Chirac égaux Carter

Well, well, well. Now we have it don't we?

Jacques Chirac the so called "President" of france is really Jimmy Carter in drag. In an article in the Wash Times he has cited "profound malaise" which is apparently a step up from the regular "malaise" cited by the peanut farmer cum President of near 30 years ago. Very much like the internet funny going around for a while now, that everyone has seen, about how france is changing their terror alert status from "run" to "hide" with the next levels being "surrender" and "collaborate" .


" . . . President Jacques Chirac said yesterday that more than two weeks of violence in the poor suburbs of [F]rance is the sign of a "profound malaise" and ordered measures to reach out to the angry rioters. . . "


Chirac plans more socialism as a means of "reaching out" to the disaffected. What he needs to be "reaching out" with is a pair of handcuffs and a deportation notice. Not an apology and another program. Don't you get it Jacques? They don't want your charity disguised as socialism. They want you and the other french people to get out of their country, "french-i-stan".

By the way Jacques, be sure leave the codes for your nuclear arsenal on your desk on the way out. Why would Iran go to all the trouble of building nukes when france can be rolled so easily, then they can have their nukes?

It is looking more and more like we are going to have to liberate france yet again. This time, I say we annex it as the 51st state and call it "New France". It would take some political backbone in this country so my plan may not be feasible, but it surely would be the right thing to do. You can't hang on to your country; fine, we'll come bail you out. Ask Kuwait. The french know this, we have already bailed them out twice.

You can't hang on to your country three times, we get the pink slip.

I can hear how that phone call goes now.

Bush: Hey Jacques, how's it hangin'?

Garbled response, furious hand waving.

Bush: You need what good buddy? You lost your country again? Jacques. Jacques. They burned the Louvre down? The Marines? Well they are kinda' busy as a matter of fact; but for what you descibe a few platoons ought to do, but listen, the American people have really had about enough of this this time.

It is really pathetic that an acceptable measure of the health of the french state is how many cars were burned last night. As though it is some sort of de facto market indicator of the french body politics last gasps.

"And this just in from france...only 284 vehicles were destroyed by torch wielding thugs last night down from 374, world markets rallied on the good news"

Think I'm being sarcastic? Read this qoute from the WashTimes piece.

" . . . Overnight, the number of car burnings -- a barometer of the unrest -- dropped again, with hoodlums setting fire to 284 vehicles, compared to 374 the previous night, police said yesterday. No clashes between police and rioters were reported. "The lull is confirmed," national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. A week ago, 1,400 cars were burned in a single night . . . "

The lull is confirmed . LOL

"Houston, we have a lull."

If it weren't so pathetic and utterly terrifying it would be funny. I suppose it's just me. I suppose I am somewhat lacking in nuance. I mean I went to college and even graduated, it must be that I am lacking in sophistication; or, is that sophistry? -SpinDaddy

Jordanian Payback

In the wake of the horrific bombing in Amman, the Jordanians are rightfully torqued off. Jordanian police have arrested 120 suspects in an attempt find all those involved. The Jordanians should get to the business of payback as only middle-easterners can do.

Having suffered this attack on their state, they should immediately declare and prosecute a war on the group claiming responsibilty; al qaeda in Iraq. The Iraqi and Coalition troops in Iraq, should stand aside and let the Jordanian army get after them; mid-eastern style.

Even better, the Iraqi and Coalition troops could not only, not interfere, but they could actually help root these bastards out and kill them. We could even arrange a twenty-first century version of the Lend-Lease act wherein we assisted the British with arms and materiel prior to WWII. Under this twenty-first century version, we could supply the Jordanians with a "plug and play" type of military might that they are probably unable to muster on their own.

The Jordanian people, a strong regional ally, have suffered butchery at the hands of fascists.

Time for some payback. -SpinDaddy

Boldness Rather Than Timidity 2.0

Perhaps Deroy Murdock has been reading BumperStickerPolitix. He has an excellent post at National Review Online that sounds the same meme as my earlier post encouraging the Bush administration to Boldness Rather than Timidity.

Murdock challenges the White House to first get its communications freak on. " . . . For starters, President Bush must address his biggest strategic problem: his and his administration's stunning wholesale inability to communicate.
Why, for example, has President Bush been unable to deliver clear, detailed, and coherent speeches to explain that Guantanamo is not his personal torture chamber, but a vital facility to isolate and interrogate suspected Islamo-fascists mass murderers? He should pick ten major thugs at Gitmo. Use Power Point to present their mug shots. Clarify how they fell into U.S. custody. Specify intelligence data that interrogators have extracted from them, including any attacks such data have foiled. Some twelve detainees released from Guantanamo have resumed terrorist operations, including shooting at American GIs. Tell us more. . . "

Indeed, do tell. There are many many compelling stories that should be told about the war on terror and not doing so is clearly diminishes support for the effort. These stories are also needed as a powerful counterweight to counter those intent on undermining the war effort, whether in Iraq or at GITMO or the recent leak regarding "black prisons" where various maniacs are being dealt with.

I also happen to believe that more forceful presentations could have been made regarding the Presidents domestic policy agenda including education, and Social Security reforms. Instead we are left with the politically bold Social Security reform proposal in an ash heap on the floor. The President was rolled too easily on this one.

Murdock makes also the point that if need be, heads should role if staff are not up to task.

" . . .White House Press Secretary Scott McMilquetoast, I mean McClellan, exudes timidity. His briefings instill neither confidence nor inspiration. The president should name McClellan ambassador to a nice, non-controversial Caribbean island . . . "

Murdock also has the same suggestion for Chief of Staff Andrew Card and perahps Murdock is right when he says that if ". . . Andrew Card cannot get through to the president. . . the commander-in-chief would be better served by someone who does not fear him. . . "

Read the whole thing, I think Murdock is onto something here.

-SpinDaddy

Oil Company Executives Harassed By Senate

Energy

Your US Senate is wasting the valuable time of oil company executives who are busy trying to find more oil for our trucks and SUVs. The senators are again claiming price gouging, collusion, whatever. How many times do we have to go through this to find once again that there is no collusion and there is no gouging. There have been investigations like this for the last several years and nothing of the sort has ever been found.

Even more outrageous than this is the call by the junior senator from NY, Mrs. Bill Clinton to impose a windfall profits tax on the oil companies who have the sheer audacity to report a profit. The economics of such foolishness are likely to make us even more dependent on foreign oil producers than not. Either she is a crass socialist, or she is utterly ignorant of market forces. I suspect it is the former, and she doesn't realize that her slip is showing.

Oil companies are in two businesses simultaneously; getting oil out of the ground to sell on the world market, and in some cases retail sales of oil derived products such as fuel and lubricating oil. When the worldwide demand for oil is up and temporary shortages in refined oil products drive up the prices on speculation; a company that produces the commodity involved will see an increase in revenues, and if costs are in order, an increase in profits. This is purely the result of a successful business endeavor, and not some evil conspiracy.

I am all about increasing our energy independence profile and have blogged about it several times, call me naive, but I don't buy into the whole "big-oil-industry-is-sticking-it-to-us" meme. If you do, I have a little challenge for you.

I will give you a shovel and let you to go get the oil for a day. Oh yeah, by the way, we'll need several hundred million 55 gallon barrels today, and after you dig it out of the ground, you'll then need to transport it several thousands of miles. After you do that, I'll need you to subject it to extreme heat and pressure to refine it into the useable fuel I would like to buy from you.

Well ?

Get busy, you've got a lot of work today. Pretty quickly you will surmise that you will need a bit of help to achieve this task. Perhaps you would like to use larger equipment than a shovel. Some of this oil is under thousands of feet of water. Are you starting to get the idea here? Unless you are God, you will need the next best thing with which you might get such help; capital.

The oil derived fuel you put into your car every few days or so represents a huge achievement of capital at work, and if the oil companies turn a decent profit every once in a while, perhaps they will be able to go get you some more of it.

There are steps we can take to lessen our exposure to some of the extremely volatile sources we use now but it will require the political will to put the leftist-socialist-environmentalists in their place. Pie in the sky nonsense about "green-energy" is just that. By the estimates I read; a so called hydrogen infrastructure, if it can ever be considered an economically viable replacement for oil at all, is at best decades away.

This great piece at Tech Central Station highlighting the folly of green energy as well as this great piece from James K Glassman which also addresses the supply side of the equation, and the one here from Glenn Harlan Reynolds, with some keen insights.

If these Senators are so terribly concerned about high energy prices and their effects on the consumer, then they should act immediately to reduce the federal tax burdens on these products and the companies that produce them. They can't control OPEC, but they can sure as heck lower the tax burden.

They should act to immediately lessen the bureaucratic and environmental regulations that impede the flow of cheap reliable energy products to market.

Well ?

I'll bet that not one Senator mentions reducing the Federal governments take from the energy industry so as to lessen the burden on their constituents they are shedding crocodile tears over.

Any takers on that bet? -SpinDaddy

Je Ne Parlais Pas francais

france

To whom will france surrender?

Perhaps france should call the UN for help?

At the very least, they should lodge a strongly worded objection.

It isn't really all that funny. Please note that I have stopped capitalizing the proper name of a country; well, a so-called country anyway. When they grow a backbone, I will consider capitalizing their name again, but after a fortnight of standing by while their country is burned to the ground by vandals and radicals I am convinced they don't have enough respect for their own country to warrant this, so.

I am deeply concerned that should we be unable to quell the advances the left continues to make in this country, that we will find france as the model of our very own future. Hear me out here. This is the current situation as I see it.

france has been crippled by socialism. Socialism implemented through bureaucracy and extreme overregulation, which have the exact same effect as denying ones property rights and sovereignty. Throw in a wide open immigration policy with lax enforcement, and you have a recipe for disaster. Is this starting to sound familiar yet? Who crippled the body politic of france by means of bureacracy and overregulation?

The left.

In other words to simplify the process a little for puposes of explanation it goes like this: the left weakens a country internally through the usual means of bureaucracy, moral depravity, and other rot; then the country weakened sufficiently, will fall. Whether pushed from the outside or inside does not matter, the left has softened them up for the kill.

Meanwhile Johnny-NASCAR-dad, and Suzie-soccer-mom plug along in a daze thinking (but only occasionally) that the cold war is over and that we won.

No. We tore down a wall in Germany but that was not; and is not the extent of the the corrosive influence of the left who now masquarade as "environmentalists", "progressives", "anti-globalists" and their goal of socialism is now disguised with the latest euphimism "social-justice". Social Justice inevitably involves some scheme to redistribute wealth.

Socialism.

We are witnessing the fall of france. It's not just me saying this, Tony Blankley has a great op-ed piece at Real Clear Politics, saying pretty much the same thing. Any day now, the surrender monkeys will either surrender to the radicals and vandals or somebody might actually send in the french military (such as it is), and put this thing down.

This will, of course, horrify the french leftists who will act promptly to apologize for offending the radicals and vandals, and will then immediately act to remedy the wrongs perpetrated by the french military by apologizing, and giving the radicals and vandals anything they wish. Some proposals being discussed are giving the radicals and vandals voting rights!!

Yeah, that ought to help.

It will help france become a nuclear armed islamic power. Who needs Iran when you can roll france over so easily? Regardless of how france gets there the end result will be the same. A once major european power having slid one step closer down the slippery slope towards "Eurabia", as Mark Steyn writes about in this excellent op-ed. -SpinDaddy

Democrat Wins of 08NOV05

Democrat Wins of 08NOV05

Hugh Hewitt has some great advice for the California Governor in an open letter that you can read here.Hewitt has some great suggestions that the governor would do well to consider.

The VA governors race is, I think, a hint at what the GOP can expect on a larger scale if they continue to ignore their base and instead govern to please the socialist blowhards they are exposed to inside the beltway. The GOP must have its base show up if they expect to win elections and it looks as though they did not do so yesterday in VA.

As Hewitt points out in the post linked to above.

"... As Nixon often remarked: You can't win with just the conservatives, but you cannot win without them..."

The republicans in congress and senate have about a year to realign with their base. That is scant time, given how far they have to go.

The good news is that the election refroms proposed by MoveOn.org types were soundly defeated in Ohio.

Other than that, the wins are not the earth shaking calamities for republicans that Howard Dean and Ron Reagan Jr would like you to think they are. -SpinDaddy

ExxonMobil Achieve Record Profits

This is good news, in spite of the wailing and moaning on the left.

This insightful op-ed by John Tamny from the National Review Online points out the greater economic picture of the recent spike in oil prices. Yeah, yeah I know "the man" is sticking it to us. But it turns out that when oil companies are able to operate profitably, they are able to invest more resources in getting more oil ! !

" . . . Back in 1980, in the midst of the last era of expensive oil, oil companies represented 28 percent of the S&P 500’s value. This investment boom stimulated exploration and led to an oil “glut” in the 1980s and ’90s. In this new environment, cheaper oil and lower oil-company profits meant that investment moved elsewhere, and with this asset redeployment, oil-company share of the S&P 500 fell to 7 percent . . . "

Tamny also reports that as more oil companies report better earnings their market valuation will increase from the current 10% share of the S&P 500. As they do oil will get cheaper.

" . . . record profits attract imitators and innovators. Canadian oil company Suncor Energy is an example of innovation at work. It has devised a way to extract crude from oil sands, and the consensus is that this process will greatly expand the amount of proven reserves around the world. Happily, investors have rewarded Suncor; its stock is up 400 percent over the last five years, a timeframe in which the Dow has been flat while the S&P500 and Nasdaq have been down. . . "

This process whereby oil is extracted from tar sands is more expensive than pumping it out of the ground in Saudi Arabia, and would not have come about without capital investment. Record oil company profits are a good thing, and should be celebrated instead of castigated -SpinDaddy