Cannabis is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, according to a report by a research charity Thursday, which called for a “serious rethink” of drug policy.
Offshore Wind To Supply 15% of Rhode Island Electricity October 2, 2008
Rhode Island took a step toward reaching its goal of providing 15% of its electricity from wind power, when it awarded Deepwater Wind the contract to build a $1 billion+ offshore wind farm.
What Palin should have said to Couric about the Supreme Court October 2, 2008
What Palin should have said to Couric about the Supreme
Court
The blogosphere and the punditocracy made much hay yesterday over Sarah Palin’s inability to name a Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade with which she disagreed. Does it bother me? Yes. But not as much as some of the hand-wringing critics who, unlike Palin, are lawyers with instant recall or commentators who make a living chattering about SCOTUS cases on the lecture/cocktail circuit. I would have loved it if Palin had been able to reel off Plessy or Kelo or Grutter or Bakke. I’m concerned that she blanked, but not ready to jump off a cliff. The Beltway/Manhattan crowd seems to have forgotten that her appeal to the base was not that she was a slick intellectual, but that she was one of them. Hockey moms aren’t going to be as upset about her non-answer answer as academics and think-tank dwellers.
All that said, I like reader David’s suggestion:
Here’s how I wish the Palin-Couric exchange would’ve went:
Couric: Can you name any other Supreme Court decisions you disagree with?
Palin: Off the top of my head, no. Roe v. Wade is clearly the one that stands out above the rest. But the average American out there isn’t worried about whether I can rattle off a bunch of Supreme Court decisions. They are worried about making their mortgage payments, keeping their jobs and sending their kids to college. They trust the Supreme Court to make those decisions. What they want from a President and Vice President is someone who will appoint Federal judges who fairly interpret the Constitution and adjudicate accordingly.
Now, let me ask you a question, Katie. You interviewed Senator Biden recently. So when you asked him this same question, would you care to share with me his answer?
Couric: Well, I didn’t ask him that question.
Palin: You didn’t? Why not? He’s a VP nominee. I’m a VP nominee. Don’t you want to know what Supreme Court decisions he disagrees with? Why are you only interested in my perspective on this?
Couric: …………. (Katie) Crickets chirping…..
I especially like the “Off the top of my head, no” part. Palin should remember tonight that it’s better to just acknowledge that she doesn’t have a ready answer if she doesn’t have one in response to gotcha questions like these. It avoids painful circumlocations and evasions — and makes clear to viewers that she’s not intimidated or insecure.
Our Economy Needs Natural Resource Development Now October 2, 2008
THE MORNING BELL
THURSDAY, OCT. 2, 2008
THURSDAY, OCT. 2, 2008
Our Economy Needs Natural
Resource Development Now
Last night the Senate passed a $700 billion rescue for the credit crunch that is beginning to hurt small businesses. The House is set to vote on the package tomorrow and the new FDIC fixes, which will likely to win
enough votes for final passage. But the plan is hardly a silver bullet fix for the U.S. economy. While there are still many regulatory and tax fixes that need to be tackled to reform our financial sector, other sectors of our economy are also in desperate need of a regulatory overhaul. Considering her deep background on the issue, hopefully in tonight’s vice presidential debate Sarah Palin will make a strong economic case for developing our natural resources.
At a time of soaring budget deficits,
the most obvious benefit of choosing to develop our natural resources
is the substantial and positive effect it well have on the U.S.
taxpayer’s bottom line. According to Energy Information Administration
(EIA) estimates, there are 18.7 billion barrels currently off limits in the Outer Continental Shelf and another 10.3 billion barrels in ANWR
. A 2007 study by the University of California estimated that leases and royalties from ANWR would generate $251 billion in government and state revenue
— and that was assuming a barrel of oil cost $53. Oil opens at $98 a
barrel today. A rough back of the envelope calculation shows that the
royalty and lease payments from oil companies that are allowed to
develop our ANWR and Outer Continental Shelf resources could net U.S.
taxpayers almost a trillion dollars. And that does not even include
revenues from the 77 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Outer Continental Shelf.
On top of the benefits to our nation’s fiscal health, developing our
natural resources would also be a boon to the economy in two other
ways: First, it will reduce the amount we spend on imported oil.
Second, it will lower the price of petroleum. The two would work
together to reduce energy expenditures, reduce the trade deficit and
expand economic activity. According to Heritage senior policy analyst David Kreutzer:
Increasing domestic production by 1 million barrels per
day would reduce imported petroleum costs by $123 billion, generate an
additional $7.7 billion in economic activity, and cost $25.6 billion in
additional oil production costs. The net gain to the economy would be
$105 billion. The impact on employment would be an increase of 128,000
jobs.Applying the same analysis to a 2 million barrel per day increase in
domestic petroleum production yields net economic gains to the economy
of 270,000 jobs and $164 billion.
As gas prices soared this summer and the public became educated on
the issue, conservatives scored a major victory when the federal ban on
resource production in the Outer Continental Shelf was dropped. But
much more work needs to be done.
Thirty years of terrible environmental policy still stands between American consumers and their own natural resources.
