It all began with George II licking Nancy Pelosi’s very expensive (and as always, muy attractive) shoes so I almost changed the channel hoping to find more tolerable programming such as VH1’s Flavor of Love. Hmm…that might be spelled Flavuh of Luv but I’m not sure.

(But the look on Vice President Cheney’s face which suggested he wanted to invite Pelosi on his next dove hunting trip made me stay tuned!)

I’m glad I did…now don’t get all nasty with me people but I really liked his speech tonight–I thought it was overall one of his best. He showed himself in his very best light: Warm, approachable, concerned and YES compassionate.

(P.S. as of print, 84% of FOX NEWS viewers called the speech “excellent” so there!)

The Fox News panel summoned to dissect the speech (and comprised almost entirely of those cranky sheep from the Weekly Standard) seem to be disagreeing with me. They think Bush should have said…well, I can’t figure out what would make those cynics happy.

Here is my bone to pick from Bush’s speech…and you know what’s coming!

Text courtesy of Monsieur Drudge:

Extending hope and opportunity in our country requires an immigration system worthy of America – with laws that are fair and borders that are secure. When laws and borders are routinely violated, this harms the interests of our country. To secure our border, we are doubling the size of the Border Patrol – and funding new infrastructure and technology.

Yet even with all these steps, we cannot fully secure the border unless we take pressure off the border – and that requires a temporary worker program. We should establish a legal and orderly path for foreign workers to enter our country to work on a temporary basis. As a result, they won’t have to try to sneak in – and that will leave border agents free to chase down drug smugglers, and criminals, and terrorists. We will enforce our immigration laws at the worksite, and give employers the tools to verify the legal status of their workers – so there is no excuse left for violating the law. We need to uphold the great tradition of the melting pot that welcomes and assimilates new arrivals. And we need to resolve the status of the illegal immigrants who are already in our country – without animosity and without amnesty.

Bush ended his comments with this:

Convictions run deep in this Capitol when it comes to immigration. Let us have a serious, civil, and conclusive debate – so that you can pass, and I can sign, comprehensive immigration reform into law.

BB translation: Democrats will get everything they want, Bush II will sign it into law and we will cease to exist as a nation independent of Mexico within 10 years.

And by the way, Speaker Pelosi jumped to applaud so fast there must have been an eject button on the arm of her chair–she was just a tad too enthusiastic about a proposal from a man she supposedly despises…if you catch my drift.

And kudos to my man Congressman Tom Tancredo for not jumping up from his seat and launching a grenade at the podium before setting fire to the entire building. Instead, the Presidential hopeful maintained an amazingly calm demeanor.

(Ok, just for you nutjobs out there: I AM NOT SUGGESTING TANCREDO SHOULD HAVE DONE THAT, OK??)

Hmm…funny how Clinton, Biden and that Barak guy sat together…even the cabinet keeps one member out of the building just to be safe!

Now then, more than anything else that happened tonight what impressed me was Jim Webb–the Freshman Senator from Virginia and former Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan.

At first, I thought it odd the Democrats would pick such a “junior” guy to issue the response but then again, the Dems always have a plan.

First and foremost, the Dems wanted to shoot down the War in Iraq…of course they did…there are only about six people left in love with the war and four of them are not likely U.S. citizens.

But Lordy, Lordy! I was not prepared for Webb’s response (ok, in truth I predicted some of it…I knew he would yank some sentimental chains in a big, big way) and I was right!

In seven minutes, Webb managed to mention that every member of his family fought in seemingly every war including his father, his brother and now his own son in Iraq. And yes, he even had photos…Webb probably made Dick Cheney weep!

And this is why: Because he was right and because he has earned the right to say that he is right! He is no John Kerry parading around podium after podium talking about a sailing trip he took back in the 70’s. The men in Webb’s family are the real deal–and as a Navy wife, I have to admit that I really appreciated his notice of the contribution we (the families of these soldiers) make to the war.

If Webb gets it together on immigration, he could be a serious (and by “serious” I mean “likely to win”) Presidential candidate…tell him to call Congressman Tancredo and start merging ideas.

P.S. It must be said, VP Cheney sharing a stage with Speaker Pelosi for that long must have been a fate worse than death…for Cheney. I didn’t know one could sit so close to her without catching on fire…at least.

The Democrats have made a lot of noise about implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. However, in one case, members of the Senate are working to disassemble legislation that has already been passed, namely the REAL ID law, the full implementation of which would make identification far more secure.

