Nothings changed, now it's just semi-offical.

Wow it only took 6 years to get CNN off of the seal, thats real progress. Man the wheels of government sure do turn fast.

Curing the crude dependency

By Michael Shames; executive director of the Utility Consumers' Action Network (UCAN), a not-for-profit San Diego-based agency that seeks to educate and protect consumers in the areas of essential energy, utility and telecommunications services.

April 27, 2006

America's precarious dependence upon oil can be likened to the chronically ill patient who visits the doctor. “I just don't feel very good,” says the patient. “Do you think that my smoking, fast-food diet, high stress, lack of sleep, no time to exercise and my high alcohol intake have anything to do with it?”

The treating doctor can take two approaches toward such a patient. She can read her patient the proverbial “riot act.” “You need to reform almost every aspect of your life, otherwise you are going to die, and die soon!” This is the approach articulated by those who would have America accelerate its independence from imported oil and dramatically reduce fossil fuel use.

Or, she can tell her patient, “Well, over the next 10 years or so, we can introduce some healthier aspects to your life and perhaps extend your life span – and you might even feel better.” This approximates the Bush solution for oil dependence. His administration relies heavily upon long-term strategies for alternative fuels, increased domestic oil production and reinvestment incentives as a way of slowly reversing the years of inattention to this vital aspect of our economic health.

Much of the national debate over oil politics represents a clash between these two competing treatments. But answers to the following four questions suggest a third diagnosis that must be considered by federal and state governments alike in curing our chronic oil illness. It requires our doctor/government to focus upon economic wellness. That is, to preserve the health of the competitive environment in which the patient lives and, presumably, thrives.

Question one: Oil companies are beginning to release their earnings data for the first quarter of 2006. Wall Street expects a continuation of record profits – 40 to 60 percent profit increases on top of last year's record figures are already being reported. And the combined earnings expected from ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Chevron are reported to be 14 times greater than the combined first-quarter profits of technology giants Google Inc., Apple Computer Inc. and Oracle Corp. At what point do the oil companies' profits become just too large? And, perhaps more important, at what point does this diversion of our economic lifeblood into the accounts of three companies threaten the national well-being?

Answer: Economists will differ on degree of impact, but none will dispute that this diversion of resources from consumers' pocketbooks into a handful of international corporate interests is an unwelcome derailment of investment dollars that our nation's businesses need to compete in the global marketplace.

Question two: The big three oil companies – ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Chevron – are expected to announce first-quarter profits of over $16 billion. This is a nearly 20 percent increase over last year's record profits for the same quarter. It amounts to $150 of pure profit paid by each and every American household during the first three months of 2006! What assurance does the American consumer have that this staggering amount of money will be in re-invested in such a way to not only drive prices back down to reasonable levels but also to help America reduce its “addiction” to oil?

Answer: There is no such assurance. In fact, it is no more in these companies' interests to drive down prices or fuel demand than it is in a drug dealer's interest to wean an addict from drug dependency. Absent some sort of recapture and reinvestment of the excess profits for more constructive purposes, Americans will find themselves with few viable options in the near or medium terms.

Question three: Industry claims to want to build new refineries. Yet, in California, there are no plans to build a new refinery despite available sites from old, retired units and the governor's support for new refineries in California. What is the truth behind charges by critics who say that oil companies won't build new refineries on the West Coast because they view gasoline consumption will be dropping in coming years, and they don't want to risk building a refinery that won't be fully used in future years?

Answer: Big Oil won't build new refineries in California or many other places in America. They have stated as much in response to California's recent initiative to encourage alternative-fueled vehicles. So in the absence of new refineries, government is going to have to redouble its efforts to reduce gasoline demand.

Question four: Back in the '80s and '90s, Californians were often treated to gasoline price wars in which an oil company sought to lure customers from competing oil companies; a battle over market share, as economists would characterize it. But in the five years since oil giant British Petroleum purchased fellow giant Arco, California's retail gasoline market has turned eerily peaceful. Oil companies no longer attempt to use lower prices as a means of luring customers away from competitors. Is this a sign that we've lost the competitive element that keeps supply and demand economics working?

Answer: All indicators point to retail competition becoming a relic of the pre-merger past. The state's attorney general declared such in his well-regarded 2002 market study analysis. This competitive breakdown is compounded by the recent drying up of refinery capacity that threatens to drive many of California's independent retail gas stations into extinction.

In order to return our patient to wellness, state and federal governments must return to doing what they do best – re-instill and then preserve a competitive environment in which our patient can thrive. This prescription includes:

Recapturing excessive profits and having them reinvested in technologies and consumer goods that give drivers realistic choices for transportation;

Improving market oversight so that the players know they are being watched and must observe the established market rules;

Monitoring oil company investment practices to ensure that money made in America is being spent in America and in ways that both increase supply and reduce demand;

Using government purchasing power (especially the fuel-guzzling military vehicles) to reduce gasoline demand and stimulate a market for alternatives.

There are numerous ways of filling this prescription. Some of them must be done at the federal level, and some can be done by individual states. But until Americans take off their driver's caps and put on their voting hats, any improvement is unlikely.

Those opportunities present themselves in June and again in November. If neglected, our chronic illness could well turn terminal.

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me@rescam.org

Back to immigration for a quick second.

With all the talk in previous weeks of immigration reform and the demands illegal immigrants are making, it got me wondering: how do these people treat illegals in their own countries?

I found this in the San Diego Union Tribune. It talks about Mexico's laws on illegal aliens and how it actually treats them. It is extremely relevant (and an eye opener) in that most so-called "undocumented" people here come from Mexico and this is the country that is loudest in calling for a "fair" treatment of its citizens illegally residing within the USA; it has gone so far as hiring lobbyists to talk to our legislators.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/20060418-1459-mexico-mistreatingmigrants.html

By Mark Stevenson
ASSOCIATED PRESS

2:59 p.m. April 18, 2006

TULTITLAN, Mexico – Considered felons by the government, these migrants fear detention, rape and robbery. Police and soldiers hunt them down at railroads, bus stations and fleabag hotels. Sometimes they are deported; more often officers simply take their money.

While migrants in the United States have held huge demonstrations in recent weeks, the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central Americans in Mexico suffer mostly in silence.

And though Mexico demands humane treatment for its citizens who migrate to the U.S., regardless of their legal status, Mexico provides few protections for migrants on its own soil. The issue simply isn't on the country's political agenda, perhaps because migrants make up only 0.5 percent of the population, or about 500,000 people – compared with 12 percent in the United States.

The level of brutality Central American migrants face in Mexico was apparent Monday, when police conducting a raid for undocumented migrants near a rail yard outside Mexico City shot to death a local man, apparently because his dark skin and work clothes made officers think he was a migrant.

Virginia Sanchez, who lives near the railroad tracks that carry Central Americans north to the U.S. border, said such shootings in Tultitlan are common.

“At night, you hear the gunshots, and it's the judiciales (state police) chasing the migrants,” she said. “It's not fair to kill these people. It's not fair in the United States and it's not fair here.”

Undocumented Central American migrants complain much more about how they are treated by Mexican officials than about authorities on the U.S. side of the border, where migrants may resent being caught but often praise the professionalism of the agents scouring the desert for their trail.

“If you're carrying any money, they take it from you – federal, state, local police, all of them,” said Carlos Lopez, a 28-year-old farmhand from Guatemala crouching in a field near the tracks in Tultitlan, waiting to climb onto a northbound freight train.

Lopez said he had been shaken down repeatedly in 15 days of traveling through Mexico.

“The soldiers were there as soon as we crossed the river,” he said. “They said, 'You can't cross ... unless you leave something for us.'”

Jose Ramos, 18, of El Salvador, said the extortion occurs at every stop in Mexico, until migrants are left penniless and begging for food.

