Squaring the Culture

So here’s what scares me - that Fox has become the most “fair and balanced” when it comes to Clinton. I really feel like I am in Upside Down World now, but they have been pretty good. Just last night, I flipped over during a ball game, and Greta Van Susteren was on, talking abt FL and MI! She kept asking how in the world Obama thought he could disenfranchise two MAJOR states without repercussions?! Good question - I’d like to know that, too!

Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy, Commenter at You Can Call Me Uppity

I spent part of the morning reading what Hillary Clinton supporters are saying about Obama, which is where I happened across the video you’ll see below. (I spent another part of the morning watching Charlie Wilson’s War with Shel; if you haven’t seen it yet, treat yourself, Aaron Sorkin scores nicely with an entertaining and thought-provoking script.) The video shows Neil Cavuto of Fox teaching young Obama “strategist” Flavia Colgan what it takes to function in the Big Leagues — and demonstrating that his show is the Big Leagues. In it, Cavuto, merely by asking pointed questions, completely dismembers the arguments that Hillary Clinton ought to drop out of the Democratic primary race.

A number of things come to mind:

First of all, candidates with no hope of earning the nomination have remained in the race ’till the bitter end plenty of times in my lifetime; Ron Paul comes immediately to mind, but with a little help, so do Ronald Reagan (1976), Ted Kennedy (1980), and Jesse Jackson (1988). None of those candidates had the slightest chance of becoming the nominee. It strikes me that the Democrats are eager for Mrs. Clinton to drop voluntarily out of the race precisely because she does have a chance of becoming the nominee, but in a way that demolishes their populist pretensions. If she truly had no chance (as they routinely and disingenuously claim), they wouldn’t give a rat’s patoot whether she stayed in or not.

Secondly, let’s take note of the fact that for the first time in the lifetime of anybody reading this, the press is actually getting a little bit tough with a Democrat. I’m wondering when one of the Democrats-in-the-street will look up from growling at his or her morning paper, frown and crinkle their brow a little, and say “I wonder if this is what it feels like to be a Republican?” I’m not holding my breath, but I am going to start plastering that comment around Hillary Clinton support sites here and there in the hopes that perhaps one of them will wake up from their stupor and, at long last, grasp something from the real world.

Let’s not pretend that what Mrs. Clinton is facing today is remotely like what Republicans face every day. It’s not; she still has their protection from completely legitimate scrutiny of the issues that properly should have landed her behind bars in the 1990s, her famous, vicious temper, her utter disdain for ordinary Americans, her imperious treatment of the help, or the complete and deliberate disconnect between what comes out of her mouth and what she genuinely believes. Before Tim Russert’s impertinent questions during a primary debate in Philadelphia last October, the press treated Mrs. Clinton like Miss America on the day after winning her crown (with occasional help from a plant or twenty.)

Still, today they’re at least sometimes expecting her to meet a professional standard, and they’re filling the air with pompous expressions of outrage that she dare act like a politician running for office, the way they do when they’re complaining that the Republicans are acting un-American when they don’t just go home and let the Democrats run things. They’re also fawning over Obama in the most embarrassing fashion. Clinton’s supporters are feeling, most of them for the first time ever, what it feels like to work against the wind of press opinion, and they think that’s unfair. The fact that they’re largely spoiled children complaining that the world isn’t providing the easy victory they’re owed does not nullify the other fact that it is unfair. The press takes sides, and does not treat candidates evenly, ever, and for the first time ever, the Clinton campaign is tasting this a little.

It’s a little too much to ask that Clinton supporters be candid about their own candidate, I suppose. The same comment I included at the top of this column contains this laugher about Clinton’s negative campaign:

… and really - WHAT negative ads has Clinton run? The ones where she points out his attacks on her are baseless?? How DARE she not cave to his false interpretation of her record!!

As I said, we can’t expect reality from day one. However, tasting the wrath of the press for a change may be a good start.

Finally, I think I’ll pay closer attention to the Hillary Clinton support sites for the next few months. They’ve got a better handle on Obama’s scandals than most conservative sites I’ve visited. If there’s real corruption there — and I’m betting there is — the Clinton campaign is a lot more likely than the McCain campaign to find it and use it, and the Clinton supporters will be talking about it in detail. Stay tuned.

Barack Obama gave us a sweet little taste of how his “new politics” is going to play in the fall. On Wolf Blitzer’s program on CNN last night, Obama played his “I’m very disappointed” game when Blitzer mentioned McCain’s comment about Hamas wanting Obama to be elected president. Obama’s response,

This is offensive, and I think it’s disappointing. Because John McCain always says ‘I am not going to run that kind of politics,’ and to engage in that kind of smear is unfortunate, particularly because my policy toward Hamas has been no different than his.

I’ve said it’s a terrorist organization and we should not negotiate with them unless they recognize Israel, renounce violence, and unless they are willing to abide by previous accords between the Palestinians and the Israelis. So for him to toss out comments like that I think is an example of him losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination. We don’t need name calling in this debate.

This is how we’ve come to expect Obama to respond; act offended, pretend to be above it, claim he’s disappointed, avoid serious debate, and continue to launch the usual political smears through implication and surrogates. I’m very sorry for those naive enough to hope for something different, and irritated with those who continue to pretend that he does represent something different, but politics is politics, and Obama is a politician, an unusually cynical one.

How many ways is this disingenuous? First off, let’s note that Obama is not the least bit offended. He knew this was coming, and prepared for it. Second, he knows it’s not a smear, but a plain statement of the truth.

Third, Obama lied to sidestep a relevant fact for comparison. Hamas prefers Obama for a reason, and that reason would arguably be his stated willingness to talk with Hamas’ benefactor, financier,  and sponsor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This is, contrary to Obama’s smooth dissembling, very different from McCain’s policy. (I noted a few days ago that a lot of the world’s tyrants and radicals prefer Obama, and all of them probably have similarly good reasons.)

Fourth, let’s note the name-calling that’s really going on here. “Lost his bearings” is a cheap shot at McCain’s age, not very carefully veiled. If anybody makes much noise about it, expect Obama to apologize by saying nothing was intended; but he intended it, you can count on it.

Fortunately, the McCain campaign is having none of it.

We have all become familiar with Senator Obama’s new brand of politics. First, you demand civility from your opponent, then you attack him, distort his record and send out surrogates to question his integrity. It is called hypocrisy, and it is the oldest kind of politics there is. . . . We understand why Senator Obama doesn’t want to engage in a debate over leadership and judgment with John McCain, but the American people demand that debate take place.

One of the commenters at Instapundit suggested what Obama could say that really would answer McCain’s objection. It goes like this:

Hamas will be VERY sorry if I am America’s president. They need to be careful what they wish for.

Does anybody believe Obama means anything remotely like this, or would ever say such a thing? Of course not. Hamas is sensible to prefer Obama.

Andy McCarthy at The Corner was appropriately dismissive, explaining why he thinks this is particularly relevant.

So, Obama wants to be able to appeal to the Islamic world, which is rife with jihadists, by holding out the likelihood (i.e., the certainty) that he would be more understanding and accommodating (which is to say more prone to appeasement) than any GOP rival, but we are supposed to say nothing about the fact that this is naturally alluring to jihadists (as the jihadists themselves are pointing out)?

