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Victor Davis Hanson writes on the enemies of George Bush.
George Bush is not a very popular fellow.
Witness the enraged reaction last week from critics to his suggestion that leaving Iraq now could have the same dire consequences as our withdrawal from Vietnam did. “It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president,” cried historian Robert Dallek. “Misleading rhetoric,” chimed in Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.
What is it about Bush that evokes such furor?
Let’s start with the hard left, whether in Hollywood or the blogosphere, or among the academic elite. They hate George Bush. To them, his tax cuts, alliance with the religious right, opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq foster the image of an illiberal imperial America. His strut and mangling of words are more salt in their wounds.
The mainstream Democratic Party has been pretty vocal in its dislike, too. Al Gore’s veins bulge when he speaks of George Bush. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s lips curl. …
Adam Smith posts on the large number of hospital infections and steps taken to fight them.
The Bush Administration recently announced that it will not reimburse hospitals for services that left patients with damage caused by poor performance, for instance by falls on hospital wards or nasty hospital acquired infections. Every year 1.7 million people in the US contract infections during their stay in a hospital resulting in as much as $473 million extra costs. …
Ann Coulter has a good idea. Liberals go into overdrive trashing Ashcroft and Gonzales, so Ann reminds us of Janet Reno.
This week, congressional Democrats vowed to investigate Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ firing of himself. Gonzales has said he was not involved in the discussions about his firing and that it was “performance-based,” but he couldn’t recall the specifics.
Right-wingers like me never trusted Gonzales. But watching Hillary Rodham Clinton literally applaud the announcement of Gonzales’ resignation on Monday was more than any human being should have to bear. Liberals’ hysteria about Gonzales was surpassed only by their hysteria about his predecessor, John Ashcroft. (Also their hysteria about Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Libby, Rice, Barney and so on. They’re very excitable, these Democrats.)
Liberals want to return the office to the glory years of Attorney General Janet Reno! …
… From the phony child abuse cases of the ’80s to the military assault on Americans at Waco, Janet Reno presided over the most egregious attacks on Americans’ basic liberties since the Salem witch trials. These outrageous deprivations of life and liberty were not the work of fanatical right-wing prosecutors, but liberals like Janet Reno.
Reno is the sort of wild-eyed zealot trampling on real civil rights that Hillary views as an ideal attorney general, unlike that brute Alberto Gonzales. At least Reno didn’t fire any U.S. attorneys!
Oh wait –
Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Ashcroft: 0
Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Gonzales: 8
Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Reno: 93
The Captain posts on Japan’s national health care.
The lack of facilities in a national health-care system has resulted in the death of a newborn. Japan, whose system has been cited as a model for the United States to consider, has few medical facilities in their rural areas, and the lack of obstetricians led one couple to be turned away from eight hospitals when the mother-to-be went into labor:
Japan’s health minister has pledged to address the shortage of doctors in the country after a woman in labour was turned away by eight hospitals.
A ninth hospital refused to admit her even after she miscarried in an ambulance and her baby died. …
The Captain also reminds us of the terrible treatment of Richard Jewell mentioned above in Ann Coulter’s piece.
Richard Jewell died yesterday at 44, the victim of diabetes and kidney failure. Richard Jewell’s public reputation died eleven years ago, the victim of a mistake by law enforcement and a media blitz that did its best to paint him as a psychopathic bomber with absolutely no evidence — when all Richard Jewell had done was save lives. …
Neal Boortz on the ag subsidies sent to people in New York.
Judging by the amount of people in Manhattan who receive agricultural subsidies you would think there would be hundreds of acres of farm land on the island. But as you’ve probably guessed, that isn’t the case.
But that doesn’t stop your tax dollars from providing these subsidies to Manhattanites who, judging by the fact that they can afford to live in Manhattan, don’t need a government subsidy to begin with. …
The Gainesville Sun (FL) with a good example of how useless statistics can be.
College students driving luxury cars down W. University Avenue may not seem impoverished, but they likely are being counted as part of Gainesville’s poverty rate, which is more than triple the national average, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures released Tuesday. …
… In 2005, the Alachua County Commission paid the Census Bureau to recalculate the poverty rate by excluding students. The report presented to county commissioners indicated that without students – 26,085 of whom met federal poverty guidelines – the poverty rate dropped from 22.8 percent to 13.9 percent. …
Wired.com with an important article on new oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico.
Even better, a recent discovery by Chevron has signaled that soon there may be vastly more oil gushing out of the ultradeep seabeds — more than even the optimists were predicting four years ago. In 2004, the company penetrated a 60 million-year-old geological stratum known as the “lower tertiary trend” containing a monster oil patch that holds between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of crude. Dubbed Jack, the field lies beneath waters nearly twice as deep as those covering Tahiti, and many in the industry dismissed the discovery as too remote to exploit. But last September, Chevron used the Cajun Express to probe the Jack field, proving that petroleum could flow from the lower tertiary at hearty commercial rates — fast enough to bring billions of dollars of crude to market. It was hailed as the largest publicly reported discovery in the past decade, opening up a region that is perhaps big enough to boost national oil reserves by 50 percent. A mad rush followed, and oil companies plowed more than $5 billion into this part of the Gulf. …
… As consensus grows that the world needs to shift away from fossil fuels, extracting oil from the most extreme and costly locations can seem foolishly myopic. If Chevron is going to throw billions of dollars into something untested and possibly doomed to failure, wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in an inexhaustible, greener technology that’s going to have political support a decade from now?
Siegele doesn’t think so. He does know that geological limitations will prevent him from drilling much deeper: It’s a pretty safe bet that below 40,000 feet, the extreme heat has baked off much of the deep-sea troves of crude. And there are financial limits to this frontier, too. Even as Chevron and other oil giants earn record profits, they also face record expenses. For example, the company has commissioned two new deep water rigs that will be able to drill 40,000-foot wells. But at more than $600 million each, they can’t exactly be snapped up on boats.com. “The costs of developing a new oil or gas project are about 65 percent higher today than 30 months ago, and the greatest escalation of costs has been offshore,” says Daniel Yergin, chair of the consulting firm Cambridge Energy Research Associates. At today’s oil prices of $70 a barrel, the current exploration makes sense. But if oil drops below $40 a barrel, Yergin says, the cost of exploring this high-risk frontier will become prohibitive.
But Siegele is hardly worried. Technological breakthroughs have, decade after decade, revived the perpetually doomed oil industry. “Predicting peak oil,” Siegele tells me as we tour the drilling floor of the Cajun Express, “is almost like predicting peak technology” — an exercise, in other words, that to him seems inherently small-minded. Even absurd.
Siegele takes me to the “crown” of the Cajun Express, a harrowing widow’s walk suspended at the top of the drill’s 200-foot derrick. The rig below looks like the loneliest place on Earth — a tiny, solitary board floating in a boundless blue sea. Then, out in the distance, I spot fleets of trawlers the size of thumbnails setting off seismic guns in search of the next big deep-sea prospect. “A decade ago, I never even dreamed we’d get here,” Siegele marvels. “And a decade from now, this moonscape could be populated with rigs as far as the eye can see.”
Instapundit posts on the oil field.