This week’s primary races, in which grassroots conservative candidates had a strong showing, suggest that the political energy is on the Republican side. Yet it is too soon to predict that 2010 will be a replay of 1994, when a voter backlash helped Republicans recapture control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Consider the May 18th showdown for John Murtha’s vacated congressional seat, which was disappointing for Republicans. In some polls, Tim Burns had been ahead of Mark Critz, and Critz’s 7 point win was bound to provoke a good deal of agonized post mortem analysis. But a crucial and sobering fact eluded everybody: PA12 showed that the decisive factor in the big GOP congressional gains of 1994 is missing this year, and will remain so until the party does something to remedy that.

Rush Limbaugh tried to cheer Republicans up by pointing to the 2 to 1 Democrat registration edge in the district, and assured them that they don’t need to win 2 to 1 districts to still win big in November. But John MCain beat Obama in that district in 2008—where shall Republicans be in the fall if they can’t hold what McCain held while Obama was winning the election? Another argument from Rush was that Critz had run like a Republican, but that one ought not to have appealed to a man who has been saying for years (correctly) that if people are given a choice between a quasi-Democrat (i.e., a liberal Republican) and a Democrat, they’ll naturally opt for the real thing. Burns was the real thing here, but that didn’t help him.

Dick Morris made a more plausible case when he said that in a low turnout election, Democrats came out in bigger numbers because they had been trying to get Arlen Specter out of his Senate seat for years, and now at last had the opportunity to finish him off. There is probably some truth in this, but unfortunately, it exposes a more important truth: Democrats were motivated to turn out but Republicans were not. The real question is why, and the answer casts a very long shadow over the fall elections. The factor which, according to Morris, successfully motivated Democrats was a trivial one: getting even with Specter. Compare this to what might have motivated Republicans: the next six months will be a dangerous time for the country. Democratic leaders know that their ability to implement their agenda may soon be gone, and so in the coming months they will try to ram through every destructive measure they can. Since they have the votes, only one thing will stop them: fear. Specifically, the fear on the part of scores of Democrats that their votes will end their careers. That fear has been stoked by the results of statewide elections in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, but statewide electorates are so large that they can never be skewed to one side as much as local congressional districts, which means that even in the era of Scott Brown’s win, large local party registration differences can still make a district feel safe. And so a Republican win in a heavily Democrat district would greatly increase fear, and that fear would make the GOP safer in the next six months.

Why didn’t this powerful motive for Republicans to go to the polls outweigh the trivial one that motivated Democrats? The ground should have been fertile: Obama’s approval numbers in the district were much lower than the national average. But Republican voters were not motivated by this powerful case because Republican leaders were not able to make it effectively. They lacked the energy and focus needed to inspire their side to vote, and so, squandered their advantage. That is a troubling lesson of the PA12 result.

There has been much discussion of the resemblance between this fall and 1994, when the GOP made large gains to take the House. The constant theme of the comparisons has been the similarity between HillaryCare and ObamaCare as sources of deep disillusion with the sitting President, and this similarity is widely assumed to be enough to make for a comparable Republican sweep this fall. But this thinking ignores a crucial factor that was present in 1994 and is not present this year: highly effective, focused and energetic leadership.

In 1994, Newt Gingrich wasn’t content to let people vote against the incumbent Democrats—he gave them something to vote for: the Contract with America. The Contract gave the campaign a clear focus, and it projected drive and energy. Newt was a compelling figure in front of the TV cameras: charismatic, full of ideas, exuding confidence and competence. What would the 1994 election have been like without dynamic, focused leadership pushing a clearly delineated positive agenda? It might well have been like PA12 this year, and that is why Republicans need to take that result seriously if they are to avoid the same outcome this fall.

In the House, energy, ideas, and strategic thought come from Paul Ryan (the Roadmap) and Eric Cantor, but not from the wooden, unimaginative John Boehner. In the Senate, waves are made by the likes of Jon Kyl and Jim DeMint, but not by the passive Mitch McConnell. Neither Boehner nor McConnell has the charisma or the focus needed to dominate a TV screen. Nor do they have strategic judgment–remember them on Scozzafava or amnesty? Where is this Republican leadership’s equivalent of a Contract with America for the fall election? In PA12, voters were asked to vote against the Pelosi-Reed agenda, but they were not given anything to vote for. Both Boehner and McConnell seem to think they can coast to victory on a wave of anti-Obama sentiment, but that’s not what produced 1994’s big win. I have seen this slogan for the fall elections: Boehner for Speaker. That’s a sure way to put GOP voters to sleep.

Spokesmen for liberal ideas are everywhere in the media, but Republicans are given few opportunities to make their case, and so must make sure that what chances they have are used to maximum effect. That’s why an ability to use TV to explain conservative ideas quickly and easily in crisp, forceful language is indispensable in GOP leaders. In 1994, the GOP seemed for once to understand that, and passed over more senior figures to anoint a natural leader in Newt Gingrich. But since then, it has gone back to its old ways, installing people with seniority but without ideas or energy, all but guaranteeing defeat with uncharismatic, lifeless figures like Denny Hastert and Bob Dole.

At the moment, tea party energy occasionally supplies some of what is missing in the leadership, but that can never be more than sporadic. Ordinary people can sustain their extraordinary efforts for only so long before the demands of their own lives reassert themselves. It’s not surprising that tea party energy suddenly disappeared in PA12. In any case, energy without the kind of focus provided by effective leadership can be dangerous, as the quirky Rand Paul’s nomination showed. Tea parties are a symptom of what is wrong with the GOP, not an antidote to it.

The real lesson of PA12 is this:  if Republicans were hoping for a repeat of 1994 this fall, then they had better prepare themselves for a disappointment—unless and until the GOP understands how it won in 1994, and accordingly moves to correct the disastrous leadership deficit that was on clear display in PA12. If the party persists in approaching its best opportunity in many years with its present passive, uninspired and uninspiring leadership, it will thoroughly deserve that old label: the stupid party.

In light of the catastrophic spill off the Gulf Coast, BP has become one of the world’s most abhorred companies. While the most recent calamity may be an isolated lapse in judgment and preparedness, this is not the first time that BP has found itself in a high-profile scandal. From the current eco-crisis to disregard for international security, foes accuse BP of placing revenue above all potential cost factors. Following in the footsteps of past offenders like General Electric (GE) and Halliburton, BP is actively engaged in business and trade with Iran, despite the impending threats the nation poses to international peace and stability.

BP’s continued support for Iran adds the energy giant to the ranks of international companies that have defied the international community’s efforts to hold the nuclear-seeking mullahs to account by continuing to do business in the country.

To be sure, doing business with Iran is not necessarily illegal. Current and proposed sanctions do not prevent companies from engaging in oil sales. But with business practices not officially restricted, energy companies like BP continue what some government officials and policy experts see as morally-bankrupt business practices. The company chooses its current policy of Iranian engagement amid the country’s non-compliance with requests by the United Nations and Western powers to contain nuclear ambitions, not to mention increasing evidence that Iran has heavily assisted Iraqi insurgents. Despite these issues, BP appears unwilling to sever its contracts with Iran.

Such lax regulations have some wondering why the United States and international allies refrain from more restrictive sanctions. According to the Wall Street Journal, sanctions on Iranian oil exports would likely increase world-wide costs, which, in turn, would potentially lead to an increase in U.S. gasoline prices well beyond their currently elevated status. Furthermore, officials suspect that an oil embargo would create economic instability for U.S. allies who are already experiencing fiscal woes. As a result, the WSJ reports that “…companies like Shell and BP PLC continue to do a brisk business buying Iranian oil products.”

When asked about companies engaging in business with Iran, Mark Ware of Vitol Group (energy-training company) said, “Everyone buys from the Iranians—governments, states, other companies. It’s not subject to any legislation,” serving as yet another prime example of the “because we can” mentality that is likely driving BP’s current policy. Predictably, representatives from BP have been unwilling to speak to the press about the company’s Iranian business connections.

Despite very obvious ethical contradictions, BP claims to embrace honesty and integrity. According to the company’s web site, “As one of the world’s leading companies, we have a responsibility to set high standards: to be, and be seen to be, a business which is committed to integrity.” BP goes on to state that it can best be characterized by four key words – progressive, responsible, innovative and performance-driven. Ironically, recent developments show BP at a loss in each key area, as gallons of oil continue to siphon into Gulf waters. Furthermore, ongoing business relations with a rogue nation do little to validate BP’s self-professed zeal for incorruptibility.

When it comes to choosing whether to engage in Iranian business interests, the ethical answer is explicit, yet BP has been inconsistent and indecisive in its approach. In 2005, BP’s Chief Executive John Browne said the following regarding the company’s business relations with Iran: “To do business with Iran at the moment would be offensive to the United States, and therefore against BP’s interests. We’re very heavily influenced by our American position.” While this stance appears firmly solidified, Browne took a very different tone in 2001. According to Business Week, at that time Browne was growing impatient with the U.S. government’s strained relations with Iran. According to the article, “Sources close to BP say Browne recently told Vice-President Dick Cheney, who was reviewing U.S. energy policy, that BP had been more than generous in waiting for the situation between the U.S. and Iran to improve.”

According to a 2005 Guardian article, prior to the 9/11 attacks BP was looking to invest in Iran. However, the attacks made such a venture less viable, as Browne said, “Right now it is impractical for BP because 40% of BP is in the US and we are the largest producer of oil and gas in the US. Politically Iran is not a flyer. One day I hope it is.” Here again, the concern is rooted in politics and the explanation is devoid of any allegiance to the nations in which BP primarily operates. Nowhere does BP’s rhetoric match the company’s penchant for truth and integrity. The focus was on BP’s bottom line.

In 2010, The New York Times reported on 74 companies who have done business with Iran, while receiving monies from the U.S. government. BP is listed as an “active” Iranian business partner, admitting to providing Iran with gasoline until 2008 – just three years after the company made public claims about its plans to cease working with Iran.  During this time, BP also admits to “…operating two fields and a pipeline” outside the rogue nation; the National Iranian Oil Company had a stake in this property. Currently, the company purchases “small quantities of crude oil” from Iran.

While BP is not necessarily violating the law by economically engaging Iran, U.S. leaders and policy experts fear that companies who ignore Iranian noncompliance with the UN and Western powers are only emboldening the nation’s leaders. Between the Gulf oil spill, which will likely have lasting environmental impact, and BP’s current Iranian policy, the company will likely remain under fire for months to come.

The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) cannot act quick enough to thumb its nose at punitive measures, claiming they are illegitimate and will be ineffective. Tuesday was no exception. Just as the U.S. finally convinced Russia and China to pass a fourth round of sanctions, the IRI promptly and audaciously dismissed the initiative, stating that it would not be approved by the rest of the United Nations Security Council and even if passed, it would not hinder the Iranian economy.

Maybe the IRI didn’t expect to be cornered this soon after making its tactful move Monday, agreeing to ship some of its uranium to Turkey to be enriched and returned as fuel for Iran’s nuclear energy plants. The operative word being ‘some,’ and the obvious motive being to show a glimmer of good faith before serious energy and gasoline sanctions are imposed.

The new proposal reiterates the demand that Iran halt its nuclear program and further prohibits any entity from selling to or aiding Iran in its nuclear weapons ambitions. It also imposes certain travel bans and requires that all Iranian cargo ships are searched before touching Iran’s shore.

Although most sanction proponents were hoping for a hard hit on Iran’s gasoline and energy industry, this fourth round of sanctions, according to the U.S., is meant to further isolate the IRI and to influence other nations to implement strict measures against Iran on their own.

While a step in the right direction, will these particular sanctions deter the IRI from going on with their proliferation? No. Does the U.S. believe it will? No. So why is the U.S. treading so lightly? Once again, we are brought back to the drawing board on sanctions. The longer we take to impose those that will genuinely cripple the Iranian regime, the more tricks the IRI will pull out of its hat to buy time and to reposition international forces.

Over the course of the last year, Iranian politicians, scholars and pundits have drastically evolved their opinions, mirroring a quickly changing and ever more urgent political backdrop.  Last June, when Iranians courageously took to the streets in the aftermath of a fraudulent election, they were filled with hope that change was within their grasp. More recently, as Iranians prepare for the one year anniversary of those demonstrations, they are going forward more cautiously and entirely cognizant that it will take more than large-scale protests to change their bitter fate under this regime.

The central topic at the time of the first demonstrations was the disenchantment of millions of Iranians whose rights were being trampled on by a rogue and hardline regime. Now at center stage, is the IRI’s nuclear weapons ambition and how quickly it will fulfill those objectives.

Likewise, talk of sanctions divided scholars, politicians, Iranians and Iranian Americans who feared the repercussion on innocent civilians. Slowly, those fears were replaced by an understanding that sanctions might be the only way to stop this relentless regime.

As the IRI further isolated itself from the international community with outlandish rhetoric and flippant demeanor, we found that a stronger and louder majority from the left, right and center began standing in support of powerful, yet targeted sanctions.

