Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

If McCain Loses This Election

22 Comments

…this will be the reason:

My support for McCain has been just as tentative as McCain’s support for market liberty, the Constitution, limited government, low taxes and not buying in to the leftist takeover on climate change.

I’ve had it with him with this latest insult. I didn’t like him showing up that Cincinnatti guy supporting him either. If he doesn’t like their tone, tell them in private. I want an apology to the North Carolina GOP or no more money.

Treat other Republicans with respect, period.

This anti-Republican schtick endears him with the press, but he can’t count on enough independents to win, if the base stays home.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Fascists Of The Corn

3 Comments

David Freddoso is still angry about our insane and, in my opinion, criminal ethanol and sugar policies:

The problem is that our sugar industry has even better lobbyists than big ethanol. They enjoy price supports, which we pay for both through the Treasury and in the supermarket. The price of our sugar is usually twice that of the world market. The sugar growers love it — even if they cannot sell all of their sugar, they have a guaranteed government buyer at an inflated price. The corn growers love it too, because high U.S. sugar prices push our food industries to use high-fructose corn syrup (ever seen that on a product label?) as an alternative sweetener — yet another artificial support for the world price of corn.

Not to mention wreaking havoc on the Everglades. Price-supported sugar cane is using up a lot of the water that both south Floridian humans and animals need, and they do this with the same political clout that they use to get the subsidies and tariffs, for an industry that is not all that big in terms of the economy.

Even if we want ethanol, we can’t solve the problem by importing sugar, because there are tariffs in place. We can’t import the ethanol itself because there’s a high tariff against that, too. Wherever you turn, there’s no way out — Americans don’t enjoy economic freedom, we live in a managed economy.

It makes me especially proud of my country when I see Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) call foreign delegates’ concerns over a potential doubling of world hunger “a joke…”

Let’s call these people out for what they are–Republicans and Democrats alike–fascists. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

[Update a few minutes later]

Biofool.

[Update early evening]

Oh, wonderful:

Key House and Senate farm bill negotiators reached agreement today on the main elements of the farm bill…[T]he five-year bill would raise the target prices and loan rates for northern crops beginning in 2010, raise the sugar loan rate three-quarters of a cent and include a sugar-to-ethanol program.

Oh, that’s just great. We have a program that makes us overpay for sugar, and now we’re going to start a new program to subsidize the ethanol we create from it — because without the subsidy, the inflated sugar price we’ve created will make the ethanol unprofitable.

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, they always find a way.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

Naming The Enemy

2 Comments

Are we at war with Jihadism?

Of course it is true that Islamic reformers are trying to redefine the very troubling concept of jihad as a positive: viz., an internal struggle for personal betterment. Much as I’d love them to succeed, it is a well-intentioned folly — largely because of modern culture, which puts such a premium on authenticity. If you want to encourage the reformers, then encourage them to drop the concept of jihad altogether. As a matter of history, jihad is a military obligation. As long as it is accorded a central place in Islam, the militants are always going to be deemed more authentic, more true to the faith of Mohammed, than the reformers.

If correct, this makes the latest State Department policy all the more idiotic.

I still prefer the term Hirabis myself.

Political Commentary

Second Amendment Needed

8 Comments

For Zimbabwe:

Everything in Mr. Mugabe’s history suggests he will use whatever force is necessary to maintain his grip on power. As a rebel leader participating in the 1980 election, he promised to continue the country’s civil war if he lost. Not long after taking power, he murdered some 30,000 members of the minority Ndebele tribe in what is known as the Matabeleland Massacre. In 2005, as punishment for voting against his ZANU-PF party, he destroyed the homes of 700,000 poor Zimbabweans. He has killed untold numbers of political opponents in the past and driven even more into exile.

Since so many of the country’s security officials are prime beneficiaries of Mr. Mugabe’s kleptocracy (and might be implicated for human-rights abuses were the regime to fall), it’s doubtful that the military would ever allow a peaceful “velvet revolution” to transpire – as many speculated in the days after the election.

In short, Mr. Mugabe’s opponents need weapons soon. This is not to effect regime change, but for simple self-defense.

Hopefully, though, it would result in regime change as well. Jefferson famously said that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Well, there’s been plenty of patriot blood shed there, but apparently there’s an element lacking in the fertilizer. Monsters like Mugabe were exactly the kind of tyrants he had in mind.

Economics, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

A Policy Disaster

5 Comments

Deroy Murdock writes on the ethanol scam, and its global effects on food and fuel prices.

[Update a few minutes later]

If this pans out, ethanol will make a lot more sense, won’t be competing with food, and won’t require any subsidies:

Along with cellulose, the cyanobacteria developed by Professor R. Malcolm Brown Jr. and Dr. David Nobles Jr. secrete glucose and sucrose. These simple sugars are the major sources used to produce ethanol.

“The cyanobacterium is potentially a very inexpensive source for sugars to use for ethanol and designer fuels,” says Nobles, a research associate in the Section of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.

Brown and Nobles say their cyanobacteria can be grown in production facilities on non-agricultural lands using salty water unsuitable for human consumption or crops.

Bring it on.

