To put it mildly, Joe Lieberman is somewhat of a sore spot in the Democratic party's side. First, he left the party, and despite the DNC's best effort and lots of money, he managed to win his Senate seat. Now, he's on the campaign trail for McCain and, as such, routinely criticizing Obama.
You've got to respect Joe Lieberman. I don't agree with everything he says or every position he's taken, but he has somehow elevated himself above blind allegiance to the Democratic party. In a stunning example of how politicians should behave, he uses his own beliefs to shape his positions, and he actually stands up for them when it comes time. Unlike many other politicians (Democratic and Republican alike) who all to often change opinions based on public opinion polls or political expediency, Lieberman has a record of sticking to his guns.
Unfortunately, this is not how the Democrats want to run their party. They want Senators and Representatives that essentially function as a rubber stamp vote for whatever the leadership decides is the hot topic issue of the day. Furthermore, they want lock-step support of Obama's candidacy and absolutely no mention of the pesky shortfalls of Obama's past and complete lack of experience.
Lieberman, probably because he's been liberated from the Orwellian control of the DNC, doesn't play by those rules anymore. The Dems and Pelosi, for whatever reason, think they still have some sort of authority over Joe, and are threatening to remove his committee chairmanship as punishment for speaking his mind.
While I'm sure Joe enjoys the position, I don't think that threat is going to do anything to keep him from attacking Obama. I wouldn't be surprised that if the Dems do remove Joe from the chairmanship, he switches from Independent to card-carry Republican.
I find it fascinating that the Democrats who claim to be the party of the people and often support the application of Constitutional rights to the point of absurdity regularly engage in practices and policies that are anything but. They advocate the return of the Fairness Doctrine which is nothing more than government censorship, and they can't stand it when someone says something they disagree with.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Pelosi: Freedom of Speech Only If I Agree
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Hey Pelosi - Drill This!
I'm pretty close to putting the phrase "We can't drill our way out of this problem" onto Bobby's Official List of Things That Will Get You Immediately Punched In the Face. The shear ignorance of the statement is enough to make me immediately stop listening to whatever the speaker has to say - good or bad.
The simple law of supply and demand dictates that if you increase supply (drill), demand (and therefore price) will drop. Granted, there are varying opinions on exactly how long it will take to get the oil out of the ground and onto the market. The Democrats like to say it will take 10 years and even then it will only drop the price of gas by 1 cent.*
And on the other extreme, I read something the other day that said there's hundreds of wells already drilled in the Gulf that have been capped and are simply awaiting a drilling platform to extract the oil and gas - a process that will only take 6 months to take the product to market. Both positions are moot in the case of this argument.
Because I'm not a student of economics, I'm unable to effectively explain why it doesn't matter how long it would take to get America's oil to market. However, Martin Feldstein, a professor at Harvard and former Reagan economic advisor, can.
The Wall Street Journal featured his Op-Ed a few weeks ago.** Feldstein does a very effective job of explaining exactly how starting the process of drilling here in the states now will have an immediate effect on the price of oil now, absolutely regardless of how long it takes that oil to get on the market.
As much as I would like to think that the Democratic party is nothing more than a ship of fools, the fact of the matter is that there are a number of highly intelligent people who gladly don the jackass pin. They understand the principles set forth by Feldstein, but they simply elect to ignore them for political expediency or because the nut-job wing of the environmental movement has them by the short and curly's. I'll let you determine which is the case.
Established economic theories tells us that drilling will certainly help the current price of gasoline, which is more than I can say about Obama's plan to check every driver's tire pressure.
* - This Democrat talking point drives me crazy. To project the rate of inflation, the demand of oil, and the hundreds of other factors that would go into determining the price of gasoline 10 years from now is pointless. No one knows the answers to those questions, so to extract the price of gasoline from a myriad of unknowns is nothing short of a miracle.
** - Feldstein's article was found via Joel Alicea's column on National Review Online.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Victims of Their Own Political Correctness
In today's politically correct world, one cannot accuse a minority of gaining their position as a result of affirmative action. Well, if you want to be called a racist, go for it. But since "racist" is the modern day equivalent of "witch" in 1692 Massuchessets, it's no wonder people in polite society refrain from the accusation.
In theory, affirmative action is a fine idea - provide opportunities to minorities that, due to social prejudices, were unavailable to those groups in the past. In application, however, affirmative action was less than perfect; kind of like communism - in theory, it works. Ultimately, affirmative action, in some cases, put unqualified people in positions, and some of those unqualified people failed miserably at their job / education. Sure, qualified people fail as well, but the chances of failure increase significantly when the person is unqualified, regardless of minority / majority status.
And that brings us to Barack Obama. The man is flat-out unqualified to be President of the United States. I'm not going to say that he is where is he because of affirmative action. But, at the same time, I'm not disagreeing with Geraldine Ferraro and Bob Johnson when they say that Barack is where he is due in large part to his race.
With Barack's lackluster performance at the Philadelphia debates, the San Francisco bitter comments, and his absolutely horrendous handling of the Jeremiah Wright crisis, several Democratic party members and leaders are questioning just how capable is Barack in a general election.
If you go on Real Clear Politics' numbers, Hillary has a larger lead in a McCain match up than Obama does. Most pundits (Democrat and Republican) are in agreement that this Wright thing is going to get much worse before it gets better (it may even last through the general election). So if Obama continues to have slip-ups and really looses favor with the electorate, will the Democractic super delegates give the nomination to Hillary?
Personally, I maintain that the DNC has painted itself into a corner. With his promises of hope and change, Obama excited a good number of people. The problem was that no one, even the most passionate of his supporters, really knew who Obama was - as a man or politician. Now that the shiny new-Obama shine has faded, we see that he really is no different than every other politician out there. But he has won enough delegates to be the logical choice for the nomination.
Hillary, on the other hand, is strengthening her argument that she is more electable than Obama. If the DNC super delegates give the nomination to her, a Democratic mutiny is a very real possibility as is a number of Obama supporters staying home and not voting in protest, thus cutting into Hillary's chances of winning the general election.
In part, this entire situation stems from the Democratic party's desire to have it all. It's a politically correct wet dream to have both a woman and a black man contending for the title of First [fill in the blank with the appropriate minority title] President. If Bill Richardson would have been able to stick it out and capitalize on the Hispanic vote, there's no telling where the nomination process would be right now.
The only problem is when you pit two minority groups against each other (women vs. blacks, in this case), polarization is inevitable, and when you slight one group in favor of the other, it only fuels the racist / sexist charges. At the end of the day (or at Denver in August, if you want to get technical) the DNC is going to have to make a very non politically correct choice, and that is a liberal's worst nightmare. Well, that and a sudden repeal of the 22nd Amendment.
