Wisdom For The Ages

1. The world is a dangerous place to live — not because of the people who are evil but because of the people who don't do anything about it. — Albert Einstein

2. The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. — George Orwell

3. History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. — Ronald Reagan

4. The terror most people are concerned with is the IRS. — Malcolm Forbes

5. There is nothing so incompetent, ineffective, arrogant, expensive, and wasteful as an unreasonable, unaccountable, and unrepentant government monopoly. — A Patriot

6. Visualize World Peace — Through Firepower!

7. Nothing says sincerity like a Carrier Strike Group and a U.S. Marine Air-Ground Task Force.

8. One cannot be reasoned out of a position that he has not first been reasoned into.

2008-06-17

Polar Bears Will Be Just Fine, Thank You Very Much!

Alaska's Polar Bears: Going With The Floe?

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

June 16, 2008

Energy: The green light given by the Fish and Wildlife Service for oil drilling off Alaska is being portrayed as an OK to hurt polar bears. But there are so many polar bears, it's the drillers who should worry.

IBD Series: Breaking The Back Of High Oil

Environmentalists rejoiced last month when Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne declared the polar bear endangered. The designation gave them a poster pet for the dangers of global warming and a club to bludgeon oil companies.

Last week, however, there was a break in the ice, so to speak. New Fish and Wildlife regulations gave legal protection to seven oil companies that plan to search for oil in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's northwest coast if "small numbers" of polar bears and Pacific walruses are incidentally harmed over the next five years.

The Associated Press went ballistic, proclaiming that less than a month after the polar bear was listed as endangered, "the Bush administration is giving oil companies permission to annoy and potentially harm them in the pursuit of oil and natural gas."

What the administration is doing is honoring contracts signed in February, before the polar bear was listed — wrongly, we believe — as endangered. Fact is, polar bears aren't endangered, either by oil companies or climate change.

When he made the listing, Kempthorne noted that exploration in the Chukchi Sea was exempt. "Polar bears are already protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act," he explained, "which has more stringent protections for polar bears than the Endangered Species Act does."

Listing the polar bear as endangered was a political decision made under political pressure.

The Mineral Management Service estimates we could recover 15 billion barrels of oil plus 76 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from the Chukchi Sea's 29.7 million acres. Oil companies enjoyed a similar exclusion in the Chukchi from 1991 to 1996 and in the Beaufort Sea since 1993 with no effect on the bears.

In fact, there's no proof of a single bear being harmed by oil operations in Alaska since 1993. Since 1960, when the Alaska oil hunt began, only two oil-related bear fatalities have been documented.

The world polar bear population is at a modern high and growing. Mitch Taylor, polar bear biologist with the Government of Nunavut, a territory in Canada, puts the current population at 24,000, up 40% since 1974. Some 2,000 of these bears live in and around the Chukchi Sea, where the oil companies purchased leases worth $2.6 billion in February.

Taylor says that, contrary to greenie hype, climate change, particularly in the Arctic, is not pushing them to the brink of extinction. They have and will continue to adapt to their environment.

The ice-loving bears have survived warmer periods than we are experiencing now. The most recent such period occurred 6,000 and 9,000 years ago, and it was even warmer between 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, long before the first SUV hit the road.

In a report to Fish and Wildlife, Taylor stated: "No evidence exists that suggests that both bears and the conservation systems that regulate them will not adapt and respond to the new conditions." Taylor stressed polar bears' adaptability, saying they evolved from grizzlies 250,000 years ago and as a distinct species about 125,000 years ago when natural climate change occurred.

From caribou that have thrived for 30 years as 15 billion barrels have been pumped from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to marine life thriving among drilling platforms that act like artificial reefs off the Louisiana, evidence says oil exploration and the environment can coexist. Katrina ravaged Gulf of Mexico oil facilities and not a single drop of oil was leaked or spilled.

Oil companies are criticized for not using their "obscene" profits to find more oil but then attacked when they want to. Lift the polar bear's endangered status. Drill in the Chukchi. Drill now.

The Next Nuclear War Starts Here!

A U.N. Khan Job

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
June 16, 2008

WMDs: Blueprints for a nuclear weapon compatible with the ballistic missiles of Iran, North Korea and other rogue states were found on computers of the notorious Khan smuggling ring. Will a complacent world wake up?

Read More: Iran | Global War On Terror

It's clear that it's getting easier to build and use a nuclear bomb. If civilized countries want to stop their biggest cities from becoming radioactive craters, they'd better implement a no-tolerance policy against nuclear proliferation.

It's unacceptable to find — four years after their seizure — that computers in Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities housed sophisticated electronic designs for a Pakistani atomic bomb, in a form easy to reproduce.

David Albright, former chief arms inspector for the United Nations who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security, will issue a report this week revealing that the designs were found on computers in the possession of Swiss smugglers linked to nuclear engineer Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is considered the father of Pakistan's bomb.

