Puterbac News Network and Political Discussion Thread

[Toemeesleather]

The green economy strikes again, or shall we say strikes out. Oakland-based Solar Trust of America filed for bankruptcy this week, leaving its planned multibillion-dollar plant in California on ice. The company declared itself insolvent after its parent—Germany's Solar Millennium—filed for bankruptcy in December, and Solar Trust realized it wouldn't be able to pay a $1 million rent check due April 1.

Solar Millennium, in turn, had been hoping to sell a controlling stake in Solar Trust to the German company, solarhybrid, until solarhybrid also filed for bankruptcy in March. Then there's Q-Cells, another German solar company, which also filed for bankruptcy this week, sharing that fate with Solon, the Berlin-headquartered photovoltaic firm that went bust in December.

This cascade of insolvencies comes after Germany decided last year to slash the above-market prices it forces utilities to pay for renewable energy sources and to cut the subsidies that have locked German taxpayers into €100 billion in handouts to the solar industry. Even before the subsidy cut, German solar manufacturers were struggling under price pressure from China, which has responded to Western subsidies by ramping up its own production, undercutting higher-cost European and American producers in the process.

Greens in Germany and beyond are protesting that if only governments would continue soaking taxpayers to prop up solar, wind and other low-carbon favorites, these technologies would be viable. But even that is far from clear. Q-Cells and others had responded to Chinese competition by outsourcing some of their own production to Asia to cut costs. That wasn't enough to save them.

The real story is that green manufacturing, which was supposed to be the planet's salvation and Europe's new industrial base, proved to be as vulnerable to low-cost competition as many other industries. Far from creating a sustainable comparative advantage, German subsidies sparked the very rivalry now putting its home-grown industry out of business.

The Italian government appears to have taken note of these economic realities and last weekend said it would slash "excessive" subsidies for solar and wind power. Industry Minister Corrado Passera uttered the obligatory promise that Rome remains committed to generating a carbon-free, wind- and sun-powered economy, but that "we need to do so without overreliance on taxpayer resources."

If he sticks to that standard, Italy may soon see the layoffs and bankruptcies that have hit Germany. Given Italy's 9.3% unemployment rate and recession, the solar flare-out will be especially painful there.

Would that the Obama Administration showed similar sense. U.S. taxpayers only narrowly avoided shelling out for Solar Trust: Last year the company received a conditional commitment for a $2.1 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, but Solar Trust said it backed out in August of its own accord.

The Administration's recovery.gov website lists five pages of other solar projects, with current and future loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Even after the $535 million Solyndra debacle, cheerleaders in Washington still insist these projects are the key to America's economic and energy future. As with so much else these days, Europe is showing what that unhappy future looks like.

[10ac]

That Obama was even nominated let alone elected the first time is proof that we're fucked. I bet Hilliary wouldn't have sucked so many foreign dicks.

[Toemeesleather]

Published in NYT.

Shoppers have more options than ever to fight back, including hybrids, plug-ins, electric vehicles and “eco” or “super fuel economy” packages.

But opting for models that promise better mileage through new technologies does not necessarily save money, according to data compiled for The New York Times by TrueCar.com, an automotive research Web site.

Except for two hybrids, the Prius and Lincoln MKZ, and the diesel-powered Volkswagen Jetta TDI, the added cost of the fuel-efficient technologies is so high that it would take the average driver many years — in some cases more than a decade — to save money over comparable new models with conventional internal-combustion engines.

That is true at today’s pump prices, around $4, and also if gas were to climb to $5 a gallon, the data shows.

Gas would have to approach $8 a gallon before many of the cars could be expected to pay off in the six years an average person owns a car.



But your intentions are good.....4 MORE YEARZZZ!!!

[sardis]

This is like pitting the tree hugger bluetick against union mob boss DSL...

http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wir ... -bin-laden

[Toemeesleather]

So...NBC has issued a curt apology for misrepresenting the 911 tape....

NBC network has offered an apology for tampering with the tape of the 911 call made by George Zimmerman, the self-confessed killer of the 17-year-old African American teen Trayvon Martin, which misleadingly made him sound racist.

NBC was widely panned for omitting a certain portion of the emergency call that the neighborhood watch member Zimmerman placed with the Sanford, Florida, police on Feb. 26, prior to fatally shooting Martin.


....and it's easy to find, except on their own website...The Today Show ran the edited version for days....but haven't spent a single second on the retraction/apology. I know, I know...shouldn't be surprised.

