H.R. 2264: No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act of 2007 (NOPEC):

The Sherman Act (15 U.S.C. 1 et seq.) is amended by adding after section 7 the following:

`Sec. 7A. (a) It shall be illegal and a violation of this Act for any foreign state, or any instrumentality or agent of any foreign state, to act collectively or in combination with any other foreign state, any instrumentality or agent of any other foreign state, or any other person, whether by cartel or any other association or form of cooperation or joint action–

`(1) to limit the production or distribution of oil, natural gas, or any other petroleum product;

`(2) to set or maintain the price of oil, natural gas, or any petroleum product; or

`(3) to otherwise take any action in restraint of trade for oil, natural gas, or any petroleum product;

when such action, combination, or collective action has a direct, substantial, and reasonably foreseeable effect on the market, supply, price, or distribution of oil, natural gas, or other petroleum product in the United States.

The bill passed the House 345-72.

Unsurprisingly it would only apply to foreign states, exempting the organization most responsible for restricting supply: the U.S. Congress.

One of the problems with government run education is that, without any built-in, systematic mechanism for holding schools accountable, all kinds of half-baked, feel-good policies get propped up by liberal educrats. It is rare, however, to find policies so blatantly racist as those currently being promoted in San Francisco.

...A new grading system will expose schools - even the popular, high-scoring ones - that are failing to address the institutional racial inequities within their walls.

"The issues we're dealing with are capital D Democracy issues," said Tony Smith, deputy superintendent of instruction, innovation and social justice, and the plan's architect.

The question, however, is how to solve those deep-rooted societal problems that are playing out in schools. So far, no urban district has bridged the achievement gap or created schools of equal quality for children regardless of their race or income.

The solution, according to the superintendent's plan, starts with a top-down acknowledgement that the schools are contributing to the inequities in society, Smith said.

Each school will be judged by how well it "serves each and every student based on that school's ability to disrupt the historically predictive power of racial, ethnic, linguistic and socio-economic student attributes," according to the plan.

Deputy superintendent of instruction, innovation and social justice? Barf.

The real objective here is not what it seems Educating children is not this educrat's goal; advancing the liberal agenda is. Notice where he contends that the first step is to admit that education is institutionally racist. This is a classic liberal ploy whereas they attempt to get one liberal assumption accepted by default by advancing a completely different proposal. Once that proposition is accepted, liberals are then free to engage in all manner of social engineering, all in the name of correcting this "historic racism."

Furthermore, this policy is inherently racist. What has individual performance to do with the larger averages of some identity group if there is no causal relationship? Unless we are to believe that different races are more or less capable of performing than other racial groups, it makes no sense to focuse on something as irrelevant as race? All students should be held to high standards, not some to lower standards than others because they belong to a certain race. This policy, like so much of liberal identity politics, will dice people up into little groups and exacerbate racial distinctions for no reason. So much for the color-blind dream.

I recently watched the remake of the classic sci-fi movie (and Michael Michael Crichton's book) The Andromeda Strain. It was rather remarkable how thoroughly the producers managed to litter the 4-hour (with commercials) mini-series with leftist propaganda. Almost no liberal talking point went unmentioned, regardless of how irrelevant to the plot the subject may have been. Iraq, wiretapping, don't-ask-don't-tell, port security and terrorist detentions all got prominent mentions, along with swipes at "greedy" corporations who dared to provide natural resources for consumption. Furthermore, the military is of course controlled by a cabal of secret organizations working in the shadows and conducting various nefarious activities that endanger all of humanity. Even low level foot soldiers don't think twice when ordered to kill Americans without any explanation.

All of that pales in comparison to the overall plot, which found future human society unable to deal with a super-virus (which we are led to believe was probably created by future society as a biological weapon) thanks to the loss of certain bacteria found near deep-sea vents due to a new plan to "strip mine" the ocean floor.

For sci-fi fans, this should sound familiar. Star Trek IV, all but written by the Sierra Club, followed a similar plot where mankind faced extinction unless humpback whales could answer the call of a malevolent space probe. In 2008, instead of feeling guilty for our whale hunting ways, we're supposed to go even further and mourn the loss of deep-sea bacteria. Even as liberal propaganda, this effort of The Andromeda Strain strained credibility.

