April 11, 2012
Mark Steyn writes about the latest Exodus.
As far as the media were concerned, the murder of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse and a
black teenager in Florida were the same story — literally: Angry white male opens fire on “the
other,” his deeply ingrained racism inflamed by the tide of toxic right-wing hate infecting our
public discourse. Alas, in Florida, the angry white male turned out to be a registered Democrat
and half Hispanic — or, as the New York Times put it, a “white Hispanic,” a descriptor never
applied by its editors to, say, Sonia Sotomayor or Gloria Estefan or indeed any other person
living or dead. And in Toulouse the angry white male turned out to be yet another Muhammad.
Oh, well. Better luck next time, although the pickings seem likely to get thinner: Pitch the
Western world a decade or two down the road, riven by an ever-more-fractious tribalism
between blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims, and the one surviving nonagenarian neo-Nazi white
supremacist will be at the retirement home. But it’ll still all be his fault.
The Toulouse assumptions were particularly deluded. If the flow of information is really
controlled by Jews, as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright assured his students at the Chicago
Theological Seminary a year or two back, you’d think they’d be a little better at making their
media minions aware of one of the bleakest stories of the early 21st century: the extinguishing
of what’s left of Jewish life in Europe. It would seem to me that the first reaction, upon hearing of
a Jewish school shooting, would be to put it in the context of the other targeted schools,
synagogues, community centers, and cemeteries. And yet liberal American Jews seem barely
aware of this grim roll call. Even if you put to one side the public school in Denmark that says it
can no longer take Jewish children because of the security situation, and the five children of the
chief rabbi of Amsterdam who’ve decided to emigrate, and the Swedish Jews fleeing the most
famously tolerant nation in Europe because of its pervasive anti-Semitism; even if you put all
that to the side and consider only the situation in France . . . No, wait, forget the Villiers-le-Bel
schoolgirl brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die”; and the Paris disc-jockey who had
his throat slit, his eyes gouged out, and his face ripped off by a neighbor who crowed, “I have
killed my Jew”; and the young Frenchman tortured to death over three weeks, while his family
listened via phone to his howls of agony as his captors chanted from the Koran . . . No, put all
that to one side, too, and consider only the city of Toulouse. In recent years, in this one city, a
synagogue has been firebombed, another set alight when two burning cars were driven into it, a
third burgled and “Dirty Jews” scrawled on the ark housing the Torah, a kosher butcher’s strafed
with gunfire, a Jewish sports association attacked with Molotov cocktails . . .
Here’s Toulouse rabbi Jonathan Guez speaking to the Jewish news agency JTA in 2009: “Guez
said Jews would now be ‘more discreet’ about displaying their religion publicly and careful about
avoiding troubled neighborhoods. . . . The synagogue will be heavily secured with cameras and
patrol units for the first time.”
This is what it means to be a Jew living in one of the most beautiful parts of France in the 21st
century. ...
Now that the Supreme Court's polls are up, Ross Kaminsky wants to know if the
president thinks the attack worked for him.
On Monday, polling company Rasmussen released results of a survey of likely voters showing
that in less than one month the percentage of Americans who rate the Supreme Court's job
performance as good or excellent has spiked up 13 points, from an all-time low of 28 percent to
a two-and-a-half year high of 41 percent. This time frame includes the Court's hearings on
Obamacare as well as the thinly-veiled Obama warning to the Court not to strike down his
signature law.
In other words, now that Americans have been reminded what the Court is there for, they are
more positive about its theoretical and actual function.
In the Rasmussen poll, the change in opinion of the Court among Republicans has gone from
29 percent favorable to 54 percent favorable. Not surprisingly, Democrats aren't on board the
Supreme Court favorability train: Rasmussen doesn't give the numbers but says that Democrats'
"views of the court are largely unchanged."
Most important politically, "among voters not affiliated with either of the major political parties,
good or excellent ratings for the court have increased from 26% in mid-March to 42% now."
Also among the poll results -- and more bad news for Democrats -- twice as many Americans
believe that the Supreme Court "does not limit the government enough" (30 percent) as those
who think it "puts too many limitations on what the federal government can do" (15 percent).
How does picking that fight feel now, Mr. President? ...
Victor Davis Hanson says the president reveals himself in unscripted moments
when there is no teleprompter to guide him.
... His lack of judgment is not evident on the teleprompter, but is only fully illustrated when he is
off it and his more extreme ideas are candidly expressed.
All presidents reveal glimpses of themselves through gaffes and off-the-cuff candor. Richard
Nixon’s various paranoias were most evident on the secret White House audiotapes. Reagan’s
anti-Soviet feelings were behind his open-mike joke “We begin bombing in five minutes.” When
George W. Bush blurted out “Dead or alive” or “Bring ’em on,” the impromptu bombast seemed
to reflect his cowboy image.
Such revelations are all the more striking in Obama’s case since rarely has a president’s
ideology been so at variance with his public persona. His real views have been gleaned mostly
from unguarded moments when he talks confidently without prompts — and therefore sounds
conniving and shallow.
