Oil at $300

You would think that this story is right out of science fiction. But the facts appear to be that the US Democrat-controlled Congress intends to destroy the Republican middle class with $11 per gallon gasoline. The Democrats’ base -- wealthy white “limousine liberals”, and very poor people -- won’t be harmed, but the families who live in suburbia will be devastated... [snip]

The so-called “Global Oil Crisis” is an invention of the US liberal ruling class, which has successfully managed to export their disastrous ideas worldwide. Oil supply and demand has been on knife-edge balance for years. With the growth of the newly well off Chinese and Indian car-consuming populations, oil consumption has been rapidly increasing in the developing world - even as it has been dropping in the US... [snip]

In the process, a minor supply-demand problem has been artificially legislated into a full-blown crisis. The stock market’s response has been predictable: down, down, down.

The liberal solution, of course, is for Congress to raise taxes, and force industry to adapt wacky “carbon credit” schemes to line the pockets of the rich liberals who sell the newly-invented credits, like Al Gore’s new company is doing. [snip]

And the irony? [the usual long-list of our vast energy reserves here at home going untapped] All of this can be done now with results beginning in 90 days, and using new super-clean super-efficient and environmentally-friendly technology. The result: oil will drop down to well below $100 per barrel and the economy will once again boom. If France and China and Brazil can do it, why can’t America?

Why not indeed?

[Highly Recommended - & forward to friends >]

READ MORE

Pelosi: Drilling in protected areas ‘a hoax’

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday shut the door on expanding oil and gas drilling beyond areas that have already been approved for energy exploration, drawing a clear distinction from her counterparts in charge of the Senate. “This call for drilling in areas that are protected is a hoax, it’s an absolute hoax on the part of the Republicans and this administration” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference.

[?]

READ MORE

Senate OKs promotion of Iraq commander Petraeus

Washington - The Senate has confirmed Gen. David Petraeus as the top commander in the Middle East. The vote was 95-2. Immediately following the confirmation, the Senate was expected to approve the nomination of Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno to replace Petraeus as the chief military officer in Iraq.

[the ramifications of this man's accomplishments are hard to exaggerate - of course we'll need wait for future historians, the media is doing its best to ignore him now.
btw: the two who opposed were Democratic Sens. Robert Byrd and Tom Harkin]

READ MORE

Surveillance Bill Debate Comes to an End

Some 15 months after the first reports emerged that the Bush administration may have been engaging in a massive, top-secret, warrantless surveillance program, Congress passed a sweeping new law Wednesday that critics say will leave most of the program largely intact...

[I.e.; we need it, they know it, and still waisted nearly a year and a half with their political grandstanding]

READ MORE

MSM Yawn at 550 Metric Tons of Uranium Removed from Iraq

Reuters has the story, as does the New York Times and the Associated Press (see below fold) but this is not exactly burning up the cable news networks today.

Given the media consternation over the pre-war charge of Iraq seeking yellow cake from Africa, and the media's penchant for making front page headlines of top secret missions in the war on terrorism, it's quite telling that this story appears to be one the mainstream media are conveniently ignoring.

READ MORE

Iran

.
. Iran has resumed A-bomb project, says West
Iran has resumed work on constructing highly sophisticated equipment that nuclear experts say is primarily used for building atomic weapons, according to the latest intelligence reports received by Western diplomats. The work is aimed at developing the blueprint provided by Dr AQ Khan, the ''father'' of Pakistan's nuclear bomb (Snip) Iran's Revolutionary Guard, which has overall responsibility for the country's nuclear programme, has set up several civilian companies...
READ MORE

Iran tests more missiles as U.S. ready to defend
Tehran - Iran tested more missiles in the Gulf on Thursday, state media said, and the United States reminded Tehran that it was ready to defend its allies. Washington, which accuses Tehran of seeking nuclear arms, said after Iran test-fired nine missiles on Wednesday there should be no more such tests if Iran wanted the world's trust. (Snip) The missile tests rattled global oil markets, pushing up the price of oil...
READ MORE

U.S. ties Caracas to Hezbollah aid

[HT:DW]
Santa Cruz, Bolivia - The Bush administration is accusing the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of providing cash and refuge to the militant Islamist group Hezbollah of southern Lebanon. An investigation by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) names Venezuelan diplomat Ghazi Nasr al Din and Venezuelan-Arab businessman Fawzi Kanan as key links between the two...
READ MORE

Russia 'backed Litvinenko murder'

The murder of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko was carried out with the backing of the Russian state, Whitehall sources have told the BBC. A senior security official told Newsnight there were ''very strong indications it was a state action''. Mr Litvinenko, who was a fierce critic of former Russian President Vladimir Putin, was poisoned in London in 2006.

READ MORE

Sarkozy twofer...

.
Sarkozy snubs Chinese pressure
Strasbourg - French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday rejected Chinese pressure not to meet Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. ''It's not up to China to set my agenda and my meetings,'' he told members of the European Parliament, without confirming whether he would meet the Dalai Lama. (Snip) Chinese Ambassador Kong Quan warned of ''serious consequences'' to Sino-French relations if Sarkozy met the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.
[kudos]
READ MORE

Nicolas Sarkozy turns screw on Irish over EU treaty
Brussels - The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, will use a Paris summit next weekend to increase pressure on Ireland’s prime minister to 'find a way' out of the impasse created by his country’s rejection of the Lisbon treaty, aimed at re-organising the European Union. Brian Cowen, the Irish leader, may want to keep a low profile at a weekend of French festivities starting on July 13 when he will again face the ire of EU leaders over Ireland’s no vote on the treaty...
['find a way out', translation: nullify the will of the people. The uber-government that is the EU is becoming scarier all the time. Will Europeans wake up to it in time?]
READ MORE

Kristof, the UN, Darfur, and Iraq

The continuing genocide in Darfur underscores how ineffective the "international community" in general--and the United Nations in particular--are when it comes to putting an end to genocide. Pick your spot -- Darfur, Rwanda, Kosovo, Burma, or any other nation on the planet -- and ask yourself what the UN has done to put an end to massive violations of human rights.

The answer is virtually nothing.

Because nations like Russia and China serve on the U.N. Security Council [with 'veto authority'], there are intrinsic, severely confining limits to the good we can hope to achieve (both nations have crippled efforts to pressure the Bashir regime and the government in Khartoum). Yet the argument we hear ad nauseam is that during the last eight years the United States has relied too little on the UN and has been too "unilateralist" in its foreign policy.

But the reality is that the best way to advance justice may be for the United States to rely less on the UN and more on narrower "coalitions of the willing"...

[I.e., we need replace the UN with the LLD: League of Leading {i.e., capable} Democracies. Recommended > ]

READ MORE

Antarctic ice shelf 'hanging by thread'

Paris - New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said today. Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is ''hanging by its last thread'' to Charcot Island.

[typical. ice shelves grow until the break off - it's what they do. The larger they've become, the colder its been to allow it.]

READ MORE

Contrary twofer...

.
Cleaner skies means more global warming
For past three decades, Europe has been following the trend of saying goodbye to air pollution and smoky chimneys but a new study has shown that cleaning up the skies has allowed more of the sun's rays to pierce the atmosphere, contributing to at least half the global warming that has occurred.

[more proof we don't know anything about anything - except that everything causes global warming - that we're certain of. this would be comical if it weren't being used to rob us of livelihood and liberties]
READ MORE

Move to ban pollutant cars gathers pace
Voters are likely to have the final say on a proposal to ban the top polluting cars from Swiss roads. The youth wing of the Green Party has gathered 130,000 signatures for a people's initiative to be lodged with the federal authorities (Snip) The group wants to outlaw vehicles such as sports utility vehicles (SUVs) that may emit excessive quantities of 'harmful' substances, particularly carbon dioxide...

[er, but carbon dioxide isn't 'harmful' - it's critical to life on Earth. hello?
also: note the 'youth wing' part... do you know what your child's being taught in school?]
READ MORE

Calif. Plan for Emissions Stickers ‘Government Overreach’

"California has the highest [gas] taxes at 75 cents a gallon and the second-highest overall cost of gas," Gainor noted.

The point of the stickers would be to inform new car buyers of a car's emissions impact in the name of making consumers more 'educated', according to Tom Cackette of the California Air Resources Board.

"People can find this information in Consumer Reports; they can find it on the Web. The government doesn't need to get involved. If the media would put two-and-two together and connect $4 a gallon gas prices with something like massive government overreach and huge regulation, maybe people would begin to learn,"...

[this 'rating' is a prelude to sin taxes based on it]

READ MORE

ACLU given 'veto power' over free-speech rights

Christian groups are appealing a federal judge's ruling that bars the Gideons from distributing Bibles to students of the South Iron Missouri School District.

The South Iron School District allows off-campus organizations to distribute literature to students before and after school. But the American Civil Liberties Union sued, saying the Gideons should not be allowed to hand out Bibles because of their religious nature.

U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry agreed. In fact, she said the ACLU must be able to have the say-so over whether religious literature can be distributed. Staver is asking the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule Judge Perry.

He says that, to his knowledge, no other U.S. court has ever ruled that a private, third party should be given veto power over private religious speech.

READ MORE

Associated Press Continues Job Reporting Malpractice

.
The Associated Press's disgraceful coverage of last week's Employment Situation Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) continues what has become the wire service's standard monthly error of treating reported seasonally adjusted job reductions as reflecting real people thrown out on the streets.

The AP's Jeannine Aversa reached into her Thesaurus as she began her report with:

The nation lost jobs for a sixth month in a row in June, a storm of pink slips drenching this year's July Fourth holiday for more than 60,000 Americans and leaving thousands more worried about the future.

What happened on a not seasonally adjusted basis (i.e., in the real word) differed (go to this link at BLS to access tables referred to at this post):

As you can see, 241,000 jobs were added on a not seasonally adjusted basis. As was the case in the preceding four months, fewer jobs were added than in preceding years, which goes a long way towards explaining why the trend of reported seasonally adjusted job losses continued.

To be clear: The job market's performance during the past six months or so has been sub-par. But that doesn't change the fact that for the fifth consecutive month, a period during which 2,712,000 jobs have been added, employers have NOT "gotten rid of" hundreds of thousands of employees, and hundreds of thousands of individuals have NOT been handed a "storm of pink slips."

READ MORE

Immigration

.
50 PERCENT OF LA WORKFORCE ARE IMMIGRANTS
Los Angeles is at the leading edge of a U.S. demographic trend, with half of its workforce immigrants, many of them unskilled and speaking little English. Consider:

• As baby boomers retire, the same pattern will emerge across the country, reports the Los Angeles Times.
• Demographers estimate that by 2025 most of the growth in the workforce will be from immigrants.
• One-third of immigrants have not graduated from high school and 60 percent do not speak English fluently according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Ernesto Cortes Jr., Southwest regional director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, said Los Angeles is at a crossroads...
READ MORE


Voters Reject Obama's call for Bilingualism
Barack Obama said yesterday that

“instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English,” Americans “need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.”

A national telephone survey conducted last month by Rasmussen Reports found that U.S. voters overwhelmingly disagree with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
READ MORE

Dallas County officials spar over 'black hole' comment

County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole."

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology - from Mayfield - for his [?] racially insensitive analogy...

READ MORE

FNC Dems' Preferred Cable Channel

In Q2, 2008 Fox News Channel averaged 1,585,000 viewers. CNN: 961,000, MSNBC: 685,000. So according to the PEW survey, how many of these are Democrats? Numbers don't lie:

• FNC (31% Democratic): 491,350 Dem viewers
• CNN (45% Democratic): 432,450 Dem viewers
• MSNBC (48% Democratic): 328,800 Dem viewers

Yes, it's true. More Democrats watch Fox News Channel than either CNN or MSNBC.

READ MORE