harmonicminer

At Townhall, Jonah Goldberg points out that big business supported Obama 2 to 1 against McCain, because it hoped to cash in at taxpayer expense:

It’s worth remembering that Obama was the preferred candidate of Wall Street, and the industry gave to Democrats by a 2-1 margin at the beginning of last year. The top business donor to Democrats in 2008 was Goldman Sachs, and nearly 75 cents out of every dollar of Goldman’s political donations from 2006 to 2008 went to Democrats. Few can gainsay the investment, given how well Goldman Sachs has done under the Obama administration.

It’s not just Wall Street. Obama led in fundraising from most big business sectors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Aside from the desire to back the winner, and the cultural liberalness of East and West Coast plutocrats, why did Obama get so much support from precisely the constituency he demonizes?

Because it was good business. A host of big corporations bet that the much-vaunted Obama era would materialize. For instance, nearly 30 major corporations and environmental groups invested in Obama’s promise to force the American economy into a new cap-and-trade system via the United States Climate Action Partnership (CAP).

Whatever the benefits of such a scheme for the economy and environment as a whole, these corporations, led by General Electric, were looking simply to cash in on government policies. GE, which makes many wind, solar and nuclear doodads that would be profitable under “cap-and-trade,” was poised to make billions if Obama succeeded in seizing control of the “carbon economy.” GE is still protecting its bet, but after the failure in Copenhagen, the “climategate” scandals and perhaps most significantly, that implosion of Obama’s new progressive era, several heavyweights — Caterpillar, BP and ConocoPhillips — have pulled out of CAP, with rumors that more will follow. There are similar rumblings of discontent within the ranks of PhRMA, the trade association for the pharmaceutical industry, which had cut an $80 billion deal with the White House last year for its support of ObamaCare, only to see the whole thing unravel.

The lesson here is fairly simple: Big business is not “right wing,” it’s vampiric. It will pursue any opportunity to make a big profit at little risk. Getting in bed with politicians is increasingly the safest investment for these “crony capitalists.” But only if the politicians can actually deliver. The political failures of the Obama White House have translated into business failures for firms more eager to make money off taxpayers instead of consumers.

That’s good news. The bad news will be if the Republicans once again opt to be the cheap dates of big business. For years, the GOP defended big business in the spirit of free enterprise while businesses never showed much interest in the principle themselves. Now that their bet on the Democrats has crapped out, it’d be nice if they stopped trying to game the system and focused instead on satisfying the consumer.

Go back and read the title of this post. Then read this, to which I’ve linked before.  Ignore the reviews, pro and con, and just take it on its own terms… and see if you can refute the history.  I think you can’t.

There hasn’t been a “free market” in the USA for sometime.  The government’s power to tax and regulate, and to give tax breaks and regulatory exceptions, is the reason there is so much lobbying in the Beltway.  It could not have been otherwise, once corporate taxes got high, and the regulation of business became one of the chief functions of government.  The merry-go-round career path of government “service” to lobbyist, and often back to government “service,” is the biggest indicator of this.  The essential role of a lobbyist in the modern world is to figure out who should get the money that the lobbyist’s principals have to donate.

When big business couldn’t count on government to help it get captive markets, and to restrain competitors, it had to compete for consumers on the basis of price and quality.  That’s why Rockefeller kept cutting the price of kerosene in the 19th century, not exactly an act of violence against the consumers of the day.

It’s unfortunate that so many people still believe that we live in a “free market” economy and that “the market” is the cause for so much economic woe today.  But we have had a “mixed economy” that often crossed the line into “crony capitalism” or just plain “state capitalism” (especially in time of war), for over a century.  The government is by far the most responsible for our current economic mess.  The lobbyists of big business (the johns) wouldn’t have any place to spend their money if politicians weren’t pimping themselves out.  Those lobbyists are often the ones who write campaign finance law and regulations.

It’s simple.  If big business didn’t think it was going to get something out of it, why would it donate so much money to politicians?  And more particularly, why did it give so much to Obama?