There’s been some chatter around the world, apparently bolstered by President Bush and Secretary of State Rice, that the world food shortage is actually being caused by increased demand for meat among the increasingly affluent Chinese and Indians. However, the release of world grain statistics from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) earlier this week demolished that argument. Instead, it looks like it’s mostly demand for ethanol in the US that’s creating the problem — demand created by government subsidy. Indian and European Union news sources concur, “It’s the US.”

The chart at the right reports the FAO’s estimates for grain demand in China, India, and the US for 2006-7 and 2007-8. Demand from the Asian countries grew at a rate that’s consistent with the growth of world demand. Demand from the US grew almost 12%, an enormous leap up.

From the Indian Business Standard:

Various reports have now come round the view that it is not just the rising demand for food in China and India that has caused prices to spiral — it has been caused also by the rising demand for bio-fuels all across the world and speculative investments in commodity markets.

As a response to rising crude oil prices, huge quantities of corn and oilseeds have been used to produce bio-fuels…

With crude oil prices rising to over $115 a barrel, the US is learnt to have utilised 30 million tonnes of corn to make bio-fuel. The FAO data show that the usage of corn in the US to make bio-fuel increased two-and-a-half times between 2000 and 2006.

I suppose it’s prudent to wait a while to make sure the FAO statistics weren’t cooked to slam the US. However, there’s nothing implausible about the figures.

Ashok Gulati, the Asia director of the International Food Policy Research Institute, added that in addition to the US biofuels program, drought in Australia and speculative investments in the global foods market also contributed to the grain shortfall this year.

This provides yet another illustration why government interference in markets is a bad idea. When ethanol makes economic sense, the market will use it. If the government has to subsidize it in order for it to happen, that means — by definition — that it doesn’t make economic sense yet.

Newt Gingrich laid out the bleak future for the Republican party in a sober analysis at Human Events yesterday. Every Republican needs to read this and take it seriously.

Beginning around 1980 and extending through 2006, Republicans were given the reins of government by the voting population, and told “Take us in the direction we want to go: smaller government, fewer taxes, less corruption.” The Republican brand is in serious trouble now because we did not deliver. Republicans, often by attempting to cooperate with Democrats rather than pursuing the Republican policies they were elected to pursue, allowed the government to grow, government oversight to grow, taxation to grow, and corruption and nest-feathering to continue unabated.  The public is sick of it; and while objectively the Democrats will produce more government, more tyranny, more taxes, and more corruption, the voters are looking at Republicans and saying “Not you.”

Newt Gingrich is arguably the best strategic thinker in the Republican party (yes, better than that magnificent bastard, Karl Rove). His list of near-term initiatives was drawn from polling data showing policy changes that a vast majority of Americans support on both sides of the aisle. Republicans can save their brand — that is, rescue the reputation of “Republican” from strong negative ratings — by announcing solid plans to accomplish these items, and then accomplishing them. Gingrich is correct in noting that any other action will result in serious, long-term losses.

The alternative, sadly, is socialism. That’s what the Democratic party is offering; and not mild, European-style socialism, but neo-Marxist socialism, complete with government disapproval of productive private enterprise, confiscatory taxation, and laws banning opposing points of view. If the Democrats win the White House and Congress in November, expect US sovereignty to be ceded to the United Nations on several fronts, vast expansions of government power, and laws mirroring the speech codes that oppress college campuses all over America.

It’s time for sober action. Call your Congressmen, call your Senators, and log onto Gingrich’s public advocacy site, American Solutions, to discover ways that you can shape the cultural debate. It’s almost too late. Do it now.

Update: Politico shares Gingrich’s pessimism about the upcoming Congressional elections, and lists several younger Republicans who may make a bid for leadership in the party if the GOP takes a severe enough beating in the fall.

I had no choice. I had to.

Impressive photoshop from sweasel.com, by way of Nice Deb.

Having flogged my research all over the Web concerning radicals in Obama’s upbringing and early training, I was gratified to see Nice Deb’s blog produce two very illuminating lists: one, listing radicals, terrorists, and tyrants who support Obama’s candidacy, and another, listing communists who support Obama’s candidacy.

Now, I understand that an endorsement from an odious person does not, by itself, make a candidate odious. Odious people retain the rights to vote and to freedom of speech, and may support anybody they like. However, when the support of a particular set of groups, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce us under absolute despotism… ok, we’re not quite to quoting the Declaration of Independence, yet. What we’re seeing, though, is that radicals all over the globe understand who Barack Obama is, and they like what they see. I think we can take it as given that they’re not enamored by his hopeful renunciation of partisanship, can’t we? The evidence is becoming more and more solid supporting the thesis that Barack Obama is not a Democrat, he’s a hard socialist, a True Believer in World Socialism. It’s looking more and more like I was right.

And that is what the Democrats are suggesting we should elect to the presidency.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin for the link to Nice Deb’s latest list. Marx graphic from The People’s Cube.

Ben Smith at Politico highlights Senator Clinton’s latest attempt at brand differentiation in the Democratic primary: she’s going to break up OPEC. Oh, really?

“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at,” she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.

“That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly,” she said, saying she’d use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.

This is what I hate the worst about presidential politics, and especially the Clinton version. They don’t propose real policy; they create talking points that sound good but have no basis in reality at all, and they count on the voters being completely uninformed. The most galling part about it is that they’re usually right about the voters. Pathetic, and scary.

Ben’s just reporting, but TPM asks the question I would ask, which is “How, exactly, do you propose to do that?” I think they even have the same, dry, unbelieving facial expression and sarcastic tone when asking the question.

This is pandering of the very worst sort. It’s not just that the US has no power — at all — to break up OPEC, it’s that OPEC is not the source of the problem. Recall my lecture about oil prices from the weekend; recall that I said Saudi production was dropping, and that oil production is limited by physics. The only mechanism OPEC ever had to enforce discipline among members was that if they did not go along with Saudi Arabia, the Saudis would open the production spigot and dump enough oil onto the market to make prices crash. Saudi spare production capacity is their only weapon. The problem today is that Saudi spare capacity is near an all-time low, and the Saudis simply can’t affect world oil prices the way they used to. They can drill more wells, and they plan to, but that takes time. OPEC is not the reason oil prices are so high, end of discussion.

Is Senator Clinton truly that clueless? I think not. I think she’s just doing what she does best; she’s cynically manipulating the voters.

This editorial at Slate led me to believe that Christopher Hitchens actually gets Barack Obama; it’s a fine analysis, and I recommend you read it. At the center is this:

What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright’s pews, and at Wright’s mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King.

Indeed. Instead of the hope of rising above racial politics, Rev. Wright has dragged us back into them.

Of course, this brings us a great deal closer to the truth of who Senator Obama really is. This is why we Republicans have been so glad of the never-ending story of Democratic presidential primaries this year — given enough time and pummeling, the truth will out, and it’s beginning to. The messianic image was never anything but puff pastry anyhow. We’re glad it fell off.

Sadly, Hitchens follows his fine analysis with a stab at the air:

All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama? …If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

Feel free to ask about his partner all you like, Chris… but he’s hiding something, and I think we know what it is.

Michelle is bad, no question about it. I certainly don’t mind if the scrutiny shifts to her for a bit, she’s as radical as Rev Wright and will drag Senator Obama a little further into the light. However, the real weakness of Senator Obama is not his wife. The real weakness of Senator Obama is Senator Obama. He’s a closet neo-Marxist. Eventually the public needs to know.

