Vets for Freedom ad: Acknowledge our victory!

Dean: Republicans are like … Milosevic

Now, after the identity-politics meltdown that the entire nation witnessed in the Democratic primaries this cycle, and with Dean’s own quotes as context, which party seems more obsessed with groupthink — Democrats or Republicans?  Which party set factions against each other more in 2008, all the way to the convention — Democrats or Republicans?  Which candidate launched multiple, unfounded smears of racism — Barack Obama or John McCain?

Poor Howard Dean.  In the end, all he has is hate.

One of the most contentious issues of late has been the question of whether increased drilling for oil would reduce the price of oil today.

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Certainly increased drilling will not bring an immediate increase in the supply of oil. But many people, even so-called experts, believe that the effect on the pump price would not be felt until the oil is actually at the pump, possibly years later.

In fact, the price will fall well before the first hole is drilled. Even the possibility of increased drilling will bring down the price of oil. It already has.

Almost everyone knows that supply and demand determine price in a market. But that knowledge seldom goes beyond understanding how supply and demand themselves are determined.

The belief that the current quantities demanded and supplied are the sole determinants of price misses an important point. Both current and expected future demand and supply interact to determine the quantity demanded and supplied in the current marketplace.

That is true because oil, and indeed almost everything else, is storable.

When a quantity is storable, the amount a producer will supply and a consumer will demand is not independent of future expectations.

If storable commodities are affected by expectations of future prices, we might think that nonstorable commodities would be unaffected by expectations. That is true only more or less in theory, because in practice virtually all commodities are storable.

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The list includes, but is not limited to, the desire for energy independence, the resurgence of electric cars (and the need for more electricity), climate change and the example of France, which gets nearly 80% of its juice from nuclear plants.

But there are plenty of ways to slow or stop the nuclear express while seeming to give it a green light. You can set conditions that sound reasonable but, in practice, become show-stoppers.

By any objective standard, nuclear energy in the U.S. has a sterling safety record, with only one major accident (Three-Mile Island) and no deaths. As for cleanliness, it has a waste problem that could be solved through the commissioning of a long-term disposal site or the reprocessing of spent fuel (or a combination of both).

Reprocessing, though, has the potential to make the whole Yucca Mountain debate moot. With technology currently used by France and several other nations, nearly all the uranium-235 and plutonium in fuel rods can be recycled as nuclear fuel. Other isotopes can be extracted for use in industry and medicine.

About 95% of a spent fuel rod is low-radiation uranium 238, which needs no special disposal. The true waste left over from recycling is just a tiny part of the material we label "waste" now. France, notes author William Tucker, stores all this material "in a single room at Le Havre."

The U.S. has banned commercial nuclear recycling since 1977, out of fear that the plutonium extracted by the process could fall into the hands of rogue states or terrorists. The same argument can be heard today, but (as with nuclear power in general) there's now a long track record of safety to refute it. New technologies have the potential to make the process even safer.

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It will be quite possibly the most verbose ticket in political history now that Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., has accepted a vice presidential nomination he earlier said he wouldn't accept from Barack Obama, who Biden once described as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Of Obama's pledge to invade Pakistan if necessary to fight terror, Biden said, "It's a very naive way of thinking how you're going to conduct foreign policy." He added: "Having talking points on foreign policy doesn't get you there."

Biden is not a man of few words and occasionally feels the need to borrow some. In 1987, Biden was a credible presidential candidate until the moment he lifted passages from a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.

In 2006, on the C-Span series "Road To The White House," Biden famously remarked: "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking."

Biden's words have criticized Obama so much that one would think he was seeking John McCain's No. 2 slot. Indeed, on "The Daily Show" in 2005, Biden said: "I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off, be well off no matter who . . ."

Of Obama's qualifications, Biden said last year, "I think he can be ready, but right now I don't believe he is. The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training."

"I am not going to fail to protect these kids as long as we have a single, solitary troop in Iraq," Biden said during a September 8, 2007, appearance on NBC's "Meet The Press." "This isn't cutting off the war. This is cutting off support that will save the lives of American troops."

Obama has spoken proudly of always being against the war. Speaking to the Brookings Institution in 2005, Biden said: "We can call it quits and withdraw from Iraq. I think that would be a tragic mistake. Or we can set a deadline for pulling out, which I fear will only encourage our enemies to wait us out — equally a mistake."

Barack Obama is not ready for prime time and electing him president may be the biggest mistake of all. But that's not us speaking — it's Obama's running mate, Joe Biden.