“If you're on a bus, they pull you off and search your pockets and if you have any money, they keep it and say, 'Get out of here,'” Ramos said.

Maria Elena Gonzalez, who lives near the tracks, said female migrants often complain about abusive police.

“They force them to strip, supposedly to search them, but the purpose is to sexually abuse them,” she said.

Others said they had seen migrants beaten to death by police, their bodies left near the railway tracks to make it look as if they had fallen from a train.

The Mexican government acknowledges that many federal, state and local officials are on the take from the people-smugglers who move hundreds of thousands of Central Americans north, and that migrants are particularly vulnerable to abuse by corrupt police.

The National Human Rights Commission, a government-funded agency, documented the abuses south of the U.S. border in a December report.

“One of the saddest national failings on immigration issues is the contradiction in demanding that the North respect migrants' rights, which we are not capable of guaranteeing in the South,” commission president Jose Luis Soberanes said.

In the United States, mostly Mexican immigrants have staged rallies pressuring Congress to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants rather than making them felons and deputizing police to deport them. The Mexican government has spoken out in support of the immigrants' cause.

While Interior Secretary Carlos Abascal said Monday that “Mexico is a country with a clear, defined and generous policy toward migrants,” the nation of 105 million has legalized only 15,000 immigrants in the past five years, and many undocumented migrants who are detained are deported.

Although Mexico objects to U.S. authorities detaining Mexican immigrants, police and soldiers usually cause the most trouble for migrants in Mexico, even though they aren't technically authorized to enforce immigration laws.

And while Mexicans denounce the criminalization of their citizens living without papers in the United States, Mexican law classifies undocumented immigration as a felony punishable by up to two years in prison, although deportation is more common.

The number of undocumented migrants detained in Mexico almost doubled from 138,061 in 2002 to 240,269 last year. Forty-two percent were Guatemalan, 33 percent Honduran and most of the rest Salvadoran.

Like the United States, Mexico is becoming reliant on immigrant labor. Last year, then-director of Mexico's immigration agency, Magdalena Carral, said an increasing number of Central Americans were staying in Mexico, rather than just passing through on their way to the U.S.

She said sectors of the Mexican economy facing labor shortages often use undocumented workers because the legal process for work visas is inefficient.

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There are three basic types, Mr. Pizer, the wills, the won'ts, and the can'ts. The wills accomplish everything, the won'ts oppose everything, and the can'ts won't try anything.

DejaVu!

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me@rescam.org

DejaVu!

Hmmm... I guess I should have looked before posting.
Thanks!

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There are three basic types, Mr. Pizer, the wills, the won'ts, and the can'ts. The wills accomplish everything, the won'ts oppose everything, and the can'ts won't try anything.

The following speech has been circulating on the Internet for some time. It has been verified to be true, but the text here was provided by the former Governor and varies slightly from text found on the snopes.com website. Like most political speeches it is not strictly grammatically correct, and I have made two grammar corrections where I thought that a non-English-native reader might have been confused. The other errors I left in place to preserve the original author's speaking style. It speaks specifically of US issues, but could be re-cast to apply to most other nations with a net in-flow of immigrants.

When I quote something of this nature, I usually add my thoughts at the end, but in this case I think that the effect is greatest if the reader quiently reaches his or her own conclusion.

I HAVE A PLAN TO DESTROY AMERICA
Richard D. Lamm
Governor of Colorado, 1975-1987

I have a secret plan to destroy America. If you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white bread, too self-satisfied, too rich, lets destroy America. It is not that hard to do. History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and they all fall, and that "an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide." Here is my plan:

I. We must first make America a bilingual-bicultural country. History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. One scholar, Seymour Martin Lipset, put it this way:

The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and tragedy. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, and Lebanon-all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with its Basques, Bretons, and Corsicans.

