According to Fox News:

Several GOP House lawmakers this week have taken the chamber by storm as Congress is officially on a five-week break and Democrats are out of town. The show continued Wednesday, its fourth day, with an appearance by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The GOP members say it is to bring attention to Democrats' blocking a vote on offshore oil drilling legislation, an issue Republicans say would be a winner if it actually made it to a vote.

So if the House Republicans stage an historic protest and the media doesn't bother to cover it, do they make a sound?

Opponents of drilling for oil say it won't impact oil prices now.

They're wrong, of course, due to the existence of the futures market (the domain of the much-pilloried "speculators").  But for the sake of argument, let's say they're correct.

And while we're at it, let's swallow whole the notion that mankind is causing global warming.  (On earth anyway; we'll leave it to Al Gore to explain who's causing global warming on Mars.)

Therefore, am I permitted to emit as much carbon as I want, because it won't impact global warming now?

According to the International Herald Tribune:


In other news, Barack Obama has recently completed his Eurpoean tour.

Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard provides an excellent analysis of how various coordinating groups, funded by liberal wealth, have smacked around conservaties in Colorado:

Eric O'Keefe, chairman of the conservative Sam Adams Alliance in Chicago, says there are seven "capacities" that are required to drive a successful political strategy and keep it on offense: the capacity to generate intellectual ammunition, to pursue investigations, to mobilize for elections, to fight media bias, to pursue strategic litigation, to train new leaders, and to sustain a presence in the new media.  Colorado liberals have now created institutions that possess all seven capacities.  By working together, they generate political noise and attract press coverage.  Explains Caldara, "Build an echo chamber and the media laps it up."

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, I can attest that Republicans are divided amongst themselves.  Here in Colorado's fifth district, we have a perfectly good, first-term conservative congressman in Doug Lamborn.  But he won a squeaker over Jeff Crank in the Republican primary two years ago, and the Crank forces want to rectify that injustice this time around.  I am all for unseating a liberal Republican in favor of the real thing, but this is nowhere near the case.  So time and money are being spent in internecine fighting while Rome burns.

Toyota has decided to build the Prius in Mississippi.  One will notice the word "Detroit" is absent from the article.  That is because no one in their right mind would start or expand their business into that business-hostile city.  The Detroit city council is famously corrupt, and Lansing thinks raising taxes and investing in education is the answer (not realizing that college students, despite heavily leftist indoctrination, are usually smart enough to move to warmer weather and more economically friendly climes upon graduation).

One will also notice Toyota is electing to slow production of pickups and SUVs in order to make more Prius hybrids.  This shows that high prices on their own are sufficient encouragement to "conserve energy".  Federal fuel economy mandates in the name of "doing something" are redundant if not outright harmful -- creating jobs for bureacrats on the one side and compliance officers on the other, but reducing the number of people engaged in productive activities, such as bringing us more energy-efficient products.

Thomas Sowell blames the fall of France in WWII on the Teacher's Union:

In France, after the First World War, the teachers’ unions launched a systematic purge of textbooks, in order to promote internationalism and pacifism.
...
At the outset of the [German] invasion, both German and French generals assessed French military forces as more likely to gain victory, and virtually no one expected France to collapse like a house of cards — except Adolf Hitler, who had studied French society instead of French military forces.

I love Thomas Sowell.

Incidentally, if you haven't read the International Baccalaureate mission statement lately, here it is:

The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.

To this end the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.

These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.

The IB site has a "World School" search capability on the left-hand side.  Colorado, for example, has 22 high schools with an IB program.

The Associated Press decided the Independence Day holiday weekend was a good time to slip this story through:

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program -- a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium -- reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" -- the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment -- was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy.

We wouldn't want anyone to think Saddam's Iraq had any kind of nuclear capability, would we?  Return to your grills and hot dogs people!  Nothing to see here!

Oxford Analytica in Forbes discusses reasons for the rise in commodity prices:
1. Supply and Demand
2. Weak Dollar
3. Questinable Policies
4. Speculators
5. Monetary Policy

Re: #1, duh.

#5 affects #2.  Because interest rates are low, foreign investors can earn a higher rate of return elswhere.  Therefore there is less demand for the dollar.

Re: #3, as I always say, Ethanol is the answer... because the presidential primary begins in Iowa.  As the article states, ethanol consumes a quarter of the U.S. corn crop.  Hello!

Re: #4, if in doubt, follow the lead of Vladimir Ilych Lenin and blame the speculators!  What do you want to do, folks, shut down the futures market?  You do realize, any time you agree to buy something at a certain price in the future, such as locking in a mortgage interest rate, you're a speculator.

Remember the American pastor thrown in jail by the Russians for bringing a box ammunition into the country?

A pastor at the Christ Community Church in Conway, S.C., Miles was convicted in April after security officers at a Moscow airport found a box of .300-caliber cartridges in his luggage.

He repeatedly apologized, saying that the ammunition was for a Russian friend who had recently bought a Winchester rifle and that he did not know bringing such ammunition into the country was illegal.

Fox News reports he is soon to be released.  This is good news.

Meanwhile, ever think about lawfully carrying a firearm for self-defense in this country?  Just get a permit, right?  Not so fast.  Even with a permit, there's plenty of gotcha laws.  Go here, you're a law abiding citizen.  Go there (e.g. national park), you're a criminal.  Carry it/ store it this way, you're law abiding.  Carry it/ store it that way, you're a criminal.

The laws are complex and vary by state.  I'd list some of them, but I'm likely to get them wrong.  But it all boils down to this -- the more inaccessible and useless your firearm, the more likely it is to be legal.

Criminals, of course, can do as they please.

Fox News/AP reports on negotiations for the continued presence of American forces in Iraq:

Iraq's prime minister said Friday that talks with the U.S. on proposals for a long-term security pact have reached an impasse over objections that Iraq's sovereignty is at stake, but held out hope that negotiators could still reach a compromise plan.

In his strongest comments yet on the debate, Nouri al-Maliki echoed concern by Iraqi lawmakers that the U.S. proposals would give Washington too much political and military leverage on Iraqi affairs.

So how exactly are these negotiations conducted?  Do the Iraqi representatives hold themselves hostage like Bart in Blazing Saddles?

Fox News reports:

A House subcommittee has rejected a Republican-led effort to open up more U.S. coastal waters to oil exploration.

Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., spearheaded the effort. His proposal would open up U.S. waters between 50 and 200 miles off shore for drilling. The first 50 miles off shore would be left alone.

But the plan failed Wednesday on a 9-6, party-line vote in a House appropriations subcommittee, which was considering the proposal as part of an Interior Department spending package.

Worldview A says, "if we need stuff (food, shelter, clothing, energy) we should go get it."

Worldview B says, "ahhh, you fool, always looking for simplistic answers to complex problems."

Call me simplistic.

But if you want complex, maybe we should sell Alaska back to the Russians.  They would gladly get the oil out of ANWR and sell it back to us.

...and I didn't speak up because I wasn't Mark Steyn.

The Editors of the National Review Online give us an update on Mark Steyn's hearing before a "Human Rights" Tribunal:

That’s right: This was only a provincial trial.  The Canadian Islamic Congress — the radical Muslim complainants — went jurisdiction shopping, so once the trial in British Columbia concludes, Steyn and Maclean’s will find themselves the targets of another witch hunt at the national Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC).  Both “courts” can impose penalties separate from each other, and the legal costs are likely to be astronomical.  (The complainant’s legal representation is conveniently provided by the state at no charge.) Incredibly enough, in 31 years, the CHRC has not once dismissed a charge that has been brought before it.  Could the courts in Soviet Russia have boasted of such a success rate?

Steyn's offense?  He wrote a book.

Meanwhile, the Examiner reports:

A new report issued by the American Textbook Council says books approved for use in local school districts for teaching middle and high school students about Islam caved in to political correctness and dumbed down the topic at a critical moment in its history.

"Textbook editors try to avoid any subject that could turn into a political grenade," wrote Gilbert Sewall, director of the council, who railed against five popular history texts for "adjust[ing] the definition of jihad or sharia or remov[ing] these words from lessons to avoid inconvenient truths."

Sewall complains the word jihad has gone through an "amazing cultural reorchestration" in textbooks, losing any connotation of violence. He cites Houghton Mifflin's popular middle school text, "Across the Centuries," which has been approved for use in Montgomery County Schools. It defines "jihad" as a struggle "to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil."

Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means."

Incidentally, John Derbyshire made a funny observation in the National Review Online, in which he compared the longevity in office of the world's despots to the longevity in office of U.S. senators.

I found it really funny when it was written all of three weeks ago.  This was before Senator Kennedy was found to have a brain tumor.

In the mean time, repeal the 17th Amendment.

The people of Colorado passed an amendment to their Constitution in 2006 to raise the minimum wage to $6.85 and adjust it annually for inflation.  It currently stands at $7.02.  Predictably, most teenagers I know are still looking unsuccessfully for work this summer.  And I've noticed many restaurants have closed (off the top of my head, I can think of two steak places, a pizza place, and a barbecue place).  There's also a local drugstore chain that's gone down.  All these buildings now sit empty.

Granted, gas prices are certainly shifting consumption from restaurants and retail.  But that means the market wage for teen labor has dropped below $7.02.  So a teenager willing to do something productive with his time for $6 can just go pound sand.

Thanks, Coloradans, for doing what's fair and making our state a better place.

John Hood makes the following observation in the National Review Online:

Gasoline is about to exceed $4 a gallon in most of the country.  Anyone who believes that isn’t the single most important number in American politics is fooling himself.

He's probably right.  I would like to believe that Americans are far-sighted enough to make stopping Iranian nukes their number one issue.  But hey, that might cause the end of the world in five or ten years, whereas gas prices are hurting us now.

Meanwhile, Robert Bryce in the American Magazine provides an excellent chart showing world supply and demand for oil (see table 2.1 in the article).  The table speaks for itself.  American supply of oil has declined slightly over five years, while American demand has held steady (bespeaking of increasingly efficienct usage offsetting increasing population).  Meanwhile, global supply and demand have both risen, but the latter has outstripped the former, thus causing the price spike.

On the bright side, Loose Ukrainian sends me a Bloomberg article detailing the current activity in the Bakken oil field:

... the Bakken formation [is] a sprawling deposit of high-quality crude beneath the durum wheat fields of North Dakota, Montana and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba.  The Bakken may give the U.S. -- the world's biggest importer of oil -- a new domestic energy source at a time when demand from China and India is ratcheting up the global competition for supplies and propelling average U.S. gasoline prices to almost $4 a gallon.

And unlike the tar from Canada's oil sands, Bakken crude needs little refining. Swirl some of it in a Mason jar and it leaves a thin, honey-colored film along the sides.  It's light - -almost like gasoline -- and sweet, meaning it's low in sulfur.

Best of all, the Bakken could be huge.  The U.S. Geological Survey's Leigh Price, a Denver geochemist who died of a heart attack in 2000, estimated that the Bakken might hold a whopping 413 billion barrels.  If so, it would dwarf Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, the world's biggest field, which has produced about 55 billion barrels.

There are technical hurdles, but with oil at $125 a barrel, the Bakken is viable, and the environmentalists have been unable to put it off limits.

Finally, Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard brings us back to the political:

Where Republicans have succeeded is in selling their solution to soaring gas prices: drilling for oil offshore and on federal lands, areas now off limits.  In the Gallup survey, support for drilling in precisely these areas jumped from 41 percent in 2007 to 57 percent in May.

So Republicans have an issue to exploit. And it's one on which Democrats are especially vulnerable because they promised in the 2006 campaign to offer a "common sense" plan to curb gas prices.  They have yet to produce one, and the price per gallon of gas has risen by more than $1.60 since Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007.

Democrats have also insisted--unwisely, it turns out--on pushing to enact a global warming bill that would further boost the price of gas and rake in trillions of dollars in new revenue.  This might have made sense a few years ago, but not in the days of public anger over $4 a gallon gasoline.

Speaking of that global warming bill, I did have a dark thought the other day that the Republicans could let the thing pass and let it wreck the country, just to teach the electorate a lesson.  Go away, dark thoughts.