When purchasing a product or service, we all like to see the itemized list of charges – one that separates the cost of the purchase from the share going to Uncle Sam through the form of taxes and fees. Needless to say, government bureaucrats don’t like that. They desire that we remain blissfully ignorant of government’s burden on our everyday lives. This is one reason why they concocted the withholdings scheme for income tax collection. Now, they are expanding their tentacles into commercial taxes so they can obfuscate the magnitude of taxes and fees on airfare purchases. Without much fanfare, the Department of Transportation (DOT) enacted a rule which requires airlines to ensconce all government taxes and fees in a single total advertised price with the fare. For example, if you purchase a $350 plane ticket with $50 of taxes and fees, the DOT is demanding that the airline advertise the price as $400. Airline passengers pay over a dozen taxes and fees on any given airplane ticket, but the government doesn’t want us to know that. The rule was finalized last April, but only took effect last week. The timing of this rule is very fortuitous. This week, Congress will finalize negotiations for a long-term FAA funding bill. This bill authorizes the collection of all taxes – including taxes on aviation fuel, domestic and international ticket taxes, and cargo –directed to the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which provides the bulk of FAA funding. As usual, Democrats want to spend more money on wasteful projects, and are all too hungry to increase aviation taxes. What better way to leverage tax increases than by forcing airlines to hide their cost and to shoulder the blame for the perceived higher price tag at the top! This is yet another insidious plan to raise taxes and place unconstitutional mandates on private enterprise – all by administrative fiat. It must be stopped in its tracks. Today, conservative Rep. Tom Graves (R-GA) is introducing a bill, the Travel Transparency Act, which will void the DOT rule, and demand that passengers have the right to view all the aviation taxes in separate line items for each ticket purchased. Graves asserted that “the federal government should not be inserting itself in the private sector to limit consumers’ ability to see how much they’re getting taxed. If the American people can’t see these costs clearly, I fear it will be easier these fees and taxes to be raised without their knowledge.” Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, who used to be a Republican, defended the rule as a necessary means to ensure that passengers are treated with “dignity and respect.” The only thing this rule will accomplish is ensuring that passengers retain their “respect” for government, while blaming the airlines for perceived increases in ticket prices. At present, airline passengers are on the hook for at least 16 different taxes and fees on the average airline ticket. Additionally, they must incur the most harmful backdoor tax; the high cost of jet fuel resulting from decades of anti-energy growth policies. We must ensure that the existing taxes remain transparent so that Congress will have a harder time sneaking through new tax increases. Please ask your member of Congress to cosponsor Tom Graves’s Travel Transparency Act. Cross-posted to The Madison Project
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The Government is Playing Hide and Seek With Airfare Taxes
The fossil fuel shale extraction industry, where technological advancements and discoveries of huge reserves of oil and natural gas hold great promise for the nation’s future energy needs, is under attack. In June the New York Times ran a dubiously sourced series of stories that sought to show the bullishness on natural gas is overblown. The National Legal and Policy Center exposed how reporter Ian Urbina seemed to rely heavily on a Texas-based shale gas critic for his stories ( others just called it “shoddy reporting”), and asked the Times ‘ ombudsman Arthur Brisbane to address the stories’ credibility. He did , writing , “My view is that such a pointed article needed more convincing substantiation, more space for a reasoned explanation of the other side and more clarity about its focus.” Then there is the obsessed, Herb and Marion Sandler -funded ProPublica , which has published 120 stories almost entirely dedicated to alleged problems with the gas industry — mostly about hydraulic fracturing (called “fracking”), the process used to break open the shale to access the natural gas. Some environmentalists allege the practice harms drinking water, an unfounded claim. Former Rocky Mountain News columnist Dave Kopel discovered ProPublica reporter Abrahm Lustgarten’s prejudice in 2009. In an email , Wyoming groundwater regulator Mark Thiesse told Kopel, “I spent several hours on the phone and around a dozen follow up emails to try and help [Lustgarten] write a factual article. Unfortunately he seemed to have his own agenda.” ProPublica’s exuberance for attacking natural gas is highlighted in their music video titled, “The Fracking Song.” But media distortions are less of a problem than excessive government regulation and panic by environmental extremists. Earthjustice, amidst hysteria over fracking and other normal activities that have been safely employed to access gas, recites from Reuters : “A widening shale gas revolution is killing the economics of renewable energy, even as falling costs allow wind and solar to overtake fossil fuels in niche areas.” They think this is bad and ignore the facts that wind and solar costs are artificially “low” (but still not low enough) thanks to taxpayer subsidies. Tired of the beating, members of the oil and gas industry last week issued a report about the promising