Let’s hope that if the Republicans do get some power back, they don’t blow it this time.

Charles Krauthammer – Closing the new frontier

“We have an agreement until 2012 that Russia will be responsible for this,” says Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian space agency, about ferrying astronauts from other countries into low-Earth orbit. “But after that? Excuse me, but the prices should be absolutely different then!”

The Russians may be new at capitalism, but they know how it works. When you have a monopoly, you charge monopoly prices. Within months, Russia will have a monopoly on rides into space.

By the end of this year, there will be no shuttle, no U.S. manned space program, no way for us to get into space. We’re not talking about Mars or the moon here. We’re talking about low-Earth orbit, which the United States has dominated for nearly half a century and from which it is now retiring with nary a whimper.

Our absence from low-Earth orbit was meant to last a few years, the interval between the retirement of the fatally fragile space shuttle and its replacement with the Constellation program (Ares booster, Orion capsule, Altair lunar lander) to take astronauts more cheaply and safely back to space.

But the Obama 2011 budget kills Constellation. Instead, we shall have nothing. For the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, the United States will have no access of its own for humans into space — and no prospect of getting there in the foreseeable future.

Of course, the administration presents the abdication as a great leap forward: Launching humans will be turned over to the private sector, while NASA’s efforts will be directed toward landing on Mars.

This is nonsense. It would be swell for private companies to take over launching astronauts. But they cannot do it. It’s too expensive. It’s too experimental. And the safety standards for getting people up and down reliably are just unreachably high.

Sure, decades from now there will be a robust private space-travel industry. But that is a long time. In the interim, space will be owned by Russia and then China. The president waxes seriously nationalist at the thought of China or India surpassing us in speculative “clean energy.” Yet he is quite prepared to gratuitously give up our spectacular lead in human space exploration.

As for Mars, more nonsense. Mars is just too far away. And how do you get there without the stepping stones of Ares and Orion? If we can’t afford an Ares rocket to get us into orbit and to the moon, how long will it take to develop a revolutionary new propulsion system that will take us not a quarter-million miles but 35 million miles?

To say nothing of the effects of long-term weightlessness, of long-term cosmic ray exposure, and of the intolerable risk to astronaut safety involved in any Mars trip — six months of contingencies vs. three days for a moon trip.

Of course, the whole Mars project as substitute for the moon is simply a ruse. It’s like the classic bait-and-switch for high-tech military spending: Kill the doable in the name of some distant sophisticated alternative, which either never gets developed or is simply killed later in the name of yet another, even more sophisticated alternative of the further future. A classic example is the B-1 bomber, which was canceled in the 1970s in favor of the over-the-horizon B-2 stealth bomber, which was then killed in the 1990s after a production run of only 21 (instead of 132) in the name of post-Cold War obsolescence.

Moreover, there is the question of seriousness. When John F. Kennedy pledged to go to the moon, he meant it. He had an intense personal commitment to the enterprise. He delivered speeches remembered to this day. He dedicated astronomical sums to make it happen.

At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA was consuming almost 4 percent of the federal budget, which in terms of the 2011 budget is about $150 billion. Today the manned space program will die for want of $3 billion a year — 1/300th of last year’s stimulus package with its endless make-work projects that will leave not a trace on the national consciousness.

As for President Obama’s commitment to beyond-lunar space: Has he given a single speech, devoted an iota of political capital to it?

Obama’s NASA budget perfectly captures the difference in spirit between Kennedy’s liberalism and Obama’s. Kennedy’s was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons. Obama’s is a constricted, inward-looking call to retreat.

Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.

Of course, green is the color of mold, really bad teeth, and gangrene.

This disastrous drag on the US economy has passed the House, narrowly.

