In the last few weeks stark differences have emerged between Dems and the GOP on energy policy. With gasoline >$4/gal politicians on all sides feel compelled to say/do something. A recap of what each side is offering:

Democrats:

Sue OPEC 

On May 22nd the House passed the “Gas Price Relief for Consumers Act of 2008.” The act does three things: 1) amend the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (written in 1890)  “…to make oil producing and export cartels illegal…”; 2) Creates a Petroleum Industry Antitrust Task Force inside the DOJ to study cartels; 3) Orders a GAO study on the effects of mergers in the petroleum industry. The bill was co-sponsored by 20 Dems, with Dems voting for the bill by a margin of 219 to 2. Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the cartel’s members have not yet responded to what efforts they will make to ensure their own national activities comply with this new US law.

“Windfall Tax” on US Oil Producers

Obama has called for a reprise of Carter’s “windfall taxes” on domestic oil producers. (Even the NYT editorial board eventually agreed that Carter’s version was a bad idea, although it took them almost a decade to figure it out.) The idea is that somehow the folks who produce oil for us will do a better job if we penalize them, or something.

“Compel” US Oil Producers to Produce More

On June 12 eighteen Dem Congressmen introduced the “Responsible Ownership of Public Lands Act.” The co-sponsors suggest oil companies leasing public lands might be secretly under-producing, a situation that they will remedy by imposing new fees on any acre leased that has not been drilled within one year. Never mind that it usually takes several years to determine whether newly leased land is worth drilling. After paying for the lease (usually 10 years) and the cost of exploration, the majority of these lands are returned to the government un-drilled. Not good enough for the Dems.

Increase Regulation of Energy Capital Markets

Just this weekend Obama outlined legislation directing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to “investigate proposals” for increasing regulation over the way oil futures are trades. New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine added, “I think everyone believes there’s too much speculation in the oil markets. A lot of the price of oil, I think, people put at the doorstep of speculators bidding up and holding supplies off the market.” Corzine thus neatly justifies this attempted power-grab by his estimate of what “people” think - note Corzine (a former bond trader and Goldman Sachs CEO) never says what he actually believes.

“Nationalize” US Refineries

Video of Maurice Hinchey (D-NY): “We (the government) should own the refineries. Then we can control how much gets out into the market.”

“Socialize” Domestic Oil Companies

Video of Maxine Waters (D-CA) tells the President of Shell Oil she wants to “socialize” his company.

Republicans:

Increase Production 

In his radio address on June 21 Bush made 4 proposals: 1) Drill ANWR; 2) Lift the 25 year ban on drilling on the outer continental shelf (OCS); 3) Lift the ban on exploiting shale oil reserves in the American West; 4) Increase refining capacity by allowing new refineries to be built in the US for the first time in 30 years.

On the second point its worth noting that Brazil has recently announced two massive oil discoveries on its own OCS, possibly turning that country into one of the largest oil exporters within the next 10 years. Its also worth noting that Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and even China (in Cuban waters less that 100 miles from Florida) are all already exploring the North American OCS.

Although McCain is still only “considering” ANWR, he largely agrees with everything Bush proposes. The American people apparently do too - according to Rasmussen only 18% of Americans oppose OCS drilling (including only 37% of self identified “liberals”). McCain is also calling for the construction of 45 new commercial nuclear reactors. The last commercial nuclear reactor in the US to come online started construction in 1973.

The GOP proposals are straightforward. They acknowledge the reality of increased oil demand from emerging economies like China and India. The solution is removing regulatory obsticles that make the US the only major oil producer in the world where new production is effectively illegal.

Some Dem proposals are laughably stupid (i.e. declare OPEC illegal so we can sue them). The rest seek to turn public concern about oil prices into yet another opportunity to expand regulation, expand government power, and grind down and demonize the private economy.

Krauthammer:

Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure — then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration’s refusal to do so not just “ridiculous” but “a disgrace.”

After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity.

Should the president ever meet with enemies? Sometimes, but only after minimal American objectives — i.e. preconditions — have been met. The Shanghai communique was largely written long before Richard Nixon ever touched down in China. Yet Obama thinks Nixon to China confirms the wisdom of his willingness to undertake a worldwide freshman-year tyrants tour….

….Having lashed himself to the ridiculous, unprecedented promise of unconditional presidential negotiations — and then having compounded the problem by elevating it to a principle — Obama keeps trying to explain. On Sunday, he declared in Pendleton, Ore., that by Soviet standards Iran and others “don’t pose a serious threat to us.” (On the contrary. Islamic Iran is dangerously apocalyptic. Soviet Russia was not.) The next day in Billings, Mont.: “I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”

That’s the very next day, mind you. Such rhetorical flailing has done more than create an intellectual mess. It has given rise to a new political phenomenon: the metastatic gaffe. The one begets another, begets another, begets…

We’re in serious trouble when a brain-fart may be transformed into a new cornerstone of US foreign policy. Why isn’t gaffe-machine a laughing-stock?

Joe Liberman:

How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?

Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful.

