Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Peter Wehner figures out the Obama Doctrine.
Jay Nordlinger, Mark Steyn and Charles Krauthammer react to BO’s narcissism. Krauthammer;
… The most telling moment, however, was when Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, delivered a 53-minute excoriating attack on the United States. And Obama’s response was “I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for the things that occurred when I was three months old.”
Does the narcissism of this man know no bounds? This is not about him. It is about his country. This is something that occurred under John Kennedy — the Bay of Pigs is what he is referring to. And what he is saying is that it’s OK that he attacked John Kennedy, as long as it wasn’t me. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on the first cabinet meeting.
… This is noteworthy not only because it took nearly a hundred days to convene the cabinet but because it suggests the “What tea parties?” feigned ignorance by the Obama spin-machine is flimsy camouflage for growing concerns that the unwashed rabble may be on to something. Really, why now, out of the blue, find some tiny cost cutting measures? The president could, after all, have made the stimulus plan $100M less expensive or the $3.6 trillion budget a smidgen less irresponsible. …
Heritage Foundation graph shows how puny $100 million looks against the budget.
The Teleprompter posts on the trip to the CIA
Daily Beast on BO’s coming environmental disaster.
Okay, I get it. Carbon dioxide is bad. It’s a pollutant. Thus, based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed finding on greenhouse gases, everyone is now a polluter.
This includes me. I’ve been polluting since July 19, 1960, and damn it, I’m going to keep polluting until they pull the nostrils from my cold dead body. And don’t even think about trying to cut the pollutants emitted by our family’s hyperactive bird dog, Biscuit. She’s a big time exhaler, particularly when the weather gets hot.
Pardon my sarcasm, but the EPA’s plan to equate carbon dioxide, the substance that we emit every minute of every day of our lives, with pollution—a term I equate with noxious substances like benzene, dioxin, and PCBs—seems like something out of a bad science fiction novel. …
Kimberley Strassel with another government created unintended consequence.
This is the tale of how a supposedly innocuous federal subsidy to encourage “alternative energy” has, in a few short years, ballooned into a huge taxpayer liability and a potential trade dispute, even as it has distorted markets and led to greater fossil-fuel use. Think of it as a harbinger of the unintended consequences that will accompany the Obama energy revolution.
Back in 2005, Congress passed a highway bill. In its wisdom, it created a subsidy that gave some entities a 50-cents-a-gallon tax credit for blending “alternative” fuels with traditional fossil fuels. The law restricted which businesses could apply and limited the credit to use of fuel in motor vehicles.
Not long after, some members of Congress got to wondering if they couldn’t tweak this credit in a way that would benefit specific home-state industries. In 2007, Congress expanded the types of alternative fuels that counted for the credit, while also allowing “non-mobile” entities to apply. This meant that Alaskan fish-processing facilities, for instance, which run their boilers off fish oil, might now also claim the credit.
What Congress apparently didn’t consider was every other industry that might qualify. Turns out the paper industry has long used something called the “kraft” process to make paper. One byproduct is a sludge called “black liquor,” which the industry has used for decades to fuel its plants. Black liquor is cost-effective, makes plants nearly self-sufficient, and, most importantly (at least for this story), definitely falls under Congress’s definition of an “alternative fuel.” …
And a WSJ Op-Ed reports on ethanol flops in Iowa.
In September, ethanol giant VeraSun Energy opened a refinery on the outskirts of this eastern Iowa (Dyersville) community. Among the largest biofuels facilities in the country, the Dyersville plant could process 39 million bushels of corn and produce 110 million gallons of ethanol annually. VeraSun boasted the plant could run 24 hours a day, seven days a week to meet the demand for home-grown energy.
But the only thing happening 24-7 at the Dyersville plant these days is nothing at all. Its doors are shut and corn deliveries are turned away. Touring the facility recently, I saw dozens of rail cars sitting idle. They’ve been there through the long, bleak winter. Two months after Dyersville opened, VeraSun filed for bankruptcy, closing many of its 14 plants and laying off hundreds of employees. VeraSun lost $476 million in the third quarter last year.
A town of 4,000, Dyersville is best known as the location of the 1989 film “Field of Dreams.” In the film, a voice urges Kevin Costner to create a baseball diamond in a cornfield and the ghosts of baseball past emerge from the ether to play ball. Audiences suspended disbelief as they were charmed by a story that blurred the lines between fantasy and reality.
That’s pretty much the story of ethanol. …
The Australian reports Antarctic ice is expanding. And the sea level rising scare? Never mind.
… East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week’s meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades”.
Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.
“Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally,” Dr Allison said. …
Shorts from National Review.
… Last year, Obama indicated a willingness to approach school choice with an open mind: “Let’s see if the experiment works,” he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. On April 3, Obama’s Department of Education released new findings on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which grants vouchers to about 1,700 low-income students in Washington. The reading scores of participants improved compared with those of their peers. Moreover, parents reported a high degree of satisfaction with their children’s schools. This evidence suggests strongly that school choice works — or at least that the D.C. experiment did, and ought to continue. Yet congressional Democrats have voted to eliminate funding for the program following the 2009–10 academic year, and Obama went along with them when he signed the omnibus budget bill. In a just world, none of these characters would be able to speak in public about the nation’s poor and vulnerable again. …
Borowitz reports on Susan Boyle.
Click on WORD or PDF for full content