It appears that it’s not news anywhere but at the Hartford Courant, where “Little Pink House” author Jeff Benedict reported the development on Saturday, and at Reason.com (HT to commenter dscott), which linked to the Courant story earlier today. I suspect it won’t get much coverage at other establishment press outlets.

The development is that one of the four Connecticut Supreme Court justices in the 4-3 majority which ruled against Susette Kelo and the New London, Connecticut eminent-domain holdouts, ultimately sending the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 against the plaintiffs in Kelo vs. New London, has apologized — quite emptily, as it turns out — to Ms. Kelo, face to face:

… I faced that situation at a dinner honoring the Connecticut Supreme Court at the New Haven Lawn Club on May 11, 2010. That night I had delivered the keynote address on the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 5-4 decision in Kelo v. New London. Susette Kelo was in the audience and I used the occasion to tell her personal story, as documented in my book “Little Pink House.”

Afterward, Susette and I were talking in a small circle of people when we were approached by Justice Richard N. Palmer. Tall and imposing, he is one of the four justices who voted with the 4-3 majority against Susette and her neighbors. Facing me, he said: “Had I known all of what you just told us, I would have voted differently.”

I was speechless. So was Susette. One more vote in her favor by the Connecticut Supreme Court would have changed history. The case probably would not have advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Susette and her neighbors might still be in their homes.

Then Justice Palmer turned to Susette, took her hand and offered a heartfelt apology. Tears trickled down her red cheeks. It was the first time in the 12-year saga that anyone had uttered the words “I’m sorry.”

It was all she could do to whisper the words: “Thank you.”

Then Justice Palmer let go of her hand and walked off.

If you stopped reading there, you would walk away thinking that the judge made an unconditional apology. Nope, as Benedict learned when he began pre-publication follow-up with Judge Palmer, who responded as follows in a November 2010 “personal and confidential” (at the time) letter:

“Those comments,” he wrote, “were predicated on certain facts that we did not know (and could not have known) at the time of our decision and of which I was not fully aware until your talk — namely, that the city’s development plan had never materialized and, as a result, years later, the land at issue remains barren and wholly undeveloped.” He later added that he could not know of those facts “because they were not yet in existence.”

So the only reason he’s sorry is that the promised development emanating from what five foolish U.S. Supreme Court justices at the time of the ruling asserted was a “carefully formulated … economic development plan” didn’t come to pass.

Judge Palmer proved that he still doesn’t get it in a mid-August interview with Benedict in his chambers, and at the same time exposed the fatal flaw in so much of what passes for jurisprudence:

Q: Looking back at the Kelo decision (by the Connecticut Supreme Court), how do you see it now? In other words, has it led to good law?

A: I think that our court ultimately made the right decision insofar as it followed governing U.S. Supreme Court precedent. Whether the Kelo case has led to good statutory law is not a question for me or my court; so long as that law is constitutional, its merits are beyond the scope of our authority. Of course, judges are also citizens and, therefore, we may hold a view on the merits, but that view should not interfere with or affect our legal judgment concerning the law’s constitutionality.

I’m sorry, Judge Palmer, that doesn’t cut it. The primary question before your court was whether Connecticut’s statute went beyond the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment restriction of eminent domain to “public use” situations. It wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, about what had been done in previous cases, while perhaps looking to the Constitution as an afterthought.

You blew the ruling, because even if New London somehow had concocted the most wonderful and “successful” plan on earth with gleaming new buildings all around, it still would not have involved a “public use,” and still should never, ever have been allowed. Judges should not care at all whether statist proponents of eminent-domain expansion have been able to rack up 100, 500, or 1,000 “precedent-setting” cases in front of pliant judges invoking “public purpose” instead of “public use” while allowing property to be taken from private citizens and conveyed to other private citizens. The starting point should always be what the Founders wrote, and determining what the Founders meant. Then, and only then, should case law matter. In Kelo vs. New London, case law shouldn’t have meant a darned thing. The Fifth Amendment’s “public use” limitation could hardly be more clear.

