Congress deadlocked over offshore drilling:
With a gallon of gas hovering at $4, energy prices are the No. 1 issue on voters' minds. But congressional leaders are increasingly deadlocked over what to do. In response, frustrated rank-and-file members on both sides of the aisle are stepping up efforts to find common ground.
I really don't need to be saved from myself...
In a state that is desperate for more power, saddled with a sluggish economy and bearing the brunt of the 'housing crisis', it's nice to see the Governor tackling the big and urgent questions of the day.
Nancy Pelosi says today of President Bush (not the Administration, but the President himself):
"God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States -- a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject," Pelosi told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in an exclusive interview.
"For him to be challenging Congress when we are trying to sweep up after his mess over and over and over again -- at the end of the day, Congress will have passed its responsibility to pass legislation," she said.
It would be bracing criticism if not for the fact that Bush--the object of so much derision and ire--is more than twice as popular as Pelosi's 110th Congress.
I've got a challenge of my own...can Al Gore stay away from microphones and television cameras for even one day?
Yet another lesson in the basics of Free markets today...
The Mainstream press reads: Crude oil was little changed below $139 a barrel in New York after tumbling more than $6 yesterday because of concern a slower U.S. economy will curtail demand.
Prices dropped as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said risks to growth and inflation have risen, in testimony to the Senate Banking Committee. He abandoned a June assessment that the threat of an economic slowdown had diminished.
Then there's this alternative analysis from a bit earlier in the day: In a dramatic move yesterday President Bush removed the executive-branch moratorium on offshore drilling. Today, at a news conference, Bush repeated his new position, and slammed the Democratic Congress for not removing the congressional moratorium on the Outer Continental Shelf and elsewhere. Crude-oil futures for August delivery plunged $9.26, or 6.3 percent, almost immediately as Bush was speaking, bringing the barrel price down to $136.
Now isn’t this interesting?
Regardless of the reason, the larger point is still the only point--the market reflects the future possibilities of increases, decreases in supply, demand and even the occasional indirect effect (think Iranian missile tests). And Democrats continue to be wrong and or stupid on the entire subject...
From the Telegraph UK:
Hating George W. Bush is not only dull and unoriginal, but it shows a complete lack of understanding of the world in which we live in.
You want liberty but you don’t want to defend it... right.
Might make for a truly interesting reality-TV program watching lefties run head-first into the real world...
The Pew Center's latest survey reveals that it is self-identified liberals who have most changed their attitude about drilling. Indeed, a slightly higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans now say that more energy production is important.
It would be even more amusing if it weren't so painful.
This post has gotten quite a lot of notice in the last couple of days and for a number of reasons. First off, it neatly if not very cynically nails the NY Times' coverage of President-in-waiting, Barack Obama:
In this morning's lead editorial ("New and Not Improved"), they detail and denounce many of Obama's post-Hillary pivots to the center. As their irritation builds, I'm thinking that there are only three positions that could explain this editorial. First, that the editors genuinely believe that Obama could win the general election with his primary season policy ideas. It is believable that they think this because they live inside a Manhattan cocoon, but silly. Second, that the editors would rather that Obama lose than compromise his principles. This seems unlikely in the cold light of a November morning, however satisfying it might feel to spew such romantic drivel on the Fourth of July. Or, third, the editors know that Obama's pivots will be much more believable to the swing voters if the Times denounces them. This theory holds that the editors are pretending to be outraged so as to further deceive the rubes who prefer the Flop to the Flip.
However, what I found most appealing was this pie-in-the-face tothe Times' editorial board found in the following couple of paragraphs:
For bonus comedy gold, note well the gun-control lie embedded in the editorial (emphasis added):
Mr. Obama endorsed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the District of Columbia’s gun-control law. We knew he ascribed to the anti-gun-control groups’ misreading of the Constitution as implying an individual right to bear arms.
Dudes. In the just-decided Heller case, all nine of the Justices of the Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment describes an individual right to bear arms. Are you lying to your own readers, or are you so wedded to your own reading of the Constitution -- the anti-freedom reading -- that you will not give it up even when Ruth Bader Ginsberg (for example) disagrees with you? (emphasis added)
Similarly as I did here, Tigerhawk not only points out but also nails the absurdity of the lefts argument on guns as made plain in the Instapundit post but goes deeper and puts meat on the bones. And quite honestly, he does a better job.
