1 January 2008 a Tuesday

A time-out day. I had lots of filing and organizing to do, that's my resolution for today. Fortunately, I have only a minor interest in the various football games. I didn't make a formal list of resolutions, but one of the ones rattling around up there is to swear off of spider solitaire. I can't decide whether to limit myself to one game a day or go cold turkey.

Ditto the last two beers in the refrigerator... Unfortunately, I have a Minor in Rationalization to go with my Major in Procrastination...can I overcome them in this new year?

What, the environmentalists took one look at North Dakota and said go ahead, no problem here? Isn't it interesting how much oil is found in some pretty Godforsaken places? The state's population peaked in 1930, the article says. North Dakota is one of the states I've been all the way across and back the hard way: Greyhound Bus. Being on the bus itself isn't bad, but in between...

I traveled by cross-country bus quite a lot when a young man. I went from Salt Lake City to Chicago one time, then back from Florida to Atlanta to SLC, and of course between southern California and SLC quite a few times. I liked it because I could read and sleep any time I felt like it, a real luxury.

I wonder what Cohen thinks the early founders thought the United States was besides a Christian nation? Cohen is technically correct in that the Constitution itself does not specifically say that in so many words, but the Constitution is seldom taken in isolation and usually considered together with the Declaration of Independence and other documents, all of which clearly refer to the divine being, God. It would be hard to imagine the men of those devout times considering themselves to be Muslims or Hindus or whatever. All of the arguments over religious freedom at the time the country was founded had to do entirely with divisions within Christianity. True, we have now stretched the religious boundaries to include all religions of any type, but that certainly was not what the founders were thinking about when the Constitution was written. It was a fact so obvious that it need not be stated.

I laughed at his "delusional" over McCain back in 2000, because Cohen is quite a lot like a weather vane in switching directions, even if the winds affecting his course changes blow only through his mind.

Apparently he made sure everybody saw it first. This is an awful lot like his earlier "off-hand" remark about Jesus and Satan being brothers where Mormons are concerned.

That will do it, certainly. If the U.S. took its $100 bills and made them $1 bills, inflation would disappear.

First they have to figure out a way to get all of the snow and ice off of the roads and parking lots, however.

This is an interesting statement, because, of course, the world actually does use all of those watts all year long. I'm sitting here looking out my window at the sunny morning and every single one of those watts is being busily employed by all of the plants and animals and even the balmy air (78 degrees at 9 a.m.) around me.

In many cities, the public schools, redoubts of violence and ignorance, have been reduced to places merely to be shunned. The educationist establishment, together with the teachers' unions, have done them in, perhaps beyond repair. Parents are taking things into their own hands in certain places.

One of those places is Los Angeles, where 128 charter schools enroll 47,000 students (or at least kids aspiring to studenthood), 7 percent of the enrollment of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Twenty-six new schools were organized only this year. These range from elementary schools to high schools teaching advanced math and physics. Charter schools didn't start here — Minnesota enacted the first charter-school legislation 16 years ago. California, accustomed to being the leader in nearly everything, followed this time, but today, California has more charter schools than any other state.

The educationists — administrators and teachers who you might think would aspire to be educators but eagerly settle for the security of pretense — hate them. The very existence of the charter schools are a rebuke to the public schools. Ironically, it was a teachers' union leader, the late Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, who urged the reform of public education by creating an alternative, "charter schools" or "schools of choice."

Charter schools are public schools within a public-school system, but freed of much of the bureaucratic red tape and obstacle-building that marks public school systems. The school district supplies the budgets, and the school is responsible for finding a building (churches, with empty Sunday school facilities during the week, are favorite solutions) and recruiting students. A charter is allowed to operate much like a private business, relatively free of downtown regulation, and judged more for "outcomes" than for "processes" and "inputs." (They're not required to abuse the language, for starters.)

The Los Angeles district professes to love charters, officially calling them "part of the District's family and an asset from which we can learn," and promises to love them as long as they "ease the shortage of school facilities and seat space, narrow the achievement gap among students of various backgrounds, increase responsible parent and student involvement in learning, and improve teacher quality and performance evaluation systems."

The man largely responsible for the growth of charter schools in Los Angeles is Jose J. Cole-Gutierrez, the general manager of the California Charter Schools Association, who has helped scores of schools through the red tape of getting started. He's the new director of the charter-schools division of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and the knives are out.