The laws that allow fringe environmental groups to hold up all of our
nation’s natural resource development need to be repealed or rewritten
so that the market can work as quickly as possible. The Alaska Oil
Pipeline took two years, two months, and four days from the first
shovel of dirt until completion. This engineering marvel covers 800
miles, crosses three mountain ranges, and traverses 800 rivers and
streams. That feat simply could not be replicated in today’s legal
environment. American engineers can deliver energy to market quickly.
We just need the political will to get the environmental left out of
the way.
Unlike Clinton, Biden Gets Pass for Saying He Was ‘Shot At’ in Iraq October 2, 2008
When Hillary Clinton told a tall tale about “landing under
sniper fire” in Bosnia, she was accused of “inflating her war
experience” by Barack Obama’s campaign — but the
campaign has been silent about Joe Biden telling his own
questionable story about being “shot at” in Iraq.
By Bill Sammon
FOXNews.com
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Barack Obama and Joe Biden wave to the crowd as they arrive for a rally in Fredericksburg, Va., Saturday. (AP Photo)
When Hillary Clinton told a tall tale about “landing under sniper fire” in Bosnia, she was accused of “inflating her war experience” by rival Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign.
But the campaign has been silent about Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, telling his own questionable story about being “shot at” in Iraq.
“Let’s start telling the truth,” Biden said during a presidential primary debate sponsored by YouTube last year. “Number one, you take all the troops out – you better have helicopters ready to take those 3,000 civilians inside the Green Zone, where I have been seven times and shot at. You better make sure you have protection for them, or let them die.”
But when questioned about the episode afterward by the Hill newspaper, Biden backpedaled from his claim of being “shot at” and instead allowed: “I was near where a shot landed.”
The senior senator from Delaware went on to say that some sort of projectile “landed” outside a building in the Green Zone where he and another senator had spent the night during a visit in December 2005. The lawmakers were shaving in the morning when they felt the building shake, Biden said.
“No one got up and ran from the room-it wasn’t that kind of thing,” he told the Hill. “It’s not like I had someone holding a gun to my head.”
The rest of the press ignored the flap at the time because Biden was viewed as having little chance of ending up on the Democratic presidential ticket. But even after Biden was selected to be Obama’s running mate last month, his claim to have been “shot at” drew no scrutiny from the same reporters who had savaged Clinton for making a similar claim that turned out to be false.
FOX News has been asking the Obama campaign for details of the alleged shooting in Iraq ever since Biden was tapped to be vice president. Biden campaign spokesman David Wade promised an answer last week, but failed to provide one.
Meanwhile, the gaffe-prone Biden has again raised eyebrows with another story about his exploits in war zones – this time in Afghanistan. Biden said he will grill Republican rival Sarah Palin in Thursday’s vice presidential debate about “the superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan where my helicopter was forced down.”
“If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where Bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me,” Biden bragged to the National Guard Association. “Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.”
But it turns out that inclement weather, not terrorists, prompted the chopper to land in an open field during Biden’s visit to Afghanistan in February. Fighter jets kept watch overhead while a convoy of security vehicles was dispatched to retrieve Biden and fellow Senators Chuck Hagel and John Kerry.
“We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn’t have to,” joked Kerry, a Democrat, to the AP. “Other than getting a little cold, it was fine.”
Biden never explicitly claimed his chopper had been forced down by terrorists. Nonetheless,
John McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said Obama-Biden officials have been less than forthcoming about Biden’s dramatic war stories.
“They never explained Biden’s helicopter story from last week – which is very similar to the story about getting ’shot at’ in Baghdad,” Rogers said.
Bill Sammon is deputy Washington managing editor for FOX News Channel.
Technorati Tags: Biden
Google is #2 Cleantech Investor in Third Quarter October 2, 2008
Google has taken such an enthusiastic role in investing and promoting clean energy that the search engine giant became the second most active cleantech venture investor for the third quarter.
A gift for Gwen Ifill October 2, 2008
A gift for Gwen Ifill
An Ivy League prof responds to the Gwen “Age of Obama” Ifill controversy, no doubt with a tinge of regret in his voice, in an interview with the Boston Herald:
“It’s probably not the greatest thing on Earth that she is in that role and it’s probably going to really force her to be fully even-handed,” Thomas Patterson, professor of government and the press at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, told the Herald yesterday.
“Fully even-handed.”
As opposed to the usual partially (un)even-handed way the ogling Obamedia has operated the past 20 months.
Snort.
Anyway, Professor Patterson better be careful.
As I predicted Tuesday night, expressing even the slightest criticism of Ifill’s vested financial and ideological interest in the outcome of the election will get you labeled a…RACIST!
Speaking of which: You won’t believe (nah, you will believe) the number of e-mails from incensed Obama supporters who complained about this sentence in my column:
“It’s not the color of your skin, sweetie.”
The reference to Obama’s dismissive use of “sweetie” when addressing a female journalist sailed right over their heads.
Ignorant of the allusion, the complainers’ immediately proceeded to attack me for…RACISM!
This one’s for you, Gwen Ifill. Like they say, membership has its privileges:
Technorati Tags: Gwen Ifill, Obama, Palin
