December 2, 2010

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Roger Simon wraps up all the WikiLeaks highlights with Flipper’s help.

Because we know sifting through over a quarter of a million documents can be time-consuming for the average citizen and therefore somewhat daunting, Pajamas Media has hired a dozen dolphins from Sea World to go over the voluminous material. Working non-stop for several days, they have boiled it down to its essence.

Berlusconi likes girls.
Sarkozy likes himself.
Angela Merkel is boring.
David Cameron is more boring.
Hillary thinks Cristina needs a shrink.
Benjamin Netanyahu can’t stand Ehud Olmert.
Al Qaeda hates America.
Yemen’s president hates Al Qaeda
Ahmadinejad is Hitler
North Korea likes Iran.
Saudi Arabia hates Iran
Julian Assange is Dennis Kucinich.
PFC Manning will never see the sun again.
America needs a new president.

 

Marty Peretz comments on how we get one foreign policy mess after another from this administration.

…So, in the meantime, Hillary Clinton …has been sent out to stem the damage. If the damage can be stemmed, that is.  

…And here are her words verbatim: “The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information.” “Strongly condemns?” These are words she has recently used against Bibi Netanyahu. Though not, if I recall correctly, against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. …

…In pursuit of gaudy symbolic action during the presidential campaign, Obama pledged to shut down Guantanamo. Big deal! What in the end he had to do was to farm out prisoners to any country that would take them since the sovereign states of the United States would not. So when he was president he tried heavy-handed diplomacy on poor and small countries. Mostly, this “haggling,” as the Herald Tribune termed it in its article on the fate of the prison on the tip of Cuba, was a flop.

The administration offered the Slovenian president a 20 minute visit with Obama in exchange for “doing more” for “prisoner resettlement.” Lithuania ultimately refused to take a prisoner. So did Norway which had, so to speak, bestowed on Obama his Nobel Peace Prize. Finland also refused to admit prisoners but under threat from China. The proposed prisoners were Chinese Muslim Uighers. An elaborate venture of putting prisoners in Yemen exploded with al-Qaeda terrorism against the regime. Various transfer programs fell apart in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, even Afghanistan. Oh, and, yes, the principality of Luxembourg. This is a joke. John O. Brennan, for whom you may recall I do not have much respect, ran much of this utterly failed program. He will still be haughty. Of course. …

 

John Fund profiles the leading candidates for appropriations committee chair.

…Rep. Jerry Lewis of California, who is 76, chaired the committee in 2005 and 2006 during the height of the earmark frenzy. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that he steered hundreds of millions in federal funds to clients of lobbyist Bill Lowery, a former congressman who was so close to Mr. Lewis that they exchanged two key staff members, “making their offices so intermingled that they seem to be extensions of each other.” Mr. Lewis impressed some of his GOP colleagues with his experience yesterday in his formal presentation to become chairman, but he stumbled when he said he would keep most of his existing staff.

Rep. Hal Rogers of Kentucky, 73, was recently labeled “Oinker of the Year” by Citizens Against Government Waste. His more notorious earmarks include $21 million for the National Institute for Hometown Security. It’s located in the town of Somerset, which has a population of 11,000. Mr. Rogers argues that small towns in Kentucky are as vulnerable to terrorist attacks as major coastal cities and must play a role in defending themselves. Unlike Mr. Lewis, he told members that he would bring in fresh staff members to run Appropriations.

The dark horse candidate is Jack Kingston of Georgia. An appropriator and earmarker himself, Mr. Kingston says the committee’s new priority must be smaller government. He has presented House Republicans with a detailed game plan for limiting spending through caps that trigger automatic across-the-board spending cuts. And he points out that even at the height of the GOP spending spree when it controlled Congress, he used his perch as chair of an Appropriations subcommittee to curb spending on Congress by 1%. …

 

Would you want to fire your dentist and then have him work on your teeth again? David Harsanyi discusses the lame ducks.

…I join with all Americans who dream of a day when Washington is broken enough to see a Congress rigged to prevent any more “progress.” But the trouble with lame-duck sessions happens to be the opposite. It is one thing to be abused by democracy and quite another to be abused by a bunch of rejected, disgruntled and disconnected politicians.

…You could argue that Congress has a responsibility to deal with impending issues — unemployment benefits extensions or tax hikes, for instance. But should “repudiated” officials be involved in making long-lasting decisions for all of us?

