Domestic Policy: May 2008 Archives

[Editor's note: with John Sith McCain as Richard Nixon, Barack Hussein Obama as a non-assassinated Bobby Kennedy, Hillary Rodham Clinton as George Wallace, and the Democrat Party as, well, the Democrat Party.  Just so that was clarified.]

By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of liberty [reposted with permission]

As the author of three books, it is obvious to me that the motivation and the timing for the release of former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan's book is a marketing strategy. As the Wall Street Journal points out, McClellan "had a revelation that the Administration used 'propaganda' to sell the war, though this means he himself was chief propaganda minister for three years during which he expressed no similar qualms.  McClellan settles various personal scores, and in particular seems bitter about former deputy chief of staff Karl Rove. White House aides can defend themselves, and we'll let others speculate about McClellan's motives for turning on his friends.

"We'd merely note that the book's publisher is PublicAffairs, an imprint founded by left-wing editor Peter Osnos and which has published six books by George Soros. PublicAffairs is owned by Perseus Books, which is owned by Perseus LLC, a merchant bank whose board includes Democrats Richard Holbrooke and Jim Johnson, who is now doing Barack Obama's vice presidential vetting. One of Perseus's investment funds, Perseus-Soros Biopharmaceutical, is co-managed with Soros."

This is not a scenario for sharing truth. The timing and the comments about meetings he didn't attend appear to be connected to vengeance, money and fame. We are now supposed to believe he knows something he DIDN'T know while working in the White House or, that he did know at the time and simply lied to the public about?

The facts are relatively simple: if Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, which he used against both Iran and the Kurds in the 1980s, why did the 105th Congress pass and President Bill Clinton sign Public Law 105-235 in August of 1998? Which states: "Whereas Iraq's continuing weapons of mass destruction programs threaten vital United States interests and international peace and security: Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Government of Iraq is in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations, and therefore the President is urged to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations."

Saddam Hussein's own generals believed he had weapons of mass destruction. In 2003 as American troops approached Baghdad, it was widely reported in the world media that once the "red line" around Baghdad encompassing the cities of Tuz Khurmatu, Bayji, Ar-Ramadi, Karbala, Al-Hillah, Al-Kut, and Al-Miqdadiyah was breached that Saddam would order the chemical weapons used, as they were against Kurds and Iranians.

If Saddam Hussein still had chemical weapons in 2003, why didn't he use them? For that matter, why didn't he use them in Desert Storm in 1991 to maintain his capture of Kuwait? According to my son, who was the battalion surgeon for the 1st Marine Battalion of the 7th Regiment that recaptured Kuwait City, there were two reasons why they were not used: (1) the speed the Marines moved against the Iraqi troops and (2) the U.S. Air Force blew up most of his chemical weapons in bombing raids. The chemical warning device on his ambulance, however, did go off numerous times, which indicated chemicals were still around.

It is almost a given in the year 2008 that whatever the problem, somehow it will be blamed on either George W. Bush, or the Republicans. On the other hand, I have received some information lately that points out there are others in the world that just might be the cause of some of our problems, especially the high price of oil. Somehow, that also is President Bush's fault, in spite of the fact that Al Gore strongly urged in his 1992 book, Earth in Balance to sharply INCREASE the cost of gasoline in order to cut consumption" and in May of 2001 George W. Bush urged Congress to pass Energy Independence legislation. Congress has refused to do so for 71/2 years.

Max Whitmore wrote recently in Money News, "that 95% of what you hear about the dollar and oil is gibberish designed either to sell something or to bring influence to bear for political reasons. But, that has been going on for centuries and will never change. In this case, however, it is just that the stakes are far, far bigger."

For months I have been deluged with e-mail informing me that we are, or will soon be in a serious recession and that we need a savior who will "change" things in Washington. Only, so far I have not seen a very important first sign of recession - a serious drop in the number of jobs available. And, about the only "change" I am hearing about involves the confused politics of 1960s which caused the defunding the Vietnam War . That, in turn led to the death of millions of people in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, expedited the communist take-over of Southeast Asia and destroyed much of the respect other nations once had for the USA.

Max Whitmore's observation about the price of gas is very much to the point in this election year. He observes: "The folks behind this push are the same ones that brought us the 1973-74 gas lines and changed the world's financial power centers forever. Only this time the reason for the move by these folks is quite different.

"The oil producers can see the handwriting on the wall. Oil will soon become just one of many power sources in the world. The so-called alternative fuel sources will force oil producers to reduce their price per barrel by a huge margin and for good in the next five to seven years. To "make hay while the sun shines" so to speak, the oil powers are using their huge money pools to run up prices that then translate into higher prices per barrel, even when nothing has changed, especially production costs.

"All the talk of running out of oil is nonsense. If we want it bad enough, we could do what the Nazis did in WWII and just make it in chemical plants. Did you know that German scientists did just that over fifty years ago and maintained their entire war machine with synthetic fuel? "

Ninety-two percent of Germany's aviation gasoline during WWII was made in German plants from coal. And, we don't even have to do that. The major media generally ignored a speech in Congress by my own Congressman, Chris Cannon, who pointed out that oil from shale in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming could be immediately available at about $30 a barrel. That would be about $100 less than OPEC is charging these days.

Our problem is not a shortage of oil, but the deception that has made it impossible to access our own vast oil resources, along with an incompetent Congress that has refused repeatedly to address the energy problem or pass the legislation needed to unlock America's energy resources. Representative Cannon will shortly introduce a bill to immediately allow extracting oil from shale - so, if you are tired of paying nearly $4 a gallon for gas - tell your members of Congress that if they don't support efforts for the USA to become energy independent - you will work for a candidate who WOULD vote for energy independence to take his or her place.

It is not the American consumer that is the victim of "Big Oil" when he goes to fill up and sees the numbers on the pump price sign whiz by like the hundredths-of-a-second digit on the clock in the final minute of a basketball game (the Chevron station where I go jumped a dime a gallon yesterday - six cents between lunch and dinner).  It is the American consumer that is the victim of the entity that wants to scapegoat (and nationalize) "Big Oil" for the predictably disastrous results of its own environmentally extremist energy policies:

Gasoline prices are through the roof and Americans are angry. Someone must be to blame and the obvious villain is “Big Oil” with its alleged ability to gouge consumers and achieve unconscionable, “windfall” profits. Congress is in a vile mood, and has dragged oil industry executives before its committees for show trials, issuing predictable threats of punishment, e.g. a “windfall profits tax.”

But if there is a villain in all of this, it is Congress itself. That venerable body has made it impossible for U.S. producers of crude oil to tap significant domestic reserves of oil and gas, and it has foreclosed economically viable alternative sources of energy in favor of unfeasible alternatives such as wind and solar. In addition, Congress has slapped substantial taxes on gasoline. Indeed, as oil industry executives reiterated in their appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 21, 15% of the cost of gasoline at the pump goes for taxes, while only 4% represents oil company profits.

To understand the depth of congressional complicity in the high price of gasoline, one must understand that crude oil prices explain 97% of the variation in the pretax price of gasoline. That price, which has risen to record levels, is set by the intersection of supply and demand. On the one hand, world-wide demand has accelerated mainly due to the rapid growth of China and India.

On the other hand, supply has been curtailed by the cartel-like behavior of foreign national oil companies, which control nearly 80% of world petroleum reserves. Faced with little competition in the production of crude oil, the members of this cartel benefit from keeping the commodity in the ground, confident that increasing demand will make it more valuable in the future. Despite its pious denunciations of the behavior of U.S. investor-owned oil companies (IOCs), Congress by its actions over the years has ensured the economic viability of the national oil company cartel. [emphases added]

And why wouldn't they?  Marxists of a feather agitate together, after all.

