Highs & Lows
Another whirlwind hurtling through the blogosphere....
***Abdallah S. Jum'ah, president and CEO of the state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known better as Aramco, asserts that humanity has only tapped a miniscule 18% of the planet's total oil reserves and that potential reserves, estimated at 4.5 trillion barrels, exist to power the globe for upwards of another century and a half.
Sure, Jum'ah has a vested interest in keeping the world "addicted" to petroleum. Later in the AP article, Rex Tillerson, chairman of ExxonMobil, predicts that world demand of oil will increase by half over the next decade alone, reeling in Jum'ah's depletion horizion quite a piece. And certainly the private sector should augment our energy sources with alternative energy sources, most especially nuclear power. But on the other hand, isn't it the business of these men to know how much of their commodity is still to be had? As well as to continue to devise more efficient means of extracting and using it? And doesn't this further deplete the credibility of the greenstremists who have for decades chicken-littled at the top of their lungs about running out of fossil fuels? Something that, out the other side of their mouths, they ought to be celebrating given their nonsensical global warming hysterics?
Bottom line is we're not running out, and the enviros have no sound arguments for why we should cut ourselves off anyway. A pity that won't shut them up. Surely reducing verbal flatulence emissions should help reduce global temperatures.
***Read the Washington Examiner take apart Fussy Russy Feingold on his baldfaced lie that campaign finance reform doesn't censor political speech. Then ponder that he's taken seriously as a 2008 Democrat presidential candidate and try not to break a rib laughing.
***Might this be why more troops are needed in Afghanistan? And doesn't it just reinforce the reality that NATO members aside from Britain and Canada are AINOs (allies in name only)?
***The headline to this Rich Lowry piece says it all: "Five years later, CIA officers are scared of lawsuits again."
Think what vengeance the 9/10 crowd would exact after another 9/11. Suddenly Michael Scheurer would have a whole lot more competition in the "backstab & tell" literary market.
***This is a compelling reason why California conservatives should not waste time sweating this - or even bothering with the top of the ballot on Election Day.
***Rosie "Pig Woman" O'Donnell sez that, "Radical Christianity is just as dangerous as Radical Islam!"
Hmmm; al Qaeda...The 700 Club; Hezbollah...Focus on the Family. Naw, I just don't see the parallel. Maybe the porcine, penised princess can let us know when Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson issue a fatwa on her life for such a vile, ignorant slur.
Meanwhile, it's the Islamic Radicals who send their former presidents to our country to tell homofilic, left-leaning Harvard audiences that all homosexuals should be executed, and people like the Sow That Ate The Upper West Side don't so much as bat an eyelash. Let any "Religious Right" spokesman say something like that and it'd be the Rosies who issued fatwas on them.
Oh, wait, there is a man sort of like that - Fred Phelps. But he's okay because he's "anti-war."
So many hatreds, so infernally difficult for neoBolsheviks to keep them all straight.
***Remember the recent "bombshell" claim that embryonic stem cells - the medical snakeoil of the 21st century - could now be harvested without destroying the embryos themselves? It was all a bunch of bullshit. Which, come to think of it, would be more likely to yield medically usable stem cells than human embryos ever will. But then the Joseph Mengeles of the medi-Left can't destroy innocent, defenseless human lives that way, and that is their true mission and priority.
***Because of our PC squeamishness, Taliban attacks in Afghanistan are going to start looking like Islamist Thriller videos. A metaphor that works on a dismayingly large number of levels.
***It is written, "The wage of sin is death." The French found that out first-hand yesterday:
That's the amusing thing about our enemies - they don't do nuance. They aren't impressed with clever manuvering and sneaky manipulations. It doesn't matter to them who supported us in the Iraq campaign or how many troops another country has sent to Afghanistan - they hate us all and mean to destroy us all.
Not that the French will see it that way. They'll blame us, of course, and, fearing their own Muslim fifth column even more, prostrate themselves to even greater lengths of turban-licking.
I always wondered what the Left, here and abroad, would do when confronted with an enemy that didn't bother to conceal its warmongering, imperialistic, totalitarian designs on the West. Well, okay, that question was answered in the 1930s. But I did wonder if history would repeat itself.
"Oh ye of little faith, why did you doubt?"
***Two news items that are natural bookends:
....and, the very same day....
I'd much rather see our UN dues go to purchase bunker-busters to take out the mullahs' nuclear weapons infrastructure instead. It'd be money much better spent.
