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.

Labels: 2008, folly, foreign policy, mccain, media bias, Obama, Reagan, Russia

Reasonable people can debate whether crude oil supplies are of a peak or abiotic (i.e., petrolium formed from nonorganic means) nature.

On the latter, a few years ago researchers witnessed "the production of methane under the conditions that exist in the Earth's upper mantle for the first time." According to Physics World, "The experiments demonstrate that hydrocarbons could be formed inside the Earth via simple inorganic reactions -- and not just from the decomposition of living organisms as conventionally assumed -- and might therefore be more plentiful than previously thought."

Similarly, NASA's Hasso Niemann found that "abundant methane of a non-biologic nature is found on Saturn's giant moon Titan..." giving rise to the thought that not only might our oil worries be for naught but that there's certainly far more about energy that we don't understand. These discoveries, if fully validated, would undercut political movements that rely on the doomsday theories that oil is finite and we're close to capping its production.

As with all neo-environmental movements, however, some persons practice it to the extreme.

Meet the Wissners.

MIDDLEVILLE, Mich. -- It was around midnight one evening in November when Aaron Wissner shot up in bed, jolted awake by a fear: He wasn't fully ready for the day when the world starts running low on oil.

Yes, he had tripled the size of the garden in front of the tidy white-clapboard house he shares with his wife and infant son. He had stacked bags of rice in his new pantry, stashed gold valued at $8,000 in his safe-deposit box and doubled the size of the propane tank in his yard.

"But I felt panicky, like I needed more insurance," he says. So the 38-year-old middle-school computer teacher put on his jacket and drove to an all-night gas station, where he filled three, five-gallon jugs with gasoline.

"It was a feel-good moment," says his wife, Kimberly Sager. "But he slept better."
Okay, first off, this guy is a moron. The only thing worse than when stupid people make the news is when stupid people make the news on the false implication that they're smart.

There is something to be said for economic laws of scarcity: artificial scarcity (thanks to the dim-witted, panic-sparked actions of "normal" Americans like the Wissner-Sagers) will drive prices up, and the very energy-based corporations, industries, lobbyists and politicans whom one would expect to be hurt by said scarcity would actually profit the most from it.

But, even so, let's entertain this Hollywood B-movie plot line and suppose that the Wissner-Sagers are right -- and oil production will suddenly peak. Exactly how far do the Wissner-Sagers expect 15 gallons (i.e., one gas tank) of fuel and $8,000 to get them before they're stuck with the rest of us? All this schmuck did was lose a night's sleep.

Besides, if things really did go that sour there's only one thing that will be worth a damn -- a gun and a lot of ammunition.

Labels: Economics, energy, folly, Oil

UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- After years as an international pariah, Libya on Thursday ascended the world stage, taking over the rotating post as president of the U.N. Security Council.

Labels: folly, libya, UN Corruption

Tom Firey and Jacob Grier opine on the folly of tying funding for the S-CHIP program to an increase in cigarette taxes.

Smoking in the United States is already declining significantly -- largely as a result of public awareness of its dangers, not higher taxes. The declining number of smokers makes cigarette tax revenue unstable. Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation projects that if the new tax rate is implemented next year, tobacco revenues will fall nearly 10 percent over the next decade. As Dr. Michael Siegel, professor at the Boston University School of Health has noted, this is a risky way to fund the program. "This is a situation where you're advocating a specific amount of money to a program based on cigarette revenue," he says. "So if that cigarette revenue falls, by definition, the revenue available to the program is going to fall."

...Nor does the "make smokers healthier" argument justify a tax increase. It's true that higher tobacco taxes result in declines in cigarette consumption. But smoking has proven relatively inelastic — that is, the increase in the price of cigarettes after the tax is larger than the decrease in smoking as a result of the tax. And studies have found that smokers compensate for higher prices by switching to brands with higher tar and nicotine content, and they smoke their cigarettes more intensely, increasing their intake of carcinogens and other hazardous substances. These unintended consequences partially offset the expected health gains of tobacco taxes. So even if we accept that government has a paternalistic role to play in altering adults' choices about smoking, it's unclear that the benefits of higher cigarette taxes outweigh their costs.

