Musings from the bridge

It is my habit to walk the Biloxi Bay Bridge from Ocean Springs to Biloxi and back when I visit my parents on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  Since the heat index was expected to rise over 100 today, I set out early in the morning for my walk.  The bridge was teeming with walkers, young and old.  On the pier of the Ocean Springs Yacht Club at the base of the bridge, I was pleased to see a sandhill crane.  For a moment, I could almost forget that an ominous black cloud of crude was bearing down on the Magnolia State from her southern aqueous border.  That mental respite would not last. (Photo by Chief Petty Officer William McAnally, USCG)

As I reached the highest point on the bridge I saw two large commercial shrimp boats emerge from underneath the span heading out toward the Gulf.  I really didn't think much about it,  Then I saw another.  And another.  They just kept coming.  On the return leg of my walk, there were shrimp boats lined up all the way to the horizon, with others joining from the Ocean Springs harbor to the east and the Biloxi Small Craft Harbor to the west.  It was quite surreal.  In my forty-plus years of living in and visiting the area, I had never seen so many boats in Biloxi Bay.  It was reminiscent of the annual Blessing of the Fleet, but without the colorful flags and pageantry.  This looked more like a naval flotilla heading to war.

These shrimp boats and their crews were likely heading out to the Mississippi Sound as part of BP's Vessels of Opportunity program.  From the San Angelo (TX) Standard-Times

To date, more than 2,300 vessels have been hired as part of the Vessels of Opportunity program, and are working aggressively in multiple shifts across the Gulf to perform a variety of important tasks, including deploying and monitoring containment boom, transporting equipment and personnel and surface and subsurface surveillance (looking for oil).

The VOO program hires vessels of all sizes—with a priority placed on commercial vessels that make their living on the sea—to perform critical response tasks to mitigate the oil’s impact on our vital shorelines. Compensation depends on the size of the vessel and ranges from $1,200-$3,000 per day. Crew members are paid $200 per eight-hour shift.

Obama: "We cannot consign our children to this future." ....Seriously?

Crocodile tears and a breathtaking quote from the President tonight in his prime time speech about the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

We cannot consign our children to this future.

Of course, Obama was referring to the "menacing cloud of black crude" that encroaches on the shores of the Gulf Coast.  He conveniently discounts the crippling financial manacles placed on future generations of Americans by the blatant reckless spending of the Democratic majority.  From US News & World Report:

It is a measure of the nation’s economic illiteracy that the most recent debt projections have not received more coverage. Sure, most people can tell Karl Marx from Harpo but it is highly unlikely that they can distinguish between Adam Smith and Will, even if he were to bite them on a visible hand.

As reported Friday by Bloomberg, the total United States debt under President Barack Obama is poised to explode past its statistical post-war norms to a point where it “exceeds the value of the nation’s annual economic output.” Total federal government debt rose past $13 trillion for the first time in June 2010 and is on track to surpass U.S. Gross Domestic Product by the year 2012, according to projections just issued by the International Monetary Fund.

Part of the problem is that the U.S. economy is not growing. The stimulus spending that President Obama and the Democrats who control Congress said would solve the problem and bring about an early end to the recession has not worked as advertized, leaving unemployment figures at their highest point in decades and doing little to spark productive economic activity.

All government funding comes from the private sector.  The government does not and can not create wealth.  Government union membership now exceeds that of the private sector.  Government employment rates exceed that of the private sector.  Government employment growth exceeds that of the private sector.  Government wages exceed that of the private sector.

When the federal government declares war on the private sector, there are only two inevitable consequences:  insolvency and collapse.

Five things the President will not say tonight

In keeping with his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's exhortation to never let a serious crisis go to waste, tonight President Obama will speak in prime time from the Oval Office and try to convince the American people that the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster is definitive proof of the need for cap and trade,  climate change clean energy legislation.  Here are five things you won't hear him say:

1.  "Under my plan, electricity prices will necessarily skyrocket:"



2.  It's time to destroy the coal industry in the U.S. so we can buy coal from China.  Charles Krauthammer put it succinctly on Fox News:

He [Obama] wants to tax carbon, which means they want to include coal, of which we are the Saudi Arabia of the world, we do not import it. We have an abundance of it. And it's not going to help us on global warming. The Chinese have said they are going to be opening a new coal-fired plant every week for the next ten years, so it will be a transfer of wealth out of our treasury into China's. (emphasis mine)

3.  Implementation of a cap and trade system in the U.S. will have no meaningful effect on global greenhouse gas levels unless China follows suit.  Obama EPA administrator Lisa Jackson admitted as much in a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last summer.



