While the cool kids have been playing with windmills and solar arrays, the adults have been changing the nation’s energy equation.

NPR

…Two years ago, America was importing about two thirds of its oil. Today, according to the Energy Information Administration, it imports less than half. And by 2017, investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts the US could be poised to pass Saudi Arabia and overtake Russia as the world’s largest oil producer.

Places like Williston are the reason why.

“For many years, they knew that there was oil in that area, but the technology wasn’t available to get it out,” the town’s mayor, Ward Koeser, tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

But in the last few years, advances in such technologies as “fracking” and horizontal drilling have made, by some estimates, as much as 11 billion barrels of oil available in the Bakken formation under North Dakota and Montana.

“There’s oil companies coming from all over the country now.” Koeser says.

Williston has skipped the recession entirely. Unemployment there is less than 2 percent. The population, the mayor estimates, has grown from 12,000 to 20,000 in the last four years.

“We actually have probably between 2,000 and 3,000 job openings in Williston right now,” Koeser says.

Oil workers like Jake Featheringill are fueling Williston’s population growth. He’s working as a shophand for Baker Hughes, making enough to support his wife and three children. But with such a sudden population increase, Williston’s infrastructure can’t keep up.

“When we came up here, we were told housing was tough but not impossible,” Featheringill says. He and his wife got lucky and borrowed an RV from a family friend. “We got lucky again and got to park the RV in a place where we were rent-free. Most of the RV spots around here run $1,000 to $1,200.”

That’s $1,000 a month, just for a parking space. “Is that not amazing?” Featheringill says. “And that’s in a 70-mile radius. Just to park your RV.”

‘Boom-Town Syndrome’

“It’s the old boom-town syndrome,” says Charles Groat says, professor of energy and mineral resources at the University of Texas in Austin.

A small town like Williston, he says, can be burdened by a sudden oil boom.

Ben Shaw hangs from an oil derrick outside Williston, ND, in July 2011. Williston’s mayor, Ward Koeser, estimates that the town has between 2,000 and 3,000 job openings for oil workers.

“All the workers. And then you have roads and trucks and pipelines. And then you have all the community services that have to be provided — law enforcement, education. So it turns into a real bonanza in terms of income, but it becomes an environmental effect that people aren’t used to experiencing.”

In Williston, many workers forgo prices as high as $2,000 a month to rent a small apartment and instead live in “man camps,” massive group-housing provided by their companies.

“Just a little room with a bed and a TV,” Mayor Ward Koeser explains. “And then they have recreation areas.”

The boom in Williston, Charles Groat says, is happening in spots across America. New drilling technology is also fueling boom towns in Texas, Louisiana, and Colorado. New drilling technologies mean companies can extract oil and natural gas from shale rock that was previously thought unreachable.

“Horizontal drilling — accessing a huge area of reservoir — and then the fracking process, which props opens those cracks, and allows the liquid or gas to flow to the well,” Groat says. “That’s what’s made shale gas and shale oil such a viable resource.” (more…)

Washington Post

Anwar al-Aulaqi, a radical U.S.-born Muslim cleric and one of the most influential al-Qaeda leaders wanted by the United States, was killed Friday in a U.S. drone strike in northern Yemen, Yemeni and American authorities said, eliminating a prominent terrorist recruiter who inspired attacks on U.S. soil.

Tried, convicted, executed. Whoops, forget the first two.

Where are the noisy protests about due process and his civil liberties? Maybe Obama has a secret plan to close Gitmo by releasing all prisoners, then shooting them dead on their home turf.

Glen Greenwald, normally incoherent, at least calls out his fellow lefties.

What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process.

Remember all that?  Yet now, here’s Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President — even Barack Obama — vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process.

Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration’s radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight? So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this:  how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?

…real energy development — natural gas and oil — is booming on its own, at least where the feds can’t stifle progress.

Lucian Pugliaresi

In response to a 2009 request from Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, the National Petroleum Council (NPC) reported earlier this month that oil production in North America could double by 2035—to 20 million barrels per day.

Where can all this oil come from? For one, the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) technique used in shale gas production is now being applied to extract oil. The vast oil reserves in Canada’s Alberta Province are increasingly being tapped. There is more oil to be had with greater access to federal lands in Alaska and the western U.S., and accelerated drilling in the deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

But to realize the enormous potential outlined in the NPC report, we need to understand how the policies of the federal government act as a serious brake on access to the reserves and the exploitation of new technologies to tap them.

The shale gas revolution started in Texas, migrated quickly to Arkansas, Oklahoma, Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania and then leaped to North Dakota—where the technology for producing shale gas was applied to oil development. Even New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, no longer wishing to miss out on the economic opportunity for his state, has pulled back from his state’s comprehensive ban on hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling for shale gas.

What do these states all have in common besides interesting geology? Their federal land holdings are extremely small and mineral rights are in private hands.

Thus landowners were not prohibited from coming to terms with oil and gas companies, providing immediate opportunities to test new drilling technologies. Knowledge gained in one region could move quickly to another. Regulatory and environmental reviews were largely the responsibilities of state and local governments, and disagreements could often be resolved at the local level.

Contrast the shale gas revolution to oil and gas development on the vast lands owned by the federal government. There access to reserves is burdened by endless federal environmental reviews, congressional oversight, permitting delays and bureaucrats who insist that oil and gas resources do not exist in areas of interest to oil and gas companies.