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided…

…A great Democratic secretary of state, Dean Acheson, once warned “no people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.” This is a lesson that today’s Democratic Party leaders need to relearn.

Read the whole thing.

Dems promise they’ll “restore America’s image abroad” once Bush is gone. In one rather important corner of the world, their message is not going over so well.

From Time:

The arrival of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who came to Baghdad on Saturday with a congressional delegation, set off a now-familiar cycle of reaction in the Iraqi capital. First there was buzz around the city about flight delays from Baghdad International Airport, which goes into lockdown when VIPs land or takeoff. Since no dust storms were grounding flights, anyone traveling could have assumed some American bigwig was heading in. But when local TV reported the visitor was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, there was a collective shrug of the kind you might expect from Republicans catching a glimpse of her somewhere in McCain country.

Pelosi is something of a nonentity to average Iraqis. If they know who she is at all, she is generally seen as an antiwar caricature figure, someone whose views on U.S. troop withdrawals are widely considered unrealistic. Pelosi has said she wants to see most U.S. troops withdrawn from Iraq by the end of the 2008, a time frame virtually no Iraqi political leader sees as feasible. Not even Mahdi Army militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, the fiercest advocate of a U.S. withdrawal on the scene, has called for such a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces. Rather, Sadr contends that the Americans should simply announce a reasonable timetable for the departure of U.S. forces.

The lack of popularity of Pelosi’s views was evident in the fact that her first day on the ground Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did not make an effort to see her. Maliki is currently in the northern city of Mosul overseeing a crackdown on insurgent networks there. But the city has been largely quiet in recent days, and there was no obvious pressing reason for the prime minister to skip Pelosi’s arrival.

Pelosi may not get much more warmth from the American military leaders she plans to meet either. Pelosi argued against sending additional surge forces to Iraq, a plan overseen by Gen. David Petraeus that is now widely credited with reducing the levels of violence in Iraq. Moreover, Pelosi made waves on Capitol Hill in November by saying U.S. troops were torturing detainees - an accusation generally not taken well by men and women in uniform of any rank….

Dem foreign policy ideas go over well in Pelosi’s home district of San Francisco and among the Mandarin eunichs in DC. But our allies and service personnel in Iraq see right through it. Too bad for Obama that Hamas doesn’t have a vote.

Mark Steyn:

…President Bush was in Israel the other day and gave a speech to the Knesset. Its perspective was summed up by his closing anecdote – a departing British officer in May 1948 handing the iron bar to the Zion Gate to a trembling rabbi and telling him it was the first time in 18 centuries that a key to the gates of the Jerusalem was in the hands of a Jew. In other words, it was a big-picture speech, referencing the Holocaust, the pogroms, Masada – and the challenges that lie ahead. Sen. Obama was not mentioned in the text. No Democrat was mentioned, save for President Truman, in the context of his recognition of the new state of Israel when it was a mere 11 minutes old.

Nonetheless, Barack Obama decided that the president’s speech was really about him, and he didn’t care for it. He didn’t put it quite as bluntly as he did with the Rev. Wright, but the message was the same: “That’s enough. That’s a show of disrespect to me.” And, taking their cue from the soon-to-be nominee’s weirdly petty narcissism, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Co. piled on to deplore Bush’s outrageous, unacceptable, unpresidential, outrageously unacceptable and unacceptably unpresidential behavior.

Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. Here’s what the president said:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

It says something for Democrat touchiness that the minute a guy makes a generalized observation about folks who appease terrorists and dictators the Dems assume: Hey, they’re talking about me. Actually, he wasn’t – or, to be more precise, he wasn’t talking only about you…

The media is definitely running with the DNC storyline here. I saw a CNN segment last night that started with something like, “Obama hits back over Bush attack,” then proceeded directly to two talking-heads discussing the implications - they neither quoted nor showed any of the actual Bush speech. On The News Hour last night Mark Shields said Bush had, “given the Democrats a big gift,” by allegedly lashing out at Obama.

Where have these people been for the last 6.5 years. Anti-appeasement has arguably been the cornerstone of everything Bush has done on the international scene since 9/11. Now he makes a speech in front of a community of people who have suffered perhaps more than any other due to appeasement in the 20th century, yet suddenly his mild and obvious comments are an attach on Obama.

This is going to be an interesting country if Obama wins. Any political disputes with the Great Leader will denounced as inappropriate personal attacks.

Lifted from Powerline:

It’s no surprise that the media are in the tank for Barack Obama, but the willingness of the New York Times to simply misrepresent the facts–while pretending to act as a fact-checker!–is pretty breathtaking. You may think the Times is an outlier, if not a joke, but I suspect that many more news outlets are prepared to follow the Times’s lead in flat-out misreporting the facts, if that’s what it takes to get Obama elected.

The Times story is “On McCain, Obama and a Hamas Link.” It takes John McCain to task for pointing out that Hamas has endorsed Obama. The Times reporter, Larry Rohter, says that John McCain has “again portrayed the Democratic contender as being the favorite of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group.” Of course, this is not McCain’s “portrayal;” it is an indisputable fact that Hamas has endorsed Obama and has said that it hopes he will be elected. But the paper’s most egregious error, in its campaign “fact check” column, is yet to come.

Rohter notes that charges and counter-charges have gone back and forth between the McCain and Obama campaigns, but Rohter judges that McCain is mostly at fault:

But important nuances appear to have been lost in the partisan salvos, particularly on Mr. McCain’s side.

McCain, Rohter writes, is guilty because he says that Obama has advocated “unconditional” meetings with Iran’s President:

[I]n a fund-raising letter sent out in April, a spokesman for Mr. McCain wrote: “We need change in America, but not the kind of change that wins kind words from Hamas, surrenders in Iraq and will hold unconditional talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad.”

That, the Times says, is wrong. It quotes Obama adviser Susan Rice denying that Obama has advocated “unconditional” talks with Ahmadinejad:

Susan E. Rice, a former State Department and National Security Council official who is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic candidate, said that “for political purposes, Senator Obama’s opponents on the right have distorted and reframed” his views. Mr. McCain and his surrogates have repeatedly stated that Mr. Obama would be willing to meet “unconditionally” with Mr. Ahmadinejad. But Dr. Rice said that this was not the case for Iran or any other so-called “rogue” state.

That’s good enough for the New York Times’s “fact checkers.” The problem is that, contrary to his campaign’s current revisionist effort, Obama plainly has advocated unconditional talks with Iran on several occasions. He was caught on YouTube doing exactly that during one of the Democratic debates. Not only that, Obama’s web site contains this statement:

Diplomacy: Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.

Now that it is convenient for Obama to retreat from his conciliatory attitude toward Iran and other bitterly anti-American states, the Times is happy to help him cover his tracks, even though Obama’s own web site confirms that, exactly as the McCain campaign said, Obama has advocated talks with Iran “without preconditions.”

It will be interesting to see whether the Times corrects this column. Personally, I’m not holding my breath. I think we are about to witness a level of partisanship in the “mainstream” media that has not been seen since the era of professional news media began a little over a century ago. In the past, when newspapers like the Times have misreported facts, people have generally assumed it was, even if the result of bias, inadvertent. No longer. We have entered an era in which leading news organs will intentionally and persistently misinform their readers in order to achieve a political objective–the election of Barack Obama.

By our favorite Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick:

Speaking in February of the man she knows better than anyone else does, Michelle Obama said that her husband, Illinois Senator and candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination Barack Obama, is the only candidate for president who understands that before America can solve its problems, Americans have to fix their “broken souls.”

She also said that her husband’s unique understanding of the state of souls of the American people makes him uniquely qualified to be President. Obama can do what his opponent in the Democratic race Senator Hillary Clinton, and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, cannot do. He can heal his countrymen’s broken souls. He will redeem them.

But then, saving souls is hard work, and Mrs. Obama won’t place the whole burden on her husband. He’ll make the Americans work for him. As she put it, “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

At base, Mrs. Obama’s statement is nothing less than a renunciation of democracy and an embrace of fascism. The basic idea of liberty is that people have a natural right to live their lives as usual and to be uninvolved and uninformed. And they certainly have a right to expect that their government will butt out of their souls….

I have a question I don’t think has been asked concerning Obama’s recent comments about small town people “clinging” to guns and religion. Recalling his remarks:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Is he saying Pennsylvania is in the Midwest? And he’s an IL Senator and resident of Chicago, the biggest city and state in the region!

Here’s the US Census definition:

And a broader one on Wikipedia:

Of course, his audiance was a bunch of hyperwealthy San Franciscans - for many of them Midwest might mean everything East of Jackson Hole and West of DC.

From the WSJ:

“In a democracy, I realize you don’t need to talk to the top leader to know how the country feels,” he said over the weekend, responding to a question from an Israeli journalist who noted that Mr. Carter had been snubbed by most of Israel’s top leadership and reprimanded by its president, Shimon Peres. “When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that’s the dictator, because he speaks for all the people.”

The mask slips. I believe Carter’s views on democracy are fairly typical among American leftists.

George Will’s piece today touches on a similar topic - Obama’s contempt for many American voters. Read the whole thing. Excerpts:

…When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, “Yes, but I need to win a majority.” When another supporter told Stevenson, “You educated the people through your campaign,” Stevenson replied, “But a lot of people flunked the course.” Michael Barone, in “Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan,” wrote: “It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind.” Barone added: “Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture — the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting.”

Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated professionals for whom, Barone wrote, “what was attractive was not his platform but his attitude.” They sought from Stevenson “not so much changes in public policy as validation of their own cultural stance.” They especially rejected “American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States was specially good and decent,” rather than — in Michelle Obama’s words — “just downright mean.”

The emblematic book of the new liberalism was “The Affluent Society” by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a “false consciousness” (another category, like religion as the “opiate” of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:

First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats….

Michelle Malkin has a link to some nice Obama gear:

Wrapup of DTN’s own fascim-chic Obama iconography:

Click for larger: