For years, populist politicians have dragged oil industry executives to Capitol Hill and accused them of price manipulation. Every time gas prices increase, liberal lawmakers direct the Federal Trade Commission to investigate oil industry price gouging. To their chagrin, the FTC has never found oil industry price manipulation.

What evidence does congress use to back their price gouging claims? Try none.

Shouldn't we demand more from our politicians than unfounded accusations?

And just what do congressional advocates of a windfall profits tax consider unreasonable?

In the first quarter of 2008, Big Oil had a profit margin of 7.4 percent. Over that same period, the pharmaceutical and medicine industry earned a 25.9 percent profit, the chemical industry earned 15.7 percent and the electronic equipment industry earned 12.1 percent.

What about those movie theater refreshments? Four large popcorns and four large sodas cost $31.50. The total raw ingredient cost is approximately $7.56. That equals a 76 percent gross margin. Where is the political outrage over that figure?

Let's take a look at where each dollar spent at the pump goes. In the first quarter of 2008, the majority – 70 cents – was spent to purchase crude oil, 17 cents was spent on refining and retailing, and 13 cents on paying taxes.

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A young lawyer, a community organizer himself, sued on behalf of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) and won. The young lawyer was Barack Obama. Acorn later invited Obama to train its staff.

When Obama served on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the Woods Fund frequently gave Acorn grants to fund its agenda and voter registration activities.

Acorn has been in the lead in opposing voter ID laws and other efforts to ensure ballot integrity. Acorn has been implicated in voter fraud and bogus registration schemes in Ohio and at least 13 other states. Acorn staffers will presumably be out registering voters again this year.

Advocates of the so-called living wage see their efforts as putting money directly into workers' pockets. But it merely transfers money from one person's pocket to another person's pocket. This is classic socialist income redistribution — not economic justice, but economic extortion.

In the real world, companies that pay workers more than the value of the goods and services they produce go out of business. Workers should be paid what their labor is worth, not what their lifestyle requires.

On his Web site, Obama embraces Acorn's socialist goal, pledging to "raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs such as food, transportation and housing."

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It's clearly a great time to be a farmer in America. So why is Congress providing over $300 billion in an agricultural version of corporate welfare? And why do we continue to throw money down the black hole of ethanol, taking food out of needy mouths and causing grocery prices to skyrocket? John McCain knows the answer and is refusing to spend a fortune in public funds for such politically motivated purposes.

As for ethanol, government wastes billions of dollars a year on federal and state consumption mandates, loan deals, tax-exempt bond financing and other crutches aimed at making the expensive corn-based fuel viable — always to no avail. Ethanol would never get to a single gasoline pump without the various layers of big government forcing it down consumers' throats in a legal form of extortion from city slickers to corn growers.

Energy Department figures indicate that for ethanol to replace gasoline in our economy, all cropland in the U.S. would have to be dedicated to its production, plus 20% of land elsewhere.

As a wet-behind-the-ears medical intern, a colleague of mine once greeted a new patient with a breezy, 'So what's your problem?' 'Oh, just a touch of leukemia,' the pallid fellow answered.

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These stunning successes notwithstanding, over the past decade the pharmaceutical industry has become a lightning rod for critics. Many influential members of Congress, in particular, have berated the FDA for being insufficiently concerned with drug safety and too cozy with industry.

And the FDA leadership, ever a reed in the political winds, now finds itself in a gale that is blowing in the direction of a more imperious and adversarial posture toward drug companies. Risk-aversion is now the rule.

Serious PR Issues

As a result, at a time when drug development should have been spurred by the exploitation of numerous new technologies and huge increases in R&D expenditures — which tripled to more than $45 billion between 1995 and 2007 — drug approvals have actually dropped. The 19 new medicines approved last year was the lowest figure in 24 years.

As the result of regulators' risk-aversion and pandering to Congress' dislike of the pharmaceutical industry, bringing a new drug to market now requires on average 12-15 years and costs more than $1.2 billion. And only one in five approved drugs garners sufficient revenue to recoup R&D costs for the manufacturer.

The officials in the FDA's Office of Surveillance and Epidemiology are focused so narrowly on "safety" that they ignore the fact that because all drugs have side-effects, safety cannot be evaluated in a vacuum but must be part of a cost-benefit judgment.

Their motto might be, "If you don't approve any new drugs, none will cause safety problems."

This reminds me of a cartoon that shows two researchers in the laboratory, one of whom is holding up a flask.

He says to his colleague, "Well, it looks as though we've finally done it — discovered a drug that will confer immortality. The only trouble is, it will take forever to test it."

WaPo research on display on Page 1

I didn’t take much notice of the Washington Post article on the front page today by Matthew Mosk regarding “unusual” donors to the John McCain campaign.  It didn’t find any wrongdoing, for one thing; it made an insinuation of wrongdoing by association that it didn’t back up with facts.  The Norman Hsu case, in contrast, built on odd donation patterns but didn’t get reported until actual wrongdoing was apparent, with Democratic bundler Hsu being a fugitive with a penchant for Ponzi schemes.

Now, however, a correction rides above the web version of the article that renders Mosk and his editors as risible examples of a media salivating for dirt on McCain.  Take a look at the correction and the first paragraph of the story:

Correction to This Article
The first name of McCain donor Faisal Abdullah was misspelled in some versions of this story, including in the print edition of The Washington Post. Also, the article incorrectly identified a Rite Aide manager and two Twilight Hookah Lounge owners as being among the donors Sargeant solicited on behalf of McCain. Those donors - Rite Aid manager Ibrahim Marabeh, and the lounge owners, Nadia and Shawn Abdalla - wrote checks to Giuliani and Clinton, not McCain.

