The International House of Bacon

* Reason talks about the airline shutdowns. Money quote:

Just in the last decade, the fatality rate has plunged by 82 percent. Last year there was not a single death stemming from accidents involving scheduled carriers. The decline has occurred even as the number of planes and people in the air has greatly increased.

It’s hard to believe this improvement stems from the stern vigilance of federal regulators. In the first place, Congress now tells us that, actually, regulation hasn’t been nearly vigilant enough.

In the second, it’s far-fetched to think that, in a business where there are nearly 27,000 flights per day, the FAA can prevent a reprobate carrier from cheating if it really wants to. The agency simply doesn’t have enough personnel to monitor everything that could go wrong.

* The big news over the weekend was Obama’s “bitter” comments, which Hillary Clinton duitfully harped on and blew out of proportion. Was the commentary unnecessary and a little out of touch? Yeah, I think most could agree with that - and he obviously did too, as he changed his tune shortly after. I just don’t think it’s surprising - Barack Obama hasn’t really had a very high view of people he doesn’t agree with from the start, and this is just another piece of that ever-expanding puzzle. If he thinks people are “clinging” to gun rights or religion or xenophobic tendencies because past administrations and government haven’t succeeded in “regenerating” these areas, he simply has no clue as to what people are ultimately concerned about. I’m sure it would be great if we could all buy into Obama’s liberal paradise that he wants to set up for us, but the fact remains that people have priorities beyond dropping an employment rate three points. Someone who spent so much time community building in Chicago should certainly know that. Also, a question of sorts - what kind of bitterness is Obama clinging to in order to justify his anti-trade sentiments, if that’s the logic?

* Hugo Chavez steals more private property. But hey, nothing to see here, move along everyone.

* Speaking of the complete uselessness of the United Nations, not only did they appoint someone who compared the Israel/Palestinian situation on par with the Nazi Holocaust to a group discussing the situation and the human rights issue, but he’s a 9/11 Truther to boot. I’m sure Israel will be getting a fair shake, as it always does on the international stage.

* Michael Yon is a reporter who’s been embedded with the troops in Iraq for over a year. The Wall Street Journal posted a must-read editorial from him. He’s seen the worst of it, and he’s thinking we’re in better shape now than we have been in years. Worth reading.

* Jimmy Carter to meet with Hamas. Idiotic.

* More inadvertent evidence of FDR and Bush’s similarity. It’s also a good example of why I’m afraid of McCain.

* I don’t know what’s sadder: that the biofuel lunacy is raising the price of beer, or that the rise in the price of beer could very well end up being the tipping point in reversing this whole “burn our food for fuel” trend.

* Cafe Hayek on our manufacturing realities.

That’s it for now.

Catching up while wondering who the mystery first pitch is for Red Sox opening day, and whether Obama’s promise to listen to the generals on the ground in Iraq applies to Gen. Petraeus this week.

* Bush fast-tracked the Colombian Free Trade Agreement yesterday. I said it before - for all the negatives of the Bush Presidency, his record on trade, on a whole, is not one of them. It’s especially refreshing when hearing the alternatives from the Democratic side.

* The rumor is that Condoleeza Rice is angling for the vice-presidential nomination on the McCain ticket. Unsolicited advice for McCain - we don’t know a thing about her, so don’t do it.

* Not everything is rainbows and unicorns financially on the left.

* Chances are that, if you have any interest in video games, you’ve already played You Have to Burn the Rope. If not, go and play it - you’re in for a treat.

* Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek on pessimistic bias regarding the economy. I’m generally more optimistic about these things myself, as he is.

* A question - it seems that every single time a politician or Presidential candidate attempts to use a person as an example for their own health care complaints, they’re lying about it. Why is that? We know that some people have it bad, why do they struggle so much to find them?

* Corn is now at $6/bushel. Thanks, ethanol! At least my gas prices are lower! Wait, what?

* In a “naw, really” moment, it appears that the health care requirement in Massachusetts has resulted in a - you guessed it - shortage in available doctors. Remember, this is the same kind of plan favored by Hillary Clinton.

* Obama’s positive ratings are due more to “how he makes voters feel than by specific characteristics they attributed to him.” But, again, I’m a jerk for pointing this out.

* Finally, more nationalization schemes from Hugo Chavez. I worry a lot for Venuzuela, and more because it’s another thing in a long list that the United Nations was designed for and that they’re essentially punting on. No, it’s not Darfur, it’s not Zimbabwe, it’s not Tibet, it’s not Taiwan. But it’s bad, and that no one is willing to step in through the allegedly essential international community is patently ridiculous.

