scale of the continuing Nato achievement. Establishing a stable government for the whole nation is painstaking work, years in the making. It might never be completed. But that was not the principal objective of the war there.

Until the US-led invasion in 2001, Afghanistan was the cockpit of ascendant Islamist terrorism. Consider the bigger picture. Between 1998 and 2005 there were five big terrorist attacks against Western targets - the bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, 9/11, and the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005. All owed their success either exclusively or largely to Afghanistan's status as a training and planning base for al-Qaeda.

In the past three years there has been no attack on anything like that scale. Al-Qaeda has been driven into a state of permanent flight. Its ability to train jihadists has been severely compromised; its financial networks have been ripped apart. Thousands of its activists and enablers have been killed. It's true that Osama bin Laden's forces have been regrouping in the border areas of Pakistan but their ability to orchestrate mass terrorism there is severely attenuated. And there are encouraging signs that Pakistanis are starting to take to the offensive against them.

Next time you hear someone say that the war in Afghanistan is an exercise in futility ask them this: do they seriously think that if the US and its allies had not ousted the Taleban and sustained an offensive against them for six years that there would have been no more terrorist attacks in the West? What characterised Islamist terrorism before the Afghan war was increasing sophistication, boldness and terrifying efficiency. What has characterised the terrorist attacks in the past few years has been their crudeness, insignificance and a faintly comical ineptitude (remember Glasgow airport?)

The second great advance in the War on Terror has been in Iraq. There's no need to recapitulate the disasters of the US-led war from the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 to his execution at the end of 2006. We may never fully make up for three and a half lost years of hubris and incompetence but in the last 18 months the change has been startling.

The "surge", despite all the doubts and derision at the time, has been a triumph of US military planning and execution. Political progress was slower in coming but is now evident too. The Iraqi leadership has shown great courage and dispatch in extirpating extremists and a growing willingness even to turn on Shia militias.

Basra is more peaceful and safer than it has been since before the British moved in. Despite setbacks such as yesterday's bombings, the streets of Iraq's cities are calmer and safer than they have been in years. Seventy companies have bid for oil contracts from the Iraqi Government. There are signs of a real political reconciliation that may reach fruition in the election later this year.

The third and perhaps most significant advance of all in the War on Terror is the discrediting of the Islamist creed and its appeal.

This was first of all evident in Iraq, where the head-hacking frenzy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his associates so alienated the majority of Muslims that it gave rise to the so-called Sunni Awakening that enabled the surge to be so effective.

But it has spread way beyond Iraq. As Lawrence Wright described in an important piece in The New Yorker last month, there is growing disgust not just among moderate Muslims but even among other jihadists at the extremism of the terrorists.

Deeply encouraging has been the widespread revulsion in Muslim communities in Europe - especially in Britain after the 7/7 attacks of three years ago. Some of the biggest intelligence breakthroughs in the past few years have been achieved from former al-Qaeda supporters who have turned against the movement.

There ought to be no surprise here. It's only their apologists in the Western media who really failed to see the intrinsic evil of Islamists. Those who have had to live with it have never been in much doubt about what it represents. Ask the people of Iran. Or those who fled the horrors of Afghanistan under the Taleban.

This is why we fight. Primarily, of course, to protect ourselves from the immediate threat of terrorist carnage, but also because we know that extending the embrace of a civilisation that liberates everyone makes us all safer.

Every death is an unspeakable tragedy. It's right that each time a soldier is killed in action we ask why. Was it really worth it?

The right response to the loss of brave souls such as Corporal Sarah Bryant, the first British woman to die in Afghanistan, is not an immediate call for retreat. It is, first of all, pride; a great, deep conviction that it is on such sacrifice that our own freedoms have always rested. Then, defiance. How foolish is the enemy that it might think our grief is really some prelude to their victory? Finally, confidence. We are prevailing in this struggle. We know it. And everywhere: in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and among Muslims around the world, the enemy knows it too.

DEBUNKING ENERGY MYTHS

2008-07-08T17:55:00.006-05:00

This is a great op-ed from Investors Business Daily. The McCain camp needs to memorize the whole thing and rattle it off at every opportunity.

• "We can't drill our way out of our energy crisis."

Actually, we can. As we've noted before, conservative estimates put the total amount of recoverable oil in conventional deposits at about 39 billion barrels. Offshore, we have another 89 billion barrels or so. In ANWR, 10 billion barrels.

In oil shale deposits, we have more than 1 trillion barrels of oil. In perspective, that's about four times the total reserves of Saudi Arabia. And if estimates of shale reserves as high as 2 trillion barrels prove true, we'll have about a 300-year supply of oil just from shale. This compares with current estimated total U.S. oil reserves of about 21 billion barrels.

ANWR alone is expected to yield 1 million barrels of oil a day. Now make the highly conservative assumption that we're able to get a like amount of oil from the other sources — for a total increase of 3 million to 4 million barrels of oil a day.

That's an enormous rise in oil output. Today, we produce just under 8 million barrels of oil a day from domestic sources. So we could, in effect, boost our energy output 50%, and thus our energy independence, by bringing an additional 4 million barrels of oil to thirsty world markets each and every day.

By the way, those calculations don't include the trillions and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas found in the same locations, which, along with nuclear power, could be used to fire our power plants.

By 2030, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, we will need at least 30% more energy to fuel our economy. Nearly 85% of that increase will come from oil and gas, even with expected gains for alternative energy. Can't drill our way out? In fact, it's the only way out of our energy crisis.

• "Oil companies are sitting on 68 million acres of oil leases and refuse to drill."

This is yet another slander of "Big Oil" by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — one that has become a major talking point for Democrats in Congress. It's completely dishonest.

Oil companies have spent billions of dollars for those leases. Drilling has increased by more than 66% since 2000. They are searching for oil even as you read this. Some parts of those 68 million acres will have oil, some won't. But at $145 a barrel, you can bet oil companies have plenty of incentive to find it.

That said, 68 million acres is in fact a minuscule amount. Some 94% of federal lands — 658 million acres — remains off-limits to exploration. Another 97% — or 1.7 billion acres — of federal offshore properties likewise remains off-limits. These lands contain tens of billions of barrels of recoverable oil. It's there for the taking, now.

How much energy is there? Federal lands, according to the American Petroleum Institute, hold 651 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to fuel 60 million households for 160 years. They hold at least 116 billion barrels of oil, maybe more. That's enough to fuel 65 million cars and provide fuel oil for 3.2 million homes for 60 years.

As such, it's the height of irresponsibility for Congress to leave these lands off the table. It ensures we remain vulnerable to pariah petrostates like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iran and others who wish us ill.

• "Even if drilling works, it'll take a decade or more for the oil to flow."

This is quite an argument coming from the Democratic Party, which has made keeping oil off the market a linchpin of its energy policy for decades.

If President Clinton hadn't vetoed the idea of drilling in ANWR back in 1995, we'd have that oil on the market today. Ditto if Congress had approved ANWR drilling in 2002, when President Bush requested it.

Even so, the larger point is false anyway. New oil will be flowing in some cases within three to four years, according to industry estimates. But the impact on prices will be immediate. Why? Because markets would suddenly have to discount future oil prices for the expected gain in oil supply. That would cause oil prices, especially in futures markets, to drop.

By the way, this isn't just conjecture. President Reagan, within a week of his inaugural in 1981, removed domestic controls on oil. Energy prices began tumbling almost immediately, with oil falling from $34 a barrel in early 1981 to just $11 by 1986.

It worked before, and it'll work again.

• "Record profits by big oil companies are the reason for soaring prices."

It's true that oil company profits have never been higher. But put into perspective, oil company profits are high because the price is high. As a share of revenue, profits aren't so high.

The average profit, as we've noted before, is around 8 to 9 cents to the dollar. That compares with about 7 cents to the dollar for manufacturers and more than 15 cents to the dollar for computer makers.

In short, oil profits aren't out of whack with the rest of industry.

What doesn't get said is that while oil companies have profit margins of about 8%, about 12% of the price of a gallon of gas goes to the government in the form of taxes. When indirect taxes are included, the share is even higher.

So who are the real price-gougers?

From 1981 to 2006, the oil industry made $867 billion in profits. Yes, that's a lot. But over that same time, they paid total taxes of $1.2 trillion, Energy Department data show. And that doesn't include taxes of $519 billion paid to foreign countries.

Please remember that the next time a politician vows to hit "Big Oil" with a windfall profits tax or some other idea. The tax won't be paid by the oil company; it will be paid by you, the consumer.

In coming weeks, we'll try to look at some of the other myths surrounding America's energy. The problem is, there are so many that dispelling the falsehoods about energy can become a full-time occupation for a newspaper.

In the meantime, let us suggest that if you think more oil will help, you should tell your local members of Congress. They're easy to find at the government Web site thomas.loc.gov. The only problem is, on this topic, many won't want to be found.
Here's a quick additional point for bullet #1, whereby the opponents claim we can't drill our way out of the problem. Let's suppose that the crew at IBD isn't right (they are), that still leaves the fact that this isn't an all or nothing proposition. We can't drill our way out of the problem? Well, okay, how about drilling most of the way out of the problem? How about half the way out of it? How about even a quarter of the way?

I'll tell you this, doing nothing, which is what we've been doing -- not drilling our own proven oil reserves, not building a refinery in 30 years, not building nuclear power plants as even France, Japan and Sweden do (which amazingly puts our energy policy to the left of those countries), heck even liberals in the northeast blocked, yes blocked, a proposed windmill farm in Cape Cod -- has proven to be absurd and deeply expensive. Moreover, it's essentially a tax on the poor. Those who couldn't afford gas prices last year are doubly screwed this year.

Remember that fact the next time you hear one of these self-proclaimed champion of the working man claim that high gas prices are ultimately a good thing.

No, it's not.

RESERVES VERSUS PROVEN RESERVES

2008-07-07T17:50:00.000-05:00

[WSJ] "I want you to think about this," Barack Obama said in Las Vegas last week. "The oil companies have already been given 68 million acres of federal land, both onshore and offshore, to drill. They're allowed to drill it, and yet they haven't touched it – 68 million acres that have the potential to nearly double America's total oil production."

Wow, how come the oil companies didn't think of that?

Perhaps because the notion is obviously false – at least to anyone who knows how oil and gas exploration actually works. Predictably, however, Mr. Obama's claim is also the mantra of Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, John Kerry, Nick Rahall and others writing Congressional energy policy. As a public service, here's a remedial education.

Democrats are in a vise this summer, pinned on one side by voter anger over $4 gas and on the other by their ideological opposition to carbon-based energy – so, as always, the political first resort is to blame Big Oil. The allegation is that oil companies are "stockpiling" leases on federal lands to drive up gas prices. At least liberals are finally acknowledging the significance of supply and demand.

To deflect the GOP effort to relax the offshore-drilling ban – and thus boost supply while demand will remain strong – Democrats also say that most of the current leases are "nonproducing." The idea comes from a "special report" prepared by the Democratic staff of the House Resources Committee, chaired by Mr. Rahall. "If we extrapolate from today's production rates on federal lands and waters," the authors write, the oil companies could "nearly double total U.S. oil production" (their emphasis).

In other words, these whiz kids assume that every acre of every lease holds the same amount of oil and gas. Yet the existence of a lease does not guarantee that the geology holds recoverable resources. Brian Kennedy of the Institute for Energy Research quips that, using the same extrapolation, the 9.4 billion acres of the currently nonproducing moon should yield 654 million barrels of oil per day.

Nonetheless, the House still went through with a gesture called the "use it or lose it" bill, which passed on Thursday 223-195. It would be pointless even if it had a chance of becoming law. Oil companies acquire leases in the expectation that some of them contain sufficient oil and gas to cover the total costs. Yet it takes years to move through federal permitting, exploration and development. The U.S. Minerals Management Service notes that only one of three wells results in a discovery of oil that can be recovered economically. In deeper water, it's one of five. All this involves huge risks, capital investment – and time.

If anything, the Democrats ought to be dancing in the streets about "idle" leases. It means fewer rigs. The days of hit-or-miss wildcatting have been relegated to the past by new, more efficient technologies, such as seismic imaging, directional drilling (wells that are "steered" underground) and multilateral drilling (multiple underground offshoots from a single wellbore).

At the same time, finding new reservoirs has become far more complex. Except for a few very large fields discovered decades ago like Prudhoe Bay, most recent discoveries have been smaller, deeper and less concentrated. The U.S. needs a continuous supply of discoveries to replace declining wells.

Yet companies are not allowed to explore where the biggest prospects for oil and gas may exist – especially on the Outer Continental Shelf. Seven of the top 20 U.S. oil fields are now located in analogous deepwater areas (greater than 1,000 feet) in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2006, Chevron discovered what is likely to be the largest American oil find since Prudhoe, drilled in 7,000 feet of water and more than 20,000 feet under the sea floor. The Wilcox formation may have an upper end of 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil and should begin producing by 2014 – perhaps ushering in a new ultradeepwater frontier.

Likewise, in April, the U.S. Geological Survey revised its estimate for the Bakken Shale, underneath the badlands of North Dakota and Montana. The new assessment – as much as 4.3 billion barrels of oil – is a 25-fold increase over what the Survey believed in 1995. Such breakthroughs confirm that very large reserves exist, if only Congress would let business get at them.

All of which has Democrats sweating bullets. The leadership is desperate to avoid debating a Department of Interior spending bill, because they know Republicans will offer amendments lifting the drilling moratorium that may peel off some Democrats. Last week, Chairman David Obey shut down the Appropriations Committee rather than countenance more domestic energy production. Given Democratic energy illiteracy, this is a fight the GOP can win if it keeps up the pressure.

LOW TAXES = HIGH RECEIPTS

2008-07-07T17:49:00.000-05:00

[WSJ] For those who still claim that tax rates don't matter to economic decisions or U.S. competitiveness, we present Exhibit A: the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act.

This law gave American companies a one-year window in 2005 to repatriate earnings from foreign subsidiaries to the United States at a 5.25% tax rate. Normally companies must pay the 35% U.S. corporate tax rate, minus a credit for whatever foreign taxes they paid on those earnings.

The IRS examined the results from this tax cutting experiment and found that the money came back in a flood. More than 800 U.S. corporations repatriated $362 billion from foreign operations. Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation had predicted closer to $200 billion. These dollars are now being invested in the U.S., rather than remaining in Europe or China. This capital infusion may be one reason that U.S. business investment rose 9.6% in 2005 – the highest rate in more than a decade.

Many Democrats, liberal groups and even some economists in the Bush Treasury opposed the measure four years ago, predicting it would lose revenue and merely be a tax holiday for profitable corporations. The Joint Tax Committee estimators also blundered again by predicting a mere $2.8 billion in revenue gains in the first year and then big losses after 2005. As always, they underestimated how tax reductions change behavior. The tax incentive raised $18 billion in 2005, and revenues have continued to exceed estimates. Instead of getting 35% of nothing, as U.S. companies kept their cash abroad, the Treasury took in 5.25% of the hundreds of billions the companies brought home.

"FAITH" OF WARMING

2008-07-07T17:47:00.001-05:00

In the absence of God, man will create his own. Bret Stephens expands on that old adage.

NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that "80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters," according to a report by NPR's Richard Harris.

The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.

This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming?

... Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.

A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?

As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.

In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, "morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.

DAMNED WHEN THEY DON'T

2008-07-06T15:49:00.000-05:00

Iraq's Oil Surge
July 5, 2008; WSJ - Page A10

Here's a thought experiment: Assume that Iraq's democratic government declared it was nationalizing its oil industry, a la Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, while excluding American companies from the country. How do you think U.S. politicians would react? With angry cries of "ingratitude" and "this is what Americans died for"?

Of course they would, led no doubt by that critic for all reasons, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. So it is passing strange that Mr. Schumer and other Senators are now assailing Iraq precisely because it is opening up to foreign oil companies, especially to U.S. majors like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. For some American pols, everything that happens in Iraq is bad news, especially when it's good news for the U.S.

Iraq announced this week that it is inviting global competition to develop its major oil reserves, with 35 oil companies invited to bid. By tapping outside capital and expertise, Iraq hopes to increase production by 60%, providing a much-needed boost to its own coffers and the world's tight oil supply.

This is welcome news. With elections looming later this year and next, the temptation for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government must have been to play the nationalist card – the way that Mr. Schumer did against Dubai Ports World's proposed U.S. investment in 2006 (see, for instance, "Ports of Gall"). Many Iraqis remain suspicious of outside oil companies – the legacy of a colonial past in which Iraq felt exploited for its oil.

Instead, Iraq chose competitive bidding that will bring in the best expertise to exploit its national resource. Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani is predicting that, with outside help, Iraq could become the second or third largest oil-producing country in the world. Today it produces about 2.5 million barrels a day, compared to 11 million for the world-leading Saudis. Foreign companies will be required to have an Iraqi partner, and to hire Iraqis, while most oil revenues will still flow to the Iraqi people.

What seems to irk Mr. Schumer – and running mates John Kerry and Missouri's Claire McCaskill – is Iraq's decision to sign shorter-term, no-bid service contracts with Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Total and Chevron. Most of these firms had extensive experience in Iraq prior to Saddam Hussein's nationalization, and were chosen because their knowledge will help Iraq boost near-term production. The contracts will run no more than two years, and all five firms have spent the past three years providing training, analysis and advice to Iraq – free of charge.

The Democrats nonetheless stomped their feet in a letter last week to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. They demanded that she intervene to stop the Iraqis "from signing contracts with multinational oil companies until a [national oil law] is in effect in Iraq." Their complaint is that a hydrocarbon law is one of the Bush Administration's "benchmarks for reconciliation" in Iraq, and that these oil contracts would only "further deepen political tension in Iraq and put our service members in even greater danger." They also griped that the five firms would get an "insider's advantage" to later oil bidding.

Also piling on is House baron Henry Waxman, who is upset with a separate contract that the Kurdistan Regional Government has signed with Texas's Hunt Oil. Mr. Waxman thinks the Bush Administration didn't do enough to stop the deal. Then again, this is old news, as the contract was signed last year. And while the Baghdad central government wasn't pleased the Kurds had moved on a contract without national approval, the deal hasn't impeded Iraq's broader progress.

We doubt French politicians are objecting to Total's contract, but American Democrats are so blinkered about Iraq that they now object even to U.S. companies getting business on the merits. The hydrocarbon law would help to clarify revenue-sharing between Baghdad and Iraq's outlying provinces. But even without that law, oil revenues are already flowing throughout the country, including to Sunni-majority areas.

The faster and more efficiently the oil deposits are developed, the more revenue there will be to distribute. And the faster Iraq will be able to rebuild on its own – which is what Democrats say they want. Meanwhile, by inviting foreign partners, Iraq is avoiding the trap of nationalization that has harmed so many countries. It concentrates political power, undermining democracy. National oil companies also tend to underinvest in technology, letting harder-to-exploit oil become a wasting asset.

What the U.S. should promote in Iraq is some kind of oil trust, or stock or revenue dispersal, that would give individual Iraqis a share of their oil wealth. This would be both a tool to build national unity and to prevent any one political group from dominating Iraq's main revenue source. If Mr. Schumer wants to help on that score, he might do some good.

THE FOUR WHO SIDE WITH KING GEORGE

2008-06-27T09:38:00.002-05:00

Before I begin my week long July 4 vacation it seems only fitting to post some comments regarding the 5-4 decision overturning the D.C. gun ban. Furthermore, it seems fitting that this ruling comes just days before we celebrate our July 4 holiday, symbolic of a generation who understood that the quickest road to tyranny is an unarmed populace.

What's so troubling, however, is that four Supreme Court justices truly believe that the Second Amendment does not guarantee an individual's right to bear arms, even in light of overwhelming historical evidence of the sheer number of persons from our founding era who owned guns but who were neither members of a standing army nor state militia!

The thought process of the dissenting justices is as astonishing as it is illogical. Consider this comment:

Justice John Paul Stevens: "[the majority] would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons."
Tools? Is Justice Stevens really suggesting that the Second Amendment of our Bill of Rights is actually a "tool" for the government! How does someone with such a backwards view of the Framer's intent and the Constitution ever become a member of the highest court in the land? The framers wrote the Bill of Rights to empower the people, the masses, not to empower the elected few, not to give government more "tools."

The "free State" in the clause "...being necessary to the security of a free State..." isn't the government, but the people. Otherwise, what's the point? Why bother noting that arms are for securing the state (the governing) when tyrants all over the world were doing just that without a written Constitution? That is, if the right to bear arms applied only to state-controlled militias, what difference would this be than that of the government already controlled by King George III?

There was one precise Framer's intent for the Second Amendment: To use armed force to overthrow a government who might turn its armies on the people. Period.

This intent is so historically documented that only the disingenuous could dare to argue otherwise.

Thomas Jefferson, himself neither a member of an army nor militia, but who owned rifles and pistols (aka handguns), put it thusly:

"No freeman shall ever be de-barred the use of arms." -- proposed for the Virginia Constitution of 1776.

We established however some, although not all its [self-government] important principles . The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, in all cases to which they think themselves competent, (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves, in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved,) or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed;
---Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright, 1824.

"The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves in all cases to which they think themselves competent..., or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of the press." --Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright, 1824.

"What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms." --Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, 1787.
And, like Jefferson, James Madison, considered the father of the Constitution, was a lawyer by trade. Thus, both were wealthy, both isolated from Indians or other frontier dangers, both with no need to hunt for survival.

Here's what Madison thought of gun ownership to combat tyranny:

A Government resting on a minority, is an aristocracy not a Republic, and could not be safe with a numerical & physical force against it, without a standing Army, and enslaved press, and a disarmed populace.
In other words, to survive, tyrants need a lack of those things -- press, assembly, gun ownership -- which our Bill of Rights promises.

As Eugene Volokh put it, I guess this makes James Madison what anti-gun factions would term a "gun nut."

THE BEST AND THE WORST

2008-06-26T19:19:00.000-05:00

Late last week, Gallup published its annual survey of public confidence in U.S. institutions.

At the top, with an impressive combined "great" or "a lot" approval of 71% sits the military, described since 2003 as presiding over a "failure" in Iraq.

At the bottom of the heap, displacing HMOs as our worst institution, one finds the second branch of government, our Congress, at 12%. The Gallup folks noted it is "the worst rating Gallup has measured for any institution in the 35-year history of this question." Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, come on down! You've made history.

-- Dan Henninger

GREAT LETTER TO WSJ

2008-06-26T19:18:00.000-05:00

Forget Oil, Tax Lawyers' Windfalls
June 25, 2008; Page A14

Recent investigations of some plaintiffs tort law firms have resulted in criminal pleas or massive settlements in the hundreds of millions of dollars, as you've documented in several editorials including "The Firm" (June 18). More investigations are to follow, according to the news. My point is that these cases have finally disclosed an inconvenient truth: The plaintiffs tort bar makes obscene profits at incredible profit margins.

Meanwhile, the Democrat-controlled Congress wants to tax oil companies on their "windfall profits." Why are they not targeting the plaintiffs tort bar for their outrageous profits? The profit margins they make would likely be found to be obscene to most Americans, especially when people are made to realize that the oil companies' profit margins are not only below most other industries, but far, far less than that of the plaintiffs bar.

The reason we hear nothing about these law firms is simple: The tort lawyers are among the biggest contributors to the Democratic Party. Not only does Congress ignore the obscene profits of the tort bar, but new laws are being proposed or passed that protect or enhance those profits. An example is the recent bill to allow tort lawyers to deduct "loans" made to clients to finance their litigation.

If taxing "windfall" profits is truly the goal, then the tort bar is certainly an appropriate target. Personally, I have no problem with anyone making as much profit as they can in a free market, but then I am not the one grandstanding and demanding new taxes on "windfall profits." For me, I bet on Congress's hypocrisy to win out over its alleged principle on this one.

John Watson
Marietta, Ga.

DRIER ON FISA REFORM

2008-06-26T19:16:00.002-05:00

Dave Drier, in an interview with Dennis Miller on his radio show last week, emphasized the importance of granting legal immunity to the Telecomms when they pass to our intelligence agencies communication intelligence. As you remember, several years ago the patriotic-impared New York Times published classified information on the warrantless wiretap program (even though communications which include at least one party not on domestic soil were never considered warrant-required). Democrats then made an election issue of it, claiming that it would ruin our democracy -- even though the British and French have been doing so for decades and their Republics are just fine, thank you very much.

Drier quoted Mike McConnell -- our current Director of National Intelligence who was also served on Bill Clinton's National Security Council -- as saying that ever since the Telecomms stopped monitoring communications without assurances of immunity from legal threats, "We are missing about 60 percent of the communications taking place among the bad guys, the people who want to kill us."

Nice, huh.

So when Barack Obama, among others, say we are less safe now than before 9-11, they're partly right. But not for the reasons they think.

Now, here's the down side of the new FISA deal.

The steep price of this authority is that from now on all of these overseas eavesdropping orders will require advance approval by a special FISA court of rotating judges. This will apply even to emails or calls that emanate in, say, Peshawar and never leave Pakistan – except that by the accident of our Internet age they may happen to move through American switching networks.

The deal does carve out an exception to this judicial preapproval for "exigent circumstances" involving urgent threats, but the FISA judges would still have to approve after the fact. No other nation in the world, to our knowledge, requires such deference to judges when tracking foreign enemies abroad.

This judicial review is supposedly to check abuses by the executive. But it also imposes a judge in the middle of the wartime chain of command. A judge, moreover, who may have no special intelligence expertise and no understanding of the enemy threat. For this reason, these judges will in practice tend to rubber stamp executive requests.

But the precedent of judicial intrusion is still dismaying because it will be used as a baseline to limit future Presidential discretion. As for potential abuses, at least an Attorney General and President are accountable to voters if they use this authority to spy on their political opponents. On the other hand, if a willful judge denies a surveillance request and Americans are killed as a result, he is accountable to no one. Recall the "wall" of separation between intelligence and law enforcement that developed in the 1990s under domestic FISA and which the 9/11 Commission so criticized. No one paid any political price for that.
That wall, by the way, was mostly due to the insistance of former Attorney General Janet Reno's deputy, Jamie Gorelick.

By the way, should he defeat McCain in November, do you know who Barack Obama is considering for his Attorney General post? Yep, Jamie Gorelick.

Welcome to September 10, 2001.

WHAT SAY YE, MURTHA?

2008-06-26T19:13:00.001-05:00

Haditha Justice
Marines vs. smears.

By Michelle Malkin

Yet another U.S. Marine, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, had charges dropped Tuesday in the so-called Haditha massacre — bringing the total number of Marines who’ve been cleared or won case dismissals in the Iraq-war incident to seven. “Undue command influence” on the prosecution led to the outcome in Chessani’s case. Bottom line: That’s zero for seven for military prosecutors, with one trial left to go.

I repeat: Haditha prosecution goes 0-7. But you won’t see that headline in the same Armageddon-sized font the New York Times used repeatedly when the story first broke.

The Times, Rep. John Murtha (D., Pa.), and the rest of the antiwar drum-pounders who fueled the smear campaign against the troops two years ago should hang their hands in shame. They won’t, of course. Perpetuating the “cold-blooded Marines” narrative means never having to say you’re sorry.

It means never having to look Lt. Col. Chessani (charges dismissed), Lt. Andrew Grayson (acquitted), Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum (charges dismissed), Capt. Lucas McConnell (charges dismissed), Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt (charges dismissed), Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz (charges dismissed), Sgt. Frank Wuterich (awaiting trial), and their families in the eyes and apologize for the preemptive character assassination they all faced at the hands of the hyperventilating, noose-hanging press.

Murtha and company applied Queen of Hearts (“Off with their heads!”) treatment to our own men and women in uniform while giving more benefit of the doubt to foreign terror suspects at Gitmo. It is worth recalling, because the press won’t do it for you, what they concluded about the now-crumbling Haditha case in the summer of 2006 before a single formal charge had been filed.

MSNBC hangman Keith Olbermann, who couldn’t wait to define the entire war in Iraq by a single moment about which he knew nothing, inveighed that the incident was “willful targeted brutality.” Due process? For convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, of course. For our military? Never mind.

Far-left The Nation magazine railed, “Enough details have emerged . . . to conclude that . . . members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment perpetrated a massacre.” The publication also judged the event “a willful, targeted brutality designed to send a message to Iraqis.” Not content with hanging the troops, The Nation pinned blame on the president and a so-called “culture of impunity” that supposedly permeates the most accountable military in the world.

Singing the same tune as The Nation, the New York Times spilled a flood of front-page ink on the case and took things a step further in a lead editorial blaming not just President Bush, but also top Pentagon brass for the “nightmare” killings in Haditha. Times reporter Paul von Zielbauer filed over 30 stories on the case, which the paper wishfully called the “defining atrocity” of the Iraq war.

Hoping to facilitate a self-fulfilling prophecy, media tools around the world likened Haditha to the Vietnam War’s most infamous atrocity — from the Guardian (“My Lai on the Euphrates?”) to the London Telegraph (“Massacre in Iraq just like My Lai”) to the Los Angeles Times (“What happened at the Iraqi My Lai?”) to the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd (“My Lai acid flashback”) and the Associated Press, which reached into its photo archives to run a 1970 file photo of My Lai to illustrate a Haditha article.

And, of course, there’s the permanent stain left by the slanderous propaganda of Rep. Murtha — the stab in the Marines’ backs heard ‘round the world: “Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.”

Relatives of the Haditha Marines have called for Congress to censure Murtha, who cuts and runs to the nearest elevator when questioned about the Haditha dismissals. He and the Haditha smear merchants have skated while the men and their families suffered global whippings on the airwaves and eternal demonization in print. Whose “culture of impunity”?

DEMS SIDE WITH THE SAUDIS!

2008-06-19T17:28:00.002-05:00

[AFP] Saudi Arabia said Thursday it planned to increase daily oil output by 200,000 barrels per day, according to a statement posted on the country's London embassy website.
The Saudis are increasing output because they're worried that the United States will increase -- long term -- the amount of domestic oil we drill and refine. This puts Democrats on the same side of the political fence as Saudi Arabia -- they both oppose more US domestic oil production.

Brilliant job, Democrats! We'll see how that works out for you come November...

Meanwhile, I'm sure you've heard it by now -- US oil companies, say the opponents of more drilling for domestic oil, already have access to the vast majority of federal lands, but are choosing not to drill for oil.

Here's the rest of the story:

[WSJ]...it is true that only 0.46% of the Outer Continental Shelf is producing oil (though only 2.3% is under lease). But because of the exploration ban, oil companies go in more or less blind, not knowing the extent of the available resources. Millions of acres lack oil or gas, which is why it's called "exploration." Federal law stipulates that an oil company must sink a producing well within 10 years or lose the lease; it often takes nearly a decade to navigate the geography, not to mention the long process of environmental and regulatory review. Or coping with multiple lawsuits from the green lobby.
So, Democrats would have the US oil companies invest billions of dollars of their capital to explore areas that have no *proven* oil reserves, while blocking access to those lands that *have* proven oil reserves.

THE JC PENNY WINDFALL PROFITS TAX?

2008-06-19T17:27:00.002-05:00

Sure, sure, Karl Rove is evil and all that, or so we're told. But as it's been said, facts are stubborn things. Here's a few from Mr. Rove, regarding the "windfall profits tax":

Instead ask this: Why should we stop with oil companies? They make about 8.3 cents in gross profit per dollar of sales. Why doesn't Mr. Obama slap a windfall profits tax on sectors of the economy that have fatter margins? Electronics make 14.5 cents per dollar and computer equipment makers take in 13.7 cents per dollar, according to the Census Bureau. Microsoft's margin is 27.5 cents per dollar of sales. Call out Mr. Obama's Windfall Profits Police!

It's not the profit margin, but the total number of dollars earned that is the problem, Mr. Obama might say. But if that were the case, why isn't he targeting other industries? Oil and gas companies made $86.5 billion in profits last year. At the same time, the financial services industry took in $498.5 billion in profits, the retail industry walked away with $137.5 billion, and information technology companies made off with $103.4 billion. What kind of special outrage does Mr. Obama have for these companies?

QUOTE OF THE DAY

2008-06-19T17:27:00.001-05:00

While it may be a revelation to the senator [Sen. Kent Conrad, D--ND], ordinary Americans, myself included, do not apply for their mortgages by calling the CEO of the mortgage company... I had hoped that a new Democratic majority meant the end of cronyism and petty bribery. Sen. Conrad's actions have disproved that.

-- Rob Teir

WHOM WOULD IRAQIS VOTE FOR?

2008-06-19T17:25:00.000-05:00

Great editorial by Bret Stephens:

However it turns out for John McCain this fall -- and so far he's running his general election campaign the way Gen. Ricardo Sanchez ran counterinsurgency ops -- the Arizona Republican is sure to carry at least one battleground state by a landslide. That state is called Iraq.

Last week, the Pew Research Center released the results of a survey of more than 24,000 people in 24 countries. Result: From Japan to Tanzania to Germany to Russia, the world has "more confidence" in Barack Obama than in his Republican rival to "do the right thing regarding world affairs."

But Pew did not poll Iraqis, whose opinions about the choice America makes should weigh at least as heavily with us as the collective wisdom of, say, Brazil. Whom would they prefer as the next U.S. president?

Constraints of time and money being what they are, I have not gotten round to phoning 1,000 Iraqis to get their views on Obama-McCain. But I did sit down last week with four key provincial Iraqi leaders, Sunnis and Shiites, who -- without actually endorsing Mr. McCain -- made their views abundantly clear.

"The Iraqis are really fearful about some of the positions the Democratic Party has adopted," says Sheik Ahmed Abu Rishah. "If the Democrats win, they will be withdrawing their forces in a very rapid manner."

Mamoun Sami Rashid al-Awani, the governor of Anbar province, agrees. "We have over a million casualties, thousands of houses destroyed," he says. "Are we going to tell [Iraqis] that the game is over? That the Americans are pulling out?"

Messrs. Abu Rishah and Awani, both Sunni, have possibly the toughest political jobs on the planet. Sheik Abu Rishah inherited the leadership of the Iraq Awakening movement when his brother was killed by al Qaeda last September. Gov. Awani's immediate predecessor was kidnapped and killed by insurgents, and he has survived more than a score of assassination attempts.

Today, the governor speaks with a mixture of confidence and foreboding. He insists al Qaeda has been vanquished. But, he adds, "Iraq is in a strategic location and has huge resources. There are a lot of eyes on Iraq." Later in the conversation, he makes his point more precisely. "Liberating Iraq is a very good dish. And now you are going to hand it over to Iran?"

A sense of incredulity hangs over the way Iraqis see the U.S. political debate taking shape. The governor tells a moving story about their visit to Walter Reed hospital, where they were surprised to find smiles on the faces of GIs who had lost limbs. "The smile is because they feel they have accomplished something for the American people."

But the Iraqis came away with a different impression in Chicago, where they had hoped to meet with Mr. Obama but ended up talking to a staff aide. "We noticed there was a concentration on the negatives," the governor recalls. "The Democrat kept saying that Americans have committed a lot of mistakes. Yes, that's true, but why don't you concentrate on what the Americans have achieved in Iraq?"

The Iraqis are even more incredulous about Mr. Obama's willingness to negotiate with Iran, which they see as a predatory regime. "Do you Americans forget what the Iranians did to your embassy?" asks the governor. "Don't you know that Ahmadinejad was one of [the hostage takers]?"

Here Hussein Ali al-Shalan, a Shiite from Diwaniyah in southern Iraq, offers a view. "For a long time, Iran has felt like Iraq is theirs. Our fear [about U.S. negotiations with Iran] is, you will be giving them something that we believe would prolong our agony. We are not against Iran. We have to coexist and work toward our mutual interests. The question is, is this possible at this stage? That's why we need the army to give a final push so the Iraqis can feel the fruits of our democracy."

It's not just Iran. "There is no other country that supports us," says Gov. Awani. "What is happening in Iraq scares everyone," by which he means the neighboring autocracies that have something to fear from a successful democratic model in their midst.

That only makes America's ambivalence toward its democratic creation that much stranger to the Iraqis. Will the next administration abandon both its principles and its friends in the region? For what?

The administration and the Iraqi government are now wrangling over a status-of-forces agreement -- evidence that Iraq has reached a point where it can once again act like a sovereign nation. But the Iraqis leave no doubt that they want a deal, not least "so Iraq would be able to protect U.S. interests in the region," as Sheik Abu Rishah puts it. Having lost 4,100 Americans for Iraq, the Iraqis are offering to return the sacrifice -- assuming only that the alliance endures.

Throughout our interview, the men did not stop fingering their prayer beads, as if their future hinges on their ability to make their case to the American public. They're right: It does. Which is why Iraq, all but alone among the nations, will be praying for a McCain victory on the first Tuesday in November.

TIM RUSSERT ON MEDIA BIAS

2008-06-19T17:24:00.000-05:00

"I am for having women in the newsroom and minorities in the newsroom -- I'm all for it. It opens up our eyes and gives us different perspectives. But just as well, let's have people with military experience; let's have people from all walks of life, people from the top-echelon schools but also people from junior colleges and the so-called middling schools -- that's the pageantry of America . . . You need cultural diversity, you need ideological diversity. You need it."

That's a quote from an interview Tim Russert had with Bernard Goldberg, author of the 2001 hit exposing mainstream media slant, Bias.

FRIENDS OF ANGELO 2

2008-06-19T17:23:00.000-05:00

[WSJ] Give Senator Christopher Dodd credit for nerve. On Tuesday, the very day he finally admitted knowing that Countrywide Financial regarded him as a "special" customer, the Connecticut Democrat also announced that he was bringing to the Senate floor a housing bailout sure to help lenders like Countrywide.

How much will Countrywide benefit from Mr. Dodd's rescue? The Senator's plan allows mortgage lenders to dump up to $300 billion of their worst loans on to taxpayers via a new Federal Housing Administration refinancing program, provided the lenders are willing to accept 87% of current market value. The program will be most attractive to lenders and investors holding subprime and slightly-less-risky Alt-A loans made during the height of the housing bubble in 2006 and 2007.

As the market leader during that period, Countrywide originated $167 billion of such loans, more than 11% of the nationwide total, according to Inside Mortgage Finance. Analyst Fred Cannon of Keefe, Bruyette and Woods estimates that the company is still holding more than $30 billion in subprime and Alt-A loans on its books, based on the company's most recent quarterly financials.

Even for the loans Countrywide has already packaged and sold, the company would still benefit from the bailout. That's because Countrywide continues to service the loans, and every loan that goes bad means increased costs for the servicer.
Those mortgage loan sales also typically come with a guarantee that Countrywide will buy back the loans if it turns out they were fraudulent. The more loans that fail, absent a federal refinancing, the more investors will be digging into the details of these stinkers and tossing them back to Countrywide. Mindful of the looming danger, in the first quarter of this year Countrywide increased by 46% its reserves to cover these so-called "rep-and-warranty" agreements.

What's more, the company is holding $34 billion in home equity loans, which are even more risky than the mortgage loans, and typically result in 100% losses for the lender if a borrower defaults. The Dodd bailout will make it more likely that Countrywide gets some recovery from the worst of these loans because the mortgage holder will need to negotiate a settlement with the owner of the home equity loan before participating in the federal bailout.

If borrowers and lenders take full advantage of this new federal program, and Countrywide loans go south at roughly the same rate as those from other lenders, this suggests a potential taxpayer bailout of more than $25 billion for Countrywide-originated loans. Even if the losses turn out to be far less, why should taxpayers do anything to help a company that did so much to foment the mortgage mess?
Meanwhile, Mr. Dodd continues to insist that, though he knew he was a "special" Countrywide customer, he didn't think he was getting any special financial benefit. But a $75,000 reduction in mortgage payments is no small matter for anyone living on a Senate salary of $169,300. Why else would he be known around Countrywide as a "Friend of Angelo" – Angelo being Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo.

Yesterday, nine Senate Republicans led by South Carolina's Jim DeMint sent a letter asking Majority Leader Harry Reid to delay consideration of Mr. Dodd's housing bailout bill in light of its benefits for Countrywide – and Countrywide's benefits for Mr. Dodd. That's an excellent idea, in addition to a Congressional and Justice Department probe of Countrywide, Fannie Mae and the favors they seem to have spread around Washington. American taxpayers need to understand more about who they're being asked to bail out here, and why.

FRIENDS OF ANGELO 1

2008-06-19T17:21:00.000-05:00

Congress and the Countrywide Scandal
By DICK ARMEY
June 18, 2008; Page A15

Countrywide Financial Corp.'s "friends of Angelo" program provided sweetheart loans to key banking players in Washington, D.C. They included former Fannie Mae chief executive Jim Johnson, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.).

The growing scandal surrounding the "friends of Angelo" loans (so-called by company employees, referring to Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo) should serve as a political wake-up call. Yet the Senate appears intent on pushing forward legislation, co-authored by Sen. Dodd, that would bail out the worst actors in the subprime mortgage banking industry.

Campaigning in Lancaster, Pa., on March 31, Sen. Barack Obama blamed Countrywide's CEO for "infecting the economy and helping to create a home foreclosure crisis." Yet Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) and Mr. Dodd have crafted a bill to provide $300 billion in new taxpayer loan guarantees to Countrywide and others. The bill will allow troubled financial institutions to foist the riskiest mortgages in their portfolios onto the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) -- ultimately putting the American taxpayer on the hook for their bad bets.

Right now, nearly a third of Countrywide's mortgage portfolio is composed of an especially chancy loan called a "payment-option ARM." Also known as negative-amortization loans, payment-option ARMs allow borrowers to pay less than the interest owed each month, with the shortfall added to the principal balance. At set intervals the loans are recalculated, or recast, to be fully amortizing. The new payments -- based on current interest rates and a higher balance -- rise dramatically.

Hundreds of thousands of payment-option ARMs are scheduled to recast next spring, which everyone expects to cause a wave of delinquencies. The Dodd-Frank plan would allow Countrywide and others to cherry-pick their worst loans and roll them over to the FHA. The bill has been advanced in the name of homeowners, but it's all too clear who is being rescued.

The FHA cannot handle a Dodd-Frank wave of $300 billion "in-distress" loans. The loan volume alone will nearly double the size of the FHA. Yet last week the agency, floundering under its existing portfolio, announced $4.6 billion in new losses. These losses destroy 22% of the FHA's entire capital reserves and raise doubts about the agency's solvency.

On June 9, FHA Commissioner Brian Montgomery told reporters that he opposes the Dodd-Frank approach, saying that the FHA "is not designed to become the federal lender of last resort, a mega-agency to subsidize bad loans." Last week the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that banks will use the program to offload their "highest-risk loans" to the taxpayer, and that a stunning 35% of all of the loans refinanced through Dodd-Frank will eventually default on the FHA.

Unsurprisingly, Countrywide executives have testified in support of expanded FHA refinancing. The company itself is a longtime and significant contributor to Messrs. Dodd and Frank. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics' opensecrets.org, Mr. Dodd raised more than $6.3 million this election cycle -- 76% of his total war chest -- from banks, finance and real estate companies.

As for Republicans, most members of the Senate Banking Committee voted for the Dodd-Frank bill in exchange for reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The reforms, part of a deal brokered by Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.), create a new regulator to establish tougher standards for the portfolio holdings of Freddie and Fannie.
While both of these agencies are in dire need of reform, this deal is still a mistake. By foisting this compromise on their Republican colleagues, Democrats are holding the reform of Fannie and Freddie hostage in order to increase bipartisan support for a bailout of reckless mortgage lenders.

Moreover, the bill creates a new tax that will create a permanent "affordable housing trust fund" -- a $500 million per-year slush fund designed to funnel money to left-wing activist groups like Acorn. Freddie and Fannie must pay into this fund even if they are not profitable, compromising their already overextended capital base.

In a free market, businesses take risks and reap either profits or losses. But markets only work when businesses are held accountable for their bad decisions. The message this proposed legislation sends to the market is clear: Big lenders like Countrywide who make bad bets can count on generous bailouts -- and responsible renters, homeowners and taxpayers who pay their bills on time can count on getting stuck with the tab.

--- Mr. Armey, House majority leader from 1995 to 2002, is chairman of FreedomWorks.

TAX CUTS = PRO-GROWTH

2008-06-16T16:53:00.002-05:00

New Evidence on Government and Growth
By KEITH MARSDEN
June 16, 2008; Page A15

In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan embraced the ideas of a small group of economists dubbed "supply-siders." They argued that lower taxes and slimmer government would stimulate growth, enterprise, harder work and higher levels of saving and investment. These views were widely ridiculed at the time, dismissed as "voodoo economics."

Reagan did succeed in lowering some taxes. But a Democrat-controlled Congress weakened their impact by raising government spending sharply, resulting in large budget deficits.

A quarter of a century later, many more countries have cut taxes and reined in heavy-handed government intervention. How far have they gone down this path, and with what success?

My study, "Big, Not Better?" (Centre for Policy Studies, 2008), looks at the performance of 20 countries over the past two decades. The first 10 have slimmer governments with revenue and expenditure levels below 40% of GDP. This group includes Australia, Canada, Estonia, Hong Kong, Ireland, South Korea, Latvia, Singapore, the Slovak Republic and the U.S.

I compared their records to the 10 higher-taxed, bigger-government economies:
Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Both groups cover a representative range of large, medium and small economies measured by their gross national incomes. The average incomes per capita of the two groups are similar ($27,046 and $30,426 respectively in 2005).

Most governments have reduced their top tax rates and spending-to-GDP ratios over the last decade or so, according to data published by the OECD, IMF and World Bank.
But slimmer governments have done so at a faster pace, and to significantly lower levels. Their highest tax rate on personal income fell to a group average of 30% in 2006 from 36% in 1996. Top corporate rates were lowered to an average of 22% from 30%. Their average ratio of total government outlays to GDP fell to 31.6% in 2007, from an average peak level during the previous two decades of 40.4%
Investment growth jumped to an average annual rate of 5.9% in 2000-2005, from 3.8% over the previous decade. Exports have risen by 6.3% annually since 2000. The net result was a surge in economic growth. The IMF reports that GDP soared in the slimmer-government group at a 5.4% average annual rate from 1999-2008 (including its forecast for the current year), up from a 4.6% rate over the previous decade.

Over that same period, the bigger-government group was more timid in its tax reductions. Their highest individual rates declined to an average of 45% from 49%, and corporate rates to 29% from 35%. Furthermore, their average spending-to-GDP ratio only fell to 48.3% from a peak of 55.2%.

The bigger-government group therefore failed to gain any competitive advantages in global markets by generating or attracting larger investment funds. Their investment growth slowed to an average annual rate of 0.8% in 2000-2005, from 4.1% in 1990-2000. Their export growth rate almost halved to 3.1% annually in 2000-2005, down from 6.1% in 1990-2000. The bottom line is a drop in their average annual GDP growth rate to 2.1% in 1999-2008, from 2.3% over the previous decade.

Nor did they balance their books. They ran budgetary deficits averaging 1.1% of GDP in 2006, whereas slimmer governments generated an average surplus of 0.3% of GDP. Their net government debt averaged 39.2% of GDP in 2006, more than four times higher than the latter's. Interest payments on their debt took 2.3% of their GDP, compared with an average of just 0.5% in the slimmer-government group.

Slimmer-government countries also delivered more rapid social progress in some areas. They have, on average, higher annual employment growth rates (1.7% compared to 0.9% from 1995-2005). Their youth unemployment rates have been lower for both males and females since 2000. The discretionary income of households rose faster in the first group. This allowed their real consumption to increase by 4.1% annually from 2000-2005, up from 2.8% in 1990-2000. In the bigger-government group, the growth of household consumption has slowed to a 1.3% average annual rate, from 2.1% during the 1990-2000 period.

Faster economic growth in the first group also generated a more rapid increase in government revenue, despite (or rather, because of, supply-siders suggest) lower overall tax burdens.

Slimmer-government countries seem to have made better use of their smaller health resources. Total spending on health programs reached 9.5% of GDP in the bigger government group in 2004, 1.6 percentage points above the average in the slimmer-government group. Yet slimmer-government countries have raised their average life expectancy at birth at a faster pacer since 1990, reaching an average level of 78 years in 2005, just one year below the average for bigger spenders. Average life expectancy is now 80 years in Singapore, although government and private health programs combined cost only 3.7% of its GDP.

Finally, spending by bigger governments on social benefits (such as unemployment and disability benefits, housing allowances and state pensions) was higher (20.3% of GDP in 2006) than that of slimmer governments (9.6%). But these transfers do not appear to have resulted in greater equality in the distribution of income. The Gini index measuring income distribution is similar for both groups.

Other forces clearly helped to narrow income disparities in slimmer-government economies. These forces include wage-setting practices, saving habits, the availability of employer-funded pension schemes, and income sharing among extended families.

Both groups reduced the share of defense spending in GDP over the past decade. The slimmer-government average fell 0.1 points to 2.2% in 2005, but this level was 0.5 percentage points above the bigger-government average. The average share of armed forces personnel in the total labor force in the bigger-government group fell to 1.1% from 1.5% in 1995, whereas it grew to 1.7% from 1.5% in the slimmer-government group.

Information on public order and safety expenditures is incomplete. But for the 11 countries for which data are available, slimmer governments seem to take their responsibilities more seriously. They spent an average of 1.8% of GDP on these functions in 2006, compared with 1.5% by bigger governments.

The early supply-siders were right. My findings firmly reject the widely held view that lower taxes inevitably result in cuts in public services, slower growth and widening income inequalities. Today's policy makers should take note of how tax cuts and the pruning of inefficient government programs can stimulate sluggish economies.
Mr. Marsden, a fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies in London, was previously an adviser at the World Bank and senior economist in the International Labour Organization.

REST IN PEACE, TIM RUSSERT

2008-06-13T23:59:00.000-05:00

I honestly liked Tim Russert a lot. He was a great journalist. And in this world of blatant media slant, one way and the other, to left and to right, I think Russert was one of the most effective at keeping slant in check. His death is a loss to journalism, a loss to politics, and most importantly a loss to his family.

God bless them and comfort them.

IF WE DON'T, OTHERS WILL...

2008-06-13T19:15:00.000-05:00

... and sell it to us at a far higher price.

SPEAKING OF "PRESIDENT" ANTHONY KENNEDY

2008-06-13T19:07:00.000-05:00

Critics of the Bush Administration's antiterror policies often cite the attitudes of our European allies as models of wisdom and effectiveness. And sometimes these critics are right, though not in the way they imagine.

Only a day before the Supreme Court handed down yesterday's Boumediene decision (see here) – which gives alien detainees access to American courts and American rights that they had sought to destroy – the British parliament voted to extend the time terrorist suspects can be held without charge to 42 days from 28. In the U.S., it's 48 hours.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the government of Angela Merkel last week approved a draft law widening the powers of the federal police to monitor homes, telephones and computers. Germany's regional police already enjoy some of these powers. But German federalism makes it difficult for law enforcement to act effectively when terrorists cross provincial borders, a loophole the old Baader-Meinhof gang was notorious for exploiting. This is the very problem Berlin now seeks to correct.

The British bill barely carried in parliament and faces an uphill challenge when it goes to the House of Lords. But it has the support of 69% of the public – not much of a surprise in a country where the chief of domestic intelligence (MI5) has publicly estimated that at least 2,000 people pose a serious threat to national security. The German bill, too, will be fiercely debated as it works its way through its various readings. But what a contrast to the attitude of Democrats in the U.S. Congress, who have refused to extend liability protection to phone companies that assisted the government in wiretapping foreign terrorist suspects in the immediate aftermath of September 11.

It has been nearly seven years without a major terrorist attack on American soil. Europeans have not been so lucky (though they've had several lucky escapes). Maybe that's why they're becoming more "American" in taking a hard line on terrorists, even as America's own Supreme Court moves in the opposite direction.

