Bam's Climate Rx: All Pain, No Gain | Patrick J. Michaels | Cato Institute: Commentary

Bam's Climate Rx: All Pain, No Gain | Patrick J. Michaels | Cato Institute: Commentary: "The cap-and-trade bill that the House passed last summer aims to force Americans to reduce those dreaded carbon emissions by 83 percent in less than four decades — to the same per-capita level as 1867. Yet, even under the Al Gore-approved climate-science models, the bill would do nothing to stop global warming."

"The median guess from the United Nations is that, if we do nothing to change our ways, the average world surface temperature will rise about 5 degrees Fahrenheit this century. (In fact, the trends in recent decades strongly suggest that this is an overestimate — but let's accept it for the sake of the argument.)

Now, if only the United States does change its ways, by adopting something like the House bill, we'd prevent about two-tenths of a degree of that warming, according to the UN's climate calculator. That is, the temperature in 2100 gets reduced to what it would otherwise be in 2096. All pain, no gain."

"That legislation would push even more of our industry into migrating to China, India and other nations that have no intention of reducing emissions by making energy more expensive."

FOXNews.com - NASA Chief: Next Frontier Better Relations With Muslim World

FOXNews.com - NASA Chief: Next Frontier Better Relations With Muslim World: "'When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- [President Obama] charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering,' Bolden said in the interview.�"

Immigration and tech: The White House speaks out | Signal Strength - CNET News

Immigration and tech: The White House speaks out | Signal Strength - CNET News: "ut the president also talked about reforming the current legal system of immigration to make the process of getting work visas and green cards easier to obtain, while also making sure that families stay together.
'Indeed, after years of patchwork fixes and ill-conceived revisions, the legal immigration system is as broken as the borders,' he said. 'Backlogs and bureaucracy mean the process can take years. While an applicant waits for approval, he or she is often forbidden from visiting the United States--which means even husbands and wives may be forced to spend many years apart.'"

I hope he makes this the priority.

FOXNews.com - House Panel Votes to Cut Off Billions in Aid to Afghanistan

FOXNews.com - House Panel Votes to Cut Off Billions in Aid to Afghanistan: "A major House of Representatives committee voted Wednesday to cut off almost $4 billion in aid to the government of Afghanistan pending an investigation into charges that Afghan officials are blocking corruption probes and huge amounts of foreign aid are being stolen.

The bipartisan move by the foreign aid appropriations subcommittee comes after The Washington Post reported that top officials in President Hamid Karzai's government were blocking corruption probes of political allies and amid widespread assumptions that Afghan power brokers are moving millions of dollars out of the country."

FOXNews.com - Senators Confident They Have Votes to Lift Cuba Travel Ban

FOXNews.com - Senators Confident They Have Votes to Lift Cuba Travel Ban: "'The nearly 50-year embargo and travel ban restricting Americans' right to travel to Cuba has been a failure,' Dorgan said. 'The quickest way to bring democracy to Cuba is through travel and trade. Just as has been our policy with China, Vietnam and other communist countries, we should allow Americans to travel freely to Cuba.'"

FOXNews.com - Pelosi: Unemployment Checks Fastest Way to Create Jobs

FOXNews.com - Pelosi: Unemployment Checks Fastest Way to Create Jobs: "Talking to reporters, the House speaker was defending a jobless benefits extension against those who say it gives recipients little incentive to work. By her reasoning, those checks are helping give somebody a job.�

'It injects demand into the economy,' Pelosi said, arguing that when families have money to spend it keeps the economy churning. 'It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.'"

Giving people money certainly helps the economy unless you consider the cost of getting that money -- then it hurts the economy.

FOXNews.com - BP Spill Hits a Somber Record as Gulf's Biggest

FOXNews.com - BP Spill Hits a Somber Record as Gulf's Biggest: "The oil that's spewed for two and a half months from a blown-out well a mile under the sea hit the 140.6 million gallon mark, eclipsing the record-setting, 140-million-gallon Ixtoc I spill off Mexico's coast from 1979 to 1980. Even by the lower end of the government's estimates, at least 71.7 million gallons are in the Gulf."

Surprising! Based on the reports, I thought it was a record long ago!

"But it's not the biggest in history.
That happened when Iraqi forces opened valves at a terminal and dumped as much as 336 million gallons of oil in 1991 during the Persian Gulf war, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration."

BP Doesn't Deserve a Liability Cap | Richard A. Epstein | Cato Institute: Commentary

BP Doesn't Deserve a Liability Cap | Richard A. Epstein | Cato Institute: Commentary: "Tort remedies are essential to protect people (and their property) who do not have contractual relations with defendants from harms such as air and water pollution."

"The first element in the mix is a no-nonsense liability system that fastens full responsibility on the parties who run dangerous operations, no excuses allowed. Accordingly, we have to be especially wary of statutory caps on tort damages, including the current law, under which, in the case of the oil industry, the 'total of liability ... with respect to each incident shall not exceed for an offshore facility except a deepwater port, the total of all removal costs plus $75,000,000.' That $75 million is chicken feed. Fortunately, the law removes that cap if the incident was caused by 'the gross negligence or willful misconduct' of any party, or its failure to comply with any 'applicable Federal safety, construction, or operating regulation.'"

"A tough liability system does more than provide compensation for serious harms after the fact. It also sorts out the wheat from the chaff — so that in this case companies with weak safety profiles don't get within a mile of an oil derrick. Solid insurance underwriting is likely to do a better job in pricing risk than any program of direct government oversight. Only strong players, highly incentivized and fully bonded, need apply for a permit to operate. This logic also suggests that the Price Anderson Act's $375 million cap on damages for each responsible party to cover incidents at a nuclear power facilities should be rethought."

"Its second misstep was to insist that BP pay for the lost wages of the workers on these wells that its own ill-advised ban would lay off. (BP does face, properly, potentially huge exposure to make good on the income of other workers laid off because of damage caused by the leaking oil.) But don't worry, taxpayers, for the U.S. government has complete statutory immunity from tort liability when acting in its 'discretionary' capacity."

Costs without Benefits | Richard W. Rahn | Cato Institute: Commentary

Costs without Benefits | Richard W. Rahn | Cato Institute: Commentary: "No individual can know the vast number of laws and regulations to which he is subject, and hence, the government (if it chooses) can target anyone and almost certainly be able to find some law or rule that the targeted person has violated. According to Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. Constitution only gave Congress the power to punish criminally 'treason, counterfeiting the securities and coin of the United States, piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the laws of nations, and no other crimes whatsoever.' Yet the federal criminal code contains thousands of pages, making it impossible for individuals to know all of the violations for which they may be sent to jail."

White House Press Challenges Pols with ... Squirt Guns? | Gene Healy | Cato Institute: Commentary

White House Press Challenges Pols with ... Squirt Guns? | Gene Healy | Cato Institute: Commentary: "conservative complaints about the supposedly monolithic 'Media' are outdated and smack of a victim mentality. Fox is the top-rated cable news channel, the Wall Street Journal has the largest circulation of any U.S. paper and Glenn Beck is the new Oprah, shooting Friedrich von Hayek's Road to Serfdom to the top of the Amazon charts last week.

We don't live in the era of three networks anymore, and it's silly to pretend that conservative voices are being shut out."