How genuine can the President’s claims of transparency be when they won’t even discuss the most basic aspects of the people and process involved with the drafting of their Executive Order on transparency?

There seemed to have been a collective sigh of relief across the country. After over two years of waging war on domestic energy production which helped to boost gas prices over four dollars/gallon ($4.58 in my neighborhood), President Obama announced a new energy plan that would allow an increase and acceleration of domestic energy production.

Well…that’s until one examines his words. That’s when you realize that the POTUS left himself enough “outs” to make his plan worthless.

I am directing the Department of Interior to conduct annual lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, while respecting sensitive areas, and to speed up the evaluation of oil and gas resources in the mid and south Atlantic.  We plan to lease new areas in the Gulf of Mexico as well, and work to create new incentives for industry to develop their unused leases both on and offshore.

Oh great! Finally drilling at ANWR? Not on your life. The National Petroleum Reserve is not ANWR it’s next the desired drilling area.  Kind of  like telling a new president that instead of the White House he would have to live at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The President didn’t mention drilling in ANWR, he said “respecting sensitive areas,” which was a signal to the important environmentalist constituency, that he did not mean ANWR

The map above describes the ANWAR situation. ANWR sits within a 20 million-acre refuge (the size of South Carolina), but thanks to advanced technology like directional drilling, the aggregated drilling footprint (the dot pointed to by the arrow) would be less than 2,000 acres (about one-quarter the size of Dulles Airport). This is like laying a 2-by-3-foot welcome mat on a basketball court.

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Earlier this year, under the title “Who Needs Congress:  Legislation by Regulatory Fiat,” we expressed concern that the Obama Administration was moving to checkmate the 2010 Republican electoral sweep by getting its acolytes and bureaucrats in the regulatory agencies, which the Administration controls, to do its legislative work for them.  We cited our fears that the agency bureaucrats, most of whom aren’t even confirmed by Congress, would use their almost unlimited power to write regulations and make legal interpretations of, ambiguous at best, legislative language to determine the “will” of Congress in passing legislation it never even read.  The common thread, we feared, was to transfer more and more control over the private sector to the Federal government.

Back in January, the fear was that the very controversial health care legislation would be expanded to incorporate provisions on which even Congress gagged.  And as it came to pass with Medicare issued regulations no one in Congress anticipated, including what Sarah Palin referred to as the “death panels” but with the more sanitized name of “end-of-life counseling”.

We expressed other fears earlier this year, none of which have abated . . . and in some cases have increased. . . an FCC power grab over the largely unregulated . . . and therefore hugely successful internet, in the form of so‑called “net neutrality” rules; and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposal of a proposed rule to take away from the states the right to regulate retail electricity service.

And what we then referred to as the “granddaddy” of them all — the power grab of the EPA which determined that carbon emissions were  a pollutant. EPA has also moved to strip states of authority to issue permits for large power and industrial projects and grab that authority for themselves.

Yet we have underestimated the aggressiveness of the Administration in its encroaching muscularity.   The White House and its regulatory toadies are now making a serious, and we think dangerously transformative, effort to decide where in the country private companies can build manufacturing (and by extension of this incredible grab) any other facilities.

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The Middle East is erupting in protest. Eventually, we hope, they will move out of the 16th Century.

From the Associated Press:

Allegations of sexual assault in a New York hotel have torn France’s presidential race asunder and savaged the reputation of the suave and self-assured Dominique Strauss-Kahn, chief of the International Monetary Fund.

The 62-year-old Strauss-Kahn has topped French opinion polls for months as the man most likely to become this nation’s next president, consistently outshining the little-loved conservative incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Yet on Sunday, Strauss-Kahn’s allies and rivals alike struggled with shock at news that he was hauled off an Air France flight minutes before takeoff, arrested and facing charges of attempted rape and a criminal sex act. An arraignment expected Sunday night was postponed until Monday.

In cafes and outdoor markets, French voters shared that disbelief.

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From AFP:

A German man scooped the title of world’s best beard on Sunday after impressing competition hosts in Norway with his facial hair featuring a moose and a Norwegian flag.

Hairdresser Elmar Weisser, 47, beat 160 hopefuls from 15 countries to take first prize in the World Beard and Moustache Championship, held this year in Trondheim.

Weisser is a veteran of the competition, held every two years, having won several times before.

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From the Associated Press:

Deputies warned people Sunday to get out as Mississippi River water gushing from a floodgate for the first time in four decades crept ever closer to communities in Louisiana Cajun country, slowly filling a river basin like a giant bathtub.