This exposes the fundamental flaw of the legal system’s overdependence on case law. Previous rulings which vary from what the Founders prescribed become the new de facto legal standards, while the importance of the Constitution’s original words and the Founders’ original intent continually diminish.

Judge Palmer isn’t “sorry” in any beneficial sense, and his apology to Susette Kelo, while perhaps a nice surface gesture, is as substantively hollow as the day is long. Now that Ms. Kelo understands the judge’s twisted “logic” as explained to Benedict in the Courant, the guess here is that she totally agrees.

That said, high-profile “apologies” often make news. So far this one hasn’t. I doubt that it will. The establishment prefers statism, and to portray judges, especially leftist judges (Palmer is a Democrat, and Benedict really should have identified his party affiliation), as our infallible betters.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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UPDATE, Sept. 20: A search on “Richard Palmer” at the New London Day indicates that hometown paper of the Kelo ruling has ignored Benedict’s column (search string not in quotes; no direct URL available).

UPDATE 2: At DDDb.net (“Assessing the Kelo Apology”) —

Benedict’s account of the apology, and his communication with Justice Palmer about publishing the account, reveals some very disturbing cognitive dissonance (and cowardice) not just in Palmer’s mind, but in the general judicial mind. Palmer’s “sorry” is followed by a sorry explanation of what he meant by “sorry.”

I totally agree.

It will be interesting to see if a quote noted at the end of Jim Kuhnhenn’s early Associated Press report about President Obama’s proposed tax increases (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) makes the cut in later revisions. I’ll bet not, because it sends both the arrogance and ignorance meters well into the red.

This post will look at the first and third paragraphs of the 11:20 a.m. version of the AP dispatch, and then relay the quote (bolds are mine throughout):

In a blunt rejoinder to congressional Republicans, President Barack Obama called for $1.5 trillion in new taxes Monday, part of a total 10-year deficit reduction package totaling more than $3 trillion. “We can’t just cut our way out of this hole,” the president said.

Geez, Barack — You, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid didn’t have any trouble spending your way into “this hole,” did you? Without bothering to correct the accounting trickery (discussed here and here for those who are interested), deficits in fiscal 2009 and 2010 amounted to $1.42 trillion and $1.29 trillion, respectively. With one month remaining, the fiscal 2011 deficit is on track to reach $1.3 trillion.

Also “somebody” said in 2009 (HT Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin’s place) that “Normally, you don’t raise taxes in a recession, which is why we haven’t and why we have instead cut taxes.” Of course, Kuhnhenn has thus far “forgotten” to pass that nugget on to AP readers.

Obama’s recommendation to a joint congressional committee served as a sharp counterpoint to Republican lawmakers, who have insisted that tax increases should play no part in taming the nation’s escalating national debt. The new taxes would predominantly hit wealthy Americans, ending their Bush-era tax cuts and limiting their deductions.

Well, at least Kuhnhenn called them “new taxes.” But at some point (which should have been about five years ago), you would think that the press would recognize that “the Bush-era tax cuts” occurred in 2003, that we’ve been operating under essentially the same income-tax system for nine years (2003 through 2011), and that tax increases should simply be called, well, “tax increases.”

But speaking of tax increases, Kuhnhenn “somehow” forgot — but in July, the Wall Street Journal didn’t — that $438 billion in tax increases are already on the books thanks to Obamacare. If the law survives court review and repeal attempts, the economy’s producers will face over $1.9 trillion in additional taxes over the next decade.

If the President wants to increase the amount of money Uncle Sam takes in, all he needs to do is unleash the economy. Maximizing fossil-fuel production could bring in as much as $50 billion a year in royalties and related taxes beginning a few years from now. Easing the regulatory burden in the rest of the economy and throwing the arbitrary authoritarianism in the trash could easily lead to at least much in additional annual income and other tax collections within a year, if not sooner.

