Examiner Publications, Inc. | Cheap Seats Online 2013

Let’s start here: the autumn of the year 1517, in Wittenberg, Germany. A pious, rather irascible priest by the name of Martin Luther is disgusted by the Vatican’s practice of selling indulgences to raise money. Luther is so disgusted that he pens a document entitled “A Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”, which will come to known over time as “The Ninety Five Theses”.

Legend has it that Luther nailed the document to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, but this is probably an embellishment. What is certainly true is that The Ninety Five Theses started a firestorm throughout Europe as the document was printed and circulated throughout the continent.

Luther was not the first to criticize the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church, but he was the first to do so in such a way as to start a revolution. For that’s what the Reformation – as it would come to be called – was: a revolution.

Like most revolutions, the Reformation was chaotic, disorganized and was sometimes abused by selfish interests (see Henry VIII). Nonetheless, this revolution took hold. A continent dominated by one Christian sect would soon be home to dozens, each of which featured their own particular tweaks of dogma and worship.

Like most revolutions, the Reformation also involved bloodshed. Religious differences offered a fine excuse for grasping leaders to attack their neighbors, or to ignite civil war. For the next hundred years or so, most conflicts on the continent featured a religious component.

The Thirty Years War (1618 – 1648) was the most famous, and the most bloody, of these wars. Yet, as the Thirty Years War progressed shifting allegiances among the combatants regardless of faith amply demonstrated that the primary motivation behind that struggle was political, not theocratic.

And that’s an important point to remember as we move forward through history. While it’s popular in certain circles to assert that “more blood has been shed in the name of religion than for any other reason”, that’s not only not true, it’s not close to true.

The three biggest murderers in history, Stalin, Mao and Hitler were all atheists who killed in the name of power, not in the name of God. (And yes, Hitler was born a Catholic, but he had long since abandoned Catholicism by the time he came to power, where he would eventually found the entirely pagan Church of National Socialism).

Further, when wars appear to be religious – like the Thirty Years War – a little scratching below the surface often reveals political components provided a lot more motivation than anything else.

Despite the chaos and the bloodshed, the Reformation was a seminal moment in the history of Western Civilization. After centuries of Papal interference in civil affairs, the political role of the Vatican would gradually erode. The Pope’s realm would encompass only what St. Augustine had called The City of God, while the affairs of the City of Man were left to the laity.

The concept of separation of church and state, an idea that is so important to maintenance of a free society, traces its roots to the Reformation. We often think of this notion in terms of an individual’s freedom of worship and that’s certainly part of what the separation of church and state implies, but there’s more to it than that.

Dividing the world into the City of God and the City of Man also means that the rulers of the City of God may not rule the City of Man. Theocracies, in other words, cannot co-exist with a free society. Before the Reformation, the idea that the Pope should not play a leading role in governing mankind was, quite literally, heretical. Eventually, in time after the Reformation had taken root, most of the west accepted that concept as a given, as we still do today.

Accepting that the rule of law trumps one’s personal belief in a free society can be a challenge at times for people of any faith. As a Catholic, I loathe the practice of abortion and believe that killing of fetuses is a sin. As an American, I understand that the only way to end the practice is through the ballot box.

Whatever your religion, or if you don’t believe in any Higher Power, you are sure to come across something in free society that is inconsistent with your beliefs, if not outright offensive. That’s part of the downside of a free society, but we who choose to live in a free country endorse the concept that the upsides of freedom to worship and separation of church and state, those precious concepts that trace their roots to the Reformation, more than make up for any failings.

We’ll get back to the “History Lesson” series nest week, for I feel a burning obligation to comment on a big story of the day. (And if anyone knows of an ointment that will help me with my burning obligation problems, please pass that information along).

The media is all abuzz with the “news” that the National Security Agency has been involved in data mining of phone records and internet traffic on a massive scale. This revelation has led to righteous outrage on both the left and the right, with even the New York Times, that tireless cheerleader of all things Obama, wagging a finger at their favoritest president ever.

Now faithful readers may have concluded somewhere along the line that I am not the biggest fan of the guy who currently makes his residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave N.W. However, this is not a case where I can criticize the President.

First of all, is this story really a surprise? What did people think the NSA did all day – search for potential terrorists at the local Suicide Bombers R Us store?

Doing the snooping is a thankless job methinks. If you’re successful in averting a terrorist attack, you can’t tell anybody about it because you don’t want to give the nut jobs tips on how we find about things. If you don’t avert a terrorist attack, you’re criticized for not doing your job properly. And, whatever happens, the fact that you have access to mountains of data is scary as hell to the rest of your fellow citizens.

And the power that NSA wields is frightening. The potential for abuse is clear. But, in my judgment anyway, the rewards more than outweigh the risks.

Look, we’re at war. Call it the “War on Terror”, or the “War Against Radical Islamists” or “An Unfortunate Conflict Involving Abused, Misunderstood Individuals Who Desperately Need A Hug”, or whatever else floats your boat. Whatever you call it, there are people out there trying to kill us who don’t believe in freedom and would – if they only could – govern the entire world through a theocracy.

When people are attempting to end one’s life and one’s way of life, that’s a war. It’s a rather extraordinary war involving a shadowy enemy, but it’s still a war and an extraordinary war calls for the use of extraordinary weapons.

This isn’t the first time that an administration utilized measures of questionable legality to fight a war. Lincoln unhesitantly and quite unconstitutionally suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War, enabling him to lock up thousands of enemies (and perceived enemies) without benefit of a trial. He reasoned that unconstitutional acts taken in defense of the constitution are allowable in war time, though the Supreme Court did not concur.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt fought an undeclared war in the Atlantic before we actually entered World War II, reasoning that Britain’s desperate situation at the time called for equally desperate measures from the island nation’s closest ally.

Some said then, as some say now, that the presidents in question were abusing their power and that our constitutional freedoms and rights, once surrendered, may never be regained.

I understand that point of view. Indeed, I sympathize with it. But, in time of war, a strict adherence to peacetime niceties may result in defeat and thus even more catastrophic consequences.

Do we, should we, expect the NSA to do its best to uncover terrorist plots hidden in the mountain of mundane daily communications? I believe we do and we should. And if that means that NSA might come across the fact that I called my brother three times last month, I’m OK with that.

I say that flippantly, but I don’t make that remark quite as off-handedly as it seems. Let’s say that I am on some kind of list of political enemies of the current administration. (For the record, I don’t think that I am, because I’m a pretty little fish, but one never knows). Anyway, if I were on such a list, then the people I talk to could also be of political interest.

But, to repeat, I’m OK with that possibility. Information like this can be abused for political reasons and we have ample proof that there are people in government who do abuse their power. If such abuse takes place, or may take place, I would rather have it happen as an outgrowth of efforts to defend our nation and save lives, rather than as an outgrowth of efforts to enforce an arcane, incomprehensible tax code.

The problem, in other words, is not about the NSA doing its job, mining data to try to protect us, but is rather about the way that data may be abused by the people at the time. And the answer to that problem is simple: elect people you believe to be both trustworthy and fair.

History Lesson (Part 1)

By Rich Trzupek

(First in a Series)

Further, when wars appear to be religious – like the Thirty Years War – a little scratching below the surface often reveals political components provided a lot more motivation than anything else.

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The Stern Effect

By Rich Trzupek

Remember when shock jock Howard Stern was slapped down by the FCC a few years ago? The incident turned Stern – whose politics up to then would probably best be described as libertarian – into a raving Bush-o-phobe.

Similarly, Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane targeted the FCC for a few jabs after finding that the agency objected to some of his material.

Both are examples of what I have to come to call the “Stern effect”, which is defined thus: most people tend to ignore and/or dismiss the debilitating effects of an expanding bureaucracy until some portion of that bureaucracy reaches out to bite them in the ass.

The first corollary of the Stern effect is that when the bureaucracy affects someone personally, most people will develop a negative opinion of the single bureaucratic institution with which they had a negative interaction, but not extend their negative opinion to the entirety of the bureaucratic structure.

The irony of the current IRS scandal is that in targeting Tea Party organizations, the agency went after one of the few groups of people in our country that are predisposed to distrust the bureaucracy as a whole. If somebody in the current administration had spent weeks trying to figure out a way to vindicate the Tea Party and validate their limited government message, it would be hard to imagine anything more effective than what has actually occurred.

The backwash of the scandal has stained the Obama administration, and rightly so. But focusing on the administration’s role in this scandal – whatever that role may be – ignores the bigger problem: Congress.

For it’s Congress that had ceded so much power to the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies that dominate more and more of our lives. And when I say “Congress” I mean both parties. Our representatives in Washington, with a few exceptions, feel obligated to “do good things” in order to justify their existence and a whole lot of those “good things” involve further empowering the bureaucracy.