Labels: Economics, folly, healthcare, SCHIP, taxes

Here's a great roundup of past predictions of apocolypse that didn't pan out. In short: more free markets, less Al Gore.

[Investors Business Daily] In 1798, a country parson named Thomas Malthus published a book in which he calculated that human populations were growing faster than the world's ability to feed them. It wouldn't be long, he reasoned, before the world would be afflicted with " sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague." In short: mass death.
He was, of course, spectacularly wrong.

True, population did increase, geometrically even. But it didn't lead to misery. Far from it. Today, we are wealthier, healthier, better-housed, better educated than ever — thanks not to U.N. bureaucrats, but to our ability as free men and women to think clearly about problems, and solve them.

Yet, according to the U.N.'s new "Geo-4 Report," our environmental problems, a result of unchecked population growth and wealth, are so extensive that, as the London Times put it, "they must be treated as a top priority if they are to be solved."

Check your wallets and your freedom at the door. For this is the old line used by environmental extremists of all types: Things are so bad we can no longer put off what must be done. Of course, you'll have to give up some income and freedom — and maybe even your right to bear children — but, hey, the environment's at stake.

Excuse us, but this seems like another attempt to foist centralized, global control over the prosperous, dynamic and fast-growing economies of the world — an attempt to shake us down and radically alter Western lifestyles, to get us out of our deluxe cars and designer clothes and onto bicycles and into bearskins.

It's a bad idea that just won't go away. In the 1960s, biology professor Paul Ehrlich revived Malthus with his best-selling "The Population Bomb." "In the 1970s," he warned, "the world will undergo famines — hundreds of million of people are going to starve." His solution: Immediate population control, mandated by law.

Ehrlich was followed by the Club of Rome's "Limits To Growth," and by President Carter's equally alarmist "Global 2000" report. They, too, were utterly wrong. Yet, they influenced a whole generation of green activists who came to think of humanity as a disease — a "cancer," in Ehrlich's word — that had to be cut out.

Unfortunately for them, far from despoiling the world and leading lives that are "nasty, brutish and short," we're thriving. As the late economist Julian Simon noted, people are the ultimate resource. More people means more brains — more problem-solvers for humanity's ills. Population isn't a curse; it's an opportunity.

This is why the Malthusian view of the world is so wrong. And why Simon and his followers are right to say not only is the world not getting worse, but by virtually any measure it's getting better.

In "The Improving State of the World," for instance, scientist Indur Goklany notes that worldwide life expectancies have more than doubled — from 31 years to 67 — in just the past century. In poor countries, the share suffering from chronic hunger plunged from 37% in 1970 to 17% in 2001, even as population soared 83%.

Even the definition of "poor" has changed, because average annual incomes in poor countries have more than tripled in real terms since 1950. Just since 1981, the share of the world's population living in poverty has been halved, from 40% to 20%.

Yes, we have social and environmental problems. But the alarmists would have us don straitjackets and then force-feed us solutions under the rubric of "sustainable growth" — a kind of friendly fascism that leads to greater poverty and loss of liberty.

We prefer what's worked before: free markets, free minds and free people, working democratically under the rule of law.

Labels: climate, folly, global warming, Gore

[Associated Press] "The departure of even a small number of U.S . service members - perhaps 5,000 of the 160,000 troops in Iraq - would send a powerful message throughout the region that time was running out," [Va. Republican Sen. John] Warner said.
What the heck was Warner thinking?

The criticism from Warner and other Congressional "leaders" that the Iraqi government isn't making "substantial political progress" rings rather hollow considering the Congressional approval rating is at an historic low of 18 percent. If Iraq's parliament isn't functioning they can't be doing much worse than the American Congress.

A "powerful message throughout the region"? You've got that right, Senator.