Some people will think that Switzerland is an example of a bilingual country that works. Don't disabuse them of this idea. Let them think that! Don't for a minute point out to them that Switzerland divided their country into three distinct mono-linguistic areas, German, French, and Roma. Let them ignore Emmanuel Kant's warning that “language is the great divider” of human history.

II. Next, I would then invent “multiculturalism” and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. I would make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal: that there are no cultural differences that are important. I would declare it an article of faith that the Black and Hispanic dropout rate is only due to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out-of-bounds.

III. We can make the United States a "Hispanic Quebec" without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic monthly recently:

...The apparent success of our own multiethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved not by tolerance but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated ethnocentrically, and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.

I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with a salad bowl metaphor. It is important to [ensure] that we have various cultural sub-groups living in America reinforcing their differences rather than Americans, emphasizing their similarities.

IV. Having done all this, I would make our fastest growing demographic group the least educated - I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated, and antagonistic to the majority population. I would allow our immigration patterns to take 50% of our immigrant stream from Spanish speaking countries. I would have this new second underclass have a 50% drop out rate from school. I would radicalize them with dreams of “Atzlan” and re-conquering the American Southwest.

V. I would then get the big foundations and big business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of victimlogy. I would get all minorities to think their lack of success was all the fault of the majority - I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority population.

VI. I would establish dual citizenship and promote divided loyalties. I would “celebrate diversity.” “Diversity” is a wonderfully seductive word. It stresses differences rather than commonalities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other-that is, when they are not killing each other. A “diverse,” peaceful, or stable society is against most historical precedent. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation together, and we can take advantage of this myopia. Look at the ancient Greeks. Dorf's World History tells us:

The Greeks believed that they belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature; and they worshiped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic games in honor of Zeus and all Greeks venerated the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. A common enemy Persia threatened their liberty. Yet, all of these bonds together were not strong enough to overcome two factors . . . (local patriotism and geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions . . .)


If we can put the emphasis on the “pluribus,” instead of the “unum,” we can balkanize America as surely as Kosovo.

VII. Then I would place all these sensitive subjects off limits - make it taboo to talk about. I would find a word similar to “heretic” in the 16th century - that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like “racist”, “xenophobe” that [halt] argument and conversation.

Having made America a bilingual-bicultural country, having established multiculturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of “victimlogy”, I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws. I would develop a mantra - “that because immigration has been good for America, it must always be good.” I would make every individual immigrant sympatric and ignore the cumulative impact.

VIII. Finally, I would get America accustomed to living on borrowed money. Debt is economic cocaine; it become addicting. I would start borrowing money, and slowly I would begin building up public and private debt. Debt will be the precipitating factor that will allow us to successfully overthrow the United State government. Look at the progress my generation quietly made in undercutting America's economic strength. I graduated from high school in 1953 and I inherited from my parents a small federal debt and the world's largest creditor nation. I am leaving to my children a staggering federal debt and the world's largest debtor nation.

I inherited an exporting nation with a high savings rate and I'm leaving my children an importing nation with the industrial world's lowest saving rate. I inherited a nation that produced more than it consumed and I'm leaving my kids a nation that consumes more than it produces. My generation invented the credit card, and the average American now has over six credit cards and daily adds to the consumer debt. We have successfully built a debt bomb ready to explode. Remember, debt at some indeterminable point of ceaseless borrowing creates economic chaos, and economic collapse preceded Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Lenin's Russia.

Successful democracy, in the long run, requires some allegiance to and respect for the future. In the short run, modern public financing gives public policy makers incredible opportunities to encumber the future for present political gain. Neither political party has the fiscal discipline to balance the budget. Our work is almost done. We can just sit back and wait for the inevitable to happen. We can destroy this up-start, arrogant nation. Victory waits in the wings.

PLEASE KEEP THIS PLAN CONFIDENTIAL. AMERICA COULD STILL WAKE UP IN TIME.

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

What Neo Nazi came out with that load of right wing bollocks? Wow, it scares me that anyone would treat that with anything but the utter contempt it deserves.