It’s a lazy and disingenuous process, one that Democrats and Republicans constantly engage in. Ceding powers to bureaucrats enables our representatives to say, with a reasonably straight face, that they are doing their best to improve our lives, without having to participate in making the difficult decisions.

For regulatory agencies effectively get pretty general directions (albeit couched in mountains of legalize that few actually understand) and a whole lot of authority to carry out their missions. This combination provides cover for Congress, for if the agency fails to accomplish its mission, then it’s clearly the agency’s fault, not the people who directed them down the path.

If the agency in question really comes off the rails, as the IRS did in this case, then the abuse obviously has nothing to do with the congressmen and congresswomen who provided them with the authority to abuse in the first place.

If we’re going to take home a lesson from this IRS debacle, it should be that we need to demand much more of our elected representatives. Wouldn’t it be nice to see them take a break from passing new laws for a while and do any or all of the following instead:

1. Review the acts that created and enabled every large federal regulatory agency and update those acts with an eye to limiting bureaucratic authority as much as possible and to limit abuse of that authority.

2. Implement an act (yeah, I’m already disagreeing with my basic premise that Congress won’t pass additional acts for a year) that limits regulatory enabling acts to a fixed term – say five years – so as to require review and reauthorization on a periodic basis.

3. In addition to the regular activities of the Inspector General, how about we implement more Congressional oversight as well. Yeah, it’ll get politicized, but I’d rather my representatives spend more time evaluating how all these regulators are doing their job rather than figuring out more things for them to do.

4. Finally, since this is my dream world, let’s require every single member of Congress to spend at least one month per year doing the grunt work in a regulatory agency and at least one other month per year working in the trenches for someone who is a target of the regulatory agency they just worked for.

None of that will happen of course, but just imagine how much better the nation would run if it did.

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Accountability

By Rich Trzupek

Sadly, it’s not at all surprising to find that the IRS has been targeting people associated with the Tea Party and other conservative organizations. That’s typical of a particular type of the bureaucratic mindset, one in which particular bureaucrats become so enamored of their own importance and power that they can internally justify abuse of their position.

That is not to say that everyone in government service behaves in such a manner. Most bureaucrats that I interact with on a daily basis take great pains to try to be equitable. However, there is never any shortage of the puffed-up sort who define the stereotype.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been quick to condemn the IRS, as they should. As Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers said: “I don't care if you're a conservative, a liberal, a Democrat or a Republican, this should send a chill up your spine.”

In addition to the Tea Party, the IRS also targeted groups that focused on government spending, debt, education, taxes, limited government, the Constitution and who were associated with Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project.

The interesting thing to watch going forward will be to see how the administration spins this one and how compliantly the Mainstream Media goes along with the storyline. As a rule of thumb, the more the MSM echoes the administration’s “nothing to see here” narratives, the more there actually is to see.

The still emerging Benghazi scandal is a case in point. Soon after the attacks happened and the “it’s all a protest over some silly video” narrative was thoroughly debunked, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said – with an incredibly straight face – that the administration had only edited the official talking points memo for style. Edits amounted to no more than a word. Really.

Thanks to ABC News (the MSM doing its job? Hallelujah! ) we now know that the official talking points memo went through at least a dozen iterations, with the State Department playing a significant role in determining the final product, in which all references to Al Qaeda were removed.

At the time, with a presidential election in progress, a cynical fellow like me might wonder if removing all references to Al Qaeda might be a politically-motivated action. After all, with bin Laden gone the President said that Al Qaeda was on the run. A well-planned, effective attack by Al Qaeda might be a bit politically embarrassing in that context.

Not so, the administration now says. Politics had nothing to do with it. References to Al Qaeda were removed because they didn’t want to jump the gun and accuse somebody before all of the facts were in.

Which might be believable, except that they did accuse somebody of wrong-doing. They accused Coptic Christian Nakoula Basseley Nakoula of making an epically crappy anti-Islamic video that sparked a riot in Benghazi. Nakoula, his life likely ruined, remains in jail to this day, supposedly over a probation violation, but in reality as a modern-day political prisoner.

Famously, or perhaps infamously, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice made the round of the Sunday news talk shows, blaming the attack on “the video”. Secretary Clinton blamed the attack on “the video”. Many observers (including this one) said that explanation was sheer nonsense.

Now that we know it was sheer nonsense, and that the administration knew it was sheer nonsense, two new talking points have emerged in an attempt to defend the administration’s actions.

The first is the Hillary Clinton defense: it doesn’t matter who did what or why they did it. That’s so pathetic a response, I’m surprised that someone as savvy as Clinton resorted to it. When people die, whether it’s in the slums of Chicago or halfway across the world, it matters. Identifying the perpetrators and bringing them to justice matters. It’s insulting to everyone, and especially to the relatives of the victims, to suggest anything else.

The second is the Daily Koz defense: there were multiple attacks on American consulates and embassies during the Bush administration and nobody called for hearing after hearing, ergo this whole Benghazi thing is all politically-motivated.

That’s a clever sidestep, but it deliberately misses the point. The Benghazi hearings are not about the attack per se, but about what appears to be an attempt to disguise the nature of the attack, which is quite a different thing. Had W attempted to whitewash the nature of any of the attacks the press would have jumped all over him, and rightly so.

Now I doubt that the President himself played a direct role in either the IRS scandal or the Benghazi spin-doctoring. But, both happened on his watch and I suspect that both are indicative of an administration in which the way things look is much more important than the way things are.

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Reality vs. Perception

By Rich Trzupek

This is the kind of stuff that drives me (more) nuts. Following up on my testimony before the House Environment sub-committee last February, the ranking minority member, Susan Bonamici (D – Oregon) submitted a number of questions intended to correct supposed “inaccuracies” in my testimony.

I’ll preface this by observing that Ms. Bomanici seems to be a genuinely nice person. When I was last in D.C. she took the time to thank me for testifying and we exchanged the expected pleasantries. I don’t think her intent is bad in other words, but she is as caught up as just about everyone else in the silliness that passes for governance in Washington today.

The question that caused me to roll my eyes the most involved toxic air emissions from three sources: industrial boilers, utility boilers and cement plants. USEPA recently passed new regulations targeting toxic emissions from these sources. Ms. Bomanici made the following statement in her interrogatory:

“The cancer risks associated with air toxics are real, and yet the three largest industrial sources of many of these toxic pollutants remain uncontrolled at the federal level until as late as 2012”.

She then posed the following question:

In your opinion, and based on the most recent National Air Toxics Assessment and other information that we invite you to identify, how close are we to reaching the goal of reducing cancer risks to less than 1 in 1 million established by Congress in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990?

Sounds like those guys are getting away Scot free, and creating a huge public health danger while they’re at it, doesn’t it? Here’s my reply to that question:

“It will come as something of a shock to the owners and operators of electric generation facilities, cement plants and industrial boilers that were required to install add-on controls under federally enforceable Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) construction permits and that are required to operate, monitor and regularly test those devices under federally enforceable Title V permits that their facilities are “uncontrolled at the federal level”. Based on my experience, the billions that those industries have invested in baghouses, electrostatic precipitators, scrubbers, selective catalytic reduction units and other such devices would qualify as “control” and the nature of their permits would qualify as “federally-controlled control”.

It is accurate to say that the controls installed have been primarily been installed to address criteria pollutant emissions. However, the majority of these devices will also control emissions of toxic air pollutants as a happy side benefit. For example, the particulate control devices that are currently installed on electric generating facilities, cement plants and industrial boilers – and I don’t know of any of solid fuel-fired electric generating facility, solid-fuel fired industrial boiler, or cement kiln that doesn’t control particulate emissions – remove the vast majority of toxic metals from the gas stream before the gas stream enters the atmosphere. It is thus incorrect to describe these sources as “uncontrolled” or to imply that rules like Boiler MACT will cause such sources to control emissions for the first time.

What these rules actually do is to force certain existing facilities to install new, more expensive controls in order to achieve an incremental reduction in certain air toxics and to help President Obama fulfill his pledge to make it impossible to construct a modern coal boiler in the United States.

I am not qualified to address the question of how close we are to achieving the 1 in 1 million cancer risk goal, or whether we have in fact achieved it already. In my experience people who perform risk assessments layer on so many margins of safety in the interest of performing conservative assessments that any objective analysis of the “real risk” differs from published data by an order of magnitude or more. In the case of the USEPA, I would note that it is never wise to allow an organization that has an interest in the outcome to act as one’s own gatekeeper when it comes to vetting studies of this sort. I have faith is EPA’s ability to develop objective data with regards to emission rates and ambient air concentrations of air pollutants. However, I do not trust the Agency to evaluate risks associated with this data, or to develop unbiased and complete risk/benefit analyses.”

