From the weekend WSJ:

…The stakes are so high in this presidential election for a fundamental reason that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough: The federal government is so large and powerful. In particular, any aggressive president and Congress acting together have it in their legal authority — under our presently elasticized Constitution — to exercise near complete control over the economy. A long line of judge-made law since the Supreme Court’s New Deal era decision in Wickard v. Filburn (1942) says there is almost no limit, under the commerce clause of the Constitution, to the regulatory reach of the federal government.

Thus, a united president and Congress can, as a practical matter, do all or any of the following (plus much more): take your money and give it to someone else; tell businesses what to produce and sell, who to hire and what wages to pay; set all commodity, wholesale and retail prices; control all energy supplies, communication networks and financial markets; replace all private health-care with a government system; prescribe the curriculum for all schools; determine which students get a slot in elite universities; diminish political and other speech; and enroll all citizens above the age of 17 either in the military or in civilian corps for periodic instruction and service. Children could be required to spend the summer in government “youth” camps…

From this weekend’s WSJ on Governor Sarah Palin:

…When she ran for governor as a Republican outsider in 2006, she took on not only a sitting governor from her own party but Alaska’s Republican establishment — vowing to clean up a political system that had been rocked by an FBI corruption investigation.

After winning handily, her popularity in Alaska has soared as high as 83% as she has gone on to sack political appointees with close ties to industry lobbyists, shelved pork projects by fellow Republicans and even jumpstarted a campaign by her lieutenant governor, Sean Parnell, to unseat veteran Rep. Don Young of Alaska in the Republican primary held this past Tuesday. The winner has yet to be declared in that contest, as Mr. Young currently leads by less than 200 votes and a recount seems likely.

Gov. Palin has shown similar fearlessness in going after Big Oil, whose money has long dominated the state. She appears, for example, to have forced Alaska’s dominant oil producers, ConocoPhillips and BP PLC, to finally get serious about a natural-gas pipeline — without making any tax or royalty concessions…

But remember, Obama was a community organizer!

The mask slips…

“Their ports, their train systems, their airports are all vastly superior to us (sic) now…”

Actually:

No informed, intelligent person would favorably compare China’s infrastructure to that of the US.

There’s an excellent chance that Obama is an idiot, but I think his comment here is driven more by ideology than (lack of) intelligence.

I think Obama genuinely admires China’s totalitarian, communist system. If the US were “doing the same thing,” Obama wouldn’t have to worry about petulant voters or press questioning his right to rule. He wouldn’t have to deal with uppity capitalists challenging his authority to restructure our economy, dividing the spoils among his cronies.

Obama’s model (from The Economist):

In all this activity it greatly helps to have a secretive planning bureaucracy and a government that brooks little dissent. In Britain it took as long to conduct a public inquiry into the proposed construction of Heathrow’s Terminal Five as it took to build Beijing’s new airport terminal from scratch.

There was no consultation with the public on the terminal. Nor was there any public debate about the construction of Beijing’s third runway, notwithstanding the noise pollution already suffered by thousands of nearby residents.

For Beijing’s airport expansion, 15 villages were flattened and 10,000 residents resettled. They were barred from unemployment benefits and other welfare privileges though their farmland had been grabbed. Officials threatened them with violence if they refused to leave.

The World Bank says that roads are sometimes built only to convert countryside into revenue-generating urban land. Combined with a lack of adequate public transport, Beijing’s polluted air and congested streets, to which 1,000 cars are added daily, are evidence of the problem.

The government wants to build a new mag Lev train line. Residents along the route are fearful of noise and radiation from the trains.

Complaints still abound about the way things work. Highways—both expressways and other intercity roads—are studded with traffic-slowing toll booths. China reportedly has 70% of the world’s tolled roads and its tolls are the highest in the world (using exchange rates adjusted according to currencies’ purchasing power). To cut costs, lorries routinely overload. This helps to make the roads among the most dangerous in the world (89,000 deaths in 2006 by official reckoning; the actual number may be much higher). And it pushes up the cost of maintaining them. 

Chinese official Xu Li said, Once a plan is made, it is executed. “Democracy”, she says, “sacrifices efficiency.”

From the DNC 2008 Party Platform:

Social entrepreneurs and leading nonprofit organizations are assisting schools, lifting families out of poverty, filling health care gaps, and inspiring others to lead change in their own communities. To support these results-oriented innovators, we will create a Social Investment Fund Network that invests in ideas that work, tests their impact, and expands the most successful programs. We will create an office to coordinate government and nonprofit efforts.

Sounds like a great idea! Where do I sign up to get Federal funding to “inspire others to lead change”? Sounds like a great use of tax dollars.

This guy is a master at keeping his cool in the face of idiotic snark.

Here’s part 2.

A guy in this video makes a striking claim: The corn used to make 1 tank-worth of ethanol (20 gallons) could feed 1 person for 1 year.

Realistic? 1 bushel of corn makes 2.5 gallons of ethanol. 1 bushel weighs 56 lbs. So 20 gallons of ethanol takes 448 lbs of corn.

Over 1 year that would be 1.23 lbs of corn per day. Sounds about right - a standard loaf of bread takes 1 lb of flour.

Looked at differently, 1 gram of corn contains about 4 calories (metabolized). So 1.23 lbs (557 g) of corn contain 2229 calories.

A “somewhat active” 180 lb 6′2″ male needs 2555 calories a day.

It would be a boring diet, but, amazingly, it appears true.

Hypocracy? Flip-flop? Maybe just oblivious. Fortunately for Obama, his base is probably oblivious, too. From AP:

Democratic candidate Barack Obama criticized Republican John McCain on Tuesday for taking a page out of “the Cheney playbook” on energy, overlooking his own support of oil-friendly policies that the unpopular vice president helped to craft.

Vice President Dick Cheney, a former oilman, early in the Bush administration helped draft an energy policy that Obama asserted is biased in favor of tax breaks and favorable treatment for big oil. Obama’s remarks were an attempt to capitalize on Cheney’s unpopularity.

“President Bush, he had an energy policy. He turned to Dick Cheney and he said, ‘Cheney, go take care of this,’” Obama said. “Cheney met with renewable-energy folks once and oil and gas (executives) 40 times. McCain has taken a page out of the Cheney playbook.”

In stumping Tuesday in this key battleground state, Obama sought to link the troubled economy with Republican policies and offer his own energy plan in contrast. He has tried to cast McCain as more concerned about oil company profits and drilling than an overall energy strategy.

However, Obama himself voted for a 2005 energy bill backed by Bush that included billions in subsidies for oil and natural gas production, a measure Cheney played a major role in developing. McCain opposed the bill on grounds it included billions in unnecessary tax breaks for the oil industry.

The Obama campaign has said the Illinois senator supported the legislation because it included huge investments in renewable energy.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, said, “Barack Obama is opposed to offshore drilling and is also opposed to admitting that he voted for the same corporate giveaways for Big Oil that he’s campaigning against today.”…

In early June we wrote:

Statistically speaking, we have probably reached an irreducible minimum for fatalities in Iraq.

We stand corrected.

Total fatalities for US troops in Iraq dropped to 13 in July, an annualized rate of 0.118% (using 132,ooo for the number of US troops in country).

That’s about 3/4 the mortality rate for all US males aged 25-35 (0.15%, according to the CDC).

Actually, 13 is probably something of an overstatement. One of the fatalities was a Petty Officer injured on the deck of an aircraft carrier almost three years ago - he died in a Pennsylvania hospital last month. (And if we’re counting deaths of sailors, we should be using a troop count higher than the “in country” number of 132,000.)

Of the four combat-related fatalities, two were soldiers killed months ago, their bodies recovered in July.

So there were really only 10 “in country deaths in July”, with only two combat related. That’s an annualized mortality rate of 0.091%. The only adult demographic segment where the CDC shows a lower mortality rate is white females aged 19-24.

Also consider, while two out of 132,000 US troops were killed in combat in Iraq last month, two Chicago police officers were killed by criminals over 4th of July weekend. There are 13,600 cops in Chicago.