We learn about Obama’s views toward Israel not from campaign speeches, in which he soars
with platitudes to raise money from the Jewish community, but when he is caught on an open
mike with French president Sarkozy rudely ridiculing Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, or in a
leak about snubbing the Israeli leader at the White House, or in a statement by the Palestinian
foreign minister to the effect that administration officials had advised the Palestinian leadership
to “sit tight” during the present election year — until Obama no longer need face the electorate
and thus its displeasure for forcing concessions upon the Israelis.
For all the talk about the need for federal courts to audit errant state immigration legislation or to
strike down the Defense of Marriage law, Obama does not believe in either an inactive or an
active judiciary, only in one that parrots his own ideology. When jurists do this, they become
sober and judicious; when they might not, then we hear an impromptu screed that Supreme
Court justices are “an unelected group of people” who should not “somehow overturn a duly
constituted and passed law” — “an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that
was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
Are we worried about Obama’s naïveté in dealing with the Russians on arms control, shortchanging the Poles and Czechs on missile defense, and not quickly dropping the failed reset
diplomacy? We should be, but we know that only because we have ignored his scripted rhetoric
about Russia and listened instead to his embarrassing gaffe when he was caught on another
open mike assuring President Medvedev that after the election our president would be more
flexible with Putin, in a fashion that most Americans would find disturbing. ....
Three cheers for Debbie WasserFace. She supported an aide who was embarrassed
by a six year old Facebook mistake. Jonathan Tobin has the story.
We don’t often have occasion to say anything complimentary about Democratic National
Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In her designated role as President Obama’s
attack dog, Rep. Wasserman Schultz has made a specialty of taking cheap shots at her
opponents. When not attempting to demonize Republican positions on the deficit and
entitlements, she has even stooped to blame conservatives for the shooting of Gabriella
Giffords. But as unfair as she has been to those on the other side of the aisle, that doesn’t justify
treating Wasserman Schultz or anyone on her staff in a similar manner. And that is exactly what
happened to Danielle Gilbert, a DNC staffer who has been pilloried lately for some silly pictures
she posted to her personal Facebook account six years ago when she was in college. But
despite reports of pressure from the White House, Wasserman Schultz has refused to dump
Gilbert. To that we can only say, good for her.
It is true the picture in which Gilbert is seen kissing money and referring to herself and some
friends as “Jewbags” was in poor taste. But the posting by Gilbert, who is the daughter of
prominent Jewish contributors to the Obama campaign and now works as the DNC’s outreach
liaison to the Jewish community, was a joke and nothing more. ...
We found an intelligent discussion about gasoline prices in Mining.com.
Gasoline consumption in the United States has been dropping for years. In the last decade,
vehicle fuel efficiency has improved by 20%, and the combination of that shift and a weak
economy of late has pushed gasoline demand to its lowest level in a decade.
At the same time, US oil production is at its highest level in a decade. Deepwater wells in the
Gulf of Mexico and horizontal fracs in the Bakken shale have turned America’s domestic oil
production scene around. After 20 years of declining production, US crude output rates started
to climb in 2008 and have increased every year since.
With production up and demand down, the basics of supply and demand indicate that oil prices
should be falling. Americans should be paying less at the pump.
Instead, the average US price at the pump reached US$3.80 per gallon on March 5, after 27
consecutive days of gains. That’s 26.7¢ above the old record for March 5, set last year. The
price of gasoline has climbed 32¢ or 9.3% since February 1; analysts expect prices to continue
rising, reaching a national average of something like US$4.25 per gallon.
What gives? Is it all about Iran? Are speculators manipulating the market? Do any politicians
have good ideas on how to “fix” the high cost of gasoline? And is there relief on the horizon?
What gives is a combination of forces. Rising tensions in the Middle East are part of the
problem, but so are deficiencies in North America’s oil infrastructure that are causing price
discrepancies across the nation. Some of the refineries being forced to pay premium prices for
oil are shutting down, and that limits gasoline supplies in parts of the country. Speculation is
also a factor, as it is an ingrained part of the market, but it is not the driving force behind
America’s fuel-price problems.
If you’re wondering, there aren’t any politicians with novel, sound ideas on how to reduce fuel
prices. Newt Gingrich’s promise to bring prices below $2.50 a gallon is as attainable as Michelle
Bachmann’s plucked-out-of-the-air promise of $2 gasoline.
Thankfully though, there is some relief on the horizon. First, we’ll tackle the issues. Then we’ll
outline some developments that should ease the pain. ...
Interesting background to the WWII story about the Man Who Never Was.
It was a plan devised by two, approved by twenty: to mislead the Axis powers that instead of
attacking Sicily, the Allies intended to invade Greece, then Sardinia, and then southern France.
Live agents were risky — they could be tortured or turned, so the ideal plan was to create an
agent who was not only fictitious but also dead.
Inside Section 17M, a unit of the British intelligence service so secret that only a handful of
people knew of its existence, two officers with impeccably British names of Montagu and
Cholmondeley created this imaginary agent, his likes and dislikes, his habits and hobbies, his
talents and weaknesses. They gave him a middle name, a religion, a nicotine habit and a place
of birth. They gave him a hometown, rank, regiment, bank manager, solicitor and cufflinks. Most
importantly, they gave him a supportive family, money, friends, and a fiancée named Pam. ...