The devil is in the details, of course, and in today’s world – with people tripping over each other to prove that they’re “greener” than the other guy – the details seem to get tossed aside more often than not. It’s all pretty depressing at times, but the fight goes on.

Whatever the real (as opposed to reported) risk that air toxics represent, the extent to which industrial boilers, utility boilers and cement plants contribute to that risk should not be measured by the raw amount of air toxics emissions associated with those industries, but by their proportionate contribution of the specific compounds deemed to represent a risk in those areas where an unacceptable risk associated with a particular compound is found to exist.

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A Departure

By Rich Trzupek

Last month Dr. James Hansen resigned as head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a position he had held since 1981. In the course of those thirty two years, Hansen used the bully pulpit that went with running a prestigious agency like Goddard to push his pet theory in the public consciousness: that the use of fossil fuels was leading to catastrophic global warming.

Hansen has been described as the “Godfather of Global Warming”, which I find to be a fitting moniker. Others, like the late Dr. Stephen Schneider jumped on the global warming bandwagon (or perhaps “gravy train” would be the more apt metaphor) early on, but no scientist played the climate catastrophe dirge longer, louder or more effectively than Hansen.

He unapologetically mixed science and politics, getting himself arrested on several occasions while lending his name to the more radical breed of environmentalists. The end always justifies the means for Hansen, which isn’t what science supposed to be about, but such is the era we live in.

In announcing his retirement for NASA, Hansen promised more of the same, noting that an employee of the federal government couldn’t sue the federal government, but a private citizen can. The implication being that private citizen Hansen would lend his weight to one or more pointless lawsuits that will force the government to “do something” about global warming.

The basic supposition here, that the government isn’t “doing something” to fight the imaginary threat of global warming is faulty, but Hansen the crusader has never been one to let an inconvenient fact or two get in his way.

The fact is that United States greenhouse gas emission rates are down to a twenty year low and that trend will continue. The fact is that a combination of federal and state regulations, laws and programs targeting fossil fuel have brought these reductions about and will continue to do so.

Personally, I think it’s silly not to take advantage of the abundant and cheap coal reserves that America has tucked away, but we’re using less and less of them and we will continue to use less and less of them. Hansen thus is getting his wish, for he believed that coal industry – not the oil industry – was ultimate environmental enemy. But while Hansen the scientific theorist may have set his sights on killing coal, Hansen the activist apparently can’t be bothered to understand that he succeeded.

Hansen’s climate models, whose catastrophic predictions set the stage for all of the lesser prophets to doom to come, described an earth that was frighteningly hyper-sensitive to the slightest variations. As another NASA scientist, Dr. Roy Spencer, once told me, if the climate were as sensitive to small changes as Hansen believes, it wouldn’t matter what we did, because we’d all be doomed anyway.

Chugging along in the fourth decade since global warming activists first predicted the worst, we find that doom still seems to be a way off, a fact sets the “sky is falling” crowd to gnashing their teeth into dust. Global average temperatures have remained pretty stable for the past fifteen years, despite assurance from the Chicken Little’s that coastal cities would be awash and inland areas virtually ablaze by now.

Like most petulant children, Hansen never understood the downside to invoking drama to get your way. One can only stomp one’s feet and hold one’s breath for so long before the people whose attention you hope to attract grow bored and choose to ignore you.

If the current climate unchanged trend continues, as I believe it will, Hansen’s legacy will be that of another bit player on the world stage whose apocalyptic visions were as empty as the multitudes of doomsday prophets who preceded him.

I don’t know the man, but presumably James Hansen is a decent human-being who – like most misguided activists – is sincere about his misguided convictions. But, as a scientist, I deplore the way he has contaminated science by mixing in the poisons of politics. And, as an American, I deeply regret the foolish paths that he has led us to follow by doing so.

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Where’s the Outrage MSM?

By Rich Trzupek

Dr. Kermit Gosnell may be – probably is – the most prolific mass murderer in United States history. Worse, the vast majority of his victims were babies. It’s an appalling, sickening story and yet the name “Kermit Gosnell” isn’t familiar to a great many Americans. Of those who have actually heard something of this story, many are under the vague impression that Gosnell botched a few abortions and ran a rather filthy clinic or something.

There’s good reason that “Gosnell” isn’t as reviled a name as “Gacy” or “Dahmer” or “McVeigh”: the mainstream media. It’s not that the MSM hasn’t covered the Gosnell case. Stung by charges of left-wing bias, liberal columnists and bloggers have spit out lists of Gosnell stories that have been published and broadcast since a Pennsylvania Grand Jury report on Gosnell was released in January 2011.

And yet, in our hyper informational age, it’s not about whether a story is covered, since one can find dozens and dozens of stories about the most trivial bits of news these days, but rather about just how the story is covered. Certain stories are front page worthy. Certain stories, as tragic events in Boston have just shown us, are not only front page worthy, they’re outrage worthy. Yet, somehow, today’s editors and journalists didn’t find that the Gosnell case rose to either of these standards.

It’s not like your modern journalist would have had to work all that hard to digest the horror that occurred in West Philadelphia. The Grand Jury report is available on-line for anyone to review. In it, the Grand Jury notes how it is illegal to perform abortions in Pennsylvania after the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy and how Gosnell got around that little problem:

“Gosnell’s approach, whenever possible, was to force full labor and delivery of premature infants on ill-informed women. The women would check in during the day, make payment, and take labor-inducing drugs. The doctor wouldn’t appear until evening, often 8:00, 9:00, or 10:00 p.m., and only then deal with any of the women who were ready to deliver. Many of them gave birth before he even got there.”

The report goes on to describe how Gosnell dealt with the next little complication:

“When you perform late-term “abortions” by inducing labor, you get babies. Live, breathing, squirming babies. By 24 weeks, most babies born prematurely will survive if they receive appropriate medical care. But that was not what the Women’s Medical Society was about. Gosnell had a simple solution for the unwanted babies he delivered: he killed them. He didn’t call it that. He called it “ensuring fetal demise.” The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that “snipping.”

According to the report, Gosnell “ensured the demise” of hundreds of babies over the years. We’ll never know how many, since the records (and bodies) have been destroyed. He’s been charged with ensuring the demise of seven babies and one mother, which hardly reflects a fraction of the horror that this beast inflicted on the world, but which one can hope will be enough to put the bastard away for rest of his miserable life.

Mainstream media coverage of Gosnell, such as it is, has tended to shy away from the fact that the doctor was killing living, viable babies. Not fetuses folks – babies. Instead, MSM outlets have tried to dance around the real story by turning this into something else. For some, it’s a story about a poorly run abortion clinic that didn’t meet Department of Health standards. For others, it’s a story about how the poor don’t have access to adequate healthcare and how more government oversight is desperately needed in low income communities in order to curtail the operations of such poorly-run operations.

Hogwash.

Gosnell didn’t run an abortion clinic, he ran a murder factory. Not only in moral terms (for most Pro-Life advocates, including this one, would describe the abortion of fetuses in mothers’ wombs as murder in the moral sense) but in legal terms as well. He killed human beings and it matters not a whit that whether those human beings happened to be one minute old or thirty years old. Murder is murder.

And the reason that government didn’t keep a close eye on this clinic is not because Pennsylvania didn’t have the resources to do so. According to the Grand Jury Report, the Department of Health made a conscious decision to stop inspecting this clinic because they worried that low-income mothers would avoid going to the clinic if government inspectors were hanging about. The lack of oversight was the result of pro-choice concerns in other words, not because government didn’t have the wherewithal to provide a safety net.

I understand why the mainstream media wants to keep the intensity of the spotlight on Gosnell to an absolute minimum. When one brings to light the fact that murdering babies on this side of the vaginal wall might be a bit abhorrent, it might make some folks wonder why it’s OK to do so on the other side. The mainstream media being overwhelmingly on the left and the left being overwhelmingly pro-choice, this would be an uncomfortable philosophical discussion to have. It might even make Pro-Lifers look a wee bit creditable.

Can’t have that.

GrandJuryWomensMedical.pdf

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Reality Check

By Rich Trzupek

So how are we doing – really? According to the administration and most of the ever-compliant mainstream media, we’re doing all right. The unemployment rate, while not ideal, is pretty good. Inflation is under control. And so on.

That tale, such as it is, depends on some statistical sleights of hand that have become sadly commonplace. Neither unemployment nor inflation are what they used to be.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps track of six different flavors of unemployment statistics. The “official” unemployment rate, the one we see quoted most often in the press, is the U-3 unemployment rate. This is limited to people who are out of work and who have been actively looking for work within the past four weeks.

The U-6 unemployment rate is the one that reflects unemployment as most of us understand it. In addition to out of work folks who have looked for work with the last four weeks, it also includes people who would like to work but have given up looking as well as people who are working part time who would like to find full-time employment.