* Not shockingly, BarackObama’s tax returns are being pored over, and plenty of unfair attacks are cropping up. One I heard a few times already (and is detailed somewhat at the link provided) is a criticism of Obama’s charitable contributions. Yes, I’m consistently annoyed that richer-than-myself politicians don’t give much money yet push for more taxes that will only end up hurting me. Yes, I know full well that Obama’s charitable contributions seem to trend much higher when he becomes a national name. He also published two very successful books in that time, and had a lot more money, so I’d expect someone who can afford to give $25k to his church to be able to ramp up other giving at the same time. The more important question is whether Obama violated the Illinois Governmental Ethics Act. If this is generally true, well, that’s just another fraudulent slash on his record - can’t change the tone if you can’t follow the rules yourself, Obama. Of course, the problem is the rule, but Obama struggles to understand that simple point, so perhaps beating him over the head with it a bit might help. Same Old Washington Politics.

* Does Clear Channel not want you to know about the XM/Sirius merger? Wouldn’t shock me.

* Rick Astley on RickRolling. Believe it or not, I wasn’t a huge fan of the whole RickRolling phenomenon, I just find the more recent examples and attention interesting.

* Iran isn’t a threat, right? Why are we trusting the United States intelligence community at all right now? I really need to know the answer to this - they missed 9/11 by a mile, they screwed up on WMD, they can’t get Iran straight, and that’s just the damage we know about. I’m not saying we need to bomb Iran here, but exactly what is it going to take to clean up the homeland intelligence community? Having a President and three candidates to succeed him who trust government implicitly certainly aren’t going to clean house over there, that’s for damn sure.

* QandO covers a lot of information on the Antarctic ice situation. Climate is weird.

* Reason’s editors haven’t exactly been kind to John McCain, and for good reason. But they do have a point - if earmarks are your problem, McCain provides a refreshing solution. A bright spot in his spotty candidacy.

* For now, I’ll end on QandO’s compilation of Obama’s positions on oil companies and where he gets it completely wrong. It’s very well-sourced, and it’s a good example of how completely out of it Obama is. Obama thinks the answer to oil prices is stricter regulation and windfall taxes on oil companies, even though the big oil companies (your Chevrons, Exxons, etc) only control roughly 10% of the current known supply, the rest being in the hands of nationalized companies or governments themselves. When the Saudi Arabians own 20% of the oil reserves on their own, trying to lower prices by going after the companies that own roughly 6% is not a logical place to go. Even today, consumers pay more to the government in direct taxes than they do to actual profits for oil companies, and that doesn’t begin the discussion of how much the absurdly high taxes on these companies pass along on the consumer end. But will we ever see Obama (or anyone else, for that matter) call for the abolition of gas taxes? Of course not.

* Finally, the Club for Growth makes a great statement on Bush’s legacy. For all the moronic protectionist things Bush has done over his term, his overall record has shown a definite expansion in free trade. Credit where it’s due.

More soonish.

OMG SO BUSY ALL TEH TIME.

* A new show on HBO with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross? Yes, please.

* I have no idea why Governor Lynch’s approval rating is so high in New Hampshire. He’s killed the budget (and plans to bury it completely after he gets re-elected), he’s actively working to restrict the rights of New Hampshire citizens, and yet 55% of people polled support him. Plus, with his likely challenger not running, it’s impossible to be able to tell at this point if we could oust him in November. If anything, my little time in New Hampshire has shown me that, even in areas where the government is better, you still get morons involved, whether they’re the governor or just a representative from your home city who never intended to serve in the first place and, thus, never showed up. Sigh.

* Thomas Sowell on Barack Obama. I’d call this a must read, but every Thomas Sowell piece is must read.

* Also, a telling story on Obama’s actions when it counts. Barack Obama is often very fraudulent, this is just another story to add to the list. Is this what we can expect?

* Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek parses the recent story about benefit costs and how they’re allegedly hurting workers. I agree with his analysis, to be frank.

* Fox deserves a massive amount of respect for refusing to pay an FCC fine for indecency. The sooner the FCC gets knocked down a peg, the better off we all are.

* The other big news I’m two days behind on is the Supreme Court ruling in Medellin v. Texas. A pretty complicated case, I think I’m happy with the outcome, but the most interesting wrinkle that will probably be looked over? Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas all ruled against President Bush, and Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer with the President. Go figure. More here, if this is as confusing as you think.

* Hugo Chavez says anyone but McCain. Sounds like a reason to vote for McCain to me…

More later…

Gah!

* Michael Barone breaks down the superdelegate issue. I think it’s going to be impossible for the Democrats to finish up things before the convention - either they’re going to go with a known commodity in Clinton or an unknown in Obama, and if they’re leaning toward the unknown, they’re going to wait until he’s as fully vetted as possible - the Democrats can’t afford for Obama to have another Wright skeleton in his closet, and I’d imagine that fear is palpable, if not unspoken. That’s what the superdelegates are for, right? Don’t buy the Politico hype - the superdelegates have a role, and never underestimate the ability of the Democratic Party to shoot itself in the foot.

* QandO on why Glen Greenwald is a hack.

* Patterico had two excellent posts this weekend: First, a little straight talk on McCain and the whole Saddam/Al Queda thing that the Los Angeles Times decided to hammer home. Even I didn’t know of many of the quotes coming directly from the 9/11 Commission. Secondly, a great takedown of an Obama endorsement from a so-called Republican. Makes me wish I didn’t have such a visceral reaction to John McCain.

* Massachusetts schools aren’t failing, they’re simply “Commonwealth priorities.” I hate self-esteem sugarcoating.

* Many of you were right: Albany’s screwed. Spitzer’s replacement may have to step down for his own corruption issues, and the next guy in line is close to being indicted as well? Yikes.

* The Washington Post on a possible reality of an Obama presidency. I must say - calling your allies “so-called” won’t help matters, he’s right.

* My favorite story in ages: red light cameras are being shut down in some places because they’re too effective and end up being a drain on revenues as a result. Again: why do people wonder why I don’t trust law enforcement?

* Heavy but cool if you can parse it: a look at a possible fall in oil prices. Lots of stuff on petrodollars and investment and peak oil and on and on.

* Hugo Chavez moves to shut down the last remaining critical news outlet. That’s what you get when you try to stand up to a coked-up dictator.

* Bill Richardson endorsed Obama last week. I’m disappointed, but not shocked.

* A great story from inside the organ donation market. An interesting note from the piece - if every cadaver had its organs harvested and handed out, we still wouldn’t have enough. As creepy as it sounds, selling organs still seems like a better idea all around.

* GraniteGrok on how John Sununu’s challenger is completely stupid when it comes to oil prices. Shaheen is typical of the current Democratic/liberal mindset on economic issues right now - no forward thinking, and no clear progress on ideas that can solve the problems we’re facing.

* A pretty great story about how one of my favorite films, His Girl Friday, only found an audience after it slipped into the public domain. It’s somewhat presented as anti-copyright extension limits, and while I appreciate the public domain and the benefits it gives people on a whole, I’m also very pro-getting-people-compensated for what they do. It’s a very hard line to draw, especially in a situation that is inherently arbitrary, but I’m not convinced Disney should have to worry about losing Mickey Mouse while it’s still around, nor am I necessarily convinced that, say, Mark Twain’s great-great-grandkids are entitled to money for copies sold of Huckleberry Finn (note: I know Twain’s work is in the public domain).

* Are burglaries declining because of cheap imports?

Whew. That should do it for now.

Back on schedule, I think.

* Charles Krauthammer wrote an excellent piece on lobbying Friday. The idea that any candidate or politician would go against the right to petition the government is really pathetic.

* You know a tax bill is completely moronic when it raises taxes on domestic companies, but inadvertently provides a break to Venuzuela. Great job, Congressional Democrats. Way to live up to that approval rating.

* A fun little memoriam: The Collected Controversies of William F. Buckley.

* From Volokh: Barack Obama, Sept. 26, 2002, where he said that the Iraq war was “a cover-up for a failing economy.” “Right from the beginning,” right folks? This would be one of the most ignorant things I’ve heard from the candidates yet if it weren’t for…

* …McCain buying into the thimerosal/autism allegations. For me, this is one of those issues that bothers me more than the creationism/evolution thing. This is my creationism. Remember how I’ve been trying to talk myself into McCain? This essentially put me back to square one. Pathetically dumb.

* Victor Davis Hansen at National Review put up a great article about what the next President faces “After Dubya.” Puts a lot of things in context.

* I’m not sure what to make of this yet, but 60 Minutes may have been duped again. Whether it happened or not is still being looked into, but the fact that we can’t even rule it out without a second look is more damning about the sad state of affairs in the mainstream national media than anything else.

* Cool link of the day: the incredible expanding Dubai. Yet we still haven’t rebuilt the World Trade Center.

* That the United States incarceration rate is as high as it is is quite shameful. Reason puts it into perspective a bit, though.

* A link I keep forgetting to post: Stuff White People Like, a blog dedicated to stuff that white people like. Pretty funny.

* This is why I avoid Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall essentially decides, with no evidence of a link but plenty of evidence of ignorance from sectors that weren’t even behind McCain until he was the only choice left, that McCain will run a bigoted campaign against Obama. That’s the hard-hitting analysis we’ve been looking for, right?

That’s all for now.

Everyone in the Raymond household is various forms of ill and sickly and yeah. Plus, I’m wicked busy, so most of this should have posted last night. Alas…

* The big news, at least amongst folk like me, is the passing of William F. Buckley. I’m much too young to have been directly influenced by him, and I’ve only been reading National Review for the last five years or so, but to consider him anything less than one of the top three figures in modern conservatism (along with Reagan and Goldwater) is probably improper. He made conservatism intellectual again in an era where it was reeling from the disaster of the New Deal and wasting away in McCarthyism. In an era of Bush-administration-style neoconservatism, I’m hoping that someone will be inspired to take up his mantle that WFB’s death brings to the forefront. For a pretty great overview of the importance, Reason pulls it together kind of nicely, and Radley Balko hits a lot of notes that went through my head.

