Hillbilly White Trash

More true wisdom from our old friend Victor Davis Hanson:

In the last 20 years, we were lectured constantly about "post-industrial" America. Experts proclaimed that the United States had evolved into an "information society" of "high-tech jobs." The traditional sources of American strength - manufacturing, the production of food and fuel, and the assembling of cars and trucks - were apparently passe. Instead, others less fortunate abroad were to do those more grubby tasks, while Americans, with their BlackBerrys and laptops, funded, organized, lectured and critiqued them.

Illegal aliens might cook our meals or change our children's diapers to free us up for far more important tasks of litigation, finance and environmental review. The Chinese would make everything from our shoes to our phones. The Japanese would supply us with quality high-end goods like cars and cameras. The Africans, Arabs, Iranians, Russians and Venezuelans would drill oil in nasty, dirty places so we wouldn't have to.

Even our food - which would be always in season - would increasingly be shipped in from Mexico and South America.

Refined Americans became more concerned over questions of gender, race and class justice in our universities and courtrooms, as if the chief problem were only dividing the American pie equitably, rather than expanding it.

The real source of American wealth apparently was the mere fact that we were Americans. Therefore, the rest of the world should naturally loan us money to sustain our envied lifestyle. Our homes got bigger, and we bought and sold them more as investments than as places to raise our families.

As an aside, there are plenty of Americans, including some on the right who think exactly this way. The way Rush Limbaugh uses the term "American exceptionalism" it seems that he thinks it means "we're Americans, we have a right to . . . just because!".

Our top graduates opted for Wall Street, insurance, law, journalism and academia. Why not, when laws made it more conducive to invest and trade, but harder and less lucrative to build, drill, farm and manufacture?

American universities bragged that they were teaching the world how to design and engineer - as our own kids gravitated to law and management schools. We relied on a paternalistic government to regulate what we shouldn't do rather than turn to our best and brightest private citizens to show us what we could.

Alas, no successful civilization in history - Greece, Rome, England, France, the list goes on - ever found prosperity through its bureaucrats and lawyers.

The result of all this growing American laxity and condescension so far is mixed.

The good news, aside from the fact that Americans have never had it so good, is that millions in China are no longer starving. Japan talks of marketing hybrid cars, not re-establishing its old "Co-Prosperity Sphere." The Persian Gulf looks more like Las Vegas than the badlands of Waziristan. Billions in the new globalized world are now emulating the American middle class, which, for all the caricatures, still represents freedom and affluence for so many.

The downside, of course, is a growing collective panic here at home, over whether such undeniable progress is sustainable when America is up to its neck in debt, dependent on foreign energy and plagued by self-doubt and inaction.

Our 21st-century paralysis is surprising. The United States is not materially exhausted. We sit atop trillions of dollars worth of untapped oil, gas, coal, shale and tar sands.

America could mine more uranium, and reprocess fuels to build hundreds of nuclear plants. American agriculture is blessed with the world's best soils, most developed irrigation systems, and most productive and astute farmers.

There is as much sun and wind in the western United States as anywhere in the world. We have plenty of natural resources and the know-how to make all the wood, steel and cement products we need.

A new, hungrier generation of Americans will have to want to reclaim our pre-eminence and change the national attitude. It must be ready to pay off generations of debt rather than borrow, build rather than sue, and drill rather than whine.

It's time to honor rather than avoid and outsource physical labor. Our children are healthy enough to cut our own lawns and pick our fruit. Let's also hope they want to hear a lot more about Gen. David Petraeus' success, and a lot less of Madonna's latest psychodramas.

But just as importantly, what Americans need now is leadership to get moving again - rather than more platitudes about hope, squabbling about race and gender, and endless rhetoric about who is really a maverick or a true conservative or the most liberal. What we need to know from our two presidential candidates are specifics about how to jumpstart America.

So, how many more barrels of oil, refineries and megawatts will America produce - and when and how? How much debt will the next administration retire - and when and how? How and when will our schools return to knowledge-based rather than the present (and failing) therapeutic curriculum?

Americans, in short, should be tired of hearing that we are a post-industrial, postmodern, post-anything society. Instead, we want to be known again as a can-do producer nation that sweats as much as it thinks. And the confident presidential candidate who can best assure us of that will surely win this election.

I agree with everything Hanson says here. Unfortunately neither Obama nor McCain is going to tell Americans that they can once again become a nation of "can-do" producers. As a left-liberal heavily influenced by the doctrines of Marxism Obama is afraid that America might recapture its old spirit. After all an America concerned with the things Hanson is talking about would have a great deal less time to obsess about race and gender and the other grievance issues which catapult men like Barack Obama into power.

As for McCain he might be able to pull something like this off - if he weren't so obsessed with running along after the left shouting "me too, me too".

All it will take is a couple of New York Times editorials about how America will ruin the planet if it tries to become a productive society once again and McCain will don his dungarees and go out to personally dismantle what are left of America's steel mills.

If America is to be saved it will be by the little children of today. If they grow up with a desire to make their nation great once again they can do it. But the adult generation of today is a spent force. The very fact that gasoline is over $4.00 per gallon and the majority political party is still dead set against developing our own oil resources tells us that they are beyond hope.

As some of you may have already been made aware The Watcher, the leader of the great and powerful Watchers Council, has retired due to health issues. I suspect foul play. Anyone who listens to talk radio or watches the cable news shows knows of the part that the Watchers Council played in the downfall of Hillary Clinton and we all have seen the video of her insane profane ravings to ever smaller audiences where she swears her vengeance upon her enemies.

In other words I think that the Watcher's doctors need to check for rician.

However life must go on and this week's Watchers Council vote is being hosted by Joshuapundit.

Here are the nominations:

Council

1.JoshuaPundit: Will Israel Attack Iran?

2.Soccer Dad:The Army's Top 10 inventions And The Legacy Of Harry Diamond

3.The Glittering Eye: Sen. Obama Re-States His Plan for Iraq

4.Cheat Seeking Missiles: Laundry Guilt

5.BookWorm Room:It's official: Obama doesn't flip-flop, he just does nuanced "rephrases"

6.Rhymes With Right: Ny Times Sides With Border Jumping Immigration Criminals

7.Wolf Howling: Critiquing The Obama Manifesto On Iraq

8.The Razor:What Can We Do To Reduce Oil Consumption?

