Stop the Insanity

I'm getting a little tired of hearing about gas prices. There must be a story every 15 minutes. Is that really necessary? I don't think its necessary to keep telling people what they probably already know. And then again and again. If only we could harness hot air for energy.

What's almost always missing, of course, is a dose of sanity. Well, let's get some, shall we?

The politicians have a lot to do with it.

Consider the "Liberal Line":

We are horribly dependent on foreign oil. But we shouldn't develop domestic oil or boost our refining capacity. We need a gas tax to wean Americans from foreign oil, but high gas prices are an outrage. We need alternative forms of energy, but we shouldn't use nuclear power. We need renewable, sustainable energy, unless it spoils the view of rich liberal icons.

Got it?

At least one politician understands this:

During an interview with Larry Kudlow earlier this week about rising gas prices, Rep. Blackburn observed, “If we're going to work toward [energy independence], we’re going to have to do some things differently. Now, I can tell you one of the things that I wish had been done differently is over the past 30 years, we have had environmental extremists driving energy policy in this country, saying no to everything.”

Certainly increased demand for oil from the growing Chinese and Indian economies and instability in the Middle East are major pressures on oil prices, but both Republicans and Democrats have added to these pressures by allowing the environmental movement to tie our energy policy in knots.

Bowing to environmentalist demands since the 1970s, Congress has blocked oil and gas drilling from areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (10.4 billion barrels of oil, according to the U.S. Geological Service) and the Outer Continental Shelf (86 billion barrels of oil, according to the Minerals Management Service).

I also really like this story today: 'Qatar: Price of oil would drop $15 if Politicians would shut up'
Seems fairly obvious to me. Nearly every politician in Washington has joined the gasbag scaremongering witchhunt against oil companies.

Some pundits sure do get it right, though. Here's Neil Cavuto talking to Durbin:

CAVUTO: "Do you know how much, out of curiosity, senator, is billed into a gallon of gasoline, profits of the oil companies, per gallon? Do you know what's the average?"

DURBIN: ExxonMobil, what did they make in three months? It was $10 billion, if I'm not mistaken, the largest corporate profits in the history of the United States.

CAVUTO: Maybe you could answer my question. It's about 9 cents. Do you know how much taxes are, senator? About 50 cents.

DURBIN: Let me tell you....

CAVUTO: So, don't you think you should be more focused on the tax- gouging than necessarily the profit-gouging?

DURBIN: How do you explain their profits -- how do you explain their profits after taxes? You're ignoring that, Neil. You don't want to talk about it.

CAVUTO: Are you ignoring the taxes? Senator, I'm asking you simply, are you ignoring the taxes?

DURBIN: No. I'm telling you...

CAVUTO: Would you roll back those taxes?

DURBIN: .. the taxes pay for the roads that we use.

CAVUTO: Would you roll back those taxes?

DURBIN: No.

CAVUTO:"So, 50 cents a gallon, those taxes are okay? The nine-cent profit, that's not okay?"

DURBIN: Oh, stop the 9 cents. Talk about ExxonMobil's record profits, my friend. Four hundred million dollars for their CEO, aren't you a little embarrassed by that?

CAVUTO: Are you worried, though, Senator, that you're mixing this argument here...

DURBIN: You didn't answer me, Neil.

CAVUTO: that, when people look at what is being paid for a gallon of gasoline, the problem, the oil companies are no saints, but you know what, Senator? I think you're a bigger sinner, because it's the tax gouging that is killing Americans, not necessarily the price of the crude.

Its economics 101. And thats all there is to it. Supply and Demand.

Modern Slave Labor Importation Roundup Part III

I'm not the only one getting a pit peeved at the demostrations. Se habla entitlement:

This could be the finest hour for the political left if we really can be convinced that illegal immigration is a right, that those here illegally are innocent victims, and that the real guilt lies with U.S. citizens who believe our laws mean something and should be enforced.

Draping these bogus claims in the garb of the civil-rights movement is particularly annoying.

The civil-rights movement was about enforcing the law, not breaking it. The Civil War amendments to the Constitution were not getting the job done in what has been a long struggle in this country to treat blacks as human beings. If Americans were kidnapping Mexicans and selling them into slavery here, I might see the equivalence. But these are free people, who chose to come here and chose to do so illegally.

Just considering Mexicans, how can we understand their taking to the streets of our country to demand rights and freedom when they seem to have little interest in doing this where they do have rights, which is in Mexico? There is no reason why Mexico, a country rich in beauty and natural resources, cannot be every bit as prosperous as the United States.

