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POPSGoing After OPEC The real energy problem, in other words, isn't Big Oil; it's Big Government. As with so many other things, President Reagan got it right when, not even a week after taking office in 1981, he signed Executive Order 12287 decontrolling the price of oil and gas. He then ordered his secretary of energy to focus on encouraging U.S. companies to find and produce more. It worked like a charm, bringing oil prices down sharply and OPEC to its knees. By 1986, after a 74% drop in the price of oil, some even doubted OPEC could survive. Such would-be monopolies look invincible when demand rises and prices follow. But when supply increases, prices fall and members start cheating, they look pathetic. This pretty much describes the history of OPEC. Reagan's strategy of energy decontrol would work again today . But this time it's supplies, not prices, that need to be untethered.
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POPSFREE EMAIL S2284 THE SENATE VOTE FOR DOMESTIC ENERGY PRODUCTION What the McConnell amendment would do: •Produce up to 24 billion barrels of oil when fully enacted—enough oil to keep America running for 5 years with no foreign imports. •Allow petitions for leasing activities on the Outer Continental Shelf—an area with 14 billion barrels of known recoverable oil. •As no new refineries have been built in the U.S. in 30 years, give the EPA authority to expedite permits for refineries •Establish a competitive oil and gas leasing program for ANWR •Repeal the $4000 fee for new permit applications to drill. •Repeal the 2007 provision that reduces mineral leasing revenue payments to the states. •Repeal the moratorium on funds to encourage the commercial leasing of oil shale. Isn’t it time Congress came to its senses and voted for U.S. domestic energy production?
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POPSBob Barr Plans To Enter Presidential Contest As Libertarian and says federal authorities have seized powers not granted by the constitution, and believes US forces should be brought home from Iraq. The Libertarian Party stands for non-interference by the US government in the personal and business lives of Americans, and advocates lower taxes, a smaller government and more individual freedom. The 59-year-old said he was not concerned about the prospect of damaging McCain, possibly among conservative voters whom the Republican candidate has had trouble courting. Independent and third parties have faced a tough task in modern US election history of breaking the dominance of the Democratic and Republican parties, though several candidates have played a spoiler role. Many Democrats still blame consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who has already announced a 2008 run, for depressing former vice president Al Gore's vote in 2000, and helping George W. Bush to capture the presidency.
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POPSObama Campaign Introduces Customized Lapel Pins Update: It's just been announced that two superdelegates from the Virgin Islands have pledged support for Obama, giving him his first-ever superdelegate lead over Clinton. Interesting timing, no? You scratch my back, I grant you statehood. Handcrafted by Flip at 07:49 PM | Permalink |
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POPSStraight Talk About Universal Healthcare I'm all about personal freedom and the rights of individuals. Universal healthcare is not only impractical, but costly - and not just for your pocketbook. It's handing over yet another right to the government, and allowing the government to decide and rule your fate. I'm not compassionless-I'm just sensible. And universal healthcare as it's being proposed by both Clinton and Obama still doesn't make much sense to me. The disaster of the Massachusetts universal healthcare system should give you a preview of what life under a universal healthcare scheme could be like. Even more shocking is the manner in which Massachusetts state officials have decided to deal with the out-of-control costs of their broken system: they've ordered the insurance companies to cut payments to doctors and hospitals, reduce choices for payments, and possibly increase how much patients will have to pay.
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POPSHillary's Bitter Victory Is there any relief in sight? When will this thing end? The short answer to this question is no, there isn't. Watching this scene, I was struck suddenly by the genius of the Clinton campaign — and also felt myself beginning to understand why this Obama-Clinton contest may yet prove to be one of those defining cultural clashes that come along once a generation or so, like Bryan-Darrow or Ali-Frazier. what we have in Hillary Clinton: a once-in-a-generation political pugilist who, like her much smoother adversary, is amazingly capable of turning weakness into strength. Pitted against physical beauty and inspirational rhetoric, Hillary made herself the champion of everything stylistically ordinary, superficially unimpressive and ignored. And while her opponent won all the attention and admiration, all the teen-idol gushings of the beautiful people, she went for something deeper — resentment at the lack of those same things.