So, while the current U-3 unemployment rate of around seven and one half per cent sounds pretty reasonable, the fact that U-6 rate is up around fourteen per cent is a bit more troubling. The U-6 rates among teens and some minorities are even worse.

As the provisions of Obamacare continue to kick in, the U-6 rate will assume even greater importance. One way for employers to escape the expense of Obamacare is to hire more part-time employees and it hasn’t taken people long to figure that out. I don’t think that we’ll ever see part-time employment become the rule, but it’s sure to be less of the exception as the years go by.

The unemployment rate deception is – in your humble correspondent’s opinion anyway – far less significant than the games that the government plays with the inflation rate.

There are two types of expenses that are not calculated into the officially published inflation rate these days: food and fuel. The official excuse is that there is too much fluctuation in these two categories, so it’s somehow wrong to figure them in.

That’s so much hooey of course. The real reasons for not including food and fuel when performing inflation mathematics are rather more self-serving.

For one, keeping food and fuel out of the equation keeps the officially-published inflation rate low, which is a good thing for whomever happens to be in power at the time. The massive inflation that hit the nation during the Carter years (when food and fuel did count) played a large role in unseating that singularly incompetent President, since the numbers helped make it obvious just how incompetent the peanut farmer was.

But there’s even a bigger, and more cynical, reason to play inflation-rate shenanigans. The growth rate in many government programs is tied to the official inflation rate. Cost of living increases, for example, are directly linked to this metric.

The greater the inflation rate, the more these payments increase. For the big-government crowd, this is a serious problem, because the faster such payments increase, the more obvious it becomes that our current entitlement/nanny state is economically unsustainable.

Sure, a fifteen trillion dollar debt should have given everybody a clue about that whole unsustainability thing, but some folks need to be beaten over the head (metaphorically speaking) before they finally wake up.

If you factor in food and fuel, the real inflation rate would be close to fifteen per cent, which is about as bad as it’s been since the Carter days, which is to say that it’s about as bad as it gets. If the government were honest about the way were printing money and it’s real effect on our purchasing power, support for this administration would dwindle to insignificance. But, that’s not going to happen of course – today’s “journalists” are both too lazy and too dim-witted to perform that sort of analysis. How much easier it is to simply spit back whatever your ideological pals explain to you.

And it should be noted, in closing, that President Obama is not responsible for creating either of the flawed accounting methods described above. But there’s little doubt that no president has benefitted more from this particular form of sleight of hand.

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Mayor Nanny Strikes Again

By Rich Trzupek

Chemo-phobia has become an accepted part of modern life, but New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed ban on the use of polystyrene foam in food service items is truly depressing. As a chemist, I can state emphatically, that it has no sound scientific basis, needlessly increases costs to restaurateurs and their patrons in the Big Apple and would do more harm than good to the environment.

In fact, polystyrene is consumed by the “green industries” that are so near and dear to the mayor’s heart. Most windmill blades, for example, use polystyrene as a base component, not to mention its use in wind turbine housings and other structural components. Polystyrene also plays a featured role in the production of many solar panels. It’s fair to say that but for this remarkable material, the renewable power industry would be facing even bigger challenges than it is today.

Why do they use polystyrene? Because it's strong, durable, inexpensive, doesn’t corrode and it’s relatively lightweight. Those characteristics make it the ideal material for use in many food service applications as well, especially when we add in one additional factor unique to the expanded version of polystyrene: it’s a great thermal insulator.

Expanded polystyrene (often mistakenly called StyrofoamTM, a similar-looking insulation product, but produced in a different way) is mostly air, about 98% air for your typical grade of expanded polystyrene. In this era of double-paned glass, most people are aware that air is a terrific insulator. An expanded polystyrene cup, or a clamshell left-overs container made from the material, utilizes that double-paned glass principle a million times over, trapping the tiny pockets of air that combine to protect your hand from that piping hot cup of morning coffee and to keep that bit of dinner you couldn’t finish warm until you can get back home.

Paper products just aren’t as good at thermal insulation as the people who double cup know. That’s because paper is porous and therefore not terribly good at trapping air. And creating a paper product for food service use consumes more energy and uses more water than the expanded polystyrene equivalent. While paper has its uses, polystyrene is better--hands down.

Environmentalists say that polystyrene is toxic, cannot be recycled and does not biodegrade.

Here's the truth: While "styrene" has been identified as a possible human carcinogen (as have, to be fair, many other chemicals in common use) once the molecules have been linked together in the molecular equivalent of a Rockettes chorus line that is polystyrene, the risk of styrene exposure no longer exists. It’s not just non-toxic, it’s effectively non-existent as far as biological systems are concerned.

Polystyrene can be recycled. Many communities are recycling it today. The only question is: how do you want to use it? You can grind it and heat it and turn it into a good filler for other plastic products. You can run it through a gasification process, break it back down into smaller components and put those components back together to make other plastics or fuels.

The final environmental objection, polystyrene’s lack of biodegradability is more problematic because polystyrene doesn’t biodegrade. But the foundation of this biodegradability objection rests on environmental mythology: that the United States is chock-full-o landfills and, even more disturbing, those landfills are just about full to the brim. This is not accurate.

Over the last thirty years, total landfill acreage has remained stable as we moved away from small urban landfills to larger, more modern landfills located in rural areas that serve multiple municipalities. We’ve got about as much landfill capacity as ever and there is little reason to believe that will be ever be a concern. In fact, you could fit all of the landfills in the United States into one moderate sized county in the Midwest and still have plenty of room left over.

So it’s hard to get upset about putting a material into the ground that – as polystyrene’s biggest critics freely admit – isn’t going react with anything, leach into waterways or do anything else except sit there as inert as inert can be for the next several millennia, especially when the ground you’re putting it in represents such a tiny fraction of the nation’s land.

So while though the road to hell may indeed be paved with good intensions, that does not mean that the intender--Mayor Bloomberg-- is a bad fellow. He's just listening to the wrong people. I suggest that the mayor mobilize the intellectual talent concentrated in a capital of modern civilization like New York City, a city full of academics, professionals and business leaders to review the issue. It is possible to develop means of incentivizing the recycling of those materials so we can both enjoy their benefits and recover their substantive value.

A leader interested in maximizing the standard of living for his constituents in this day and age needs a strategy more in tune with contemporary intellectual developments in science and technology.

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Feeding on Their Own

By Rich Trzupek

Rarely has a television commercial annoyed me – disgusted me actually – as much as this one has. The Peak Antifreeze brand has lately been featuring an ad that emphasizes their down-home, familyesque character as a company (which is fine), but that does so while dumping on the hundreds of thousands of men and women who labor to keep America’s increasingly abused energy industry cranking along.

The Peak commercial in question, like Peak’s website, distances the brand from the supposed evils of “big oil”, whatever that is supposed to be.

Based on their website, the company that owns Peak, Old World Industries, appears to be an entirely philanthropic organization: “We're not here to sell you more performance than your car needs just to make a few extra dollars for shareholders - We don't have shareholders.”

Really? Old World may be a privately held (as opposed to publicly held) company, but the last time I checked privately held companies do indeed have shareholders. And – go figure – those people running private companies are as interested in making a “few extra dollars” for their shareholders (a.k.a.: themselves) as the people running public companies are interested in making a “few extra dollars” that may help boost the value of the IRA held by their shareholders (a.k.a.: you and me).

To be sure, we’re all used to hearing about the supposed evils of the “big-oil” boogeyman when we deal with grandstanding politicos and ignorant media types. For them, it’s a simple matter of pointing to the number of zeros included in a particular company’s financial statement and reaching the conclusion that something fishy must have been going on to create such gaudy numbers.

“Big oil” is convenient punching bag for environmental extremists, unreformed hippies, “occupy” idiots, and the like. And that’s fine. The men and women who work in the industry are used to abuse coming from that quarter, courtesy of our ever-compliant mainstream media, but to get kicked by another petrochemical company – one that ought to know better – is something else again. It’s the difference between taking crap from your annoying neighbor and a member of your own family stabbing you in the back.

Besides that, I’m not buying Peak’s proposition that the company is not “big oil”. Old World Industries, and by extension Peak, sure seems to fit comfortably under that umbrella to me.

Being a privately held company, we don’t know what Old World is worth. But we do know that Old World sells a variety of transportation-related products in over sixty countries. We do know that it sold its U.S. ethylene glycol (the basic component of most anti-freeze) production facility to a Thai company last year for a cool $795 million. I’m pretty sure that most people would call a company doing business in over sixty countries that also gets involved in transactions totaling close to a billion dollars “big”, but maybe that’s just me.

How about the “oil” part? Can we say that Old World is in the oil business? Well, most of their products are both ultimately derived from petroleum and are sold into transportation markets that are wholly dependent on petroleum. Without oil, Old World wouldn’t have anything to sell, but that would be OK, because they’d have nobody to sell to anyway.

