Daily Archives: August 16, 2006

Do as I say? Or as I do?

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Barack_Obama_portrait_2005.jpgAccording to this report, Illinois senator Barack Obama warned citizens at his 50th Town Hall meeting about gas guzzling vehicles and proclaimed that such vehicles are a big part of the blame for the world’s higher temperatures. In urging citizens to switch to higher mileage hybrids, Obama observed that “it would save more energy, do more for the environment and create better world security than all the drilling we could do in Alaska.”
After the meeting, Obama proceeded to leave in his SUV, a GMC Envoy.
But it’s not finished. When Obama’s staff saw the news report, they sent the following email to the station that published the report:

A story your station ran seems to imply that my boss Senator Obama was being hypocritical when he said Americans should drive more fuel-efficient vehicles though he was himself traveling in an SUV.
The SUV in question, though, is a Flexible Fuel Vehicle that can run on E85, which the Senator fills it with wherever its available (and in fact he’s worked very hard to provide tax credits to increase availability and access to e85). I believe in light of these facts the story is misleading and warrants a correction.

Let’s get this straight. Don’t drive an energy guzzling SUV. But it’s o.k. to do so if your SUV can guzzle primarily ethanol, for which the Senator promotes tax breaks because it is uneconomic to produce otherwise, partly because of the energy cost involved in such production.
Something tells me that Senator Obama and his staff should shut up on this particular issue. Hat tip to Steven Hayward.

Christine Hurt is working on an interesting paper

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scales of justice10A.gifChristine Hurt, Conglomerate blogger, former Houstonian and currently the Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Scholar in the University of Illinois College of Law, is working on an interesting paper that she describes here:

The prosecutorial response to white collar crime post-Enron has had some setbacks. In both the Arthur Andersen case and the Enron Nigerian Barge case, appellate courts eventually said that the fact pattern did not constitute the crime in question. However, as welcomed as these decisions are, they cannot turn back time. Arthur Andersen was destroyed by the investigation and conviction and, like a corpse after an autopsy, cannot be brought back to life. The defendants in the Nigerian barge case will never get back the years they spent defending themselves and actually living in prison, not to mention the untold defense costs. I am writing a paper on the relative burdens on the various parties in criminal and civil corporate misconduct cases, and I find it interesting that we have so many requirements and presumptions to save corporate civil defendants from vexatious litigation and exorbitant discovery costs, but we seem not to care about the corporate criminal defendant who must wait until a jury verdict or an appellate ruling to determine whether the prosecution was without merit.

Music to my ears! ;^)

On the Iraqi counterinsurgency and radical Islam

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Keegan John.jpgIn this short review of Thomas Ricks’ new book, Fiasco (Penguin July, 2006), renowned British military historian and author Sir John Keegan (previous posts here) provides a typically lucid explanation of “how a brilliantly executed invasion turned into a messy counterinsurgency struggle.” Keegan concludes with the following observation:

[W]hat may underlie the whole insurgency, . . . is the rise of Islamic militancy across the Muslim world.
America was so certain that what it had to offer–modern government in an incorrupt and democratic form–was so obviously desirable that it failed altogether to understand that the Iraqis wanted something else, which is self-government in an Islamic form. It is too late now to start again.
All that can be hoped is that the U.S. Army will prevail in its counterinsurgency and, as Mr. Ricks’s gripping accounts of the troops in action suggest, it may still. His description of Marines “attacking into an ambush” leaves one in no doubt that American soldiers know combat secrets that their enemies do not and cannot match. Whether pure military skills will win the war, however, cannot be predicted.

Meanwhile, in this NY Times op-ed, Yale fellow Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslimís Call for Reform in Her Faith (St. Martin’s 2004) reminds us that radical Islamic jihadists do not require foreign policy grievances to justify their violence, and that support of responsible Islamic leadership is the key to success in the Middle East:

Whether in Britain or America, those who claim to speak for Muslims have a responsibility to the majority, which wants to reconcile Islam with pluralism. Whatever their imperial urges, it is not for Tony Blair or George W. Bush to restore Islamís better angels. That duty ó and glory ó goes to Muslims.

And finally, Will Wilkinson points to this wonderful, short Bertrand Russell essay that identifies one of the key human dynamics underlying not only radical Muslin jihadists, but demagogues in any culture:

Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.