Today, in 1974, West Germany defeated the Netherlands 2-1 to win the World Cup. It looks like there may be another Germany-Netherlands final in the World Cup.

It has been almost three months since the oil spill in the gulf. However, there has been little attention given to the health effects of exposure to the various components present in the spill or the chemical used to disperse the oil.

The contents of the oils spill contain several components. Each has the potential to cause health risks to those who are exposed to them. These are some facts of some of the most toxic substances:

1.  Benzene

Is a colorless liquid that has a somewhat sweet odor. It evaporates in air quickly and can dissolve into water. Therefore, it can be present in rain water carried distances and can have an effect on the ground a distance from the original source. Reports from the EPA have put the amount of Benzene measured near the Gulf of Mexico at 3,000-4,000 parts per billion (normal 0-4ppb). The EPA has set the minimum benzene exposure in drinking water at 5 ppb and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has placed safe exposure of benzene at 1part per million parts of workplace air for 8 hour shifts in a 40 hour work week. The EPA considers it a carcinogen at 1,000 ppb. Exposure to benzene vapors can cause a myriad of symptoms from headaches, nausea, dizziness, and drowsiness to rashes, respiratory difficulty. It has also beenlinked to leukemia and lymphoma. More Benzene Facts

2.  Hydrogen Sulfide

This is a colorless flammable gas that is highly toxic that has a characteristic  “rotten egg” odor.It is 20% heavier than air, and therefore will accumulate on the ground and in confined spaces. At concentrations above 100 ppm the olfactory nerve (the nerve that controls the sense of smell) is affected and the person can no longer detect the foul smell. However, if the person has a prolonged exposure to a low concentration the ability to detect the smell will also be lost. Exposure to the gas at low concentrations (0-10 ppm) can cause eye, nose and throat irritation. At moderate concentrations (10-50 ppm) it can cause headache, dizziness, nausea and vomiting and cough. Respiratory difficulty; and at high concentrations (50-200 ppm) it can cause convulsions, coma and death. The EPA has measured the level of hydrogen sulfide gas in the gulf at 1000 ppm (the normal is 5-10 ppb).Most countries put a safe legal limit in the work environment of 10 ppm. In addition, protective equipment such as air respirators is mandated.More Safety Facts

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t looks like President George W. Bush may have a pretty good birthday today. After all, this time last year the liberal media was terming him as “the worst president in American history.”

But a lot has changed since then.

History has proven that the challenges he faced during his presidency were much more daunting that anyone realized. In fact, shortly after the 2008 presidential election, Gallup ranked Bush’s popularity at only 27 percent and Obama’s at 70 percent.

Most of the country thought Obama would prove Bush totally incompetent, but since then a lot has happened, and Obama’s popularity, according to Gallup, has dropped 24 points to only 46 percent.

One of his lead generals has publicly criticized his handling of the war in Afghanistan and even former Bush senior adviser Karl Rove has equated the current administration’s handling of the BP disaster to of the BP disaster to what happened with Katrina. Some people have even suggested Obama’s handling of the BP disaster is much worse than the way the Bush administration handled Katrina. (more…)

Last week, we reported on the undisclosed funding and conflicts of interest behind the pro-regulatory “research” being peddled by The Sunlight Foundation and picked up by the New York Times.  Following that Big Government report, Sunlight scurried to put up a post mentioning that pro-net neutrality companies also hire government officials and spend money on lobbying and disclosing that “Google senior manager Kim Scott sits on the Advisory Board of the Sunlight Foundation.”

The most interesting aspect of this story is not really about Internet regulation, though.

The real issue is how the Sunlight Foundation, which says it exists to push “transparency in government,” actually has a stunningly hypocritical stance with its own funding and self-interest.

All you have to do is to look at its Board of Directors and major donors (often one and the same).  Start with Craig Newmark, founder of the eponymous Craig’s List. His foundations gave Sunlight $10,000 in 2009 (Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund) and $50,000 in 2010 (Craigslist Charitable Fund).  Craig Newmark sits on the Board of the Sunlight Foundation, and has been one of the leaders in lobbying for heightened government regulations on broadband.

Next, you have Google, which has joined Newmark in financing pro-Net neutrality lobbying for years and which has a senior executive on Sunlight’s Advisory Board.  It wasn’t until our post that the Sunlight Foundation thought it relevant to mention that their Advisory Board and major donors contain people with a direct financial interest in regulation for which Sunlight is providing helpful “transparency research”.  The New York Times didn’t mention that, either.

Apparently transparency is only for those on the other side of the political aisle.

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Back on May 10^th, we broke the story that Taliban leader, Mullah Omar had been captured by the Pakistanis.

Our reporting was subsequently backed up by The Jawa Report, Oliver North, Millblogger Baba Tim, Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive.net, the Nation, and Iranian Television.  Even Newsweek magazine added a dog to the hunt with their story, “Taliban in Turmoil,” chronicling the total disarray the Taliban have been in since Mullah Omar disappeared.

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I’ve met a lot of people across the country since those news cameras caught me doubting Barack Obama’s ideas for giving my money to someone else. Over the last 18 months I have mostly enjoyed my role speaking as and for average working Americans.

Nobody puts a cordon around me to keep the “little people” away because this Ohio plumber is one of the little people. I talk with just about everybody and it’s been an education.

Everywhere I go at least one person asks me what it’s like to meet the political and media “stars” I’ve come across and who we all see on the national stage. Maybe we all want to believe that the best about us can be found in these people because it is they who will have the real power to change the direction of the country.

I can tell you that some of these national figures are real and some are not. What else is new? The hotter the spotlight, the more the tendency to “go cardboard” with scripted remarks, handlers keeping people away and a distance between what is real and what is “packaging”. It’s not always the case but pretty common from what I’ve seen.

What I have found, however, is a deep well of good ideas, common sense, decency and strength of character in the everyday people I meet. If you really want to know what makes America strong and good and resilient, look to our hometowns, not to the national stage.

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I recently released a new web video challenging President Obama to focus on the American people’s priorities after the release of yet another disappointing jobs report. Last Friday we learned that our economy lost 125,000 jobs in the month of June, yet another example of how the President’s trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ has failed to deliver the jobs he promised.  The video, entitled “What About The Country, Mr. President?,” features questions that I posed to the President regarding jobs, spending, the financial meltdown, and the Gulf oil spill.

SCRIPT: “WHAT ABOUT THE COUNTRY, MR. PRESIDENT?”

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In a rebuke to President Obama, a Senate panel last week gave a thumbs-up to the creation of an alternative Gulf oil spill commission to rival that previously announced by the President.

The bipartisan commission was approved by five Democrats and ten Republicans on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Its members would be determined mainly by Members of Congress, on a 50/50 Democrat/Republican basis, with President Obama retaining the power to appoint the Chairman.

The move followed intense criticism of President Obama’s own announced commission—composed in substantial part of anti-drilling members like Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke, and several individuals professionally focused on environmental law— from Democrats and Republicans alike.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), one of those involved in the alternative-commission effort, said earlier this week that the Obama Gulf oil spill commission “appears to me to be stacked with people philosophically opposed to offshore drilling.”

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Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Even using all the standard controls—including race and gender, full- or part-time work, firm size, marital status, region, residence in a city or suburb, and more—the federal wage premium does not disappear. It stubbornly hovers around 12%, meaning private employees must work 13½ months to earn what comparable federal workers make in 12.

Most academic studies dating back to the 1970s have found similar pay differences. In addition to the wage premium, federal workers enjoy more generous fringe benefits than do private workers. For instance, federal workers receive a defined benefit pension with benefit levels comparable to those from private 401(k) plans, except that federal workers contribute only 0.8% of pay and are not subject to any market risk. They also receive employer matches to the defined contribution Thrift Savings Plan that significantly exceed the typical private employer match.

If the overall generosity of federal benefits matches that of federal salaries (which seems quite likely), total compensation for federal workers may easily exceed $14,000 per year more than an otherwise similar private employee.

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Far-left ideologues and self-styled intellectual illuminati have, for years, labored overtime to highjack the notion of American Exceptionalism by equating it with their own notion of American arrogance.  Let us put an end to this calumny. Let us recall and, indeed, praise the American Exceptionalism at which Alexis de Tocqueville marveled when, during his travels through the young country in 1831, he coined the term in his treatise, “Democracy in America.”

De Tocqueville was writing for the European reader, especially for his fellow Frenchmen far more than he was writing for the new and vibrant American marketplace.  Whereas revolution had produced chaos and anarchy and hatred of almost anything that smacked of religion in France, de Tocqueville was quick to observe that something quite the contrary had emerged in America.  Here he saw the budding fruits of freedom, individual liberty, equality of opportunity and a people absolutely free to practice religion however they chose or not to practice any religion at all.   What he saw, first hand, was the world’s first functioning meritocracy, and what he described so eloquently was the fantastic differentiation of America from Europe.  He called it American Exceptionalism. It was, and has been, that exceptionalism that produced the most industrious nation the world has ever known.

That is something we should celebrate each and every day…that which made us different, that which made us great, and that which, thankfully, a rapidly growing number of Americans are determined to reestablish as the great American paradigm.  And while American Exceptionalism shouldn’t merely be about what was, but rather about what is, it is worth remembering that twenty-five thousand Americans died during the War of Independence to establish the great American experiment.  Relative to population that first American war was the second costliest in human treasure, exceeded only by the Civil War.   During the course of the 235 years since the shot at Concord that was heard around the world, more than 1.3 million Americans have died defending freedom and liberty.

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This week, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell will sign his eighth and final state budget (term limits prevent him from seeking re-election).  The budget passed with no tax increase, and represents $1 billion less than Gov. Rendell requested.  However, the budget merely passes the bill onto future years, and future generations, through accounting tricks and borrowing for egregious pork projects.

The budget relies on $2.7 billion in federal aid, including $850 million in Medicaid funds (FMAP) that has yet to pass Congress.  Indeed, no one believes Pennsylvania will get that much, if any, as the legislation doesn’t have enough support in the US Senate.  Gov. Rendell, along with Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, New York Gov. David Paterson and others were in Washington last week to lobby for more federal aid.

The state will use $121 million from Tobacco Settlement Funds for teachers’ pensions, which will then be backfilled, and another $35 million from other one-time sources to balance the budget.   Still unresolved are a projected $4 billion annual pension contribution hike and a $3 billion Unemployment Compensation Fund deficit.

Finally, the budget deal includes increasing the debt ceiling for the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP) by $600 million.

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Today, in 1917, Arab troops under the command of Lawrence of Arabia captured the Ottoman stronghold of Aqaba. It is a testament to what one man can do, as well as a caution to our limitations. T.E. Lawrence’s hopes for the Arab cause outstripped their capacity for self-government.

On the latest episode of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, Rob Long and Mark Steyn reflect on speeches given by Ronald Reagan and discuss their relevance today.

Reagan argued that the beginning stage of socialism is when the state gets control of Health Care.  Our freedom is infringed upon once the government can control where and how we work.  Once given this power, the government will only gain even more control – how long until they tell us what we can or can’t eat?

Steyn and Long argue that the federal government is acting like Mommy and Daddy – paying for everything to where we are so infantilized that our salary is more like allowance, only used for toys.

Steyn and Long hope that conservatives get back to Reagan’s Liberty argument, meaning instead of opining against “big government,” advocating for “big freedom.”  And that a nation with “big freedom” must include a President who is a citizen legislator, not a moral guidepost and leader who knows what’s best for the masses.

As Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “we are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.”

Watch the full episode below.  And be sure to visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

Although President Obama’s executive order imposing a six-month moratorium on drilling for crude oil and natural gas in ultra-deep waters within the 200-mile territorial limit recognized by international law has at least temporarily been suspended by a federal district judge, offshore drilling will not come to a screeching halt even if that precipitous action ultimately is determined to be within his constitutional powers.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal on Friday. July 2, Respol YPF SA, a Spanish company, has announced that next year it will begin drilling exploratory wells off the northern coast of Cuba, just 60 miles south of Key West. Industry experts as well as the U.S. Geological Survey seem confident that substantial deposits of crude oil and natural gas are there for the taking.

America’s oil companies cannot participate in exploiting those deposits because of our long-standing and counterproductive trade embargo against Cuba. (Can anyone identify a benefit flowing from that embargo offsetting the heavy costs imposed on me and other smokers of cigars? I doubt it.)

The point is that if the United States commits to bypassing offshore drilling at depths greater than 500 feet, we will be cutting off our collective noses to spite our collective face. Spain, China, Venezuela and other nations will continue to exploit potential reserves of fossil fuels, wherever they may be found. As a result, more of the world’s supply of crude oil and natural gas will fall into the hands of unfriendly nations.

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Yesterday, Andrew Breitbart launched his newest web venture, Big Peace. It will do for national security, what Big Hollywood has done for culture, Big Journalism for the media and Big Government for domestic policy. It has also caused me to climb into the way-back machine.

In 1985, I was an exchange student at a gymnasium (high school) in Bremen, West Germany. It was an anxious time; with renewed leftist terrorist attacks and hijackings throughout Europe. (The TWA airplane which took me to Frankfurt was hijacked about a week later.)  The Middle East was, predictably, tense. The Soviet Union looked as strong as ever. America was coming out of an economic and psychological malaise, but much of Europe, and U.S. political and media elites, were openly worried about a “warmongering” US President who didn’t understand complex foreign policy and might just start a war for kicks.

For those readers under forty, the political debates at the time centered on MX and Minuteman missiles, nuclear disarmament and small dust-ups like the Contras in Nicaragua. One night over dinner, my otherwise gracious German hosts, along with some of their friends, berated me for US foreign policy. Most every problem in the world could somehow be traced back to the U.S. They were particularly incensed about US Government support for the Contra rebels, fighting the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

America should stay out of the affairs of all other countries, I was lectured. It shouldn’t interfere in any of the domestic squabbles in other nations. I replied that I understood that, but the Sandinistas were communist dictators who were supported by the Soviets and Cuba, so it was probable we would be involved.

Support for the Sandinistas from other countries was immaterial, I was told. America should be better and never involve itself in another country’s affairs, they argued.

So, I replied, what about that Berlin Airlift?

Oh, America had to do that, my German hosts replied. That was totally different.

It always is.

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Send lawyers, guns and money…the sh%$ has hit the fan!

Seriously!  Justice Thomas opened a whole new chapter in constitutional jurisprudence with his concurring opinion regarding the 14th Amendment’s “privileges and immunities” clause.

Part II deals with Justice Thomas’ concurring opinion in McDonald v. Chicago. Part I dealt with the plurality decision written by Justice Alito, and the dissenting opinion of Justice Breyer, and is relevant to a discussion on the doctrine of incorporation.  Part III will address Justice Scalia’s concurrence directed at Justice Stevens’ dissent.

Let me preface this article by saying Justice Thomas is my favorite Supreme Court Justice.  Progressives often ridicule him for being “silent,” but why should he bother asking attorneys questions when their arguments focus on SCOTUS swing-vote, Justice Kennedy.  His textual approach to interpreting the Constitution makes the most sense.  While originalism and textualism both seek the original meaning of a statute or provision of the Constitution, originalism seeks the intent of the authors, where textualism focuses on the contemporary meaning of the text.  Primary sources on the intent of authors leads to a cogent argument, but primary sources on the meanings of words promotes a sound argument (and if you never learned logic then you have some studying to do; progressive arguments are rife with fallacies). (more…)

On the heels of an abysmal unemployment report, striking clerical workers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach (CA) are threatening to put an even bigger damper on the nation’s already-sagging economy.

When members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63 went out on Thursday, cargo continued to move through the ports.  However, that is not expected to last.

“Most of the paperwork is processed in advance,” stated John Fageaux, president of the ILWU local.

Little progress was reported today in negotiations between shipping companies and striking clerical workers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The negotiating teams representing employers released a statement this afternoon accusing the union of “featherbedding.”

The term featherbedding refers to the union practice of either limiting output or requiring extra union workers than is necessary.

According to Stephen Berry, who is representing the shipping companies, union demands would “force the employers to hire temporary and permanent workers even when there is no work for them to perform.”

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In his recent trip to Racine, Wisconsin, President Obama claimed that his stimulus policies worked and “saved jobs.” He also said that his policies staved off another Great Depression. But lets take a look at some of the graft, waste and pointless, useless, wild-eyed spending that was in his so-called stimulus.

• $5 million to create a geothermal energy system for a shopping mall in Tennessee. The mall is over half empty of tenants and has had falling shopper attendance for years *
• $1.57 million to Penn State University study fossils in Argentina *
• $100,000 to a puppet theater in Minnesota *
• $2 million to build a replica railroad tourist trap in Carson City, Nev. *
• A boat cruise company in Chicago got almost $1 million to “combat terrorism” *
• $500,000 went to Ariz. State Univ. to study ant genetics *
• Another $450,000 went to Uinv. of Arizona to study ants *
• Almost $400,000 went to Univ. of New York to pay students to drink beer and smoke marijuana for a study there *
• $219,000 to the Nat’l Institute of Health to study if young people “hook-up” after getting drunk *
• $210,000 to the Univ. of Hawaii to study bees *
• $700,000 to crab fishermen in Oregon to pay for lost crab pots *
• $5,000 a person tax rebate if you buy a new electric golf cart (Wall Street Journal)
• Up to $1 million went to prisoners in $250 stimulus checks (FoxNews)
• $54 mil to a New York Indian tribe to run its casino (New York Post)
• $1 billion for a power plant in Mattoon, Illinois that is based on speculative science and may not even work **
• $15 million to back-road bridges that get little traffic in Wisconsin **
• $800,000 for a practically unused airport in Pennsylvania **
• $3.4 million for an animal walk way under a road in Florida **
• $1.15 million to install a guard rail for a lake that doesn’t even exist in Oklahoma **
• $10 million to renovate a rail station that has stood unused for a decade **
• $578,000 to battle homelessness in Union, New York even though the town says they have no homeless people there **
• $233,000 to the Univ. of Calif. to study why Africans vote… in Africa ***
• $2 million to build a new fire house in a Nevada town that has no firemen ***
• North Carolina schools got $4.4 million for literacy and math coaches… to teach their teachers! ***
• $54 million for a railroad project in Napa Valley went to a minority-owned company that then hired a local construction company for half the price, pocketing the rest ***
• A California company was given $15 million in stimulus money to monitor water quality in a stream it was under indictment for polluting previously***

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Last Thursday President Obama acknowledged during his speech on comprehensive immigration reform that under Washington’s failed leadership legal immigration had become a fallacy as we have been reporting here and here.

As the President stated, “More fundamentally, the presence of so many illegal immigrants makes a mockery of all those who are going through the process of immigrating legally. Indeed, after years of patchwork fixes and ill-conceived revisions, the legal immigration system is as broken as the borders.”

That’s right. The legal immigration system has grown into a boondoggle. For over 200 years people from around the globe have flocked to America in search of the American dream but over the last couple of decades, as millions of illegal aliens crossed the unsecured borders, the American dream was mired and crushed under the cruel weight of incompetent ever-changing government bureaucracy for countless legal immigrants. This actuality does not only negatively impact legal immigrants; it adversely affects national security and the economy. Americans should be concerned. So what did President Obama propose to fix this federal-government made disaster that metastasized under both Republican and Democrat rule? He didn’t say.

Nor did President Obama name the federal agency that is the broken legal immigration system. It’s the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), formerly the troubled Immigration Naturalization Services (INS).

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