Maxine Waters' verbal slip last week was less a gaffe than simply moderately premature.  The political wind is all at the Democrats' backs despite their hard left buffoonery.  Indeed, in that sense they truly deserve PR-incontinent Barack Hussein Obama as their standardbearer, in that he's doing everything humanly possible to make himself maximally radioactive politically, and if he succeeds in upsetting Hillary, he will nonetheless cruise to victory in November, and bring a reprise of the Jimmy Carter era right into office with him.

He calls that "change"; I call it reactionary.

Perhaps I've reached a milestone in my life: I'm now old enough that a majority of the electorate is too young to remember what the day-to-day reality of the Carter years were like.  The anti-energy policies; the "windfall profit taxes"; oil and gas price controls and the shortages, and resultant long, miserable gas lines, they generated.  I was in junior high school, but I was starting to pay attention to current events, and my father had plenty to say on the subject.  I would surmise that anybody under the age of fifty never had to put up with the consequences of these Donk-imposed energy market distortions directly, and my precocious political awareness made me a decided minority among my contemporaries.

To anybody not eligible for AARP membership, they haven't personally felt the pain of the Dem energy policy agenda that Mac Owens articulates.  That and most Americans' abysmal ignorance of history and basic economics (as well as common sense - over which, as Ronald Reagan once reminded us, there is a great deal of overlap) provide a thick layer of insulation for the Dynamo-shutter-downers.  Thus do long-discredited socialist policy nostrums get endlessly recycled: eventually, the electorate turns over sufficiently that a majority of voters once again do not know any better.  The hell of it is we all have to learn the lesson anew.

Or, in the words of the noted philospher Rancid Crabtree, "If you stay in one place long enough just about everything will pass by twice."

For my money, I would rather pay four bucks a gallon at the pump than spend fortnightly afternoons waiting my turn to get at the damn thing.  Even better, why not "stop fulminating against IOCs and reverse current policies that discourage, indeed prohibit, the production of domestic oil and natural gas" so as to "create incentives for domestic producers to invest in exploration and to increase production" and "caused oil prices to tumble"?

Unfortunately that's not the world we live in.  At least until this generation gets a taste of Obamanomics, and vomits its Carteresque architect out of its electoral mouth.

Notice a common thread running through the avowed objectives of the greenstremists following the Bush Interior Deparment's execrable polar bear decision?:

[L]ike scores of other species-protection cases won by the Center for Biological Diversity in the past, this is but the first step in a long, arduous process to translate the listing into action.

The center petitioned for the polar bear's listing back in 2005. It later sued along with Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council to force the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list it.

The center's blueprint for saving the polar bear is ambitious and complex. It includes:

***Challenging offshore oil and gas leasing in Alaska within six months.

***Launching a large-scale challenge to the licensing of coal-fired power plants around the country sometime after that.

***Finally, challenging large-scale, local government development plans in major cities.

Stopping energy exploration...stopping energy creation...stopping development.

Stop, stop, stop - in the midst of an allegedly recessed economy and four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline.

Oh, but don't call these commielibs "socialists," you dirty rotten McCarthyite!

I'd prefer to feed 'em to the polar bears, myself.  If they really are on the brink of extinction, what better "last meal" could they receive?

h/t: Double-H

Hugh warned us about this plot to sneak Kyoto in the regulatory back door; now it's too late:

The Interior Department is listing the polar bear as a threatened species because of declining Arctic sea ice.

That would be the Bush Interior Department.  You know, those gleefully wicked destroyers of Gaia's preciously divine realm.

Just to reiterate the practical effects of this ecological police state - which will have nothing whatsodamnever do to with f'ing polar bears:

[Now that] the polar bear is listed as a "threatened" species, every federal action - the grant of a permit, the award of a grant - that leads even indirectly to the emission of greenhouse gases will come under at least the theoretical review of the United States Fish & Wildlife Service pursuant to Section 7 of the ESA...in fact it is as likely to delay or destroy economic activity in any part of the lower forty-eight as it is in Alaska.

