Check out this bit of wisdom from Nancy Pelosi on Meet the Press.

Rep. Pelosi: I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels.

Good thing natural gas isn’t a fossil fuel!  I propose using gasoline as an alternative to oil.

From the bluegrass state:

Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.

The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.

Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

First of all, this is not the same Tim Couch who played quarterback at Kentucky.

Where to begin…

Would his law only apply to domains registered or hosted in Kentucky?  How would the website operators really know whether or the information provided was real?  Would I personally have to research the background of every commenter?  Most importantly, I pay for this domain and web hosting so I should be able to post whatever content I damn well please - regardless of the author.  There is that pesky 1st amendment.

On one level I understand and appreciate what he’s doing.  I personally don’t blog anonymously.  I feel that it “keeps me honest.”  Anonymity brings out typically unpleasant extremes in people.  But it also allows certain people to speak more freely and opens up dialog that might otherwise be restrained.  On balance I’ll take the wild west internet of Mr. Couch’s civilized version.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) penned an op-ed advocating single-payer health insurance - better known as socialized medicine.  McDermott believes that our current health care system is broken.  No argument there.  McDermott believes that the government should take over health care.  I disagree.

McDermott counters the argument that government shouldn’t concern itself with health care by stating that 70% of health care today is paid for by state and federal governments.  Hmmm…  It doesn’t take a genius to correlate the perceived growing health care crisis with increasingly heavy government involvement.  Does he really believe that increasing government involvement to 100% will all of a sudden fix everything and create a health care panacea?  Give me a break.

Next McDermott explains that private insurance is not as efficient as Medicare because overhead on private plans is three times Medicare’s.  I hope he isn’t seriously using Medicare as a shining example of how great things will be with government run health care.  We have a relative who was on Medicare at one point in time.  She strongly cautioned us against even seeing a doctor that accepted Medicare patients due to the deficient treatment she had witnessed first hand.  I’ve found that such feelings are far from rare.

He then makes two of the flat out dumbest statements I’ve seen in a while.

Health-care coverage is the single biggest domestic crisis facing America.

Try looking at entitlement programs and the looming threat to people of my generation when the roof collapses.  It will be bloody and painful for all involved and will make today’s health care crisis look like a sunny day.

America was founded on the common good and it is time we reaffirm this core value.

No, congressman, you must have us confused with the Soviet Union - the former Soviet Union.  America was founded on the concepts of personal freedom and just representation.  McDermott’s “we, not me” rhetoric that is popular among today’s Democrats should strike everyone who believes in personal freedom and individualism as deeply troubling.

Affordable health-care coverage should be a right, not a privilege, in America.

Oy vey.  He sounds like John Edwards, which is not a goal one should aspire to.

Congratulations to Alabama State Senator Charles Bishop for giving Alabama some much needed national attention.  You can’t beat getting linked by Drudge.  Unfortunately, the attention was due to his brand of third world style politics.  According to Bishop, Senator Lowell Barron called him a son of a bitch.  For a simple Arkansas born redneck like Bishop ‘dems fightin’ words.  He cold cocked Barron and the two were quickly restrained.

The good news?  There’s video!

Fortunately for Barron the punch landed on his head, so there’s no likelihood of any long term damage.

Now I don’t begrudge Bishop for wanting to slug Barron.  He would be the most deserving recipient of such violence in the Alabama Senate.  However such actions are unacceptable.  Political disagreements in a civilized society, or even the Alabama legislature, must be settled through dialog.

As usual, Bishop was good for some entertaining quotes.

“I was raised in the woods of Arkansas and people don’t say that about your mom.”  Translation: I wasn’t raised any better than this.

“I love every one of you. Most of all I love this chamber. I’m going home and you all have a good day.”  Was Barron in the room when he said this?

“We are going to have to start acting like adults and quit acting like children.”  Starting when?

“If he calls me that again, it’ll happen again.”  He does sound repentant.

So just how proud has Bishop made his constituents over the course of this year?

Early in the term he proudly proclaimed that he wanted to get rid of all the “Mexicans” during a protest over the legislature’s 62% raise.  He later said that he meant “illegal Mexicans,” but I was in the crowd and it was pretty clear that he was throwing out bigoted red meat (which most of the crowd sadly ate up).

Bishop firmly opposed the state’s slavery apology - some might say that he too firmly opposed it.  During the course of that debate he called the resolutions sponsor, Hank Sanders (who is black), “Big Boy.”  While not overtly “racist,” it certainly carried with it some racial undertones.

Earlier in the term, Bishop almost got into another altercation with Senator Little.

Personally I don’t think that it is too early to strip Bishop of his Senate seat.

Eight freshmen Democratic Senators are proposing a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies.

The legislation, proposed by Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., would impose a 50 percent tax on profits after oil prices rise above $50 a barrel. It also repeals tax “loopholes and breaks” from legislation signed into law in 2005, Casey said Thursday.

The article specifically mentions ExxonMobil’s first quarter profits of $9.28 billion.  Sounds impressive, right?  Gas prices are high and they’re raping us, right?  Wrong!  Exxon’s total first quarter revenue was $87.2 billion, which means that their profit margin was a meager 10.6%.  Yes, Exxon’s total profit sounds huge, but they incurred costs of $77.9 billion in the course of their business (including $7 billion in income taxes), which involves more than just selling gas by the way.

