On Energy, Do Everything

Democrats are killing themselves trying to prevent Americans from using proven fuels

By Charles Krauthammer

Let's see: housing meltdown, credit crunch, oil shock not seen since the 1970s. The economy is slowing, unemployment growing and inflation increasing. It's the sixth year of a highly unpopular war and the president's approval rating is at 30 percent. The Italian Communist party could win this election. The American Democratic party is trying its best to lose it.

Democrats have the advantage on just about every domestic issue from health care to education. However, Americans' greatest concern is the economy, and their greatest economic concern is energy (by a significant margin: 37 percent to 21 percent for inflation). Yet Democrats have gratuitously forfeited the issue of increased drilling for domestic oil and gas. By an overwhelming margin of two to one, Americans want to lift the moratorium preventing drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf, thus unlocking vast energy resources shut down for the last 27 years.

Democrats have been adamantly opposed. They say that we cannot drill our way out of the oil crisis. Of course not. But it is equally obvious that we cannot solar or wind or biomass our way out. Does this mean that because any one measure cannot solve a problem, it needs to be rejected?

Barack Obama remains opposed to new offshore drilling (although he now says he would accept a highly restricted version as part of a comprehensive package). Just last week, he claimed that if only Americans would inflate their tires properly and get regular tune-ups, "we could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling."

This is bizarre. By any reasonable calculation of annual tire-inflation and tune-up savings, the Outer Continental Shelf holds nearly a hundred times as much oil. As for oil shale, also under federal moratorium, after a thousand years of driving with Obama-inflated tires and Obama-tuned engines, we would still have saved only one-fifth the oil shale available in the United States.

But forget the math. Why is this issue either/or? Who's against properly inflated tires? Let's start a national campaign, Cuban-style, with giant venceremos posters lining the highways. ("Inflate your tires. Victory or death!") Why must there be a choice between encouraging conservation and increasing supply? The logical answer is obvious: Do both.

Do everything. Wind and solar. A tire gauge in every mailbox. Hell, a team of oxen for every family (to pull their gasoline-drained SUVs). The consensus in the country, logically unassailable and politically unbeatable, is to do everything possible to both increase supply and reduce demand, because we have a problem that's been killing our economy and threatening our national security. And no one measure is sufficient.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

An amazing book here about credulous Americans in the 1930s who believed all the propaganda about Soviet Russia being a "workers' paradise" and actually emigrated there. Their fate was very unpleasant. Book review here

Leftist racism: "African Americans are leaving San Francisco because of substandard schools, a lack of affordable housing and the dearth of jobs and black culture, according to a report by a committee looking into the exodus. San Francisco's black population has dropped faster than that of any other large U.S. city's. It went from 13.4 percent in 1970 to an estimated 6.5 percent in 2005, according to the census. Nationally, African Americans make up 12.1 percent of the population. Much of the blame has been placed on the Redevelopment Agency, which intentionally drove black families and businesses from the Fillmore district in the 1960s and 1970s. Many residents who attended the nearly four-hour meeting live in the Bayview-Hunters Point area and expressed concern about the redevelopment project now under way there, saying it will continue to reduce the city's dwindling African American population."

More Leftist psychopathy: "A day or two ago, I put up the quote from Jonathan Edwards: "He can't even run his own life, I'll be damned if he'll run mine!" Today, deliciously, John Edwards, the man who wanted to be President, proves the point. A woman apparently seduced him and hustled his campaign for some serious dough. Reports say this all happened in 2006, at the beginning of the Edwards campaign. I don't know if it's karma or subconscious guilt that made his campaign ineffective, but his status as a "major" candidate evaporated in the early primaries. And it raises the question: How could he not have known that this affair would be made public, especially if he won the Democratic nomination?

Children value brands, not Leftist obsessions: "Children who cannot afford or do not want to buy fashionable brands face mockery and bullying, says research from a teachers' union. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers said children were under `huge pressure' to buy brands. The teachers' survey claims children are strongly aware of brands and logos, but pay little attention to the green or ethical values of products."

Pickens plan is based on ignorance : "Can a person be a good businessman but a lousy economist? Yes. Take T. Boone Pickens, for example. He's all over television touting his plan for wind power as a substitute for foreign oil, a plan that calls for massive government subsidies. This should immediately make us suspicious. If wind is so good, why does it need subsidies?"

The FBI anthrax hustle: "The FBI's total failure to point to a shred of evidence placing Ivins in New Jersey on either of the two days the anthrax letters were sent is a very conspicuous deficiency in its case. It's possible that Ivins was able to travel to Princeton on two occasions in three weeks without leaving the slightest trace of having done so (not a credit card purchase, ATM withdrawal, unusual gas purchases, nothing), but that relies on a depiction of Ivins as a cunning and extremely foresightful criminal, an image squarely at odds with most of the FBI's circumstantial evidence that suggests Ivins was actually quite careless, even reckless, in how he perpetrated this crime ."

Leave stores alone: "Banning legal products from being sold at privately owned businesses, as San Francisco did recently with tobacco, shows a remarkable arrogance (July 30, 'Board passes tobacco ban in pharmacies'). Regardless of whether government officials 'feel' that the sale of tobacco is contrary to values they want stores to promote, such a ban is improper government intrusion into private business decisions."

For more postings from me, see OBAMA WATCH, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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