future of energy in the U.S. — if government and Earth perfectionists don’t successfully impede. The Western Energy Alliance’s ” Blueprint for Western Energy Prosperity ” cites projections by respected analysts ICF International , which assert: • “The West is projected to generate 1.3 million barrels of domestic oil and condensate production a day by the year 2020, an amount that exceeds the current daily oil imports from Russia, Iraq and Kuwait combined.” • “The West has the potential to produce 6.2 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas annually by 2020, an additional one Tcf from 2010 levels.” • “Combined, western oil and natural gas is projected to produce more energy on a daily basis than the total U.S. imports from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Venezuela, Colombia, Algeria, Nigeria, and Russia.” • “The number of direct, indirect and induced jobs in the oil and natural gas sector is projected to increase by 16 percent to 504,120 by 2020.” Impressive, but there are many hitches and glitches — namely, litigation-happy environmental groups who thwart affordable fossil fuel energy that actually works, while instead promoting inefficient, expensive wind ( dirty and unconstitutional , as revealed by my organization, American Tradition Institute) and solar ( also unconstitutional , in certain states). Worse, EPA and other government agencies often go along with the extremist groups and invite litigation, and then (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) “settle” their “dispute” at the expense of taxpayers . As solutions, the WEA Blueprint recommends comprehensive reform of federal leasing, permitting and environmental analysis processes. The group also calls for a moratorium on any new or expanded regulations, in favor of “a more efficient, predictable means than the current and ever expanding maze of haphazard federal regulation.” And they also seek relief from unreasonable litigation that only seeks to obstruct and delay, rather than constructively and cooperatively seek best solutions to protect people and the environment they live in. WEA also seeks for states to amend their renewable energy standards to allow natural gas to compete to provide electricity on “fuel-neutral performance criteria” such as cost and emissions. I mildly disagree as the renewables mandates are anti-freedom, anti-consumer, extremely costly and as I mentioned earlier, unconstitutional . Open the electricity market to true competition for power generation and gas will do just fine. It’s not a coincidence the unemployment rate in North Dakota is 3.2 percent, where most land is privately owned and the Bakken formation is producing oil, gas and jobs. Private equals liberty, and less meddling by government and outsiders, so there is where the energy and work flows more freely. (Author disclosure: I spoke at the annual meeting of the Western Energy Alliance in Beaver Creek, Colo. in June. The group paid for one-night’s hotel stay and gave me (and all attendees) a golf shirt and a nice pen and pencil set (which all speakers received), while my organization, American Tradition Institute, paid for the rest of my travel expenses. There was no honorarium.)
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Inhibiting an Oil and Gas Boom
ABC News : Syria today declared today that foreign diplomats must seek approval to travel outside Damascus. The move comes after the U.S. and French ambassadors’ recent travel to the restive city of Hama ahead of major planned protests. The Associated Press reports that Syria’s foreign minister warned if the U.S. and French envoys disobey the order then all diplomats will be banned for leaving the capital… U.S. officials say Ambassador Robert Ford has plans to travel again this week, but there’s no word yet on when he’ll go. An opposition group suggested last week that he would visit Deir Ezzor in the east last Friday but it didn’t happen. The visit to Hama was, as far as I can tell, the only good thing Ambassador Ford has done in his tenure — and, as I said last week , the sort of thing he should be doing regularly. Ford should disobey the FM and go ahead with his travel plans; if the regime follows through and keeps him in Damascus, he should be withdrawn. Then we can send Imad Moustapha and his staff at the Syrian embassy in Washington packing. That would make it harder for them to threaten anti-Assad activists in America, something that is seriously worrying the FBI . Any chance the administration will do this? This LA Times story , headlined “U.S. softens its criticism of Syria,” does not inspire optimism. Noting that the administration has backed off from Hillary Clinton’s statement that Assad has “lost legitimacy” (which we now know was unplanned ) — the Secretary of State has since slung some more nonsense about hopes that Assad might stop the violence and institute reforms — the LAT paints a picture of an administration that still can’t make up its mind: The change in tone reflects the continuing debate over whether Syria’s ruler is likely to survive the current turmoil, and how best to use the limited diplomatic tools available to pressure him. For now, a State Department official said, it’s unclear whether the administration will ramp up the rhetoric and officially call for Assad’s departure. “Whether we take it farther will depend on events on the ground,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities. “We need to think through carefully what we say.” Whoever is on the make-nice-with-Assad side of this internal debate should be ignored, and preferably cashiered. The problem, I would guess, is that advisers who fantasize about the efficacy of diplomatic engagement with tyrants are telling the President exactly what he wants to hear.