And just to reiterate the "science" of the underlying pretext for this blatant regulatory power-grab:

NASA’s not even sure yet that it’s global warming that’s causing the ice caps to melt; in fact, it’s Canada that’s best positioned to address the needs of the bears since they host two-thirds of the global population. Are the Canadians freaked out about the bears’ endangerment? No: They haven’t even listed the species as threatened, and according to this fact site about polar bears, Canadian hunters actually believe the population’s increasing. Some biologists think that’s untrue, that the bears are simply moving inland as the ice melts. Other biologists disagree, claiming that there are more bears today than there were thirty-five years ago.

It's all bullbleep, folks.  Polar bear extinction, melting ice caps, global warming - all bullbleep.  The....planet....is....cooling, not "warming," and that's being driven by the sun, not "Earth's greatest threat".

Nevertheless, the pagan commie-pinkos get to impose their religion on the rest of us, unlike those phantom "Christianists" of their feverishly bigoted imaginations.  And with the economy already being talked down by the triumphalist Left, with the Bush tax cuts destined to be allowed to expire, with Rodbama banging the drums for jacking capgains tax rates back up and imposing new energy taxes in the midst of an energy price upward spiral, well, what could be a better coup de grace for a Second Great Depression than using f'ing polar bears as justification for greenstremist Gestapo lawsuits that'll litigate us back to the Stone Age?

True to form, Double-H has outlined a plan of counterattack against Operation Polar Bear.  Maybe it'll be undertaken, maybe it won't - but if (God willing) it is, what hope is there that the damage can be remotely contained?

Once again, here's what we're up against:

The [Endanger Species] Act operates simply. Once an animal is listed, it becomes a felony to harm or harass it without the permission of the feds.  Harm or harassment has been defined to include destruction or impairment of the habitat the species actually occupies....

Because the polar bear has been listed as threatened due to alleged deterioration of its ice habitat, and because the alleged loss of the ice habitat has occurred because of global warming caused at least in part by the emission of greenhouse gases, environmental activists will argue that all emissions of greenhouse gases that flow as a consequence of the grant of a federal permit of any sort are now subject to review under the ESA and, crucially, that those permits cannot be issued unless and until the United States Fish & Wildlife Service reviews and approves of the requested permit under Section 7 of the ESA, a process which takes at a minimum months and which can cost millions of dollars even if it is successful. [emphases added]

That's a reach almost to ubiquity.  This is orders of magnitude beyond "You can't build your Burger King because a Delhi Sands flower-loving fly that has never been seen and is above ground only a few days a year might be near-by"; this is more like, "You can't build a house anywhere because you might go outside in your back yard and break wind, releasing methane that will contribute infinitisemally to the melting of the polar ice caps and, thus, the destruction of the polar bear's natural habitat."  The next step, I suppose, will be, "You are being put to death because you might break wind, releasing methane into the atmosphere that will float north, help melt the polar ice caps, and destroy the polar bear's natural habitat."

Or perhaps the step after next.  The greenshirts are already pushing for harm to habitat that could be occupied in the future being criminalized under the ESA.  And they know precisely where to go: the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most Marxian appellate stop in the country.  Even if businesses, industries, and trade associations were to counter-blitz the courts as Hugh suggests (since no relief can be expected from the Donk Congress), what chance would they have in such a hostile venue?

And how likely is it that they'd even make the attempt?:

Incredibly, not one of the industries likely to be impacted by the listing intervened in the court proceeding that imposed a deadline on Secretary Kempthorne. Not one.

