America Becomes Net Oil Exporter

December 13th, 2018

For the first time in 75 years:

America turned into a net oil exporter last week, breaking almost 75 years of continued dependence on foreign oil and marking a pivotal — even if likely brief — moment toward what U.S. President Donald Trump has branded as “energy independence.”

The shift to net exports is the dramatic result of an unprecedented boom in American oil production, with thousands of wells pumping from the Permian region of Texas and New Mexico to the Bakken in North Dakota to the Marcellus in Pennsylvania.

While the country has been heading in that direction for years, this week’s dramatic shift came as data showed a sharp drop in imports and a jump in exports to a record high. Given the volatility in weekly data, the U.S. will likely remain a small net importer most of the time.

“We are becoming the dominant energy power in the world,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research. “But, because the change is gradual over time, I don’t think it’s going to cause a huge revolution, but you do have to think that OPEC is going to have to take that into account when they think about cutting.”

(Hat tip: Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Twitter feed, which also offers this piece on the background of the shale boom.)

Good news for every American except Democrats and ecoweenies (but I repeat myself). Especially for those looking for jobs in Midland, where unemployment just hit 2.1%

Theresa May Survives No Confidence Vote

December 12th, 2018

Theresa May survives:

Prime Minister Theresa May has won a vote of confidence in her leadership of the Conservative Party by 200 to 117.

After securing 63% of the total vote, she is now immune from a leadership challenge for a year.

Speaking in Downing Street, she vowed to deliver the Brexit “people voted for” but said she had listened to the concerns of MPs who voted against her.

Her supporters urged the party to move on but critics warned of a stalemate over finding an acceptable Brexit deal.

The prime minister won the confidence vote with a majority of 83, with 63% of Conservative MPs backing her and 37% voting against her.

The secret ballot was triggered by 48 of her MPs angry at her Brexit policy, which they say betrays the 2016 referendum result.

May also promised she would not lead the Tories in the next general election:

She has survived by promising her colleagues she will die another day. She has vowed not to lead her party through the next general election, and therefore has the consent to lead her party for the next few months, or days, or hours.

It was a bad week for May. The Brexit deal she has negotiated with the heads of state of the other 27 EU countries was so unpopular with her colleagues that she had to delay Parliament’s vote on it. Her government was found to be in contempt of Parliament and had to be forced to disclose the legal advice it had received about the deal’s wording. She has spent much of the week seeking wiggle room from Brussels, assurances that the “backstop,” which would have the U.K. continue to follow EU rules in the absence of a trade deal, is not a permanent trap.

May appeared at the 1922 Committee ahead of the vote. At that weekly gathering of Tory backbenchers, May essentially promised that in exchange for her party’s consent to lead it right now, she would resign before the Tories face another general election, opening up the possibility she would exit in the spring.

Perhaps no one should be shocked that the 40-year split in the Tory party over Europe has not been healed by the Brexit referendum’s result or the post-Brexit manifesto the party ran on, promising a speedy, orderly, and thorough exit.

What to make of the rebel MPs? Tory MPs do not want to vote for May’s deal because, like all compromises, it disappoints. But the unwillingness to make a more serious bid to unseat her shows that they do not believe there is a better deal to be made or that they will not take the political risks of trying to make one. What they want — and what May gave them — is her assurance that she will pay a political price for her deal and get no credit whatsoever. That is, the Tory party believes more in ending May’s reign than in a better Brexit.

Unable to Brexit, May Will Exit

December 12th, 2018

The British Conservative Party, enraged by what a dog’s breakfast Prime Minister Theresa May has made of Brexit negotiations, will have a no-confidence vote on her tonight:

Theresa May vowed to fight with ‘everything I’ve got’ today after a Tory no-confidence vote was dramatically triggered – and will be held within hours.

The PM insisted she would not give up after hardline Eurosceptics secured the 48 letters from MPs needed to force a ballot that could bring her time as leader to a shambolic end.

In a defiant speech on the steps of Downing Street, Mrs May warned Brexit will need to be delayed beyond March if she loses and Jeremy Corbyn might end up in power. She appealed for more time to secure further concessions on the controversial exit package she has thrashed out with the EU.

‘I have devoted myself unsparingly since I became Prime Minister… and I stand ready to finish the job,’ she said.

Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the powerful 1922 committee, emerged this morning to announce the threshold of 48 letters had been ‘exceeded’ and Mrs May was eager to resolve the issue ‘rapidly’.

Mrs May will deliver a make-or-break speech to MPs behind closed doors at 5pm before the secret ballot opens an hour later. The crucial result will be declared as soon as the 315 votes have been counted.