My wife and I watched Spike Lee’s movie Malcolm X over the weekend, and were struck by the remarkable similarity between the attitude and rhetoric of Malcolm X and that of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. X called himself Muslim, and Wright calls himself Christian, but they seem to meet on key areas: God’s wrath, and theirs, against whites, identifying the white race as defective or demonic, exalting blackness and keeping it separate. We raised our eyebrows at each other when X (Denzel Washington) responded to Kennedy’s assassination by observing “The chickens are coming home to roost.” It turns out that Wright was actually quoting Malcolm X’s comment when he said that, echoing his sentiment.

The New York Times yesterday published a history of black liberation theology that bears reading (you have to register with the Times, but that costs nothing). It was born out of the same rage that produced Malcolm X, and perpetuates that rage in quasi-Christian form. As I pointed out earlier, though, it has a lot more in common with Marxism than with Christianity, leading me to call Wright’s theology “racialist Marxism” in an earlier post. (Liberation theology may be a better name; I had previously only known the version of liberation theology taught by central American activists, who are mostly white or latino.) The article makes a point I’m eager to emphasize, that Wright’s brand of hard-left lunacy does not represent the bulk of black churches at all, despite Barack Obama’s representation to the contrary.

The link, above, to Wright’s “chickens coming home to roost” sermon contains a lengthy portion of the sermon, attempting to exonerate him by providing context. I saw a similar attempt with the “God Damn America” sermon, and as with that sermon, I don’t find that the surrounding context exonerates him at all. Wright chants a litany of Americans bombing civilians, a stunning display of intellectual dishonesty, conflating traditional warfare with terrorism as though they were precisely the same thing. After listing how Americans “bombed civilians” in Grenada, Tunisia, and an aspirin factory in the Sudan, Wright basically said “America had it coming.” In addition to the frank dishonesty about the nature of bombing and terrorism, this illustrates profound ignorance of the nature of Islamic aggression against the West, which has nothing to do with retribution and everything to do with the ultimate defeat of the Great Satan. And as we’ve come to expect from Wright, the sermon contains accusations of a retributive spirit among whites that simply does not describe the American reaction at all.

Wright is dangerous for the same reason that Malcolm X was dangerous; he divides America, turning one group of citizens against another. Malcolm X, though possibly paranoid, had some reason for his animosity, having been raised during an era of social oppression and violence against blacks. Wright has no such excuse; he’s perpetuating racist rage as a form of self-indulgence, a remarkably unchristian thing to do.

The Reverend Martin Luther King articulated a very different vision than Malcolm X, one without division and rage, in which race played no role in American life. We’ve come a long way toward achieving that vision. Leftists, drawing on Marxist tactics, hate such progress, and do what they can to separate groups and fan the flames of animosity. The proper approach is King’s. The destructive approach is X’s and Wright’s.

Which has Barack Obama embraced for most of his adult life? and, can we believe his renunciation of it now?

Photo shows Rev. Martin Luther King with Malcolm X at the US Capitol in March of 1964. I obtained it from Wikipedia’s entry on Malcolm X. The photo is in the public domain.

Ever since a couple of my students told me to watch “Who Killed the Electric Car?”, a documentary about GM’s EV-1 and why it’s not available to consumers today, I’ve been meaning to write the Electric Vehicle Lecture. Yesterday I discovered that Blue Crab Boulevard had beaten me to it, at least in the matter of emissions, and they’d also made some scathing comments about California’s energy policy scam. But I’m going to write this anyway, ’cause I’m covering a wider range of information, and it’s a natural follow-up to yesterday’s lecture about oil prices.

Some environmentalists tout the electric car as a solution to pollution and to dependence on foreign oil. They speak about them as though they were an immediate solution. Some, particularly those who produced the film I mentioned a moment ago, believe that entrenched economic interests are the only thing preventing a full-scale shift to pollution-free electric vehicles.

I’ve just spent an hour or so reading their claims. I find logical fallacies amusing, so it was a highly entertaining hour. For instance, the EV-1 had a range of 80 miles, and took hours to recharge; but that wasn’t a real problem, said the producers, because “the average American drives only 29 miles a day,” so most Americans can drive the EV-1 for days without recharging, right? They actually thought that was convincing. The flaw is that few Americans drive exactly 29 miles every day; most drive 5 or 10 miles a day, but need to be able to go 150 miles or more at least a couple of times a year, and those few trips would require a completely separate vehicle. Oops. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s look at the conspiracy theories first.

EV enthusiasts claim that the oil companies conspired to prevent electric cars from production, because they want to continue to profit from oil. Undoubtedly they do want to continue to profit; and they will, since oil gets used for plastics, lubrication, home heating, industrial heating, jet fuel, and generating electricity. Only about half of refined crude becomes gasoline. But what I need to hear from some Enviro-Loon is why General Motors or Honda Motors give a damn whether Exxon/Mobile makes a dime selling gasoline. Are they really going to surrender their share of the future profits of the automobile so their golfing buddy won’t have to alter his business at all? I thought they were a lot more ruthless than that.

So, then the EV enthusiasts say GM won’t make electric cars because they make too much money on the internal combustion engine (ICE) aftermarket, selling parts. The problem with this argument is that no automobile manufacturer controls the entire market, or even comes close. If there’s a viable electric vehicle (EV), and GM decides they’re not going to produce it, what are they going to do when Honda brings out their EV? and if Honda likewise moves to protect their aftermarket business, won’t Tesla Motors or some other upstart eat their lunch? GM is already advertising electric fuel cell cars, and so is Honda; they’ll bring them to market as soon as humanly possible, because if they don’t, they’ll disappear as a force in the market. Same with every other auto manufacturer; nobody would dare withhold hybrids or EVs from the market if they were viable, because the competition would eat them alive.

So why did the EV-1 fail? And why aren’t we seeing electric cars all over? And why are some of us absolutely thrilled, not to mention relieved, that electric vehicles have not taken off?

It failed, and we’re relieved, because it’s a bloody disaster of a solution. In fact, it’s not a solution at all.

The GM EV-1 meets its well-deserved fate.

First of all, they don’t solve the pollution problem, not at all. They just shift it off-tailpipe, and change the components a little. The electricity you suck from the wall outlet gets produced elsewhere. About half of it, on a national average, gets produced by burning coal, and about 20% by burning natural gas or fuel oil (most of the rest is nuclear or hydroelectric; see EIA figures here). So the chances are about 7 in 10 that your electric car is actually a fossil fuel car, with all the sulfurous and nitrous oxides, particulates, and (gasp) carbon dioxide that implies. Progressive technology is making power plants cleaner; technology is making ICE automobiles cleaner, too. There’s really no difference, in terms of pollutants, whether we’re burning gasoline in the car or coal far away. The ICE makes more particulates, the EV more nitrous oxide and SO2.

This is one of the places I got a good laugh in my reading. I was eager to see what the EV-ers would say about the “Long Tailpipe Problem.” What they said was “coal-fired plants produce half the CO2 that ICEs produce.” That was it. Carbon dioxide is not even a pollutant. It’s plant food. It makes crops grow better all over the planet. (And no, I don’t think human-produced CO2 is harming the earth even a little, but that’s for a different day.) They didn’t even mention the NOx, SO2, or particulate matter. Lame, lame, lame.

Secondly, electric cars don’t have the range that a useful car needs. The EV-1’s lead-acid batteries got 80 miles — with no air conditioning or heating. Turn on the headlights, and cruising range drops 10%. Turn on the AC in a properly-appointed EV, and cruising range drops by half (in all the modern hybrids, if you touch the switch on the AC, the gasoline motor powers up.) And once you’ve run your 80 miles, it takes from 40 minutes to 2 hours to recharge to 80%. Effectively, you can’t use the EV for the trip to grandma’s house, only for local buzz-around trips.