The bundle of $2,300 and $4,600 checks that poured into Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign on March 12 came from an unlikely group of California donors: a mechanic from D&D Auto Repair in Whittier, the manager of Rite Aid Pharmacy No. 5727, the 30-something owners of the Twilight Hookah Lounge in Fullerton.

Excuse me, but doesn’t that gut the entire premise for the article in its entirety?  The only “odd” donor left is the mechanic, and no pattern exists any longer.

That makes twice that the Post has jettisoned normal fact-checking in order to rush an attack piece against McCain onto its front page.  The Post owes its readers more than just this correction — they owe them a retraction on the front page of tomorrow’s paper. If this is the level of journalistic competence we can expect from the Post, then they have signed onto the Gray Lady Express to the fringe.

Example: " 'Elitist' is another word for 'arrogant,' which is another word for 'uppity,' that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves." And:

Casting Obama as "out of touch" plays harmoniously with the traditional notion of blacks as "others" at the edge of the mainstream, separate from the whole. Despite his ability to articulate the frustration and yearning of broad segments of Americans, his "otherness" has been highlighted effectively by right-wingers who harp on his Kenyan father and spread false rumors that he's a clandestine Muslim.

Here's another example. Some people have said Obama has a "thin résumé." But "thin" is another word for "skinny," which is a slur for "black." Or so it is according to Slate's Timothy Noah³, who has found invidious racism in the pages of the venerable Wall Street Journal.

This latest racial crisis began last Friday, when Journal reporter Amy Chozik⁴ published a piece titled "Too Fit to Be President?" Chozik speculated that Obama may be too far gaunt to lead a nation of lard butts. As political analyses go, it was more whimsical than weighty, which was signaled by its placement on the front page of the Weekend Journal section.

Yesterday Noah weighed in on the subject. "Any discussion of Obama's 'skinniness' and its impact on the typical American voter," he opined, "can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race." Here's his argument:

Barack Obama is the first African-American to win a major-party nomination for president of the United States. African-Americans are distinguishable from other Americans by their skin color. This physical attribute looms large in our nation's history as a source of prejudice. . . .

When white people are invited to think about Obama's physical appearance, the principal attribute they're likely to dwell on is his dark skin. Consequently, any reference to Obama's other physical attributes can't help coming off as a coy walk around the barn.

Chozik tells Noah that this is "ridiculous," to which Noah responds that she is "clueless." Proving that cluelessness comes in all colors, Noah calls his black friend "to ask whether she was offended. She was not."

He said he would “not pretend we can achieve (his goal) without cost, or without sacrifice.” And then he pretended that we could, promising that his “new energy economy . . . will create new businesses, new industries, and millions of new jobs. Jobs that pay well. Jobs that can’t be outsourced. Good, union jobs.”

A plug-in car is not yet in production. GM and Toyota are both targeting 2010 for their market debuts, but both companies are struggling with the lithium-ion technology at the heart of those battery-powered vehicles.

Even assuming Obama’s omniscience, an electricity-based market growing that fast will put increasing strains on the U.S. power grid. Yet, in his MSU speech, Obama also called on the “American people to meet the goal of reducing our demand for electricity 15 percent by the end of the next decade.” Considering that the federal Energy Information Agency predicts an 18 percent increase in electricity consumption during that time — even before you add on electric car demand — it’s hard to see how Obama squares his circle.

. . . To purchase all those new plug-in vehicles that don’t yet exist, Obama promised a $7,000 federal tax credit — more than doubling the current federal subsidy. And he promised that they would be built “right here in the state of Michigan,” which begs the question of whether the $7,000 credit would be limited to American vehicles (currently, the $3,000 credit goes mostly to Toyota Priuses made in Japan, the status symbol of American liberals).

. . . only highlight McCain’s similarities to Obama. On CAFE, for example, McCain himself has been no friend to the auto industry. In 2002, he co-sponsored a bill with John Kerry hiking mileage mandates by 30 percent — a proposal that ultimately became law last year over loud Big 3 protests. On drilling, McCain quickly steps on his message of “oil independence” by opposing drilling in ANWR — just as his opponent does.

Ultimately, McCain’s soft-spot for nuclear is because it’s not coal: America’s most abundant — and cheapest — energy resource. It is an aversion that McCain shares with Senator Obama, because both candidates are, at root, global-warming alarmists.

And global warming alarmism is not good for the state that they are wooing.

An American Council for Capital Formation study of this year’s Lieberman-Warner cap and trade bill found that "Michigan would lose 37,400 to 56,260 jobs in 2020 and 91,490 to 121,786 jobs in 2030” and electricity prices would increase by 126 percent to 177 percent.

The World Looks to Nuclear Energy

Ralph Nader on Obama: This is not the black president I thought I knew

But here’s something interesting: If it’s bad for McCain to take money from the oil industry, isn’t it also bad for Barack Obama?  The Democrats claim that McCain has taken some $55,000 from Exxon employees and political committees.  But according to a search of the FEC’s contributions database I found $10,900 in contributions from Exxon executives, employees and political committees to Obama.

So what does this mean?  That Obama is only 1/5th as evil as McCain is because he only took 1/5th of the contributions from Exxon that McCain has?

At a screening of a forthcoming HBO documentary honoring liberal journalist Helen Thomas in Washington, she was asked whether most White House...

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. . . reporters are liberal. "Hell, no!" she thundered. I'm dying to find another liberal to open their mouths. Where are they?"

Is this Grande Dame of Journalism serious? The answer is yes. Since Ms. Thomas is dying to find vocal liberals in the news media, the least we can do is point her in the right direction.

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