Archive for January, 2008
By Erik Rush
"There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967. The agreement must establish a Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people."
–President George W. Bush, January 10, 2008
Geopolitics is such a complicated subject, you see, far beyond the comprehension of the average American. Those whom destiny has ordained to ameliorate the world’s geopolitical woes are far more insightful and inherently capable that you or I could ever hope to be.
I’m being facetious, of course. Without going into the promotion of that belief by politicians over the years due to spineless vacillation or their quest to keep Americans ignorant and uninvolved in the political process, I’d be interested in hearing how the Founding Fathers of this nation would have viewed the above concept, those who took on the most powerful empire on the planet and declaring that they were prepared to fight, kill and die to throw off the yoke of tyranny.
President Bush has gotten a lot of bad press from the establishment media because of who and what they are. I was forwarded some factoids the other day which, though verifiable, I was reluctant to use simply because the initial contact was a group email from a business associate.
There have been 39 combat related killings in Iraq in January. In Detroit there were 35 murders in the month of January. That’s just one American city, about as deadly as the entire war-torn country of Iraq.
Though some claim that President Bush "shouldn’t have started this war," consider:
FDR (a Democrat) led us into World War II. Although we were attacked, from 1941-1945, 450,000 lives were lost, an average of 112,500 per year.
Truman (a Democrat) finished that war and started one in Korea.
North Korea never attacked us.
From 1950-1953, 55,000 lives were lost, an average of 18,334 per year.
John F. Kennedy (a Democrat) started the Vietnam conflict in 1962.
Vietnam never attacked us.
Johnson (a Democrat) turned Vietnam into a quagmire.
From 1965-1975, 58,000 lives were lost, an average of 5,800 per year.
President Clinton (a Democrat) went to war in Bosnia without United Nations or French consent.
Bosnia never attacked us.
By Alan Caruba
A little news item in an April 15 edition of my daily newspaper was headlined “Saudi Arabia proposes to boost oil production.” The increase was intended to “meet domestic and international demand while insuring ‘fair’ world prices”, said King Abdullah. Indeed, OPEC, the oil cartel, had twice cut production, “contributing,” said the news item, “to relative stability that has kept benchmark crude between $50 and $60 a barrel—down from the record highs of more than $78 a barrel last summer. Current prices are around 40% above 2004 levels.”
The world is not about to run out of oil, but the price is likely to remain where the Saudis and other oil producing nations want it, knowing that too high a price retards the billions that must be invested to find new reserves and then extract, transport and refine it. They know that the world is growing hungrier for oil as nations like China and India industrialize and become major economic centers.
The oil we use today is the result of careful decisions made a decade or two ago by the world’s greatest masters of risk, the oil companies whom we trust to keep the world’s economic engine running. If the price was less in the past, it is because fewer nations were competing for it and that it could be extracted from places less costly than deep oceans.
These days when I hear our politicians talk of “energy independence” while often refusing to allow our own reserves of oil and natural gas to be tapped, I am mindful that they are deceiving us.
This was clarified in an excellent policy analysis published recently by the Cato Institute. The authors are Eugene Gholz, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and Daryl G. Press, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth University. It had six pages of footnotes as an indication of how thoroughly researched it was.
It’s title was “Energy Alarmism: The Myths That Make Americans Worry About Oil.”
By Warner Todd Huston
In an article that is ostensibly supposed to be about the many Iowa homeschoolers that are supporting Mike Huckabee, the Washington Post pins the reason to the fact that homeschooling parents must hate Mormons! This has easily become the MSM’s favorite theme as they try to divide and anger portions of the GOP primary voting base against each other. In this MSM meme, anyone who votes against Romney or questions the relative Christian merits of the Mormon faith is a bigot who hates Mormons and won’t vote for Romney merely because he is one. They are also unanimous in pinning support for Huckabee to an anti-Mormon sentiment. The MSM is doing their level best to start a religious war on the right.
In the Post’s article, religion is the central theme of pro-Huckabee homeschool advocates. Here the Post reveals the efforts of a homeschooling Mother named Julie Roe (bet they chose her for her familiar name: Roe) who has stumped for Huckabee by making homemade buttons and making numerous phone calls.
Julie Roe, an early believer in Mike Huckabee, worked with what she had… With no buttons, no yard signs and no glossy literature from his nearly invisible Iowa campaign, she took a pair of scissors and cut out a photograph of the former Arkansas governor. She pasted it on a piece of paper, scribbled down some of his positions, made copies and launched the Huckabee for President campaign in rural Hardin County.
