A ROMAN HOLIDAY FOR ETHANOL
The Germans have a word for it: schadenfreude (shay-din-froy-deh). It means someone being happy over someone else being unhappy. The only English equivalent is the term "Roman holiday," referring to the happy excitement Romans got over gladiators' suffering in the Colosseum. It says a lot about us that we don't even have a word for this terrible and all too-common emotion. Yet all of us have probably experienced it at one time or another, and right now it's hard to resist it regarding folks who are biting the financial dust with ethanol. As this recent story, Ethanol Boom Is Running Out of Gas, in the Wall Street Journal details, the glut of ethanol plants has caused a collapse of ethanol prices while the price of the corn from which it is made is rising. Thus many ethanol companies are now "under deathwatch." So of course, the corn farmer lobby and ethanol producers are screaming for more subsidies from Congress. They won't get them because a Nobel Prize winner has just pounded in the final nail in ethanol's coffin. No - not the phony you just thought of, a real Nobel Laureate.
THE SALVATION OF 2008
Americans are by and large in a sour mood. The only hope for Republicans in 2008, it seems, is that voters will be more soured on Democrats than Republicans for House and Senate seats, and be more turned off by Hillary than whomever the GOP offers up. It's a slender reed of hope on which to bet the future of America. For if the Dems sweep the White House and Congress, every Republican Bush-hater will soon long for the yesterday of GW. A Socialist-Fascist America run by a criminal political mafia and enforced by hundreds of hyper-liberal judges. Yet fear of this, fear of Hillary - FOH - will not be sufficient to prevent this. What the voters have to be offered is something so exciting, so electrifying, so positive yet well-grounded, well-thought-out and researched so it is actually achievable, that it sweeps away the sourness. This is what happened in 1994. The electorate was in this same crummy mood, and the GOP came up with the Contract With America. The CWA was an exciting positive vision that was real and achievable. Voters responded by ending the Democrat Party's monopoly control of 64 years (with two irrelevant interruptions) over the House. What Republicans need is the CWA's equivalent for 2008. There is such a thing, and what's more, a growing number of key Republican Party leaders are beginning to embrace it. It may turn out to be the Salvation of 2008.
IRAQI OIL AND THICK SUNNI SKULLS
Late last month, just as the Senate was voting 75 to 23 for a "sense of the Senate" resolution calling for Iraq to be divided into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish "federal regions" with a weak national government to "facilitate sharing of oil revenue," eight tanker trucks arrived in Jordan with crude oil from Kirkuk in northern Iraq. Not a single Senator noticed, nor made the ironic connection. For the arrival of the tankers is a more important event than the Senators' vote of frustration. The tankers had to cross all of the Sunnis' Anbar Province to get to Jordan. It hasn't yet penetrated thick Sunni skulls that their land may contain more oil than the rest of Iraq. When it does, Iraqi Sunnis are going to look at the political map of the Middle East very differently. Unsurprisingly, thick Senate skulls are unable to figure this out.
SO MUCH TO CELEBRATE
On our hike through the Garden of the Gods at the TTP Summer Rendezvous last August, TTPer Ed Sanders gave me a good-natured ribbing about my mentioning in some previous article that I loved to celebrate things by drinking good red wine in a Reidel crystal glass. Ed and his wife Susan, it turns out, are the US distributors for Reidel's competitor, WineStar. "Our hand-blown unleaded crystal leaves Reidel in the dust, Jack," Ed told me. "If you drink a favorite red from our Diamond Cru instead, you'll be blown away by the difference." Ed kindly offered to send me a sample to prove it. There was a shipping delay and it just arrived. Okay, I asked myself, I've got the glass - what do I celebrate? Well, tonight, October 12, there is celebration to savor. Not only is it time to toast the 515th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America, but of the world's greatest buffoon winning the world's most tawdry and degraded award. Whatever glass you have, WineStar or not, fill it full and raise it to Algore's Nobel. You can be quite sure that one person who will not is Hillary Clinton.
THE BRECK BOY IS CLEARED FROM THE PRESIDENTIAL FIELD
What is happening to Dem presidential aspirant John Edwards - the Breck Boy - is too awesomely delicious not to quickly brief you on. The National Enquirer is now running a story about Edwards cheating on his wife. The Enquirer doesn't reveal her name or anything about her identity. Evidently she is Lisa Druck, the former girlfriend of novelist Jay McInerney who described her as "jaded, cocaine-addled, (and) sexually voracious."
