What will the price of oil mean at the pump?
The price of oil reached new record highs this week -- driven in part by a weakening dollar -- alarming drivers and consumers of just about everything else. Why is oil getting so expensive? Will anything bring the cost back down? And how will we live if it doesn't?
How much more pain must Americans endure before our masters in Washington let oil companies punch a few holes in the Alaskan tundra? Must we shiver pennilessly in the dark before we may extract new domestic petroleum deposits? Or shall we simply keep buying $114 barrels of oil from people who want us dead?
In case Congress missed the news, four U.S. airlines have gone broke during this month alone. Frontier declared bankruptcy, but will continue flying. Even worse, Aloha, ATA, and Skybus blamed unaffordable fuel as they grounded their jets. Aloha said sayonara to 1,900 employees, NBC News reports. ATA’s demise destroyed 2,200 jobs, while Skybus sacked 450 workers, atop the 80,000 positions lost across the economy as unemployment spiked from 4.8 percent in February to 5.1 in March.
Will we finally grow up and harness our resources, or will we childishly weep over imaginary threats to wildlife, dispatch supertankers of cash to the Middle East, and watch our petrodollars sponsor bomb belts and exploding aircraft? Merely asking this question illustrates how desperately this nation needs adult supervision.
Over the past few years Russia has been a relative bright spot on the oil scene, expanding its production by over a million barrels per day between 2002 and 2007. But it looks like Russia is now due to join Norway, Mexico, and the UK as countries that have hit their peak and are about to go into decline.
It's true that both the Saudis and the Russians have megaprojects due to come online over the next year or two, so it's not as if they're just twiddling their thumbs. Overall, though, oil at $100 a barrel sure doesn't seem to be spurring the kind of additional production you'd think it would. It's almost as if there's no net additional production to be had.
He'll celebrate Mass in Yankee Stadium.
Pope Benedict XVI's trip to America moves to New York today; he'll address the United Nations and celebrate Mass in Yankee Stadium. Already he has met with survivors of clergy sexual abuse and challenged Catholics not to limit their faith to the private sphere. How is the American church being affected by the pope's visit?
The point here is simple and radical: As the Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton argued, men and women are either created in "the image of God" or they are "a disease of the dust." If human beings are merely the sum of their physical attributes -- the meat and bones of materiality -- they are easier to treat as objects of exploitation.
So Catholicism offers a second contribution: It is the main defender of human dignity against a utilitarian view of human worth. And the church has applied this high view of man with remarkable consistency -- to the unborn and the elderly, the immigrant and the disabled. Individual views on issues of life and death vary widely, even within the Catholic Church. But it is a good thing to have at least one global institution firmly dedicated to the proposition that every growing child, every person living in squalor or in prison, every man or woman approaching death or contemplating suicide or trapped in profound mental disability, every apparently worthless life is not really worthless at all.
An institution accused of superstition is now the world's most steadfast defender of rationality and human rights. It has not always lived up to its own standards, but where would those standards come from without it?
The most jarring word that Pope Benedict XVI is using during his visit to the United States is "countercultural." The American sense of that term is shaped by the 1960s: free love, drugs, hippies, rock music and rebellion. Needless to say, that's not what Benedict is preaching.
For myself, I admire Benedict's distinctly Catholic critique of radical individualism in both the moral and economic spheres, and his insistence that the Christian message cannot be divorced from the social and political realms.
Yet I do not see the "spirit of this age" as being quite so threatening to faith or human flourishing as Benedict seems to think. As the pope has acknowledged in the past, Catholicism has been enriched by its encounter with enlightenment thought. The church should not now close itself off to what our age has to teach about the equality of men and women or the virtues of more democratic structures in its internal life.
Is the United States still looking for this man?
More than six years after the 9/11 attacks, the United States still does not have a coherent plan to destroy a key staging area for terrorist attacks into the country, according to an independent government watchdog.
Still, the administration's answer to this "clear and present danger" is to send more aid to Musharraf and trust that he will take care of our problem for us. We are still farming out the battle to Muslim generals who in spite of the diplomatic rhetoric and posturing clearly do not have our best interests at heart.
The strategy is at odds with the Bush doctrine of preemption. The head of the CIA has now verified that at least a remote part of Pakistan -- essentially a break-away Islamic province -- is harboring America's Enemy No. 1 and presenting a direct and urgent threat to the homeland.
Instead of carpet-bombing the terror camps and safe houses there (as opposed to the occasional drone-fired missile), we're playing a dangerous game of wait-and-see. If we have intelligence specific enough to know the type of terrorists al-Qaida's training along the Pakistan border, why aren't we acting on it?
This GAO report may be the most damning condemnation of the Bush administration's counter-terrorism efforts. The report goes on to say that the Bush administration has failed to develop any plan to address the Al Qaeda threat. Worse, the report finds that Al-Qaeda is now able to attack the United States and represents the "most serious" threat to this country.
The report's opinion of the Bush administration efforts speaks for itself. Not only have we not met our goals but we have no plan to meet our goals. Al-Qaeda can now attack the United States. Al Qaeda in Pakistan is the most serious threat. Al-Qaeda is using the Pakistan tribal areas to put the finishing touches on its plans to attack the United States.
It is really not a good thing to have incompetent people running this country.