--WSJ

"PRESIDENT" ANTHONY KENNEDY

2008-06-13T19:04:00.002-05:00

In previous rulings this same Supreme Court asked Congress and the president to create a system to hold and try illegal combatants during wartime. They did so with two laws, the 2006 Detainee Treatment Act and the 2006 Military Commissions Act. Now the court says, "just kidding," as Justice Scalia sarcastically rebuked in his dissent of the 5-4 ruling. The Court's majority opinion, written by the five liberal justices, is completly at odds with historical legal precident on this issue. Keep reading.

To reach yesterday's decision, Justice Kennedy also had to dissemble about Justice Robert Jackson's famous 1950 decision in Johnson v. Eisentrager. In that case, German nationals had been tried and convicted by military commissions for providing aid to the Japanese after Germany's surrender in World War II. Justice Jackson ruled that non-Americans held in a prison in the American occupation zone in Germany did not warrant habeas corpus. But rather than overrule Eisentrager, Mr. Kennedy misinterprets it to pretend that it was based on mere "procedural" concerns. This is plainly dishonest.

By the logic of Boumediene, members of al Qaeda will now be able to challenge their status in court in a way that uniformed military officers of a legitimate army cannot. And Justice Scalia points out that this was not a right afforded even to the 400,000 prisoners of war detained on American soil during World War II. It is difficult to understand why any terrorist held anywhere in the world – whether at Camp Cropper in Iraq or Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan – won't now have the same right to have their appeals heard in an American court.

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution contains the so-called Suspension Clause, which says: "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." Justice Kennedy makes much of the fact that we are not currently under "invasion or rebellion." But he ignores that these exceptions don't include war abroad because the Framers never contemplated that a non-citizen, captured overseas and held outside the U.S., could claim the same right.

Justice Kennedy's opinion is full of self-applause about his defense of the "great Writ," and no doubt it will be widely praised as a triumph for civil liberties. But we hope it is not a tragedy for civil liberties in the long run. If there is another attack on U.S. soil – perhaps one enabled by a terrorist released under the Kennedy rules – the public demand for security will trample the Constitutional delicacies of Boumediene. Just last month, a former Gitmo detainee killed a group of Iraqi soldiers when he blew himself up in Mosul. And he was someone the military thought it was safe to release.

Justice Jackson once famously observed that the Constitution is "not a suicide pact." About Anthony Kennedy's Constitution, we're not so sure.
What's truly ironic is that these five justices may themselves be targets of terrorists one day released prematurely from Guantanamo. Recall Spanish authorities charged 32 Islamic extremists for their failed plot to bomb Spain's National Court (their equivilant of the Supreme Court). In a lesson of the folly of appeasement, which is something that these justices should have considered, this bombing plot occurred after Spain's withdrawl from Iraq. In other words, Spain's forign policies are irrelevant to the bombing radicals, rather to the Islamicists, Spain's liberally-constitutional parlimentary style of government (i.e, not being a sharia-law state) is their true crime.

OH, THAT MEDIA BIAS

2008-06-12T19:06:00.002-05:00

Have a little fun real quick, input into Google: +"stunning setback" guantanamo. You can do the same with "stinging rebuke," etc.

Page after page of uncreative reporters parroting one another on today's "stunning setback" and so on of a Supreme Court ruling a right of Guantanamo detainees to challenge their imprisonment in federal court.

WSJ: The much-anticipated decision, which broke 5-4, opens the door to the first-ever independent review of the reasons hundreds of men have been held at the offshore naval base for as long as six years. Reporter Jess Bravin writes that it is the third ruling in four years to reject the White House's claims of power over prisoners it deems enemy combatants. Taken together, the rulings repudiate President Bush's view that the 9/11 attacks imbued him with authority to set aside civil liberties akin to that President Lincoln assumed in the Civil War and President Roosevelt asserted during World War II.
Whether one agrees with the decision or not it's ridiculous to call yet another 5-4 decision, in which Justice Kennedy swings left, as a rebuke or that Bush's war decisions are somehow grossly different than Lincoln or Roosevelt.

A rebuke is 9-0, or 8-1 or at least 7-2. Heck, one might even make the argument with a 6-3 ruling, where at least one conservative justice sides with the 5 liberals. This decision is nothing but a typically partisan one in a series of 5-4 partisan rulings. Had there been one more conservative on the court, and that ruling been in favor of Bush by 5-4, you can wager your next paycheck that the media and opponents would paint the decision as partisan.

(Just as they did the 2000 election, for they never would have labeled that 5-4 decision as a "stunning rebuke" of Gore. However, the 7-2 Supreme Court decision that the Florida Supreme Court's method for recounting ballots - in just three Democratically controlled counties - was unconstitutional -- that's a stunning rebuke! Got it?)

Even worse, to compare Bush's detention of 300 men -- who were armed, wore no uniforms, followed no Geneva conventions or recognized rules of war -- to Roosevelt's extreme imprisonment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans (that is to say, citizens of the US) is nothing more than historical masturbation -- pleasurable to the revisionist but fantasy nonetheless.

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. MCCAIN

2008-06-12T17:14:00.002-05:00

Economist Larry Kudlow notes that one never knows what John McCain one is going to get.

A few days ago McCain delivered a Reaganesque speech on economic policy, which included tributes to growth through low taxes, supply-side philosophy and credit to private business as the backbone of the country.

But this morning on NBC's Today Show , McCain talks of evil oil, cartels, finite oil (huh!?), and "obscene profits.

[Kudlow] When asked about gas prices at the pump, and whether they could go any lower, Sen. McCain said he didn't think so because "You've got a finite supply, basically, and a cartel controlling it."

This is exactly wrong. There is no finite supply, or if there is we are 100 years away from it. I don't know who has put this thought into the senator's mind, but it is a bad thought in terms of energy and a bad thought in terms of the politics of this campaign.

Look, we have the Bakken fields, the outer continental shelf and all the offshore drilling opportunities, ANWR, and so forth. There's probably over a trillion barrels worth of reserves out there. And Republicans in the Senate are trying to move a deregulated drilling bill through the process. McCain should be backing this and talking about it.

Democrats are out there pushing cap-and-trade, which would jack up gasoline and oil energy prices, damage the economy, and create a massive central-planning exercise. The Democratic Congress has done nothing to alleviate the oil shortage. They're captured by the greenies. They should be blamed.

This is a real turnaround issue for the Republicans and Mr. McCain. But McCain's not going there.
This is what angers me so much about Republicans today. With the exception of a few, most Republicans (1) don't recognize opportunity when it bites them on the rear, and (2) are absolutely terrible at communicating conservative ideals [perhaps because (3) so many of them are not conservatives but just average ideologically expedient politicians].

As Kudlow says, more domestic drilling, and creating refineries to turn the oil into fuel (and plastics for that matter) should be a slam-dunk issue for McCain and Republicans.

The WSJ summarizes the heart of the problem -- obstructionism.

Anyone wondering why U.S. energy policy is so dysfunctional need only review Congress's recent antics. Members have debated ideas ranging from suing OPEC to the Senate's carbon tax-and-regulation monstrosity, to a windfall profits tax on oil companies, to new punishments for "price gouging" – everything except expanding domestic energy supplies.

Amid $135 oil, it ought to be an easy, bipartisan victory to lift the political restrictions on energy exploration and production. Record-high fuel costs are hitting consumers and business like a huge tax increase. Yet the U.S. remains one of the only countries in the world that chooses as a matter of policy to lock up its natural resources. The Chinese think we're insane and self-destructive, while the Saudis laugh all the way to the bank.

There are two separate moratoria on offshore drilling: One is a ban that Congress has attached to every budget since 1982, and the other is a 1990 executive order that President Bush has waived in only a few cases. Republicans made failing attempts to overcome both when they ran Congress, but current Democratic leaders and their green masters remain adamantly opposed. The new political opportunity amid record prices is to convince enough rank-and-file Democrats that they'll suffer at the polls if they don't break with this antiexploration ideology.

While energy "independence" is an impossible dream, there's no doubt the U.S. has vast undeveloped fossil-fuel deposits. A tiny corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge contains an estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil and would be the largest producing oil field in the Northern Hemisphere. Yet the Senate blocked that development as recently as last month. The Outer Continental Shelf is estimated to contain some 86 billion barrels of oil, plus 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Yet of the shelf's 1.76 billion acres, 85% is off-limits and 97% is undeveloped.

Engineers recently perfected refining solid shale rock into diesel or gas, which may amount to the largest oil supply in the world – perhaps as much as 1.8 trillion barrels in the American West. That's enough to meet current U.S. oil demand for more than two centuries. Yet as late as 2007, Democrats attached a rider to the energy bill that prohibits leasing the federal interior lands that contain at least 80% of America's oil shale. The key vote was cast by liberal Senator Ken Salazar from Colorado, of all places.

These supply guesses are probably conservative, because the only way to know for sure is to drill exploratory wells. Yet most of Alaska and offshore are cut off even from modern seismic testing. Many areas haven't been examined since the 1960s, when exploration technology was far more primitive. This has led to the believe-it-or-not situation in which the Chinese are prepping to drill in Cuban waters less than 60 miles off the Florida coast. American companies are banned from drilling in American waters nearby.

Yes, we know, increased drilling is no energy cure-all; new projects take about a decade to come on line. Then again, more than a few experts say that new production could affect price as the market perceives a new U.S. seriousness to increase supplies. Part of today's futures speculation is based on the assumption that supplies will remain tight for years to come, even as Chinese and Indian demand surges.

Nor would merely repealing the exploration bans be enough. Between 2000 and 2007, the drilling of exploratory oil wells climbed 138%, but over the same period domestic crude oil production decreased 12.4% and fell to the lowest levels since 1947. Refineries for gasoline are stretched to the limit, but multiple regulatory barriers impede new construction or even expansions at existing facilities. Then there is the inevitable lawsuit downpour from the environmental lobby.

Democrats are going to have to grow up. The oil-rich areas they want to leave untouched are accessible with minimal environmental disturbance, thanks to modern technology. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flattened terminals across the Gulf of Mexico but didn't cause a single oil spill. As for anticarbon theology, oil will be indispensable over the next half-century and probably longer, like it or not. Airplanes will never fly on woodchips, and you won't be able to charge your car with a windmill for some time, if ever.

Public anger over fuel prices could hardly come at a worse time for the GOP, since voters tend to blame a flagging economy on the party that occupies the White House. But the opportunity is to offer a reform alternative to Barack Obama and the high-price energy status quo he embraces. It looks like the public is increasingly ready for . . . change. In a May Gallup poll, 57% favored "allowing drilling in U.S. coastal and wilderness areas now off limits." Just 20% blamed the increase in gas prices on Big Oil, like Mr. Obama does.

Recent weeks have seen some GOP stirrings on Capitol Hill, but John McCain has so far refused to jettison his green posturings, such as his belief in carbon caps and his animus against offshore development. A good reason for a rethink would be $4 gas. At present, it is charitable to call Mr. McCain's energy ideas incoherent, and it may cost him the election.

COMMITTING (SLOW) ECONOMIC SUICIDE

2008-06-12T17:09:00.001-05:00

Great editorial by Dan Henninger:

One thing Brazil and the U.S. have in common is the price of oil: It is priced in dollars, and everyone in the world now knows what the price is. Another commonality is that each country has vast oil reserves in waters off their coastlines.

Here we may draw a line in the waves between the serious and the unserious.

Brazil discovered only yesterday (November) that billions of barrels of oil sit in difficult water beneath a swath of the Santos Basin, 180 miles offshore from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. The U.S. has known for decades that at least 8.5 billion proven barrels of oil sit off its Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts, with the Interior Department estimating 86 billion barrels of undiscovered oil resources.

When Brazil made this find last November, did its legislature announce that, for fear of oil spills hitting Rio's beaches or altering the climate, it would forgo exploiting these fields?

Of course it didn't. Guilherme Estrella, director of exploration and production for the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, said, "It's an extraordinary position for Brazil to be in." Indeed it is.
Read the rest.

EVERY WAR A CHOICE

2008-06-12T17:05:00.000-05:00

Every War Is a Choice
By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. and LEE A. CASEY
June 12, 2008; Page A15

Claims that the Iraq War was a reckless "war of choice" – rather than a prudent war of "necessity" – are a standard element of the anti-Bush narrative. The latest critic to make this claim is former White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

But a close look at American history shows that this distinction makes little sense. All wars are wars of choice, because it is almost always possible not to fight. The real question is whether the price of peace outweighs the costs of war.

Although the U.S. has resorted to armed force hundreds of times, it had engaged in only 10 major conflicts before 9/11, including the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War. In each instance, American leaders chose to go to war because they believed national interests were at stake. However, in only three of these conflicts was the nation's existence even arguably threatened. And, even in each of these instances, options other than war were available.

The Revolutionary War was necessary, but only if the goal was American independence. Otherwise, colonial grievances could have been compromised. In 1776, Admiral Lord Richard Howe arrived in New York Harbor with a British Army and offers of pardon for most patriot leaders. As George Washington reported to Congress, Admiral Howe had "great powers" to negotiate a settlement. Indeed, as late as 1778, the British government offered to meet all colonial demands short of independence. America's leaders, however, chose to fight on instead. By then, independence was the very point.

Likewise, the Civil War was a war of choice. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln chose to confront secession with force. The seceding states had not invaded the north, and the abolition of slavery was not – at this point – a war aim. Lincoln chose to fight because he genuinely believed in the Union's constitutional indivisibility, and that the future of democracy rested on its survival, especially on vindicating the proposition that constitutional government was impossible if part of the country could simply opt-out after losing an election. However, there would still have been a United States if the South had gone, and many serious people thought the South would prevail. Britain's William Gladstone spoke for many when he said, early in the war, that "We may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States." Lincoln bet differently.

At the beginning of World War II, when Japan actually attacked Pearl Harbor, the country could nevertheless have chosen not to fight. It was perhaps politically unthinkable, but America would not have ceased to exist if it had abandoned its position as a great power in the Far East. The principal U.S. territory there – the Philippine Islands – was a colonial conquest from Spain; its other interests were economic and, of course, ideological. Was containment possible? Fortunately, Franklin Roosevelt did not explore that possibility.

Similarly, American engagement against Nazi Germany was also a matter of choice. Hitler declared war on the U.S. but had not invaded any U.S. territory. Should Roosevelt have explored a peaceful settlement and then, again, sought to contain an Axis Europe? Was his later demand for "unconditional surrender" necessary, or did it prolong the war? Some Americans – in ways eerily reminiscent of today's efforts to decouple the Iraq war from the war in Afghanistan – argued at the time that the European campaign against Hitler was a distraction from the Pacific war against Japan.

Of course, it would have been morally unacceptable, and not in the national interest, to pursue any of these opportunities for peace – but they did exist. The question then, and now, is not whether war was unavoidable, but whether force is legally and morally justified in light of the circumstances.

In 2003, President Bush chose to confront Saddam Hussein – who indisputably was hostile to the U.S., who had used weapons of mass destruction in the past, and who had given aid to terrorist groups (though not directly to Osama bin Laden). The president may well have acted on faulty intelligence – as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence now claims – but he did not ignore or suppress intelligence proving that Saddam wasn't a threat after all. Rather, he acted on available intelligence and in light of Iraq's past record.

Going to war may have been a choice others wouldn't have made. But it was no more a war of choice than any of our other wars.

-- Messrs. Rivkin and Casey, Washington attorneys, served in the Justice Department under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

AND HOW DOES MRS. OBAMA FEEL ABOUT THIS?

2008-06-12T17:04:00.000-05:00

[UK Telegraph] The actress Scarlett Johansson has revealed that she has regular email contact with presidential hopeful Barack Obama in which she offers advice and consoles him after difficult debates.

The Hollywood starlet said she had been communicating with the Democratic candidate for months and was "amazed" that he always found the time to reply.
"You'd imagine that someone like the senator who is constantly travelling and constantly 'on' - how can he return these personal emails?" she told the Politico website.
Wow, she is as naive as she is pretty apparently... I mean to other men. Not me.
I have to go now. My wife is asking me a question...

FRIENDS OF FRIENDS OF ANGELO

2008-06-11T18:06:00.007-05:00

Which do you remember? the "Party of corruption" or Tony Rezko? Likely the former (what Nancy Pelosi termed Republicans in the Democrat's sweep of the House). Why would most Americans remember one more than the other? Because when it's a Democratic presidential candidate involved there's always a few free passes first. We'll see how the AngeloGate goes.

Blatant hypocrisy is something even the left leaning media has a tough time swallowing. And hypocrisy is hiring an advisor from the very company one was demonizing just days before. Obama said Jim Johnson, who resigned hours ago from conducting Obama's VP search, didn't work for him. For whom did he work then, senator, as he was helping you choose your VP?

WSJ Countrywide Financial Corp. makes mortgage loans through a vast network of offices, brokers and call centers. But a few customers have gotten their loans a special way: through Countrywide Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo.

These borrowers, known internally as "friends of Angelo" or FoA, include two former CEOs of Fannie Mae, the biggest buyer of Countrywide's mortgages, say people familiar with the matter.

One was James Johnson, a longtime Democratic Party power and an adviser to Sen. Barack Obama's campaign, who this past week was named to a panel that is vetting running-mate possibilities for the presumed nominee. Another was Franklin Raines, a onetime Clinton administration budget director, who left Fannie Mae amid an accounting scandal in 2004.

There is nothing illegal about a mortgage firm treating some borrowers better than others. But if Fannie Mae officials received special treatment, that could cause a political problem for the government-sponsored, shareholder-owned company.

The Wall Street Journal editors pile on, justifiably so:

Barack Obama may have come up with a creative way to solve the housing recession: Let everyone buy property at a discount the way he did from Tony Rezko, and give everyone in America a discount mortgage the way Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide did for Fannie Mae's Jim Johnson. Team Obama's real estate and mortgage transactions are certainly a change from business as usual. They suggest old-fashioned back-scratching below even current Beltway standards.

A former CEO of mortgage financing giant Fannie Mae, Mr. Johnson is now vetting Vice Presidential candidates for Mr. Obama. But he is also a textbook case for poor disclosure as regulators sifted through the wreckage of Fannie's $10 billion accounting scandal. Despite an exhaustive federal inquiry, Mr. Johnson managed to avoid disclosing one very special perk: below-market interest-rate mortgages from Countrywide Financial, arranged by Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo. Journal reporters Glenn Simpson and James Hagerty broke the story this weekend.

Fannie Mae tells us that Mr. Johnson did not inform the company's board of these sweetheart mortgage deals, nor did his CEO successor Franklin Raines, who also received such loans. We can understand why. Fannie bought mortgages from loan originator Countrywide, and then packaged them into securities for sale or kept the loans and profited from the interest. Mr. Mozilo told Dow Jones in 1995 that he was "working very closely . . . with Jim Johnson of Fannie Mae to come up with a rational method of making the process more efficient by the use of credit scoring."

Since Fannie was buying Countrywide's loans, under terms set by Mr. Johnson and later Mr. Raines – or by people in their employ – the fact that Fannie's CEO had a separate personal financial relationship with Countrywide was an obvious conflict of interest. The company's code of conduct required prior approval of such arrangements. Neither Mr. Johnson nor Mr. Raines sought such approval, according to Fannie.

Even if they had received waivers from the board to enjoy these perks, conscientious board members would then have wanted to disclose the waivers to investors. Post-Enron, the Sarbanes-Oxley law requires such disclosures. But even in the late-1990s, when the Friends of Angelo loans began, board members would likely have raised red flags.

Former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt tells us that "the best way to deal with issues like this is not to have these kinds of relationships. From both the Countrywide and the Fannie perspective, it is simply bad policy to permit loans to 'friends' on more favorable terms than others similarly situated would be able to get."

One question is whether Messrs. Johnson and Raines were using their position to pad their own incomes that were already fabulous thanks to an implicit taxpayer subsidy. (See the table nearby.) But the bigger issue is whether they steered Fannie policy into giving Mr. Mozilo and Countrywide favorable pricing, which means they helped to facilitate the mortgage boom and bust that Countrywide did so much to promote. A further federal probe would seem to be warranted, and we assume Barney Frank and his fellow mortgage moralists will want to dig into this palm-greasing from Capitol Hill.

The irony here is that Mr. Obama has denounced Mr. Mozilo as part of his populist case against corporate excess, calling Mr. Mozilo and a colleague in March "the folks who are responsible for infecting the economy and helping to create a home foreclosure crisis." Obama campaign manager David Plouffe also said in March that "If we're really going to crack down on the practices that caused the credit and housing crises, we're going to need a leader who doesn't owe these industries any favors." But now this protector of the working class has entrusted his first big task as Presidential nominee to the very man who received "favors" in return for enriching Mr. Mozilo.

Yesterday, ABC News asked Mr. Obama whether he should have more carefully vetted Mr. Johnson and Eric Holder, who is working with Mr. Johnson on veep vetting.

Correspondent Sunlen Miller noted Mr. Johnson's loans from Countrywide and Mr. Holder's involvement as Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration in the pardon of fugitive Marc Rich. Said Mr. Obama: "Everybody, you know, who is tangentially related to our campaign, I think, is going to have a whole host of relationships – I would have to hire the vetter to vet the vetters."

Vetting Mr. Johnson's finances would have been time well spent, judging by a May 2006 report from Fannie Mae's regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (Ofheo). Even if Mr. Obama considers the advisers helping him select a running mate "tangentially related" to his campaign, he might have thought twice about any relationship with Mr. Johnson.

Addressing the company's too smooth (and fraudulent) reported earnings growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ofheo reported: "Those achievements were illusions deliberately and systematically created by the Enterprise's senior management with the aid of inappropriate accounting and improper earnings management . . . By deliberately and intentionally manipulating accounting to hit earnings targets, senior management maximized the bonuses and other executive compensation they received, at the expense of shareholders."

The regulator described how, despite an internal Fannie analysis that valued Mr. Johnson's 1998 compensation at almost $21 million, the summary compensation table in the firm's 1999 proxy suggested his pay was no more than $7 million. Ofheo found that Fannie had actually drafted talking points to deflect such media questions as: "He's trying to hide how much he's made, isn't he?" and "Gimme a break. He's hiding his compensation."

To this list we would add one more, directed at Mr. Obama: Is this what you mean by bringing change to Washington?

ECON-IGNORAMUSES

2008-06-10T17:27:00.005-05:00

I read these headlines and I just am dumbfounded.

Obama says he would impose oil windfall profits tax

McCain wants... regulated CEO pay.
Windfall profits tax? Regulated CEO pay? How does one propose we do that, exactly? Or, better yet, we can just cap prices, let we tried back in the 1970s so unsuccessfully. Somewhere Karl Marx is howling with laughter.

Once more, arrogant politicos wish to legislate what is good for us, rather than letting us decide. How does one subjectively judge what is a "windfall profit" or salary versus what is not? (To be fair to McCain, the lesser of two evils on your wallet to be sure, at least he acknowledges that our current corporate tax rate - second highest in the world - is damaging our economy.)

The truth is they're not econ-ignorant. I don't think they really believe this, because anyone who's ever taken Eco 101, or lived through the 70s, understands that when you cap prices, whether CEO pay or a commodity like oil, you create artifical shortages. There's simply no incentive to produce more.

Rather, and I think this is especially true of McCain in part to live up to his "maverick" identity, these guys know that a large segment of the voting population goes along with what sounds good, what is populist. It's far easier to say "hate CEOs!" than to explain economics.

But facts are stubborn things:

"Though the market is surely not flawless, and government interferences often have praiseworthy goals, good intentions are not enough. Any government that sets out to repair what it sees as a defect in the market mechanism runs the risk of causing even more serious damage elsewhere... In case after case where legal price ceilings are imposed, virtually the same series of consequences ensues. . . . A persistent shortage develops because quantity demanded exceeds quantity supplied. . . . An illegal, or 'black,' market often arises to supply the commodity. . . . Investment in the industry generally dries up. Because price ceilings reduce the monetary returns that investors can legally earn, less capital will be invested in industries that are subject to price controls."

-- Alan S. Blinder, former member of the Council of Economic Advisers and Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Blinder, by the way, was praised by none other than President Bill Clinton as "a brilliant contributor to our efforts to improve the economy."

Do people really believe this populist crap? And why stop there? What about you, reading this blog? Why not have McCain or Obama decide through presidential fiat or Congressional law when you, personally, have made enough money?

John Hinderaker, over at Power Line Blog, wonders, what of a windfall profit for authors:

Barack Obama said yesterday that he wants to impose a "windfall profits tax" on American oil companies. This is a stupid idea, unless you want to reduce the supply of oil and thereby increase prices even further.

But it did cause me to wonder why we don't have a windfall profits tax on authors. Think about it: it takes as much work to write a 300-page book that sells 1,000 copies as to write one that sells 1,000,000. Yet the former author is paid almost nothing, while the author who happens to write a best-seller gets rich. Where is the fairness in that? Besides, the oil companies need their profits to make huge capital investments in oil drilling equipment, ocean platforms, pipelines, and so on. What capital investment does an author need his windfall profits in order to make? A new pencil? An author could easily pay extra taxes on his windfall profits and have plenty of capital left over for his next book.

A windfall profits tax on authors seems like a no-brainer. Coincidentally, Barack Obama's 2007 income of around $4.2 million came almost entirely from book royalties. Now, that's what I call a windfall! If authors' windfall profits are taxed at 90%, Obama can write a check to the Treasury for around $3.2 million. What do you say, Barack? Why not a windfall profits tax on authors?
Pretty audacious. Obama is a guy who just a few weeks ago told a Wesleyan commencement that he hopes those graduating students do not "take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy." No, Obama said, don't do that because "our individual salvation depends on collective salvation."

$4.2 million windfall profit book deal. Do as I say, not as I do, eh Obama?

The only difference between Karl Marx and Barack Obama is that Marx actually practiced what he preached. At least he was an honest communist.

Check out this post, too, by Hinderaker.

What we need, of course, is oil companies with bigger profits, not smaller. Then we need them to invest those profits in drilling for more oil in places like ANWR and the coastal shelf, as well as developing shale oil reserves. The problem with America's oil companies is not that they're big, the problem is that they are tiny, as this chart shows; click to enlarge:

Our oil companies control tiny amounts of petroleum (relative to the world's big players) because they are shackled by Congress, which prohibits them by law from accessing America's abundant petroleum reserves. If you want gasoline prices to come down, write, call and email your Congressman and Senators and tell them to allow the oil companies to do what only they can do: bring us more oil.