Shell Oil, the winning bidder on a federal lease sale in Alaska, has spent over four years and billions of dollars and is only now getting the final permits to proceed with exploratory drilling in the Arctic Ocean’s Beaufort Sea. Further court challenges remain likely…

More government meddling, supposedly to help the little guy, instead screws the little guy. Who’d a thunk it?

Todd Zywicki

This Saturday, government price controls on debit card interchange fees (which card issuers charge to merchants) go into effect. The controls are the result of the Durbin amendment to last year’s Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. They were enacted at the behest of big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Walgreen’s, which stand to gain a multimillion-dollar windfall. But the controls are already transforming the retail banking landscape.

The Durbin amendment tasked the Federal Reserve with establishing the allowable maximum interchange fees. It originally intended to slash them by 70%-80%. In response to a firestorm of criticism, the Fed cut the fees about in half, to about 24 cents per transaction from an average of 44 cents per transaction, including a one-penny allowance for fraud prevention. The new fee limits apply to any bank with more than $10 billion in assets.

Faced with a dramatic cut in revenues (estimated to be $6.6 billion by Javelin Strategy & Research, a global financial services consultancy), banks have already imposed new monthly maintenance fees—usually from $36 to $60 per year—on standard checking and debit-card accounts, as well as new or higher fees on particular bank services. While wealthier consumers have avoided many of these new fees—for example, by maintaining a sufficiently high minimum balance—a Bankrate survey released this week reported that only 45% of traditional checking accounts are free, down from 75% in two years.

Some consumers who previously banked for free will be unable or unwilling to pay these fees merely for the privilege of a bank account. As many as one million individuals will drop out of the mainstream banking system and turn to check cashers, pawn shops and high-fee prepaid cards, according to an estimate earlier this year by economists David Evans, Robert Litan and Richard Schmalensee. (Their study was supported by banks.)

Consumers will also be encouraged to shift from debit cards to more profitable alternatives such as credit cards, which remain outside the Durbin amendment’s price controls. According to news reports, Bank of America has made a concerted effort to shift customers from debit to credit cards, including plans to charge a $5 monthly fee for debit-card purchases. Citibank has increased its direct mail efforts to recruit new credit card customers frustrated by the increased cost and decreased benefits of debit cards…

To understand “green jobs” just follow the money.

…DOE announced a $737 million loan guarantee to help finance construction of the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, a 110-megawatt solar-power-generating facility in Nye County, Nev. The project is sponsored by Tonopah Solar, a subsidiary of California-based SolarReserve.

The Energy Department said the project will result in 600 construction jobs and 45 permanent jobs.

“If we want to be a player in the global clean energy race, we must continue to invest in innovative technologies that enable commercial-scale deployment of clean, renewable power like solar,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a news release. “Solar generation facilities, like the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, help supply energy to local utilities and create hundreds of good, American clean energy jobs.”

That comes out to $16 million per job.

Whatever else these green-tech loans are, they certainly are not job-creation stimulus.

But that’s not the best part.  As both Gateway Pundit and American Glob discover, one of SolarReserve’s “investment partners” is Pacific Corporate Group, through its Clean Energy and Technology Fund.  And PCG’s executive director is Ron Pelosi — brother of Nancy Pelosi’s husband.  Suddenly, this deal makes a lot more sense than spending $737 million for forty-five jobs.

Oh, the humanity!

Falling Whistles [an activist group] pasted over the mural with images of the faces of hundreds of people from Los Angeles and the Democratic Republic of Congo — part of an effort to raise awareness of the conflict in the African nation.

The destruction of the mural sparked anger among graffiti writers and other artists who bombarded the nonprofit’s director with social media messages Wednesday.

Gotta love it when graffiti punks bitch about destruction of property.

Burp!

A former model, convicted nearly two decades ago of killing her husband and then cooking and eating parts of his body, has long claimed she was the victim of domestic violence that pushed her over the end.

Omaima Aree Nelson is seeking early release from her 27-years-to-life sentence for murdering William E. Nelson, 56, over Thanksgiving weekend in 1991.

According to prosecutors, Nelson was the first defendant to used the “battered wife” defense in Orange County, claiming her husband raped her the night before she killed him.

Daniel Henninger reminds us that Herman Cain has quite a record of accomplishment.

It’s curious that he isn’t regarded as serious candidate when Obama, with resume, was.

You hear the same thing said about Herman Cain all the time: Herman Cain has some really interesting ideas, but . . .

I love Herman Cain, but . . .

But what?

But he can’t win.

Why not?

At best, the answer has to do with that cloudy word “electability.” Or that Mr. Cain has never held elected political office.

In 2004, Mr. Cain ran for the GOP’s U.S. Senate nomination in Georgia. He lost to Johnny Isakson. Last weekend, Mr. Cain ran away with the Florida straw poll vote, winning with 37%. He torched both the “Southern” candidate, Rick Perry of Texas, who worked hard to win the vote, and Mitt Romney, who in 2008 campaigned everywhere in Florida.

The time is overdue to plumb the mystery of Herman Cain’s “interesting, but” candidacy. Let’s start at the top—in the top-tier candidacy of Mitt Romney.

Though he’s got the governorship credential, Mr. Romney’s emphasis in this campaign is on his private-sector experience. It’s good, despite the knock on Bain Capital’s business model. But measured by résumés, Herman Cain’s looks deeper in terms of working on the private sector’s front lines.

The details of his career path are worth knowing.

Steve Moore on Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan and his odds of winning.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Cain was recruited from Coca-Cola in Atlanta, his first job in business, to work for Pillsbury in Minneapolis. His rise was rapid and well-regarded. He joined the company’s restaurant and foods group in 1978 as director of business analysis. In the early 1980s, Pillsbury sent him to learn the hamburger business at a Burger King in Hopkins, Minn. Then they assigned him, at age 36, to revive Pillsbury’s stumbling, franchise Burger King business in the Philadelphia region. He succeeded. According to a 1987 account in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Pillsbury’s then-president Win Wallin said: “He was an excellent bet. Herman always seemed to have his act together.”

In 1986, Pillsbury sent the 41-year-old Mr. Cain to turn around their Godfather’s Pizza business, headquartered in Omaha. The Herman Cain who arrived there April 1 sounded like the same man who roused voters last Sunday in Florida: “I’m Herman Cain and this ain’t no April Fool’s joke. We are not dead. Our objective is to prove to Pillsbury and everyone else that we will survive.”

Pillsbury sold Godfather’s to Mr. Cain and some of his managers in 1988. He ran it until 1996 and served as CEO of the National Restaurant Association from 1996-1999. This June, Mr. Cain visited with the Journal’s editors and put the issue of health-insurance availability inside the context of the restaurant industry. He said (more…)

I missed this article by John Tierney when it ran last month. It’s worth a read.

Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one:

Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.

Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing, as researchers discovered by analyzing more than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges, who would hear the prisoners’ appeals and then get advice from the other members of the board, approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day. Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.

The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the other Arab Israeli prisoner was serving the same sentence for the same crime — fraud — the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 in the afternoon. He was denied parole, as was the Jewish Israeli prisoner at 3:10 p.m, whose sentence was shorter than that of the man who was released. They were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.

There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. The judges’ erratic judgment was due to the occupational hazard of being, as George W. Bush once put it, “the decider.” The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time…

Read it tall.

Ted Leonsis

I have great empathy for middle class or lower middle class America. My horizons as a young adult were not expansive. I was programmed to be a produce department manager at a grocery store in my neighborhood. That was my dad’s aspiration for me. I would have been proud to work hard to become a leader in a grocery store and I bet I would have been good at it, too. By luck and hard work, my career took a different path.

I say this as I read all of the rhetoric about Class Warfare, the rift that is being created between economic middle and lower class and as the President said “those millionaires and billionaires.”

The real rift in philosophy though is do you want the Government to create jobs and stimulate the economy or do you want America’s small business to be the engine of growth?

Economic Success has somehow become the new boogie man; some in the Democratic party are now casting about for enemies and business leaders and anyone who has achieved success in terms of rank or fiscal success is being cast as a bad guy in a black hat. This is counter to the American Dream and is really turning off so many people that love American and basically carry our country on their back by paying taxes and by employing people and creating GDP.

This is a bad move all designed by some pollster who said this is the way to get votes during the re-election. It should be stopped. We should be healing and creating teams NOT dividing and pitting people against one another.

I know the President isn’t speaking to me specifically when he talks but many times I hear stuff and I cringe personally. As a friend told me the other day who lives in China, “Every time your President talks of late, it costs us billions in market cap and in confidence in your country and your economy.” Why do we devalue success in the US when the rest of the world is trying to emulate what we have created as an economic system?

Why indeed?

More solar dollars.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the department has completed a $737-million loan guarantee to Tonopah Solar Energy for a 110-megawatt solar tower on federal land near Tonopah, Nev., and a $337-million guarantee for Mesquite Solar 1 to develop a 150-megawatt solar plant near Phoenix…

SolarReserve LLC of Santa Monica, the parent company for Tonopah, is privately held. The Energy Department said its rules prevented it from discussing the company’s financial information. Sempra Energy of San Diego, which owns Mesquite, is publicly held.

So $737 million of public money is being loaned, but we don’t get to know the financial details?

Why does the Energy Department have “rules” forbidding public disclosure?

Whew.

Remember the big stink raised by the fulminating left when Dick Cheney convened a panel of experts to help craft his energy policy? They demanded to know who and when, blah blah blah, when it was clearly none of their business.

These solar deals are clearly public business, but the details are kept secret.

The loony left burps up another gem.

Janeane Garofalo: “Herman Cain is probably well liked by some of the Republicans because it hides the racist elements of the Republican party. Conservative movement and tea party movement, one in the same.

“People like Karl Rove liked to keep the racism very covert. And so Herman Cain provides this great opportunity say you can say ‘Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look we have a black man.’”

Herman Cain has another view:

The one African-American running for the GOP presidential nomination said Wednesday the black community was ‘brainwashed’ for traditionally siding with liberal politicians.

“African-Americans have been brainwashed into not being open minded, not even considering a conservative point of view,” Godfather’s Pizza executive Herman Cain said on CNN’s “The Situation Room” in an interview airing Wednesday between 5-7 p.m. ET. “I have received some of that same vitriol simply because I am running for the Republican nomination as a conservative. So it’s just brainwashing and people not being open minded, pure and simple.”