C'mon, ladies and gents.  Much as I want to see Commodore Hewitt's strategy employed, it is sheer fantasy.  The reason why is because we haven't reached rock-bottom yet.  The Right is beaten, reeling, divided, and demoralized.  We don't even have a candidate in the presidential race, and are doomed to decimation at the congressional level this fall.  It's a state of debility far worse than what we faced after the 1992 debacle because we've had so much farther to fall, and because we haven't been the victims of opposition deception.  Democrats didn't retake Congress in 2006 by pretending to be conservatives, "blue dogs" or no "blue dogs"; they did so by being their loud, obnoxious, seditious, neoBolshevik selves; by yelling and screaming and whining and bitching and moaning and agitating until the voters finally gave them their power back, even if just to shut them up.  Neither is Rodbama on course to retake the White House in November on a platform of triangulation and "New Democrat-ism".  Far to the contrary, Hillary and Ba-ROCK are elbowing each other to be the biggest tax-raiser, business-destroyer, healthcare-rationer, war-quitter, and all-around Stalinist on the ballot, and both are leading the so-called "Republican" candidate in hypothetical polling matchups.

America got snookered sixteen years ago.  Now it is turning - HARD - to the Left.  The catastrophic consequences of that lamentable mistake will have to land with both feet before any "counterattack" can even be mounted, much less have any chance of succeeding.  Assuming such, or even any political opposition to the New Order, will even be tolerated.

But we - or at least, I - have seen this fate coming for years.  What most appalls me is that such a ruling could be allowed to come out of a Republican - and at intermittant times, even a conservative - Administration.

And spare me the "They were under a court order" fiddle-faddle.  As President Lincoln said of the infamous Dred Scott decision, "Justice Taney has issued his ruling; now let him enforce it."  Quite simply, the Bush Interior Department should have flatly refused to list the polar bear as a "threatened species".  Period.  What did they have to lose, seeing as how any of its three Democrat successors would do it next year anyway?  Indeed, what did they have to gain by putting Dubya's fingerprints on such an economically ruinous policy betrayal?

Particularly when, as you ought to have expected, it's still not good enough for the other side:

''They're trying to make this a threatened listing in name only with no change in today's impacts and that's not going to fly,'' said Jamie Rappaport Clark of Defenders of Wildlife and a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director.

Members of Congress also were skeptical.

The Bush Administration ''is forcing the polar bear to sink or swim,'' said Representative Edward Markey, D-MA, chairman of a House committee on global warming.

Senator John Kerry, D-MA, called it ''a lifeline for our last remaining polar bears'' but said the bear's survival won't be assured without limits on oil development in the same Arctic waters where the bears are found.

Despite the new listing, the announcement underscores the need to approve climate legislation that would limit the release of greenhouse gases and avert the future effects on climate change, said Senator Barbara Boxer, D-CA, chairwoman of the Environment Committee.

We're already approaching the $4 per gallon mark at the pump even without this polar bear nonsense, and the Dems want even more limits on energy exploration.  Kind of like how healthcare costs continue to spiral upward and their solution is to complete the government takeover of the medical sector, and federal spending continues to skyrocket and their solution is ever higher taxes.  But don't call them socialists!

Do call them winners, though.  Because in their twelve years in the political wilderness they never buckled, never compromised, and never quit.  It is we, conservatives, the Right, that couldn't handle prosperity, that didn't tear down the entire liberal welfare regulatory behemoth and restore the federal government to its proper, constitutionally mandated size, structure, and function - or at least make a good faith attempt.  It is we who have forgotten why we engaged and defeated the Left in 1994 and 2000 and 2002 and 2004, forgotten the lessons of the Clinton era, and now blunder around blindly in utter disarray, which is the only contextual explanation for why the Bush Administration is making such a massive regulatory downpayment on the DisLoyalists' behalf.

Oh, yes, and by the way, the Calfornia Supremes imposed sodomarriage on their state today.  And most of them were appointed by...."Republican" Governor Arnold Schwartzeneggar, who bears more than a passing political resemblance to....John Sith McCain.

