The Windfall Profits Prophets

I can’t believe that I’m having to post this piece, as you would think that the cast of Democrats, mainly liberal, and Republicans, as well as any learned journalist should know the definition of the term ‘windfall profits.’

So, for those of you who are ignorant, and I know that many of you just might be, here is what ‘windfall profits’ mean.

Profit that occurs unexpectedly as a consequence of some event not controlled by those who profit from it, in other words – an unexpected profit arising from causes not controlled by the recipient.

So, in regards to the oil companies, windfall profit would be described as – A profit that occurs through no action of a company but is produced by an external event.  For instance, oil companies reap windfall profits when oil prices rise due to a system-wide shortage.  Electric utilities and traders that have spare generating capacity to sell also may reap windfall profits if prices rise substantially because of higher-than-normal temperatures lead to a higher demand for air-conditioning, for example.

P.S. The big oil companies earn about 3-4% net profit on their oil sales. I dare you to tell me another retailer who could possibly stay in business at that rate of return on their investment.  Yes, I know that 3-4% of what the oil companies make is a huge number, but that’s before dividends are paid to share holders.

YOU CAN’T FUEL ALL OF THE PEOPLE ALL OF THE TIME

Liberals dismiss studies that show a link between abortion and breast cancer, claiming they are biased because the people promoting the studies are “anti-choice.”

For the same reason, no one should believe the Democrats’ “energy” policies.

Democrats couldn’t care less about high gas prices. The consistent policy of the Democratic Party, going back at least to Jimmy Carter, has been to jack up gas prices so we can all start pedaling around on tricycles.

Environmentalists are constantly clamoring for higher gas taxes as the cure-all to their insane global warming theory. Clinton proposed a 26-cent tax on gas. John Kerry said it should be 50 cents. Gore endorsed the Malthusian proposal of Paul and Anne Ehrlich in “The Population Explosion” that gas taxes be raised gradually to match prices in Europe and Japan.

The result is consumers now pay about 46 cents per gallon in gasoline taxes. That’s not including taxes paid directly to the government by the oil companies and passed onto consumers. As the inestimable economist John Lott has pointed out, in the past 25 years oil companies have paid more than three times in taxes what they have made in profits.

B. Hussein Obama’s response to soaring gas prices is to have the oil companies collect even more money from us at the pump, proposing a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies. “Corporate taxes” sound like taxes on rich people, but all they do is force corporations to collect taxes on behalf of the government.

Democrats have worked hard to ensure that Americans pay as much for gas as Europeans do. After a quarter-century of gas tax hikes, a ban on drilling for oil and a complete destruction of the nuclear power industry in America, I guess liberals can declare: Mission accomplished!

In response to skyrocketing gas prices, liberals say, practically in unison, “We can’t drill our way out of this crisis.”

What does that mean? This is like telling a starving man, “You can’t eat your way out of being hungry!” “You can’t water your way out of drought!” “You can’t sleep your way out of tiredness!” “You can’t drink yourself out of dehydration!”

Seriously, what does it mean? Finding more oil isn’t going to increase the supply of oil?

It is the typical Democratic strategy to babble meaningless slogans, as if they have a plan. Their plan is: the permanent twilight of the human race. It’s the only solution they can think of to deal with the beastly traffic on the LIE (Long Island Expressway).

How do liberals propose we acquire the energy required for the economic activity and production that results in light appearing when they flick a switch? The larger enterprise involved in producing that little miracle eludes them.

Liberals complain that — as B. Hussein Obama put it — there’s “no way that allowing offshore drilling would lower gas prices right now. At best you are looking at five years or more down the road.”

This is as opposed to airplanes that run on woodchips, which should be up and running any moment now.

Moreover, what was going on five years ago? Why didn’t anyone propose drilling back then?

Say, you know what we need? We need a class of people paid to anticipate national crises and plan solutions in advance. It would be such an important job, the taxpayers would pay them salaries so they wouldn’t have to worry about making a living and could just sit around anticipating crises.

If only we had had such a group — let’s call them “elected representatives” — they could have proposed drilling five years ago!

But of course we do pay people to anticipate national problems and propose solutions. Some of them — we’ll call them Republicans — did anticipate high gas prices and propose solutions.

Six long years ago President Bush had the foresight to demand that Congress allow drilling in a minuscule portion of the Alaska’s barren, uninhabitable Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). In 2002, Bush, Tom DeLay and the entire Republican Party were screaming from the rooftops: Drill! Drill! Drill!

