NEWS YOU CAN USE: What To Say To New Parents If You Think Their Baby Is Ugly.
Archive for 2013
July 18, 2013
TRUST YOUR GOVERNMENT TO TAKE CARE OF YOU: Using Outdated Data, FEMA Is Wrongly Placing Homeowners in Flood Zones.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 70. And this one’s a doozy.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: HIV Divides Lesbians In South Africa.
A DATING STRATEGY BASED ON sitting in bars with cake.
THEY’LL TURN US ALL INTO BEGGARS CAUSE THEY’RE EASIER TO PLEASE: Ed Morrissey: The Great Obamacare Workforce Exodus.
HOW DID THE TRAYVON MARTIN CASE BECOME A NATIONAL MEDIA SENSATION? With help from the Justice Department. “Through their requests for documents from local, state and federal authorities, Judicial Watch researchers were able to obtain hundreds of documents and emails pertaining to the case. This information helped Judicial Watch prove that a little-known unit of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Community Relations Service (CRS), was deployed to Sanford following the Trayvon Martin shooting to help organize and manage rallies and protests against George Zimmerman.”
Frankly, for the government to help organize and manage rallies and protests against an individual charged with a crime looks like a civil rights violation to me. I hope Zimmerman’s lawyers go ahead and sue, as they’ve indicated. The discovery process will be fascinating.
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Ethanol Still A Boondoggle.
The ethanol targets set by the Renewable Fuel Standard are out of sync with both the demand for ethanol and its potential supply. Gasoline consumption is projected to be relatively flat this year, a change that the Renewable Fuel Standard lacks a mechanism to account for. This shortfall in demand could potentially be fixed if producers up the percentage of ethanol they mix in with their gasoline past the current industry standard of 10 percent, but few oil companies are willing to move past this so-called “blend wall,” citing studies that link higher ethanol content with engine damage. Even if refiners started blending in more ethanol, the supply problem remains: this year’s supply is projected to be less than the mandate.
All of this explains why oil companies are snatching up increasingly-rare RINs at ever-higher prices. Oh, the RIN-sanity!
This is a mess even before you consider the foibles of the source of the lion’s share of this ethanol: corn. Before the Renewable Fuel Standard set these arbitrarily high targets, the US used just 23 percent of its corn to produce ethanol. Last year 43 percent of our corn crops went towards producing the biofuel. That shift has driven up global prices for corn, starving the world’s poor and potentially fueling food riots. And to what end? Corn ethanol is categorized as a biofuel, but it doesn’t reduce emissions. Advanced biofuels produced from such sources as sugarcane and algae pass the green test, but they haven’t yet proven their commercial viability.
It’s a crime against humanity. When do the trials start?
UPDATE: Reader J. Johnson writes:
Something that very seldom is mentioned in re the ethanol boondoogle is the profound effect the ethanol mandate has had on land prices in the midwest USA. The impact of ethanol on corn prices has been monumental, with average prices per bushel nearly double (and sometimes much more than that) what they were prior to the ethanol mandate. In turn, this has driven the prices of ‘corn ground’ profoundly higher, such that there are now hundreds of thousands of acres in the midwestern corn belt and elsewhere with prices (as much as $12,000/acre) which are completely unsustainable if the mandate was eliminated or substantially rolled back. It would result in a farm-belt crisis akin to what happened in the early 1980’s when tens of thousands of farmers went bankrupt when land prices collapsed.
A ‘partner in crime’ in this fiasco is Bernanke, whose zero interest rate policy has allowed farmers, bankers and speculators to pay exhorbitant prices for farm ground that is used strictly for producing corn for ethanol and servicing of the enormous debt associated with much of this acreage depends totally on continuation of the ethanol mandate. This mostly hidden debt bomb probably explains why the mandate not only continues, but is possibly going to get even more onerous. There are just too many money men who have too much to lose if anything changes.
Seems like it’s market-distorting cronyism all the way down, these days.
I BELIEVE THE COVERUP HAS PROCEEDED NICELY, AS HAS THE DISTRACTION CAMPAIGN: Politico: What has become of the Benghazi investigation?
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Mission Creep: When Everything Is Terrorism. “NSA apologists say spying is only used for menaces like ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘terror.’ But those terms have been radically redefined.” Kinda like “racism” has been.
IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: IRS Lawyer Says Scandal Was Overseen by D.C. “Top IRS officials in Washington, D.C. planned and oversaw the agency’s improper targeting of conservative groups, according to the 72-year old retiring IRS lawyer who will testify Thursday before the House Oversight Committee.”
I SUPPORT THIS IDEA IN THE ABSTRACT, BUT UNDER THIS ADMINISTRATION I WONDER IF IT’S COVER FOR POLITICAL PURGES: Sec. Hagel: Cut Top Brass 20%. “Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Tuesday that he has ordered a 20 percent cut in the number of top brass and senior civilians at the Pentagon by 2019, the latest attempt to shrink the military bureaucracy after years of heady growth.”
It’s sad to be so distrustful, but with this track record. . . .
LIKE YELP FOR POLITICS? Disruptive innovation from Heritage. Politicians about as thrilled as “if you are a restaurant owner and I can go on Yelp and complain about my meal.”
MORE ANTI-TEA-PARTY ACTIVITY: IRS Admits It Leaked Christine O’Donnell’s Tax Records To Opposition Day She Announced:
On March 9, 2010, the day she revealed her plan to run for the Senate in a press release, a tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers and publicized. The problem was she no longer owned the house. The IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.
Now Mr. Martel, a criminal investigator for the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, was telling her that an official in Delaware state government had improperly accessed her records on that very same day.
Beyond that, Ms. O’Donnell and Senate investigators who have tried to help her have run into a wall of silence, leaving more questions than answers about whether abuses of the IRS system extend to private individuals and not just the tax-exempt groups already identified as victims.
Seems like a lot of the “bad luck” that affected some Tea Party candidates wasn’t bad luck at all. Examples must be made to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. Name, shame, and sue.
Related: House Holds Hearing Today on The IRS’ Systematic Delay and Scrutiny of Tea Party Applications.
UPDATE: An official in Delaware state government is pretty synonymous with “opposition” for the O’Donnell campaign, no?
AS THE ELECTION GETS CLOSER, HARRY REID’S HAND GETS WEAKER: GOP won’t let ongoing threat of ‘nuclear option’ curb future filibusters.
SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TAKE ADVICE FROM JOE BIDEN? Vancouver Man Fires Shotgun, Gets Charged, Cites Biden. “’I did what Joe Biden told me to do,’ Barton told KOIN. ‘I went outside and fired my shotgun in the air.'”
JOURNALISM: Reporters Mock, Sneer At Daily Caller Intern Who Dared Ask Jay Carney A Question. You can’t ask him questions. He’s the Press Secretary!
WHEN PATERNITY ISN’T: DNA test: Rep. Steve Cohen not the father. “The test found that the man who raised Brink, Texas oilman John Brink, was indeed her father.” Think of all the trouble we could save if paternity testing was routinely done at birth, before a man’s name was attached to the birth certificate.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Guantanamo: The Obama Administration’s Nutritional Waterboarding. “According to the Department of Defense, 80 of the prison’s 166 detainees are participating in a hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention; 46 are being force-fed with gastric tubes inserted through the nose.”
“SMART DIPLOMACY” UPDATE: White House signals Obama may snub Putin over Snowden asylum.