More Government Perfidy on BP Oil Spill

CNSNews reports:

Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana, sensed that a chart showing 140 oil skimmers at work — a chart given to him by BP and the Coast Guard — was “somewhat inaccurate.” So, Nungesser asked to fly over the spill to verify the number.

The flyover was cancelled three times before those officials admitted that just 31 of the 140 skimmers were actually deployed.

The incident is detailed in a report released Thursday by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Republicans say the report provides evidence that the Obama administration misrepresented the assets devoted to the cleanup, misrepresented the timing of when government officials knew there was an oil spill and misrepresented the level of control the government had over the matter …

Tuck this into the file with previous reports.

Go on.

New Taxes Hit 1/1/11

January 1, 2011, will see a massive increase in taxes and reduction in tax breaks, including:

First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief …

Second Wave: Obamacare

There are over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare. …

Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hikes …

Mug tip to Power Line.

Yeah, go on, while you can still afford to do so.

Riehl Warning to the GOP

Dan Riehl warns the establishment GOP:

…

A big part of my thinking in coming to DC was to try and help to create a synergy between the Right on-line and the establishment GOP. I had hoped to forestall anything like an insurgency from the Right by finding common ground. What I didn’t realize is that today’s GOP is interested in no such thing. It can’t hear anyone outside the Beltway echo chamber and isn’t interested in listening to them even if they could.

And I don’t believe today’s Beltway entrenched GOP is going to bring about the kind of change America needs. The leadership is weak, wasteful, misguided and out of sync with the people. The signs are all there, from Dede Scozzafava, to Charlie Crist – and worse.

And even if they reclaim this, or that majority in the fall, we will most likely see the same old politics as usual that so frustrated the Right under Bush. You don’t really believe they are going to repeal ObamaCare and tell millions of people expecting health insurance at taxpayer expense they can’t have it, do you? That will be politically imprudent to our Beltway ensconced GOP.

Illegal immigration? Led by soon to be ex-border cop John McCain, assuming he’s re-elected, they will be calling us racists and haters, again. They have to worry about that Hispanic vote, after all.

… Today’s Republican Party is broken and corrupt. And they are not my friend, any more than they are yours. They are only interested in themselves.

…

Preach it, Dan!

Go on!

Why BP Stockholders Should Sue the US Gov’t

When Obama is looking for whose ass to kick, he should begin taking yoga lessons.  According to the Financial Post:

Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn’t capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana’s marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.

…

In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with “Thanks but no thanks,” remarked Visser, despite BP’s desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer –the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment –unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

…

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer — but only partly. Because the U.S. didn’t want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

If I were the CEO of BP, this would come up every single time the media interviewed me.  Of course, to do that would be to anger the politically powerful.  I’m cool with that.  I would document every way the government took its revenge (as it inevitably would).  Of course, at that point the MSM would no longer report on it, but it would be there, official documents on an official website somewhere, to provide ammo for someone who cares about justice.

Go on, then.

Quick Politics Link Roundup

Two lists of proposed objectives for conservatives:

The American Spectator

Valley of the Shadow

And On The Issues, which tracks politicians’ records and offers an interesting political graph for each one (and for readers if they want to take their quiz).

Go on!

Random Things Worth Noting

Backwoods Home Magazine – self-reliance is a good set of skills to have.

Dems rule the campus

Police SWAT teams in Maryland and our psycho laws

Update – New Links:

Reason on Economic Suicide

Harvard economist Robert J. Barro: Government spending is no free lunch

Go on.

Is “Shut Up” Really a Good Argument?

On the question of whether Sotomayor’s statement was racist, one defense I’m seeing is “Shut up.”

Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesperson, responded initially that, “I think it is probably important for anybody involved in this debate to be exceedingly careful with the way they in which they’ve decided to describe any aspects of this impending confirmation.” He does not address her statement directly in any way.