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POPSPopular Vote: Obama 48.9% Clinton 51.1% (continued) in some states, these were not recorded (or whether to count Florida and Michigan:) http://www.redstate.com/stories/elections/2008/obamomentum_revisited Here's the remaining schedule, with a chart showing the most recent poll I could find - I used Rasmussen for West Virginia, Kentucky and Oregon, a mid-April Dakota Wesleyan poll for South Dakota, a mid-April Puerto Rico poll, and, lacking a head-to-head poll, I used Rasmussen's general election numbers for Montana, which show Obama polling much better, but with basically similar numbers to the South Dakota poll (but note that unlike earlier Obama mountain-state victories these are primaries, not caucuses).
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POPSEscape From Reality With Stories Of Myth And Magic The answer is in the magical letter "D" next to a politician's name, which tends to vanish mysteriously in news media reports! It is almost always possible to apply both 'W' and 'R' to news and pictures of death, destruction, global warming, economic downturn, etc. By Pioneer Pavlik Brought to you by the MSM: "Indulging your fantasies because the truth is just too hard to bear" The next mystery letter of the day: "A HYPHEN"
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POPSNot-So-Secret Secret Societies 6. The Trilateral Commission The Trilateral Commission has been accused of all sorts of underhanded shenanigans by its critics. Formed in 1973 by David Rockefeller, the Commission includes over 300 prominent citizens from Europe, Asia, and North America in a forum for discussing the regions’ common interests. But conspiracy theorists hold that the Trilateral Commission, along with the Council on Foreign Relations and others, is really just a front for a larger, more sinister order called the Round Table Groups, founded in London over 100 years ago and bent on the creation of a new world order, a global capitalist police state. Yikes! (For the record, some say the Round Table Groups are themselves just fronts for another society, the Illuminati, so who knows?) American members of the Trilateral Commission have included Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Dick Cheney, and Dianne Feinstein. Thanks alanocu
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POPSPrice Of Superdelegate Ybarra Vote $20M US, por favor The Democratic National Committee member doesn't parse his words when it comes to what he wants from Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton - an ironclad promise to spend that heady amount to register Mexican-American voters and get them to the polls in November. In a telephone interview Wednesday, he said he plans to remain undecided in the tight contest until "someone shows me the money." When will he settle on a candidate?
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POPS The Politics Of Freedom: David Boaz (continued) heading early Wednesday for a new round of speeches, rallies and town meetings in West Virginia, which holds its primary on May 13," The New York Times reports. "Highlighting the financial woes of her campaign, Mrs. Clinton has lent her campaign more than $6 million over the last month, according to campaign officials." "Republicans have been trying to drive libertarian voters out of their party. But so far Democrats aren't jumping on that opportunity."
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POPS Is Barack a Team(ster) Player? (continued) should be relaxed or withdrawn. But sadly, Obama understands, like Bill Clinton intimately understood, that judicial affairs can be affected by the political branches, such as through sympathetic appointments to the Justice Department and the courts. So it is no small matter that a presidential candidate would consider intervening, albeit indirectly, in a judicial question, especially one involving potential corruption. Who can say at this point whether Obama has nefarious intentions concerning this? But it is difficult to understand what benign motives would lead him to take a position against the advice of the sitting review board that corruption and elections require continued supervision, especially in light of the union's endorsement. We'll see if the "watchdog" MSM pursue this story.
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POPSSupreme Court Judges: Judge, Not Legislate But just as McCain has asked voters to check his opponents' track record, a glance at his is heartening. McCain, unlike a number of fellow GOP senators, voted in favor of Ronald Reagan's failed nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. And as National Review Online's Jim Geraghty notes, McCain characterized as "a largely unknown quantity" George H.W. Bush's nomination of Justice David Souter — who now usually votes with the high court's liberal contingent. We know that Sens. Clinton and Obama want the federal judiciary to be a liberal quasi-legislature. McCain this week committed himself to buttressing the federal courts' integrity as what they were meant to be: nonpolitical tribunals, dedicated to upholding the Constitution.