The narrative for the general election is being cast and anyone who doesn't immediately jump on the Obama bandwagon will be accused of racism. CQ Politics frets that Obama will face a "racial challenge" in the general election. To substantiate the proposition that people who don't support Obama are all just evil racists, the article rests heavily on Newsweek poll, an organization with a history of using shoddy polling methodology.

While Illinois Sen. Barack Obama runs dead even with Arizona Sen. John McCain in a new Newsweek poll at 46 percent each with 8 percent undecided, the survey took a hard look at the race factor by employing what it called a “Racial Resentment Index” to further analyze voting blocs and it concluded that, “Obama’s race may well explain his difficulty in winning over white voters.”

Questions in the poll that tested voters on issues that involved race included views on affirmative action, whether blacks or whites lost out more because of racial preferences in things like hiring or school admissions, whether racial discrimination or personal responsibility accounted for problems facing black Americans, opinions on interracial marriage and dating and reaction that white voters would have if a black American with equal education and income moved into their neighborhood.

Measuring people's motivations is admittedly a difficult task, but this is a horrible conceptualization of racism. Newsweek's "Racial Restenment Index" doesn't measure racism, it measures liberalism! The only questions that possibly have anything to do with racism are the last two; the rest are just direct measures of an individual's proclivity toward liberal policy. Support affirmative action? If so, you're a good non-racist (liberal)! See everyone as victims rather than in control of their own destiny? If not, you must be a racist (and an evil conservative)!

Be prepared: the media will, at the behest of the Obama campaign, continue to assault non-Obama voters and insist on labeling them all racists with ever greater frequency the closer we get to the election.

Low-cost health coverage will now be "allowed" for Floridians! One can't help but ask: who was disallowing it in the first place? Oh, that's right, government was.

With considerable fanfare, Gov. Charlie Crist traveled the length of his state on Wednesday to sign a bill aimed at providing low-cost health coverage to the uninsured by allowing the sale of stripped-down insurance policies.

...His initiative, which both houses of the Republican-controlled Legislature approved unanimously, enables insurers to create bare-bones policies that the governor hopes will sell for no more than $150 a month. That is about 60 percent less than the average cost of a policy for a single person in Florida, according to state insurance regulators.

The policies would be available to any Floridian 19 to 64 who has been uninsured for at least six months and who is not eligible for public insurance. In a critical provision, insurers would be prohibited from rejecting applicants based on age or health status.

To make the policies affordable, Florida will allow insurers to offer policies that do not include many of the 52 services that standard policies must currently cover, like acupuncture and podiatry. The state added a mandate on Tuesday, when Mr. Crist signed a bill requiring coverage for treating autism.

The low-cost plans have to include preventive services, office visits, screenings, surgery, prescription drugs, durable medical equipment and diabetes supplies.

It's amazing that no where in this coverage is the author able to articulate the most obvious point: if undoing government restrictions lowers cost, then government is at least partly to blame for high costs. It is also, therefore, responsible for the numbers of people without insurance. Anytime you have these restrictive standards which inflate production costs, you necessarily freeze people out of the market by preventing them from being serviced at a price they can afford.

Mr. Crist acknowledged that the low-cost plans would not provide “Cadillac coverage.” But he said he was optimistic that uninsured Floridians would buy the plans after they are able to analyze their costs and benefits, starting early next year.

Milton Friedman addressed the problem of "Cadillac standards" in Capitalism and Freedom:

At a meeting of lawyers at which problems of admission were being discussed, a colleague of mine, arguing against restrictive admission standards, used an analogy from the automobile industry. Would it not, he said, be absurd if the automobile industry were to argue that no one should drive a low quality car and therefore that no automobile manufacturer should be permitted to produce a car that did not come up to the Cadillac standard. One member of the audience rose and approved the analogy, saying that, of course, the country cannot afford any thing but Cadillac lawyers! This tends to be the professional attitude. The members look solely at technical standards of performance, and argue in effect that we must have only first-rate physicians even if this means that some people get no medical service - though of course they never put it that way. Nonetheless, the view that people should get only the "optimum" medical service always lead to a restrictive policy, a policy that keeps down the number of physicians.

While Friedman was addressing medical care itself, the analogy works equally well for insurance coverage. Government mandates enforcing "Cadillac coverage" have kept down the number of people who can afford coverage. In other words, the problem of high numbers of uninsured is government created. If you want to reduce the number of people without medical insurance, allow them to buy policies that are customized to their needs, not ones loaded with unnecessary mandates created by government nannies.

In today's culture everyone is victim. It doesn't matter how responsible one is for getting themselves into a situation, the fault always lies elsewhere. The following WaPo article pulls out all the stops in trying to get readers to sympathize with the criminals (illegal aliens) instead of law enforcement.

Antonio Escobedo ran to get his wife Monday when he saw a helicopter circling overhead and immigration agents approaching the meatpacking plant where they both work. The couple hid for hours inside the plant before obtaining refuge in the pews and hall at St. Bridget's Catholic Church, where hundreds of other Guatemalan and Mexican families gathered, hoping to avoid arrest.

What a terrible plight for this family man who, if this opening is anything to go by, is guilty of nothing more than trying to work in a country run by a bunch of fascists!

"I like my job. I like my work. I like it here in Iowa," said Escobedo, 38, an illegal immigrant from Yescas, Mexico, who has raised his three children for 11 years in Postville. "Are they mad because I'm working?"

Yes, that's exactly why they're mad. Don't ask me why they don't arrest all those millions of people working while legally in the country, though. I'm sure that's just coincidence.

Monday's raid on the Agriprocessors plant, in which 389 immigrants were arrested and many held at a cattle exhibit hall, was the Bush administration's largest crackdown on illegal workers at a single site. It has upended this tree-lined community, which calls itself "Hometown to the World." Half of the school system's 600 students were absent Tuesday, including 90 percent of Hispanic children, because their parents were arrested or in hiding.

Cry me a river.

Current and former officials of the Department of Homeland Security say its raid on the largest employer in northeast Iowa reflects the administration's decision to put pressure on companies with large numbers of illegal immigrant workers, particularly in the meat industry. But its disruptive impact on the nation's largest supplier of kosher beef and on the surrounding community has provoked renewed criticism that the administration is disproportionately targeting workers instead of employers, and that the resulting turmoil is worse than the underlying crimes.

"They don't go after employers. They don't put CEOs in jail," complained the Postville Community Schools superintendent, David Strudthoff, 51, who said the sudden incarceration of more than 10 percent of the town's population of 2,300 "is like a natural disaster -- only this one is manmade."

He added, "In the end, it is the greater population that will suffer and the workforce that will be held accountable."

"Disproportionate" is a favorite cry of liberals when they want to try and evoke the issue of fairness in situations where it is entirely irrelevant. Criminals do not get to cry that it's not fair that they got caught while other criminals did not. Yes, the administration should go harder after businesses that knowingly hire illegals, but those cases, due to the necessity of proving what they knew about their employees, are much more difficult to build than those against individuals illegals, whose very presence in the country is all the evidence necessary. That not enough effort is being put into going after these businesses is not a reason to sympathize with the criminal behavior of illegal aliens, as the author of this article so desperately wants the reader to conclude.

The talking heads have been abuzz, salivating at the prospect of a decapitated republican party, with many already writing up the eulogies. Reports of the party's demise are, of course, premature. While the landscape this election is unquestionably bad, the party can regain its strength in the long run if it returns to a proper understanding of its role in the American political landscape.

Republicans have fared so poorly in recent years primarily because the party has abandoned the ideological framework which successfully guided the party into power and replaced it with the democrats issue-oriented, say-whatever-it-takes-to-achieve-power approach. Lacking any significant overarching ideology, the democratic party jumps from issue to issue, adopting whatever position is most popular by pandering to a public that may or may not be capable of understanding the consequences of its positions. The Republican party cannot win by adopting this appeal-to-popular-feelings approach. It lacks the ability to out pander the democrats, in large part because the media are less inclined to call democrats out on the inconsistent positions which will necessarily arise when candidates act on whim rather than coherent ideology.

Unable to actually win many new voters with this approach, Republicans are still perfectly capable of losing them. No longer given the option of a "thinking man's party," ideological voters who once saw a sharp contrast between parties now find little reason to consistently choose republicans over democrats.

The way out of the wilderness is fairly straightforward. The party must quit trying to play the democrats game. Don't berate oil companies just because democrats are doing it; point out the numerous ways in which government has forced high gas prices upon us. Don't whine about fictional "price-gouging"; defend the free market system and acknowledge the important role that price fluctuations play in simultaneously signaling a need for, and encouraging the movement of, additional resources. Don't jump on board the "climate change" bandwagon; point out the very real dangers in ceding control of so many realms of private society out of fear for an unproven environmental threat. The republican party needs to justify its existence in a political landscape in which the role of panderer is already taken. To do so it must not only pay lip service to the free market, classical liberal ideology, it must live it.

Following Senator Harkin's baffling attempt at using McCain's military service to disqualify him from the Presidency, I dispatched the following email:

Senator Harkin,

Your recent comments regarding Senator McCain's military service, and the impact it has on his qualifications for the office of President of the United States, were disgraceful and unbecoming of your office. They reflect a tragically misguided and negative view of the men and women who serve in our armed forces.

According to your statements, you consider it "dangerous" that military personnel, having outlooks shaped by their service, might be elected President. This sentiment flies in the face of our nation's history. To date, twenty-one Presidents have had combat experience, while many more served but saw no combat.

You further contended that volunteering for service, or coming from a family with a history of such, is a greater disqualification for office than having been drafted. I am having trouble apprehending the logic, and I use that term loosely, which leads you to conclude that volunteering to serve ones country suggests a character unfit for the Presidency. In my experience it is the career military personnel, and in particular those who come from a long line of such service, who exhibit the greatest willingness to place the welfare of others above their own. Perhaps to you and your party this is not a desirable characteristic; for the rest of us it is essential.

Your statements are all the more confusing when considered in the context of previous accusations. You once labeled the Vice President a coward for not serving in Vietnam, and then sanctimoniously declared that he and President Bush were "running scared because John Kerry has a war record and they don't."

Having a track record of distorting your own service, among numerous other things, for personal gain, it comes as no surprise to me that you would now contradict your previous positions and disparage fellow servicemen for partisan gain. If you had half as much honor as the average servicemen, you'd resign after disgracing yourself in such a manner. I'm not holding my breath.

A disgusted civilian,
Brian Garst

Running a typically anecdotal story on the upcoming democratic primary in Kentucky, the Chicago Tribune has thrust itself into contention for understatement of the year. Despite noting Clinton's 25+ lead in polls, the Tribune could only bring itself to admit that the state is "leaning Clinton's way".

The cause of Obama's inability to run a competitive campaign, of course, must include racism:

Like its Appalachian neighbor, Kentucky shares a large rural population, though metropolitan areas in Louisville, Lexington and the suburbs across the Ohio River from Cincinnati give Obama an opening.

Although Gershtenson said "religion and guns matter" in the Kentucky ethos, race also is a factor. "There's no doubt that there is a significant portion of the electorate that would be very hesitant to vote for a black man," he said.

Really? And what evidence exactly leads one to conclude such a thing with "no doubt"?

Kim Criglier, a married mother of four who runs a photography business and works the bar at the historic Brown Hotel, said she and her friends have debated the upcoming election.

A lifelong Kentuckian, who considers herself "a liberal, yet conservative," she acknowledges resentment to strong women exists in some parts of the state, yet "they would be more apt to vote for a white woman over a black male, sad as that is."

This is how the racism argument typically goes. The media never actually shows any empirical evidence to support their claims. Rather, they just find people who think that everyone else is racist, regurgitate their unsubstantiated opinions, and we're just supposed to throw up our hands and say, "by golly, they must be right!"

I always get a good chuckle monitoring the daily global warming hysteria. It's gotten to the point where it's impossible to turn around with running into another report on how global warming is going to make life miserable. In honor of the media's obsession of stoking fear over global warming I'm beginning this series, which will run for as long as I have material (which doesn't look to be running out anytime soon), highlighting all the myriad ways in which global warming is supposed to ruin our lives.

First up: Kidney Stones!

Latest research indicates that global warming could have another unwanted spin-off - it may spur the formation of kidney stones.

Dehydration, particularly in warmer climes and higher temperatures, will only exacerbate this effect. Consequently, the prevalence of stone disease may increase, along with the costs of treatment.

This is going to be fun.