National Review
Exodus
by Mark Steyn
As far as the media were concerned, the murder of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse and a
black teenager in Florida were the same story — literally: Angry white male opens fire on “the
other,” his deeply ingrained racism inflamed by the tide of toxic right-wing hate infecting our
public discourse. Alas, in Florida, the angry white male turned out to be a registered Democrat
and half Hispanic — or, as the New York Times put it, a “white Hispanic,” a descriptor never
applied by its editors to, say, Sonia Sotomayor or Gloria Estefan or indeed any other person
living or dead. And in Toulouse the angry white male turned out to be yet another Muhammad.
Oh, well. Better luck next time, although the pickings seem likely to get thinner: Pitch the
Western world a decade or two down the road, riven by an ever-more-fractious tribalism
between blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims, and the one surviving nonagenarian neo-Nazi white
supremacist will be at the retirement home. But it’ll still all be his fault.
The Toulouse assumptions were particularly deluded. If the flow of information is really
controlled by Jews, as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright assured his students at the Chicago
Theological Seminary a year or two back, you’d think they’d be a little better at making their
media minions aware of one of the bleakest stories of the early 21st century: the extinguishing
of what’s left of Jewish life in Europe. It would seem to me that the first reaction, upon hearing of
a Jewish school shooting, would be to put it in the context of the other targeted schools,
synagogues, community centers, and cemeteries. And yet liberal American Jews seem barely
aware of this grim roll call. Even if you put to one side the public school in Denmark that says it
can no longer take Jewish children because of the security situation, and the five children of the
chief rabbi of Amsterdam who’ve decided to emigrate, and the Swedish Jews fleeing the most
famously tolerant nation in Europe because of its pervasive anti-Semitism; even if you put all
that to the side and consider only the situation in France . . . No, wait, forget the Villiers-le-Bel
schoolgirl brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die”; and the Paris disc-jockey who had
his throat slit, his eyes gouged out, and his face ripped off by a neighbor who crowed, “I have
killed my Jew”; and the young Frenchman tortured to death over three weeks, while his family
listened via phone to his howls of agony as his captors chanted from the Koran . . . No, put all
that to one side, too, and consider only the city of Toulouse. In recent years, in this one city, a
synagogue has been firebombed, another set alight when two burning cars were driven into it, a
third burgled and “Dirty Jews” scrawled on the ark housing the Torah, a kosher butcher’s strafed
with gunfire, a Jewish sports association attacked with Molotov cocktails . . .
Here’s Toulouse rabbi Jonathan Guez speaking to the Jewish news agency JTA in 2009: “Guez
said Jews would now be ‘more discreet’ about displaying their religion publicly and careful about
avoiding troubled neighborhoods. . . . The synagogue will be heavily secured with cameras and
patrol units for the first time.”
This is what it means to be a Jew living in one of the most beautiful parts of France in the 21st
century.
Well, you say, why are those Jewish kids going to a Jewish school? Why don’t they go to the
regular French school like normal French kids? Because, as the education ministry’s admirably
straightforward 2004 Obin Report explained, “En France les enfants juifs — et ils sont les seuls
dans ce cas — ne peuvent plus de nos jours etre scolarises dans n’importe quel etablissement”:
“In France, Jewish children, uniquely, cannot nowadays be provided with an education at any
institution.” At some schools, they’re separated from the rest of the class. At others, only the
principal is informed of their Jewishness, and he assures parents he will be discreet and vigilant.
But, as the report’s authors note, “le patronyme des eleves ne le permet pas toujours”: “The
pupil’s surname does not always allow” for such “discretion.”
Metropolitan Toulouse has a population of 900,000 or so, about the size of Jacksonville, Fla.
Imagine if, in Jacksonville, synagogues were firebombed, and kosher butchers shot up, and
Jewish schoolkids gunned down, and, in the dull, placid months between the spasms of frontpage attention, the cold, ongoing Jew-hate were so routine that it was no longer safe for a Jew
to walk his own city with any identifying mark of his faith, or for his child to reveal his Jewishness
at school.
In Toulouse, much of the Jewish community arrived after the religio-ethnic cleansing of French
North Africa in the Sixties and Seventies. What they fled has followed them to the MidiPyrenees, and now it’s time to move on again — as it is elsewhere in Europe. “Jews with a
conscience should leave Holland, where they and their children have no future, leave for the
U.S. or Israel,” advised Frits Bolkestein, the former EU commissioner and head of the Dutch
Liberal party. “Anti-Semitism will continue to exist, because the Moroccan and Turkish
youngsters don’t care about efforts for reconciliation.”
Thus, posterity’s jest. Pre-war Europeans would never have entertained for a moment the
construction of mosques from Malmo to Marseilles. But post-war Holocaust guilt, and the
revulsion against nationalism and the embrace of multiculturalism and mass immigration,
enabled the Islamization of Europe. The principal beneficiaries of the Continent’s penance for
the great moral stain of the 20th century turned out to be the Muslims — with the Jews on the
receiving end, yet again.
