VIRGINIA POSTREL: Delta’s Oil Refinery Plan Flies Against Economic Sense. “Delta doesn’t need its own refinery to obtain jet fuel, which is traded in a thick worldwide market, any more than it needs to own a peanut farm to supply in-air snacks. And it seems unlikely that Delta would be noticeably better at running a refinery than any other potential buyer — or, for that matter, ConocoPhillips (COP), which plans to close down the refinery if it can’t make a deal. . . . You might think that owning a refinery would at least protect the airline from price fluctuations. But, Pirrong notes, crude oil prices affect the profits of airlines and oil refineries exactly the same way. When oil prices go up, their profits go down. Owning a refinery would simply magnify the effect.”
Archive for 2012
April 20, 2012
A PAT SUMMITT TRIBUTE VIDEO.
BYRON YORK: Obama faces defeat on pipeline as Dems defect. “While much of the political world obsesses over Twitter fights and Seamus the dog, Barack Obama has set himself up for a high-profile defeat on one of the most important issues of the campaign. The president has put his feet in cement in opposition to the Keystone oil pipeline. But on Capitol Hill, more and more Democrats are joining Republicans to force approval of the pipeline, whether Obama wants it or not.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: 10 Faces Behind The Incredible Law School Underemployment Crisis.
THE HILL: Democrats Expressing Buyers’ Remorse On Health Care Law.
An increasing number of Democrats are taking potshots at President Obama’s healthcare law ahead of a Supreme Court decision that could overturn it.
The public grievances have come from centrists and liberals and reflect rising anxiety ahead of November’s elections. “I think we would all have been better off — President Obama politically, Democrats in Congress politically, and the nation would have been better off — if we had dealt first with the financial system and the other related economic issues and then come back to healthcare,” said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who is retiring at the end of this Congress.
Miller, who voted for the law, said the administration wasted time and political capital on healthcare reform, resulting in lingering economic problems that will continue to plague Obama’s reelection chances in 2012.
Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.) also criticized his party’s handling of the issue, and said he repeatedly called on his leaders to figure out how they were going to pay for the bill, and then figure out what they could afford.
Cardoza, who like Miller will retire at the end of the Congress, said he thought the bill should have been done “in digestible pieces that the American public could understand and that we could implement.”
Shoulda listened to InstaPundit. They rammed the whole thing through because they could. But it sucks, the country hates it, and if they lose in the Supreme Court, which seems increasingly possible, it will all have been for nothing — and yet, politically, that may still be the Democrats’ best outcome.
April 19, 2012
JERRY BROWN BREAKS THE LAW: Governor joked about violating open-meeting law in talk with supervisors. “A closed meeting between L.A. County supervisors and Gov. Jerry Brown is ruled to have violated California’s open-meetings law. According to a transcript, Brown noted that questions could arise.”
OFFENSE: Romney Visits Empty Factory to Mock Obama.
You know, Romney suddenly seems to be following my hammer-and-tongs advice. . . .
TOBY HARNDEN: Barack Obama’s re-election bid is already in deep trouble.
UPDATE: Sign of a campaign in trouble: ‘Dinner with Barack’ now includes George Clooney.
As long as it doesn’t include Benjy or Beethoven.
SECRET SERVICE UNPROFESSIONALISM:
One of the Secret Service supervisors ousted from the agency this week for their involvement in the Colombia prostitution scandal made light of his official protective work on his Facebook page, joking about a picture of himself standing watch behind Sarah Palin.
David Randall Chaney, 48, posted several shots of himself on duty in a dark suit and sunglasses, including one that shows him behind the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee during that campaign.
“I was really checking her out, if you know what i mean?” Chaney wrote in the comments section after friends had marveled at the photo. He is married and has an adult son.
Really, it’s hard to trust the professionalism of government employees these days.
AT AMAZON, top deals in video games and software.
THEY PROBABLY SHOULD BE: Are Colleges Afraid of Peter Thiel?
SPENGLER: Dog-Eating And Obama’s Identity. A species of oikophobia? “He tells the story in his memoir to emphasize that viscerally, Obama identifies with the Third World of his upbringing more than with the America of his adulthood. It is our great misfortune to have a president who dislikes our country at this juncture in our history.”
JOBS IN THE MOJAVE: A reader sends this:
Scaled Composites is holding its open house/career fair from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. this Saturday, April 21, at its headquarters on the Mojave Airport in California. The company is looking to bolster its recruiting efforts to work on numerous large-scale projects looming like Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and the Stratolaunch Carrier. “If you’re interested in working in the private space industry, there’s no better place than Mojave right now,” said project and flight test engineer Elliot Seguin, who says EAAers represent the company’s premier hiring pool. More than two-thirds of current employees are also pilots, and most of them are EAA members as well. Those interested in attending are asked to RSVP via e-mail to , with an attached resume and using the subject line “Career Day.”
