Category Archives: Political Commentary

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?

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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

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

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.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

When The Old Becomes New Again

Are all of Hillary’s negatives really already “all out there”, as Lanny Davis spins? Rich Lowry thinks not:

The problem with this (and I’m more sympathetic to Hillary than Obama at this point) is that Hillary’s negatives aren’t “all out there.” She’s perfectly capable of creating new, damaging ones, as she did with the Bosnia story. Plus, Bill is always a wild card, in terms of what he’s going to say, what is going to be revealed about his business dealings, etc.

It actually goes beyond that. We don’t have to speculate on new revelations for Hillary to have big problems if she somehow snatches the nomination from Obama.

Throughout the nineties, the classic Clinton tactical response to discussion about their corruption or criminality was to say “that’s old news.” And it often, even usually, worked, given the degree to which the press was in the tank for them. And that will surely be their response if anyone brings up Cattlegate, the White House travel office, the missing billing records, the FBI files, “who hired Craig Livingstone,” Whitewater in general, etc. And we can be assured that these things (and particularly their abuse of women) will come up, because the Slick Grope Vets for Truth have pledged to make them come up if she gets the nomination. I assume that they’ve been keeping their powder dry during the nomination process, both because they want any revelations they have to have maximum impact in the fall, when people are paying attention, and because they wouldn’t have much effect on Democrat voters.

But if she does get the nomination, and Gennifer, Kathleen et al do make an issue of their treatment at the hands of both Bill and Hill, as I’ve written before, I don’t think the “it’s old news” gambit will fly, partly because it’s become too old:

One of the tactics that the Clintons used to use to deflect bad news was to leak something on a Friday afternoon, and hope that it would die down after the weekend. Then if anyone brought it up, they’d dismiss it as “that’s old news.”

Given how ignorant much of the public remains of all the Clinton scandals that they successfully buried in the nineties, I wonder if this “old news” tactic will continue to work if things like Travelgate are brought up as issues in a 2008 campaign. I’ve already noted that Hillary will have her own “Slick Grope Vets” problem if she runs.

…It occurs to me that the “that’s old news” defense may not work, particularly with the “Slick Grope Vets For Truth,” at least based on the Kerry experience. After all, what could be older news than his congressional testimony after Vietnam? Yet it did become a potent campaign issue.

Many of today’s young voters have no memory of the Clinton scandals. An eighteen-year old was only eight years old during the Lewinsky saga, and a toddler during the early scandals and Whitewater. Even today’s twenty-somethings weren’t paying that much attention at the time, and even if they were, they always got the Clinton spin in the MSM, not the vast amount of information available via the Internet and talk radio (and to a lesser degree, Fox News). So for them, it won’t be old news, or at least, it will be a revelation of history, of which they were previously unaware.

And this time, with the blogosphere, the MSM won’t be able to help her spin her way out as it did in the nineties. No, I don’t think that Hillary’s negatives are “all out there.” We can expect a massive replay, and reminder, if she gets the nomination, and to a lot of people, the “old news” will become new news, or more simply, news.