Most residents heeded the warnings and headed for higher ground, even in places where there hasn’t been so much as a trickle, hopeful that the flooding engineered to protect New Orleans and Baton Rouge would be merciful to their way of life.

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Even the most avid circus goers tire of the big top, apparently.

Saturday, various labor and left wing organizations attempted to hold another massive protest at the Wisconsin State Capitol.

The lackluster May Day rallies in Milwaukee and Madison were filled with pleas to head to Madison on May 14th to show Scott Walker that the fight isn’t over. Liberal radio hosts plugged the event. Lefty bloggers posted about it. Labor unions sent out emails and robo calls to their members. Madison coffehouses, bookstores and telephone poles were littered with brochures about the rally. People were bused in from across the state.

Yawn.

It appears “We’re not going away!” isn’t as catchy as “We skipped out of work, to show we deserve our pay.”

When the allure of shutting down schools or shutting down the legislature are missing, so are a hundred thousand protesters it seems. Now, 7-10,000 is still a crowd, but in Madison, Wisconsin the left can get that many out to protest an appearance by the rare conservative speaker on campus.

The changes to the public employee union’s collective bargaining power remain held up in court. But Act 10 has been signed into law. It’s done. It is just going to take some time to get past the liberal judges in Dane County.

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Border fence? Papers? Immigration reform?

San Francisco has just decided that they will no longer cooperate with the feds when they arrest juveniles who commit felonies. This is being done in the spirit of their Sanctuary law.  Sanctuary for violent law breakers, that is.   San Francisco has always welcomed illegal aliens and provided them every service imaginable while thumbing their noses at the feds.

President Obama and his lame side-kick, otherwise know as Attorney General Eric Holder recently prosecuted the State of Arizona because Arizona had passed a law, with wording mimicking the federal statutes, to enforce immigration laws.  Holder claimed the state was precluded from passing these type of laws as the state was “pre-empted” by the feds.    However, Obama and Holder see no “pre-emption” policy violation when states and cities pass laws designed to defeat or circumvent federal laws. That’s apparently lawful according to the brain trusts that run the Attorney General’s office.   Do you need more evidence that we live in an Alice in Wonderland world, a world full of left wing rodents running the government?

Not all states are giving into the alien felons.   Utah recently enacted a law that would check the citizenship status of all those persons arrested for felonies.  This is what the feds want. They allegedly want felons deported.  However, this week a federal judge struck down Utah’s attempt to identify arrested illegal alien felons because it’s too much like the Arizona law!     Excuse me your honor, but how exactly do we know which felons to turn over to the feds- if we can’t ask for proof of legal presence in our country?

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From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

A Washington Post story about Catholic professors challenging Rep. John Boehner’s Catholic faith with an open letter to the House Speaker ignores the role of one of the key signers in a George Soros-funded group.
The letter to Boehner says, “Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress.” Ignoring the Catholic tradition of subsidiarity, or decentralized government, and voluntarism, the letter claims Boehner’s votes against expansion of the federal welfare state are anti-Catholic.

Letter signer Stephen F. Schneck of the Catholic University of America (CUA) is a board member of the Soros-funded Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG). Because of the significant funding the group has received from Soros, an atheist, CACG has been called a “fake Catholic” group designed to undermine official Catholic teaching on abortion and homosexuality and promote Obama Administration Big Government policies. The former CACG executive director, Alexia Kelley, now works for the Obama Administration.

A major financial backer of the ACLU, Soros supports such causes as drug legalization, the rights of “sex workers” and felons, euthanasia, radical feminism and abortion rights.

In addition to helping organize the protest against Boehner, Schneck recently hosted two socialists on the CUA campus at a one-sided forum on how and why the Catholic Church should be promoting liberal and pro-union social policies.

The focus of the anti-Boehner article by Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein is the letter that she notes was “organized by faculty at Catholic University, the national university of the Catholic Church in Northeast Washington.” She adds, “Of the nearly 80 signers, about 30 are from Catholic University, including faculty from the schools of law, nursing, history and theology, among others.”

What this means, of course, is that CUA has become a hotbed of liberal social activism designed to benefit the national Democratic Party.

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There’s a lot of buzz about a Wall Street Journal interview with Stanley Druckenmiller, in which he argues that a temporary delay in making payments on U.S. government debt (which technically would be a default) would be a small price to pay if it resulted in the long-term spending reforms that are needed to save America from becoming another Greece.