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Syria Threatens, The Obama Adminstration Dithers
PARIS — Not having stopped here other than for a change of planes in nearly a year, I was delighted by the invitation to try out British Air’s Open Skies, a boutique flight to Paris that leaves from New York or Washington with only 85 passengers. The kindness of my hosts came just at the right time, as Mr. Pleszczynski and I had been discussing the French Open — the Championnats Internationaux de France , as they have been known since 1925 — and a few other items on the radar screen concerning this dear and old country, eldest daughter of the Church presently embroiled in a couple of savage wars of peace in Africa and engaged in a soul-searching debate regarding the proper limits on the press with regard to the private lives of public officials. At the tournament, the only debates took place on this legendary site’s famous red clay, with most of the top players advancing through the first round yesterday and the day before, Sunday. The weather is perfect under the clear azure skies that my friends assure me have been the norm since the beginning of spring, turning even the gloomiest souls into dreamers, though raising concerns about drought. The stadium itself, designed like one of those classical French gardens that make you think the world is rational, is so agreeable and well-organized that visitors turn happy — and courteous — even as they approach the gates on the avenue Gordon-Bennett, named for the founder of the New York Herald , also the Paris paper of the same name (many streets in Paris’ western quarters are named after Americans). It is hard to imagine that Roland-Garros, named for an aviation pioneer and World War I ace, was in competition last year with other locations to continue hosting this classic event in the tennis universe. Of the other four tournaments in the tennis grand slam circuit, only the All-England, held at Wimbledon near London, has never considered moving: the Australian and U.S. championships have, by contrast, seen changes in their locations. These have been on balance happy moves. Although Flushing Meadows represented a sharp departure from Forest Hills with its classic handsome layout, its clay and grass courts, its class, you must allow, I suppose, that the huge season-ending event in U.S. tennis needs the space and the big-time environment its new digs provided. There were good reasons to move the Internationaux away from Paris’s west side to a proposed new sports complex in a northern suburb. There was space there for a state-of-the-art stadium and facilities that other sports could use, for training as well as competition. French educational authorities as well as private athletic clubs are willing and often quite dynamic, but when you talk to the individuals involved you usually hear a note of apology for the second and even third tier levels of French amateur and professional athletics, with the possible exception of solo sailing and fencing. If you build it they will learn, I suppose that was the argument. However, this is far from a sure thing, and the excellent athletes here (and on American basketball courts) who grew up in makeshift sports programs in eastern and central Europe underscore an observation someone made on the plane, money does not make champions, coaches and teachers do. Not to get romantic about this, and I am sure good facilities cannot hurt, other things being equal, but anyway the French tennis federation opted to keep the tournament at its location near the Porte d’Auteuil, which is just at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in a neighborhood of sports stadiums, including the famous Parc des Princes football field, where the Lille club played an important game last Saturday, necessitating a major mobilization of gendarmes in full riot gear in anticipation of post-game fan exuberance, which fortunately stayed rational, as these things go, possibly because sufficient minds were concentrated by the highly visible police presence. The expansion and redesign of Roland-Garros, scheduled for completion in 2016, calls for using nearby space to lay out some additional courts for both competitive play and training programs. A retractable roof will be fitted over the center court, whose bleachers already seats as many, about 10,000, as other major tennis stadiums. It is a risky gamble to change the character of a tradition-bound sport in a radical way, and this includes the environment in which it is identified. With all due respect for the capital’s northern suburbs, they are not the venerable and expensive old west side with its wooded areas and tracks-and-field and vast elegant sun-lit apartments in handsome old seven-story buildings. There would not be the old racetrack across the street with its fin-de-siècle architectural motifs. There would not be the nostalgic small poets’ garden tucked away next door to the tennis stadium where children play and old men read verses inscribed on stones. It made sense in every way to build on what they already had. Roland-Garros has been improved upon several times since its original design, done in great haste to allow the famous Four Musketeers of French