So yeah, I’m pretty sure that Old World Industries and Peak Antifreeze deserves to wear the “Hello My Name is: Big Oil” name tag to cocktail parties, something that wouldn’t bother me a whit, were it not for the fact that the company is taking such care to simultaneously deny its own place in the industrial world and dump its petrochemical brethren.

Cowards.

To be fair, I doubt that Tom Hurvis, one of two entrepreneurs who founded Old World and who still serves as CEO, had anything to do with this offensive ad campaign. This sounds a lot more like the brainchild of some Madison Avenue type who has little knowledge of or appreciation for the way industry really works in the United States.

Because, like Old World Industries, “big oil” doesn’t’ make money via a collection of unreformed robber-barons exploiting the masses so they can add some wings to their sprawling estates. The petrochemical industry – including Old World – earns their keep in this world because of the hundreds of thousands of men and women working in the oil and natural gas fields, refineries, petrochemical plants and all the off-shoots of this dynamic, wealth-producing industry. I’ve had the privilege to work with many of them over the years and they have my respect and my gratitude.

And while I have no qualms about privately held companies like Old World or Koch Industries, nor am I offended by the publicly-held variety. The public is you and me after all. If I can save a few bucks more toward retirement because an oil company I’m invested in had a good year, then I’m all for them.

So pull your head out of your posterior Old World. When it comes to your fellow companies engaged in the petrochemical business, perhaps you should employ the old adage: if you can’t say something good about someone, perhaps it would be better to say nothing at all.

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Another Time, Another Place

By Rich Trzupek

I am not one of those prone to endlessly mourn for days gone by. Which is not to say that I don’t mourn for the old days, just not endlessly.

Over the course of my fifty-some years on the planet, some things have changed for the better of course. Automobiles, for example. Some of my fellow old-timers bemoan the demise of the old gas guzzling tanks that we grew up with, but who’s kidding whom?

Forty years ago, getting one hundred thousand miles out of a car was rare, today that magic number represents middle-age for most cars. If you lived in northern climes your car would be infected by rust after dealing with a winter or two. With modern sealants and paints, one rarely sees rusty clunkers on the road.

There are other good things about the twenty-first century, but there are many things that are so very different and, in their own ways, so very much worse.

I was ruminating on this the other day as I was dealing with one of the most annoying parts of modern life: the cattle line at the airport.

Those of you younger than about thirty have never known anything else. The delays have grown and the indignities to which you are subject have increased, but the cattle line has always been a part of your life whether or not it involved removing your shoes and full body scanners. That’s what people do when they travel by air: they stand in long lines and get inspected before they are allowed on an airliner.

It’s justified of course. In a world crawling with fanatics willing to kill and be killed to advance their cause, we have little choice but to be as cautious as we can.

And yet there was a time, not so very long ago as all that, when going to the airport was one hundred per cent adventure and zero per cent goofiness.

Fifty years ago, people dressed up before boarding something as exotic as an airliner. There was a red-carpet vibe to walking down the aisle of a 707 and few would be so crass as to make that trip clad in denim and a t-shirt.

Fifty years ago, there were no cattle lines. There was no need. Hijacking hadn’t been invented yet – or at least it was so rare as not to be of much worry. Using airplanes as large-scale suicide bombs was simply inconceivable.

That would all come later. The “summer of love” in 1968 morphed into a dangerous new world containing almost unprecedented levels of hate and we have debated ever since whether the latter was the inevitable outgrowth of the former.

But, in the innocence of the early sixties, there was something magical about going to the airport, whether you happened to be flying or not. If you were taking a trip yourself, the size and power of the 707s and DC-8s that were – at the time – the queens of the skies was almost unimaginable. Flying in one was just this side of going to the moon, and no doubt the airline would be inaugurating scheduled service to a lunar spaceport in just a few years.

If you were seeing somebody off, you walked right on to the gate with them. Nobody stopped you anywhere short of getting on the plane itself.

So you went to the gate, you said your good-byes, watched everybody board and waited by the window until the plane pushed back. As the pilot ran up his engines and got ready to taxi away, you searched the windows of the plane for whomever you were sending off. Everybody, on the plane and at the gate, waved madly, although I doubt more than one in ten on either side could actually identify whomever they were waving at.

You might linger at the airport for a while after that, watching the jets take off and land, stretching out the magic just a little bit longer. Then, reluctantly – very reluctantly – you headed home, wishing that you were the one soaring through the heavens toward some exotic locale.

Those days and that feeling are long gone, a remnant of another, less complicated time that we will probably never see again. It was a different world, one that I and most of my contemporaries look back upon with a sense of rueful wonder.

The loss of innocence is inevitable I suppose, but I sometimes wonder if there has been any other period in human history where we have – as a society – lost so much of it so quickly.

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Spraying to All Fields

By Rich Trzupek

I write this column in the faint hope that it may reach your eyes, faithful Examiner readers. I realize that this is unlikely, given that sequestration has occurred, thus triggering the Apocalypse.

However, just in case the power grid is still functioning and airliners crashing to the earth have not completely destroyed the interstate system, let us consider recent news.

Crude is Crude – I have long been a fan of The Onion, so I was especially disappointed to find the “nation’s finest news source” at the center of an Oscar-week controversy. In case you have been in hibernation for the last few weeks, an Onion employee went on Twitter to mock nine-year actress Quvenzhane Wallis in a particularly offensive manner.

The Onion apologized, as was right, but the satirical newspaper/website was just the latest example of what happens when folks confuse crude for edgy. It’s an on-going problem that isn’t going to get better anytime soon.

There is an element of the entertainment industry that feels the need to constantly push the edge of the envelope of good taste. This is nothing new of course, my generation had Richard Pryor and the one before that had Lenny Bruce, along with countless other examples through the years.

At some point, however, pushing the edge of the envelope must result in tumbling over that edge. I mean, that’s the whole point of having an edge, isn’t it? I’m sure that the idiot tweeter at The Onion thought he was being terribly hip using a crude sexual term to make fun of a nine year old, but it turns out that our culture hasn’t degenerated to that point.

Not yet anyway.

The Pension Crisis – The Newspaper That Used To Be The Chicago Tribune spent some of its ink this weekend to wag a finger at Illinois lawmakers who have steadfastly been avoiding do anything substantive to solve the state’s pension crisis. My thought regarding Tribune editors, in the immortal words of John McClane, are this: “Welcome to the party pal.”

It’s nice that the Trib has noticed the mountain of unsustainable pension debt that has accumulated over the past ten years, but one cannot help but wonder where those crusaders – excuse me “watchdogs” – were ten years ago when all of this started.

Ten years ago the state’s pension system was pretty much solvent, until Blago, Madigan and the rest of the gang started fooling with it to pay for a bunch of goodies we couldn’t really afford. It wasn’t hard to predict where that fiddling would end up, as many people not employed by The Newspaper That Used To Be The Chicago Tribune (including yours truly) pointed out at the time.

Ten years ago, municipal governments could keep their fiscal houses in pretty good order, until the state started meddling in their business by passing mandates that vastly increased the pension and insurance liabilities of villages and cities throughout the state. Again, it was pretty easy to see how that would end up, as this writer and others at the mighty Examiner observed at the time, but the reaction over in Tribune Tower was pretty much a collective yawn.

Now that the crisis – actually crises – are here, the editors at TNTUTBTCT (how’s that for a new acronym!) have decided to do something about it. To resort to another analogy from the cinema, they are as shocked (shocked!) as Claude Rains to find that Springfield has spent the last decade gambling with our money. Thanks a lot Trib.

Crude is Oil – Recently released statistics show that crude oil production in the state of Texas increased at a greater rate last year than any time since the 1950’s! That’s amazing. No matter what restrictions this, or previous, administrations put on the oil industry, a lot of talented, hard-working people figure out a way to get it done anyway. That’s the real power of the free market. It’s a shame that the current administration doesn’t have a clue how to harness that kind of power.

Dumb is Dumb – So, to recap: 1) the city of Chicago has had one of the toughest (if unconstitutional) gun-laws in the nation for years, 2) the city of Chicago has one of the highest murder rates of any municipality in the nation, 3) no one was killed in the Sandy Hook massacre with an assault weapon, and 4) more people in the United States are killed by hammers every year than are killed by assault weapons.

And yet, according to Chicago pols, the way to stop the bleeding in the streets of the Windy City is to ban assault weapons in the state of Illinois. Rrrrrright.

This is not just an example of avoiding confronting a problem, it’s the poster-child for not actually understanding what the problem is.

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Unsustainable

By Rich Trzupek

I’m pretty sure that if somebody told me that I had the choice between racking up more credit card debt to pay for things I could not otherwise afford, or cutting down on the amount of money I spent, I would choose the latter. Most of us – I hope anyway – would do the same.