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Reality Internet Personality

What Neo Nazi came out with that load of right wing bollocks? Wow, it scares me that anyone would treat that with anything but the utter contempt it deserves.

Short bio of the speech's author:

Richard D. Lamm is Co-Director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver, and the former three-term Governor of Colorado. (1975-1987) He is both a lawyer (Berkeley, 1961) and a Certified Public Accountant. He joined the faculty of the University of Denver in 1969 and has, except for his years as Governor, been associated with the University ever since.

Lamm was selected as one of Time Magazine's "200 Young Leaders of America" in 1974, and won the Christian Science Monitor "Peace 2020" essay in 1985. In 1992, he was honored by the Denver Post and Historic Denver, Inc. as one of the "Colorado 100" - people who made significant contributions to Colorado and made lasting impressions on the state's history. He was Chairman of the Pew Health Professions Commission and a public member of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

Lamm has appeared on virtually every national news program, including Buchanan & Press (MSNBC), Larry King Live and Inside Politics (CNN), Today (NBC), Meet the Press (NBC), ABC's Good Morning America, Lehrer NewsHour (PBS), and CBS's Face the Nation. His editorials have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, as well as in a number of academic and medical journals. While Governor, Lamm wrote or co-authored six books: A California Conspiracy, with Arnold Grossman (St. Martin's Press, 1988); Megatraumas: America in the Year 2000 (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), The Immigration Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America, with Gary Imhoff (Dutton and Company, 1985), 1988, with Arnie Grossman (St. Martin's Press, 1985), Pioneers & Politicians, with Duane A. Smith (Pruett Publishing Company, 1984) and The Angry West, with Michael McCarthy (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982).

Lamm has always been in the forefront of political change. As a first year legislator, he drafted and succeeded in passing the nation's first liberalized abortion law. He was an early leader of the environmental movement, and was President of the First National Conference on Population and The Environment. Reacting to the high cost of campaigning, he walked the state in his campaign for Governor of Colorado. Lamm was elected to three terms as Colorado's top elected official, and in serving as Governor from January 1975 and retiring in January 1987, he was the longest-serving Governor in Colorado's history to that date.

The Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver comprises the Public Affairs Program (Bachelor's in Public Affairs), the Graduate Program in Public Policy (Master's in Public Policy, MPP), and the Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues. In addition to directing the University of Denver's academic policy programs, the Institute for Public Policy Studies contributes to the study and discussion of American society's most critical issues through an active program of conferences, seminars, forums and publications.

-----------------------------

Anyone with a passing famiarity with US politics will recognize the affiliations are among the "leftest" in American politics. Note the absence of "Fox News Channel" and "Wall Street Journal" credentials.

Now, I'm not saying that I agree with every word he uttered, but parsing most of it into my own statement would have been plagarizing.

EDIT: For the literary-illiterate... the "plan" is the current trend in US politics, not an actual proposal.

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

I don't really know where to begin, there is so much wrong with what he has said, so much knee jerk simplification appealing to people's fear of 'the other'. I am left speechless.

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Reality Internet Personality

What Neo Nazi came out with that load of right wing bollocks? Wow, it scares me that anyone would treat that with anything but the utter contempt it deserves.

I am stunned that for once, I totally agree with Es ...
(And NO!, Misfit ... not what you think !!! ;-))) )
It is a chilling thought that the very freedoms that are produced by America ... can also produce a cackle-headed, cock-a-mamy idiot like that. But I will bet ... that there are others out there who would accept everything this Kook is saying!
THAT is creepy!!!

I don't really know where to begin, there is so much wrong with what he has said, so much knee jerk simplification appealing to people's fear of 'the other'. I am left speechless.

That is unfortunate because I was looking forward to someone making a point-by-point rebuttal to seperate fact from fiction on this issue. Get a conversation started instead of stale rhetoric.

I know that you are not in the US, so it doesn't directly apply to your situation. I was hoping to get one of those in the US who advocates blatant disregard for US law to defend his or her position.

