As Barak Obama took the political field with a microphone to soothe the tensions created by the incendiary comments of his pastor, Jerimiah Wright, he has proved once again that what we need as a nation is not help shedding ourselves of our institutionally racist ways; what we need is to have the democrats move beyond using racism as a crutch to support their failing candidates. As Obama talked about how the jubilant atmosphere of his black church might shock the average white churchgoer, as Obama posited that "race is an issue that this nation cannot afford to ignore", as he linked his racial background to the repudiation with which the American people reacted to the comments of his pastor, as he spoke of the continuing segregation and inferiority of black schools, and linked racism of the past to the failure of black men to remain with their families and find good paying jobs; he conveniently sticks with the status quo, his buzz words of change and hope were not applied to the accepted paradigm. He declined the opportunity to condemn pastor Wright for his black racism, he declined the opportunity to admit just how far this nation has come, and declined the opportunity to admit that the ills that befall the average black family can hardly be blamed on white racism when black men commit crimes at many fold the white male rate, when two thirds of black men drop out of high school, when three quarters of black children are raised without a father.

There was nothing new in this speech, no change, certainly no hope. "We have no choice [except Barak Obama] if we are to continue on the path to a more perfect nation" he said, alluding yet again to the notion that only a black man can "fix" our country, and unintentionally to the notion espoused by Geraldine Ferraro that he would not be where he is today but for the color of his skin. In fact, rather than assure the American people that he disagreed with the vehement accusations of pastor Wright, he ludicrously suggested that he wasn't there when those statements were made, and that we just don't understand that there is more to the man than the statements being circulated by the media.

The mere fact that Obama's pastor's remarks were received so harshly by the American people, that in spite of the fact that Jerimiah Wright could have been given a pass for his comments because of the color of his skin, he was held accountable because racism is intolerable regardless of who originates it or to whom it is directed; indicates just how over race the American people are. It is the Democrats that can't let go. It's the Liberals that need race as a crutch in order to win elections and who need deep racial divisions to in order to have a race card to play when their candidates hit the rough road of their own indiscretions.

Imagine, on the other hand, that John McCain had a pastor, whose services he had attended for years, who had married him and his wife, baptized their children, and spoken at his political events. And imagine that that pastor had been a supporter of the KKK. What type of media reaction would you envision? This revelation would not be one that could be condemned as guilt by association or cherry picking of the pastor's statements. This problem would not be put to rest by giving a speech on race and just how far America has yet to go to solve the problem. McCain would certainly not be able to get up on a podium and tell the people that "we need him if we are to continue on the path toward a more perfect nation".

The sole reason that Barak Obama was able to pull this insolent charade is because he played the race card. He began with talk of his blood being a mixture of both slave and slave owner, and thus indemnified himself from any reverberations resulting from the comments of his pastor and supported by the Obama family's financial contributions. We can and will move beyond race in this great nation, but not until we shed the light on the terrible defeatism and victemology that lies behind the curtain of change and hope.

In the latest evidence of the lies and treason of the environmental left, the global warming scam fueled biofuel craze has now been shown to actually generate MORE carbon emissions than fossil fuels when the total process' emissions are counted. The study, cited in a New York Times article, points to the fact that the land cleared for production of biofuels alone generates "93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land", among other production and transportation emissions which, taken together, belie the claim that the efforts by Congress to interfere in the markets on behalf of the planet are doing anything other than expanding the scope and control of government into our lives to make our decisions for us. For those liberals who value their perceived status among their peers in terms of their environmental credentials, this information will undoubtedly be ignored, but for the rest of us "green elephants" a hard look at environmental fact and fiction is in order to generate real environmental policy.

The darling of the biofuels craze, ethanol, was a corn farmer's subsidy packaged as an eco-friendly big government solution in search of a problem from the start. At a little over $2.20 per gallon of gasoline replaced, this seemingly efficient fuel benefits from massive government subsidies (and since the government produces no money of its own, it benefits from your subsidies) amounting to "7 billion dollars" during fiscal year 2006 and yielding 4.9 billion gallons of ethanol. This amounts to a subsidy of $1.45 per gallon of ethanol produced, making ethanol hardly more cost effective than standard gasoline. Furthermore, as congress continues to meddle in the energy markets, energy companies are starting to invest not in increased refining capacity to meet our needs, but in new equipment to meet the expectedly increasing demands of an activist congress which has broken the markets system of allocating resources to the chagrin of all when filling their tank. If this weren't bad enough, the ripple effects of the massive corn subsidies are changing the relative prices of other farmed commodities, causing increased prices for meat, corn, wheat, hops, and virtually every other farmed good to increase as the supply of land devoted to food production shrinks in favor of ethanol production.


Inflation numbers are often reported in two categories: all consumer goods, and consumer goods excluding food and energy. The reason for this is that food and energy prices tend to be both more volatile, and they tend to react faster to economic shocks than other comoddities, since we buy these goods more frequently than any other item in our lives. With government mandated ethanol production, both food prices and energy prices are increasing at faster rates than they would in a truly free market, thus increasing the rate of real inflation, driving down consumer spending in other sectors of the economy, and depressing bond yields which are by definition valued in terms of our expectations of future inflation. These ripple effects leave no corner of the economy untouched, from the bond market to the housing market to the environment.

Of course, as these prices rise more land is being converted into cropland in order to satisfy the joint demands of the US congress and the people. Some of this land is scrub land, and some is rain forest, both of which represent a carbon absorbing "sponge" which will no longer be retrieving carbon form the atmosphere. Additionally, the favored method of burning the land to prepare for planting in and of itself generates sufficient carbon that it would take "93 years" of ethanol production to offset the carbon produced by this action, according to Joseph Fargion, a scientist at the Nature Conservancy.


But as alarming as these findings are, and given that the authors of the recent studies felt it necessary to send letters to the Bush administration and leaders in congress, the mandatory biofuels supporters like Nicholas Nuttall say they "don’t want a total public backlash that would prevent us from getting the potential benefits". Congress has mandated that 15% of all transport fuels are to be made from biofuels by 2022, an astonishing increase from the current levels; and after paying an additional 3.6 billion at the pump in 2006, not including the 7 billion in tax dollars spent on subsidies, we are now looking at tripling the amount of ethanol consumed domestically in the next 14 years.

The combined costs of this increase will be staggering. From high inflation, to expensive food, to poor returns on investments, to higher interest rates on home loans, to increasingly expensive fuel and worse than fossil fuels emissions; biofuels will not ever achieve the goal of energy independence or environmental protection. But does that mean we should throw up our hands and stop trying? Of course it doesn't, but our methodology needs to change. Already, just as happened during the Arab oil embargo of the 1970's, the high price of gasoline has pushed people, all by themselves, to move toward smaller and more fuel efficient cars. As a finite resource, we will adjust to the increasing relative scarcity of hydrocarbons through the market system, raising the fuel efficiency of our transportation and even finding alternative fuels when it ceases to be prohibitively expensive to do so. As someone who hikes, camps, fishes, and hunts more than the average person or "environmentalist" I have nothing short of a personal interest in preserving the outdoor lifestyle I enjoy to share with my (future) children. In my field (economics), pollution represents the classic example of what we term an externality: a cost or benefit attributable to an economic activity not reflected in the price of the goods or services being produced. One of the few instances in which I support government intervention in the market for any reason is to internalize externalities. A pollution tax system with tradeable credits (mitigated by a 1:1 ratio cut in other corporate taxes) would go further toward reducing our harmful emissions than any level of expenditure of our government money imaginable, but unfortunately when those in government attain their power and prestige not by empowering us to engage our problems ourselves but by using our shared challenges to further enslave us to an ideology of guilt and powerless incompetence, nothing is likely to actually get done.

The Super Tuesday Dilemma

As the field of Republican presidential hopefuls narrows, Tuesday the 5th (super Tuesday/tsunami Tuesday) will likely yield decisive margins for an emergent front runner in the party. But as the partisan rancor barely reaches a low simmer, intra-party aggression boils vehemently in the conservative punditry. Talkers such as Hugh Hewitt and Rush Limbaugh have exclaimed that a McCain nomination will "destroy the Republican party" and Ann Coulter threatens to campaign for Hillary if McCain wins the nomination, but increasingly it seems that the real threat to the party might indeed be extreme positions taken by influential party activists in the aftermath of a McCain nomination.