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POPSNo Gas Price Relief In Sight Global demand will continue to increase, not just through the summer, but forever. The only answer is to increase supply (domestically if we can't get it on the global market) while continuing investments in research and development and upgrades to our aging infrastructure.
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POPSMcCain-Jindal? Another McCain staffer called my attention to this finding in the latest Fox News poll: McCain led Obama in the straight match-up, 46 to 43. Voters were then asked to choose between two tickets, McCain-Romney vs. Obama-Clinton. Obama-Clinton won 47 to 41. That reversal of a three-point McCain lead to a six-point deficit for the McCain ticket suggests what might happen (a) when the Democrats unite, and (b) if McCain were to choose a conventional running mate, who, as it were, reinforced the Republican brand for the ticket. As the McCain aide put it, this is what will happen if we run a traditional campaign; our numbers will gradually regress toward the (losing) generic Republican number.
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POPSDNC Chairman Joe Andrew Is Urging Clinton Supporters To Switch May 1, 20 Dear Friends: I have been inspired. Today I am announcing my support for Senator Barack Obama for President of the United States of America. I am changing my support from Senator Clinton to Senator Obama, and calling for my fellow Democrats across my home State of Indiana, and my fellow super delegates across the nation, to heal the rift in our Party and unite behind Barack Obama. The hardest decisions in life are not between good and bad or right and wrong, but between two goods or two rights. That is the decision Democrats face today. We have an embarrassment of riches, but as much as we may love our candidates and revel in the political process that has brought Presidential politics to places that have not seen it in a generation, we cannot let our family affair hurt America by helping John McCain.
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POPSBarack Obama's Worst Nightmare On Media Tour The poll shows Clinton beating Republican candidate John McCain, 50 percent to 41 percent, in a potential matchup, while Obama would be tied with McCain, leading 46 percent to 44 percent. Among the white voters polled, Clinton received 43 percent to McCain's 48 percent, while Obama landed only 38 percent to McCain's 51 percent. David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, appeared clearly worried about Wright's affect on his candidate's campaign. "We don't have any control over Reverend Wright," Axelrod told The Times of London. "There's not a thing we can do about it. "Obviously, I don't think we would have encouraged him to go on a media tour."
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POPSThe Democrats And Gun Control Mr. Obama's campaign Web site touts his belief in the Second Amendment rights to have guns "for the purposes of hunting and target shooting." Conspicuously absent is the right to have firearms to defend one's self, home and family. A presidential candidate could of course swear devotion to the First Amendment, while declaring that the amendment's purpose is to protect sports reporting and book collecting. And that candidate could still support government lawsuits against publishers, local bans on newspapers, and draconian restrictions on political commentary. Civil libertarians who supported such a candidate because of his alleged love for the First Amendment would be foolish. Civil libertarians who support Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton because of their purported fealty to the Second Amendment may be bitterly disappointed.
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POPSDemocratic Candidates Long To Renegotiate NAFTA U.S. manufacturing is not in decline. Quite the opposite is true. Output, revenues and profits in the sector all achieved records in 2006, and preliminary government data indicates that new records were set in 2007. American factories remain the world's most prolific, producing 2.5 times the value of Chinese output. ... Between 2000 and 2003 there was a pronounced manufacturing recession, during which 2.8 million jobs in the sector were eliminated. The two candidates extrapolate from that statistic to assert that 3 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000 on account of bad trade deals, like NAFTA, as though the trend were continuing. That's wrong. ... If trade had something to do with the loss of those 2.8 million jobs between 2000 and 2003, imports weren't the culprit. Manufactured imports did not increase at all during those three years. U.S. exports, however, dropped off by 11 percent during that precise period.
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POPSHow Obama Fell To Earth
Obama's Capital Gains response last night still has to be one of the stupidest--and most revealing--answers ever given in a televised debate. Yes, he understands that Capital Gains reductions raises more revenue for the Government---but that's not the point; it is just so...."unfair" to have businesses making profits, even if it means the Government gets more money: more investments and profits means businesses can hire more workers and distribute dividends to our 401K's. It is so utterly obvious that Obama does not care about how much revenue Government does or doesn't raise: the point is to punish business and the middle class, no matter what it does to revenue; revenue is just the convenient excuse. The beauty of last night's debate is that the rest of the country knows this, and also knows that Obama has spent his entire adult life hanging out with known Communists, anarchists, terrorists, racists, and crooks. Yet the media is not supposed to ask about these associations?