All the linkage and twice the sarcasm. Well done...
This is what you get when a left-leaning blogger attempts something resembling a measured argument about George W. Bush...in this case, Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum.
LOL at the insanity. I especially loved the letter-writer:
I am appalled. Does Washington Monthly as a magazine support this errant, inaccurate, and uncaring opinion?
I daresay that those unfortunate souls who have been secretly, illegally, and unconstituionally renditioned in unmarked white CIA planes to other countries to be tortured for months -- without recourse to counsel, legal proceedings, or habeas corpus protections -- would be the first to say that Bush's crimes are worse than Bush's. And would they be wrong?
Well -- would they? I'm asking you to defend Kevin's assertion. And if you don't support it, to apologize to your readership. Whether on Kevin's behalf, or not, I don't care -- I'm talking to you. I'm making an ethics and morality check on YOU, the editors.
Yeah, I'm mad. This is how the country slides further and further down the slippery slope to authoritarianism and despotism, when the opinion leaders can't be bothered to call a war criminal a war criminal and a destroyer of the Constitution exactly what he is.
I await your response, and I expect to hear personally from one of you.
Regards,
Rob Conrad
Chicago, IL
The most obvious point (So obvious that it's one of those things you feel guilty pointing out but only for a moment) is of course his confusion of Bush's crimes with those of...Bush; apparently he's so angry he forgot who he was writing about.
Rob needs a big dose of Get Over Yourself...demanding answers from the magazine editors for Kevin's audaciousness. 'Cause after all, he's mad!
I'm no fan of most of Kevin Drum's work as anyone who looks around will notice. But he has all the sympathy in the world on this one.
Kevin's no fan of the President but undertook, as best I can tell, an honest appraisal of the difference, as he sees it, between President Nixon and Bush the younger. And what does he get for his trouble?
The lefty venom that so usually pervades his regular readership turned back onto the unsuspecting author, that's what. I guess though when you've been feeding the bears for years you shouldn't be surprised when one of them takes a bite out of you.
And oil prices...
Buy, buy, buy and drill, drill, drill!:
It’s unfortunate the administration doesn’t seem ready to back this strong rhetoric with some old-fashioned intervention. The Treasury has the authority to buy dollars and sell euros in the open market. Better yet, it can coordinate these efforts with Jean Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank. President Bush and Treasury man Paulson also are forgetting the key word: “appreciate.” As in appreciate the dollar. That would be a head turner on Wall Street and on global foreign-exchange markets.
Meanwhile the ECB is raising interest rates which will appreciate the currency against the dollar, and you guessed it, more likely than not boost the price of oil.
Is anybody in D.C. paying attention...?
...when they tell you starting to explore and/or drill for new oil won't affect the price:
Now here is the good news. Any policy that causes the expected future oil price to fall can cause the current price to fall, or to rise less than it would otherwise do. In other words, it is possible to bring down today's price of oil with policies that will have their physical impact on oil demand or supply only in the future.
For example, increases in government subsidies to develop technology that will make future cars more efficient, or tighter standards that gradually improve the gas mileage of the stock of cars, would lower the future demand for oil and therefore the price of oil today.
Similarly, increasing the expected future supply of oil would also reduce today's price. That fall in the current price would induce an immediate rise in oil consumption that would be matched by an increase in supply from the OPEC producers and others with some current excess capacity or available inventories.
Any steps that can be taken now to increase the future supply of oil, or reduce the future demand for oil in the U.S. or elsewhere, can therefore lead both to lower prices and increased consumption today.
But I leave it to you...you can believe the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan or Chuck Schumer.
What happens when a cartoonist goes off the rails? They look dumb. Really dumb:
What's most striking about Heller is that absolutely everybody -- majority and dissents -- says the Second Amendment protects an individual right.
It's true that the dissenters' view of that right is somewhere between "minimalist" (to be charitable) and "incoherent" (to be accurate). But nonetheless, all nine Justices specifically said the right is individual, and thus rejected the "collective right" position on the Second Amendment, a position that's been the mainstay of gun-control groups, newspaper editorialists, and lower federal courts for decades, and one that was presented by those adherents as so obviously correct that those arguing for an individual right were called "frauds" and shills for the NRA.
Yet the collective right theory could not command a single vote on the Court when actually tested.
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