The Greenness of Iceland

From the northern center of Iceland, the volcanic Lake Myvatn, greetings. This island in the north Atlantic, straddling the Atlantic ridge, is a country of scarce 300,000 people. It is remarkably empty, with widely separated farms, occasional villages, and one substantial city, Reykjavik, in the extreme west.

There are scarcely any trees, except where deliberately cultivated. The main crop of the land is grass, cropped by sheep, and grown for hay in carefully drained fields. All over Iceland you will see in August white "marshmallows," the huge rolls of hay that have been mowed, tossed, baled and wrapped in plastic. These squat cylinders are gradually moved from the fields to the farm buildings where they feed the sheep and cattle during the long dark winter.

And all over Iceland are the volcanoes, ready to spew out ash and lava. At the large icefield in the south-east, the eruptions can unleash devastating floods, as the heat of an eruption melts ice deep in the glaciers, and suddenly appears in a vast river at the snout of a glacier, tearing away bridges, roads, and embankments. At Skaftafell there is a description of the 1996 eruption in the Vatnajokull icefield that released a flood equal to the flow of the Amazon. The twisted I-beams of a collapsed bridge section are displayed to demonstrate the power of the river of water and ice blocks that burst out from beneath the 10 mile wide Skeidararjokull glacier about ten days after the eruption.

In this empty land summer tourists ride, drive, bicycle and walk along Route 1, the road that circles the island. The road winds along lonely fjords, over barren highlands, and across vast glacial outwash sands. In summer it is light all the time; in winter it is dark. Right now, in mid August, it gets darkish at about 10:30 and lightens up at about 4:30. But in midsummer it is light all the time, and in midwinter it is almost always dark. The northernmost tip of Iceland lies just below the Arctic Circle.

We are traveling west today, from Lake Myvatn to Varmahlid. Then it is on to the western tip and south back to Reykjavik and home to Seattle.

After the Healthcare Meltdown

Now that President Obama has got us into this mess, what do we do about it?

Wise heads are talking about sensible healthcare reform, doing something about the uninsured instead of trying to rebuild the whole system on the model of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

But let us not be diverted by small ball. Let us think big ball.

The basic problem with health care (and education and just about everything to do with the modern welfare state) is that a lot of people who could be paying for their health care and should be paying for their health care are not paying for their health care. Government is good at encouraging people who don't want to pay for health care to imagine that they have a moral and economic right to free or subsidized health care. But government is thugs in pinstripe suits.

Dick Morris has remarked that that the Democratic Party is built on six pillars: blacks, Latinos, single women, young people, unions, and the elderly. You'll notice that just about all the government programs about which we've heard tell give money to these special interests. But the elderly, he writes, are turning away from the Democrats because of the threat in Obamacare to their Medicare benefits.

Maybe they will, but the Republicans aren't likely to be much help. Republicans think that Medicare needs "reform" too. Only they aren't quite as two-faced about it as the Democrats.

Sooner or later all these programs that keep up the pillars in the Democratic Party are going to come tumbling down, because there just ain't the money there to pay for them all. Democrats have promised the same money to six different pillars.

Maybe the right thing to do is to stand back and let the pillars fall down. After all, blacks and Latinos should get a job. Union thugs should get a job. Single women should get a husband, Young people should get a job. And the elderly, America's richest kind, should get a life and pay for their own medical care, as most of them can.

Then we would have money available to help people who are needy through no fault of their own. Instead, we are paying out trillions in benefits to middle-class people who can afford to look after themselves.

Is this a great country or what!

Pelosi's Un-Americans

You'd think that US politicians would have learned by now not to accuse the opposition of being un-patriotic. So why are House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer coming out and calling the opponents to ObamaCare "un-American?"

However, it is now evident that an ugly campaign is underway not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue.

Oh, silly me. The chaps who started the un-American thing 50 years ago were Republican McCarthyites. Nobody could accuse a Democrat of using McCarthyite tactics. Nancy Pelosi is a card-carrying liberal. Nobody could accuse her of fascistic tendencies.

More and more, it is becoming clear that Nancy Pelosi is out of her depth. She just doesn't understand the "high game" and thinks she is still playing thug-level big-city machine politics. Republicans couldn't ask for a better opponent.

Glenn Reynolds has articulated the situation best.

The truth is that for my adult lifetime, "protest" has been a kind of Kabuki engaged in by organized groups on the Left with help from the press -- as in the recent bus tour of AIG executives that was organized and paid for by an ACORN affiliate and in which the protesters were heavily outnumbered by the media, who nonetheless generally treated it as an "authentic" expression of populist discontent.

Now, all of a sudden, conservatives have erupted into genuine "out-of-doors" political activity, and liberals are calling it "unruly" and "astro-turf." They are questioning its legitimacy. These are the guys who have made an art form out of rent-a-mob "peaceful protest."

I'd advise my Democratic friends to be careful. In politics you want to avoid waking sleeping dogs. You can get the people to put up with a lot of abuse from government. They will grumble and complain, but not do anything about it. But when you provoke a populace into rebellion, then you have bought yourself a peck of trouble. Once people get aroused it becomes very difficult to get them to go home again.

Back in the 1950s liberals were delighted to be accused of being "un-American." It put them on the side of the angels over a dispute (communists spies in government) in which they had a lot to answer for.

Today, conservatives should be delighted that clumsy liberals like Nancy Pelosi are reaching for the patriotism button. It will rile up center-right Americans like you wouldn't believe, and unite conservatives, libertarians, and Christian conservatives into a single, powerful coalition. That is terrible news for liberals because this is a center-right country, and the only way that liberals can get things done is by keeping the right divided.

My judgment is that we have a generation of liberals in power today that don't really have first-class political minds. They have had it too easy, for they have never had to defend their ideas against a hostile media. Unlike your average conservative.

We are going to see, in our time, a great liberal unraveling. It began with the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Liberals had told us how bad it was for politicians like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to lie. Liberals had told us that the rules over the treatment of women had changed and that the old double standard was over. Then along came Bill Clinton, treating women like objects, and lying about it.

So liberals said it was OK. Everyone lies about sex, they said.

In the Obama era we will see a bunch of other liberal sacred cows sacrificed to political convenience.

That is why conservatives make such a big deal whenever Obama throws someone "under the bus." Modern liberalism is reduced to mere political convenience, even as it continues to recite the shibboleths from its long-departed era of idealism with ever increasing emphasis.

So go ahead Nancy Pelosi. Call me un-patriotic. Make my day.

The Liberals and the "Unruly Mob"

For years and years our liberal friends have written sensitively about "peaceful protesters" and marches for justice.

They understood the rage that drove the workers and the civil-rights activists, the feminists and gays, to the streets. The earnest faces of the ordinary Americans driven to the streets were a verdict on America's failure to live up to its promise.

But now that peaceful protesters are attending the town halls of Democratic representatives and senators, our liberal friends are singing a different tune.

Senior Democrats are talking about "unruly mobs."

It almost reminds me of the "middle-class riot" that occurred during the Counting of the Chads in Florida 2000.

What is going on here? All of a sudden our liberal friends are fulminating about "the mob!" They sound like British Tory squires expostulating from their gentlemen's clubs in London. Or 19th century American robber barons exclaiming about labor agitators threatening the extra dividend.

Anyway, what is this mob are we talking about? Everything that I've seen about the spirited town hall participants says: Middle-class America. Are liberals now saying that the great middle class is a bunch of radical provocateurs out to create a disturbance of the peace?

And what about the police that are being used by the upper class to limit the right of peacable assembly? How long are they prepared to act as the stooges of their liberal masters?

I'll tell you. If liberals think that the mild reactions to their cruel and unjust takeover of health care are the work of "unruly mobs," I'm here to say this.

You ain't seen nothing yet.

Greetings from Rejkyavik

Yes. Here we are on a dull rainy morning in Reykjavik, Iceland, reporting from the 4th Floor Hotel's wireless connection, after an overnight flight on Icelandair from Seattle.

Night is by courtesy. Since the flight went above the Arctic Circle, it never quite got dark in the plane; there was always a tinge of dusk/dawn in the north.

But what a surprise as we descended through the clouds into Kevlavik Airport. There, out at sea, was a cruise ship. You mean to say the cruise ships come to little old Iceland? Yes, they do, according to the taxi driver on the way into Reykjavik. Above 50 ships will call this year, and maybe 80 next year. They call at Reykjavik and the east side of Iceland, and then head north to Spitzbergen before cruising down the coast of Norway. Some ships even cross over to the east coast of Greenland.

What's the economy here in Iceland, you ask? Tourism (up sharply this year), fish, and aluminum. The cheap geothermal power means they can afford to do aluminum smelting. And then there's oil.

