Everything's a Conspiracy at Washington's Blog: Now He's a Melter, Too

So the meltdown denial from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a cover-up:

Did Markey misunderstand what the NRC was telling him? Or is the NRC covering up the situation by publicly denying what it told Markey in a private briefing?

If We Want More Home Sales, Subsidize Home Ownership, Don't Tax It

It's an old principle too often forgotten in discussions of economic policy:

"If you want less of something, tax it; if you want more of something, subsidize it."

We've learned in America that when you don't limit welfare in some way, you'll get lots more people on it. And tax people too much like we did in the 1970s, and you'll proliferate money in tax shelters.

What we need more of right now in America is home sales. 18.4 million dwellings sit vacant in the US, and homeowners all across the country who want to sell and scale down or sell and move up can't, because of the housing slump. Properties go unsold season after season, and people are stuck.

Jonathan Swift put it this way a long time ago:

"Money, the lifeblood of the nation,

Corrupts and stagnates in the veins,

Unless a proper circulation

Its motion and its heat maintains."

Logic tells us that we should subsidize housing through tax policy even more than it already is, but the Obama regime, and a bunch of misguided libertarians, want to do the opposite: recover the "tax loss expenditure" created by the mortgage interest deduction.

In other words, they want to tax home ownership, in the name of tax neutrality, handing the advantage to landlords who can still deduct their mortgage interest, along with the maintenance and depreciation which homeowners cannot deduct. It almost sounds like planned crony capitalism.

If Obama and company succeed, we'll have even less home ownership than we have now, and even lower values, but lots of new politically favored slumlords.

The following is an excerpt from John C. Weicher's "Repealing the Mortgage Interest Deduction? Hold the Applause!,"  found here, which touches on some of these issues:

The President’s budget for 2012 proposes to take a small but significant step in the same direction.  The value of the deduction would be reduced for families with incomes above $250,000.  These are the same taxpayers for whom Mr. Obama wanted to raise taxes back in December - “the rich.”   

But the deduction isn’t a particular benefit for rich people. ... they only account for about 20% of all mortgage interest reported on tax returns, according to the IRS.

Most of the benefit of the mortgage interest deduction goes to households who are not “rich,” households with incomes between $75,000 and $200,000.  These are middle-class families, reasonably well off, but working, and working hard. ...

Repealing the mortgage interest deduction will make it harder for young families to become homeowners.  Repealing the capital gains exclusion, another Commission recommendation, will make it harder for older families, when they want to move to a retirement home or move to be near their children and grandchildren. 

Puritanism Lives!

What the Richest 5 Percent Pay

Taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 pay:

over 50 percent of all income taxes;

over 50 percent of state and local income taxes;

almost 50 percent of charitable contributions;

but only 20 percent of mortgage interest.

More here.

Zen and the Art of Economic Cycle Maintenance

In which Louis Woodhill asks the disciples of John Mauldin:

“In a time of famine, would you plant less rice?”

Read it all at Forbes.

Dems Pick Hardcore Pro-Abortionist to Head DNC

Story here.

Hutaree Militia Update: Big Talk, No Plot?

All behind the scenes stuff about what is and is not evidence in the case:

Defense lawyers have spent the past year arguing over evidentiary issues and trying to frame the case as a First Amendment fight.

There was no plan and no target identified by the Hutaree members, said lawyer Todd Shanker of the Federal Defender Office, who represents the Hutaree leader's stepson, David Stone Jr.

"A few of the people talked a lot and talked big in front of their friends and fellow militia members," Shanker told The Detroit News.

"But everybody, I think, was there for different reasons."

There's more here at The Detroit News.

Q4 2010 GDP Revised Up to 3.1 Percent from 2.8 Percent in Final Estimate

As reported here.

Q3 2010 GDP was 2.6 percent.

The final number for all of 2010 comes in at 2.9 percent (up), after the historic decline in 2009, when GDP was down 2.6 percent.

Pretty pathetic after all the trillions of dollars in stimulus, bailouts and lending at taxpayer expense.

