Jaded Sage:

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Lost in all the discussion about the war in Iraq is the fact that the architect of 9-11-01 is still out there. In fact Osama Bin Laden has released a new tape warning Europe not to support US efforts in the Middle East. Arno Herwerth drives a rather over-the-top van and reminds everyone who passes him that Osama is still at large. The state of New York wants their license plates back that say “Getosama”. They deem them offensive. Personally, I deem offensive the fact that the government would rather nation build in Iraq than track down and kill the villain that killed 3000 Americans.

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Posted by JadedSage

Energy policy is a significant issue for the upcoming election. Rising gas prices effectively puts great amounts of money into the coffers of regimes such as Saudi Arabia who in turn fund the spread of Wahhabism throughout the world. How we address our energy needs in the future will determine not only the welfare of the planet but also the duration of conflicts in the Middle East.

A recent New York Times article outlines how the 2008 candidates for President stand on the issue of energy policy:

Candidates Offer Different Views on Energy Policy

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Published: November 28, 2007

WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 — As oil prices flirt with record highs, hovering around $95 a barrel on Tuesday, the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are offering few quick fixes but profoundly different long-term approaches to energy policy.

Over the next decade or two, the differences could have a major effect on billions of dollars in government spending, on the relative prices of gasoline versus renewable fuels and on the efficiency of American cars and trucks.

For Democrats, the goal of energy policy is largely about reducing oil consumption and has become inseparable from the goal of reducing the risk of climate change.

For the Republican candidates, energy policy is primarily about producing more energy at home — more oil and gas drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; more use of American coal to produce liquid fuel; and, as with Democrats, more renewable fuels like ethanol.

By contrast, all of the Democratic candidates would repeal billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil companies, spend billions more each year to develop alternative fuels, and require cars and trucks to be far more fuel-efficient.

Indeed, most of the Democratic rivals are proposing plans that are more aggressive than the bills that Democratic leaders in Congress are hoping to pass before year-end. The disparity raises questions about whether the candidates’ plans are politically realistic. The candidates, however, are quietly acknowledging limits to what they can offer in the way of immediate relief, aside from putting more money into a program that helps low-income people with the cost of heating oil.

“There are no short-term solutions,” said Leo Hindery, the chief economic adviser to John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina who has positioned himself to the populist left of his principal Democratic rivals.

The Republican contenders, maintaining the traditional conservative approach of relying on market forces, are much more reluctant to impose change through restrictions on oil and coal or mandates for alternative fuels.

“The truth is that the answer to high prices is high prices,” said R. Glenn Hubbard, a top economic adviser to Mitt Romney, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts. “This is one area where the public expects more from politicians than politicians can deliver.”

To be sure, the party contrasts are muddled in some areas.

Among the Democrats, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois supports the development of coal-based “clean” liquid fuels — an idea that grates on many environmentalists who see coal as a major contributor to global warming. Senator Obama also is open to government support for nuclear power while Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has said she is agnostic on the issue.

Within the G.O.P. group, Senator John McCain of Arizona has broken with the Republican orthodoxy on increasing energy production. Senator McCain repeatedly opposed oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a top goal for both President Bush and Republican leaders in Congress.

Likewise, Senator McCain and Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, are the only Republican candidates to support mandatory limits on emissions of greenhouse gases. Mr. Huckabee, who has positioned himself as a standard-bearer for social conservatives and Christian evangelicals, recently called action on climate change a “moral issue.”

Manik Roy, a lobbyist for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said the Republican candidates may be more divided than they appear about controlling greenhouse emissions.

Mr. Romney, for example, said he opposed government restrictions. As governor of Massachusetts, he stayed out of a regional “cap and trade” plan by Northeastern states to impose ceilings on emissions by electric utilities and let companies trade their emission allowances.

But shortly after he made that decision, his state regulators imposed their own restrictions on such emissions.

For consumers, the precise effects are difficult to predict. Democratic mandates to sharply increase the use of renewable fuels could initially lead to higher prices at the gas pump, much as the mandate to blend ethanol into gasoline contributed to higher prices in 2005.

But over time, a large expansion of biofuels could both reduce their own production costs and put downward pressure on oil prices. Much would depend on how fast new technologies, like ellulosic ethanol, become practical on a large scale.

The Republican proposals to expand domestic oil and gas drilling could damp oil prices, though not for at least five years because of the long lead times to discover and develop new reserves. Likewise, Republican support for coal-based liquid diesel fuel could eventually drive down prices for gasoline. But without expensive and still unperfected technology to capture carbon dioxide, such liquids would increase the production of carbon dioxide, which most scientists say would aggravate global warming.

At the same time, Republican proposals to encourage more oil and gas drilling, and the candidates’ reluctance to require lower greenhouse emissions, could boomerang by prolonging what President Bush has called the nation’s addiction to oil.

Though they differ on the details, the Democrats all closely link the goals of “energy independence” and slowing global warming.

Most of them would create a cap-and-trade program, under which the government would set a ceiling on carbon emissions and require companies that burn fossil fuels to bid for carbon permits through an auction. The ceilings would be steadily lowered over the coming decades, with a goal of reducing carbon emissions as much as 80 percent below current volumes.

But for Republicans, energy policy is quite separate from the issue of climate change — and some of the candidates have been skeptical that global warming needs to be addressed.

The Republican candidates have mostly been silent about repealing tax breaks for oil companies. Though all the candidates support investment in biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel (Iowa, after all, dominates the early primary race in both parties), most of the Republicans oppose mandatory restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions that would effectively penalize the use of oil and coal.

In a written response to questions about his energy positions, Mr. Romney said on Friday that “now is not the right time to raise taxes on our oil companies” and expressed doubt about requirements to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

“While it is likely that human activity is contributing to climate change, I am not sure how much, or what we can do to significantly reduce or reverse this effect,” Mr. Romney wrote. Any new mandates for renewable fuels should be “a collaborative effort between industry, scientists, and the agriculture and energy communities.”

By contrast, the leading Democratic presidential candidates have jumped ahead of their own colleagues in Congress — possibly too far ahead to be politically realistic.

In Congress, for example, Democratic leaders have coalesced behind a cap-and-trade proposal under which the government would initially give away about half the carbon-emission allotments to the factories and electric utilities that would need them, granting them a large subsidy to help pay for future investments. But most of the Democratic candidates insist that companies should bid for all the allotments in an auction and pay for them, which would raise much more money for the government.

The Democratic candidates are also running ahead of their counterparts in Congress on fuel economy. The Senate recently passed a bill that would increase the average fuel economy of cars and light trucks to 35 miles per gallon by 2017. The current requirement is 27.5 miles per gallon for cars and 21.3 miles per gallon for pickups, sport utility vehicles and minivans.

Most of the Democratic candidates would go much further. Senator Clinton says she would require 40 miles per gallon by 2020 and 55 miles per gallon by 2030. Mr. Edwards favors 40 miles per gallon by 2016, and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico wants to push to achieve 50 miles per gallon by 2020.

But those requirements could be impossible to pass. In the House, Democrats from Michigan and other car-producing states strenuously oppose even the Senate’s comparatively modest plan. After months of stalemate, House and Senate Democrats are close to agreeing on a compromise before Christmas.

NYT

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Mike Huckabee has seen a gust of wind hit his campaign sails based on his unusual mix of moral values and populous plans but The Economist believes many of his ideas are ill conceived:

“THERE are no perfect candidates. We had one 2,000 years ago, but we crucified him,” says John Stemberger, a family-values enthusiast from Florida. That pretty much captures the mood among socially conservative voters. If you think abortion on demand is a holocaust and gay marriage threatens to undermine the conventional sort, you are unlikely to back a Democrat. On the other hand, none of the leading Republicans thrills the religious right either.

Rudy Giuliani is pro-choice on abortion. Fred Thompson lacks gumption. Mitt Romney is a Mormon. John McCain tells a moving story of his time being tortured by godless communists: one of his Vietnamese guards secretly loosened the ropes that trussed him and, by way of explanation, drew a cross in the dirt with his foot. But Mr McCain has long riled religious conservatives, once calling the late televangelist Jerry Falwell an “agent of intolerance”.

Enter Mike Huckabee. A couple of months ago, few people had heard of him outside his native Arkansas, where he was governor. This week a poll put him a close second among Republicans in Iowa, the crucial first-voting state. He came within four points of the leader, Mr Romney, and has trebled his support since July, leaping from 8% to 24%. Twice as many evangelical Protestants in Iowa backed Mr Huckabee as backed Mr Romney, with the rest of the field nowhere. Pundits now have to take Mr Huckabee seriously.

His core appeal is to “values voters”, as they sometimes call themselves. Pro-lifers and evangelical Protestants immediately sense that he is one of them. He is a Baptist minister. He can cram eight Bible stories into a single paragraph. He can say things like “it’s important that the language of Zion is a mother tongue and not a recently acquired second language” without it sounding contrived. (Pious audiences know this is a dig at Mr Romney, who only became pro-life when he was thinking of running for president.) He can even link abortion with illegal immigration: would America need to import so many workers if it hadn’t let multitudes die in the womb?

If social conservatives were to coalesce around Mr Huckabee, that would throw the Republican primaries into utter confusion. The candidate they back tends to win the Republican nomination. Their record turnout in 2004 helped George Bush beat John Kerry. Yet social conservatives are only a small minority of the national electorate, so they have to pick a candidate who also appeals to others. Some think that Mr Huckabee might be that candidate.

Largely, this is because of his personality. On the campaign trail, he is approachable, chummy and eloquent. He talks about hunting. He plays the bass guitar with school bands. He plays up his endorsement by a bearded action-movie star: “My plan to secure the border? Two words: Chuck Norris.” As the son of a fireman and the first man in his family to finish high school, Mr Huckabee embodies the American dream in a way that Mr Romney, the big-businessman-turned-governor son of a big-businessman-turned-governor, cannot hope to.

He cracks corny jokes. He admits they are corny, yet crowds love them. On a recent stop in New Hampshire, he suggested that Jesus doesn’t approve of air travel. “He said: ‘Lo, I am with you always.’ But He said nothing about up high.”

Another man from Hope

Like Bill Clinton, he hails from Hope, Arkansas. (“Give Hope a second chance,” he quips.) Also like Mr Clinton, he has humanising flaws. He was once colossally fat. Feeling unwell, he asked his doctor what the problem was. “You’re fat,” said the doctor. Mr Huckabee said he wanted a second opinion. “OK, you’re ugly, too,” came the reply. Mr Huckabee got a grip, lost 100lb (45kg) and now runs marathons. He wrote a diet book: “Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork”. At a dinner in New Hampshire, he offered your correspondent his sticky pudding.

Many voters find this appealing. Values voters, typically poorer and less well-educated than other Republicans, sense a kindred spirit. Heck, plenty of Americans can relate to a man who has wrestled with extra rolls. Plenty applaud a candidate who seems so straightforward, too. In a poll by YouGov/Polimetrix for The Economist (full results here), Republicans rated him the most honest candidate and Americans rated him the most moral of either party (see chart: Hillary Clinton was rated the least honest, and, after Mr Giuliani, the least moral).

Mr Huckabee’s weakness is the worry that he may be a lightweight figuratively as well as literally. It is fine for his 12-step weight-loss plan to be simple. “Eat less and exercise more” is good advice. But his 12-step plan to “restore America’s greatness” is worryingly populist.

Take trade. Mr Huckabee calls himself a free-trader, but on the stump he does not sound like one. He rouses nativist crowds by fretting that America cannot be secure unless it is self-sufficient in food, energy and military hardware. “I don’t want to see our food come from China, our oil come from Saudi Arabia and our manufacturing come from Europe and Asia,” he says. “There is so much foolishness in that one sentence it is hard to unpack,” comments Rich Lowry, a conservative columnist. America hardly imports any food from China. Mr Huckabee’s promise of energy independence within 10 years is impossible. And cheap imports benefit precisely the cash-strapped folk Mr Huckabee purports to champion.

Mr Huckabee’s tax plan is as radical as it is ill-thought out. To achieve a populist goal—abolishing income tax—he proposes a federal sales tax. To make up for lost revenue, it would have to be a stiff one, and levied on practically everything. Mr Huckabee says a rate of 23% would suffice, but this is a sleight of hand. Calculated the way sales taxes usually are, the rate would have to be at least 30% and possibly much higher. This would be horribly regressive. Mr Huckabee says he can solve that problem by giving monthly rebate cheques to those who need them. But to track Americans’ income month by month would require a bureaucracy nearly as intrusive as the one Mr Huckabee hopes to abolish by repealing the income tax. The plan is a non-starter.

On green issues, he is all mood and little substance. He says God wants us to look after the earth, and touts his own use of a flex-fuel car. But he has no serious plan to reduce greenhouse gases. A carbon tax, he claims, sounds too much like a tax. And a cap-and-trade system sounds “a bit like buying indulgences from the ancient church,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Mr Huckabee’s ideas on health care are considerably sounder, and he sells them deftly. He understands that costs are out of control. “We have to change a system that happily pays $30,000 for a diabetic to have his foot amputated, but won’t pay for the shoes that would save his foot,” he says. He warns, wisely, of the looming budgetary calamity when baby-boomers start claiming Medicare (public health care for the elderly). Or as he puts it: when “all the old hippies find out that they get free drugs.” He touts the benefits of prevention, citing his own life-saving weight loss as an example.

Weighed in the balance

Overall, though, Mr Huckabee is a less rounded candidate than his chief rivals. He has little or no experience of foreign policy. His support among self-described moderate Republican voters in Iowa is negligible. He was not a bad governor of Arkansas—he fixed up the state’s roads and schools. But his success was hardly as dramatic as Mr Giuliani’s in New York, nor has he anything like Mr Romney’s breadth of executive experience. The website for the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think-tank, lists the various candidates’ positions on a range of foreign-policy areas: on an embarrassing number of them, including defence, North Korea, Africa and India, Mr Huckabee’s position is listed as “unknown”.

And as people start to take Mr Huckabee’s presidential bid seriously, he will face the sort of hostile scrutiny he has so far mostly avoided. The Club for Growth, a lobby for economic conservatives, assails him for hiking sales and petrol taxes in Arkansas, and for his attacks on industries he accused of “price-gouging”. The Club says that nominating him would be “an abject rejection” of the free-market, limited-government principles for which the Republican Party stands. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, gave him a “D” grade for fiscal policy. Salon.com, an online journal, recently published a long list of ethical complaints about Mr Huckabee compiled by a reporter from Arkansas.

Nationally, voters still think Mr Huckabee likeable and godly. That is probably not enough to win him the Republican nomination. But he might easily peel enough values voters away from Mr Romney to hand the race to Mr Giuliani, which might in turn prompt pro-lifers to support a third-party candidate in the general election. With five candidates still very much in the frame and no one convincingly ahead, the Republican primaries will certainly not be dull.

The Economist

Posted by The Jaded Sage

After nearly seven years in office President Bush has decided that diplomacy is an option to solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

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Posted by The Jaded Sage

   The cost of the Iraq War has been unprecedented for a conflict of its scale. According to the Democratic Staff of Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, the war has cost over $1 trillion. This amounts to over $20,000 for a family of four. By the time Bush leaves office the war in Iraq will have cost the US taxpayers more than the Vietnam and Korean Wars combined. The most significant effects of the war are not monetary. 3,876 soldiers have died in the land of Babylon and over 28,000 soldiers have been wounded.  Nearly 13,000 of those were not returned to duty. The stories of those who have been grievously injured mainly due to close impact weapons in the form of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) are numerous.

   In economics there is a concept known as opportunity cost. The general idea of an opportunity cost is if you spend your money on product ‘A’ what products are you then not able to buy since you purchased product ‘A’. We have seen this played out numerous times since the Iraq War began. Since we are spending so much money in Iraq and Afghanistan, what could we have done with that money? Democrats would like to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina, create a state run health care system, or heal the Social Security system. Republicans either don’t question the value of the war or would prefer to pay off the national debt, depending on who you talk to. One thing is obvious, we are not getting good value for our money.

   Through the spring of 2007 the war in Iraq was run as poorly as any in our history. Those deserving blame are as abundant as Donald Rumsfeld’s snowflakes. From the CIA’s Curveball to Cheney’s fear mongering. From the Democrat’s Congressional vote to Powell’s vial. From Rumsfeld’s false optimism to Bremer’s debathification policy. Through it all was the poor leadership of the Commander in Chief and the Democrats’ inability to present a strong candidate that could defeat such a weak incumbent in 2004.

 

   In the spring of 2007 there emerged a unique general who has changed the dynamic of the Iraq war. General Petraeus is everything Bush isn’t but he may end up being Bush’s savior. Petraeus is by all accounts one of the most intelligent military minds to bless the Army in some time. He received his doctoral degree with a paper entitled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam". Prior to being named commanding general of MNF-I (Multinational Forces- Iraq) he co-authored the field manual for counterinsurgency. Despite all the comparisons to the Vietnam conflict, the man who may make the most positive impact knows all about counterinsurgencies.  Our failings in Vietnam may end up being our lesson learned in Iraq.

  

Up until recently, this war did not deserve supporting. Those who led it in Washington and those who initiated strategy in Iraq were drowning in incompetence. The chief architects of this war are gone. Donald Rumsfeld has faded into the dustbin of history along with a vast array of neo-cons. Vice President Cheney has become a silent partner. His role has been filled by moderates such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Diplomacy, that evil word in Bush policies past, has emerged. We know President Bush is a slow learner but in the twilight of his administration it seems the strategy of international relations and conflict management have begun to be understood. It is clear there are significant gains in Iraq and as a liberal one cannot turn their back on a people who have suffered mightily from the rule of a tyrant and the chaos of over four years of war. Whatever you may have felt about the war prior, it is now time to forget the notion of an immediate US pullout. As a liberal, if you damned the Chinese in Tibet or the Sudanese government in Darfur, it is your obligation to support the Iraqis now that progress can finally be measured. The strategy of the surge is to buy the Iraqi government time. That time is now ticking. If they are unable to take advantage of the improved situation on the ground, then it is time to leave. For those that have suffered most, the families of the soldiers and the Iraqis themselves, don’t equate a failure in Iraq as a victory for the left. A failure in Iraq is much more significant than an "I told you so" moment. Failure in Iraq is a tragedy for the Iraqis.