MURTHA, ROCKEFELLER AND OTHER LIES

2008-06-10T17:17:00.002-05:00

Two great posts from the Weekly Standard:

1) When Will Murtha Apologize?

Yesterday Lieutenant Andrew Grayson became the sixth U.S. soldier [of eight] exonerated of any wrongdoing in an incident at Haditha in 2005. Grayson is the first Marine tried for his alleged transgressions; two others will face trial later this year... So far it's at least six servicemen slandered by Murtha, without an apology. He seems to be holding out hope that at least one American soldier is found guilty of being a cold-blooded killer.
Read the rest.

2) Jay Rockefeller's Amnesia, which takes the senator to task for grotesque political expedience. Namely, that Rockefeller's "bipartisan" (80% Democrat) committee all but calls Bush a liar for pre-war intelligence, yet oddly fails to mention that Rockefeller himself often sold the war using the same arguments as Bush!

Like when Jay Rockefeller called it an "imminent threat" on October 10, 2002? The Bush administration made the case that the Iraqi threat must be addressed before it was imminent. Rockefeller disagreed.

[Rockefeller said:] "There has been some debate over how "imminent" a threat Iraq poses. I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat, but I also believe that after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated."

It's also worth pointing out that the Jay Rockefeller who today accuses the Bush administration of inventing the threat posed by Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration once saw "a substantial connection" between the two and warned about the consequences of leaving Iraq to pass its WMD to Osama bin Laden. On February 5, 2003, Rockefeller said: "The fact that Zarqawi certainly is related to the death of the U.S. aid officer and that he is very close to bin Laden puts at rest, in fairly dramatic terms, that there is at least a substantial connection between Saddam and al Qaeda."

And here's what he said one week earlier, in an interview with the Charleston Gazette: "If you go pre-emptive, do you cause Hussein to strike where he might not have? He is not a martyr, not a Wahabbi, not a Muslim radical. He does not seek martyrdom. But he is getting older," Rockefeller told the paper. "Maybe he is seeking a legacy by attacking Israel or using al-Qaeda cells around the world."

Rockefeller and his colleagues also accuse the Bush administration of exaggerating WMD claims. It's worth recalling that Rockefeller called Iraq an "imminent threat" in his floor speech supporting the resolution which would authorize the war.

And it's worth noting that he told his colleagues that "there is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years." And: "Saddam's existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose a very real threat to America, now." And: "We cannot know for certain that Saddam will use the weapons of mass destruction he currently possesses, or that he will use them against us. But we do know Saddam has the capability."

Unmistakable evidence. Existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities. We do know Saddam has the capability.

What are the chances any of these claims from Rockefeller will make the news stories about his committee's new "report?"

NOW WITH MORE REGULATION!

2008-06-10T17:11:00.005-05:00

And while we're on the subject, be sure to check out this post by the US Chamber of Commerce, and the sheer complexity of the failed Warner-Lieberman energy bill. It's more proof positive that the only action from Congress that can help our problems is inaction.

KILLING US SOFTLY

2008-06-10T17:09:00.000-05:00

The Big Chill, by Pete DuPont, explains how the (fortunately) defeated Warner-Lieberman climate bill would have been a trifecta of bad economics.

The Senate's global warming bill began by capping greenhouse gas emissions and reducing them each year, from 5.8 billion metric tons in 2015 to 1.7 billion in 2050. A Heritage Foundation study calculates that such reductions would cost more than 600,000 jobs a year through 2028 (900,000 in both 2016 and 2017), and the Environmental Protection Agency estimates the annual economic losses at $1 trillion to $2.8 trillion by 2050. Electricity prices would rise about 44% by 2030, and gasoline prices by more than 50 cents a gallon. Existing coal-fired plants, which provide about half of our electricity, would be shut down, requiring nuclear generation capacity would have to expand by more than 150%, to 1,982 billion kilowatt-hours from the current 782 billion, by 2050. That is a good idea--nuclear plants are virtually pollution-free--but doubling the number of them has zero chance of happening in a country that has not started construction of a new nuclear plant since 1977.

Then comes modern socialism: The government would offer "allowance" permits to emit greenhouse gasses. Initially about half the permits would be auctioned off to businesses, which Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) says would raise about $3.3 trillion by 2050--money the federal government would give away to favorite constituencies. There would be $190 billion for "environmental" job training, $228 billion for federal "wildlife adaptation" and $237 billion to the states for similar efforts. There would be billions for international aid, domestic mass transit, energy research and so on.

The permits that wouldn't be auctioned off would be given by the government to the states, foreign countries, Indian tribes, carbon-heavy industries, utilities, oil refineries and so forth to help them meet their global warming challenges. To make all this work, the bill would create massive new federal bureaucracies, beginning with a Climate Change Credit Corp., which would invest government money in private businesses, and a Carbon Market Efficiency Board, which could change the rules and alter the government demands on businesses.

Finally would come protectionism: A new climate change agency would have the authority to determine whether other countries are taking proper action to prevent climate change, and to restrict their imports into America if not. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.) tells us if a foreign company "enjoys a price advantage over an American competitor" whose country has no cap-and-trade system, "we will impose a fee" on the foreign company's imports "to equalize the price." Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) wants to impose trade sanctions on countries that do not cap their emissions. Should Barack Obama become president, his protectionism will become our policy; add to that this global warming bill and rampant protectionism will be with us once again, as it was in 1930.

"IF YOU CONTROL CARBON, YOU CONTROL LIFE"

2008-06-09T17:36:00.002-05:00

Great editorial from the Orange County Register. Read the whole thing. Right now.

Editorial: We dodge a bullet on carbon cap-and-trade
Senate kills a potentially disastrous bill, but possibly worse legislation could be coming

The nation avoided global warming-related devastation last week. The Senate killed a grandiose scheme to clamp down on emissions of CO2, a benign, necessary, natural atmospheric gas. However, something similar, if not worse, will be back next year.

The devastation wouldn't have been the 1- or 2-degree temperature increases that may have occurred over the next century, which may noteven be related to CO2. The real devastation would have been gasoline prices increasing $1.40 per gallon by 2050, millions of jobs lost or shipped overseas, an effective $3,700-a-year tax on families, a 33-percent increase in home energy costs by 2020, and, says the Heritage Foundation, the equivalent economic cost of 35 Hurricane Katrinas every year for two decades.

Those would be certain results of the failed Climate Security Act's vastly expanded government controls to extract trillions of dollars from productive companies and redistribute the money to politically favored interests, say the bill's opponents.
What's uncertain is whether the trouble and expense would have bought anything. Even if CO2 emissions are returned to the level of horse-and-buggy days, an increase of 0.013 degree Celsius mightbe avoided over the next century, says climatologist Patrick Michaels. That's if CO2 increases temperature, which many scientists doubt. So, why go down this path?

"Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat's dream," MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen said. "If you control carbon, you control life."

Global warming is the perfect big-government issue. First, it's predicated entirely on predicted disasters based on arbitrary data fed into computers. What's fed changes continuously. That's why a few years ago sea levels were predicted to rise 20 feet, but now only 20 inches or less. Garbage in, garbage out.

Second, global warming is unscientific because it can't be disproved. When temperatures slightly dropped over the past decade, then were predicted even by alarmists to drop more over the next decade despite ever-rising CO2, rather than admit their theory is wrong, the story line changed. Now we're told the entirely unpredicted 20-year cooling is only temporary. If temperatures go up, it proves global warming. If they go down, voila!It proves global warming.

Third, global warming is blamed for what has happened since the beginning of time. Climates always change. This ensures permanent government involvement. Fourth, if government imposes costly, Draconian solutions, and temperatures rise, it only means more Draconian solutions are needed. If temperatures drop, it only means Draconian solutions must continue.

Last week we saw how political support is mustered for such an unintuitive idea. Hundreds of billions of dollars never collected by the government before would be doled out to favored interests, after government pocketed its share. The failed bill would have given $51 billion to so-called energy-efficient manufacturers, $68 billion to automakers making government-smiled-upon cars and $150 billion to owners and operators of favored energy producers.

Disguised as a "cap-and-trade" plan, it would have made CO2 emitters pay to do what they've always done for free. Deceptively passed off as a market-based plan, cap-and-trade is really a hidden tax.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid assured us, "Gas prices will not go up. They will go down." In the end, the obvious connection to ever-higher gas prices politically killed the Climate Security Act. Next year another version is certain to return with a president inclined to sign it. We had a preview of the future last week. It's grim, costly and authoritarian.

OBAMA: SEE NO PROGRESS, HEAR NO PROGRESS, SPEAK NO PROGRESS

2008-06-06T13:02:00.003-05:00

Why Obama Must Go to Iraq
By PETE HEGSETH

Earlier this year, I spent five days in Iraq, walking the same streets in Baghdad where I had served two years earlier as an infantry platoon leader in the 101st Airborne Division.

The visit reinforced for me not only the immense complexity of the war – so often lost in our domestic political debate – but also the importance of taking the time to visit Iraq to talk with the soldiers and Marines serving on the front lines in order to grasp the changing dynamics of a fluid battlefield.

It is for this reason that the failure of Sen. Barack Obama to travel to Iraq over the past two and a half years is worrisome, and a legitimate issue in this presidential election.

Since his election to the United States Senate in 2004, Mr. Obama has traveled to Iraq just once – in January 2006. This was more than a year before Gen. David Petraeus took command and the surge began. It was also several months before Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government came into office. Although Mr. Obama frequently criticizes the Iraqi leader on the campaign trail, he has never actually met him.

Mr. Obama's conduct is strikingly different from that of Sen. John McCain, who has been to Iraq eight times since 2003 – including three times since surge forces began to arrive in Baghdad. The senior senator from Arizona has made it his mission to truly understand what is happening on the ground, in all its messy reality.

Mr. Obama has dismissed the value of such trips, suggesting they are stage-managed productions designated to obfuscate, not illuminate, the truth. This has become an all-too-common sentiment within the Democratic Party leadership, especially since the surge began to transform conditions on the ground for the better. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has denied that there is any value in visiting the troops in Iraq, and has never done so.

In fairness, there are a number of Democrats who visit Iraq frequently – namely Sens. Joe Biden, who has made eight Iraq trips, and Jack Reed, with 10 trips. Mr. Obama's absence and cynicism stands in stark contrast to their serious approach. It is especially problematic given his intention to become our next commander in chief.

As anyone who has spent time on the ground in Iraq – speaking with troops of all ranks and backgrounds – can tell you, it is hardly a mission impossible to get them out to speak bluntly and openly about the problems they face.

Indeed, Mr. McCain's own frequent and vociferous criticisms of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his warnings, as early as 2003, that the Bush administration was pursuing a flawed strategy in Iraq, were directly informed by his firsthand interactions during his trips to Iraq. Troops and commanders warned him that we lacked sufficient forces to defeat al Qaeda and Iranian-backed militias, and they were correct.

In turn, Mr. McCain's early advocacy for the surge and his prescient conviction that it would succeed were rooted not only in his extensive knowledge of military affairs, but in his close consultations with troops serving in the theater. They recognized that the new strategy was succeeding far before the mainstream media in the U.S. was willing to acknowledge these gains.

That Mr. Obama apparently doubts his ability to distinguish spin from reality, and to draw bad news out of subordinates, does not bode well for his possible future as our nation's chief executive. As I'm sure he will discover, if he wins the White House, these are among the most important skills for a president to possess.

Even more astonishing than Mr. Obama's absence from Iraq, however, is the fact that he has apparently never sought out a single one-on-one meeting with Gen. Petraeus. The general has made repeated trips back to Washington, but Mr. Obama has shown no interest in meeting privately with him. It's enough to make you wonder who exactly Mr. Obama listens to when it comes to Iraq?

Mr. Obama frequently decries the danger of "dogmatists" and "ideologues" in public policy, yet he himself has proven consistently uninterested in putting himself in situations where he might be confronted with the hard complexities of this war. It suggests a dangerous degree of detachment and overconfidence in his own judgment.

After all, Mr. Obama was among those in January 2007 who stridently opposed the surge and confidently predicted its failure – even going so far as to vote against funding our soldiers in the field unless the Bush administration abandoned this new approach. It is now clear that Mr. Obama's judgment on the surge was spectacularly wrong.

Yet rather than admit his mistake, Mr. Obama has instead tried to downplay or disparage the gains our troops have achieved in the past 12 months, clinging to a set of talking points that increasingly seem as divorced from reality as some in the Bush administration were at the darkest moments of the war.

Mr. Obama continues to insist that "Iraq's political leaders have made no progress in resolving the political differences at the heart of their civil war" – despite the passage of numerous pieces of benchmark legislation by the Iraqi Parliament and unequivocal evidence of grassroots reconciliation across the country.

Mr. Obama also continues to claim that America has "simply thrown U.S. troops at the problem, and it has not worked" – despite the dramatic reduction in violence in precisely those areas of Iraq where American forces have surged, and since handed over to Iraqi Security Forces.

And of course, Mr. Obama persists in his pledge to withdraw all combat forces from Iraq, on a fixed timeline, beginning the moment he enters office – regardless of the recommendations of our commanders on the ground, regardless of conditions on the ground, and regardless, in short, of reality.

America is longing for an informed and principled debate about the future of Iraq. However, such a debate seems unlikely if the Democratic nominee for president won't take the time to truly understand the dynamics on the ground, let alone meet with commanders.

The time for talking points is over. Too much is at stake. When will Mr. Obama finally return to Iraq and see the situation for himself?

Mr. Hegseth, chairman of Vets for Freedom, served in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division and returned as an embedded reporter.

TAX GAS TO LOWER PAYROLL TAX?

2008-06-06T11:10:00.001-05:00

Okay,I have to admit that Charles Krauthammer gets me to rethink my thought that energy wonks who want to raise taxes on gas are nuts. Krauthammer cites some strong economic arguments... Having said that, Krauthammer can't really believe that the government (at least the Democrats) would ever lower regulation of the energy industry or use gas tax proceeds to offset other taxes. I think that's a pipe dream.

On top of that, it's simply against the conservative viewpoint that the government should see fit to tell other people what's "good" for them by artifically legislating what kind of car they should drive or how they should consume.

So now we know: The price point is $4.

At $3 a gallon, Americans just grin and bear it, suck it up and, while complaining profusely, keep driving like crazy. At $4, it is a world transformed. Americans become rational creatures. Mass transit ridership is at a 50-year high. Driving is down 4 percent. (Any U.S. decline is something close to a miracle.) Hybrids and compacts are flying off the lots. SUV sales are in free fall.

The wholesale flight from gas guzzlers is stunning in its swiftness, but utterly predictable. Everything has a price point. Remember that "love affair" with SUVs? Love, it seems, has its price too.

America's sudden change in car-buying habits makes suitable mockery of that absurd debate Congress put on last December on fuel efficiency standards. At stake was precisely what miles-per-gallon average would every car company's fleet have to meet by precisely what date.

It was one out-of-a-hat number (35 mpg) compounded by another (by 2020). It involved, as always, dozens of regulations, loopholes and throws at a dartboard. And we already knew from past history what the fleet average number does. When oil is cheap and everybody wants a gas guzzler, fuel efficiency standards force manufacturers to make cars that nobody wants to buy. When gas prices go through the roof, this agent of inefficiency becomes an utter redundancy.

At $4 a gallon, the fleet composition is changing spontaneously and overnight, not over the 13 years mandated by Congress. (Even Stalin had the modesty to restrict himself to five-year plans.) Just Tuesday, GM announced that it would shutter four SUV and truck plants, add a third shift to its compact and midsize sedan plants in Ohio and Michigan, and green-light for 2010 the Chevy Volt, an electric hybrid.

Some things, like renal physiology, are difficult. Some things, like Arab-Israeli peace, are impossible. And some things are preternaturally simple. You want more fuel-efficient cars? Don't regulate. Don't mandate. Don't scold. Don't appeal to the better angels of our nature. Do one thing: Hike the cost of gas until you find the price point.

Unfortunately, instead of hiking the price ourselves by means of a gasoline tax that could be instantly refunded to the American people in the form of lower payroll taxes, we let the Saudis, Venezuelans, Russians and Iranians do the taxing for us -- and pocket the money that the tax would have recycled back to the American worker.

This is insanity. For 25 years and with utter futility (starting with "The Oil-Bust Panic," the New Republic, February 1983), I have been advocating the cure: a U.S. energy tax as a way to curtail consumption and keep the money at home. On this page in May 2004 (and again in November 2005), I called for "the government -- through a tax -- to establish a new floor for gasoline," by fully taxing any drop in price below a certain benchmark. The point was to suppress demand and to keep the savings (from any subsequent world price drop) at home in the U.S. Treasury rather than going abroad. At the time, oil was $41 a barrel. It is now $123.

But instead of doing the obvious -- tax the damn thing -- we go through spasms of destructive alternatives, such as efficiency standards, ethanol mandates and now a crazy carbon cap-and-trade system the Senate is debating this week. These are infinitely complex mandates for inefficiency and invitations to corruption. But they have a singular virtue: They hide the cost to the American consumer.

Want to wean us off oil? Be open and honest. The British are paying $8 a gallon for petrol. Goldman Sachs is predicting we will be paying $6 by next year. Why have the extra $2 (above the current $4) go abroad? Have it go to the U.S. Treasury as a gasoline tax and be recycled back into lower payroll taxes.

Announce a schedule of gas tax hikes of 50 cents every six months for the next two years. And put a tax floor under $4 gasoline, so that as high gas prices transform the U.S. auto fleet, change driving habits and thus hugely reduce U.S. demand -- and bring down world crude oil prices -- the American consumer and the American economy reap all of the benefit.

Herewith concludes my annual exercise in futility. By the time I write next year's edition, you'll be paying for gas in bullion.

CLINT TO SPIKE: SHUT YER PIEHOLE!

2008-06-04T17:56:00.000-05:00

[UK GUARDIAN] Clint Eastwood folds his gangly frame behind a clifftop table at the Hotel Du Cap, a few miles up the coast from Cannes, sighs deeply, and squints out over the Mediterranean. "Has he ever studied the history?" he asks, in that familiar near-whisper.

The "he" is Spike Lee, and the reason Eastwood is asking is because of something Lee had said about Eastwood's Iwo Jima movie Flags of Our Fathers, while promoting his own war movie, Miracle at St Anna, about a black US unit in the second world war. Lee had noted the lack of African-Americans in Eastwood's movie and told reporters: "That was his version. The negro version did not exist."

Eastwood has no time for Lee's gripes. "He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else." As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, "but they didn't raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate."

Lee shouldn't be demanding African-Americans in Eastwood's next picture, either. Changeling is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city's make-up was changed by the large black influx. "What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fuckin' story about that?" he growls. "Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is. When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people."

Eastwood pauses, deliberately - once it would have provided him with the beat in which to spit out his cheroot before flinging back his poncho - and offers a last word of advice to the most influential black director in American movies. "A guy like him should shut his face."

HOW TRUE!

2008-06-04T17:54:00.001-05:00

Great comment regarding the convoluted election mess during the Democrat primary cycle from Dennis Miller during his Tuesday broadcast:

If the Democrats can turn their own election process into this kind of Rube Goldbergian process, imagine what they can do with nationalized health care."

ON IRAQ: GOOD NEWS IS NO NEWS

2008-06-03T17:54:00.000-05:00

Even the Washington Post notices that fellow news agencies have ignored some very important and good turning points in Iraq, especially regarding the ability of Iraqis to govern themselves:

THERE'S BEEN a relative lull in news coverage and debate about Iraq in recent weeks -- which is odd, because May could turn out to have been one of the most important months of the war. While Washington's attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have "never been closer to defeat than they are now."

Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained "special groups" that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. It is -- of course -- too early to celebrate; though now in disarray, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr could still regroup, and Iran will almost certainly seek to stir up new violence before the U.S. and Iraqi elections this fall. Still, the rapidly improving conditions should allow U.S. commanders to make some welcome adjustments -- and it ought to mandate an already-overdue rethinking by the "this-war-is-lost" caucus in Washington, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Gen. David H. Petraeus signaled one adjustment in recent testimony to Congress, saying that he would probably recommend troop reductions in the fall going beyond the ongoing pullback of the five "surge" brigades deployed last year. Gen. Petraeus pointed out that attacks in Iraq hit a four-year low in mid-May and that Iraqi forces were finally taking the lead in combat and on multiple fronts at once -- something that was inconceivable a year ago. As a result the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki now has "unparalleled" public support, as Gen. Petraeus put it, and U.S. casualties are dropping sharply. Eighteen American soldiers died in May, the lowest total of the war and an 86 percent drop from the 126 who died in May 2007.

If the positive trends continue, proponents of withdrawing most U.S. troops, such as Mr. Obama, might be able to responsibly carry out further pullouts next year. Still, the likely Democratic nominee needs a plan for Iraq based on sustaining an improving situation, rather than abandoning a failed enterprise. That will mean tying withdrawals to the evolution of the Iraqi army and government, rather than an arbitrary timetable; Iraq's 2009 elections will be crucial. It also should mean providing enough troops and air power to continue backing up Iraqi army operations such as those in Basra and Sadr City. When Mr. Obama floated his strategy for Iraq last year, the United States appeared doomed to defeat. Now he needs a plan for success.

MCCLELLAN'S ACCUSATION IS WRONG

2008-06-03T17:51:00.002-05:00

Great commentary by Bill McGurn.

In the media week that has been Scott McClellan, my former colleague has had his motives questioned, his character impugned, and his own book dismissed as something he could not possibly have written himself.

Yet in the midst of the storm, the press has largely skipped over what is at once Scott's central claim, and his silliest argument: that the president's big mistake was to embrace the "permanent campaign" and that this led to a strategy that meant "never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising. Especially not where Iraq was concerned."

The decisions on Iraq that followed Scott's departure tell a much different story. Whether you agree with the surge or not, that decision was one of the defining acts of his presidency. And what Scott apparently still has not recognized is that his own heave-ho was the prelude to exactly the kind of reconsideration he says was impossible in the Bush White House.

Exhibit A is the sacking of Don Rumsfeld immediately after the 2006 elections that gave the Democrats control of Congress. The "after" is critical, because the president was blasted for his timing by many in his own party. Arlen Specter complained that he would still be chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee if the president had made the move before the elections. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that the president's timing probably cost Republicans control of the Senate and 10 to 15 seats in the House.

These men had a point. But the timing also said something about George W. Bush: A president who makes a decision knowing that it could cost his party control of Congress can be accused of many things, but subsuming all his decisions to the "permanent campaign" cannot seriously be one of them.

The president's decision to replace his Defense secretary was followed by an even more thorough rethink of his war policy. Anyone who has spent time in government knows that changing a major policy midstream is like trying to make a U-turn with an aircraft carrier. And anyone who was in the White House in late 2006 knows that the dramatic shift in Iraq that we now almost take for granted was the result of one man: George W. Bush.

Scott and the other critics accuse the president of stubbornness. In my experience, when the pundits accuse you of being stubborn, often all it means is that you don't accept the conventional wisdom of the Beltway establishment – and that you are unwilling to run up the white flag and bow to their superiority.

The president I served had concerns that were far removed from this audience. Constantly he would remind his speechwriting team to keep in mind how his words would be heard by others. By an enemy who believed Iraq was theirs for the taking. By Iraqi families being asked to stand up and have faith in the United States. And by some second lieutenant in some godforsaken town in Iraq about to lead other Americans into battle.

So for several intense weeks, my colleague Chris Michel and I isolated ourselves in a tiny room in the West Wing, trying to capture the new policy in a coherent draft. Early one Saturday, Dan Bartlett came by to check on our progress.

Dan is a straight shooter. He knew that the new policy risked losing the support of the few remaining hawks, because they wanted many more troops than the five brigades the president would be proposing. He also knew that most everyone else in America wanted to hear that our men and women in Iraq were coming home. Dan did not kid himself – or us – about how it would go down, at least in the short term. "No one wants to hear what this speech is going to tell them," he told us.

The president understood this too. But he also understood that the moral and strategic purposes of the U.S. demanded a president willing to stand up and do the unpopular thing – no matter what the polls or pundits were saying.

So on the evening of Jan. 10, 2007, Mr. Bush looked into the television cameras and gave the speech nobody wanted to hear. He told the American people that the central policy of his administration was not working, he took all responsibility for the mistakes, and he offered a fix that he knew many would regard with skepticism. It is hard to imagine any presidential act more removed from "the permanent campaign."

Of course, only a mind that was not completely closed to "rethinking" or "reconsidering" or "reflecting" on Iraq (or George W. Bush) could appreciate the magnitude of what the president did that January night. And as Scott more than proves, in today's Washington that kind of mind is all too rare.

SOAK THE POOR

2008-06-03T17:49:00.001-05:00

We Don't Need a Climate Tax on the Poor
By JAMES INHOFE
June 3, 2008; Page A21

With average gas prices across the country approaching $4 a gallon, it may be hard to believe, but the U.S. Senate is considering legislation this week that will further drive up the cost at the pump.

The Senate is debating a global warming bill that will create the largest expansion of the federal government since FDR's New Deal, complete with a brand new, unelected bureaucracy. The Lieberman-Warner bill (America's Climate Security Act) represents the largest tax increase in U.S. history and the biggest pork bill ever contemplated with trillions of dollars in giveaways. Well-heeled lobbyists are already plotting how to divide up the federal largesse. The handouts offered by the sponsors of this bill come straight from the pockets of families and workers in the form of lost jobs, higher gas, power and heating bills, and more expensive consumer goods.

Various analyses show that Lieberman-Warner would result in higher prices at the gas pump, between 41 cents and $1 per gallon by 2030. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says Lieberman-Warner would effectively raise taxes on Americans by more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years. The federal Energy Information Administration says the bill would result in a 9.5% drop in manufacturing output and higher energy costs.