Radiation in Namie, Japan, Approximately 37.88 Microsieverts Per Hour

As reported here (but you have to do the math of 10 mSv divided by 264 hours times 1000):

On Monday, the [Japanese] government announced that radiation of more than 10 millisieverts had been detected at one location in Namie Town, some 30 kilometers northwest of the plant. The figure is what a person would be exposed to if they stayed outdoors for 11 consecutive days at the location. It is 10 times higher than the 1 millisievert-per-year long-term reference level for humans as recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.

The prefectural government is measuring from Tuesday more than 1,400 institutions in the prefecture outside the 20-kilometer evacuation zone.

If the recommended limit is 1 mSv per year, however, it is utterly misleading to suggest the problem in Namie is 10 times higher than it should be. It is, but only for eleven days. This is comparing 11 day apples with 365 day oranges. The problem is much worse.

The fact is, people are getting almost a millisievert per 24 hour day, 909 microsieverts to be exact, if the radiation has been properly measured. At the levels indicated, people in Namie would get 332 mSv in a year, 332 TIMES normal for a year, if normal is 1.

The reported radiation level of almost 38 microsieverts per hour, if it is accurate, is much lower than prior reports here and here, which were 161 microsieverts per hour around March 21st and 1,400 microsieverts per hour around March 27th.

Radiation at the main gate to Fukushima Daiichi, one kilometer from the reactors, at the latest reading was 121 microsieverts per hour, over three times worse than in Namie.

Radiation Next to Reactor Buildings 100 Millisieverts Per Hour, Inside Off the Scale

So reports NHK World, here:

A radiation monitor at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says workers there are exposed to immeasurable levels of radiation.

The monitor told NHK that no one can enter the plant's No. 1 through 3 reactor buildings because radiation levels are so high that monitoring devices have been rendered useless. He said even levels outside the buildings exceed 100 millisieverts in some places.

Your Kid Still Can't Read, But His Teacher Retires a Millionaire

From Scott Johnston's The Naked Dollar:

Let's get back to my millionaire claim about teachers, which on the face of it, should seem preposterous. Teachers are by far the biggest public employee category, and their contract terms are illustrative of what goes on elsewhere. In my town, a teacher retiring today gets 70%, give or take, of his or her salary for the rest of his or her life. That's about $84,000 a year (not taxed by the state, incidentally). Plus, they get health benefits for their entire family for life. That's worth another $16,000 a year, for a total of $100,000 a year. Live for 25 years and that's a total of $2.5 million. Discounted at 4%, it's $1.6 million.

To quote our president, "let's be clear": there is zero difference between this and having an IRA with a value of $1.6 million, except the rest of us didn't demand that taxpayers fund our IRAs.

But it's much worse than that.

Read the whole thing here.

Headline Unemployment Drops to 8.8 Percent

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent interactive graphic of unemployment showing every month going back to January 1948 here:

The broader measure known as U-6 is still high at 15.7 percent, and 13.5 million, dropouts not included, continue to look for work.

Employment in America hasn't been really solid since the 1960s, except for a few months in the year 2000.

Fleep.com/earthquake Has The Most Comprehensive Fukushima Accident Radiation Data

Here is a sample, graphing the differences between the histories of the radiation levels measured at the two gates to the reactor facility, compared with the main building of the complex itself, from March 24th until April 1st:

Note that the radiation in the main building is still close to a full millisievert per hour (1000 microsieverts). You would absorb there in just 6 hours what the average American absorbs in a year.

Radiation in the most sensitive areas of the reactors themselves, and the turbine buildings, has been reported as high as 1000 millisieverts per hour, even now. Expressed in full sieverts, an hour of such exposure equals 1 sievert. 8 of those will kill you very quickly.

When it comes to radiation, distance away is your friend: first the main building, then the main gate, then anyplace else, even Iitate.

Radiation Level in Iitate, Japan, Down to 6.65 Microsieverts/Hour

As of 2:00 PM, Japan time, April 3, 2011 according to the Main Disaster Office of Fukushima Prefecture (here):

The level is down from 12.1 microsieverts per hour, reported here on March 21.