They tried to use NiMH batteries in EVs to increase the range, and it took them two years just to figure out how to keep them from exploding; NiMH batteries heat up, and they never completely solved the problem. Batteries that in theory would last 3 years, were lasting only 6 months in actual use, and replacing the batteries is equivalent to replacing your current car’s engine. To give them enough range, they had to be so heavy that even a small car became, in effect, a small truck. This would wreak havoc on road maintenance, costing taxpayers billions. And all this is not to mention auto safety: the ICE is actually light and diffuse compared to the concentrated heavy metal of a battery pack sized to provide decent range. The battery pack is like a case-hardened missile traveling down the road at 70 mph; get hit by one of those and they’ll be sweeping you off the pavement.

Li-ion batteries work much better, and they’re lighter. They also cost about 5 times what you can afford to pay for a car. It’ll be at least a decade before the cost comes down enough to make this a reasonable possibility.

And then, there’s the grid.

I found this calculation at a physics talk site, in a comment about “Who Killed the Electric Car.” If you can’t follow it, just read the conclusion. It’s pretty simple, though:

A gallon of gasoline contains approximately 130 megajoules of chemical potential energy. Americans drove 2,923 billion miles in 2004. If the average car gets about 30 miles per gallon (which is heavily on the optimistic side), American motorists expended a total of about 3.5 x 10(12) kWh of energy in 2004.

By contrast, American consumption of electricity was only 1.4 x 10(12) kWh in 2001.

In other words, Americans consumed roughly three times as much energy in their automobiles in the form of gasoline and diesel as they did energy from electricity.

It takes the same amount of power to move a chunk of metal plus one or more human beings down the road whether that power is produced by electricity or gasoline combustion. What that calculation says is that to convert all cars to electricity would require us to quadruple our national production of electricity. And since the electric power grid is already showing signs of obsolescence and insufficient capacity, a conversion to electric cars would require an entire rebuilding of our electric distribution system — AFTER we build three times as many power plants as are already in use.

Yes, EVs would break our dependence on foreign oil, but does this sound like a sensible solution to you?

The EV-1 was a disaster for GM. They spent $2 billion on the project. The 1,100 leases they sold on the test vehicles did not even cover the cost of maintenance for the vehicles. The consumer demand for them was tepid at best. The only reason GM actually produced the vehicle at all was that the government of California required automakers to produce a zero-emission vehicle if they wanted to do business in the state in the 1990s. They stopped producing it, not because there was some collusion to keep consumers in the dark, but because they’re not in business to lose money.

Many of the problems mentioned in the above analysis are solved by hydrogen fuel cells. Fuel cells generate electricity on the fly, so you never have to plug in your car; the batteries for the engine are heavy, but not nearly the size of EV batteries. Refueling takes no longer than filling your gas tank. Cruising range is already comparable to gasoline-powered vehicles. Like the EV, the engine has 1/10 of the moving parts of an ICE, and nothing but water comes out of the tailpipe. You have to produce hydrogen to fuel the fuel cells; but oil refineries already produce enough hydrogen for about 30 million fuel cell cars, and existing gas stations can be retrofitted to supply hydrogen. The investment in hydrogen pipelines will be nothing close to the cost of rebuilding the electric grid.

Fuel cell cars are already on the road in test programs and will likely be available to the public in a few years. They do not solve oil dependency right away — oil and natural gas are the immediately available sources of hydrogen — although at expected economies of scale they will be somewhat less expensive to operate than their gasoline-powered counterparts, which implies reduced demand for oil. However, there are dozens of ways to produce hydrogen. Promising clean-coal technologies like coal gasification produce hydrogen as a by-product. Hydrogen can be produced by electrolyzing water, so new, clean electrical sources (nuclear, solar, wind) can produce hydrogen as they come on-line. Experimental techniques are being developed to use algae to produce hydrogen.

The market, as expected, is already well on its way to producing a viable alternative to the internal combustion engine. It may not be coming as quickly as environmentalists like, but it’s probably coming more quickly, and will produce a better result, than any government-forced project would produce. If the electric car had been a viable solution, the market would have picked it; it didn’t pick the EV because it was a lousy solution.

Photo of crushed EV-1s from Electrifying Times. Photo of smokestacks from the State of Maryland. Photo of transmission lines from Photography Review, copyright 2008 to Jerry Litynski Photography.

Gasoline is going to rise above $4/gallon this summer. Most of us are going to be angry because our budgets will be strained badly, and we’ll go looking for culprits. I’m writing about this today to explain, in as simple terms as I can, that there are no culprits. The oil companies are not screwing us — quite the contrary, they’re making less and less from the sale of refined fuel, but continuing to refine it anyway. The government is hurting us a little, but not all that much. Environmentalists are hurting us by preventing us from building refineries, but new refineries wouldn’t affect anything for another 10 years or so.

The price of gasoline is controlled by simple economics. I wish it weren’t so, because like the rest of you, I want to know who I can smack to make the problem go away. But it’s so, and the problem is not going to go away.

By the way, the current price of gasoline is not the highest it’s ever been, in inflation-adjusted dollars. If the current price of gasoline is $3.80/gallon, the price of gasoline in 1979 reached as high as $4.10/gallon expressed as 2008 dollars. This is a rough calculation based on the price of gasoline in Texas from 1979 to 2008, using the data shown here. But it’s still pretty high, and going higher.

Let’s start by showing where the price of gasoline comes from. The graph below comes from the US Energy Information Administration, and shows that most of the cost of gasoline comes from the price of crude oil:

The numbers here are a little old, but illustrate the major points. Less than 10% of the cost of gasoline comes from gasoline stations, and that includes all their costs and profits. Gasoline stations actually make very little profit. Less than 20% of the price comes from refineries, and that includes all their costs and profits. Refineries, like gasoline stations, make very little profit, and the profit margins for refineries are falling (this by oil companies’ choice). Taxes account for as much as refinery costs and profits combined, but it’s still less than 20% of the total price. By far the largest piece is the price of crude oil, and the percentage of the price of gasoline represented by crude oil is growing steadily as the price of a barrel of oil rises. Figures from the California Energy Commission suggest that the price of crude now accounts for 73% of the price of gasoline, up from 53% in 2005. Most of the oil companies’ profits that we hear about comes from the sale of crude oil.

So if you want to know why gasoline is so expensive, the most important thing to understand is why crude oil is so expensive. And that turns out to be pretty simple.

First, you need to know that the demand for crude oil is skyrocketing. Most of this growth in demand comes from Asian countries that are industrializing rapidly. The following chart, again from the EIA, shows recent growth in world demand for oil, emphasizing China’s demand (click on the image for a larger, clearer image.) Notice that US demand is actually stable, and even dropped a few years since 2000.

However, while the demand for oil is rising, the supply of oil is not.

Before I give you the numbers, let me explain something about oil production that I suspect a lot of people don’t know. An oil well is not like a gasoline pump; it’s not just a big tank in the ground with a pump that can be turned on or off. It’s more like a big, underground balloon filled partly with oil and partly with natural gas. The oil comes out in proportion to the pressure created by the gas. Once the gas pressure is gone, you can’t get the oil out. You could get the remaining oil out if you could squeeze the balloon, but you can’t — it’s actually embedded in rocks a long way below ground. And you could get it out if you could fill the balloon again with gas (they use CO2 or steam when they do this), but that’s expensive and raises the price of oil even further, not to mention that the volume of gas required to do this can get pretty huge, and the return drops off quickly.

