“To the annals of market manias and regulatory follies, a new chapter is being added: The Great Ethanol Bubble of 2008. It is possible that someday a fuel made from a cheap, abundant, renewable crop may replace oil. But it won't be food-based ethanol. It’s time not only to stop subsidizing the stuff but to revamp the chaotic, politicized and wasteful system of subsidies for alternative energy."

— The Editors, The Los Angeles Times
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Services Meet or Exceed April 2008 Recruiting Goals

– All military services met or exceeded their recruiting goals for April ... [snip] In the re-enlistment arena, the Army, Navy and Marine Corps met or exceeded their active-duty retention objectives.

All the reserve components also met or exceeded their recruiting goals, with the Air National Guard at 130 percent and the Army Reserve at 120 percent.

April “was another strong month for recruiting and retention,”

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Moral equivalence twofer

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Israeli woman killed by Gaza rocket fire
A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip has killed an Israeli woman, hours after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert set conditions for a truce with Palestinian militants in the Hamas-ruled territory. The projectile slammed into a house in a small farming community near the Gaza border, killing an elderly woman, an Israeli army spokeswoman said, adding that the victim was around 70 years old. On Friday an Israeli man was killed in the same area by a mortar round...
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Israelis resume Gaza fuel delivery
Gaza City - Israel yesterday authorized the resumption of fuel deliveries to the besieged [?] Gaza Strip, where shortages caused the only power plant to shut down at the weekend, an Israeli security official said. The Nahal Oz border terminal, which supplies most of the territory's fuel, reopened yesterday morning, the official said. Gaza's only electricity plant had shut on Saturday due to lack of fuel, leaving thousands of Palestinians reliant on candles and gas lanterns...
[who's 'besieged'? who's firing the rockets and who's being murdered by them?]
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Putin’s Power Reinforced with Kremlin Appointees

Moscow - Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin announced the formation of a new Russian government on Monday, reappointing several top ministers and maintaining the power and prominent roles of members of his inner circle. (Snip) In announcing the new cabinet, Mr. Putin sat at the same place at a table that he used as president for these performances. Mr. Medvedev, officially the president, sat in a chair viewers have come to regard as for subordinates...

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UN celebrates disability treaty

The UN is celebrating the coming into force of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) - a landmark agreement that aims to give the world's 650m disabled people full equality. Adopted in 2006, and opened for signature in March last year it took effect on 3 May a month after the 20th nation ratified it - in this case Ecuador. (Snip) Disabled women are said to be ''multiply disadvantaged'' because they experience exclusion on account of their gender and their impairment...

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California’s Potemkin Environmentalism

A celebrated green economy produces pollution elsewhere, ongoing power shortages, and business-crippling costs

... To understand better how California’s environmental policies have played out, however, consider what two of them—opposition to nuclear energy and promotion of solar power—have done to Clay Station, California, 25 miles outside Sacramento, where two gigantic cooling towers rise up over rolling fields and farmland. This facility was once the Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station, capable of generating over 900 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to power upward of 900,000 homes. Rancho Seco opened in 1975, when antinuclear fervor in California was just beginning to gain momentum, and at one point, it generated more electricity than any other nuclear plant in the world. [snip]

Today, Rancho Seco possesses one of the largest photovoltaic arrays in the world. Yet it provides less than 4 MW of electricity, or less than half of 1 percent of what the closed nuclear plant optimally offered. Total solar capacity for the Sacramento region is less than 50 MW, or about 6 percent of the nuclear plant’s output. In fact, after millions of dollars in subsidies and other support for solar power, the entire state of California has less than 250 MW of solar capacity.

The Rancho Seco story helps explain California’s infamous turn-of-the-millennium energy crisis. In 2000 and 2001, numerous rolling blackouts and power outages caused billions of dollars in damages in the state. California had insufficient power to meet demand because officials had let the state’s infrastructure for moving electrons become frayed and overloaded. [snip]

State senator Tom McClintock underscored the real problem, which went well beyond Rancho Seco, in a speech to a Silicon Valley group in 2001. “From 1979 to 1999, generating capacity of over 45,000 megawatts was proposed to the [California Energy] Commission,” he said. “Only 4,500 megawatts was approved. Nuclear power plants were forbidden, and Rancho Seco and San Onofre Unit One,” another nuclear reactor, “were shut down prematurely. . . . For 27 years, this state has actively discouraged the construction of new power plants, and the day finally arrived when we ran out of power.”

Indeed, California’s capability to generate electricity actually decreased slightly from 1990 through 1999...

[and they're still working only the consumption side: recall the recent fiasco trying to place state-controlled thermostats in our homes... MUST READ for Californians - you need know what's coming >>> ]

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Hydrogen Cars Won't Make a Difference for 40 Years

President Bush, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the big automakers agree on this much: They love hydrogen-powered fuel cell technology and its promise of a zero-emission, petroleum-free future. Unfortunately, experts say it will be 40 years or more before hydrogen has any meaningful impact on gasoline consumption and we can't afford to wait that long. In the meantime, fuel cells are diverting resources from more immediate solutions...

[another government boondoggle...]

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[Special Report had a Ben Liberman of the Heritage Foundation on last night that said ANWR had oil reserves equivalent to the entire state of Texas, but that our coasts were the thing: containing five times the amount of oil than is under the ground in all of the continental U.S.
- by all means lets keep sending our money to Saudi Arabia]

Recession, Recession, Where's the Recession?

"It's a recession," said former President Harry Truman, "when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours."

For people facing home foreclosure, job loss or the struggle of paying high gas prices, the definition a recession seems immaterial and insignificant. True.

But during an election year, the media's constant use or expectation of "recession" does matter. Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic Party's likely nominee, already considers the U.S. economy "in a recession." So are we?

No -- not even close.

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ICE describes raid as 'largest in Iowa history'

Postville, Ia. - At least 300 people were arrested today at the Agriprocessors, Inc. meat packing plant, federal officials said. The operation, which targeted people who illegally used other persons Social Security numbers and were in the U.S. illegally, was the largest of its kind in Iowa, said Claude Arnold, a special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement...

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[UPDATE: 2nd story =

As many as 700 arrested in Iowa illegal immigration raid
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Media Downplay Hawaii Uprising, Back Hawaiian Apartheid Bill

A real-life secessionist movement seizes a historic American landmark and major media outlets treat the uprising as a curiosity of mere passing interest. Meanwhile, that same media gives a thumbs-up to a seditious, balkanizing plan for Aloha State apartheid.

AP's Mark Niesse reported yesterday, "Native Hawaiian sovereignty advocates" who are members of the group known as the Hawaiian Kingdom Government occupied the grounds of the palace of Hawaii's final monarch, Queen Lili`uokalani. "Hawaiian activists have long used the palace as the site for protests of what they call the United States' occupation of the islands, but never before had they physically taken control," wrote Niesse.

Pacific Business News reported that the "protesters" surrounded the Iolani Palace in Honolulu, chained palace gates, posted no-trespassing signs, and told "palace officials that the palace is their rightful seat of government." The PBN story noted that "Only those with Hawaiian blood, as well as news media, were initially allowed onto palace grounds."

The Honolulu Advertiser reported that the "sovereignty group" claimed its actions were "not a protest or demonstration but a reoccupying of its legitimate seat of government." CNN called the occupiers simply a "group of native Hawaiians."

Many mainstream media outlets have treated the pro-segregation, pro-secession bill, sponsored by Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), that would create a new government for "Native Hawaiians" in Hawaii, as just another bill. A sunny piece called "Freshman senators hold key to Native Hawaiian bill's hopes," appearing in The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper focused on Congress, noted cheerfully that "the bill has a fighting chance."

Both Honolulu papers, the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin have editorialized in favor it.

[how nations die from within]

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The Union Police

Unions keep losing membership as a share of the national workforce, which explains why organized labor's main political focus is changing the rules to force more workers into unions. Witness a bill that Senate Democrats are pushing this week to require that hundreds of thousands of local police and firemen submit to collective bargaining...

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ADDITIONAL COLLECTIVE BARGAINING RIGHTS HURT TAXPAYERS

Taxpayers need to start questioning the financial stranglehold the collective bargaining process has on a budget. As governments cave to the high demands of big labor, there is less money available for states to operate, maintain current projects, and fix or repair failing infrastructure.

Indeed, collective bargaining has affected Washington State's budget drastically. Payroll expenses immediately began to skyrocket when Washington State Public-sector unions were granted the right to negotiate exclusively with the governor's office in 2004:

In 2007, general fund expenditures jumped to more than $14.1 billion dollars. Of that amount, $2.2 billion was spent on state employee salaries, while $330 million was spent directly on state employee health benefits -- these figures don't include K-12 education.

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Obama Says Teamsters Need Less Oversight

Sen. Barack Obama won the endorsement of the Teamsters earlier this year after privately telling the union he supported ending the strict federal oversight imposed to root out corruption, according to officials from the union and the Obama campaign. It's an unusual stance for a presidential candidate.

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Europe's New Pro-American Direction

Silvio Berlusconi’s re-election as Italy’s Prime Minister is more promising and more important for Italy and the United States, and for trans-Atlantic relations generally, than most commentators have admitted. President Bush’s critics have been quick to assign him blame for weakened trans-Atlantic relations, particularly because of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

But look today at Europe’s political leadership: Nicolas Sarkozy in France has replaced the bitterly anti-American Jacques Chirac. In Germany, Angela Merkel has replaced the dyspeptic and anti-Iraq war Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Britain now once again speaks about the US-UK “special relationship.”

Europe’s new political configuration has already partially manifested itself in NATO’s decision in Bucharest to support deployment of U.S. missile defense assets in Poland and the Czech Republic. And now, Berlusconi will soon return to the Chigi Palace. How times change.

[I.e., there's a resurgence of conservative principles occurring in old-Europe (already well under way in 'new' Europe - and embarrassing the oldies) -- at exactly the same time America is running toward Socialism. How times do change.]

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New Offer: 57 State Lapel Pin

A few days ago we reported that Barack Obama was ever so proud to have visited all "57 states" on his campaign swing. But, we noticed that he still avoids wearing that U.S. flag lapel pin, just the same. Well, we have finally found out why Barack Obama won't wear that darned ol' U.S. flag pin. Until now he couldn't find one with all "57 States" on it. Well, the folks over at Suitably Flip blog have solved the problem for the junior Senator from Illinois.



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