And the question, as always, was how the people of Iran will be affected. Why punish the citizens? Particularly in the case of Iran, we know the answer plain and simple. The people of Iran differ greatly with their government.  Yet by pushing for sanctions, are we allowing the Iranian people to bear the reprimands of their government; the same government many of them oppose.

The argument against sanctions on the people of Iran hinges on the premise that they will further strain an already suffering economy in a country where unemployment has been in the double digits for years. Many of those who can feed their families have to work a handful of menial jobs to do so.  The rule of thumb for many in the case of Iran has been to refrain from taking any action that would hurt the people, economically or otherwise.

It is dangerous, however, to make such a categorical statement given Iran’s precarious state. It then becomes necessary to carefully examine all the other avenues that the Iranian people have taken and are willing to take, having risked both their lives and livelihoods quite often.

Take, for example, the 2009 demonstrations. If we calculate the number of Iranians who were out on the streets throughout this year, missing work and cutting back on productivity for days at a time and then multiply this number by the number of man hours that were lost over the course of the year, it amounts to a huge economic loss for the Iranian economy. Yet, many opponents of sanctions, both in Iran and abroad, advocated protests and large-scale organized protests. It is interesting how economic loss was never an issue then.

Juxtapose this number with the irreplaceable and invaluable individuals who were killed, detained, beaten and tortured over the last 30 years. When one considers how the Iranians were willing to send their children out onto the streets the day after the well-known young woman Neda was shot and killed and hundreds of their friends and neighbors were secretly, yet brutally rounded up by the Revolutionary Guard and Basiji militia men, then the argument against sanctions for the protection of the Iranian people becomes entirely moot.

The debate among Iran scholars and political and social activists at this point should not focus on whether sanctions are appropriate to impose, but rather how they should be implemented, and what type of restrictions would best choke this regime while having the most nominal effect on Iranians.

The best recipe for sanctions requires five essential ingredients. First, they should be properly implemented. This means that they are targeted and meant to pinpoint the regime and its extensions only. Next, they should be clearly defined. As we are seeing in the case of Iran, a lack of boundaries and barriers leaves room for games and evading authority. Third, sanctions should be linked to a particular behavior change or resolution of specific issues.  Very clearly, sanctions should be tied to a particular action or behavior and made very clear to the regime. Next, it should be explained well to the Iranian people. What the United States has missed time and again in the case of Iran is a transparent and honest dialogue with the Iranian people. Where sanctions could be misconstrued as action against the people of Iran, the United States and all cosignatories should make it abundantly clear to the people of Iran that the sanctions are meant against its defiant government. Lastly, the sanctions should be lifted after conditions are met, meaning it needs to be a punishment that leaves room for repentance.

Another important point that is scarcely mentioned in talks about sanctions is that they are not meant solely to deter the Iranian regime from fulfilling its nuclear weapons ambitions. They can and should also be used in human rights cases to deter the regime from stoning, hanging and executing innocent civilians such as the five innocent Iranians arrested during the demonstrations and executed on Mother’s Day.

Over the past decade, targeted and action-specific sanctions have been successful in deterring the Islamic Republic. Two instances that come to mind are the freeing of the 13 Iranian Jews from the city of Shiraz in 1999 who were being tried for espionage. The campaign to halt the use of cranes for hangings was successful in stopping public executions for over three years.

Even if we were to give credence to the economic argument against sanctions, there are various ways in which they can be implemented to help the Iranian people without costing them anything. There can be sanctions on diplomats and their families. There can be a restriction on the regime’s communication worldwide, which would prevent them from making sanctimonious speeches at the United Nations every few months or so. The personal accounts of government officials and their families should be frozen. Which raises an interesting question: if these individuals want so badly to hold onto Iran’s government and care for its economic state, then why don’t they invest their money into the country?

Government officials should also feel pressure when they travel, when they invest abroad, and when they send their children abroad. Often, we see the children of the Iranian officials studying at top ranked American universities, while the regime is busy ruining the lives of their compatriots back home. Maybe if these officials felt the same pressures other Iranians did, their own children and families could pressure them to let up their chokehold on the country.

So, despite the IRI’s three-decade-long crusade to steer the country elsewhere, the argument should not be whether or not to impose sanctions. The Iranian people are hurting more in the interim with a hard-line regime which turns a blind eye to its citizens’ needs while duping the international community to cover its illicit nuclear weapons agenda. The argument should only focus on how we can hit hardest at the regime’s lifeline through crippling regulations on their energy and gasoline sectors, for the sake of the Iranians and everyone else.

Here's what's going on: Iran will continue as long as it can to make the bare minimum gestures it needs to in order to buy time, while continuing business as usual. "Iran to resume uranium enrichment despite Turkey deal," from CNN, May 17:

(CNN) -- Iran will continue to enrich uranium to 20 percent, it said Monday, despite agreeing hours earlier to ship its low-enriched uranium to Turkey.

Foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told the Islamic Republic News Agency shortly after the announcement of the deal with Turkey that Iran will not stop enriching its own uranium.

That deal had been designed to answer international concerns that Iran was secretly trying to build nuclear weapons -- a charge it has long denied.

"With this agreement there are no more excuses left for the other side to impose pressure and continue with hindering the whole process of fuel exchange for Iran," Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, said Monday.

He said he hoped the deal would lead the United Nations nuclear energy watchdog to close its file on Iran "forever."

His speech was carried live by Iran's government-backed Press TV.

The offer -- announced in a joint statement Monday by Iran, Turkey and Brazil -- would have Iran send 1,200 kg (2,645 lbs) of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey within a month, and the international group monitoring Iran's nuclear activities send 120 kg (264 lbs) of high-enriched uranium to Iran within a year.

The group to whom Iran is making the offer -- the so-called Vienna Group of the United States, Russia, France, and the International Atomic Energy Agency -- did not respond immediately.

Iran, Turkey and Brazil said Iran would formally notify the IAEA of the proposal within a week.

If the deal is not accepted, Turkey will return Iran's low-enriched uranium, the joint statement said.

Turkey's indifference to the success or failure of this arrangement is telling:

Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Burak Ozugergin said Iran had made a major concession. "Iran is ready to deliver," he said. "If the deal goes through that's fine. If it doesn't, then the 1,200 kilograms in Turkey will continue to belong to Iran and can be arranged for return."

It is not clear how Iran's insistence that it will continue to enrich uranium itself is related to its offer to send low-enriched uranium abroad....

I never thought I’d agree with a member of the Kennedy clan, but Bobby Kennedy’s son got it right when he dismissed the much-hyped Cape Wind project that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved last week. “It’s a boondoggle of the worst kind,” Kennedy said. “It’s going to cost the people of Massachusetts $4 billion over the next 20 years in extra costs.”

If anything, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, underestimated the cost of Cape Wind. The project will see the construction of 130 wind-powered turbines off the coast of Cape Cod Massachusetts that will, according to its developers, generate an average of 170 megawatts of electricity for the Bay State. The turbines will cost about $1 billion to build. Let’s assume that the useful life of the wind turbines is twenty years, that the maintenance costs of the windmills is zero, and that nobody has to pay a dime of interest on the $1 billion worth of financing needed to construct these windmills. Even if we accept such wildly inaccurate and charitable assumptions, the cost of energy generated by Cape Wind over those twenty years will be over thirty-three cents per kilowatt. That’s more than six times the typical wholesale price for electrons today, around six cents per kilowatt, depending on the market.

Thanks to government subsidies, Massachusetts’ residents won’t have to pay the full price for Cape Wind power. Instead, they’ll only have to fork over four and a half times the going rate, rather that something over six times that benchmark. According to Bobby junior:

“We’re the windiest country on earth and we have lots and lots of land. Americans don’t want to pay 27 cents a kilowatt hour for energy.”

Truth be told, Americans don’t want to pay 26 cents a kilowatt for energy, or 25 cents a kilowatt, or one fraction of a penny more than they have to. They rather reasonably expect that the free enterprise system will function properly and allow them to find the most competitive – aka: least expensive – source of power available. Kennedy is putting the economic argument to use here in a very limited sense of course. The Kennedys don’t really care what you and I pay for power. It’s just that the Kennedys don’t want a forest of giant windmills interfering with their view while they’re yachting majestically down Nantucket Sound. But, the same logic in fact applies everywhere in the “windiest country on earth”: wind fired energy is expensive.

I recently asked an energy executive why his company was investing in wind-power so heavily, when we both know it doesn’t make any economic sense to do so. His reply was that it’s all about the government subsidies. Once those run out, they intend to forgo any further – very expensive – maintenance, run the things till they break down and then forget about them. Given the high cost of wind power, and the fact that you have to have an equivalent amount of fossil power ready to back up wind energy (since the wind doesn’t blow all the time outside of the halls of Congress) it’s reasonable to assume that this fellow isn’t the only person in the energy industry thinking along such lines.

Yet wind power projects are still all the rage and promise to be for quite a while yet. Wind power recently passed biomass power as number two on the Department of Energy’s renewable power rankings. The Obama administration loves windmills, but apparently not just because it’s “green energy.” It appears that there has been some spreading of the green involved as well. Former New York Sun managing editor Ira Stoll uncovered some of the connections at his website, Future of Capitalism. Stoll noted how $503 in stimulus money was awarded to a couple of wind energy companies that have close ties to the Obama administration:

“…the recipient of $294 million, Iberdrola SA, had executives who had donated more than $21,000 to the Obama campaign and related funds. Another $115 million in funds for windmills went to a company called First Wind, which, I noted, had owners that included D.E. Shaw and Madison Dearborn Partners. Shaw is the firm at which President Obama’s chief of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, held a $5.2 million a year, one-day-a-week job, and Madison Dearborn is the firm of which Rahm Emanuel, now the White House chief of staff, said, “They’ve been not only supporters of mine, they’re friends of mine.”

Odd that the mainstream media has shown no interest in these sorts of ties, especially after journalists spent eight years drawing every connection they could, no matter how tenuous, between the Bush administration and the oil industry. It’s not surprising that such ties exist of course. They smack of the kind of “pay to play” politics for which Chicago is justifiably famous.

If you really want to understand the futility of wind power, consider the following analysis. In 2007 (the last year for which verified data is currently available) the Department of Energy reported that there were 389 wind-farms producing electricity in the United States, with a net generation capacity of 16,596 megawatts.  If all of those windmills were churning out electrons at capacity all of the time, they would have produced a little over 145 million megawatt hours of electricity in 2007. How much did they in fact produce? A little less than 27 million megawatt hours, or less than twenty percent of capacity (also called “capacity factor” in the business).

If a coal-fired plant providing base-load power operates at something less than a ninety percent capacity factor, it’s owners are going to take a long, hard look at the way it’s being run. But windmills – both because they’re expensive and thus often among the last units to called into service to meet demand, and because you just can’t count on the wind – are built in droves despite the fact they are eighty percent useless. But for government subsidies, Cape Wind, or any of the big wind farms sprouting up across the country, would not exist.

Watching Big Oil Burn

In the spirit of ”keep[ing] the boot on the neck of British Petroleum (BP),” per Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, CBS News and Politico are reporting the new witch hunt of BP and its cohorts, Transocean and Halliburton.

The American public is about to witness a very public flogging, something reminiscent of a 17th century stoning of evil-doers by the mob before being dragged to a pyre to be burned alive.

Something like what should’ve been done to that evil oil spill before it creeped its way to the Lousiana shore.

BP et al. will be facing hearings before:

• Witch Hunt Waxman’s Energy and Commerce Commitee
• House Committee on Natural Resources
• The Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming
• House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment
• House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
• Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works
• House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
• Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government
• House Committee on Natural Resources

BP and companies tied to the spill are also being sued for $5 million by commercial shrimpers Acy J. Cooper Jr. and Ronnie Louis Anderson in a class action lawsuit representing all affected Louisiana residents.

Then there’s the “Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act,” authored by Senator Robert Menendez, and cosigned by Sens. Frank Lautenberg and Bill Nelson, to up the $75 million liability cap to $10 billion for Big [Bad] Oil Company spills.

And Senator Nelson wants the media to remember the reports of sex for oil between Denver government regulators and oil company representatives who allegedly traded nooky for mineral rights.

So far CBS and leftist Think Progress are the only ones to bite Nelson’s May 4th press prelease referencing “all kinds of booze parties, all kinds of marijuana parties, and all kinds of sex parties” from 2002 to 2006 amongst greasy oilmen and hot government gals.

Prostitution charges were never filed.

If old news pay-to-play political sex romps are used to determine “whether oil and gas industry have exerted too much influence over regulators,” does this mean that all old sexual trysts in the political realm are fair game?

Who among them will cast the first stone?

This weekend, The New York Times reported on a secret, three-page memorandum that was composed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and sent to President Obama’s national security advisor this past January.  The document highlights Gates’s fear that the United States is not adequately prepared for a nuclear Iran, while calling for effective long-term strategies in dealing with the defiant Mideast nation.  This unintended admission showcases the American government’s lack of long-range preparedness in the face of an aggressive and resistant Iran, while leaving many to wonder how the administration will confront Iran’s ever-increasing volatility.

