Panderer Population Explodes.

It's not just on oil prices that politicians are pandering, free trade is also coming in for a battering. Strangely enough despite the USA's image as being a right wing nation support for free trade has always been much lower than in the UK.

Despite this it seems that both Obama and Clinton believe in free trade, Obama believes it is one of the things that bitter small town like to attack whilst they cling to their guns and Hillary Clinton never opposed trade whilst her husband was signing NAFTA. In fact a belief in free trade is a core belief for the Clintons as Mark Steyn once put it:

With hindsight, Clinton had two bedrock convictions: he believed oral sex didn't qualify as adultery and he believed in free trade.

Hillary only agrees with Bill on one of those points I should add.

Obama's proposal is to offer:

a “Patriot Employers” plan that would lower corporate taxes for companies that did not ship jobs overseas. …Mr Obama’s plan would lower the corporate tax rate for companies that met criteria including maintaining their headquarters in the US, maintaining or increasing their US workforce relative to their overseas workforce, holding a neutral position in union drives among their employees and providing decent healthcare

Right, aside from being unworkable shouldn't he also be demanding that foreign companies stop creating jobs in the US if he wants to be consistent? In fairness there is one exception to the list of countries that Obama wants to stop the United States trading with, Cuba.

Hillary on the other hand.... oh hang on, she's toast now so there's no need to consider her pandering at all.

Fuel Prices & Political 'Solutions'

The rising cost of oil seems to have turned US politicians into idiots, as opposed to being exponents of Solomonesque wisdom that we expect them to be. First up Hillary Clinton's ludicrous proposal, sadly also acked by McCain, for a 'tax holiday' for a couple of months which has been universally panned. Now the Senate Democrats have come up with the brilliant idea to combat fuel prices by er raising taxes on the oil companies. It is, in many ways, impressive that two contradictory can both be so idiotic, you'd imagine that by dumb luck one proposal would be a good one.

This comes down to the mistaken idea of the left that every 'problem' requires massive government intervention to provide a 'solution'. Fuel prices are rising and the only thing that will change that is increasing the supply, and the Democrats almost universally oppose oil exploration in Alaska, or lowering demand which the market is taking care of without the need for government imposed 'solutions'.

Health & Politics.

The link between autism and the MMR vaccine has been pretty comprehensively discredited. I realise that it is hard to imagine that a study published by the Lancet would turn out to be such complete crap but there you go.

In politics however the empirical reality is that facts matter much less than public perception, and seeing as the anti MMR lobby is organised and motivated whereas the supporters of MMR are generally apolitical this means that all three of the remaining candidates for US president are willing to pander to the scaremongers.

The scientific evidence here is pretty clear yet the controversy has caused levels of vaccination to fall off and by not challenging the supposed MMR autism link all the candidates have demonstrated that they are willing to endanger the citizens whom they seek to serve and lead in order to get elected.

Where the political backlash against vaccination is even greater in some parts of world than in the West, it has enabled diseases that were on the cusp of being eliminated, like Polio, to make strong resurgences and it has left a lot of children severely disabled for life. For the three main aspirants to become the most powerful person on the planet to fuel this backlash for votes is disgusting.