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Coming Soon, to a State Near You!

Posted by BrianR on Sunday, August 27, 2006 3:17:55 AM
 

It’s been said that Kalifornia is the state that starts all trends in this country. Rather than being called the “Golden State”, based on the history involved, I think we should be called the “Bellwether State”. That’s unfortunate for those of you who don’t live here, because there’s another nutty idea coming down the freeway (instead of the “pike”, as it’s known in many of the more rational areas of the country).

In taking another look at some of the proposals coming up in this year’s elections at the website of the Secretary of State, I’ve come upon another doozy: Prop 87.

You can see it for yourself here, at the official website:

http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/elections_vig_publicdisplay.htm

Then scroll down to Prop 87. The official title of this little gem is:

ALTERNATIVE ENERGY. RESEARCH, PRODUCTION, INCENTIVES.
TAX ON CALIFORNIA OIL PRODUCERS.INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDEMENT AND INTITIATIVE


Sounds great. But what does it mean? Hint: Notice the key word: TAX.

Fifteen words in the title, fourteen of which are irrelevant, because of the fifteenth: TAX.

Some background: California is a fairly oil-rich state. We’ve been producing crude for decades. Of course, much of the current potential production lies in off-shore fields, which can’t be developed because it might spoil the view from some millionaire’s estate in Santa Barbara or Montecito or Santa Monica or… well, you get the picture. And, of course, we can’t even build new refineries to process the crude oil we’re forced to import from other sources because, well… you get THAT picture, too.

Further, Kalifornia has just about the highest tax burden per gallon of fuel (gasoline) in the nation. As of late 2005 (the latest data I could find) Kalifornia’s tax burden on a gallon of gas was 60 cents/gallon, comprised of 41.6 cents state, and 18.4 cents federal taxes. The only states I find on this chart with higher taxes are Hawaii (which has to import all its gas), and New York (home of Schumer and Clinton). Even Taxachussetts was lower! See the chart here:

http://api-ec.api.org/filelibrary/Gasoline-taxes.pdf#search='california%20gasoline%20tax%202005'


Moving on, what’s the purpose of this new tax? Once you wade through all the Barbra Streisand on the title page of the document, it sets up a committee. This committee’s goal? “Reduce petroleum consumption by 25%”. How is it going to do that? Well, according to the proposal, by simply being a committee! And, of course, imposing a new tax!

This new committee, political appointees all, is accountable to no one. Sounds like a great deal to me if you’re a committee member. They have the power to reorganize or initiate “new programs” apparently without accountability to anyone, with only the most nebulous of goals mentioned, and certainly not defined.

They have the power to impose taxes on oil produced in Kalifornia according to a sliding scale that even the State’s own analyst couldn’t make sense out of. It could be anywhere from 1.5% to 6% of value, but the measure is unclear as to how this would be imposed. But it would be IN ADDITION to extant taxes. Further, any imposed taxes couldn’t, by law, be passed on to the consumer. Back to that in a moment.

So, you ask yourself, what does this mean to me? I don’t, thank God, live in Kalifornia. Here’s your answer.

Remember earlier, when I wrote that the tax couldn’t be passed on to the consumer? What does that mean to the PRODUCER of the product? Oil companies operate on a thin margin, because their profit depends on volume. Add another 1.5% to 6% tax burden, ONLY to be absorbed by the producer, and Kalifornia oil production could dry up even further, if that’s possible. The mandated adjusted selling price of Kalifornia oil, with the new taxes, would exceed any profitablitity that could be recouped by the producers in the world- or spot market, because any profit would be more than absorbed by the new taxes. That would make Kalifornia crude unprofitable to produce, which would subtract Kalifornia oil production from the domestic oil-production scene.

And here we are, a nation dependant for its energy existence on importing oil from the Middle East where our avowed enemies are located, adding even more ammunition to their fiscal arsenal.

Why, in the title, do I write “Coming to a State Near You”? Because your state is either an importer or exporter of gasoline. And if this kind of lunacy, intellectually bereft in every way, can pass here, totally ignorant of the larger issues involved, as only a “feel good” measure, in a state literally awash in oil if only we were allowed to produce it, what can happen in YOUR state? And what does this mean to our country as a whole, while we’re engaged in a War on Terrorism centered in the currently-largest oil producing region in the world?

Instead of even considering this kind of idiocy, we should be realistically looking at ways of enhancing our domestic production capacity, from developing and exploiting new fields, to bringing on-line new technologies like wind-farming, boosting our nuclear power capabilities, and expanding our refinery capacity for fossil fuels.

Instead, we are being held hostage to the environmentalist extremists.

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City of Glass

Posted by BrianR on Saturday, August 19, 2006 12:09:09 PM

I am not sanguine.