Carbon caps will have an especially harmful impact on low-income Americans and those with fixed incomes. A recent CBO report found: "Most of the cost of meeting a cap on CO2 emissions would be borne by consumers, who would face persistently higher prices for products such as electricity and gasoline. Those price increases would be regressive in that poorer households would bear a larger burden relative to their income than wealthier households."

The poor already face energy costs as a much higher percentage of their income than wealthier Americans. While most Americans spend about 4% of their monthly budget on heating their homes or other energy needs, the poorest fifth of Americans spend 19%. A 2006 survey of Colorado homeless families with children found that high energy bills were cited as one of the two main reasons they became homeless.

Lieberman-Warner will also hinder U.S. competitiveness, transferring American jobs overseas to places where environmental regulations are much more lenient. Instead of working to eliminate trade barriers on clean energy and lower emitting technologies, the bill imposes a "green," tariff-style tax on imported goods. This could provoke international retaliatory actions by our trade partners, threatening our own export markets and further driving up the costs of consumer goods.

My colleague, Sen. George Voinovich (R., Ohio), warned last week that Lieberman-Warner "could result in the most massive bureaucratic intrusion into the lives of Americans since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service." Mandating burdensome new layers of federal bureaucracy is not the solution to America's energy challenges.
This bill is ultimately about certainty. We are certain of the huge negative impact on the economy as detailed by numerous government and private analyses. We are certain of the massive expansion of the federal bureaucracy.

And we are certain the bill will not have a detectable impact on the climate. According to the Environmental Protection Agency's own analysis, by 2050 Lieberman-Warner would only lower global CO2 concentrations by less than 1.4% without additional international action. In fact, this bill, often touted as an "insurance policy" against global warming, is instead all economic pain for no climate gain.
Why are many in Washington proposing a bill that will do so much economic harm? The answer is simple. The American people are being asked to pay significantly more for energy merely so some lawmakers in Washington can say they did something about global warming.

I have been battling global warming alarmism since 2003, when I became chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. It has been a lonely battle at times, but it now appears that many of my colleagues are waking up to the reality of cap-and-trade legislation.

The better way forward is an energy policy that emphasizes technology and includes developing nations such as China and India. Tomorrow's energy mix must include more natural gas, wind and geothermal, but it must also include oil, coal and nuclear power, which is the world's largest source of emission-free energy. Developing and expanding domestic energy sources will translate into energy security and ensure stable supplies and well-paying jobs for Americans.

Let me end with a challenge to my colleagues. Will you dare stand on the Senate floor in these uncertain economic times and vote in favor of significantly increasing the price of gas at the pump, losing millions of American jobs, creating a huge new bureaucracy and raising taxes by record amounts? The American people deserve and expect a full debate on this legislation.

Mr. Inhofe, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, is ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

PAGING DANNY GLOVER, PAGING SEAN PENN!

2008-06-03T17:46:00.001-05:00

One wonders what Sean Penn thinks about the below news? After all, Penn is a glowing fan -- he visited Venezuelan "President" Hugo Chavez a while back and even told the media that "much more positive for Venezuela than he is negative" and that his party's constitution is "a very beautiful document." And, Chavez contributed with Danny Glover for a $20 million movie deal.

CARACAS, Venezuela: President Hugo Chávez has used his decree powers to carry out a major overhaul of this country's intelligence agencies, provoking a fierce backlash here from human rights groups and legal scholars who say the measures will force citizens to inform on one another to avoid prison terms.

Under the new intelligence law, which took effect last week, Venezuela's two main intelligence services, the DISIP secret police and the DIM military intelligence agency, will be replaced with new agencies, the General Intelligence Office and General Counterintelligence Office, under the control of Chávez.

The new law requires people in the country to comply with requests to assist the agencies, secret police or community activist groups loyal to Chávez. Refusal can result in prison terms of two to four years for most people and four to six years for government employees.

"We are before a set of measures that are a threat to all of us," said Blanca Rosa Mármol de León, a justice on Venezuela's top court, in a rare public judicial dissent. "I have an obligation to say this, as a citizen and a judge. This is a step toward the creation of a society of informers."
The sweeping intelligence changes reflect an effort by Chávez to assert greater control over public institutions in the face of political challenges following a stinging defeat in December of a constitutional reform package that would have expanded his powers.

Chávez, who has insisted the defeat would not dampen his ambitions to transform Venezuela into a Socialist state, said the new law was intended to guarantee "national security" and shield against "imperialist attacks."

He lashed out at its critics as being agents of the "empire," meaning the United States.

LEGISLATING THEFT

2008-06-02T18:05:00.004-05:00

It's ironic that our founding fathers based this country on individual liberty and property rights, because it's abundantly clear that modern politicians have not just forgotten that but brazenly rejected it.

Get ready, folks, because it's coming. It inevitable, especially because every candidate running for president, including McCain, is advocating some kind of tax on energy consumption. Worse, the science -- and lack thereof -- behind global warming is irrelevant to salivating Senators and Congresspersons (almost every Democrat, but far too many Republicans too) looking to tax and spend even more of your money. If you like the double-digit unemployment rates and miserably high tax rates of Europe than this purposely-deceptive and complicated legislation to "save" the environment will be right up your alley.

And the proponents of this tax-in-sheep's-clothing are brilliantly effective in convincing you that it will only affect some socio-economic group of which you do not consider yourself a member: "The rich," "Big Oil," "Special interests," etc.

But facts are stubborn things, and if history has taught us anything it is that one cannot change the laws of economics without causing a Pandora's Box of problems for all. If you think energy prices are bad now, if you think that unemployment is bad now, if you think GDP is bad now, if you think you're having trouble making ends meet now, just wait until this current group of arrogant legislators impose a cap (i.e., a tax) on the amount of energy one can consume.

Like the income tax that was supposed to be temporary, it doesn't, and grows forever more. And ever more.

First, Robert Samuelson explains in the Washington Post, and the post below that from the WSJ:

... The chief political virtue of cap-and-trade -- a complex scheme to reduce greenhouse gases -- is its complexity. This allows its environmental supporters to shape public perceptions in essentially deceptive ways. Cap-and-trade would act as a tax, but it's not described as a tax. It would regulate economic activity, but it's promoted as a "free market" mechanism. Finally, it would trigger a tidal wave of influence-peddling, as lobbyists scrambled to exploit the system for different industries and localities. This would undermine whatever abstract advantages the system has.

The Senate is scheduled to begin debating a cap-and-trade proposal today, and although it's unlikely to pass, the concept will return because all the major presidential candidates support it. Cap-and-trade extends the long government tradition of proclaiming lofty goals that are impossible to achieve. We've had "wars" against poverty, cancer and drugs, but poverty, cancer and drugs remain. President Bush called his landmark education law No Child Left Behind rather than the more plausible Few Children Left Behind.

Carbon-based fuels (oil, coal, natural gas) provide about 85 percent of U.S. energy and generate most greenhouse gases. So, the simplest way to stop these emissions is to regulate them out of existence. Naturally, that's what cap-and-trade does. Companies could emit greenhouse gases only if they had annual "allowances" -- quotas -- issued by the government. The allowances would gradually decline. That's the "cap." Companies (utilities, oil refineries) that needed extra allowances could buy them from companies willing to sell. That's the "trade."

In one bill, the 2030 cap on greenhouse gases would be 35 percent below the 2005 level and 44 percent below the level projected without any restrictions. By 2050, U.S. greenhouse gases would be rapidly vanishing. Even better, their disappearance would allegedly be painless. Reviewing five economic models, the Environmental Defense Fund asserts that the cuts can be achieved "without significant adverse consequences to the economy." Fuel prices would rise, but because people would use less energy, the impact on household budgets would be modest.

This is mostly make-believe. If we suppress emissions, we also suppress today's energy sources, and because the economy needs energy, we suppress the economy. The models magically assume smooth transitions. If coal is reduced, then conservation or non-fossil-fuel sources will take its place. But in the real world, if coal-fired power plants are canceled (as many were last year), wind or nuclear won't automatically substitute. If the supply of electricity doesn't keep pace with demand, brownouts or blackouts will result. The models don't predict real-world consequences. Of course, they didn't forecast $135-a-barrel oil.

As emission cuts deepened, the danger of disruptions would mount. Population increases alone raise energy demand. From 2006 to 2030, the U.S. population will grow 22 percent (to 366 million) and the number of housing units 25 percent (to 141 million), the Energy Information Administration projects. The idea that higher fuel prices will be offset mostly by lower consumption is, at best, optimistic. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a 15 percent cut of emissions would raise average household energy costs by almost $1,300 a year.

That's how cap-and-trade would tax most Americans. As "allowances" became scarcer, their price would rise, and the extra cost would be passed along to customers. Meanwhile, government would expand enormously. It could sell the allowances and spend the proceeds; or it could give them away, providing a windfall to recipients.

The Senate proposal does both to the tune of about $1 trillion from 2012 to 2018. Beneficiaries would include farmers, Indian tribes, new technology companies, utilities and states. Call this "environmental pork," and it would just be a start. The program's potential to confer subsidies and preferential treatment would stimulate a lobbying frenzy. Think of today's farm programs -- and multiply by 10.

LEGISLATING THEFT II

2008-06-02T18:03:00.001-05:00

As the Senate opens debate on its mammoth carbon regulation program this week, the phrase of the hour is "cap and trade." This sounds innocuous enough. But anyone who looks at the legislative details will quickly see that a better description is cap and spend. This is easily the largest income redistribution scheme since the income tax.

Sponsored by Joe Lieberman and John Warner, the bill would put a cap on carbon emissions that gets lowered every year. But to ease the pain and allow for economic adjustment, the bill would dole out "allowances" under the cap that would stand for the right to emit greenhouse gases. Senator Barbara Boxer has introduced a package of manager's amendments that mandates total carbon reductions of 66% by 2050, while earmarking the allowances.

When cap and trade has been used in the past, such as to reduce acid rain, the allowances were usually distributed for free. A major difference this time is that the allowances will be auctioned off to covered businesses, which means imposing an upfront tax before the trade half of cap and trade even begins. It also means a gigantic revenue windfall for Congress.

Ms. Boxer expects to scoop up auction revenues of some $3.32 trillion by 2050. Yes, that's trillion. Her friends in Congress are already salivating over this new pot of gold. The way Congress works, the most vicious floor fights won't be over whether this is a useful tax to create, but over who gets what portion of the spoils. In a conference call with reporters last Thursday, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry explained that he was disturbed by the effects of global warming on "crustaceans" and so would be pursuing changes to ensure that New England lobsters benefit from some of the loot.

Of course most of the money will go to human constituencies, especially those with the most political clout. In the Boxer plan, revenues are allocated down to the last dime over the next half-century. Thus $802 billion would go for "relief" for low-income taxpayers, to offset the higher cost of lighting homes or driving cars. Ms. Boxer will judge if you earn too much to qualify.

There's also $190 billion to fund training for "green-collar jobs," which are supposed to replace the jobs that will be lost in carbon-emitting industries. Another $288 billion would go to "wildlife adaptation," whatever that means, and another $237 billion to the states for the same goal. Some $342 billion would be spent on international aid, $171 billion for mass transit, and untold billions for alternative energy and research – and we're just starting.

Ms. Boxer would only auction about half of the carbon allowances; she reserves the rest for politically favored supplicants. These groups might be Indian tribes (big campaign donors!), or states rewarded for "taking the lead" on emissions reductions like Ms. Boxer's California. Those lucky winners would be able to sell those allowances for cash. The Senator estimates that the value of the handouts totals $3.42 trillion. For those keeping track, that's more than $6.7 trillion in revenue handouts so far.

The bill also tries to buy off businesses that might otherwise try to defeat the legislation. Thus carbon-heavy manufacturers like steel and cement will get $213 billion "to help them adjust," while fossil-fuel utilities will get $307 billion in "transition assistance." No less than $34 billion is headed to oil refiners. Given that all of these folks have powerful Senate friends, they will probably extract a larger ransom if cap and trade ever does become law.

If Congress is really going to impose this carbon tax in the name of saving mankind, the least it should do is forego all of this political largesse. In return for this new tax, Congress should cut taxes elsewhere to make the bill revenue neutral. A "tax swap" would offset the deadweight taxes that impede growth and reduce employment. All the more so because even the cap-and-trade friendly Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the bill would reduce GDP between $1 trillion and $2.8 trillion by 2050.

Most liberal economists favor using the money to reduce the payroll tax. That has the disadvantage politically of adding Social Security into the debate. A cleaner tax swap would compensate for the new tax on business by cutting taxes on investment – such as slashing the 35% U.S. corporate rate that is the second highest in the developed world. Then there's the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, which are set to expire in 2010 and would raise the overall tax burden by $2.8 trillion over the next decade. Democrats who want to raise taxes on capital gains and dividends are proposing a double tax wallop by embracing Warner-Lieberman-Boxer.

All of this helps explain why so many in Congress are so enamored of "doing something" about global warming. They would lay claim to a vast new chunk of the private economy and enhance their own political power.

-- Wall Street Journal

SOCIALISM BY ANY OTHER NAME...

2008-06-02T18:00:00.002-05:00

For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class -- social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but -- even better -- in the name of Earth itself.

Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. (See Newsweek above.) And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment -- carbon chastity -- they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There's no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

-- Charles Krauthammer

2008-05-29T17:37:00.001-05:00

Health-care providers – not consumers – are always asking for tighter regulation, because they profit from making everyone subsidize generous plans that cover, say, podiatry or infertility treatment. Given the choice, consumers might choose policies that cover some services but not others.
Regulation is a very misunderstood and often mistaught concept (the above comment, by the way, was taken from a WSJ editorial touting a new Florida state law that would get the Florida government out of health insurance).

We were all taught when we were young that regulators like Teddy Roosevelt "fought" against the powerful big businesses to provide a more governed and regulated (and thus, the argument goes, more "fair" or safe) industrial world. But the truth is that the so-called "fat cats," the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, etc., co-authored the very regulations that Teddy Roosevelt, among others, was supposedly shoving down their throats.

And why would big business so readily agree to MORE regulation?

Simple. Regulation kills competition. The "fat cats," then, no longer need worry about smaller, more nimble companies undercutting their profit margins. Instead, the government makes the business of doing business so expensive that only the largest corporations will survive.

Whatever the regulation costs the corporations the cost is far less then the cost of competing, and what's more, those costs can just be passed onto the customers, and the customers will just have to eat it because the government killed whatever competitive choice there would have been had government never involved itself in order to "save" us.

The law of unintended consequences strikes again!

THOSE WHO KNEW MCCLELLAN

2008-05-29T17:29:00.003-05:00

The following retort of Scott McClellan's book-bash of Bush is from Peter Wehner, a former deputy assistant to the president, who knew and worked along side Scott McClellan.

He [Scott McClellan] would have us believe that the Bush administration was, at bottom, massively and deeply deceitful and corrupt — but this has only dawned on Scott since he started writing his book, years after the fact. Let's just say that for these revelations to spring forth as if truth were like a time-released capsule, in which things magically get clearer with the passage of time (and the signing of book contracts), is, well, suspicious. And my former colleagues are absolutely right to point out that Scott not only never raised any objections contemporaneously, in meetings or with his superiors; in fact, he said almost nothing at all, at any time, about anything of consequence. ... Scott seems to be that rare bird who kept those concerns suppressed, if he had them at all. And now, years later, he finally feels liberated to make arguments he didn't appear to believe at the time.

Scott's broader claim that "in some small way" his hope is to "move us beyond the destructive partisan warfare of the past 15 years" and that he wants to "contribute to [a] national conversation" about making our politics higher and better is not terribly persuasive. The same can be said about his complaints about his disdain for "the Washington game." In fact, one of the oldest games in Washington is to turn against those in power who cared for you and gave you the greatest opportunity in your life to serve this nation — and to do so in a book, for which you received a hefty advance.
It's also been pointed out that one of McClellan's suppossed turning points was upon learning that he had been lied to by Karl Rove, who claimed he had nothing to do with the leak of Valerie Plame's name. Just one problem with that -- the man who admitted to leaking Plame's name was Richard Armitage, not Karl Rove. How can one be betrayed by someone who didn't betray?

BASH BUSH, MAKE A MILLION

2008-05-28T18:04:00.001-05:00

I'll say this for Scott McClellan, at last he learned how to communicate. He was, to my mind, one of the worst press secretaries in presidential history — at least in modern times, continually cowed by the press, never able to show any confidence, and making us all wince whenever he held a briefing.

His book, titled What Happened, seems to go after Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, the president and others. The main releases we read about are how the president bollixed the response to Katrina and how the White House made a political campaign of the Iraq war, using, as Scott puts it, "a propaganda campaign."

The first thing to ask about these kinds of books is "does it help history, does it shed light, does it add to the sum total of knowledge about a topic history or contemporary analysis can use to shed light on an administration?" OR, rather, "is this a self-aggrandizing after-the-fact justification to bolster one's own reputation and credibility?" especially after having done such a poor job in the first place.

I think we'll probably find this book is mostly of the latter category. The evidence I've seen does in fact show that the administration had different justifications for the liberation of Iraq — but we saw them plainly and in the open before as well as after the invasion. The president, the secretary of state, the VP, and many others gave lots of reasons for the invasion of Iraq. There were international legal cases, there were public policy cases, there were national security cases all to be made. And they were. The idea that the press didn't do its job and was too soft on the president — as McClellan writes — is, frankly, laughable. Raise your hand if you have any evidence that the press was too soft on the administration.

As far as Katrina, I think we all know and can admit it was both a public policy and public relations disaster. We had a bad FEMA director, the president should not have flown over the disaster, or said Michael Brown was doing a good job. But it wasn't just the administration that didn't do so hot. I seem to recall state and local officials, those who had more access to the facts on the ground, those tasked with evacuation plans, those responsible for the city and state, were pretty unprepared as well. Heck, the mayor's family fled the state. Not the city, the state.

Finally, we'll learn more as those written about in his book speak out. I note Fran Townsend is already on record saying she recalls no meeting where Scott McClellan ever objected to what was being said or made his dissenting views known. And I'll just leave you with this — having not read the book and having no plans to do so: don't you think that when someone has an objection to what is being done, they owe it to the public and as a mark of duty to do something about it or say something about it at the time, rather than wait two years and save it for a book? Does that in and of itself not cut down some of the credibility.

The job of press secretary is not easy, but it can be done well, as Tony Snow and Dana Perino have shown. You want a Democratic example, I always thought Mike McCurry did a good job — and with good cheer in a tough time. But I'll say one other thing, too. I think this genre of book is losing its cachet, and people are getting a little tired of the game which goes something like this: Get a high-level job, make your name and reputation, do an average job at it, then write a book after you leave that helps nobody but bolsters your own reputation at the expense of those without book contracts. It's one of the uglier things in Washington, and as I say, I think its days will soon be over. People are tired of it.

-- Seth Leibsohn

NEWS FLASH: DESPITE REVISIONISM, GORE STILL LOST

2008-05-28T17:53:00.004-05:00

Investors Business Daily has a quick retort of the factually-challenged HBO film, Recount, suggesting that Bush stole the 2000 election. What was it Joesph Goebbels said? "...when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous."

Goebbels was attempting to criticize Churchill at that time, but the concept of the big lie -- that saturation and repetition of propaganda will revise memory of factual history -- has been elevated to pathetic heights vis-a-vis liberal romanticizing of the 2000 election.

In all its specific and unambiguous language, the [Florida state] law clearly stated in section 102.111: "If the county returns are not received by the Department of State by 5 p.m. of the seventh day following election, all missing counties shall be ignored, and the results shown by the returns on file shall be certified."

All the U.S. Supreme Court decided was to reaffirm that, according to the U.S. Constitution, the manner in which elections are conducted is up to each individual state and that the will of the people as expressed through the laws enacted by the popularly elected Florida legislature stood and could not be overturned by a Florida Supreme Court legislating from the bench.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says: "The principal issue in this case, whether the scheme that the Florida Supreme Court had put together violated the federal Constitution, that wasn't even close. The vote was 7 to 2." It was Al Gore, he adds, "who made it a judicial question. It was he who brought it into the federal courts."

All the votes were counted, and recounted, and counted again. And not a single recount, either by local boards or major news organizations, found a way for Gore to win. A comprehensive review of 64,248 ballots in all 67 Florida counties by the Miami Herald and its parent company, Knight Ridder, in partnership with USA Today, found that Bush's slender margin of 537 votes would have tripled to 1,665 votes even under the generous counting standards advocated by Gore.

Another review conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the request of CNN, the New York Times and other news organizations found that Bush still would have won Florida even if the U.S. Supreme Court had not ended the nonsense.

In 2000, the election boards of Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties were all controlled by Democrats. The infamous butterfly ballot was designed by a Democrat. The attorney general of Florida at that time was Democrat Robert Butterworth.

Voters were instructed at the polling place: "After voting, check your ballot card to make sure your voting selections are clearly and cleanly punched and there are no chads left hanging on the back of the card."

The fact is, Gore himself requested recounts in only four counties where he thought he might gain votes, not lose them. Gore lost not because Florida was "stolen," but because he couldn't carry his home state of Tennessee, the people who knew him best.

OH THAT MEDIA BIAS

2008-05-27T18:16:00.001-05:00

Jim VandeHei and Josh Kraushaar report that "the GOP is heading into the 2008 election without a single minority candidate with a plausible chance of winning a campaign for the House, the Senate or governor." First, note the weasel words: "plausible chance of winning." That's meant to exclude candidates like Allen West. Why didn't VandeHei and Kraushaar simply write: "The five to ten GOP candidates who have a shot of winning Democratic seats are white"? Well, that's not provocative enough to make it up on Drudge, now is it?

Also, VandeHei and Kraushaar ask: "So who's to blame for this diversity deficit?" They cite Jack Kemp, who says it's due to a "pitiful" recruitment effort, and a former black GOP candidate, who says it's because the GOP is broke. Good points. But VandeHei and Kraushaar never mention the vile attacks by liberals upon GOP minority candidates. For example, Democrats darkened Bobby Jindal's skin in a 2003 election, and even after his victory, he still endures accusations of "being a 'potato': brown on the outside, white on the inside," as the Washington Post reported.

And who can forget the case of 2006 Maryland Senate candidate, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele? The Washington Times reported: "attacks against the first black man to win a statewide election in Maryland include pelting him with Oreo cookies during a campaign appearance, calling him an 'Uncle Tom' and depicting him as a black-faced minstrel on a liberal Web log."

So Howard Dean's got a pretty good racket. First, slam the GOP as a "white Christian party." Then ruthlessly attack GOP minority candidates for betraying "their people." When the GOP fails to recruit a decent number of minority candidates, sit back, relax, and wait for the mainstream media to publicize your talking points.

-- Mike Goldfarb, Weekly Standard

WHY TALKING WITH IRAN IS FOLLY

2008-05-20T18:31:00.006-05:00

Here's a rather odd splitting of hairs -- Time Magazine's "objective" reporter Joe Klein takes John McCain to task because Barack Obama has never said he'd talk with Ahmadinejad specifically, just Iran's leaders, which is to say Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Um, Joe, how is that better than talking to Ahmadinejad?

[From Joe Klein's Time.com blog] At a press conference here, I just asked John McCain about why he keeps talking about Obama's alleged willingness to talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has no power over Iranian foreign policy, rather than Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who does. He said that Ahmadinejad is the guy who represents Iran in international forums like the United Nations, which is a fair point. When I followed with the observation that the Supreme Leader is, uh, the Supreme Leader, McCain responded that the "average American" thinks Ahmadinejad is the boss. Didn't get a chance to follow up to that, but I would have asked, "But isn't it your job to correct those sorts of mistaken impressions on the part of the American public?" Oh well... As I said below, there is a real debate lurking beneath all this bluster--whether we directly engage our adversaries, as we did during the cold war. McCain says no. Obama says yes. They should have it out in debate.
Again, nonsensical hair splitting.

Sure, technically, the Ayatollah and his Supreme Council (i.e., the Ayatollah and 11 mullahs) call all the shots. But Ahmadinejad, as McCain pointed out, is their boy, and he's hardly powerless.

In any event, this is irrelevant.

What is relevant is Klein's second point - that we "engaged" our adversaries during the Cold War. The thing is, Klein is backwards on his conclusions. Then again, reporters are often ignorant of history.

Many key points:

* Iran is not the Soviet Union. It is nowhere near as powerful or influential and thus it's a mistake to elevate them as such.

* We didn't have direct talks with the Soviets and Chinese because we wanted to. We did so because we had to. See point one.

* This isn't the Cold War. Under Nixon, we talked with China in large part to leverage them off of the Soviets. We correctly identified a weakness in their supposed Communist alliance. Thus, we didn't talk with our enemies out of anything but a strategy to undermine them, not because of some highbrow liberalism like Obama and company propose.

* Finally, Reagan didn't get elected, pick up the telephone and start talking to the Soviets, as our misinformed revisionist-history liberal friends keep stating. Indeed, Gorbachev wasn't even leader of the USSR when Reagan took office, Leonid Brezhnev was. Reagan met with Brezhnev with preconditions (namely, the US brazenly placed scores of Pershing II missiles in Europe), not without preconditions, as Barack Obama's own website claims he'd do with Iran (Obama's website: "Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.")

* It wasn't until Gorbachev took office that Reagan got anywhere with the Soviets, because the West recognized that Gorby was someone we could reason with. So even if one wants to elevate Iran to the status of the USSR (folly #1), neither the Ayatollah nor Ahmadinejad are anywhere near the reasonable guy that Gorby was (folly #2).

* At bare minimum, Reagan only talked with his enemies from a position of strength (did I mention the Pershing II missiles parked in Russia's back yard?). He likewise didn't fail to call a spade a spade. He reminded the Soviets at every turn of their cruelty - calling them the "Evil Empire," or telling them that "the march of freedom and democracy" would "leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history." I don't see any strength like that from Obama or Democrats in general. In fact, they go out of their multi-cultural, diversity-lovin', kumbayah way NOT to dare insult the Iranians. With the exception of far left Kool-Aid drinkers, the Obama camp looks whimpy to everyone, espeically to the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad.

In summary: Joe Klein needs to open up a frakin' history book, because his knowledge has been found lacking.

OBAMA AND MCCAIN BOTH HAVE CART LEADING HORSE

2008-05-20T17:27:00.000-05:00

Candidates Vie to Be The Anti-Lobbyist
Obama Cites Conflicts in McCain Camp

BILLINGS, Mont., May 19 -- Sen. Barack Obama accused Sen. John McCain on Monday of running a presidential campaign bought and paid for by lobbyists and criticized the presumptive Republican nominee for waiting more than a year to address the conflicts of several key advisers.

During a speech at a high school here, Obama said voters should be concerned that "after nearly three decades in Washington, John McCain can't see or won't acknowledge what's obvious to all of us here today -- that lobbyists aren't just part of the system in Washington, they're part of the problem."

McCain's campaign shot back quickly, challenging Obama to "shed light on the long list of federal lobbyists advising him on policy issues" and accusing him of diverting attention from more serious matters.
There are two important points to make regarding demonization of lobbying.

Point #1: Whether you philosophically agree with it or not, and whether you like it or not, the US constitution protects lobbying. Period. There's no debate on this, and so race to see which politician lobbys the least is a collossal waste of time. The First Amendment gives the "right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Petition the government for a redress of grievances is what we today call "lobbying."

Point #2: We don't need more regulation because of lobbying. Rather the reverse is true: We have a lobbying juggernaut exactly because the government interferes so much and so often in the private sector. The day that government butts out of commerce is the day that companies and businesses don't find it necessary to spend so much of their precious resources "petitioning the government"!

You don't like lobbying, Sens. McCain and Obama? Then get the heck out of our lives!

SPEAKING OF

2008-05-20T17:25:00.001-05:00

By David Ranson:

Will increasing tax rates on the rich increase revenues, as Barack Obama hopes, or hold back the economy, as John McCain fears? Or both?

[Economist] Mr. [Kurt] Hauser uncovered the means to answer these questions definitively. On this page in 1993, he stated that "No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP." What a pity that his discovery has not been more widely disseminated.

...The federal tax "yield" (revenues divided by GDP) has remained close to 19.5%, even as the top tax bracket was brought down from 91% [during WWII] to the present 35%. This is what scientists call an "independence theorem," and it cuts the Gordian Knot of tax policy debate.

The data show that the tax yield has been independent of marginal tax rates over this period, but tax revenue is directly proportional to GDP. So if we want to increase tax revenue, we need to increase GDP.

What happens if we instead raise tax rates? Economists of all persuasions accept that a tax rate hike will reduce GDP, in which case Hauser's Law says it will also lower tax revenue. That's a highly inconvenient truth for redistributive tax policy, and it flies in the face of deeply felt beliefs about social justice. It would surely be unpopular today with those presidential candidates who plan to raise tax rates on the rich – if they knew about it.

...What makes Hauser's Law work? For supply-siders there is no mystery. As Mr. Hauser said: "Raising taxes encourages taxpayers to shift, hide and underreport income. . . . Higher taxes reduce the incentives to work, produce, invest and save, thereby dampening overall economic activity and job creation."

NOT SO SETTLED

2008-05-20T17:24:00.001-05:00

31,000 scientists reject 'global warming' agenda
'Mr. Gore's movie has claims no informed expert endorses'

More than 31,000 scientists across the U.S. – including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields such as atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties – have signed a petition rejecting "global warming," the assumption that the human production of greenhouse gases is damaging Earth's climate.

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate," the petition states. "Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

The Petition Project actually was launched nearly 10 years ago, when the first few thousand signatures were assembled. Then, between 1999 and 2007, the list of signatures grew gradually without any special effort or campaign.

But now, a new effort has been conducted because of an "escalation of the claims of 'consensus,' release of the movie 'An Inconvenient Truth' by Mr. Al Gore, and related events," according to officials with the project.

"Mr. Gore's movie, asserting a 'consensus' and 'settled science' in agreement about human-caused global warming, conveyed the claims about human-caused global warming to ordinary movie goers and to public school children, to whom the film was widely distributed. Unfortunately, Mr. Gore's movie contains many very serious incorrect claims which no informed, honest scientist could endorse," said project spokesman and founder Art Robinson.

WND submitted a request to Gore's office for comment but did not get a response.

Robinson said the dire warnings about "global warming" have gone far beyond semantics or scientific discussion now to the point they are actually endangering people.

"The campaign to severely ration hydrocarbon energy technology has now been markedly expanded," he said. "In the course of this campaign, many scientifically invalid claims about impending climate emergencies are being made. Simultaneously, proposed political actions to severely reduce hydrocarbon use now threaten the prosperity of Americans and the very existence of hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries," he said.

In just the past few weeks, there have been various allegations that both shark attacks and typhoons have been sparked by "global warming."

The late Professor Frederick Seitz, the past president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and winner of the National Medal of Science, wrote in a letter promoting the petition, "The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds."

"This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful," he wrote.

Accompanying the letter sent to scientists was a 12-page summary and review of research on "global warming," officials said.

"The proposed agreement would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations throughout the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to the over 4 billion people in technologically underdeveloped countries," Seitz wrote.

Robinson said the project targets scientists because, "It is especially important for America to hear from its citizens who have the training necessary to evaluate the relevant data and offer sound advice."

He said the "global warming agreement," written in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, and other plans "would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind."

"Yet," he said, "the United Nations and other vocal political interests say the U.S. must enact new laws that will sharply reduce domestic energy production and raise energy prices even higher.

"The inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness include the right of access to life-giving and life-enhancing technology. This is especially true of access to the most basic of all technologies: energy. These human rights have been extensively and wrongly abridged," he continued. "During the past two generations in the U.S., a system of high taxation, extensive regulation, and ubiquitous litigation has arisen that prevents the accumulation of sufficient capital and the exercise of sufficient freedom to build and preserve needed modern technology.

"These unfavorable political trends have severely damaged our energy production, where lack of industrial progress has left our country dependent upon foreign sources for 30 percent of the energy required to maintain our current level of prosperity," he said. "Moreover, the transfer of other U.S. industries abroad as a result of these same trends has left U.S. citizens with too few goods and services to trade for the energy that they do not produce. A huge and unsustainable trade deficit and rapidly rising energy prices have been the result.

"The necessary hydrocarbon and nuclear energy production technologies have been available to U.S. engineers for many decades. We can develop these resources without harm to people or the environment. There is absolutely no technical, resource, or environmental reason for the U.S. to be a net importer of energy. The U.S. should, in fact, be a net exporter of energy," he said.

He told WND he believes the issue has nothing to do with energy itself, but everything to do with power, control and money, which the United Nations is seeking. He accused the U.N. of violating human rights in its campaign to ban much energy research, exploration and development.

"In order to alleviate the current energy emergency and prevent future emergencies, we need to remove the governmental restrictions that have caused this problem. Fundamental human rights require that U.S. citizens and their industries be free to produce and use the low cost, abundant energy that they need. As the 31,000 signatories of this petition emphasize, environmental science supports this freedom," he said.

The Petition Project website today said there are 31,072 scientists who have signed up, and Robinson said more names continue to come in.
In terms of Ph.D. scientists alone, it already has 15 times more scientists than are seriously involved in the U.N.'s campaign to "vilify hydrocarbons," officials told WND.

"The very large number of petition signers demonstrates that, if there is a consensus among American scientists, it is in opposition to the human-caused global warming hypothesis rather than in favor of it," the organization noted.

The project was set up by a team of physicists and physical chemists who do research at several American institutions and collects signatures when donations provide the resources to mail out more letters.

"In a group of more than 30,000 people, there are many individuals with names similar or identical to other signatories, or to non-signatories – real or fictional.
Opponents of the petition project sometimes use this statistical fact in efforts to discredit the project. For examples, Perry Mason and Michael Fox are scientists who have signed the petition – who happen also to have names identical to fictional or real non-scientists," the website said.

The petition is needed, supporters said, simply because Gore and others "have claimed that the 'science is settled' – that an overwhelming 'consensus' of scientists agrees with the hypothesis of human-caused global warming, with only a handful of skeptical scientists in disagreement."

The list of scientists includes 9,021 Ph.D.s, 6,961 at the master's level, 2,240 medical doctors and 12,850 carrying a bachelor of science or equivalent academic degree.

The Petition Project's website includes both a list of scientists by name as well as a list of scientists by state.

DEMOCRATS DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH

2008-05-15T19:04:00.003-05:00

Shakespeare once wrote, "Methinks the lady doth protest too much." Protesting too much is exactly what faux-outraged Democrats are doing in response to a speech in which President Bush told the Israeli Knesset that, "We also believe that nations have a right to defend themselves and that no nation should ever be forced to negotiate with killers pledged to it's destruction." He referenced Neville Chamberlain, and that appeasement never worked with Nazis. That's it.

What's fascinating in all this is that Bush (1) made no mention of Barack Obama or any Democrat, and (2) simply repeated what American presidents have been saying about our Israeli relationship since Harry Truman more than 60 years ago.

That Democrats are so oddly defensive when no attack was made simply underscores that they are as weak in the face of autocracies from Burma to China to North Korea to Tehran as everyone suspects.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK

2008-05-15T18:43:00.005-05:00

Oh, what a surprise, our Congressmen waste our tax dollars for personal luxury.

AUTOCRACIES KILL

2008-05-15T18:40:00.001-05:00

Great commentary by Dan Henninger.

Among the Western intellectual classes in the U.S. and Europe, there is no idea more routinely mocked than George Bush's proposition that what the world needs today is more democracies. Much of this has to do with the Iraq war and the apparently bottomless, neurotic antipathy to Mr. Bush. But make no mistake: The steady stream of pushback against "exporting democracy" as quixotic or inappropriate has gone far toward throwing out the democratic baby with the Bush bathwater.

Tectonic plates in motion don't distinguish between democracies and autocracies, but the record shows that getting hit by an earthquake or cyclone in an authoritarian government is a high-risk proposition for the survivors.

Communist China's Tangshan earthquake of 1976 was the 20th century's most devastating, killing 255,000. (All data here from U.S. Geological Survey.) Managua under the Somoza dictatorship in 1972: at least 5,000 dead and most of the city destroyed.

Mexico City's 1985 earthquake under the one-party PRI government killed 9,500 according to government estimates, but the toll is believed to have been much higher. Soviet Armenia 1988: 25,000 dead. In 2003 an earthquake in mullahfied Iran destroyed the ancient city of Bam and killed at least 31,000.

Common to all is that their governments never held real elections. In such places, after nature kills people, delay and incompetence kill the rest. Set aside idealism and the flowery rhetoric that must accompany a statement like the 2002 Bush Doctrine. The bottom line is accountability. In democracies, even poor or imperfect ones, public pressure, even outrage, pushes elected officials to act. In nondemocracies, the politicians don't give a damn because they don't have to.

Bureaucracies anywhere are lumpen, but in nondemocracies their sloth can be lethal. Their political masters, in office in perpetuity, are often corrupt, and so too are they. This, not poverty, is mainly why buildings like the Juyuan Middle School collapsed this week. In Bam just five years ago, many died because they were trapped beneath crude houses. Cement up to code isn't that expensive.

Bad people and bad cement exist everywhere. When they kill people in a democracy, the pressure of public outrage calls for heads to roll. After the fiasco of Hurricane Katrina, the head of FEMA went to the block, George Bush's approval rating collapsed and has never recovered. Arguably, one can divide the Bush presidency's status to before and after Katrina.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who saw his fill running Doctors Without Borders, suggested last week that disaster aid to Burma's government would be ripped off. Paul Wolfowitz, a democracy-addicted neocon, came to the World Bank arguing that authoritarian corruption was at the center of many developing-nation horrors. The Bank's bureaucracy drove him out. One wonders how many shoddy buildings their corrupt borrowers have tossed together.

BAD SCIENCE -> BAD POLICY -> BAD ECONOMICS

2008-05-13T18:15:00.001-05:00

Fortunately, there is hope.

We're not all stupid, and it's proven by the British stiff arm of their government's proposed taxation advocation of carbon output.

Majority of Britons are opposed to increases in green taxation

By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
Friday, 2 May 2008

More than seven in 10 voters insist that they would not be willing to pay higher taxes in order to fund projects to combat climate change, according to a new poll.

The survey also reveals that most Britons believe "green" taxes on 4x4s, plastic bags and other consumer goods have been imposed to raise cash rather than change our behaviour, while two-thirds of Britons think the entire green agenda has been hijacked as a ploy to increase taxes.
Read the rest. Like I said, people aren't stupid. When you try to grab their wallets to "save" a planet that doesn't need saving, they react.

In a critical essay of John McCain -- calling it an "assault on reason" -- Roy Spencer lays the blame on this over-politicization of undetermined science on the scientific community:

When the public finds out how much any legislation that punishes energy use is going to cost them, with no guarantee that anything we do will have a measurable impact on future climate, there will be a revolt just like the one now materializing in the U.K. and the EU. At some point, as they are faced with the stark reality that mankind’s requirement for an abundant source of energy cannot simply be legislated out of existence, the public will begin asking, “Just how sure are we that humans are causing global warming?”

And this is where the science establishment has, in my view, betrayed the public’s trust.

Even though there has never been a single scientific paper published that has ruled out natural variability for most of the warming we’ve seen since 1850, Big Science has managed to convince politicians and much of the public that the science is settled. Apparently, our addition of nine molecules of carbon dioxide to each 100,000 molecules of air over the last 150 years can now be blamed for anything and everything we choose. Hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, floods, glaciers flowing toward the sea…. all of these used to happen naturally, but no more.

The warming that allowed the Vikings to farm in Greenland 1,000 years ago was surely natural. But we are now told that warming in Greenland today is surely manmade. Glaciers retreating in western Canada have revealed evidence of previous forests, showing that warming and cooling cycles do indeed occur, even without SUVs. Yet the SUV is now the scapegoat for retreating glaciers.

McCain pointed to shrinking Arctic sea ice and collapsing Antarctic ice shelves as obvious evidence that humans are to blame, even though the sea ice did the same thing in the 1920s and 1930s, and those ice shelves must break off eventually, as new glacial ice flows toward the sea to take their place.

But McCain has made it clear that the science really does not matter anyway because, even if humans are not to blame for global warming, stopping carbon-dioxide emissions is the right thing to do. And if we had another choice for most of our energy needs, I might be willing to accept such a claim as harmless enough.

But carbon dioxide is necessary for life on Earth, and I have a difficult time calling something so fundamentally important a “pollutant.” Maybe the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher now than it has been in hundreds of thousands of years. So what? I am increasingly convinced that its influence on climate pales in comparison to the influence that natural climate events like El Niño and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation have on regional climate. Indeed, most of the warming we’ve seen in the last century might well be due to these natural modes of climate variability alone.

MCCAIN WHIFFS IN OREGON

2008-05-13T18:06:00.001-05:00

The ineptness of Republicans never ceases to amaze me. The past few weeks John McCain had a perfect opportunity to capitalize on the Democratic Party infighting between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

So, what did McCain do with this moment in the spotlight? He mimicked Democrats and delivered a speech in Portland, Oregon, on how he would combat climate change...

... say again, John?

McCain does realize he's the Republican candidate, right?

His speech will do one of two things for his intended audience - that is, Republicans: Bore the hell out of them, or (in my case) infuriate them by offering a costly government-intrusive solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist.

It's hasn't gone over too hot with Republican audiences:

[From the Wall Street Journal editors] The problem is that once government creates an artificial scarcity of carbon, how the credits are allocated creates a huge new venue for political rent-seeking and more subsidies for favored industries. Some businesses will benefit more than others, in proportion to their lobbying influence and how well they're able to game the Beltway. Congress itself will probably take the largest revenue grab, offering itself a few more bites out of the economy and soaking politically unpopular businesses.

Then there's the question of whether any of this will even reduce greenhouse gasses. The McCain plan would allow businesses unlimited use of domestic and international offsets to comply with the carbon cap. So a chemical manufacturer, say, would pay an industry not covered by the program – most notably, agriculture – to reduce its emissions. Or it could pay a coal plant in China for plucking low-hanging efficiency fruit, like installing smokestack scrubbers. In other words, U.S. consumers would be paying higher prices for energy in return for making Chinese industries more efficient and competitive. Europe is in the midst of that experience now under the Kyoto Protocol, and most of its reductions so far have been illusory.

The compliance bookkeeping for this new "market" is vastly complex, and a McCain Administration would create a public-private "Climate Change Credit Corporation" to oversee it all.
And here's the take from NRO.
The Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) estimates that a U.S. cap-and-trade regime like the one discussed in this speech would cause about a one-percent reduction in GDP within five years. In less abstract terms, under that projection, by 2014 something like 1 million people would lose their jobs and the average American family would have about $150 less to spend every month. The costs would ramp up dramatically from there. In short, it would cost a lot. The U.N. IPCC estimates that unconstrained global warming is expected to cause damages equal to about 1-5 percent of global economic output about a century from now. William Nordhaus of Yale has estimated that the net benefit that would be created for the world by a perfectly implemented, globally harmonized carbon tax would be just under 0.2 percent of the present value of future global consumption. That presents a painfully thin margin for error, ignores the fact that costs will be disproportionately borne by the U.S., and does not bear much resemblance to the rhetoric of crisis that Sen. McCain uses in his speech.

It is highly unlikely that we could ever realize this theoretical benefit. Nobody has any realistic plan to get China and India to reduce emissions, and without doing so the costs of cap-and-trade to the U.S. would be dramatically greater than the benefits. Even if we could get the developing world to go along, the theoretical benefits that such a regulatory regime might create would, in the real world, be more than offset by the economic drag that would be created by the side deals required to get China, India, and the U.S. ethanol lobby, among many others, to go along with it.
It's like I've said before... every time I concede for McCain, or even warm up to him, or find myself defending him, he goes and does something to really tick me off.

YES.

2008-05-09T16:51:00.000-05:00

Are conservatives happier than liberals?
Right-wingers rationalize (or reason away) nation's problems
By Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience

updated 11:39 a.m. ET, Wed., May. 7, 2008

Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are."

To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance. In that way, one's social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.

If your beliefs don't justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings.

"Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives," the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, "apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light."

The results support and further explain a Pew Research Center survey from 2006, in which 47 percent of conservative Republicans in the U.S. described themselves as "very happy," while only 28 percent of liberal Democrats indicated such cheer.

The same rationalizing phenomena could apply to personal situations as well.

"There is no reason to think that the effects we have identified here are unique to economic forms of inequality," the researchers write. "Research suggests that highly egalitarian women are less happy in their marriages compared with their more traditional counterparts, apparently because they are more troubled by disparities in domestic labor."

The current study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

WHEN HYPOCRISY IS WRIGHT

2008-05-07T16:51:00.001-05:00

[Rev. Jeremiah] Wright attacks capitalism throughout his sermons, an odd ideological target for a man who reportedly drives a Porsche and whose grateful congregants are building him a $1 million, four-garage home in a predominantly white suburb of Chicago (so much for being “unapologetically black”). He has also praised Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Libya’s Muammar al-Qadhafi. So it’s really no wonder that a huckster such as Wright has emerged as some sort of “reality-based community” folk hero. The political left finds common cause with the religious left and is apparently willing to overlook exactly the sort of racist sectarianism that it would be so quick to condemn were its perpetrator a white conservative.

-- James Kirchick, The Politico

ADAM SMITH 1, AL GORE 0

2008-05-07T16:23:00.004-05:00

Call it another case of the folly of environmentally-based central planning. Try as they may, the world's environmental "experts" just can't get around the stubborn laws of economics. Somewhere Adam Smith is smiling.

To create just one gallon of fuel, ethanol slurps up 1,700 gallons of water, according to Cornell's David Pimentel, and 51 cents of tax credits. And it still can't compete against oil without a protective 54-cents-per-gallon tariff on imports and a federal mandate that forces it into our gas tanks. The record 30 million acres the U.S. will devote to ethanol production this year will consume almost a third of America's corn crop while yielding fuel amounting to less than 3% of petroleum consumption.

In December the Congressional Research Service warned that even devoting every last ear of American-grown corn to ethanol would not create enough "renewable fuel" to meet federal mandates. According to a 2007 OECD report, fossil-fuel production is up to 10,000 times as efficient as biofuel, measured by energy produced per unit of land.

Now scientists are showing that ethanol will exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions. A February report in the journal Science found that "corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years . . . Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%." Princeton's Timothy Searchinger and colleagues at Iowa State, of all places, found that markets for biofuel encourage farmers to level forests and convert wilderness into cropland. This is to replace the land diverted from food to fuel.
I love it too when the economic arguments additionally note that the environmental solutions don't even come close to attaining the advertised goal of the environmental movement (i.e., "curing" global warming), but at the same time I don't like it, because it implies that one has accepted the junk science to begin with. Don't fret, environmentalists: I'm sure that one of Al Gore's non-peer reviewed computer models will prove next week that Congressionally-mandated fuel cell cars will nullify the power of the Sun -- that huge bright orb that actually contributes 99.99% of all natural global warming and cooling cycles. Okay, so that's not scientific fact. But neither is Al Gore's claim that the Burmese cyclone was caused by global warming. Who needs facts when one peddles in human misery, eh Al?

AGAINST FOREIGN OIL IMPORTS... EXCEPT WHEN THEY AREN'T

2008-05-07T16:17:00.004-05:00

Speaking of energy, we can't help but give more attention to a recent press release from some of the Senate's leading liberals. Charles Schumer, Byron Dorgan, Bernie Sanders, Bob Casey and Mary Landrieu are demanding that President Bush tell OPEC nations to increase their oil supplies or risk losing arms deals with the United States. The Senators say U.S. consumers need the price relief that only increased oil production can bring.

Yes, that Senator Schumer and that Senator Dorgan, both of whom voted against increasing U.S. oil production because they couldn't abide drilling across 1% of Alaska's wilderness. Yes, that Senator Casey, who has called for mandatory reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide. At least Senator Landrieu of Louisiana has fought to allow more offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

All of these Senate Democrats are willing to accept greater carbon emissions, as long as we can also outsource jobs in the petroleum industry to Middle Eastern dictatorships. The Senators do aver that "some of us have concerns in general about arming this region to the teeth," but apparently cheap fossil fuel buys a lot of peace of mind.

A special word of concern about Mr. Sanders: He is the only avowed socialist in Congress, but the Vermonter appears to be losing his religion over $122-a-barrel oil. By signing this letter, not only is he officially recognizing the law of supply and demand; he's also proposing a more crassly commercial trade of guns for oil than anything we've ever heard from the most candid realpolitician.

To top it off, the Senator whose Web site proudly proclaims that the first bill he introduced was to combat global warming now wants more fossil fuels ready for burning. We hope his friends are closely watching Mr. Sanders, in case he blows a gasket over all of this cognitive ideological dissonance.

--Wall Street Journal

OH YEAH, THAT'S WHY WE HAVE GUANTANAMO

2008-05-05T12:59:00.004-05:00

ADEN, Yemen -- Almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials.

Jamal al-Badawi, a Yemeni who helped organize the plot to bomb the Cole as it refueled in this Yemeni port on Oct. 12, 2000, has broken out of prison twice. He was recaptured both times, but then secretly released by the government last fall. Yemeni authorities jailed him again after receiving complaints from Washington. But U.S. officials have so little faith that he's still in his cell that they have demanded the right to perform random inspections.

Two suspects, described as the key organizers, were captured outside Yemen and are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. Many details of their alleged involvement remain classified. It is unclear when -- or if -- they will be tried by the military.
Ya know... maybe if "allies" like Yemen proved to be more reliable in their counterterrorism policies the United States wouldn't feel the need to even have Guantanamo.

WELCOME TO THE COTTON GIN ERA

2008-04-28T17:37:00.001-05:00

The Real Cost of Tackling Climate Change
By STEVEN F. HAYWARD

The usual chorus of environmentalists and editorial writers has chimed in to attack President Bush's recent speech on climate change. In his address of April 23, he put forth a goal of stopping the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2025.

"Way too little and way too late," runs the refrain, followed by the claim that nothing less than an 80% reduction in emissions by the year 2050 will suffice – what I call the "80 by 50" target. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have endorsed it. John McCain is not far behind, calling for a 65% reduction.

We all ought to reflect on what an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050 really means. When we do, it becomes clear that the president's target has one overwhelming virtue: Assuming emissions curbs are even necessary, his goal is at least realistic.

The same cannot be said for the carbon emissions targets espoused by the three presidential candidates and environmentalists. Indeed, these targets would send us back to emissions levels last witnessed when the cotton gin was in daily use.

Begin with the current inventory of carbon dioxide emissions – CO2 being the principal greenhouse gas generated almost entirely by energy use. According to the Department of Energy's most recent data on greenhouse gas emissions, in 2006 the U.S. emitted 5.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, or just under 20 tons per capita. An 80% reduction in these emissions from 1990 levels means that the U.S. cannot emit more than about one billion metric tons of CO2 in 2050.

Were man-made carbon dioxide emissions in this country ever that low? The answer is probably yes – from historical energy data it is possible to estimate that the U.S. last emitted one billion metric tons around 1910. But in 1910, the U.S. had 92 million people, and per capita income, in current dollars, was about $6,000.

By the year 2050, the Census Bureau projects that our population will be around 420 million. This means per capita emissions will have to fall to about 2.5 tons in order to meet the goal of 80% reduction.

It is likely that U.S. per capita emissions were never that low – even back in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood. The only nations in the world today that emit at this low level are all poor developing nations, such as Belize, Mauritius, Jordan, Haiti and Somalia.

If that comparison seems unfair, consider that even the least-CO2 emitting industrialized nations do not come close to the 2050 target. France and Switzerland, compact nations that generate almost all of their electricity from nonfossil fuel sources (nuclear for France, hydro for Switzerland) emit about 6.5 metric tons of CO2 per capita.

The daunting task of reaching one billion metric tons of CO2 emissions by 2050 comes into even greater relief when we look at the American economy, sector-by-sector. The Energy Department breaks down emissions into residential, commercial (office buildings, etc.), industrial, and transportation (planes, trains and automobiles); electricity consumption is apportioned to each.