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

Note Es's textbook use of Part VII of the Plan to Destroy America.

By labelling the author as a neo-Nazi, an effort was made to tar the author without discussing the points raised. Any investigation into the author's background would reveal that the former Governor has no ties with such an organization.

For the record, if a neo-Nazi declared that the Sun was yellow, I wouldn't feel compelled to assert that it is purple just to be dis-associated. That said, I can't think of any issue upon which I would actually agree with a neo-Nazi's reasoning.

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

Note Es's textbook use of Part VII of the Plan to Destroy America.

By labelling the author as a neo-Nazi, an effort was made to tar the author without discussing the points raised. Any investigation into the author's background would reveal that the former Governor has no ties with such an organization.

For the record, if a neo-Nazi declared that the Sun was yellow, I wouldn't feel compelled to assert that it is purple just to be dis-associated. That said, I can't think of any issue upon which I would actually agree with a neo-Nazi's reasoning.

Octogon, if you feel defensive about what you posted, that's fine. Can't you see what is wrong with it and how it plays into the deepest fears of the average man in the street and offers a simplistic solution of all the problems that confront America today? Blame the immigrants, blame the foreigners. Just because it's a little more dressed up than usual doesn't make it any different.

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Reality Internet Personality

Octogon, if you feel defensive about what you posted, that's fine. Can't you see what is wrong with it and how it plays into the deepest fears of the average man in the street and offers a simplistic solution of all the problems that confront America today? Blame the immigrants, blame the foreigners. Just because it's a little more dressed up than usual doesn't make it any different.

As I said, I was looking for someone to post why they think each of those points is wrong, that is why each of them is good for the country. I don't agree with everything there, and I expected someone to tear it to shreads in a reply, then we'd engage in an actual discussion on the topic.

Besides, the speech doesn't advocate "blaming the foreigners" although it does imply that they should be expected to assimilate.

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

I call it political satire.

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me@rescam.org

Fix it, don't kill it - FEMA's woes stem from rotten leadership

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

April 28, 2006

Every American should be outraged by the ineptitude of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response to Hurricane Katrina. But the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's recommendation that FEMA be abolished in favor of a new disaster relief agency is nonsensical.

FEMA's fundamental problem last August and September dealt with a failure of leadership, not intrinsic flaws in the agency's structure or mission. It may be less dramatic, but it's far easier and less costly to install new leaders who can shape FEMA up than to abolish the agency for the sake of a showy political gesture.

Consider FEMA's reputation under the Clinton administration. Agency chief James Lee Witt won bipartisan kudos for his aggressive response to hurricanes, 100-year floods, the Northridge earthquake and more. If Witt hadbeen running FEMA when Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast, does anyone think we would now be talking about killing the agency?

Further proof of the folly of shuttering FEMA can be found in the report the Senate committee put out in an attempt to justify its position. Page after page document bad decisions made by leaders from President Bush to local cops that have nothing to do with FEMA fundamentals. Examples:

FEMA's regional office wanted FEMA headquarters to approach other federal agencies to line up emergency transportation and shelter in case New Orleans was struck by a hurricane. FEMA bosses did nothing.

Federal, state and local officials talked about but never got around to setting up a communications system that could work during a disaster as severe as Katrina.

Only one emergency public-health team was predeployed before Katrina's landfall to provide medical care in devastated areas.

Yes, the report does offer many examples of problems that go beyond failed leadership. Tight budgets made it difficult to fill 375 to 500 FEMA vacancies and delayed development of contingency plans that would have been immensely helpful (at least if they had been implemented).

Also, some of the changes in FEMA's responsibilities when the agency was incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 came back to haunt the federal government. One example: FEMA's once-close working relationships with local and state disaster-relief agencies steadily began to diminish after its say over preparedness-grant programs was transferred elsewhere in the bureaucracy.

But the remedy is to follow up on the funding, planning and organizational failures identified in the Senate report and fix them – not to abolish the agency and start from scratch.