The computers were seized in 2006. Yet the geniuses at the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reportedly had more trouble deciphering the more than 1,000 megabytes of information on the computers and finding the bomb plans than the Manhattan Project had building the first atom bomb in the 1940s.

Which raises a question: Why send hundreds of millions of dollars to Vienna, Austria, each year for IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei's budget? So he can win a Nobel Peace Prize while helping the Islamofascist Iranian regime stall for time while it builds a nuke?

The U.N. agency, which turned 50 last year, exists by law to make sure that nuclear energy "is not used in such a way as to further any military purpose." On winning his 2005 Peace Prize, ElBaradei said it was an "urgently required" step for the IAEA to "keep nuclear and radiological material out of the hands of extremist groups."

Khan's contacts with Tehran's revolutionary regime go back to the 1980s. The IAEA knew at least five years ago that Iran's centrifuge designs were Pakistani.

The IAEA should have been aggressively tracking down every tentacle of the Khan network for years.

Had it done so — who knows? — it might even have found Saddam Hussein was one of Khan's clients, something that may yet be in the cards and that would not enhance ElBaradei's reputation.

Switzerland's government announced that it destroyed 30,000 pages relating to the Khan nuclear plans so they wouldn't fall into the wrong hands. But only a naif would conclude that Khan's plans aren't now in the hands of dozens of unsavory characters around the world, from Pyongyang to Damascus, and perhaps even in the caves of Waziristan.

A real international nuclear watchdog would be carrying out a relentless global manhunt for anyone who might have such instructions on how to kill a million innocent souls.

What we have instead in the IAEA is an incompetent, ideologically leftist bureaucracy that continually is making worse an already dangerous state of affairs.

What Do These Three Men Have In Common?

Posters Of Communist icon Che Guevara and Barack Obama hang on a wall as Common Pleas Judge James Burge speaks in his office in Loraine, Ohio, in this April 22 photo. Last week, Burge ruled that Ohio's lethal injection process is unconstitutional because it could cause pain and the state mandates that an inmate's death be painless.

Your Taxes Will Be Going Up -- WAY UP!

Price Of Not Extending Bush Cuts: Return To Historically High Taxes

By J.T. YOUNG

Despite liberal condemnation of the Bush tax cuts, virtually no one embraces a complete return to their pre-cut level — including the Democratic majority in Congress and both pending presidential nominees. There is good reason.

Implicit in this rejection is the admission that they were too high to return to. While the media won't say it now, and certainly wouldn't then, those supposedly halcyon days of fiscal policy rested on historically high tax levels.

Taxes got there by increasing retroactively in 1993, adding a 36% income-tax bracket and effectively another of 39.6% through a surcharge on incomes above a certain level. That hike also raised the corporate rate to 35%, increased estate taxes and the gas tax, taxed certain Social Security benefits and upped AMT rates to 26% and 28%.

In short, most everyone making more than $20,000 paid more in taxes.

Eight years later, those hikes were reversed. The 2001 tax cut created a low 10% rate bracket and lowered all the rest — the top 39.6% rate to 35%, 36% to 33%, 31% to 28%, and the 28% bracket to 25%.

It also increased the child credit, eased the marriage penalty, incentivized pension contribution and decreased estate taxes.

In short, most everyone paying income taxes paid less in taxes. The difference is reflected in individuals' effective tax rates — the rate of taxes actually paid.

The Congressional Budget Office studied effective rates from 1979 to 2005. It showed the 1993-2000 average for all quintiles at 22.6% — higher than any other single year outside 1993-2000. The 2001 tax cut decreased these effective rates across the board, as the accompanying chart shows.

A comparison of the distribution of the federal income tax burden is similarly illuminating.

Using 2008 Internal Revenue Service statistics, the 2001 cuts shifted the income tax burden up the economic ladder.

In 2000, the top 1% paid 37.4% of all income taxes vs. 39.4% in 2005. The top 2% went from 56.5% to 60%, the top 10% from 67.3% to 70.3%, the top 25% from 84% to 86%, and the top 50% from 96% to 97%.

In addition to its impact on taxpayers, the 1993-2000 years also had a historically high federal tax burden on the economy. Over the last 60 years, the federal tax burden has averaged 17.9% of GDP; the 1993-2000 period averaged 19.2%.

While that 1.3% difference may seem slight, it is greater than the 1% level deemed necessary earlier this year to stimulate the slowing economy.

In contrast, the 2001-07 period averaged 17.9% of GDP — equaling the 60-year average despite the 2000 economic slowdown that tipped into a recession following 9/11.

The 1993-2000 burden magnitude is demonstrated by the fact that its 19.2% average was surpassed by only three single years — 1981 (19.6%), 1969 (19.7%) and 1945 (20.4%) — outside the period.

The period's highest year, 2000's 20.9%, is unsurpassed and only equaled by 1944's wartime level.

All told, the period was the highest of any eight years recorded in the Historical Tables of the President's Budget.

Comparing the federal income tax burden to the economy is even more dramatic. The average of the last 60 years is 8% of GDP. The 1993-2000 period average was 8.8%; 2001-07's 8.1%.

Again, the 1993-2000 period was the highest of any eight-year period, and its 2000 peak of 10.3% of GDP was higher than any on record.

We need not simply look backward to understand what will happen going forward. The CBO projects that, even with the removal of the Alternative Minimum Tax's impact, federal taxes will immediately return to 19.8% of GDP in 2012 — easily exceeding the 1993-2000 average — just two years after the 2001 tax cuts expire.

The effect on income taxes is even greater, tying the all-time record of 10.3% of GDP by 2016 and breaking it at 10.4% a year later.

The current fixation on the 2001 tax cuts masks the real, bigger tax story. By myriad measures — marginal rates, effective rates, distribution of the tax burden or as percentage of the economy — taxes were not just high before the 2001 tax cuts; they were also historically high.

It's no wonder that such tax levels are being rejected — at least in part — across the political spectrum this election year. But they will return in 2011.

They will not increase gradually, but immediately return to high levels. They will come regardless of the state of the economy. And they will come regardless of what politicians promise this year . . . unless they act by Congress passing and the president signing legislation.

Talk is cheap, particularly in an election year. But rest assured, the taxes of 2011 will not be.

Young served in the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004 and as a congressional staff member from 1987 to 2000.

2008-05-29

We are, indeed, safer now!

Have We Been Safer Under Bush? The Empirical Evidence Says Yes

By JOHN HINDERAKER
May 28, 2008

The debate over Iraq and the war on terror rages, even amid signs we're winning. John Hinderaker of powerlineblog.com recently posted a blog entry answering the perennial question, "Are We Safer?" We rerun it here with his permission.

On the stump, Barack Obama usually concludes his comments on Iraq by saying, "and it hasn't made us safer."

It is an article of faith on the left that nothing the Bush administration has done has enhanced our security, and, on the contrary, its various alleged blunders have only contributed to the number of jihadists who want to attack us.

Empirically, however, it seems beyond dispute that something has made us safer since 2001. Over the course of the Bush administration, successful attacks on the U.S. and its interests overseas have dwindled to virtually nothing.

Some perspective here is required. While most Americans may not have been paying attention, a considerable number of terrorist attacks on America and American interests abroad were launched from the 1980s forward, too many of which were successful.

What follows is a partial history:

1988

February: Marine Corps Lt. Colonel Higgens, chief of the United Nations Truce Force, was kidnapped and murdered by Hezbollah.

December: Pan Am flight 103 from London to New York was blown up over Scotland, killing 270 people, including 35 from Syracuse University and a number of American military personnel.

1991

November: American University in Beirut bombed.

1993

January: A Pakistani terrorist opened fire outside CIA headquarters, killing two agents and wounding three.

February: World Trade Center bombed, killing six and injuring more than 1,000.

1995

January: Operation Bojinka, Osama bin Laden's plan to blow up 12 airliners over the Pacific Ocean, discovered.

November: Five Americans killed in attack on a U.S. Army office in Saudi Arabia.

1996

June: Truck bomb at Khobar Towers kills 19 American servicemen and injures 240.

June: Terrorist opens fire at top of Empire State Building, killing one.

1997

February: Palestinian opens fire at top of Empire State Building, killing one and wounding more than a dozen.

November: Terrorists murder four American oil company employees in Pakistan.

1998

January: U.S. Embassy in Peru bombed.

August: Simultaneous bomb attacks on U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed more than 300 people and injured over 5,000.

1999

October: Egypt Air flight 990 crashed off the coast of Massachusetts, killing 100 Americans among the more than 200 on board; the pilot yelled "Allahu Akbar!" as he steered the airplane into the ocean.

2000

October: A suicide boat exploded next to the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 American sailors and injuring 39.

2001

September: Terrorists with four hijacked airplanes kill about 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

December: Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," tries to blow up a transatlantic flight, but is stopped by passengers.

The Sept. 11 attack was a propaganda triumph for al-Qaida, celebrated by a dismaying number of Muslims around the world. Everyone expected that it would draw more Muslims to bin Laden's cause and that more such attacks would follow.

In fact, though, what happened was quite different: The pace of successful jihadist attacks against the U.S. slowed, decelerated further after the onset of the Iraq War, and has now dwindled to essentially zero.

Here is the record:

2002

October: Diplomat Laurence Foley murdered in Jordan, in an operation planned, directed and financed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, perhaps with the complicity of Saddam's government.

2003

May: Suicide bombers killed 10 Americans, and killed and wounded many others, at housing compounds for Westerners in Saudi Arabia.

October: More bombings of U.S. housing compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killed 26 and injured 160.

2004

There were no successful attacks inside the U.S. or against American interests abroad.

2005

There were no successful attacks inside the U.S. or against American interests abroad.

2006

There were no successful attacks inside the U.S. or against American interests abroad.

2007

There were no successful attacks inside the U.S. or against American interests abroad.

2008

So far, there have been no successful attacks inside the U.S. or against American interests abroad.

I have omitted from the above accounting a few "lone wolf" Islamic terrorist incidents, such as the Washington, D.C., snipers, the Egyptian who attacked the El Al counter in Los Angeles, and an incident or two when a Muslim driver steered his vehicle into a crowd.

These are, in a sense, exceptions that prove the rule, since the lone wolves were not, as far as we know, in contact with international Islamic terrorist groups and therefore couldn't have been detected by surveillance of terrorist conversations or interrogations of al-Qaida leaders.

It should also be noted that the decline in attacks on the U.S. was not the result of jihadists abandoning the field.

Our government stopped a number of incipient attacks and broke up several terrorist cells, while Islamic terrorists continued to carry out successful attacks around the world, in England, Spain, Russia, Pakistan, Israel, Indonesia and elsewhere.

There are a number of possible reasons why our government's actions after Sept. 11 may have made us safer.

Overthrowing the Taliban and depriving al-Qaida of its training grounds in Afghanistan certainly impaired the effectiveness of that organization.

Waterboarding three top al-Qaida leaders for a minute or so apiece may have given us the vital information we needed to head off plots in progress and to kill or apprehend three-quarters of al-Qaida's leadership.

The National Security Agency's eavesdropping on international terrorist communications may have allowed us to identify and penetrate cells here in the U.S., as well as to identify and kill terrorists overseas.

We may have penetrated al-Qaida's communications network, perhaps through the mysterious Naeem Noor Khan, whose laptop may have been the 21st century equivalent of the Enigma machine.

Al-Qaida's announcement that Iraq is the central front in its war against the West, and its call for jihadis to find their way to Iraq to fight American troops, may have distracted the terrorists from attacks on the U.S.

The fact that al-Qaida loyalists gathered in Iraq, where they have been neutralized by American and Iraqi troops, may have crippled their ability to attack elsewhere.

The conduct of al-Qaida in Iraq, which revealed that it is an organization of sociopaths, not freedom fighters, may have destroyed its credibility in the Islamic world.

The Bush administration's skillful diplomacy may have persuaded other nations to take stronger actions against their own domestic terrorists. (This certainly happened in Saudi Arabia, for whatever reason.)

Our intelligence agencies may have gotten their act together after decades of failure. The Department of Homeland Security, despite its moments of obvious lameness, may not be as useless as many of us had thought.

No doubt there are officials inside the Bush administration who could better allocate credit among these, and probably other, explanations of our success in preventing terrorist attacks.

But based on the clear historical record, it is obvious that the Bush administration has done something since 2001 that has dramatically improved our security against such attacks.

To fail to recognize this, and to rail against the Bush administration's security policies as failures or worse, is to sow the seeds of greatly increased susceptibility to terrorist attack in the next administration.

Hinderaker blogs at powerlineblog.com.

2008-04-30

Obama The Vacuous!

New Face, Yes, But With Ideas Dating To '30s

By THOMAS SOWELL
April 29, 2008

The following is the conclusion of Thomas Sowell’s article; the full article is referenced below:

Tried And Failed

Although Sen. Obama has presented himself as the candidate of new things — using the mantra of "change" endlessly — the cold fact is that virtually everything he says about domestic policy comes straight out of the 1960s and virtually everything he says about foreign policy is straight out of the 1930s.

Protecting criminals, attacking business, increasing government spending, promoting a sense of envy and grievance, raising taxes on people who are productive and subsidizing those who are not — all this is a re-run of the 1960s.

We paid a terrible price for such 1960s notions in the years that followed, in the form of soaring crime rates, double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. During the 1960s, ghettoes across the country were ravaged by riots from which many have not fully recovered to this day.

The violence and destruction were concentrated not where the greatest poverty or injustice existed, but where there were the most liberal politicians, promoting grievances and hamstringing the police.

Internationally, the approach that Obama proposes — including the media magic of meetings between heads of state — was tried during the 1930s. That approach, in the name of peace, is what led to the most catastrophic war in human history.

Everything seems new to those too young to remember the old and too ignorant of history to have heard about it.

Read full article at:

http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=294360984335847

Pelosi: As Bad As It Gets!

Nancy Pelosi's Widening Power Grab

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
April 29, 2008

Congress: On the heels of a rules change that iced the Colombia free trade treaty, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is scrapping the appropriations process in a new war funding bill. Something new and anti-democratic is afoot.