Consider the residential sector. At the present time, American households emit 1.2 billion tons of CO2 – 20% higher than the entire nation's emissions must be in 2050. If households are to emit no more than their present share of CO2, emissions will have to be reduced to 204 million tons by 2050. But in 2050, there will be another 40 million residential households in the U.S.

Today, the average residence in the U.S. uses about 10,500 kilowatt hours of electricity and emits 11.4 tons of CO2 per year (much more if you are Al Gore or John Edwards and live in a mansion). To stay within the magic number, average household emissions will have to fall to no more than 1.5 tons per year. In our current electricity infrastructure, this would mean using no more than about 2,500 KwH per year. This is not enough juice to run the average hot water heater.

You can forget refrigerators, microwaves, clothes dryers and flat screen TVs. Even a house tricked out with all the latest high-efficiency EnergyStar appliances and compact fluorescent lights won't come close. The same daunting energy math applies to the industrial, commercial and transportation sectors as well. The clear implication is that we shall have to replace virtually the entire fossil fuel electricity infrastructure over the next four decades with CO2-free sources – a multitrillion dollar proposition, if it can be done at all.

Natural gas – the preferred coal substitute of the moment – won't come close. If we replaced every single existing coal plant with a natural gas plant, CO2 emissions from electric power generation alone would still be more than twice the 2050 target. Most environmentalists remain opposed to nuclear power, of course. It is unlikely that renewables – wind, solar, and biomass – can ever make up more than about 20% of our electricity supply.

Suppose, however, that a breakthrough in carbon sequestration, a revival of nuclear power, and a significant improvement in the cost and effectiveness of renewables were to enable us to reduce the carbon footprint of electricity production. That would still leave transportation.

Right now our cars and trucks consume about 180 billion gallons of motor fuel. To meet the 2050 target, we shall have to limit consumption of gasoline to about 31 billion gallons, unless a genuine carbon-neutral liquid fuel can be produced. (Ethanol isn't it.) To show how unrealistic this is, if the entire nation drove nothing but Toyota Priuses in 2050, we'd still overshoot the transportation emissions target by 40%.

The enthusiasm for an 80% reduction target is often justified on grounds that national policy should set an ambitious goal. However, claims on behalf of alternative energy sources – biofuels, hydrogen, windpower and so forth – either do not match up to the scale of the energy required, or are not cost-competitive in current form.

How on God's green earth will we make up the difference? Someone should put this question to the candidates. And not let them slide past it with glittering generalities.

Mr. Hayward is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the annual "Index of Leading Environmental Indicators," from which this article is adapted.

HOW DARE YOU NOT UNITE!

2008-04-24T21:16:00.003-05:00

This is long but great op-ed by Jonah Goldburg. I love the correction of the oft-misquoted Thomas Jefferson.

'Unity is the great need of the hour," insists Barack Obama. Unity and the hope for unity and the need for unity in the pursuit of hope and the hope that our unified hopefulness will carry us to ever greater heights of hopeful unity until each and every one of us is the person he longs to be: That's what Barack Obama is all about. And don't you dare say otherwise. These are not "just words."

One might be forgiven for asking, What the heck do these words mean? Specifically, what's so special about unity? Unity for what? Unity around what? Obama has an answer: We need unity "not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential [empathy] deficit that exists in this country." His wife, Michelle, dilates on the subject: "We have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation."

If you go on to read or listen to more of this stuff, you'll eventually see what they're getting at: Americans need to rally around Obama and his platform if they are going to mend their souls and make this a better country. You might buy this or you might think it's hogwash, and there's no shortage of arguments out there for both perspectives, but what is it with this obsession with unity? American politicians used to have a word to describe their appeals to collective action for the betterment of the whole society. They called it patriotism. But that word summons the banshees of the Democratic party. To raise the issue of patriotism, say the Democrats, is to question whether someone is patriotic at all — at least when Republicans do it.

Except that Republicans don't actually use the word "patriotism" very much. Nevertheless, Democrats hear it in almost everything Republicans say. When Republicans disputed John Kerry's commitment to national defense, Democrats said they were questioning his patriotism. When John McCain released an ad calling himself the "American president Americans have been waiting for," one could hear outraged caterwauling from the Democratic jungle: What's John McCain trying to say? We're un-American? Who's he calling unpatriotic? Fred Barnes, writing in The Weekly Standard, calls this anticipatory offense "patriotism paranoia." Indeed, there does seem to be psychological insecurity on display. If I say to a male friend, "Those are nice shoes," and he responds with "How dare you call me gay!" it's fair to say he's the guy with the issues.

Obama himself has gotten in on this act: "In this campaign, we will not stand for the politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon." His campaign manager, David Plouffe, chimed in later: "Questioning patriotism is something we don't think has a place in this campaign."

This is a mess. Barack Obama and other Democrats use the word "unity" as a substitute for something like "patriotism." They consider "questioning the patriotism" of Democrats — even when it's not actually being questioned — beyond the pale and "divisive." All the while they use the word "divisive" with diuretic abandon as code for "unpatriotic." And if that's not confusing enough, many Democrats routinely declare flat-out that Republicans are unpatriotic. For example, Howard Dean, when running for president, insisted that John Ashcroft was "not a patriot. John Ashcroft is a direct descendant of Joseph McCarthy." John Kerry complained that Bush's "creed of greed" led him to "unpatriotically" allow corporations to move overseas. And what is the "chickenhawk" epithet if not an attack on the patriotism of war supporters who do not enlist, lubricated with the spittle of anti-hypocrisy hysteria?

Perhaps we should "unpack" some of these concepts, as the academics say.

DEFINITIONS GOOD AND BAD

Suppose there were someone who believed it might do America "a ton of good to have our butts kicked" (in the words of left-wing novelist Tom Robbins). Or that the world would benefit from "a million Mogadishus," and that "the only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military" (Columbia professor Nicholas De Genova). Or that America is "just downright mean" — brimming with "broken souls" — and hasn't done anything worthy of pride in her lifetime (Michelle Obama). Or that because of the racism of "U.S. of KKK A" at home, and its cruelty abroad, we shouldn't sing "God bless America" so readily as "God damn America" (Rev. Jeremiah Wright). It would stretch the bounds of neither reason nor decorum to say these people are less in love with America than is your typically patriotic person. Try replacing "America" in the above quotes with just about any other noun. "The only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the New York Yankees!" "Cleveland is downright mean!" "God damn my KKK-car!" And so on. In any of these instances, a reasonable person might question the speaker's love for the Yankees, Cleveland, or Chrysler. But no reasonable person may ever — ever! — question someone's love of country when he attacks it with similar words.

If patriotism is a thing, if it has meaning as a concept and as a description of attitudes or behaviors, it isn't surprising that some people will be more patriotic than others — whatever definition we finally settle on. And we need not settle on just one, because there are many kinds of patriotism. Walter Berns argues in his book Making Patriots that, because America is a nation founded on individual rights, American patriotism differs markedly from, say, Spartan patriotism, which extolled loyalty to the collective and the state above all else. Many liberals would agree with this at first blush. But they can't seem to hold on to the idea that American patriotism has something to do with America.

John Edwards, whose bifocal vision of "two Americas" involves pity for one and contempt for the other, says, "Patriotism is about refusing to support something you know is wrong, and having the courage to speak out with strength and passion and backbone for something you know is right." Well, no. Dissent is about all that. Patriotism is about loving your country. So, yes, dissent could be patriotic — or it could be treason. Everyone from American Communist spies and saboteurs dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. government during the Cold War to the protesters carrying signs saying "Bomb Texas, Not Iraq" at your typical ANSWER rally is patriotic, according to Edwards's definition, which is 200-proof nonsense.

Or consider this supposedly brilliant bumper-sticker insight: "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." Mark Steyn has had great fun with that line, pointing out that Thomas Jefferson — usually credited as its author — never said anything of the sort. Steyn traces the fakery back to a 1991 quote from Nadine Strossen, the head of the ACLU, an organization with a vested interest in putting the founders' imprimatur on relentless knee-jerk complaining. (The oldest reference I can find in major newspapers is a 1969 line from New York mayor John Lindsay, who was congratulating anti-Vietnam protesters at Columbia for their patriotism. He was booed after he left the stage, and Paul Boutelle — a cab driver and Socialist Workers party mayoral candidate known after 1979 as Kwame Montsho Ajamu Somburu — vilified him in absentia. The crowd loved it.)

It is worth pointing out that if Jefferson had in fact said something like that, he would have been what social scientists call a moron. As John O'Sullivan once noted, tongue firmly in cheek, "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Treason is the highest form of dissent. Therefore treason is the highest form of patriotism." Yet when you listen to the verbal contortions many on the left go through to defend the New York Times's efforts to reveal national-security secrets, or to journalists who think expressing open sympathy for America in the international arena is a grave sin, or simply to the usual battiness of countless America-haters, you can appreciate the wisdom of the Italian proverb that the truest things are said in jest.

Like the layers of steel in a Japanese sword, the logic of "Jefferson's" wisdom folds in on itself until one is left with an adamantine blade of invincible ignorance and razor-sharp asininity. For example, if George Bush and conservatives are little better than Prussian heel-clickers for wearing their patriotism on their sleeves, what does it say about you when you wear your patriotism on your bumper? After all, "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" is bandied about almost exclusively by self-styled dissenters. "This is not the first time in American history when patriotism has been distorted to deflect criticism and mislead the nation," harrumphed the Great Dissenter John Kerry in 2006. "No wonder Thomas Jefferson himself said: 'Dissent is the greatest form of patriotism.'" Get it? John Kerry is bragging about what a great patriot he is by calling attention to what a wonderful dissenter he is. "I am more patriotic than thou" sneaks up on us in the Trojan Horse of "I dissent more than thou."

Now it must be said that no conservative standing upon the shoulders of Burke, Nock, Buckley, Hayek, Goldwater, and Reagan would for a moment dispute the suggestion that dissent for the right reason can be one high form of patriotism. But it depends on the reason. The dissenter-for-dissent's-sake is among the most common species of pest in the human ecosystem. The reflexive contrarian who cares not what he is contradicting is quite simply the most useless of citizens.

When confronted with the assertion that the Soviet Union and the United States were moral equivalents, William F. Buckley Jr. famously responded that if one man pushes an old lady into an oncoming bus and another man pushes an old lady out of the way of a bus, we should not denounce them both as men who push old ladies around. Likewise, we should not say that the man who dissents from a church-burning mob and the man who dissents from a fire brigade are morally equivalent "dissenters."

"FASCIST," YOU SAY?

Part of the problem is that many on the left think patriotism is essentially fascist, another name for nationalism and jingoism. And some may use it that way — but some may also call a duck a "cat," which doesn't mean we should all be hostage to this usage. The misuse of "patriotism" and "dissent" is worse, because a country without a word to describe its love for what is best within it is a country ill-equipped to defend what is best within it. And, for the record, it should be noted that fascism wasn't about patriotism, but nationalism. Hitler himself insisted he was no patriot, but a nationalist. In the United States, a creedal nation dedicated to limited government and individual rights, fascist nationalism is almost the complete opposite of patriotism.

Alas, that's too much for many liberals to process, so they have come to extolling the word "unity." But here's the thing: Unity by itself has no moral worth whatsoever. The only value of unity is strength, strength in numbers — and, again, that is a fascist value. That's the symbolism of the fasces, the bundle of sticks that in combination are invincible. Rape gangs and lynch mobs? Unified. The mafia? Unified. The SS? They had unity coming out the yinyang. Meanwhile, Socrates, Jesus, Thomas More, and an endless line of nameless souls were dispatched from this earth in the name of unity. Returning to Buckley, the mob that pushes old ladies in front of a bus and the posse that tries to stop the mob are not morally equivalent. Indeed, the lone man who faces the mob with justice on his side is the greatest of heroes.

American patriots pay heed: The founding fathers dedicated a great deal of thought to the subject of unity, and they found it was something to view with skepticism at best and, more often than not, with fear. Hence we have a constitution designed to thwart the baser forms of unity. Our government is set up so that the Senate cools the populist passion of the House, the executive thwarts the passions of the legislature and vice versa, and the Supreme Court checks the whole lot, to which its composition is in turn ultimately subject. "Divisiveness" — the setting of faction against faction, one branch of government against another, and the sovereignty of the individual above the group — was for the founders the great guarantor of our liberties and the source of civic virtue.

Rightly ordered unity in a democratic republic is the end result of ceaseless debate and discussion. But today, ceaseless debate and discussion is precisely what many liberals object to. As Al Gore is fond of saying about global warming, "The time for debate is over." Legions of liberals insist that we must move beyond ideology and partisan differences on this, that, and the other. But have you ever heard anyone say that we need to "move beyond ideology" for the sake of bipartisan unity and then abandon his own position? Of course not. When someone says that we need to get past labels and move beyond ideology, what he means is that you need to drop your principled objections and get with the program. That is why Time magazine heralded Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Bloomberg as "new action heroes": These "post-partisans" had dropped any pretense of a Republican vision and simply embraced the liberal agenda. That's what the AARP intends when its ad campaign for health-care reform proclaims: "Divided we fail." The mascot for this campaign is a chimera, the GOP elephant's head and the Democratic jackass's body. Of course, such a creature cannot be created without shrinking the Republican brain or vastly inflating the Democratic ass.

The fact that we take liberals seriously when they talk about patriotism doesn't mean they are doing the same. John Edwards wouldn't call a Communist saboteur a patriot, and Barack Obama's love of unity would hardly drive him to praise the virtue of the mob. But what's important to understand is that it is the Left, not the Right, that speaks in code. The supposedly neutral language of "unity" and "division" is not neutral at all. "My rival in this race," Obama proclaimed early in 2007, "is not other candidates. It's cynicism." His insistence that "divisiveness" is his greatest enemy is belied by the fact that he is unwilling to repudiate Jeremiah Wright, who is about as divisive a character as we've seen in American politics in a generation. Meanwhile, Obama sees nothing wrong with demonizing Geraldine Ferraro — or even his own grandmother — for crass political purposes. He uses seemingly conciliatory language to give the impression that he is above the fray, transcendent and enlightened. Only those who see through his act are cynical, only those who disagree with his agenda are divisive. But he won't name names, because that would spoil the illusion. "It would," in the words of Andrew Ferguson, "at last be plain that his politics of unity, his politics of 'addition not subtraction,' is simply another way of recasting the old 'politics of us vs. them' that he says he disdains."

It's worth asking, then: If Obama and the Democrats believe unity in all things is the supreme political value, but the American tradition holds that liberty is a greater good, then could it not be argued that Barack Obama's rival in this race is not the other candidates, but patriotism?

KRYSTOL ON PETRAEUS

2008-04-23T19:09:00.000-05:00

The allegedly lame duck Bush administration has--if this report is correct--hit a home run. CENTCOM is the central theater of the war on terror, and the president is putting our best commander in charge of it. What Odierno achieved as day-to-day commander in Iraq was amazing (see Fred and Kim Kagan's article, "The Patton of Counterinsurgency"), and he's clearly the right choice for MNFI. Bush has done the right thing, overriding opposition from within the Pentagon. He deserves congratulations--and thanks.

-- Bill Krystol commenting on reports that Gen. David Petraeus has been tapped to run US Central Command

HOLLYWOOD'S VIEW OF IRAQ: OPTIMISM NEED NOT APPLY

2008-04-23T19:05:00.002-05:00

"In my opinion, the four greatest achievements of America are its Revolution, the freeing of Europe, the freeing of slaves, and the freeing of Iraq. But it will take time to comprehend."

-- Dr. Shafeeq Al Mahdi, director for the National Directorate of Film and Theater.
That quote above comes from an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal regarding how the Arts have flourished with the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Obviously the transition to post-Saddam rule is quite dangerous for artists who now dodge religious extremists. But Saddam's oppression against the Arts was systemic:

A millennium later it was no longer the sultan's eye, but Saddam's. Under Saddam, virtually all cultural institutions had Baath party spies in their midst. Nonparty folk seldom progressed. Extensive Stasi-like files monitored everyone. A well-directed whisper led not just to the downfall of rivals but often also to their sudden disappearance. In theater, film and academe, unconfirmed suspicions and silent hatreds flourished, none of which -- who did what to whom and why -- has come clear in the post-Saddam era. Instead, many intellectuals have been anonymously killed and most of the Baath party files have disappeared -- including those deliberately stolen in the sacking of the National Archives after the allied invasion.

...Finally, I met a group of young art and movie festival organizers, named the Contemporary Visual Arts Society (CVAS), with no political ax to grind. They had organized a short-films festival in 2005 at a former children's theater in Baghdad and were since collaborating with festivals in Italy and Britain to train 20 new Iraqi filmmakers. CVAS's director, Nazar Rawy, an art academy graduate, minced no words: "Americans help only the politics; they don't help the culture. You can't have a normal paying audience today, so you must keep culture alive for now with help. That means either political money or cultural help from abroad. We have a strange situation: endless politics but almost no culture. Who has heard of such a situation before?"

According to Mr. Rawy, only three major Iraqi films have come out in recent years, all "allegories of the situation," all debuted outside of Baghdad. The first, "Underexposure," was filmed between 2003 and 2005 with help from Kodak. Mr. Rawy explains: "When the looting started, some film enthusiasts tried to save the National Film Archives and they found reels of old underexposed film. They tested it and found it usable, so they decided to make a movie with it, a fictional story about an Iraqi filmmaker trying to chronicle Saddam's collapse and the aftermath."

The second movie, with Dutch and British backers, appeared in 2006 and was titled "Dreams." It told the story of a woman political prisoner, locked up in a mental asylum by Saddam, suddenly being liberated into the post-Saddam chaos. "It's about the search for sanity in a nightmare," says Mr. Rawy. During the filming, the director was taken hostage by kidnappers. He was then rescued and detained by U.S. forces for three days. "The terrorists thought he was a foreign agent, and the Americans thought he was a terrorist," says Mr. Rawy.

The last film, "Crossing the Dust," in Kurdish and Arabic, also came out in 2006, and was backed by Kurdish cultural sources, according to Mr. Rawy. "It told the story," he says, "of a lost Arab boy found by two Kurds who lose their car in a dust storm, and all three wander around helping each other."

Mr. Rawy says that "these films all got acclaim and prizes around the world. But they were fortuitous successes, beginnings. Iraqi culture needs to gel. We are isolated and lost from each other. We need to be freed from politically directed culture. This will be the true liberation. Where are the intellectuals and artists and filmmakers of America -- why don't they help people like us?"
Understandable. But we've seen this before, and recently. Hollywood liberals complain of their own censored liberty and self-expression, which is a phantom as the very fact that they can complain with impunity proves there is no censorship. Conversely, Hollywood cares little for those actually battling violent censorship.

Mike Goldfarb opines:

Funny you should ask, Mr. Rawy. The friends and family of Theo VanGogh have wondered the same thing. So let me give you the answer: American intellectuals, artists and filmmakers, by and large, were against the liberation of your country and the routing of al Qaeda. In fact, they've demanded that President Bush and his cabinet be tried for war crimes. At the same time, their only responses to Islamofacism are excuses, silence or, in the case of the filmmakers, movies about the evil of your country's liberation and our country's government. The reason? Well, I'd suggest you ask them yourself, but they'd duck you in a Hollywood second.

Indeed, Mr. Rawy, you and your fellow artists have shown more courage just running a film festival than your American counterparts will ever possess. Just don't expect anything as trifling as a pat on the back for your troubles.

HAPPY EARTH DAY

2008-04-22T18:03:00.000-05:00

Why I Left Greenpeace
By PATRICK MOORE

In 1971 an environmental and antiwar ethic was taking root in Canada, and I chose to participate. As I completed a Ph.D. in ecology, I combined my science background with the strong media skills of my colleagues. In keeping with our pacifist views, we started Greenpeace.

But I later learned that the environmental movement is not always guided by science. As we celebrate Earth Day today, this is a good lesson to keep in mind.

At first, many of the causes we championed, such as opposition to nuclear testing and protection of whales, stemmed from our scientific knowledge of nuclear physics and marine biology. But after six years as one of five directors of Greenpeace International, I observed that none of my fellow directors had any formal science education. They were either political activists or environmental entrepreneurs. Ultimately, a trend toward abandoning scientific objectivity in favor of political agendas forced me to leave Greenpeace in 1986.

The breaking point was a Greenpeace decision to support a world-wide ban on chlorine. Science shows that adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health, virtually eradicating water-borne diseases such as cholera. And the majority of our pharmaceuticals are based on chlorine chemistry. Simply put, chlorine is essential for our health.

My former colleagues ignored science and supported the ban, forcing my departure. Despite science concluding no known health risks – and ample benefits – from chlorine in drinking water, Greenpeace and other environmental groups have opposed its use for more than 20 years.

Opposition to the use of chemicals such as chlorine is part of a broader hostility to the use of industrial chemicals. Rachel Carson's 1962 book, "Silent Spring," had a significant impact on many pioneers of the green movement. The book raised concerns, many rooted in science, about the risks and negative environmental impact associated with the overuse of chemicals. But the initial healthy skepticism hardened into a mindset that treats virtually all industrial use of chemicals with suspicion.

Sadly, Greenpeace has evolved into an organization of extremism and politically motivated agendas. Its antichlorination campaign failed, only to be followed by a campaign against polyvinyl chloride.

Greenpeace now has a new target called phthalates (pronounced thal-ates). These are chemical compounds that make plastics flexible. They are found in everything from hospital equipment such as IV bags and tubes, to children's toys and shower curtains. They are among the most practical chemical compounds in existence.

Phthalates are the new bogeyman. These chemicals make easy targets since they are hard to understand and difficult to pronounce. Commonly used phthalates, such as diisononyl phthalate (DINP), have been used in everyday products for decades with no evidence of human harm. DINP is the primary plasticizer used in toys. It has been tested by multiple government and independent evaluators, and found to be safe.

Despite this, a political campaign that rejects science is pressuring companies and the public to reject the use of DINP. Retailers such as Wal-Mart and Toys "R" Us are switching to phthalate-free products to avoid public pressure.

It may be tempting to take this path of least resistance, but at what cost? None of the potential replacement chemicals have been tested and found safe to the degree that DINP has. The Consumer Product Safety Commission recently cautioned, "If DINP is to be replaced in children's products . . . the potential risks of substitutes must be considered. Weaker or more brittle plastics might break and result in a choking hazard. Other plasticizers might not be as well studied as DINP."

The hysteria over DINP began in Europe and Israel, both of which instituted bans. Yet earlier this year, Israel realized the error of putting politics before science, and reinstated DINP.

The European Union banned the use of phthalates in toys prior to completion of a comprehensive risk assessment on DINP. That assessment ultimately concluded that the use of DINP in infant toys poses no measurable risk.

The antiphthalate activists are running a campaign of fear to implement their political agenda. They have seen success in California, with a state ban on the use of phthalates in infant products, and are pushing for a national ban. This fear campaign merely distracts the public from real environmental threats.

We all have a responsibility to be environmental stewards. But that stewardship requires that science, not political agendas, drive our public policy.

Mr. Moore, co-founder and former leader of Greenpeace, is chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies.

HAPPY TAX DAY, CONGRESSIONAL HYPOCRISY STYLE

2008-04-15T17:25:00.002-05:00

"People say all the time: 'We can't pick winners and losers.' Well then fine. Take every single dollar of subsidy out of the federal tax code. Get rid of it all. . . . Let's have a real level playing field where nobody gets a penny in subsidy."
– Hillary Clinton, quoted in USA Today, April 5, 2008

Now, there's a capital idea – and just in time for April 15. The simplest, fairest and most economically efficient tax code would end all special interest tax advantages and flatten tax rates. Except Mrs. Clinton was ridiculing this idea. She went on to say that if subsidies vanish from the tax code, we'd "hear the squeals of protest from Wall Street to Houston to Silicon Valley."

Her philosophy certainly fits with that of the current Congress, which is becoming a tax loophole production factory for the powerful. Exhibit A is the "Foreclosure Prevention Act," which passed the Senate last week and contains $25 billion in tax subsidies for home builders and industry interests hurt by the housing crunch. Builders will be able to offset current losses against taxes paid in the past three years, which will mean billions of dollars of tax rebate checks from Uncle Sam.

This giveaway came only a few weeks after the National Association of Home Builders threatened to suspend their PAC contributions to Congress "until further notice" – meaning until they saw more return on their political investments. Congratulations.

That gambit paid off big time. Other winners include the large Wall Street banks that have lost money in the subprime mortgage meltdown, including Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, which also qualify for rebates to offset current losses.
Republican Johnny Isakson of Georgia won Senate passage of a $7,000 tax credit for those who buy foreclosed properties. This won't prevent foreclosures or make these properties more affordable. Instead it will only prop up the sales price of the inventory of abandoned homes that the banks now own. Meanwhile, the House bill contains a $7,500 tax credit for first-time middle-income home buyers. The powerful Realtors' lobby and mortgage banks that own foreclosed properties blazed the money trail across Capitol Hill to get that one passed.

Oh, and while they were at it, the Senators voted 88-8 to add $6 billion in tax deductions for renewable energy producers. (If you wonder what this has to do with the mortgage "crisis," you just arrived off the turnip truck.) This industry is already teed up to get nearly $10 billion in tax breaks in the energy bill, including subsidies for wind and solar power producers, hybrid vehicles and biodiesel. Much of this social engineering comes from the same people on Capitol Hill who insist that taxes don't change industry or personal behavior.

With this loophole factory open for business on Capitol Hill again, business lobbies are spending more money than ever to curry Congressional favor. The real-estate industry may be in dire financial straits, but housing industry PACs have already contributed $56 million to political campaigns this election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Politico.com reported last week that 40 new business lobbying firms have registered since January to represent the likes of concrete makers, home builders, Freddie Mac and the Realtors. Wall Street investment banks are also pumping up the volume of campaign contributions as they seek financial relief from the subprime mess.