… if Washington is “broken,” it is by those who abuse power in the name of moving forward. And the lame-duck Congress is just another example.

 

It is always a pleasure to hear from Thomas Sowell, particularly when it comes to dispelling the constantly repeated lie that tax cuts hurt the economy, tax cuts have to be paid for, and other lies that politicians tell us to make us keep paying them more of our money.

…But cuts in tax rates do not mean cuts in tax revenues…

These are not new arguments on either side. They go back more than 80 years. Over that long span of time, there have been many sharp cuts in tax rates under Presidents Calvin Coolidge, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. So we don’t need to argue in a vacuum. There is a track record.

What does that record say? It says, loud and clear, that cuts in tax rates do not mean cuts in tax revenues. In all four of these administrations, of both parties, so-called “tax cuts for the rich” led to increased tax revenues– with people earning high incomes paying not only a larger sum total of tax revenues, but even a higher proportion of all tax revenues.

Most important of all, these tax rate reductions spurred economic activity, which we definitely need today. …

 

Thomas Sowell explains that tax cuts increases government revenue, and increases the percentage of taxes paid by the rich. Send this article to your local congressman.

…Internal Revenue Service data show that there were 206 people who reported annual incomes of one million dollars or more in 1916. But, as the tax rate on high incomes skyrocketed under the Woodrow Wilson administration, that number plummeted to just 21 people reporting a million dollars a year in income five years later.

…Right after Congress enacted the cuts in tax rates…there were suddenly 207 people reporting taxable incomes of a million dollars or more in 1925. …

Where had all the income of those millionaires been hiding? In tax-exempt securities like state and local bonds, among other places. …

…The government, which collected less than $50 million in taxes on capital gains in 1924, suddenly collected well over $100 million in capital gains taxes in 1925. At lower tax rates, it no longer made sense to keep so much invested in tax-exempt securities, when more money could be made by investing in the economy.

As for “the rich…those in the highest income brackets paid 30 percent of all taxes in 1920 and 65 percent of all taxes by 1929, after “tax cuts for the rich.”

How can that be? Because high tax rates on paper, that many people avoid, often does not bring in as much tax revenue as lower tax rates that more people actually pay, after it is safe to come out of tax shelters and earn higher rates of taxable income. …

 

Ed Morrissey has an exciting post on the beginning of the end of ethanol.

Has the federal government’s appetite for ethanol ended?  A bipartisan group of Senators signed a letter today calling for an end to subsidies and tariffs designed to protect and enhance domestic production of ethanol, which has been until recently the darling of the alternative-energy movement.  In a sign of how far ethanol subsidies have fallen from favor, the letter addressed to both Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell has the signatures of such liberal luminaries as Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and the newly-elected Chris Coons…

…The letter makes clear just how much the government has intervened to coddle ethanol production:

Historically, our government has helped a product compete in one of three ways: subsidize it, protect it from competition, or require its use.  We understand that ethanol may be the only product receiving all three forms of support from the US government at this time.

It’s long past time for those efforts to cease.  Converting food to fuel not only doesn’t work as a replacement for gasoline, it expands starvation by artificially inflating corn prices and making it more difficult to purchase.  This letter might be the first step in dismantling an expensive and ongoing failure.

 

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders comments on how effectively politicians can spend your money, and how effectively they can make decisions that hurt the economy and the environment.

In Greece earlier this month, Al Gore made a startling admission: “First-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake.” Unfortunately, Americans have Gore to thank for ethanol subsidies. In 1994, then-Vice President Al Gore ended a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of an ethanol tax credit that added almost $5 billion to the federal deficit last year. And that number doesn’t factor the many ways in which corn-based ethanol mandates drive up the price of food and livestock feed.

…Back to Gore. There is a movement in Washington to end Gore’s mistake. Republican Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina have proposed ending the 45-cent-per-gallon subsidy on corn ethanol, which is set to expire on Dec. 31 unless Congress extends it.

As DeMint explained in an e-mail to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, “Government mandates and tax subsidies for ethanol have led to decreased gas mileage, adversely affected the environment and increased food prices. Washington must stop picking winners and losers in the market, and instead allow Americans to make choices for themselves.”…

 

John Podhoretz blogs about the latest poll numbers.