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POPSPresidential Bid By Georgia Ex-Congressman Instead of siphoning votes from Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.), Barr said that his support would come from “disaffected Republican voters, Ron Paul supporters and independent voters and Democratic voters who believe in a strong message of civil liberties.” To him, both the Republican McCain and Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) fail to offer “a real choice” in November, especially on his No. 1 issue, reducing the size of government. Of course, there’s the chance that Barr’s campaign won’t make much of an impact. “I can’t imagine Bob Barr or any other Libertarian candidate making any difference in this election,” said Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report. “This is likely to be a massive-turnout election, which will wash out the impact of fringe candidates on either end of the spectrum.”
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POPSHillary Clinton Gushes Over Oregon's Green Leadership Clinton praised Portland for cutting its greenhouse emissions from 1990 levels. And she said she wants to get 25 percent of the nation's electricity from renewable energy such as solar and wind by 2025 -- which is called for in Oregon law. "Oregon is already doing it," she said. Michael Grainey, director of the state Department of Energy, said the 2005 federal law "clearly pre-empts" Oregon's authority to decide on an LNG project. But the state does have some ability under the coastal law to challenge the projects, such as the one proposed near Astoria.
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POPSCongress Is Full Of Bold-Faced Liars What’s the only thing worse than Republicans on a spending spree? Democrats on a spending spree. Or maybe Republicans on a spending spree when they know the Democrats are going to take the heat. Either way, your representatives in Washington D.C. are a bunch of dirty filthy liars. Take the time today, right now, to write to your representatives and let them know how you feel about what they are doing. They still need our votes to get elected, so what you say really does matter to them. How can the people who are supposed to be running the country on our behalf do such a crappy job and lie about it when the facts are so obvious. In 2004 the Democrats took control of congress promising to fix the earmark problem. Instead of fixing it, they are doing their best to outdo the spending of the Republican controlled congress before them. This isn’t a partisan problem, it’s a problem all Americans need to be aware of, and take action to fix.
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POPSSubstance Abuse The e-mail inflates Obama's numbers by counting his cosponsored bills, but Sarah Binder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on legislative politics, tells FactCheck.org that often "cosponsorship does not require a commitment of time, energy or resources – let alone the political or policy ingenuity that might generate a bill idea in the first place." Tallying sponsored bills, says Binder, is "a better metric of a senator's agenda, efforts and interests." Clinton has been in the Senate a little more than seven years; Obama, a little more than three. Using the numbers above, we calculate that Clinton has been the sole sponsor of a few more bills and resolutions per year – 51, to Obama's 43. And she has steered twice as many through the Senate and almost four times as many into law per year, on average, as Obama has. from THOMAS.gov, the Library of Congress' database of legislative information
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POPS58% Majority Of Voters View Clinton Favorably Or Neutrally…Media Refuses To Report It This is, of course, a fancy way of saying “we didn’t get the results we wanted the first time, so we went back and found some more black people who would tell us how much they hate the bitch.” With the right Wright answers finally in hand, the announced results found Mrs. Clinton with a 37% positive rating and a 48% negative rating. Obama had a 49% positive rating and a 32% negative rating. The national media spin of Obama thus continues with lame pundits convincing themselves that the country doesn’t mind the anti-White, anti-American rantings of the Democratic frontrunner’s chosen father figure and closest adviser since 1988. NBC, home of such translucent Hillary haters as Keith Blowbermann and the perpetually lipless Chris Matthews — joined with conservative mouthpiece The Wall Street Journal to produce a poll — prObama (in the case of NBC) and anti-Clinton (in the case of the WSJ).