9.Done With Mirrors: Poetry Matters

10The Colossus Of Rhodey:The Latest - Global Warming Causes Kidney Stones!

11.Hillbilly White Trash:What To Do About The Dollar

12.The Education Wonk: Texas Teacher Shortage?


Non-Council

1.Shrinkwrapped:Making People Better

2.Doug Ross & Journal: Let Me Put It In Pictures For Our Progressive Friends

3.Dan Drezner:"We are seriously concerned about this most serious outbreak of seriousness"

4.Power Line: Obama's Dishonest Op-Ed

5.Power Line:Setting the Record Straight

6.Harris County Criminal Justice System: A Good Man

7.EU Referendum:The Great Bio Fuels Con

8.Israel Matzav: Lebanon plans 'state ceremony' to welcome Kuntar

9.Melanie Phillips: Sleepwalking Into Islamization

10.7.62 Justice: Troop Drawdown

11.Seraphic Secrets: Comrade Obama Purges Website

12.Vox Popoli: Home and Garden hater

I apologise to my fellow council members because I was unaware that the vote was going on this week and so did not either submit any writings for consideration (one of my essays was picked for me - and it is the one I would have submitted) and I did not even see that a vote was being held until it was already too late to vote.

I will bring you the results tomorrow as usual and in future weeks I will hold up my end.

For now and in all seriousness let's all say a prayer for the Watcher's health. He is a good man and an asset to the blogosphere. May he have a speedy and complete recovery and be back among us ASAP.

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or as she is called on the Big Dogs blog, "the worst speaker in the history of Congress," explained the cause of high oil prices back in 2006: "We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect."

Yes, that would explain why the price of oral sex, cigars and Hustler magazine skyrocketed during the Clinton years. Also, I note that Speaker Pelosi is a hotelier ... and the price of a hotel room in New York is $1,000 a night! I think she might be onto something.

Is that why a barrel of oil costs mere pennies in all those other countries in the world that are not run by "oilmen"? Wait -- it doesn't cost pennies to them? That's weird.

In response to the 2003 blackout throughout the Northeast U.S. and parts of Canada, Pelosi blamed: "President Bush and Rep. Tom DeLay's oil-company interests." The blackout was a failure of humans operating electric power; it had nothing to do with oil. And I'm not even "an oilman."

But yes -- good point: What a disaster having people in government who haven't spent their entire lives in politics! That explains everything. A government official with relevant experience or knowledge about an issue is obviously a crisis of gargantuan proportions.

This must be why the Democrats are nominating B. Hussein Obama, who finished middle school three days ago and has less experience than a person one might choose at random from the audience of "American Idol."

Announcing the Democrats' bold new "plan" on energy last week, Pelosi said breaking into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve "is one alternative." That's not an energy plan. It's using what we already have -- much like "conservation," which is also part of the Democrats' plan.

Conservation, efficiency and using oil we hold in reserve for emergencies does not get us more energy. It's as if we were running out of food and the Democrats were telling us: "Just eat a little less every day." Great! We'll die a little more slowly. That's not what we call a "plan." We need more energy, not a plan for a slower death.

But there's more! Pelosi announced that the Democrats also plan to push for "an historic investment in biofuels, efficiency, conservation and the rest." The "rest" is apparently what she called our "important and essential" investment in alternative energy.

That certainly would be historic: We would make history by throwing our money away on unproven energy boondoggles that have eaten up untold billions since the 1960s without producing a single net kilowatt of power while we all starve to death.

The proposal to use energy sources that don't yet produce any energy is like the old New Yorker cartoon with Obama in Muslim garb -- no wait, that was a different cartoon. The cartoon is: A scientist has written out his extremely complicated theory on a blackboard and is showing it to another scientist. The theory consists of numbers and characters and takes up the entire blackboard. About two-thirds of the way across, reading left to right, appear the words, "then a miracle happens," followed by more numbers and characters.

That's the Democrats' plan to run cars on biofuels, solar and wind power: Then a miracle happens. The current Democratic mantra on energy is: "We can't drill our way out of this problem." Apparently their plan is to talk our way out of this problem.

Democrats are also alleging that the oil companies are sitting on millions of acres of oil but are refusing to drill -- presumably because oil company executives hate the American people and perversely don't want to make money. Manifestly, those acres are being explored for oil or have already come up dry.

If the Democrats really wanted oil companies to find more oil, they'd allow oil companies to drill offshore and to drill in ANWR, which we happen to know is bursting with oil.

But they don't. They don't want drilling. They don't want more oil. They want humans to ride bicycles and then to die. We deserve it: We were mean to the polar bears.

It's good to know that in the middle of a crisis, the Democrats are still liars. As long as we're fantasizing about "alternative" energy sources, what we really need is a car that runs on Democrats' lies.

Let me back Mis Ann up by saying this. Conservation is not even a part of the solution. Conservation, also called economizing, is a fine thing for people wishing to save money to do, but it does not produce one drop of new oil or one watt of new electric power. Conservation does not move a truck or car one foot down the highway and it does not provide one ounce of the petrochemicals which are so important to our modern economy.

Wind power is not even a part of the solution. Yes there are some places where the wind blows hard enough with enough consistency (that is 24/7/365) to make wind turbines not completely useless, but those areas are not common enough to provide more than a trickle of power to the national grid. And even where there is enough wind and wind farms have been built they are not able to produce power at a competitive price. Wherever you see windmills you see taxpayers being robbed in order to fund a boondoggle. The business reason for erecting windmills is not to generate power. It is to gain tax breaks and government subsidies, and that is not going to change.

Solar power may one day be part of the solution, but is it cannot be today. The best photovoltaic cells we have today only convert a tiny percentage of sunlight to electricity. If a much more efficient solar cell could be developed it could literally solve all of earth's energy needs in that the energy of the sunlight which strikes the earth is 6000 time the amount of energy which all human activity now consumes.