One of the world’s most successful money managers, the lanky, sandy-haired Mr. Druckenmiller is so concerned about the government’s ability to pay for its future obligations that he’s willing to accept a temporary delay in the interest payments he’s owed on his U.S. Treasury bonds—if the result is a Washington deal to restrain runaway entitlement costs. “I think technical default would be horrible,” he says from the 24th floor of his midtown Manhattan office, “but I don’t think it’s going to be the end of the world. It’s not going to be catastrophic. What’s going to be catastrophic is if we don’t solve the real problem,” meaning Washington’s spending addiction. …Mr. Druckenmiller’s view on the debt limit bumps up against virtually the entire Wall Street-Washington financial establishment. A recent note on behalf of giant banks on the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee warned of a “severe and long-lasting impact” if the debt limit is not raised immediately. …This week more than 60 trade associations, representing virtually all of American big business, forecast “a massive spike in borrowing costs.” On Thursday Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke raised the specter of a market crisis similar to the one that followed the 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. As usual, the most aggressive predictor of doom in the absence of increased government spending has been Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. In a May 2 letter to House Speaker John Boehner, Mr. Geithner warned of “a catastrophic economic impact” and said, “Default would cause a financial crisis potentially more severe than the crisis from which we are only now starting to recover.”

Mr. Druckenmiller is not overly impressed by this hyperbole. The article continues with this key passage.

“Here are your two options: piece of paper number one—let’s just call it a 10-year Treasury. So I own this piece of paper. I get an income stream obviously over 10 years . . . and one of my interest payments is going to be delayed, I don’t know, six days, eight days, 15 days, but I know I’m going to get it. There’s not a doubt in my mind that it’s not going to pay, but it’s going to be delayed. But in exchange for that, let’s suppose I know I’m going to get massive cuts in entitlements and the government is going to get their house in order so my payments seven, eight, nine, 10 years out are much more assured,” he says. Then there’s “piece of paper number two,” he says, under a scenario in which the debt limit is quickly raised to avoid any possible disruption in payments. “I don’t have to wait six, eight, or 10 days for one of my many payments over 10 years. I get it on time. But we’re going to continue to pile up trillions of dollars of debt and I may have a Greek situation on my hands in six or seven years. Now as an owner, which piece of paper do I want to own? To me it’s a no-brainer. It’s piece of paper number one.” …”Russia had a real default and two or three years later they had all-time low interest rates,” says Mr. Druckenmiller. In the future, he says, “People aren’t going to wonder whether 20 years ago we delayed an interest payment for six days. They’re going to wonder whether we got our house in order.”

This is a very compelling argument, but it overlooks one major problem – the complete inability of Republicans to succeed in forcing fiscal reform using this approach.

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Mike Huckabee is not running for the GOP nomination for President.

We have been hearing a lot about “social justice,” during the tenure of the Obama Administration. From Eric Holder to John Holdren, Lisa Jackson to Van Jones to President Obama himself, the goal of social justice appears to be at the forefront of Mr. Obama’s agenda for the country. But while the term sounds innocuous enough, the goal itself is quite sinister and the road to getting there creates havoc and waste but for the chosen few.

A recent San Francisco Chronicle article proves this point beyond doubt:

“San Francisco’s much-heralded ‘social justice’ requirements for city contracts are costing local taxpayers millions of dollars a year in overcharges, according to workers in departments ranging from the Municipal Transportation Agency to the Department of Emergency Management.

“In one case, a Muni worker said the city paid $3,000 for a vehicle battery tray. Such parts can be found online for $12 to $300, depending on the type of vehicle…

“Other city purchasing policies, if followed, would mean paying about $240 for getting a copy of a key that actually cost a worker $1.35 to get done at a hardware store on his break, the employee said. Another city worker called the use of catalog pricing for supplies ‘Pentagon-style purchasing.’

“Markups from approved vendors range from 10 to 150 percent, employees said, with one calling the city’s requirement that contractors provide health care benefits for domestic partners ‘the expensive white elephant standing in the middle of the room (that) no one wants to mention.’

“Some vendors are suspected of being little more than middlemen who comply with San Francisco’s very specific requirements for contractors – like disclosing historic ties to slavery and providing domestic partner benefits, a provision known as 12B because of its chapter in the Administrative Code – then turn around and buy the products from companies that don’t meet the restrictions, city officials acknowledge.

“An analysis by the General Services Agency found that in the last complete fiscal year, 2009-10, the city paid $9.8 million to ‘possible third-party brokers’ – vendors that may be pass-through companies.”

Imagine that, a city with a $306 million budget deficit, from a state with a $15.4 billion deficit, justifying the over-payment of taxpayer dollars to what is essentially special interest affirmative action groups in the private sector by claiming it satisfies the quest for “social justice.”

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For thousands of years, philosophers have told us that if we are to live our lives at their best, we should seek truth, beauty, and goodness. Of course, each of these qualities has raised thorny issues and provoked ongoing arguments. That people have carried on such arguments, rather than surrendering themselves to their raw appetites and animal instincts, may be counted a valuable thing in itself. A final resolution of such deep questions may lie beyond human capacities.

In regard to goodness and beauty, I have nothing worthwhile to add to the discussion. For guidance in seeking goodness, we may look to saints, theologians, moral philosophers, and moral exemplars of our own acquaintance. For demonstrations of beauty, we may turn to nature and to artists, great and small, who have adorned our lives with the grace of music, poetry, and the visual arts. My own professional qualifications, as an economist and an economic historian, do not equip me to contribute anything of value in these areas.

I do feel qualified, however, to speak with regard to truth, because the search for truth has always served as the foundation of my intellectual endeavors. Moreover, my study, research, and reflection within my own professional domains have brought home to me a relationship that others might do well to ponder and respect―a relationship, indeed, an array of relationships, between truth and freedom, such that anyone who seeks the triumph of truth must also seek to establish freedom in human affairs.

When I began my academic career in 1968, my research specialty was the economic history of the United States. I was expected to publish the findings of my research in reputable professional journals. For a young man just beginning to master his field, carrying out publishable research was a daunting task. Thousands of other writers had already contributed to building up the literature in my field, so adding something of enough importance to merit its publication in a good journal was hardly an easy task.

I discovered, however, that one way to proceed was by identifying significant mistakes in the existing literature and correcting them. Moreover, I soon found that many such mistakes had been made. To put this statement in another way, I found that the existing sources often failed to tell the truth about one thing or another, and in some cases the falsehoods propounded by one writer led later writers, who relied on those false statements, to make errors of their own.

We often think of the scientific or scholarly enterprise as a cooperative process in which the establishment of one truth facilitates the establishment of another, but, unfortunately, the process often works in an adverse way, too, as the establishment of one falsehood fosters the establishment of another.

The errors in my fields of study and research take two main forms: factual and interpretive.

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Talking on the CBS show “60 Minutes,” President Obama noted: “It’s going to take some time for us to exploit the intelligence that we were able to gather on site” during the raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed. This information, according to Mr. Obama, gives the U.S. a chance “to…really deliver a fatal blow [to Al Qaeda], if we follow through aggressively in the months to come.”

The United States intelligence agencies reliance on labor-intensive, time-consuming and inefficient methods to decipher the captured electronic devices and paper documents. The delay has allowed al Qaeda operatives and many of its budding affiliates to relocate, change their identity and communication methods, diminishing the U.S. ability to act upon the intelligence contain in the trove, The window of opportunity to destroy the organization and its global metastasizes, has significantly shrunk.

This event demonstrates the need for a more efficient process to mine the tens of millions of documents – electronic and print – which are seized or intercepted annually in different languages by U.S. intelligence, military, and law enforcement agencies. There is an urgent need to extract information of high intelligence value contained in such documents rapidly and efficiently, and to pass the intelligence on for operational exploitation.

The current Document Exploitation (DOCEX) method, including automated translation and categorization technologies, suffers from several major deficiencies: focus on an inefficient key word spotting techniques, long processing times, and a high rate of false negatives and positives. Moreover, the automated translation tools are still unsuitable for the sophisticated language of neo-classical Arabic used by Islamist terrorists such as al-Qaeda. Similarly, categorization technologies do not meet the challenge of analyzing sophisticated, culturally sensitive nuances. Poorly translated and categorized documents of course cause the loss of crucial actionable and preventative intelligence.

To address such problems, IntuView, an Israeli company, has developed revolutionary software that can process large volumes of digital documents related to Islamic terrorism very quickly.

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Andrew Puzder knows a thing or two about creating jobs. As CEO of CKE Restaurants, the parent company of many famous brands including Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, Puzder has seen firsthand how government policies can help or hurt job creation. In his new book, “Job Creation: How It Really Works and Why Government Doesn’t Understand It”, Puzder and co-author Dave Newton share what they have learned.

