He informs us that just 500,000 extra barrels of oil drilled in Saudi Arabia (which would take years and years to actually come on line, of course) will increase not only present supply but future supply, and thus knock the price of oil down, and stop endless up-bidding on the price by speculators, and all that other good stuff.

He does not explain, though, why Saudi Arabian oil has this magical property of increasing supply and psychologically pulling the carpet out from under speculators, and yet American oil does not.

We should be grateful that Chuck Schumer has at least grasped the interrelation of supply and demand. Now we just need explain to him the notion of fungibility, that a barrel of American oil is precisely the equivalent of Saudi oil as far as supply goes, and we'll be in like Flynn.

And on this point: Of the 18 billion in known reserves in the seas alone, ten million are off the coast of California, and those derricks could start producing oil within a year.

It seems a lot of them already are drilled and capped and ready to produce oil. They've just been shuttered by the ban on offshore drilling.

Posted by: Ace at 02:34 PM | Comments (40)
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Michael Yon cannot personally decide whether a country is in a state of war or not -- only the supreme military historians at NBC have that right -- but 1) he's there 2) he's sharp and 3) we all sort of are thinking this anyway.

Barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What's left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it's time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.

Big, big starting caveat with that "unexpected" business of an Israeli strike, which isn't really all that unexpected.

Similar thoughts from the Kagans and Keane:

All of the most important objectives of the surge have been accomplished in Iraq. The sectarian civil war is ended; al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has been dealt a devastating blow; and the Sadrist militia and other Iranian-backed militant groups have been disrupted.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government has accomplished almost all of the legislative benchmarks set by the U.S. Congress and the Bush administration. More important, it is gaining wider legitimacy among the population. The attention of Iraqis across the country is focused on the upcoming provincial elections, which will be a pivotal moment in Iraq's development.

...

As far as the civil war is concerned, there have been virtually no sectarian killings recorded for the past 10 weeks. Violence is still perpetrated by organized groups, but AQI, the remnant Sunni insurgents and Shiite fighters are now focused on attacking their own members who have defected to our side. This is a measure of their weakness. The Iraqi population is increasingly mobilizing against the perpetrators of violence, flooding American and Iraqi forces with tips about the locations of weapons caches and key militant leaders – Sunnis turning in Sunnis and Shia turning in Shia.

The fighters have not simply hidden their weapons and gone to ground to await the next opportunity to kill each other. The Sunni insurgency, as well as AQI, has been severely disrupted. Coalition and Iraqi forces have killed or detained many key leaders, driven the militants out of every one of Iraq's major cities (including Mosul), and are pursuing the remnants vigorously in rural areas and the desert.

The Shiite militias have also been broken apart, sending thousands of their leaders scurrying for safety in Iran. Iraqi forces continue to hammer Iranian-backed Special Groups and elements of the Sadrist Jaysh al Mahdi that have been fighting with them in Sadr City, Maysan Province and elsewhere. At this time, none of these networks can conduct operations that could seriously destabilize the Iraqi government. But both al Qaeda and the Iranians are working hard to refit their networks.

They don't say the war is over, and in fact the rest of the article is about the firmness and vigilance with which we must continue the fight, but obviously they are saying something big has happened in Iraq, and something good.

Is the war over? I'm not sure any guerrilla terrorist war is ever officially over; as long as one extremist with a gun or a bathtub full of chemicals is willing to kill, it's not "over" in the sense that hostilities have ended as with a conventional war and conventional armistice.

But is it effectively over? The media will of course never deem it so, but if violence in Iraq falls to the level that any peaceful state might experience if terrorists take a bad interest in it, I'd say it's over.

At the peak of violence, and the lowest point for war support, I admittedly went pretty wobbly on the war. I'm not sure how honest I was about that at the time, though I did make statements along the lines of "The surge is our last, best hope for a success in Iraq; let us give it six months and see if it results in progress." Implicitly, I thought if there was no progress, we had to pull the plug.

I just could not conceive of any realistic series of events unfolding which would result in victory. I thought the surge had a chance of working and for that reason must be tried, but I didn't think that chance was very high, nor did I expect the success of the surge to be more than incremental.

Instead of incremental gains, this past year our troops (and the Iraqis fighting beside them, and the Poles and Australians too) have succeeded spectacularly. And not merely spectacularly in a military sense, but spectacularly politically as well. Al Qaeda and the Sadrists have not merely been decisively defeated on the battlefield -- always important, of course, but not necessarily the equivalent of the political victory all wars are ultimately fought to secure -- but in their well-nigh complete rejection by the population in which, as they say, they once swam.

Just as I was hard-pressed to imagine how victory could occur in 2007, I'm having a hard time conjuring scenarios in which the victory is lost now.

But then, I was wrong in 2007, due to a failure of imagination, and a lack of appreciation that all those "Red on Red" fights we read at the time (Sunnis insurgents fighting Al Qaeda) were actually more than isolated events and represented more than petty differences which would soon be papered over, and of course an ignorance at how profoundly strategy and tactics could turn a war. (I stupidly thought that war was 90% just numbers and logistics, and strategy and tactics, while obviously important, were very secondary concerns, and probably could not, except in the oddball case, reverse the course of a war.)

That last bit was stupidity that I now feel pretty embarrassed about.

I did, however, note a lot of times that it is not merely Americans who can be exhausted by war, and that the enemy was not the Supermen the media always portrays them to be (and which they sometimes seem in the collective imagination; the Nazis, too, were seen by some as unstoppable supermen), and that the terrorists might be pretty good at senseless destruction, but our boys were much better at sensible destruction.

I also kept in mind that prior to our breakthroughs in Afghanistan, it seemed to the media, and to those who weren't listening to reports from the military, that the situation was a "quagmire" and were were stuck in another unwinnable war. Look -- the battle-lines aren't moving! Our troops aren't moving! So we're not having any success at all?

Of course, the military reported we were doing quite a bit, despite those battle-lines not moving much. We were coordinating with the Northern Alliance. We were buying the support of warlords. And, of course, we were bombing the living shit out of the Taliban. We were hollowing them out. Their lines stood on paper maps, but in fact were barely there anymore; we were just waiting until they were all but decimated to move forward and take control of the ground.

When our troops finally did move, they blitzed all the major cities in a matter of a week with light resistance. What appeared to the ignorant, and by "the ignorant" I mean our quagmire-happy media, to be a stalemate (a stalemate of ten or fourteen days!) was in fact simply a catastrophic defeat for the Taliban which simply hadn't yet been formalized by ground control.

Similar stuff was going on in Iraq, under the surface of the water, such as the very real and very profound split between Al Qaeda and indigenous Sunni insurgents, and our troops' and intelligence agents' exploitation of that split by bringing the Sunnis over to our side. I hadn't been fooled by the superficial lack of progress in Afghanistan, but I was fooled by the apparent lack of progress in Iraq.

And then came the surge, and all those beneath-the-surface gains suddenly became apparent.

There may still be such subtle shifts going on Iraq, but in favor of the terrorists. I have to admit that's possible, having missed all the invisible but very real progress being made in Iraq while I despaired. But it seems pretty unlikely -- they're being demolished militarily, they have lost all their key havens, they have lost the people, and the once-derided government is now looked upon as favorably.

What would it take for the Iraqi population to suddenly choose civil war and terrorism over security and increasing prosperity, especially given their very recent memories of the former option? I'm having trouble seeing what could animate the public to begin shouting "Let's give Al Qaeda and Al-Sadr another chance."

Again, though, I've been wrong before.

Posted by: Ace at 02:30 PM | Comments (37)
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View the CNN report here, skipping forward to 1:55. A horrific Palestinian kindergarten graduation pageant is shown, in which five year olds are (as CNN's reporter does note) dressed as Hamas fighters and seen "brandishing toy guns."

So, CNN is accurately reporting on the tape? Not quite. Second Draft notes the tape's provenance:

It has further been confirmed by Second Draft's source that the full length video which had been confiscated by the Israeli Defense Force had been given to CNN as an exclusive with the understanding that it represented clear and undeniable evidence that the Palestinian Authority is not complying with one of the basic responsibilities it has undertaken as part of the ongoing negotiations to stop intentionally fomenting hatred and violence.

Here's the actual tape CNN was provided. Note that they've deliberately chosen not to show the most horrific part of the tape. It occurs right at the beginning, so it's not possible they "missed" it: more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:37 PM | Comments (34)
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Let's be honest, black votes are tough to come by in normal times for Republican presidential candidates and this isn't a normal year for obvious reasons. Still, McCain went and did his thing today.

I have to admit I really liked his remarks on education.

After decades of hearing the same big promises from the public education establishment, and seeing the same poor results, it is surely time to shake off old ways and to demand new reforms. That isn't just my opinion; it is the conviction of parents in poor neighborhoods across this nation who want better lives for their children. In Washington, D.C., the Opportunity Scholarship program serves more than 1,900 boys and girls from families with an average income of 23,000 dollars a year. And more than 7,000 more families have applied for that program. What they all have in common is the desire to get their kids into a better school.

Democrats in Congress, including my opponent, oppose the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. In remarks to the American Federation of Teachers last weekend, Senator Obama dismissed public support for private school vouchers for low-income Americans as, "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice." All of that went over well with the teachers union, but where does it leave families and their children who are stuck in failing schools?

...If I am elected president, school choice for all who want it, an expansion of Opportunity Scholarships, and alternative certification for teachers will all be part of a serious agenda of education reform.

I fear there's some huge federal plan behind this rhetoric that I'll hate but this, along with his ideas to get non traditional teachers in classrooms, is good stuff.

Will any of this pass a Democrat controlled Congress? Sadly, no.

As is his habit, McCain took questions after his speech.
more...

Posted by: DrewM at 01:03 PM | Comments (26)
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Actually, he vows to rid "the world" of nuclear weapons, but we know of only one country he can successfully manage that trick with, and he's just crazy enough to do it.

Pshop: By Hartsfeld. Thanks, buddy. Looks awesome.

Posted by: Ace at 02:45 PM | Comments (54)
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BumperStickerist offers these for starters:

Knock Knock!

-- Who's there?

Barack Obama

-- Barack Obama who?

Barack Obama who wants to see that Hope is restored to America through Change, Change in our country's politics; Change in our Great Nation's Ability to Lead through Peace, and Change in the Eating Habits of Children, so that together we can face this Century with Hope. Hope brought through Change.

-------------------------

a boy, a girl, and Barack Obama walk into McDonald's. The boy says to the cashier "Thanks to the dietary advice from Senator Obama, I'd like a healthy salad and a water for lunch!" The girl says "I'd like the same and I'd also like to talk to the manager about how I can access employment opportunities."

--------------------------

Barack Obama is standing on stage at the Ivesco Center, he adjusts his tie and says to the audience "Take my wife, please ... She's an example of how America offers promise but fails to make that promise available to all. For too long people like my wife, Michelle, have had to work too hard to achieve for reasons that are historical, but that can change. Together, we can make a difference."

--------------------------

Barack Obama took his wife and children to see a talent show agent. The agent asked Senator Obama what the family act was.

Senator Obama explained that his family represented the opportunity for change, the ability of people to improve their lives through hardwork, that children can reach their potential even at the cost of ten to fifteen thousand dollars per year in music lessons and summer camps, that families can struggle to eat healthy foods, such as fresh fruit and leafy greens, and, that all this can happen despite being limited to speaking in one language.

The agent sat back, decided he would never smoke again, order healthier foods that contained zero transfats, begin saving a percentage of his income, donate to charity, and invest in that RosettaStone package he'd seen advertised on television, and asked Senator Obama what the name of his act was.

"The Aristocrats"

----------------------------

So, my name is Barack Hussein Obama, Hussein. Yeah, I know. Hussein.

It's a common enough middle name where my father grew up, and it given to me by my father over forty years ago. It could have been worse, though.

If my father were from anywhere else, my middle name could have been 'Dubya'

--------------------------------

How many Barack Obamas does it take to change a lightbulb?

None. Barack simply hopes and the light bulb changes itself.

--------------------------------

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Hope. And a desire for Change.

--------------------------------

Barack Obama, Maureen Dowd, and Bob Novak are standing at the Pearly Gates. Barack says to Maureen Dowd - "So, why should I let you in?"

--------------------------------

Barack Obama likes to shop at Whole Foods. He says that's where he buys his arugula.

Message to Senator Obama, half of America thinks that arugula is something in the back of your throat and the other half of America thinks that "Whole Foods" is a donut shop.

taptaptap

is this thing on?

Credit: Not sure if BumperStickerist had this idea first, but Andy Borowitz also has the same idea of officially-approved Obama "jokes"/campaign advertisements.

Credit Part II: BumperStickerist did have the idea first, or at least indepedently. Why, it's just like Newton and Leibniz.

Posted by: Ace at 11:52 AM | Comments (115)
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1.1 percent in June.

Some good news, bad news on the economy from Instapundit. The Fed has revised its end of year growth projections from a near-recessionary 0.3% (at the lowest) to a non-recessionary, but still quite anemic, rate of 1 to 1.6%.

A reader writes to Instapundit:

The looming recession is not a fabrication of the election-focussed MSM. It is real, and it is scary.

Start with the fact that since WWII there has never been negative YOY gasoline demand without a recession, understand that if hydrocarbon prices merely held at these levels, total energy prices would continue to rise for 3 years due to the lags of utilities and pasing along input costs (natural gas and coal, which have both doubled in the past 6 months and haven't taken even the first bites out of pocketbooks yet), and then realize these energy headwinds are childs' play compared to the contraction of credit that will slow down all businesses' investments. I fear your "Dude, Where's My Recession" series trivializes the inevitable pain that has only been temporarily delayed by the massive 2Q08 fiscal stimulus package of tax rebates.

My profession as an energy analyst and portfolio manager prohibits me from being quoted in your blog (so please don't attribute anything to me, even if you were so inclined to print my perspective) but I worry that in 6 months, there is a very high probability you will regret your cavalier attitude towards significant weakening of the underpinnings of our economy--namely consumer spending, available credit and accessible liquidity.

Not to get "wobbly," as some have said, but I agree with that. It's worrisome enough that we're at the typical point at which growth ends and a recession begins. Even if the economy were fairly sound, there would still be reason to be concerned.

Add to that the fact that credit is becoming much tighter -- reducing spending, reducing new business start-ups -- and people are spending much more money on the essentials (transportation, food... everything) than they used to, and this looks like a real problem. If $1000 bought $1000 in services and goods before, and now it only buys (say) $950, that's a 5% loss in economic activity, isn't it? And that's a pretty big blow to the economy.

I'm not sure we can avoid a recession, but one can always mitigate it. And lowering fuel costs would go a long way towards that.

The Democrats are playing games, inviting not only a recession, but a fairly serious one. It should be every politician's main goal to reduce quickly-rising costs (and diminishing consumer spending) due to fuel price increases. And yet they dilly-dally, partly because they're stupid, partly because they believe abstract concerns about the caribou are more important that the trivial details of petty citizens' lives and prosperity, and partly because they think -- perhaps wrongly -- that a nice deep painful recession is in their political interests.

They ought to reevaluate that last point. The public is not stupid, and they know full well it's the Democrats who are deliberately keeping their fuel and food (and everything) prices high in order to satisfy their far-left environmental cultists.

Posted by: Ace at 11:46 AM | Comments (30)
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But this went unreported, except by vaguest allusion.

Seems relevant to me.

This seems to dove-tail with the New Yorker Cartoon thing. The use of this word in regard to Barack Obama (even if not directed at him personally as a slur) brings up, vaguely, the issue of race. So the media embargoes it. Including Fox News, of course, which knows how badly it will be pilloried for being the lone media outlet to report on it.

It's unobjectionable that the media should avoid getting into irrelevant racial controversies as regards Obama. It's another thing entirely to suppress otherwise-newsworthy stories, just because they believe the public is stone-cold retarded and will suddenly realize Obama is black if they hear the n-word in a sentence about him.

This isn't a big story. But it does reflect poorly on Jackson, and generally, quotes that reflect poorly on prominent political figures have been considered news. Fox (and no one else) made hay of Robert Byrd's notorious "white niggers" comment. Why the double-standard here?

Thanks to CJ.

Posted by: Ace at 11:14 AM | Comments (27)
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I'm not even sure how that's possible. Unless he did something like lay the chainsaw horizontally and fall on to it with his neck.

He killed himself because his apartment was being bulldozed by developers and he couldn't stand to move.

Thanks to Joe.

Posted by: Ace at 11:05 AM | Comments (33)
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First rule about the New Messiah: You don't joke about the New Messiah.

WhatÂ’s so funny about Barack Obama? Apparently not very much, at least not yet.

...

[T]here has been little humor about Mr. Obama: about his age, his speaking ability, his intelligence, his family, his physique. And within a late-night landscape dominated by white hosts, white writers, and overwhelmingly white audiences, there has been almost none about his race.

“We’re doing jokes about people in his orbit, not really about him,” said Mike Sweeney, the head writer for Mr. O’Brien on “Late Night.” The jokes will come, representatives of the late-night shows said, when Mr. Obama does or says something that defines him — in comedy terms.

“We’re carrion birds,” said Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show” on the Comedy Central channel. “We’re sitting up there saying ‘Does he seem weak? Is he dehydrated yet? Let’s attack.’ ”

But so far, no true punch lines have landed.

Why? The reason cited by most of those involved in the shows is that a fundamental factor is so far missing in Mr. Obama: There is no comedic “take” on him, nothing easy to turn to for an easy laugh, like allegations of Bill Clinton’s womanizing, or President Bush’s goofy bumbling or Al Gore’s robotic persona.

“The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way,” said Mike Barry, who started writing political jokes for Johnny Carson’s monologues in the waning days of the Johnson administration and has lambasted every presidential candidate since, most recently for Mr. Letterman. “He’s not a comical figure,” Mr. Barry said.

Jokes have been made about what Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton really thought about Mr. Obama during the primaries, and about the vulgar comments the Rev. Jesse Jackson made about him last week. But anything approaching a joke about Mr. Obama himself has fallen flat.

When Mr. Stewart on “The Daily Show” recently tried to joke about Mr. Obama changing his position on campaign financing, for instance, he met with such obvious resistance from the audience, he said, “You know, you’re allowed to laugh at him.” Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview on Monday, “People have a tendency to react as far as their ideology allows them.”

Despite audience resistance, Mr. Stewart contended, his show had been able to develop a distinctive angle on Mr. Obama.

Noting that the senator seems to emphasize the historic nature of his quest, Mr. Stewart said, “So far, our take is that he’s positioning himself to be on a coin.”

There is no doubt, several representatives of the late-night shows said, that so far their audiences (and at least some of the showsÂ’ writers) seem to be favorably disposed toward Mr. Obama, to a degree that perhaps leaves them more resistant to jokes about him than those about most previous candidates.

“A lot of people are excited about his candidacy,” Mr. Sweeney said. “It’s almost like: ‘Hey, don’t go after this guy. He’s a fresh face; cut him some slack.’ ”

Justin Stangel, who is a head writer for “Late Show With David Letterman,” disputed that, saying, “We always have to make jokes about everybody. We’re not trying to lay off the new guy.”

But Mr. Barry said, “I think some of us were maybe too quick to caricature Al Gore and John Kerry and there’s maybe some reluctance to do the same thing to him.”

There you go.

Jon Stewart's Take on the New Yorker Cover: John Stewart is at the top of his game here, and by "the top of his game," I mean very so-so almost-funny and lecturing. He does make a decent point about the media's stupidity in falling for non-stories that are easy to report and easy to have an opinion about, and yet...

He of course misses an angle. Yes, the media is reporting on the New Yorker cover because it's an easy story to report on and hype up and so forth. But they're also going overboard because they -- like Jon Stewart's writers -- are hopelessly in the tank for Obama. They feel it is akin to a religious duty to make certain that everyone in the country knows this was a satire, and (in their estimation), a wildly off-base one, and no one anywhere should think Obama had a Muslim upbringing, or that his wife is a radical, or that he is, objectively, a terrorist sympathizer. Thus the wildly out-of-proportion denunciations from the so-called neutral and objective media.

And yeah, even at Fox, which is obliged to cover the hot story and, frankly, relies more heavily on easy-to-report controversies that can fill its programming day than, say, CNN.

Posted by: Ace at 10:35 AM | Comments (54)
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