Congress is creating all of these new loopholes even as overall tax revenues are slowing and this year's budget deficit could reach $450 billion to $500 billion. This will play nicely into the hands of Democrats who contend that the lower tax rates of 2001 and 2003 must expire to pay the government's bills. So we could soon have the worst of all worlds: a leaky tax code full of exceptions for powerful interests, but with ever higher rates to make up for the loopholes. Congress gets PAC contributions in return for the loopholes, plus any extra revenue from the tax hike. The losers are taxpayers who aren't powerful or rich enough to afford a tax lobbyist.

At least this exercise is making clear what Democrats really mean by tax "fairness." It means raising tax rates so they can then sell tax breaks to the highest corporate bidder. We have certainly come a long way from 1986, when a Democratic Congress joined with Ronald Reagan to strip the tax code of most tax deductions and lower tax rates to a high of 28%. That reform spirit is dead on Capitol Hill.

Senators Clinton and Barack Obama are racing across the country promising Americans that they will clean up a process that "favors Wall Street over Main Street." Fat chance. Their party and most Republicans just voted for a housing bill that is the biggest victory for corporate special interests in years – and there's much more to follow. Happy Tax Day.

-- Wall Street Journal

CARTER'S MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

2008-04-15T17:23:00.002-05:00

Here's a stop-what-your-doing-and-read-this-now great editorial by Bret Stephens on Jimmy Carter's moral bankruptcy:

Former President Jimmy Carter has an interesting way of saying more than he intends. He lusts in his heart. He turns to his 13-year-old daughter for foreign policy wisdom. He titles a book, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid." What Mr. Carter means to say is that he is a flesh-and-blood human being, a caring father, a missionary for peace. What he actually communicates is that he is weirdly libidinal, scarily naive and obsessively hostile to Israel.

Now the 2002 Nobel laureate is in reprise mode. "In a democracy, I realize you don't need to talk to the top leader to know how the country feels," he said over the weekend, responding to a question from an Israeli journalist who noted that Mr. Carter had been snubbed by most of Israel's top leadership and reprimanded by its president, Shimon Peres. "When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that's the dictator, because he speaks for all the people."

Come again?

Mr. Carter is on a tour of the Middle East, the most newsworthy aspect of which is a scheduled meeting in Damascus with Khaled Mashal, the head of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. More on that below. For now, ponder what he could possibly have meant by this statement. On a charitable view, what Mr. Carter had in mind is that in a democracy it is the people who ultimately make the policy, whereas in a dictatorship it is only the dictator's opinion that counts. Or as W.H. Auden put it, "Only the man behind the rifle [has] free will."

That's not quite what Mr. Carter said, however. He said the dictator "speaks" for "all" the people, just as the people in a democracy speak for themselves. Taken at face value, this is a reflection of every dictator's conceit: that his will is also the general will, whether the people agree with him or not. This is what Fidel Castro meant when he praised Cuba's elections, in which only the Communist Party is on the ballot, as "the most democratic in the world." Perhaps Mr. Carter has harbored similar views about the relative merits of his opinion versus the people's since he was turned out of high office by 44 states.

Yet a dictator does not speak for the people. Properly speaking, a dictator speaks for none of the people. A dictator speaks only for himself, while "the people" are transformed, through force and fear, into an abstraction, an instrument, a rhetorical trope. On the contrary, it is only in a democracy where the government can morally and lawfully be said to speak for the people, since it was morally and lawfully chosen by the people to speak for them. Which means that Mr. Carter has matters precisely backwards: It is in democracies such as Israel where the views of the leadership matter most, and in dictatorships such as Syria where they matter least.

Besides Israel, Mr. Carter's trip will take him to the West Bank, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. What would the logic suggested above mean in terms of his choice of interlocutors?

- In Egypt, Mr. Carter could give an address at the newly established Middle East Freedom Forum. He could call for the immediate release of George Ishak, a lawyer and democracy activist who helps coordinate the liberal Kifaya ("Enough") movement and was arrested by security forces last Wednesday. He could pay a call to journalist Gameela Ismael, the wife of Ayman Nour. Mr. Nour, who contested the 2005 election against President Hosni Mubarak and took 8% of the vote, has spent the past two years in prison on trumped-up charges of electoral fraud.

- In Saudi Arabia, Mr. Carter could raise the case of Fawza Falih, an illiterate woman who was convicted of "witchcraft" and sentenced to death on charges that she used sorcery to render a man impotent. He might also seek out the now famous "Qatif Girl," the woman who was gang-raped by seven men and, as a result of her "crime," sentenced to 200 lashes.

- In Jordan, Mr. Carter might find time for Jihad Momani, editor of the weekly "Shihan," who in 2006 was arrested for reprinting the Danish cartoons of Prophet Mohammed. "Muslims of the world be reasonable," he wrote in an editorial that ran alongside the cartoons. "What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony in Amman?"

- With the Palestinians, Mr. Carter could denounce the Hamas-operated Al Aqsa TV, whose programming includes a Sesame Street-like show that urges its young viewers to "get rid of the Jews."

- In Syria, Mr. Carter could ask to meet with representatives of the National Council of the Damascus Declaration for Democratic Change. A dozen leaders of this pro-democracy umbrella group were arrested in December on charges of "spreading false or exaggerated news which would affect the morale of the country"; Human Rights Watch charges that at least eight of the men signed false confessions under torture.

Will Mr. Carter do any of this? The odds are long. Instead, he will meet with Mr. Mashal, author of the murder of several hundred Israeli civilians and not a few Americans, too. On a visit yesterday to Sderot, the besieged Israeli town near Gaza, the former president denounced the "despicable crime" of Hamas's incessant rocket attacks of the past several years. Yet he continues to defend the view that all relevant parties, including Hamas, must be partners in a negotiation to bring about a peaceful settlement.

Hamas, it is true, fairly won a parliamentary election in January 2006. It is also true that nobody elected Mr. Mashal to his position, that he is another of Auden's men behind the rifle, and that Hamas has never accepted the Oslo Accords that are the legal basis of the Authority they seek to govern, much like other totalitarian parties of yore that participated opportunistically in a democratic process – cf. Weimar Republic. They do not seek an entente with the Jewish state but its elimination. In meeting with a former U.S. president, they seek to burnish their reputations as legitimate Mideast players, not outlaws. Perhaps Mr. Carter knows this, or perhaps he doesn't. Whichever the case, his actions bespeak more than he intends.

YON ON THE SURGE

2008-04-11T19:13:00.000-05:00

Let's 'Surge' Some More
By MICHAEL YON
April 11, 2008

It is said that generals always fight the last war. But when David Petraeus came to town it was senators – on both sides of the aisle – who battled over the Iraq war of 2004-2006. That war has little in common with the war we are fighting today.

I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war – and our part in it – at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous.

The change goes far beyond the statistical decline in casualties or incidents of violence. A young Iraqi translator, wounded in battle and fearing death, asked an American commander to bury his heart in America. Iraqi special forces units took to the streets to track down terrorists who killed American soldiers. The U.S. military is the most respected institution in Iraq, and many Iraqi boys dream of becoming American soldiers. Yes, young Iraqi boys know about "GoArmy.com."

As the outrages of Abu Ghraib faded in memory – and paled in comparison to al Qaeda's brutalities – and our soldiers under the Petraeus strategy got off their big bases and out of their tanks and deeper into the neighborhoods, American values began to win the war.

Iraqis came to respect American soldiers as warriors who would protect them from terror gangs. But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic, school or a neighborhood. They learned that the American soldier is not only the most dangerous enemy in the world, but one of the best friends a neighborhood can have.

Some people charge that we have merely "rented" the Sunni tribesmen, the former insurgents who now fight by our side. This implies that because we pay these people, their loyalty must be for sale to the highest bidder. But as Gen. Petraeus demonstrated in Nineveh province in 2003 to 2004, many of the Iraqis who filled the ranks of the Sunni insurgency from 2003 into 2007 could have been working with us all along, had we treated them intelligently and respectfully. In Nineveh in 2003, under then Maj. Gen. Petraeus's leadership, these men – many of them veterans of the Iraqi army – played a crucial role in restoring civil order. Yet due to excessive de-Baathification and the administration's attempt to marginalize powerful tribal sheiks in Anbar and other provinces – including men even Saddam dared not ignore – we transformed potential partners into dreaded enemies in less than a year.

Then al Qaeda in Iraq, which helped fund and tried to control the Sunni insurgency for its own ends, raped too many women and boys, cut off too many heads, and brought drugs into too many neighborhoods. By outraging the tribes, it gave birth to the Sunni "awakening." We – and Iraq – got a second chance. Powerful tribes in Anbar province cooperate with us now because they came to see al Qaeda for what it is – and to see Americans for what we truly are.

Soldiers everywhere are paid, and good generals know it is dangerous to mess with a soldier's money. The shoeless heroes who froze at Valley Forge were paid, and when their pay did not come they threatened to leave – and some did. Soldiers have families and will not fight for a nation that allows their families to starve. But to say that the tribes who fight with us are "rented" is perhaps as vile a slander as to say that George Washington's men would have left him if the British offered a better deal.

Equally misguided were some senators' attempts to use Gen. Petraeus's statement, that there could be no purely military solution in Iraq, to dismiss our soldiers' achievements as "merely" military. In a successful counterinsurgency it is impossible to separate military and political success. The Sunni "awakening" was not primarily a military event any more than it was "bribery." It was a political event with enormous military benefits.

The huge drop in roadside bombings is also a political success – because the bombings were political events. It is not possible to bury a tank-busting 1,500-pound bomb in a neighborhood street without the neighbors noticing. Since the military cannot watch every road during every hour of the day (that would be a purely military solution), whether the bomb kills soldiers depends on whether the neighbors warn the soldiers or cover for the terrorists. Once they mostly stood silent; today they tend to pick up their cell phones and call the Americans. Even in big "kinetic" military operations like the taking of Baqubah in June 2007, politics was crucial. Casualties were a fraction of what we expected because, block-by-block, the citizens told our guys where to find the bad guys. I was there; I saw it.

The Iraqi central government is unsatisfactory at best. But the grass-roots political progress of the past year has been extraordinary – and is directly measurable in the drop in casualties.

This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting. To give one example, I just returned this week from Nineveh province, where I have spent probably eight months between 2005 to 2008, and it is clear that we remain stretched very thin from the Syrian border and through Mosul. Vast swaths of Nineveh are patrolled mostly by occasional overflights.

We know now that we can pull off a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. We know that we are working with an increasingly willing citizenry. But counterinsurgency, like community policing, requires lots of boots on the ground. You can't do it from inside a jet or a tank.

Over the past 15 months, we have proved that we can win this war. We stand now at the moment of truth. Victory – and a democracy in the Arab world – is within our grasp. But it could yet slip away if our leaders remain transfixed by the war we almost lost, rather than focusing on the war we are winning today.

Mr. Yon is author of the just-published "Moment of Truth in Iraq" (Richard Vigilante Books). He has been reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan since December 2004.

THE TRUTH BEHIND THAT "RECORD"

2008-04-11T07:32:00.002-05:00

Okay, sure the economy sucks. But portraying it as never been worse is silly.

Take the headline "Food Stamp Use Nears Record," which is only partially accurate. True, the 28 million Americans who will use food stamps in 2008 is the highest number ever. But that raw number is a poor measure; it doesn't provide context.

What's relevant is the percentage of the population that's on food stamps. And the worst years there are 1993, 1994 and 1995.

Yes, it was during the second Camelot presidency that the largest portions of the population were using food stamps: 10.4% in 1993 and 1994, and 10% in 1995.

Even if 28 million Americans use food stamps in 2008 as projected — and eagerly reported — with 303.5 million people in the country, the rate of 9.2% would still be lower than those three Clinton years.
That's from Investors Business Daily. Read the rest.

A RANK FALSEHOOD

2008-04-05T16:35:00.003-05:00

Krauthammer hits one out of the park.

'A Rank Falsehood'

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 28, 2008; A19

Asked at a New Hampshire campaign stop about possibly staying in Iraq 50 years, John McCain interrupted -- "Make it a hundred" -- then offered a precise analogy to what he envisioned: "We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so." Lest anyone think he was talking about prolonged war-fighting rather than maintaining a presence in postwar Iraq, he explained: "That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed."

And lest anyone persist in thinking he was talking about war-fighting, he told his questioner: "It's fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintained a presence in a very volatile part of the world."

There is another analogy to the kind of benign and strategically advantageous "presence" McCain was suggesting for postwar Iraq: Kuwait. The United States (with allies) occupied Kuwait in 1991 and has remained there with a major military presence for 17 years. We debate dozens of foreign policy issues in this country. I've yet to hear any serious person of either party call for a pullout from Kuwait.

Why? Because our presence projects power and provides stability for the entire Gulf and for the vulnerable U.S. allies that line its shores.

The desirability of a similar presence in Iraq was obvious as long as five years ago to retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, one of Barack Obama's leading military advisers and his campaign co-chairman. During the first week of the Iraq war, McPeak (an Iraq war critic) suggested in an interview that "we'll be there a century, hopefully. If it works right." (Meaning, if we win.)

Why is that a hopeful outcome? Because maintaining a U.S. military presence in Iraq would provide regional stability, as well as cement a long-term allied relationship with the most important Arab country in the region.

As McPeak himself said about our long stay in Europe, Japan and Korea, "This is the way great powers operate." One can argue that such a presence in Iraq might not be worth the financial expense. A legitimate point -- it might require working out the kind of relations we have with Japan, which picks up about 75 percent of the cost of U.S. forces stationed there.

Alternatively, one might advocate simply bolstering our presence in Kuwait, a choice that would minimize risk, albeit at the sacrifice of some power projection. Such a debate would be fruitful and help inform our current negotiations with Baghdad over the future status of American forces.

But a serious argument is not what Democrats are seeking. They want the killer sound bite, the silver bullet to take down McCain. According to Politico, they have found it: "Dems to hammer McCain for '100 years.' "

The device? Charge that McCain is calling for a hundred years of war. Hence:

• "He says that he is willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq" (Barack Obama, Feb. 19).

• "We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years" (Obama, Feb. 26).

• "He's willing to keep this war going for 100 years" (Hillary Clinton, March 17).

• "What date between now and the election in November will he drop this promise of a 100-year war in Iraq?" (Chris Matthews, March 4).

Why, even a CNN anchor (Rick Sanchez) buys it: "John McCain is telling us . . . that we need to win even if it takes 100 years" (March 16).

As Lenin is said to have said, "A lie told often enough becomes truth." And as this lie passes into truth, the Democrats are ready to deploy it "as the linchpin of an effort to turn McCain's national security credentials against him," reports David Paul Kuhn of Politico.

Hence: A Howard Dean fundraising letter charging McCain with seeking "an endless war in Iraq." And a Democratic National Committee news release in which Dean asserts: "McCain's strategy is a war without end. . . . Elect John McCain and get 100 years in Iraq."

The Annenberg Political Fact Check, a nonprofit and nonpartisan project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, says: "It's a rank falsehood for the DNC to accuse McCain of wanting to wage 'endless war' based on his support for a presence in Iraq something like the U.S. role in South Korea."

The Democrats are undeterred. "It's seldom you get such a clean shot," a senior Obama adviser told Politico. It's seldom that you see such a dirty lie.

100 YEARS... NOT SO FAST

2008-04-03T17:31:00.003-05:00

Democrats twisting the facts and words of John McCain? Imagine that. Nice reporting by the Washington Post :

A Century-Long War? Not Exactly.
Thursday, April 3, 2008; Page A06

The charge that Republican Sen. John McCain wants the Iraq conflict to become a "100-year war" has become a recurring theme in Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign. The Democrat has made the claim several times on the campaign trail, as has Susan Rice, one of his top foreign policy advisers. McCain has never talked about wanting a 100-year war in Iraq. But he has talked about a prolonged U.S. military presence there, similar to the stationing of U.S. troops in Germany after World War II or in South Korea after the Korean War.

THE FACTS

Take a look at what McCain actually said in Derry, N.H., in January. Cutting off a questioner who talked about the Bush administration's willingness to keep troops in Iraq for 50 years, the Republican senator said: "Make it a hundred." He then mentioned that U.S. troops have been in Germany for 60 years and in South Korea for 50 years, and added, "That's fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed."

Democrats seized on McCain's remarks. At one time or another, both Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton have said that the presumptive Republican nominee is willing to fight a 100-year war in Iraq. When challenged about this assertion on Monday, Obama referred journalists to the YouTube version of the Derry meeting. But the YouTube clip does not back up his case.

Whether the conflict is winnable is a separate question. But there is a difference between fighting a war and occupying a country. World War II lasted nearly six years (3 1/2 years in the case of the United States), but a significant U.S. troop presence still remains in Germany.

McCain has also not been entirely consistent about his thoughts on a long-term U.S. military occupation of Iraq. Interviewed on "The Charlie Rose Show" last November, he rejected the Korea/Germany analogy:

ROSE: Do you think that this -- Korea, South Korea -- is an analogy of where Iraq might be, not in terms of their economic success but in terms of an American presence over the next, say, 20, 25 years, that we will have a significant amount of troops there?

McCAIN: I don't think so.

ROSE: Even if there are no casualties?

McCAIN: No. But I can see an American presence for a while. But eventually I think because of the nature of the society in Iraq and the religious aspects of it that America eventually withdraws.
THE PINOCCHIO TEST

A more honest line of attack for the Democrats would be against McCain's support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, whether he has a clear strategy for winning the war, and against the feasibility of a long-term U.S. occupation of a Muslim country. Instead of attacking him on these grounds, they have twisted his words by claiming that he "wants" to fight a 100-year war.

UM, WHO'S HERBERT HOOVER?

2008-04-03T17:23:00.002-05:00

To hear Mr. [Senator Chuck] Schumer and his fellow-traveling columnists tell it, [President Herbert] Hoover's great policy blunder was to do nothing, all the while insisting that everything was fine. But the problem with Hoover's economic policy isn't that it was passive but that it was actively destructive.

In 1930, he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, setting off a wave of protectionist retaliation that undid the globalization of the preceding decades and did far more harm to the world economy than the stock-market crash ever did. Two years later, amid a bad recession, he undid the Calvin Coolidge-Andrew Mellon tax cuts, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 63% from 25%. The recession became a Depression.

Now, since we're talking Hoover, which Presidential candidate has a similar agenda of protectionism and tax increases? Hmmm.

Oh, that's right. Just the other day, one of the candidates for President was saying she'd withdraw from Nafta if the Mexicans didn't do what she demanded, and she wants "a pause" in free trade. She also wants to repeal the Bush tax cuts, more than doubling the rate on dividends back to 39.6% from 15%.

Her Democratic opponent agrees with her, except that he'd raise taxes even more, including by eliminating the $102,000 cap on income subject to the 6.2% payroll tax (12.4% when you include employers), and raising the capital gains tax to at least 25%, and maybe even 28%, from 15%. Add up all of Barack Obama's tax increases and his proposals would get entirely too close to Hoover's top marginal rate of 63%.

-- Wall Street Journal

HIJACKING ISLAM

2008-03-30T10:24:00.000-05:00

THE OBAMA MESSIAH

2008-03-30T10:21:00.002-05:00

I don't know if the website Obamamessiah is a promotion of Barack Obama as a religious figure or a subtle criticism of those who seem to be promoting Obama as just that -- but in any event it's chocked full of creepy examples of liberals and "progressives" (i.e., fascism by another name) who view Obama as something more than just another politician.

One such example comes from television and soccer-mom magnate Oprah Winfrey.

It isn't enough to tell the truth, Winfrey said. "We need politicians who know how to be the truth. I do believe, I do today, we have the answer to Miss Pittman's question – it's a question that the entire nation is asking – is he the one?" Winfrey said. "South Carolina – I do believe he's the one
Oh, really?

What's creepy about this isn't so much regarding Obama, but his followers.

As we've just started to discover - because of the main-stream media only now doing its job and covering Obama more critically - through the Tony Rezko link, or through Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is that Obama is a politician no different than any other.

Today's Washington Post: Regarding Obama's claim that his "very existence" can be traced to the Kennedy family "the key details are either untrue or grossly oversimplified."

In other words, Obama isn't one who tells "the truth" but just another politician who will exaggerate for influance sake. Politics is defined as the art of influancing people. Obama isn't the "New Testament," as NBC's Chris Matthew's labeled him (shamelessly, given he's "objective" reporter, right?), he's just another guy running for president.

Contrary to Obama's claims in speeches in January at American University and in Selma last year, the Kennedy family did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the United States that included Obama's father. According to historical records and interviews with participants, the Kennedys were first approached for support for the program nearly a year later, in July 1960. The family responded with a $100,000 donation, most of which went to pay for a second airlift in September 1960.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton acknowledged yesterday that the senator from Illinois had erred in crediting the Kennedy family with a role in his father's arrival in the United States. He said the Kennedy involvement in the Kenya student program apparently "started 48 years ago, not 49 years ago as Obama has mistakenly suggested in the past."

...In his speech commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the Selma civil rights march, Sen. Obama linked his father's arrival in the United States with the turmoil of the civil rights movement. Although the airlift occurred before John F. Kennedy became president, Obama said that "folks in the White House" around President Kennedy were looking for ways to counter charges of hypocrisy and "win hearts and minds all across the world" at a time when America was "battling communism."

"So the Kennedys decided 'we're going to do an airlift,' " Obama continued. " 'We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is.' This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great-great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves. . . . So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born."

A more accurate version of the story would begin not with the Kennedys but with a Kenyan nationalist leader named Tom Mboya, who traveled to the United States in 1959 and 1960 to persuade thousands of Americans to support his efforts to educate a new African elite. Mboya did not approach the Kennedys for financial support until Obama Sr. was already studying in Hawaii.
Read the rest.

Will the Kool-Aide drinking Obama acolytes begin to see their leader as a politician, not a savior?

Don't count on it.

RE: SPLITTING HAIRS

2008-03-30T10:19:00.000-05:00

Here's a continuation of a post below regarding Democrat's odd and inaccurate insistence that we differentiate between al Qaeda versus other Islamic terror groups, differentiate between Sunni versus Shiite jihadists. When it comes to us, Amir Taheri explains, they make no differentiation in their hatred of Western civilization... nor do their bombs.

For more than a quarter century, Tehran has been host to the offices of more than three dozen terrorists organizations, from the Colombian FARC to the Palestinian Hamas and passing by half a dozen Trotskyite and Leninist outfits. It also finances many anti-American groups and parties of both extreme right and extreme left in Europe and the Americas. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has bestowed the Muslim title of "brother" on Cuba's Fidel Castro, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega. Communist North Korea is the only country with which the Islamic Republic maintains close military-industrial ties and holds joint annual staff sessions.

George Ibrahim Abdallah, the Lebanese maverick who led a campaign of terror in Paris in the 1980s on behalf of Tehran, was a Christian. So was Anis Naqqache, who led several hit-teams sent to kill Iranian exile opposition leaders. For years, and until a recent change of policy, Tehran financed and offered shelter to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a Marxist movement fighting to overthrow the Turkish Republic. Why? Tehran's displeasure with Turkish membership of NATO and friendship with the U.S.

Yes, Mr. Obama might ask, but what about Sunni-Shiite cooperation?

The Islamic Republic has financed and armed the Afghan Sunni Hizb Islami (Islamic Party) since the 1990s. It's also financed the Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS), a Sunni political-terrorist outfit in Algeria between 1992 and 2005.

In 1993, a senior Iranian delegation, led by the then Islamic Parliament Speaker Ayatollah Mehdi Karrubi, attended the Arab-Muslim Popular Congress organized by Hassan al-Turabi, nicknamed "The Pope of Islamist Terror," in Khartoum. At the end of this anti-American jamboree a nine-man "Coordinating Committee" was announced. Karrubi was a member, along with such Sunni eminences as Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mr. Turabi and the Algerian Abdallah Jaballah. The fact that Karrubi was a Shiite mullah did not prevent him from sitting alongside Sunni sheikhs.

In 1996, a suicide attack claimed the lives of 19 American servicemen in Al Khobar, eastern Saudi Arabia. The operation was carried out by the Hezbollah in Hejaz, an Iranian-financed outfit, with the help of the Sunni militant group "Sword of the Peninsula."

In 2000, Sunni groups linked to al Qaeda killed 17 U.S. servicemen in a suicide attack on USS Cole off the coast of Yemen. This time, a Shiite militant group led by Sheikh al-Houti, Tehran's man in Yemen, played second fiddle in the operation.

In Central Asia's Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Tehran has for years supported two Sunni movements, the Rastakhiz Islami (Islamic Awakening) and Hizb Tahrir Islami (Islamic Liberation Party). In Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic, Tehran supports the Sunni Taleshi groups against the Azeri Shiite majority. The reason? The Taleshi Sunnis are pro-Russian and anti-American, while the Shiite Azeris are pro-American and anti-Russian.

There are no Palestinian Shiites, yet Tehran has become the principal source of funding for radical Palestinian Sunni groups, notably Hamas, Islamic Jihad and half a dozen leftist-atheist minigroups. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh refuses to pray alongside his Iranian hosts during his visits to Tehran. But when it comes to joining Khomeinist crowds in shouting "Death to America" he is in the forefront.

With Arab oil kingdoms no longer as generous as before, Iran has emerged as the chief source of funding for Hamas. The new Iranian budget, coming into effect on March 21, allocates over $2 billion to the promotion of "revolutionary causes." Much of the money will go to Hamas and the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah.

In Pakistan, the Iran-financed Shiite Tehrik Jaafari joined a coalition of Sunni parties to govern the Northwest Frontier Province, until they all suffered a crushing defeat at last month's parliamentary elections.

The fact that the Sunnis and Shiites in other provinces of Pakistan continued to kill each other did not prevent them from developing a joint, anti-U.S. strategy that included the revival of the Afghan Taliban and protection for the remnants of al Qaeda. Almost all self-styled "holy warriors" who go to Iraq on a mission of murder and mayhem are Sunnis. And, yet most pass through Syria, a country that, as already noted, is dominated by a sect with a militant anti-Sunni religious doctrine.

Next month, Tehran will host what is billed as "The Islamic Convergence Conference," bringing together hundreds of Shiite and Sunni militants from all over the world. The man in charge, Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Taskhiri, has described the goal of the gathering to be delivering "a punch in the face of the American Great Satan."