The recent memo, written just three months ago, is startling in its own regard, as it appears to warn the White House that the U.S. is ill-prepared for the potential nuclear fruits of Iran’s defiance.  While this memo does, indeed, provide new internal insight, experts have been aware of the horrific dangers of a nuclear Iran for years.  On Mon., Reuters reported that, with “sufficient foreign assistance,” Iran may have the capability to strike the U.S. with a missile by 2015.  This, teamed with Iran’s very obvious nuclear ambitions and a plethora of “what ifs” should sanctions fail, has many experts worried about what is to come.  As time progresses, Iranian leaders are making it clear that, regardless of Western pressures, nuclear plans are forging onward.

Over the past two weeks the Iran/U.S. saga has intensified.  Just days prior to the memo’s release, Gates told reporters that he does not anticipate Iranian ability to produce nuclear weapons for at least another year.  While this may seem like a settling piece of information, one year is hardly enough time to make viable headway with a nation that shows no signs of yielding. Gates vocalized this timeline in response to recent statements from Behzad Soltani, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.  According to Voice of America,

“Iran’s Fars news agency quotes the deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization as saying “no country would even think about attacking Iran” after it joins the nuclear club.  Fars also quotes the official, Behzad Soltani, as saying Iran plans to expand nuclear technology for “purposes other than energy and fuel production.”

This exchange of sorts occurred around the same time last week that President Obama met with 47 world leaders to discuss global nuclear security.  As Time Magazine reports, the event was an attempt by Obama to build support for international sanctions against Iran.   In warding off U.S. pressures, Time reports that “…Iran has relied on its commercial relations — especially with Russia and China — to thwart U.S. efforts to isolate Iran.”  Coincidently, Iran was not invited to Obama’s conference, so the nation held its own “summit” to counteract the U.S.-led event.  In sum, 60 nations were in attendance (13 more than attended the U.S. conference), including representatives from both Russia and China.

Following the wake of the memo’s release, Gates seems to be downplaying the concerns that the document has sparked.  However, the Jan. 2010 memorandum exposed appropriate urgency in a matter that can no longer be ignored.  In the original memo, Gates plainly stated that the U.S. “…does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability.”  In an effort to put the Jan. 2010 memo into context, Gates attempted to explain why he issued what some see as a “jolt to action” for the Obama administration.  Gates said,

“The memo was not intended as a ‘wake up call’ or received as such by the President’s national security team.  Rather, it presented a number of questions and proposals intended to contribute to an orderly and timely decision making process.”

In the end, regardless of the PR game administration officials are likely playing, the main story here is that the U.S. lacks long-term strategy in dealing with a dangerous and volatile rogue nation – a nation that is doing little to nothing to comply with international requests that it stop utilizing nuclear materials.  Regardless of what Gates intended, or believes for that matter, the lack of a solidified plan is more than evident.  So, the natural question is: Where do we go from here?

Obama’s nuclear summit was likely a starting point for what is to come.  On April 14, just four days before the now-infamous memo leaked, The Los Angeles Times quoted Gates as saying that a broad, international agreement is extremely important if the U.S. plans to make headway with Iran.  In fact, the Obama administration is pushing so hard for something viable that officials are willing to adopt weaker sanctions than they would like, so long as the United Nations and the international community join forces in furthering Iranian isolation.   According to the Times,

[Gates] said a Security Council resolution “provides a new legal platform” for individual nations or groups such as the European Union to take more stringent action. In that way, the UN resolution acts as a “launching pad” for economic strictures that are much tougher than those adopted by the world organization, [Gates]  said.

This indicates that the Obama administration is settling for whatever compromise its international colleagues are willing to make.  As a result of pushback from other nations, the U.S. has abandoned a push for a ban on petroleum heading to and coming from Iran.   With Turkey, China and Russia serving as potential blockades to Security Council action (the latter two have recently joined talks), U.N. sanctions may be weak at best.  Still, the Times notes that insiders believe that U.N. agreement, regardless of strength in tone, makes a statement to Iran and is essential to the formulation of smaller contingencies of nations that, under U.S. leadership, may embrace stricter sanctions.  While only time will tell how the scenario will play out, swift and stringent U.S. policy is surely due.

In an economy full of problems there are still a few high points. One of them, as you may have noticed if you pay attention to your utility bills, is that natural gas prices are relatively low. Back in mid-2008, natural gas prices hit record highs. The market reacted as it is supposed to: exploration took off, production increased and now, almost two years later, the cost of natural gas has stabilized at a comfortable level, amid normal seasonal variations. We shouldn’t have to worry about this sector of the economy, but there is a dark cloud looming on the horizon in the form of yet another environmental initiative that the Obama administration is pushing forward, one that has the potential to cut domestic natural gas production, cost us jobs and revenue and force energy prices upward.

There is quite a bit of natural gas and oil trapped in shale and rock formations located thousands of feet underground. The tried and true technique of “hydraulic fracturing” has been used for about sixty years to coax these hydrocarbons to deep wells, where they can be recovered. In simple terms, hydraulic fracturing fluids are pumped down into a deep well under pressure. The fluid consists mostly of water and sand, with a small amount of other chemicals. As the pressurized fluid is distributed along a horizontal plane, it creates micro-fractures in the rock holding the natural gas. The sand particles hold these fractures open, allowing gas to flow along the path of least resistance up into the borehole of the well.

There are more than a million natural gas wells that utilize hydraulic fracturing in the United States. About ninety-five per cent of natural gas wells in the country use this form, or an analogous form, of reservoir enhancement to recover energy. The process is an important – some would say vital – piece of the puzzle if the nation is going to maintain some degree of energy independence. However, the technology caught the attention of Barack Obama’s EPA, which recently confirmed that it is “studying the issue”. When uttered by members of this administration those three words generally sound rather ominous and this is no exception. “Studying the issue,” whatever the issue, typically means more regulations, more restrictions and higher costs. When it comes to a part of our economy as vital as the energy sector, one has to wonder: how many more studies and subsequent “recommendations” can we afford?

Why is the EPA studying hydraulic fracturing? For environmental reasons of course. Scattered, unconfirmed and wholly anecdotal claims that hydraulic fracturing has contaminated drinking water in a few locations across the nation spurred the EPA into action. From a scientific point of view, it’s hard to understand why the EPA would lend any credibility to these tales, much less allocate $1.9 million dollars to take another look at a technology that has been studied to death, not only by the oil and natural gas industries, but by the EPA itself. A 2004 EPA study concluded that hydraulic fracturing didn’t present any threat to human health and the environment, but of course that was George W. Bush’s EPA, so any of its decisions are subject to a Barack Obama do over.

There are a number of reasons why it’s just plain silly to spend almost two million dollars to reconfirm what we already know. Chemically, as noted above, hydraulic fracturing fluid is overwhelmingly water and sand (or ceramic, or some other inert solid used to keep rock pores open). Other chemicals, which are often proprietary, represent a very small fraction of the whole. Geologically, the formations holding the gas and oil are located thousands of feed underground, under layers of different strata, while drinking water aquifers are typically no more than a few hundred feet below ground. The natural gas recovered, like the fracturing fluid, will naturally follow the path of least resistance and flow to the bore hole that’s been drilled for that purpose, rather than try to find a tortuous path through all of the layers of rock and sediment containing it. Plus, consider this: even as the EPA looks at ways to restrict an important means of producing energy, they’re simultaneously developing regulations that encourage another segment of the power industry to inject chemicals deep underground without the kind of relief valve that a bore hole represents. Carbon storage and sequestration is the leading, EPA approved way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. In this case, carbon dioxide is injected deep underground at high pressures, but because there is no well to relieve the pressure, it’s free to find fractures that will carry it, and any contaminants from the stack gas that remain, into aquifers.

The Environmental Engineering Committee (EEC) of EPA’s Science Advisory Board is in charge of studying hydraulic fracturing. The EEC has sixteen members, fourteen of which are academics and two of which are consultants. Not a single industry expert sits on the committee. The energy industry will be free to comment on the committee’s work of course, but is Obama’s EPA likely to pay serious attention to experts who represent evil corporate interests?

According to a study conducted by IHS Global Insight, a ban on hydraulic fracturing would cost the United States $374 billion in lost Gross Domestic Product by 2014, would result in the loss of about 3 million jobs and would require a sixty per cent increase in imported oil and natural gas to make up the difference. Placing restrictions on the fluids that can be used for hydraulic fracturing would be slightly less painful, but painful enough. In that scenario, IHS’s study foresees a $172 billion reduction in GDP, 1.4 million jobs lost and a thirty per cent increase in energy imports.

It should be noted that hydraulic fracturing is already regulated on the state and federal levels. Studying the practice once again will lead to one of two results. Either the EPA will conclude that existing regulatory protections are sufficient, which doesn’t seem likely given this administration’s record when it comes to environmental issues, or the EPA will deem it necessary to pile another layer of crippling regulations onto an industry that has been one of the few bright spots in a floundering economy.

The Obama administration opened up some of the nation’s shores to offshore drilling on Wednesday, a move that seemed more political than practical. Ironically, environmentalists and conservatives inadvertently found common ground when criticizing the plan: it won’t do all that much to create true energy independence. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell praised the move, but qualified his support by noting that it was “a small one that leaves enormous amounts of American energy off limits.” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune felt much the same way, for different reasons of course, saying that “drilling our coasts will [do] nothing to lower gas prices or create energy independence.”

Obama opened up offshore drilling along much of the Atlantic coast and in the Cook Inlet in Alaska. The drilling ban remains in place along the Pacific coast and most of Alaska, while more drilling in the Gulf of Mexico remains under study. Accordingly, this is merely a partial measure, as both McConnell and Brune imply. But, Brune’s assertion that more drilling will do nothing to lower gas prices is likely incorrect. Gas and oil prices depend in large part on the futures market and the prospect of more supply down the road, even a little more, will help to depress futures prices. Back in 2008, when gasoline prices were over four dollars per gallon, president Bush moved to open up offshore drilling. That announcement had the desired effect. Gasoline prices dropped, not because there was an immediate increase in supply, but because the market responded to the prospect of increased supplies down the road.

It’s worth remembering how the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi responded when Bush pushed for more offshore drilling in 2008:

“The president has failed in his economic policy, and now he wants to say, ‘but for drilling in protected areas offshore, our economy would be thriving and the price of gas would be lower.’ That hoax is unworthy of the serious debate we must have to relieve the pain of consumers at the pump and to promote energy independence.”

Did Speaker Pelosi complain about Obama’s drilling initiative in similar terms, or at all? You don’t need Google to answer that question. Yet, the last sentence in Pelosi’s 2008 attack still largely applies, for if Obama’s plan isn’t actually a hoax, it doesn’t go nearly far enough towards fulfilling the worthy goal of energy independence. This move feels like a bargaining chip, but – having already flipped it onto the table – it’s hard to see how this ploy will help the administration. Ideally, Obama would like to pass a comprehensive energy bill that includes cap and trade, or some other form of greenhouse gas reduction measures. Now that he has “given in” on offshore drilling, does the president expect Republican support for an energy bill in return? That seems an unlikely scenario, given how unpopular greenhouse gas reduction measures are among the public and the GOP.

Environmental groups are upset with the president over his latest move, but their anger will pass, especially with new motor vehicle fleet fuel efficiency standards going into effect and as Obama pushes cap and trade back into the spotlight. Both moves will go a long way to soothing hurt feelings. Still, it was amusing to hear the rhetoric from the environmental crowd after the president relaxed the offshore drilling ban. “Short of sending Sarah Palin back to Alaska to personally club polar bears to death, the Obama administration could not have come up with a more efficient extinction plan for the polar bear,” Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity complained.

The Christian Science Monitor had to reach back more than forty years to find an environmental incident it could use to smear offshore drilling: “In 1969, off Santa Barbara, Calif., 3 million gallons of crude oil bubbled up from the seabed after a blowout on an oil-drilling platform,” the Monitor said in an April 1 editorial. The fact that they had to dig that deeply in the archives to find a significant incident is a testament to how much drilling technology has evolved. In fact, some scientific data indicates that not drilling hurts the environment more than doing so. A 1999 study by the University of California, Santa Barbara concluded that offshore drilling reduces oil seepage on the ocean floor, by reducing pressure on undersea petroleum reservoirs.

If the president wants to increase domestic energy production with more than just a token gesture, there’s a number of substantive moves that he could make, but the sorts of policies that would markedly boost homegrown energy in the long run are precisely the sorts of policies that would send the green faction of his base screaming over the edge of sanity in righteous horror and indignation, rather than seeing them merely grumble about a relatively minor change in policy that will be forgotten in a week or two.

If Obama really wanted to boost domestic energy production and give the economy a shot in the arm, opening up ANWR would be a nice start. Tapping the vast petroleum reserves locked away under federal lands in the west would be another fine move, as would drilling along the Pacific coast, the Gulf of Mexico and further into Alaskan enclaves. We all know that none of this is going to happen. Still, if the president isn’t going to go “all in” as far as domestic gas and oil production is concerned, I suppose we must be grateful that he tossed a chip into the pot, even if it’s one that is relatively unimportant to him.

Al Gore has been keeping a lower profile in general of late, but there’s one aspect of “climate change” that he doesn’t seem to talk about at all anymore: the supposed relationship between greenhouse gases and hurricanes.

Recall that shot of Gore from “An Inconvenient Truth” that showed Big Al standing in front of a satellite photo of Hurricane Katrina as the storm appeared ready to devour the gulf coast. He explained how, as ocean temperatures increase, hurricane activity would increase and, although he did not explicitly say so, the clear implication was that “global warming” would lead to hotter oceans and therefore more frequent and destructive hurricane activity.

Gore stuck to this theme for quite a while and the mainstream media readily accepted the supposed link between greenhouse gases and extreme weather. Katrina was just the beginning, we were told. The weather would get worse. But, quite unnoticed by most, this chapter in the global warming narrative has faded into the background over the last couple of years. I can only find one instance of Gore directly mentioning hurricanes at his blog for over a year, and he quietly dropped a PowerPoint slide that deals with the issue from his standard presentation in 2009. The media doesn’t seem to talk about the global warming-hurricane connection much, if at all, any more. So what happened?

The inconvenient, perhaps embarrassing, truth is that global hurricane activity has been steadily dropping since 2006. In fact, the years 2008 and 2009 represent a thirty year low in hurricane activity. That’s the reason that you don’t hear much about the supposed connection between greenhouse gases and hurricanes in the mainstream media any longer. Doing so would undercut the message that “the science is settled” and would provide further evidence that the way political figures like Gore make predictions are based on a rudimentary, and ultimately faulty, understanding of the way that the earth’s climate actually functions.

There is no doubt that there is a strong relationship between oceanic temperatures and hurricane formation. So why the precipitous drop in hurricane formation over the last four years? There’s a few likely reasons. For one, our ability to accurately measure oceanic temperatures, particularly in this era of politically-driven science, has been called into question by more than one skeptical scientist. In other words, ocean temperatures probably haven’t risen as much as alarmists claim, if at all. For another, some climatologists have suggested that there are self correcting mechanisms at work in the global climate that are much more important than the negligible effect of a small increases in relatively insignificant greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. Finally, as far as 2008 and 2009 in concerned, there is the La Nina effect. La Ninas are cooling events, a part of those natural, self correcting mechanisms that appear to be doing their jobs.

It should be noted that when we talk about a drop in global hurricane activity, the correct way to measure that activity is not the number of hurricanes that form in the North Atlantic, or even the total number of hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons that form across the planet. All storms are not created equal. Some, like Katrina, are monsters that span across hundreds of miles and release tremendous amounts of energy. Others are relatively small and release a fraction of the energy of a Category 5 behemoth like Katrina. When scientists look at the effect that hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons have each year, they consider the total energy released by all of those storms, what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calls “Accumulated Cyclone Energy,” or “ACE.” Using this standard of measurement, hurricane activity – in both in the Northern hemisphere and across the planet as a whole – dropped to levels that we have not seen since the late 1970s.

Those who subscribe to the theory that burning fossil fuels is causing disastrous climate change will, no doubt, dismiss this particular issue as unimportant. Increased hurricane formation is, after all, merely one among the many hundreds of terrible things that are supposed to happen as the concentration of greenhouse gases increases in the atmosphere. But, how would alarmists have reacted in an alternate reality? If 2008 and 2009 featured more and larger storms than we actually had, is there any doubt that Al Gore and mainstream media would have claimed those events were further evidence that mankind is destroying the planet?

This is one the reasons that the alarmists have less and less credibility as time goes on. They say, repeatedly and in the strongest possible terms, that this disaster or that catastrophe is about to happen because of greenhouse gases. Glaciers will melt away in twenty five years. The rainforests will disappear. Giant hurricanes will devastate the planet. Then, when it turns out that the doom-and-gloom predictions not only didn’t come true, but that they were based on pseudo-science, the public is told that those predictions really didn’t matter anyway. Is there any doubt as to why global warming skepticism is on the rise in America?

It will be interesting to see what happens this year. We are, as we speak, in the midst of a mild El Nino, an event that tends to warm the planet. Most climatologists seem to think it will be over by the middle of the hurricane season, but – and predictions at this time of year are never definitive – most believe we will see an increased number of North Atlantic hurricanes as compared to last year. If that happens, it is probably cynical to predict that some in the mainstream media and some environmental groups will use this occurrence to proclaim something like: “Hurricanes are on the rise; it’s further evidence of global warming!” But, given the way this issue is politicized, that seems very likely to happen.

Rich Trzupek is a chemist and Principal Consultant at Mostardi Platt Environmental, an environmental consulting firm based in Oak Brook, Illinois. He specializes in air quality issues and is the author of McGraw-Hill’s Air Quality Permitting and Compliance Manual. Rich is a confirmed skeptic with regard to the theory that human activity has caused global warming. He is also a regular contributor at threedonia.com.

Attacking someone’s religion is a practice guaranteed to elicit heated responses. This is certainly true when one dares to question the deeply-held tenants of the First Church of Environmentalism. The green commandment “thou shalt recycle” is an especially touchy subject. Yet, at the risk of damnation, let us consider another bit of blasphemy: there is no good reason — environmentally, economically or otherwise — to recycle glass.

One of the reasons that we are told we have to recycle is that it takes so long for many wastes to decompose in a landfill. This argument presupposes that there is something inherently wrong, even dangerous, about burying an inert material under the soil in a relatively small plot of land. The decomposition argument is not the only evidence used by recycling zealots to advance their case, but it’s an especially important exhibit.

Wastes that end up in landfills can be broken down into two broad categories: organic and inorganic. Organic wastes, like foodstuffs and paper, break down pretty quickly; twenty years is the generally-accepted rule of thumb decomposition period for organic waste in a landfill. Plastics are the organic exception to this rule, but that’s another column. Global warming alarmism has changed the way that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) views the organic decomposition process. When organic wastes decompose, they create methane, which can then be recovered and thus used to generate electricity. This energy is, according to EPA, renewable, greenhouse-gas-neutral power and is therefore prized. Indeed, under the proposed Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, power generated through the use of landfill gas would be exempt from what would effectively be a carbon tax.

Of course, burning those organic wastes directly is still officially frowned upon. That would be “incineration” and incineration is bad. The irony here is that it is enormously difficult to obtain EPA permission to separate the organic components of a waste stream and burn them “tomorrow” to generate renewable energy, but it’s perfectly fine – environmentally friendly even – to bury those same materials under a mound of earth and slowly recover their energy value over the course of two decades.

In general, inorganic wastes take a very long time to decompose. Inorganic wastes include metals like aluminum and steel and, to return to the focal point of this piece, glass. Depending on the source, the decomposition rate for glass is variously quoted as thousands to millions of years. The first question that leaps to mind is a basic one: Who cares? Undecomposed glass does not, can not, harm the environment or endanger human health by any possible stretch of the most vivid imagination. Chemically speaking, you can’t get much more inert than glass. Further, as I have previously pointed out, we’re hardly hurting for landfill space that an excess of glass waste could somehow use up.

The second question that quickly follows is this: What does the term “glass decomposition” even mean? Glass is primarily comprised of fused silica, i.e., sand. If the concern here is that it takes thousands or millions of years before silica crystals that make up the empty bottle of your favorite libation finally break apart into smaller pieces, here’s a suggestion: grab a ball-peen hammer and smash the offending bottle into smithereens. Problem solved. (Safety warning: please don’t forget to don your safety goggles should you perform this valuable environmental service).

The big problems with glass recycling are that: a) the primary raw material (sand) used in glass production is plentiful and cheap, and b) the supply of recycled glass far exceeds demand. There are a couple of reasons for the latter. The first has to do with the chemical composition of recycled glass. While glass is primarily made up of silica, it also contains trace amounts of other chemicals that are specific to the application in question. The chemical compositions of the glass in windshields, beverage containers and panes of window glass are all subtly different; each product is carefully engineered to optimize performance related to a specific end use.

Ground, recycled glass, called “cullet” in the industry, is a mish-mash of diverse chemical components. Accordingly, glass manufacturers can only use a small amount of cullet when producing their products. If they use too much cullet they run the risk of compromising the integrity of whatever they are manufacturing. In recognition of this inherent problem, recycling proponents have labored valiantly to create new markets for cullet, but those markets don’t even come close to addressing the gross over-supply of waste glass. When you drop that empty bottle of brew in your recycle bin, chances are that it will ultimately end up in a landfill.

The other problem with recycled glass involves color. Like it or not, manufacturers who utilize glass products are charged with producing specific colors. Heineken beer bottles are green, while Miller favors clear glass and Michelob chooses a brown hue for their brand of suds. When bottle manufacturers utilize cullet, they introduce a wild-card that has the potential to throw their color-matching train off track. Accordingly, color-matching is another reason why recycled glass is used sparingly. The problem is especially acute when it comes to green glass. While the market for recycled glass of any color is limited, the demand for green glass is practically non-existent. Some municipalities that require residents to recycle glass have tried to exempt green glass from their recycling ordinances, to little avail. Environmental groups will not tolerate such apostasy, even when blasphemy is grounded in marketplace reality.

Glass recycling programs are perhaps the ultimate example of environmentally inspired, pointless government intervention in the free market. A recycled commodity with essentially no value has been declared by government mandate an essential resource when it is anything but.

Want to prove the point? After you have dutifully set aside your recyclables, try this: sort out your aluminum cans and your glass bottles and place them in separate piles upon your front lawn. I’ll guarantee you that some enterprising scavenger will collect the aluminum in short order, because those cans will bring a profit. The glass bottles? They will go untouched, leaving your neighbors to wonder what in the heck you are trying to pull. When it comes to the environmental movement’s recycling dogma, one has to wonder the same thing.

Israel praised an International Atomic Energy Agency report released on Thursday that says Iran may be developing a nuclear warhead.

"The new IAEA report deals more sharply and clearly than its predecessors with the military aspects of Iran's nuclear program," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement released on Friday.

Noting that the report is the first during the term of new IAEA chief Yukiya Amano of Japan, Israel said it "establishes that the agency has a lot of trustworthy information about the past and present activities that testify to the military tendencies of the Iranian program."

Among these activities were the recently declared decisions to enrich uranium to 20 percent and the continued construction of the Qom nuclear facility, kept secret until it was discovered by Western intelligence agencies and made public in recent months.

The UN nuclear agency report suggested for the first time that Teheran had either resumed such work or had never stopped when US intelligence thought it did....

Yet the Fantasy-Based Policymaking continues.

The Iranian regime is morally bankrupt. But it was always morally bankrupt, from its earlier days. What obscured this was the fact that the "advanced" people in Iran, those who for some reason are called "on the left, " had early on decided that the Shah's regime was so corrupt, and its enforcers, the Savak, so brutal, that it had to go. They did not think that they needed to worry about those Muslim reactionaries around the Ayatollah Khomeini. Who could, in advanced Tehran, possibly take such people seriously? Who could possibly believe that such people as Khomeini might triumph? Before he came to power and consolidated his iron grip, Khomeini spoke soothingly about "democracy" and invoked, too, other of the magic phrases that so often cloud the minds of those who hear them.

Over the past five years, as the Americans have been caught in Tarbaby Iraq, and now as they are caught, in a different way, with a slightly lesser Tarbaby Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been allowed to march, steadily, without any interruption except, just possibly, a few months of prudently waiting, right after the invasion of Iraq, to see if the Americans were so much on the warpath that this time they would not stop at the Treaty of Erzrum line, but cross it, bringing the fight beyond Saddam Hussein right to the Islamic Republic itself. It never happened, and instead of Iraq ending in a Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations, as some in the Bush Administration naively assumed could or would happen, the Administration found American forces stuck there, and also doing what Ahmad Chalabi and other Shi'a exiles always hoped they would do: assuring that power in Iraq was transferred, and forever, from Sunni Arabs to Shi'a Arabs, never to be relinquished. That meant not that Iran had necessarily become the new power in Iraq, for many of the Iraqi Shi'a are not friendly to Iran, and the sense of being Arab, as opposed to being Persian, is sufficiently powerful for some to overcome any pan-Shi'ist appeal. And so far the appeal has not been made, as the Islamic Republic of Iran still tries to overcome Sunni Arab suspicions, in order to present itself as the plausible leader of the Muslims against the Infidels.

And now the Americans, even as they withdraw, slowly and stickily, from Iraq, have transferred their main military effort to Afghanistan, on the other side of Iran. But with American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, that does not make the Americans feel more confident of their ability to take on Iran's nuclear project, but less. For they are fearful -- wrongly, I think - of what the Iranians might do to the American troops on either side of Iran. The reason not to be fearful is that in Iraq, the Iranians are not quite as powerful or attractive as some imagine. Ayatollah Sistani is not impressed with them. The Shi'a who are said to be "pro-Iranian" are not really impressed with the Ahmadinejad regime, but are more worried about a possible attempt by Sunni Arabs in Iraq, with the help of Sunnis outside Iraq, to re-take power. Yet this is most implausible, given that the Sunni Arabs constitute less than 20% of the population, and the Sunni population of Baghdad has gone way down, thanks to the Shi'a efforts of the last seven years. And the Sunni heartland, in Anbar and Diyala Provinces, is an area devoid of oil, that is, devoid of money to finance a revanchist movement. In the north, the Kurds, though mostly Sunni, are on the alert to resist any attempts by Sunni Arabs, the ones moved in by Saddam Hussein as part of his arabization of Kurdistan, to retake power in Mosul or Kirkuk.

