ConservativeINC

My reactions are based on an article titled Israel-Syria Peace Deal Could Threaten Iran, Hezbollah. When you only read the title you think that things are improving (snicker, snicker) in the Middle East. That is what the article is about - right?

Wrong. First off, if you actually believe that things can dramatically improve in the Middle East just through talks then, well, you’re stupid and naive. Secondly, here is some stuff from the article that tells why this new “peace” deal has no chance:

Negotiations between two nations that have officially been at war for 60 years face significant hurdles on a long road that could lead nowhere.

Assistant Secretary of State David Welch told reporters on Wednesday that the Bush administration remains skeptical of Syria because it continues to back Hezbollah , allows top Hamas leaders to operate openly in Damascus and retains close ties to Iran .

“That said, Israel lives in a difficult neighborhood,” said Welch. “It’s in its national interest to find ways to expand the circle of peace if other people are serious about doing it, and I see that they’re undertaking that experiment now.”

The news was met with deep skepticism in Israel , where Olmert’s political future is in jeopardy because of a deepening political corruption investigation that could bring down his fragile coalition government before he can ever approve direct talks with Syria .

Israel and Syria announced the new peace initiative hours before an Israeli judge eased a gag order and allowed Israeli journalists to report more details of the Olmert investigation.

Israeli police and prosecutors are looking into allegations that Olmert accepted cash bribes from an American businessman, Morris Talanksy. Both Olmert and Talansky have denied the charges, but the prime minister has vowed to step down if he is indicted.

“This is very dangerous for Israel that a Prime Minster is trying to negotiate because of his personal interest and out of weakness,” said Yuval Steinitz , a lawmaker with Israel’s opposition Likud party.

To summarize, Olmert is talking with Syria to take attention away from his bribery scandal.

But this wasn’t what really caught my attention. At the end of the article there was a little portion that the editors said could be cut for space considerations. Here it is, uncut:

News of the peace talks came on the same day that Lebanon’s warring factions reached an agreement to end an 18-month political impasse that spilled into street fighting earlier this month with deadly clashes between opposition forces led by Hezbollah’s Sunni Muslim fighters and pro-government Sunni Muslim fighters.

The breakthrough gives the Iranian-backed Hezbollah camp its two main demands: veto power over all government decisions and a revised electoral law that’s designed to better represent Lebanon’s disparate sects.

The agreement is an important political victory for Hezbollah, whose allies seized large swaths of Beirut this month in a show of military superiority that left the fragile, Western-allied government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Saniora with few cards to play.

This is exactly what is meant by “one step forward, two steps back.” More accurately, these developments can be characterized as one small step for protecting Olmert’s ass and one giant leap for advancing Iran’s stranglehold on the region.

The only thing that will ever help the Middle East is if someone can spread the ideals of personal liberty to that region. Bush tried and there have been some successes in Iraq. But Iran is the key player there. They want power and are willing to push the limits to increase their power. I hate saying this, but I think Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was better at limiting Iran’s overreaching foreign “policy” than we are. The main difference is that while Hussein did something we fall over ourselves to prove that we will do nothing.

No, I’m not saying “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” (technically) but I am saying that now is the time to prevent the virus that is Iran from spreading. We should have helped Lebanon protect itself from Iranian-backed Hezbollah. We need to do whatever it takes to make sure Iran’s influence isn’t allowed to spread further to places like Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, South America, and other places throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia.

The world is quickly changing and we’re standing back as not-so-friendly countries like Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, and the like are spreading their influence to countries that greedily accept “aide” in exchange for support against America and the West.

Over the last generation a greater portion of the world has come to live in free countries than at any other time in history. If we relent and give up our leadership position in the world in exchange for some BS talks with crazed regimes this trend will be reversed.

The quintessential question Americans need to answer is this: do we want to talk or do we want to lead? BigT

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And they’re down to the wire, racing neck and neck. Who’s it going to be? Jindal? Crist? Or maybe Pawlenty?

Ah heck, who knows. All we do know, or at least what I think I know, is that John McCain’s VP is going to have to be a governor, youngerish, and (crossing my fingers) conservative in some way.

Here’s a little from an article in the International Herald Tribune:

Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, on Friday is scheduled to meet with two Republican governors who have been prominently mentioned as potential running mates, according to Republicans familiar with McCain’s plan.

The two governors, Charlie Crist, of Florida, and Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana, have both accepted invitations to meet with McCain at his home in Arizona, according to Republican familiars with the decision. One Republican said that Mitt Romney, a former rival of McCain for the presidential nomination was also expected to visit him this weekend. Romney’s advisers declined to comment.

My pick, from a couple of months ago, was Mr. Jindal. From what I have read (here’s a link to a particularly good one from Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review) he is reliably conservative. Sure socially conservative (fine) but, more importantly, conservative-conservative. He wants to cut taxes, bring some sanity back to his state (Louisiana), and he stresses personal liberty.

Here’s some more from the article at the International Herald Tribune about Governor Jindal:

Jindal, who was born in Baton Rouge to a family that had just arrived there from the Punjab area of India, took office in January after serving three years in the House of Representatives. In a race with four candidates, Jindal, who was born a Hindu but converted to Roman Catholicism as a teenager, won 54 percent of the vote after campaigning as a social conservative, opposing human embryonic stem cell research and abortion in any form and favoring teaching “intelligent design” in schools as an alternative to evolution.

But Jindal also has a reputation as a policy wonk, like the Clintons, with a specialty in health care issues. After graduating in 1991 from Brown University, where he majored in biology and public policy, and attending Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, he worked for the management consulting firm McKinsey and Company and was executive director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare. He later served as Secretary of the Louisiana state Department of Health and Hospitals and in the Bush Administration as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for planning and evaluation.