The point is that the amount of oil a well can produce at any one time is limited by physics. It isn’t just up to the whim of the operator. If you cap a well and stop producing, the gas dissipates, so eventually you can’t get the oil out. If you pump oil from the well too quickly, the gas dissipates too quickly, and you wind up getting a lot less oil from the well in the long run. And, of course, you can’t pump the oil out of the well any faster than the gas pressure will let you in any case. So, when I tell you that the Saudis aren’t producing as much oil as they used to, please trust me when I also tell you that they don’t have that much choice in the matter.

That’s what I’m going to tell you; the Saudis aren’t producing as much oil as they used to, because they can’t. And not just the Saudis; most of the middle eastern producers are producing less. The oil fields still have plenty of oil in them, but the production capacity has peaked, and is starting to fall off gradually. The following chart was produced from figures taken from the March 2008 International Petroleum Monthly, by James Hamilton for EconoBrowser. The scale on the left is millions of barrels of oil per day:

That’s just OPEC, but that’s driving the overall world supply. Canada (the US’ largest source of imported oil) is producing a little more than before, and the countries of the former Soviet Union are producing quite a bit more, but they’re both being offset by production drop-offs in the North Sea, near Britain. The total world oil supply dropped just a little overall; but it did not go up, and demand did go up, a lot.

From Day 1 of Economics 101: if the supply stays steady, but the demand rises, prices go up. It’s that terribly simple.

Of course, there’s a little more to it. World politics affect the supply of oil. as wars and strikes interfere with production or shipping. The next graph, from James Williams’ marvelous history of world oil prices at WRTG Economics, shows the major world events that affected world oil prices from 1970 through today (click on the image to see a larger, clearer image):

That’s the next piece of the puzzle. The places in the world where politics are affecting oil prices are Iraq, Nigeria, and Venezuela (the “PDVSA Strike” that shows up on the chart is in Venezuela.) We in the US import oil from all three countries. Every time the supply gets threatened, the price jumps up.

The third, and arguably the largest (but that’s debatable), piece of the puzzle is the declining value of the American dollar. This article in US News explains the reasons for the dollar’s drop in simple terms; the main reasons, though, are the slowdown of the growth of the US economy (the Fed responds by keeping the price of the dollar low to encourage investment), the shakiness caused by the burst of the housing bubble (which drives investors away from the dollar), and the continuing imbalance between what America imports compared to what we export (our yearly trade deficit of $700 billion increases the supply of dollars to foreign investors, making them cheap). Since the value of oil is expressed in dollars at the world oil exchange markets, a decline in the value of the dollar mechanically increases the price of oil. This article at the Wall street Journal suggests that nearly all the increase in the price of oil since 2001 is due to the devaluing of the dollar; but I disagree with how they value oil based on gold, so I think world demand has a higher impact. But that’s just me.

The thing that’s missing from all this is the oil companies. American consumers get riled because the oil companies make record profits at times like these. Why? They make such huge profits because 80% of their income comes from the sale of crude oil. Oil companies don’t control the price of crude; that’s determined by supply and demand. When they produce what the wells are capable of producing, and the price of oil flies up due to factors they don’t control, they make huge profits. There’s no gouging going on; the market sets the price. And the more the oil companies make, the more they invest in new sources of oil, so big profits this year usually mean lower oil prices down the road.

Oil companies can affect the supply of oil in the long run by investing their profits in new exploration, and they do. This is why taxing “windfall profits” makes no sense; it makes the high prices last longer. Worse, whenever the government stops oil companies from drilling and selling the oil they’ve found, they prevent increases in crude oil supply, and drive the price even higher. This is why restrictions on US oil production in Alaska and offshore make so little sense.

None of these factors are going to change in the next ten years or so, except possibly the value of the dollar. It takes time to find new oil and build new wells and shipping platforms. It takes time to settle political strife. It takes time to build new electric plants, so alternative fuels won’t help in the short run, either. Arguably, the best chance we have for reducing oil prices anytime soon would be for the government to take measures to strengthen the dollar; we can expect that to happen sometime after January 2009, when a new administration takes over, but it will not take effect immediately. Government could also reduce taxes; that would help once. Aside from that, all we can do is conserve; the less oil we use, the lower the price will go.

Four dollars for a gallon of gas. It’s here. I’m afraid we’re going to have to get used to it, because it will only go away gradually, and the peoples’ reflex to attack the oil companies is only going to make the problem worse.

Barack Obama broke the logjam. Now, the rest of the party seems primed to follow. Wednesday and Thursday, Hillary Clinton allowed Bill O’Reilly to interview her, and Howard Dean is slated to show up on Fox News Sunday this weekend.

Beginning with his announcement of his presidential bid, candidate John Edwards refused to appear on Fox, and challenged his fellow candidates to join his boycott. He and the netroots bloggers succeeded in convincing the rest of the pack to cancel their appearance at a debate in Detroit that Fox intended to televise on Sept 23, 2007. None of the Democratic candidates have appeared personally on Fox throughout the entire campaign season.

The leftward netroots were not happy with Obama for appearing on Fox News Sunday last weekend, and can only be snarling into their coffee this morning. They have to face a political reality; more Democrats watch Fox than watch CNN or MSNBC. What’s worse for them, the Democratic primaries are being affected by independents and crossover Republicans voting in the Democratic primaries, per Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos, so it’s making very good sense for the Democratic candidates to reach out to the moderate-to-conservative viewers on Fox.

The hard left regards mainstream, network news as middle-of-the-road, because by and large the mainstream reporters, by trying to sound objective, land a little to the right of the hard left. When you hear leftists complain about the biases in the news, what they’re complaining about is the media’s failure to pick up their latest conspiracy theory and trumpet it across the headlines. They argue on this basis that the networks are biased toward the conservatives.

If you measure from the hard left, they’re correct, but if you measure from the middle of the political spectrum, they’re very wrong; the mainstream news outlets consistently skew to the left of center. This has been established not only by research, but by several books written by political liberals from inside the news business, buttressed by pundits and watchdogs from the outside. The most famous of these, Bernard Goldberg’s Bias, argues that the bias is not deliberate, but a natural result of the limited perspective of the nearly-ubiquitous metropolitan liberalism of the leaders, editors, and primary reporters for the mainstream news organizations.

Fox is actually almost as fair as they claim to be, with research putting them no farther to the right of center than the least biased of the mainstream news organizations is to the left. However, given the fact that we’ve all been hearing leftward-biased news represented as “objective” all our lives, and given that even the biased mainstream sources are to the right of the hard leftists, I can imagine that Fox sounds like gibberish from Mars to hard leftists. This explains their irrational rage at Fox, and why they wish they could persuade Democratic candidates not to legitimize Fox by appearing on their network.

Their problem is that as influential as the hard left is within the Democratic party, at this point in the campaign new votes can only be found in the center. Clinton and the DNC are facing political reality and going where the votes are. Diarists at Kos will huff and puff and denounce the DNC as sellouts for the next three years, but they’ll have to live with the political reality that they simply don’t control things.

Continuing to consolidate his coalition government, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent a delegation to Iran to confront them with evidence of Iran’s efforts to train and supply Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

The current action follows Maliki’s successful campaign against the Jaysh al Mahdi (”JAM”), or Mahdi Army in Basrah and Nasiriyah in the south and in sections of Baghdad, which in turn prompted Sunni and Kurdish elements to rejoin Maliki’s government. He now appears to be aiming at separating the JAM from its suppliers, hoping eventually to remove the large, heavily armed militia as a factor in Iraqi politics.

Operations continue against the JAM in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, where the Mahdi Army has taken a pounding but continues to resist the government’s efforts to root them out of the city. Maliki continues to offer quarter and enfranchisement to whichever elements of the JAM or other armed groups wish to disarm and join the government. (Note: the comments at Long War Journal are full of detail and analysis not available through the mainstream press, as usual. I recommend investing the time to browse them.)

Maliki is showing himself an able and active leader in this difficult situation. He may succeed at producing a peaceful, pluralistic government, proving that despite some claims to the contrary, quasi-Jeffersonian democracy is possible among Middle Easterners.

Hat tip to Ed Morrissey, who continues to provide the best coverage of this progress in Iraq from his seat at Hot Air.

Insider Advantage released a poll last night showing that Hillary Clinton has erased Obama’s double-digit lead in north Carolina. IA has Clinton up by 2 points. Meanwhile, a local news organization in the Raleigh-Durham area has Obama up by 7 points, but with a 5 point margin of error. The North Carolina primary takes place next Tuesday, May 6.

I recommend you read the excellent analysis from both Hot Air on the right and TalkLeft on the left.

There are reasons to believe the poll may be off (when is this not true?), but it looks as though the Reverend Wright has done significant damage to Obama among older voters and possibly among black voters. This has got to be worrying the Obama camp.

If Obama loses in North Carolina, he may have trouble holding the Superdelegates. Recall that the purpose of the Superdelegates in the Democratic party’s primary process is to override the will of the party voters if they’re backing a clear loser. If Obama limps into the convention perceived as permanently damaged goods, he may have the nomination snatched from him despite his lead in delegates.

This has been the most entertaining election season I’ve ever lived through.

The McCain campaign, in the latest of a series of conference calls to bloggers, unveiled its ideas for reforming health care in the US. Matt Lewis’ blog at Townhall identified the callers as Senior policy advisor Doug Holtz-Eakin and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. This is an impressive pair, and an indication of the sorts of advisors we can expect a President McCain to draw.

The proposals focused on free-market solutions to existing problems in health care delivery, leaving as many choices as possible in the hands of consumers. Proposals include a tax credit for privately-purchased health insurance, removal of state barriers for insurance carriers, and paying Medicare providers for results rather than procedures.

I was pleased to note that the proposals included tort reform, a long-overdue treatment for the damage done by the cancer of out-of-control medical litigation. I was displeased to note their inclusion of re-importation of drugs from Canada, which McCain stupidly considers a free-market initiative. I’m trying to figure out why he doesn’t realize that it’s an oppressive government, not the market, that sets the prices of Canadian drugs, and that allowing their importation effectively allows the Canadian government to set US pharmaceutical prices. If we go down this road, in five years we’ll be wondering why new drug development slowed so badly. The only good thing I can say about this part of the program is, it’s no worse than what the Democrats will do.

What we’re looking at here is political necessity. An American populace conditioned to accept government solutions is being sold on national health care as a basic right; the Democrats will eat McCain’s lunch if he doesn’t counter with a plausible, free-market health care reform package. The gullibility of the nation regarding national health care, which would be an unallayed disaster for America, underlines how important it is to wrest education from the hands of cultural progressives, who have robbed all notion of self-reliance from the minds of America’s children.

The advisors spoke of wellness initiatives, creating incentives for weight control, exercise, and quitting smoking. A number of bloggers note their discomfort with what they consider intrusions into private choices. While possibly intrusive, the proposal constitutes a glance in the right direction. Health is a much broader topic than merely who your doctor is and who pays his bill. I’m hoping the culture at large begins to notice the impact of diet and food quality on overall health, an area where far too little attention is paid. However, exercise, smoking, and diet are arenas where a liberty-friendly government can only play a roles as preacher and cheerleader, and must never become Mom.

Ed Morrisey and The American Mind have more detailed reviews.

The US Supreme Court decided yesterday that Indiana’s Voter Identification law requiring citizens to show a picture ID in order to vote does not violate the Constitution. The majority opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stephens, argues that requiring Indiana voters to dig up a birth certificate and stand in line at the Dept of Motor Vehicles to obtain a photographic voter ID card does not unduly burden the voter or threaten to curtail voting by the poor and elderly. The Indiana voter ID is free, and Indiana allows provisional voting without the ID.

The case was decided 6-3, with Justices Stephens, Kennedy, and Roberts arguing that the petitioners (Democrats) did not manage to quantify what burden the law placed on poor voters, and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito arguing that the law was not discriminatory since all voters were treated alike. Justices Souter and Ginzberg dissented, saying that the law would probably deter tens of thousands from voting (this is nonsense, in my humble opinion) and that the state did not justify the burden on voters. Justice Breyer dissented because he felt the law unevenly burdened voters who lack a driver’s license. You can read the opinions here.

I’m pleased. The Court did the right thing.

The case will severely restrict the Democratic party’s attempts to flood the polls with illegal aliens voting Democratic, and should also limit schemes to pay voters to vote more than once. The law should go a long way toward restoring public confidence in the voting process.

I have never, for a single moment, believed that Democrats were actually concerned that the poor and elderly would be unduly burdened by the requirement to show photo ID. It’s simply not intellectually plausible. Poor people are required to hold a photo ID to receive welfare benefits in some states, and the system works. Indiana’s law contains appropriate accommodations for those who have difficulty traveling, or who can’t find the documents they need in order to obtain a photo ID. In fact, as Allahpundit points out, the burden of obtaining a voter ID is not much different from the burden of voting itself; the voter has to leave home, travel, and stand in line. If that’s an undue burden, then voting itself is an undue burden.

Nor did I believe that Democrats were serious when they said that voter impersonation was rare. Perhaps it was in the past, but there are millions of illegals in the country today that can easily come up with a bill listing their name and address, but cannot qualify for a photo ID. I don’t know personally any Democrats stupid enough not to see how the law might affect the ability of illegals to vote.

In short, I believe Democrats opposed the law simply and completely because they know their ability to cheat during elections will be curtailed by photo IDs… and I sincerely hope they are correct.

The partisan divide on this issue was striking. The law was passed in the Indiana state legislature with Republicans voting unanimously for the measure, and Democrats voting unanimously against. The petitioners even attempted to use this as an argument for striking down the law, but the Court correctly observed that while the vote was partisan, the reasons given for the law were neutral. See p. 20 of Justice Stephens’ opinion.

Update: Oh, I forgot: Michelle Malkin points out that the plaintiff in this case, who was refused the right to vote in Indiana in 2006, was illegally registered to vote in two states — and taking a homestead exemption to her taxes in both states, as well.

Disturbing questions persist about the state of Texas’ raid on the FLDS compound in San Angelo, TX earlier this month. State Child Protective Services employees and judges have to balance the rights of the parents against the needs of the children, and claim they only remove children from homes where abuse is likely. However, the equation presupposes that children are safe in state custody. There’s disturbing evidence that they’re not.