Radiation Report About Iitate, Japan, Had to Be Wrong

Nothing illustrates the incredibility of some of the radiation reports about Japan in the popular press than the case of Iitate, Japan.

Today The Wall Street Journal is reporting here that the radiation level at the main gate to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant is 144 microsieverts per hour. Inside the grounds of the plant, high level readings have been reported in reactor and/or turbine buildings all the way between 200, 300, and 400 millisieverts per hour on the lower end to as much as 1000 millisieverts per hour or more at the higher end, readings worlds away from microsieverts per hour (1 millisievert per hour is the same as 1000 microsieverts per hour).

The main gate is exactly one kilometer distant from the reactors, while the west gate is just slightly farther out.

This means that despite the catastrophe unfolding at the water's edge, a kilometer away the radiation levels drop dramatically. It doesn't mean they are safe, but the decline is dramatic with distance. 

Compare that observation with the report by Kyodo News (which we detailed here) in which the spokesman for the Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency is quoted as saying radiation levels in Iitate, Japan, 25 to 30 miles away, were at 25 millisieverts per day, or 1.04 millisieverts per hour, if one spent a maximum of eight hours outdoors. In microsieverts per hour, that would have to be 1,040.

The following map (source) of today's conditions shows that that statement must be in error, and wildly so:

All the readings in the affected area displayed here are measured in microsieverts, and very low measurements are reported.

There is only one line of contamination running northwest of the reactors where there are reports of relatively higher readings, the highest of which is around 70 microsieverts per hour, still much lower than at the main gate to Fukushima, and nowhere even remotely in the vicinity of 1,000 microsieverts per hour.

Fukushima Daiichi Main Gate Radiation at 3:00 PM at 144 Microsieverts Per Hour

According to this cool interactive map from The Wall Street Journal here:

As of now, there's only one data point available in Fukushima Prefecture, and that's at the main gate to Ground Zero, but it's better than nothing.

At the stated level of 144 microsieverts per hour, you'd get 3.456 millisieverts camping out there for 24 hours, 6.912 millisieverts in 48 hours (just over the average American's ANNUAL exposure), and 483.6 millisieverts (the average American's exposure in a 78 year lifetime) in just 140 days (that's 20 weeks for those of you in Rio Linda). 

Sounds safe to me!

  

Fukushima Reactors 2, 3 and 5 Jolted Beyond Worst Case Projections

As reported here:

Three of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant experienced a jolt stronger than a worst case projection when hit by Japan's largest-ever earthquake March 11, provisional data by the operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. showed Friday. ...

According to the data, the lowest underground levels of the Nos. 2, 3 and 5 reactor buildings faced a seismic movement of 550, 507 and 548 gals in the east-west direction, respectively, and each figure exceeded the projected level.


The limits, according to the following data (source), were 438, 441 and 452, respectively:

This means the effect of the 9.0 quake on these reactors was 25%, 15% and 21% beyond the design parameters.

Obama, Distributor of Miseries, Must Resign

Friday-Morning, April 1, 2011

The True-born Sons of Liberty are desired to hear the public Resignation, under Oath, of Barack Hussein Obama, a Dastard, Distributor of Miseries for the United States of America.

A Resignation ?    YES.

Source

The Marks of the Slave: Ignorance and Cowardice

Source

Radiation in Iitate, Japan, at 25 Millisieverts Every 24 Hours

If that's really true, that's FOUR years' worth of normal exposure in America IN A CALENDAR DAY, AND STILL THEY WON'T EVACUATE Iitate, Japan.

Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, . . . said at a press conference in the afternoon [Thursday] that the agency's rough estimates have shown there is no need for people in Iitate to evacuate immediately under criteria set by the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan.

''The radiation dose of a person who was indoors for 16 hours and outdoors for eight hours (and continued such a lifestyle) would be about 25 millisieverts, which is about half the level which requires evacuation based on the commission's criteria,'' he said.

The commission explained that domestic criteria are based on measurements at radiation in the air, and not the soil.

The data was buried here, in a story about groundwater contamination near reactor one. The technique appears to be an old one: casually refer to the touchiest subject as an aside in a report about something entirely unrelated.