It’s certainly not a choice that requires a degree in economics to make. If you can’t afford something today, and you don’t have any reason to expect that you can afford it tomorrow, then you must do without.

As simple as that decision should be, it’s mind-boggling to me that the Washington elite are apparently incapable, or perhaps unwilling, to face it. We are told, by members of both parties, in the sort of shrill terms usually reserved for announcing the presence of a rock-star or a fire, that sequestration will result in disaster.

Why? Because if those automatic spending cuts kick in, then the government won’t be able to do all of the wonderful things that it has been doing. OK. So what’s the answer?

Raise taxes on the rich some more? Raise them all you want, we still can’t pay for all the goodies people demand of their government these days. Actually make spending cuts? Can’t have that. Deal the entitlement train wreck? Don’t make me laugh.

All that’s left is more of the same: raise the debt ceiling and print/borrow more money to stave off the inevitable day of reckoning a little longer. Or, in other words, put it on the credit card again.

The word “sustainable” having crept its way into popular culture as one of the noblest goal of the green generation, it is remarkable that the largest institution in the nation – that being the United States government – should pursue a path so obviously unsustainable.

“But how are we going to live without (fill in the blank with the goodie of your choice)” people shriek. By definition, if we can’t actually pay for it, we’re going to have to live without whatever “it” is. The only question is “when”.

Well, no, there’s another question as well. There’s the question of how we adjust. For the more we put off the inevitable crisis, the bigger the crisis becomes and the more painful it will be to come to terms with it.

Today, we’re talking about some flights – maybe, possibly – being delayed if sequestration hits, for example. I suspect that’s just more propaganda, but even if it were so, how in the world would it possibly make more sense to let the fiscal crisis build up to the point that the inevitable depression would relegate flying to the rich and famous?

Whenever people involved in any sort of business, be it private or public, hears that their department’s budget might be cut, the inevitable cries of doom and gloom follow right behind. It’s human nature.

More often than not – much more often than not – people deal with budget cuts just fine. We see this in the private sector time and again. It is, in fact, a natural part of the economic cycle in the business world. Organizations get fat and bloated, profits drop, the least productive are cut and the new, leaner organization does a much better job than the old one did.

Unfortunately, the nature of the public sector, particularly on the federal level, usually prevents this kind of self-correcting behavior from happening as it naturally should. We’re now at the point where that kind of correction is being forced upon lawmakers who don’t have the guts to make the hard decisions themselves.

And yeah, there will be some tough times ahead when/if sequestration hits, but not so nearly wide-spread nor so tough as the doom-sayers have advertised. Besides, it will be a hell of a lot better than what would happen if we continue to ignore the bills we’ve been running up for far too long.

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Mr. Trzupek Goes to Washington (Again)

By Rich Trzupek

So last week marked my second opportunity to testify before a Congressional committee on the subject that is, if not quite near and dear to my heart, at least pretty important to me and in which I may claim to have a certain expertise.

The hearing was held before the Subcommittee on Environment of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology and the subject was (quoting from my invitation to testify letter): “The State of the Environment: Evaluating Progress and Priorities. The purpose of this hearing is to assess broad environmental trends and indicators, including an examination of recent developments in air and water quality, chemical exposure, environmental health, and climate change.”

Chairman Andy Harris (R – MD) opened the hearing by calling all of the environmental progress we have made over the past forty-some years, “the greatest story never told”, a sentiment with which I rather agree. It set the tone for the rest, including a good deal of back and forth in the question and answer phase. You can watch the whole thing here, if you’re interested: http://science.house.gov/hearing/subcommittee-environment-state-environment-evaluating-progress-and-priorities.

So what’s it like testifying before Congress? A few observations come to mind.

Everybody is very nice, very polite, before and after the hearing. The lone Dem witness, Dr. Goldstein, and I had very pleasant conversations in both cases. Ranking member Bonamici took the time to come up after we wrapped up and thanked me for my contributions. It’s all very civilized.

Which is a good thing of course, but there is a part of me that yearns for our wild west days when congressmen called each other the most creative of names and were even know to take a poke at one another when they felt honor was at stake. I’m not so sure that having Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell duke it out to settle their differences would be such a bad idea. I’m certain that it would be damn entertaining.

There is also the paperwork, which includes – among other things – a “Truth in Testimony” form in which you are required to disclose who is paying you to go to DC and say whatever you intend to say. That was pretty short list in my case, since nobody was paying me to say anything. However, that didn’t stop the opposition from throwing mud my way.

Prior to the hearing, the National Resources Defense Council published a hit piece attacking me and my fellow GOP witness. You can read the whole thing here: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/jdevine/gop_science_subcommittee_kicks.html

I actually found the NRDC thing entertaining rather than offensive. It’s amazing the degree to which some people will sling arrows in order to divert attention from their own failings.

But more than anything, I came away from that hearing with the overwhelming feeling that nothing I said, nothing Ms. White said and nothing Dr. Goldstein said actually mattered. It was a sad, depressing realization.

The inertia that pervades Washington is so all-encompassing these days. It’s palatable. It’s a national paralysis that creeps up your spine the minute you deplane, and I don’t know what the heck we’re ever going to do about it.

There are good people in that town to be sure. I like Dr. Harris and think he gets it. I like Lamar Smith too, who now chairs the Committee on Space Science and Technology. He’s sharp and he’s a gentleman, which is a good combination in my book. And while I don’t agree with Ms. Bonamici’s positions on this topic, I don’t think she has bad intentions.

But maybe that’s the problem. The road to hell, it is said, is lined with good intentions. In DC, everybody claims to want to do the right thing. Maybe they all do. I just know. But with half the nation pulling in one direction and the other half pulling just as firmly in the other, the ship of state isn’t going anywhere.

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Fracking Ridiculous

By Rich Trzupek

Matt Damon’s anti-fracking film “Promised Land” may have flopped at the box office, but the dubious claims and outright lies that lie behind Damon’s obsession with this particular part of the energy industry continue to grow. There has been so much disinformation disseminated, most of it generated by environmental groups and their tame, technically ignorant allies in the mainstream media, that it’s impossible to refute it all in one short commentary. However, we can try. In that spirit, here’s my list of the top five fracking fantasies currently in circulation:

1) Fracking is a new and therefore poorly understood technology – Not even close to true. Fracking (more properly “hydro fracturing”) is a technique that is more than fifty years old and is consequently very well understood. Breakthroughs in horizontal drilling technology and exploration techniques are the real drivers for today’s natural gas boom. These two advances made it possible to identify deep, natural gas rich shale formations and to economically remove the gas. Fracking is merely the most efficient way to ensure that the greatest possible amount of gas can be removed from each shale formation.

2) The chemicals used in fracking are dangerous and can contaminate aquifers – As is often the case when it comes to green disinformation, there is a tiny morsel of truth here, surrounded by a great mass of distortion and hyperbole. When a hole is drilled deep underground, for any purpose, it necessarily must pass through shallow aquifers. The depth of aquifers used for drinking water vary, but 50 to 200 feet is typical in the United States. When the hole passes through the aquifer, an impermeable casing must be used to ensure that the materials used in drilling do not contaminate the aquifer. Again, this is the case whenever one drills deep, for any purpose.

Drilling also requires the use of very small concentrations of certain chemicals, such as corrosion inhibitors (to prevent metal oxidation) and anti-bacterials (to prevent biological growth and fouling). This has and will continue to be the case of any kind of deep well drilling. So, if a casing is poorly constructed, there is a chance that a small amount of certain, well-understood chemicals could seep out into an aquifer. That risk – tiny as it may be – will always exist as long as man uses drills to explore the earth and extract its resources. However, if the casing is properly installed, there is no way for any material used to extract shale gas lying a mile below the surface to seep into aquifers lying a couple of hundred feet down.

3) Fracking releases dangerous amounts of natural gas into host communities where the wells are drilled – This particular myth, most famously perpetuated by HBO’s faux-umentary “Gasland”, persists even though it’s been debunked time and time again. The simple truth is this: there are some parts of the country where sources of natural gas (typically shallow coal deposits) lie close to the surface and, in some of these places, these sources of natural gas may seep into aquifers. People who live in such places must install equipment to deal with the problem. This was the case before fracking began and will continue to be so whether or not fracking takes place in these areas. There is simply no way that a natural gas contained in shale formations can pass through thousands of feet of impervious rock and seep into shallow aquifers.

4) Fracking in pretty much unregulated – Untrue. The big shale gas states have rules and regulations that cover fracking and USEPA has proposed more rules that will apply to drilling, extraction, transportation and processing of natural gas and natural gas liquids. There is, in other words, extensive regulatory protection that applies to the natural gas industry and those protections are going to grow even stronger.

