RFG MANDATE QUESTIONED

As Bruce Willis said in Die Hard: “Welcome to the party, pal.”

Now some experts are questioning the need for reformulated gas in southeastern Wisconsin. Not that they haven’t been told this for years and years by the consumers themselves.

Motorists in southeastern Wisconsin pay an average of 14 cents more a gallon for gasoline billed as cleaner for the environment, but the government and air quality experts now question how much the gas actually cuts pollution.

Reformulated gas hit Milwaukee and six surrounding counties, metropolitan Chicago and other regions with high levels of ground-level ozone in 1995 - a mandate under the federal Clean Air Act to slash ozone. Ground-level ozone, or smog, is a summer phenomenon that can endanger public health.

But much has changed since 1995.

The Public Investigator Team asked the Environmental Protection Agency exactly how the gas benefits air quality today.

The answer: “That’s the data we don’t know now,” said Paul Machiele, director of the EPA’s Fuels Center in Ann Arbor, Mich.

14 cents a gallon for nothing — except for additional tax revenue for the bloated turd called government. And this is one of the most infuriating parts of the federal mandate:

The problem is all the more frustrating for motorists in southeastern Wisconsin because much of the region’s pollution drifts in from northern Illinois and Indiana.

In other words, it ain’t ours.

Another sign that the people behind this policy don’t understand supply and demand is the mandates creating numerous types of boutique fuels, which are in limited supply because of production and when mandates increase demand without an increase in supply, up go prices.

U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Janesville) has sought to streamline the nation’s fuel types. Wisconsin is being needlessly penalized, Ryan said.

Reformulated gas is an economic burden on motorists because a limited number of refiners are producing it and it’s only being sold in specific markets, he said.

“The current system basically sets up a system for high prices,” Ryan said. “From Green Bay to St. Louis, there are five different blends of fuels. That makes absolutely no sense.”

Of course it doesn’t make any sense. it’s the government. They aren’t required to make sense.

WUSSIFYING SPORTS

H/T to Charlie Sykes.

The promotion of self-esteem over the recognition of achievement continues unabated.

An Ohio community has decided to cancel its Little League All-Star game on the basis of an article written by a so-called expert that says having All-Star games harms the self-esteem of athletes who aren’t selected.

In March, Beachwood Mayor Merle Gordon sent a letter to parents of children involved in the Little League program stating the city was canceling the All-Star game based on information provided in an article written by the founder of the National Alliance for Youth Sports, Fred Engh.

The article suggested that All-Star games take away from sportsmanship and hurts the self esteem of players, especially younger players.

The article was written by Fred Engh, the founder and CEO of the National Alliance for Youth Sports. It appears in the Parks & Rec Business Magazine. You can read it here.

After reading it, my conclusion is that Engh’s offering is 100 percent Barbra Streisand (B.S.). It’s from the same mentality as the idiots who advocate not keeping score in youth athletics because winning and losing hurts self-esteem. And those who have dumbed down the classroom by eliminating grades, standards of achievement and individual academic honors like valedictorian and salutorian and made the idea of making the honor roll meaningless by including 80 percent or more of the school.

All-Star games are an excellent way of recognizing individual achievement. And yes, individual achievement does lead to more positive self-esteem, not the other way around.

Every year, the state association with which I am involved holds an All-Star game in August after a Milwaukee Brewers’ game at Miller Park. The North and South All-Star squads consist of 27 players each and the two teams play a nine-inning exhibition game. Various coaches’ associations put on all-star games in all sorts of sports. The Wisconsin Baseball Coaches Association just finished its annual All-Star game held at Fox Cities Stadium in Grand Chute.

Does Engh really, think he could go peddle his garbage at these events? Of course not. This is more designed to pacify parents who don’t like it when their son or daughter doesn’t make the All-Star game. Just like not keeping score is aimed at the parents who don’t like it when their kids’ sports team doesn’t win.

All pabulum like this does is turn our kids into wimps and wusses. Competition is good, and recognizing achievement is even better. Unless you are into collectivism, in which no one is allowed to excel or achieve.

And no, not every child is special or unique.

SUDDEN IMPACT

The opening sequence from Sudden Impact, when Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood) foils a robbery of a restaurant. Includes one of the best movie lines of all time, one even quoted by President Reagan in threatening to veto Democrat tax hikes.

WHOSE SIDE ARE THEY ON?

Thanks, you jihadist enablers in the Drive By Media. You just blabbed another secret and put who knows how many lives in jeopardy.

Seymour Hersh, one of the jihadists’ best friends in the Drive By Media, reveals a covert operation OK’d by congressional leaders and President Bush to destabilize the leadership in Iran, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pronounced “I’m A Nutjob”).

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Just how many lives are in danger inside Iran among the groups helping us because of the New Yorker article? What’s more, now the enemy knows what we are doing and can take steps to counter our efforts by jailing and even killing those cooperating with us.

