From the WSJ Opinion Archives
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Owing to a hard-drive malfunction, James Taranto is unable to write his column today. In its place we offer a free sample of Political Diary, the daily premium email newsletter (subscribe here). Things will be back to normal tomorrow.
- An Untapped Energy Source: Karl Rove's Spinning
- Playing the Stem-Cell Card
- Quacks Like a Duck (Quote of the Day I)
- Weather Vranes (Quote of the Day II)
- Senator Inhofe Joins the Pajama Pundits
White
House aide Karl Rove held a conference call with some 100 heads of free-market
groups yesterday and provided a preview of President Bush's State of the Union
message tonight.
The president's speech will be about 40 minutes in length -- significantly shorter than Bill Clinton's stem-winders -- and will be split equally between domestic and foreign policy.
Mr. Rove focused on domestic policy in his remarks, saying the president will lay out bold plans to expand access to health insurance for all Americans and to reduce gasoline usage in the U.S. dramatically over the next ten years. Most of the conference call was taken up exploring the details of the speech's energy component.
The president will set out two goals. First will be to lay out a plan to increase domestic production of oil as the nation enters what the president believes is a transition period away from fossil fuels. That will also include active promotion of nuclear power.
But the president also will spend a lot of time touting the alternative fuels he's become enamored with: from clean coal to cellulosic ethanol to bio-diesel. He believes the country is on the cusp of a "whole series of breakthrough technologies," Mr. Rove said. The president will not use the blunderbuss of seeking increases in the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards but instead focus on encouraging the efforts of "private firms, research labs and universities" developing the new technologies.
Mr. Rove took pains to assure his audience that the administration wasn't lavishing Manhattan Project-sized expenditures on such fuels. "Government will spend no more money but will get money to these facilities faster and without earmarks," he told the group. The goal will be to spur market development of such technologies, not lead it. "The president met with Silicon Valley high-tech investors who said their biggest pool of money was set aside for investments in alternative fuels. They are waiting to take some of these things that are on the cusp of development and commercialize them."
It all sounds well and good, but the new Democratic Congress will actually have to pass legislation reallocating the money Mr. Bush wants to direct to alternative fuels. As we saw with yesterday's passage of a $14 billion energy bill, Congress seems intent on using the energy issue to raise taxes on domestic production and lavish goodies on favored alternative energy producers.
Almost everyone in Congress will applaud the president's remarks on energy independence tonight. But the real test will be whether Mr. Bush is willing to ride herd on a pork-minded Congress and ensure that his plans aren't converted into just another government boondoggle.
Keep
an eye out for actor Michael J. Fox, who plans to attend tonight's State of
the Union Address as the guest of four-term Rhode Island Democrat Rep. Jim Langevin.
The two are hoping Mr. Fox's attendance will draw the attention of network TV
cameras and commentators to President Bush's ban on using federal funds to support
certain kinds of stem-cell research.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already rushed legislation through the House that would lift the ban, notwithstanding that an identical bill passed by a Republican Congress last year drew the first veto of Mr. Bush's presidency. So far, Democrats have been winning on the issue by controlling the debate and portraying the president as opposed to all stem-cell research and the potential life-saving cures that research might yield.
This glosses over the fact that Mr. Bush allowed federal funds to flow to research derived from adult stem cells and from a handful of embryonic stem cell lines that were already in existence when his ban went into effect. Mr. Langevin, who has been confined to a wheelchair since 1980 when he was partially paralyzed from an accidental shooting, explains the politics this way: "This legislation has strong, bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress. It enjoys the support of up to 70% of Americans."
The Democratic Party has already struck gold on the issue. Last fall it supported a constitutional amendment in Missouri to open up state spending spigots for embryonic stem-cell research. Despite the best efforts of Christian conservatives, the amendment passed and helped Democrat Claire McCaskill unseat Republican Sen. Jim Talent and tip the Senate into Democratic control.
Look now for similar initiatives to crop up in other states in 2008. As in Hollywood, initial success nearly guarantees that there will be a sequel.
"Arnold Schwarzenegger persists in living in denial about his proposed tax increases, apparently spooked by his campaign pledge not to raise taxes. He wants to seize 2% of doctors' receipts and 4% of the hospitals' to help pay for universal, affordable healthcare...'It's not a tax, just a loan, because it does not go for general [spending],' the governor told the Sacramento Bee last week. 'It goes back to healthcare. I think it's the important fact here, that you take it for healthcare.' No, governor, the important fact is that you'd 'take it.' To take is to tax when you're talking about people's incomes" -- Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton, dean of California political columnists, on Gov. Schwarzenegger's proposed health care tax.
"A few climate scientists are beginning to question whether some dire [global warming] predictions push the science too far. 'Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster,' says Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado. Vranes, who is not considered a global warming skeptic by his peers, came to this conclusion after attending an American Geophysical Union meeting last month. Vranes says he detected 'tension' among scientists, notably because projections of the future climate carry uncertainties -- a point that hasn't been fully communicated to the public" -- science reporter Eric Berger, writing in the Houston Chronicle.
Pundits
do it. Scientists do it. Even Donald Trump does it. So why shouldn't Congress
blog too?
As the former Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Republican Jim Inhofe was a coruscating critic of climate change alarmism. Now in the minority, he plans to make sure his voice is heard over the din of the media-savvy environmental groups through a new blog. His team even intends to make a bit of Congressional history by conducting the first-ever live Senate blog during the president's State of the Union Address tonight. Watch out, National Review Online.
This is the latest in Senator Inhofe's strategy of trying to shout louder than his many opponents in the environmental community. His media team is somewhat notorious in Washington for their "facts of the day" and "weekly closer" emails that attempt to get out another side of the story. And their new blog is already making waves, not to mention causing some congressional tech malfunctioning.
Last week the minority blog issued a scathing indictment of Heidi Cullen, host of the Weather Channel's weekly global warming program "The Climate Code." Ms. Cullen had called for the American Meteorological Society to decertify any TV weatherperson who exhibits undue skepticism about climate warming. The widely-read Drudge Report linked to the Inhofe site's critique of Ms. Cullen, generating so much traffic that the Senate's web servers shut down. A subsequent email update from the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms said the link had been bringing "30-50,000 queries per hour to senate.gov."
No word yet as to when Senator Inhofe himself might roll up his sleeves and post a few items. Let's hope the Senate can get its still-sluggish servers up to speed by then. The blog can be found at http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs.
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: Hillary takes a pass on public funding for her presidential campaign.
- Mohammed Fadhil (from Iraq the Model): Iraq's future doesn't rest on the outcome of a coin flip.
- Clark Judge: Democrats would love to have Republican pollster Frank Luntz on their side. Now we can see why.