Oh, and there’s one other thing. His heritage is Indian. No, not Native American Indian, but Indian Indian. From India!

Personally, I couldn’t care less. But others, like the McCain camp, might be weighing that as one of the requirements seeing as the democrat ticket is going to at least have one minority candidate. If McCain wants to pick Jindal because of his skin color, great, because that means we will be getting a great number 2 in the White House.

So here’s to hoping that Mr. Jindal impresses Mr. McCain enough this weekend to make me actually vote for McCain’s ticket come November. Otherwise, I can’t say for sure if I will be voting for president this year. BigT

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T. Boone Pickens.

Just his name conjures images of gushing oil strikes and four-pound steaks. But maybe his name should bring up images of windmills and pork.

First the windmills - that’s his next big investment.

Here’s a couple of key questions and answers from Fast Company’s David Case (questions in bold, answers in normal type, and story can be found HERE):

Listening to all of your environmental ideas, it sounds like you’re the Al Gore of Texas Republicans.
Don’t connect me to Al Gore! A lot of what he says just doesn’t make sense. Texans know I’m environmentally directed in some ways. But I’m realistic about what’s going on. Industry people are comfortable with me. Gore talks about getting rid of the combustion engine. I don’t talk about that.

You recently announced plans to build the world’s largest wind farm, in the panhandle. Is that about money or the environment?
Money! First thing, it’s about money. Of course, I’m also a good environmentalist. I can pass the saliva test. But I’m not going to go do a 4,000-megawatt wind farm for the environment first and money second. I’d rather go give money someplace else. You’re talking about $10 billion.

What kind of return do you expect?
A minimum of 15%. It’ll probably be closer to 25%.

Tell me about the project.
It’s huge, the size of two nuclear plants in output, enough to power a million homes. More than 2,000 turbines, each between 2 and 3 megawatts. The first 1,000 megawatts will be ready by 2011, and 1,000 each year or two after that.

How important is wind to America’s future energy needs?
The United States today runs on 987,000 megawatts, and the demand is going to increase 150,000 megawatts in the next 10 years — 15%. We could supply most of that with wind from the Great Plains, from Texas to North Dakota, but we’ve got to set up corridors to the West Coast and to the East Coast.

So you’re an oil man who’s turning his back on oil?
Foreign oil is costing us $500 billion a year. In 10 years, $5 trillion goes out of the country. It’s nuts. It’s the greatest transfer of wealth from one area to another in the history of the world.

Take a stab at what we’ll be paying at the pump in five years.
Oh hell, that’s so far out. Maybe $6 to $8 a gallon.

Now the pork (with a side of hypocrisy):

What happens if Congress doesn’t extend the $20-per-megawatt-hour Production Tax Credit for wind — set to expire December 31? On a project this size, that’s an $80,000 deduction every hour at full capacity.
Then you’ve got a dead duck. It would be hard to go without a subsidy. But they’ll probably pass it.

You’ve advocated a higher gasoline tax. What do you think the tax ought to be?
I don’t have a formula. I’ve just said, if it were up to me, I’d raise the tax to kill demand. And the people who are going to be most hurt by it, give them a break on payroll taxes or something else.

Is ethanol part of the solution?
Ethanol is political. That’s what Bob Dole told me in 1989. He called me up and said, “Quit talking down ethanol. You need to understand something: There are 21 farm states, and that’s 42 senators. Those senators want ethanol.” He said, “Are you getting the picture?” And I said, “Yeah, it’s coming through pretty clear.” [Dole confirms that Pickens’s account is “probably accurate.”]

Not exactly an inspiring vision of Congress.
The leadership is absolutely, totally pissy in Congress — a real conglomeration of fruitcakes. I mean pitiful people.

So would you cut the ethanol subsidy?
No. Hell, I’d rather subsidize ethanol or cream soda than have the money going out of the country buying oil. If you subsidize ethanol, the technology will ultimately get better. Corn will not be the primary ethanol fuel. They’ll go to something cellulosic. People who are against it say, “It costs so much to buy ethanol.” It costs more to buy oil from the Middle East. You’re better off circulating money in the United States. Create jobs here.

This is something that has been developing in my mind for the last year or so. I have come to realize that businessmen, especially powerful ones like Mr. Pickens, aren’t capitalists. They are just actors trying to maximize their piece of the pie. And the quickest and most secure way to ensure that their piece of the pie grows is by cozying up with the government.

Mr. Pickens, in fact the whole “environmentalist” business sector, would probably not exist if it were not for our federal, state, and local governments. These governmental bodies force you and I to put solar panels on our roofs, subsidize wind and ethanol, and a myriad other things all in the name of being “green.”

If wind were truly a great investment then Mr. Pickens would not need tax credits in order to turn a profit. If all the subsidies, tax credits, regulations, and tariffs were stopped tomorrow our energy situation would change dramatically. But that’s all hypothetical and Mr. Pickens completely understands the real world.

He knows that there is no financial victory to be made from fighting the government. So he does what any logical player in our market should do, he plays the game. He, Al Gore, and every other environmentalist “businessman” play on our fears of a not-to-distant apocalypse unless we embrace wind or carbon credits or whatever else that is “green.”

As a businessman I admire Mr. Pickens. He has assessed the strategic situation and has positioned himself for profit. But our present strategic situation is stacked against our country’s long term viability.

Our government is responsible for spending an ever increasing amount of our GDP (federal, state, and local governments spent over 35% of our GDP in FY 2005). Our government has decided to spend our money on unproven technologies or at least on technologies that aren’t as efficient as what is already available (nuclear power, for example). And until that changes and our money is spent by US we are going to have to live with our government spending our money on technologies older than our country so that Mr. Pickens can make up to 25% on his “investment.” BigT

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