No, Vegas’ green bust isn’t the latest titillating show on the strip; it’s the latest lesson in why we should let the market establish prices and buying decisions. Will politicians ever learn?

In one of today’s most-emailed WSJ stories, the tale is told of high-minded Nevada legislators who thought that the construction of green buildings — buildings that conserve energy and energy, and use earth-friendly building materials — should be incentivized.

Now, one would think that in a desert city where the temperature routinely reaches 300 degrees or so, developers would need no incentive beyond lower electric and water bills to build green buildings. But legislators didn’t get this, so here’s what they cooked up:

In 2005 the Nevada Legislature unanimously approved a measure that cut property taxes up to 50% for 10 years and lowered sales taxes for building supplies to 2% for energy-efficient construction. … Original estimates put state abatement costs at just $250,000, though no one can say how that figure was conjured.

The $250,000 cost was just a wee bit off — the ding to the state in lost tax revenues is approaching $1 billion. Green buildings already in the pipeline got meaningless incentives and new buildings got decked out in the greenest shades of green, when a lighter shade of green might have been sufficient.

Nevada has no income tax, so when its sales and property taxes flatten, there’s no back-up plan for funding schools, road and infrastructure projects except the General Fund. So, and I can’t say this any better than WSJ did:

… late last week the Nevada Legislature, already facing budget shortfalls, worked out a retroactive compromise and essentially asked for a mulligan.

The details of the roll-back aren’t important; the lesson of the roll-back is. If there’s a good product that offers benefits to the market, the market will buy it. The market is smarter than the legislators, every time.

But if the legislators followed this wisdom, how would they keep themselves busy?

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Meet Ryan, who will be leaving soon for his first tour in Iraq. He’s a friend of Incredible Daughter #1, a member of an on-line community at Bimmerforums.com, BMW lovers all, who have grown into great friends through the forum and, for many, road trips, race days and meets.

Today, in the matter of a couple hours, Ryan’s Bimmerforum friends got together quite a send-off. Incredible Daughter #1 picks up the story:

So this morning Ryan, my friend, asked [on Bimmerforum] for recommendations for a nice knife. He wanted to get it before he leaves next Tuesday for Iraq. He made it clear that he didn’t have a huge budget, and couldn’t afford a really nice knife. By mid-afternoon, another member, Patron, suggested that we collect money to buy Ryan a knife.

At that point, Joe from www.hero-gear.com picked it up, offering his services for the Ryan fund. Post from Joe:

“FYI:

My plan is to take whatever money we raise, and buy Buller his knife/additional gear at dealer cost. This will allow us to get more badass gear for the money.
Just didn’t want you guys to think I was going to profit from this.

Those wanting to contribute can paypal me joe@hero-gear.com“

Within 20 minutes we had 80 dollars. One member posted that this was stupid because a knife was standard issue and Ryan could use his own money to buy a knife. Joe and other members put him in his place. Response from Joe:

“This is his first deployment, and some of us would like to honor his duty and sacrifice by sending him to the show with a good knife.”

By 5 p.m. (4 1/2 hours later) we had over $300.

Ryan had no idea what we were doing, he was offline long before we started the drive. He didn’t sign on again until the evening. When he did he posted this:

In all reality I really think I should hold off on spending any of the money quite yet because when I get over there I will have a much better idea of the kinda gear that we will need and don’t have….and our troop is definitely VERY under supplied. Considering we are the last brigade in the 82nd to deploy…and with our departure the entire 82nd Airborne Division will be deployed….. getting anything that we need will be very hard.

This is really awesome of you guys. I’m really humbled by what you guys are doing and your support will definitely make things way better for us when we need something desperately and can’t get it. As for the guy that was asking why I don’t spend my combat pay on stuff, the main reason I don’t want to is for the past couple months and all the way through Iraq until I’m out of the Army I’m saving all my money for helicopter flight school for when I get out…that way I’ll have a decent job right out of the Army. I can spend on little things but when it comes to multiple hundreds of dollars…that’s hours of flight time that is very valuable towards my license.

Again thanks a ton for the support and if you guys don’t mind I would rather set the funds aside for something that all the guys in the platoon can really benefit from when I’m over in country. And again if there is anything I can do for any of you guys just let me know and I will help out to the best of my ability.

Right now, we are thinking about adopting his platoon through www.hero-gear.com. The problem with this is that Ryan is not [Bimmerforum's] only soldier. We have dozens, and a lot of them are on tour right now. Ryan just gets the attention because he gives us lots of updates. So while I really want to help Ryan, I think it’s unfair to all the other soldiers we have in our ranks.

Well, sure, but I think it’s great that these kids (most are in their 20s) feel so strongly supportive of what Ryan is doing — and that’s what the troops need more than anything else, just the knowledge that we care.

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Yes, John Bolton would have been the more fun nominee, but W. picked a safe and solid candidate in Robert Zoellick, who will be officially announced tomorrow as Paul Wolfowitz’ replacement at the World Bank.

Here’s a fine summary of the man from WSJ:

Robert B. Zoellick served as U.S. trade representative — a cabinet-rank post — during Mr. Bush’s first term. The 53-year-old was considered for the World Bank job the last go-round, before moving to the State Department, where he served as deputy secretary, at the start of Mr. Bush’s second term. Mr. Zoellick is regarded as a tough-minded but nonideological advocate for U.S. power. As U.S. trade representative, Mr. Zoellick often acted as an international healer in the wake of tumultuous events and has pushed trade liberalization in the Arab world.

The perennial candidate for many high-profile Washington jobs, his name was floated as successor to World Bank President James Wolfensohn in 2005. In his resignation letter as the No. 2 person at the State Department, Mr. Zoellick said he was particularly proud of having “reframed” the administration’s approach toward China. He joined Goldman Sachs in 2006 as a managing director and chairman of the firm’s international advisers and was expected to play a central role in advising Goldman’s global strategy.

Democracy Arsenal has a more succinct summary:

Googling readers will already know, or I can save you the trouble, that he’s a realist’s realist…

Experience in the Arab world is a plus, as is the assurance that he’ll stand for America’s interests. Also a great relief is that there’s no apparent connection between the man and George Soros.

What’s missing from all the summaries I’ve read so far is what cred he’s got in the area of his most important task: Rooting out corruption and streamlining the bank. We know such stuff can get you fired from the World Bank (forget all the girlfriend smoke and mirrors!), so hopefully Zoellick has the stamina and smarts to take on the World Bank staff and its more corrupt participating states.

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The rap (well deserved) on Barak Obama is that there’s plenty of sparkle, but not much substance, so in an effort to be considered a “serious candidate,” according to AP (and isn’t it funny that he’s gotten this far without being serious?), Obama got serious today.

Did he get serious about making sure the economy stays robust? No. Was it the war on terror? Nope. Was it fixing Social Security before it goes bankrupt? Think again. It was universal health insurance! The no-brainer of politics!

You can float out whatever universal health insurance plan you want with absolutely 100 percent assurance that nothing like it will ever become law, and in this case, that’s a very good thing.

Obama says his plan will insure the “45 million” Americans who are uninsured. That number is so high it appears to include illegals, along with the millions of young Americans who have made a financial decision to spend their sufficient incomes on something other than insurance. Neither should be insured at public expense.

Who’s going to pay for it? Obama says it won’t be us; no, we’ll SAVE $2,500 a year. It’ll be THEM, because he plans to help pay for it by repealing “the Bush temporary tax cut for the wealthiest taxpayers.” You mean the folks who’ve always paid for their insurance, and probably paid for or contributed to the insurance costs of thousands of their employees? Those richest Americans?

It’s worth it, Obama says, because “the skyrocketing profits of the drug and insurance industries” shouldn’t be on the backs of the people. How about the skyrocketing profits of the class-action attorneys?

