Barack Obama needs to go back to school.  Here’s the brief on a recent proposal of his:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Friday pushed for a windfall profits tax to fund $1,000 emergency rebate checks for consumers besieged by high energy costs, a counter to Republican rival John McCain’s call for more offshore drilling in coastal states like Florida. (AP)

Let’s look at this carefully.  There is a perceived problem: Americans are spending a larger fraction of their income on energy costs, most directly gasoline, but also the rising crude oil costs cascade price escalations throughout the economy, since basically everything involves energy-using transportation.  (I say perceived, because in the short run everything seems like a crisis.)

Perhaps there should be a government solution to this perceived problem.  I won’t argue that particular point, not today.  So let’s assume that yes, there should be some government action.  Obama’s proposed plan is to tax oil companies’ so-called “windfall profits” and use the increased revenue to issue a rebate check to consumers.

Taxing oil companies will increase the cost of providing gasoline to consumers.  Gasoline supply will decrease.

Issuing a rebate check to consumers will provide them with additional wealth to spend on things like gasoline.  Gasoline demand will increase.

When supply decreases, prices go up.  When demand increases, prices go up.  When supply decreases and demand increases… prices go up.

Obama’s plan is so far off-base, it’s borderline idiotic.  But of course, there is a reason.  This is a classic example of election-time politics.  A politician promises immediate satisfaction in the short run (in this case, a rather substantial rebate check).  Though this instant gratification feels good right now, it will hurt much worse later.  But by that time, elections are over and the politician is in office.  When the
costs of the instant gratification finally become apparent, the previous office-holder gets blamed, and the newly elected official (who knew exactly what he was doing) lets things return to equilibrium and takes credit for fixing the problem.

There are, of course, variations on this theme.  That’s politics, and it’s been going on for a long time.  But Barack Obama, who claims to be subscriber to “New Politics”, shows his hand with this particular play.

How racism in America survived the Civil War Amendments, the civil rights revolution, the advents of cable television, talk radio and citizen journalism and other various equalizing forces in American society to its present form.

By the Managing Editor

Perhaps it’s the fact that the GOP no longer has a primary race to run, or maybe it’s because I had no intention of voting for Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama in the first place. Whatever the reason, I find myself otherwise quite bored with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal. Perhaps my colleagues might disagree, but I can’t find much fault in Wright for his belief that America’s track record toward blacks might actually be less than spotless, even to this day. As if the eighty years and change of bondage weren’t bad enough, the Radical Republicans of the North imposed draconian Reconstruction policies upon the South, institutionalizing poverty and antiquity in the former Confederate states that has only been mitigated by military investment and the invention of air conditioning in the past sixty years. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Democrats in the South imposed America’s first gun control laws in the 19th century to make sure those colored folk wouldn’t stand a fighting chance when the Klan knocked on their door with white sheets and stiff ropes.

The 20th century did not bode much better for blacks, and the 21st century appears to offer more of the same racist traditions with merely different tactics. The naively-named “separate but equal” doctrine further aggravated the atrocious teaching conditions Southern schools faced from the outset of the 1900s, and in Tuskegee, black men were used as human guinea pigs for syphilis treatments as recently as the 1970s, nearly thirty years after Dachau was shut down. Today, a black American can sit at the front of the bus and share a classroom with white children and presumably be allowed to attend a college in Florida besides FAMU, but neither the conservative’s American Dream of equality of opportunity nor the liberal’s of equality of outcome could be said to be achieved by any objective standard.

Imagine being a black child about to be brought into this world. You have about a seventy percent chance of not having a dad waiting on the receiving end of your mother’s birth canal. You are twelve times more likely to go to prison than even attend college, let alone get a degree. Your mother likely had to drive (if she did not have to take the bus for lack of a car) past several Planned Parenthood clinics on the way to an emergency room, unless she was lucky enough to have health insurance. You are drastically more likely than the white kid being born in the delivery room next to you to live in real poverty, develop diabetes, drop out of high school, learn what it’s like to choose between food and driving to your second job, and never enjoying retirement.

Numbers are not everything by any means, but this is essentially reality in 2008 for a black child in America. Sure, it’s better than being flogged and sexually assaulted by overseers or having to walk in gutters when a white man passes by on the street, but this is nothing to pat our backs over. It is folly to look to our past and say that our present is somehow progress, and it is equally foolish to look at the ways of the past and not say that racism is not only alive and well in America, but remains a source of power and influence to those who practice it. The War on Drugs has given America a cocaine enforcement policy that says white people get less time for snorting blow in their country club homes while cops swarm the streets of Detroit busting people for holding anything that could be used as a crack pipe, let alone actually carrying crack cocaine. Inner cities are home to some of the most restrictive firearms codes in the country, allowing criminals with less than admirable tolerance for conventional morality to shoot up neighborhoods and murder innocents in the streets with impunity. The resulting crime problems that engulf the inner cities tank property values, send qualified and needed public servants to the more peaceful suburbs and exurbs, and extinguish any chance for meaningful economic development by the private sector. With no hope for a better life coming to them, blacks often feel they have no choice but to come to government, the same entity which in these cases created the problems which lead to their desperate situations, for answers.