***When's the last time you saw any of Ramesh Ponnuru's work in the New York Times? Is it any wonder that when this singular occasion does take place, it's a piece talking up the benefits for Republicans of losing control of the House of Representatives?
Coming on the heels of the Washington Monthly "forum" of disgruntled righties arguing the same nonsense, it starts to look like an Enemy Media campaign to suppress the GOP vote. Which, I guess, is okey-dokey when they do it to us, but the unforgivable sin if we do it to them. if, you know, we ever had done that to them.
Dean Barnett did a yeoman job cutting Ponnuru's political masochism to pieces. And it appears as though this meme isn't working either:
Double-H is right - as voters start paying more attention to the mid-term campaign, they're recoiling at the prospect of turning the nation's defense over to a bunch of deranged extremists who would spend the next two years plunging - or, rather, escalating - the nation's political civil war at the expense of the shooting war with the Islamic fundamentalists. However disenchanted with their own party they may be, Republican voters are not so myopically self-absorbed as to believe there would be no consequences to such a fit of self-defeating pique.
This isn't 1992. The casualties would be a helluva lot more than just center-right pride. And just because Donks wish to perpetrate mass public amnesia in order to regain power does not obligate Republican voters to succumb to it just to settle some intra-party ideological scores.
Maybe Bush the son sounds like a broken record, and definitely he isn't setting his war ambitions high enough. But he is keeping his eyes on the prize. And it's moving the polls in his and his party's direction.
There's a lesson in that for the tighty-righties, if they're willing to learn it.
***Abdallah S. Jum'ah, president and CEO of the state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known better as Aramco, asserts that humanity has only tapped a miniscule 18% of the planet's total oil reserves and that potential reserves, estimated at 4.5 trillion barrels, exist to power the globe for upwards of another century and a half.
Sure, Jum'ah has a vested interest in keeping the world "addicted" to petroleum. Later in the AP article, Rex Tillerson, chairman of ExxonMobil, predicts that world demand of oil will increase by half over the next decade alone, reeling in Jum'ah's depletion horizion quite a piece. And certainly the private sector should augment our energy sources with alternative energy sources, most especially nuclear power. But on the other hand, isn't it the business of these men to know how much of their commodity is still to be had? As well as to continue to devise more efficient means of extracting and using it? And doesn't this further deplete the credibility of the greenstremists who have for decades chicken-littled at the top of their lungs about running out of fossil fuels? Something that, out the other side of their mouths, they ought to be celebrating given their nonsensical global warming hysterics?
Bottom line is we're not running out, and the enviros have no sound arguments for why we should cut ourselves off anyway. A pity that won't shut them up. Surely reducing verbal flatulence emissions should help reduce global temperatures.
***Read the Washington Examiner take apart Fussy Russy Feingold on his baldfaced lie that campaign finance reform doesn't censor political speech. Then ponder that he's taken seriously as a 2008 Democrat presidential candidate and try not to break a rib laughing.
***Might this be why more troops are needed in Afghanistan? And doesn't it just reinforce the reality that NATO members aside from Britain and Canada are AINOs (allies in name only)?
***The headline to this Rich Lowry piece says it all: "Five years later, CIA officers are scared of lawsuits again."
Think what vengeance the 9/10 crowd would exact after another 9/11. Suddenly Michael Scheurer would have a whole lot more competition in the "backstab & tell" literary market.
***This is a compelling reason why California conservatives should not waste time sweating this - or even bothering with the top of the ballot on Election Day.
***Rosie "Pig Woman" O'Donnell sez that, "Radical Christianity is just as dangerous as Radical Islam!"
Hmmm; al Qaeda...The 700 Club; Hezbollah...Focus on the Family. Naw, I just don't see the parallel. Maybe the porcine, penised princess can let us know when Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson issue a fatwa on her life for such a vile, ignorant slur.
Meanwhile, it's the Islamic Radicals who send their former presidents to our country to tell homofilic, left-leaning Harvard audiences that all homosexuals should be executed, and people like the Sow That Ate The Upper West Side don't so much as bat an eyelash. Let any "Religious Right" spokesman say something like that and it'd be the Rosies who issued fatwas on them.
Oh, wait, there is a man sort of like that - Fred Phelps. But he's okay because he's "anti-war."
So many hatreds, so infernally difficult for neoBolsheviks to keep them all straight.
***Remember the recent "bombshell" claim that embryonic stem cells - the medical snakeoil of the 21st century - could now be harvested without destroying the embryos themselves? It was all a bunch of bullshit. Which, come to think of it, would be more likely to yield medically usable stem cells than human embryos ever will. But then the Joseph Mengeles of the medi-Left can't destroy innocent, defenseless human lives that way, and that is their true mission and priority.
