At least temporarily. A federal judge has struck down the idiotic and mendacious drilling moratorium.

My prediction: the lamestream media and the administration will attempt to make hay out of the fact that Judge Feldman is a Reagan appointee. I expect them to appeal, unfortunately. But at least the ban is lifted for now, or will be in thirty days.

[Update a few minutes later]

They’ve already said they’re going to appeal. But I don’t think they can get it reinstated until they win the appeal, if they do (and I suspect they won’t). I wonder if they’ll try to get the appellate court to take it as an emergency case? No, I don’t really. You know they will.

Will there be a federal bailout of California? As a Californian, I’m firmly on record as opposing it, so don’t get mad at me when they pick your pocket to prop up our public-employee unions. If I were Whitman, I’d be running on a platform of abolishing them.

Even on its own terms.

No one who was really paying attention should be shocked.

Thieves.

Russia is getting rid of the capital gains tax. But President Obama doesn’t think that’s fair.

Some thoughts on the impending collapse of the euro, and how much the UK may end up on the hook regardless of the fact that they kept sterling. I found this part interesting, though:

Again and again in politics, great schemes don’t work – Soviet Communism, for example, and now the euro. Rational people tend to conclude that, because a scheme doesn’t work, it will quickly stop. Unfortunately, rational people are wrong. Bad political schemes are usually given up only when they have been tested literally to destruction. It would be much better for Europe if the euro had never happened, and I long for it somehow to fade away, but the process of destruction will be horrendous, and it is only just beginning.

I think that we were seeing the same thing with Constellation and NASA’s five- and ten-year plans. Interestingly, the Founders didn’t have a great scheme, because they understood that they don’t work. That’s why they wrote a constitution of limited government. Unfortunately, the great schemers have managed to circumvent it over the past two and a third centuries. Their great scheme is on the verge of collapse, as well, and as usual, all will pay, guilty and innocent alike.

North Korea is finally turning to the free market? I don’t understand why. I was under the impression that the government was indifferent to starvation.

…in which it has no interest: how to waive the Jones Act.

I’ve got a better idea, for which there will be even less appetite in this administration — repeal it. It’s a protectionist relic of the last century. Along with Davis-Bacon (which is also racist in intent). Not to mention the Wagner Act.

They told me if I voted for John McCain, the special relationship with the Britain would deteriorate. Man, the Brits aren’t happy.

The vitriol has a xenophobic edge: witness the venomous references to “British Petroleum”, a name BP dropped in 1998 (just as well that it dispensed with the name Anglo-Iranian Oil Company even longer ago). Vilifying BP also gets in the way of identifying other culprits, one of which is the government. BP operates in one of the most regulated industries on earth with some of the most perverse rules, subsidies and incentives. Shoddy oversight clearly contributed to the spill, and an energy policy which reduced the demand for oil would do more to avert future environmental horrors than fierce retribution.

Mr Obama is not the socialist the right claims he is (see article). He went out of his way, meeting BP executives on June 16th, to insist that he has no interest in undermining the company’s financial stability. But his reaction is cementing business leaders’ impression that he is indifferent to their concerns. If he sees any impropriety in politicians ordering executives about, upstaging the courts and threatening confiscation, he has not said so. The collapse in BP’s share price suggests that he has convinced the markets that he is an American version of Vladimir Putin, willing to harry firms into doing his bidding.

Guess that relationship will have to be on hold until 2013.

[Updatea early afternoon]

Barack Obama, most unpopular man in Britain. Glad we have that “smart diplomacy.”

The PIIGS who fell to earth.