Sounds cool.
#MESSAGEFAIL: Proud To Be A Democrat Not A Republican. Boy, we’ve come a long way from Hope And Change.
UPDATE: A perfect encapsulation of the Obama 2012 campaign: with nothing else to go on, it’s a campaign ad hominem. “Exactly. Nothing describes the sheer level of fail of Obama than that sticker. You had 4 years, Mr. Resident. You had a super majority for 2 of those years. And the net effort of having this massive amount of power — is that you have to say ‘I’m not a Republican.'”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Treacher emails: “Did Geithner design that Dem bumper sticker? I guess it’s shorter than ‘We don’t have any good ideas… we just don’t like yours.'”
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: LSAC Jacks Up Fees 15-31% to Students in Light of Decline in LSAT Test Takers. Fewer people are using our product. Let’s raise our prices!
UPDATE: Reader Kevin Murphy writes: “The Blue State Model in a nutshell.” Yes, alas.
DENIAL AIN’T JUST A RIVER IN EGYPT — it’s also a museum in Europe:
The whole problem of explaining the present is so nettlesome that the European Union’s “House of European History” museum decided to omit the mention of World War 2 altogether by the simple expedient of declaring 1946 the Year Zero for European history. “It celebrates the creation of the EU with barely a nod to the crisis raging all around. France’s recent history is marked by a picture of the Tour de France, and Germany’s by the famous Berlin address by Barack Obama in 2008.”
Farcically, it’s been decided to omit any exhibit on which agreement cannot be reached. And because of their differing views about World War II, the museum will begin with an EU ‘year zero’ of 1946.
But of the unpleasantness of 1939-1945 it will only say that there was an event called the “European Civil War”, which presumably was fixed by the European Union, without the slightest input from things called the United States, the former Soviet Union, China and the Empire of Japan.
Yet these absurd naming conventions are only further signs that the Narrative is now developing yawning gaps. For the current world crisis, like almost every other crisis is caused as much by what went right in the last 70 years as what went wrong. And the problem with the Narrative is that what should have gone wrong went right and what ought to have gone right went wrong.
Read the whole thing.
I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: How it Would Work: Destroying an Incoming Killer Asteroid With a Nuclear Blast.
Weaver has been running simulations on LANL’s Cielo supercomputer to determine humanity’s capacity to mitigate an impending asteroid threat using a one-megaton nuclear energy source–one roughly 50 times more powerful than the blasts inflicted upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World War II.
There’s more than one way to divert an asteroid of course. With the proper notice, like that afforded us by the asteroid Apophis or 2011 AG5, humans could fly a spacecraft out to intercept an asteroid in deep space. This spacecraft could impact the asteroid to nudge it slightly off course, or it could fly abreast of the threat, acting as a kind of “gravity tractor” whose slight gravitational tug would push it off its collision course over time. It’s even been suggested that a spacecraft could bombard one side of a killer asteroid with a laser, heating it enough to change its orbital characteristics and its path.
That’s if we have time. “From my perspective, the nuclear option is for the surprise asteroid or comet that we haven’t seen before, one that basically comes out of nowhere and we have just a few months to respond to it,” Weaver says. In other words, lacking the time to deploy something more elegant, we can pull out the method of last resort and blast the threat out of existence with the biggest energy source at our disposal. There’s no telling exactly how an asteroid deflection mission would transpire because it’s never been tried before, but scientists like Weaver are hard at work simulating the ins and outs of mitigating of an incoming impactor. It’s knowledge we hope we’ll never have to use, but should we ever have to, this is how it would work.
Whether it would work depends a lot on what the asteroid is made of.
FOOD-STAMP FRAUD IS ALL THE RAGE ON TWITTER.
THE REAL MEANING OF DOG-GATE: “It’s amazing how the aptly named ‘Army of Davids’ is able to use the Internet and social media to run with a theme and dominate the popular imagination. We may be seeing the end of an era dominated by ability of Leftist comedians like Jon Stewart, Bill Maher or the cast of SNL to create a false image of a political figure. Perhaps the trashing of Sarah Palin was the high point of their power, just as Watergate was for the MSM. Ridicule is the most potent political weapon. Obama is rapidly looking less and less like a President and more and more like an inept pol who’s also something of a doofus.”