As financial markets took fright and the Pound tumbled to a 20-month low, Cabinet ministers rallied to try and shore up Mrs May, with Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Michael Gove, Amber Rudd, Penny Mordaunt and Brandon Lewis among those making clear they will be supporting her.

But despite their entreaties the Tories were plunged into outright civil war, with David Davis hinting that he might vote against the PM and her allies accusing mutineers of being ‘divisive and disloyal’.

Mrs May – who has cancelled a planned visit to Ireland and a Cabinet meeting this afternoon – can stay on if she wins the confidence ballot by just one vote, and would theoretically be immune from challenge for another 12 months. Some 110 MPs have publicly declared that they will back her, although as it is a secret ballot there is no guarantee they are telling the truth.

In reality anything short of a handsome victory will make it almost impossible for her to cling on, with rebels saying she must go if she is opposed by more than 80 MPs.

Allies believe she would have romped home if a contest had been staged last month – but her position has weakened significantly since then.

There’s a strong possibility May fails the vote, at which point Boris Johnson or Home Secretary Sajid Javid could take her place. (Whether Tories would be willing to place Javid, a man of Pakistani decent who once held several high positions at now-scandal-ridden Deutsch Bank, at the head of the party remains to be seen.) Former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab is another name being bandied about. All, unlike May, were pro-Brexit Euroskeptics. There’s also the possibility (though by no means a surety) that a no-confidence vote could trigger a general election, raising the specter of the Labour Party under the hard-left leadership of Jeremy Corbyn coming to power.

If May falls, she will likely be viewed as the least competent PM since Labour’s James Callaghan brought on the strike-plagued “Winter of Discontent” in 1978-79.

The Women’s March Racket

December 11th, 2018

The safest assumption about any spontaneous left-wing protest movement is that there’s nothing spontaneous about it. Be it Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter or any of the Brady Bunch hydra heads, you’ll always find a small cadre of activists, backed by some of the same left-left funding network, involved.

So it is with the Women’s March, with a nice side helping of antisemitism, as shown in this Leah McSweeney and Jacob Siegel piece in Tablet:

According to several sources, it was there—in the first hours of the first meeting for what would become the Women’s March—that something happened that was so shameful to many of those who witnessed it, they chose to bury it like a family secret. Almost two years would pass before anyone present would speak about it.

It was there that, as the women were opening up about their backgrounds and personal investments in creating a resistance movement to Trump, [Carmen Perez] and [Tamika] Mallory allegedly first asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people—and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade. These are canards popularized by The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a book published by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam—“the bible of the new anti-Semitism,” according to Henry Louis Gates Jr., who noted in 1992: “Among significant sectors of the black community, this brief has become a credo of a new philosophy of black self-affirmation.”

Snip.

As its fame grew, so did the questions about the Women’s March’s origin story—including, at first privately within the inner circles of the organizations, questions pertaining to the possible anti-Jewish statement made at that very first meeting. And that wasn’t the only incident from the initial encounter that would have far-reaching consequences. Within a few months of the original marches, key figures who came from outside or stood apart from the inner circle of the Justice League, an initiative of The Gathering for Justice, left the organization. And many of those involved began questioning why it was that, among the many women of various backgrounds interested in being involved in the March’s earliest days, power had consolidated in the hands of leadership who all had previous ties to one another; who were all roughly the same age; who would praise a man who has argued that it’s women’s responsibility to dress modestly so as to avoid tempting men; and, at least in one case, who defended Bill Cosby as the victim of a conspiracy.

The questions started to be more practical, as well. At some point during that very first meeting in Chelsea, Perez suggested that the Justice League’s parent entity, The Gathering for Justice—where she, Mallory, and Skolnik all had roles—set up a “fiscal sponsorship” over the Women’s March to handle its finances. A fiscal sponsorship is a common arrangement in the nonprofit sector that allows more established organizations to finance newer ventures as they get off the ground and find their own funding. In this case, though, the standard logic didn’t apply since the Women’s March would, from its inception, raise vastly more money than its sponsor ever had. Over time, new details of the Women’s March’s organizational structure have been dragged into public view that reveals complicated financial arrangements, confusing even to experts.

Yet within no time, the March leaders would be named 2017 Women of the Year by Glamour magazine. There was a glossy book published with Condé Nast, a lucrative merchandise business selling branded Women’s March gear, and millions of dollars raised through individual donations and institutional funding from major organizations like Planned Parenthood and the powerful hospital workers union, 1199SEIU. Fortune magazine named Mallory, Linda Sarsour, Perez, and Bland to its list of the World’s Greatest Leaders, and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand—in explaining why these four were on Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People—wrote: “The Women’s March was the most inspiring and transformational moment I’ve ever witnessed in politics … and it happened because four extraordinary women—Tamika Mallory, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour—had the courage to take on something big, important and urgent, and never gave up.” In conclusion, the senator declared, “these women are the suffragists of our time.”

