Mr. Chávez’s latest moves serve as yet another reminder of why America needs to curb its insatiable appetite for oil. The United States is the biggest buyer of Venezuelan petroleum products. If a powerful Hugo Chávez is against U.S. interests, we should stop paying for his Russian fighter jets and helicopters — and his nationalizations — with our gas-guzzling cars and trucks.

The NYT editorial writer weaves across three lanes of traffic to slam into America and Bush for the predictable nationalization move of a socialist. Does the NYT believe Bush aggravated Chavez into being what he always has been? Wasn't Jimmy Carter the wet nurse on duty when Chavez's was born? How come he wasn't mentioned? Will the NYT-owned Boston Globe now campaign to take down the Citgo sign over Fenway? (So the drivers of Boston don't inadvertently fill up their SUVs with socialist carbon.)

I think it still needs emphasizing that "nationalization" is a spinword designed by collectivists to glorify theft by politicians.

Dorgan is hard corps for every regulatory mandate ever conceived. Snowe is a populist lost cause. There's not much of an economy in either of their states but what little promise their citizens have is delivered by the distance-erasing power of the internet. Just try explaining that actual intellectual concept to either of them. (I've tried.)

IRONY ALERT: The interest group most hurt by this issue, if it ever passed, is the telecom union, the Communications Workers of America. CWA reps most non-management employees of AT&T, Verizon and Qwest.

Virtually every tech company supporting NN is non-union (e.g. Microsoft, Ebay, Amazon, Google, and so on).

Why are the Dems for NN? They get the populist kudos from MoveOn.org and the no-nothing media and the $$ from the techs -- and they whisper to the CWA, don't worry it won't pass. There is one big desire the CWA wants, which the Dems support.

Ever heard of "card check"? That's what CWA cares about. It will allow their organizers to legally intimidate employees who have not (yet) signed a postcard ballot to authorize a union-election of a non-union company. Verizon Wireless, unlike Cingular, is mostly non-union.

Welcome to the new Washington.

Here's a question for everyone -- Lou Dobbs, Paul Craig Roberts, Pat Buchanan, Sen. Sherrod Brown, etc. -- who believes that government should use force to reduce the amount of money domestic consumers voluntarily spend on goods and services offered for sale by foreign producers:

Do you believe that a consumer who has long patronized a corner bakery is morally obliged to continue patronizing that bakery? Do you believe that government would be acting justly if it told that consumer "You must not take your patronage from this bakery. We do not care if you no longer care for baked goods or if a new bakery across town offers you a better deal. Because the owners and employees of this bakery have depended upon you for some time now to help keep their business and incomes afloat, you would harm them if you stop buying from them, or even if the amount you buy from them is substantially reduced"?

If you don't believe that any such consumer is morally obliged to continue patronizing the corner bakery, on what ethical foundation do you rest your case for "protectionism"?

I’m afraid I’m going to get cranky about this: The Democrats who oppose the so-called “surge” are right. But they have to be careful not to sound like ill-informed dilettantes when talking about it.

The latest to make a fool of himself is Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who argues that those who favor the increase in troops are either cynical or delusional. Mostly the latter. Delusional neocons like Bill Kristol and Fred Kagan, to be precise. But what about retired General Jack Keane–whom Krugman doesn’t mention–and the significant number of military intellectuals who have favored a labor-intensive counterinsurgency strategy in Baghdad for the past three years? They are serious people. They may be wrong about Iraq now, reflexively trying to complete a mission that has been lost, but they are not delusional. The counterinsurgency doctrine they published in 2006 is exactly what the U.S. military should be doing in places like Afghanistan...

Liberals won’t ever be trusted on national security until they start doing their homework.

Now Reisman goes to work. He notes that the "home fuel cell" costs $9,100 -- and if it weren't for a government subsidy, would cost $51,000. Reisman says, "I hope I will be forgiven for failing to see the intelligence of a policy that makes people pay twice the price for energy in order to provide funds to make possible the production of electricity at a sharply higher cost."