McCain has a very real chance of winning the nomination. In the waning hours before 24 states will allot their delegates, McCain's polling numbers have jumped to an impressive 2-1 lead against his combined GOP rivals! If he does continue to build on this surge toward the party nomination the talk radio faction of the party will have handed the biggest victory in years to the left leaning media: they will have brought about their own irrelevance.

Who would take seriously Rush Limbaugh's endorsement of McCain over Hillary or Obama? Or more relevantly, what would he have his listeners do in November? Stay home? The party is indeed undergoing a period of flux; the Bush presidency has turned out to be exactly what it was billed as: a different kind of conservative. Never since Nixon have we seen a Republican president so eager to expand the size of the federal government as President Bush, yet conservatives loyally stand by their president while chastising McCain as a liberal and pining for the days of Reagan. Perhaps the reason we don't have "another Reagan" on the ballot is in fact a function of history, and perhaps that history is itself more a figment of our imagination than it was a reality.

Reagan came to power as a direct result of the extensive damage done during that national tragedy called the Carter administration. Never before has a landslide victory like Reagan's been achieved, and Reagan reversed the course of government away from misery and near socialism which Carter had fought hard to bring about. Reagan was a hero, Reagan was one of the great presidents, and I would be thrilled to have the opportunity in my lifetime to vote for someone with the clarity of vision that he had. But the rose colored tint of history is misguided when we look in disdain at John McCain as compared to this great president.


Reagan won the presidency by promising to do three things: fix the economy, beat back the soviet union, and lower your taxes while doing it. Done, done, and done. But it might also be helpful to remember that he agreed to a 165 Billion dollar bailout of social security, expanded the size of social security by bringing federal workers into the system, started taxing Social Security benefits (yes, that would be a tax on the return of your tax), compromised with the Soviets on arms control, and raised taxes four times between 1982 and 1984! Does this make Reagan a liberal? Of course not! Reagan was a politician, and when we leave the land of fantasy and enter the land of reality, compromises can and must be made in order to get things done.

Much of the criticism surrounding John McCain's record stems from some of the legislation he has worked on: namely McCain-Feingold, and the recent "comprehensive" immigration reform. Yet in spite of the fact that Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which he even called amnesty because that's what it did (Gasp!), every pundit has been stampeding to be the first to say that John McCain is nothing like Reagan. John McCain has an 83% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, has crusaded against spending in Washington, has an impressive record in cutting subsidies to the bloated US Agriculture Department, has supported every single free trade bill that has come to the senate, supports reforming Social Security into an individual account plan with a positive rate of return, supports solving our health care systems problems by instituting a more market based approach, doesn't want to wreck the housing market with government intervention, doesn't believe writing a bunch of checks and spending more of your money should be called "stimulus", has pledged to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and refuses to stop fighting for victory in Iraq. The only valid criticism that can be leveled at him results directly from his willingness to compromise to get things done, exactly like Reagan did.

In spite of the trash talk McCain is a lot more like our beloved Reagan than Rush Limbaugh would like to believe. He has the strongest, most conservative record of anyone running, and those in the conservative media who have failed to see this have squandered their opportunity to lead the movement in this election. He has a good shot at winning the nomination, and a good shot at winning the white house precisely for all the same reasons why Ann Coulter hates him: the fact that he can appeal to 51% of the population. Regardless of how the 2008 contest turns out, talk radio already lost big.

PTSD and The New York Times Disorder

In a 9 page article featured by the New York Times as a weekend special, many sad and harrowing stories are told of American service members who have been charged or convicted of murder after returning from combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. Some have killed girlfriends or spouses after losing a temper in an argument, some were themselves victims of a crime but reacted to it in a manner understandable in combat, but illegal here at home. The authors claim that "taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak." and the conclusion implied page after page is that those returning from combat are broken, terribly violent, and amount to a list of reasons why we should be against war for any reason. Let me state for the record, that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is an under-reported, and under-treated aspect of combat that causes difficulties for returning veterans and their families that can scarcely be understood by those who have never experienced them. I do not in any way wish to belittle the challenges faced by soldiers readjusting to civilian life, however I do wish to examine the explicit and implicit allegations made in the Times' article and statistically examine whether those returning from combat are truly more violent than they would otherwise be expected to be.