You might think that someone who knows more about charter schools than almost anyone would be perfect for the job, but if you think that, you don't know how the educationist establishment works. "He's been so identified with one part of the movement, as an advocate," a senior district administrator complained to the Los Angeles Times. "The operators of charter schools are going to make it difficult for him to be anything other than an all-out advocate." Hmmmmm. This is bad?

The tensions here, between the educationists and the parents organizing charters, is typical of many cities in which charter schools are trying to survive. Strangling with red tape is the ultimate bureaucratic skill. The petitions required to start a charter here already have grown from 75 pages to nearly 500 pages. But isn't that the point of government bureaucracy?

Our son, Tony, starts school in just over a month from now. We're sending him to a private school because the local system just doesn't have the facilities. In Costa Rica I suspect a big part of the problem may be that apparently so little money goes to the school system, but Tony's private school is costing us little more than his day-care is now. I don't know at this point how much bus fare will add to that, and it's too bad that he'll have to ride a bus about an hour each way, but I did that all of my life so I guess he'll just have to handle that.

In his 1996 autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," presidential candidate Barack Obama admitted using alcohol and drugs in high school. He was unusually frank compared to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush--to name just two politicians reputed to have used drugs.

Mr. Obama raised the issue again in November in Manchester, N.H. In response to a request by Central High School's principal that he reveal his "human side," he discussed his high school years in Hawaii: "I was kind of a goof-off. . . . There were times when I got into drinking and experimented with drugs." He added that he had righted himself to become a "grind" by the end of college. ...

Are there many other prominent people who used illicit substances when young? Messrs. Bush and Clinton are likely only the tip of the iceberg.

One of the interesting things about drugs is the way we decide to categorize some of them as "illicit". For instance, alcohol and nicotine are illicit only if you are under an arbitrary age, after which they are considered just fine...and alcohol wasn't ever just fine at any age not all that long ago. The issue, then, is not actually USE but whether or not the law is broken when you use the drug. And how about the various prescription drugs which are legal as long as a doctor says okay, but not otherwise?

Frankly, I always admired the strict Mormons who managed to avoid alcohol, tobacco and even coffee (caffeine is so commonly used we don't even think about it being a drug), although I didn't know too many who succeeded completely. Frankly, I'm a lot more likely to trust the guy who has lost and learned then one with no experience at all.

People who speak from no experience at all are rather suspect in my book. I have some friends who like to put me down because my Marine Corps service included only training but no actual combat experience, as if I therefore know nothing at all, but then they speak knowingly about the military without themselves having even come within shouting distance. You don't have to be a drug addict to know something about drugs, though, and you're a lot further ahead than a Romney who knows nothing at all about it from personal experience.

I wouldn't trade my Marine Corps experience for anything else I can imagine. I'm happy that I avoided combat, knowing only what the training was like, but I did know one thing after being trained by combat veterans: I was scared as hell about the idea.

Few subjects matter as much as oil, the Persian Gulf and American foreign policy. But few subjects are less well understood. Even relatively sophisticated observers will attribute American interest in the Persian Gulf to Uncle Sam's insatiable thirst for crude, combined with an effort to gain lucrative contracts for American oil firms. The U.S. on this view is something like a global Count Dracula, roaming the earth in search of fresh bodies, hoping to suck them dry.

True, the security of America's oil supply has been an element in national strategic thinking at least since Franklin Roosevelt met with King Abdul Aziz in the waning days of World War II. And true, the U.S. government has never been indifferent to the concerns of the major oil concerns. But the security of our domestic energy supplies plays a relatively small role in America's Persian Gulf policy, and the purely commercial interests of American companies do not drive American grand strategy.

The U.S. today depends on the Middle East for only a small portion of its energy supplies. Still the world's third largest oil producer and holding large coal reserves, America is significantly less dependent on foreign energy sources than the other great economies. Imports account for 35% of U.S. energy consumption versus 56% for the European Union and 80% for Japan. Nearly half the oil and all the natural gas imported by the U.S. comes from the Western Hemisphere; sub-Saharan Africa supplies most of the balance. Only 17% of U.S. oil imports and less than 0.5% of our natural gas come from the Persian Gulf; 80% of Japan's imports come from the Gulf, and by 2015 70% of China's oil will come from the same source.

While U.S. import needs are projected to grow significantly, U.S. dependence on Persian Gulf energy is not, thanks largely to expected production increases in the Western Hemisphere and sub-Saharan Africa. U.S. energy imports from the Persian Gulf are expected to remain below 20% of total consumption. The oil market, of course, is global, and if something were to happen to the Middle Eastern supplies, prices would rise world-wide, and the U.S. economy would be seriously disrupted. But domestic supply is not the key to American interest in the Gulf. ...

The end of America's ability to safeguard the Gulf and the trade routes around it would be enormously damaging--and not just to us. Defense budgets would grow dramatically in every major power center, and Middle Eastern politics would be further destabilized, as every country sought political influence in Middle Eastern countries to ensure access to oil in the resulting free for all.

The potential for conflict and chaos is real. A world of insecure and suspicious great powers engaged in military competition over vital interests would not be a safe or happy place. Every ship that China builds to protect the increasing numbers of supertankers needed to bring oil from the Middle East to China in years ahead would also be a threat to Japan's oil security--as well as to the oil security of India and Taiwan. European cooperation would likely be undermined as well, as countries sought to make their best deals with Russia, the Gulf states and other oil rich neighbors like Algeria.

America's Persian Gulf policy is one of the chief ways through which the U.S. is trying to build a peaceful world and where the exercise of American power, while driven ultimately by domestic concerns and by the American national interest, provides vital public goods to the global community. The next American president, regardless of party and regardless of his or her views about the wisdom of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, will necessarily make the security of the Persian Gulf states one of America's very highest international priorities.

People seem to forget that this whole Saddam thing began when Saddam invaded Kuwait after unsuccessfully trying to invade Iran. The visionaries think that either Saddam had changed and abandoned his dreams, or else that he had successfully been "contained" by Clinton's foreign policy, are little more than wishful-thinkers.

Can anyone honestly believe that a democratic Iraq will not be critical to the future stability of the Middle East? Or that a nuclear Iran with dreams of reconstituting the Persian Empire won't destabilize the whole area?

Read the whole thing for a better understanding of our foreign policy in the Middle East. It’s every bit as much in our national interest for China and Europe to have peaceful access to Middle Eastern oil as it is for American domestic use. Stable world markets benefit us far more than simply an increased market share. Yes, Iraq was all about oil, in the long run, but not the way many people think.

“The US Air Force is experimenting with a synthetic fuel that could become a cheaper fuel-alternative for the entire US military and even commercial aviation, officials say.

As the cost of a barrel of oil approaches $100 and US reliance on foreign oil sources grows, the Air Force, the single biggest user of energy in the US government, wants to find a cheaper alternative. Air Force officials think they may have found it in a fuel that blends the normal JP-8 fuel, currently used for the military’s jet engines, with a synthetic fuel made from natural gas and liquid coal.

The 50-50 blend is less expensive – between $40 to $75 per barrel – and it burns cleaner than normal fuel. The synthetic fuel is purchased from US-based suppliers and then blended with the military’s JP-8 fuel.”

“In addition to being cheaper and ultimately more plentiful, synthetic fuel can also be greener, Air Force officials say. The fuel itself burns cleaner than regular JP-8 fuel, but the current process used to make the fuel produces nearly twice the amount of carbon.”

This is a little like that bit about all of the watts of solar power falling on the earth which aren't being used, somehow. The way you get energy out of a hydrocarbon is by burning it, which means you are changing the carbon to carbon dioxide. The carbon doesn't go away when the fuel "burns cleaner" because the carbon you start with is still there afterwards. The confusion about something, especially coal, being "cleaner burning" comes from the stupid notion that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, but those dark clouds of smoke belching from the chimney aren't carbon dioxide because it is colorless. Every time you exhale you exhale carbon dioxide.

I also liked the "between $40 to $75" throw-away line...there's quite a lot of difference between those two numbers. Like almost double.

Thomas Houlahan comments on Ms. Hillary's recent discussions of events in Pakistan with Wolf Blitzer and George Stephanopoulos, addressing the question: "How credible is Hillary Clinton on Pakistan?" Houlahan writes:

"If President Musharraf wishes to stand for election," [Senator Clinton] told Blitzer, "then he should abide by the same rules that every other candidate will have to follow."

My immediate reaction was: "Did I hear that correctly?"

As a Pakistan analyst, I know for a fact that Pervez Musharraf doesn't wish to stand for election any time soon.

The upcoming elections are for the next parliament. Musharraf was just elected president of Pakistan, overwhelmingly, by popularly elected electors on Oct. 6. He's just begun his five-year term as the president of the country. Why would he ever want to run for one seat in parliament? It wouldn't make sense.

However, I checked the transcript of the interview later. That's exactly what she said. ...