The complaints are mainly about money, but one of the biggest loudmouths, California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, wants state identification for illegal aliens, and REAL ID has been a big stumbling block.

Introduced by Sens. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, and John Sununu, R-N.H., the bill would eliminate a cascade of federal driver’s license standards that Congress passed last year and states must implement by May 2008.

In its place, the senators would set up a process that lets states and the federal government jointly create license standards. [...]

“The costs associated with it are out of reach for California,” state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez said during a recent trip to Washington to lobby for federal funding. “My hope is that Congress will roll it back.”

Nunez and others estimate the state will have to spend at least $500 million to prepare for an estimated 15 million Californians who will have to get a new license from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
[Senate bill aims to repeal 'Real ID' law, Daily News 1/23/07]

California evidently has enough spare change rolling around to give welfare benefits to illegal alien pickers affected by the freeze. But spending money to protect citizens from terrorists would interfere with the Mexican colonization agenda, as noted by Mexico’s Interior Minister Santiago Creel when he expressed his displeasure that REAL ID would prevent Mexicans from getting US drivers’ licenses.

Below is a photo of Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez in Mexico City, saluting the Mexican flag and its national anthem Aug. 26, 2005, showing where his loyalties lie.

Thomas Sowell has an article saying that oil companies aren’t necessarily evil, in which he says, among other comments:

“Now that oil prices have dropped big time, does that mean that oil companies have lost their ‘greed’? Or could it all be supply and demand – a cause and effect explanation that seems to be harder for some people to understand than emotions like ‘greed’?”

The “Greed” Fallacy, January 23, 2007

But Mark In Mexico has a post about one company that doesn’t really underestand supply and demand–the only oil company in North America that may be running out of oil: PEMEX.

He writes that

Pemex was formed after 1938 when President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized Mexico’s oil industry. When a government nationalizes its oil industry, that means that the government steps in and confiscates all of the equipment, drills, pumps, buildings, refineries, vehicles, ships, airplanes, offices, records, bank accounts etc. of the private companies to which that same government had previously sold leases and other rights.

In other words, the government sells licenses to various foreign investors to attract them to invest billions of dollars, then steps in and steals it all. In almost all cases, the government blames the foreign companies, and often the foreign governments, for “robbing” the people’s energy inheritance. Except, of course, when a US company is involved, in which case the local government always blames the US government.

And, frequently, America gets blamed even when there are no US companies involved at all. In Bolivia, the Bolivian Gas War was brought on by a minority group’s charge that the United States was absconding with the Bolivian people’s natural gas inheritnce. But the companies that had extraction rights are all European companies. If an American energy company wanted Bolivian gas, it had to buy that gas from and pay market prices to a European energy company that was extracting that gas. Oh well.

The problem is, in essence, that while the corrupt governments, and corrupt governments, that control the company are greedy, the company itself, as a government-run monopoly, isn’t greedy.

So the Mexican government and a whole slew of Mexican governments since 1938 have had control of the Mexican oil industry through a government controlled company called Pemex. You know how that had to go. Badly. And it has.

These governments have, year after year and decade after decade, used Pemex as a private funding source. It is estimated that Pemex loses a cool billion dollars a year just to internal corruption.

All of that corruption has little to do with oil extraction or oil availability or oil reserves. What it does do however, is cause gasoline at Pemex gas stations — the only ones allowed here — to cost the Mexican consumer about $1.00 per gallon more than that same oil costs once it is shipped to the United States. At an Exxon station in Laredo, Texas, you pay $1 per gallon less for gasoline than you do at a Pemex station just a couple of miles to the south. And that’s for gasoline produced from oil from the same Mexican well.

What that corruption also does is bleed money away from Pemex that should have been reinvested in the company. That loss, along with the Mexican government’s skimming off 60% of all Pemex revenue to pay for all the sub-standard public services that the bloated Mexican constitution guarantees to the Mexican citizens, leaves no money for exploration or drilling for new sources or the technology development necessary to tap those new sources nor even enough to maintain its existing facilities.

I’ve noted that earlier that Mexico has a public holiday celebrating

the biggest armed robbery of the twentieth century. It left all the oil in Mexico in the hands of corrupt Mexican governments, who couldn’t even get most of it out of the ground; a lot of it is just sitting there, because they won’t allow foreigners to touch it.

See Businessweek’s 2001 article Pemex: Still in the Dark Ages, for a discussion of how Mexico doesn’t want to have Americans exploit Mexicans by drilling wells, which means fewer jobs for Mexicans, who go north illegally and exploit Americans.