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| POLITICAL GAS |
| Wednesday, August 31, 2005 |
| Thomas Sowell: An oil 'crisis'?: "Candidates for Congress next year, and politicians hoping to run for President in 2008, are virtually guaranteed to come up with all sorts of 'solutions.'
These 'solutions' will be packaged as brilliant new ideas, courageous and far-seeing. But most will be retreads of old ideas that remain untested or which have been tested in the past and found wanting.
Price controls, arbitrary new higher gas mileage standards for cars, 'alternative energy sources,' and other nostrums are sure to surface once again.
The last time we had price controls on gasoline, we had long lines of cars at filling stations, these lines sometimes stretching around the block, with motorists sitting in those lines for hours.
That nonsense ended almost overnight when President Ronald Reagan, ignoring the cries of liberal politicians and the liberal media, got rid of price controls with a stroke of the pen.
What happened is what usually happens when government restrictions are ended: There was more production of oil. In fact the 1980s became known as the era of an 'oil glut' and gasoline prices declined.
Today production is being held back, not by price controls, but by political hysteria whenever anyone suggests actually producing more oil ourselves. Organized nature cults go ballistic at the thought that we might drill for oil in some remote part of Alaska that 99 percent of Americans will never see, including 99 percent of the nature cultists.
People used to ask whether there is any sound if a tree falls in an empty forest. Today, there are deafening political sounds over oil-drilling in an empty wilderness.
Nor can we drill for oil offshore, or in many places on land, again for political reasons. Nor can we build enough refineries or even build hydroelectric dams as alternative
Many of the same people who cry "No blood for oil!" also want higher gas mileage standards for cars. But higher mileage standards have meant lighter and more flimsy cars, leading to more injuries and deaths in accidents -- in other words, trading blood for oil.
Apparently the only things we can do are the things in vogue among nature cultists and the politicians that cater to them, such as windmills and electric cars. That is why we would be better off if the government did nothing and let people adjust their own energy consumption individually in their own ways as the prices of gasoline and fuel oil rise. But that is also politically unlikely. |
posted by Jack Mercer @ 8/31/2005 07:03:00 PM   |
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| PRESIDENT BUSH |
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| President Bush in Air Force One was seen leaving the scene of where Hurricane Katrina started. He was dressed in the robe of a high priest and could be seen walking on the water while sprinkling ashes from a sacrificed kiwi bird.
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President Bush personally started Hurricane Katrina in order to advance his Neo-con regime. "The more they need me, the more powerful I'll become", he intoned, as he starred from the window of Air Force One.
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President Bush started global warming when he was governor in Texas. Everyone knows that global warming and green house gases created Katrina. Even though there were no green house gases in 1900 when the hurricane hit Galveston, TX killing over 6,000 and completely reshaping the Gulf Coast. You see, it happened in Texas, and George Bush is from Texas. Therefore, some of those greenhouse gases probably warped back in time and caused that hurricane. It is also suspected that George Bush started all of the hurricanes. Of course his brother runs Florida so that's why they get hit each year.
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Former Clinton Advisor: "No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming" - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News: "FORMER CLINTON ADVISOR
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The Blog Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: "For They That Sow the Wind Shall Reap the Whirlwind" The Huffington Post: "For They That Sow the Wind Shall Reap the Whirlwind (112 comments )
As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi's Gulf Coast, it's worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush's iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2."
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| posted by Jack Mercer @ 8/31/2005 04:39:00 PM |
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| Hmmm... |
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"THE HURRICANE that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming." Writer Ross Gelbspan, the author of two global warming books, goes on to argue that the United States caused Hurricane Katrina by refusing to cut our use of coal and oil by the 70% that he says is necessary to stop global warming.
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A group on the opposite end of the spectrum, Columbia Christians for Life, asserts that Hurricane Katrina is God's punishment for abortion. CCL mailed out a satellite image of Katrina that it says is the spitting image of a six-week old fetus. The picture was accompanied by the message, "Just as God did with a similar satellite picture of hurricane Ivan in 2004, He is showing us, in this and many, many, many other ways, our abomination of child-murder-by-abortion. When will we stop murdering 3,000 plus babies in America per day !?l"
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| posted by Jack Mercer @ 8/31/2005 10:39:00 AM |
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| NOT A ONE... |
| Monday, August 29, 2005 |
| ...suggesting that we drill for more, decrease regulation, look into the designer fuel fiasco, or decrease taxes.
Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., asked the Bush administration Friday to urge OPEC nations to increase oil production to lower prices.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and two other Democratic senators want the Federal Trade Commission to investigate possible market manipulations in areas where prices have risen more than 20 percent. They also want the FTC and other agencies to oversee the oil and gasoline markets to protect Americans from price gouging.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked the Bush administration Friday to sell oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower crude prices. Leahy noted in a letter that the Clinton administration sold 30 million barrels from the reserve in 2000, which led to oil falling by $6 a barrel and wholesale gas prices falling by 14 cents a gallon. |
| posted by Jack Mercer @ 8/29/2005 04:27:00 AM |
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| Mark Tapscott: Has the GOP Lost Its Soul? |
| Saturday, August 13, 2005 |
| Mark Tapscott: Has the GOP Lost Its Soul?: "President Reagan often said it�s hard to recall that you came to drain the swamp when you�re up to your armpits in alligators. Republicans like Rep. Don Young of Alaska would rather use your tax dollars to build a scenic bridge to the swamp.
Hard as it is to believe, Young is more in tune with the GOP that rules Congress today than the former president who restored the party to national power in 1980 when he won the White House and a Republican Senate.
Their differences are nowhere more evident than on limiting government and reducing federal spending. Reagan said in his first inaugural speech that �government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.� Today, Young crows about the $286.4 billion transportation bill to The New York Times, saying he �stuffed it like a turkey.�" |
| posted by Jack Mercer @ 8/13/2005 10:10:00 PM |
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| LIBERAL VS. CONSERVATIVE |
| Thursday, August 11, 2005 |
| This is interesting...
United Press International-The Washington Times, America's Newspaper: " 'Detroit and Provo epitomize America's political, economic and racial polarization,' BACVR Director Jason Alderman said in a release Thursday. 'As the most conservative city in America, Provo is overwhelmingly white and solidly middle class. This is in stark contrast to Detroit, which is impoverished, black and the most liberal.' " |
| posted by Jack Mercer @ 8/11/2005 04:35:00 AM |
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| Chuck Colson: Inadequate ideologies |
| Wednesday, August 03, 2005 |
| Chuck Colson: Inadequate ideologies: "Recently, a Wall Street Journal poll announced that both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, are now held in low regard by the American people. Usually if the fortunes of one party decline, the other party increases-sort of a zero sum game. Now, however, for the first time in polling history, both parties come up in negative territory.
Why would this be? Well, the driver who took me to do a CNN broadcast recently gave me a hint. He didn't know who Karl Rove was, and he didn't know who all the people up on Capitol Hill were who were calling for his scalp. Nor did he care. He dismissed it as just politics, that is, ideologically driven politics.
When ideology begins to replace revealed truth as the basis for governing a society, you inevitably have the kind of polarization we have in America today, Reds vs. Blues. Ideology is a man-made political formulation for how people should live their lives together and is, therefore, from our perspective as Christians, inherently flawed. And it's dangerous when a society becomes so polarized over ideology that it lacks a frame of reference for agreeing on the common good.
This all started when moral relativism took root in America, beginning in the sixties on the campuses and then invading popular culture -back when Time magazine asked that provocative question, "Is God dead?" When this happened, the overarching standards of truth and moral behavior historically governing our society were undermined. And forty years of aggressive secularism since then have simply erased the idea of moral absolutes-no such thing as truth; everything is a matter of personal preference.
This eliminates the possibility of reasoned, intelligent discourse. Since people are attracted to different ideologies, all we can do is clash. So every issue about how we govern ourselves, or what our standards ought to be, ends up in a titanic wrestling match.
The American public is rightly disenchanted with this poor excuse for a political process. And while I would like to blame the politicians, I can’t. They are simply reflecting what has happened in our broader culture—the death of truth, the lack of any common standard by which we can judge what we do. The tragedy is, of course, that politicians will continue to lose stature in the public’s eye with the over-the-top rhetoric we saw in the Karl Rove case. With no agreed-upon standards, you just start shouting more loudly.
Public discourse becomes course, unreflective, harsh, and when you don’t get your way, it becomes shrill. You set out to destroy your political enemies, because power is the way to win an argument. Obviously, people are going to be turned off by this." |
| posted by Jack Mercer @ 8/03/2005 05:22:00 AM |
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| PLAYING WITH THE NUMBERS - JOHN LEO |
| Tuesday, August 02, 2005 |
| Isn't it awful, a friend said at dinner the other night, that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the U.S. invasion? When I asked where the statistic came from, he said maybe it was 8,000, but def initely somewhere between 8,000 and 100,000. That's a pretty broad spread, so I decided to do some checking.
