Introductory Chemistry For Nancy Pelosi

Over this last weekend, Nancy Pelosi (who is trying to save the planet) declared that natural gas (which she has invested in) is an attractive alternative to fossil fuels. Today's Wall Street Journal lets the Speaker in on a little secret - burning natural gas emits carbon.

It's frightening that someone so intellectually mediocre has so much power. It's a testament to our founding fathers that they limited the power that politicians may wield, because it's quite obvious that fools like Pelosi, Reid, Obama and Biden couldn't manage the garden department at Wal Mart.

Nancy Pelosi's Intelligence

Nancy Pelosi says that the latest John McCain advertisement "insults our intelligence." Here's how intelligent Nancy Pelosi is.

“I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels,” she said at one point. Natural gas “is cheap, abundant and clean compared to fossil fuels,” she said at another.

Ahem.

Nancy Pelosi is fortunate that she's not a contestant in the teenaged Miss America contest.

Game On: No New Energy

Nancy Pelosi has just handed the November election to the Republicans, if they have the stones to accept the gift.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday ruled out a vote on new offshore oil drilling even as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he might be open to a compromise that included it.

The scramble over expanded drilling off America's coasts — ammunition for a weekend of rat-a-tat-tat by the presidential campaigns — underscores the political power of $4-a-gallon gas. Though President Bush and other backers of new drilling acknowledge it wouldn't directly affect gas prices for years, they have pounded Democrats for opposing the measure, which is now supported by most Americans.

Do the Republicans want to win? Well, last Friday's demonstration showed promise. Let's see if there's some follow through.

We'll see. Supposedly a few Republican rebels are preparing to restart their demonstration.

Continuing with their guerilla tactics from last week, House Republicans will be back on the floor Monday to talk gas prices, even though Congress is in recess, and they may stay there all week.

More than a dozen Republicans have already committed to make appearances, according to House GOP leadership aide, including National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (Okla.).

Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) and Mike Pence (R-Ind.), who led Friday's five-hour talkathon after the House shut down for the August recess, are also expected to be there, according to this aide.

"In an urgent memo sent to GOP Members and staff Saturday (“A Call to Action on American Energy”), Republican Leader John Boehner (R-) and Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) hailed Friday’s action, and encouraged House Republicans to return to the Capitol beginning Monday morning to help keep the historic effort going," said a press release just released by Minority Leader Boehner's office.

This is a winning issue. If there is any one issue that clearly divides Democrats from Republicans on an issue that is of paramount importance to voters, it's energy policy. And Republicans are on the winning side on this issue. Americans favor new drilling by a 2-1 margin.

Update: Is it possible that some Republicans are getting it?

McCain supporters in Michigan will distribute tire gauges at Obama’s energy speech in Lansing.

The RNC will also deliver gauges reading “Obama’s energy plan” to Washington newsrooms.

No Oil, No Drilling, No Debate

Republicans should take notice of what scares Nancy Pelosi.

WHY NOT have a vote on offshore drilling? There's a serious debate to be had over whether Congress should lift the ban on drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf that has been in place since 1981. Unfortunately, you won't be hearing it in the House of Representatives -- certainly, you won't find lawmakers voting on it -- anytime soon.

Instead of dealing with the issue on the merits, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a staunch opponent of offshore drilling, has simply decreed that she will not allow a drilling vote to take place on the House floor. Why not? "What the president would like to do is to have validation for his failed policy," she said yesterday when asked that very question. "What we're saying is, 'Exhaust other remedies, Mr. President.' . . . It is the economic life of America's families, and to suggest that drilling offshore is going to make a difference to them paycheck to paycheck now is a frivolous contention. The president has even admitted that. So what we're saying is, 'What can we do that is constructive?' "

Screw The Polar Bears, Drill Here, Drill Now

Elitist opinion treats anthropogenic global warming skeptics as the moral equivalent of Nazi holocaust deniers and the intellectual equivalent of flat Earth adherents. All of the computer models, all of the newspaper editorial boards, all of the Hollywood stars, the Democratic Party leadership, both major party presidential candidates, the Weather Channel and the infallible United Nations all agree – burning fossil fuels will warm the Earth, melt the glaciers, flood coastal cities and cause kidney stones. In fact, just this last Wednesday, I received a letter from that noted atmospheric scientist, Leonardo DiCaprio, warning me that cute little polar bear cubs would die screaming in anguish as their melting snow dens collapse.

Global warming seems to have everything going for it, except for warming. Ten years ago the news that 1998 was the warmest ever recorded made headlines. What has not made headlines is that, ever since, the Earth has been cooling and today its temperature is about the same as it was a century ago. This data was verified by thousands of buoys scattered around the world’s oceans to measure water temperatures at depths down to several thousand feet. These buoys confirmed what your bones already know, that the Earth is growing colder.

Have you seen that in the headlines? I haven’t. I don’t watch television news, but I doubt that any of the networks have mentioned it. Even Shepard Smith, host of the supposedly conservative Fox News recently expressed his incredulity that anyone could doubt global warming: “It’s hard to believe this, but there are people watching us right now, and I’ll get e-mails from hundreds of them, who don’t think we have anything to do with this [global warming]. They refuse to believe it. They believe that what’s happening is they want to try to tax us on our carbon eventually, and that this is all a conspiracy to get us. ”

It strikes me as curious that computer models predicting global warming qualify as news, while the actual fact of global cooling is not news. Those of us who place more faith in data than theory are the fools. And of course, computer predictions of global warming are the primary reason why we are not permitted to develop any new oil in this country. Instead we are told that we have to pursue whimsical solutions like wind and solar power, even though any reasonable evaluation of data or computer models prove conclusively that both are losers. Meanwhile, nuclear remains a taboo. And so, we are paying more than four dollars per gallon to drive our cars. And much of the money we spend on that fuel ends up in the hands of America’s most venomous enemies.