[10ac]

9:1

[Professor Tiger]

Romney will take Nevada, New Hampshire, Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, and New Mexico from Obama.

According to:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls ... e_map.html

That batch of states have a total of 68 electoral votes (Nevada (6), New Hampshire (4), Florida (29), North Carolina (15), Colorado (9), New Mexico (5)).

Last election, Obama got 365 electoral votes.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls ... e_map.html

If you are right, and all those states flip from Obama to Romney, then Obama still wins with 297 electoral votes - i.e., with 27 votes to spare. (365 - 68 = 297.)

He will have to run the tables on these and the other long shot states you mentioned to win.

[GBJs]

That Obama was even nominated let alone elected the first time is proof that we're fucked. I bet Hilliary wouldn't have sucked so many foreign dicks.

Hillary wouldn't, Monica would...

[Professor Tiger]

4 More Years.

sigh.

We are all so very, very hosed.

[puterbac]

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April 5, 2012

Colleges Skimp on Science, Spend Big on Diversity

By Michael Barone

How many times have you heard Barack Obama talk about "investing" in education? Quite a few, if you've been listening to the president at all.

In fact, Americans have been investing more and more in education over the years, led by presidents Democratic and Republican. But it's become glaringly clear that we're getting pretty lousy return on these investments.



That's been evident at the K-12 level for a long time. Teacher unions and education-school types have had custody of most of our public schools for more than three decades, during which test results and high school graduation rates have been mostly stagnant.

It has come to the point that Democratic politicians like former New York City Superintendent Joel Klein, past and current Chicago Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Newark Mayor Cory Booker have taken on the teacher unions.

Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, deserves credit for doing a bit of this, as well. All this, despite the fact that teacher unions funnel millions of taxpayer-funded dollars into Democratic campaigns.

On higher education, Democrats and many Republicans as well have followed the same course as on public schools: Shovel in more money, in this case in the form of Pell grants and subsidized student loans.

College and university administrators have been happy to scoop up all the money by rapidly raising tuitions and fees. Higher-ed expenses have been rising much more rapidly than inflation for three decades.

And what has the money been spent on? Some of it presumably goes to professors in the hard sciences and the great scholars who have made American universities the best in the world. Well and good.

But many university administrators have other priorities. The University of California system has been raising tuitions and cutting departments. But, reports John Leo in the invaluable Minding the Campus blog, its San Diego campus found the money to create a new post of "vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion."

That's in addition to what the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald calls its "already massive diversity apparatus." It takes Mac Donald 103 words just to list the titles of UCSD's diversitycrats.

The money for the new vice chancellorship could have supported two of the three cancer researchers that the campus lost to Rice University in Houston, a private school that apparently takes the strange view that hard science is more important than diversity facilitators.

This doesn't just happen on the Left Coast. The University of North Carolina at Wilmington saved some money by lumping together two science departments and raised spending on its five diversity-multicultural offices.

But, to quote George W. Bush, is our students learning? Not very much, concludes the California Association of Scholars in its 87-page study of the University of California system.

Students aren't required to study American history or Western civilization. But they're subjected to a lot of political indoctrination by leftist activists. "Far too many" have not learned to write effectively to read "a reasonably complex book."

"In recent years, study after study has found that a college education no longer does what it once did and should do," the report concludes. "Students are being asked to pay considerably more and get considerably less."

That's the sort of thing that happens when you pump money into an insular system and don't hold its leaders accountable for results.

Many politicians' instinctive response is to pump in more money. But if you're stuck in a hole, it's a good idea to quit digging.

Millions of young Americans are living with the results. In a time of economic stagnation, the degrees they've earned haven't equipped them with basic work skills, much less expert knowledge that can command a premium even in a sluggish market.

And they're saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt, which -- darn it! -- turns out not to be dischargeable in bankruptcy. They can get by on partial payments for a while, but interest keeps accumulating, to the point that Social Security checks may get dunned to pay for college.

Glenn Reynolds, proprietor of instapundit.com and a law professor at the University of Tennessee, says we're watching a higher education bubble that's just about to pop. That's what happens when you throw a lot of money at college and university administrators who don't have much common sense. 

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

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[Professor Tiger]

Good article.

A lot of kids are coming out of college these days owing $100K, not knowing anything about the US Constitution, but with an encylopedic knowledge of slavery, man-made global warming, Jim Crow, Gloria Steinem, Joe McCarthy, etc.