What, you say? I thought the world was running out of oil. Not in Iceland. There's oil off the east coast and they are drilling in the strait between Iceland and Greenland. More oil than the North Sea fields, the taxi driver says.

It's now 9:00 am, and the other hotel guests are coming into the restaurant for breakfast. There's breakfast for all here. Cold cuts for the Germans, baked beans for the Brits, and good healthy stuff for the Americans. And fish for the Icelanders.

Is Opposition to ObamaCare "Astroturf?"

The current line from the president, the Democrats in Congress, and the "state-run media" is that the apparent grass-roots opposition to the president's healthcare proposals is in fact "Astroturfing."

For those of you not yet up the minute on the latest political jargon, here is the definition from Wikipedia. It is a top-down political (or PR campaign) that is

seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous "grassroots" behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass, AstroTurf.

The term was apparently invented by Texas US Senator Lloyd Bentsen.

Thus, our Democratic friends are presently trying to sell the notion (from the top) that the angry constituents barracking their Democratic representatives at local townhall meetings are not spontaneously organized from the grass roots, but in fact artificial "astroturf" organized from the top down.

(The Dems should know about astroturfing. Many of their activist organizations are organized and funded by the billionaire George Soros.)

Today, InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds has lots of links about the controversy, here, here, and here.

So which is it? Well, my instinct is that the opposition started spontaneously, and was not initially organized by GOP leaders in Washington. But now, of course, the bigwigs have latched onto the grass-roots phenomenon and are flogging it for all they are worth.

Here's what I think is happening. A whole bunch of folks that weren't too politically motivated in the last few years and who got kinda disappointed by the Bush administration are now, all of a sudden, fighting mad.

Now why would that be?

It's simple. The Obama administration is taking dead aim at their pocket-books. All of a sudden we are looking at major tax increases.

When you really get down to it, politics in the United States is pretty simple. If the Democratic Party doesn't stand for more spending, what's the point of it? So the Democrats always stand for more spending. If the Republican Party doesn't stand for tax cuts, what's the point of it? So the Republicans are always strong on tax cutting. Elections are about the clash of these opposing notions.

What with the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, the average Republican-leaning voter hasn't felt that they had a dog in the race recently. Taxes were reasonable, house prices were going up, jobs were plentiful. They were relaxed about a little increased spending. Why not? We could afford it.

But now things have changed. Not only is the economy in trouble, stocks and house prices in the tank, but the Democrats are proposing tax increases to sustain their bloated patronage state.

That is going to hurt a lot of people, and re-inject rage and energy into Republican Party politics.

You can call it "grass-roots" or you can call it "astroturf." Take your pick. It is still real, and you ain't seen nothing yet.

Obama = Joker = Racism?

This is not a post-racial presidency, Virginia. Not a chance. It was always obvious that as soon as President Obama got into a jam that our liberal friends would start playing the race card. And so they have.

Someone has been putting up posters in Los Angeles and elsewhere featuring the president as The Joker--as played by the late Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. According to Thomas Lifson in The American Thinker, it means the end of the fantasy,

It is starting. Open mockery of Barack Obama, as disillusionment sets in with the man, his policies, and the phony image of a race-healing, brilliant, scholarly, middle-of-the-roader.

You could easily see what was coming next. Racism! Yes, the usual suspects are accusing the president's critics of being racist. From Toby Harnden in the British Daily Telegraph:

The liberal tabloid "LA Weekly", which depicted George W. Bush, the former president, as Dracula on its cover in 2004, denounced the Obama-Joker poster as virulently racist.

"It has a bit of everything to appeal to the drunk tank of California conservatism: Obama is in white face, his mouth (like Ledger's Joker's) has been grotesquely slit wide open and the word 'Socialism' appears below his face," wrote its blogger Steven Mikulan. "The only thing missing is a noose."

This is an important warning to conservatives everywhere. As things go south for President Obama our liberal friends are going to get increasingly desperate. They will reach for the race card again and again. Conservatives will have to learn how to respond with the appropriate degree of courage and scorn. Fortunately there are examples of appropriate scorn that we can use.

1. Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy: "You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
2. Dirty Harry to a punk: "Go ahead. Make my day."
3. Rhett Butler to Scarlett: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

I tell you. What's not to like?

But there is a serious side to this. For too long, decent Americans have been afraid, afraid to be tagged as racists. This must stop. Because there is one thing you need to defend freedom, justice, and the American Way. And that is courage. In America in 2009, in 2010 and beyond, if you are going to defend freedom you are going to need the courage to risk being called a racist.