It won’t stop there. Mijnheer Bolkestein is not (yet) asking what else those “youngsters” don’t
care for, but like many other secular Continentals with no interest in Jews one way or the other
he’ll soon find out.
American Spectator
How Are Those Supreme Court Attacks Working Our for You?
The president's bullying comes back to haunt him -- though he's right to compare himself
to the Court-villifying FDR.
by Ross Kaminsky
On Monday, polling company Rasmussen released results of a survey of likely voters showing
that in less than one month the percentage of Americans who rate the Supreme Court's job
performance as good or excellent has spiked up 13 points, from an all-time low of 28 percent to
a two-and-a-half year high of 41 percent. This time frame includes the Court's hearings on
Obamacare as well as the thinly-veiled Obama warning to the Court not to strike down his
signature law.
In other words, now that Americans have been reminded what the Court is there for, they are
more positive about its theoretical and actual function.
In the Rasmussen poll, the change in opinion of the Court among Republicans has gone from
29 percent favorable to 54 percent favorable. Not surprisingly, Democrats aren't on board the
Supreme Court favorability train: Rasmussen doesn't give the numbers but says that Democrats'
"views of the court are largely unchanged."
Most important politically, "among voters not affiliated with either of the major political parties,
good or excellent ratings for the court have increased from 26% in mid-March to 42% now."
Also among the poll results -- and more bad news for Democrats -- twice as many Americans
believe that the Supreme Court "does not limit the government enough" (30 percent) as those
who think it "puts too many limitations on what the federal government can do" (15 percent).
How does picking that fight feel now, Mr. President?
It is lucky for Republicans that President Barack Obama lives in a radical leftist echo chamber
which reinforces his delusions that he's the second coming of FDR -- as well as of Teddy
Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, just to
name a few.
Obama is a poor student of history, and not just of Supreme Court history despite his prior
position as a "Senior Lecturer" in constitutional law. And without understanding the past, the
president thinks of FDR's 1930s attack on the Supreme Court as part and parcel of Roosevelt's
being elected to the presidency four times.
This explains Obama's rhetoric all but daring the Court to strike down Obamacare, or at least its
individual mandate provision -- a dare that Judge Jeffrey Smith recently challenged the
administration to defend. The defense, in the form of a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder,
reeked of "you can do it, but you really shouldn't" condescension, and notably did not claim to
represent the views of President Obama, but simply of the Justice Department.
What the echoes from Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, and Debbie "We can call it 'Obamacare'
now" Wasserman Schultz will miss is that attacking the Court was not a political success for
FDR, with support for Roosevelt's court-packing plan falling under opposition among the public
within about one month of the plan's announcement, and never recovering.
The public may not love the Supreme Court but that does not mean they support its assault by
other branches of government. Now, as in 1937, Republicans, out of some mixture of principle
and politics, were forceful in defense of the Court's independence. But then as now, it was not
only Republicans who objected to the presidents' tyrannical overreach.
In a 1937 editorial, presaging public reaction against Democrats and FDR the following year,
William Allen White, the Progressive editor of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, railed against
Roosevelt's assault on the independence of the Supreme Court: "But while crying against these
economic royalists [much like Obama's demonization of "the 1 percent"] he would seem to have
harbored subconsciously a seven-devil lust to become an unconstitutional royalist himself."
White continued: "[T]hose who scorn the orderly processes of democracy, those leaders who by
instinctive indirection slip around our laws and annul the basic implications of American
democracy, they become a menace more deadly than the economic royalists whom Roosevelt
denounces."
Perhaps Obama's self-comparisons to the anti-constitution FDR are not so far-fetched after all.
In the 1938 mid-term elections, Republicans gained House seats for the first time in a decade,
picking up a stunning 81 seats in the House of Representatives, or 18.6 percent of that
chamber. Even the Republican tsunami of 2010 only caused a GOP pickup of 63 seats, or 14.4
percent, although Republicans began the most recent mid-term elections with twice as many
seats (178) as the party held during their hapless years going into 1938 (88).
Much like George W. Bush in the last decade, in the 1920s, Herbert Hoover did substantial
damage to the Republican brand, saddling the GOP with back to back disastrous elections (in
1930 and 1932, in which Republicans lost a total of 148 House seats); 1938 marked the first
Republican gains in the House for a decade and the first gains in a mid-term election since
1918.
It is true that FDR won re-election in 1940, and perhaps this is the bulletin that is bouncing
around inside the White House echo chamber, but FDR was far more popular than Barack
Obama, and the nation was heading into war -- always an advantage for an incumbent. While
Republicans remained the minority party in Congress, the 1938 landslide following FDR's courtpacking scheme remains the largest gain for either party in the House of Representatives since
1894 and arguably ended any expansion of the New Deal.
Because Democrats either don't know this or don't think the lessons of history apply to them, the
Obama administration has been shocked -- shocked! -- that its verbal mugging of the Court has
been politically ineffective at best. Perhaps, like Obamacare itself, the administration believed
that once we really understood its position, we'd come to like it better.
As usual, its projections don't reflect reality, and now the Rasmussen data support the obvious
fact that attacking the Court isn't working outside of the left's already-committed base.