Every page of the article talks about "the profound depths to which some veterans have fallen, whether at the bottom of a downward spiral or in a sudden burst of violence", about how war "unleash[es] certain things in a human being we don’t allow in civic society", " tales [of] warriors plagued by psychic wounds ", tales of soldiers who "wanted to be the first one to get a kill". Like many articles in today's mass media, it is ostensibly about something important and unbiased; in this case the article purports to be about the link between PTSD and violence. But after reading nine pages of example after example, the true thesis becomes clear: you should be against the Iraq war because all the soldiers are coming home with PTSD and killing people.

Nowhere in the article will you find any analysis of the statistics to determine whether veterans are more violent than other groups of people, or even the general population. PTSD is a serious problem, and one that needs to be addressed better by the military medical establishment, but demonizing the soldiers as blood thirsty savages which cannot control their urge to kill after combat does nothing to achieve that goal. While I can personally offer nothing to those coping with PTSD, I can set the record straight.

The Times found 121 cases of former soldiers accused or convicted of murder, to err on the side of caution the first assumption I will make for this analysis is that all those accused are guilty. There are 1.4 million Americans who have answered the call of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Due to the asymmetrical nature of combat in this theater, there are no traditional front lines. Many units that were never meant for combat found themselves facing the enemy in the course of their non-combat duties. For this reason, the threat of combat was ever present for many soldiers, whether they were ever involved in a fire fight or not, and IED's have taken many of our forces who were never involved in the front lines action. As the New York Times did not limit itself to those who had been in combat for its article, I shall not limit this analysis in such a fashion either.

Let us begin broadly by simply doing the arithmetic to see the the murder rate in the terms commonly expressed when examining a US city. This results in a murder rate for returning soldiers of 8.64 per 100,000. To put that into context, you are 530% safer with soldiers than you are in Washington DC, 486% safer than in Detroit, 443% safer than in Baltimore, 285% safer than in Memphis, and 222% safer than in Chicago. In fact, using 2002 numbers (note: all percentages calculated using 2002), if we treat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan as the 51st state, they would be ranked as the 11th safest state in the country!

Yet I will argue that this is as yet an incomplete picture. The average age of the US army is 28 years old, which is likely skewed by the aging army brass by a year or two. Never the less, the average age of a murderer in the US is 27 years old. What this means is that due to statistical differences in murder rates, the randomly selected veteran is more likely to be in a "high murder" age demographic than the randomly selected inhabitant of Washington DC, Detroit, Baltimore and so on. If that wasn't bad enough, combat veterans tend to be overwhelmingly male, because that's who the military puts into combat. Murderer's also tend to be overwhelmingly male. So if you take the randomly selected veteran, and the randomly selected US citizen, the vet is significantly more likely to be of the exact demographic which represents the highest numbers of murders than the US citizen, and yet the veterans can be thought of as the 11th safest state!

Where is the "cross-country trail of death and heartbreak"? Where is the endemic killing and murder? Where is the outrage at those in the media who consistently portray those who have endured combat in the name of our country for the sake of our security at home in such a disgraceful manner? People tend to form strong opinions based on weak evidence and exceptions to the rule rather than investigate it for themselves. The media play into this in order to push their agenda by highlighting the few specks of evidence they can marshal in support of their opinion while ignoring the ocean of evidence to the contrary. Those who faced the battle fields of foreign wars must continue their fight once back home to re-assimilate themselves into civilian life, and theirs is a challenge we must embrace as a nation; not vilify as the bane of the nation if we are discontented with our government's foreign policy.

"I am only one of many who sleep beneath the blanket of freedom won for me by men greater than I will ever be, one who lives under the liberty paid for by the blood of heroes and patriots, one who has never been asked to make any substantive sacrifice on behalf of his country." -Boge Quinn