MARGARET HAMILTON FOR PRESIDENT
According to Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, that's who Democrats are going to foist upon America next November. Below is a video clip of Stewart reporting on the now-infamous Hillary Cackle. It is a hilariously funny put-down of Her Royal Shrillness, or as she is known on the internet, the PIAPS. Try to stop laughing enough at the end of the clip and listen carefully to Stewart's closing line: (click on the link below to view the clip on Comedy Central) HILLARY CLINTON CACKLES He says, "She'll be our first president that you can't spill water on." Margaret Hamilton in the White House.
POLAND VS. THE EUROCRATS
At a conference on the future of the European Union held in Brussels last week and co-sponsored by George Soros, it was advocated that the EU expel member states that are "not European enough." One country in particular which Europe should throw out because it hampers the EU's aim of transforming itself into a federal superstate is Poland. What have the Poles done to antagonize the Eurocrats? Today (October 10) is the "European Day Against the Death Penalty." The EU wanted to inaugurate the event with a common European declaration against capital punishment. Poland thwarted this by refusing to sign the declaration because the EU did not condemn abortion and euthanasia as well. Last month, during an EU meeting on the death penalty, the Polish justice minister confronted his Danish colleague with Denmark's annual 15,000 abortions and the latter got so angry that she left the room, slamming the door. Other countries, such as Belgium and Portugal, accuse Poland of "immoral and unworthy behavior" by daring to compare abortion and euthanasia to the death penalty. Richard Howitt, a British Labor politician and the vice president of the European Parliament's human rights subcommittee, said that Poland's refusal to reject the death penalty brings into question its commitment to European values.
THE SENATE MUST SINK THE TREATY THAT WILL SINK THE US NAVY
[This is a follow-up to Frank Gaffney's Losing Our Sovereignty with LOST of last week. Again, I could not encourage you more to contact both your Senators and request they vote NO on this incredibly dangerous treaty's approval. ---JW] Irony of ironies: The principal champion of the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) is the United States Navy. Yet predictably few organizations would suffer more than America's naval forces from a supranational government of the oceans empowered by U.S. accession to that treaty. The absurdity of this situation was on display last week as the Navy's former senior officer, retired Chief of Naval Operations Vernon Clark, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Adm. Clark waxed on about LOST as "a Magna Carta for the oceans that guarantees navigation freedoms throughout the world's largest maneuver space." The committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, declared in about as many words that, if the Navy wants the treaty, the Senate should give it to them. Period. Fortunately, a necessary corrective was offered the next day by another distinguished retired four-star, Adm. James "Ace" Lyons.
CONGRESS’ SECRET CHAMBER OF TAXES
Knowing how consumers will respond is key in estimating how much revenue will come in from a proposed tax rate increase - if any. There are tax economists who can give pretty good estimates about the consumer response. Unfortunately, they are not allowed to speak in the Joint Tax Committee (JTC) of the U.S. Congress, the "Secret Chamber" where the "official estimate" is made. For decades, a cabal in Congress has had effective control of the official tax scoring committee. Thus, they overestimate the tax revenue that will come in from a rate increase and overestimate the loss in revenue from a tax rate cut, which serves the interest of those who, for ideological reasons, want to increase the size of government. After all too many years, the Bush administration is at least trying to have its Treasury Department tax office (OTA) undertake some dynamic analysis (i.e., considering the behavioral response). However, Congress refuses to fund this modest effort (we are talking about less than a million dollars), let alone clean up JTC, which refuses to allow public scrutiny of its estimating procedures.
MITT WAS A HIT
"Utah's leading newspaper," the Salt Lake Tribune fully lived up to its reputation as a left-wing rag last Saturday (9/29), when it breathlessly reported in its lead front page article that Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney had just spoken to a meeting of "the most influential members of the conservative movement" so "cloaked in secrecy," so "shadowy," that the group of leaders is known as "The Sith Lords of the Ultra-Right." All of us who were there in Salt Lake at this "secretive meeting" of course laughed our heads off over the headline story. The "shadowy" group scaring all the moonbats is the Council for National Policy (CNP), of which I have been a member since the early 80s soon after it was formed. We meet in private, not "secret," a difference lost on the moonbats, which means no leftie journalists are allowed. It means we're free to discuss what we want in confidence. Mitt Romney, however, did not speak to us in confidence - he wants everyone in America to know where he stands. So I can tell you what he said - and I can also tell you he made a deeply positive impression on what is indeed the most influential collection of conservatives in the country. Mitt was a hit.