Bush Ignored As Cause of Oil's Recent Plummeting

It's been a long time since I've played apologist for Bush and defended him against attacks from Democrats and the media. After all, as a conservative I can't blindly defend actions that destroy the budget or civil liberties, regardless of the identities of the people who engage in them.

But when somebody does something with a positive outcome and then gets ignored by those that illuminate all of his negative outcomes - well, that's not right.

On Monday, President Bush lifted the executive ban on offshore drilling. Now there's a lot of debate about what obstacles are still in the way of pulling oil out of the Gulf, and about how long it will take, and about how much impact it will really have on gas prices. But regardless of the direct impact, there was also a harder-to-measure psychological impact on the economic forces with this new indication that the government was willing to remove one of its previous interventions in the market.

And what happened?

Oil has plummeted $16 a barrel from its record highs over the last three days, breaking all sorts of decreasing records.

But when you browse today's headline articles about the extended fall, nowhere is Bush's decision mentioned as a cause - not even derided as a potential or negligible one. They churned out the usual reasons of concern about the weakening U.S. economy, declining demand, surprise reports about increases in stockpiles... they even took time to explain away an "explosion that damaged an oil pipeline in Nigeria’s restive south — the sort of threat to supply that has helped fuel crude’s recent rally" as something that didn't affect the falling prices.

Since they're so concerned about everything else that has to do with oil, you think they'd at least mention Bush's removal of the offshore drilling ban, even if just to insist that it had nothing to do with the price dropping.

But they don't. I browsed all the major news sites - USAToday, MSNBC, CBS, New York Times - they all had headline articles about oil's drop. CNN even had a detailed article about several causes that contributed to the fall. But not a nod to Bush or offshore drilling. Not even on FOX, where the Republican party can do no wrong.

Bush does something big to help oil prices. The next day, oil plummets a record amount. Two days later, it's fallen even farther. But in all of the media that constantly details every action that affects oil prices - up or down - in every new article about oil, there is not even a mention about Bush. And you want to tell me his action had nothing to do with the drop in oil that just happened to begin the very next day?

Something just doesn't add up.

Evolution in Tasmanian Devils? Nothing New Here.

There's a curious story about Tasmanian Devils circulating the science news. Typically, they mate around two years of age, but a tumor has been killing severe numbers of the little devils, and many of them are dying before they have a chance to mate. But a newly published shows there has been a sixteen-fold increase in the number of devils mating at one year.

The species seems to have altered its instincts of sexual activity and everyone's excited that this is evolution's way of preserving the species. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorialized with almost visible glee, as if pointing at the silly creationists:

"Researchers studying, of all things, Tasmanian devils, have documented significant biological changes that occurred over about 12 years... Before the cancer appeared, virtually all female devils reached sexual maturity at age two... the number capable of breeding at the age of one — what scientists call 'precocious breeding' — has jumped 16-fold.

University of Tasmania zoologist Menna Jones reported the change in this week's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 'We could be seeing evolution occurring before our eyes,' she told the AP.

That's not likely to sit well with the anti-evolution crowd, which prefers its devils with horns, pitchforks and a tail..."

I'll ignore the fact that pitchforks and tails are not actually included in the doctrine of any of the several major religions that discount evolution. In the commentators' haste to shout a "gotcha" at creationists, they brushed right over the fact that no genetic evolution has taken place here.

I'm reminded of the infamous white moth / black moth event, where changing numbers of different colored moths was said to indicate evolution in color as an adaptation to survive in cities where smog turned the trees from white to black, when really all that was happening was different shades of already existing moths were finding it easier or harder to survive, depending on what shade the trees were.

And all that's happening today is that the earlier mating Tasmanian Devils are spreading faster than the late bloomers, since the late bloomers are dying before they can bloom. If there's been a 16-fold increase, that means early mating isn't a new phenomenon - it just happened less often in the past. No genetic mutations, no passing on of new traits - just good ol' natural selection selecting one already-existing trait over another as the environment changes.

The local newspaper loves to disparage creationists for a lack of intelligence and not paying attention to science, but I have to wonder at the scientific smarts of their own editorialists - and that university zoologist - if they so readily conclude that tangible evolution could actually take place in a mere 12 years.

Fannie & Freddie: Paving The Way For More Socialism

The news lately has been dominated by the potential failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the innocent-sounding names of two giant mortgage lenders set up by the government years ago. I've been reading as many articles and editorials as I can (RealClearMarkets.com is my favorite collection of multiple economic opinions), and it seems that Fannie and Freedie (or, the FM's) hold $5 trillion in housing loans, or half the national debt, and no one wants to think about what happens if these guys go under, and there's even talk about the government bailing them out.

I may be oversimplifying things in my limited understanding, but it seems that Congress set the FM's up years ago to help more people afford houses. Indeed, as long as everyone pays you back, it doesn't matter how many people you guarantee a loan for; no matter how much money you really have - it will all balance out after everyone gets their money and pays you back. But when thousands of people have to default - because no matter how much the government wants to believe it, it can't automatically make houses affordable for everyone - there's a big problem because most of that money never really existed, and now it matters.

Now the root of this problem was in too much government involvement - it artificially influenced supply and demand for housing, and it's coming back to haunt them. But in the cruel irony of advancing socialism, capitalism and free markets are being blamed for not regulating the FM's well enough to keep this from happening, and populist appeal is building for more government intervention - bailouts, regulations, and who knows what else.

In other words, government involvement was the problem, but when government involvement fails, the suggested solution is that the government needs to be more involved... and round and round goes the expanding circle of big government. (Andrew Napolitano and the Washington Post have some decent, explanatory editorials.)