Then Reisman lets the article destroy itself simply by quoting it, on the subject of exemplary energy conserver Mr. Kimura:

Mr. Kimura says he, his wife, and two teenage children all take turns bathing in the same water, a common practice here. Afterward, the still-warm water is sucked through a rubber tube into the nearby washing machine to clean clothes. Wet laundry is hung outside to dry or under a heat lamp in the bathroom. The different approach is also apparent in the layout of Mr. Kimura’s home, which at 1,188 square feet is about the average size of a house in Japan but only about half as big as the average American one. The rooms are also small, making them easier to heat or cool. The largest is the living room, which is about the size of an American bedroom.

During winter, the entire family, including the miniature dachshund, gathers here, which is often the only room heated. Like most Japanese homes, Mr. Kimura’s does not have central heating. The hallways, stairwell and bathrooms are left cold. The three bedrooms have wall-mounted heaters, which are used only when the rooms are occupied, and switched off at night.

The living room is kept toasty by hot water running through pipes under the floor. Mr. Kimura says such ambient heat saves money. He says the energy bill for his home is about 20,000 yen ($168) a month. Central heating alone would easily double or triple his energy bill, he says.

“Central heating is just too extravagant,” says Mr. Kimura, who is solidly middle class.

The government has tried to foster a culture of conservation with regular campaigns like this winter’s Warm Biz, a call to businesspeople to don sweaters and long johns under their gray suits so that office thermostats could be set lower.

So there you have it: the Green party line presenting poverty as technologically advanced, as the wave of the future, and as morally virtuous. We can supposedly all look forward to the day when we will be as advanced as the Japanese and energy will cost us twice as much as it now does. When we too will be unable to afford central heating and will have to live in houses half their present size. When we will have to gather our entire family into the one heated room in the house. When we will have to follow one another into the same bathwater, and then use that bathwater to wash our clothes, which we will have to dry outdoors, as our great-grandparents did. When we will have to wear long underwear and sweaters to keep warm indoors. What a glorious, green future!

Tax Cuts Offer Most for Very Rich, Study Says

The study offers ammunition to supporters and opponents of Mr. Bush’s tax cuts...

Here's the headline the New York Times did not run:

40% of all Americans -- and 100% of the Poor -- Pay No Income Taxes, Get Money Instead, says CBO
Increased revenues from middle and upper income taxes make it possible -- Bush gets credit!

Money quote from the story:

...families in the bottom 40 percent of income earners, those with incomes below $36,300, typically paid no federal income tax and received money back from the government. That so-called negative income tax stemmed mainly from the earned-income tax credit, a program that benefits low-income parents who are employed.

Sum it up this way: rich families were the undisputed "winners" from President Bush’s tax cuts, but people in the bottom half of the earnings scale were not paying taxes anyway (they'd already won).

In the true spirit of science, in which competing researchers test each other's hypotheses and experiments in search of a higher truth, Alan Reynolds -- author of Income and Wealth -- has been doing brilliant work in investigating the widely held hypothesis that income inequality has increased steadily over the last 20 years. Yes, that is just an hypothesis, though it is so widely believed and frequently quoted as to have the air of fact. What makes Reynolds' work so powerful is that he's patiently and systematically demolished the apparent experimental evidence behind that hypothesis, and dared to stand nearly alone against the conventional wisdom of economic science. When it comes to income inequality, Reynolds is a modern Galileo.

Liberal economist Mark Thoma has followed Reynolds' work over the last several months, and his website has become a forum for debating it. In a posting today, Thoma begins with a reprise of the key documents in the debate, which anyone interested in this subject ought to read in order.

• The Top 1% . . . of What? (Reynolds WSJ op-ed)
• Reynolds' Rap on Inequality
• Follow-Up on Inequality
• Poverty Rates in Recent Years
• Intellectual Garbage Collection: The Unreliability of Alan Reynolds (Brad DeLong)
• Settling the Score on Census Top-Coding of Income Data
• "The Chewbacca Defense"