The Sunni Arabs can make life very unpleasant and uncertain for both the Kurds and the Shi'a Arabs in Iraq, but they cannot again take control of the country. The best they can hope for is the election of a Shi'a Arab - Iyad Allawi, for example - who is not so programmatically anti-Ba'ath. Allawi, with a Shi'a background, is also secular, which is to say that he is unenthusiastic about an Iraq run by those who are too devout in their Islam. Allawi himself was a Ba'ath Party member before he left Iraq in disgust for London, and it was in London that agents of Saddam Hussein tried to kill him. The prospect of Allawi in power gives the Sunnis hope of what they might consider a semi-fair deal, even if they do not regain their old hold on power.

Now the Iraq and Afghanistan ventures of the Americans constitute a squandering of resources - men, money, materiel, morale. And those ventures represent a failure of American foreign policy, or rather a failure of those in power to adequately study the texts and tenets of Islam. For if those in power had studied those texts and tenets, instead of allowing themselves to be unduly impressed by the word "religion" affixed to Islam (as Bush was so impressed), or if they did not allow themselves to be impressed by plausible, smiling, carefully apologetic representatives of Islam in the form of some Muslim advisers, including the Bright Young Reformers who have stood in the way, for many in Washington, of a sober grasping of the ideology of Islam, then another strategy would have been followed. It is interesting that Barack Obama clearly wants out of Iraq and, I suspect, out of Afghanistan too. But he will not be able to do the latter, for obvious political reasons, unless he shows that the reason he wants out of Afghanistan is not because he is soft on Islam (though he has given various signs of that, and the worst was that unbelievable speech he delivered in Cairo, a speech in which almost every phrase about Islam could be held up for inspection, analysis, and ridicule) but because he wishes to undertake an entirely new strategy, one based on a recognition that the presence of Infidels merely helps to unite Muslims, or at least to make less likely that internal conflicts will develop. And it is in the interests of the world's Infidels that the pre-existing fissures, sectarian, ethnic, and economic, within the Camp of Islam, be exploited to the fullest.

That is one part of a two-part strategy. The other part is a campaign of education and self-education, all over the Infidel world, so that many more people come to understand the relation of Islam to the political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failures of Muslim states, societies, and even families and individuals living in environments - even within the West - that are suffused with Islam. This can be done. And if it is done, it will be hard for the world's Muslims not to have to begin thinking about the matter. And because the case, once you begin to think about it, is so obvious and so convincing, that will further demoralize the Camp of Islam. Among those who might have other reasons for jettisoning the faith, or at least de-emphasizing it (as Iranians, sick at heart from their experience under the Islamic Republic of Iran), such arguments will particularly resonate.

Now we wait to see what the Obama Administration will do about the Islamic Republic of Iran's nuclear project. The nightmares that American policy-makers have about Pakistan's nuclear bombs, and where they are, and who might get them, and who might use them, ought to have forever engraved on the minds of American policymakers that they must never ever allow any other Muslim state or group to acquire such weaponry. But what do we see? We see years of drift, years of not knowing what to do. The Bush Administration huffed and puffed, but in the end was ineffectual. It was ineffectual because it was caught Laocoon-like in the coils of serpents, serpents however of its own making, through its foolish hopes and dreams for Iraq, and bringing "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East. It was ineffectual because it was so uncunning and so ignorant not only of Islam but of the fissures within the Camp of Islam and, as well, so seemingly unaware of what is going on in Western Europe, which matters far more for the United States than any outcome in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Obama Administration has turned out to be, in some ways, even worse. It believes in outreach to the Muslim world, and part of that outreach is to make remarks that are flatly untrue - the speech in Cairo was a tissue of nonsense and lies when it came to the description of Islam, and if the speech was in part written, or vetted, by Muslims such as Rashad Hussain, then that explains, but does not justify the outcome, and makes the whole effort even more dismaying and frightening.

So what will happen now in Iran? Will the Americans recognize their responsibility to prevent the Islamic Republic of Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons? Or will it rely on Israel, a country that has been denied even the weapons it knows it would need to be semi-successful in its effort? Or will it, still worse, do everything it can to prevent Israel, now mortally threatened by the possibility of those weapons being acquired by the chiliastic Twelver-Shi'a who run Iran, from acting as it must to protect itself, if the Americans will not do the job?

What happens in Iraq and Afghanistan matters far less than if the Islamic Republic of Iran acquires such weapons, and with those weapons, it will acquire something else: a permanent lease on political life. For the primitives in Iran, who far outnumber the advanced, the same primitives who were bussed in from the countryside recently to flood the streets of Teheran and other cities with demonstrations of loyalty to the regime, will be so happy with the regime that whatever those economic sanctions do will not matter. Iran will be a Nuclear Power. Iran will be, in their eyes, a Great Power. It's the delusions of grandeur, akin to those of the Shah, incidentally, who in his vainglorious way used to talk about how Iran would soon become "the second industrial power in Asia" (after Japan). Of course Iran is not the second industrial power, nor even the fifth, and Islam holds it, and forever will hold it back, despite the oil wealth. And of course we know, in the West, that the attainment of nuclear weapons will not mean much to the lives of Iranians, and if, as should happen, those "crippling sanctions" remain in force until those weapons are surrendered (the Iranians can keep nuclear power plants, as long as those are vigilantly monitored by the West, not the U.N.), things will remain difficult for them. But many of them don't care, and won't care, in the villages where there was never much to start with. For them, Iran will be a Nuclear Power. What else do they need to know?

Yet we see a new theme being developed by those who want, at all costs, to prevent the United States from taking action against the Islamic Republic of Iran. They argue a number of things. Some say: well, no attack can be guaranteed to totally destroy the nuclear project, so it's not worth doing. Quite a non sequitur, of course. Many attacks set back efforts (see that on the Osirak Reactor) for a long time, and the buying of time, so that the dissidents can finally topple the present Iranian regime, would be useful. Flynt and Hillary Leverett have had their own go at this "don't attack Iran" business, in the Op/Ed pages of the New York Times. And the Times recently offered its pages yet again to an effort in the same line, one worth looking at more closely.

This article, "Iran's Two-Edged Bomb," was written by Adam B. Lowther, described as a "defense analyst at the Air Force Research Initiative." The article argued that we should, essentially, see what was to our advantage or how we might take advantage of Iran's acquiring nuclear weapons. It was written by someone of the cheerily defeatist school, that is, the school that thinks that nothing can or should be done to stop Iran ("It's over," as Tariq Ramadan has repeatedly said about the Muslim demographic conquest of Europe, not needing to add, "we're here to stay, and there's nothing you Infidels can do about it").

Here is some of what Adam L. Lowther, defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute, tried to convince readers. He begins with a brisk confession of hopelessness and seeming helplessness:

"With Iran having notified the United Nations nuclear Watchdog agency on Monday that any day now it will begin enriching its stockpile of uranium n order to power a medical reactor [does Adam L. Lowther believe that that is what Iran will do with that enriched stockpile of uranium? Shouldn't he tell us what he thinks might actually happen?] we should admit that Washington's approach to countering the Islamic Republic is leading nowhere. [True, because two Administrations were unwilling to employ "crippling sanctions" - the kind that you know are "crippling" because they lead to the behavior one wants - or military force, and even now we have the Obama Administration still following far behind Congress on what it is willing to do]."

And then comes the key sentence, the real topic sentence of the piece: "What's needed, however, may be less of a change of plan than a change in how we view the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran."

So, in a phrase, Adam L. Lowther dismisses the possibility, or rather doesn't even think he is obligated to consider, even if later to dismiss, the continued use of sanctions, now becoming "crippling sanctions," or "crippling sanctions" accompanied by military aid and threats of more such aid to the Baluchis in the east, the Azeris in the north, the Kurds in the west, and the Arabs in the southwest (in Khuzistan, where almost all of Iran's oilfields are located). And he dismisses, or rather, doesn't even think he is obligated to discuss, the possibility of military action by the United States, or by immediately imperiled Israel. Strange this Air Force analyst who won't even allow himself to think about the efficacy of the intelligent application of military force. One wonders what the trillions of dollars poured into our military, on weapons systems, have all been about, if in such a case as this the use of military force is not even considered. For here is a monstrous regime, headed by those who have given every sign of a deep belief in a semi-demented ideology (that of the Hidden Imam), at a time when suicide bombings are commonplace, and where a moment's thought might lead some to conclude that those who blow themselves up would, by the same logic, not be afraid to take much larger casualties among Muslims, now seen as involuntary "suicide bombers" - in order to remove a hated Infidel nation-state, Israel, from the face of the earth. Ahmadinejad is not the only Iranian leader who has said Iran "could afford" to lose a few million people in a nuclear exchange with Israel; Iran, after all, has a population of 70 million.

All of this goes by in a second, as Lowther ignores the effort of the past few years - the "sanctions" - and even the effect of the "crippling sanctions" or of military strikes (which one might have expected him, as a defense analyst for the Air Force Research Institute, to at least have thought worth considering), and proceeds to tell us all the good things that can happen, for the United States, if the Islmamic Republic of Iran acquires nuclear weapons.

First, he tells us, "Iran's development of nuclear weapons would give the United States an opportunity to finally defeat violent Sunni-Arab terrorist groups like Al Qaeda." Strange, Lowther knows his readers will first think, but here's just how it would work: "Here's why: a nuclear Iran is primarily a threat to its neighbors, not the United States. Thus Washington could offer regional security - primarily, a Middle East nuclear umbrella - in exchange for economic, political and social reforms in the autocratic Arab regimes responsible for breeding the discontent that led to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."

Let's stop right there, and try to get over our amazement and this fantastic misunderstanding, and these utopian goals. What in god's name makes Adam B. Lowther, defense analyst, think that the Saudis or other Arabs would ever do what the Americans ask? Why should they? They know perfectly well that the American "nuclear umbrella" will be extended to them not because we like their regimes, but because we don't want any harm to come to the oilfields. Again and again, over the past several decades, the Americans have tried to get these regimes, especially that in Saudi Arabia, to do something, do anything, to show that they were not simply a thieving family, the Al-Saud, determined to hold onto power and to continue to help themselves to much of the country's oil revenues, as they can. They have never done American bidding. Indeed, when the Saudis "collaborated" with the Americans, it was always the Saudis who ended up getting their way. It was Saudi Arabia that helped to convince the naïve Americans to help the muhajidin, and then to turn away, unalarmed, when the Pakistani and Saudi-supported Taliban came into Afghanistan, and were kept in power through the diplomatic, financial, and other support of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. These regimes are past masters at getting their way in Washington, and certainly at preventing even the most obvious of measures being taken to diminish reliance on oil - that is, a tax on oil at the source, and on gasoline, the latter being sizable enough to make a real dent in demand. And even if the heady days of James Akins, and Fred Dutton, and Raymond Close, and James Baker, and Colin Powell, (who accepted a Jaguar, or rather his wife did, from an appreciative friend, Prince Bandar) are no longer in fashion, Saudi Arabia has never done American bidding, and the Americans have always come away frustrated, and they always will. Would the Al-Saud change their political and economic system for the American threat to take away a "nuclear umbrella" that, the Saudis know, they would never do? Would they change what it is that lends support to the despotism, and to the economic statism, and to the mistreatment of guest-workers, and the use of Saudi money around the world to fund mosques and madrasas, and propaganda on behalf of Islam, and campaigns of Da'wa, and all the rest? Has there been the slightest indication that they would ever cease to do this, ever stop heeding the demands and duties that Islam imposes on them as good Muslims? What remarkable ignorance of the Saudi regime, and of Saudi behavior, not this year or this decade, but for the past half-century.

Adam B. Lowther might take the time to read the work of J. B. Kelly. The best place to begin is with his essay "Of Valuable Oil and Worthless Policies," in which American reliance on the "twin pillars" - Iran and Saudi Arabia -- is shown to have been always based on a misperception of both regimes. But especially in the case of Saudi Arabia, this misperception is based on decades of propaganda put out by ARAMCO. Now ARAMCO has been superceded by a small army of Western hirelings, and by the Saudis themselves, who have become dab hands, when they meet Western leaders, at sincere liquid-brown eyes expressions of hurt and betrayal ("why do you Americans treat us this way, when we are such loyal allies?"). We are to ignore the viciousness and meretriciousness of the regime, at home, and abroad. The enslavement of foreign workers, the cruelties inflicted on those caught reading Bibles or even singing Christmas carols, the torture of Westerners arrested on trumped-up charges, or of captured Yemenis, or of Saudi subjects (not "citizens") themselves, and the hideousness of every aspect of that primitive country, are known to the intelligence services of the Western world, but apparently not to the un-intelligent services, or the un-intelligent members of our various military services.

Lowther's belief that magically, in exchange for that "nuclear umbrella," the Saudis would do our bidding is the stuff of fantasy. The Saudis wrapped us around their little finger in Afghanistan, where we didn't think beyond getting the Russians out, and did not for one minute realize that the dying days of the Soviet Empire might have lasted just a bit longer, if the result was to help stamp out the power of militant Islam (as the Soviets did, with some success, in Central Asia, with the Muslims, many of whom are now Muslim in name only because of Soviet anti-religious implacable ruthlessness). The Saudis will never do our bidding. And they know their oilfields, and the tankers in the Gulf, will always be protected by the Americans.

Lowther's second point is equally naïve, and shows an equal ignorance - this time of the workings of the world oil market, and of OPEC. Here is Lowther's claim:

"Second, becoming the primary provider of regional security in a nuclear Middle East would give the United States a way to break the OPEC cartel. Forcing an end of the sorts of monopolistic practices that are illegal in the United States would be the price o0f that nuclear shield, bringing oil prices down significantly and saving billions of dollars a year at the pump. Or, at a minimum, President Obama could trade security for increased production and a lowering of global petroleum prices."

There is so much here that is wrong, that one hardly knows where to begin. But let's try. First, OPEC is not the power it once was in the setting of prices, because there are not, any longer, large amounts of oil being deliberately kept off the market. The Saudis and others in the Gulf have always priced their oil in such a way as to maximize profits, to the extent that they can make reasonable estimates of future demand, and future supply, and the effect of price increases on worldwide demand. This means they must put into their calculations all sorts of things: the likelihood of alternative sources of energy coming on stream, the elasticity - or inelasticity--of demand in response to increases (or decreases) in prices; the possibility of innovation (as with electric cars) making demand elasticity more of a threat; the political will, absent or present, to do the kinds of things - such as a higher tax on oil - that could take place in response to a hike in the price of oil or, ideally from the oil-consuming nations' point of view, take place even when, or perhaps especially when, prices go down.

Lowther seems to think that OPEC continues to retain the same power today as it had in late 1973. As the oil price rise in 1979 showed, elasticity of demand is considerable. If the Saudis and others overshoot, they can suffer more by a collapse in demand and then in price. Lowther seems to think that we should wish for the price of oil to go down. Not quite. We should wish for the price that the oil-producing states charge to go down. For that to happen, we have it within our power to decrease demand, by taxing oil and gasoline ourselves, and in so doing, to recapture oligopolistic rents. That is, at any Time X, the Saudis will calculate that for them there is an ideal Price Y. But that price is based on a calculation that the American government will continue to be unable to put in place significant taxes on oil (as James Hansen suggests) and on gasoline (taxes large enough to dampen consumption, and on the kinds of cars that are produced). Lowther is flatly wrong. We don't want the price of oil to go down. We want it to go up, but to go up in measured, and predictable increments. That will allow for investments in electric cars, or cars that get high mileage for each gallon of gas, or in mass transit systems within cities, and high-speed railways between cities. And the price of gasoline (and of oil) should go steadily up because the governments of oil-consuming nations do the taxing themselves, and then they can rebate the taxes, or apply them to such projects as subsidies for nuclear reactors (the most important part of any sensible energy possible, however unpalatable this idea may be those who are blind believers in "alternative energy" as the way out), solar and wind power. The notion of "breaking up OPEC" is meaningless, because OPEC right now no longer has any real market power. It cannot prevent oil from other producers from reaching the market, and it cannot enforce any discipline of its own on member states to reduce their production, and it hasn't been able to do so for a long time. Adam B. Lowther is apparently unaware of what OPEC now is, and what the state of the oil market is. One wonders what exactly caused him to make pronouncements on things he knows nothing about.

Lowther's third point has to do with Israel:

"Third, Israel has made clear that it feels threatened by Iran's nuclear program. [Yes, it's good of Lowther to admit that, however grotesquely his understatement]. The Palestinians also have a reason for concern, because a nuclear strike against Israel would devastate them as well [would it? Would bombs on Tel Aviv, Haifa, and the western part of Jerusalem "devastate" the "Palestinians"? Is Adam B. Lowther well-versed in targeting, and wind currents, and so on? And how does he know that many of the "Palestinians" would not welcome an Iranian attack, in the same way that they welcome, and train, and make heroes of, and encourage others to become, suicide bombers?] This shared danger might serve as a catalyst for reconciliation between the two parties, leading to the peace agreement that has eluded the last five presidents. Paradoxically, any final agreement between Israelis and Palestinians would go a long way to undercutting Tehran's animosity toward Israel, and would ease longstanding tensions in the region."

This statement is written by someone who has paid no attention to Islam and has no understanding of the war being waged on Israel. That war is a classic Jihad. It does not stop when Israel makes concessions, even life-threatening concessions. It does not stop because Israel, a state so tiny it is hardly discernible on a map of the word, surrenders territory after territory and gives up gains won in war, as it did when it returned the Sinai to Egypt after 1956 (under Eisenhower's pressure), and then again when it gave up the entire Sinai to Egypt again, for a "cold peace" that is misunderstood in the West, and that could be reversed by the government of Egypt and its population, the Muslims of whom have been raised up to be deeply and permanently anti-Israel. Adam B. Lowther does not understand: the reason "five presidents" could not find a "solution" to what is called, not quite accurately I'm afraid, the "Arab-Israeli dispute" - which, however, is quite a bit better than the tendentious "Israeli-Palestinian dispute" -- is that it isn't a "dispute" at all. It's a permanent war, a war to eliminate the humiliation and offense, as Muslims see it, of an Infidel nation-state, one still more offensive because it has been created and successfully and repeatedly defended from Arab Muslim efforts to destroy it, by Jews, who were always despised by the Muslims. For unlike the Christians, they did not have a powerful Western Christendom somewhere in the background, no co-religionists to possibly protect them or come to their aid, or apply pressure on Muslim states (as was done on the Ottoman government by England and France, to improve the lot of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, beginning with the Tanzimat reforms of 1839, with the pressure repeated at intervals throughout the nineteenth century). Adam B. Lowther simply does not understand that an important part of Islam is triumphalism. The spirit of compromise is not part of Islam. You win, or you lose. You are the victor, or you are the vanquished. You do not compromise with your enemies. Islam teaches, or rather inculcates, the idea that Muslims must be loyal to Islam, and to fellow members of the Umma. The whole world belongs, by right, to Allah and to Muslims, the "best of peoples." Infidels do not have rights to any part of the world, and eventually, through the steady spread of Islam, and its dominance, they will be reduced to the condition of dhimmis, the only condition that permits selected Infidels (formally, the People of the Book, Ahl al-Kitab, that is Christians and Jews as well as Zoroastrians, though informally, for reasons of cold calculation, Hindus began to be allowed to live, so as to provide the Muslim state with the Jizyah, the tax on dhimmis, that was its main source of revenue).

I don't think this "Air Force analyst" understands that the campaign to push Israel back has gone on steadily since the Six-Day War, and it began with a careful renaming of the local Arabs, the shock troops, at least in the propaganda aspect, of the Jihad against Israel. Those Arabs - that is what they were called, before late 1967, by all the Arab leaders, diplomats, and propagandists - suddenly became, metamorphosed into, the "Palestinian people." It was a way to present an alternative narrative to that of the Jihad against the Jewish State that the Arabs had freely discussed among themselves - see Ahmed Shukairy, Arafat's predecessor as the leader of the local Arabs, even though he worked out of Egypt - and that they did not cease, have not ceased, to discuss, as such splendid eavesdropping organizations as www.MEMRI.org offer us fresh evidence of, every week and every day.

The Jihad against that Infidel nation-state did not begin with Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, did not begin with Israel's declaration of statehood on May 15, 1948, but began with the first stirrings of the Jewish settlers who bought land (at greatly-inflated prices) from the absentee Arab and Turkish landlords. The very idea that there were small landholders in Israel who were dispossessed shows a complete misunderstanding of the system of land ownership in the two Ottoman vilayets and one sanjak that constituted the territory that would later be assigned, by the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, to Mandatory Palestine for the sole purpose of facilitating the creation, through the efforts of the Jews themselves, the Jewish National Home. In fact, the Jihad against Israel is merely a local manifestation of the general, worldwide Jihad, one that depends on a doctrine that does not date, that is central to Islam, and that only for a century or two fell into desuetude, not because the doctrine had at all been modified, but because the Muslims themselves rightly perceived their ability to go up against the much more powerful West would end inexorably in failure.

But things have changed. The OPEC trillions have allowed states that were permanently mired in poverty - Islam discourages economic development, both in its hatred of bid'a (innovation) and in its inshallah-fatalism (why work hard, if Allah giveth, and Allah, on the same whim, taketh away) -- to have the financial wherewithal to buy trillions of dollars worth of weapons. Those trillions have also been used to buy Western hirelings to help with propaganda, and votes at the U.N., and influence in the chanceries of the West, and academic centers or departments of Islamic studies, or endowed chairs, so as to ensure that most or all teaching about Islam remains in vigilantly pro-Islamic hands, and the ability of non-Muslims to educate themselves, in colleges and universities, truthfully about the doctrine, and practice, of Islam remains difficult and often nearly impossible, so that autodidacticism is the only way.

There is no doubt that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, the increased danger this will mean for Israel will - or should - end forever any further Israeli concessions. For they cannot possibly reduce themselves to a state even tinier than the one they have, precisely because that will make it easier for Iran to go in for the kill. And the smaller and more obviously vulnerable Israel becomes, the less likely it is that leaders of Muslim states, even if they wish, would be able to resist the calls of their hysterical populations for attacks or gang-ups on Israel. Remember how Nasser had to convince King Hussein of Jordan to join the attack against Israel by assuring him that the Egyptians had wiped out much of Israel's air force and was on the road to victory? Those telephone calls were recorded by the Israelis, and you can probably find them, or transcripts of them, online. The only way to prevent open warfare again between Israel and Arabs is for Israel to possess the power of deterrence -the same power that the United States relied on during the Cold War. And Israel cannot possess that deterrence if it becomes so ridiculously small, with a handful of airfields, that Hamas from the south, and Hezbollah (possibly armed by Iran?) in the north can overwhelm it, with help from the east -- and who knows who will be in control of Jordan in twenty years, or ten years, or five years, or one? Peace is, and always will be maintained, between those who will continue to conduct Jihad, and those who are the intended victims of Jihad, only if those conducting Jihad are convinced that they will lose, or lose far more, than will the other side. I have written about the doctrine of "Darura" - Necessity - many times before. I suspect that Adam B. Lowther is as unfamiliar with "Darura" as he is with the texts and tenets of Islam. And because he is unfamiliar with those texts and tenets, he has no business discussing - has not earned the intellectual right to discuss - policy toward Iran or OPEC or the Jihad against Israel.

And then there is the appeal to the interest of the arms merchants. Here is his next reason for thinking it will be just swell if Iran acquires nuclear weapons:

"Fourth, a growth in ex ports of weapons systems, training and advice to our Middle Eastern allies [allies!] would not only strengthen our current partnership efforts but give the American defense industry a needed shot in the arm. With the likelihood of austere Pentagon budgets in the coming years, Boeing has been making noise about shifting out of the defense industry, which would mean lost American jobs and would also put us in a difficult position should we be threatened by a rising military power like China. A nuclear Iran could forestall such a catastrophe."

This is extraordinary. The veriest conspiracy-theorist writing for Counterpunch, or appearing on Al-Jazeera, must be made delirious with joy by such a naked call for increasing business for the American defense industry. One wonders if Adam B. Lowther is angling, once his stint as a "defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute" ends, for a job at Lockheed, or Boeing, or one of the other firms that he thinks, that he devoutly hopes, will benefit through an increase in business in the Middle East, if Iran gets nuclear weapons.

The piling-up of weapons in the Middle East, the heedless selling of vast quantities of the most advanced arms to the primitive tribes-with-flags in the Middle East, was one of the subjects that nearly drove J. B. Kelly mad with fury. He spent, on-and-off, nearly fifty ears in the Middle East, beginning with his time in Egypt before the coup of Nasser and Naguib, and including his time as a close advisor to Sheik Zayed of Abu Dhabi, back in the 1970s, helping to prepare the legal brief of Abu Dhabi against the land-grabbing Saudis. No one scared the Saudis like J. B. Kelly, for it was he who knew more about the Frontier Question - the frontiers of the Arab states of the Gulf - than they did. And no one was less impressed with Western appeasement and miscomprehension of the Saudis and other Arabs - he retained a slight soft spot for the Omanis - than J. B. Kelly. The piling-up of weapons was certain, he felt, to lead to all kinds of explosions, because such weapons were bound to be used. He predicted their use before the Iran-Iraq War, and before the latest war, proxy or being made into a proxy, war between Iran and Saudi Arabia (even if the Iranians have not been involved as the Saudis claim, or hint) in the Yemen, and before the steady violence, with most of the weapons imported from other Muslim states, in Somalia.