Consider this cry for help from the Comptroller of the State of Texas, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, back in 2006. Ms. Strayhorn’s initial 2004 report, Forgotten Children, documented instances of overmedication, poisoning, rape and other abuse within the Texas foster care system. By 2006, no substantive action had been taken by the state of Texas, and Strayhorn released press announcements calling attention to the lack of action on the problem she’d uncovered. I have no information indicating that the situation has been resolved.

Consider, also, the 2006 video report from NBC News appearing below, concerning the extreme overuse of psychotropic medications on small children in foster care in Texas. Since foster care always involves separation trauma to the children (simply because they’re removed from their homes), and in many cases involves other traumas in the homes of origin, foster children present behavior problems. In far too many cases, these problems are addressed using medications that are inappropriate for children. The numbers are staggering: 60% of the children in the Texas system were prescribed some sort of psychotropic drug, including antidepressants and antipsychotics.

(Two notes: first, I have trouble believing the drug rep at the end saying the pharmaceutical companies “prescribe” these drugs because they want to make money. Pharmaceutical companies do not prescribe drugs. Most likely, the drugs are prescribed by doctors as a surrogate babysitter — it’s a simple and insurer-paid way to tame a behavior problem, only it doesn’t really address the problem, it just masks it. And second, I have some family experience with antipsychotics; they turn people into zombies. Kids on drugs like these probably have no life. Prescribing them for kids who are not psychotic is inexcusable, and ought to be criminal.)

Finally, scan this report explaining the unsurprising inability of the rural foster care system in San Angelo, TX to handle more than 400 new clients. The kids in this case are going to be scattered all over the country, reminiscent of what happened to Katrina victims, only in this case the kids are going without their parents. They will be uncomprehending, terrified, and traumatized.

So, we know that the foster care system is a bad thing for the kids. What do we know about the LDS families?

We know that girls are ushered into wedlock early. That seems pretty certain; the current reports from Texas CPS workers suggest that 31 of 53 girls under 17 in the sect are either pregnant now or have children already, although attorneys for the women dispute the numbers. Without considering whether this is healthy or not — in pre-industrial cultures, child-bearing during these years is normal — Texas law simply does not permit it; a pregnant girl 16 or younger indicates a violation of state law. Furthermore, let’s keep in mind that the fathers of these girls are mostly men in their 40s or 50s, which may indicate something pretty ugly.

Still, while there’s some indication that young women face early marriage to older men, there’s no indication that children are mistreated in any way, other than that they’re taught the group’s doctrines. Furthermore, there’s no indication that I’ve seen so far that the young women object to the system.

So my question is, what’s the basis for removing all the children from the group? Why did the state not select out the young women in immanent danger of marriage to a gnarly old pervert, if that’s their concern, and leave the rest of the children with their parents?

I don’t see any way to justify this unless the state has passed judgment on the belief system; and the state simply has no Constitutionally valid role in judging belief systems. The precedent being set against a bizarre sect can easily be used against a more common but unpopular religion, like Judaism or conservative Evangelical Christianity. This is precisely what the First Amendment was written to prevent.

This is a civil liberties disaster, but it’s more than that; it’s a disaster for the children. Most have been removed from homes in which they faced no danger, and are being ushered into a system where real abuse is likely.

We should begin to consider writing laws that recognize the inherent superiority of leaving children in their home, and that permit removal of children from their parents only in the most dire of circumstances. We should also consider writing laws that strengthen the Constitutional protection against the state judging our beliefs.

Finally, we should openly discuss the question, and examine our prejudices to the contrary: is it truly so egregious and damaging for a teenage girl to marry a 40-year-old man, that the state is justified in tearing families apart and causing trauma to prevent it from happening? I have the same cultural distaste for it that everyone else reading this has, but objectively, I’m not convinced. If the girls are happy and their children are thriving, what is the law protecting them from?

If you attack Reverend Wright, it means you hate the Black Church. And don’t you forget it.

Michelle Malkin did a live-blog on the Reverend Wright’s speech before the National Press Club this morning. You’ve got to read this to believe it. Wright is worse than anything we could have imagined. “If God is not for black people and against white people, then God is a murderer and we’d better kill him.” That’s a quote from James Cone, leading proponent of Black Liberation Theology, and Wright says “I do not in any way disagree with James Cone. Jim is a personal friend of mine.”

Read the whole thing here.

Racial hatred has nothing in common with Christianity. Jesus died for everyone, regardless of race, because the Christian God loves every man, woman, and child more deeply than we’re capable of grasping, and forgives sins more heinous than we’re capable of understanding, for anybody who has the audacity to ask Him. The god who hates whites is not the Christian God, nor any god that I care to encounter.

What’s truly alarming about this is the number of times the press applauded this vile heretic, and even gave him standing ovations.

By the way — an attack on Wright has nothing to do with the black church. I’ve been to plenty of black churches. They’re not usually fountains of the sort of hate this man spews.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the preaching of leftist dogma at D-Y High in Yarmouth, MA, where I’ve served a few weeks as a substitute teacher. One of the comments following that article exhorted me to “DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.”

Circumstances have conspired to give me an unexpected and interesting opportunity to do just that. Providential, even.

Two weeks ago, I was asked to sub for an entire week at the local technical school, where I’m listed as a substitute. A senior English teacher apparently crossed several behavioral lines this year and got herself fired, with only about a month left in the year. When I walked in, the curriculum director handed me 25 copies of Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom, and a list of questions to ask the kids. I was warned that the kids would tell me they’d already read the book, but to run with it anyway.

Picture my predicament: It’s spring. These kids have one month left in their public school careers. Their teacher, who apparently has wasted the year with them, just got fired. I’m trying to teach about a book the kids have already studied — three times, according to some of them. We’re talking complete attitudinal dysfunction, here. And I’m winging it.

By Wednesday, I had picked up on a a series of questions Morrie asked Mitch early in the book (which I was reading for the first time, myself): “Do you have somebody you can share your life with? Are you giving to the community? Are you at peace with yourself? Are you trying to be as human as you can be?” It occured to me — Morrie had principles, and made choices according to them. I started talking to the kids about what it means to live a principled life, a life lived according to clearly defined standards that can be applied to specific circumstances to allow sensible priority choices. This leads to a purposeful life, I said, perhaps even a meaningful life, and ultimately, without really trying to achieve it, a happy life.

I made a unit out of it, talking to them about how postmodernism, multiculturalism, and nihilism prevent us from establishing sensible principles, and how they result in a meaningless life.

And then, the school called me at the end of the week and asked, “Can you cover the same class after the Spring Break?” That’s this week.

I’m told I’ve got to get these kids to produce something that can be graded, so the school can represent to the parents that they’re actually doing something with their kids. So, this week I’m going to get the kids to write principles that they intend to live by. I expect to cover the cardinal virtues, and to discuss other lists of virtues certain organizations have produced, like the law and oath of the Boy Scouts.

Most of these kids have never heard anything remotely like what I’m telling them. This is practically unheard of in a public school, and may even be skirting the law — but I’m not teaching religion, just a Western view of purpose. And they’re listening.

I’m not sure where else I can go with this, but I’m not going to waste this opportunity. The topic is a unit on A Principled Life. Today I’m asking my reading audience: any ideas? Think about which organizations have oaths that articulate principles of living, and about individuals who have lived principled lives. Post your comments, please. And thanks in advance.

Barack Obama’s appearance on Fox News Sunday has touched off a fascinating debate in the leftward blogs that gives us a window into how Progressives think, and about how Obama thinks. It’s intriguing, and a little scary.

First, the setting: sometime in 2006, Barack Obama agreed to let Fox interview him on their network, but for some reason never followed through. On March 16, 2008, Fox News began displaying “Obama Watch,” a ticking digital clock displaying the days, hours, minutes and seconds since Obama agreed to appear. When it first appeared, it had been 730 days since Obama agreed to be on. It took just 35 more days before Obama’s interview with Chris Wallace aired on Fox News Sunday. Apparently, the Obama campaign did not like this sort of publicity and agreed to the interview to quell it. Well played, Fox News.

When ads appeared last week announcing the weekend interview, leftie blogs complained loudly. After all, they’d worked pretty hard to prevent Democratic candidates from debating on Fox, hoping to reduce Fox’s legitimacy as a news network. Obama’s campaign countered that Obama was going to “take Fox on,” recognizing that Fox has been “the tip of the spear … repeatedly broadcasting some of the most specious of rumors about Obama.”

The last was what the Progressives really wanted to hear, because they find Fox’s treatment of Obama scandalous. It’s mostly a reference to two stories — two — that reported other people raising questions about Obama’s education in a Muslim school as a child (the first was the Clinton campaign, the second, the front page of the New York Post). If I ever have to face a hostile attack, I sincerely hope that the tip of the spear launched against me is that mild. Please take my word for it when I tell you that Progressives seriously believe this constitutes wholehearted yellow journalism. Two stories. About what the Clinton campaign and the New York Post said.

The interview happened, and the left was horribly disappointed. It was a cordial interview. Wallace asked questions about the flag pin, Reverend Wright, and the substance behind Obama’s claim to be a uniter. Obama performed well, sounding polished and conciliatory. The left is horrified because he did not leave Wallace’s blood on the floor.

Greg Sargent from TPM first:

“He is going on their Sunday show to take Fox on…”

Keep in mind that this adviser said this specifically to mollify critics who worried that Obama’s decision to appear on Fox would help legitimize the network and hence hurt Dems overall. There’s no ambiguity here to speak of: The adviser was telling these critics not to worry, that the reason Obama was going on was to “take Fox on.”

And this just didn’t happen in any meaningful sense. When Wallace brought up Wright and the flag-pin, for instance, Obama didn’t point out that these bogus stories have been pushed relentlessly by Fox or that the network has pushed the Obama-is-a-Muslim lies.

And Matt Stoller from Open Left drives home the sword thrust:

When we accept lies from our leaders and openly dismissive knocks from them, it destroys our core argument that Democrats need to have integrity and to stand up for themselves. No they don’t. We don’t stand up for ourselves and we let them lie to us without consequence.

The lie Stoller is talking about is Obama’s claim that he intended to “take Fox on.” This is what upsets Sargent, as well. Neither has any apparent problem with Obama claiming he’d never heard his pastor of 20 years make outlandish statements about race and America, and then later admitting that he had. They have no objection to Obama attempting to minimize his connections with Tony Rezko, only to have personal sweetheart land deals exposed. They’re not dismayed by Obama telling an Ohio audience he plans to fight NAFTA while he’s telling a Canadian official not to pay attention to his campaign rhetoric. No. They feel their integrity is compromised by allowing Obama to get away with saying he’s going to “take Fox on,” and then hold a cordial interview rather than attack Fox for it’s alleged biased reporting.

I’m kinda curious about Progressives’ definition of “integrity.” It’s not the same as mine.

Diarist Eugene from the Daily Kos offered his grudging defense of Obama’s willingness to let Fox interview him, noting that Obama has always voiced willingness to talk to the enemy. (That’s right; Fox is “the enemy.” Not Hugo Chavez. Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Chris Wallace from Fox is the enemy. I’m really sorry, I’m trying to restrain my incredulity, but oh, my God…)

At the core of Obama’s political philosophy is the belief that real divisions should not stand in the way of conversation. He has always believed that it is right and necessary for us to speak to folks on the other side of the aisle, to speak with our enemies. That to do so is a sign of strength, of problem-solving, and that it can be done without having to compromise any of our own values in the process.

I don’t agree with this strategy. At all. But I respect it. I understand it. And I made my peace with it long ago when I came around to openly supporting Obama’s candidacy at the beginning of the year…

I’ll acknowledge here that for a Progressive, Obama’s willingness to even talk with moderates, let alone conservatives, is refreshing. Most of them are like Eugene, here — they can’t even imagine holding a conversation with somebody like me. We’re “the enemy.” Eugene is being generous by allowing that a politician might actually want to do it for a good reason, but he’d never stoop to such distasteful labors, himself.

An anecdote from Obama’s book illustrates what Obama means by “talking to the enemy.” From Eugene’s Kos diary again:

In one of his autobiographies Obama recounts an episode in 1987, when he was a community organizer in Chicago, that crystallized this thinking for him. He had led a group of tenants to confront their landlord about whether he had tested their building for asbestos. Obama felt sympathetic to both the landlord and the tenants, understanding that the landlord was himself strapped for cash and struggling to make his own ends meet. Obama tried to talk with the landlord, tried to understand where he was coming from, instead of getting in his face with confrontation. And eventually a satisfactory resolution was produced.

That has been Obama’s way ever since. He believes that there are issues on which we can achieve positive, even progressive outcomes by going over and talking to the people we assume are our enemies. To Obama there is no downside to this action - if they turn us down, well, we’re no worse off than before. If they decide to work with us, wonderful. In some cases it can even wrongfoot the opposition by making them look like the uncooperative side, and makes us look like the better folks.

So Obama’s version of conciliation amounts to accepting from his “enemies” whatever of the Progressive’s goals they’re willing to concede peacefully. If they’re not willing to concede enough, he might still resort to confrontational tactics to achieve those goals — and use his previous willingness to talk as a weapon against his “enemies.” And do take note: landlords are enemies, in this vignette.

This may make him a friendlier Progressive; it might also make him a more dangerous one. The point is that he’s still a Progressive, and the question is whether he ever concedes any of his goals for a bipartisan solution, or whether he merely achieves whatever parts of them he can by talking first. We’ve never really seen him do the former. Note how Paul Mirengoff from Power Line analyzes Obama’s version of conciliation from the Fox interview:

I agree that Obama handled the questioning well, as he did throughout his appearance on Fox. However, it’s significant that the best Obama could come up with to recommend himself as a “uniter” was (1) to distance himself generally from (his characterization of) the Democratic position on regulation during the “the 60s and 70s,” (2) to note that he defended the right of Democrats to vote in favor of the John Roberts nomination, which he himself voted against, and (3) to blame the legislation before the Senate for his failure ever to deviate from the Democratic position when it comes actually to voting.

Obama either has a skewed sense of what it means to be post-partisan or an audacious sense of his ability to snow the American public. I’m guessing he has both.

For those who are genuinely concerned about partisanship in modern politics, John McCain is the real candidate, and Barack Obama is the deceptive knock-off. This further solidifies our assessment of Obama as an unapologetic hard leftist, beneath a soft-sounding exterior shell.

I must say, though, that there’s a perverse logic to at least this position from the Progressives, noted by Daily Kos diarist “Hunter” in his objection to Obama’s interview:

…there’s no upside in appearing on a network specifically devoted to the election of Republicans….

Nor, we should note, is there any upside to Republicans appearing on networks specifically devoted to the election of Democrats. I wonder when a Republican candidate will take note of this, and what the Progressives will say when one does.