Which we already do, by the way. It's called the Federal Fuel Excise Tax. And it's currently 18.4 cents/gal (24.4 cents/gal for diesel.)

But wherever there's a will to tax more, there's a way.

Obama's proposal seems to follow up on that idea in section 2218 of the draft bill. That section would create, within the Federal Highway Administration, a Surface Transportation Revenue Alternatives Office. It would be tasked with creating a "study framework that defines the functionality of a mileage-based user fee system and other systems."

The hell?

By the way, the states and even some municipalities pile on too. Taxes per gallon average 41.1 cents nationwide (CA sets the bar).

Why would they consider this? (I mean, besides the obvious "hey, it's another tax yippee!). I'm guessing somebody put a pencil to the offsets in revenue from increased CAFE standards and hybrids, and got a little nervous. You could add in concerns about suppressed demand as a result of vastly higher prices.

It doesn't matter really. When it comes to developing new and more creative ways to take your money, Democrats never sleep.

via Instapundit and adamsbaldwin on Twitter.

UPDATE: Slublog has a suggestion:

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Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:38 AM | Comments (149)
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Why the killing of OBL didn't move markets much. My own take on this is simple: OBL was old business that had nothing to do with our current economic troubles. Most Americans are glad he's worm-food, but his death isn't providing the psychological lift it might have had in the dark days after 9/11. (And the Administration's increasingly-incoherent messaging on the event is only diluting the public opinion further.)

In Portugal, a DOOM delayed is only a DOOM deferred, not a DOOM avoided.

I sold a bunch of silver when it was nudging $50 an ounce because I thought that $50/oz silver was ludicrous. The price of silver crashed almost immediately after I did this. (What awful powers do I have?!?) I'm not saying this to brag (it really was a combination of guesswork and good luck) but just to point out that if even a dummy like me can see evidence of panic-buying, it must be really really obvious. I'm still pretty fond of silver and will probably buy some back when it goes back down some more.

Another call for states to go exclusively to defined-contribution plans rather than defined-benefit plans. I suspect that this will happen eventually, but only after the power of the public-sector unions have been broken and a lot of court cases have been filed. In other words: it'll take a financial catastrophe to force the issue. The pressure is going to mount when muni debt starts getting more expensive and states have to choose between paying pensions, servicing debt, and actually performing the day-to-day business of government.

California, senior member in good standing of the Loyal Order of the Terminally Boned (LOTB), is home to San Francisco -- a city whose finances are in pretty dire straits. San Francisco is one of the big cities I'm keeping an eye on in the next couple of years as an interesting test-case in how Democrat-controlled governments are going to handle onerous benefit costs when they start to chew away at funding for favorite liberal programs (not to mention more quotidian stuff like trash-collection, sewer and water, and all the rest).

Okay, so Social Security is doomed. We obviously need to reform it (or preferably abolish it and replace it with something better). The Democrat answer? Let's implement another entitlement program just like Social Security! It can't miss! (If this actually comes to pass, fair warning: I'm leaving the planet to open an off-world mining, manufacturing, and prostitution entertainment business in the asteroid belt.)

Public sector unions in Illinois gearing up to do what public-sector unions in Illinois do. Which is to say: wring money out of the taxpayers.

Teh Bernank: Inflation is low! Spend! Consume! Reality: What are you, high?

The jobs recovery? Not a "recovery", actually. More like the twitching of a corpse.

The GOP and Democrats may be reaching a deal on the debt-ceiling debate. It's not a question of whether the debt-ceiling will be raised; of course it will. The big question is what trade-offs the Donks will be willing to make in order for that to happen, and whether the GOP will blink if the Donks play hardball.

[UPDATE 1]: It's not just the employment numbers that are sucking wind. Manufacturing is down too.
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Posted by: Monty at 05:08 AM | Comments (60)
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Happy Cinco de Mayo. Shots for everyone!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:07 AM | Comments (187)
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Scan down to the item "What's the Matter With Connecticut?"

Where previously committed liberal advocate Thomas Frank had been puzzled that modest-income rural voters were doing crazy, self-destructive things like voting Republican, now committed liberal advocate Kate Zernicke is puzzled that middle-to-higher income suburban voters are doing crazy, self-destructive things like attending Tea Party rallies.

It's insane. Don't these people all know that voting Democrat is in everyone's interest, whether black or white, rich or poor, young or old, male or female?

Let's just stop with the variations of the question, the different demographic and regional parsings, and just sum it up: the media considers it an unsolvable mystery why anyone would do something crazy like vote Republican.

As I just wrote, maybe instead of speculating about us as if we were an alien species with which a common language had not yet been established, maybe they could just ask us and we'd clear up the bafflement for them. But they won't.

I understand this syndrome when it comes to political partisans and true believers. And many of the media are just that, of course. But they're something else besides: They're supposed to be professional fact-gatherers and fact-disseminators.

It's not as if these facts are kept secret from them. This is not a conspiracy to keep the truth from the liberals. We conservatives are not shy about our beliefs.

If they asked us why we didn't like Obama, we would tell them. Eagerly.

But they don't ask. They don't even listen when we tell them, unasked.

These are facts in plain sight. This is low-hanging fruit.

Easiest thing in the world if a liberal is bewildered by a conservative's position is to write him an email and ask him.

But they don't.

They've got their Narrative.

And they're sticking to it.

The Narrative answers all questions -- or, at least, all questions that matter.

Why are conservatives doing x? Because they're evil and stupid and crazy.

Why are conservatives saying y? Because they're evil and stupid and crazy.

God forbid you should pick up the phone, ask a question, write down someone's actual words, and then report that.

No, by all means -- keep telling me what I really think.

Because you're the ones to know, right?

Posted by: Ace at 07:04 PM | Comments (118)
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I can't watch it yet; I just watched the show from two weeks ago. They really kicked it up a notch.

Posted by: Ace at 06:16 PM | Comments (66)
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Oh yeah - happy Star Wars Day!

The 'Hudson' Cut of Aliens

Yep it's every single line that Bill Paxton spoke in Aliens (including scenes from the extended version) and it pretty much tells the story with all its ups and downs purely in terms of Hudson quotes. Well at least until it was Game Over for him.

After watching this I realized just how many quotable lines he had. And that Hudson wasn't a coward or just comic relief - he was sort of an Everyman character who goes from relaxed cockiness, to fear and desperation, and ultimately to desperate badassery, reflecting how an average person probably would react in the same situation. And as one commenter points out - other than Ripley he has the largest kill count of aliens in the movie.

[Video below the fold] more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:53 PM | Comments (490)
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Kind of shows these guys up as the pikers, pretenders, and prats they are -- the first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club.

And similarly, if you found some intelligence gems, you don't alert the enemy to this fact. You act.

"I thought to myself, why in the world would they be talking about that. It ought not be talked about, there ought to be..just go about their business, gather any intel you can, and leave in doubt the people out there who feel vulnerable as a result of this," he told 630 WMAL.

Nah, let's just tell the enemy what we have, so long as we can get a nice paragraph about us in the New York Times out of the deal.

As they say: If you get to the endzone, act like you been there before.

Instead of just drinking from the cup of captured intelligence, this Administration has to parade it around and show it off for their media friends.

Andrew C. McCarthy also wrote a few days ago that the mere death of bin Ladin should have not have been announced -- let the world figure it out in time, and in the meantime, prepare the next wave of attacks, without (for example) Zawahiri being given advanced warning.

Although that's a good general rule, I think it fails here. If Pakistan knew Osama lived there, they would know something had happened there immediately; even if they didn't know, we'd have to tell them in order to explain an attack on their sovereign territory, and then they'd leak it.

In this case, the target was so notorious that being quiet about it would have served no purpose at all. All it would have done would be to delay Obama's photo op, and that just would have happened in 24 or 48 hours anyway. In the meantime, Zawahiri would have a pretty damn good idea he was compromised.

But as to immediately proclaiming the value of the captured intelligence -- yes, this is an example of an administration that is big on preening and taking victory laps and not terribly concerned with actual success and results.

This administration talks when it should be quiet.

It's all this administration does -- talk and squawk and brag and boast and preen and praise itself.

Obama says he won't reveal the kill-pic because he doesn't want to "spike the football," i.e., he wants to act as if he's been there (the endzone) before.

But in fact he hasn't been there, and it shows, and his Administration is doing a "coordinated celebration" over their "intelligence jackpot."

Posted by: Ace at 02:50 PM | Comments (595)
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Gory stuff, so content warning.

If that link doesn't work try here.

No Osama. Why? Because these were snapped by a Pakistani official, who then sold them to Reuters. No Osama picture because we carted his ass away to dump it in the ocean to be eaten by Hebrew eels.

You Made The Mistake of Bringing a Gun To a Gunfight, Except You Brought a Water-Gun: Ch-ch-ch-check it out -- one turd-blossom died with a squirt gun beneath him.

No, but really, it probably belonged to one of the verminspawn living here. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:42 PM | Comments (292)
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Interesting idea by Michael Ledeen, who writes the article as if it's a dialogue with the ghost of grandmaster spy James Jesus Angleton.

Here's the point, or my point, anyway: We often cover up the real method by which we obtain intelligence. You always hear that among the most tip-top classified parts of intelligence are "sources and methods." No matter what, you don't give away your source, and you don't tip the method by which you discovered the intelligence, if it's novel or clever. If it's novel or clever, you can keep on doing it, until your enemies figure out what you're doing.

There is an old story (a true one) about the United States lying about how it knew about German ship and plane movements. The truth was: We cracked (mostly) the "unbreakable" Enigma code. But we couldn't let the Germans know we were reading their coded communiques. So this was the most tightly-held secret of the war (perhaps more tightly-held than the Manhattan Project).

When we would alert local commanders to expect a German attack, we would lie to the commanders about how we knew this. One lie we told was that "We have a local Italian, friendly to us, who peers over the wall around the German compound; he just saw the planes scrambling, so prepare for an attack."

We told this same local commander this lie multiple times, alerting him to an attack.

One day the local commander radioed back: "Can you ask the Italian to count how many petrol dumps they have?"

Well, we couldn't answer, because there was no source actually looking; this was all derived from Enigma transmissions. So the response came back: "He can't, he's sick today."

Well, that's the basics of the story. I forget the exact details but that's basically all true.

At any rate, the point is that the whole story of the phone call and tracking al-Kuwaiti back to Abbottabad could be a lie to hide the truth, that some source, possibly a Pakistani government official, who would rather have his involvement overlooked, came forward due to integrity or wanting that $25 million bounty.

It's possible. We've done it before. We'll continue doing it.

Ledeed further speculates (via the "ghost of James Jesus Angleton") that maybe the Pakistan government secretly revealed this to us in exchange for 1, a winding down of our anti-terrorism drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and 2, keeping the cash they've come to rely on coming.

Correction: I thought the US was also breaking Enigma by war's end, but commenters say it was only Britain, and looking online, I can't find the statement "the US also began breaking Enigma."

So the details of that part may be shaky. I think the story was about Italy or North Africa, involving US troops. How we knew, I don't know; I know it came from codes, but maybe it was the Brits' intelligence passed to us.

Posted by: Ace at 01:13 PM | Comments (170)
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This would be a bit of a black eye for Bush's team, if true, because India said they told us once in mid-2007 and again in 2008.

But not much of one. Giving someone an informed hunch/opinion that someone is in the vicinity of a 4.5 million metro center isn't super-helpful, even if believed and true. (To clarify: Islamabad has a population of 1.3 million or so, but the metro area -- of which Abbottabad would be counted -- is 4.5 million.)

They did specify "in a cantonment area," which is what Osama's area was. But I don't know how much that helps, because I don't know 1, how many cantonment areas are in that area, or 2, what the hell a cantonment area even is.

So maybe I should look that up.

a temporary or semi-permanent military or police quarters.

Well that does narrow it down. But they didn't know Abbottabad, as they make no specific claim about that. And also, Abbottabad is known more as a "tourist town" than a cantonment area.

I Should Have Read The Article: Like Joncelli did, who points me to this quote:

“The urgency with which Zawahiri visited Islamabad or the area in its vicinity suggested that he was there for some purpose. We told them about Zawahiri visiting Islamabad and we also told them that we believed Osama may not be hiding in caves but in a highly urbanized area somewhere near Islamabad. Of course, nobody had spotted him and it was a conclusion we drew on the basis of the information we got,” said a top intelligence official involved in processing the information."

Yeah, that's a real "maybe, maybe not" situation. The conclusion turns out to be likely true, but before we knew bin Ladin was in Abbottabad, we really didn't know if Zawahiri was visiting him or some other person. Like someone with money to donate to the cause, or a Pakistani official who could help out, or a gay brothel, etc., etc., etc. -- a thousand other likely possibilities spring to mind, none looking less plausible than India's conclusion.

Pakistan: We Totally Had It Covered. They had Osama's compound being watched under "sharp focus" since 2003.

Since 2003? You had it under sharp focus for eight years and still didn't move the ball beyond that?

This word "sharp focus" you keep using. I dunna think it means what you think it means.

Either that, or you knew, and just refused to tell.

Posted by: Ace at 12:32 PM | Comments (160)
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