…is to vote to sue OPEC.

Webutante notes just how humorous this is.

And this is apparently the second year in a row that the Democratic-run House of Representatives has voted to expose the oil sheikhs to American trial lawyers. (Heck, maybe it is an elaborate payoff to the party’s wealthiest backers.)

The Congress will not vote to suspend the federal gasoline tax, pass legislation denying highway funds to states that fail to cut their fuel levies or allow Alaskan or offshore drilling. But they will allow lawsuits against oil producers.

America, we are leaving inside a parody.

Iraqi journalist Nibras Kazimi has been reading Arabic-language jihadi web sites and finds something surprising.

Al Qaeda’s admits that its attacks in Iraq have dropped 95 percent over the past twelve months. Read the whole thing.

That may be why the anti-war crowd is so desperate for the U.S. to leave: We have to go before victory. If we prevail in Iraq, it would teach our country the terrible lesson that sometimes our military means can succeed, that not every foreign deployment must lead to a Vietnam-like outcome.

John McCain began the day rejecting the endorsement of a second Christian conservative minister and now the Arizona Senator is being rejected by conservative bloggers across the country.

Clearly, McCain’s relationship with conservatives–who make up the majority of GOP voters–is worsening. And there are more than five months to go to election day.

Earlier, McCain had rejected the endorsement of Rev. John Hagee. Today he spurned the endorsement of Rev. Parsley, whose remarks on Islam the good senator found offensive. Parsley said that Islam was “an anti-Christ religion” which is trying to take over the world “through violence.”

I could debate Parsely’s interpretation (the favorable references to Jesus in the Koran are numerous), but I can also see his reasoning (Muslim persecution of Arab Christians from Lebannon to Egypt to Saudi Arabia and Iran is growing.) And, be rejecting the divinity of Christ, one could argue that Muslims are “anti-Christ.” As for taking over the world through violence, well, what does John McCain see out of his porthole?

McCain’s rejection of Parsley looks like another instance of P.C. prissiness.

And it looks politically maladroit. The McCain camp is not exactly swarming with support. Why reject the few friends who turn up unbidden?

Oh, because Rev. Parsley and his crowd are not acceptable at the country club. They are awfully serious about religion. And, my, they probably could lose some weight. And, is there any way they could stop shopping a Wal-Mart?

I am exaggerating a bit. But McCain’s inner circle is both well-heeled and liberal. They don’t want to spoil their pure image with the press by allowing a few conservative Christians to clamber aboard. But, of course, victory coalitions are multi-hued things. Losing ones all look alike.

That’s the question on the mind of Time Magazine’s Karen Tumulty–and apparently a lot senior Democratic-Party operatives (and I don’t just mean the press corps).

The speculations Tumulty uncovers are interesting: “This is about making her pile of chips bigger so she can use them to bargain with when the voting is done,” says a longtime backer, who also believes she is making a play for a place on the ticket. That is plausible and possible, but I think there is more to it.

I doubt she is staying in so that she can be vice president or have her campaign debts paid off. She will take those prizes, but only if she cannot get the big one.

I suspect that those Democratic leaders who think she is still in the race to increase her bargaining position simply don’t understand Hillary Clinton.

She is winning now, with double-digit victories in West Virginia and Kentucky. Most observers expect her to finish ahead of Obama in the popular vote. If she does, expect her to launch a relentless campaign demanding that the superdelegates give her the nomination. Expect her to resurrect every argument made about counting every vote during Bush v. Gore.

This is Hillary: she plays to win and she plays hardball. If she operated the same way against America’s foreign enemies as she does against her own domestic enemies, I would vote for her.

Saddam Hussein’s last words are revealing.

Al Hayat, the Arabic daily based in London, persuaded U.S. officials to part with thousands of pages of Saddam’s Arabic-language jottings, written while the Iraqi tyrant was in custody from 2003 to 2006. This fascinating article, which appeared a few weeks back, takes us into his confused and angry mind.

Here’s the punchline: Saddam feared catching a venereal disease from sharing a clothesline with some U.S. soldiers. Somehow their clean wet laundry would infect his, giving the former strongman a humiliating disease.

Crazy, right?

Well, this is the man that some American politicians wanted to negotiate with. This is the man that some wanted to trust with powerful weapons and the world’s second-largest supply of oil. A man driven insane by irrational fears and boiling hatreds and breathtaking vanity.

A man afraid of clean laundry. And a man who took every action in his power to keep that laundry away from his own.

Imagine him alive, in power and with the bomb.

There is a lesson here: some dictators are beyond the shared world of reason, inhabiting a private hell immune to give and take.

Perhaps Barack Obama should cogitate on the lesson of Saddam’s last words–and Ahmadinejad’s current words. Is Iran’s president too fearful and addled to negotiate? What about North Korea’s Kim Jong Il? Is any dictator too addled by fear, ideology or personal demons to make a poor negotiating partner?

If his answer is that every one should have a chance to be heard, fine. Let’s ask him about Saddam’s underwear.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling is not yet a household name, but this week he demonstrated why he deserves more attention.

The Texas Republican challenged the entire Republican caucus to unite behind a common platform of eight ideas (or even two or three), as NRO’s Mark Hemingway reports. It is not exactly as bold a stroke as the Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, but it is a start.

Frankly, if the House Republicans are going to avoid disaster this November they will need a persuasive reason for Republicans to vote for them, let alone independents and Democrats.

Rep. Hensarling has sparked the patient, now we will see if recumbent Republicans can rouse themselves to do some original thinking.

Apparently, the 2006 defeats were not enough. The record number of old bull Republican retirements were not enough. The loss of three special elections in a row–in “safe” seats–is not enough.

I’d like to add a few ideas to the mix.

Federal gas taxes.  Sen. John McCain has proposed a summer-long “gas tax holiday” and been met with mostly jeers. He is trying to keep both America and Washington (drunk of highway spending financed by gas taxes) happy. And, as St. Paul warns, you cannot serve two masters. A better idea: suspend the federal gasoline tax until oil prices fall to $30 per barrel.

Or abolish the federal gasoline tax altogether. The Eisenhower-era tax was supposed to be temporary and states were supposed to fund their own roads. That’s why all federal highway projects are technically “demonstration projects” to show the locals new paving techniques. Time to end this costly insult to America’s intelligence.

Federal Employee Retirements. Between January 1, 2005 and January 1, 2009, some 750,000 federal employees are due to retire. Why replace all of them? Hire only 75,000 instead and use new technology to streamline the work flow. Moving more government permits and reports to the Internet–as Texas did with its E-Government Initiative–would be a start. These retirements offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shrink the size of government and to do it relatively painlessly.

Tax reform. Both the federal income tax and the social security tax take bites out of the same income. But social security (FICA) has a ceiling, which is presently around $90,000 per person. You only pay social security taxes on the first $90,000 you earn. Why not have the income tax begin right as the social security tax ends? That way every one under $90,000 is freed from income taxes and everyone over $90,000 gets a break as well.  It would be very hard to argue that this tax cut is a giveaway to the rich and it would draw in Democracts and independents who make up what used to called “the working class.”

Ah, the government would lose so much revenue you say. Not exactly. Those earning over $100,000 pay roughly 90% of the federal tax burden. Why torture the small fry for such a low return?

Anyone else have new ideas for the Republicans? Let’s hear about it in comments.

This is a fairly devastating use of Senator John McCain’s own words against him. I suspect that you will see a lot more like this during the fall election brawl.

It was put together by an online film maker who calls himself “brave new films.” Once again, the web guys are a step ahead of the old “pros.” McCain is lucky this isn’t coming from the Obama campaign (or is it?).

It would be smart for McCain’s inner circle to devise a way to defuse these attacks, before those attacks harden into the conventional wisdom. Even smarter would be to develop a network of surrogates to defend the GOP’s presumtive nominee on youtube.com and other sites.

If the campaign waits until September, it will have waited too long. It will earn the headline that the New Yorker appended to George Packer’s excellent article this week: “Is the GOP brain dead?”

These days, the question mark is pure charity.