So, why Huckabee? (My emphasis added throughout).
Huckabee’s name is no longer a mystery to Iowa’s Republican voters, in large part because of an extensive network of home-schoolers like Roe who have helped lift his underfunded campaign from obscurity to the front of a crowded field. Opinion polls show that his haphazard approach is trumping the studied strategy of Mitt Romney, who invested millions only to be shunned by many religious conservatives such as Roe, who see the former Baptist preacher from Hope, Ark., as their champion.
But, even the Post contradicts this religious basis only a few paragraphs later.
(Alexandria, VA) — As House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY) plans another push this year for an overhaul of the Tax Code, lawmakers should abandon Rangel's multi-rate proposal and follow the worldwide movement toward a simple flat tax system, according to the 362,000-member National Taxpayers Union (NTU). In the mid-20th century, Hong Kong was the only country with a flat — and proportional — national personal income tax rate. Since then, 17 other countries have followed suit and introduced flat taxes, according to the World Taxpayers Associations (WTA), a coalition of 60 taxpayer-advocacy groups — including NTU — from 44 countries.
"A single-rate tax would create a more simplified and transparent Tax Code," NTU Vice President for Policy and Communications Pete Sepp said. "Instead of 'wrangling' more money from families, Chairman Rangel and other legislators should catch on to what the rest of the world is discovering — lower, flatter taxes benefit their citizens and their economies."
One recent trend many countries have followed is to introduce very low flat income tax rates — usually from 10 percent to 13 percent. Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Macedonia have introduced flat tax rates of 10 percent over the past two years. Russia enacted a 13 percent income tax rate in 2001, and Ukraine did the same in 2004, according to WTA.
Estonia, the first European country to introduce a flat tax rate (in 1994), plans to reduce its rate by 1 percent each year, with a goal of an 18 percent rate by 2011. Estonia's current rate is 20 percent. Both Lithuania and Hong Kong reduced their income tax rates for 2008, from 27 percent to 24 percent and from 16 percent to 15 percent, respectively. Jersey, Georgia, Guernsey, Iraq, Ireland, Latvia, Macau, Romania, and Slovakia also have flat income tax rates ranging from 12 percent to 25 percent.
"Whether it's a flat income tax or even better, a retail-level national sales tax, American policymakers should look abroad to see what's working," Sepp concluded. "Single-rate taxes represent the wave of the future for countries that want to be competitive and governments that want to respect the rights of their taxpayers."
NTU is a nonpartisan, nonprofit citizen organization founded in 1969 to work for lower taxes, smaller government, and economic freedom at all levels. Note: For further tax policy information, visit www.ntu.org.
By Alan Caruba
I wonder if the folks at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment think that electricity is made by fairies who live in the garden or that an army of elves produce it?
On October 19, a Washington Post article was headlined “Power Plant Rejected Over Carbon Dioxide for First Time.” Let’s hope it is the last time or those of us around the nation who depend on coal to produce over 50% of the electricity we use are in big trouble.
Roderick L. Bremby, Secretary of the Kansas DHE, said, “it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing.” So the KDHE killed a proposal by Sunflower Electric Power, a rural electrical cooperative, to build a pair of big, 700-megawatt, coal-fired plants in Halcomb.
Someone needs to tell Secretary Bremby that greenhouse gases consist of 95% water vapor in the earth’s atmosphere. Or that not a single blade of wheat or corn would grow in Kansas were it not for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Someone needs to tell Secretary Bremby and his fellow global warming simpletons that, between 1970 and 2004, the population of the United States grew by 40%, its Gross Domestic Product by 18%, and electricity consumption by 115%. During that same time period, the aggregate air pollution of the U.S. was cut in half due to advances in pollution control technologies.
The United States Department of Energy predicts that overall electricity demand will grow by 45% between now and 2030.
By Alan Caruba
Let’s understand a simple fact. You cannot squeeze any more energy out of a gallon of gasoline than already exists. If you mix it with an additive which itself provides less energy, what you get is less energy.
So, when Congress passed a so-called energy bill in mid-December that demanded more “fuel efficiency” by a measure of forty percent, requiring that automobiles be built to get 35 miles per gallon in 2020 as opposed to the former mandate of 25 mpg, it was essentially telling American auto makers to start making cars out of paper mache or something so lightweight that the driver and passengers will have to be extracted from a crash with a sponge.
Then, too, there’s a strange notion that 300 million Americans, some of whom have been known to drive cars and trucks, are somehow going to be able to “conserve” their way to “energy independence.” You can’t save or conserve the energy in a gallon of gasoline or any other fuel. You either use it or you don’t. If you don’t use it, you better find another way to get to work or anywhere else.
Democrat Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, said the energy bill will cut demand for foreign oil and promote non-fossil fuels that will reduce greenhouse gases linked to global warming. This is worse than just being stupid, this is dangerous nonsense because (1) there is no global warming and (2) one way to reduce the importation of foreign oil is to encourage the discovery, extraction, and refining of the oil sources that are known to exist in and offshore America.
Does the new “energy bill” permit for drilling and extraction of the millions, perhaps billions, of barrels of oil in Alaska’s ANWR? No. Does the new bill encourage the exploration for oil and natural gas off the nation’s continental shelf on our vast east and west coasts? No. Did it give the oil companies any tax breaks to build the billion-dollar refineries the nation needs? No. Did it encourage the building of nuclear plants? No.
By Frank Hyland
Food for thought.
Picture this if you will: You are on the way to a soccer game in your car with your kids and the children of neighbors in the back seat. Your SUV has been acting up and again this time the engine falters and sputters. It is running so poorly that you realize clearly that it is destined to wind up on the shoulder of the downhill side of the road, to run no more. The kids sit there disconsolately, staring out the windows, waiting for you to take some action on their behalf so that they can make it to "the game."
Now try to imagine yourself walking around to the rear of the vehicle and pushing it forward, only to realize that you and the children are approaching the edge of a cliff.
Dumb Question # 287: What do you do when you realize that the SUV is picking up speed toward the cliff’s edge? It was a trick question for anyone with more than four functioning brain cells. Of course you would do everything in your power, once you saw the danger ahead, to stop the vehicle before the children were hurt. Why, then, would anyone continue pushing your kids and others’ kids toward and over a cliff, you ask? Why, indeed.
By now you’ve figured out that the "SUV" is the federal and state programs collectively known as "entitlements," chief among them being Social Security and Medicare. Both have been the subject of repeated warnings, followed by repeated creation of commissions to investigate and recommend solutions. I would recommend, for openers, the near-term renaming of both, to become Social Insecurity and Mediscare as a means of getting the attention of those who still hope to become recipients.
In case those pushing the two programs off the cliff haven’t noticed, we’re now in the year 2008. It was one thing for proponents to put things off when we were still in the 20th Century, back in the ‘90s, and insolvency was still more than a decade away. For those who get elected every six, four, and especially for those elected every two years, that’s a lifetime and the problems can safely be "kicked down the road" for others to deal with. Depending on the date of the estimate and the source, the year of impending insolvency swings back and forth by a year or so.
WASHINGTON, January 9, 2008 — Accuracy in Media editor Cliff Kincaid said today that he was not surprised by the poor performance of the polls and the press in predicting the outcome in the Democratic New Hampshire primary. The media in general have been terrible at analyzing political races and predicting outcomes, he said.
"The conservative media were out of touch with Republican voters in Iowa and missed the real reasons for the Mike Huckabee phenomenon," Kincaid noted. "They have also been mystified, even horrified, by the conservative limited-government appeal that lies at the heart of the Ron Paul revolution. So it is not surprising that the liberal media would miss the story of what was happening on the Democratic Party side. The results demonstrate that the American people have decided to have their say in the process, despite what the media say and write."
The AIM editor said that the conservative media, including most of talk radio, many bloggers, and Fox News, have clearly lost their influence with the grassroots and are at risk of becoming marginalized or irrelevant as the presidential process goes forward. "From their perspective," Kincaid said, "the more moderate candidates, McCain and Huckabee, are doing the best, and the most conservative candidate, Romney, who should have won Iowa and New Hampshire, is barely hanging on. If Romney, who was endorsed by the conservative National Review, continues to lose, many in the conservative media may have to throw up their hands in despair."
In terms of the liberal media, Kincaid said they are divided in their loyalties to Clinton and Obama but will eventually settle for a Clinton-Obama ticket. "Then the liberal media will do what they do best � attack Republicans," he said. The question becomes, on the Republican side, whether conservative media will rally around McCain if he is the nominee. "It's doubtful," the AIM editor said. "They may go AWOL."