All the while, we remain the only nation in the world that chooses to leave undeveloped all the fuel we would need to wean ourselves from imports. Tens of billions of barrels of easily recovered oil are sitting in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and along our coasts. According to the Institute for Energy Research, our shale oil deposits hold at least 8 times as much petroleum as the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia.

Recently, a few timid Republicans rose up on their hind legs and called for more domestic oil and gas development. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Luna) denounced this as a “hoax.” For decades now, Democrats have insisted that new oil development would take a few years before it bore fruit. But, immediately after President George Bush announced that he was rescinding the executive order banning oil exploration along US coastlines, oil prices dropped by $10 per barrel each of the next two days and another $5 on the third day. Natural gas prices have fallen even faster and farther.

That was quite a different reaction than Ms. Pelosi gained when she threatened to sue OPEC for not pumping enough and pushed through legislation barring the government from purchasing oil for the National Strategic Reserve, the only solutions that her party has authored.

Republicans need to stop seeking the approval of the mainstream media. The MSM will publish stories about how global warming will increase the incidence of kidney stones (as they did this week) or repeat the rantings of a crank who hoaxed them into reporting that global warming was causing stronger earthquakes.

If Republicans get aggressive about energy policy, they’ll not only be doing right by America, they’ll win the November election. If not, they deserve a place in the rubbish can of history.

News Not Fit To Print

Considering how much opinion finds its way onto the front page, perhaps a little room should be made for news on the opinion page. There have been a number of interesting stories in these last few weeks that have not seen the prominence they deserve. In fact some have been totally ignored.


For example, you probably heard that several hostages were rescued from the so-called Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) guerillas in Columbia. These cocaine smuggling terrorists have made life miserable for Columbians for years. You might also have read someplace that the FARC has suffered a number of other devastating defeats recently.

But, unless you read the Wall Street Journal, you probably have not heard that a laptop computer was recently captured and that it contained a wealth of information about the FARC and its allies. Along with revelations about FARC’s alliances with Venezuela and Ecuador, we learned that the Democratic Party was conducting back channel negotiations with the FARC.

More recent information has come to light that Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco, where else?) had a direct hand in these negotiations and had personally designated Representative James McGovern (D-Massachusetts) to represent her to the terrorists. Among the issues discussed was the recently negotiated Columbia Free Trade Agreement. The terrorists are against it. Nancy Pelosi exercised unprecedented powers to stall the treaty in the House. Coincidence?

If you doubt the authenticity of the intelligence, it should be noted that Columbia allowed Europe’s Interpol to examine the hard drive and Interpol concluded that the evidence was authentic and that the hard drive had not been tampered with.

A few years ago, the front pages were covered with the Valerie Plame affair. Valerie Plame was a CIA desk jockey who’s “cover” was blown after her husband, the execrable Joe Wilson had written a New York Times Op-Ed piece in which he claimed to have disproven President Bush’s claim that Iraq had sought to purchase high grade uranium ore from Niger. The mainstream press dutifully repeated Joe Wilson’s accusation that Karl Rove had exposed his wife and ruined her career.

Well, it turned out that Joe Wilson’s Op-Ed was directly contradicted by the report that Joe Wilson had submitted to the Bush Administration. The Iraqi trade minister had indeed visited Niger to promote trade between the two countries. And considering that uranium ore is Niger’s only export, the Niger government interpreted the visit as an attempt to purchase the raw materials for a nuclear bomb.

This is old, if not widely reported news. Even less widely reported was the recent revelation that Valerie Plame shares her husband’s reverence for the truth. When asked why the Bush Administration would have hired a flaming lefty like Wilson for such an assignment, the answer given was that, he had been recommended by his wife. She vehemently denied that publicly and under oath. A recently declassified document shows that indeed, Joe Wilson was hired after his wife’s recommendation.

You’d think that the truth would deserve as much prominence in the mainstream news as the original lies received. You’d think. But you’d be wrong.

Early last month, the New York Times briefly noted that a major military operation was getting underway in Iraq. In fact, what was happening was an Iraqi-led operation to snuff out the last remaining organized remnants of Al Qaida in Iraq. An estimated 12,000 terrorists had been surrounded and ever since their number was being ground down. The final pocket of about a thousand was essentially wiped out. Iraqi president Maliki declared the war essentially over. I didn’t learn this from reading American newspapers or watching American television news. I learned it reading the Times of London online edition.

At last check, the US had only suffered one combat death this month.
So, how did the mainstream media go about putting a negative spin on this grim milestone? They noted that combat deaths in Afghanistan had surpassed Iraqi combat deaths.

I think that I am far more likely to read about Britney Spears being seen again in public sans underwear than good news from Iraq.

Finally, the latest underreported story was the revelation that the United States has spirited 550 tons of purified uranium ore out of Iraq. Now, what would 550 tons of uranium ore be doing in Iraq? As everyone surely knows, Saddam Hussein had no plans to develop nuclear weapons. And so, he would have had no use for uranium. Surely, somebody simply misplaced it. It was probably Niger.