Jill Lawrence at Politics Daily echoes this in an oped piece titled Wise Conservatives Might Want to Stop Calling Sotomayor a Racist:

Do Republicans really want to seem like they’re ganging up on Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina nominee to the Supreme Court, by calling her a racist? If they don’t, somebody had better get the word out, because that seems to be the talking point of the week.

The rest of her oped quotes several conservatives calling Sotomayor’s statement racist, and then giving three paragraphs from the original speech to provide context. She does not, however, address whether the statement is racist or not, and, like Gibbs, seems to be offering the argument that Republicans should just shut up.

As Andrew Klavan notes, this seems to be a common reaction from the left.

Because Sotomayor’s statement should be seen in context, here are the paragraphs that Lawrence quoted, taken from the NYT full text of that speech:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

Again, I have no problem with the idea that one’s experiences affect one’s judgment, but to think that one person’s judgment is better than another based on race and gender is racism and sexism. I would not want a white man on the court that believed his experiences as a white man made his judgment better than a Hispanic woman’s, and I don’t think a white man who made a similar statement would be appointed in this day and age.

Oh, go on.

Was Sotomayor’s Statement Racist?

My conclusion is yes, her statement was both racist and sexist. Here’s why.

According to CNN’s Political Ticker:

On Twitter, [Newt] Gingrich pointed to a line in Sotomayor’s 2001 speech to a Hispanic group in Berkeley that has drawn fire from some conservatives.

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Sotomayor said in that speech, describing how life experience can inform judicial opinions.

On Wednesday, Gingrich tweeted: “Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman.’ new racism is no better than old racism.”

Moments later, he followed up with the message: “White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”

There ensues a 300+ comment battle, which I won’t get into here.

Is the comment racist? Orin Kerr, at The Volokh Conspiracy, provides quite a bit more of the speech and a link to the full text. The comments there are far more erudite, but you get much of the same opinions, only expressed in witty, or pedantic, or well-argued ways. (Plus, there’s a good discussion of the term and organization La Raza.)

While there are a number there who disagree with me, I don’t find the context helpful in understanding the line Gingrich quoted, although I’m glad to have read it. Sotomayor seems to believe she has an advantage in judgment in general over a white male based solely on her experiences as a latina. She assumes her experience is rich and that a white male’s would not be. This, on the face of it, is both racist and sexist.

Some argue that, surely, Sotomayor must have meant something like “in the context of minority or womens issues,” but nothing else in the speech indicates that. Some of her defenders focus on the experience issue, claiming that she meant an experienced Hispanic woman would be better than an inexperienced white male, but again, the experience of the white male isn’t addressed; it is simply assumed to be less rich than the Hispanic female’s because he is white and male.

Darren Hutchinson at his blog Dissenting Justice points out other places where other Supreme Court justices have noted that race and gender play a role in individual experience and judgment, and he concludes with:

Many of the examples this article provides of judges accepting the reality of race- and sex-based decision making within law concerns jurors. But court doctrines prevent judges from overturning or even inquiring about the basis of jury decisions in most instances. Accordingly, juries have a central role in law — particularly in criminal cases. Furthermore, it would take a lot of argumentation and empirical evidence to demonstrate that these same identity categories and experiences do not impact judges, and most of the evidence, where available, seems to confirm the opposite. In fact, Sotomayor’s speech cites to several empirical studies which demonstrate that in particular types of cases judges tend to reach different outcomes depending on their race or sex.

The reality of race and sex does not mean that judges discard judgment and analysis or that they abandon precedent and rely solely on force and power. Instead, Sotomayor’s position acknowledges what psychologists and sociologists deem as self-evident: Decision making takes place through a prism of experience. Having diversity, rather than homogeneity, actually permits judges to isolate “fact” from identity-based biases. I applaud Sotomayor’s honest reflection on this subject.

However, this was not the question. No one is arguing that race and gender are not part of one’s experience and that one uses one’s experiences in making judgments. The argument Sotomayor explicitly makes is that the experiences her race and gender have provided her should make her judgment better than a white male’s, and that’s where the racism and sexism come in.