* This is a good example of why I think Obama’s missing the point. And while I give him some minor kudos for his attempt at a response, never mind that he’s likely wrong to some degree on that anyway. Still, Obama’s ridiculous position on it does open up a can of worms - if things go to hell in Iraq once we withdraw, you’re gonna go back in? Yeah, that’ll go over well.

* It’s still way too early for these polls to have any significant meaning, but McCain’s essentially closed the gap in head-to-head polling. Compare McCain going after Obama in the previous piece with Clinton’s anemic “attacks” over the last week - I think Obama’s going to struggle more with McCain than even I previously thought.

* Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy muses over possible Obama Supreme Court appointments. What’s most telling about this is Obama’s view of the Court: “part of the role of the Court is that it is going to protect people who may be vulnerable in the political process, the outsider, the minority, those who are vulnerable, those who don’t have a lot of clout. . . [S]ometimes we’re only looking at academics or people who’ve been in the [lower] court. If we can find people who have life experience and they understand what it means to be on the outside, what it means to have the system not work for them, that’s the kind of person I want on the Supreme Court.” Uh, no, Mr. Senator. That has nothing to do with the Supreme Court’s role in society. You have no clue what you’re talking about. Can his supporters even defend this ignorance? That he can talk about the Supreme Court in multiple sentences and not mention the Constitution once should really give anyone pause, I think.

* This was a big Obama day for me, sorry: National Review covers one of those odd video collections of Obama on the military and kind of cuts to the chase as to how stupid it sounds to “slow the development of future combat systems.”

* In other news, Obama decides to redefine liberal in order to assert that he isn’t one. I’ve never bought into the “liberal as a dirty word” meme, for what it’s worth.

* How Obama deals with the media. More importantly, what the military thinks of Obama. Remember the howling over Bush allegedly not listening to the military regarding the run-up to Iraq? Do we think Obama’s going to fix that from what we’ve heard so far? Both links from William Katz’s great Urgent Agenda.

* Obama currently has a “hold” in the Senate on one of the Federal Election Commission appointees. Putting aside that this is simply more evidence of Obama equalling “politics as usual,” this would normally not be news except that the FEC is short enough members to produce a quorum, and this is actively harming McCain’s campaign, especially in terms of fundraising. Now, as far as I’m concerned, McCain made his campaign finance bed and he can damn well sleep in it, but there’s something that should feel kind of dirty about this whole thing about the guy running for President using his Senate position to harm his opponent, even if it’s completely (o my knowledge) legal and above-board. Hell, he couldn’t even convince one person to do the hold for him? Still shady.

* I repeat: Barack Obama is the Same Old Washington Politics as Usual. Thanks, Jana. You can’t complain about lobbyist influence while giving the impression that you’re influenced by lobbyists.

* Don Luskin has been one of my favorite economic bloggers for a while now, and I’ll even forgive him for latching onto McCain’s campaign. He wrote a great piece on prediction markets this week that is worth reading.

* Venuzuela introduces food rationing. Because, you know, socialism works, nationalizing the oil companies was a wonderful idea, and Hugo Chavez is to be praised for his wonderful reforms that are improving so many lives.

I’ve gone long enough for now.

* From Jana, a link to the latest David Brooks editorial about the campaign. It details a probable result of a Democratic Presidency in political terms, which I can’t say I disagree with. It’s just like the relative failure of the Democratic Congress, but on the executive level.

* Instead of angering people daily with the more uncomfortable aspects of the Obama campaign, just keep an eye on this blog: Is Barack Obama the Messiah? It’s a blog that collects links and news stories about the more-than-occasional deification of this author’s favorite punching bag. Joel Stein has more to say on the matter.

* On the flip side, a cool list at The Friendly Atheist showing the relative lack of differences between Christians and atheists.

* Hugo Chavez has decided that, since the United States courts have decided that ExxonMobil is entitled to some money for what his government stole from them, he’s going to threaten to hold out on oil if we freeze those assets. Bright idea, buddy - hardly anyone can refine your oil, and it’ll hurt you much, much more than it’ll hurt us. After all, we can always buy oil from the dozens of other suppliers who have better crude anyway. In the meantime, Chavez has decided to put the oil revenues in Swiss banks. Classy.

* National Review’s David Freddoso gives some context to the turnout meme. Interesting data.

* So, John McCain supports draconian controls on finances for elections, but doesn’t see the need for those limits for himself. He’s well within rights to turn down private financing, but this is an excellent example of the two-facedness of McCain on many issues.