An interesting political question remains how a Supreme Court decision will impact the
presidential election. Democrats, such as James Carville, suggest that if the Court overturns the
law (or the mandate), it will be a tremendous benefit to Democrat electoral hopes. Color me
skeptical.
Even Democrat pollster Pat Caddell says that Obamacare is likely be a political loser for Barack
Obama, whether or not he wins reelection -- and deserves to be, because of how the law
destroys consumer choice, raises prices, and centralizes health care decisions and power in
Washington.
As Scott Rasmussen put it in a recent op-ed, "For something as fundamental as medical care,
government policy must be consistent with deeply held American values. That's why an
approach that increases consumer choice has solid support and a plan that relies on mandates
and trusting the government cannot survive."
Obamacare and the role of the Supreme Court will be a fierce debate, and is likely to remain
central to the presidential campaign regardless of the Court's verdict. It is too early to know just
how the arguments will play out, or who will win them.
But what we do know is that the president's echo chamber will keep him mired, at least on these
issues, in leftist talking points that those outside the bubble would recognize as ineffective
campaign material, not least because of the lessons of the 1930s.
For the Democrats' narcissistic, historically ignorant group-think, perfectly exemplified by the
president's attacks on the Supreme Court, Republicans should be grateful. It is one of the few
reasons a moderately inspiring GOP nominee may be able to beat a dangerous and
incompetent but "historic" incumbent president.
Ross Kaminsky is a self-employed trader and investor and is a senior fellow of the Heartland
Institute. He blogs at Rossputin.com and is the host of The Ross Kaminsky Show on Denver's
NewsRadio 850 KOA on Sundays from 11 AM to 2 PM.
National Review
Obama off the Cuff
by Victor Davis Hanson
Conservatives caricature 24/7 Barack Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter. True, his
speeches are scripted; but we forget why so: He is very good at reading a prepared script as if
he were talking off the top of his head, and he is very bad at actually talking off the top of his
head. In the former mode, he sounds pleasantly moderate and mellifluous; in the latter, sort of
creepy and awkward.
Yet the result is paradoxical: Obama seems to feel false when he sounds balanced and
eloquent reading someone else’s ideas on a teleprompter, and genuine only when he is extreme
and ad hoc in his own words. Because teleprompted eloquence is by definition somewhat
artificial, Obama believes that his real wit and insight are appreciated only in extemporaneous
exposition.
Yet here lies another paradox: His lack of judgment is not evident on the teleprompter, but is
only fully illustrated when he is off it and his more extreme ideas are candidly expressed.
All presidents reveal glimpses of themselves through gaffes and off-the-cuff candor. Richard
Nixon’s various paranoias were most evident on the secret White House audiotapes. Reagan’s
anti-Soviet feelings were behind his open-mike joke “We begin bombing in five minutes.” When
George W. Bush blurted out “Dead or alive” or “Bring ’em on,” the impromptu bombast seemed
to reflect his cowboy image.
Such revelations are all the more striking in Obama’s case since rarely has a president’s
ideology been so at variance with his public persona. His real views have been gleaned mostly
from unguarded moments when he talks confidently without prompts — and therefore sounds
conniving and shallow.
We learn about Obama’s views toward Israel not from campaign speeches, in which he soars
with platitudes to raise money from the Jewish community, but when he is caught on an open
mike with French president Sarkozy rudely ridiculing Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, or in a
leak about snubbing the Israeli leader at the White House, or in a statement by the Palestinian
foreign minister to the effect that administration officials had advised the Palestinian leadership
to “sit tight” during the present election year — until Obama no longer need face the electorate
and thus its displeasure for forcing concessions upon the Israelis.
For all the talk about the need for federal courts to audit errant state immigration legislation or to
strike down the Defense of Marriage law, Obama does not believe in either an inactive or an
active judiciary, only in one that parrots his own ideology. When jurists do this, they become
sober and judicious; when they might not, then we hear an impromptu screed that Supreme
Court justices are “an unelected group of people” who should not “somehow overturn a duly
constituted and passed law” — “an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that
was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
Are we worried about Obama’s naïveté in dealing with the Russians on arms control, shortchanging the Poles and Czechs on missile defense, and not quickly dropping the failed reset
diplomacy? We should be, but we know that only because we have ignored his scripted rhetoric
about Russia and listened instead to his embarrassing gaffe when he was caught on another
open mike assuring President Medvedev that after the election our president would be more
flexible with Putin, in a fashion that most Americans would find disturbing. In that exchange, the
president seemed to regard all Americans as veritable Pennsylvania clingers, backward
emotional folk who do not understand the diplomatic nuances of their more gifted technocrats.
Impromptu bows to a Saudi sheik or a Japanese monarch are also not written in the margins of
the script, but they likewise give insights into the sort of multilateral, we-are-all-equal worldview
that Obama envisions for America. Almost any time the president is abroad and goes
impromptu, he must send shivers up the spines of his handlers: How he will react to the antiAmerican rant of a Daniel Ortega, or what new critique of his presidential predecessors will he
come up with in Turkey?