We’d be gushing oil now — except the Democrats stopped us from drilling.

Drilling on only 0.01 percent of ANWR’s 19 million acres was projected to produce about 10 billion barrels of oil. From all domestic sources combined, we currently produce about 1.8 billion barrels of oil per year. To a layperson like myself, 10 billion barrels seems like a lot of oil.

The other party — plus John McCain — ferociously opposed drilling in ANWR, drilling offshore or drilling anyplace else. Instead of Drill! Drill! Drill!, their motto could be: Kill! Kill! Kill!

They refuse to believe our abortion studies? I refuse to believe they care about Americans having to pay high gas prices.

Visitors can’t get enough of Hitler tours in Munich

MUNICH – Visiting tourists can’t get enough of Adolf Hitler tours in Munich, the southern German city where the dictator nurtured his Nazi Party and, 10 years before he was elected German chancellor, mounted the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

The guided walking tours take visitors to city sites with Adolf Hitler significance which most Munich natives today are no longer aware of, such as the fact that Hitler gave his first public speech upstairs at the world-famous Hofbraeuhaus beer hall in 1918.

Close by, in the Schwabing district, is a pub, the Schellingsalon, where Hitler liked to drink and often did not pay the bill.

Though he was born in Braunau, Austria, Hitler made Munich his home in 1913, before World War I. The trail follows him from his beginnings and his rise to Fuehrer of the Third Reich.

Eric Loerke, 57, a U.S. national and longtime Munich resident, conducts the walks in English for a local guides firm, Munichwalktours, with a maximum of 25 paying visitors on each Third Reich Tour.

“We wanted to find out some more about Hitler,” said one holidaymaker, a lawyer from Dublin, Ireland.

She and her husband were on a weekend break in Munich. Others on the walk were a family with two teenage daughters from Alabama, several U.S. teenagers and three older women from Puerto Rico.

Bo Williams, 22, a Washington, D.C. history student, said, “It’s pretty interesting to see all the places where Hitler was.”

Most of the visitors have also visited the Dachau concentration camp memorial on the outskirts of Munich.

“After that, a lot of them are curious to know how Hitler came to power,”
Munichwalktours co-owner Ralph Lluenstroth said.

Wilma, 60, from Puerto Rico, said: “I’ve read so much about this, and I just could not comprehend how the Germans could follow a guy like that. After seeing the place, I can understand it better.”

Loerke, whose previous job was tending golf courses, has lived in Germany for more than 30 years and is able to explain the German mindset, as well as why modern Germans do not enjoy Hitler walking tours.

He starts the tour by holding up photos of Hitler as a baby and as a mediocre artist in 1913 drawing pictures for postcards. He describes Hitler’s enthusiasm for the operas of Richard Wagner.

The tour begins at the heart of the city, the Marienplatz, and continues to Koenigsplatz, site of the old Nazi Party headquarters and a rally site, taking in the Hofbraeuhaus, where Hitler honed his rhetoric and founded the Nazi party in 1920.

In 1923, Hitler gathered his supporters at a public meeting at another beer hall, the Buergerbraeukeller, and marched to the city’s landmark Feldherrnhalle, in an unsuccessful attempt to seize power, the Putsch.

That beer hall was torn down decades ago, but the tourists can see where the Nazi Party affixed a plaque on the Feldherrnhalle to commemorate the Nazi men killed when police put the coup down.

Older Munich residents remember when the plaque was there, because they were required to do a Heil Hitler salute when passing it.

Those who hated the Nazis preferred to pass the site by a back lane, Viscardi Gasse, nicknamed “Evaders’ Alley,” so that they would not have to salute.

The Nazi period rouses such agony among modern Germans that few would care to do a Nazi-sites walk as part of a happy holiday.

Loerke tells the visitors that he sees a certain ambivalence about how to deal with the Nazi past among the Germans.

They face up the past, but often only after long-running reluctance, he says, pointing to a program only begun in 2000 to compensate Europeans drafted by the Nazis into forced labor.

Inside a palace built for Hitler overlooking the Koenigsplatz, the tourists looked stunned at the imposing red-marble staircase.

The palace is one of the few Nazi-style buildings still standing in the city. It is now a college of music and theater.

A choral performance, sung by students born long after World War II, wafts out of a great hall in the palace as Loerke describes to the tourists the Nazi campaign to enslave Europe.

“Where is Germany today?” Loerke says. “The answer now is simple: it’s part of the European Union. But defining the answer back then cost millions of people’s lives.”

What exactly are we teaching in school nowadays – how to text message, play video games, make pregnancy pacts, smoke dope snort coke, lie, cheat and steal?

About That ‘Obama Grew Up Muslim’ Story

Malik Obama confirms his half-brother Barack grew up a Muslim

By Israel Insider staff  June 13, 2008

Apparently the Obamas of Kenya have been reading those scurrilous emails to which Barack likes to refer, because they have no doubt — contrary to the claims of the Obama campaign, that the presidential candidate was raised a Moslem. They take that as a given.

As the Jerusalem Post reports, “Barack Obama’s half brother Malik said Thursday that if elected his brother will be a good president for the Jewish people, despite his Muslim background. In an interview with Army Radio he expressed a special salutation from the Obamas of Kenya.”

The Obama brothers’ father, a senior economist for the Kenyan government who studied at Harvard University, died in car crash in 1982. He left six sons and a daughter. All of his children – except Malik — live in Britain or the United States. Malik and Barack met in 1985.

In a remarkable denial issued last November that still stands on the official campaign website, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs issued a statement explaining that “Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised as a Muslim, and is a committed Christian.”

Apparently Malik Obama, himself a Muslim, had not read the press release.

Melanie Phillips is the most recent commentator to draw attention to the massive body of evidence that leaves no doubt that Barak Hussein Obama was born a Muslim (Islam is patrilineal) and raised a Muslim (so registered in school, acknowledging attending Islamic classes, reported accompanying his step-father to the mosque, and able to recite the Koran in the original Arabic).

Reuven Koret, Aaron Klein and Daniel Pipes have previously pointed to the attempts by Obama and his campaign to conceal the candidate’s Muslim background. The well documented evidence draws upon the on-the-ground interviews by researchers in Indonesia and Kenya, published quotations of Obama’s childhood friends and his school records, as well as the candidate’s own autobiography.

It is not clear whether Barack Obama will now disown his half-brother Malik, or throw him under the campaign bus, for acknowledging that shared family background. In any case, some one should notify “Fight the Smear” tout de suite. Perhaps they can get him with the program.

Sorry, but this story is nonsense. And it does not do Mr. Obama’s opponents any credit to dwell on it.

After all, what is the point of the Israel Insider article? Its claim is taken from the Jerusalem Post’s very brief characterization of an interview, presented here in its entirety:

Malik Obama says his brother will be good president for the Jews

Jun. 12, 2008
JPost.com Staff, THE JERUSALEM POST

Barack Obama’s half brother Malik said Thursday that if elected his brother will be a good president for the Jewish people, despite his Muslim background.

In an interview with Army Radio he expressed a special salutation from the Obamas of Kenya.

That is it. And it is a mighty slim reed upon which to base such a breathless headline and article.

The interview has reportedly published in Hebrew, but so far no transcript has yet surfaced.

Meanwhile, elsewhere (here and here) Malik Obama’s remarks were reported without any mention of the “despite his Muslim background” codicil.

Lest we forget, it was S&L that first unearthed the photo that is featured in the Israel Insider piece. In fact, the photograph is from an October 26, 2004 Associated Press article.

In that very article this selfsame Malik Obama is reported as saying that, unlike the rest of the family, Barack is a Christian:

Their paternal grandfather, Onyango Hussein Obama, was one of the first Muslim converts in Nyangoma-Kogelo, Malik said. However, not all of his descendants are Muslim, Malik added. Barack is Christian.

Of course there is no doubt that Mr. Obama lived in a Muslim country, Indonesia, nor that he went to a madrassa — which is also the Arabic word for “school” — whether secular or otherwise.

Nor is there any doubt that as a boy he had to study the Koran. As the article notes, this fact is mentioned several times in his first autobiography, “Dreams From My Father” and elsewhere.

But none of this proves that Barack was actually raised as a Muslim or that he is not now a Christian. (Even though we have our own thoughts on Mr. Obama’s brand of Christianity.)

Moreover, as the aforementioned AP article notes, Malik Obama never met Barack Obama until 1985, so he himself would have no way of knowing how he was raised.

But articles like these, based on the flimsiest of premises are apparently becoming de rigeur on many websites. (Cf. Larry Sinclair, the spammed phony Obama book quotes, the “whitey” tape, the Obama’s birth certificate controversy…)

Dear Reader’s – what’s your take?