The 100,000 estimate is from a survey of Iraqi households conducted last year by a team of scholars from Johns Hopkins University and published in a British medical journal, the Lancet. As luck would have it, the team was antiwar, and the study was released just before the presidential election. The study's coauthor called the 100,000 figure "a conservative estimate," the customary phrase attached to politically useful wild guesses. The study said, "We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8,000-194,000) during the postwar period."
Writing on Slate, Fred Kaplan translated that little technical phrase between the parentheses: It means that the authors are 95 percent certain that war-caused deaths totaled somewhere between 8,000 and 194,000. Kaplan's conclusions: "The math is too vague to be useful."
Iraq Body Count and the Oxford Research Group, Britain-based antiwar organizations, released an analysis of Iraqi civilian fatalities last week, based on their collection of media reports (www.iraqbodycount.org). It said 24,865 civilians had died in the first two years after the invasion, with U.S.-led forces accounting for 37 percent of the total, criminal violence 36 percent, and "antioccupation forces/insurgents" 9 percent. The Times of London dismissed the study as "an entirely arbitrary figure published by political agitators." But Michael O'Hanlon, who tracks statistics on Iraq at the Brookings Institution, says the study "is probably not far off, and it's certainly a more serious work than the Lancet report."
The modern numbers game of war dead began with the Gulf War. Greenpeace said 15,000 Iraqi civilians died. The American Friends Service Committee/Red Crescent claimed that 300,000 civilians died. Various media assessments hovered around 1,200. Later, Foreign Policy magazine put the civilian dead at 1,000. Unsurprisingly, the high estimates come from antiwar groups, often described in the media as neutral and nonpartisan. A New York Times article during the Afghan war ("Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundred of Civilians Dead") relied heavily on Global Exchange, a hard-left, pro-Fidel Castro group blandly identified by the Times as "an American organization that has sent survey teams into Afghan villages."
Today, yet another round of inflated estimates is breaking out, this one on the number of homeless veterans. A UPI story a few months back reported that nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless on any given night.
If so, as blogger Megan McArdle pointed out a few weeks ago on Asymmetrical Information, that would mean that every single homeless person in America must have served in the armed forces, since 300,000 is about the total number of the homeless. The 2000 census, covering people living in shelters but not those living on the street, counted only 170,706 homeless people. The Department of Housing and Urban Development asked cities and counties getting federal aid for the homeless to provide statistically valid counts. New York City reported 40,000 homeless, Los Angeles County 90,000,and Chicago 9,600.
The problem here is a familiar one. "Advocates for the homeless," as they are called in the usual press catchphrase, cannot resist passing on wildly inflated numbers. The pioneer here was the late Mitch Snyder, a prominent advocate, who admitted making up the "fact" that there were "many millions" of homeless in America to give the cause more leverage. The media accepted that estimate for years, though it was surely far higher than the actual number. Now the numbers foisted on the media have soared again. The Department of Veterans Affairs says that some 250,000 vets are living on the street on any given night. Since the department says that number accounts for something like a third of all homeless, this means they are working with a total estimate of more than 750,000 homeless.
This makes the department a piker compared with the Urban Institute and the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers, which say, in a joint study, that between 2.3 million and 3.5 million people (and 529,000 to 840,000 veterans) are homeless at some time during the year. The lesson? Don't trust advocacy numbers.
Townhall.com: Conservative Columnists: John Leo |
| posted by Jack Mercer @ 8/02/2005 09:44:00 PM |
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| About Me |
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Name: Jack Mercer
Home:
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"Snipet" (pronounced: snipe - it) is not a word.It is a derivative of two words: "Snipe" and "Snippet".
Miriam Webster defines Snipe as: to aim a carping or snide attack, or: to shoot at exposed individuals (as of an enemy's forces) from a usually concealed point of vantage.
Miriam Webster defines Snippet as: : a small part, piece, or thing; especially : a brief quotable passage.
In short, "Snipets" are brief, snide shots at exposed situations from a concealed vantage point.
WARNING! With due reverence to the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment there is NO comment policy on the News Snipet.
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