The last chance to block it is in the Senate.  Don’t just assume that your senator can’t be moved.  Write them, evey day, to express your disapproval of a bill that even its proponents admit will make no significant difference to the climate, but which will weigh down an already struggling US economy.   This is purely a “feel good” bill for the eco-pagan elites, yet it is a bill which will hurt the poor more than anyone, because they are always the first hurt by a struggling economy.  The notion that only “the polluters” will pay more is risible.  Prices will be higher, and costs and fees will simply be passed on to the consumers, doing the most harm to those on the tightest budgets.  More subtle effects, but even more damaging to the poor, will be the jobs that will continue to move offshore, as the US becomes less competitive against other large economies that will never make such restrictions on their own producers.

Imagine a public pool that isn’t quite as perfectly clean as you’d like it to be.  Now imagine about 100 people in it, splashing around, many barely staying above water, but all required to be in the water, because there is simply nowhere else to be.  And now imagine throwing a 25 pound cleaning filter around the neck of one swimmer who is already struggling, a swimmer whose history is one of rescuing other swimmers, giving other swimmers short breathers while they hang on for a minute, even though you know that only an insignificant difference will be made by the 25 pound filter.

Now imagine being proud of your commitment to clean water, because you hung the filter around the neck of one swimmer.  Now imagine having friends in the press who are willing to repeat your line that “it won’t really hurt the swimmer who is carrying the extra weight” as if it’s true.  And imagine pretending that you’ve done a great service for the world, and being allowed to get away with it.

That’s about where we are today.

Call your senators.  Then write to them, or send email at least.  Then call them again.  You owe it to yourself, and anyone you care about.

Flotation devices are going to be in very short supply, and very expensive.

An earlier version of this was posted Oct 21, 2008.  It has been edited slightly to reflect current conditions, but it is basically accurate still.
____________________________________

The patient takes vitamins and minerals in doses recommended by most physicians, and gets plenty of exercise.

The patient eats a reasonably healthy diet. However, the patient depends to a large degree on imported food, which is often expensive, though the price goes up and down to a degree, and while the patient could grow plenty of home grown food, the patient hasn’t been planting enough lately to sustain present and future dietary needs. So the patient is hungry, and losing weight

The patient is mysteriously ill. Upon examination, it appears that the patient has been slowly poisoned. The patient’s immune system and general state of health might have been sufficient to cover the symptoms of the poisoning longer, except for the strain imposed by the recent hunger and weight loss. The symptoms have been coming on for sometime, but only recently have they become indisputable, as what seemed subclinical does of the poison accumulated in the tissues enough to cause big problems.

Some physicians suggest simply stopping the poison immediately, engaging in a crash program to feed the patient, and growing lots more food for the future, starting today. The basically healthy patient’s immune system and generally good habits will reverse the effects of the poison.

Some physicians suggest continuing the patient’s calorie restriction, cutting back on the vitamins and exercise, switching to a different poison (but reducing the dose) and using leeches to drain away the bad blood. When it’s pointed out that the vitamins and exercise are usually good things, and that poison is usually a bad thing, these practitioners assure the patient that the problem was an unexpected reaction between the nutritional supplements and the low grade poison dose, and the new poison is really a purgative to help clear the system of the effect of too many vitamins, and won’t do any harm. When these doctors are asked if the patient really shouldn’t be eating more, they say it’s good to be skinny, and research shows that skinny people live longer, anyway. They point to all kinds of studies that seem to prove all of this, and cite complicated sounding theories to justify the counter-intuitive nature of their prescriptions. Trust them: they’re the experts. And besides, even if the patient starts growing more food again, it will be many years before enough can be grown to adequately feed the patient (aren’t growing seasons usually annual things?). And even if the patient eats more, the patient will just start exercising more again, and burn the calories, and what good will that do?

I know which advice I’d follow, if I was the patient.

The patient, of course, is the US economy.

The vitamins and exercise are the tax cuts put in years ago by the Bush administration and Congress. Strictly speaking, the vitamins are the tax cuts (think antioxidants that prevent cross-linking), and the exercise is the additional economic freedom those cuts created for productive activity that drove the huge success of our economy for six years after 9/11, until the combination of oil prices and the housing/financial meltdown drug it down about a year ago.

Did you get the pun?  The housing/financial meltdown “drug” the economy down.  Ouch…

The diet is oil and energy, and we don’t make anywhere near enough of our own, which is part of the reason prices were so high not long ago.  Don’t be fooled!  Even though prices have fallen far off the $150/barrel highs, oil is still in short supply for an active, vibrant economy.  You can’t have a speculative bubble without an underlying “shortage,” and right now people are simply doing less that demands energy. But our access to energy is going to reflect itself in our ability to “rev up” the economy as we grow out of the recession.  The combination of a true structural energy shortage for a vibrant economy, plus the inflation that is going to result from the printing of new money, is going to result in higher oil prices than we’ve ever dreamed of, within a relatively short time, as the economy improves, demand goes up, and the worth of money goes down.

The mysterious poison (that “drug” we mentioned, the one with inevitably serious side effects) is government interference in the marketplace, particularly in trying to repeal the basic laws of economics. One of the main things that poisons do is to interfere with normal biological processes, and market interference is little different. There are many of these poisons, and when one of them is having an obviously negative effect on the patient, too many so-called experts suggest we try a different one. The problem is that all such interference is toxic for our economy. Some amount of government interference is probably inevitable; after all, we take medicines that are essentially poisons, because our overall organisms can handle it in small amounts, and the medicine sometimes helps resolve a short-term problem. But you will die young on a steady diet of high doses of all kinds of medicine, regardless of how beneficial some medicines are in short term use for very specific problems. A body can tolerate just a very few “maintenance” medicines for a long life, and they must have very mild side effects to be survivable.

A few years ago I had some blood tests that revealed serious problems.  My doctor couldn’t figure it out, and sent me to a specialist.  He looked at the list of medicines I was taking, and simply took me off everything but the absolute minimum.  My blood-work improved dramatically, as did my overall health.  What had happened was “medicine creep”, where the doctor prescribes one thing, then another to deal with the side effects of the first, then another, then another, and so on.  It took an expert to decide to do very little, while the mediocre practitioner tried to do too much.

We are toxic with government economic medicine right now. The physicians who are prescribing it were wrong about the LAST ten prescriptions, with side effects they claimed we wouldn’t experience, and with frequent failure in the purpose of the medicine, even WITH the deleterious side effects. And they are planning to send us the bill for their professional services, anyway. The very best thing they could do is to withdraw all but the very minimum of economic medicine (meaning a tolerable toxicity), and let the body heal itself. It will.

But our president and Democrat congress have big plans. They want to put us on about a dozen VERY STRONG maintenance medicines for life, medicines with serious toxic side effects, medicines that have not ever worked for any other patient over the long term, and send our children the bill.

I wish politicians had to take the Hippocratic oath before taking office, which includes, if memory serves, this promise:

First, do no harm.

Unfortunately, instead of Hippocrates in office, we have hypocrites.

At the link, an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post detailing the reasons why Israel’s “window of opportunity” to take out or slow down Iran’s nuclear program is closing fast, making imminent action likely, especially given the results of the recent Israeli election. It’s a very persuasive case,  and includes this assertion:

American policymakers are now convinced that Iran, despite all protests and charades, is in a mad dash to create a deliverable nuclear weapon. The Obama administration has almost openly abandoned the assertions of the CIA’s much-questioned 2008 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iran was not pursuing nuclear weaponry for the simple reason that its atomic program and military programs were housed in separate buildings.

But what if Israel DOES strike Iran? Necessary as that may be, it spells very bad news for the USA.

Iran, of course, has repeatedly threatened to counter any such attack by closing the Strait of Hormuz, as well as launching missiles against the Ras Tanura Gulf oil terminal and bombarding the indispensable Saudi oil facility at Abqaiq which is responsible for some 65 percent of Saudi production. Any one of these military options, let alone all three, would immediately shut off 40% of all seaborne oil, 18% of global oil, and some 20% of America’s daily consumption.

America’s oil vulnerability has been back-burnered due to the economic crisis and the plunge in gasoline prices. However, the price of gasoline will not mitigate an interruption of oil flow. The price of oil does not impact its ability to flow through blocked or destroyed facilities. Indeed, an interruption would not restore prices to those of last summer – which Russian and Saudi oil officials say is needed – but probably zoom the pump cost to $20 per gallon.

American oil vulnerability in recent months has escalated precisely because of oil’s precipitous drop to $35 to $40 a barrel. At that price, America’s number one supplier, Canada, which supplies some 2 million out of 20 million barrels of oil a day, cannot afford to produce. Canadian oil sand petroleum is not viable below $70 a barrel. Much of Canada’s supply has already been cancelled or indefinitely postponed. America’s strategic petroleum reserve can only keep that country moving for approximately 57 days.

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, like the Bush administration before it, has developed no plan or contingency legislation for an oil interruption, such as a surge in retrofitting America’s 250 million gas guzzling cars and trucks – each with a 10-year life – or a stimulus of the alternate fuel production needed to rapidly get off oil. Ironically, Iran has undertaken such a crash program converting some 20% of its gasoline fleet yearly to compressed natural gas (CNG) as a countermeasure to Western nuclear sanctions against the Teheran regime that could completely block the flow of gasoline to Iran. Iran has no refining capability.

The question of when and how this endgame will play out is not known by anyone. Israeli leaders wish to avoid military preemption at all costs if possible. But many feel the military moment must come; and when that moment does come, it will be swift, highly technologic and in the twinkling of an eye. But as one informed official quipped, “Those who know, don’t talk. Those who talk, don’t know.”

Because our leaders have dithered and stonewalled in developing our own oil resources, in the name of “environmentalism” and “global warming” fears, and general eco-pagan-panic, we’re about to be in world of hurt, energy-wise.

I’m keeping my Prius.  And I just put in a wood stove. 

Try to imagine what a true oil-shock will do to our already reeling economy.  Can you imagine a DOW average of 4,000?   Better stuff your nest egg (shrunken though it probably is already) in some VERY SECURE place…  which the stock market sure isn’t.

The last time I looked, Thomas Friedman is neither a climate scientist, meterologist, physicist, or economist.  His academic training is in “Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Studies”. He’s a journalist. That’s it. So I hope Obama is not taking seriously this advice from Friedman to him, which presupposes Friedman’s ability to make scientific and economic judgments:

[Friedman] insisted that the challenge facing Obama required a revolutionary attitude to environmental policy, if the new administration wanted to avoid the devastating effects of global warming.

“We can do it if our next president, who I have great hopes for, is ready to be as radical as the moment we are in,” Friedman, whose previous bestseller was “The World is Flat”, told a lunch hosted by The Asia Society.

“Our next president is going to be called on to be more radical — I am talking crazy, wild-hair, paint-on-your-face, ring-in-your-nose radical — in what he does, than any president since FDR,” he said, referring to Franklin D Roosevelt, US president during the 1930s depression and the Second World War.

Continue reading “Time to get RADICAL?”

Russian Navy Increases Activity in Foreign Waters

Russian Navy spokesman Dygalo also issued a statement saying ships from the Northern fleet will arrive Tuesday in Venezuela and will conduct joint maneuvers with that country on December 1. The statement says the exercise would involve operational planning, helping distressed vessels, and supplying ships underway.

In Moscow, independent Russian military analyst Alexander Konovalov told VOA that Russia’s increased naval presence in the Gulf of Aden is a practical response to intolerable piracy. But he characterized the naval maneuvers with Venezuela as an empty political gesture aimed at the United States in response to NATO ships that delivered humanitarian supplies to Georgia during that country’s conflict with Russia in August.

Konovalov says, “you Americans send a ship to the Georgian port of Batumi with powdered milk and hygiene supplies, we send you the Peter the Great, a heavy nuclear-powered cruiser, to the Caribbean Sea.”

It’s OK Congressman Frank, we really don’t have to worry about those nice Russians and Venezuelan President Chavez. They just want to be friends. With each other, that is.  Not us.

Victor Davis Hanson is in fine fettle indeed, in Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts. Herewith, two of them, but all are worth the reading.

5. California is now a valuable touchstone to the country, a warning of what not to do. Rarely has a single generation inherited so much natural wealth and bounty from the investment and hard work of those more noble now resting in our cemeteries—and squandered that gift within a generation. Compare the vast gulf from old Governor Pat Brown to Gray Davis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. We did not invest in many dams, canals, rails, and airports (though we use them all to excess); we sued each other rather than planned; wrote impact statements rather than left behind infrastructure; we redistributed, indulged, blamed, and so managed all at once to create a state with about the highest income and sales taxes and the worst schools, roads, hospitals, and airports. A walk through downtown San Francisco, a stroll up the Fresno downtown mall, a drive along highway 101 (yes, in many places it is still a four-lane, pot-holed highway), an afternoon at LAX, a glance at the catalogue of Cal State Monterey, a visit to the park in Parlier—all that would make our forefathers weep. We can’t build a new nuclear plant; can’t drill a new offshore oil well; can’t build an all-weather road across the Sierra; can’t build a few tracts of new affordable houses in the Bay Area; can’t build a dam for a water-short state; and can’t create even a mediocre passenger rail system. Everything else—well, we do that well.

…

10. The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy. This upcoming generation knows instead not to judge anyone by absolute standards (but not why so); to remember to say that its own Western culture is no different from, or indeed far worse than, the alternatives; that race, class, and gender are, well, important in some vague sense; that global warming is manmade and very soon will kill us all; that we must have hope and change of some undefined sort; that AIDs is no more a homosexual- than a heterosexual-prone disease; and that the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.

John Stossel has some good thoughts on what is, and is not, in the power of governments. He begins by quoting African-American economist Walter Williams:

“Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good,” Williams says.

The failure to understand this is at the root of many of our problems.

“Most of life is outside the government sector,” says David Boaz of the Cato Institute. “Most change in America doesn’t come from politicians. It comes from people inventing things and creating. The telephone, the telegraph, the computer, all those things didn’t come from government. Our world is going to get better and better, as long as we keep the politicians from screwing it up.”

Continue reading “Economic reality, government programs, food and energy”

The patient takes vitamins and minerals in doses recommended by most physicians, and gets plenty of exercise.

The patient eats a reasonably healthy diet.  However, the patient depends to a large degree on imported food, which has become very expensive, and while the patient could grow plenty of home grown food, the patient hasn’t been planting enough lately to sustain present and future dietary needs.  So the patient is hungry, and losing weight

The patient is mysteriously ill.  Upon examination, it appears that the patient has been slowly poisoned.  The patient’s immune system and general state of health might have been sufficient to cover the symptoms of the poisoning longer, except for the strain imposed by the recent hunger and weight loss.  The symptoms have been coming on for sometime, but only recently have they become indisputable.

Continue reading “Dying from too much care”

Unless I am mistaken, this is the first time a non-governmental organization or business has managed to put anything in orbit.

An Internet entrepreneur’s latest effort to make space launch more affordable paid off Sunday when his commercial rocket carrying a dummy payload was lofted into orbit.

It was the fourth attempt by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, to launch its two-stage Falcon 1 rocket into orbit.

The Hawthorne, California-based rocket maker was started by multimillionaire Elon Musk, who made his fortune as co-founder of the PayPal Inc. electronic payment system.

The rocket carried a 364-pound (165-kilogram) dummy payload designed and built by SpaceX for the launch.

Wow. Harbinger of things to come, I hope.

Thnk the ability to debate is seriously important?  Think it matters more than good judgment, clear understanding of the world, and commitment to the welfare of America above party?

The threats, and some unfortunate connections, are made clear here.  These are serious people, with seriously bad intentions, who aren’t impressed by debate tactics, smooth talk or stage presence.  They will not be “negotiated with” in the normal sense of the term, because we have nothing they want that they aren’t going to get from us anyway.  We cannot give them enough to remove their bad intentions, and they have the capabilities, by and large, to act on those intentions, if we give them time and opportunity.  All of them have proved that.

Who is the very serious person you want as President of the USA to deal with these people?  Who, among the candidates we have, has sufficient wisdom, experience, clarity and toughness to represent us, and make decisions critical to our security?  Who has proved that he will put us first, regardless of his own self-interest, regardless of political fallout?   Who, among the candidates we have, will these people take seriously?   I think you know.

The old standbys, also hip deep in bad plans for the USA, and freedom around the world.

And then, there are our “friends”.

Whose vested interest is keeping us waiting in line for their largess.

Venezuela’s Chavez says US ambassador must leave – Yahoo! News

President Hugo Chavez ordered the U.S. ambassador to leave Venezuela within 72 hours on Thursday, accusing the diplomat of conspiring against his government and saying he would also withdraw his own envoy from Washington immediately.

Chavez made the move in solidarity with Bolivia after his Andean ally expelled the U.S. diplomat there, accusing him of aiding violent protests. He said a new American ambassador will not be welcome in Caracas “until there’s a U.S. government that respects the people of Latin America,” suggesting that diplomatic relations will be scaled back until President Bush leaves the White House.

“They’re trying to do here what they were doing in Bolivia,” Chavez said, accusing Washington of trying to oust him.

“That’s enough … from you, Yankees,” Chavez said, using an expletive. Waving his fists in the air, he added: “I hold the government of the United States responsible for being behind all the conspiracies against our nations!”

Holding up a watch to check the time, Chavez declared: “From this moment, the Yankee ambassador in Caracas has 72 hours to leave Venezuela!” He told his foreign minister to recall Venezuela’s ambassador to Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, “before they kick him out of there.”

The U.S. Embassy said it was aware of Chavez’s speech but had not received official notification. Embassy spokeswoman Robin Holzhauer said Ambassador Patrick Duddy is traveling in the United States this week.

The diplomatic spat brings relations between the two countries to a new low and raises questions about whether it could hurt trade. Venezuela is the fourth-largest oil supplier to the United States, and Chavez also threatened to cut off crude shipments “if there’s any aggression against Venezuela.”

How clear can it be? If you’re against drilling in the USA, everywhere we have oil, then you are consumed with some kind of sick self-hatred, and you hate the rest of us, too.  It’s time for the America hating eco-panic “gotta keep the wilderness no one ever sees pristine” Left to be replaced with someone who has our better interests in mind.

In the meantime, does anyone with a desire to survive and to live in a free nation really want Obama in charge when the Russians start putting bomber bases in Venezuela?

Maybe he’ll negotiate nicely with Putin….  hold him down to just a couple dozen bombers, and maybe only 100 or so nukes. 

In return we’ll promise not to admit any more former Warsaw block nations into NATO.

Fair trade, right?

We really, really need you, Senator McCain.

Here in California we have something called the “Flex Your Power” program. Here is their website self-description.

Flex Your Power is California’s statewide energy efficiency marketing and outreach campaign. Initiated in 2001, Flex Your Power is a partnership of California’s utilities, residents, businesses, institutions, government agencies and nonprofit organizations working to save energy.

Part of the Flex Your Power program includes something called a “Flex Alert”. It is a public warning that we are getting dangerously close to overloading our energy grid, or as they put it, our energy reserves are getting low.

The reasons? What they say:

High peak demand

Unplanned generation outages or transmission problems

Adverse weather

What they mean:

Your federal, state, and local government has not been doing it’s job. In fact while we have been passing ridiculous laws about plastic grocery bags, Co2, and removing the words “mom” & “dad” from school textbooks our supply of energy has not kept up with demand. We will not admit we are abject failures in energy planning. Instead, we are blaming you and expecting you to make do with less energy though our lack of foresight and planning, along with a death-grip on us by the environmental wacko lobby, has put us all in this precarious position.