Picking on President Bush for mangling the English language is not exactly playing the varsity. Back in the early 2000s, books and websites recorded every new “Bushism” –followed by a chorus of laughter. These days, the game has become so easy that even enthusiasts on the far-Left seem to realize there is no sport in it anymore.

But what about Obama’s mangling of basic facts? In the past few days, we have seen quite a parade of Obama-isms–facts that simply aren’t so. These false facts are generally shrugged off by the press corps.

Remember his claim about “visiting 57 states”? I was prepared to let that go. Fatigue makes idiots of all pols. (Of course, the media would have gone wall-to-wall with it if it was uttered by a lesser mortal, say a Republican.)

But the Obama-isms continue. The latest two Obama-isms are more disturbing. Here is an excerpt from an ABC News report:

“We don’t have enough capacity right now to deal with it — and it’s not just the troops,” Obama, D-Ill., told a crowd in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Obama posited — incorrectly — that Arabic translators deployed in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan — forgetting, momentarily, that Afghans don’t speak Arabic.

“We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then its harder for us to use them in Afghanistan,” Obama said.

The vast majority of military translators in both war zones are drawn from the local population.
Naturally they speak the local language. In Iraq, that’s Arabic or Kurdish. In Afghanistan, it’s any of a half dozen other languages — including Pashtu, Dari, and Farsi.

No sooner did Obama realize his mistake — and correct himself — but he immediately made another.

“We need agricultural specialists in Afghanistan, people who can help them develop other crops than heroin poppies, because the drug trade in Afghanistan is what is driving and financing these terrorist networks. So we need agricultural specialists,” he said.

So far, so good.

“But if we are sending them to Baghdad, they’re not in Afghanistan,” Obama said.

Iraq has many problems, but encouraging farmers to grow food instead of opium poppies isn’t one of them. In Iraq, oil fields not poppy fields are a major source of U.S. technical assistance.

The dry, wire-service style response to Obama’s claims is to be savored.

When you are in a hole, what is the first thing you are supposed to do? Stop digging,right?

Brushing aside this cherished bromide, the Obama campaign insisted they were right all along. (Can’t they just say I goofed?) Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, contended that foreign fighters in Afghanistan do speak Arabic (yeah, but we’re trying to kill or capture them, not talk to them–and our interrogation facilities are not short of translators) and that there are farming experts deployed to Iraq. Sure. But they aren’t there to stop the Iraqis from growing Heroin in the hot sands.

One measure of how fair the media intends to be this election cycle: How well, if it all, they cover Obama-isms.

