Guess which is which?

According to data released on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Midland, Texas, has a 2.9 percent unemployment rate, the lowest in the country.

Midland sits above the Permian Basin Shale, a massive formation that constitutes a large chunk of TexasÂ’ booming shale oil industry.

The West Texas town is also one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country, which many attribute to its booming oil-fueled economy.

...

As a result of MidlandÂ’s fracking-induced oil glut, the townÂ’s increasing population is also enjoying a boost in personal incomes. Per capita income in the city increased by 25 percent between 2009 and 2011.

...

In contrast to the successes of those oil and gas boomtowns, Yuma, Ariz., is facing the highest unemployment rate of any U.S. metro area at a whopping 26.1 percent.

Yuma is the site of the Agua Caliente solar plant—the largest photovoltaic solar generation facility in the world.

Agua Caliente received a $967 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy (DOE) in 2011. According to DOE, federal financing helped create 10 permanent jobs.

Ten jobs for almost a billion dollars.

That's damned good.

Via @slublog.

Posted by: Ace at 11:36 AM | Comments (267)
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@johnekdahl sends this along, noting that it's one of my pet peeves. While, for example, that Pennsylvania AG case will be ignored by the national press (as the Gosnell case was ignored as a "local crime story"), all the left has to do is get one of its many house organs to type up a largely false and misleading report, send it over to one of the country's allegedly "mainstream" media outfits, and wait for its claims to be endlessly retransmitted throughout the country.

Powerline notes that a left-wing organization wrote up a report claiming that the Koch Brothers stood to benefit greatly from their operation of tar-sands operations in Alberta.

There are numerous problems with the claims made. The report claims, falsely, that the Koch Brothers are the largest leaseholders of Canada's tar sands. That's simply false. Apparently the article compares their holdings to Exxon and Conoco and Chevron but fails to check for other leaseholders -- other companies own more.

They then assume that companies with the most acreage of leaseholds must be producing the most oil -- which is false. The Koch Brothers' holdings are in fact largely non-productive. Despite their acreage of leaseholds, they're a "negligible" producer as far as actual extraction of oil.

But the last misleading claim made is that the Koch Brothers stand to make a windfall from the Keystone XL pipeline. This not only isn't true, but it's admitted as not being true in the left-wing organization's own report:

The astonishing thing about the IFG report is that it admitted that the Keystone Pipeline will damage KochÂ’s economic interests. Keystone would funnel Canadian oil to the Midwest, thereby driving down oil prices in that region. The original IFG report admitted that this would cost Koch $120 billion! Now, that is a stupid number based on a 50-year projection. But still, the basic point is correct: the Keystone Pipeline would hurt Koch Enterprises economically, which is why Koch has never come out in favor of the pipeline or lobbied on its behalf.

The IFG report hypothesized that despite this $120 billion hit, Koch would come out ahead in the long run–the very long run!–by selling two million acres worth of Alberta oil. Just one small problem: they forgot to consider the fact that the size of the Keystone Pipeline, 830,000 barrels per day, limits the speed with which Koch can recoup its $120 billion loss. As I calculated in my post, it would take 476 years for Koch to break even, using IFG’s own numbers.

So why make all these claims?

Because the Democratic Party has a lot invested in the proposition that the Koch Brothers are boogeymen and the Keystone Pipeline is their boogey-baby.

In the pages of the "mainstream" media press, the truth is whatever the Democratic Party needs it to be for this particular two-minute hate.

And there's some Democratic operative/media incestuousness here too, of course. Click over to Powerline for that.

Posted by: Ace at 10:12 AM | Comments (307)
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It was always the plan.

Emanuel reveals this in a new book, as reports the New York Times.

Mr. Emanuel expects the law to produce an unadvertised but fundamental shift in where most working Americans get their health insurance — specifically, a sharp drop in the number of employers who offer coverage to their workers. That scale of change would dwarf what took place last fall, when a political firestorm erupted over President Obama’s “if you like your plan you can keep it” pledge.

His former colleagues in the Obama White House say there is no evidence the law will bring “the end of employer-sponsored insurance"...

But now Mr. Emanuel thinks that a number of well-known national companies will break the mold and begin a trend. By his estimation, the proportion of private-sector workers who receive health care from employers will fall below 20 percent by 2025. Currently, just under 60 percent of private-sector workers get health care from employers.