Tribune-Review: The company Obama keeps

ACORN’s long record of shady operations has been long known.  Why would a supposed reformer hire ACORN as a partner for a campaign that promises to end business as usual?  As the song goes, you can tell a a man who boozes by the company he chooses — and you can tell volumes about a politician comfortable with the likes of ACORN, Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, and William Ayers.

Barack Obama and the exercise of free speech

One has to wonder why the Obama campaign wants to stage a complete meltdown on the Ayers issue.  Team Obama has thrilled the netroots by saying they won’t be “Swiftboated”, but there isn’t anything factually inaccurate in the ads.  Obama’s own response boils down to this: “Ayers tossed bombs a long time ago, and who cares what he thinks now?”  Plenty of people care about Presidential candidates who feel comfortable with bomb-tossers as friends, and the more Obama keeps the story alive, the more the media will pay attention and more voters will discover this connection.

They have compounded it by demanding a criminal probe into a group that works for political advocacy.  The arcane regulations of political advertising will fly over most people’s heads, but bullying people through the Department of Justice as a candidate will cause reasonable people to wonder what will happen if Obama gets elected. Most Americans will see this as Obama trying to silence someone with an inconvenient political point of view, not as a defense of a campaign-finance system that’s already egregious enough as it is without this kind of precedent.

There are certain laws you can break without serious repercussions, but the laws of economics are far less forgiving. And history shows that we will all pay a hefty fine if lawmakers choose to enact a "windfall" profits tax as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has just proposed and Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama supports.

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Talk of a "windfall" profits tax turns up, like a bad penny, when politicians catch on that Americans have become frustrated by high gas prices. The concept is simple: Politicians, who are no more popular than high energy prices right now, see an easy scapegoat. So they slap an extra tax on the "bad guy" and take a bow.

Indeed, even calling it a "windfall" tax implies that people or firms have not rightly earned that money.

In a bill earlier this year, 51 senators voted to impose a massive new special tax on energy companies whose profits grew by more than 10% — hardly a "windfall" by most definitions.

Unfortunately for proponents of sound policy, windfall profits are more satisfying emotionally than they are economically.

American households and business are rightly frustrated by the high cost of energy, but will punishing the oil industry with higher taxes do anything to make prices fall? Most experts believe that is not likely for a number of reasons.

. . . we tried a windfall profits tax from 1980 to 1988. A report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded that this tax reduced domestic oil production by 3% to 6% and increased oil imports in the range of 8% to 16%. History has shown that a windfall profits tax increased U.S. dependence on foreign oil. It would do so again if repeated.

This is an energy expert? Pelosi doesn't know that natural gas is a fossil fuel!

Huckabee: Romney should have ignored the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage

New Obama ad: Why is McCain trying to distract us with that unrepentant terrorist I’m friends with?

Dhim·wit (dïm-wît) - A non-Muslim member of a free society that abets the stated cause of Islamic domination with remarkable gullibility.  A dhimwit is always quick to extend sympathy to the very enemy that would take away his or her own freedom (or life) if given the opportunity.

July 2008 Dhimwit:
Britain's Chief Justice Lord Phillips

Pithy comment withheld out of respect for our British readers.
(Sure hope you chaps appreciate this, because it was a good one.)

Given that it is the model for every country that immigrants are currently trying to get into (by hook or by crook), one might wonder what is so wrong with the British legal system as to require augmentation.  The answer, according to the country's chief justice, is that it isn't Islamic enough.

Muslims in the UK are demanding a parallel legal system based on Sharia (Islamic law) and dhimwits like Lord Phillips seem eager to accommodate them, even though it means irreversibly opening the door to a backward and tragic set of rules and penalties that carry divine sanction.

Rather than legitimizing Islamic law, British leaders should be pointing out the obvious: it doesn't work.  In fact, this is why Muslims flee to the West in the first place.  It is no coincidence that countries with Sharia (or even Muslim majorities) have some of the worst records of human rights abuse, social repression and economic stagnation.

Instead of importing the sort of religious dysfunction that is clearly antithetical to progress, the British should be exporting those Muslims who want to live under Sharia.

What Part of Muslim Theocracy Does this Man Not Understand?

So, this hostility toward the Democratic-controlled Congress simply misses Speaker Pelosi’s political virtue. “That government is best which governs least,” Thomas Paine famously wrote in Civil Disobedience.