Haste Makes Waste

Earlier this week, before the the House passed a wide-ranging energy bill, three conservative nonprofits—Americans for Tax Reform, the American Conservative Union, and FreedomWorks—e-mailed their supporters an action alert asking them to defeat the bill.

Because I place a premium on writing, I couldn't help but to fisk the first two alerts (I used to work at ACU, so I won't critique the third):

1. From ATR:

Make no mistake, H.R. 3221 will raise taxes, reduce energy supplies and make prices of fuel and appliances sky-rocket under H.R. 3221.

"Under H.R. 3221" is risibly redundant.

H.R. 3221, by restricting offshore and onshore leases for oil production on federal lands, is crippling an industry that provides 2 million jobs to hard-working Americans.

There are two points here: (1) that the bill restricts domestic drilling, and (2) that the bill will cripple the jobs-providing oil and gas industry. The first point is strictly factual, and even though I agree the restrictions are bad, ATR offers no argument as to why. The second point is similarly unsubstantiated: where's the evidence that the bill will cost Americans their jobs?

Semantically, "H.R. 3221" should be moved to after "federal lands."

And, H.R. 3221, by mandating every utility in each state to have a percentage of its electricity come from a narrowly defined list of renewable energy sources, regardless if the state possesses the resources or not, will result in nothing more than a massive excise tax on rate paying consumers in states that cannot meet this standard.

Is that a run-on sentence, or what? Here's a quick rewrite: "Finally, by mandating that most utilities must generate a percentage of their electricity from a narrowly defined, federally regulated list of sources—regardless of whether the state possesses the sources or not—H.R. 3221 will result in a massive excise tax."

If your Representative votes for H.R. 3221, they are voting for a tax increase.

"Representative" is singular, so "they are" should be "he is."

2. From FreedomWorks:

Before the Congress leaves town for its August Recess next week, they will be debating a massive energy bill that would raise the price of energy and do nothing to increase domestic production.

1. "Congress" is singular, so "they" should be "it."
2. "Recess" need not be capitalized.
3. "The Congress" is stuffy and archaic; just say "Congress."

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Offsetting Your Liberal Guilt

A few months ago, Charles Krauthammer coined the phrase "limousine liberal hypocrisy" for those who claim to neutralize their excessive carbon emissions by funding green projects elsewhere. The process works by buying credits from a "carbon broker," who promises to reduce emissions somewhere on the planet equivalent to what you've spewed into the atmosphere while jet-setting on your private plane or electrifying your McMansion.

But this much liberal guilt is too much for even Tom Friedman, whose credentials include a proposal to rev up the tax on gas to 50 cents a gallon and who is now challenging his fellow Prius owners to

offset their real sins, not just their carbon excesses. . . . Imagine if you could offset the whole Ten Commandments. . . .

Imagine if there were a Web site—I'd call it GreenSinai.com—where every time you thought you had violated one of the Ten Commandments, or you wanted to violate one of them but did not want to feel guilty about it, you could buy carbon credits to offset your sins.

Here's how it would work: One day, you're out in the backyard mowing the lawn and suddenly you covet your neighbor's wife. Hey, it happens—that's why "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" is one of the Ten Commandments. No problem. You just go to GreenSinai.com and buy 100 trees in the Amazon or fund a project to capture methane from cow dung in India—and, presto, you're free and clear.

So, Laurie, Leo and Al, whaddya say? Are you ready to put your money where your morals are?

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The Daily Digest

In a bunker under the White House on 9/11

The iPhone spin stops here.

Contrasting the energy policies of the libertarian Cato Institute with the conservative Heritage Foundation, Jerry Taylor concludes that Heritage is more hostile to the free market than is the Sierra Club, of all places.

Here's an apt, Luntzian turn of phrase: "political power." It's a spin-off of "government power," which conveys undefined but big authority. "Political power" sounds more specific, pairing the idea of power and politics to convey the inevitable when the latter is given too much of the former: corruption.

In 2000, 95 percent of Wyoming women who had abortions traveled out of state to get them. In Mississippi, the number was 60 percent, in Kentucky, 41 percent, and in South Carolina, 35 percent. Accordingly, argues Eyal Press, "[A]bortion-rights advocates ought to focus less on the specter of a Supreme Court reversal than on the reality of who is—and is not—able to exercise choice under current laws."

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The Daily Digest

Soren Dayton, the blogger behind Eyeon08, has been chronicling Mitt Romney's flip-flops: on abortion, gay rights, taxes, guns, embryonic stem-cell research, Ronald Reagan, the Contract with America, his draft dodging, education, immigration and campaign- finance reform.

Jeffrey Birnbaum documents how career politicians are extinguishing citizen legislators: "Thirty years ago lawmakers and many of their staffers accepted that their Washington careers were over when they left Congress. Not anymore. Now they look forward to lucrative second acts on K Street working for the same interests they were asked to judge impartially when they were on the government payroll."

Frank Zarb, Jimmy Carter's energy secretary (before it was called that), identifies one of the obvious, if politically treacherous, solutions to America's energy crisis: "Nuclear energy is the cleanest and best option for America’s electric power supply, yet it has been stalled by decades of unproductive debate. Our current commercial nuclear power plants have an outstanding record of safety and security, and new designs will only raise performance."

Shorter Nick Gillespie, from a week after the Iraq war began: I told you so.

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The Daily Dose

Contrary to popular lore, Congress did not pass the Height Act to restrict Washington's skyline to 130 feet, but in response to protests prompted by the 160-foot Cairo apartment building, on Q Street NW near 16th Street, in 1894

Here's another opening for Fred Thompson to exploit: all three front-running GOP candidates support some form of earned citizenship or guest worker status for illegal immigrants. "This stance puts them at odds with their base that rejects anything in the ballpark of 'amnesty,'" writes the Politico's Jonathan Martin.

With the endorsement of the state's Democratic governor and its two senators, the Bush Administration wants to begin oil and gas exploration off the coast of Virginia. (HT: Bluey.)

GQ is reprinting what it says "may well the best" profile it's ever run: Michael Kelly on the hard-partying, hard-working senior senator from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy.

The Castle Coalition celebrates its fifth anniversary.

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The First Law of Petropolitics

Tom Friedman's first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, is, in my opinion, the best introduction to the tinderbox that is the Middle East. His two subsequent dead trees, The Lexus and the Olive Tree and Longitudes and Latitudes, were equally important and brilliant.

But then Tommy Boy got lazy. He dramatically narrowed his focus to the politics of oil, and his columns became eminently predictable and uninteresting. (Similarly, I haven’t read his latest book, The World Is Flat, since his NYTM article on same seemed sufficiently informative.)

As it turns out, I haven't missed much, since one year ago, Friedman teamed up with Foreign Policy magazine to test his theories in graph form:

Along one axis we would plot the average global price of crude oil, and along the other axis we would plot the pace of expanding or contracting freedoms, both economic and political, as best as research organizations such as Freedom House could measure them.

The result: the "first law of petropolitics," which holds that

the price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in oil-rich petrolist states. . . . [T]he higher the average global crude oil price rises, the more free speech, free press, free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and independent political parties are eroded. And these negative trends are reinforced by the fact that the higher the price goes, the less petrolist leaders are sensitive to what the world thinks or says about them. Conversely, according to the First Law of Petropolitics, the lower the price of oil, the more petrolist countries are forced to move toward a political system and a society that is more transparent, more sensitive to opposition voices, and more focused on building the legal and educational structures that will maximize their people’s ability, both men’s and women’s, to compete, start new companies, and attract investments from abroad. The lower the price of crude oil falls, the more petrolist leaders are sensitive to what outside forces think of them.

I think I sense a new book in the works.

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The Daily Dose

If the U.S. attorney scandal has left you confused, you're not alone. The reason, as David Freddoso ably explains, is that while some of the firings seem to be legitimate (as in Carol Lam's failure to pursue administration priorities), others were seemingly intended to roadblock investigations into Republicans (as was the case with Paul Charlton, John McKay and David Iglesias). (Related: Charles Krauthammer explains why this "unnecessary scandal" is Gonzales's fault, and Dahlia Lithwick and Jack Goldsmith explain why the Justice Department will never, and should never, be entirely apolitical.)

Politicians uniformly speak of an energy crisis. We're "addicted to oil," declared President Bush in his 2004 SOTU address. His possible successors would bathe in ethanol if it would win them the Iowa caucuses. The solution, however, outlined by Heritage's Michael Frank, is to increase domestic supply by reducing regulatory bans and burdens. (If you think we're running out of oil, click here.)

Good news for the globe-trotting, liberty-dispensing Tom Palmer: as Christopher Hitchens reports, the soon-to-open American University of Iraq will offer not only an M.B.A. course but also, in the words of Azzam Alwash, one of its directors, "the ideas of Locke, the ideas and writings of Paine and Madison."

One big reason Democrats won November's midterms was because they recruited Blue Dog candidates. Or did they? According to the Capitol Briefing blog (as summarized in the Weekly Standard), through the first seven weeks of the 110th Congress, out of almost 4,000 total votes cast by the 42 new House Dems, a mere 20 were against positions advocated by the Democratic caucus' leadership. Only 14 of the 42 had cast even one roll call vote deviating from the party line. Pat Toomey drives home the point: "The Club for Growth PAC is targeting these freshmen in the hope that they will live up to their word and put American taxpayers ahead of the Democratic Party leadership."

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