However the development of that new photovoltaic technology is something which we cannot predict and may in fact prove to be impossible. Betting our energy future on a technology which we have no idea how to develop is like planning your retirement around buying Power Ball tickets. Yeah it might pay off, but do you really want to take the chance?

We understand petroleum and we have large supplies of it right now. And we need energy right now. The oil extraction technology we have available right now is environmentally safe. The offshore oil rigs are located so far out to sea that they cannot even be seen from shore so they pose no threat to the coastal tourist or fishing economies of any state in the Union.

The fear of what an oil spill might do to the pristine beaches of Florida or California is based on a small number of incidents the most recent of which is decades old and involved technology which has long been superseded.

The oil operations in Alaska prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that they are no danger to any wildlife or plant life and in fact have proven beneficial to the local caribou population.

There is no sane reason not to develop America's domestic energy reserves right now.

But how long will it stay there?

Mat Drudge is reporting the following:

Michelle Obama IS NOT going on Obama's trips to Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and Europe.

Nor would she have a policy role in the Obama administration; she would be raising their daughters.

But SHE WILL have a primetime speaking role at the Democratic National Convention.

NEW YORK TIMES reporter Patrick 'The Biographer' Healy will be first out with the full details in the coming days, newsroom sources tell DRUDGE.

Developing...

We are led to wonder how long all this will last if Obama is actually elected president. The simmering anger which occasionally breaks free and shows itself in Michelle's unguarded moments is unlikely to remain buried and the massive, if not bottomless, sense of entitlement which Michelle absorbed from growing up as a minority in the sewer of the Democrat party will most likely compel her to attempt to grab off a piece of the presidential power. At this point I wouldn't even bet that she would be more subtle than Hillary.

After all what's the fun of sticking it to the white people if they don't know that they've been stuck to?

Irish politicians reacted angrily Wednesday after French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested Ireland should hold a second referendum on the EU's new treaty, after rejecting it last month.

Irish voters dealt a blow to the European Union last month by rejecting the Lisbon Treaty in the only popular vote on the text anywhere in the 27-nation bloc.

According to deputies who attended a meeting with Sarkozy Tuesday, he said that the Irish would "have to re-vote", despite 53 percent opposition.

A key adviser to the French president said later on Wednesday that Sarkozy could ask Ireland to hold a second referendum on the document, but with some minor changes.

"One of the solutions would be indeed to eventually ask the Irish to re-vote, but probably not on a text that would be exactly the same," said Henri Guaino in an interview to French television.

"We'll see," he added.

Guaino stressed that Sarkozy's remarks, widely reported in the press, were "not an official statement from the president."

Sarkozy's comments were described as "deeply insulting" by Sinn Fein's Aengus O Snodaigh, who speaks for the party on international affairs. Sinn Fein was the only major political party in Ireland to oppose the Lisbon Treaty.

"In the month since the Irish people voted overwhelmingly to reject the Lisbon Treaty, we have listened to a succession of EU leaders lining up to try and bully and coerce us into doing what they want," O Snodaigh said.

"The fact is that the people have spoken and the Lisbon Treaty is dead."

Not if the Euro-Elite has anything to say about it.

This is how it was supposed to work. Each nation in the EU would have to ratify the new EU constitution and if any failed to do so then the document would be dead. The nations could make their decision any way they wanted to. Anything from a decree by an imperial legislature to a free vote of the people.

All the nations of Europe other than Ireland chose the imperial decree route. The reason is that the new EU government's structure has more in common with fascism than it does with any other political system that man has ever devised and most Europeans are still aware of what happened when Europe last tried to go fascist.

Now the Elites are going to do what leftists do every time a vote or court decision goes against them - demand a re-vote. Of course when the decision goes their way they consider the matter completely and eternally closed, but the topic of the left's hypocrisy is one of those "water is wet" things that most of us are tired of hearing about so we won't dwell on it.

Over the next few months we will hear European politicians attempt to shame the Irish into capitulation by reminding them of how much Ireland owes the Union. They will claim that development aid from the Union is the only reason that Ireland is enjoying it's current prosperity (Ireland has one of the most dynamic and healthy economies in Europe).

This is a lie. Ireland's prosperity is due to two factors. One is the collapse of the Soviet Union. This led to the chain reaction implosion of all of Europe's Soviet led/funded/inspired terrorist/revolutionaly movements like the Red Brigades and the IRA and all its offshoots.

The second factor in Ireland's renaissance is the decision by the Irish people, acting through their elected representatives, to turn Ireland into a low-tax haven for business. This has pulled large amounts of money into the Irish economy from other parts of Europe, as well as North America and Asia.

And thus we come to the real reason that the Euro-Elites want to take Ireland into their suffocating embrace. Ireland shows the rest of Europe what can be accomplished by a people who act to remove the dead hand of government from their economic lives. Totalitarian governments fear this knowledge as vampires fear crosses and wooden stakes. That is why they must bring Ireland into the European fold and snuff out its prosperity. Otherwise other European peoples might begin to wonder why they can't have the same freedom and prosperity.

The Irish people should be glad that the EU nations have cut back their military spending so drastically in the past decade. Otherwise they might find themselves facing what Hitler and Napoleon (the EU's precursors) could only dream of, a massive cross-channel invasion of the British Isles (at least a part of them).

So let's all begin the weekend by hoisting a glass of stout to our Irish brothers and sisters and say a prayer that their courage and resolve will hold in the face of all that the EU can do to bully them into signing away their sovereignty.

And today I'm wearing green.

July 15 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar declined to a record low against the euro on speculation Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will say credit- market losses are hurting U.S. economic growth.

The currency also weakened to the lowest level in more than a month against the Japanese yen and to a 25-year low versus the Australian dollar on concern confidence in the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will diminish even after the U.S. government pledged support for the two-largest buyers of home loans. The pound surpassed $2 for the first time since July 1 after U.K. inflation quickened to the fastest pace in at least 11 years.

Put simply the reason that the dollar is dropping like a stone is that the US dollar is not tied to any commodity - like gold, for example - and so it is backed only by confidence in the US economy. Add to this the fact that the US has spent the past few decades printing money as fast as it can, thus devaluing the currency, and you can see why each dollar is worth less and less. But there's more.

Confidence in the US economy is being seriously damaged now by several factors. One is the credit crunch and all of its consequences. Another is the extreme reluctance of the US to exploit its own energy resources (drilling, oil shale, coal and nuclear). This means that the US will remain dependent upon foreign nations (many of them hostile to us) for it's economy's most important commodity.

The high oil prices themselves are causing damage to the American economy and therefore harming confidence in that economy. Built into ever barrel of oil's price is an "uncertainty premium" of at least 20%. The uncertainty I speak of is over the future of the Middle East. The US attempt to bring some stability to the region is going well but could still be torpedoed by a too-soon withdrawal from Iraq. If this were to happen and the Iraqi government found itself unable to stand on its own (an increasingly less likely prospect, but still a realistic one) the entire region could become a great deal more dangerous. This fear cannot help but to drive up the price of oil.

There is also the fear in financial circles of the prospect of an Obama presidency. B. Hussein Obama has tended to surround himself with the most extreme radicals the left can produce. He had the most anti-capitalist voting record in the Illinois state legislature and in the US Senate his voting record is to the left of Bernie Sanders, the US legislature's only self-identified socialist. There is simply too much prospect that an Obama presidency would turn a recession into a full-blown depression, just as the socialist FDR did in the 1930's.

The particular steps needed to bring back the US economy, and confidence in the US economy, are simple to identify, but difficult to implement.

First George W Bush along with John McCain, Barack Obama and the leadership of both parties from both houses of congress need to hold a joint press conference and issue a joint statement saying the following:

1. The United States is unalterably committed to the cause of stability and democracy in the Middle East and to that end we will keep combat troops in Iraq for as long as it takes to get the job done regardless of the cost.

2. The United States is determined that Iran will not become a nuclear power and absolutely no option is "off the table" in achieving that goal, up to and including nuclear strikes or a full scale invasion.

3. The United States is committed to restoring confidence in the American dollar by once again tying the dollar to precious metal reserves. America should commit to having a fully backed currency by 2050.

4. The government of the United States admits that the current crisis in the lending industry is the fault of the government of the United States. The seeds of the mortgage crisis were planted by congress distorting the market by establishing mechanisms whereby persons unqualified to obtain a mortgage could nevertheless get one.

From this grew Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two giant very poorly run lenders which were "private corporations" that were nevertheless owned by the federal government. They were immune from taxation and regulatory oversight. They spent vast sums of money lobbying congress in order to ensure that they would continue to be able to operate outside of any meaningful kind of accountability. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

The political leaders of this nation must articulate that they have learned the lesson that government must always strive to create as little distortion in the market as possible because everything the government does in or to the market will have unforeseen negative consequences which will, as certainly as the rising and setting of the sun, overwhelm and cancel out any possible positive results of that interference.

5. The United States commits to ending its dependence upon foreign oil through the implementation of proven energy technology. This means that we will drill for every drop of oil on US soil or off the shores of the US. We will commit to replacing every oil or natural gas fired power plant in the nation with a nuclear power plant and will perfect the technology to extract oil from shale and for liquefying coal so that it can be used as a motor fuel.

As I said these steps are easy to identify but they will be difficult to implement because they would mean that the politicians would have to admit their guilt and because the left would have to tell both the environmentalist and the deadbeats whining for more handouts that the gravy train was over.

From Rasmussen Reports:

The race for the White House is tied. The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows Barack Obama and John McCain each attract 43% of the vote. When "leaners" are included, Obama holds a statistically insignificant 47% to 46% advantage. Today is the first time that McCain’s support has moved above 45% since Obama clinched the nomination on June 3. It’s also the first time the candidates have been tied since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination (see recent daily results). Tracking Polls are released at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time each day (see recent demographic highlights).

For most of the past month-and-a-half, Obama has led McCain by approximately five percentage points. It remains to be seen whether this recent tightening of the race reflects real change or is merely statistical noise. Check out our weekly review—What They Told Us—to see what was on voters’ minds this past week.

The reason that this news is bad for Obama is that we are still more than three and a half months out from the election and at this point in every race in post WWII history the Democrat has been far ahead of the Republican.

When Ronald Reagan was running for reelection against Walter Mondale at this point in the election Mondale was something like 18 points ahead of Reagan and Reagan went on to win a 59% to 41%, 49 state landslide.

Even in those races where the Democrat went on to win as with Carter/Ford and Clinton/Bush and Clinton/Dole the race tightened considerably from the early big lead the Democrat originally held.

Obama simply can't afford to give up any voters. If the race "tightens" on him he will be behind.

What is causing this?

In my opinion it is simply a function of the public getting to know Obama. Obama started his presidential campaign after serving a grand total of 143 days in the Senate. Before that he had been an obscure state Senator in Illinois whose only claim to fame was a DNC convention speech.

As the people of the United States have been introduced to Obama they have learned about the insane hate-filled pulpit ravings of the racist preacher of nearly 20 years who Obama called his "mentor". They saw Obama declare that he could no more disown Wright than he could disown the black community or his white grandmother - then they saw him disown Wright - not because Wright shrieked "God damn America" from the pulpit, but because Wright said that Obama was "a politician who was doing what politicians have to do".

We heard Obama say that he would have left his church if Wright hadn't retired, then we saw Obama leave his church even though Wright has retired.

We learned about Anthony Rezko, the corrupt land developer who Obama has called a friend and supporter - and major donor to Obama campaigns. We learned about the highly questionable land deals which the Obamas have entered into with Rezko and we have seen Obama run away from his connection with Rezko.

We learned about Obama's friendship with William Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, the domestic terrorists who bombed the Pentagon, among other places.

We have seen Obama abandon position after position in the name of political expediency. From his decision not to accept public financing to his flip-flops on abortion and gun control to his hedging on Iraq troop withdrawals we see a man willing to sell out literally anyone or anything to obtain his ambition.

Oh, and let's not forget that we also got to meet Obama's angry and bitter wife, Michelle.

Speaking of Michelle, she had better watch what she says from now on. Obama's pattern in dealing with liabilities is clear.

That wasn't the Anthony Rezko he had known for all these years.

That wasn't the Jeremiah Wright he had known for all these years.

That wasn't the Trinity United Church of Christ he had known for all these years.

Unless she wants to turn on CNN one day and hear her husband talking about how that wasn't the wife he has known for all these years. . .

From Fox News:

Tony Snow, the former White House press secretary and conservative pundit who bedeviled the press corps and charmed millions as a FOX News television and radio host, died Saturday after a long bout with cancer. He was 53.

A syndicated columnist, editor, TV anchor, radio show host and musician, Snow worked in nearly every medium in a career that spanned more than 30 years.

"Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of our dear friend Tony Snow," President Bush said in a written statement. "The Snow family has lost a beloved husband and father. And America has lost a devoted public servant and a man of character."

Snow died at 2 a.m. Saturday at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Snow joined FOX in 1996 as the original anchor of "FOX News Sunday" and hosted "Weekend Live" and a radio program, "The Tony Snow Show," before departing in 2006.

"It's a tremendous loss for us who knew him, but it's also a loss for the country," Roger Ailes, chairman of FOX News, said Saturday morning about Snow, calling him a "renaissance man."

As a TV pundit and commentator for FOX News, Snow often was critical of Bush before he became the president's third press secretary, following Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. He was an instant study in the job, mastering the position — and the White House press corps — with apparent ease.

"One of the reasons I took this job is not only to work with the president, but, believe it or not, to work with all of you," Snow told reporters when he stepped into the post in 2006. "These are times that are going to be very challenging."

During a tenure marked by friendly jousting with journalists, Snow often danced around the press corps, occasionally correcting their grammar and speech even as he responded to their questions.

"Tony did his job with more flair than almost any press secretary before him," said William McGurn, Bush's former chief speechwriter. "He loved the give-and-take. But that was possible only because Tony was a man of substance who had real beliefs and principles that he was more than able to defend."

As he announced Snow as his new press secretary in May 2006, Bush praised him as "a man of courage [and] a man of integrity." Snow presided over some of the toughest fights of Bush's presidency, defending the administration during the Iraq war and the CIA leak investigation.

"I felt comfortable enough to interrupt him when he was BSing, and he kind of knew it, and he'd shut up and move on," Snow said.

His tenure at the White House lasted 17 months and was interrupted by his second bout with cancer.

I first became aware of Tony Snow when he would fill in for Rush Limbaugh. It didn't take me long to realize that the Limbaugh was much more filled with information and was much more fun to listen to when Snow was guest hosting than when Rush was there.

I bought a Sirius satellite radio so that I could listen to Tony's show, only to find out that he was on medical leave to take his cancer treatments (the first time I tried to tune in to the Laura Ingraham show she was also absent due to cancer - has the left found a new weapon in their war against any dissenting idea?) . However he was soon back behind the microphone and I learned to time my morning departure for the work day to coincide with his schedule.

When he announced that he was leaving radio to take a job in the White House I was sorry to see him go, but I (along with many others on the right) realized that the Bush administration desperately needed to improve its communication skills. I don't think that it is too much to say that if Mr. Bush has started his first term with Tony Snow as press secretary, and had retained him until now, that his approval numbers would not be at 31% (not quite twice the Democrat congress' 18% - according to the RCP average).

Mr. Snow's announcement that his cancer had returned told anyone who was familiar with the disease that his remaining time would be short.

America has lost a voice that it desperately needed as it teeters on the brink of a new dark age. The forces of the left have managed to cripple the nation's ability to survive as a free and prosperous nation (can you imagine any other time in American history when we wouldn't have already been drilling in ANWAR or off shore and can you imagine what Teddy Roosevelt would have already done to Iran). We need all the Tony Snows we can get if we hope to do what no nation in the history of the world has ever managed to do before, pull itself out of terminal decline and regain it's past golden age.

He will be missed.

Here is some of the music I'll be seeing on the mountain:

Barleyjuice

Albannach

Coyote Run



Mother Grove

The Kildares

I'm off now to the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games and Gathering of the Scottish Clans!

I'll post some pictures when I get back late this afternoon or early this evening.

You may talk among yourselves while I am away.

That means that YOU are listening!

Last Friday, on the Fourth of July, the great patriot Jesse Helms passed away. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson also went to their great reward on Independence Day, so this is further proof of God.

Helms is now the second great American patriot I've always wanted to meet and never will, at least in this lifetime. The only other one is the magnificent Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger. (Wikipedia quote: "I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.")

After a week of hundreds of Helms obituaries -- one or two of which were not completely dishonest -- I will mention just a few items that were not addressed or given sufficient attention.

The two most obsessively discussed topics among Senate staffers are: (1) Who is the stupidest senator? (Sen. Barbara Boxer pulled into the lead when Sen. Lincoln Chafee retired), and (2) which senators are beastly and which are wonderful to their staff?

When I worked in the Senate in the '90s, the two senators famous for being absolute princes to work for were Sen. Helms and -- it pains me to tell you this, so you know it has to be true -- Sen. Teddy Kennedy. (He was so nice to his staffers, he frequently offered them rides home in his car after parties.)

I never knew -- and you never knew, unless you read one of the two honest obituaries this past week -- that in 1962 Helms and his wife "Dot" adopted a 9-year-old orphan with cerebral palsy. They already had two daughters and Helms was 41 years old at the time. But it was Christmastime and they read about Charlie in a newspaper. He said all he wanted for Christmas was a mother and father.

In the 1976 North Carolina Republican primary, Helms engineered Ronald Reagan's upset victory over Gerald Ford, the sitting president. That victory carried Reagan to the convention and made him the front-runner in 1980. The night Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, Helms famously uttered the beautiful words: "God has given America one more chance."

In 1984, Helms' re-election campaign was the then-most expensive Senate race in history. His Democratic opponent, Gov. Jim Hunt, received campaign contributions from the usual dotty liberals: Barbra Streisand, Phil Donahue, Marlo Thomas, Paul Newman, Woody Allen -- all, no doubt, steeped in North Carolina politics.

Shockingly, Hunt also received a donation from Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the nonpartisan, totally objective, straight-down-the-middle New York Times. Which I guess explains the nasty obituary last week.

Meanwhile, Helms received contributions mostly from America's two most dangerous fringe groups: housewives and businessmen. His few celebrity supporters included Gene Autry and Ellin Berlin, wife of composer Irving Berlin, the patriotic Jewish immigrant who wrote "White Christmas" and "God Bless America."

Other Republicans loved to run in years when Helms was up for election because, like a Marine exposing himself to enemy fire to let his comrades escape, all the Hollywood money would be dedicated to defeating Helms.

On election night 1984, a friend of mine was at a Republican victory party in Michigan when suddenly a group of Hasidim broke out in cheering and dancing. Was "Fiddler on the Roof" being made into a major motion picture? He looked up at the mammoth TV screen. It read: "Jesse Helms Wins North Carolina."

Helms was viciously and falsely portrayed as a racist -- including in the totally objective New York Times obituary last week. In January 1963, a decade before Helms would run for office, he editorialized about Harvey Gantt, the first black student to be admitted to Clemson University in South Carolina.

Helms praised Gantt to the skies, saying he had "stoutly resisted the pose of a conquering hero" and had "turned away from the liberal press and television networks which would glorify him." Gantt, Helms said, just wanted to be an architect and "Clemson is the only college in South Carolina that can teach him how to be one."

Funny how that little tidbit didn't make the Times obituary. They must have cut it for "space."

Helms was for integration; he was simply against "movements." He would later hire James Meredith, who was the first black to attend the University of Mississippi -- with the assistance of federal troops. By 1989, Meredith's views had come around to those of Helms, not the other way around.

After years of reading and studying and attending law school at Columbia University, Meredith concluded that blacks had been better off when they worked for themselves and not for white liberals. (Having worked for white liberals myself, I couldn't agree more.) Meredith claimed Helms fired him as domestic policy adviser after a year because he was too right-wing for Helms.

Which reminds me: I'll have to try to meet Meredith before the next Fourth of July.

Liberals discount Helms' hiring of Meredith on the grounds that Meredith had wandered off the reservation. (Blacks are allowed to have only one set of political views.) It just shows you how stupid liberals are: Blacks don't live on reservations; Indians do.

It's pretty much the same thing liberals are accusing B. Hussein Obama of right now. In its July 4 editorial, the Times harangued Obama for his diversions from the liberal line on Iraq, the domestic surveillance bill, capital punishment and guns. I believe the editorial was titled something like, "Get in Line, N-word."

To paraphrase Dan Quayle, to be called a racist by these people is a badge of honor. Rest in peace, Jesse Helms: New York Times stock was recently lowered to a notch above junk bond status.

Jesse was a great man. I remember well how hated he was by the left-wing media here in NC and nationwide (being hated by the media is a sure sign that one is worthy to be called a great man).

From The Herald Sun:

Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children's Hospital say this delusion was a "previously unreported phenomenon".

"A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events."

(So have Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery, Profit of Doom Al Gore and Sir Richard Brazen, but I digress.)

"The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies."

But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What's scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this "climate change delusion", too.

Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: "If we do not begin reducing the nation's levels of carbon pollution, Australia's economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands."

And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd's guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: "Australians must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . ."

Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd's next campaign slogan?

Of course, we can laugh at this -- and must -- but the price for such folly may soon be your job, or at least your cash.

Rudd and Garnaut want to scare you into backing their plan to force people who produce everything from petrol to coal-fired electricity, from steel to soft drinks, to pay for licences to emit carbon dioxide -- the gas they think is heating the world to hell.

The cost of those licences, totalling in the billions, will then be passed on to you through higher bills for petrol, power, food, housing, air travel and anything else that uses lots of gassy power. In some countries they're even planning to tax farting cows, so there's no end to the ways you can be stung.

Rudd hopes this pain will make you switch to expensive but less gassy alternatives, and -- hey presto -- the world's temperature will then fall, just like it's actually done since the day Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth.

But you'll have spotted already the big flaw in Rudd's mad plan -- one that confirms he and Garnaut really do have delusions.

The truth is Australia on its own emits less than 1.5 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide. Any savings we make will make no real difference, given that China (now the biggest emitter) and India (the fourth) are booming so fast that they alone will pump out 42 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases by 2030.

Indeed, so fast are the world's emissions growing -- by 3.1 per cent a year thanks mostly to these two giants -- that the 20 per cent cuts Rudd demands of Australians by 2020 would be swallowed up in just 28 days. That's how little our multi-billions of dollars in sacrifices will matter.

And that's why Rudd's claim that we'll be ruined if we don't cut Australia's gases is a lie. To be blunt.

Ask Rudd's guru. Garnaut on Friday admitted any cuts we make will be useless unless they inspire other countries to do the same -- especially China and India: "Only a global agreement has any prospect of reducing risks of dangerous climate change to acceptable levels."

So almost everything depends on China and India copying us. But the chances of that? A big, round zero.

A year ago China released its own global warming strategy -- its own Garnaut report -- which bluntly refused to cut its total emissions.

Said Ma Kai, head of China's powerful State Council: "China does not commit to any quantified emissions-reduction commitments . . . our efforts to fight climate change must not come at the expense of economic growth."

In fact, we had to get used to more gas from China, not less: "It is quite inevitable that during this (industrialisation) stage, China's energy consumption and CO2 emissions will be quite high."

Last month, India likewise issued its National Action Plan on Climate Change, and also rejected Rudd-style cuts.

The plan's authors, the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change, said India would rather save its people from poverty than global warming, and would not cut growth to cut gases.

"It is obvious that India needs to substantially increase its per capita energy consumption to provide a minimally acceptable level of wellbeing to its people."

The plan's only real promise was in fact a threat: "India is determined that its per capita greenhouse gas emissions will at no point exceed that of developed countries."

Gee, thanks. That, of course, means India won't stop its per capita emissions (now at 1.02 tonnes) from growing until they match those of countries such as the US (now 20 tonnes). Given it has one billion people, that's a promise to gas the world like it's never been gassed before.

So is this our death warrant? Should this news have you seeing apocalyptic visions, too?

Well, no. What makes the Indian report so interesting is that unlike our Ross Garnaut, who just accepted the word of those scientists wailing we faced doom, the Indian experts went to the trouble to check what the climate was actually doing and why.

Their conclusion? They couldn't actually find anything bad in India that was caused by man-made warming: "No firm link between the documented (climate) changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established."

In fact, they couldn't find much change in the climate at all.

Yes, India's surface temperature over a century had inched up by 0.4 degrees, but there had been no change in trends for large-scale droughts and floods, or rain: "The observed monsoon rainfall at the all-India level does not show any significant trend . . ."

It even dismissed the panic Al Gore helped to whip up about melting Himalayan glaciers: "While recession of some glaciers has occurred in some Himalayan regions in recent years, the trend is not consistent across the entire mountain chain. It is, accordingly, too early to establish long-term trends, or their causation, in respect of which there are several hypotheses."

Nor was that the only sign that India's Council on Climate Change had kept its cool while our Rudd and Garnaut lost theirs.

For example, the Indians rightly insisted nuclear power had to be part of any real plan to cut emissions. Rudd and Garnaut won't even discuss it.

The Indians also pointed out that no feasible technology to trap and bury the gasses of coal-fired power stations had yet been developed "and there are serious questions about the cost as well (as) permanence of the CO2 storage repositories".

Rudd and Garnaut, however, keep offering this dream to make us think our power stations can survive their emissions trading scheme, when state governments warn they may not.

In every case the Indians are pragmatic where Rudd and Garnaut are having delusions -- delusions about an apocalypse, about cutting gases without going nuclear, about saving power stations they'll instead drive broke.

And there's that delusion on which their whole plan is built -- that India and China will follow our sacrifice by cutting their throats, too.

So psychiatrists are treating a 17-year-old tipped over the edge by global warming fearmongers?

Pray that their next patients will be two men whose own delusions threaten to drive our whole economy over the edge as well.

Just try to imagine a major American daily newspaper writing an article like this and telling the truth about global warming.

I feel sorry for the teenager who has been driven over the edge by the high priests of the global warming cult, but I blame his parents for raising so weak minded a child.

Perhaps the sanity of the Indian scientists will spread to the USA? Dare we hope?

Red Planet presents a couple of good articles to go with this cartoon. Here is one of them:

Mark Steyn, The Wall Street Journal (2006): It’s the Demography, Stupid.

The thing is though that it won't be an empty continent. It will be teeming with humanity - it's just that it will be Muslim humanity. By the middle of this century Europe will be majority Muslim, unless the Europeans find the political will to do something about it right now.

Unfortunately "doing something" would mean deporting tens of millions of Muslims - and not just immigrants but native born as well - back to the North African and Middle Eastern nations from which they, or their parents, came. Given the sheer number of Muslims living in Western Europe and the degree to which they have been radicalized this would likely mean continent wide civil wars of terrible savagery.

The question is whether Europeans will be willing to pay that kind of price to retain their civilization. I would guess that the answer is going to be "NO". After all if they do not even care enough about the survival of their culture to have enough children to replace themselves will they really be willing to turn their streets into rivers of blood to save it?

The left's policies always come with some kind of negative unintended consequences which can range from the merely comical to the downright lethal. The CAFE Standard (Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards) is one of the ones with lethal consequences, as seen in this National Center for Public Policy Research study by Ryan Balis.

On the heels of the Arab oil embargo, in 1975 Congress enacted Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards as a regulatory solution to reduce the United States' dependence on foreign oil and gasoline consumption.1 CAFE standards mandate that vehicles sold in the U.S. meet fuel efficiency - or "fuel economy" - standards. Current standards require an average of 27.2 miles per gallon (mpg) for cars and 21.6 mpg for light trucks.2

Beginning in 2008, "one-size-fits-all" CAFE standards for light trucks will be phased out. New regulations will divide light trucks into six categories based on vehicle size - each category having its own mpg target.3 However, the fuel economy for these vehicles will be raised from the current 22.2 mpg to 24.0 mpg in model year 2011.4

According to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimate, implementing this change will cost American consumers over $6.71 billion in added vehicle expenses from 2007-2011.5 Yet Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, calculates that the fuel savings will be a mere 0.44 billion gallons of gasoline annually.6 On average, U.S. cars and light trucks consume some 11 billion gallons of gasoline each month.7

Despite the new regulatory "reform," high gas prices have lawmakers in Washington debating, once again,8 whether to impose even steeper CAFE standards. For instance, Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) proposed burdensome across-the-board legislation to increase CAFE standards to 35 mpg on both light trucks and cars by model year 2017.9 Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) have also recently called for CAFE increases.10

But such increases have unintended safety consequences for the safety of drivers and passengers. The reason is because carmakers build lighter and smaller cars that burn less fuel to comply with CAFE standards.11 The trade-off is these lighter, smaller cars fare much worse in violent crashes, resulting in greater rates of death and injury for occupants.

A number of studies have documented the lethal consequences of requiring carmakers to improve fuel standards.

* According to a 2003 NHTSA study, when a vehicle is reduced by 100 pounds the estimated fatality rate increases as much as 5.63 percent for light cars weighing less than 2,950 pounds, 4.70 percent for heavier cars weighing over 2,950 pounds and 3.06 percent for light trucks. Between model years 1996 and 1999, these rates translated into additional traffic fatalities of 13,608 for light cars, 10,884 for heavier cars and 14,705 for light trucks.12

* A 2001 National Academy of Sciences panel found that constraining automobile manufacturers to produce smaller, lighter vehicles in the 1970s and early 1980s "probably resulted in an additional 1,300 to 2,600 traffic fatalities in 1993."13

* An extensive 1999 USA Today analysis of crash data found that since CAFE went into effect in 1978, 46,000 people died in crashes they otherwise would have survived, had they been in bigger, heavier vehicles. This, according to a 1999 USA Today analysis of crash data since 1975, roughly figures to be 7,700 deaths for every mile per gallon gained in fuel economy standards.14

* The USA Today report also said smaller cars - such as the Chevrolet Cavalier or Dodge Neon - accounted for 12,144 fatalities or 37 percent of vehicle deaths in 1997, though such cars comprised only 18 percent of all vehicles.15

* A 1989 Harvard-Brookings study estimated CAFE "to be responsible for 2,200-3,900 excess occupant fatalities over ten years of a given [car] model years' use." Moreover, the researchers estimated between 11,000 and 19,500 occupants would suffer serious but nonfatal crash injuries as a result of CAFE.16

* The same Harvard-Brookings study found CAFE had resulted in a 500-pound weight reduction of the average car. As a result, occupants were put at a 14 to 27 percent greater risk of traffic death.17

* Passengers in small cars die at a much higher rate when involved in traffic accidents with large cars. Traffic safety expert Dr. Leonard Evans estimates that drivers in lighter cars may be 12 times as likely to be killed in a crash when the other vehicle is twice as heavy as the lighter car.18

THE greatest lie intellectuals tell us is that "the pen is mightier than the sword." That's what cowards claim when they want to preen as heroes.

Billions of words have been hurled at Sudan's government. The misery in Darfur not only continues but deepens. While intellectuals wrestled with compound sentences, Darfur degenerated from selective oppression to savage anarchy.

Legions of columnists and commentators have deplored Robert Mugabe's monstrous rule in Zimbabwe. But none of the hand-wringing by American, European or even African intellectuals restrained one fist or stopped one club in midair. Guess who "won" that election.

Regiments of professors and pundits have bemoaned China's gobbling of Tibet for half a century. The result? Beijing cracked down even harder.

"Brave" columnists wrote countless columns bemoaning the suffering of the Kurds and the Shia under Saddam Hussein. Their earnest paragraphs didn't save a single life.

Only when better men acted did the surviving victims of one of the world's worst dictatorships glimpse freedom - an imperfect freedom but better than a mass grave.

Nothing positive is going to happen in Sudan or Zimbabwe (or Tibet) until rule-of-law states take action. As outraged activists scribble on, Beijing blithely continues supporting these and other rogue regimes (and our president crawls to the Olympics - it's as if FDR had rushed to the games in Berlin).

There was a good reason the assassins of 9/11 attacked the targets they did, rather than steering those planes into Columbia University or Harvard Yard: They knew that the potency of the intellectual is illusory, that it dissolves at the first shot.

As I pointed out on July 4, even our glorious Declaration of Independence and our Constitution would be no more than bizarre artifacts had they not been defended by patriots willing to fight.

Does anyone really believe that there's anything we can write or say that will persuade al Qaeda to make nice? It's on the strategic defensive today but only because our soldiers and Marines thumped the hell out of its cadres in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The point isn't that military solutions are always the best solutions - any problem that can be resolved without bloodshed should be handled peaceably. But we've got to stop playing pretend: In this hate-plagued, often merciless world, events sometimes demand action, not just talk.

Our diplomats and "distinguished commentators" see the world from the 17th floor of a luxury hotel or the office of an English-speaking Cabinet member. The insular safety of their lives has convinced them that every problem has a peaceful solution if only we can all have a good chat.

But those who rule by the sword (or the fist, or engineered famines or outright genocide) don't want to hash things out. They want to win. No elegant phrase has ever stopped a bullet in midflight.

Please, educate me: In over 5,000 years of more or less recorded history, how many tyrannies have been overthrown by noble sentiments? How many genocides have been averted by reasonable discussions? How many wars have been prevented by Quakers?

As William James - no archconservative - put it a century ago, "History is a bath of blood." It's been a long time since we got badly splashed (9/11's casualties were an average day in Normandy). We're so spoiled that we've forgotten how brutal humankind can be. But our enemies are determined to remind us. Meanwhile, they practice on the innocents close at hand.

If the pen truly were mightier than the sword, the defense industry would be making ink, paper and keyboards, rather than smart bombs and body armor. A pen wielded by a talented writer may wound a target's ego, but a sword will cut off the writer's head.

Pacifists mean well. But they're a dictator's best friends. The man who won't fight for justice abets the terrorist, the tyrant and the concentration-camp guard.

All decent men want peace. But wise men know that not all men are decent.

The use of the pen is an indulgence we can afford only because better men and women grip the sword on our behalf.

When Joseph Stalin was told that the Pope disapproved of some of his actions he was said to have asked "how many divisions does he have".

That perfectly sums up Mr. Peters point. The tyrant only respects force. Of course words sometimes inspire the use of force which is why tyrants always control the press. However the kind of "fighting words" which raise people to action are deplored by the left-wing. Just look at the efforts in Europe and Canada to criminalize criticism of Islam.

Or even in this country look at the way the cable and broadcast news outlets have banned the showing of the World Trade Center's collapse on 9/11 out of fear that it might remind the public why we are fighting a global war against Islamofascism and steel their resolve to see it though to victory (and maybe vote Republican).

From Rasmussen Reports:

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

Last month, 11% of voters gave the legislature good or excellent ratings. Congress has not received higher than a 15% approval rating since the beginning of 2008.

The percentage of Democrats who give Congress positive ratings fell from 17% last month to 13% this month. The number of Democrats who give Congress a poor rating remained unchanged. Among Republicans, 8% give Congress good or excellent ratings, up just a point from last month. Sixty-five percent (65%) of GOP voters say Congress is doing a poor job, down a single point from last month.

Voters not affiliated with either party are the most critical of Congressional performance. Just 3% of those voters give Congress positive ratings, down from 6% last month. Sixty-three percent (63%) believe Congress is doing a poor job, up from 57% last month.

This should be good news for Republicans who ought to be able to point out that since Democrats regained control of both houses of the legislature that the country has gone to hell in a handbasket. They have utterly failed to accomplish anything other than hold an endless series of hearings about the war in a vain attempt to find George W Bush guilty of some kind of war crime.

Meanwhile the chickens of chickens of environmental extremism are finally coming home to roost in the form of $4.00 gasoline and the public has finally had enough.

The great hope here is that as the people finally wake up and realize that the eco-Nazis have lied to them about the environmental dangers of offshore and Alaskan drilling they will also examine what other thing they have been lied to about. Things like the supposed danger of nuclear power and perhaps even the entire global warming myth.

The left has wanted sky-high gas prices for years. Now that that those high prices are the political results might be very different from what the Democrats expected and hoped for.

This week's Watchers Council nominations are in.

Council links:

Non-council links: