Coal Was King Recourse In Last Decade, Followed by Oil and Gas

"Almost half of the increase in primary energy use in the past decade has come from coal. Almost all the rest has come from oil and gas."

-- Peter Foster, here

Pay For Your Own Goddamn Abortion

“What we can’t be doing is using last year’s budget process to have arguments about abortion . . .."

-- President Obama, quoted here, who used the Obamacare process under budget reconciliation to slaughter the Hyde Amendment prohibiting federal funding of abortion.

BankRobberiesRUs

From Jeff Randall for The UK Telegraph:

When asked by a judge why he persisted in robbing banks, the serial offender replied: “Because that’s where the money is.”

For us taxpayers, this observation is now doubly true. The banks have captured our money twice over: as cash in their vaults and investments in their shares. ... We rescued them – and in so doing became their prisoners. ...

The global economy cannot function without big banks, they say: gigantism provides synergies, efficiencies and benefits of scale. What a hoot. Tell that to the shareholders of Citigroup, a banking behemoth, which all but disappeared up its own balance sheet in 2008, having had a wild (losing) punt on sub-prime mortgages. ...

There is a general perception that we don’t want banks to fail, not even bad ones. This is a mistake. We should be perfectly happy to see poorly run businesses disappear.

Read the rest here.

5 Radiation Monitoring Posts 20-30 Km From Fukushima Daiichi Over 10 MicroSv/Hr

One radiation post, #83 near the 20 km ring northwest of the reactors, continues to register the highest reading of all the monitoring posts: 58.5 microsieverts/hour.

A little farther out, four others, #s 33, 32, 31 and 79 near the 30 km ring, register 19.5, 27.8, 11.4 and 14.8 microsieverts per hour respectively.

The main gate to the reactor complex is about 108 microsieverts per hour, while Iitate is just over 6 microsieverts per hour.

These values would all need to come down to 0.11425 microsievert per hour just to mirror normal, natural conditions under which a person gets 1.0 millisievert per year. Just a handful of locations even come close.

For the following map and values, go here:

Federal Reserve Discount Window Aided Many Banks Which Failed Anyway

So says another in a long line of incriminating stories in The New York Times, highlighting the pervasive involvement of the US government in bailing out failing institutions and implicating it in the spread of moral hazard to the highest levels of American banking:

More than one thousand banks have taken advantage [of the discount window during the financial crisis]. A review of federal data, including records the Fed released last week [by court order], shows that at least 111 of those banks subsequently failed. Eight owed the Fed money on the day they failed, including Washington Mutual, the largest failed bank in American history.

Here's the graphic from the article showcasing some of the worst offenders:

"You Might Want To Think About A Trade-In"

Trade-in value of this clunker = zero

The Tyrant is the Flatterer of the Vilest of Mankind

In "Obama's Close Friend Arrested In Prostitution Sting," here, we learn that Bobby Titcomb is a former classmate who holidays, golfs and picnics with the president, and has hosted him at his home in Hawaii for a barbecue.

Birds of a feather, perhaps?

How To Plan

                                        Think ahea

d.

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.