Nicholas Bakalar in the NYT:

In developed countries, getting glasses is a simple matter: Visit an optometrist, get a prescription and have it filled at a corner store. Not so in the developing world, where there are few optometrists and little money for luxuries like eyeglasses.

Enter Joshua Silver, an atomic physicist at Oxford with a penchant for tinkering. “I like to experiment,” he said. “Take things apart and figure out how they work.”

In the 1980s, he began a do-it-yourself project making lenses whose focusing power could be changed by the user. He designed and built a liquid-filled packet made of two flexible transparent membranes — a liquid lens. Adding or draining liquid changes the curvature, making the lens stronger or weaker.

“I realized after a few months that I could make a very good lens — good optically, but not for glasses,” Dr. Silver said. “I started some dialogue with the World Health Organization and found the director of the program for the prevention of blindness. I asked him how many people in the world needed glasses and don’t have them. He said it was about a billion.”

Working with a British government grant, Dr. Silver developed a practical pair of adjustable eyeglasses. The two lenses are filled with clear silicone fluid, and there is a dial on each arm. The user puts on the glasses and then twists each dial until vision in both eyes is satisfactory.

The glasses do not correct for astigmatism, Dr. Silver said. “Many people, if you just correct their spherical refractive error, you get vision good enough to function.”

The glasses are not beautiful. The thick frames resemble those worn by Jean-Paul Sartre. But the dial and pump can be removed after adjustment. More than 30,000 pairs are in use by adults worldwide, and a study financed by the World Bank is testing a version for use by teenagers.

Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post:

President Obama is campaigning for reelection by casting Republicans as the party of the rich because they oppose his plan to raise tax rates on wealthy Americans. “If you’ve done well,” Obama declared in Cincinnati last week, “then you should do a little something to give something back.”

One person who agrees with that sentiment is Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee — though not in the way Obama means it. Ryan wants the wealthy to give something back: the billions of dollars in government benefits, taxpayer subsidies and corporate welfare they receive each year and do not need. Instead of raising taxes, which would hurt growth and job creation, Ryan told me: “We want to stop subsidizing corporations. We want to stop subsidizing [wealthy] individuals. And you can get more money for savings to reduce the deficit without damaging the economy this way.”

Call it “soak the rich” economics, GOP-style.

What government spending on the wealthy would Ryan target? “Everything,” he says. He would start with entitlements. The two biggest and fastest-growing areas of federal spending are Social Security and Medicare, both of which provide the richest Americans with growing benefits. To help stabilize both programs, Ryan wants to scale back those benefits for the wealthy. On Social Security, he says, “you can get the bulk of your way to solvency without tax increases by indexing benefits so that they don’t grow as fast for wealthier people.” As for Medicare, his reform plan would provide wealthier seniors with lower subsidies, while “focusing the benefits on the people who need it and away from those who need it the least.”

Ryan is not alone in his call for means-testing entitlements. Means-testing has the strong support of House Speaker John Boehner, who earlier this year told Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson at a forum in New York, “Pete, I love you to death, but I don’t think the taxpayers ought to be paying your Medicare premium.” The two leading GOP presidential candidates, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, have also expressed support for means-testing. In May the Heritage Foundation put forward a plan that would reduce Social Security and Medicare benefits for well-off retirees and eliminate them entirely for the wealthiest seniors.

Some Republicans would apply means-testing to other government programs, such as unemployment benefits. Sen. Tom Coburn says that some 2,804households that reported incomes of $1 million or more on their tax returns were paid a total of $18.6 million in unemployment benefits in 2008 — including more than 800 individuals earning between $2 million and $10 million. “Why should someone struggling to make ends meet . . . pay into a system that provides benefits to someone not working, yet earning millions of dollars a year?” he asks.

Ryan would also institute means-testing for the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant Program — a program that provides Washington residents with grants of up to $50,000 to make up the difference between in-state and out of-state college tuition. The program is currently available to individuals with annual family incomes of up to $1 million. Ryan would eliminate grants for the wealthy and use the savings to fund the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships for poor District children to attend private or parochial schools…

HT: Susan Gertson

Social Security Reform Bill Encourages Americans To Live Faster, Die Younger

This goes hand in hand with my solution to the Medicare crisis.

Advance to 1:45 for the hilarity.

by Burt Prelutsky

I know that there are tickertapes that constantly keep investors abreast of the stock market. I therefore have to assume that there are similar devices used to keep kneejerk liberals up to the minute on talking points. Otherwise, how would they all know to dismiss the earthshaking results of the special election in New York’s 9th congressional district as a referendum on Obama and, instead, insist it was all about local issues?

Oddly enough, when earlier this year, Democrat Kathleen Hochul defeated Republican candidate Jane Corwin in a special election in New York’s 26th congressional district, Obama and his crew hailed it as proof that America was infatuated with ObamaCare. The fact that Hochul won with a mere 47% of the vote because Jack Davis, a lifelong Democrat, intentionally confused the electorate by running as the Tea Party candidate and siphoning off nine percent of the votes, was ignored by the mass media.

I understand that the Democrats have good reason to regard American voters as a bunch of ignorant mugs. After all, in 2008, 53% of us elected a Socialist pig-in-a-poke to the Oval Office. But when a congressional district that has a 3-1 Democratic advantage in registration, and is overwhelmingly Jewish, votes by a 54%-46% margin for a Republican Catholic over a Jewish liberal, “local issues” isn’t an explanation, it’s a punch line.

Inasmuch as no Republican has been elected in that district in about 90 years, it would seem to most people that some local issue or other would have tipped the scales long before 2011 rolled around. Of course it’s just possible that by “local issues,” the liberals are referring to 9.1% unemployment, 7% underemployment, ObamaCare, a $15 trillion dollar deficit and this administration’s anti-Israel bias. If that’s the case, the Democrats are very likely to discover in next year’s elections just how many other places in America regard them as local issues.

If liberals in the House and Senate persist in promoting Obama’s abominable policies, I can assure them that in November, 2012, they will face an electorate that will be only too happy to help them pack up and return to civilian life.

For those current office holders not content to once again chase ambulances for a living, they might consider carving out careers teaching lemmings how to leap off cliffs and instructing Centurions on the proper way to fall on their swords.

A peek inside the mind of Team Obama, courtesy of Peter Orszag:

“During my recent stint in the Obama administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget, it was clear to me that the country’s political polarization was growing worse—harming Washington’s ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing. If you need confirmation of this, look no further than the recent debt-limit debacle, which clearly showed that we are becoming two nations governed by a single Congress—and that paralyzing gridlock is the result.

So what to do? To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.”

Then there was the Democrat governor of North Carolina suggesting that elections be suspended so that Congress could do the right thing.

Oh, those bitter clingers who insist on having their voices heard!

Putin doesn’t have to tolerate that crap, no sir.

Life would be so much simpler for Obama, if he could do like Putin.

• Hate billionaires? Don’t just tax ‘em, lock ‘em up and confiscate all their wealth.
• Term limits? Ha ha ha ha!
• Fed up with annoying journalists who don’t adore you? Outlaw them or see them mysteriously murdered.
• An opposition party delivers a shellacking? Give ‘em a whacking..
• Fundamentally transform your nation? Just Do It!
• Czars, czars and more czars.

If only Obama could macho up like Putin.

Oh, I wish I could be just like Putin,

With Vlad, there’s no debate nor disputin’.

What he says goes

Because everyone knows

Talk back too loud and there’ll be shootin’.

Before getting to the main points, it’s worth noting that crime rates are very low these days, even with the economy in the crapper.

The same was true during the Great Depression, Bonnie and Clyde notwithstanding.

Liberals have believed — and probably will always believe — that poverty causes crime.

Anyway…

Do you long for peace on earth and goodwill toward men? We’re as close as we’ve ever been.

Steven Pinker in the WSJ:

On the day this article appears, you will read about a shocking act of violence. Somewhere in the world there will be a terrorist bombing, a senseless murder, a bloody insurrection. It’s impossible to learn about these catastrophes without thinking, “What is the world coming to?”

But a better question may be, “How bad was the world in the past?”

Believe it or not, the world of the past was much worse. Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species.

The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth. It has not brought violence down to zero, and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.

This claim, I know, invites skepticism, incredulity, and sometimes anger. We tend to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which we can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. There will always be enough violent deaths to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from its actual likelihood.

Evidence of our bloody history is not hard to find. Consider the genocides in the Old Testament and the crucifixions in the New, the gory mutilations in Shakespeare’s tragedies and Grimm’s fairy tales, the British monarchs who beheaded their relatives and the American founders who dueled with their rivals.

Today the decline in these brutal practices can be quantified. A look at the numbers shows that over the course of our history, humankind has been blessed with six major declines of violence….

On the environmental front:

The Amazing Decline in Deaths from Extreme Weather in an Era of Global Warming, 1900–2010

Proponents of drastic curbs on greenhouse gas emissions claim that such emissions cause global warming and that this exacerbates the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including extreme heat, droughts, floods and storms such as hurricanes and cyclones. But what matters is not the incidence of extreme weather events per se but the impact of such events—especially the human impact. To that end, it is instructive to examine trends in global mortality (i.e. the number of people killed) and mortality rates (i.e. the proportion of people killed) associated with extreme weather events for the 111-year period from 1900 to 2010.

Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by more than 90% since the 1920s, in spite of a four-fold rise in population and much more complete reporting of such events. The aggregate mortality rate declined by 98%, largely due to decreased mortality in three main areas:

• Deaths and death rates from droughts, which were responsible for approximately 60% of cumulative deaths due to extreme weather events from 1900–2010, are more than 99.9% lower than in the 1920s.
• Deaths and death rates for floods, responsible for over 30% of cumulative extreme weather deaths, have declined by over 98% since the 1930s.
• Deaths and death rates for storms (i.e. hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, typhoons), responsible for around 7% of extreme weather deaths from 1900–2008, declined by more than 55% since the 1970s.

Here is Leonard Reed’s 1958 classic “biography” of a common pencil.

If Obama and his party of meddling know-it-alls understood Reed’s message, the nation would be in much better shape.

I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.^[1]

Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do.

You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, as a wise man observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”^[2]

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousnesswhich I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U. S. A. each year.

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye—there’s some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the (more…)

A UC Berkeley student group is stirring support and outrage nationwide over its planned bake sale Tuesday that is pricing items according to a buyer’s race, ethnicity and gender.