Far too many journalists have painted themselves into a corner with their constant opposition to the Iraq war. (Time magazine wondered when we were finally going to get out… in 2004.) So any news of progress in Iraq must be ignored or explained away.  (Of course, if you don’t take a position and only report what you see, then no development is unwelcome… but I digress. ) As a result, I find the accounts of Iraqis more informative.Take the story of Hussayn, which is posted over at Castle Arghhh!, a kind of irreverent companion to Blackfive. I am not sure I trust all of the particulars of Hussayn’s story. It is sanded and smooth, like a rock from a fast-moving creek. It has obviously been told many times, losing unique and unnecessary details along the way. Of course, Iraq is an oral culture. Having a set-piece like this one is expected in Iraqi conversations (and in Irish bars). And Hussayn, if he exists, is clearly a practiced story-teller. The other problem is that this story reads like what Americans would think Iraqis think; it contains no counter-cultural surprises. It may even be a story invented to illustrate changes in American tactics. All that said, the folks at Castle Arghhh! present it as an actual account from a real person and it is possible that it really is.It is worth a read because it illustrates a painful truth–our troop rotation policy and boneheaded force-protection policies have hurt the war effort. With the surge came some essential community policing precepts, and, if Hussayn is right, it is partly why things seem to be going our way in Iraq. “After Baghdad falls to the US, I am cashiered out of the Air Force and take a job in one of the markets in my neighborhood. One night, some of my friends are visiting, and we have a barbecue and are watching videos of cowboy movies. There is a knock on my door. I open it and there is a US patrol. They ask if they can enter my house and I say, ‘Sure, come in.’ I offer them some barbecue, because we see them on patrol; we recognize them and know how long they are out before they return to base. They say, ‘No, thank you. We have eaten recently.’ “Then they ask if I have weapons. One of my friends says to me in Arabic, ‘Tell them “No” because they will take your guns and you will be defenseless.’ I tell him in Arabic, ‘I will not lie to them or they will not trust us.’ “So I say, ‘Yes, I have a submachinegun, an AK and a pistol.’ The patrol leader says, ‘Bring them, please. We need to see them.’ So, I bring them out. The patrol leader examines them, the submachinegun, the AK and the pistol. He tells me, ‘The lubricant you have been using is bad quality.’ But I know he is really checking to see if they have been fired recently. “Two of his men strip the weapons, clean them, give me new lubricant, show me how to use new lubricant, re-assemble the weapons and return them to me. They say, ‘We must leave now – thank you for allowing us into your home.’ “They return every night, the same patrol, and ask if my family is well. I offer them food, tea, they say, ‘Thank you,’ and sometimes they stay for a bite to eat, or a cup of tea. I see them in the marketplace, we say ‘Hello, how are you?’ and ask about their families, too. They are friends with all the neighborhood. “One day, everything changes. The patrols are all in Humvees and they travel fast. The soldiers all look at us with suspicion from the Humvees and we do not understand why. Then I hear of Wahabi in the neighborhood, but I do not report them to the patrols – I cannot, the Humvees travel fast and no one comes to my house any more. More and more, we hear shooting down the street, and one morning a bomb destroys the market where I work. I could get another job in another market, but that market might also be destroyed by a bomb. Only a few Wahabi are where I live, but there is no one to tell – no patrols, no police. “So I come back to the Air Force. I come back because I want to get the Wahabi out of my neighborhood, get them out of Iraq. “One month ago, the patrols are back, and they are walking, not in Humvees. Different soldiers from the soldiers in the first patrols, but behaving like them – very courteous, very watchful. “When the patrol knocks on my door, I say, ‘Please come in – I would like some lubricant for my pistol.’ The patrol leader looks at me with a funny look, then he smiles, then they all come in and drink tea and I draw a map of where the Wahabi are…”

Senator John McCain, the great reformer of campaign-finance laws, believes candidates should be required to reveal who gives to them and how much–unless the giver happens to be named Cindy McCain.
Cindy McCain has announced again today that she will not release her tax returns. She was emphatic on this point. “You know, my husband and I have been married 28 years and we have filed separate tax returns for 28 years. This is a privacy issue. My husband is the candidate,” she told the Associated Press. 
While I sympathize with her desire for privacy from the probing press, one might wonder just what she thought would happen when her husband ran for president? Did she not watch what happened to Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of another senator running for president, just three years ago? 
Certainly questions about the McCain family finances are legitimate. No one doubts the heiress to a beer-distributorship fortune funded the McCain campaign in its darkest days.Yet beyond subsidizing her husband’s ambitions, the public knows little about Cindy McCain’s financial agenda. What are her business interests? She is apparently connected to a developer who has (naturally and unavoidably) angered some Arizona environmentalists. Some radio hosts suggest that she is still linked to Keating, the slick savings and loan operator who fathered the “Keating Five” scandal.
Is there any legislation likely to come before “President McCain” that would boost or sink Cindy McCain’s fortune?And, uhm, Senator Sunshine, doesn’t the public have a right to know?Nitpicker, a partisan blogger, has a wonderful post that is dead right common sense. First, he notes that the National Review, Weekly Standard and other outlets piled on the Kerry campaign, demanding that he reveal how much money his wife had contributed to his presidential efforts. Fair is fair. Intellectual honesty demands that they call for the same disclosure from Senator McCain. It is a nice point, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting…
Senator McCain is running as a reformer and leader. He should lead by example–and defuse what will almost certainly become a big campaign issue this fall–by asking his wife to release her returns now. This building story (with the journalist’s favorite angle of political hypocrisy) would disappear in hours.
And the public might be pleasantly surprised by Cindy McCain’s impressive history of charitable donations.
From the McCain campaign perspective, that is a far better subject for public disussion–and set a far better public example.