Sunday morning, ABC's This Week ran an interview George Stephanopoulos had done with Sen. Clinton on Friday.

The interview produced this gem:

Referring to a possible delay in the elections, Sen. Clinton said: "I think it will be very difficult to have a real election. You know, Nawaz Sharif [leader of the PML-N, an opposition party] has said he's not going to compete. The PPP is in disarray with Benazir's assassination. He [President Pervez Musharraf] could be the only person on the ballot. I don't think that's a real election."

And then it hit me:

Sen. Clinton really didn't know that the upcoming elections were for individual seats in Pakistan's parliament. She actually believed that Bhutto, Nawaz and Musharraf would be facing off as individual candidates for leadership of the country in the upcoming elections.

Sen. Clinton didn't know that Nawaz Sharif isn't allowed to run for office in Pakistan because of a felony conviction. She didn't know that President Musharraf won't be on the ballot because he's already been elected.

Power Line wants to know what the press would have said if a Republican candidate for president had made this mistake? Hillary, you remember, is supposed to be a lot smarter and more knowledgeable than Bush already.

Shocking, because it seems to me almost like yesterday, too. Even more shocking is the realization than I'm 73!

This is going to produce some interesting reactions, noted in Captain's Quarters:

Like the Captain said, it seems a bit strange to do it before the very first actual primary is held, and also to make the decision even before Iowa's joke.

I think that's an easy mis-speak, rather than a mistake. My desk here is set up facing north, for instance, whereas for years I lived in a house where it faced south. Further, in those years our weather came in from the west and moved east. Here, our weather comes from the east and moves west. I sometimes have a hard time remembering which way is really east, frankly.

Hillary, however, has based her entire campaign as the one person most prepared to hit the ground running in the White House. Someone using that as a selling point does damage to her case when she can't tell the difference between a presidential election and a parliamentary election in a critical state for the war on terror. Given that most of the current unrest springs from Musharraf's questionable election as president in the last few weeks, it's even stranger that she made this error twice in three days.

If Hillary can't get Pakistan right, then she's obviously not prepared to get started on Day One. Her entire sales pitch fails on this question, and it reminds us that the three frontrunners among the Democrats have less national-office experience put together than John McCain, less executive experience -- as in zero -- than Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, and that Mike Huckabee was Governor of Arkansas longer than any of them served in national public office. Even Fred Thompson beats them on that score.

I don't think the Democrats are really doing a very good job of presenting us with qualified candidates.

If 2007 was the Year of Al Gore, with his movie, Academy Award and Nobel Prize, 2008 just might be the year the so-called scientific consensus that man is causing the Earth to warm begins to crack.

The fissures started to show in 2007: Prominent French physicist Claude Allegre called Gore a crook and equates Gore's French followers with religious zealots. Weather Channel founder and meteorologist John Coleman said global warming is "the greatest scam in history." Gore continued to duck open invitations to debate his theory. More than 400 scientists disputed the global warming claims.

Though they were shut out of the meeting, dissenting scientists were able to get a bit of media attention at the December climate conference in Bali.

Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told us that it will take several years for the climate change scare to finally die. But the death spiral will begin at some point, and it looks like the spinning will start in '08.

Feeling better? Don't. Seriously. The problem? If the sun really is the culprit, as I and many others believe, the sad fact is that it is about to head into a cycle of global cooling in a few years' time.

And global cooling is really BAD news. For one thing, the vast bulk of humanity cannot afford the reduction in crops which will result. Being too warm or too cold is one thing, and tropic diseases further north are another, but not having enough food is critical!

One of their concerns is Cuba, and did I just miss reading these headlines or something?

Democrats hate to admit it, but just one Bush policy alone, Iraq, could mark him as being supremely successful. Trying to deny that a democratic government in Iraq friendly to the United States is anything less than transformational in historic terms simply isn't realistic. It will be a change every bit as revolutionary as that which took place in Iran with the overthrow of the shah. Actually, even much more so if the results actually are a ripple-like spreading of democracy throughout the area.

You'll know more about Bush's legacy in the near future as you start to see others trying to claim the actual credit. Look for Hillary to announce this summer that actually she and that other guy, Bill, actually proposed what is happening in Iraq two years before Bush came along and screwed up their plans.

And I still expect him to get blamed, eventually, for not working harder to fix Social Security when he should have.

Interestingly enough, I had been thinking along the same lines when I came to this OpinionJournal piece:

If it had to be a Democrat, who would I find the least appalling? It has to be Hillary, I think, because in my opinion the greatest challenge facing us is not the economy or immigration or health care, but the escalating battle with militant jihadism. If we go back to pre-campaign Hillary, she alone appears to know this.

Edwards scares me, he's a dangerous man. Obama I could probably live with, since I don't think he's going to govern much like the imaginary world he presents, not after reality sets in for him. Are there, realistically, any other Democrats who might win? No.

I guess my favorite is McCain, based less upon rational argument about all of the various pro/con points than upon how I feel about him losing. I don't feel the same way at the thought of any of the other losing, so I guess the inner 'me' has made a selection. I think I could live with Romney or Giuliani and Thompson might be even a pleasant surprise. Huckabee and Paul, heaven forbid. I'd almost rather have Hillary.

That's better-stated than most. "Sealed" the election at least acknowledges that Bush won it initially. The USSC got involved not because of anything Bush did, but because of Algore. Had it been up to Bush, the Supreme Court would never have been involved at all. He did not need the Supreme Court to win; he already had.

This is the point the Bush-haters always want to ignore: Bush won the election from the get-go. Everything which happened after that was as a result of Gore's attempt to overturn those results. Everything was, in fact, Gore's doing. It got to the Supreme Court in the first place entirely because of Gore, not Bush.

I suspect many Goreons are mad because they did not know the president was not elected according to the total popular vote and are too ashamed to admit it.

As I quoted the other day, the best explanation I've seen yet was a comparison with the World Series, in a year when the winning 4-3 team was outscored by the losers by a wide margin. It isn't the total scoring that counts, it's the games (states, or electoral votes) won which determines the winner.

Not fair? That's another argument entirely. Bush beat Kerry by a MUCH larger popular vote margin, but could have lost the electoral vote if just one final state had gone the other way. You know that the anti-Bush would not have been complaining in that case.

Now, tell me...how would one go about making a war hero look like a sissy? How, for instance, would you have done this to Audie Murphy? When it boils right down to it, what was the question about Kerry? Right, it was how did he manage to get 3 purple hearts with no visible scars and not a single day spent in a hospital?

This was the crux of the Swift Boat challenge, and they said that all Kerry had to do to shut them up was provide full and complete disclosure of his war records.

And, despite winning more votes in 2004 than any other Democrat ever has, he isn't running this year. Why not? The man was within one state from becoming president last time, why wouldn't you want him to run again? There's talk of a campaign to draft Algore, but none to draft Kerry...why not?

Obviously I think Kerry faked...or at least greatly hyped...his medal applications. I was Chief Clerk of Headquarters Battalion MCB Camp Pendleton, and I know paperwork. Kerry originated his own medal applications, not superior officers.

Look, Kerry was in a dangerous combat zone, no doubt in the world about that. And getting out with three purples may well have saved his life, no doubt about that, either. Do I blame him for seeing the opportunity--after all, he didn't invent the rule--and sensibly taking advantage of it? No, not really.

But does this make him a war hero? No. He's a successful Corporal Klinger from MASH, that's all. He's a successful Yossarian from Catch-22. Neither guy pretended to be proud, both wanted only to live. Same with Kerry.

His problem was his ego, not an uncommon stumbling block. What would have happened in the race, for instance, if Kerry had done like McCain is doing this time, minimizing his own heroic service in Vietnam...a man whose purple hearts came close to killing him and have handicapped him for life. Kerry windsurfs; McCain is lucky to walk.

Where would the Swift Boats have been if Kerry had never even mentioned Vietnam? Or if he had been up against someone like Cheney, say, rather than someone who actually flew a solo fighter jet, a job which doesn't qualify you for a good rating when you go to apply for a New York Life insurance policy?

Big mistake. If Kerry had never once mentioned Vietnam he might well be president today. Try to imagine Kerry modestly shrugging off reporters demanding to know more about his heroic service in Vietnam, a place where Kerry had once said that ALL servicemen were war criminals?

An item Thursday cited Rep. Ron Paul's speech recognizing Juneteenth--the anniversary of June 19, 1865, when the slaves of Galveston, Texas, learned of emancipation. "The slaves of Galveston were the last group of slaves to learn of the end of slavery," Paul said. "Thus, Juneteenth represents the end of slavery in America."

Well, not quite. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves only in states "the people whereof shall then [as of Jan. 1, 1863] be in rebellion against the United States." It did not cover the Union's five slave states: Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia. The last three had all abolished slavery by Juneteenth, but Delaware and Kentucky had not, which means slavery survived in those two states until December 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified.