Tearing off the fringes, one post at a time.
It only took six years and an issue that all but the most religiously conservative people disagree with him on, but he finally vetoed something!
Now, hopefully the veto will be overridden by the people who understand that this veto will not stop the destruction of embryos nor stop stem-cell research.
Still, I have to congratulate President Bush for working within the normal confines of the law to change policy.
I find it amusing that President Bush is pushing for a line-item veto when he has never once pulled out a real veto.
Perhaps if he actually vetoed something, people would begin to believe him when he says he’s for any amount of fiscal restraint.
Still, the line-item veto does thankfully look to be a splendid tool for increasing gridlock.
All that said, I think Bush should do the one thing that would make people believe his claims about a line-item veto: ask for it to take effect after the next presidential election.
I imagine very few of you are following the aftermath of the Mexican presidential election, but I have to say that I’m rather happy that Felipe Calderon beat out Andrés Manuel López Obrador. I do prefer free markets over excessive government control, though I understand both, and wouldn’t have thought of López Obrador as the next Hugo Chavez until he proved himself such.
I still don’t think he would have gone that far overboard, but he’s sounding crazier by the day.
Now, Calderon evidently won by about 243,000 votes out of 41 million cast, so it’s a close margin, and thus it’s quite reasonable to do all the normal grandstanding with lawsuits and demands for recounts of different sorts. I’m okay with that.
On the other hand, López Obrador released a video of a person putting multiple ballots in a ballot box, and said that it was proof of ballot-box stuffing.
Except that it was actually a video of a poll worker moving three votes for congressional races that the voters had placed in the wrong box. Representatives from all the political parties were present and consented to the poll worker’s action.
That’s what the Federal Electoral Institute(IFE) found. The representative for López Obrador’s party(the PRD) said that she had agreed to the move and that there was nothing sinister about it.
Did this reasonably high level of evidence cause López Obrador to question his previous statement that this was ballot box stuffing?
Of course not. He said that the action was still illegal, and that his party’s representative’s “comments show that not all of the PRD’s representatives had acted with ‘rectitude’ and implying that she had been bribed by his opponents.”(Quoted from the Wall Street Journal article on A6 of today’s paper.)
Everything that I’ve read about the guy makes me believe that he has simply decided that it’s not possible that he could have lost, and thus it’s just a matter of finding out exactly how the system went wrong.
May we avoid having similarly messianic candidates in the future.
Herb Kohl, who is running on the platform of being a rich man whose money scares other candidates away, is hoping to get re-elected as the senior senator from Wisconsin.
As part of this quest, he’s spending a bit of his fortune on television advertising.
Now, most television advertising is either positive(I’m pro-healthy families, I think babies should be well taken care of, and I believe Americans should have the right to make money if they work hard and have a good idea.) or negative(the opposing candidate wants to destroy all that you live for! He’ll increase taxes! End social security! He’s a corrupt politician!), but rarely do ads talk about actual policy initiatives or positions, as that would inherently annoy a large percentage of the population that is against those initiatives or positions. And, frankly, for the people who intend to vote based on those sorts of issues, television advertising is going to happen a wee bit late to have any effect.
So, again, television advertising is for improving your own image or tearing down that of the other guy, without taking excessive risks.
The entire concept turns my stomach, but I understand and accept it.
Now, for some reason Herb Kohl decided to go against that strategy for success, and run an ad about how he’s for new anti-trust laws against oil companies, because they’re making lots of money.
Or, as I like to put it, he’s running an ad attempting to capitalize on high gas prices by assuming that the average American voter is too stupid to understand basic economics.
So, in the spirit of education, here’s a mini-primer on how gas prices work:
1. Crude oil is pumped out of the ground. A price is set, based on issues such as quality, available supplies of crude oil, and world-wide demand. And, since there are many exporters of oil throughout the world, the market is competitive, as demand will flow to different countries if one country sets too high of a price.
2. Oil refiners buy the crude oil,
3. turn the crude oil into gasoline,
4. then store the gasoline in large tanks.
5. Then the gasoline is trucked to your local gas station, and sold to the gas station at the price it would cost the oil refiner to replace that gallon of gas
6. Your local gas station sells you gasoline at a competitive price. If they don’t, you should go to the gas station down the street. There are plenty of them, and the overcharging place will soon go out of business, considering that they advertise their too-high prices on the side of the road.
So, are oil companies making lots of money? Yes, of course they are; they had a million or two barrels of oil that they bought when the price per barrel was $30 to $40 lower than it is now, and they sold it at the new market rate.
Or, in other words, they bought a commodity at a low price and sold a commodity at a higher price, and therefore profited.
Now, Senator Kohl, where in there is something evil that has to be stopped?
Jonah Goldberg had an interesting opinion article that I read in the Sunday, July 2nd issue of the Wisconsin State Journal(page C3). He talks about how liberals and conservatives are both changing. He quotes David Brooks from the New York Times: “We’re seeing a conservatism that emphasizes freedom give way to a conservatism that emphasizes authority.”
Goldberg then points out that Hillary Clinton has “positioned herself outside stereotypical liberal groupthink. She talks about securing borders, banning flag burning and staying the course in Iraq. And she’s hardly alone. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois … has even defended school prayer and the “under God” part of the Pledge”
Goldberg sums it up with these final paragraphs:
The arguments between the political parties for the foreseeable future will not be between champions of state intervention and champions of laissez-faire. They’ll be between those who want the state to do “liberal” things, on race and the environment, for example, and those who want it to do “conservative” things, such as faith-based initiatives and national educations standards.Forced to choose, I’ll take the latter. But I won’t like it.
Forced to choose, I’ll vote for gridlock.