Accuracy in Media is a citizens' media watchdog organization whose mission is to promote fairness, balance, and accuracy in news reporting. Founded in 1969, AIM is the oldest non-profit press watchdog group in America. For more information, please visit www.aim.org.
By Ken Marrero
It is impossible anymore to go anywhere without being followed by the Global Warming gremlin. It’s on the Radio and TV. It’s in the papers and the magazines. The folks on the Left are agonizing over the destruction being visited upon our planet by the heartless, soulless minions of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy driving from rubber chicken fund-raiser to rubber chicken fund-raiser to support the US occupation of Iraq in their SUVs. The glaciers are shrinking; the oceans are rising, tempers are flaring and those who got in on the ground floor of carbon offsets are smiling.
They savage Capitalists and Corporate CEOs who care only about the bottom line and ignore their responsibilities as citizens of the world. They bemoan the expenditure of money for dividends, stock splits, IPOs and the other vagaries of the sordid realm of filthy luchre. They yearn for Captains of Industry with feelings in their portfolios and who have banned animal testing along with freon from their bag of tricks.
They ask penetrating questions like "But why can’t businesses and governments pledge a percentage of their obscene profits, squeezed from the toil and sweat and sacrifice of the noble laborer, to better the lives of the masses? Wouldn’t it be good for them to make better consumers out of the people that work for them? Why must corporations always take and take and take? Why can’t they give back every now and then?
Here’s why!
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — In a makeshift laboratory equipped with little more than a battered chair and a cheap kitchen scale, inventor Rene Nunez Suarez displays the contraption that has become his life’s obsession.
It’s a stainless-steel cooker that uses about 95 percent less fuel than conventional wood stoves, with minimal pollution. It would seem a can’t-miss technology in a country where millions still cook with wood and most forests have been destroyed.
The device has garnered Nunez a prestigious environmental prize. It has earned him a U.S. patent. And it has won fans among some Salvadoran peasants who no longer spend a good chunk of their days hunting for firewood and then inhaling cooking smoke.
It has also wrecked Nunez’s marriage, alienated two of his three children and swallowed his life savings. At 61, he lives with his mother to save on rent and drives a 1990 Kia.
"We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahedeen."
Al-Qaeda commander and spokesperson Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid, referencing the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto; Adnkronos International News Service (AKI), December 27, 2007.
Lest I wind up standing back-to-back with actor Will Smith tomorrow morning defending myself against flying produce (Smith is taller, so I might not fare too badly), I’ll insert the disclaimer here: My personal, moral and religious values preclude a belief that any ethnic group is inherently superior or inferior to any other.
That being said, periodically I find it necessary and useful to state that such values do not preclude a belief that a particular culture might be inherently superior or inferior to another, and this is precisely the comparison I am making as regards Western culture versus the retrograde Indo-Arabic culture that spawns the mentality and social convention we glimpse in radical Islam.
True, the West and Western-influenced cultures do produce our share of sick freaks, however one cannot compare the body counts generated by one Jeffrey Dahmer, Jim Jones or even Aum Shinrikyo to that of radical Islamists worldwide or the primal, inhuman barbarity that is the hallmark of so many of their atrocities. Islamic extremists around the globe are currently averaging one People’s Temple-sized massacre each month, according to a cross section of media outlets, both reputable and questionable.
Benazir Bhutto, like many heads of state, particularly in the Third World, was no saint. Though definitely a cut far above her craven killers, this wasn’t Gandhi getting gunned down. In addition to the charges of corruption that plagued Bhutto during her tenure, the former Pakistani prime Minister was party to the repression of religious minorities in Pakistan. As is the case with many foreign politicos America has supported (and perhaps should not have), being an open advocate of cooperation with the West was Bhutto’s chief appeal. It was widely expected that her pro-Western stance would result in a government more cooperative and less duplicitous than that of the Pervez Musharraf regime.
This brings us to the likely course that might have been taken by the Bush administration and whichever administration follows. Was the hope that Bhutto would have immediately allowed NATO forces into northern Pakistan to wipe out Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives – as opposed to sucking another $10 billion in American taxpayers’ money out of the invertebrates in high office as did Musharraf? The scenario is indeed reminiscent of that in Egypt, where a "cooperative" Sadat replaced the anti-West, anti-Israel Gamal Abdel Nasser, with Bhutto being an avatar of the former. As long as the U.S. aid dollars kept flowing, Sadat was willing to come to the table with Israeli leaders. It bears mentioning that he too was gunned down for his political coziness with the West.