You just have to wonder what today’s Drive By Media would have done in 1944 with information about Operation Overlord and the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. You know what they would have done: published it on the front pages of their newspapers and told the Germans and the Japs just exactly what we were doing.

The difference between the media then and today’s Drive By Media is that the World War II era media was able to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys yet still report the news. Today’s Drive Bys think at most both sides are equal in terms of morality and even some think we’re the bad guys and have no problems helping our enemies.

JUSTICE IS SERVED

A former Army scientist smeared and wrongfully targeted in the investigation into the anthrax attacks immediately after 9/11 will receive a sizable amount of money to settle his lawsuit against the Justice Department.

WASHINGTON (al-AP) - A former Army scientist who was named as a person of interest in the 2001 anthrax attacks will receive $5.8 million to settle his lawsuit against the Justice Department. Steven Hatfill claimed the Justice Department violated his privacy rights by speaking with reporters about the case.

Settlement documents were filed in federal court Friday. Both sides have agreed to the deal, according to the documents, and as soon as they are signed, the case will be dismissed.

The deal requires the Justice Department to pay $2.825 million up front and buy Hatfill a $3 million annuity that will pay him $150,000 each year for 20 years.

“Our government failed us, not only by failing to catch the anthrax mailers but by seeking to conceal that failure,” Hatfill’s lawyers said in a statement. “Our government did this by leaking gossip, speculation, and misinformation to a handful of credulous reporters.”

The statement also blamed journalists for not questioning the motives of the government’s statements or its tactics.

“As an innocent man, and as our fellow citizen, Steven Hatfill deserved far better,” they said.

Unfortuantely, our government, in an attempt to calm jittery nerves after the 9/11 attacks and to appease the politically correct crowd intent on preventing “unfair” targeting of Muslims, instead of going after the jihadists who most likely carried out the attacks, targeted an innocent man and smeared him. Reminiscent of the Richard Jewell case regarding the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta in 1996, the government targeted Hatfill as a “person of interest” without a shred of evidence and leaked potentially damaging information to friendly reporters who did the government’s dirty work for them.

Question: where does Steven Hatfill go to get his good name back? Or does the government get yet another Emily Litella moment? “Never mind.”

HOUSE GOP HEADED TO A PERMANENT MINORITY

Writing at Pajamas Media, Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House explains how the House Republicans are stumbling and bumbling toward the status of a permanent minority party.

Retirements, coupled with the inability to recruit good candidates, means the margin for the Democrats should grow even wider this November, possibly to immediate post-Watergate levels.

In addition to the 22 GOP House members who are retiring, another 12 are leaving for a variety of reasons including death, running for higher office or, like Dennis Hastert (R-IL), resigning prior to the end of their term.

That means there will be 34 seats previously held by a Republican in play for the Democrats. The Democrats have a total of six members who will not be coming back next year.

The math is frightening. With 28 seats up for grabs in 2008 on top of the 18 seat majority currently held by Democrats, there is a very good chance that Democrats, for all practical purposes, could win enough seats this year that the GOP would be a minority party for the next decade - and perhaps beyond. When 98% of incumbents in the House are victorious and redistricting looms in 2012, the chances of Republicans overcoming a 40 or 50-seat Democratic majority in the next couple of election cycles are slim.

Just as the Republicans were in position to redistrict favorably for themselves after the 2000 census, Democrats will be in position to do the same after the 2010 census.

On candidate recruitment, Moran writes:

Worse than that, the GOP is missing something else vital to winning political races: viable candidates.

Take Ilinois, for example: there are two races that feature vulnerable Democrats and no GOP challenger was recruited to face them. Nationwide, the Democrats see 29 tough races and only 19 of those have a challenger they deem “credible.”

Of the 30 House seats that changed hands in 2006, Republicans have targeted only 16 of them.

On paper, it would appear that the GOP should be in better shape. There are 60 districts held by Democrats where George Bush won a majority of votes in 2004. Many of those districts were carried easily by Bush - more than 55% of the vote.

But the reality for Republicans is that Bush’s margin of victory was largely supplied by independents. And those voters deserted the GOP in droves in 2006 and show no sign of wanting to vote for a Republican House member in 2008. In fact, in three special elections in Illinois, Louisiana, and Mississippi where the GOP lost previously safe seats, independents voted by huge margins for the Democrat.

Moran says there are no silver linings in this dark cloud for Republicans. The voters clearly blame them for the country’s problems.

Voters aren’t stupid. They know who was in charge from 1994 to 2006 and are not in a forgiving mood.

A commenter in the thread nails it:

The Repubs stand for nothing right now. The RINOs and country club Repubs are fighting tooth and nail against the conservatives. That’s why they will lose seats. they have no ‘message’ and they stand for nothing except getting reelected.

It’s why President Obama will have a Watergate-level majority in the House and a cloture-proof majority in the Senate to ramrod his socialist agenda through over the next eight years.

INTERPRETING THE CONSTITUTION

Lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal on the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in support of the Second Amendment draws a clear picture between the conservative bloc, which understands the Constitution, and the extreme leftist bloc, which doesn’t.

In writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia follows the Silberman Constitutional roadmap in finding that the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” is an individual right. The alternative view – argued by the District of Columbia – is that the Second Amendment is merely a collective right for individuals who belong to a government militia.

Justice Scalia shreds the collective interpretation as a matter of both common law and Constitutional history. He writes that the Founders, as well as nearly all Constitutional scholars over the decades, believed in the individual right. Many Supreme Court opinions invoke the Founders, but this one is refreshing in its resort to first American principles and its affirmation of a basic liberty. It’s not too much to say that Heller is every bit as important to the Second Amendment as Near v. Minnesota (prior restraint) or N.Y. Times v. Sullivan (libel) are to the First Amendment.

Which makes it all the more troubling that no less than four Justices were willing to explain this right away. These are the same four liberal Justices who routinely invoke the “right to privacy” – which is nowhere in the text of the Constitution – as a justification for asserting various social rights.

Yet in his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens argues that a right to bear arms that is plainly in the text adheres to an individual only if he is sanctioned by government.

Justice Breyer, who wrote a companion dissent, takes a more devious tack. He wants to establish an “interest-balancing test” to weigh the Constitutionality of particular restrictions on gun ownership. This balancing test is best understood as a roadmap for vitiating the practical effects of Heller going forward.

Using Justice Breyer’s “test,” judges could accept the existence of an individual right to bear arms in theory, while whittling it down to nothing by weighing that right against the interests of the government in preventing gun-related violence. Having set forth this supposedly neutral standard, Justice Breyer shows his policy hand by arguing that under this standard the interests of the District of Columbia would outweigh Mr. Heller’s interest in defending himself, and the ban should thus be upheld.

But as Justice Scalia writes, no other Constitutional right is subjected to this sort of interest-balancing. “The very enumeration of the right takes [it] out of the hands of government” – even the hands of Olympian judges like Stephen Breyer. “Like the First, [the Second Amendment] is the very product of an interest-balancing by the people – which Justice Breyer would now conduct for them anew.”

In that one sentence, Justice Scalia illuminates a main fault line on this current Supreme Court. The four liberals are far more willing to empower the government and judges to restrict individual liberty, save on matters of personal lifestyle (abortion, gay rights) or perhaps crime. The four conservatives are far more willing to defend individuals against government power – for example, in owning firearms, or private property (the 2005 Kelo case on eminent domain).

You can read the SCOTUS decision for yourself here.

A RIGHT REINFORCED, MR. MAYOR

Seems Tom Barrett just doesn’t understand the U.S. Constitution.

The Mayor of Milwaukee is a leading advocate of gun control and frequently blames guns for crimes rather than criminals.

In reacting to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning the Washington, D.C., ban on possession of guns by private citizens, Barrett made this incredibly obtuse statement:

It appears the majority of the court has decided its judgment should supplant that of elected officials in Washington, D.C.

No, Mr. Mayor. The Court decided that the Constitution should prevail over the judgment of those elected officials in D.C.

Barrett’s attempt to spin this as judicial activism is understandable, given that the Left loves finding things that aren’t in the Constitution — the right to privacy, right to an abortion, “rights” for foreign jihadists — and ignoring things that are — free speech, gun ownership, the 10th Amendment.

THE DE-EVOLUTION OF TEACHING MATH

We had it before here. Got it from Charlie Sykes here. And am repeating it because of this:

1. Teaching Math In 1950s

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?

2. Teaching Math In 1960s

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?

3. Teaching Math In 1970s

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. Did he make a profit?

4. Teaching Math In 1980s

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

5. Teaching Math In 1990s

A logger cuts down a beautiful old-growth hardwood forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes? Remember, there are no wrong answers, and if you feel like crying, it’s OK.

6. Teaching Math In 2007

Un hachero vende una carretada de maderapara $100. El costo de la producciones es $80. Cuanto dinero ha hecho?

AN ANSWER TO A DISHONEST ATTACK

This woman who lived under Communist oppression answers the dishonest smear ad currently being run by MorOn.org against John McCain:

By the way, on the MorOn.org ad, when the mother tells McCain he can’t have her son for Iraq, it isn’t her decision. We have an all-volunteer military and if Alex wants to volunteer to serve his country, he’s perfectly free to do so. And there’s no draft, either.

And when Jon Stewart fisks MorOn.org, you know they’ve gone too far.

MorOn.org: 10 years of making even people who agree with you cringe. Stewart’s words, not mine.