Manly’s Blog

I don’t really care anymore to debate the why’s and how’s of Iraq. I just want us to accomplish the mission and quit spending insane amounts of money over there. I am not a huge fan of Bush so discard the notion that this is just me sticking up for “my President”.

However, I keep hearing that were were all fooled into believing there was a reason to be there. I keep hearing senators (Democrats and Republicans alike) saying they were duped by Bush administration lies.

This is simply not true. These politicians are trying to rewrite history to cover their own asses.

In short, it’s Bullshit.

Found an article which I will quote below that spells it out pretty well.

Manly

Bush never lied to us about Iraq
The administration simply got bad intelligence. Critics are wrong to assert deception.
By James Kirchick
June 16, 2008
Touring Vietnam in 1965, Michigan Gov. George Romney proclaimed American involvement there “morally right and necessary.” Two years later, however, Romney — then seeking the Republican presidential nomination — not only recanted his support for the war but claimed that he had been hoodwinked.

“When I came back from Vietnam, I had just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get,” Romney told a Detroit TV reporter who asked the candidate how he reconciled his shifting views.

Romney (father of Mitt) had visited Vietnam with nine other governors, all of whom denied that they had been duped by their government. With this one remark, his presidential hopes were dashed.

The memory of this gaffe reverberates in the contemporary rhetoric of many Democrats, who, when attacking the Bush administration’s case for war against Saddam Hussein, employ essentially the same argument. In 2006, John F. Kerry explained the Senate’s 77-23 passage of the Iraq war resolution this way: “We were misled. We were given evidence that was not true.” On the campaign trail, Hillary Rodham Clinton dodged blame for her pro-war vote by claiming that “the mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress.”

Nearly every prominent Democrat in the country has repeated some version of this charge, and the notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.

Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House “manipulation” — that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction — administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.

In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found “no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, the production of which excluded Republican staffers and which only two GOP senators endorsed. In a news release announcing the report, committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV got in this familiar shot: “Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.”

Yet Rockefeller’s highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that “top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.” Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were “substantiated by intelligence information.” The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.

Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were “misled” into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.

In 2003, top Senate Democrats — not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others — sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month’s report, titled “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” includes only statements by the executive branch. Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees — who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors — many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.

This may sound like ancient history, but it matters. After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighboring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis and stood in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program. By glossing over this history, the Democrats’ lies-led-to-war narrative provides false comfort in a world of significant dangers.

“I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop communist aggression in Southeast Asia,” Romney elaborated in that infamous 1967 interview. That was an intellectually justifiable view then, just as it is intellectually justifiable for erstwhile Iraq war supporters to say — given the way it’s turned out — that they don’t think the effort has been worth it. But predicating such a reversal on the unsubstantiated allegation that one was lied to is cowardly and dishonest.

A journalist who accompanied Romney on his 1965 foray to Vietnam remarked that if the governor had indeed been brainwashed, it was not because of American propaganda but because he had “brought so light a load to the laundromat.” Given the similarity between Romney’s explanation and the protestations of Democrats 40 years later, one wonders why the news media aren’t saying the same thing today.

Could it be more obvious what the true priorities of Democrats and Republicans are?
Democrats simply want more government and think the the answer to all problems is help from Uncle Sam.

On the other side of the isle we have Republicans who believe in the free market system and it’s ability to solve most problems with little government intervention. I don’t know how accurate the actual numbers in the following picture are, however the ideas belonging to each party ARE accurate.

Manly

Most of the informed realize by now that we are paying $4 for a gallon of gas due to supply issues (not the evil oil companies). If you want someone to blame you need to go after the knuckleheads in Congress.

George Will says it very well below. The link to the original article is here.

Manly

The Gas Prices We Deserve
By George Will

WASHINGTON — Rising in the Senate on May 13, Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat, explained: “I rise to discuss rising energy prices.” The president was heading to Saudi Arabia to seek an increase in its oil production, and Schumer’s gorge was rising.

Saudi Arabia, he said, “holds the key to reducing gasoline prices at home in the short term.” Therefore arms sales to that kingdom should be blocked unless it “increases its oil production by one million barrels per day,” which would cause the price of gasoline to fall “50 cents a gallon almost immediately.”

Can a senator, with so many things on his mind, know so precisely how the price of gasoline would respond to that increase in the oil supply? Schumer does know that if you increase the supply of something, the price of it probably will fall. That is why he and 96 other senators recently voted to increase the supply of oil on the market by stopping the flow of oil into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which protects against major physical interruptions. Seventy-one of the 97 senators who voted to stop filling the SPR also oppose drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

One million barrels is what might today be flowing from ANWR if in 1995 President Clinton had not vetoed legislation to permit drilling there. One million barrels produce 27 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel. Seventy-two of today’s senators — including Schumer, of course, and 38 other Democrats, including Barack Obama, and 33 Republicans, including John McCain — have voted to keep ANWR’s estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil off the market.

So Schumer, according to Schumer, is complicit in taking $10 away from every American who buys 20 gallons of gasoline. “Democracy,” said H.L. Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” The common people of New York want Schumer to be their senator, so they should pipe down about gasoline prices, which are a predictable consequence of their political choice.

Also disqualified from complaining are all voters who sent to Washington senators and representatives who have voted to keep ANWR’s oil in the ground, and who voted to put 85 percent of America’s offshore territory off-limits to drilling. The U.S. Minerals Management Service says that restricted area contains perhaps 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — 10 times the oil and 20 times the natural gas Americans use in a year.

Drilling is under way 60 miles off Florida. The drilling is being done by China, in cooperation with Cuba, which is drilling closer to South Florida than U.S. companies are.

ANWR is larger than the combined areas of five states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware) and drilling along its coastal plain would be confined to a space one-sixth the size of Washington’s Dulles Airport. Offshore? Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed or damaged hundreds of drilling rigs without causing a large spill. There has not been a significant spill from an offshore U.S. well since 1969. Of the more than 7 billion barrels of oil pumped offshore in the past 25 years, 0.001 percent — that is one-thousandth of 1 percent — has been spilled. Louisiana has more than 3,200 rigs offshore — and a thriving commercial fishing industry.

In his “Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of ‘Energy Independence,’” Robert Bryce says Brazil’s energy success has little to do with its much-discussed ethanol production and much to do with its increased oil production, the vast majority of which comes from off Brazil’s shore. Investor’s Business Daily reports that Brazil, “which recently made a major oil discovery almost in sight of Rio’s beaches,” has leased most of the world’s deep-sea drilling rigs.

In September 2006, two U.S. companies announced that their “Jack No. 2″ well, in the Gulf 270 miles southwest of New Orleans, had tapped a field with perhaps 15 billion barrels of oil, which would increase America’s proven reserves by 50 percent. Just probing four miles below the Gulf’s floor costs $100 million. Congress’ response to such expenditures is to propose increasing the oil companies’ tax burdens.

America says to foreign producers: We prefer not to pump our oil, so please pump more of yours, thereby lowering its value, for our benefit. Let it not be said that America has no energy policy.
georgewill@washpost.com

The post below is lifted from the Wall Street Journal. If you don’t understand how windfall profit taxes work (especially when used on oil companies) you should give this one a read.

This has to be in the top 10 of worst ideas ever. There is an oil supply problem, not a profit problem (by the way, the oil companies only make 8-10 cents profit on every dollar of revenue).

The most effective method of relieving a supply shortage is to increase production (opening Alaska, restricted areas off the east and west coast, etc).

Politicians proposing windfall profit taxes for oil companies are simply pandering to the anger of the masses. If the masses had a clue as to the cause of high oil prices they would be hanging the politicians from the lampposts (yes, it’s their fault).

Manly

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120977019142563957.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Windfall Profits for Dummies
May 3, 2008; Page A10

This is one strange debate the candidates are having on energy policy. With gas prices close to $4 a gallon, Hillary Clinton and John McCain say they’ll bring relief with a moratorium on the 18.4-cent federal gas tax. Barack Obama opposes that but prefers a 1970s-style windfall profits tax (as does Mrs. Clinton).

Mr. Obama is right to oppose the gas-tax gimmick, but his idea is even worse. Neither proposal addresses the problem of energy supply, especially the lack of domestic oil and gas thanks to decades of Congressional restrictions on U.S. production. Mr. Obama supports most of those “no drilling” rules, but that hasn’t stopped him from denouncing high gas prices on the campaign trail. He is running TV ads in North Carolina that show him walking through a gas station and declaring that he’ll slap a tax on the $40 billion in “excess profits” of Exxon Mobil.
[Barack Obama]

The idea is catching on. Last week Pennsylvania Congressman Paul Kanjorski introduced a windfall profits tax as part of what he called the “Consumer Reasonable Energy Price Protection Act of 2008.” So now we have Congress threatening to help itself to business profits even though Washington already takes 35% right off the top with the corporate income tax.

You may also be wondering how a higher tax on energy will lower gas prices. Normally, when you tax something, you get less of it, but Mr. Obama seems to think he can repeal the laws of economics. We tried this windfall profits scheme in 1980. It backfired. The Congressional Research Service found in a 1990 analysis that the tax reduced domestic oil production by 3% to 6% and increased oil imports from OPEC by 8% to 16%. Mr. Obama nonetheless pledges to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, which he says “costs America $800 million a day.” Someone should tell him that oil imports would soar if his tax plan becomes law. The biggest beneficiaries would be OPEC oil ministers.

There’s another policy contradiction here. Exxon is now under attack for buying back $2 billion of its own stock rather than adding to the more than $21 billion it is likely to invest in energy research and exploration this year. But hold on. If oil companies believe their earnings from exploring for new oil will be expropriated by government – and an excise tax on profits is pure expropriation – they will surely invest less, not more. A profits tax is a sure formula to keep the future price of gas higher.

Exxon’s profits are soaring with the recent oil price spike, but the energy industry’s earnings aren’t as outsized as the politicians seem to think. Thomson Financial calculates that profits from the oil and natural gas industry over the past year were 8.3% of investment, while the all-industry average is 7.8%. And this was a boom year for oil. An analysis by the Cato Institute’s Jerry Taylor finds that between 1970 and 2003 (which includes peak and valley years for earnings) the oil and gas business was “less profitable than the rest of the U.S. economy.” These are hardly robber barons.

This tiff over gas and oil taxes only highlights the intellectual policy confusion – or perhaps we should say cynicism – of our politicians. They want lower prices but don’t want more production to increase supply. They want oil “independence” but they’ve declared off limits most of the big sources of domestic oil that could replace foreign imports. They want Americans to use less oil to reduce greenhouse gases but they protest higher oil prices that reduce demand. They want more oil company investment but they want to confiscate the profits from that investment. And these folks want to be President?

Late this week, a group of Senate Republicans led by Pete Domenici of New Mexico introduced the “American Energy Production Act of 2008″ to expand oil production off the U.S. coasts and in Alaska. It has the potential to increase domestic production enough to keep America running for five years with no foreign imports. With the world price of oil at $116 a barrel, if not now, when? No word yet if Senators Clinton and Obama will take time off from denouncing oil profits to vote for that.

This is amazing.

I am astounded that medical professionals could be so unethical. Re-using dirty syringes? Shouldn’t that be a criminal offense?

I for one will be requiring that the doctor or nurse let me inspect the syringe or watch them open a new container before I get any shots.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-03-25-needles-hepatitis_N.htm?csp=34

Manly

For a long time I have wondered why people seem to have the NEED to acquire more things and more debt. The housing market is one example of the problem (and moving endlessly up the property ladder is just a small part of this). The endless cycle of increasing debt load, zero savings and stagnant wages has to stop sometime. When it does, things will be interesting to be sure.

See this article for some very telling statistics.

Manly

First there is the Big Dog robot, next comes SkyNet!

This thing is AMAZING. It is carrying 340 pounds of gear.

Manly

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Forecast is up to 5 inches of snow possible tonight.
I was just outside and shot a little video of it, the flakes were the biggest I have seen here.
The view is from the front door of my house.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Manly

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Thanks Dan.

Manly

Boortz is too far to the right for me but if you read MY blog you would know that I am a pro-business kind of person.

There has been much talk of “taking” some of Exxon Mobil’s profits by the far left.

Some interesting points:

EXXON MOBILE PROFITS

I covered this on the Information Overload portion of the Boortz show yesterday. Web Guy and Cristina tell me that there have been hundreds of email requests to put the information here in the Nuze.

Happy to oblige.

The issue here is the profit figures for Exxon Mobile. This oil company has been a favorite target for leftist, anti-capitalist politicians. I’m sure you remember Hillary screeching about wanting “to take those profits” so that she could spend them.

Recap: In 2006 Exxon reported profits of $39.5 billion. Politicians went nuts. In 2007 those profits went to $40.6 billion. Politicians went nutsier.

The reason politicians can successfully demagogue these profits is that the vast majority .. and we’re talking 95% and above .. of Americans couldn’t tell you the difference between a profit and a profit margin if their flat screen TVs depended on it. Simply stated, profit is the total amount you make. Profit margin is how much you make on each dollar of sales. You would think that this would be taught in our government schools … but if you did think that you would be wrong.

So … what has been happening to Exxon’s profit margin during these record profit years? Staying about the same, that’s what; around 10%. The reason their profits have been increasing is because the price of crude oil has been going up … bring gas prices up with them … thus increasing the dollar amount of sales. Profit � up. Profit margins � ’bout the same.

By the way … financial institutions and cosmetics companies have been enjoying higher margins … along with many other sectors of our economy.

Now .. the numbers that I presented yesterday. Pretty eye-opening. The research was posted on the Seeking Alpha website.

Over the past three years Exxon Mobile has paid an average of $27 billion a year in taxes to the Imperial Federal Government. This has amounted to about 41% of Exxon’s taxable income.

The last year for which complete numbers on who pays what taxes are available was 2004. In 2004 there were 130 million individual tax returns filed. If you take the bottom 50% of those tax returns � 65 million of them � and add up the total amount of taxes those households paid you come up with $27.4 billion. This means that one corporation, Exxon Mobile, pays as much in taxes to the federal government as do the bottom half of individual taxpayers. How’s that for paying your fair share.

There’s more. The Adjusted gross income for the bottom 50% of taxpayers comes out to about $922 billion. This means that these taxpayers are paying an effective tax rate of about 3% of their adjusted gross income. Exxon? Adjusted gross income of around $67.4 billion in 2006 … for an effective tax rate of 41%.

There’s the facts, my friends. If you’re able to absorb them you’ll see just how you’re being manipulated by the likes of Hillary Clinton and other politicians. If the American voters were truly educated they couldn’t get away with it for a minute.

Link HERE.

Manly

This just goes to show you that looking at one year (or two, or 10) of warming/cooling doesn’t amount to fundamental climate change.

As I have stated before, much of the data suggests that at the very least the jury is still out on the cause.

The article linked below doesn’t prove or disprove that there is warming but I found it amusing.

http://newsmax.com/newsfront/global_warming_or_cooling/2008/02/19/73798.html

Manly

I found this interesting.

The quote below is from a book titled “The Bad Boy of Baltimore” which is a biography of H.L. Mencken by Marion Rodgers.
Page 409 reads:

By the mid-1930’s, thanks to the New Deal, all that self-reliance had changed, prompting Mencken to declare: ‘There is no genuine justice in any scheme of feeding and coddling the loafer whose only ponderable energies are devoted wholly to reproduction. Nine-tenths of the rights he bellows for are really privileges and he does nothing to deserve them.’ Despite the billions spent on an individual, ‘he can be lifted transiently but always slips back again.’ Thus, the New Deal had been ‘the most stupendous digenetic enterprise ever undertaken by man…. We not only acquired a vast population of morons, we have inculcated all morons, old or young, with the doctrine that the decent and industrious people of the country are bound to support them for all time. The effects of that doctrine are bound to be disastrous soon or late.’

When someone asked, “And what, Mr. Mencken, would you do about the unemployed?” He looked up with a bland expression. “We could start by taking away their vote,” he said, deadpan. Mencken was not surprised when the majority disagreed. “There can be nothing even remotely approaching a rational solution of the fundamental national problems until we face them in a realistic spirit,” he later reflected, and that was impossible so long as educated Americans remained responsive “to the Roosevelt buncombe.”

Wherein “buncombe” means nonsense.

How completely relevant to the election happening this year, in which every Democrat has nothing to say about self-reliance or freedom but only talks of their new entitlement schemes.

History is definitely repeating itself here.

Manly