The satirical event — titled the Increase Diversity Bake Sale — is a reprise of similar cookie sales held on college campuses by Republican clubs over the years. It was scheduled to counter another student-led effort urging Gov. Jerry Brown to sign a bill to allow California’s public universities to consider race, ethnicity and gender in student admissions as long as no preference is given.

Leaders with the Berkeley College Republicans said their intent was to highlight the impropriety of basing decisions on race or gender. The sale, according to a posting on Facebook, will offer five pricing levels, with pastries described as “White/Caucasian” going for $2, “Asian/American American” for $1.50, “Latino/Hispanic” for $1, “Black/African American” for 75 cents, and “Native American” for a quarter. A 25-cent discount will be offered to women.

Ridicule social engineering? How gauche. How retro. How “racist.”

At the heart of the controversy is SB 185, which the student Senate unanimously endorsed earlier this month. Authored by state Sen. Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina), the bill would allow the UC and Cal State systems to consider — but not give preference to — applicants’ race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, geographic origin and household income — along with other relevant factors.

“Consider but not give preference to”? Wink wink.

California voters in 1996 approved Proposition 209, which forbids using ethnicity as an element of college admissions decisions. In a legal brief filed recently in support of a federal lawsuit seeking to deem the initiative unconstitutional, Brown cited a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found race could be considered in admissions if it did not involve quotas or predetermined weight in decisions.

The Supreme Court ruled on a Constitutional matter. California has its own specific law banning the practice.

Associated Students President Vishalli Loomba said that while debate over the merits of the legislation was welcome, “I think their tactics are inappropriate. There are a lot of other methods. This method makes students feel uncomfortable and unwelcome on campus.”

Oh, boo hoo. Unwelcome? That’s how campus conservatives feel.

Senator Susan Collins in the WSJ

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to a company that sells packaged walnuts. Believe it or not, the federal government claimed the walnuts were being marketed as a drug. So Washington ordered the company to stop telling consumers about the health benefits of walnuts.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new rule on fossil-fuel emissions from boilers that—by the EPA’s own admission—would cost the private sector billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. The owner of a small business in Maine told me the proposed rule would require him to scrap a new, $300,000 wood waste boiler he recently installed.

No wonder America’s employers dread what is coming next out of Washington. Our country cannot afford regulations run amok at a time when no net new jobs are created and unemployment remains above 9%. But at least we’re safe from health claims about walnuts.

America’s overregulation problem is only getting worse. Right now, federal agencies are at work on more than 4,200 rules, 845 of which affect small businesses, the engine of job creation in our country. More than 100 are major rules, with an economic impact of more than $100 million each.

No business owner I know questions the legitimate role of limited government in protecting our health and safety. Too often, however, our small businesses are buried under a mountain of paperwork that drives up costs, prevents the hiring of workers, and impedes economic growth.

Business owners are reluctant to create jobs today when they’re going to need to pay more tomorrow to comply with onerous new regulations. That’s what employers mean when they say that uncertainty generated by Washington is a big wet blanket on our economy.

I have asked employers in my state what it would take to help them add jobs. No matter their business or the size of their work force, they tell me that Washington must stop imposing crushing new regulations…

California does on a state level what Obama wants to do nationally– skew taxes to the rich. The upshot: a very volatile tax base.

George Skelton in the LA Times

If President Obama really wants to see the “Buffett Rule” in action, he should look at California’s tax system. The state has been plagued by it for years.

The revenue stream is unstable and the state budget has been a deficit disaster.

Soaking the rich — relying heavily on them for income taxes — has resulted in a precarious revenue roller coaster ride. It’s either boom or bust in Sacramento, depending on how the wealthy are faring in the stock market and their other investments.

Billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett’s rule is that he shouldn’t be paying a lower income tax rate than his secretary or any middle-class taxpayer.

“Legislators in Washington,” Buffett complained in a New York Times opinion piece last month, “feel compelled to protect us [mega-rich] much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species…. My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.”

With rhetorical flourish, Obama incorporated the Buffett Rule into the deficit-cutting plan he announced Monday, declaring that people earning more than $1million shouldn’t be allowed to pay a lower tax rate than middle-income families.

In California, we’ve got what you could call a Buffett Rule-Plus. There’s an extra tax bracket — at 10.3% — for income exceeding $1million.

According to the state finance department, families with adjusted gross incomes of between $1 million and $2 million, on average, paid an overall state tax rate of 8.4% in 2008, the last year for which data are available. The average rate rose as incomes did to 9.3% for those earning $5 million and up. (There were 3,757 of them.) (more…)

As is common these days, it’s the “progressives” carrying the pitchforks and the censor’s pens.

A professor has been censored twice, reported to the “threat assessment team,” and threatened with criminal charges because of satirical postings on his office door.

Campus police at the University of Wisconsin–Stout (UWS) censored theater professor James Miller’s poster depicting a quotation from actor Nathan Fillion’s character in the television series Firefly, and the police chief threatened Miller with criminal charges for disorderly conduct. After UWS censored his second poster, which stated, “Warning: Fascism,” Miller came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

“Colleges and universities are supposed to foster brave and bold environments of freewheeling intellectual inquiry and expression. If a quote from a network science fiction show is a bridge too far, something has gone seriously wrong,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “As both president of FIRE and a huge Firefly fan, I call on the chancellor of UW–Stout to rein in his overreaching administration and to restore both free speech and basic common sense.”

On September 12, 2011, Professor Miller posted on his office door an image of Nathan Fillion in Firefly and a line from an episode: “You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.” On September 16, UWS Chief of Police Lisa A. Walter emailed Miller, notifying him that she had removed the poster and that “it is unacceptable to have postings such as this that refer to killing.”

Lord knows what havoc a poster might unleash.

But then Shakespeare’s play are replete with killing, so they’d better ban him too.

Read the whole article — it gets even more absurd.

“60 Minutes” ran a story last night about NYC’s impressive anti-terror apparatus.

You can watch a preview of the segment here.

It’s high tech, expansive and expensive. It involves overseas agents, security cameras that monitor the streets, regular demonstrations of police force and much more.

Commissioner Ray Kelly tells CBS’ “60 Minutes” that after the Sept. 11 attacks, he decided the city couldn’t rely on the federal government alone. He set about creating the NYPD’s own counter-terrorism unit. He says the department is prepared for multiple scenarios and could even take down a plane.

Kelly didn’t divulge details but said “obviously this would be in a very extreme situation.”

Other measures include sending NYPD officers abroad, using radiation detectors and creating a network of surveillance cameras in Manhattan.

But as I watched I couldn’t help wonder:

• Who paid for all this?
• Where were the civil liberties/privacy rights activists in the story?
• Why is NYC allowed to do this when Arizona gets repudiated, and sued by the Feds, for trying to protect itself when it determines that it can’tt rely on the federal government

Morgan Freeman demonstrated once again why it’s best for actors to be scene and not heard by charging that the Tea Party hates Obama because he’s black.

“Stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term,” he said. “What … underlines that? Screw the country. We’re going to do whatever we do to get this black man … outta here.”

Freeman added: “It just shows the weak, dark, underside of America. We’re supposed to be better than that. We really are. That’s, that’s why all those people were in tears when Obama was elected president. ‘Ah, look at what we are. Look at how, this is America.’ You know? And then it just sort of started turning because these people surfaced like stirring up muddy water.”

Meanwhile, Florida GOP straw voters — many of them Tea Partiers — overwhelmingly chose Herman Cain as their choice for president.

Memo to Freeman: Herman Cain is black.

Mark Steyn:

It’s the end of the world as we know it,” sang the popular musical artistes R.E.M. many years ago. And it is. R.E.M. has announced that they’re splitting up after almost a third of a century. But these days who isn’t? The eurozone, the world’s first geriatric boy band, is on the verge of busting apart. Chimerica (Prof. Niall Ferguson’s amusing name for the Chinese-American economic partnership that started around the same time R.E.M. did) is going the way of Wham!, with Beijing figuring it’s the George Michael of the relationship and that it’s tired of wossname, the other fellow, who gets equal billing but doesn’t really do anything. The deeper problem may be that this is a double act with two wossnames.

Still, it’s the end of the world as we know it. Headline from CNBC: “Global Meltdown: Investors Are Dumping Nearly Everything.” I assumed “Nearly Everything” was the cute name of a bankrupt, worthless, planet-saving green-jobs start-up backed by Obama bundlers and funded with a gazillion dollars of stimulus payback. But apparently it’s “Nearly Everything” in the sense of the entire global economy. Headline from the Daily Telegraph of London: “David Cameron: Euro Debt ‘Threatens World Stability.’” But, if you’re not in the general vicinity of the world, you should be okay. Headline from the Wall Street Journal: “World Bank’s Zoellick: World In ‘Danger Zone.’” But, if you’re not in the general vicinity of . . . no, wait, I did that gag with the last headline.

I mentioned in this space a few weeks ago the IMF’s calculation that China will become the planet’s leading economic power by the year 2016. And I added that, if that proves correct, it means the fellow elected next November will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world’s dominant economy. I thought that line might catch on. After all, we’re always told that every election is the most critical consequential watershed election of all time, but this one actually would be: For the first time since Grover Cleveland’s first term, America would be electing a global also-ran. But there’s not a lot of sense of America’s looming date with destiny in these presidential debates. I don’t mean so much from the candidates as from their media interrogators — which is more revealing of where the meter on our political conversation is likely to be during the general election. On Thursday night, there was a question on gays in the military but none on the accelerating European debt crisis. It is certainly important to establish whether a would-be president is sufficiently non-homophobic to authorize a crack team of lesbian paratroopers to rappel into the Chinese treasury, break the safe, and burn all our IOUs. But the curious complacency about the bigger questions is disturbing…

Doing some catch up after a week of downtime.

I don’t know about you, but when I see Obama make that prissy gesture with his fingers, I have to suppress the urge to smash my TV.

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s not just millionaires who’d pay more under President Barack Obama’s latest plan to combat the deficit.

Air travelers, federal workers, military retirees, wealthier Medicare beneficiaries and people taking out new mortgages are among those who would pay more than $130 billion in government revenues raised through new or increased fees.

Airline passengers would see their federal security fees double from $5 to $10 for a nonstop round-trip flight and triple to $15 by 2017, raising $25 billion over the coming decade. Federal workers would face an additional 1.2 percentage point deduction from their paychecks to contribute $21 billion more for their pensions over the same period. Military retirees would pay a $200 fee upon turning 65 to have the government pay their out-of-pocket Medicare expenses. They’d also pay more for non-generic prescription drugs.

And it’ll cost corporate jet owners a new $100 fee for each flight.

The fees aren’t taxes. They’re charged to people who use government services or receive benefits such as taxpayer-subsidized health care, and they typically defray the government’s cost of providing a service. The fee on corporate jets and other private passenger planes, for example, would raise about $1 billion a year to help finance the cost of air traffic control. Recreational flyers won’t have to pay…

Another fact check from the AP:

President Barack Obama says he wants to make sure millionaires are taxed at higher rates than their secretaries. The data say they already are.

“Warren Buffett’s secretary shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. There is no justification for it,” Obama said as he announced his deficit-reduction plan this week. “It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million.”

On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

In his White House address on Monday, Obama called on Congress to increase taxes by $1.5 trillion as part of a 10-year deficit reduction package totaling more than $3 trillion. He proposed that Congress overhaul the tax code and impose what he called the “Buffett rule,” named for the billionaire investor.

The rule says, “People making more than $1 million a year should not pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle-class families pay.” Buffett wrote in a recent piece for The New York Times that the tax rate he paid last year was lower than that paid by any of the other 20 people in his office.

“Middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires,” Obama said. “That’s pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against that.”

Nearly 700,000 Tennesseans will gain new coverage under health-care reform, but those already with insurance might have to wait longer to receive care and younger people overall may have to pay more.

Those are among findings from a report out from a think tank the state’s largest health insurer, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, launched this year to study the interface between public policy and health care.

“It will be a little longer line, but everybody will be in the line,” said Dr. Steven L. Coulter, president of the insurer’s Tennessee Health Institute and co-author of the report with William T. Cecil, an independent health-care consultant.

by Burt Prelutsky

It’s hard not to appreciate the irony of the man who promised that with his election, the rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet would begin to heal having to cut his vacation short because of Hurricane Irene. Apparently Mother Nature doesn’t like this guy any more than I do.

It occurred to me that between them, George Bush and Barack Obama have spent most of the past decade telling us what a great religion Islam is. They’ve gone at it like a pair of competing televangelists. All it took was for Muslims to top off 20 years of taking Americans hostage, bombing our embassies, leveling our Marine barracks, blowing up our ships, and killing thousands of us in New York, Iraq and Afghanistan, to make Islam the religion du jour. What makes this especially odd is that in the prior 200 years of our history, no president felt even slightly inclined to pay these folks a single tribute, no matter how insincere.

It makes me think that if an American Muslim soldier made his bed, cleaned his plate and refrained from killing anyone in his unit for, say, two consecutive months, Obama would probably see to it that he received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Speaking of he who should be permanently unemployed, Obama told Syria’s Bashar Assad to resign for the sake of his brutally oppressed people. Rumor has it that Assad replied, “Look who’s talking.”

It turns out that Warren Buffet, who’s been yammering for the wealthy to pay more taxes, runs a company that’s been in arrears to the IRS since 2002. It’s just one more example of liberals insisting that people do as they say, not as they do. I find it almost as amusing as Nancy Pelosi’s constant attacks on wealthy Americans. Inasmuch as the woman is worth upwards of $35 million, you have to wonder what a psychiatrist would make of her incessant ravings.

Someone recently told me that it was Rush Limbaugh who first observed that politics is show business for ugly people. It’s a wonderfully perceptive line. The only problem is that it immediately put me in mind of Henry Waxman, Mr. Show Biz himself. Imagine if he and Pelosi had married and had a child. Go ahead — imagine it, and then just try to get to sleep tonight.

I find it fascinating that it’s always the presidential candidates who have the least chance of winning an election whose fans are the biggest, most annoying, zealots. In 1948, it was Henry Wallace, a Communist, who had the most excitable followers. In 1968, it was George Wallace. In other years, it’s been Eugene McCarthy, John Anderson, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader and even Harry Browne. In the past and again this year, it’s the sometime Libertarian, sometime Republican, always goofy Ron Paul, the fellow who doesn’t regard a nuclear Iran as any more dangerous than Fiji, whose disciples are the loudest, the rudest and the ones with the loosest grip on reality.

I, personally, don’t take Rep. Paul’s peculiar notions to heart. I merely blame it on his youth.

For the longest time, whenever I’d see Barack Obama on TV, I’d find that I couldn’t take my eyes off his ears. Outside of a National Graphic documentary on bats, I’d never seen ears like that. Then, one day, I noticed his thumbs. It’s as if they have an extra joint or two. His thumbs are longer than some people’s hands. They’re like something out of a sci-fi movie, and they freak me out. The good news is that I am no longer riveted on those ears. The bad news is that I can’t help wondering what his toes are like.

Finally, I recently read that in 1990, we had 76 Army Brigades, and we now have 45. Back then, we had 546 Navy ships; at last count, we had 288. We had 82 Air Force fighter squadrons, and we now have less than half that number. We now have 154 strategic bombers, reduced from 360. That’s pretty scary. It suggests that the last three presidents all decided that the world has become a far safer place over the intervening 21 years, and that is even scarier.

As if it’s not bad enough that, in the name of social engineering and political correctness, we’ve repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” it appears that all those cuts resulted in Uncle Sam’s having undergone a sex change operation, and will henceforth be referred to as Aunt Samantha.