Let's Check The In-Basket

The President of the United States delivered the State of the Union Address last night. I gave an operational review presentation this morning. Not that the two are remotely comparable, but I like to think that I sounded as relaxed and confident as Dubya did. Not being particularly adept at public speaking of any sort is another thing we have in common. Pity that my setting was completely different; if I'd had a mob of seditious, snot-for-brains partisan dimwits to pavlovianly manipulate at will, I might have actually enjoyed my gig as much as GDub appeared to revel in his.

So, anyway, here is a list of news odds & ends none of which merit a post of their own but are worth tossing into this hodgepodge - kind of like "popcorn chicken" is really floor sweepings somebody accidentally threw into the batter one day.

***The 9/11 Commission - remember them? The mob of seditious, snot...well, you know, that tried to hang the 9/11 attacks on George Bush in the middle of his re-election campaign for "failing to connect the dots"? - "pre-emptively" crapped all over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that those same lib knuckleheads now insist he should have consulted:

The FISA application process continues to be long and slow. Requests for approvals are overwhelming the ability of the system to process them and to conduct a surveillance....

The "wall" between criminal and intelligence investigations apparently caused agents to be less aggressive than they might otherwise have been in pursuing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance powers in counterterrorism investigations.

Moreover, the FISA approval process involved multiple levels of review, which also discouraged agents from using such surveillance. Many agents also told us that the process for getting FISA packages approved at FBI Headquarters and the Department of Justice was incredibly lengthy and inefficient.

Several FBI agents added that, prior to 9/11, FISA-derived intelligence information was not fully exploited but was collected primarily to justify continuing the surveillance.

Funny how you never hear much from or about the 9/11 Commission anymore, isn't it?

***Not only is Hamas, the newly installed Palestinian kingpins, determined to finish what Adolph Hitler started, but they have an even more important mission to accomplish: making the Jews change their national flag:

Palestinian Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar said Israel must change it flag, according to a report in Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news agency. He also claimed the flag is a symbol of oppression.

"Israel must remove the two blue stripes from its national flag,” Zahar said. "The stripes on the flag are symbols of occupation. They signify Israel’s borders stretching from the River Euphrates to the River Nile.”

The Israeli flag features a blue Star of David between two blue stripes. Arutz Sheva reports the stripes are designed to make the flag resemble a traditional Jewish prayer shawl.

My recommendation to the Israeli government? Send Zahar a message something like this (think Bob Newhart):

"Hello, Mahmy? Hey, no-can-do on the flag thing. At least not until we can get a meeting of the minds on a few other matters. What's that? Oh, nothing all that important. Just, you know, your organizational charter...yeah, that whole "destroy Israel" thing is a really tough sell here. And while we're at it, we'd like you to change your maps...uh-huh, uh-huh, the ones that show Israel re-labeled "Palestine". Well now Mahmy, it doesn't much matter to us that you picked them up for a song at the Fatah liquidation sale. Besides, everybody knew what a lousy sense of direction dear old Yassir had...well, if it hadn't been for the French, every time he went to vacation in the Greek Isles he would have ended up in the Aleutians.

Say, Mahmy, you might want to talk to the Americans about cutting a deal on a few of them for your new homeland. Because we sure aren't changing our flag or anything else.

Mahmy? Mahmy? Is this thing on...?

***Contrary to the mind-rotting idealism of Star Trek lore, men don't explore to "see what's out there" - they explore because they think there's something in it for them. The Vikings went to the New World for conquest, the later West Europeans wanted gold and a sea route to India. And still later, the United States went to the moon because we were scared to death the Russians would beat us there like they did with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and gain a critically strategic high ground. Once the lunar race was won, there was no more apparent point to the U.S. space program, which is why NASA has been visionless for a generation and is still wasting gobs of money on the floating junkpile otherwise known as the International Space Station.

Two years ago President Bush echoed his dad's proposal to return to the moon and go on to Mars, but with no overarching imperative like the Cold War competition to goose us into action, the son's urgings will fall on equally deaf ears.

Hellooooo, overarching imperative:

Russian space officials announced plans last week to build a permanent base on the moon to mine isotope helium-3, a promising fuel for nuclear energy....