We’ll know truly meaningful health insurance reform, because it will come with tort reform designed to protect drug companies, doctors, hospitals and insurance companies from the ravenous attacks of shark lawyers.

And you’ll never, ever see that universal health insurance program coming from a Dem.

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As Hugo Chavez forced an opposing voice off the air — it was only the longest-standing broadcast outlet in Venezuela — so he could impose his views, and only his views on the Venezuelan people, here’s how the left met the news, courtesy of Democratic Underground:

Caracas, May 28 (Prensa Latina) The new Venezuelan Social TV Network (Televisora Venezolana Social, TEVES) inundated channel two of Venezuela”s radio-electric spectrum on Monday, marking the beginning of a new era in Latin American media.

With the appearance of its signal in the first minutes of May 28, TEVES switched off the image of private Radio Caracas Television (RCTV channel), which had exploited the frequency for 53 years to benefit only its owners and their families.

At the same time, this was the materialization of a patient effort of the Venezuelan government in its struggle for democratization of the media in this South American country.

RCTV was off the air at the very moment its concession to use radio-electric space expired, as it was not renewed by authorities in order to facilitate the launching of the public service TEVES station.

The left is utterly without honor. It used to stand for something: For the liberal exchange of ideas, for freedom of speech, for government not heavy-handedly imposing its will on others.

That is now long-gone, as the left gleefully welcomes the brutal and total suppression of any thought but Chavez-thought in Venezuela.

As I wondered this morning: NanPo and Kookcinich, are you tracking this? Is it making you feel better than ever about your efforts to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine on America?

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Maybe they’re all BBQ’ing their tofu-burgers this Memorial Day, but the leftyblogs, after demeaning the Bush admin for not talking to Iran, are not writing much about the diplomatic talks today with representatives of the Iranian regime.

(The photo shows Iran’s ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, either showing us that Iranians can’t even pick their noses right … or he’s giving us a gesture that we’ll soon find out is quite obscene … we’ll have to keep an eye out on MEMRI.)

Despite the near-total news blockout on the left, I did find this:

For much of the Bush administrations tenure, and especially prior to the 2004 election, direct conversations with Iran were off limits … [All Spin Zone]

Yes, as they have been for nearly 30 years, since the Iranian hostage crisis. Your boy Bill didn’t talk to them, either.

It’s going to be very difficult for these talks to get anywhere since the Iranians’ actions don’t follow their policy — they’re officially for a stable Iraq, but they’re working hard to destabilize it, and to kill Americans in the process.

So if — and that’s a very little if — the talks don’t produce results, expect the left to follow up on its general ignoring of the talks with loud and unified howls of derision, blaming Bush’s “lack of diplomatic skills” on the failure.

One of the controversial and much-trounced points of the Iraq Study Group that I’ve always agreed with is the need to open talks with Iran. I’m not hopeful that they’ll go anywhere, but not talking isn’t going anywhere either.

And with the Bush admin at the table instead of Kerry, we can be fairly sure the talks will proceed as they should, with a near-complete lack of trust and a near-fanatical commitment to verification.

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Venezulea has been rocked with demonstrations against the despotic regime of Hugo Chavez, with the “people’s president” using tanks and water cannons against his people.

Free speech and freedom of the press are the triggering issues of the demonstrations, which started when the nation’s oldest broadcast outlet, RCTV, was forced to close after Chavez refused to renew its broadcast licence. (Dem supporters of the Fairness Doctrine, are you tracking this?)

BBC reports:

Within seconds of screens going blank, the insignia of a new state-sponsored broadcaster, TVES, appeared.

Mr Chavez said RCTV had tried to undermine his government.

The president says the new channel that took RCTV’s place at midnight on Sunday (0400 GMT Monday) will better reflect the socialist revolution he has pledged to lead.

(Nancy Pelosi and Dennis Kucinich, are you finding this interesting?)