Consider that another complimentary "bipartisan" downpayment.  The next step will be the banning of heterosexual marriage.  Because, as we all ought to know by now, there's no such thing as RINOs out-liberaling liberals.

I may as well segue full-bore into this topic since I'm halfway there already.  This polar bear surrender is but the baton that was handed off to Darth Queeg, who, as I alluded the other day, isn't exactly the second coming of Ronald Reagan, and is going out of his way to use global warming superstitution to prove it:

If Republicans are going to be stampeded by phony environmental alarms and propose terrible public policies in the name of these scams, what the hell do we need Democrats for?

America is so far gone in the global warming superstition that the Republican candidate for president (the REPUBLICAN!) is proposing a Soviet scheme to take decisions about energy use out of the private sector where they belong and turn them over to politicians and bureaucrats. If there's a quicker way to make America into a Third World nation, pray tell me what it is....

So how account for the execrable cap and trade policy McCain sprung on us from Portland, Oregon, Monday and which he says will save us from the dreaded carbon dioxide? (If you're asking: "Carbon dioxide -- isn't that what makes the flowers grow and what baby's breath is made of?" Answer: yes.) All a cap and trade system (government energy rationing) would bring about is a sharp decline in our standard of living in return for, well, nothing. Sources of energy to replace the carbon-based ones we rely on now just aren't here yet, and we don't know when they will be. 

Later, Larry Thornberry answers his own question:

For the Left's political agenda of taxes and regulation without end, you couldn't design a better scam than global warming. And a scam is all it is. As someone smart and famous once said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and dazzle the rest of them with statistics and charts." These folks just want as much control over the economy as they now exercise, to our sorrow, over the culture. And global warming is their ticket to ride.

Computer programming 101, gentles: IF x, THEN y.  IF the "climate change" hoax is the Left's ticket to a revival of the old Soviet Union right here in the formerly good ol' US of A, and IF John Sith McCain is the newly self-minted champion of crusading against "climate change," THEN he is a man of the Left, is leading a hostile takeover of the Republican Party BY the Left, and is removing any viable opposition to said one-party Marxist-Leninist state.

It is isn't just conservatives and the GOP that is truly endangered, my friends, but America as we have known it for the past 232 years.  Even if the polar bear WAS "threatened" - on which, to be bending-over-backwards charatible, the jury is still way out - better that critter die out than American prosperity and liberty.

A lamentation that is falling on stubbornly deaf ears.

According to the global warming hoaxers, solar-induced global cooling is just a temporary respite from the man-made climactic frying pan (via HA):

Average temperatures in areas such as California and France may drop over the next ten years, influenced by colder flows in the North Atlantic, said a report today by the institution based in Kiel, Germany. Temperatures worldwide may stabilize in the period.

The study was based on sea-surface temperatures of currents that move heat around the world, and vary from decade to decade. This regional cooling effect may temporarily neutralize the long- term warming phenomenon caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases building up around Earth, said Richard Wood, a research scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, a U.K. provider of environmental and weather-related services…

“If we don’t experience warming over the next ten years, it doesn’t mean that greenhouse-gas warming is not with us,” [Noel] Keenlyside said in an interview. “There can be natural fluctuations that may mask climate change in the short term.”…

“Natural variations over the next ten years might be heading in the cold direction,” Wood said. “If you run the model long enough, eventually global warming will win.”…

“We thought a lot about the way to present this because we don’t want it to be turned around in the wrong way,” Keenlyside said. “I hope it doesn’t become a message of Exxon Mobil and other skeptics.”

Oh, perish forbid, "Dr." Keenlyside.  Let's not let facts and the reality that the Sun has vastly more influence over our planet's climate than poor ol' homo sapiens conflict with your sacred, venerated "model".  Why, that would be heresy, and the Goreacle would be most displeased at this breach of pagan neoBolshevik dogma.

On the other hand, it would afford Fat Albert a bigger carbon footprint....