Mollohan's Memory

In Preston County recently, Congressman Alan Mollohan spoke at length on the need for a national energy policy. High gas and other fuel prices are the result of the nation lacking a sound plan and of course you know who, as usual, is to blame.

Maybe Mollohan and other Democrats forgot that in George W. Bush's first term he pushed hard on the need for an energy plan. His administration warned that unless the country expanded its access to domestic oil supplies, we could face shortages or severe price hikes in the future. Democrats and environmentalists produced staunch opposition while weak willed Republicans wilted under the pressure. (Shelley Moore Capito thankfully supported the president.)

Over and over again President Bush pushed his energy ideas and warned about the crisis to come. No one listened. Even when gas prices started a steep rise, no one listened. Yes America was short sighted, but do not count President Bush, Congresswoman Capito, and a few others with political courage among them.

West Virginia Democrats are now stuck in the unenviable position of opposing drilling on a few thousand of the many millions of acres in ANWAR while supporting widespread mountaintop removal in West Virginia. White tailed deer flourish here despite the mining, interstates, and cities, but we are to believe that reindeer would perish in Alaska with much less development.

Consistency alone demands that Alan Mollohan and other West Virginia Democrats back the president on this issue. Fairness dictates that they stop blasting the one man who constantly urged Congress to act on energy before it was too late.

Observations from Flyover

Recently I read an article in the London Times about Obama not doing well in polling in the rural south. In fact they say Obama’s elitist campaign alienates the south. It is not just the rural south; it is all the rural areas of the country that people fly over going from major city to major city, the snobby like to call it “Flyover.”

In flyover we trust in personal responsibility, we believe government is usually more cause of a problem than solution and we believe the framers of The Constitution never intended it to be a living document.

We believe that government assistance should only get you through the rough times and not be a life style that last from birth to death. We don’t like our taxes supporting people that never work. At the same time most of us in flyover will come to your aid when you need it. We will help move furniture out of your house as the water rises; we will pull your car out of a ditch in the middle of a snow storm and an invite you in for hot chocolate. We are apt to have volunteer fire departments, not paid fire departments. We are members of Rotary, Kiwanis & Ruritan. We support the boy & girl scouts, the Food Pantry, the United Way and many other organizations. We loaded up food, clothes and blankets and drove to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Katrina before we were asked because we knew our neighbors would need help.

We are patriots. We volunteer for military service to defend the nation at a higher rate that other areas of the nation. Our volunteers don’t get stuck in Iraq; they volunteer to go to defend our way of life.

We are not bitter, but we do cling to our religion. We believe in God. We believe in religious freedom. We know there is no separation of church and state clause in the constitution. There is a clause in the constitution states the government shall not "prohibit the free exercise" of religion. We believe that clause allows us to put baby Jesus and the wise men on the courthouse lawn as long as we allow other religions a similar display. We feel the Christian religion is under attack.

We keep and bear arms because we like to hunt and by the time the State Police or Sheriff get out of bed in the middle of the night more than an hour may have gone. Lot’s of flyover doesn’t have 24 hr police coverage. The intruder could be a burglar or even a bear, but we are quite capable of holding whatever it is at bay until authorities arrive. In flyover we are well armed and crime is low. In the cities citizens are not well armed and crime is high. That correlation is not lost on us.

While Hollywood likes to portray those in flyover as hillbillies, country bumpkins, rednecks and extras from Deliverance. The facts are our rural schools tend to have higher test scores than those in the cities. Our colleges and universities turn out Rhodes Scholars.

We are tired of high fuel prices. In flyover high fuel prices affect us more than they do for the cities. In many of our areas the bus lines quit running in the 1950’s and we haven’t seen a passenger train in about as long. Electric cars have a limited range, a range that is shorter than the round trip to work and back. We too have hour long work commutes, but those commutes are at 60 miles an hour. We like the idea of drilling for our own oil. We recognize an increase in supply reduces price. We don’t drive cars as an option we drive them as a necessity.

We are not environmentalist, but we are conservationist. We don’t visit the mountains, the desert and the plains for a week or two in the summer, we live in the mountains, the desert and the plains. We enjoy their beauty everyday and we will protect it, but we will also use it. We know our nation needs coal for power, wood for paper and furniture, and oil for our vehicles and industry. We will provide it, but we live here and will not destroy our backyard. We have learned from our own history.

The London Times story got it right. Obama’s elitist attitude fails. We want a leader that understands that rural areas have different needs than those of the cities and neither should be accommodated at the expense of the other. We want a leader that is our equal, not our superior. We are a government of the people and by the people. We understand something the founding fathers understood; all men are created equal, even in Flyover.

The Wisdom of Margaret Thatcher

I just started reading Margaret Thatcher: The Downing Street Years. First of all, this autobiography comes from a simply amazing individual. Thatcher's precise writing articulates a clarity of vision rarely seen in politics, but certainly shared by some of her contemporaries. It cannot be just coincidence that great visionary leaders such as this Prime Minister, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Chancellor Helmuth Kohl brought their principles and courage together to save democracy and peacefully annihilate the Soviet Empire.

The introduction of Thatcher's book strikes me as unnerving though. She describes the sharp decline suffered by Great Britain after World War II. Certainly some of that came from Franklin Roosevelt's rather predatory policies towards Britain during World War II, but most of the blame lies with the British themselves. Simply put, they lost faith in capitalism and succumbed to the utopian dreams of the Left. Will our country follow the same path despite the fact that we have enjoyed our most productive twenty-five years in history?

The welfare state bloated to the point where 30% of the British people worked for the government in some form. Heavy taxation destroyed what was in the early 1900s one of the most dynamic economies on earth. The taxes passed after World War II were very similar to the ruin that Barack Obama promises our entrepreneurial class. Government regulation forced the supposedly free market into following policies planned out by the government. By 1979 strikes paralyzed the economy and the dead even lay unburied. Such was the success of Eurosocialism in Britain.

Thatcher spoke of the Soviet Union in an interesting way. She claimed that they imposed upon themselves economic backwardness and as a result lost power. What a fascinating observation. Self-imposed backwardness is not inherent only to totalitarian regimes. Look at the current United States where we risk our economy and national security because environmentalists will not let us develop a few thousand acres out of the many millions that compose ANWAR. At least the Soviets held themselves hostage to an ideal, as mistaken as it was, it was an ideal. We hold ourselves hostage to reindeer.

She had some interesting points to make about Jimmy Carter. Thatcher said he was a likeable man with good intentions. Carter's windfall profits tax on the oil industry, passed during an OPEC price hike, caused shortages and lines at the gas pumps. He was accountable to a Democratic Party that sought to minimize as much as possible the threat posed by the USSR. In other words, Carter was in over his head. How similar was Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama? The main difference lies in the fact that Obama is beholden to anti-American moneymen such as George Soros. The scary thing about the modern day Carter is that Obama's supporters think American weakness is good for the world. Why else would they continue to oppose reforms that would strengthen our economy? Like Carter, Obama merely says that we must get used to a lower standard of living. Luckily, Carter begat Reagan and America was saved before it was too late.

The road towards a bright future runs through the Republican Party. It can only happen if Republicans and Democrats that believe in free market economics and a strong America band together to continue working towards less government and more opportunity. This takes the kind of courage shown by people willing to take criticism and even hatred. Republicans remain respected over time when they put principle in front of popularity, just like Margaret Thatcher.

Communist China Exposed By Olympics

Fawning journalists for weeks leading up to these Olympic games tried to convince us that the advent of the Chinese century had come upon us. Too many people, too many resources, too much to compete with.

Not long ago we got a glimpse of what Communist China was about. Tibetan protesters found themselves brutally beaten by Chinese police for daring to question the government. The Olympic shenanigans revealed much more. Chinese Communism suffers from a serious self-esteem problem.

What else explains their strange shenanigans? The lip syncing national anthem singer surprised a lot of people. It shouldn't have. Totalitarian societies from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia put more of a premium on physical achievements and appearance. Crush a seven year old girl by telling her she is not cute enough to show the world? No problem. The fake fireworks displays were also a sad case of putting on an image to hide insecurity. The cheating in gymnastics reflects a culture accepting and even encouraging of corruption as long as it leads to desired ends. Because corruption encourages law breaking and greed, no society so saturated with it can ever advance too far.

The pollution, euphemistically called "haze" by some announcers, is much worse than one would see in a US city. Environmentalists warn that this is a view to the future if we do not radically change. In reality this is a look back in time. Communist governments do not have the same standards of clean air that capitalist democracies enjoy. We may not be perfect, but free market America produces more goods, more efficiently, with less waste and pollution than Communist China.

Worse for China is the massive amounts of empty seats shown at the games. Due to a fundamental misunderstanding of economics, they allowed scalpers to purchase large amounts of tickets to be sold again at very high prices. Tourists to the games cannot obtain tickets to even the most pedestrian events.

China's Olympic sized image problem has burst through the facade of progress. Any system that stifles individuality and steals from the productive to maintain the non productive will never compete effectively with real capitalist societies.

No Time For Newbies

Russia's move into the Caucasian Republic of Georgia demonstrates that a new challenge has started shaping up to American interests around the world.

Russia has restarted its traditional drive to the south, a historical expansion dating back to the 1400s. That country sees the belt of smaller nations to its south as its own national playground, a historical reality that should make Iran, Pakistan, and other nations very nervous. Certainly at one time nations did claim "spheres of influence" and asserted the right to total predominance in those regions and the US was no different. However it is 2008, not 1908. Times have changed.

Some commentators linked the drive against Georgia to the war in Chechnya that Putin prosecuted to success in the beginning of his presidency. The two situations could not be more different. Chechnya is a part of Russian territory inhabited by a separatist ethnic group. The Chechen War was fought to maintain the integrity of Russian territory and to prevent like minded Muslim minorities in Russia from also fighting to leave. Georgia is a sovereign nation invaded by Russia.

Russia through this invasion intends to reassert itself as a Great Power who can project its strength at times of its choosing. The drive by the US to incorporate Georgia into the NATO alliance certainly played a role in Russia's decision to flex its muscles at this point. Now that Russia has been well-fed by oil revenues and is led by a prime minister who desires to bring back Russia's imperial glory, the United States must have experienced leadership to deal with this new challenge.

Now is no time for a neophyte president from a party that sees foreign affairs as issues that distract from social engineering and tax hikes. Russia has issued the world a challenge. Nothing would make them happier than to see a newbie elected to the American presidency.