But in fact, according to many involved in the January 2017 marches, Gillibrand’s description wasn’t just over the top; it undermined and erased the very people actually doing the work to create female-centric voting blocs throughout the country. “To be fair, the Women’s March on Washington—the one I was involved with at the time—had no real connection to the many marches that took place across the country and globally that month,” said Wruble, in an interview with Tablet. “Local leaders, often first-time organizers, spearheaded marches in their own communities. Many used the branding we put out as open source and helped to make the marches look unified—which was certainly advantageous in creating the sense of a singular, massive movement—but they were the ones who did the real work.”

It’s a long, detailed article about how some of the original Women’s March organizers were quickly pushed out by people who “have been in bed with the Nation of Islam since day one.”

Eric Hoffer once said “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” The Women’s March was born as a racket…

Cornyn Seeks Fourth Term

December 10th, 2018

In case you missed this news Friday, Texas Senator John Cornyn is seeking a fourth term, and fellow Texas Senator Ted Cruz has endorsed him:

Signaling that the 2020 election season has begun, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has endorsed his colleague John Cornyn for re-election.

In a video posted this morning by Cornyn’s campaign, the two men sit together with Cruz asking voters to join him “in supporting John Cornyn’s campaign for re-election to keep Texas strong and prosperous.”

He and Cornyn take turns extolling their achievements, working with President Trump, on behalf of Texas.

“Ted and I fight shoulder to shoulder to make the country look more like Texas,” said Cornyn, who will be seeking a fourth six-year term in 2020.

“John and I have made a very strong team here in Washington, and I hope that we can keep working together so that together we can uphold the principles that have long embodied the Texas can-do spirit,” added Cruz.

Their relationship hasn’t always been so smooth. In 2016, Cornyn famously refused to make a similar early endorsement of Cruz for 2018. Of course, Cruz didn’t endorse Cornyn’s 2014 re-election bid until after that year’s primary.

There was talk that Cornyn, being 66, might retire, but that’s evidently not the case.

In 2014, I thought Cornyn might be vulnerable to a primary challenge from the right (which sort of happened, but Rep. Steve Stockman’s lackluster campaign didn’t even throw a scare into Cornyn). I don’t think that this year, for a variety of reasons, mainly that Donald Trump’s victory ended up largely incorporating the Tea Party back into the folds of the Republican Party proper, Cornyn has hewed more closely to the conservative line in recent years, and this year’s Democratic successes has deadened the Republican appetite for inter-party challenges of popular (and mostly conservative) incumbents.

It’s not that Cornyn is perfect, it’s that his deviations from Republican orthodoxy are few enough that he doesn’t stand out from other Republican senators the way Jeff Flake and Lisa Murkowski do. (And Cornyn had a significant role in guiding Brett Kavanaugh’s supreme court nomination to a successful conclusion.) Also, don’t forget that Cornyn pulled in more votes than any other statewide candidate in 2014, obliterating his Democratic opponent even worse than Greg Abbott trounced Wendy Davis. If 2020 is anything like 2018, Republicans will want a familiar, popular incumbent on the ticket.

I don’t see Cornyn losing in 2020, even if Democratic Party flavor-of-the-month Beto O’Rourke forgoes an expected Presidential run to challenge him.

Yellow Vest Protests Spread

December 9th, 2018

The “yellow vest” protests/riots have continued throughout France, and spread to other countries as well:

  • 1,700 arrested in France, with 1,200 still in custody. I’m betting that Interior Minister Christophe Castaner’s estimate of 100,000 protestors nationwide lowballs it, possibly by an order of magnitude.
  • Hundreds” arrested in Brussels:

    Belgian police detained more than 400 people on Saturday after “yellow vest” protesters inspired by riots in France threw rocks and firecrackers and damaged shops and cars as they tried to reach official buildings in Brussels.

    In the second violence of its kind in the capital in eight days, a crowd which police estimated at around 1,000 faced riot squads who used water cannon and tear gas to keep people away from the European Union headquarters and the nearby Belgian government quarter. Calm was restored after about five hours.

  • 1,000 protested in Sweden, but evidently over the “migrant pact” that reportedly makes criticism of of EU migrant policies a crime.
  • Also scattered “yellow vest” protestor sightings in Spain, Hungary, Germany, a member the Serbian parliament, and even Iraq, though there the protests don’t seem to be against high fuel taxes.