***Because of our PC squeamishness, Taliban attacks in Afghanistan are going to start looking like Islamist Thriller videos. A metaphor that works on a dismayingly large number of levels.
***It is written, "The wage of sin is death." The French found that out first-hand yesterday:
Deputy al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has urged a militant Algerian Islamist group to punish "Crusader nation" France, even though it vehemently opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq, a newspaper said on Thursday.
The Le Figaro daily cited a security expert who had reviewed the entire tape, released on Monday, in which Zawahiri called on the Algerian GSPC group to become "a bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders."
He also urged the GSPC - the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat - to sow fear "in the hearts of the traitors and the apostate sons of France" and to crush the "pillars of the Crusader alliance".
That's the amusing thing about our enemies - they don't do nuance. They aren't impressed with clever manuvering and sneaky manipulations. It doesn't matter to them who supported us in the Iraq campaign or how many troops another country has sent to Afghanistan - they hate us all and mean to destroy us all.
Not that the French will see it that way. They'll blame us, of course, and, fearing their own Muslim fifth column even more, prostrate themselves to even greater lengths of turban-licking.
I always wondered what the Left, here and abroad, would do when confronted with an enemy that didn't bother to conceal its warmongering, imperialistic, totalitarian designs on the West. Well, okay, that question was answered in the 1930s. But I did wonder if history would repeat itself.
"Oh ye of little faith, why did you doubt?"
***Two news items that are natural bookends:
The United States should give the United Nations until the end of the year to reform and then consider cutting back on its U.N. dues if the changes fall short, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said.
"Is good management and lack of corruption too much to ask for?" he asked, calling the United Nations "severely challenged from a management and accountability point of view."
....and, the very same day....
U.N. inspectors have protested to the U.S. government and a Congressional committee about a report on Iran's nuclear work, calling parts of it "outrageous and dishonest", according to a letter obtained by Reuters.Goes to show that the problem is more than just crappy management and corruption; it is the fact that we are subsidizing an international organization to run interference on behalf of enemies that seek the means to destroy us.
I'd much rather see our UN dues go to purchase bunker-busters to take out the mullahs' nuclear weapons infrastructure instead. It'd be money much better spent.
***When's the last time you saw any of Ramesh Ponnuru's work in the New York Times? Is it any wonder that when this singular occasion does take place, it's a piece talking up the benefits for Republicans of losing control of the House of Representatives?
Coming on the heels of the Washington Monthly "forum" of disgruntled righties arguing the same nonsense, it starts to look like an Enemy Media campaign to suppress the GOP vote. Which, I guess, is okey-dokey when they do it to us, but the unforgivable sin if we do it to them. if, you know, we ever had done that to them.
Dean Barnett did a yeoman job cutting Ponnuru's political masochism to pieces. And it appears as though this meme isn't working either:
The political season has kicked into high gear this week and the initial news cycle features a bounce in President Bush's Job Approval ratings. Our numbers today show the President at 47%, up six points in a week and the best numbers he's enjoyed since mid-February. What's fueling this? The Republican base is coming home. Today, 85% of the GOP faithful voice approval of Bush's performance. Earlier this year, that level of support had fallen as low as 66%.
Of course, it's still early. It's just one poll. It might be statistical noise or perhaps a temporary bounce following the 9/11 activities and the President's recent speeches. However, it might also be an early signal that the White House strategy to re-focus the debate is starting to energize the base.
Double-H is right - as voters start paying more attention to the mid-term campaign, they're recoiling at the prospect of turning the nation's defense over to a bunch of deranged extremists who would spend the next two years plunging - or, rather, escalating - the nation's political civil war at the expense of the shooting war with the Islamic fundamentalists. However disenchanted with their own party they may be, Republican voters are not so myopically self-absorbed as to believe there would be no consequences to such a fit of self-defeating pique.
This isn't 1992. The casualties would be a helluva lot more than just center-right pride. And just because Donks wish to perpetrate mass public amnesia in order to regain power does not obligate Republican voters to succumb to it just to settle some intra-party ideological scores.
Maybe Bush the son sounds like a broken record, and definitely he isn't setting his war ambitions high enough. But he is keeping his eyes on the prize. And it's moving the polls in his and his party's direction.
There's a lesson in that for the tighty-righties, if they're willing to learn it.
posted by JASmius at 4:30 PM
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