“It’ll be a matter of a few big employers, blue-chip companies,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview. “Then it’s going to be the norm.”

Posted by: Ace at 09:00 AM | Comments (435)
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First of all, the background:

The Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office ran an undercover sting operation over three years that captured leading Philadelphia Democrats, including four members of the city's state House delegation, on tape accepting money, The Inquirer has learned.

Yet no one was charged with a crime.

Prosecutors began the sting in 2010 when Republican Tom Corbett was attorney general. After Democrat Kathleen G. Kane took office in 2013, she shut it down.

In a statement to The Inquirer on Friday, Kane called the investigation poorly conceived, badly managed, and tainted by racism, saying it had targeted African Americans.

...

Before Kane ended the investigation, sources familiar with the inquiry said, prosecutors amassed 400 hours of audio and videotape that documented at least four city Democrats taking payments in cash or money orders, and in one case a $2,000 Tiffany bracelet.

Typically, the payments made at any one time were relatively modest - ranging from $500 to $2,000 - but most of those involved accepted multiple payments, people familiar with the investigation said. In some cases, the payments were offered in exchange for votes or contracts, they said.

Sources with knowledge of the sting said the investigation made financial pitches to both Republicans and Democrats, but only Democrats accepted the payments.

...

Sources with knowledge of the sting said Ali approached a wide range of officials, from both parties, black and white. In time, the sources said, Ali didn't even have to reach out to elected officials. They called him.

Tyron B. Ali was a lobbyist who'd been caught in a $430,000 fraud case. Apparently prosecutors recruited him to wear a wire for this investigation. He was connected to the political culture of west Philadelphia, because that's where he'd operated before. That, rather than race, accounts for who he did or didn't contact. (And, apparently, elected officials were calling him, anyway.)

Given this explosive slam-dunk corruption case, Kane chooses to disappear it, and issues a single quote when asked about it: that the case is "nothing more than the Good Ol' Boys club playing political games to discredit me in order to fulfill their own selfish and improper agenda."

And now, via the Ungrateful Loaf of Bread, she seems to be threatening the free press in an effort to cover up her cover up.

During the meeting, Sprague [Kane's new lawyer] suggested that The Inquirer may have been used by the sources of its stories – “wittingly or unwittingly” as a “weapon” to attack Kane to defend themselves from potential charges of wrongdoing in the management of the probe.

“I intend to look at the investigation from the very beginning to the conclusion of it, and in terms of what has been published, by this paper and others, to take appropriate action on behalf of the attorney general against those responsible for the defamatory and the false publications that have been made,” Sprague said.

Incredible. Incredible.

Posted by: Ace at 07:16 AM | Comments (473)
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FRIDAY!!

Hawaii law allows undercover police officers to have sex with prostitutes.

Daily Caller's Alax Pappa's had a sit down with Sen. Paul. Among a great deal of discussion about civil liberties and the NSA, he'd like folks to know that he does not have identical positions as his father.

Obama at Democratic fundraiser: "In midterms, we get clobbered."

I just this week came across this. Why didn't somebody tell me? more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:49 AM | Comments (355)
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The Vela Incident

While the search for MH370 continues in the Southern Indian Ocean, it's a reminder that this area of Earth is quite remote from...well anywhere. It's far from any major populated areas, doesn't get much shipping traffic and has deep waters. Which makes it perfect for doing things that you'd rather not have anyone find out about.

This could be disposing of a passenger jet or say testing something out that you'd like to keep hush-hush. Like say a nuclear test.

The Vela Incident - sometimes referred to as the South Atlantic Flash - was an unidentified "double flash" of light detected by an American Vela Hotel satellite on September 22, 1979, near the Prince Edward Islands off Antarctica, which many believe was of nuclear origin. The most widespread theory among those who believe the flash was of nuclear origin is that it resulted from a joint South African and Israeli nuclear test. The topic remains highly disputed today.

...The "double flash" was detected on September 22, 1979, at 00:53 GMT, by the American Vela satellite 6911, which carried various sensors designed specifically to detect nuclear explosions that contravened the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

The satellite reported the characteristic double flash of a small atmospheric nuclear explosion of two to three kilotons, in the Indian Ocean between The Crozet Islands (a very small, sparsely inhabited French possession) and the Prince Edward Islands which belong to South Africa at 47°S 40°E. The previous 41 double flashes the Vela satellites detected were all subsequently confirmed to be nuclear explosions.[7]

Despite the official US declaration that the satellite's detection was inconclusive, it's widely believed that the flash was in fact a joint Israeli-South African nuclear test that was stronger than expected and produced a detectable flash.

Author Richard Rhodes also concludes the incident was an Israeli nuclear test, conducted in cooperation with South Africa, and that the United States administration deliberately obscured this fact in order to avoid complicating relations with South Africa.[2] Likewise, Leonard Weiss offers a number of arguments to support the test being Israeli, and claims that successive US administrations continue to cover up the test to divert unwanted attention that may portray its foreign policy in a bad light.[3] In the 2008 book The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman stated their opinion that the "double flash" was the result of a joint South African-Israeli nuclear bomb test.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:50 PM | Comments (453)
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• The Weak Side Of History
  
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• Man Uses Selfies To Protect Himself From The IRS
  
• CNN Breaks Down Zombie Plane Theory
  
• Ukrainians And Venezuelans Need Guns To Be Free
  
• Our Criminal Justice System Has Become A Crime
  
• Please Let SMOD Strike Earth Before This Happens
  
• The Hitler Model
  
• Young Invinceables Are Killing Obamacare
  
• Is This Illinoiss' Scott Walker
  
• Diplomas Vs. Dirty Jobs
  
• Which One Of You Did This
  

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:00 AM | Comments (470)
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Paul Ryan said, in an interview with Bill Bennet, “We have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities, in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”

For saying this, the left and the media (but I repeat myself) have been insisting he's a racist for ten straight days.

Rich Lowery has dug up some more racist quotes.

What notorious racist said the following? “Fewer young black and Latino men participate in the labor force compared to young white men. And all of this translates into higher unemployment rates and poverty rates as adults.

“In troubled neighborhoods all across this country—many of them heavily African American—too few of our citizens have role models to guide them.”

“We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households…. We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.”

“We know young black men are twice as likely as young white men to be ‘disconnected’—not in school, not working.”

Have you figured out which incorrigible dog-whistling racist made such vicious comments about inner city dysfunctions?

Hint: His initials are "BHO," and when he said things like this, he was hailed as a truth-telling, post-partisan Savior of Mankind.

Related: David Harsanyi questions the reductive, racial claim made by progressives that Asians vote Democratic mostly because they're upset by "microaggressions" that people they psychically know to be conservative lodge at them, "microaggressions" sometimes taking the form of the question, "Where were you born?"

Posted by: Ace at 02:18 PM | Comments (309)
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Via @doreenhdixon.

That's a lot of dogs. more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:11 PM | Comments (433)
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Remember this guy? He skipped out of work constantly, and, at one point, collected a steady paycheck despite not showing up for work for a year and a half.

Between 2000 and 2012, Beale skipped work for at least 616 days. But his fraud wasnÂ’t discovered until last year when it was found out that he was still getting paid for a year and a half but hadnÂ’t shown up for work in that whole time. Under McCarthy, Beale missed at least 18 consecutive months of work, costing taxpayers more than $239,000.

He covered his absences by claiming he was working for top men in the CIA.

Who?

Top. Men.

But despite his chronic absenteeism, he did manage to do Big Things when he troubled himself to show up at work.

A report by Senate Republicans contends that the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory “playbook” was written by known agency fraudster John Beale, who put into place major air quality regulations that set the stage for “the exponential growth of the agency’s power over the American economy.”

...

“This report will reveal that within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), some officials making critically important policy decisions were not remotely qualified, anything but neutral, and in at least one case — EPA decision making was delegated to a now convicted felon and con artist, John Beale,” wrote Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

...

“Together, Brenner and Beale implemented a plan, which this report refers to as ‘EPA’s Playbook,’” the senators continued. “The Playbook includes several tools first employed in the 1997 process, including sue-and-settle arrangements with a friendly outside group, manipulation of science, incomplete cost-benefit analysis reviews, heavy-handed management of interagency review processes, and capitalizing on information asymmetry, reinforced by resistance to transparency. Ultimately, the guiding principal behind the Playbook is the Machiavellian principal that the ends will justify the means.”

By the way, Beale got his job through a friend.

It's nice and friendly to have nice and friendly friends working nicely in the government.

Posted by: Ace at 12:41 PM | Comments (393)
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