From Power Line:

Barack Obama is a lot like Sean Penn or George Clooney. If you give him a script, he can deliver it pretty well. But if he tries to talk without a script that has been written for him by others, he quickly reveals that he is poorly-informed if not downright ignorant. Today he delivered another classic, by claiming that if only we would all properly inflate our tires, we could save as much gasoline as "all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling.

Just for fun, I did the math. Properly inflating your tires can improve gas mileage by 3%. Of course, many people already keep their tires properly inflated, and many more are at least close to being properly inflated. Let’s be generous and assume that one-half of the total possible savings would be realized if we all inflated our tires properly; that’s a net gain of 1.5% fuel efficiency.

Americans drive approximately 2,880 billion miles per year. If we average 24 mpg, we use around 120 billion gallons of gasoline in our vehicles. If, through perfect tire inflation, we improved our collective fuel efficiency by 1.5%, that would be 1.8 billion gallons. A barrel of oil produces around 20 gallons of gasoline, so the total savings available through tire inflation is approximately 90,000,000 barrels of oil annually.

How does this stack up against "all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling?"

ANWR: 10 billion barrels
Outer Continental Shelf: 18 billion barrels (estimated; the actual total is undoubtedly much higher, since exploration has been banned)
Oil shale: 1 trillion barrels

So, on the above assumptions, it would take only 11,308 years of proper tire inflation to equal "all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling."

Obama is a curious case. He gives the impression of being an intelligent guy, but through his unscripted comments we have learned that he knows little about history, science or mathematics. He also seems rather shockingly short on common sense, as this most recent gaffe illustrates.

Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is to resign his post in two months! A new leader is to be chosen by the Kadima party on 17th September.

Perhaps this signals an end to the talk of ceding the Golan Heights to the Syrians. I suspect in the face of the ever more pressing Iranian threat, a stronger leader will be chosen; someone who is not willing to surrender any gains Israel has made in the last 60 years.

Mazeltov Israel!

Maybe the Israeli governement read my post and is starting to follow my suggestions…

 From Power Line:

Politics is largely about priorities; so is life, for that matter. Barack Obama’s priorities were put into sharp relief today when he canceled visits to two American military bases in Germany. He still has time, of course, to play the "rock star" in front of cheering multitudes of Germans. Ed Morrisseybroke the story:

Der Spiegel’s blog reports on Obama’s priorities:

1:42 p.m.: SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that Obama has cancelled a planned short visit to the Rammstein and Landstuhl US military bases in the southwest German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The visits were planned for Friday. “Barack Obama will not be coming to us,” a spokesperson for the US military hospital in Landstuhl announced. “I don’t know why.” Shortly before the same spokeswoman had announced a planned visit by Obama.

The message here is that thousands of screaming German fans at the Tiergarten take precedence over visiting Americans serving their country at Rammstein and Landstuhl. Maybe one of the networks following Obama could interview a few of the soldiers about how they perceive that set of priorities from Obama.

 

Landstuhl, of course, is where soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan are sent for treatment. Obama’s visit there no doubt would have included meeting some of them.

It turns out that Obama didn’t stiff the servicemen because of a schedule conflict. Rather, as Jake Tapper pointed out, apparently without knowing that Obama had canceled planned visits to the two military installations, Obama is going sightseeing in Berlin tonight. I can’t say it any better than Ed did:

Obama canceled a previously-planned stop to visit thousands of American service personnel, including troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan being treated at Landstuhl, so he could hold a political rally for Germans and go shopping in Berlin. Now that’s a nice set of priorities for a man who wants to become Commander in Chief.

 

 From Little Green Footballs:

‘Now, in terms of knowing my commitments, you don’t have to just look at my words, you can look at my deeds. Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.’

But Obama is not a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Obama just made that up so he could count the committee’s action as one of “my deeds.”

 It makes the media and the Democrats mad – so mad they don’t want to report it or acknowledge it. 

But it is great news.

For news of victory, Americans may have to look to the foreign press. For example, the Times of London, which carried a piece by Marie Colvin the other day. She reported that "American and Iraqi forces are driving al Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror."

Read the whole article from which this is taken here.

 Good news! Danes are hitting back at racist Muslims who are trying to take over their country. They are hanging effigies of Muhammad from lampposts.

Read about it and see the PICTURES here.

 Gordon G Chang writes on the Contentions site of Commentary Magazine:

 Is the Bush administration crumbling? Asia experts Liu Kin-ming and June Teufel Dreyer, in postings on the Taiwan Policy Forum listserv today, ask a pertinent question.

The answer, unfortunately, is “yes.” An exhausted Dubya is now doing everything he once said he would not. The President, for example, is rewarding North Korea prior to surrender of its nuclear weapons. On Wednesday, the administration agreed to talk with Iran even though the Islamic Republic is continuing to enrich uranium and undoubtedly maintaining a covert bomb program. And on the same day, it was revealed that the Bush White House isundermining democratic Taiwan to please communist China by refusing to sell the former defensive weapons. Next month, the President will be joining the likes of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe to honor Chinese autocrats at the opening ceremony of an event recently described as the “Totalitarian Olympics.”

Mr. Bush probably won’t have to sit next to Sudan’s Omar Bashir–seating is said to be alphabetical for attending heads of state–only because the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on Monday asked for an arrest warrant for the genocidal ruler.

The American leader who believes so much in freedom and democracy has done more than any autocrat to support the strengthening coalition of authoritarian states. Getting little in return, Bush is yielding on almost every request from Beijing and most of them from Moscow. In doing so, he is abandoning American allies and undermining critical American goals. By reversing course on major initiatives, he is eroding American credibility. Now, it seems every foreign policy of the Bush administration is, well, Kerryesque.

Some will argue that the President’s recent radical turns are only recognizing reality because Russia and China have been frustrating American initiatives. As an initial matter, it was Bush administration policy that helped put these two authoritarian giants into positions from where they could bedevil America and the rest of the international community. Yet more important, the President’s policy changes come too late to be effective. Now, even if they are the right approaches–and I do not think they are–they can only make the United States appear weak and irresolute. It would have been preferable for the administration to have stuck to its principled stands, which at least had the possibility of leading to enduring solutions, especially if they would have been continued by the next administration.

The President should have realized that, so close to the end of his term, the best he could do was to cause no further harm. Yet we are now witnessing policy disarray in a White House that has lost its confidence and bearings.

 At least some Germans are:

In the case of the controversy over the mosque planned for Cologne’s Ehrenfeld neighborhood, the right-wing Pro protesters have indeed been pushed into the margins. Their complaints have been drowned out by more high-profile statements coming from prominent leftists and liberals including German Jewish journalist Ralph Giordano, women’s rights activist Alice Schwarzer and investigative reporter Günter Wallraff, who have all spoken out against the mosque. Representatives of Germany’s large churches have increasingly added their voices to the criticism as well. The "dishonest dialogue" with Islam described in SPIEGEL’s pages in December 2001 – in which church representatives simply ignored scandalous and unbearable aspects like persecution of Christians, discrimination against women, toleration of terror and "honor" killings for the sake of harmony – is now a thing of the past.

In place of the "fairy tale that we’re all ‘children of Abraham’," in the words of Leggewie, the churches are now making an effort not to entangle themselves in finding contrived common ground with Islam. Instead they are trying to find areas in which they differ – and this applies particularly to the construction of mosques.

 

Read the whole report here.

 The British police cave again to outrageous Muslim demands. Now their dogs must wear socks. 

Read about it here. 

Who is it that orders the police to grovel like this? Is it Britain’s clueless Home Secretary? Or is it the unbelievably weak Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair?

 German government funds paid for a conference in which an Iranian spokesman advocated the destruction of Israel.

Read about it here.