5) People like me who write commentaries like this are unscrupulous, unprincipled pawns of the big energy companies – Actually, people like me who write commentaries like this stand in awe of the technology and the people that have – in the matter of a decade – removed all worries that the United States would run out of natural gas and will soon turn our country into an exporter of that vital commodity. The shale gas revolution is an American success story of the first order and hundreds of thousands of men and women across the nation have had their lives enriched by the remarkable bright spot in our otherwise dismal economy. Rather than mindlessly criticizing that which they plainly don’t understand, critics like Damon and the mega-environmental lobby ought to join the rest of us in offering thanks to this badly-needed, amazing addition to America’s economic engine.

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Little of This, Little of That

By Rich Trzupek

- Saw “Lincoln” this past weekend. Spielberg’s politics being Spielberg’s politics, I wish I could say that it blows, but it just doesn’t. It’s magnificent. More than that, it’s historically accurate, down to the little details that few but Civil War buffs would appreciate.

David Strathairn’s portrayal of Secretary of State William Seward, for example, was spot on. He captured the complex nature of the Seward-Lincoln relationship, in which the two routinely swapped the role of student and teacher.

Picking Tommy Lee Jones to play irascible Congressman Thaddeus Stevens was certainly the obvious choice, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right choice. Nobody does brilliant curmudgeon better than Jones and those two words pretty much define Stevens, by all accounts.

The performances of Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field have been universally praised of course. And rightly so. The combination of Lewis’ talent and Spielberg’s touch brought out a Lincoln that – in this writer’s humble opinion – is the most historically accurate to ever have been captured on film, down to the great man’s rather high-pitched voice, melancholy character and shambling walk. It you haven’t seen “Lincoln” yet, what the heck are you waiting for?

- It’s a shame that the 787 Dreamliner is having some teething problems, but I wouldn’t go selling that Boeing stock just yet. The mainstream media does a wonderful job of wringing its hands and gnashing its teeth whenever aviation problems arise. And they are pros at consulting so-called “aviation experts” whose lack of professional qualifications are only matched by their willingness to say anything in order to grab the spotlight.

The late Michael Crichton did a wonderful job of exposing the lazy way that the mainstream media covers aviation issues in his novel “Airframe”. If you haven’t read it, get your butt out there and do so. It’s “Exhibit A” in the case explaining why journalism majors should not cover aviation stories – or any technical issues for that matter.

Practically every airplane every built has had some kind of problem (or problems) develop soon after introduction into regular service. Those problems get figured out and fixed, making aviation the safest form of transportation going.

The Dreamliner will be a success. Count on it.

- A few folks have asked me to weigh in on the Sandy Hook tragedy. I am somewhat reluctant to do so. However…

It’s easy to understand the desire to do something – anything – to ensure that this kind of tragedy can never happen again. Any parent (this one included) can empathize with that feeling. But, the reality is this (Piers Morgan notwithstanding): in a nation with 300 million fire arms and the Second Amendment, the answer is not going to include, and should not include, outlawing guns.

It’s worth noting that Sandy Hook is not the deadliest mass murder at an elementary school in American history. That dishonor goes to Bath School bombings of 1927.

In that tragedy, a mentally-disturbed, fifty-five year old school board treasurer by the name of Andrew Kehoe killed his wife and then set off explosives at the local elementary school. By the time he was done, Kehoe had murdered forty five people, including thirty eight children.

The point here being that evil always tries to find a way and we’re kidding ourselves if we believe that we can defeat evil by meager efforts to limit evil’s access to a world full of tools with which evil may accomplish its ends.

- Egypt is coming apart at the seams. Wish it wasn’t, but that seems to be the reality. A prayer or two for the Copts who are still there would be in order at this point.

- And, speaking of Christians living in theocracies, the fact that Iran sentenced Christian pastor Saeed Abedini – an American citizen – to eight years in prison because of his religious beliefs is reprehensible, if predictable.

The fact that the Obama administration has done little more than offer lip-service in protest, and that the mainstream media hasn’t gone to bat for Abedini is absolutely shameful, if equally predictable.

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Redemption

By Rich Trzupek

I’m a particular fan of stories of redemption and this particular story of redemption is not only one of my favorites of the genre, it’s also timely. All will be revealed at the end.

Our tale begins in 1919, when a twenty six year old lefthander pitching for the Chicago White Sox won two games in the World Series that would come to known for the infamous Black Sox Scandal. The lefty, who was also a rookie that year, hailed from St. Louis, Missouri. His name? Richard Henry “Dickey” Kerr.

Kerr then has a couple more good years with White Sox teams that were really, really bad following the Black Sox purge. After that, having been loyal to the Sox, he asked owner Charles Comiskey for a raise. Comiskey, being the tight-wad that Comiskey was, refused to cough up. So, following some legal maneuvering, Kerr ends up out of the majors.

The reserve clause was then in place in baseball. If you don’t know what that was, the reserve clause allowed owners to tie a player to a team for life. There wasn’t any free agency. There wasn’t any open market. You played for the team the owners wanted you to play for – period.

Save a so-so comeback in 1925, that was Kerr’s major league career: one World Series season, marred by a despicable cast of miscreants who soiled the game; two more seasons during which the club would be gutted and what remained would become the laughingstock of the American League; and, to top it off, an owner that couldn’t come up with the lousy five hundred bucks after Kerr pitched his butt off with a cast of clowns to back him up. Thanks for the memories Dickey. Don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass.

Dickey Kerr had ample reason to be bitter, particularly toward the game he had put so much honest effort into, but which treated him so shabbily in return. You have to believe that Kerr put at least a little time pondering the “what ifs”.

Were it not for the Black Sox scandal, the White Sox were on the road to establishing a dynasty that might have displaced the Yankees as the team that dominated the twenties. And Kerr, a talented, relatively young pitcher, could have won a ton of games for such a team. Would we remember Dickey Kerr as a Hall of Fame pitcher, if only the 1919 Sox hadn’t tanked the fall classic? Who knows, but Kerr surely had to wonder, at least a little bit.

To be sure, there are indications that Kerr felt some resentment to the game. “All baseball gave me was the boot,” he is said to have complained. And yet, he kept giving. He spent time as a scout after his playing days were over, and he also coached young players at Rice University and later, in the minors.

It was in the minors, while managing the Daytona Beach Islanders, that Kerr took a promising young pitcher under his wing. Unfortunately, the youngster developed a sore arm. Depressed, he contemplated quitting baseball. He needed to eat. He couldn’t afford to wait around to see if his arm healed and, even if he did, he understood that he would be viewed as damaged goods by major league teams.

Kerr had other ideas. He liked the young man and recognized his raw athletic talent. Even as a pitcher, the youngster demonstrated some talent with the bat. Stick around, Kerr said, get better and we’ll try you out in the outfield. As far as money went, well Kerr and his wife would take the youngster in till he got back on his feet.

The pitcher took Kerr up on his offer. And it turned out he could hit. He hit so well in fact that he made it to the majors, where he became a star of the first order. And he never forgot what Dickey Kerr did for him. He ended up buying Kerr a big, brand new home in Houston and he would remain friends with Kerr until the old lefthander passed away in 1963.

I like to think that Kerr felt a bit of redemption and I’m sure that he felt more than a little pride, given the career and the type of man his young protégé became. For, the name of that injured pitcher who went on to become a Hall of Fame outfielder was Stan “The Man” Musial, one of the greatest hitters and greatest gentlemen in baseball history.

With Stan passing from this life into the next this past weekend, I imagine he’s enjoying his reunion with Dickey. They both lived lives in full and they are proof – if any more proof is needed – that you never know where the tides of life will take you.

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Gore is a Whore

By Rich Trzupek

At this point, can we just call him “Al Whore”? I’m not sure which is worse, that the guy was Vice President of the United States for eight years, or that he came within one Supreme Court vote of being elected President. Good Lord, what a pathetic, hypocritical, slimy, cowardly, egotistical, son of a bitch Gore is.

What little respect (if any) that I had for Gore has long ago evaporated. This is the man who pretends to be an expert on climate science, but refuses to talk to any actual climate scientist who disagrees with him. This is the guy who has made a career out of whining about global warming while living in a huge mansion and flying around the world in private jets.

Nice carbon footprint you got their Al.

Gore justifies his massive use of evil fuels in a couple of ways. For one (according to Al) he’s serving the greater good by flying to exotic locales and staying in fancy hotels to expose the evils of the world’s energy companies. And, if a hot masseuse happens to make her talents available to the former veep, he’ll be all the more refreshed when going into battle.

The other part of his rationalization involves the purchase of carbon credits. Yeah, carbon credits. They still exist, even though the United States has done away with any notion of a “cap and trade” program and the European version has been a disaster. Carbon credits are composed of equal parts pixie dust and guilt, but they are an important part of making the privileged class feel good about themselves.