Rasmussen has just come out with a new poll of American adults indicating that 36 percent call themselves Republican and 34.7 percent Democrat. This is the first time in the history of Rasmussen’s polling, from 2004 to the present, that among all adults — not registered voters, not likely voters, but all adults — more consider themselves Republican than Democrat. Indeed, I believe it may be the first time in the history of major national polling that there has been such a finding.

Rasmussen writes: “In November 2008, following the presidential election, Democrats held a 7.6 percentage point advantage over the GOP. That means Republicans have picked up a net of approximately nine points over the past two years. That is a somewhat larger gain compared to the Democratic gains from the reelection of President Bush in 2004 to the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006. However, it is similar to the gains recorded by Democrats during the four-year period from Election 2004 to Election 2008.”

That nine-point shift means that something like 25 percent of American adults changed their minds about whether to call themselves Democrat or Republican in the past two years, and a similar percentage changed from 2004 to 2008. What we have here, then, is more evidence that we are in an uncommonly fluid, even unstable, political era. Anybody who thinks it’s possible to extrapolate from these numbers where we will be in 2012 is kidding himself, save one thing: Obama and the Democrats have to do something to alter the political dynamic in their favor, because people are saying they are Republican even though they don’t like the GOP very much either.

 

File this under the heading: some people don’t learn. In the Washington Examiner, Byron York reports on the folks in charge in Portland. Portland residents have the FBI to thank for keeping them safe, not Portland’s government.

In 2005, leaders in Portland, Oregon, angry at the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror, voted not to allow city law enforcement officers to participate in a key anti-terror initiative, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.  On Friday, that task force helped prevent what could have been a horrific terrorist attack in Portland.  Now city officials say they might re-think their participation in the task force — because Barack Obama is in the White House.

…What is ironic is that the operation that found and stopped Mohamud is precisely the kind of law enforcement work that Portland’s leaders, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, rejected during the Bush years.  In April 2005, the Portland city council voted 4 to 1 to withdraw Portland city police officers from participating in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Mayor Tom Potter said the FBI refused to give him a top-secret security clearance so he could make sure the officers weren’t violating state anti-discrimination laws that bar law enforcement from targeting suspects on the basis of their religious or political beliefs.

Other city leaders agreed.  “Here in Portland, we are not willing to give up individual liberties in order to have a perception of safety,” said city commissioner Randy Leonard.  “It’s important for cities to know how their police officers are being used.”

…Now, there are indications that the Mohamud case might cause city leaders to change their mind about the FBI and the war on terror. Current mayor Sam Adams, who says he was not aware of the Mohamud investigation until after Mohamud had been arrested, told the Oregonian newspaper that he might as the city council to reconsider the decision to pull out of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.  Because he now realizes the city was wrong?  Not at all. “[Adams] stressed that he has much more faith in the Obama administration and the leadership of the U.S. Attorney’s office now than he did in 2005,” the paper reported.

 

So which of the package shippers will take care of your parcel best? Just in time for the holidays, Popular Mechanics’ Glenn Derene put them to the test. Looks like UPS comes out slightly ahead of FedEx and the USPS. The complete results are in the article.

…I called up a contact at National Instruments—an innovative manufacturer of industrial control equipment and software, based in Austin, Texas—and presented a challenge: Could the company help me disguise vibration sensors inside a package that I could secretly ship around the country? I soon got a call from National Instruments engineers Kelly Rink, Jamie Brettle and Rick Kuhlman, who agreed to build for me a self-powered data logger equipped with an ARM microcontroller evaluation board, a three-axis accelerometer and a massive Energizer Energi To Go XP18000 battery.

…Before the first journey, the ­National Instruments engineers collected baseline g-force readings. “We dropped the package from different heights, kicked it around our building, ran down the stairs with it in a backpack and took it on a car ride—giving real-world meaning to how many g’s the package endured,” says Kuhlman. The findings: A moderate jostle exerts 2 g’s, while a 2.5-foot drop registers 6 g’s; we set the latter as our limit for rough treatment. “Our co-workers thought we were a bit odd,” says Brettle, “but we assured them it was all in the name of science.”

…So which company treats your packages with the most tender loving care? After crunching the data and averaging the number of spikes recorded by each carrier on each trip, we found that the USPS has the gentlest touch, with a per-trip average of 0.5 acceleration spikes over 6 g’s. FedEx and UPS logged an average of three and two big drops per trip, respectively…

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