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Mark Steyn’s piece from Sunday was so good we run it again.
… But, before we start suing distant sheikhs in exotic lands for violating the NOPEC act, why don’t we start by suing Congress? After all, who “limits the production or distribution of oil” right here in the United States by declaring that there’ll be no drilling in the Gulf of Florida or the Arctic National Mosquito Refuge? As Rep. Wasserman Schultz herself told Neil Cavuto on Fox News, “We can’t drill our way out of this problem.”
Well, maybe not. But maybe we could drill our way back to $3.25 a gallon. More to the point, if the House of Representatives has now declared it “illegal” for the government of Saudi Arabia to restrict oil production, why is it still legal for the government of the United States to restrict oil production? In fact, the government of the United States restricts pretty much every form of energy production other than the bizarre fetish du jour of federally mandated ethanol production.
Nuclear energy?
Whoa, no, remember Three Mile Island? (OK, nobody does, but kids and anyone under late middle age, you can look it up in your grandparents’ school books.)
Coal?
Whoa, no, man, there go our carbon credits. …
Robert Samuelson says “progressives” who fight globalization are consigning billions to lives of poverty.
What’s the world’s greatest moral challenge, as judged by its capacity to inflict human tragedy? It is not, I think, global warming, whose effects — if they become as grim as predicted — will occur over many years and provide societies time to adapt. A case can be made for preventing nuclear proliferation, which threatens untold deaths and a collapse of the world economy. But the most urgent present moral challenge, I submit, is the most obvious: global poverty.
There are roughly 6 billion people on the planet; in 2004, perhaps 2.5 billion survived on $2 a day or less, says the World Bank. By 2050, the world may have 3 billion more people; many will be similarly impoverished. What’s baffling and frustrating about extreme poverty is that much of the world has eliminated it. In 1800, almost everyone was desperately poor. But the developed world has essentially abolished starvation, homelessness and material deprivation.
The solution to being poor is getting rich. It’s economic growth. We know this. The mystery is why all societies have not adopted the obvious remedies. Just recently, the 21-member Commission on Growth and Development — including two Nobel-prize winning economists, former prime ministers of South Korea and Peru, and a former president of Mexico — examined the puzzle. …
WSJ – Europe has more on al-Dura.
September 30, 2000, Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip: France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin offers the world a front seat on the video shooting of Mohammed al-Durra and his father Jamal. Targeted, according to Mr. Enderlin’s voice-over commentary, by “gunfire from the direction of the Israeli positions.” A few seconds later: “Mohammed is dead, his father is critically wounded.” The France 2 cameraman, later identified as Palestinian stringer Talal Abu Rahma, caught the child killers in the act. A prize-winning scoop!
Independent analysts and Israeli officials seeking clarification of inconsistencies in the al-Durra news report encountered stubborn resistance from the state-owned French channel and its Mideast correspondent. An Israeli army investigation concluded the gunfire could not have come from their position; independent investigators went further and declared that the incident had been staged. Exasperated by the controversy, France 2 and Mr. Enderlin sued four Web sites for defamation, won three cases and lost the fourth on a technicality. Philippe Karsenty, director of the Media-Ratings watchdog site (www.m-r.fr), convicted of defamation for calling the al-Durra report “a hoax,” took the case to the Court of Appeals.
May 21, 2008, Palais de Justice, 11th Chamber of the Court of Appeals: Presiding judge Laurence Trébucq announced the verdict with a delicate smile: Philippe Karsenty is acquitted; the plaintiff’s claims are dismissed. …
Gerard Baker says it is not misogyny, Hillary just s**ks.
… The principal reason voters give for not liking Senator Clinton is that they don’t trust her, that they sense that someone who would do or say anything to get elected is not someone who should be entrusted with the presidency. If anything has been demonstrated in the two long years in which she has been actively campaigning for the presidency, it is how right they are.
As she ratchets up her final efforts to wrest the nomination from Barack Obama’s grasp, she has finally cut herself free from the frayed moorings that connected her campaign with honesty and reality. This week, as Senator Obama moved closer to securing a majority of delegates needed for the Democratic nomination, she was insisting with more urgency than ever that the votes cast in Michigan and Florida must be counted.
These states, you’ll recall, broke the Democratic Party’s rules and went ahead with their primaries earlier than they were supposed to. As a result the Democratic Party – not the Republicans, or the Supreme Court or the Bush Administration – decided to disqualify those states from the process. In Michigan, Senator Obama was not even on the ballot papers, yet now Senator Clinton not only insists those votes must count towards the final vote totals, but says it would be a terrible denial of Americans’ civil rights if they did not.
She compared her effort to overturn the decision not only to Al Gore’s controversial defeat in Florida in a disputed recount in 2000, but to the victims of tyranny throughout history – from enslaved blacks in pre-Civil War America to the cheated voters in the election in March in Zimbabwe.
This is, truly, disturbing. It matters not whether it is a man or a woman saying it. It is not only hyperbolic and cynical. It is inflammatory nonsense. But it is at least of a piece with her increasingly desperate struggle. …
The Corner thinks we should be paying attention to Jake Tapper’s blog.
Over at ABC, Jake Tapper has done some first-rate reporting on the campaign this year; chiefly because he seems to be subjecting all the candidates to real scrutiny. Case in point, Tapper seems to be one of the few people not so mesmerized by his mellifluous baritone he hasn’t noticed that Obama’s a “one-man gaffe machine.” …
So, Here’s Jake who wants to know “what the FARC” Obama was talking about.
… There have also been gaffes of more consequence.
As ABC News’ David Wright and Sunlen Miller wrote, Obama seemed to either think Arabic is spoken in Afghanistan or he misunderstands the nature of military translators.
More recently, Obama as he traveled through Florida seemed to give some contradictory statements about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and the Colombian terrorist group FARC.
On Thursday Obama told the Orlando Sentinel that he would meet with Chavez and “one of the obvious high priorities in my talks with President Hugo Chavez would be the fermentation of anti-American sentiment in Latin America, his support of FARC in Colombia and other issues he would want to talk about.”
OK, so a strong declaration that Chavez is supporting FARC, which Obama intends to push him on.
But then on Friday he said any government supporting FARC should be isolated. …
WaPo’s Fact Checker gives Obama three Pinocchio’s for his Auschwitz gaffe.
… In an attempt to burnish his credentials with America’s veterans, Barack Obama has frequently talked about his grandfather “who served in Patton’s army.” He has now added a new episode to his World War II repertoire: the uncle who liberated Auschwitz. Unfortunately, the story shows that the presumptive Democratic nominee has a poor grasp of European history and geography. …
Byron York thinks Obama’s continual family references might be a mistake.
I think it’s a mistake for Obama to make so many references to his family, as he did with his maternal grandfather’s military service over the Memorial Day weekend and as he will reportedly do again, with the same grandfather, in a trip to Punchbowl National Cemetery sometime in the future. It’s a mistake because it invites this question: How come he talks about his family a lot, but only one side? And then mostly just his grandparents on that side?
Before his marriage, Obama’s mother’s parents were his only real familial link to the sort of life experience that most Americans would recognize. His mother was basically an expatriate, and his father was a visitor from Kenya. (Although Obama has at times portrayed his father as drawn to the United States by the immigrant dream, he in fact came to the U.S. for school and went back home.) That leaves Toot and Gramps, the maternal grandparents who raised Obama as an adolescent in Hawaii while his mother was in Indonesia and his father had abandoned the family for Africa. Since Gramps was a World War II veteran, Obama has focused on him to show patriotic bona fides. …