We thus begin to see a vicious circle of paternalism and dependency, where people in government provide handouts instead of answers, and scramble for votes instead of actually making a difference. It turns out that the Democratic Party has been a good deal more effective at this than the Republican Party, as blacks vote Democrat to Republican at a 9 to 1 clip consistently. But while Republicans tend to ignore the opportunity to help blacks, Democrats not only ignore the opportunity but seem perfectly content to reap the benefits of a reliable constituency at the polling station. A statistician with my level of tact might call this sort of thing “demographic enslavement”.

If we want to have Barack Obama’s gooey, smooshy visions of “hope” and “change” come to fruition, we should start by viewing all Americans, not just black Americans, as more than just welfare mercenaries looking for the next bribe. If our states spent the money they spend administering entitlements for the federal government on cutting crime, enforcing environmental standards and reforming school curricula, economic opportunity in urban areas would significantly increase. If the 2nd Amendment were legalized in Urban America, criminals would be less inclined to terrorize our streets and we could put to rest the shameful legacy of gun control, one of the last great failures of Reconstruction. Finally, once we make these things happen, localities must lower property taxes and the federal government must cut taxes on investment to make sure jobs can grown and replenish our cities with wealth and income for poor families like never before.

If we are going to have a real discussion about race in America, let’s drop the talk about pastors and middle names and start talking about what really keeps our cities in ruins and why our politicians do everything in their power to keep them that way. It is only once we recognize and come to grips with our new vehicles of racism when we can really put an end to it and ensure that the American Dream of equality of opportunity and an equal shot at prosperity can be realized. Liberty and prosperity go hand in hand in this country; for black Americans, it’s been a long time coming to ensure they finally can have both.

Due to the limitations of the print form of the Frontier Jeff and I were forced to cut the list of possible candidates down significantly. While many people are being thrown around as possibilities, including Tommy Franks among others.

Our short list included the 5 men and women discussed in the article, Jindal, Pawlenty, Sanford, Pence, and Hutchison. Also the following were, in our eyes, possible choices:Mitt Romney (R), Charlie Crist (R-FL), Rob Portman (R-OH), Haley Barbour (R-MS), Condoleezza Rice (R), Joe Lieberman (I-CN), Jim DeMint (R-SC), Fred Thompson (R), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

Recently a list of 5 front runners was named by the campaign. Lieberman, Crist, Blackburn, Barbor and Pawlenty are there. Our list seems to be dead on here, we not only have all 5 the campaign has listed but we included the hot names like Condi that seem to pop up weekly reguardless of how much she denies.

Of course no one will admit they want it. Some dance gracefully around the question, like either Ms. Rice or Mrs. Hutchison, saying they do not want the position when asked. Others laugh off the question, as Mr. Jindal did, saying “He’s not going to ask me.” while modest it isn’t a no.

It will continue to all be speculation and guessing until the man himself decides.

Some of the Frontier staff, along with some College Republicans, went to see Ben Stein’s new big screen documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”.  In case you haven’t heard, the film is about intelligent design and whether or not it is a valid scientific theory.  Honestly, I went into the theater hoping for myths about evolution to be debunked, for scientific hypotheses generated by intelligent design, for significant holes in the evolutionary theory.  I was sorely disappointed (but rather entertained, I should add) by a parade of fluffy interviews, Ben Stein wandering around various cities, and scathingly atheistic evolution advocates, all juxtaposed with footage from Nazi and communist Germany.

To be fair, Ben Stein had a point.  His claim that anybody who even mentions intelligent design in the scientific community is instantly ridiculed and ostracized is probably true.  Science should be about challenging authority, breaking theories down to make them better.  Most of the people he interviewed said that intelligent designers had some very valid issues with evolutionary theory.

Unfortunately, I never saw nor heard from these “valid issues”, only some very weak, non-arguments that have already been raised, debated on, and settled. Anybody who has read a little bit of literature on evolution will find the arguments presented to be ridiculous.  Ben Stein’s incredulity at “DNA riding on the backs of crystals” was laughable, the intelligent design scientists’ claim that evolution could not construct new species was simply ignorant.

The rest of the movie was riddled with propaganda.  A large chunk of time was devoted to Ben Stein visiting a holocaust memorial.  Wait, what?  What does that have to do with evolution?  His point was that Hitler was a firm believer in Darwinism, and therefore Darwinists are Nazis.  Clips of interviews with evolutionary scientists were interspliced with clips of Nazis murdering Jews.  Planned Parenthood was portrayed as a neo-Nazi eugenics movement.  Does all this remind you of something?  Or perhaps, someone?

Yes, Michael Moore, the liberals’ own “documentary” maker, notorious for his non-arguments and skewing of facts.  Moore has been criticized for bad facts, poor taste, and downright misconstruing of quotations.  Stein is now just as guilty.  In “Expelled”, he quotes from Darwin’s “Descent of Man”, using the quotation to imply that Darwin was suggesting Hitler-like breeding of the human race.  Stein stops right there, but Darwin goes on to say that mankind’s sympathy is “the noblest part of our nature”, and if we were ever to participate in the kind of breeding he just described, it would be an act of “overwhelming … evil”.

“Expelled” is an entertaining watch, I’ll admit that.  I had a good time chuckling at the absurdities of the movie, and at the very least it made me think about the issues again.  My opinion of Mr. Stein has been lowered some, but hey, the Republican’s can have their own Moore if they want.