I’m taking off tomorrow morning to work at a 2-month gig far, far away. Blogging, and even blog surfing, will be impossible for a week, and I’m not sure how it’ll work out after that. Snif.
Take care, everybody.
UPDATE 8/12/08: Worse than I thought. It’ll be some time before I can get back to the blogging world. Don’t have too much fun without me.
Nancy Pelosi has the audacity to call offshore drilling for 86 billion barrels of oil a “decoy.” Compare the oil gained from that drilling to the oil saved by her oh-so-important legislation to halt the filling of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (25 million barrels). You’ve got to click on the chart, enlarge it, and scroll all the way down to the bottom to find her contribution, which is still barely visible.
Nancy Pelosi: working hard to do absolutely nothing.
UPDATE: To be fair, estimates of the offshore oil reserves that are under the drilling moratorium is more like 18 billion, though that estimate is based on old surveys and is considered conservative. So if you could imagine the offshore bar in the graph as 1/5 of its height, or Pelosi’s bar as 5 times its current height, you can get a more accurate comparison of the policies.
Pelosi had a huge sense of urgency in pushing through the legislation to stop filling the Reserve. But that sense of urgency seems to have evaporated as she heads off on her 5-week vacation. I guess working on legislation that was actually meaningful was too much for her.
How many times have you heard this line?
“In his latest reversal, Barack Obama…”
Here’s today’s:
In a dramatic reversal of policy, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama on Saturday told supporters on the Space Coast he no longer favors slashing NASA’s budget, declaring that the United States “cannot cede our leadership in space.”
Yet another example of Obama’s Clintonian approach of telling any audience at any given time exactly what they want to hear, regardless of his previously stated position. So let’s check out how deeply he has thought this through: what’s his vision for NASA?
“Under my watch, NASA will inspire the world, make America stronger and help grow the economy here in Florida,” he told 1,400 people at Brevard Community College in Titusville, a community economically dependent on the Kennedy Space Center.
He could have made that statement to any agency, university, corporation, or citizen’s group in the country by simply substituting their location for “Florida.”
And he probably will.
The food police have been at it again:
Four food manufacturers agreed to reduce levels of a cancer-causing chemical in their potato chips and french fries under a settlement announced Friday by the state attorney general’s office.
California sued H.J. Heinz Co., Plano-based Frito-Lay, Kettle Foods Inc., and Lance Inc. in 2005, alleging they violated a state requirement that companies post warning labels on products with carcinogens.
…
Acrylamide forms naturally when starchy foods are baked or fried. Studies have shown the chemical, which also has industrial uses, causes cancer in lab animals and nerve damage to workers who are exposed to high levels. The Food and Drug Administration is researching whether acrylamide in food poses a health risk.
Read that last line – nobody knows whether acrylamide in food is even a health risk. The “cancer in lab animals” test was the typical case of lab rats eating absurdly large amounts of a substance:
I hope you like McDonald’s French fries because you’d have to eat 486 large servings — weighing out at 182 pounds — every day for life to get the same amount of acrylamide as the EPA’s lab rats. If you prefer low-fat foods, how about 5,000 one-ounce servings — weighing out at 312 pounds — of Honey Nut Cheerios per day for life?
Similarly, occupational exposure involves concentrated acrylamide, again yielding exposures far above the normal. The few studies that have found a cancer/acrylamide-in-food link have been contradicted by later studies, and most studies have shown no link at all.
So here we have companies forced to change their product based on absolutely no science. It is nonsensical, wasteful, and a dangerous precedent. Kind of reminds you of another area of research…
Nancy Pelosi tries floating a new meme on the surge:
President Bush’s troop surge in Iraq has not been successful, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday.
…
“The purpose of the surge,” which started in January 2007, “was to create a secure period of time so the government of Iraq would have political room to take actions that would bring [political] reconciliation to Iraq,” Pelosi told CNSNews.com at a press conference.“Since the surge began, 1,100 of our troops have died,” she said. “They told us it would take 60 to 90 days to do it all. It’s a year and a half and it still hasn’t happened.”
That’s completely false: the buildup for the surge began in January, but the buildup wasn’t complete until June, and it was in mid-June that the first surge operations were conducted. That’s 13 1/2 months, not 18.
Then she tells us that they said it would take “60 to 90 days to do it all.” I assume she’s referring to General Casey’s comment back in January 2007, when he said:
Sounding his optimistic note, he said, “You’re going to see some progress gradually over the next 60 to 90 days.”
…
Asked when he thought some of the extra U.S. troops could be pulled back, Casey replied, “I believe the projections are late summer, but the first troops are just arriving,” so nothing is sure.
Doesn’t sound like anybody promised her anything. But Pelosi digs deeper:
“Whether you are talking about provincial elections … whether you are talking about amending the constitution, whether you are talking about de-Baathification, the rest of it, it still hasn’t happened. And so the purpose of the surge has not been fulfilled,” Pelosi said.
Really? That’s not what I remember. Here’s what the recent assessment of Iraqi progress against those 18 benchmarks told us:
They have passed, for example, legislation that grants amnesty for some prisoners and allows former members of Saddam Hussein’s political party to recover lost jobs or pensions. They also determined that provincial elections would be held by Oct. 1.
Sounds like progress has been made on the re-Baathification and provincial elections. In fact progress has been made on almost all fronts, and only someone determined to find fault would refuse to acknowledge that.
It’s Nancy who’s made no progress in the last year and a half.