tennis to defend their Davis Cup against the revenge-seeking Americans, at the time still led by the legendary Bill Tilden, who remains a contender in the perennial game of “greatest of all time.” This was back in 1928, and they (I mean the Mousquetaires) , won behind their own legendary champion, the crafty René Lacoste, known as the crocodile for the way he moved. Some tennis powers, as well as municipal bigs and ordinary citizens, question whether the proposed innovations can be successfully completed and worry about their cost, but those questions could be raised about a new venue as well. ME PERSONALLY, I WAS DELIGHTED for the innovation in my travel habits provided by my Open Skies hosts. Lately I have been traveling in African army cargo planes and broken down trucks, so the opportunity to see how the other half gets from A to B was welcome. Let me tell you, if you are an athlete — and I am, I say this purely as an objective fact not as a boast, the leading over-the-hill tennis player on Washington’s entire east side, which means I can beat Mr. Tyrrell, especially if we play after discussing critical questions relating to Republican Party politics over a few martinis — traveling on Open Skies is the ticket. They keep you in perfect comfort and get you on and off the plane and into Paris in record time. I have never spent less time getting out of an airplane and to my final destination, not that I am always sure what that is. They have the good sense to fly into Orly airport on the city’s southern outskirts and scarcely a quarter hour to the river, whereas the appalling Charles-de-Gaulle wasteland is way over in some distant zone to the northeast from which you cannot reach Paris in less than an hour. The seats are fantastic. Of course, my standard of recent comparison is benches in a Tupolev flying over an African desert (superb American-trained pilot, soldiers and their families, some with barnyard animals, but hey, I have also been in steerage). Seriously, this is the way to go. You can stretch your legs, you can have a drink — or several — you can read, you can speak to an elegant stewardess in any language you want, you can quote either Shakespeare or Corneille and she gets it, you can eat, you can not eat, you lean over and discuss restaurants and museums and sporting news with a fellow passenger who turns out to know more than you do instead of talking for eight hours about currencies and tips, or you can stay by yourself and enjoy the magic of moving through the clouds. How blessed we are! How foolish to let our human sins undermine all the wonderful gifts our God-given brains have made for us! Why cannot the Arabs get their acts together? Hah? I ask you. Not a single Arab competitor in high-level tennis. Well, the Russians have got there, several of them, at least among the women, have a clear shot at reaching the final next week, and look where they were just a few years ago. Freedom will out, my friends, and tennis is the index of its progress. After all — look at Rafael Nadal. This child of the New Democratic Spain — admittedly wracked by unseemly disturbances over the weekend, which threaten to cause real trouble down the road — this young man (24) from the Balearic Islands, was inconceivable during the years of the dictatorship. They had great players in Manuel Santana and Andres Gimeno, but not the explosion of talent across all fields, not just sports, which he epitomizes. I admit I am of those who sometimes asks whether Don Francisco got a bad rap, or at least an exaggerated rap, and whether the new Spain gets too wide a berth from American Deweyites (“the solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy”), but freedom, freedom — it is their country, let them deal with it. In the meantime, they have produced some fantastically good tennis players. One of whom is David Ferrer, who advanced easily to the second round. Rafa Nadal will try to equal the mighty Bjorn Borg’s record six victories here. The unexpected is always possible, but the man who may stop him is likely to be either Roger Federer or Novak Djokovic, who are in the same bracket and therefore will meet but for an upset. They both started out easily yesterday with straight set victories, although Feliciano Lopez forced Federer to a tie-break in the third. The only surprise on the men’s side, actually, was the comeback from two sets down by a 31-year old French qualifier, Stéphane Robert, over the Czech Thomas Berdych in a thriller whose final set (where there is no tie-break) went to 9-7. The Americans are not shining, with the graceful and fierce Williams sisters out of the running due to health problems and our teenage star Melanie Oudin already overwhelmed by the defending champion Francesca Schiavone. The men are represented by an attractive but weak field relative to what we usually send here, Isner, Querrey, Fish. The French have Gasquet and Monfils, maybe Simon, Tsonga, Bennetteau, while their Michael Llorda is already out. Perhaps the countries that sent the finest players of their time to Roland-Garros in its infancy, will be doing so again when all the renovations are finished in about four years’ time. It will be a gorgeous stadium then. But then it always was.
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We’ll Always Have Tennis — in Paris
This past Tuesday, two people were executed in front of a hotel in the Golden Zone in Mazatlan, a touristed area. As it happens, the Patterico clan was in Mazatlan that day. I swear I had nothing to do with it. Nor did I have anything to do with the headless body tossed in front of a restaurant the same day. The story of the double murder at the hotel barely merited a couple of lines in the Associated Press : Farther north, in the Pacific coast resort of Mazatlan, two men were shot to death in the parking lot of a hotel frequented by foreign tourists. Neither of the victims were tourists, but guests reported hearing the gunshots. A travel site adds these details : Also, a travel agent told TravelPulse.com he received an email from a client on the Norwegian Star who said other passengers in the vicinity reported hearing about 40 shots being fired. That was our cruise ship, and there was indeed a lot of talk about it, although it was mostly in the form of fourth-hand rumors that botched the details, as you would expect. As for us, we hadn’t gone into town, as we had opted for a boat ride around some estuaries that would keep us out of the town. I sort of wanted to see the cathedral afterwards, but I was the only one — and with all the previous reports of muggings and such in the city, I didn’t force the issue. I’m now glad I didn’t. As for the headless body, well, that didn’t even merit a single mention in any English-language Big Media source I could find. It took an exploration of Mexican newspapers to learn about the beheaded body. . . and the head, in a separate bag . . . and the body of the pig : Una persona fue decapitada y su cuerpo dejado en el acceso principal de un restaurante en la zona Dorada, en la cual se encuentran la mayoría de los hoteles, restaurantes y discotecas turísticas del puerto de Mazatlán. Junto al cuerpo que estaba envuelto en una bolsa de plástico negro, estaba la cabeza en otra bolsa negra. A menos dos metros dejaron un puerco muerto, al cual le dispararon en la cabeza los sicarios. El reporte de la Policía Municipal señala que la víctima no ha sido identificada, aunque autoridades presumieron que se trata de una persona secuestrada. El restaurante de la zona dorada, donde dejaron el cuerpo es El Habaleño, el cual a la hora en que dejaron el cuerpo decapitado y el cerdo, ya estaba cerrado. En este inmueble también ejecutaron a dos personas identificadas como Guadalupe Núñez el domingo pasado por la tarde. I include the Spanish for the benefit of readers who can read it, as I have no reliable translation. A horrible Google translation is available here , but I would ignore that. I’ll do my best at a rough translation, and then you smarty-pantses who know better can correct me: A person was decapitated and his corpse was left in the main entrance of a restaurant in the Golden Zone, where the majority of the hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs of the port of Mazatlan can be found. With the corpse, which was wrapped in a black plastic bag, was the head in a separate black bag. Less than two meters away the killers left a dead pig, which they had shot in the head. The report of the Municipal Police indicated that the victim had not been identified, although authorities presumed that it was a kidnapping victim. The Golden Zone restaurant where the body was dumped is El Habaleño, which was already closed at the time that the decapitated corpse and the pig were left. The previous Sunday afternoon, at the same location, two people were executed who went by the name of Guadalupe Núñez. Another story here (horrible Google translation here ) adds the charming detail that the killers, after dumping the headless body, carjacked a woman in a Lincoln to make their getaway. Again, the headless body dump and the double murder all occurred Tuesday, oddly enough, the same day we were there. I suppose the silence in English-language papers about the beheaded body in Mazatlan is no surprise. After all, in the very same AP story I quote above, it was reported that police had found seven hacked and mutilated corpses in the seaside tourist town of Acapulco the very same day. Three were found “dumped in a highway tunnel that leads into Acapulco’s tourist zone” with pieces of the bodies missing. Three more “bullet-ridden bodies” were found in the streets, and police “discovered a fourth body half-buried and lacking its head.” Heck, even that wasn’t the lede of the story, which was primarily concerned with the discovery of a rural camp suspected to be operated by one of the cartels, containing “72 sticks of commercial synthetic explosives . . . 14 rifles, eight grenades,” and “more than 4,000 bullets.” So I guess a single headless body with accompanying head is no big deal. Except that it is. Because the violence continues, even after we tourists depart. And it has ripple effects. The day after we left, gunmen sprayed a different tourist restaurant in Mazatlan with gunfire. That restaurant and three namesake restaurants were all closed. (Story here , horrible translation here .) Although none of the victims of these crimes were tourists, the cruise lines have had enough . After the double murder, Carnival Cruise Lines immediately canceled a planned stop in Mazatlan, and Norwegian Cruise Lines canceled its Mazatlan stop for the season. And that was, ostensibly, only because of the murders at the hotel. Never mind the headless body or the restaurant shooting the next day. This means that the nice fellow with the easy sense of humor who ran our little boat outing in the estuaries is going to have a much harder time finding guests for his excursion, with fewer cruise ships coming into town. And he, his son, and the other good people of this little city will continue to live in an atmosphere of increasing and constant violence. And all this is a picnic compared to Juarez. Mexico is a great place, huh?
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Headless Body Dumped in Front of Restaurant in Mazatlan; Patterico Denies Responsibility