FEMA has worked well before. It can do so again. Killing the agency may provide aggrieved Gulf Coast residents with a cathartic rush and give lawmakers opportunities for endless self-congratulatory preening. But it would accomplish little else.

Banning free speech on clothing

By Robert D. Richards and Clay Calvert; co-directors of the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment and professors of communications and law at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa.

April 28, 2006

Does the First Amendment guarantee of free speech protect a public high school student who wears a shirt to school with “Homosexuality is Shameful” emblazoned on the back? According to an opinion last week by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals involving a student at Poway High School, the answer is a resounding no.

In a decision that raises complex questions of religion, culture and free expression, the two-judge majority of the appellate court concluded that the school's rule against wearing a “demeaning T-shirt is constitutionally permissible” and that schools “need not tolerate verbal assaults that may destroy the self-esteem of our most vulnerable teenagers and interfere with their educational development.”

Just how one is to determine when a nonspoken, passive message on a shirt constitutes or rises to the level of a “verbal assault” or is “demeaning” remains unclear, particularly since the majority also wrote that speech that is “merely offensive to some listener” is protected by the First Amendment. The line between what is “demeaning” and what is “merely offensive” is inherently vague and will, as Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in dissent, likely “cause innumerable problems in the future.”

But the majority nonetheless fashioned a politically correct rule that public school students may not wear clothes that “flaunt demeaning slogans, phrases or aphorisms relating to a core characteristic of particularly vulnerable students that may cause them significant injury.”

In fact, the majority's opinion is demeaning to gay and lesbian students, suggesting they are too weak, too insecure and too fragile to withstand a message printed on a T-shirt that objects to their sexual orientation.

The majority's opinion, of course, would protect a student who wears a T-shirt with the message “Homosexuality is Great” and yet prohibit a student from wearing a T-shirt with the message “Homosexuality is a Sin.”

That is the height of viewpoint-based discrimination: One side of the political and cultural debate is allowed to come out, and the other side is squelched and stifled.

Even the attorney for Tyler Chase Harper, the student whose shirt stirred the controversy, recognized the school would be better off banning the entire topic of homosexuality rather than choosing sides. According to the Student Press Law Center, Robert H. Tyler called the court's ruling “a very bad decision cloaked in a veil of tolerance.”

It is particularly troubling that a powerful federal appellate court would short-circuit settled First Amendment principles to advance what is, at core, a politically one-sided message. The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that “state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism” and that a message like the one inscribed on the T-shirt in question can be stifled only when it “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.”

The majority sidestepped the material disruption requirement completely, opting instead to give heightened significance to the “rights of others” language by the Supreme Court – a politically expedient but constitutionally unstable scale upon which to balance First Amendment rights.

Indeed, as Judge Kozinski pointed out, the school has shown “precious little to support an inference” that the T-shirt would cause the requisite disruption. Instead, the court's majority believes that schools are free to control political and religious messages of students, provided they do so for what some might consider noble purposes.

In practical terms, the case turns settled First Amendment doctrine on its head, inviting school officials to cast expression they abhor into the framework of an ill-defined “verbal assault” or “demeaning” expression.

The Ninth Circuit's newly ordained model gives a wide berth to administrators who often are all too eager to silence debate in an effort to avoid controversy. Schools are charged with educating the nation's youth, but the lesson here seems to be erase those messages with which the school disagrees.

Wouldn't students be better served by robust discussion of pertinent issues? After all, in just a few years even the youngest high school students will take their place in society, exercising their franchise to vote and participating in our democratic form of governance.

Society will surely lose out if the next generation of adults has been reared in a bubble-like environment where the messages they have been exposed to on a daily basis have been sanitized – if not ordained by – the public school system.

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me@rescam.org

Political pandering on gas prices

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
THE WASHINGTON POST

April 28, 2006

If you thought the Dubai port deal marked a record high in Washington cynicism, think again. Nothing can match the spectacle of politicians scrambling for cover during a spike in gasoline prices. And this time, the panderfest has gone all the way to the Oval Office. President Bush has joined the braying congressional hordes by ordering the Energy and Justice departments and the Federal Trade Commission to launch an investigation into possible gasoline price-fixing.

What a disgrace.

Precisely 10 years ago (April 29, 1996) as gas prices reached a shocking $1.27 a gallon, President Clinton ordered his Energy and Justice departments to launch investigations to find out why. In my column that week, I offered a wild guess as to why: “Supply is down and demand is up.” I offered Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary and Attorney General Janet Reno a $100 bet (I roll high on sure things) that their million-dollar probes would do nothing more than confirm my hunch.

No takers. Even Cabinet secretaries don't throw C-notes away. Sure enough, months later these perfectly pointless investigations discounted charges of price gouging and attributed the price hike to ... increased demand and decreased supply.

Today, every time an Iranian mullah opens his mouth about nukes, the risk premium for Persian Gulf supply interruptions jumps again. Crude oil prices alone account for about $1.70 of what you pay for a gallon at the pump. So 10 years later, I'll wager again. Here's what the Bush search for price gougers and profiteers will find:

(1) Demand is up.

China has come from nowhere to pass Japan as the No. 2 oil consumer in the world. China and India – between them home to eight times the U.S. population – are industrializing and gobbling huge amounts of energy.

American demand is up because we've lived in a fool's paradise since the mid-1980s. Until then, beginning with the oil shocks in 1973, Americans had changed appliances and cars and habits and achieved astonishing energy conservation. Energy use per dollar of GDP was cut by 30 percent in little over a decade. Oil prices collapsed to about $10 a barrel.

Then amnesia set in, MPG ratings disappeared from TV ads and we became “a country of a million Walter Mittys driving 75 mph in their gas-guzzling Bushwhack-Safari sport-utility roadsters with a moose head on the hood, a country whose crude oil production has dropped 32 percent in the last 25 years but which will not drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for fear of disturbing the mating habits of caribou.”

I wrote that during the '96 witch hunt for price gougers. Nothing has changed. Except that since then, U.S. crude oil production has dropped an additional 12.3 percent. Which brings us to:

(2) Supply is down.

Start with supply disruptions in Nigeria, decreased production in Iraq and the continuing loss of 5 percent of our national refining capacity because of Katrina and Rita damage. Add to that the mischief of idiotic new regulations. Last year's energy bill mandates arbitrary increases in blended ethanol use that so exceed current ethanol production that it is causing gasoline shortages and therefore huge price spikes.

Why don't we import the missing ethanol? Brazil makes a ton of it and very cheaply. Answer: the Iowa caucuses. Iowa grows corn and chooses presidents. So we have a ridiculously high 54-cent ethanol tariff and ethanol shortages.

Other regulation requires specific (“boutique”) gasoline blends for different cities depending on their air quality. Nice idea. But it introduces debilitating rigidities into the gasoline supply system. If Los Angeles runs short, you cannot just move supply in from Denver. You get shortages and more price spikes.

And don't get me started on the missing supply of might-have-been American crude. Arctic and Outer Continental Shelf oil that the politicians kill year after year would have provided us by now with a critical and totally secure supply cushion in times of tight markets.

In March 2000, the price of gas hit $1.80. Scandalized congressional Republicans shamelessly pushed for repeal of Bill Clinton's whopping 4.3-cent gas tax increase. Now that the president is a Republican, what do you think Senate Democrats are proposing? A 60-day suspension of the federal gas tax. It would cost $6 billion and counteract the only good thing that comes with high gas prices – the incentive to conserve.

George Shultz once said, “Nothing ever gets settled in this town.” But even Shultz, who has seen everything, must marvel at the perfect regularity, the utter predictability, of the bottomless cynicism of Washington in the grip of gasoline fever.

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me@rescam.org

I'm Tellin the sheriff on you!

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