Briefs on Iran, oil, taxes, the dollar, double standards, etc.

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Briefs on Iran, oil, taxes, the dollar, double standards, etc.

Opinions

Saturday, 20 March 2010 01:17

Ross Mackenzie
Tribune Media
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it More briefs related to public questions — accompanied by more thoughts about them....
Two women — take your pick. Nancy Pelosi says, “We have to pass the (health care) bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Which recalls an earlier comment from a more insightful – and more eloquent – Sarah Palin: “How’s that hopey changey stuff workin’ out for ya?”
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Remember genius John Kerry’s mantra about voting for invading Iraq before voting against it – a mantra typifying the left’s gauzy intellectualism? If uncertainty about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq should have motivated us to hold off removing Saddam Hussein, where do things stand regarding Iran? Are we more certain than we were regarding Saddam and weapons of mass destruction that Iran is developing, or less? If less, then what about Iranian claims about all its centrifuges? If more, then – if they merit a strike to wipe them out – what is staying our hand?
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In Reid/Pelosi land, Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid is quoted in a new book as describing Barack Obama as a “light-skinned” black man “with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” But Reid still has his job. Other Democrats, such as Howard Dean and Joe Biden, also have said racially insensitive things without suffering much permanent damage. Ditto the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, each a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.
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Yet former Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott lost his job – as he should have – for saying on Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday that the country would have been better off if Thurmond had won his 1948 Dixiecrat presidential campaign. And Virginia Sen. George Allen lost a re-election bid for using the word “macaca,” which has at best a dubious racial pedigree. It all constitutes yet another double standard applied with little consequence to Democrats yet with harsh outcomes for Republicans.
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No discussion about the strength of the dollar should proceed absent this datum: Since 1913, principally through inflation caused by the Federal Reserve creating new money out of thin air (i.e., printing it), the dollar has lost 95 percent of its purchasing power.
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And central to any discussion about the stability of the dollar is this: Today, China, America’s No. 1 creditor, holds about $1.6 trillion in dollar-based assets – or debt.
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With government-employee unions now representing more than 50 percent of the nation’s unionized workforce, your Congress and the Obama administration are moving to deny states any choice as to whether to bargain collectively with unions representing firemen, paramedics, and police. The Public Safety Employer/ Employee Cooperation Act (PSEECA) would federalize labor practices by effectively abrogating state and local laws and requiring state and local governments to bargain with public-safety unions. The effort is yet another pay-back to unions central to Obama’s election and today’s lopsided Democratic congressional majorities.
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You obviously saw the findings of a major study that abstinence education actually works in lowering teenage pregnancies – as how could sexual abstinence in general possibly not work in driving all pregnancies toward zero? You were less likely to see the findings of another study suggesting college is – please sit down for this – a dating agency, even a marriage bureau. Who can be surprised that the booze, partying and sex permeating the collegiate atmosphere have less to do with astrophysics than with hooking-up – either for the night or for the long haul?
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Remember Obama’s many promises to raise taxes only on the rich – those with taxable incomes over $250,000 per year? Now the president is talking about raising taxes on practically everyone. His budget agenda for the years 2011 through 2015 includes $1 trillion in higher taxes. And in a February interview with Bloomberg Business Week, Obama said: “What I can’t do is set the thing up where a whole bunch of things are off the table. Some would say we can’t look at entitlements. (Others would) say we can’t look at taxes. And pretty soon you can’t solve the problem.”
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In its efforts to move the nation toward energy independence, the administration clomps along at donkey speed. Oil works; it produces energy. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said recently his department soon will begin looking into claims of oil on the Atlantic’s coastal floor. Yawn. Meanwhile, he’s fast-tracking “alternative” energy sources – not dependable coal or nuclear or oil or natural gas so much as diaphanous tidal, solar, geothermal and wind boasting but the thinnest records of sustainable production of energy at sustainable cost.
Ross Mackenzie may be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .