Clipfile: May 2, 2008

“The sad thing is that, when the voters ‘throw a rascal out’ the replacement seems to pick up where the rascal left off without missing a beat.” -- Charles Brumbelow, in an e-mail to Chaos Manor

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Central Indiana blog meetup

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Another adult heard from

Robert Samuelson on energy:

The truth is that we're almost powerless to influence today's prices... because we didn't take sensible actions 10 or 20 years ago. If we persist, we will be even worse off in a decade or two.  The first thing to do:  Start drilling.

It may surprise Americans to discover that the United States is the third-largest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia.  We could be producing more, but Congress has put large areas of potential supply off-limits.  These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.  By government estimates, these areas may contain 25 billion to 30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion barrels of proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves).

What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears, strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity...

A good beginning. Unfortunately, Samuelson starts waffling as soon as he tries to consider practical solutions. (Well, he is writing in the Post, after all.)  Second thing out of his mouth is the old command-and-control solution of demand restraints: Higher CAFE standards and higher taxes. He does take a swipe at the ethanol boondoggle, but only on environmental and food-price grounds. No mention of nuclear power, or the Congressional restrictions on DOD use of oil from Alberta, or the tariff on imported ethanol.

Still, you have to count this as progress, since it appeared in The Washington Post.  But there’s still such a long way to go.


Previously: Drawing attention to the real issues

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Transportation “security:” fire them all

We’re now told that the Transportation Security Administration’s “no-fly” list has been doing a good job catching Federal Air Marshals– for years:

Federal Air Marshals (FAMs) familiar with the situation say the mix-ups, in which marshals are mistaken for terrorism suspects who share the same names, have gone on for years — just as they have for thousands of members of the traveling public.
...
“In some cases, planes have departed without any coverage because the airline employees were adamant they would not fly...”

Incompetence exemplified.  And I don’t blame the airline employees:  They are, after all, following the regulations.

Buried further down in the article is this little gem:

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said this week that one major air carrier reports roughly 9,000 false positive hits on the watch list every day.

And this has been going on for how many years?  Oh yes, Homeland Security’s “Terrorist Screening Center^[1]” says it’s finally getting ready to deal with the estimated

...500,000 names on its watch list that are frequently matched during airport screenings and other law-enforcement encounters with the general public, and remove those names that don't belong to actual suspects.

Incredible.  500,000 names– that’s half a million, folks!  And 9,000 false hits â€“ from one airline â€“ every day.  Wotthehel has DHS/TSA been doing that they’re only now getting around to removing names that “don’t belong to actual suspects?”

If Chertoff had any self-respect, he’d fire every subordinate he has authority over, call for abolition of his agency, and then resign.  It’s long past time that this production of Homeland Security Theatre got the hook.


Via: Instapundit

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Sites Linked - April 2008

35 posts in April, the same as March. Not too bad, considering I was effectively off the air from April 1^st through the 15^th. (I hate tax time.)

Still not the lowest post count, which (for the last 12 months) remains May ’07 at 25. Will I do better this year? Stay tuned.

The April linklist is below the jump... more...

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