The blog The Devil’s Excrement (hat-tip, Gateway Pundit, which has several more good links) gives a blow-by-blow of the day’s events, including:

Then the Minister of Defense going into a military parade comes in and says that “minority groups can not go against the majority feeling of the Venezuelan people to create uncertainty with the closure of RCTV, as if there was a majority support to the decision, which is in any case a legal decision and not one to be decided by popularity,["] but in any case, all indications are the illegal and political decision is highly unpopular, contradicting the Minister’s words.

Meanwhile, as people begin checking the newssites on the Internet, Noticiero Digital, Megaresistencia and RCTV websites are taken down by denial of service attacks, the effects of which are still being felt hours later. This is compounded by problems with the CANTV network which take down some other news sites in what may be unrelated to the denial of serivce attacks, since all the others are hosted abroad.

Then the autocrat/dictator himself shows up at the military parade, the main focus of which is the new Russian planes. I had little tie to listen (or interest) to the speech, but what little I heard may have been Chavez at his nuttiest . While I will wait to have the transcript, the intimidation was there, dressed in military garb (which is illegal since he is not active), the President told his supporters not to worry that “his” new planes (on the right above) are flown by experts and carry bombs which these experts can drop with pinpoint accuracy on their targets. (Us?).

And then, as if this were not enough evidence and proof of how we have lost our rights and freedom in this country, the Constitutional Hall of the Supreme Court decides to “protect” the diffuse rights of the “people”, the same rights that it refused to protect in allowing the shutdown of RCTV, and essentially allows the Government not only to shutdown the network, but to take over the equipment rightfully owned by the owners of RCTV, all in the name of the “Law”. Gimme a f… break! This is a simple and direct confiscation of the enemy’s property, which goes beyond anything ever seen so far in the Chavez Dictatorship, as usual under the guise of “legality”.

Let’s see, a regime that’s hungry for power and frightfully afraid of any opposition on public airwaves revokes broadcast licenses of outlets that aren’t “fair.” One more time: that sounds just like the thinking behind the Fairness Doctrine, doesn’t it?

hat-tip: Memeorandum

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Once again, Google has decided not to honor Conservative or religious values on its home page, adding a slight of heroes killed in combat to its earlier slights of Christian holidays.

Today, Memorial Day, Google welcomes you with a plain page. No remembrance there of those who died so Google would be here today, and be free to do business with the Commies in China. Not one electron expended to pay homage to those that made Google’s home page possible by defending our country and our freedom of speech.

Ask.com did better, with this little patriotic icon and a link to its Memorial Day search page, which leads off with this nice history of the day from USMemorialDay.org, where I learned among many other interesting things that this is the 139th Memorial Day, and that the tradition may have started in the South with widows honoring their Civil War dead, but,

It is more likely that [Memorial Day] had many separate beginnings; each of those towns and every planned or spontaneous gathering of people to honor the war dead in the 1860′s tapped into the general human need to honor our dead, each contributed honorably to the growing movement that culminated in Gen [John] Logan giving his official proclamation in 1868.

There’s also a petition on the site you can sign to ask Congress to move the Memorial Day holiday to its traditional day, May 30, instead of its current floating day. Seems like a good idea.

How hard would it be for Google to admit that it is an American company, serving American people who, by and large, cherish our American holidays and have “a general human need to honor our dead?”

How hard would it be for you to at least try a different search engine as your default, and turn to Google, as I do, only when you need its generally superior search capabilities?

God bless our fallen heroes, who deserve better than Google.

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Mah- I’m- in- the- moud- for- euphemisms Ahmadinejad (rhymes with “Antisemitism — now that’s iron-clad) has once again called for the destruction of Israel, but not with his old “wiped off the map” rhetoric. Here’s the latest from his mouthpiece news agency, Fars:

TEHRAN – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Saturday warned the Zionist regime of Israel to avoid invading Lebanon, adding that in case it intends to make up for its last year defeat in Lebanon, regional nations would uproot the regime from the region.

Liberal media may see the change from “wiped off the map” to “uprooted from the region” as indicative of a less strident, more approachable Ahmadinejad. They do try mightily to find evidence of more liberalness in Tehran, not because it’s there, but because they think it might forestall a Bush-directed attack, which they feel is imminent.

They might note that the kinder Ahmadinejad is so diplomatic that he even warns Israel of the specifics of its forthcoming doom:

“According to our information, they intend to invade Lebanon this summer to make up for their last year defeat, and I warn other nations and this [Israeli] regime to be vigilant and to understand that this year is not going to be similar to last year,” the Iranian president underlined.

I wonder how he underlined it. A gesture, perhaps? A swish of the hand across the air? An upthrust arm, palm open?

And what if we should try to stop this new, more approachable Ahmadinejad?

“But we have the honor to proclaim here today that satanic powers are not capable of harming the Iranian nation even for a bit, and if they think that they can make the Iranian nation surrender to them by avoiding dispatch of nuclear fuel or equipment to Iran, they are wrong, because we have already gained access to the production of nuclear fuel at an industrial scale,” the Iranian president underscored.

Underscoring, underlining, underhanded SOB. I would humbly point out that satanic powers are not interested in harming the Iranian nation even one bit, because it’s doing a fine, fine job of carrying out their agenda.

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The quote above, from the post Memorial Day And The Mirror Of Hope, stretches out and catches the beauty of the defense of the American experiment beautifully — it is a Willie Mays in the ’54 World Series kind of beautiful catch.

Our veterans have fought, don’t you see, for Madison and Jefferson and Adams and the others, not for Teddy or FDR or LBJ or W. Not for Pusan or Da Nang or Tikrit. They fought, and fight, for the principles those men laid down in that incredibly difficult time at the end of the 16th Century when out of a sea of divisiveness and discord they hewed a beautiful ship — call her Liberty, call her Freedom, call her The People — and launched her into history, forever changing it.

When our armed services take up arms, they do it for the ideals our God-inspired forefathers created, beyond all human capability to create. That, so much more than the remembrance of every wrong from the Alamo to the World Trade Center, is what they are willing to fight and die for.

I woke up this morning, as I do every Memorial Day, thinking of a man I never met, Christopher Fassnacht. Chris was everyone’s favorite cousin in my mom’s world of aunts and uncles and cousins. He was Paul and Rosetta Fassnacht’s boy, who grew up just down the street from the house Granddad and Grandmother lived in for over 60 years.

Paul worked with Granddad at Indiana Lumber and Rosetta was the sweetest great-aunt, such a soft voice, and an eye condition that kept her from opening her eyelids, save for a tiny slit, so she had to tilt her head way back to see you. They must have teamed up wonderfully on Chris, because his cousins adored him.

He served his country in WWII as a bomber pilot and was lost over Germany when his plane was shot down. So many died as he did, in a trail of smoke against the sky — so many that he’s lost even to Google.

Even though I never knew him, he gave me my sense of the loss of a loved one serving in the armed forces. That’s because the love of his cousins and his legacy as a man live on in my brother Chris and a cousin Chris, and an entire branch of the family, the Christophers, who used to be the Fassnachts until Uncle Bill changed his name after the war.

(I don’t know if there’s a connection, but Robert Fassnacht, a distant cousin, had a son Christopher before he was killed in an anti-Vietnam war bombing at the University of Wisconsin in 1970.)

That, my friends, was a man who touched so many during a short life. And there are thousands upon thousands of Chris Fassnachts who we honor today — remarkable young men and women who meant so much to so many, but were willing to fight for the principles and dreams of a nation that has touched so many more.

Some would have us leave Iraq before we can finish our work there. They don’t hold enough faith in the bright vision of America to think we can change a place like Iraq. They’re right in saying Iraq is a tough, tough place for that vision to take hold. But they dishonor the almost 3,500 wonderful, honorable and courageous Americans who have given their lives so that the American dream may be dreamed by others.

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