French winemakers are suffering the consequences of their government’s defense of Saddam, EU policies that keep the Euro high, and resting on their own laurels. There are too many good wines in the world now to expect to sell it just because it’s French:

Riot police will be on standby this week for clashes, expected to involve up to 16,000 winemakers. Many of the demonstrators feel they have nothing to lose, since up to half of them are expected to go to the wall in the next five years unless the French government – or the Europe Union – bails them out.

Critics say French wine producers have brought the crisis on themselves by arrogantly overproducing wines of indifferent quality that do not sell.

Last year Mrs Montosson did not sell a single drop from her 50-acre vineyard for eight months because she refused the price offered by her agent. “He offered me only half of what I’d got for my wine the year before,” she said. “I said it was too low and refused to sell. But afterwards the prices just fell lower and lower.”

It’s not all about the boycott, but that has to be a major factor.

I get very irritated when people, even intelligent people, who I respect greatly, use the phrases “tax cuts” and “tax-rate cuts” interchangeably, and one of the things that I’d do if I were King would be to outlaw this.

But because so many are unfamiliar with the difference, the administration has managed to pull a fast one on the Beltway. They are going to require an analysis of tax proposals by scoring them dynamically, rather than (absurdly) they’ve done in the past, statically. What does this mean?

In the past, any time the CBO or GAO did an analysis of a proposed change in tax rate changes, they assumed that said rate changes would have no effect on the growth rate of the economy, either in the general economy, or in the specific economic sphere in which the tax change would take place. Anyone familiar with economics knows that such an assumption is…to put it gently…nonsense.

We can’t necessarily know what the effect of a tax rate change will be on an economic sector, but to assume that it will be nil is ridiculous.

So, people who are “scoring” (that is, attempting to estimate what the revenue effects of a proposed tax change will be) will now have a more difficult job–they will have to attempt to estimate what the effect of the tax change will be on the affected economic sectors when coming up with their estimate of revenue change for the federal government.

Will they get it right? Who knows. But at least now, they’ll have to make the attempt, instead of absurdly assuming that the effect is zero. It will also provide one more thing to argue about when we attempt to reduce tax rates, but since it will also have that effect on attempts to increase them, that’s a wash, in my opinion. At least it will force a debate on the subject, and make it a respectable topic of discussion.

Cindy Sheehan won’t be running against DiFi (whose intellect I’m also unimpressed with, though she’s nowhere near the moron that Cindy Sheehan is). Too bad. It would have been an entertaining self-immolation among CA Democrats.

Hillary’s presidential poll numbers at Rasmussen are at a low:

…just 27% of Americans say they would definitely vote for the former first lady while 43% would definitely vote against. Still, 59% of Americans believe it is somewhat or very likely that she will be the Democrat’s nominee in 2008.

Among Democrats, the number who would definitely vote for Clinton dropped 11 percentage points over the past two weeks.

This is a microcosm of the Democrats’ problem. Their base won’t allow them to nominate anyone who can win a general election, whether Hillary (who is a powerhouse of the party but politically unappealing to much of the electorate) or someone who will have to tack too far left to win the nomination to find their way back to the center in the fall.

Even brobdingnagian. Lileks comments on the latest federal budget:

You can expect the news stories to fasten on that 5.5 percent cut, since the media seem to operate with three unspoken and largely unexamined assumptions: We don’t spend enough on education; conservatives don’t want to spend anything on education anyway since it leads to godless rational beliefs like “the Earth is round”; and a reduction in the overall rate of increase is tantamount to a reduction in funds.

Really? If you find two $5 bills and lose one, are you $5 ahead or $5 behind? The latter, if you work in Washington.

A reduction in the projected rate of growth is always a cut. Note the headlines about the `07 proposals: “Bush’s $2.77 Trillion Budget Plan Calls for Medicare Cuts,” said The New York Times. The Washington Post had the same idea, and graciously upped the budget total: “Bush’s $2.8T Budget Proposal Cuts Domestic Programs.”

To which Democrats say: But of course. To which Republicans say: If only.

Conservatives will still, for the most part, vote Republican, even if they weep and rend their garments before checking off “R.” Why? Because they see Democrats as the ones more likely to tax everything that isn’t nailed down, levy “gravity user fees” for things that are, take away private health care, strangle school choice and want SpecOps to get a warrant before sabotaging Iranian nuke factories.

There are a lot of dim bulbs in the Senate, and there’s a lot of competition for the dimmest (Patty Murray, Babs Boxer, Jim Jeffords, Susan Collins come immediately to mind, and I’m sure that there are others), but my impression from every interview with him that I’ve ever heard is that Lincoln Chafee is not qualified (in Jonah Goldberg’s famous quip) to be a spell checker in an M&M factory. The Conways have a roundup of his political prospects this fall, including some other oatmeal-brained commentary from him:

Laffey described Chafee’s views on the region as “two standard deviations outside of American and Rhode Island thought.” In an effort to make the point, he quoted Chafee’s own words questioning the legitimacy of what the senator termed American “gripes” with Iran’s nuclear program…Chafee, he said, “doesn’t get it at all” that “there are some really bad people in the world.”

They’re upset that the National Republican Senatorial Committee continues to support him against the much more conservative Laffey, presumably on the assumption that he’s the only Republican (to the infinitesimal degree that he is) that can win Rhode Island. But here’s where the dim bulbedness comes into play. According to them, if even with the support of the NRSC, he loses the nomination, he’ll run as an independent.

But that would seem to me to result in a Republican win, because an independent (and liberal) Chafee would split the liberal vote with the Democrat candidate, whereas the Republicans would coalesce around Laffey. So this really is a fight worth waging, and it not only doesn’t necessarily risk a Senate seat for Republicans, but it might be an opportunity to replace Chafee with a real Republican, and provide a lesson to the other RINOs.

He should be. John Bolton has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. By a Swede.

Boy, that one’s going to piss off the TSA…

It shows a woman TSAer faking a wanding at the security line to steal a passenger’s soft drink.

…that John McCain is trying to rehabilitate his image with conservatives, in preparation for a run for the White House, this should put it to rest:

Sen. John McCain, who is to endorse Rep. John Shadegg for Maj Leader at a 3:15 Capitol presser, has already started calling around to some of his GOP pals in the House.

One thing to offer an endorsement to his fellow AZ’an and pork-buster, but quite another to actively whip support for his bid.

A Canadian who doesn’t hate the US has a response to Michael Moore’s idiocy:

Michael, even though you are highly political and rub some folks on the other end of the political spectrum the wrong way, we do appreciate your unabashed enthusiasm for our country.

You might be surprised to know that there are a considerable number of us who have kind thoughts and feelings toward Americans and America, even when we differ on some the policies coming out of Washington.

We wanted to elect people to national office who reflect that view and not the American-bashing one that the Liberals have spewing out for 13 years. That is why we sent the Conservatives to Ottawa.