    Far left intellectuals are always calling for the masses to take to the streets, but most probably never anticipated that it was high fuel prices and objections to uncontrolled immigration that would do the trick…

    Paris Burning and the Existential Crisis

    December 8th, 2018

    So French President Emmanuel Macron was forced to delay implementation of his carbon tax hike because the peasants were revolting French citizens were blocking traffic, burning vehicles, and battling police throughout the streets of Paris.

    Nearly 300,000 protesters, many wearing yellow vests, took to the streets, including tens of thousands in Paris. Participation in the “yellow vest” protests, named after the yellow vests French drivers are required to keep in their vehicles for emergencies, fell to approximately 166,000 with 8,000 in Paris in the second weekend, but by the third weekend the protest gained momentum and violence.

    The protests were sparked by Macron’s plans to increase taxes on gasoline, diesel, and electricity, and to enforce stricter limits on emissions from vehicles, in an effort to force people out of their cars and suburban homes, and onto public transit and back into densely populated cities. In Paris, protesters sang the national anthem and carried signs saying “Macron, resignation” and “Macron, thief,” and stormed barricades erected by the 3,000 to 5,000 security forces deployed to guard the presidential palace and National Assembly. Outside of Paris, protestors blocked highways, overran motorway toll booths, and obstructed access to gasoline stations and shopping malls.

    On average, French gasoline costs a whopping $7.00 per gallon, and diesel more than $6.00 per gallon, with a majority of the price coming from fuel taxes imposed by the national government. These taxes had been scheduled to increase annually in the coming years, to meet Macron’s carbon dioxide emission reduction goals.

    “We’re going to tax you until you bleed until you adopt a lifestyle more in tune with the way we think you should live.” For global leftists elites, global warming is not just a holy cause, but an existential struggle whose high stakes (“We’re all going to die!”) require ignoring any democratic pushback from the less-enlightened masses. And we’re just supposed to ignore the fact they write themselves cushy green energy tax breaks while imposing the overwhelming majority of the costs for such policies on ordinary people who live differently than they do. (While Paris burns, Macron is conspicuous by his absence.)

    But it’s important to remember that conservatives have an existential threat of their own (deficit spending triggering hyperinflation that will destroy the economy), the solution to which (cutting back on the welfare state) is also deeply unpopular with wide swathes of the populace.

    The difference, of course, is that the doomsday scenario of anthropocentric global warming is entirely conjectural, while hyperinflation has happened several times throughout history.

    This is why you’re seeing the signs of that weird left-right populist nationalist fusion across Europe: No taxes increase, but also no welfare state cuts, while also restricting immigration so only natives get the cushy welfare handouts. That seems like an obvious recipe for electoral success in countries where even the EU’s weak tea “austerity” is increasingly unthinkable. But it’s not a recipe for growth, and can’t stave off the inevitable doom of a demographically unsustainable welfare state. In America it takes the form of President Donald Trump, a dogged tax-cutter and deregulator working diligently to get the economy growing again, but not someone who has tried to pare back the deficit or the welfare state in any meaningful way.

    Europe’s sclerotic economy and demographic decline are going to bring on a crisis there long before it hits here, but it will eventually hit here. In the long run, the big government welfare state is likely to be seen as one of the longer-running mass delusions in history.

    There will come a reckoning. The only question is whether you and I will be there to see it…

    LinkSwarm for December 7, 2018

    December 7th, 2018

    This week was bears all the way down, but there may be some light at the end of the tunnel. So enjoy a free Friday LinkSwarm:

  • President Donald Trump wants to end green energy subsidies for electric cars. Good for him.
  • Don’t lean on me man if you cant afford a ticket back from geezer Dem city.
  • Clues suggest Chinese hackers behind Marriott breach.
  • Remembering the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia during Prague Spring 50 years ago. (Hat tip: Ace of Spaces HQ.)
  • Another day, another fake hate crime. (Hat tip: Charlie Martin on Twitter.)
  • In a follow up to this story from January, Charlie Geren aide David Sorensen admits he filed a false CPS report against Geren’s primary opponent Bo French:

    A former political operative for State Rep. Charlie Geren (R–Fort Worth) has now admitted that he made a factually inaccurate and anonymous report to Child Protective Services against Geren’s opponent during a contentious 2016 Republican primary campaign.

    As part of a settlement resolving a lawsuit brought by Bo French, David Sorensen has acknowledged he made the anonymous and incorrect election eve report to CPS alleging that French was abusing his children. The former Geren political aide has also acknowledged the report was not accurate, and he has apologized to the French family for submitting it.

