Internet Scofflaw

Via the Corner:

We have all become familiar with Senator Obama’s new brand of politics. First, you demand civility from your opponent, then you attack him, distort his record and send out surrogates to question his integrity. It is called hypocrisy, and it is the oldest kind of politics there is.

It is important to focus on what Senator Obama is attempting to do here: He is trying desperately to delegitimize the discussion of issues that raise legitimate questions about his judgment and preparedness to be President of the United States.

Through their actions and words, Senator Obama and his supporters have made clear that ANY criticism on ANY issue — from his desire to raise taxes on millions of small investors to his radical plans to sit down face-to-face with Iranian President Ahmadinejad – constitute negative, personal attacks.

Senator Obama is hopeful that the media will continue to form a protective barrier around him, declaring serious limits to the questions, discussion and debate in this race.

Truer words were never spoken.

Both Clinton and Obama have endorsed the “80 by 50” target for greenhouse gas reductions: an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050. Stephen Hayward ran the numbers to see what that would mean.

An 80% reduction in these emissions from 1990 levels means that the U.S. cannot emit more than about one billion metric tons of CO2 in 2050.

Were man-made carbon dioxide emissions in this country ever that low? The answer is probably yes – from historical energy data it is possible to estimate that the U.S. last emitted one billion metric tons around 1910. But in 1910, the U.S. had 92 million people, and per capita income, in current dollars, was about $6,000.

By the year 2050, the Census Bureau projects that our population will be around 420 million. This means per capita emissions will have to fall to about 2.5 tons in order to meet the goal of 80% reduction.

2.5 tons. Now we can compare that against what is possible:

It is likely that U.S. per capita emissions were never that low – even back in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood. The only nations in the world today that emit at this low level are all poor developing nations, such as Belize, Mauritius, Jordan, Haiti and Somalia.

If that comparison seems unfair, consider that even the least-CO2 emitting industrialized nations do not come close to the 2050 target. France and Switzerland, compact nations that generate almost all of their electricity from nonfossil fuel sources (nuclear for France, hydro for Switzerland) emit about 6.5 metric tons of CO2 per capita.

Now there is a new study out of MIT that computes the absolute minimum level of emissions that an American can achieve:

But the “floor” below which nobody in the U.S. can reach, no matter a person’s energy choices, turned out to be 8.5 tons, the class found. That was the emissions calculated for a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters.

This offers some much-needed perspective.  Barring an unforeseen technological breakthrough, the 80 by 50 goal advocated by Clinton and Obama is literally impossible without returning the entire nation to abject poverty.

Oh, and McCain?  He is only slightly less the demagogue, advocating 65 by 50.  That works out to 4.375 per person, which is still impossible.  President Bush’s proposal, to freeze emissions at the current level, may be unpopular with greens, but it has the singular virtue of being possible.

(Via the Corner.)

UPDATE (January 2018): Links updated.

Score another one for the blogosphere: Tennessee bloggers catch the state collecting a tax that doesn’t exist in law.  The Tennessee Revenue Department is now pushing a “technical correction” bill that would retroactively authorize their theft.  (Via Instapundit.)

A Brazilian judge has ordered Brazilian ISPs to block access to a blog hosted at WordPress.com. Since all WordPress blogs share the same IP, the order amounts to a total ban on WordPress blogs (including Internet Scofflaw). Unfortunately, Brazil is establishing a record of such draconian censorship actions; two years ago Brazil banned YouTube for days.

To their credit, WordPress has refused to censor the blog themselves. This makes them better than Google (which owns Blogger).

The New York Times (!) runs a very positive piece on progress in Iraq, written by an employee of its Baghdad bureau. Here’s its conclusion:

This meant that all the things I heard about the improvements are true. Even the people are more friendly and I can say that there is now a kind of mutual trust between the people and the soldiers, not like before when there was no trust between each other. . .

Will it stay safe or not?

I guess that all depends on the American troops, since we will not have qualified Iraqi forces soon. Although most Iraqi forces are sincere you find some have been infiltrated by groups of gunmen and sectarian people who made the mess all around us.

So we still need the Americans because if they intend to leave, there will be something like a hurricane which will extract everything – people, buildings and even trees. Everything that has happened and all that safety will be past, just like a sweet dream.

As people say in my neighborhood: “The Americans are now Ansar al Sunna.” Protectors of the Sunni.

(Via Instapundit.)

Gateway Pundit reminds us what all was in those files.  (Via Instapundit.)

Urg. You know, when you watch what’s happening in Britain, putting our Constitution on paper looks like a better idea all the time.

(Via LGF.)

(Via the Foundry, via the Corner.)

On the heels of a lot of good (or not-so-bad) economic news, even Paul Krugman notes that the markets are recovering:

Cross your fingers, knock on wood: it’s possible, though by no means certain, that the worst of the financial crisis is over. That’s the good news.

Krugman is said to have predicted fifteen of the last two recessions (or something like that), so it has to be a good sign if even he sees things getting better.  Of course, in Krugman’s bizarro world, good news is bad news:

The bad news is that as markets stabilize, chances for fundamental financial reform may be slipping away. As a result, the next crisis will probably be worse than this one.

You see, when the markets were tanking, the progressives had a good shot at extending more governmental control over financial markets.  Now he fears that’s no longer in the cards.  That means that all that excess freedom is likely to stay out there:

Wall Street did an end run around regulation, using complex financial arrangements to put most of the business of banking outside the regulators’ reach. Washington could have revised the rules to cover this new “shadow banking system” — but that would have run counter to the market-worshiping ideology of the times.

When they can, humans always do “end runs” around government curtailment of their freedom.  Actually, I think Krugman understands this, but sees it as an arms race, one in which his side is falling behind.

(Via the Corner.)

Bolivia’s Evo Morales is dealt a stinging rebuke:

While sporadic street battles erupted, voters in this divided country’s richest and second most-populous province appeared to approve a controversial measure Sunday that would make them autonomous from the leftist government of President Evo Morales.

According to an exit poll by the firm Captura Consulting, 82.7 percent of voters in Santa Cruz province supported the autonomy referendum, creating what promises to be a tense standoff between Morales and provincial leaders. . .

Morales has called the vote illegal, and the country’s top electoral court has said it will not certify the results because only the country’s Congress can call referendums. Morales has warned leaders of the eastern Bolivian province not to implement the autonomy statute, although he refused to send in troops to block Sunday’s vote. . .

Tension over the referendum exploded Sunday when autonomy opponents in the rural Santa Cruz towns of San Pedro, San Julian, Yapacani and Montero, as well as in the poor outskirts of Santa Cruz city, attacked polling sites, in some cases destroying and burning cardboard ballot boxes.

(Via Instapundit.)

Morales is a Hugo Chavez wannabe, but he evidently hasn’t learned to rig elections yet.

Barack Obama is growing “angry and frustrated” with the tedium of campaigning against a real opponent:

Barack Obama is struggling to contain his anger and frustration over the constant barrage of questions about his character and judgment, his wife has revealed. Michelle Obama lifted the lid on the irritation felt by the leading Democrat candidate for the White House at the way anti-American outbursts by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, have dogged his campaign.

He is said to be itching to turn all his fire on John McCain, the Republican candidate, who is benefiting most from Mr Obama’s protracted tussle with Hillary Clinton. . .

A senior Democrat strategist privy to Obama’s campaign said: “He’s sick of the battle against Clinton. He wants to get stuck into McCain. His people have had to remind him that this thing isn’t over yet and he needs to focus and put her away.”

Most candidates get used to politics long before their first run for President. But not Barack Obama, who heretofore has always been able, one way or another, to run virtually unopposed.  Now that he’s running for President, people aren’t rolling over for him.  Accordingly to his wife — presumably a well-informed source — this has left him “struggling to contain his anger and frustration.”  How dare anyone oppose him!

A typical candidate would have run previous campaigns, which would have left him (1) emotionally prepared for opposition, and (2) with his numerous character and judgement issues already aired.  On the other hand, then he wouldn’t be a blank canvas into which people could invest their hopes and dreams.

(Via Instapundit and Tom Maguire.)

Charles Krauthammer points out that Obama’s recent remarks disowning Wright vitiate his “race” speech:

“I can no more disown him [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother.”

— Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18

Guess it’s time to disown Granny, if Obama’s famous Philadelphia “race” speech is to be believed. . . On Tuesday, the good senator begged to extend and revise his previous remarks on race. Moral equivalence between Grandma and Wright is now, as the Nixon administration used to say, inoperative.

These equivalences having been revealed as the cheap rhetorical tricks they always were, Obama has now decided that the man he simply could not banish because he had become part of Obama himself is, mirabile dictu, surgically excised.

At a news conference in North Carolina, Obama explained why he finally decided to do the deed. Apparently, Wright’s latest comments — Obama cited three in particular — were so shockingly “divisive and destructive” that he had to renounce the man, not just the words.

What were Obama’s three citations? Wright’s claim that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government to commit genocide. His praise of Louis Farrakhan as a great man. And his blaming Sept. 11 on American “terrorism.”

But these comments are not new. These were precisely the outrages that prompted the initial furor when the Wright tapes emerged seven weeks ago. Obama decided to cut off Wright not because Wright’s words or character or views had suddenly changed. The only thing that changed was the venue in which Wright chose to display them — live on national TV at the National Press Club. That unfortunate choice destroyed Obama’s Philadelphia pretense that this “endless loop” of sermon excerpts being shown on “television sets and YouTube” had been taken out of context.

(Emphasis mine.) Exactly right. The “you have to hear it in context” line was very clever, because no one at all is going to do that. (I sat through 10 minutes of one of them, and that was quite enough, thank you.)  Unfortunately for Obama, that line is worthless now.

Krauthammer continues:

Obama’s Philadelphia oration was an exercise in contextualization. In one particularly egregious play on white guilt, Obama had the audacity to suggest that whites should be ashamed that they were ever surprised by Wright’s remarks: “The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning.”

That was then. On Tuesday, Obama declared that he himself was surprised at Wright’s outrages. But hadn’t Obama told us that surprise about Wright is a result of white ignorance of black churches brought on by America’s history of segregated services? How then to explain Obama’s own presumed ignorance? . . . Obama’s turning surprise about Wright into something to be counted against whites— one of the more clever devices in that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud in Philadelphia — now stands discredited by Obama’s own admission of surprise.

(Emphasis mine.)  There’s more.  Read the whole thing.

(Via LGF.)

In the British local elections yesterday, Labour was brutalized, capped by the defeat of “Red” Ken Livingstone, the appalling extreme-far-left mayor of London. Early results gave the Tories 44% of the vote, and Labour 24%. If it holds up, that would leave Labour in third place behind the socialist Liberal Democrats who were polling 25%.

Last September, Labour was riding high, and all expected that Prime Minister Brown would call a snap election. Then his poll numbers sagged and those plans were scrapped in favor of an election in Fall 2009. Now most expect that Brown will hold on until Spring 2010, the latest he could call an election. (ASIDE: How ridiculous is it for the party in power to decide when the election will be?)

We’ll conclude with Iain Dale’s quip:

A plane has been spotted at RAF Northolt ready and waiting to take Ken Livingstone into exile in Venezuela.

(Via ConservativeHome (via the Corner), which also posts an amusing picture of Tony Blair smiling last night.)

Power Line notes that Al Franken, a US Senate hopeful in Minnesota, blames his failure to pay taxes on his accountant but has ordered his accountant to remain silent.  He can’t have it both ways.  In any case, it strains credulity to suggest that his repeated failure to pay his bills wherever he is (Air America and personally in multiple states) is always someone else’s fault.

Fox News reports:

Just weeks before it announced the onset of a global food crisis and the urgent need for donors to provide at least $775 million in additional funding, the World Food Program was sitting on a cash and near-cash stockpile of more than $1.22 billion.

The startling figure is contained in the latest audited statements of the WFP, which were endorsed by the WFP’s executive director, Josette Sheeran, on March 31, just a month before Sheeran announced at an international aid conference on April 22 that a “silent tsunami” in rising food prices demanded the huge infusion of cash for the WFP’s latest budget.

In a May 1 International Herald Tribune op-ed, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon further declared that the WFP had just “$18 million cash in hand” in the wake of its appeal for emergency funding.

So the UN was understating its assets for food relief by 98.5%.  This organization is a complete fraud.  Why exactly do we continue to fund them?

The Star-Tribune reports the story of a homeowner who shot a home invader armed with a knife:

I grabbed our gun, which we keep for protection,” he said.  “As I stepped around the corner, he hit me … right between the eyes,” Sokol said. “And I fired the gun.

“Down on the ground he went and I insisted, in a not very nice way, that he not move,” he said. “I held him at gunpoint until the police arrived.” . . .

Sokol said the burglar had a knife, but Sokol doesn’t know if he was hit by that or a fireplace poker that he noticed had been moved.

(Via Instapundit.)

Barack Obama says there’s no evidence that Sokol was any safer for owning a gun.  Good thing Sokol lives in St. Paul, not Chicago.

CBS’s Richard Butler is a piece of work:

CBS News journalist Richard Butler said he believes he was kidnapped in Iraq by policemen with sympathies toward the Hezbollah but isn’t entirely sure who held him captive for two months or why.

Butler, a British journalist kidnapped with his interpreter on Feb. 10, was rescued by Iraqi troops on April 14 when he was found with a sack over his head in a house in Basra. . .

While he was held, he heard a lot of Hezbollah propaganda video and Hezbollah ringtones on mobile phones, but he can’t be sure his captors were affiliated with the organization. . .

Yes, let’s not jump to any conclusions that Hezbollah was involved. Anyway, now we get to the point:

Butler said he felt it was better to be kidnapped in Iraq then taken into custody by Americans in Afghanistan.

“I was pleased I wasn’t being mortarboarded in Guantanamo or being held for six and a half years like an Al-Jazeera cameraman, for instance,” he said.

Yeah, I hear that mortarboarding is really unpleasant. . . I didn’t know there was a chapter at Guantanamo, but I guess those guys want it on their resume when they graduate.

All snark aside, one is tempted to speculate about Stockholm syndrome, but I think it’s more likely he leaned that way from the start.

(Via LGF.)

The original defense of Jeremiah Wright’s was that his sort of hatemongering was typical of black churches.  This struck me as a strange sort of defense (“everybody’s doing it!”), but more importantly, it smelled to me like a slander of Black churches.  Nevertheless, it didn’t seem like something I could usefully comment on.  Now, Protein Wisdom takes on the matter.  (Via Instapundit.)

For what it’s worth, the one time I visited a Black church (an AME church in the Boston area), the focus of the service was on Christ, and no racial hatred was preached.

James Pethokoukis asks, “Dude, where’s my recession?” The economy grew 0.6 percent in the first quarter 2008. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, so the soonest we could say there was a recession this year is October. (Via Instapundit.)

This news is actually pretty good, in a beats-low-expectations kind of way. The press will probably notice it early next year.

UPDATE: Unemployment falls to 5 percent.

AP reports:

A college student apparently called 911 from her cell phone shortly before she was killed but a dispatcher hung up, failed to call back and never sent police to investigate, authorities said Thursday.

Madison Police Chief Noble Wray said it was too early to know whether a better response could have prevented the April 2 slaying of Wisconsin-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann or helped police capture her killer.

Too early to know?  More like it’s too late.

Depending on the government for protection can be a risky gamble.

Pittsburgh is now the nation’s sootiest city, surpassing Los Angeles, according to the American Lung Association.  However, Los Angeles remains number one in overall air pollution.  Pittsburgh doesn’t make the top eight.

The Washington DC Examiner has the shocking story of an Arlington County court permanently dissolving the parental rights of a special-needs child’s parents, despite the parents having been exonerated of neglect nine months earlier.

Arlington Judge Esther Wiggins Lyles signed the removal order with neither Hey nor Slitor even aware of the proceedings, much less being present to contest the decision. Sabrina went to a politically influential local professional couple with no training as foster parents, despite CPS requirements that foster couples be trained before being entrusted with children.  Judge Almand later used the baby’s inappropriate removal to justify making the separation permanent, saying it would be too “traumatic” to return Sabrina to her natural parents.

No happy ending here either.  This outrage has yet to be corrected.

(Via the Corner.)