[Evening update]

David Freddoso has an appropriately outraged follow-up to the Murdock piece:

Our government’s negligence and perhaps even malicious misdirection of societal resources toward a worthless, unwanted product — ethanol — will cause millions of people to go hungry tonight.

The way things are going, this could become the worst chapter yet in the sad, ruinous history of our bipartisan agricultural welfare programs. For those who write in and protest that free-market capitalism is an uncompassionate, un-Christian economic system, I submit that you are currently witnessing the alternative.

Indeed. End the tariffs, end the subsidies. Let the market work.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Weird

Illegal Legal Weed

2 Comments

What would we do without federal regulators?

Federal alcohol regulators thought differently. They have ordered Dillmann to stop selling beer bottles with caps that say “Try Legal Weed.”

While reviewing the proposed label for Dillmann’s latest beer, Lemurian Lager, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau said the message on the caps he has been using for his five current beers amounts to a drug reference.

In a letter explaining its decision, the agency, which regulates the brewing industry, said the wording could “mislead consumers about the characteristics of the alcoholic beverage.”

Because, you know, a bottle of beer is so similar to a joint. I wonder how many bottles you’d have to drink before you really couldn’t tell the difference?

Political Commentary

Is Obama A Croc?

5 Comments

Well, maybe.

If Barack Obama had to be compared to a shoe product right now, it would have to be Crocs. These are the foam and vinyl casual shoes with the great big crocodile-like holes in them that everybody seemed to want six months ago. Today, it’s hard to find very many people still willing to wear them. They are so last year.

Certainly what he’s selling is a crock.

I do think that he’s past his sell-by date. But I wish that people hadn’t caught on to him until after the convention. There’s enough potential buyers’ remorse out there that Hillary! may yet pull it out.

Political Commentary

The Democrats’ Civil War

3 Comments

And it’s not very civil. Here’s a report from the front lines:

One of the things that makes this division in the Democratic ranks so intense is that each side of this demographic divide would prefer to win with as minimal help from the other side as possible. Read the pro-Obama blogs; their comments drip with contempt for the demographics in Hillary’s coalition – the elderly, unions, Catholics, the white working class, etc. They see these folks as more socially conservative, resistant to radical change, and holding back the party from embracing its true progressive ideals.

(One other wrinkle – your average liberal blogger thinks our Middle East policy is way too deferential to Israel’s interests, and bristles at what they see as pandering to Jewish voters, such as promising to “obliterate” those who would attack the Jewish state.)

Meanwhile, the white working class, the elderly and Catholic tend to look at the Obama coalition – the young activists, African-Americans, and the latte-sipping university professors – with a certain amount of suspicion and distrust. All this talk of ethereal “change” and not enough how you’ll help put more food on the table.

Also, heard from a smart conservative strategist a day or so ago… this is what happens when your party is made up of groups that want government to do things for them (and spend time and resources) vs. when your party is made up of groups that want government to get off their backs and go away.

I just keep munching popcorn.

Political Commentary

The Democrats’ Civil War

And it’s not very civil. Here’s a report from the front lines:

One of the things that makes this division in the Democratic ranks so intense is that each side of this demographic divide would prefer to win with as minimal help from the other side as possible. Read the pro-Obama blogs; their comments drip with contempt for the demographics in Hillary’s coalition – the elderly, unions, Catholics, the white working class, etc. They see these folks as more socially conservative, resistant to radical change, and holding back the party from embracing its true progressive ideals.

(One other wrinkle – your average liberal blogger thinks our Middle East policy is way too deferential to Israel’s interests, and bristles at what they see as pandering to Jewish voters, such as promising to “obliterate” those who would attack the Jewish state.)

Meanwhile, the white working class, the elderly and Catholic tend to look at the Obama coalition – the young activists, African-Americans, and the latte-sipping university professors – with a certain amount of suspicion and distrust. All this talk of ethereal “change” and not enough how you’ll help put more food on the table.

Also, heard from a smart conservative strategist a day or so ago… this is what happens when your party is made up of groups that want government to do things for them (and spend time and resources) vs. when your party is made up of groups that want government to get off their backs and go away.

I just keep munching popcorn.

Political Commentary

The Democrats’ Civil War

And it’s not very civil. Here’s a report from the front lines:

One of the things that makes this division in the Democratic ranks so intense is that each side of this demographic divide would prefer to win with as minimal help from the other side as possible. Read the pro-Obama blogs; their comments drip with contempt for the demographics in Hillary’s coalition – the elderly, unions, Catholics, the white working class, etc. They see these folks as more socially conservative, resistant to radical change, and holding back the party from embracing its true progressive ideals.

(One other wrinkle – your average liberal blogger thinks our Middle East policy is way too deferential to Israel’s interests, and bristles at what they see as pandering to Jewish voters, such as promising to “obliterate” those who would attack the Jewish state.)

Meanwhile, the white working class, the elderly and Catholic tend to look at the Obama coalition – the young activists, African-Americans, and the latte-sipping university professors – with a certain amount of suspicion and distrust. All this talk of ethereal “change” and not enough how you’ll help put more food on the table.

Also, heard from a smart conservative strategist a day or so ago… this is what happens when your party is made up of groups that want government to do things for them (and spend time and resources) vs. when your party is made up of groups that want government to get off their backs and go away.

I just keep munching popcorn.