Take also the question of race. Officially, in scripted speeches, we still hear the healing tropes of
2008. Unofficially and in clumsy fashion, we are told that America is a society in which police
officers stereotype and act stupidly. Presidential wisdom about the Trayvon Martin tragedy is
limited to a tribal reflection that the son Barack Obama never had would have resembled the
deceased — an odd observation whose exact intent is still not clear. In 2008, “typical white
person” and the clingers speech were also ad hoc and not teleprompted, but these repulsive
remarks proved to be more accurate harbingers than any soaring script explaining away the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
How about healing and unity — as in the no-more-red-America-or-blue-America sermons of the
past? For the answer to that we turn to the imprompu “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring
a gun,” “Get in their faces,” “tea-baggers,” and “punish our enemies.” Or consider Obama’s
private call to Sandra Fluke and his later quip that he did not wish his daughters to grow up in a
world in which a Rush Limbaugh defames women — without much cognizance that his own
campaign affiliates had gladly accepted $1 million from the misogynist Bill Maher, or that he now
de facto owned the comments of his celebrity supporter, who had said far worse things about
women than had Limbaugh — but without commensurate presidential rebuke.
Obama felt impulsively that he must editorialize that the shooting of Representative Gabrielle
Giffords teaches us about the need for civility in public discourse — without much worry that
soon those words could come back to haunt him. They surely did when labor leader Jimmy
Hoffa Jr., in Obama’s presence, appeared to threaten violence, with the promise, “President
Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these son-of-a-bitches out and give
America back to an America where we belong.”
The inadvertent Obama gives glimpses of his them-vs.-us world, in which doctors lop off limbs
and rip out tonsils for cash, fat cats junket to Vegas on their kids’ tuition money, the uncaring
don’t know when to stop their profiteering and they worry little about spreading the wealth. In the
world of the flippant Obama, energy prices should “skyrocket”; Brazil should sell us the sort of
offshore oil we ourselves will not develop; and proper tire pressure, tune-ups, and algae can
substitute for more drilling. In these moments of candor, there are no speechwriters, and no
canned phrases moving down a screen, spiced with the Nixonian “Make no mistake about it”
and “Let me be perfectly clear” fillers. The thoughts, phraseology — and incoherence — are all
Obama’s own.
If it comes down to a choice between an eloquent delivery of someone else’s neatly crafted
liberal ideas and Obama’s ad-hoc revelations of his own hard-left worldview, it is no wonder why
most of us prefer the teleprompter.
Contentions
DNC Chair Learns the Quality of Mercy
by Jonathan S. Tobin
We don’t often have occasion to say anything complimentary about Democratic National
Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In her designated role as President Obama’s
attack dog, Rep. Wasserman Schultz has made a specialty of taking cheap shots at her
opponents. When not attempting to demonize Republican positions on the deficit and
entitlements, she has even stooped to blame conservatives for the shooting of Gabriella
Giffords. But as unfair as she has been to those on the other side of the aisle, that doesn’t justify
treating Wasserman Schultz or anyone on her staff in a similar manner. And that is exactly what
happened to Danielle Gilbert, a DNC staffer who has been pilloried lately for some silly pictures
she posted to her personal Facebook account six years ago when she was in college. But
despite reports of pressure from the White House, Wasserman Schultz has refused to dump
Gilbert. To that we can only say, good for her.
It is true the picture in which Gilbert is seen kissing money and referring to herself and some
friends as “Jewbags” was in poor taste. But the posting by Gilbert, who is the daughter of
prominent Jewish contributors to the Obama campaign and now works as the DNC’s outreach
liaison to the Jewish community, was a joke and nothing more. The existence of the photo didn’t
merit a story. Nor did it justify subjecting a young woman who has done nothing wrong to the
sort of humiliation that is part of being the subject of even a minor political dust storm such as
this one.
Wasserman Schultz’s instinct to back her aide is laudable. As she rightly points out, it is
important for young people (as well as not so young people) to understand that anything —
whether innocent jokes or not so innocent behavior captured in a photo or video — they publish
on Facebook or Twitter is a matter of public record and can come back to haunt them at any
time in the future. But destroying the budding career of an otherwise blameless youngster over
such nonsense is both unjust and unethical.
In the no-hold-barred world of political combat in which both parties and their respective
journalistic cheering sections are constantly engaged in the business of embarrassing each
other, it sometimes feels as if anything is fair game. Far worse things than the Gilbert photo —
such as, to take just one egregious example, the unsubstantiated innuendo masquerading as
investigative journalism alleging infidelity on the part of then Republican presidential candidate
John McCain published by the New York Times in 2008 — easily come to mind. But politics and
journalism ought to be better than that. We hope the next time a similar alleged youthful
indiscretion about a politician or activist is unearthed, journalists will choose not to go down this
same road. We also hope Wasserman Schultz will remember this the next time she is inclined to
indulge in uncivil rhetoric herself.
Mining,com
The Story Behind US Gas Price Pain
by Marin Katusa
Gasoline consumption in the United States has been dropping for years. In the last decade,
vehicle fuel efficiency has improved by 20%, and the combination of that shift and a weak
economy of late has pushed gasoline demand to its lowest level in a decade.