    “Before and after Geren’s campaign, Sorensen worked as an operative on Democrat political campaigns and for the Democrat Party.” After this confession, Sorensen should never work on the campaign of any candidate for any political party ever again…

  • “John Stossel: Google and Facebook cross ‘The Creepy Line’ of censorship every day.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Armed woman kills South Carolina jail escapee who kicked in her door.” Good. (Hat tip: @davilch’s Twitter feed.)
  • More on the demise of the Weekly Standard:

    Just as Milton’s Satan would rather reign in hell than to serve in heaven, so also neoconservatives would never be part of any movement if they were not acknowledged as the movement’s intellectual leadership. Neoconservatives were content to have John McCain win the GOP nomination and lose to Obama, since this result did not impair the market for what Kristol, et al., were selling — political commentary and policy analysis. What really threatened their racket, however, was when Republican primary voters in 2016 refused to be herded into the camp of any of the neoconservative-approved candidates. Make no mistake, Bill Kristol would have much rather seen Jeb Bush or Chris Christie win the GOP nomination and then lose to Hillary, than to have a Republican president who wouldn’t take advice from Bill Kristol.

    Questions of policy — is Bill Kristol in favor of enforcing our immigration laws, or not? — were ultimately less important to the fate of the Weekly Standard than their intellectual pride. Neoconservatives decided in 2015 that Donald Trump should not be the Republican nominee and, when their advice was rejected by GOP primary voters, the neoconservatives doubled-down and decided that Hillary Clinton should be president. When that didn’t happen, they doubled down again, and declared Trump’s presidency illegitimate. At no point, apparently, did it ever occur to them to ask, “What if we’re wrong?” The possibility of error was not something Bill Kristol (Harvard, Class of 1979) was willing to consider.

  • Low dose aspirin did not increase the lifespan of the elderly in a study, but did increase deadly hemorrhages. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Dog food recall.
  • “Elon Musk Cancels Boring Project After Delving Too Deep, Unearthing Balrog.”
  • Avengers: Dendgame trailer drops.
  • There are few presents that beat a Golden Retriever puppy:

  • Tweet containing a video of President George H.W. Bush’s body being borne by train to its final resting place next to his wife and daughter:

    America is not a kingdom, and a president is not a king, but the pagan power of a dead king’s passage still stirs some part of our ancient souls. These rituals of our civil religion (the lying in state, the transport of the coffin, the missing man flyover) are both objectively a little silly and subjectively profoundly important as part of the social glue that still binds the nation together.

    Rest in peace, Mr. President.

  • The Weekly Standard’s Ongoing Suicide Finally Achieves Results

    December 6th, 2018

    It looks like The Weekly Standard is going to shut down.

    The easiest way to sum up the failure of the Weekly Standard is this: Why would anyone on the right offer financial support to the Weekly Standard when CNN will call us a racist for free? And why would anyone on the left offer financial support to the Weekly Standard when CNN will call us a racist for free?

    Sarcasm aside, that is the Weekly Standard’s primary problem. In the age of Trump, the publication offers nothing we cannot get everywhere else in the elite media, nothing we cannot find at the far-left Washington Post, MSNBC, New York Times, CNN, etc.

    Smug virtue-signaling and superior Trump-bashing are the cheapest commodities in today’s news business. They are literally everywhere. And so, instead of offering a unique voice and perspective in an ocean of left-wing media, the Weekly Standard instead chose to sit in the middle of this ocean and sell saltwater.

    Back in the late 1990s, I used to subscribe to The Weekly Standard, and they did some good articles. They were the first place I read about how the French government had lost control of the predominately Muslim banlieues. But I dropped my subscription because I wasn’t reading as many magazines any longer as my Internet reading increased, and National Review filled my “what I read at breakfast and dinner” needs.

    There were always oddities in The Weekly Standard‘s worldview, including their embrace of “National Greatness” conservatism, which struck me as Big Government with a conservative facade. But judging from their Twitter timelines, the 2016 election seems to given them a more severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome than any other institution on the right. They became the voice for that tiny strand of elite conservatism that cared more about properly creased trousers and liking the right opera conductors than improving economic conditions for the middle class or reigning in the excesses of big government. They’d rather join forces with Democrats than let the uncouth ruffian Trump besmirch their class credentials by winning without them.

    Now some tweets on the subject:

    Michael Avenatti Stops Pretending He’s Running For President

    December 5th, 2018

    In a devastating blow to political satirists everywhere, creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti has stopped pretending he’s going to run for President:

    Twitter reaction was swift:

    Well, yeah. That’s why we were urging him to run.

    

    This leaves a core of hardcore Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers up for grabs from another delusional candidate.