Obama's choice is not to choose on Iran - Los Angeles Times

Obama's choice is not to choose on Iran - Los Angeles Times

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President Obama

Just for the record... I think you people are nuts... but I really, really am hoping I'm wrong.

And it just gets worse and worse.

Speaking of not being serious, how about that Supreme Court decision this week? Okay, I understand that the Guantanamo solution to detaining enemy combatants has been less than perfect but it was on the way out anyway. Both Senators McCain and Obama are in favor of closing the detention facility and the military has been shipping prisoners out from there already. Some of the released prisoners have already returned to the battlefield. Basically, 5 justices on the Supreme Court have declared these these guys to have the same constitutional rights as citizens of the United States, even though they are alien nationals captured on foreign battlefields.

Associate Justice Antonin Scalia (who may be my favorite living American) sums it up brilliantly in his scathing dissent.

America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 60–61, 70, 190 (2004). On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. See id., at 552, n. 9. It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed.

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.

Also, as the Wall Street Journal points out on yesterday's editorial page, by creating a new right for non-citizens in foreign lands, the Supreme Court has now gotten in the business of making decisions on how to wage war, a responsibility specifically given by the constitution to the President and Congress.

The WSJ ends it's opinion column by recalling a famous quote by former supreme court justice Robert Jackson that the Constitution is "not a suicide pact."

All this is making me quite depressed.

Exactly!!!

Pardon me if most of my blogs these days are mostly reposting of opinion pieces or news articles I find on the web. It's not because I don't have my own thoughts on the pressing matters of the day, it's just that why re-write what someone else has already researched and written that sums up my own point of view or has helped focus it.

In case none of you have noticed, gasoline prices have gone up a bit recently. Oh, you say you have noticed? Well, so have I and I am getting super pissed. But not at the big bad greedy oil companies. I'm absolutely furious at the idiots in Congress who or in any position to set public policy that make it nearly impossible to build new refineries, nuclear power plants, or exploit the vast reserves of energy resources this country possesses.

There is so much to say on this topic but let's start with Daniel Henninger's column on OpinionJournal.com yesterday. I especially love the line at the end where he talks about this being the year we "tired" of being a serious country. Fits right in with my civilizational fatigue comments earlier this week, eh


June 12, 2008

Sitting on an Ocean of Energy, Doing Nothing

By Daniel Henninger

Charles de Gaulle once wrote off the nation of Brazil in six words: "Brazil is not a serious country." How much time is left before someone says the same of the United States?

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.

At this point in time, is there another country on the face of the earth that would possess the oil and gas reserves held by the United States and refuse to exploit them? Only technical incompetence, as in Mexico, would hold anyone back.

But not us. We won't drill.

California won't drill for the estimated 1.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil off its coast because of bad memories of the Santa Barbara oil spill - in 1969.

We won't drill for the estimated 5.6 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil in the moonscape known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) because of - the caribou.

In 1990, George H.W. Bush, calling himself "the environmental president," signed an order putting virtually all the U.S. outer continental shelf's oil and gas reserves in the deep freeze. Bill Clinton extended that lockup until 2013. A Clinton veto also threw away the key to ANWR's oil 13 years ago.

Our waters may hold 60 trillion untapped cubic feet of natural gas. As in Brazil, these are surely conservative estimates.

While Brazilians proudly embrace Petrobras, yelling "We're Going to Be No. 1," the U.S.'s Democratic nominee for president, Barack Obama, promises to impose an "excess profits tax" on American oil producers.

We live in a world in which Russia's Vladimir Putin and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez use their vast oil and gas reserves as instruments of state power. Here, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid use their control of Congress to spend a week debating a "climate-change" bill. This they did fresh off their subsidized (and bipartisan) ethanol fiasco.

One may assume that Mr. Putin and the Chinese have noticed the policy obsessions of our political class. While other nations use their oil reserves to attain world status, we give ours up. Why shouldn't they conclude that, long term, these people can be taken? Nikita Khrushchev said, "We will bury you." Forget that. We'll do it ourselves.

Putin intimidates Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states and Poland with oil and gas cutoffs, while Chávez uses petrodollars to bankroll Colombian terrorists. Cuba plans to exploit its Caribbean oil fields within a long tee shot of the Florida Keys with help from India, Spain, Venezuela, Canada, Norway, Malaysia, even Vietnam. But America won't drill. Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida said just last month he's afraid of an oil spill. Katrina wrecked the oil rigs in the Gulf with no significant damage from leaking oil.

Some portion of the current $4-per-gallon gasoline may be attributable to the Federal Reserve's inflationary monetary policy or even speculators. But we can wave goodbye to the $1.25/gallon gasoline that in 1990 allowed a President Bush to airily lock away the nation's oil and gas jewels. This isn't your father's world of energy. New world powers are coming online fast, and they need energy. We need to get back in the game.

The goal shouldn't be "energy independence," a ridiculous notion in an economically integrated world. It's about admitting the need to strike a balance between the energy and security realities of the here-and-now and the potentialities of the future. Some of our best and brightest want to pursue alternative energy technologies, and they should be encouraged to do so, inside market disciplines. But let's at least stop pretending the rest of the world is going to play along with our environmentalist moralisms.

The Democrats' climate-change bill collapsed last week under the weight of brutal cost realities. It was a wake-up call. This is the year Americans joined the real world of energy costs. Now someone needs to explain to them why we - and we alone - are sitting on an ocean of energy but won't drill for it.

You'd think the "national security" nominee, John McCain, would get this. He's clueless - a don't-drill zombie. We may mark this down as the year the U.S. tired of being a serious country.

Not a good start... or re-start anyway.

I'm not very happy with yesterday's post. I don't think I did a good job summarizing Weigel's work or expressing my own thoughts very well. I think I'll have to visit the civilization fatigue idea at some later time. Maybe when I've shaken the rust off my blogging skills.

Today I just wanted to share with you Larry Kudlow's June 11 Real Clear Politics article before I've forgotten about it. He just about sums up why you should vote for Senator McCain in November if you're an investor, small-business owner-operator, or one of the vast majority of middle-class Americans who go to work every day.

Here's the key section of Kudlow's piece.


Getting down to specifics, McCain said he will maintain the low income and investment tax rates put in place by President Bush. He singled out the need to keep the capital-gains tax rate at a low 15 percent, so that businesses will have the investment necessary to expand jobs, productivity, and real wages.

Completely unlike Obama, McCain is saying you can't have capitalism without capital. And he recognizes that investors must have high after-tax returns in order to take risks and fuel entrepreneurial activity. On this point, think high-risk energy technologies for clean coal, natural gas, oil shale, and nuclear and cellulosic power.

McCain repeated his plan to reduce the corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent. This could be his single-most-important tax reform. Not only will it enhance America's global competitiveness, since we have the second highest corporate tax among large countries. But a number of studies show that roughly 70 percent of the benefits from a lower corporate tax will flow to the workforce in the form of higher real wages and more jobs.

McCain also pledged to keep the estate tax low to reward family businesses. Overall, he would seek a flatter and simpler tax system, probably modeled on Rep. Paul Ryan's idea of two rates of 25 and 15 percent. McCain also discussed several middle-class tax cuts, such as doubling the child tax exemption and phasing out the alternative minimum tax. For businesses, McCain added a first-year cash-expensing provision for the write-off of new equipment and technology.

McCain coupled all this with a pledge to veto earmarks and pork-barrel spending. He held out as an example the outrageous $300 billion farm bill that drew Obama's vote. McCain would go after corporate welfare and freeze discretionary spending outside of the military. And he made an especially strong case for the free-trade policies that have been so important to U.S. economic growth.

Click here for the entire article.

Where to begin?

I started this blog with a lot of things I wanted to say and a lot of ambition to try to say it all. Then, reality set in. I realized this blogging thing is pretty hard work if you want to do it right. It sometimes would take an entire day's worth of free time to turn out a quality post and... I must admit... I can be a pretty lazy guy much of the time.

But this is not the entire reason the quality and quantity of my blogging was radically reduced all those months ago. Here's the other part of the story. Two summers ago I read a book by George Weigel called The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God. In it, he examines so-called "post-Christian" Europe. How did it get to be post-Christian and what will the ultimate consequences of that continent turning away from the faith that guided its denizens for more than a thousand years. I have had the opinion for years that Europe is a dying civilization if for no other reason that it's committing demographic suicide in that Europeans are not having enough babies and are making up the difference by letting in tens of thousands of immigrants from the Islamic world who are more than happy to procreate at a prodigious rate. Weigel generally reinforces this idea even though he tries also offers an optimistic scenario for how an Islamic Europe can be avoided. I'm not so sure.

Weigel identifies one of Europe's problems as a lack of "civilizational morale". Centuries of devastating wars and other upheavals has basically fatigued the European psyche to a point where an entire continent has lost the will to live... or at least the will to identify itself as a civilization with values worth preserving and not just an amalgam of people who speak a variety of languages united under the bureaucrats of the European Union. Weigel also points out that this is not just isolated to Europe, there are many people in the United States with this sort of European world view though it is not as dominant here. So, while we many not have full-on decline of civilizational morale, I think we definitely have a sort of civilizational fatigue. I believe there is an unspoken national debate going on as to whether we want to be the pre-eminate power in the world any longer. There are a lot of people in this country who don't like that we have the nerve to project our power around the globe and are thrown into fits of self-doubt when someone like Jacques Chirac wags his finger at us. And there are a lot of people who have bought into the idea that our very way of life is something to feel guilty about. That we are selfish, that we consume too much of the world's resources, etc.

I have more to say on these things but I want to get back to how this relates to my lack of blogging. Well, Weigel's book actually crushed my morale and I was quite depressed for a time. I know that might sound like an over-reaction but it's the truth. In fact, I'm still quite bummed about the state of things to this day but maybe blogging again can help me work out of it.


I'll end this post on a positive note. I'm getting married October 4 to a wonderful lady I truly don't deserve. More about that later :-)

Gil

Frnknsalsa endorses...

Senator John McCain!

















Yay!!!

Boo!!!

So, I asked Enterprise for the smallest car available...