And Lowther is himself a little inconsistent. First, he wants the Americans to offer a "nuclear umbrella" in exchange for promises by the locals to completely change their ways - in effect, to un-islamize their societies. Lowther, however, not knowing what it means to have a society completely suffused with Islam, and expressing Islam in its political and economic and social institutions, does not recognize that that is what he is calling for when he calls for "economic, political, and social reforms." Genuine reforms of such a kind would begin, but not end, with those Saudi textbooks that inculcate hatred against the Infidels, including the millions of Infidel foreign wage-slaves who keep Saudi Arabia going.

But why stop there, in the application of the truly brilliant strategy of Adam B. Lowther, defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute? If only he had been in charge of our policy in East Asia, we never would have bothered to try to stop North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons. No, we would instead have secretly welcomed North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons. After all, isn't South Korea a great economic competitor? Why, last I looked, Samsung was making portable phones, and those wonderful backlit LED televisions we all hear so much about, and so much else. And then there's Hyundai, and Kia. And then there's Japan too, still eating our electronic lunch. So how to recover some of that money? We can't build those backlit LED televisions, apparently, or the rest of what Korea and Japan produce, so at least let's scare the hell out of them, so that they come running to Boeing. And what better way to scare them then to have North Korea acquire nuclear weapons? Why, think of all the contracts our defense industry could sign with the governments of South Korea, and Japan.

So to keep the manufactures of airplanes happy, to keep Boeing from leaving the defense market, by all means - let Iran get nuclear weapons. But of course. My god, why stop there? Let's try to sell arms, too, to Angola, with its new oil wealth. And while we are at it, have Angolan oil money spent on arms for Mozambique at the same time, and then encourage both parties, oil-funded, to start thinking about pushing inward from east and from west, in order to create one giant lusophone state (doing Camoens proud). Then that state, in turn, might push southward, right through the soft fotanelle of collapsing Zimbabwe and right through to Aids-weakened South Africa, where the goldmines beckon. And once that idea has been set in place, the American defense manufacturers could go to South Africa, and offer to sell them billions in weapons.

So, dear reader, you can make up a half-dozen other examples of places that, were they to become nuclear states, would so frighten other countries around them that those frightened countries would naturally turn to us, to the United States, and quickly become loyal (how loyal? for how long?) customers of the American defense industry. And don't even think that the day might come when such countries would use their weapons on other countries, not necessarily threats to them, countries that they just didn't like, for some reason. Nor should you assume that, say, Saudi Arabia might someday ask not Boeing for help, but a Chinese aircraft company - oh, they are coming along, you know - one that sold things more cheaply. That company furthermore might even supply Chinese pilots to do the bidding of the Al-Saud, and might even agree to handle all the "security for the oilfields" in a way guaranteed to be more reliable than those Americans - well, you see where all of this is, or could be, headed. You see, I see. Only Adam B. Lowther, defense analyst with the Air Force Research Institute, doesn't see.

The final point of Lowther is again economic. Still he has forgotten, and doesn't want to be reminded at this point, the fifth of his points, of the need to keep in mind the frightening effect on the world, and possible use by Iran, or by others (Hezbollah?) of nuclear weapons. That includes all sorts and conditions of nuclear weapons that Iran might manage to produce, and use, or hand off to others, or sell to others. Iran could even sell nuclear weapons to Sunni Arab regimes with which, in a spirit of pan-Islamism, it might reconcile - how does Adam B. Lowther know they won't? This could happen while the Americans are left surprised, astonished, and confused, as has happened with them so many times before, when it comes to dealing with Muslim powers, in and out of the Middle East.

Here's Lowther:

"Last, the United States would be able to stem the flow of dollars to autocratic regimes in the region. It would accomplish this not only by driving down the price of oil and increasing arms exports, but by requiring the beneficiaries of American security to bear a real share of its cost. And in the long run, a victory in the war on terrorism would save taxpayers the tens of billions of dollars a year now spent on overseas counter-insurgency operations."

So these regimes will do what they have given no sign of ever doing before. Did Egypt, without any oil, and dependent on the Americans for $2 billion a year, change in any way, over the past three decades, the stratokleptocracy that runs and more or less owns Egypt? Has Egypt, despite now and again making throat-clearing noises about "democracy" and unspecified "reforms," in any way over those thirty years done a single thing to show it is willing to engage in "economic, political, and social reforms" in order to keep being on the receiving end of vast amounts of entirely unmerited American largesse? Hasn't the regime in Egypt not only mocked the idea of "democracy" in its conduct of elections, but failed to improve, and even has seemed to make the situation worse, for the persecuted and threatened Copts in Egypt? What do Copts tell us about their own situation, when they are in the safety of the West? And what about the other Muslim countries, such as Pakistan? Pakistan has been favored as a recipient of military aid for a half-century, ever since CENTO and the Dulles brothers, with their naïve belief that Islam was "a bulwark against Communism" and so Muslim states deserved American support. And Pakistan was so meretricrious in its dealings, and the executive branch of our government so terminally credulous in dealing with it, that members of Congress who had been following the matter (such as Senator John Glenn) rose up and passed the Pressler Amendment, and then discovered that the Executive Branch continued to make a mockery of the intent of that amendment, letting Pakistan get away with murder. And of course Pakistan managed to create its bomb with money freed up by American aid. We, American taxpayers, paid for that Pakistani nuclear project, and the "Islamic bomb." But perhaps Adam B. Lowther doesn't care, because in his view that, no doubt, simply made it possible - or did it? What did India do? - to sell more defense systems to India.

How exactly does Lowther think that the rich states of the Gulf can be persuaded not only to institute "economic, political, and social reforms," but also to buy more weapons from America? Why would they buy them from America if they could buy them, at lower prices, from China - unless of course America is willing not to set up any barriers to the Saudi efforts to spread Islam within the West, and willing as well not to stand up for non-Muslims, such as Copts, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Maronites, and foreign Christians, being mistreated in Muslim Arab lands, all in order not to offend Saudi Arabia?

He hasn't thought this out.

In fact, he hasn't thought anything out.

If his Op/Ed were passed in to me by a student - say, a freshman full of bright ideas - I'd give it a D plus. Or possibly I'd move it up to a C plus. I'm kind, you see. I wouldn't want to discourage him. I'm indulgent with the young, the confused, the ignorant. But Adam B. Lowther is not a freshman in college. He's a defense analyst, discussing matters of life and mass death. And with him one need not be so indulgent. One should apply appropriate standards, and give him his due. On second thought, I'll change that D plus, but not upwards. Downwards - to an F.

VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog fears Iran may be working now to develop a nuclear-armed missile, the agency said on Thursday, throwing independent weight behind Western suspicions of an active Iranian weapons program.

In unusually blunt language surfacing under new chief Yukiya Amano, an International Atomic Energy Agency report for the first time suggested Iran was actively chasing nuclear weapons capability rather than merely having done so in the past.

The IAEA seemed to be cautiously going public with suspicions arising from a classified agency analysis leaked in part last year which concluded that Iran has already honed explosives expertise relevant to a workable nuclear weapon.

The report also confirmed Iran had produced its first, small batch of uranium enriched to a higher purity -- 20 percent.

Both developments will intensify pressure on Iran to prove it is not covertly bent on "weaponising" enrichment by allowing unfettered access for IAEA inspectors and investigators, something it rejects in protest at U.N. sanctions.

The United States is already leading a push for the U.N. Security Council to impose a fourth round of sanctions on Iran because of suspicions that it may be developing nuclear weapons, and has received declarations of support from Russia, which has until now been reluctant to expand sanctions.

Tehran says its nuclear program is meant only to yield electricity or radio-isotopes for agriculture or medicine. It took a diametrically opposing view of the report's conclusions.

"The IAEA's new report confirmed Iran's peaceful nuclear activities and the country's non-deviation toward military purposes," Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told the state news agency IRNA.

U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the United States did not understand why Iran had refused to "come to the table and engage constructively" over its nuclear program, adding: "You have to draw some conclusions from that." [...]

IAEA's new chief, Yukiya Amano, is seen as more inclined to confront Iran than his predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei, who retired on December 1.

"Now we see from (available intelligence) that certain activities may have continued after 2004," said a senior official close to the IAEA. "We want to find out from Iran what they've had to do with these nuclear explosive-related activities."

The U.S. director of National Intelligence concluded last year that Iran would not be technically able to devise a nuclear weapon before 2013. But a new intelligence estimate is due soon....

Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz of The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies argue in the New York Post that sanctions targeting Iran’s energy sector will cause the regime some very substantial pain. Material and political support for the opposition is necessary as well, but the impact of tough sanctions could cause the regime to further loose its footing and force them to decide whether to fund their own survival or their nuclear program.

The mere threat of sanctions is already causing the regime to suffer. From the article:

Last week, for example, the Italian energy company ENI announced it will soon cease business operations in Iran. Norway’s Statoil suspended all new investments, and even Russia’s Gazprom withdrew from a handful of projects.

The German industrial and engineering firm Siemens also announced it wouldn’t enter into any new contracts with Iran — after a presence there of more than a century. Siemens’ business in Iran was worth roughly $700 million in 2009. The threat of gasoline sanctions also recently persuaded BP, Reliance Industries and Glencore — all with deep, longstanding ties to Iran — to terminate direct gasoline sales.

Schanzer and Dubowitz write that many banks and insurance companies involved in Iran’s gasoline imports are backing out of dealing with the country, and many more are sure to follow if sanctions are implemented.

Iran’s reliance upon gasoline imports is the regime’s second biggest Achilles’ heel, only behind the discontent of the country’s population. The Chinese are trying to come to Iran’s rescue though, and make some dough while they are at it. The Chinese Sinopec firm has signed a $6.5 billion deal with the National Iranian Oil Company to build and develop refineries, reducing their dependency upon such imports. Luckily, this will take years to accomplish.

Ryan Mauro is the founder of WorldThreats.com and a regular contributor to FrontPage Magazine.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency is soon expected to make a decision that could have an enormous impact on coal-fired power plants across the nation and, by extension, on the cost of energy and building materials. No, we’re not talking about greenhouse gas regulations here. The question that USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson must answer is this: Should the ash generated from the burning of coal be classified as a hazardous waste or not? It’s a decision that has the potential to pile more costs onto the price of energy at a time we can least afford it.

The Agency began considering reclassification following a disastrous release of 1.7 million cubic yards of fly ash from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston plant, a large coal-fired power station located east of Knoxville, Tennessee, in December 2008. That release, caused by the failure of an earthen retention wall, caused many environmental groups to renew their call for the USEPA to classify coal ash as a hazardous waste.

Such an action would be another way to undermine coal-fired power, forcing coal-fired power plants not only to dispose of the ash they generate, but to pay a premium to do so. The cost to dispose of ash as a hazardous waste is typically four or five times higher than the costs to dispose of it under a lesser classification. Coal fired power plants generate about 130 million tons per year of ash. If we conservatively assume that the cost of ash handling would rise by approximately $200 per ton, reclassification would cost over $25 billion per year, and those costs would inevitably be passed along to consumers.

The Sierra Club, and other environmental groups, maintain that this action is necessary because coal ash contains, among other things:”…arsenic, selenium, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, boron, thallium, and aluminum – toxic heavy metals that have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and neurological disorders, and which clearly threaten nearby communities and ecosystems.”

True enough, as far as it goes, but your body and mine also naturally contain measurable amounts of arsenic, selenium, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, boron, thallium, and aluminum. The relevant question is not whether these elements are present in ash, but how much is present and in what form. The ancient adage, “the dose makes the poison” applies, but the Sierra Club and other environmental groups generally steer well clear of that sort of analysis. Fortunately, USEPA has standard methodologies for determining whether wastes exhibit toxic characteristics sufficient to classify such wastes as hazardous. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) analyzed samples of coal ash from eighty different plants across the country, following USEPA’s evaluation methodology. Results of these analyses showed that none of the ash could be classified as hazardous wastes following USEPA’s own rules.

The worst part of this ill-considered over-reaction to an isolated incident is that it would undercut one of the most successful recycling programs in the nation. Without any government interference, the free market led coal-fired power plant operators to look for markets for coal ash and they have been spectacularly successful in doing so. Today, millions of tons of coal ash are used to produce cement, make bricks, build roadways and in a wide variety of other beneficial ways. According to EPRI’s analysis, recycling ash saves the equivalent of thirty two billion gallons of oil in energy annually, and – for those concerned about global warming – displaces eleven million tons of greenhouse gases per year, simply by utilizing an inert byproduct that could only be replaced by increased mining operations. What’s not to like?

But, if the Sierra Club has its way, coal ash will not be recycled in the future. USEPA rules prohibit the use of hazardous wastes in manufacturing processes. A decision to classify the coal ash as hazardous wastes, despite all of the scientific evidence that they are not, would not only drive up the cost of operating coal-fired power plants, it would also make manufacturing the many products that utilize coal ash as a raw material that much more expensive. Given the state of the economy this would be a foolish, unpardonable decision.