Apparently Gore’s carbon credit bill has gotten hideously expensive, for why else would he agree to sell Current TV to Al Jazeera for over twice what the cable network is worth? A guy has to be hurting for money to sell an American television network to an organization with ties to terrorist organizations.

Gore, who had a twenty percent stake in Current, is said to have netted $100 million in the sale to Al Jazeera. In turn, Current will be reborn as “Al Jazeera America”, as the Arab news network adds additional news bureaus across the country.

Now it’s self-apparent that Al Jazeera has as much of a right to peddle their propaganda as anyone else. A nation that puts up with the twaddle emanating from MSNBC can’t be all that worried about a network that throws welcome home parties for terrorists.

However, the fact that Gore is the guy to provide Al Jazeera its entry card into the club of American broadcasting definitively demonstrates just how much of a hypocrite the man is.

Gore, that bastion of modern liberalism, has decried the evils of corporate, money-grubbing American for decades, but he obviously has no problem raking in millions himself to secure his place among the “one per centers”.

Gore, the environmental champion, supposedly hates fossil fuels and everyone involved in their production, sale and distribution, but he doesn’t blink an eye when a network founded and paid for by Middle Eastern petrodollars hands him a windfall.

Here’s how Big Al described Current TV and Al Jazeera when the sale was announced: both networks exist, he said “to give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling."

(Note to Al: the reason that no one else is telling those stories is because the stories they tell are so much horse-puckey).

Now, whenever anyone uses the phrase “truth to power”, you can be damned sure that the speaker possesses neither, and that is certainly the case with Al. He’s a fraud – a charlatan – a con-man of the first order. One hundred and fifty years ago, he would have been selling snake oil and charms to ward off evil spirits.

I don’t imagine Al Jazeera will attract many viewers and those that do tune in will be those predisposed to Al Jazeera’s point of view. That’s fine. I get that. But how in the world a fraud like Al Gore continues to be accepted by polite society is utterly, completely beyond my comprehension.

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Drowning In Red Ink

By Rich Trzupek

So we got a budget deal. Ain’t we proud. Democrats got their cherished tax increases on the rich. And Republicans got – well, I’m not sure what Republicans got, but I do know what we the people got: nothing.

Actually, we got less than nothing. Literally. The tax increase doesn’t do anything to offset spending increases, which has been the standard for the Obama administration. Nor does the budget deal do anything to address the real problem: entitlements. This is, in other words, just the latest version of the kick-the-can game that the nation has been playing for the last few years.

It goes without saying that this is all Bush’s fault. Clearly, the only way to address the huge debts run up during the Bush years was to run up truly horrendous debts in the Obama years. It was a brilliant solution to a problem that should never have existed.

Honest economists of all political ilks acknowledge that the problem is entitlements. Neither Social Security nor Medicare can continue in their current form for very much longer. It doesn’t matter how much we tax who. It doesn’t matter how much reduce defense spending. All of that is sideshow. If we don’t fix entitlements, the nation will go broke (if it hasn’t already).

That’s also the conclusion that the Simpson-Bowles Commission – assigned by President Obama to find solutions to the nation’s budget woes – arrived at. Just this past Sunday, former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles repeated the message on Meet the Press: “We have to slow the growth of entitlement spending,” he said. “A big part of going forward has to be entitlement reform.”

We could have and should have dealt with this ten years ago, when President Bush tried to address entitlement reform. That attempt came a cropper, as everyone in D.C. put political posturing ahead of fixing what is so clearly broke.

So far, the current administration’s approach to the problem has been consistent with the President’s Chicago politics roots: ignore an uncomfortable issue and hope everyone else does as well.

It’s more than a little ironic that we’re having this discussion nationally at the same time that the President’s adopted home state is being forced to face up with its equally unsustainable pension program.

Back when Blago started raiding the state pension funds over a decade ago, it was pretty damn clear that we’d eventually get to this point. Or, at least, it should have been clear to anyone who was paying attention at the time.

I happened to be among those paying attention at the time and wrote about how stupid, short-sighted and ultimately disastrous Blago’s plans (fully supported by his fellow Democrats in the General Assembly) would be. This of course led to the usual barrage of letters accusing me of that most damning of sins: uncontrolled conservatism.

In reality, that particular prediction had nothing to do with conservatism or liberalism, it had to with basic math: you can’t continue to pay out more than you could conceivably take in.

With a few blessed exceptions, politician of both parties stuck their heads in the sand as the crisis got worse and worse over the years. The incredibly ignorant mainstream media pretty much ignored the problem as well. It was one of the stories that involve numbers and math and somewhat complex analysis and modern journalists lake both the will and brains to cover boring old stories like that.

If this sounds like your humble correspondent crowing “I told you so”, you’re damn straight that’s what I’m doing. Now that the fecal matter has finally hit the fan so hard that it’s impossible to ignore the splatter any longer, the alarm bells and clanging and hands are wringing from Chicago to Cairo. About time, or too late?

I rather suspect the latter and I think that Illinois is going to be in for even tougher economic times than those we’ve seen. And there’s little doubt that Illinois Dems will evade the notion that they are in the least responsible for the mess. Such is what passes for governance in the Land Of Lincoln these days.

But, to bring us full circle, what is happening in Illinois is a microcosm of what will soon be happening on the national level. It’s the same irresponsible philosophies brought to you by the same Chicago pols and it’s leading us to the same place: a black hole of debt that will suck the life out of each and every one of us.

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Promised Land

By Rich Trzupek

I haven’t decided whether or not to see “Promised Land”, the new Matt Damon fantasy film which – I am reliably informed – is basically an attack on the natural gas exploration industry. On the one hand, watching Hollywood hatchet jobs usually raises my blood pressure. On the other hand, it’s probably better for me to know what garbage is being spewed about in popular culture. We’ll see.

The particular part of the natural gas exploration industry that seems to disturb Damon is what is (usually inaccurately) described as “fracking” in the popular media. Fracking is shorthand for “hydro-fracturing”, a technique that is part of extracting natural gas from shale formations.

We will pause for a minute to answer two questions that usually come up when I talk about energy issues:

1) What makes you think that you’re an expert on these issues?

Because I’ve worked with scores of energy companies in my day job for the last thirty years and I understand how a great many processes in the energy sector work, including shale gas exploration. People like me have to understand the processes so that we can help companies obtain permits for them.

2) You’re just writing this because you’re a tool of the big oil companies!

Okay: A) that’s not actually a question, and B) most (but not all) of the work in this sector of the energy business is performed by companies that have nothing – zip – nada – to do with oil companies.

2A) OK, fine. Isn’t it true that you’re writing this because you’re a tool of the big natural gas companies and those big oil companies that are also in the natural gas business?

No, it’s not, but I have learned long ago that there is a certain portion of the population that is so infatuated with making corporate America the villain in every story there is absolutely no point in attempting to dissuade them. So if that’s what you need to believe, be my guest.

With that out of the way, let’s deal with a couple of common misconceptions regarding fracking and shale gas.

Misconception 1: Fracking is a dangerous new technology and we don’t know nearly enough about it for it to be used safely.

The hydro-facturing technique is over sixty years old. Pump a bunch of water and sand into a “tight” formation in which natural gas is trapped and you create fissure for the gas to escape so that it can be collected and used.

What’s “new” is horizontal drilling technology that makes it economical to “frack” deep, but relatively thin shale formations, along with sensing technology that has driven drilling success-rates from roughly one in ten twenty years ago to over eighty five per cent today. Combine the two and we have the ability to recover natural gas reserves in amounts that were almost unimaginable ten years ago.

Misconception 2: The chemicals used in fracking are toxic and will contaminate water supplies.

Whenever one drills any kind of hole deep in the ground, for any purpose, chemicals are used. Some of the chemicals help lubricate the drill bit, some keep bacteria from growing and fouling the well, some prevent corrosion and there are others that serve other purposes. All are used in very small concentrations, but some could potentially foul a water table there was a leak into the water table.

Note however that this is true of any hole that is drilled, not just those holes drilled to extract natural gas. The “danger area” is the zone where the hole passes through shallow aquifers – typically 50 to 250 feet, depending on local geology. When the hole passes through the aquifer, a secure casing prevents any communication between chemicals used for drilling and the aquifer. It is the quality of the casing that determines whether or not drilling chemicals will contaminate an aquifer.

In the case of shale gas, once the well is in place with a quality casing, there is no way for the natural gas – typically found at depths of a mile or more – to get into an aquifer as the result of the drilling. That’s reality, not that such things matter to Hollywood.

I suspect that Damon will do his level best to perpetuate these misconceptions, and many more that have made their way into our internet culture. It’s stupid, especially since the natural gas industry is one of the few parts of the economy that’s really working, but that’s Hollywood for ya.

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