As I’ve been saying for years, we are in the midst of a civil war in this country every bit as divisive and important as the one that took place in the 19th Century. Fortunately so far bloodless, this conflict will determine the shape and character – and possibly the very existence -- of our nation as we move forward. The schism occurred during the Vietnam War era, when irrational idealism suddenly became a political force on the American Left. This idealism is grounded not in a realistic worldview based in practicality and traditional American values, but in a philosophy based on wishful thinking, naïve assumptions about the level of the threat posed to us by our opponents on the national stage, and an over-riding belief in the innate goodness of man which leads to a dangerous conviction that our opponents will obey the same rules of international conduct that we do.

Compounding the threat to America is the fact that we are engaged in a war with Islamo-Fascist terror. The seed of this war can be found in Jimmy Carter’s ineffectual response to the Iranian seizure of the American Embassy (United States sovereign territory) in 1979. One must understand that in the Middle East, strength of action – not hollow rhetoric -- is culturally respected. Carter’s incompetence in dealing with the crisis was perceived in the region as a sure sign of American weakness. It’s interesting to note that after 444 days in captivity, the hostages were released 20 minutes after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, a sure sign that Khomeini knew that in Reagan he was dealing with someone of a completely different ilk than the fumbling and weak Carter.

However, by that point the stage had been set. While the loss of the Vietnam War could be seen as an anomaly, that loss being due to the political activism of the Left and the news reportage of the time (General Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnam’s chief military strategist, is quite clear on this in his books), the fact that a liberal President (Carter) repeated the same mistakes inevitably led to the perception of America’s lack of resolve due to internal conflicts between the Left and the rest of America.

This emboldened our enemies, as typified by the actions of those like Muammar Qhadaffi and Saddam Hussein, who took both overt and covert action targeted against American interests, if not always directly against America itself. Of course, the perception of our weakness culminated in the attacks of 9/11/01, and the loss of over 3,000 American lives on American soil.

Iran’s current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is strident in his demands that Iran be allowed to develop nuclear capability, and unwavering in his anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric. The question then becomes: what will he do if he develops nuclear weapon capability?

To listen to the American Left, Iran will really pose no threat; they have to be rational people, after all, and what’s one more nuclear-capable nation on the international scene? In spite of Britain’s disruption of a plot to destroy several America-bound airliners, the Left is more concerned with the right of terrorist operatives to make unmonitored cell phone calls.

This is horribly naïve. There’s no reason in the world to believe that Ahmadinejad won’t make a nuclear device available to his perceived allies – those such as Hezbollah – to move forward his (and other Islamic fanatics’) dream of a defeated America. Particularly as we are perceived by them at this stage of the game as a paper tiger. They are confident any response we may make, crippled as we are by our own internal disagreements, will be ineffectual at best.

I have read that the crater of the detonation of a nuclear device is lined with glass due to the fusion of sand caused by the intense heat.

What is going to happen in this country if a portable nuclear device, carried by a small cell of committed Islamo-fascists, is detonated in one of our major cities, leaving behind a glass-lined crater? What if Washington, DC, or New York, or LA, or San Francisco is turned into a City of Glass?

The death of 3,000 people united this country for a short time, until the Left once again veered off onto their own path. But what will be the reaction if the body count is not 3,000, but 3,000,000? I don’t think I’d want to be a known Leftist in this country after that event.

Unfortunately, I’m reaching the conclusion that just such an event is becoming ever more inevitable.
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Who "Owns" Israel?

Posted by BrianR on Tuesday, August 15, 2006 10:27:19 PM
In this entire debate over the war -- be it WOT, Iraq, or the recent  Israel/Lebanon conflict, not only on this website but internationally, up to and including the UN -- those who oppose the WOT in general and the Israeli conflict with Hezbollah in particular try to seek refuge in historical arguments over who has "historically owned" these lands.

Of course, once you open that door to the argument, you've opened the door to boundless arguments over the "ownership" of every land on earth.
Let's talk realpolitik: in the modern era countries are "owned" by the nation-states that have conquered them by one manner or another; political alliance, purchase, military conquest, whatever.

For anyone, on either side of the equation, to talk about lands in the Middle East, including Israel, in some millenia-long context is simply ridiculous. Are we going to return Australia to the Aborigines? White people have only been there a couple of hundred years or so. New Zealand to the Maoris? North America to the hundreds of Indian tribes (please forgive me for my consciously un-PC name usage -- or don't, I don't give a rip) who were running around in animal skins when the whites showed up?

Heeeellll, no. Ain't gonna happen.

So then it boils down to reality, which is: whatever happens as a result of diplomatic or military action. The days of imperial conquest are OVER.

If the Israelis lose, in three hundred years who's gonna care? If we get our butts kicked because we refuse to fight the I-F terrs on their basis, who's gonna care? Not us; we'll all be dead, without the option of posting a "reset" command. But I hope my descendants aren't wearing chadors, and can have some say in their lives without a bunch of religious enforcers running around with whips forcing them to cover themselves.

We have to think specifically about the threat to OUR way of life. I don't care about a bunch of Lebanese civilians who don't have the guts or weapons to tell some Hezbollah schmuck to hit the road with his RPG launcher. Should have thought of that earlier. Get a life, or some guts, or a gun, or someone with some balls to stand up for you. Otherwise, you get to turn into a red mist. As they say in Russia: toughsky shitsky.

If the Israelis lose this war, a few hundred years from now everyone will just shrug. More importantly for us, if we lose this war, no one will shrug because our conquerors will get to rewrite history and erase us from the picture.

Think about it.
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The Zenith of Radical Leftism (They Eat Their Young)

Posted by BrianR on Friday, August 11, 2006 6:46:01 PM
 
Though the loss by Joe Lieberman to Ned Lamont of the Connecticut Democrat primary has been commented on to death over the last few days by bigger names than I, I felt I had to throw in my two cents worth (though Townhall isn't paying me even the two cents to do so).
 
For those of us who lived through the period of political turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s, this whole era is oddly reminiscent of those times, right down to the sloganeering chants, though the phrases themselves have changed. "Hell, no, we won't go" has turned into "Bush lied, people died", "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" into "Halliburton!", "Make love, not war" transformed into "No more blood for oil".
 
The last Democrat president who can be said to have represented mainstream America is Kennedy; though liberal for his time, were he a candidate today with the views he held then, he would probably be Republican, though of the McCain mold. Johnson made the mistake of trying to institute his Great Society program while expanding and micro-managing the Vietnam War, and that doomed his presidency. The war was unpopular on the Left, the social program on the Right. Johnson lost his constituency on both sides. He tried to be all things to all people; obviously an impossible task.
 
When that became evident, the McCarthy/McGovern wing of the Democrat party started its ascendancy. As time passed, groups that were originally on the fringe of the party were given greater voice within the party as to platform issues and the party worldview (or at least what was expressed as such). I think this was due to only one thing: party strategists, aware of the fact that they were wandering afield from traditional American values, and in order to maintain political viability as a national party, were forced into an escalating dependancy on a coalition of fringe elements cobbled together out of expediency.
 
Of course, the Achilles Heel to this approach is the accelerating cycle of development inherent within. Each of these fringe constituencies, aware of their own independant weakness, formed alliances with others to form blocs within the party that had the ability to wield power. As their influence grew, more mainstream elements left the party due to disagreement, leaving the new coalitions as an ever growing percentage of the remainder, enhancing their power, and on it goes.
 
Further, much of liberal orthodoxy is based on emotion rather than reason: compassion, guilt, rage at perceived inequities, etc. The problem with emotion-based decision-making is that it is vulnerable to rational contradiction. A good case in point is the welfare system set up under Johnson's Great Society. Originally conceived as a solution to the problem of poverty and its attendant outgrowths (such as out-of-wedlock childbirths), it has been a dismal failure with a cost in the billions of dollars that has actually produced results exactly counter to those intended. Yet, for its duration, when the program was criticized the reaction from the Left was that we simply hadn't yet spent enough money, more was needed. It wasn't until the reforms during the Clinton administration, forced upon him by the Republican Congress, that the crisis was to some extent eased. That vulnerability to rationality of the emotion-based Leftist orthodoxy is probably the main reason why any criticism of Leftist policy is met with "arguments" that essentially try to shoot the messenger: ad hominem attacks ("racist", "homophobe", "cruel", etc), diversionary arguments and tactics, refusal to directly answer questions or issues, obfuscation, science perverted from objectivity to political ends, lies, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. It's also why there's a difference in how each side of the debate views its opponents. The Right views the left as foolish or misguided, because they don't understand reason. The Left views the Right as evil, because if you don't feel the same rage or guilt or compassion -- and if you don't agree with them you obviously don't feel those same emotions -- well, then, you are obviously a bad person.
 
Now, it has finally reached its zenith. Whereas before the anger of the far Left was focused on the Right and some internal accommodations were made in order to preserve the coalition, that state of affairs has come to an end. Joe Lieberman can in no way be considered conservative. He's just about as traditionally liberal as it gets -- "traditionally" liberal, though, and that's the key. The far Left -- spearheaded by radicals such as the blogosphere (MoveOn, DailyKos, et al), the Sheehanites, Deaniacs, George Soros, Al Franken, Michael Moore -- has become bold enough to demand monolithism even within the Democrat party, to the point that if you're perceived as having wandered off the Leftist plantation, you are doomed if they can possibly help it. They are heaping as much scorn on their own ideological brethren as they do upon their true foes, the Right. And over single-policy issues, not overall conformance to Leftist principles. Lieberman wandered off the plantation on only one issue; he was burned at the stake for his blasphemy. This far left fringe has arrogated to itself the right to determine party policy and orthodoxy. This is an ominous development for the Democrat party.
 
As a conservative, I can't help but view these developments with joy. The Democrat party is pushing itself ever more leftward, away from the Mainstream America which is still rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic and traditional values. The more they become the shrill party of dogmatic obeisance to antithetical values, the less likely they'll remain a viable national party. They may go the way of the Whigs.
 
I have long maintained that we are in the midst of a civil war in this country, fortunately so far bloodless, but every bit as serious as the one that took place in the 19th Century, as it deals with the very issues that form the core tenets defining the nature and fabric of what this country represents. Hopefully, this is a war my side wins.
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There Oughtta Be A Law!

Posted by BrianR on Saturday, August 05, 2006 11:44:44 AM
 

Back when I was a kid, in prehistoric times, that was a catchall phrase used sardonically to express the thought that sometimes you simply have to put up with things with which you don’t agree.

It was said then in jest. Not anymore.

“You say you want to enjoy the sense of freedom and exhilaration that comes from riding your Harley up the coast, the wind blowing through your hair? Tough! Get that helmet on!”

“You want to take a nice Sunday drive along Mulholland, and view the Pacific from the cliffs? Buckle up! Click it or ticket!” (I hate that puerile phrase).

When the seat belt law was proposed back in the day, it couldn’t pass until the proponents promised that the seat belt violation alone would never be cause for one to be stopped by the cops. Turned out to be a big, fat lie. What a shock, I’m sure.

“You want to smoke? You’ve gotta go over THERE! That’s right, behind the dumpster where no one can see, hear, or smell you. Move it, bud!”

“You want that Ferrari, the one that only gets 8 miles to the gallon? The penalty tax will be about a gazillion dollars. Pay up!”

Liberals lose sleep at night worrying that someplace, someone might be enjoying himself, and having a good time. Can’t have that!

“You don’t like the fact that this school is teaching your 10 year-old how to put a condom on a banana? We’re the school board. We know what’s best. Shut up!”

“You want to mention God at the commencement address? You’re crazy! Turn off the mike!”

I guess the only law liberals don’t want is one that prevents doctors from poking a hole in the skulls of unborn babies and vacuuming their brains out.

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Mel “The Pariah” Gibson

Posted by BrianR on Thursday, August 03, 2006 3:17:38 AM
 

I had another topic planned for this week’s essay; in fact it’s already written and stored on my desktop. It’s pretty funny, too, though it makes a pretty good point (at least in my mind).

But in driving around over the last few days and listening to talk radio, and from what I’ve read in the recent columns, I’ve simply got to jump into this issue.

The Left, of course, is taking this opportunity to jump all over Gibson because, frankly, they hate him. This is the guy who brought you “Passion of the Christ”. He’s Catholic, and conservative in his values. Omigod, he’s a Christian Conservative! And a Hollyweird success!

Can’t have THAT!

I expect that from them. That’s what they do. It’s the nature of the beast. They hate Gibson, Tom Selleck. They hated, HATED Charleton Heston. How dare he become the President of the NRA?!

They grudgingly put up with Clint Eastwood, because he’s the ultimate Hollyweird success story, his movies make gazillions of dollars, and all of them want to participate, as actors, writers, producers, studios, whatever.

Those of you who know me personally know I used to be an actor. Now you know one of the main reasons I left that industry, and never looked back in regret.

What I find especially disturbing is that conservative writers, and writers whose columns supposedly reflect a Christian perspective, are also jumping on the “Gibson is despicable” bandwagon. Sometimes, this is the hubristic failing of those of us on the right: sanctimony.

I don’t know what their motives are; one can’t read the mind of another. But it makes me question, especially those who write from the “Christian” perspective, their true values. The only exception to this whole shivaree I’ve come across is Dennis Prager, and to him I give kudos.

Look into your hearts and be honest.

Did every one of you also condemn Cynthia McKinney when she slapped a simple Capitol guard doing his job? And she was supposedly stone-cold sober.

You ever flip someone off in traffic?

You ever "beam" bad thoughts at the jerk in the grocery express lane with 25 items?

You ever curse at the idiot in the fast lane doing 55?

Ever look at that kid with the Mohawk haircut and think he's a druggie?

Ever look at the three black teens coming your way and cross the street or duck into a store?

Do you harbor thoughts, about any person or group, that you consider un-Christian?

Do you make a conscious effort to suppress or compensate for those thoughts in your everyday life?

If, when out of control or in an inebriated state, you gave voice to those thoughts though you never acted on them, would you like that held against you as a matter of course?

And lastly, if you can honestly say, in your deepest heart of hearts, that you've never had any un-Christian thoughts, why haven't you stepped forward as the next Messiah?

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