USpolitical.com

Really makes you wonder.

Air traffic safety is under increased scrutiny by federal authorities following an incident in which two passenger jets landed without controller assistance at Reagan National Airport because no one could be reached in the airport tower.

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Responding to the incident, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement that he has directed FAA to put two air traffic controllers on the midnight shift at Reagan National.

“It is not acceptable to have just one controller in the tower managing air traffic in this critical air space,” LaHood said. Reagan National is located in Northern Virginia just across the Potomac River from Washington.

Strange.  It makes you question where the money goes.  How much does the FAA official that writes the rules make?  They seriously don’t have a specific 24/7 stipulation in place for the airport a scant 3 miles from the Capitol and White House?

A great segment of video showing Rand Paul blast Kathleen Hogan, a deputy assistant at the Energy Department. He outlines the hypocrisy of those that fiercely advocate a woman’s right to choose, yet support restrictions that force compact fluorescent light bulbs and low capacity toilets upon consumers.

While I’m sure all conservation policies are not a bad thing, I am still confused why we would do away with harmless (but inefficient) light bulbs in favor of twirled tubes full of toxic mercury vapor. And put them in every home in America.

You would think this conservation crowd would have warmed up to nuclear power already.

Affleck before congress to discuss issues in Congo.

I was surprised at his delivery of prepared remarks.  This is a seasoned actor we’re watching, right?

Certainly nothing compared to his fine parody on Olbermann.

An encouraging article about a company that claims to have produced an organism that can turn CO2 and light energy into diesel fuel.  I want to believe that such breakthroughs are inevitable and will impact our lives within the decade.  This certainly is a step in the right direction, if not for a full on red flag stumble along the way.

Joule was founded in 2007. In the last year, it’s roughly doubled its employees to 70, closed a $30 million second round of private funding in April and added John Podesta, former White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, to its board of directors.

Podesta’s involvement casts doubt in my mind for some reason…maybe it has something to do with his fondness for Van Jones.

I want this kind of technology to work, but I almost wonder if some of that delicious government “investment” finds its way to their coffers in the next while.

Allahpundit says it all.

My point this week, though, and Ace’s point at his site, has been that this episodeisn’t business as usual. This isn’t some standard “Palin’s using rhetorical dog whistles for her Christian base!” attack. This is a congresswoman bleeding out of her head on the sidewalk with six bodies lying around her, one of them a little girl, and Palin being blamed for it instantly. And yet according to Keith Ellison, the proper response here should have been to validate that accusation by implication by saying, gee, yeah, I guess I should have toned it down. I’m not known for being a Palin fan (as, er, any actual Palin fan could tell you) and even I can’t contain my indignation at the charge. And yet she’s supposed to just mellow out and take it because political reporters who won’t flatly correct the record for their readers think it’s bad “optics” to do otherwise? Unbelievable.

UPDATE: Ace makes equally awesome points in his wrap up linked to in the above.

We are now debating — quite seriously, or we’re supposed to be quite serious about debating this — whether Sarah Palin can use martial imagery in her speech, even though everyone in politics does this, including the very media now assuring us this is all a terrible thing. And we are supposed to have this very serious debate while our opponents in the debate are simply making things up, or, more accurately: We are supposed to indulge our opponents’ retreat to a fantasy world they’ve constructed, and not disrupt their fantasy too much, because, who knows, Paul Krugman might snap if we do.

George Will explains why coal is a big deal.  He also touches on the elephant in the room that I have yet to hear a cognitive response to from advocates of reducing global emissions.

Fallows reports that 15 years from now China expects that 350 million people will be living in cities that do not exist yet. This will require adding to China’s electrical system a capacity almost as large as America’s current capacity. The United States, China, Russia and India have 40 percent of the world’s population and 60 percent of its coal.

A climate scientist told Fallows that stabilizing the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would require the world to reduce its emissions to Kenya’s level – for America, a 96 percent reduction. Nations with hundreds of millions of people in poverty would, Fallows says, have to “forgo the energy-intensive path toward wealth that the United States has traveled for so many years.”

Time to ask them.

It does not have to be this way. If we chose our immigrants differently, immigration would upgrade the average skill level of the U.S. population. (As is, 31% of immigrants have not completed high school.) If we chose our immigrants differently, they could contribute more in taxes than they require in benefits. (As is, immigrants are 50% more likely to be poor than the native-born.)

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Someday, the United States will probably have to double back and do something for the hard cases showcased in the Senate hearings on the DREAM bill. But if we really want to do something useful, we should do more than help the hard cases. We should ask some hard questions.

Ruben Navarrette lays out yet another example of mainstream liberal hypocrisy.  This time, making fun of a politician shedding tears.

We’ve seen this skit before. Liberals make fun of Sarah Palin because, despite their declared affection for average Americans, they can’t stand the sight of one. And now some of them are making fun of Boehner because, despite their historical role as the party whose policies preserved the American Dream, they consider the fact that someone would get emotional over that storyline to be comedic material.

What was the stimulus for again?  I could have sworn I was promised massive investment in a new green economy.

Chu said the United States still concentrated on research in areas such as computers, defense and pharmaceuticals but that its funding for energy innovation was paltry.

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“America still has the opportunity to lead in a world that will need essentially a new industrial revolution to give us the energy we want inexpensively but carbon-free,” Chu said.

“But I think time is running out,” said Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101130/sc_afp/unclimatewarminguschina

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/11/23/pistole.threat.delay/index.html

“Frankly it just came down to the fact there was not a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed administrator in place until I was confirmed at the end of June to make a really significant decision like that, that would have impact on a number of people,” Pistole said. “That was a big part of it.”

TSA Director Pistole is basically telling us that the White House was so inept in responding to the threat of underwear bombers, that it took the actual confirmation of a TSA director over 7 months later to then begin the process of implementing the pat downs, which wouldn’t take effect until another 3 months later.

So this Christmas, if you’re flying, as we celebrate the 1 year anniversary foiling of the “Underwear Bomber,” we can also join hands in celebrating the 2 month anniversary of nationwide pat downs.