[T Dot O Dot]

the US constitution is a hard science?

[Toemeesleather]

Alchemy?

[Toemeesleather]

This is why adding just 120K jobs makes the unemployment % drop to 8.2. 4 MORE YEARZZZZ!!11

[puterbac]

Too Young to Die

By Lee Habeeb

April 3, 2012 4:00 A.M.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/ ... lee-habeeb

His name was Albert Vaughn. He was by all accounts a very good kid living in a very tough neighborhood. He was attending a party at a home that was supposed to be a haven for young inner-city Chicago teens back in April of 2008. The kids were there to enjoy some fun, drink some Kool-Aid, and listen to their favorite music, free from the fear of violence that too often inhabited the streets outside.

But violence found a way in.

At about 10:30 p.m., a scuffle broke out in the basement between two of the guests, and the fight ignited a chain of events that led to the death of the innocent young man. He was fatally struck in the head with a baseball bat as he tried to help the party chaperones usher the kids home.

That’s right. A baseball bat. The same murder weapon Al Capone killed a guy with in The Untouchables.

“He was just trying to do something good for the ’hood because there’s nothing but violence around here,” Sunday Turman, 33, who hosted the party, told reporters. “Next thing you know, he hit the ground right in front of police.”

Vaughn, a student at Julian High School, was the 23rd Chicago Public Schools student slain that school year.

From 2008 through January of 2012, 530 young people have been killed in Chicago, President Obama’s hometown. Over 80 percent of those homicides occurred in black or Latino communities on the city’s South, Southwest, and West sides.

But you don’t know Albert Vaughn’s name.

You don’t know the name of those other 22 kids from Julian High School who died in 2008.

You don’t know any of the other 530 young people, most of them minorities, who were killed between 2008 and January of 2012 in Chicago alone.

All of them were tragedies. All of those victims were too young to die.

Why didn’t you hear about their senseless deaths? Why didn’t the media make them household names? Why didn’t civil-rights leaders march, and march and march again, calling for justice?

Because they were not killed by a white guy.

No, I need to be more accurate. They were not killed by a “white Hispanic,” a new term of art the New York Times and others in the media are using to describe George Zimmerman, the man who killed Trayvon Martin.

Why? Because the real racism that exists in the media is this: a young black male’s life is not worth reporting when it is taken by another black male. It is worth reporting only when it is taken by a white guy.

Thus the contortions to make George Zimmerman “white.”

If this were a voter-ID story, Zimmerman would have been called an Hispanic, not a “white Hispanic.”

And if he were a presidential candidiate, Zimmerman would have been called an Hispanic, not a “white Hispanic.”

I don’t ever remember the New York Times calling President Obama the first “white black” president.

The real tragedies here are the stories not being told by the media when it comes to race. So let me continue with Albert Vaughn’s.

He was known for playing basketball with the younger kids in the neighborhood, and trying his best to keep them out of harm’s way. Not the usual activity of a teenage boy, being selfless and caring about someone other than himself.

“If he was guilty of anything, he was guilty of always protecting these kids,” said Trualanda Fields, a neighborhood mother.

Vaughn’s father, who is also named Albert, said his son was “always smiling,” dreamed of attending college, and wanted to be a football player or boxer. “He’d rather box in the ring than in the streets. He didn’t pick fights,” the elder Vaughn said.

Piers Morgan didn’t give Vaughn’s father a sit-down on CNN to talk about his grief.

President Obama didn’t talk about how young Albert could have been his son.

Albert Vaughn’s story gets worse. According to his stepmother, Yolanda Johnson, on the night of Albert’s memorial — a Sunday-night candlelight vigil — about 50 people were huddled close together when the sound of gunshots was heard. Everyone scattered as the count approached ten.

“This isn’t cool anymore,” said Johnson. “They’re trying to take out another one of my kids.” Johnson told reporters she did not feel safe anymore in her neighborhood, and planned to vacate her home.

The “they” Yolanda Johnson was talking about were other young black males, not white people. Because it is predominantly young black gang members — and, increasingly, young Hispanic gang members — who are terrorizing the streets of inner cities all over America.

Yolanda Johnson told reporters she was leaving home, and she is not alone. Blacks are fleeing northern urban centers in record numbers, many of them heading back to the South in what has been called “the Great Return.” They are fleeing the crime and the awful schools and seeking opportunity and a better quality of life.

Between 2000 and 2010, an estimated 1,336,097 blacks moved to seven major southern cities alone, according to the Brookings Institute, which compiled the most recent data from the U.S. Census. Today, 57 percent of the country’s black population lives in the South, a 50-year high.

Young black males are killing one another in epic proportions, and blacks are moving in record numbers from cities like Chicago and Detroit, and the media just yawn.

That story doesn’t interest the mostly white editors and gatekeepers of the mainstream media, who presume such stories won’t draw ratings, especially from a white majority insulated from the problems of inner-city life.

And they may be right for making such assumptions.

This I know for sure: If hundreds of white kids were senselessly murdered by other white kids in high concentrations, the media would be all over it.

Chicago is Columbine every day.

But the one ratings grabber — the one story the media run to like a mouse to cheese — is the story of white-on-black crime. They jump all over it, sometimes to their own detriment, as was true in the Duke lacrosse case. The very same civil-rights leaders posing for cameras in Sanford, Fla., marched in Durham, N.C., a few years back demanding “justice” without actually knowing what had happened in that case.

We all know how that turned out. Those white lacrosse players are still living down the false accusations of a black woman, and the media — and the civil-rights leaders — just moved on.

Those civil-rights leaders I refuse to name don’t seem to care all that much about white people’s civil rights, that’s for sure. Silly ones included in our Bill of Rights such as the the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth amendments, all of which protect the accused from mob justice, and which demand probable cause before an arrest, real-life due process for defendants, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt for any criminal conviction.

No one knows whether George Zimmerman is guilty of a crime, or whether he is a racist. Only time — and a trial — will tell. The endless speculation is just that — speculation.

Then there is the reality of Chicago, and the all-too-real tragedy of black-on-black crime in America. In his latest Wall Street Journal column, Juan Williams cited a comprehensive study by the Justice Department in 2005 on the subject that he said should have been a “clarion call” for the black community, and the nation at large.

Almost one half of the nation’s murder victims that year were black and a majority of them were between the ages of 17 and 29. Black people accounted for 13% of the total U.S. population in 2005. Yet they were the victims of 49% of all the nation’s murders. And 93% of black murder victims were killed by other black people, according to the same report.

That is astounding. Almost one in two murder victims in America is a black male, and more than likely, a young male. And nine out of ten of those young black men were killed by other young back men.

Williams went on to cite some other depressing figures. Less than half of black students graduate from high school, and the education system’s failure is “often a jail sentence or even a death sentence.”

Williams is right. For far too many black kids, public schools are jails before they get to real jails. Young men and women staring down such prospects are kids without hope. And kids without hope can do desperate, senseless things.

This year, a shocking 72 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, let alone a social scientist, to begin to make some connections about the relationship between that last shocking figure and the rest of them.

Kids — and entire communities — without fathers do not know a masculine love that is essential to a neighborhood. To its moral development. And its safety.

That we are still not properly talking about the real race problems in America — ones that include disparate sentencing and profiling — is a failure of imagination. And conscience.

Yes, Trayvon Martin’s death was a tragedy, and a nation’s prayers should go out to everyone in his family. And all of his loved ones.

But while you are at it, say a prayer for Albert Vaughn’s loved ones. Say a prayer for all of the thousands of young black Americans whose lives were cut short by senseless street violence. Say a prayer for the faceless, voiceless victims we never hear about or read about or see on TV because so many of us just aren’t interested.

Say a prayer for all of those young black men and women who were too young to die.

— Lee Habeeb is the vice president of content at Salem Radio Network, which syndicates Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt. He lives in Oxford, Miss., with his wife, Valerie, and daughter, Reagan.

[Jungle Rat]

Yep

[aTm]

This is why adding just 120K jobs makes the unemployment % drop to 8.2. 4 MORE YEARZZZZ!!11

What a useless graph. It needs to be percentage of population, not hard numbers just to account for population growth. Not to mention accounting for age.

[Toemeesleather]

And Mexicans...and it's no more useless than the 8.2 figger.

[Professor Tiger]

Chicago is a shooting gallery on the south and near east side. It's truly horrendous, but so common that Chicagoans are desensitized to it.

The witches' brew of fatherlessness, crime, gangs, worthless public education and drugs are a guaranteed full employment program for us prison employees.

[Op Ed]

The USA does not negotiate with terrorists... we train them on our soil.

http://www.juancole.com/2012/04/us-pent ... hersh.html

http://www.loonwatch.com/2012/03/sheila ... standards/