Puzder spoke at Heritage this week and sat down with Heritage to talk about his experience in the business world.

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A Facebook posting from Illinois State Senator Sam McCann:

I am at my desk here on the floor of the IL Senate. We are in the midst of voting on FY2012 Budget Bills. You may ask yourselves how I have time to make this post when I perhaps should be weighing the merits of the facts contained within the individual bills so that I can make thoughtful, educated votes, for you, the taxpayers for whom I work. And you would be wise to ask that question. And I have the answer for you: I have NO BILL LANGUAGE TO READ!!!!! You are reading correctly. The bills we are voting on are AMENDMENTS to previously filed bills (many of which are SHELL Bills to begin with).

The Amendments become the Bills themselves. And it was JUST MINUTES ago that the Chicago Democratic Machine-controlled Democrat Caucus came out of a back room filing these bills AND immediately calling them for votes. Not only has there NOT been a week or three days or 24 hours or even one hour of SUNLIGHT on any of this budget language, there has not even been one minute. NOT ONE MINUTE!!!! They not only have not had time to print it out, it DOES NOT EVEN EXIST IN THE ELECTRONIC RECORD. Not only can I not pull up the language or any analysis on my “special Senate computer”, there is nothing on the IL General Assembly website.

Furthermore, I don’t believe there is anything even on the rank-and-file Democrats’ desks, either. It is all talking points from their leadership. I am not trying to sound partisan. I was elected by the people of the 49th District and I work for ALL THE PEOPLE OF THE 49TH District. I wake up in the morning and am proud to consider myself an American and an Illinoisan before anything else. But I have to tell you something: this is sickening. It is appalling. At a time when the People of the state are demanding balanced budgets and wise stewardship of their tax dollars, the majority party is choosing to continue to engage in bullying and blind-voting instead of conversation and negotiation.

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The recent correction in the commodities markets may be providing Bernake, Geithner and their easy money acolytes with a sense of relief given the relentless run up in prices of raw materials since the announcement of QE back in 2008, but they should not sleep tight just yet.  As anyone in the markets will tell you, when any underlying commodity has a price move so vertical in its trajectory it’s bound to face a correction as the smart money, having gotten in for fundamental reasons much earlier along the trend line now wait for the panic buyers or the Johnny-come-lately’s to give the rally that last unsustainable spike to unload their longs and leave the suckers holding $40.00 silver in their purses.

So one must step back and take a long view.  Although it would appear that those of us who warn that inflation is not just a threat but very much a fact of life now were knee-jerk pontificators jumping on the commodities rally trend for political (read: Fed/Obama bashing) reasons, the analysis is quite sound.  Most important, it is methodical not emotional as price surges tend to make investors and analysts from time to time.

Here are some facts: even with the inevitable correction in commodities, as of this writing crude oil is 35% more expensive than it was a year ago…advancing with ups and downs along the way from as low as $17.50/bbl in November of 2001 to its current level of over $100/bbl or around a 19% annual appreciation in a decade since the Fed started giving away dollars.  In that same year silver is still up 93%   Wheat 84%. Cotton 100%  Coffee 55%. Cattle 10%, etc.  In that same decade the USD index against all currencies shed 40% of its value.  Gold is up 22% for the year.  More revealing, the most precious metal and most stable of exchange mechanisms is up an astonishing 450% since 2001. Put another way, whereas the dollar was worth 1/250^th of an ounce of gold in 2001, it is now only worth 1/1500^th.  Money can be printed with much more ease and speed than gold can be mined.

To understand why the Bernake’s and Geithner’s of the world view CPI through rose-tinted glasses we must remember who they are.  They are wonks who have spent their entire careers lecturing and/or fidgeting with economies without actively participating in them.  They are awash in data and are hardwired to extrapolate patterns from the past to predict the future.  But we have only had a non-gold fiat monetary system in place since 1971 which is hardly enough time to get a handle on repeating macro-economic cycles in such an ever changing and dynamic landscape.  And I want to offer something else.  From the late 1940s to the mid-1980s the United States was the dominant manufacturer in the world.  The reason?  Of our three main foreign competitors today, China, Japan and Germany, one was mired for much of the third quarter of the 20^th Century in a disastrous experiment with Maoist communism while the latter two’s urban centers had been reduced to utter wasteland as their reward for launching the most devastating war in human history.  Indeed, all of Europe was digging out of the wreckage of their mass-fratricide, including a bankrupted Great Britain…once the supreme power of the world.

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