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POPSBill To Open Refuge To Drilling If Crude Hits $125 "The goalposts of what's reasonable have moved quite a bit lately," Halff said. "One hundred and twenty-five dollars is just $15 away. It doesn't sound quite as farfetched as it did a few months ago." But environmentalists say they're confident that Murkowski and Stevens simply don't have 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster that would allow the bill to be heard. It's equally unlikely that a Democratic-led House of Representatives would even consider hearing the legislation, said Myke Bybee, a spokesman for the Sierra Club. "No amount of oil and no amount of money is worth despoiling the Arctic Refuge," Bybee said. "I don't think there's support for opening up a special place like the Arctic Refuge at any cost, at any amount of oil or at any cost of oil."
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POPSObama Talks Capital Gains Rate With CNBC I think that we can have a capital gains rate that is higher than 15 percent. When I talk to people like Warren Buffet or others and I ask them how much of a difference is it going to be if it's 20 or 25 percent, they say,if it's within that range then it's not going to distort economic decision making. On the other hand, what it will also do is first of all help out the federal treasury, which is running a credit card up with the bank of China and other countries. What it will also do is allow us to make investments in basic scientific research, in infrastructure, in broadband lines, in green energy and will allow us to give us--give some relief to middle class and working class families who have been driving this economy as consumers but have been doing it through credit cards and home equity loans. They're not going to be able to do that. And if we want the economy to continue to go strong, then we've got to make sure that they're getting a little relief as well."
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POPS Judicial Watch: Obama ‘Intended To Leave No Paper Trail’ However, the Obama campaign said the senator’s records are available. “All of Sen. Obama’s correspondence with state agencies and records of requests Obama made to them on behalf of his constituents are available to the public and have been accessed by our opponents and members of the news media,” said Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt. “Illinois State senators have limited staff – Obama did not have a scheduler – and so no detailed record exists of all of his daily activities in Springfield.” Fitton argues that Obama’s public accounts of what happened to his records do not mesh with information from the Illinois Office of the Secretary of State. Judicial Watch investigation “suggests” that the senator could have had his records archived in a way that would grant the public access to them. “It appears that Obama never kept records of his time in the Illinois state legislature, or he discarded them,” Fitton stated. “Either way, he clearly intended to leave no paper trail.”
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POPSGetting Poverty Wrong While they insist that strengthening labor unions or protecting homeowners from foreclosures will alleviate the hardships of the poor, the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census remind us that the breakdown of the traditional two-parent, married family is a far greater contributor to poverty in America than many of the supposed shortcomings of our economy. It’s hard to imagine that America will make much more headway on reducing persistent poverty until it halts this long-term trend. The Census Bureau’s study on the living arrangements of American children appeared in mid-February. The data show that the number of children now living in two-parent families has dipped just below the 70 percent mark for the first time since the Census began collecting data on family formation nearly 130 years ago. Researchers estimate that the entire rise in poverty in America since the late 1970s can be attributed to the decline of families headed by two married parents.
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POPSExpenses At U.N. Balloon 25 Percent U.S. Demands on Body Help Drive Up Budget The additional funds in the latest request would be used to renovate the landmark U.N. headquarters in New York, fund war-crimes investigators in Lebanon and pay $100 million to build a reinforced, attack-resistant U.N. headquarters building in Baghdad. But they would also be used to pay nearly $7 million for a 2009 anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, which Washington believes would serve as a forum to bash Israel. Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, insists that the organization will have to find savings or live without its new programs. On the eve of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Bush spoke before the U.N. General Assembly and challenged the institution to enforce the resolution requiring Saddam Hussein to disarm, suggesting that the institution's reason for being was at stake: "Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"
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POPSJudicial Watch Scrutinizing Clinton White House Pardon Fitton says the Rich pardon was particularly scandalous because of "copious" financial contributions made by Denise Rich, Marc Rich's ex-wife, to Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign and the Clinton Presidential Library foundation in the months leading up to the pardon. According to Fitton, the scandal is still relevant today in light of Mrs. Clinton's current run for the White House because the pardons are part of the experience which she widely touts in terms of her days at the White House. "The pardon scandal involved the entire Clinton family -- Bill, Hillary, Hillary's brothers, Bill's brother. Hillary herself was involved in the scandals, conveying pardon applications to Bill Clinton," Fitton contends.
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POPSClinton, McCain, Obama's Passport Files Snooped State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the violations of McCain and Clinton's passport files were not discovered until Friday, after officials were made aware of the unauthorized access of Obama's records and a separate search was conducted.
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POPSKen Blackwell: The Real Obama Some pundits are calling him the next John F. Kennedy. He’s not. He’s the next George McGovern. And it’s time people learned the facts. Because the truth is that Mr. Obama is the single most liberal senator in the entire U.S. Senate. He is more liberal than Ted Kennedy, Bernie Sanders, or Mrs. Clinton. Never in my life have I seen a presidential frontrunner whose rhetoric is so far removed from his record. Walter Mondale promised to raise our taxes, and he lost. George McGovern promised military weakness, and he lost. Michael Dukakis promised a liberal domestic agenda, and he lost. Yet Mr. Obama is promising all those things, and he’s not behind in the polls. Why? Because the press has dealt with him as if he were in a beauty pageant.
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POPSIs Obama Trying to Bamboozle Us We journalists merely opened it in the interest of providing voters with as much information about a candidate for president as could be found. And no journalist has put any words in Jeremiah Wright's mouth. Is Senator Obama suggesting that "we all come together" by burying the truth of his pastor's racism? This would seem to represent a rather chilling call to censorship, albeit delivered in a soothing, kind-mannered voice. When I visited Trinity United Church of Christ, I perused the titles in the church bookstore. Well, all of James H. Cone's books on black liberation theology were on prominent display, as were books by Malcolm X and black panther luminaries and Nation of Islam greats. Does Obama also expect us to believe that he never knew there were books glorifying violence and black supremacy racism in his own church's bookstore, even though he was a prominent member there for more than 20 years.
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POPSThomas Sowell ‘Non-Judgmental’ Nonsense Nor is his 20 years of going to a church whose pastor has praised Louis Farrakhan and condemned the United States in both sweeping terms and with obscene language. The Obama camp likens mentioning such things to criticizing him because of what members of his family might have said or done. But it was said, long ago, that you can pick your friends but not your relatives. Obama chose to be part of that church for 20 years. He was not born into it. His “personal” character matters, just as Eliot Spitzer's “personal” character matters -- and just as Hillary Clinton's character would matter if she had any. We cannot risk all that for the sake of the fashionable affectation of being more non-judgmental than thou.
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POPSTo Die For NAFTA Hillary won Ohio denouncing the NAFTA deal Bill Clinton cut. The lady gets it. McCain admits to knowing almost nothing about economics and is now being advised by my old friend Jack Kemp. In a Wall Street Journal essay bemoaning my views, Kemp concedes, "I'm on the advisory board of Toyota North America and now drive a hybrid Lexus." Ex-secretaries of state and Cabinet officers, ex-senators and congressmen, and ex-White House aides are getting rich working for foreigners who are carting off American jobs, American technology, American markets, American factories -- and America's future. Look at the Bush-McCain record: $4 trillion in trade deficits, $2.5 trillion in manufactures alone. One in every six manufacturing jobs, 3 million, gone. With America borrowing $2 billion a day to pay for foreign goods, we have seen a collapse of the dollar, the price of gold quadruple to $1,000 an ounce, oil soar to $107 a barrel and gas heading toward $4 a gallon.
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POPSPlaying By Obama's Rules To observe Democrats this week, savaging one of their heroines, is to understand why the party is unready to rule. This week, after being subjected for 48 hours to accusations of divisiveness by Barack Obama, and racism by his agents and auxiliaries in the media, Ferraro resigned from Clinton's campaign. What had she said to send the Obamaites into paroxysms of rage? Obama's agents suggest that Ferraro deliberately injected race into the campaign. But this, too, is ridiculous. Her quote came in an interview with the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif., not "Meet the Press." The attack on Ferraro comes out of a conscious strategy of the Obama campaign -- to seek immunity from attack by smearing any and all attackers as having racist motives. When Bill Clinton dismissed Obama's claim to have been consistently antiwar as a "fairy tale," and twinned Obama's victory in South Carolina with Jesse Jackson's, his statements were described as tinged with racism.
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