At the same time, US oil production is at its highest level in a decade. Deepwater wells in the
Gulf of Mexico and horizontal fracs in the Bakken shale have turned America’s domestic oil
production scene around. After 20 years of declining production, US crude output rates started
to climb in 2008 and have increased every year since.
With production up and demand down, the basics of supply and demand indicate that oil prices
should be falling. Americans should be paying less at the pump.
Instead, the average US price at the pump reached US$3.80 per gallon on March 5, after 27
consecutive days of gains. That’s 26.7¢ above the old record for March 5, set last year. The
price of gasoline has climbed 32¢ or 9.3% since February 1; analysts expect prices to continue
rising, reaching a national average of something like US$4.25 per gallon.
What gives? Is it all about Iran? Are speculators manipulating the market? Do any politicians
have good ideas on how to “fix” the high cost of gasoline? And is there relief on the horizon?
What gives is a combination of forces. Rising tensions in the Middle East are part of the
problem, but so are deficiencies in North America’s oil infrastructure that are causing price
discrepancies across the nation. Some of the refineries being forced to pay premium prices for
oil are shutting down, and that limits gasoline supplies in parts of the country. Speculation is
also a factor, as it is an ingrained part of the market, but it is not the driving force behind
America’s fuel-price problems.
If you’re wondering, there aren’t any politicians with novel, sound ideas on how to reduce fuel
prices. Newt Gingrich’s promise to bring prices below $2.50 a gallon is as attainable as Michelle
Bachmann’s plucked-out-of-the-air promise of $2 gasoline.
Thankfully though, there is some relief on the horizon. First, we’ll tackle the issues. Then we’ll
outline some developments that should ease the pain.
A Two-Part Problem
Two main forces are driving fuel prices upward in the United States: high global oil prices and
the state of the US oil transportation and refining industry.
High oil prices are the more obvious part of the problem and are certainly the part that attracts
the most attention. Tensions in the Middle East have been elevated since Tunisia’s revolution
kick-started the Arab Spring in January 2011. Subsequent revolutions in Egypt and Libya as well
as the oftentimes violent suppression of dissent in Bahrain, Jordan, and now Syria have kept
questions about the stability of supplies from the oil-important Middle East front and center all
year.
Now, of course, it’s Iran that is keeping oil traders up at night. Between oil embargoes against
the country and threats from Iran to block the Strait of Hormuz (a maritime passageway vital to
the oil industry), the growing rift between Iran and the Western world is threatening supplies
from the world’s fourth-largest producer. That’s a surefire way to push oil prices skyward.
The result: Brent North Sea (the pricing benchmark for crude oil traded in Europe) climbed
above US$100 per barrel a year ago and hasn’t looked back. Since last February Brent crude
has traded above US$110 per barrel more often than not, and has regularly topped US$120 per
barrel.
The Middle East’s ongoing tensions also lifted crude prices in North America: After sitting
comfortably near US$80 per barrel for most of 2010, the price for West Texas Intermediate
(WTI) rose above US$100 several times during 2011 and averaged close to US$90. Yes, it
moved much less than did Brent; moreover, not all crude oils in North America had similar
boosts. To understand that situation, we have to delve into America’s oil transportation and
refining system.
The US is divided into five oil districts, which were originally designed to ensure energy security
during World War II. Things have certainly evolved since then, but the districts remain less
connected than you might think. Crude oil cannot necessarily flow from one side of the country
to the other or from one producing region to another refining area. The system’s
disconnectedness means that refiners in different regions are forced to pay whatever the price
may be for the crude oil they can access – and those prices differ significantly.
East-Coast refiners have traditionally relied on imported oil from Europe and West Africa, which
means they pay Brent pricing for most of their crude. As such, Brent’s surging price has dealt a
blow to East-Coast refiners, hitting several so hard that they are shutting down. No fewer than
four refineries serving the East Coast are going or have gone offline since 2010, eliminating
almost half of the gasoline previously supplied to the US Northeast. Knowing that, high gasoline
prices in the Northeast start to make a bit more sense: Refiners’ costs have been sky high, and
refinery shutdowns have eliminated a huge chunk of supply.
Similarly, refiners on the West Coast receive some supply from Alaska but depend on
internationally priced crude for the bulk of their input. Their need to pay Brent pricing explains
why gas prices in California are regularly among the highest in the nation.
At the other end of the spectrum are refiners in the Midwest. The oil hub at Cushing, Oklahoma,
is being increasingly inundated with crude oil as production ramps up in North Dakota’s Bakken
formation and in Canada’s oil sands. Crude from both of those rapidly-expanding oil regions
flows primarily to Cushing, where refineries process as much as they can. Those refiners are
able to buy at WTI pricing, which has held a roughly 20% discount to Brent crude for the last
year. That helps keep gasoline prices in the Midwest a little lower.
However, Midwest refineries are generally designed to process light, sweet oil, which means
they can handle output from the Bakken but are not up to processing heavy oil from the sands.
Oil-sands crude needs to go to the Gulf Coast, where an army of sophisticated refineries are
thirsty for heavy oil. All that is lacking is a pipeline to connect supply with demand, but at the
moment there is no such pipe; thus, the supply glut at Cushing has discounted heavy oil
significantly. Western Canada Select, the benchmark crude oil coming out of Canada’s oil
sands, closed at US$74.73 per barrel on March 5, a 30% discount to WTI and a 40% discount to
Brent.
There is cheap oil available in the United States. You just have to be able to transport the crude
from Cushing to your personal refinery to take advantage of it.
One final element is making matters worse: Refineries are currently starting to shift to producing
spring-summer gasoline blends, which are lighter and therefore usually cost about 10¢ more per
gallon than fall-winter blends. And this year, the quick refinery shutdowns needed to enact the
seasonal shift are creating slight supply gaps because some of the “swing” refineries that
usually help bridge the gap are no longer operating. For example, the Hovensa refinery in the
US Virgin Islands – a joint venture between Hess Corp. (NYSE.HES) and Petroleos de
Venezuela – used to produce extra volume during the seasonal transition, but it was closed
down a few weeks ago after losing $1.3 billion over the last three years.
Lights on the Horizon
Both sides of the problem – high oil prices and insufficiencies in America’s oil infrastructure –
will develop over the next 12 months. On the infrastructure side, we can be pretty certain that
the developments will be positive. One pipeline that for years has carried oil north from the Gulf
to Cushing is being reversed, which will start to ease the heavy-oil glut within weeks.
TransCanada recently announced that it is seeking expedited approval to start construction of
the southern leg of its Keystone XL pipeline, which will also connect Cushing to the Gulf Coast.
Since there is nothing controversial about the southern portion of the project it should be
approved quickly, in which case TransCanada hopes to have the pipeline built and operational
by the middle of next year.
These pipelines will enable America’s army of Gulf Coast oil refineries to purchase North
American crude oil. When that happens, Western Canada Select will not maintain its current
40% discount to Brent, but it will almost certainly remain cheaper than its European counterpart,
creating cost savings for US refiners that they will pass on to consumers.
As for high oil prices in general, the biggest question there is Iran. If Iran blockades the Strait of
Hormuz, oil prices will shoot up. If Israel or the US sends in air strikes against Iran’s nuclear
facilities, the same thing will happen. The average price of gas in the United States would likely
top US$5 per gallon. However, if war can be avoided, the price of oil should start to recede as
fears abate; if oil sanctions against Iran stay in place, Saudi Arabia should be able to step up
production enough to replace the lost volumes. Under this scenario the price of a barrel of Brent
oil could fall below $100.
The level of warmongering from all sides seems to change on a daily basis, so we are not
prepared to make any predictions about whether an attack on Iran is imminent. However, there
are ways savvy energy investors can profit from this uncertain situation as well as other shifting
trends. Get our free 2012 Energy Forecast to get started today.
Iconic Photos
Jean Leslie (1923 – 2012)
Jean Leslie, MI5 secretary whose photograph may or may not have changed the outcome
of the Second World War, has died, aged 88.
It was a plan devised by two, approved by twenty: to mislead the Axis powers that instead of
attacking Sicily, the Allies intended to invade Greece, then Sardinia, and then southern France.
Live agents were risky — they could be tortured or turned, so the ideal plan was to create an
agent who was not only fictitious but also dead.
Inside Section 17M, a unit of the British intelligence service so secret that only a handful of
people knew of its existence, two officers with impeccably British names of Montagu and
Cholmondeley created this imaginary agent, his likes and dislikes, his habits and hobbies, his
talents and weaknesses. They gave him a middle name, a religion, a nicotine habit and a place
of birth. They gave him a hometown, rank, regiment, bank manager, solicitor and cufflinks. Most
importantly, they gave him a supportive family, money, friends, and a fiancée named Pam.
To create a believable fiancée, Cholmondeley wanted a photograph of Pam, so he asked the
most attractive girls from the Secret Service to provide the kind of photo which a red-blooded
young Marines officer would be likely to carry about his person. It was an open invitation,
but Montagu in fact already had a strong candidate in mind — Jean Leslie. Montagu indicated to
her that she might be a favoured candidate were she to be interested, and Miss Leslie provided
the photo taken the previous summer; she had been swimming in the River Thames near Little
Wittenham in Oxfordshire, with a Grenadier Guardsman on leave called Tony and he had taken
the above photograph.
With that photograph, Major William “Bill” Martin of the Royal Marines, ID 148228, was
complete. Among his possessions, placed with fictitious invasion plans, were an angry letter
from Lloyd’s about an overdraft, a bill for shirts, a used bus ticket, a stern letter from his father,
and a couple of love letters from affectionate but dim Pam — composed by Leslie’s own spinster
superior. A drowned body was taken from a morgue in London and dispatched to the Spanish
coast, where pro-Nazi officials passed the misleading documents to the Germans.
The deception was indeed effective. Hitler became convinced that any attack on Sicily would
only be a decoy for the main assault in Greece and Sardinia, and for two weeks after the Sicily
landings on the island on July 9, 1943, no attempt was made to rush reinforcements to meet
them.