4.  There is virtually no chance that the Chinese will follow the U.S. in implementing a cap and trade system.  From The Heritage Foundation:

It is unreasonable to expect the PRC to follow the U.S. on climate change. China has rejected American leadership on security issues in Iran and North Korea and on human rights matters in Sudan and Burma. In economics, the PRC's existing and anticipated coal dependence dwarfs America's, making a serious adjustment far more difficult.

Moreover, China does not compete in most goods and services with the U.S. but with other suppliers to the American market, such as Mexico. These nations'--not American--climate change restrictions are more pertinent to Beijing's decision making.[7] And the PRC has steadfastly avoided the Western European cap-and-trade experiment (wisely so, as the EU has failed to cut emissions while harming its economy). That China will follow an American lead in cutting greenhouse gases flies in the face of all available evidence.

5.  My cap and trade plan will create thousands of cushy government jobs, but its net effect will be to increase our nation's overall unemployment rate:

Cap and trade has macroeconomic effects that would do economic harm that no rebate check would cover. Higher prices lower consumer demand, and the lower demand prevents higher prices from completely offsetting production cost increases. As a result, businesses must make production cuts and reduce labor. The Congressional Budget Office recently affirmed that job losses from a slower economy would outweigh those created by clean energy investments: “Job losses in the industries that shrink would lower employment more than job gains in other industries would increase employment, thereby raising the overall unemployment rate.”

Gov. Bobby Jindal orders National Guard to build barrier wall offshore

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has ordered the National Guard to start building sand barriers nine miles offshore to protect the state from the millions of gallons of crude that threaten his state's way of life.  ABC News reports:

Eight weeks into the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of the Mexico, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has told the National Guard that there's no time left to wait for BP, so they're taking matters into their own hands.

In Fort Jackson, La., Jindal has ordered the Guard to start building barrier walls right in the middle of the ocean. The barriers, built nine miles off shore, are intended to keep the oil from reaching the coast by filling the gaps between barrier islands.

Jindal's plan to construct physical barriers to the oil has been criticized by environmentalists, BP and the Army Corps of Engineers as an unproven oil-response technique.  Some question the effects the berms with have on natural tidal flows, citing the possibility that saltwater could be channeled in new directions threatening the marsh grasses.  A critical article in Scientific American seems to vaguely suggest that the marsh grasses may tolerate the oil more easily than the salty water of the ocean.

Rob Young, a coastal geologist at Western Carolina University recently expressed his doubts about the barrier walls to NPR:

"The structure that I see that they're planning to build is going to erode as soon as it's constructed, and it's going to have a tough time making it through a hurricane season that's predicted to be a fairly active one," Young tells NPR's Melissa Block. "I just don't have a very high level of confidence that a project that's going to require a lot of energy and a lot of sand and mobilize a lot of people is going to do what they promise it will do."

To borrow a hackneyed phrase from the Obama administration, Bobby Jindal has been at ground zero in this disaster "from day one," and has been begging BP and the federal government for more help in preventing the oil from reaching the fragile Louisiana coast.  Jindal is no intellectual slouch.  From the governor's website:

Jindal was born in Baton Rouge on June 10, 1971. He graduated from Baton Rouge High School in 1988 and went on to attend Brown University where he graduated with honors in biology and public policy. Following his graduation from Brown he attended Oxford University in England as a Rhodes Scholar, having turned down admissions to medical and law schools at both Harvard and Yale.

As Jindal takes matters into his own hands, he reveals a refreshing and fearless leadership that our country has been sorely lacking.  Teddy Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech comes to mind:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

ObamaCare side effects: Physicians leaving medicine

My long time friend and technology guru, Alf Sauve', has graciously acquiesced to my request for personal testimony on ObamaCare:

On June 16, 2009 President Obama stated, "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period."(1) A promise he repeated on numerous occasions. And he has also has stated, "Nobody is talking about getting between you and your doctor."(2) What he didn't say was that Obamacare was so onerous that some doctors would be abandoning their profession. How many you ask? I'm not a researcher. I don't have access to the necessary data to even take a swag at it. But imagine my surprise when my personal physician (and friend) for the last 10 years announced he would be leaving his practice because of Obamacare. And he did exactly that. Oh retired, you say? No, he had been in his practice for about 10 years and was in his early 40's. Made a killing in the market, you say? No, again. He has an undergraduate degree in engineering and will be moving to a different community and joining the building trades. This really hurts. Medical care is so much more than charts and lab results. While there are extensive notes and computerized records about all my visits, exams and treatments, my doctor "knew" me. He knew, maybe even "felt" things about me that the replacement physician will never really know or understand. My new physician is certainly knowledgeable and competent, but it will take years to build up the knowledge of my body and the level of care that I had with my old doc. So I wonder how many more are like him? How many either have the assets to retire on or another profession to fall back on? What scares me even more is how many will feel trapped in a profession they no longer like. What kind of quality care will they give? And how many potential medical professionals will seek other lines of work now to avoid being part of Obama's socialized medical plan. Or to reverse the question, what type of personality will now want to become a physician? Do I want that person taking care of me? So yes, I could keep my physician, except Obamacare has come between me and my doctor. Welcome to the brave new world.

(1) Speech to AMA June 15, 2009 http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/06/15/obama-if-you-like-your-doctor-you-can-keep-your-doctor/

(2) Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marlene-h-phillips/obama-confronts-misinform_b_264542.html

Glick to Netanyahu: Remember the first rule of strategy

Caroline Glick warns Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he is focusing on the wrong things.  From The Jerusalem Post:

The first rule of strategy is to keep your opponent busy attending to your agenda so he has no time to advance his own. Unfortunately, Israel’s leaders seem unaware of this rule, while Iran’s rulers triumph in its application.

Over the past few weeks, Israel has devoted itself entirely to the consideration of questions that are, at best, secondary. Questions like how much additional assistance Israel should provide Hamas-controlled Gaza, and how best to fend off or surrender to the international diplomatic lynch mob have dominated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s and his senior ministers’ agendas. Our political leaders – as well as our military commanders and intelligence agencies – have been so busy thinking about these issues that they have effectively forgotten the one issue that they should have been considering.

Israel’s greatest strategic challenge – preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons – has fallen by the wayside.

Glick urges the Prime Minister to appoint an equivalent to Obama's envoy George Mitchell to mind the fires of the ruthless and unending news cycle, and give him fancy offices, deputies, aides, spokesmen, "and a free hand in talking with the Palestinians and the Obama administration until the cows come home."  This would give Netanyahu the time he needs to address Israel's most pressing existential problem:  Iran:

In the meantime, Netanyahu and his senior cabinet ministers and advisers must devote themselves to battling Iran. They must not merely prepare to attack Iran’s nuclear installations.

They must prepare the country to weather the Iranian counter-attack that will surely follow.

Those preparations involve not only fortifying Israel’s home front. Netanyahu and his people must prepare a diplomatic and legal offensive against Iran and its allies in the lead-up, and aftermath, of an Israeli strike against Iran.

This strikes me as an important piece.  Read the whole thing.

Saudi Arabia gives Israel clear skies to attack Iran

It's been an eventful week for Iran.  On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council passed a fourth sanctions resolution meant to stifle Iran's nuclear activity. Friday, Russia announced its plan to freeze delivery of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. And today, this, from The Times (UK):

Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal.

In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran.

To ensure the Israeli bombers pass unmolested, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defence systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom’s air defences will return to full alert.

“The Saudis have given their permission for the Israelis to pass over and they will look the other way,” said a US defence source in the area. “They have already done tests to make sure their own jets aren’t scrambled and no one gets shot down. This has all been done with the agreement of the [US] State Department.”

Sources in Saudi Arabia say it is common knowledge within defence circles in the kingdom that an arrangement is in place if Israel decides to launch the raid. Despite the tension between the two governments, they share a mutual loathing of the regime in Tehran and a common fear of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “We all know this. We will let them [the Israelis] through and see nothing,” said one.

It has long been the conventional wisdom that Saudi Arabia would not interfere with an Israeli airstrike on Iran, but to see it in print with confirmation, albeit anonymously, from the U.S. State Department is quite extraordinary.