Doug Scott, the Director of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, who has been close to the decision-making process, addressed the issue during a City Club of Chicago luncheon earlier this month. For a while, it seemed that USEPA was determined to press on with the reclassification and damn the consequences. According to Scott, that might not happen. In recent weeks, he said, the Agency has been more receptive to creating a multi-faceted regulatory structure instead. Power plants that use surface impoundments to store their ash, like the Kingston plant, would face tougher oversight, but USEPA would not impose rules that would undercut ash recycling.

If this happens, it would be absolutely the right decision. The Agency should work hard to make sure that a release like the Kingston event doesn’t happen again, but it would be foolish and irresponsible to further undermine the power industry, the manufacturing sector and the economy while doing so.

Given the dogmatic fervor of global warming proponents, and their intolerance of skeptics who dare to question the latest commandment (see: cap-and-trade) in the green scripture, it is perhaps no coincidence that the environmentalist movement sometimes seems to have more in common with theology than with science. If that is true, then the logical word to describe those scientists who have challenged environmental hysteria and extremism is “heretics.” In a series of profiles, Front Page’s Rich Trzupek will spotlight prominent scientists whose “heretical” research, publications, and opinions have helped add a much-needed dose of balance and fact to environmental debates that for too long have been driven by fear mongering and alarmism. In a field that demands political conformity, they defiantly remain the heretics. Previous profiles in the series include Steve Milloy, Dr. Craig Idso, Dr. Roy Spencer, and Lord Christopher Monckton. – The Editors

Theorizing that burning fossil fuels can cause catastrophic global warming is relatively easy to do, all you need is a computer model and the “right” set of inputs. Proving that one’s model reflects reality is another matter entirely. Meteorologist Anthony Watts has been a leading skeptical voice in the global warming debate because he has challenged supposed evidence that the models work, through his herculean efforts in examining the dubious surface temperature records published by leading climate change centers.

At first blush, Watts seems an unlikely heretic. While he questions the veracity of alarmist data, Watts personal lifestyle reveals a man who spends a great deal more time trying to conserve energy than, say, Al Gore. He describes himself thus:

“While I have a skeptical view of certain climate issues, I consider myself ‘green’ in many ways, and I promote the idea of energy savings and alternate energy generation. Unlike many who just talk about it, I’ve put a 10KW solar array on my home, plus a 125 KW solar array on one of our local schools when I was a school trustee. I’ve retrofitted my home with CFL’s and better insulation, as well as installed timer switches on many of our most commonly used lights.”

Watts’ two chief websites, wattsupwiththat.com and surfacestations.org are regular stops for most people interested in learning more about the other side of the global warming debate. While many of the themes on his sites are familiar to skeptics, his examination of the United States’ surface temperature monitoring network affords him a unique niche in the debate.

A bit of background first. When Climategate – the publication of data and e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU) – first broke, some climate change supporters said, in effect, that even if CRU’s temperature data was flawed, plenty of other respected, reliable organizations reached the same conclusion as CRU, so climategate didn’t matter. Chief among those seemingly respectable, reliable scientific organizations cited was the United State National Weather Service, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA’s data does indicate a steady rise in average temperatures across the country for the last few decades. But, how reliable is NOAA’s data and, specifically, the data from the National Weather Service’s network of 1,221 surface temperature monitoring stations?

This is where Anthony Watts comes in. Watts started a surface stations auditing project in 2007, assisted by Dr. Robert A. Peilke, a climatologist at Colorado State University. The purpose of the project is to examine each of those 1,221 surface temperature monitoring stations and to determine how reliable the data from is, following the National Weather Service’s own guidelines. The results were stunning. Though the project is not complete, Watts has released preliminary reports through the Heartland Institute. In the latest version of the report, entitled “Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” and published in 2009, Watts reached a damning conclusion:

“During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically document more than 860 of these temperature stations. We were shocked by what we found.

We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.

In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating reflecting heat source.

In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.”

NOAA responded to Watts’ latest report, saying that its data is reliable and claiming: 1) the 70 properly sited stations supported a warming trend, and 2) the remainder of the data had been “homogenized” and showed the same trend. Homogenization is, simply put, a statistical method of blending data points in order to come up what a number that replaces all the bad data points. The technique has been widely used, and roundly criticized, as part of the global warming debate. As responses go, even given the often bizarrely unscientific tone of many climate change defenders, NOAA’s answer to Watts rang exceptionally hollow.

This isn’t the first time that climate change advocates have been caught fiddling with temperature records. Climategate showed that the Dr. Phil Jones of the CRU had truncated temperature data associated with tree ring measurements when that data ceased to show a temperature increase and replaced it with new surface temperature records instead, thus “hiding the decline.” More recently, The Guardian (which can hardly be accused of being a home to skeptics) revealed that Jones attempted to conceal flaws with temperature records in China – problems with the measurement network that are eerily similar to the inaccuracies that Watts uncovered in the United States. As increased urbanization compromised temperature measurement sites that had previously been properly located, effectively putting them into the middle of new urban heat-sinks, Jones appears to have been desperate to cover up the newly-discovered bias.

Temperature records are the key to proving the alarmist case. If they can show that nature dutifully follows the script that their computer models have written for them, their predictions of doom carry infinitely more weight. But, skeptical, independent, thoughtful scientists like Anthony Watts have cast more and more doubt onto the truthfulness of the official records, proving once again that one man can truly make a difference.

Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009, after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package, the largest spending bill in galactic history, he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society — health care, education and energy.

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”

This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking “in the plain words of plain folks,” because the people are “suspicious of complexity.” Counseled Blow: “The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’”

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are “a nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive.”

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself “for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people.” The subject, he noted, was “complex.” The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

via RealClearPolitics – The Electorate vs. Obama’s Agenda.

Before his speech in New Hampshire on Tuesday, President Obama visited a small technology company in Nashua called ARC Energy. During his talk, he promoted ARC Energy as an example of the kind of innovation he wants taxpayers to subsidize with what he called “seed money” in the form of federal “green jobs” funding. We need to do it, he said, so we can get ahead of the Chinese.

Probably few in the audience knew what the people who founded ARC Energy only two years ago know: ARC received no federal startup money. Dr. Kedar Gupta and his wife founded the company with their own money, the same way Dr. Gupta co-founded GT Solar, the world’s largest maker of photovoltaic cells, in the 1990s.

Obama presented a narrative that was fundamentally false – namely that, without federal “seed money,” our technology sector won’t advance quickly enough to beat the Chinese. But guess where ARC Energy sells many of its products? China.

That sleight of hand was typical of Obama’s speech. The main point of his presentation was to tout his plan to pump $30 billion into small banks for the stated purpose of providing them with enough money to lend to small businesses. But that cannot possibly be the real goal of the program, for several reasons.

First, community banks are not short of cash for lending. According to Stephen Wilson, the chairman-elect of the American Bankers Association, they aren’t lending because federal bank regulators have forced them to tighten their standards. “Obama is calling us ‘fat cats’ and telling us to be lending more, and then he sends his bank examiners and regulators to stifle our lending,” Wilson told the Cincinnati Enquirer last month. If Obama wanted to free up cash for small businesses, he could have his regulators back off and let small banks lend.

Second, if Obama were really interested in freeing up more money for lending, why is he proposing to tax large banks? Wells Fargo, one of the large banks Obama wants to punish with a new tax, is the largest small-business lender in America. It expects to loan $16 billion to small businesses this year. Bank of America projects a similar figure.

Those two banks alone would lend about as much (more, if the economy improves) to small businesses this year as the $30 billion Obama wants to spread among smaller banks. But rather than make it easier for them to lend, Obama is making it harder by proposing to tax them simply for being large and by having his regulators restrict their ability to take risks. By encouraging banks to build up larger cash reserves, Washington is reducing the amount of money available for lending.

Clearly, Obama’s interest is not in freeing up money for small businesses. The only explanation for his behavior — taxing the largest banks and distributing money to smaller ones — is that he wants to use the power of the state to shift assets (and, thus, power) from large banks to smaller ones.

This is purely an ideological crusade. Obama believes that large banks are generally a bad thing, and small ones are generally a good thing. So, he’s taking from the large and giving to the small. It’s economic idiocy, but in his mind it’s a morally just cause.

What Obama did in New Hampshire is the same as he has done for the past year, and on the campaign trail before that. He presented a façade of an argument to justify actions Americans would not possibly support were he to state their real motives. It’s exactly how he tried to sell health care reform (it’s vital to economic recovery!), his massive transfer of wealth from private producers to government employee unions (it’s shovel-ready stimulus!), and his cap-and-trade bill (it will create green jobs!).

If we take any lesson from his New Hampshire “town hall” event (it wasn’t a town hall meeting), it is that we must ignore what the president says his proposals are intended to do and scrutinize what they actually do. More often than not, we will find that they simply transfer wealth and power from people and groups Obama dislikes to those he favors.

As Jacob Laksin noted, a surprising blog post appeared on Monday that proclaimed “The Death of Global Warming,” in which the author wrote:

“After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all.”

What makes that statement rather remarkable was not the fact that it was said, for we’ve heard many similar declarations over the last few months, it’s who said it. The author was not anyone from the Heartland Institute, or Junk Science, or Climate Audit, or any other of the long-time skeptics. The author was foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead, posting at The American Interest Online.

Mead may be fairly described as a Jacksonian Democrat: a fellow of strong convictions, but those opinions are not so strongly held as to dismiss the collective wisdom of middle-America out of hand. As his post makes clear, he was previously on board with alarmist global-warming theories. Indeed he sits on the board of the Acra Foundation, an organization that funds eco-groups like the Tides Foundation, the Earth Island Institute and the National Resources Defense Council.

While most of Mead’s analysis is accurate, the title of his post is a bit misleading. Global Warming has been dealt a grievous injury over the last few months, but none have been fatal, at least not yet, for too many initiatives are already in place for us to administer last rights.

A national cap-and-trade program won’t pass Congress this year, or – if I had to bet – in 2011, and even if one did, it wouldn’t go into effect for years. The same goes for regulation under the Clean Air Act. That will take years to accomplish. However, several east coast states implemented the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a regional cap and trade program, in 2009. Midwestern and western states are planning their own regional cap and trade programs as well: the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord and the Western Climate Initiative, respectfully. (The latter was originally called the Western Greenhouse Gas Initiative, until somebody figured out that the acronym “WGGI” would inevitably be pronounced “wedgie,” which came a too uncomfortably close to describing the effect that the program would have on the economies of those regulated).

Further, many states have implemented Renewable Portfolio Standards, which require power producers to use less and less fossil fuel each year. Starting this April USEPA will begin requiring large sources of greenhouse gases to incorporate those “pollutants” into their permits. And, as of January 1, 2010, industry had to start keeping track of their greenhouse gas emissions. The latter move is sort of the first step in figuring out who gets the biggest pieces of the national cap and trade pie, should national cap and trade ever come to pass.

The net effect of the various state and regional initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be profound. These measures artificially inflate the value of energy produced using low carbon or zero carbon technologies, well beyond the actual cost of production in a competitive, free marketplace. The President addressed the use of two of the lower cost, less greenhouse gas intensive technologies during his State of Union address, advocating more nuclear power and – albeit more tentatively – increased offshore drilling.

On the face of it, such a declaration seems a reasonable, moderate response to a problem that he, if not the majority of the American people, believe is important. But, there’s not much substance behind this exercise in style. Permitting new nuclear plants; negotiating the inevitable legal battles that are sure to follow the issuance of each permit and then, eventually, building those plants will take at least two decades. This is not a practical solution to the problem that the President assures us so imminently endangers the very existence of our planet.

More offshore drilling makes all the sense in the world if the planet is indeed threatened by the evils of coal. Burning natural gas is less greenhouse gas intensive than burning coal. Even better, combined-cycle power plants are far more energy efficient than coal-fired power plants. If one really wants to reduce our national carbon footprint, the cheapest, quickest way to do so would be to increase America’s supply of natural gas and to build the high-efficiency power plants that can utilize this fuel.

Should this administration cheerfully and willingly support offshore drilling, they deserve applause. Unfortunately, the President has heretofore only paid lip-service to offshore drilling, even as his Interior Department has quietly placed obstacles in the way of tapping offshore energy reserves, such as leasing the rights to an important oil/gas field off the coast of Virginia. The President said that he is in favor of “… making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development.” The salient question would seem to be: is the President actually going to make “tough decisions,” or will he choose to perpetuate a regulatory environment where such decisions are effectively impossible to make?

This administration can provide vocal support for nuclear power and offshore drilling, but – absent actual action – that rhetoric won’t mean a thing. Global warming hysteria has spurred multiple responses at the state and regional level. The states, in turn, are simply reacting to this supposed threat using every unit of government available, save Congress.

There is a good deal of bureaucratic inertia still in play here, in other words. Halting the global warming juggernaut, much less trying to throw it into reverse gear, will take an awful lot of work. Global warming is far from dead, but the fact that someone like Walter Russell Mead recognizes that its vital signs are dropping is good news indeed.