I believe that diversity in general is useful, but I do not define diversity as limited to race and gender. Diversity in life experience is the valuable part of it. As R.S. McCain pointed out,* Obama could have added more diversity to the Supreme Court by nominating someone (dare I say a white male?) who received his or her degree from a state university rather than just one more Ivy Leaguer.

*This is in update 2 of a rather funny 6-update post entitled “What’s Wrong With the North Bronx?”

So, like, go on, then.

Update: I added the first two sentences above a few hours after posting this, giving my conclusion first.

Update 2: Gabriel Malor, a legal blogger who also blogs at Ace of Spades, writes:

Judge Sotomayor has given us no reason to believe she is capable of approaching cases involving white people or men without discriminating against them. In fact, she’s given several reasons to believe that the opposite is true.

The two most obvious are her 2001 Berkley speech, in which she extols the special knowledge she has by virtue of her membership in minority identity groups and admonishes male lawyers to “work on” their experiences and attitudes so that they too can reach the heights of “enlightenment” which belong to certain minority identity groups.

…

The second obvious example demonstrating that she might have a problem with racial bias is the New Haven firefighter case, Ricci v. DeStefano, in she and the other panel members tried to sweep their support of the city’s discriminatory acts under the rug. They failed and the Supreme Court will be issuing a decision by the end of the term.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Motor Vehicle Traffic Deaths and Fuel Efficiency

John at Powerline makes the claim that:

With a stroke of the pen, Barack Obama has imposed higher fuel-economy standards on the American auto industry. Those standards can only be met by making the average car smaller and lighter than consumers prefer. The inevitable result is that thousands of innocent Americans, possibly tens of thousands, will die painful and sometimes fiery deaths, while many thousands more will be seriously injured.

He links a report by the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) that claims:

To improve fuel economy, auto makers primarily reduce the size and power of vehicles. Unfortunately, this downsizing has tragic consequences … :

Researchers at Harvard University and the Brookings Institution found that, on average, for every 100 pounds shaved off new cars to meet CAFE standards, between 440 and 780 additional people were killed in auto accidents – or a total of 2,200 to 3,900 lives lost per model year. [See the figure.]

This matches up with what I’ve heard, but I did find another report that claims that, since the 1980’s, many improvements in fuel economy have been made without reducing vehicle weight.  There is probably some truth to that, but how much I don’t know.  In any case, Obama’s new CAFE standards may or may not mean reducing vehicle weight.  If they do, then they will probably lead to increased fatalities.

The NCPA report has other reasons for opposing these new standards, including the fact that as vehicles become more fuel efficient, and therefore cheaper to drive, people tend to drive more, negating the benefits for both the environment and energy consumption.

What they don’t mention is that slapping our reeling auto makers with new, tougher standards is likely to harm their ability to recover (if they have any left, of course).

So much for CAFE.

The number of traffic fatalities in the US is truly shocking already: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates more than 37,000 Americans last year alone, and that was the fewest annually since 1961.  More about that later.

Go on!

America Is Doomed, or, Our Looterocracy

As GM and Chrysler swirl around the drain, California leaps into the sink after them. The decision was made long ago, of course – the voters refusal to raise taxes is quite justified. Tell me, wouldn’t California’s rags to riches to excess to broke make a great movie?

Politicians: the Looter Class. No matter the question their answer is always Give me more, more, more! Well, loot the rich and the rich leave. Game theory has told us that for some time now, and Doc Russia gives an example in the medical profession. The Looter Class: our idiocrats. And, I always thought it was rank hypocrisy that caused Aerosmith to cut the song Eat the Rich. Do they really think, with all their millions and fame, that they are one of us? Please.

America seems to be in some big trouble, and all our leaders are doing is rearranging deck chairs and looting the ship’s silver. We need a new class of politicians. I’m hoping the Tea Parties start raising some, but we aren’t going to be nearly ready to entirely replace the House and 1/3 of the Senate in 2010. We won’t even be close, but that’s what is needed.

Oh.  Go on.  What else are you going to do?