It's not happening because of a long history of mismanagement, corruption and excessive government. Although Mexico is a democracy, for some reason Mexicans seem to need to be north of the Rio Grande to get politically active and demand the benefits of a free society.

Last year the Pew Hispanic Center surveyed adults in Mexico and asked them if they would come to the United States if they had the means and opportunity to do so. Forty-six percent responded yes. Almost half of Mexican adults said they'd rather live here! When asked if they would do it illegally, more than 20 percent said yes.

Yet in the current contest for the Mexican presidency, the leading candidate is a leftist former mayor of Mexico City who is polling in the high 30s.

Maybe you can figure out why almost half of Mexican adults say they would rather live in the United States, presumably because of the opportunities our free society affords, yet vote for a leftist candidate who will continue policies in Mexico that choke off any prospect for growth, prosperity and opportunity.

So forgive me for being a little suspicious of the wholesome picture being painted of these folks who are pouring across our border allegedly just to be free, work and maintain traditional families.

What exactly is the legal basis of the claims made by the rallies? Well, none:

With last month's mass demonstrations of illegal aliens, the United States has entered the era of postmodern rights. The protesters looked like conventional rights demonstrators, with their raised fists, chants, and banners. But unlike political protesters of the past, the illegal-alien marchers invoked no legal basis for their claims. Their argument boils down to: "We are here, therefore we have a right to the immigration status we desire." Like the postmodern signifier, this legal claim refers to nothing outside of itself; it is, in the jargon of deconstruction, a presence based on an absence.

The consequences of this novel argument are not insignificant: the demise of nation-states and of the rule of law. Remember: The only basis for the illegals' demands is: "I am here." The "I am here" argument could be made by anyone anywhere — a Moroccan sneaking into Sweden could make the same demand for legal status. In one stroke, the border-breaking lobby has nullified the entire edifice of American immigration law and with it, sovereignty itself. None of the distinctions in that law matter, the advocates say. The conditions for legal entry? Null and void. The democratically chosen priorities for who may enter the country and who not? Give me a break! In other words, the United States has no right to decide who may come across its borders and what legal status an alien may obtain upon arrival. Those decisions remain solely the prerogative of the alien himself. The border no longer exists.

One of the most interesting aspects of this debate is are the calls for temporary work programs, to do jobs Americans won't do. I noted something about this a little earlier, but besides what I said before, there is a further "ridiculous" factor, you might say. As Mark Levin has pointed out most recently,

Why is it assumed that businesses, which today demand illegal labor, won't continue to demand cheap labor, skirt a guest-worker program, and evade taxes and regulations in order to keep down the price of lettuce (or whatever)?

That is, once a guest worker program is put into place, it will become irrelvant, more or less. The reason for implementing such a program would not be because Americans simply won't do those jobs (that is about as bald-faced a lie as I've heard in months) but Americans happen to work for fair pay. Illegal aliens will work for practically nothing--in some cases, employers can work it out so it ends up that way. It is not the job itself, it is the psuedo-slave labor aspect of it. Making a temporary worker program would mean paperwork for the companies, and in all likelihood, better wages. Which would just lead to the above quoted passage.

Now, it seems to me the most common objection to this is that if those jobs were taken by Americans who were payed fairly, that would lead to an increase in the cost of those goods for all of us. Our economy would trend downward. (yet again, see above quote.) Well, there is certainly a flaw to this argument, and in reality it is probably just the opposite. So what, importing Mexico's poor is going to help our economy? Do it enough and we're going to become a Third World nation. I am sorry, but in my opinion, the economic argument is one of the weakest. Various bits from The Immigration Mystique[1]:

While no one blames the immigrants for America's economic problems, nevertheless the arrival en masse of unskilled immigrants self-evidently thwarts the nation's attempts at overcoming problems in productivity, and provides a disincentive to advance toward higher technological levels. . . . The result, as Lawrence E. Harrison has written, is that the United States now emphasizes relatively cheap labor in the manner that Third World countries typically do. On the other hand, if the United States should make rapid progress in technological innovation, the ensuing reliance on robots and computers would ensure that a work force comprised significantly of uneducated and unskilled immigrants became to that extent unemployable and economically irrelevant.

In other words, this reliance on pseudo-slave labor is more of a hindrance to the advancement of this country. And after all, the same economic collapse arguments were made by the defenders of both slave and child labor. Both were obviously shown to be bankrupt.

Further,

In fact, according to Huddle, Corwin, and MacDonald, illegal aliens engaged in common labor quit their jobs with approximately the same frequence as American workers and for the same reasons (that is, those for which labroers usually quit their work) to be replaced by other aliens as cheap and docile as themselves. The truth is, citizen workers find if impossible to compete with illegal ones when the competition between them will be decided by which of them are willing to work the longer hours under the mroe unpleasnt conditions for less pay. Simon and other immigrationists are eager to take unscrupulous and hypocritical employers at their word when they complain that "Americans don't want to work at menial jobs." Vernon Briggs, though admitting that the claim remains a very difficult one for economists either to disprove or substatiated, insists that there is no evidence at all to support it. A former undersecretary of labor, Malcolm Lovell, has noted taht as of 1981 nearly 30 percent of the American labor force held the same sort of low-skilled jobs that illegal aliens typically take; while a study made by Ohio university in 1980 for the Labor Department indicated that a majority of teenagers and young people were willing to accept ill-paying jobs in such industries as the fast food business--[. . .]

------------
Endnotes
[1] The Immigration Mystique, by Chilton Williamson Jr. BasicBooks: 1996.

Poor Undocumented Day Laborers Roundup Part II

More from the illegal invaders front.

For starters, its useful to Decode Immigration Doublespeak. A couple highlights:

“Pro-Immigration Rallies.” The elite media consisted presented the protests as rallies in favor of immigration or immigrants rights. The Washington Post called the protestors “pro-immigration demonstrators.” New York Times “reporters” described a rally in Madison, Wisconsin – home to a large, left-leaning state university, naturally – as a “rally for immigrants’ rights,” burying in the second paragraph the inconvenient reality, “many of [the protestors are] undocumented immigrants who speak no English.” The sympathy of the masses would be moved in quite another way were these described by more accurate terms, like “Open Borders Rallies,” “Pro-Lawbreaking Rallies,” “Anti-Homeland Security Rallies,” or “Massive Collections of Perhaps Felonious Welfare Recipients.”

Patriotic and Pro-American. The protestors’ sudden affinity for the Stars-and-Stripes fooled no one in Middle America – and a few of the organizers were surprisingly forthright about their disingenuous motives. The L.A. Times reported Cardinal Roger Mahony told his flock to put away Mexican and Latin American flags: “They do not help us get the legislation we need.” The New York Times quoted Miami protest organizer Maria Rodriguez instructing the crowd:

This is the people bringing the flags. It seems that they heard the message: American people want flags. We'll, let's give them flags! It's really spontaneous. It's not about the flag. It's about people getting a chance.

Perhaps most outspoken in his non-pro-American rhetoric was L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who shouted:

America we've come here to work, we clean your toilets, we clean your hotels, we build your houses, we take care of your children. We want you to help us take care of our children as well. Today we say to this great America, America you were founded on the backs of immigrants.

Like reparations advocates, their cry is, “We are owed

My favorite quote from the article: "'I want things to work out in our favor, or we go back to our country.' (Finally some sense!)"

Some Talking Points:

News coverage of the illegal-immigrant demos was awash with happy-clappy cliches on the subject every one of which has a straightforward answer. Samples.

---"They're just coming here for a better life." Well, that's also the reason people rob banks. If you rob a bank and get away with it, you'll have a MUCH better life than you had before. Should we legalize bank robbery?

---"Many of them have sons & daughters in the military, fighting in Iraq." On general grounds, I think hiring illegal immigrants into the armed forces is a lousy idea. When the Romans ran out of citizens willing to fight, they hired Germans, and look what happened. Still, any illegal who has served in combat on this country's behalf ought to be given citizenship, though I'd make his relatives go through proper channels. At least we'd find out how many is that "many."

---"Deporting illegals would mean splitting up families." Only if they chose to split up. If a man is illegal, his wife legal, and their child a citizen, I'd deport the man. They'd have to decide among themselves whether to split up the family or not. The wife and child could go with the man, if they didn't want to be split up.

Time to face some rather uncomfortable facts about some of the rally organizers. Domestic Terrorist Groups are involved.
See also, Who's Behind the Immigration Rallies?

More info on the crime wave:

In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.

I also suggest picking up a book by the title The Immigration Mystique

I am getting really aggravated. I am also tired of hearing the idiotic statements that we "are a nation of immigrants" and that we "need a temporary worker program." Stop already!

Iraq and Niger

Well what do ya know.

But Iraq did try to buy Uranium in Niger

Oh, and Joe Wilsom showed as much himself:

''Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the president had lied to the American people, that the vice president had lied, and that he had 'debunked' the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. . . . [N]ot only did he NOT 'debunk' the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true.''

And besides, Britain stands by it's assertions and the Butler commision found such asstertions to be well-founded.

Climate of Fear

This is a downright superb article from opinionjournal the other day. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few highlights:

To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.

[ . . . ]

Al Gore. In 1992, he ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists--a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.

Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

Here is another remarkable article, this one from the Telegraph:

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.

[ . . . ]

Marketed under the imprimatur of the IPCC, the bladder-trembling and now infamous hockey-stick diagram that shows accelerating warming during the 20th century - a statistical construct by scientist Michael Mann and co-workers from mostly tree ring records - has been a seminal image of the climate scaremongering campaign. Thanks to the work of a Canadian statistician, Stephen McIntyre, and others, this graph is now known to be deeply flawed.

[ . . . ]

Two simple graphs provide needed context, and exemplify the dynamic, fluctuating nature of climate change. The first is a temperature curve for the last six million years, which shows a three-million year period when it was several degrees warmer than today, followed by a three-million year cooling trend which was accompanied by an increase in the magnitude of the pervasive, higher frequency, cold and warm climate cycles. During the last three such warm (interglacial) periods, temperatures at high latitudes were as much as 5 degrees warmer than today's. The second graph shows the average global temperature over the last eight years, which has proved to be a period of stasis.

The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown.[ . . . ]

Immigration Roundup

Well, with all the illegals marching I thought I'd put in a few words and point out a few fallacies currently popular.

For starters, my biggest peeve is the "nation of immigrants" argument. Just read this.

In reality, we are not—even in a figurative sense—a nation of immigrants or even a nation of descendants of immigrants. As Chilton Williamson pointed out in The Immigration Mystique, the 80,000 mostly English and Scots-Irish settlers of colonial times, the ancestors of America’s historic Anglo-Saxon majority, had not transplanted themselves from one nation to another (which is what defines immigration), but from Britain and its territories to British colonies. They were not immigrants, but colonists. The immigrants of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries came to an American nation that had already been formed by those colonists and their descendants. Therefore to call America "a nation of immigrants" is to suggest that America, prior to the late nineteenth century wave of European immigration, was not America. It is to imply that George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant (descended from the original colonists) were not "real" Americans, but that Richard Rodriguez (descended from 20th century immigrants) and the anti-American demonstrators last week in Los Angeles, are.

And now, to the proposals that "don't" give amnesty. Well, they do. And let's be clear, amnesty is not a good thing.

Reagan gave amnesty to 4 million, and we get 12 million more. What part of “If you forget history, you’re doomed to repeat it,” do they not get?

These people are breaking the law, and we just give them a free pass. And many of them continue to break the law, as shown by the fact that illegals make up a ridiculous number of criminals.

And besides, they don't "do jobs Americans won't", they just do it them for dirt, while sponging off of the government and costing us all. STOP SAYING THEY DO JOBS AMERICANS WON'T.

And I have other issues with some of the idiotic proposals being thrown around. We are told they will have to be around for 6 years or 11 years or whatever number of years, pay a fine, pay back taxes, etc, whatever for the various plans before they can become legal. Well, I would like to know how exactly we are going to know how long they have been here. They are, after all, illegal. The point is we don't know they're here. And these plans think they can somehow make things right by documenting them? I don't think so. More and more are going to come, and guess what, they aren't going to be documented. And all the while we have these illegals marching in rallies and flying the American flag upside down. These people need to be deported. What we need is a plan with teeth. No, I take that back, what we need is enforcement. We don't need more blathering from politicians, we need the laws currently to be enforced. And it's not a matter of a divided nation. It's just politicians who think they know better. Well, come election time, we'll see who knows better.

I'm a huge supporter of free-trade, but the argument from free-trade does not hold up well. Just read this.

We don't need guest workers, we don't need amnesty, we don't need illegal aliens invading the country.

UPDATE 4/10:

Try this on for size.

Enter Mexico illegally. Never mind immigration quotas, visas, international law, or any of that nonsense.

Once there, demand that the local government provide free medical care for you and your entire family.

Demand bilingual nurses and doctors.

Demand free bilingual government forms, bulletins, etc.

Keep your American identity strong. Fly Old Glory from your rooftop, or proudly display it in your front window, or on your car bumper.

Speak only English at home and in public and insist that your children do likewise.

Demand classes on American culture in the Mexican school system.

Demand a Mexican driver license. This will afford other legal rights and will go far to legitimize your unauthorized, illegal presence in Mexico.

Drive around with no liability insurance.

Insist that Mexican law enforcement teach English to all its officers.

Good luck!
Good luck is right. The Mexican authorities wouldn't put up with that kind of behavior for a second. As they shouldn't. As we shouldn't. And yet we do. In this one way, it would be nice if we were a little more like Mexico.