Some scientists believe the isotope could be the next great source of energy for the world. Gerald Kulcinski, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in January 2004 that helium-3 could transform energy production without causing harm to the environment.

"If we could land a space shuttle on the moon, fill the cargo with canisters of helium-3 mined from the surface and bring the shuttle back to Earth,” Kulcinski promised, "that cargo would supply the entire electrical power needs of the United States for an entire year.”

Wow. Competition and something in it for us. A space-based "blue plate special." And Bush did emphasize nuclear energy in his speech last night. Hmmmm.

Maybe I might realize my ambition of spending my golden years watching Earthrises after all.

***Left-wing stupidity, despite the skeptical reassurances of the rational mind, really is boundless:

When the audiotaped proposal was made 10 days ago, the White House dismissed it out of hand. That was a politically logical move, given the need to appear tough on terror at all times. An image of strength and determination may be particularly important in the months ahead because Republican Party leaders have put security issues at the heart of their 2006 congressional election campaign strategy.

But there are reasons why bin Laden's overture should be carefully weighed and thoughtfully debated.

The moral imperative that should drive us is a sincere desire to end the long suffering of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Official figures suggest that 30,000 innocent noncombatants have been killed since March 2003 in Iraq alone. Many respected sources believe that this figure is grossly underestimated.

So if bin Laden were to call off his dogs of war, it would be a very good thing, saving lives by removing major elements in the insurgencies in both countries. Such al Qaeda withdrawals would sharply reduce the need for our forces to remain in these sad lands.

Peace would also prove a boon to our standing, both in the Muslim world and throughout the international community, where, after initial agreement with our attack on terrorists in Afghanistan, serious fissures erupted over the propriety (and legality) of our invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

"Peace" with bin Laden. Bin Laden would certainly enjoy peace - which he would put to murderously good use. Meanwhile, wasn't it our "forced retreats" on al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that "ended the long suffering of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan"? And boosted our respect in the Muslim world by scaring the piss out of every tinpot and theocrat in the region that they might be next? Wouldn't Iraq and Afghanistan be re-Talibanized if we called off our "dogs of war"? Wouldn't that resume their "long suffering"? Wouldn't that re-pussify our standing in the Middle East?

Ask not what color the sky is in John Arquilla's world, it burns a fiery red - blood red.

Cap'n Ed takes apart this hack brick by brick. Rarely has the expression "sport fishing with nuclear depth charges" been so vividly illustrated.

***Donald Luskin had to dig out what the Congressional Budget Office sought to bury beyond any possible unearthing: the 2003 Bush capital gains tax cut has not only paid for itself, but has been a gusher of revenue for the federal treasury:

Table 4-4 on page 82 in CBO’s Budget and Economic Outlook of [2004] shows that the estimates for capital-gains tax liabilities had been lowered to $46 billion in 2004 and $52 billion in 2005, for a two-year total of $98 billion. Compare the original $125 billion total to the new $98 billion total, and we can infer that CBO was forecasting that the tax cut would cost the government $27 billion in revenues.

Those are the estimates. Now let’s see how things really turned out. Take a look at Table 4-4 on page 92 of the Budget and Economic Outlook released this week. You’ll see that actual liabilities from capital-gains taxes were $71 billion in 2004, and $80 billion in 2005, for a two-year total of $151 billion.

So let’s do the math one more time: Subtract the originally estimated two-year liability of $125 billion from the actual liability of $151 billion, and you get a $26 billion upside surprise for the government. Yes, instead of costing the government $27 billion in revenues, the tax cuts actually earned the government $26 billion extra.

CBO’s estimate of the “cost” of the tax cut was virtually 180 degrees wrong. The Laffer curve lives!

It's a shame that a Republican Congress still lets the Democrats run its budget office. Otherwise they could rename the CBO the NSA, and the Extreme Media would be blasting this latest triumph of what Ronald Reagan used to call "common sense economics" all across the fruited plain.

There's more, but I couldn't keep my eyes open much longer with bailing wire and alligator clampszzzzzzz....