In the business world an 11% profit margin is not very high.  To give you a bit of perspective tech icon Google reported a first quarter profit of $1 billion on a revenue of $3.7 billion.  That gives them a profit margin of 27%.  If Sen. Casey and his compatriots increase the oil companies’ cost basis they will simply pass that cost on to you and me.

I believe that Casey et al. know that their plan is harmful to Americans, but they don’t care.  Their motive is two fold.  one, they can score some political capital with people who are economic idiots - our government schools have seen to it that there are plenty of them.  (Not the teachers fault, by the way.  It’s the curriculum that is woeful at preparing kids with the most basic business acumen.)   Casey also seeks to increase the power of government by growing tax revenue.  Repealing tax “loopholes and breaks” is the same as raising taxes on those companies.  Again, that money comes out of our pockets eventually and into government coffers where politicians like Casey use it to increase the welfare state and buy votes with pork.

Neither the article nor Casey mentioned that the national average for state and federal taxes is 45.5 cents per gallon.  This guy, who apparently favors price controls for the industry (think of gas lines), calculated that Exxon makes about 29 cents of profit on each gallon of gas.  I’m not going to check his numbers.  I think given his view on the matter its safe to say that he isn’t padding his number down.  The government is making over 1.5 times what Exxon (supposedly) makes on every gallon of gas and Casey thinks we should raise taxes.

Here is an incredibly bad idea from a Texas state legislator:

A Republican state lawmaker from Baytown has filed a bill that would charge parents of public school students with a misdemeanor and fine them for playing hooky from a scheduled parent-teacher conference.

Rep. Wayne Smith said Wednesday he wants to get parents involved in their child’s education.

…

Under Smith’s bill, schools would send parents a notice for a meeting with three proposed dates by certified mail. Parents who don’t respond or who schedule a meeting and don’t show up without notice could be punished.

Parents should care about their children’s education.  But you can’t make caring compulsory.  All this would do is force teachers to attend more conferences with parents who are there for no reason other than to avoid a fine.  Talk about a colossal waste of time.

I do, however, draw a distinction with parents who miss conferences they initiate.  When she taught, my wife stayed late at school a number of times at the behest of a parent only to have that parent not show.  If you make an appointment with any professional, such as a doctor, and you fail to show without giving proper warning then you should have to make some form of compensatory payment.

The GOP has not learned a thing from their thumpin’ at the polls.  Lott is a big time porker and carries with him the baggage of his racially inflammitory comment at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party.

Good job guys!

Are the Dems and GOP having a contest to see who can elect the worst leadership?

Note to Rep. Charles Rangel: Don’t bother scheduling any trips to Jackson in the near future.

Rangel, D-N.Y., was quoted in a Thursday article in The New York Times, saying: “Mississippi gets more than their fair share back in federal money, but who the hell wants to live in Mississippi?”

I know plenty of people who say the same thing about your stomping grounds, Mr. Rangel. 

Mississippi Rep. Chip Pickering took umbrage with Rangel’s statement.

“I hope his remarks are not the kind of insults, slander, and defamation that Mississippians will come to expect from the Democrat leadership in Washington, D.C.,” Pickering said.

Rangel offered up a pitiful explanation.

“I certainly don’t mean to offend anyone, I just love New York so much that I can’t understand why everyone wouldn’t want to live here.” - Charles Rangel

In the clip below windbag extraordinaire and 2008 Presidential hopeful Joe Biden brags about how his home state of Delaware was a slave state.  That is his twisted rationale for why he thinks he can be successful in the south in ‘08.  The effete northerners think that the civil war was all about slavery, not state’s rights, and therefore they think that their slave owning background gives them points with southern voters.  Come on!

As a slight aside, my wife and I used to live in northeastern MD, just one county away from Delaware.  Although I was still technically south of the Mason Dixon Line I was essentially in the north.  Let me tell you, there are considerably more bigoted people in that part of the country than in Alabama.  I lived near a town that was a slave trapping village during the Civil War era.  It is strategically positioned along a major river for capturing people using the Underground Railroad.  The community is still lily white and I heard, and had no reason to disbelieve, that there was an active KKK presence there.

Joe Biden (D-DE) thinks that Iraq should be divided into three regions and governed by a loose central government.  Doesn't sound too bad, huh?  But, guess what.  He thinks the three regions should be divided along religious lines.  That, my friends, is segregation.  You can call it apartheid, separate but equal, or anything else, but it is segregation.  I thought we were opposed to segregation in this country.

To rationalize whether some concept makes sense I like to reverse the roles.  How would you react if you learned of a legislator who suggested dividing America along racial lines during the contentious Civil Rights struggles of the 50's and 60's?  Hindsight being 20-20, I think that our country is stronger and better for having persevered through those troubled times.

We should encourage Iraqis to resolve their differences, or at least come to an agreement to peacefully disagree.  It's a solution that will definitely take time.  But by separating people who do not see eye to eye, we would only perpetuate and accentuate their dislike of one another, which could possibly set the stage for future conflict.

Sen. Biden, you've earned a nomination for Dumbest Legislator of the Day.  With the constant drumb beat of gas pandering in D.C. you might not have what it takes to win - only time will tell.

Update: Congratulations, Joe.  You are today's big wiener winner.