Warner's suggested "powerful message" has already provided antiwar liberals some red meat propaganda, it has and undercut military morale (see Major Lynch's reaction below).

If the president were to actually follow such advice all we'd do is give encouragement to jihadists from Baghdad to Damascus. Oh look. American's are quitting. It's Vietnam all over again. They fled Vietnam after 58,000 dead. They'll flee Iraq after 3,000. Who knows, maybe the next war they'll flee after 1,000. Or maybe they won't show up at all!

In the words of Osama bin Laden, "when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse." Guess which one Senator Warner looks like right now?

His statement doesn't even follow any logic -- he just throws a number out. 5,000? Why not 6,000? Or 4,000? Warner's careless number crunching just epitomizes the carelessness of the entire message.

One expects the armchair-quarterback Democrats to try and undercut General Petraeus' September progress report. But you'd think a republican senator would let the generals run the war.

In the end it's insignificant what Warner thinks. Short of them having the cajones to cut the war funding Congress' say is no more remarkable than your's or mine.

It's Petraeus' advisement that matters, not Warner's or another Congressional fool.

[ABC News] The U.S. military commander in one of the more troubled areas of Iraq said Friday that embracing Sen. John Warner's call to begin troop withdrawals before the end of the year would be "a giant step backward."
Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of troops south of Baghdad, said that in such a scenario, militants pushed from his sector in recent operations would quickly return.

"If coalition soldiers were to leave, having fought hard for that terrain, having denied the enemy their sanctuaries, what'd happen is the enemy would come back," said Lynch.

"He'd start building the bombs again, he'd start attacking the locals again and he'd start exporting that violence into Baghdad and we would take a giant step backward," Lynch told Pentagon reporters in a video conference from Iraq.

He said that recent gains resulted from the buildup of troops in Iraq and that he needs all the forces he has until Iraqis are able to step up and take over, perhaps some time next year.
Good job undercutting your constituent base, "General" Warner.

Labels: capitulation, Congress, folly, Iraq, Petraeus, republican folly, Warner

Obama's blunder is best put by blogger Jason Smith: "I'm Not Naive on Foreign Policy… Watch Me Invade a Nuclear-Armed, Muslim Country!"

Indeed, even his Democratic opponents smell the blood in the water. Expect Clinton to weigh in shortly. Then again, she really doesn't have to. There's nothing she can say that will be more damaging than what Obama did to himself.

Fellow Democratic candidates aren't stopping short. They're slamming him for broadcasting his plans:

[WSJ] Clinton didn't immediately weigh in on today's speech, but New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson cautioned that "we should address this problem with tough diplomacy with Gen. Musharraf first, leaving the military as a last resort. It is important to reach out to moderate Muslim states and allies to ensure we do not unnecessarily inflame the Muslim world."

Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wasn't so kind. "The way to deal with it is not to announce it, but to do it," the Delaware senator said at a National Press Club event. "The last thing you want to do is telegraph to the folks in Pakistan that we are about to violate their sovereignty, putting Musharraf in the position that makes it virtually impossible for him to do anything other than what he's done, basically cut a deal with the warlords on the border, to our great detriment."

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd said he wouldn't "declare my intentions for specific military action to the media in the context of a political campaign.'' He called it "dangerous and irresponsible to leave even the impression the U.S. would needlessly and publicly provoke a nuclear power.''
Clearly, Hillary Clinton's assessment that Obama was "naive" on foreign policy because he claimed he would meet any ol' dictator without conditions got under his skin.

She pushed his buttons and Obama responded like Pavlov's dog. Clearly the Obama camp didn't think this one through, and this blunder is probably the beginning of the end of the Obama campaign.

Labels: 2008, Clinton, folly, foreign policy, Obama

What's most ironic about the Democrats' efforts to undermine the TSP program?

If the next terrorist attack succeeds because the TSP program has been rendered ineffective it will be those very legistators whose lives are put most in danger. Hijackers intended United FLT 93 to ram the Capital Building -- and there's no guarantee that next time US citizens will be able to protect what our intelligence agencies couldn't on 9-11.

Related: An educating editorial by the Wall Street Journal.

Democratic leaders were briefed on the [Terrorist Surveillance Program (aka warrantless wiretapping) program from the first and never once tried to shut it down. But once it was exposed [by a criminal leak to the New York Times], these same Democrats accused Mr. Bush of breaking the law by not getting warrants from the special court created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

Mr. Bush has rightly defended the program's legality, but as a gesture of compromise in January he agreed to seek warrants under the FISA process.

This has turned out to be an enormous mistake that has unilaterally disarmed one of our best intelligence weapons in the war on terror. To understand why, keep in mind that we live in a world of fiber optics and packet-switching. A wiretap today doesn't mean the FBI must install a bug on Abdul Terrorist's phone in Peshawar. Information now follows the path of least resistance, wherever that may lead. And because the U.S. has among the world's most efficient networks, hundreds of millions of foreign calls are routed through the U.S.

That's right: If an al Qaeda operative in Quetta calls a fellow jihadi in Peshawar, that call may well travel through a U.S. network. This ought to be a big U.S. advantage in our "asymmetrical" conflict with terrorists. But it also means that, for the purposes of FISA, a foreign call that is routed through U.S. networks becomes a domestic call. So thanks to the obligation to abide by an outdated FISA statute, U.S. intelligence is now struggling even to tap the communications of foreign-based terrorists. If this makes you furious, it gets worse.

Our understanding is that some FISA judges have been open to expediting warrants, as well as granting retroactive approval. But there are 11 judges in the FISA rotation, and some of them have been demanding that intelligence officials get permission in advance for wiretaps. This means missed opportunities and less effective intelligence. And it shows once again why the decisions of unaccountable judges shouldn't be allowed to supplant those of an elected Commander in Chief.

When the program began, certain U.S. telecom companies also cooperated with the National Security Agency. But they were sued once the program was exposed, and so some have ceased cooperating for fear of damaging liability claims. We found all of this hard to believe when we first heard it, but we've since confirmed the details with other high-level sources.

Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell more or less admitted the problem last week, albeit obliquely, when he told the Senate that "we're actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting." That's understating things. Our sources say the surveillance program is now at most one-third as effective as it once was.

Labels: 9-11, Congress, democrats, folly, intelligence, interrogation, TSP

Gosh, even Newsweek agrees that the Democrats attacks on the Terrorist Surveillance Program have gone too far. Well, not exactly:

Aug. 6, 2007 issue - Six years after 9/11 , U.S. intel officials are complaining about the emergence of a major "gap" in their ability to secretly eavesdrop on suspected terrorist plotters. In a series of increasingly anxious pleas to Congress, intel "czar" Mike McConnell has argued that the nation's spook community is "missing a significant portion of what we should be getting" from electronic eavesdropping on possible terror plots. Rep. Heather Wilson, a GOP member of the House intelligence community, told NEWSWEEK she has learned of "specific cases where U.S. lives have been put at risk" as a result. Intel agency spokespeople declined to elaborate.

... Two officials familiar with the controversy, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive material, said that had the administration initially been candid about its antiterror surveillance plans, it could have worked with Congress years ago to tweak the FISA laws to account for the technological changes. One of the officials said the administration's secretiveness had, in this case, created problems for antiterrorism efforts.
So, who is to blame for Congress attempting to undermine President Bush's TSP program? Why Bush himself! But of course!

Such tortured logic, however, doesn't meet with honesty.

You see, Bush presented Congress the details of the TSP shortly after its creation in 2002. It was only after the New York Times leaked the story that Congress pretended to be shocked -- yes, we're shocked!!! -- and awed.

Pathetic.

I guess the Newsweek gang is getting a little nervous knowing this since, you know, their main offices are in DC and NYC.

Labels: Congress, democrats, folly, intelligence, surveillance, TSP

In fact, granting unwarranted legal rights [to unlawful combatants] would put soldiers and civilians at risk by rewarding their treachery with privilege. Unlawful enemy combatants — individuals who do not adhere to the traditional laws or customs of war — have never been entitled to Prisoner of War status or the full protections of the Geneva Conventions, let alone unfettered access to U.S. courts. When only one side plays by the rules on a battlefield, that side is likely to disproportionately suffer from illegal acts of war.
-- James Jay Carafano, Heritage Foundation

Sadly, that doesn't seem to bother some of our elected officials, including, astonishingly, a Democratic representative from New York. Get a load of this jaw-dropping response:

A few weeks ago, former White House aide Bradford Berenson testified before the House Judiciary Committee about the much-debated question of whether suspected-terrorist detainees should have habeas-corpus rights.
During one exchange, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) had this to say: "I don't see how you can pick up someone in New York and say that his rights are different or less because he's accused of being an enemy combatant, based on whatever information, as opposed to his being accused of being a murderer. . . ."

Berenson responded: "[W]e need to be clear about what that means. It means that if we had captured Mohammed Atta on September 10th, we would have had no choice but to treat him as a criminal defendant, which would have meant no interrogation, no intelligence, and the World Trade Center is coming down."

Nadler interjected, "That's exactly right."

Labels: democrats, folly, geneva, guantanamo, intelligence, interrogation, terrorism

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 times faster than the past century's 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.
That's the beginning of the latest from the National Post's "Deniers" series on climate change (now at part XXVII).

If you haven't started reading Tim Patterson's series you should start. It's eye opening and contradicts the vast amount of conventional environgelical hysterics that so frequently is pounded down our throats.

Labels: climate, folly, global warming

Christopher Hitchens comments in Slate the absurdity of jailing Scooter Libby for a victimless "crime" for a leak he actually never made:

If Scooter Libby goes to jail, it will be because he made a telephone call to Tim Russert and because Tim Russert has a different recollection of the conversation. Can this really be the case? And why is such a nugatory issue a legal matter in the first place?

Before savoring the full absurdity of the thing, please purge your mind of any preconceptions or confusions.

*Mr. Libby was not charged with breaking the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
Nobody was ever charged with breaking that law, designed to shield the names of covert agents. Indeed, the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, determined that the law had not been broken in the first place.

*The identity of the person who disclosed the name of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak—his name is Richard Armitage, incidentally—was known to those investigating the non-illegal leak before the full-dress inquiry began to grind its way through the system, incidentally imprisoning one reporter and consuming thousands of man hours of government time (and in time of war, at that).

*In the other two "counts" in the case, both involving conversations with reporters (Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time), Judge Reggie Walton threw out the Miller count while the jury found for Libby on the Cooper count.

*The call to Russert was not about Plame in any case; it was a complaint from the vice president's office about Chris Matthews, who was felt by some to have been overstressing the Jewish names associated with the removal of Saddam Hussein. Russert was called in his capacity as bureau chief; any chitchat about Wilson and Plame was secondary.

*The call was made after Robert Novak had put his fateful column (generated by Richard Armitage) on the wire, and after he had mentioned Plame's identity to Karl Rove.

Does it not seem extraordinary that a man can be prosecuted, and now be condemned to a long term of imprisonment, because of an alleged minor inconsistency of testimony in a case where it is admitted that there was no crime and no victim?
Yes, it does. Read the rest.

Labels: folly, justice department, Libby, PlameGate, Wilson

“[In 1999] We started allocating precious intelligence resources to environmental issues just as al Qaeda was on the upswing. We were becoming politically correct. My fear is that we’re going back to the same place.”
-- Rep. Pete Hoekstra, from George Tenet's book At the Center of the Storm

Asking everyone to remember it the next time terrorists attacked our soil, last week I posted a comment from Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, who told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Democrat's Congressional pressure to limit so-called warrantless wiretaps was becoming detrimental to intelligence gathering. "We are actually missing a significant portion [surveillance data] of what we should be getting," said McConnell.

Today it's reported that the Democrats now want to burden our intelligence agencies even more by forcing the CIA director to periodically report on the status of global warming. The last time we did this, underscored by the quote above, the CIA was caught with its pants down by 9-11.

Mike Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard has a whole writeup about it, and notes that Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence were likewise flabbergasted on redirecting CIA resources away from their work on al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc., to concentrate on something as silly as global warming.

[House Republicans] The task of the intelligence community is to steal foreign secrets. Global climate change simply does not require clandestinely acquired, classified information or analysis. The United States is spending more than $6.5 billion in FY07 on global climate change. Thousands of reports have been paid for on global climate change across the U.S. government. Hundreds of universities and private organizations have written many more reports on climate change. This is not the time to force our intelligence professionals to waste scarce intelligence resources on trendy topics such as global warming for the purposes of `political correctness'.
That's as to the point as one can get.

Goldfarb links to a post by Byron York reminding readers that in 1999 the Clinton Administration, "established what was known as the DCI Environmental Center within the CIA. The Center used satellite spying resources to track environmental matters. “They took pictures of volcanoes and sea turtle nests and took air samples of air pollution, as opposed to checking for traces of biological or chemical weapons, and it was all done at the behest of Al Gore."

Should the day come when we are attacked and people are asking "How did this happen again?" remember this post.

Labels: CIA, climate, democrats, folly, global warming

Miraculous [fuel efficiency] technologies will not spring into being when Congress waves its wand, revealing to auto makers dramatic new ways to achieve mileage gains without sacrificing other vehicle qualities cherished by consumers. To meet the new standard, auto makers will have to offer smaller, less-powerful cars than Americans, with their dollars, have shown they prefer. There will be less room for the dog and kids. Don't try towing a boat. It will be harder for an aging, fatter population to climb in and out. Costs incurred to make the car run farther on a gallon of fuel will be costs not incurred to make the car safer, more comfortable, more useful.
-- Holman Jenkins

Labels: CAFE, Congress, folly

Boy, you know you've screwed up when even the Washinton Post editors - whom hardly could be accused of being cheerleaders for the Bush presidency - label you as a schmuck.

Pratfall in Damascus
Nancy Pelosi's foolish shuttle diplomacy

Thursday, April 5, 2007; A16

HOUSE SPEAKER Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered an excellent demonstration yesterday of why members of Congress should not attempt to supplant the secretary of state when traveling abroad. After a meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, Ms. Pelosi announced that she had delivered a message from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that "Israel was ready to engage in peace talks" with Syria. What's more, she added, Mr. Assad was ready to "resume the peace process" as well. Having announced this seeming diplomatic breakthrough, Ms. Pelosi suggested that her Kissingerian shuttle diplomacy was just getting started. "We expressed our interest in using our good offices in promoting peace between Israel and Syria," she said.

Only one problem: The Israeli prime minister entrusted Ms. Pelosi with no such message. "What was communicated to the U.S. House Speaker does not contain any change in the policies of Israel," said a statement quickly issued by the prime minister's office. In fact, Mr. Olmert told Ms. Pelosi that "a number of Senate and House members who recently visited Damascus received the impression that despite the declarations of Bashar Assad, there is no change in the position of his country regarding a possible peace process with Israel." In other words, Ms. Pelosi not only misrepresented Israel's position but was virtually alone in failing to discern that Mr. Assad's words were mere propaganda.

Ms. Pelosi was criticized by President Bush for visiting Damascus at a time when the administration -- rightly or wrongly -- has frozen high-level contacts with Syria. Mr. Bush said that thanks to the speaker's freelancing Mr. Assad was getting mixed messages from the United States. Ms. Pelosi responded by pointing out that Republican congressmen had visited Syria without drawing presidential censure. That's true enough -- but those other congressmen didn't try to introduce a new U.S. diplomatic initiative in the Middle East. "We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace," Ms. Pelosi grandly declared.

Never mind that that statement is ludicrous: As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush's military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi's attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

Labels: folly, foreign policy, pelosi, syria