In any event, the problem isn’t the intake, it’s the outgo. If fiscal 2011 spending comes in at roughly $3.60 trillion as expected, that will represent a 32% increase over the $2.73 trillion spent in fiscal 2007. What in the world do we have to show for it?

Okay, here’s that final-paragraph quote:

Responding to a complaint from Republicans about his proposed tax on the wealthy, Obama added: “This is not class warfare. It’s math.”

This statement will not be well received, which in my view explains why Kuhnhenn saved it for the end. Even if it survives in future AP dispatches, the guess here is that it probably won’t be picked up at very many of the wire service’s subscribing outlets, and you won’t hear it much if at all in broadcast network news reports. We’ll see.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Every once in a while you’ll hear a globalarmist like Al Gore or NASA’s James Hansen tell us that the earth is doomed to catastrophic warming in five, ten or twenty years if we don’t hand our economic lives and fortunes over to them. The challenge is then to set your calendar for their drop-dead date so you can ridicule them when it comes and goes.

At the Wall Street Journal today, Daniel Yergin, “chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy research and consulting firm,” engages in scholarly debunking of another group of goalpost-moving alarmists: believers in “Peak Oil.”

It’s a long read, but worth every word. Here are several key paragraphs:

(Peak Oil) advocates argue that the world is fast approaching (or has already reached) a point of maximum oil output. They warn that “an unprecedented crisis is just over the horizon.” The result, it is said, will be “chaos,” to say nothing of “war, starvation, economic recession, possibly even the extinction of homo sapiens.”

The date of the predicted peak has moved over the years. It was once supposed to arrive by Thanksgiving 2005. Then the “unbridgeable supply demand gap” was expected “after 2007.” Then it was to arrive in 2011. Now “there is a significant risk of a peak before 2020.”

… This is actually the fifth time in modern history that we’ve seen widespread fear that the world was running out of oil. The first was in the 1880s, when production was concentrated in Pennsylvania and it was said that no oil would be found west of the Mississippi. Then oil was found in Texas and Oklahoma. Similar fears emerged after the two world wars. And in the 1970s, it was said that the world was going to fall off the “oil mountain.” But since 1978, world oil output has increased by 30%.

Just in the years 2007 to 2009, for every barrel of oil produced in the world, 1.6 barrels of new reserves were added. And other developments—from more efficient cars and advances in batteries, to shale gas and wind power—have provided reasons for greater confidence in our energy resiliency. Yet the fear of peak oil maintains its powerful grip.

… In the oil and gas industry, technologies are constantly being developed to find new resources and to produce more—and more efficiently—from existing fields. In a typical oil field, only about 35% to 40% of the oil in place is produced using traditional methods.

… But this is no done deal. There are many “buts,” having to do with what happens above ground. The policies of governments around the world—especially concerning taxes and access to resources—have a major impact on whether and when oil is discovered and developed.

This country’s above-ground policies are atrocious. The conscious and consistent stance of the Obama administration has been to obstruct exploration and development wherever possible, and to employ any available excuse to do so.

When there’s an oil spill in the Gulf, all drilling gets shut down. It’s being restored at a grudging, bureaucratic pace. Many companies are giving up and taking their rigs elsewhere.

When we learn that “fracking” may be the source of amazing amounts of natural gas, the EPA decides to submit it to study over groundwater concerns even environmentalists — before they figured out that they could be used as a premise to stop it — believed were specious.

Only as its prospects for reelection have declined has the administration begun to make fitful attempts to improve things. They’ll all disappear if Obama wins in November 2012. The only way Peak Oil will ever happen is if the world’s politicians cause it to come true.

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Previous Related Posts:
- Nov. 16, 2006 — Peak Oil, Schmeak Oil
- March 6, 2007 — NY Times: Peak Oil, Schmeak Oil

Add a Nobel-winning physicist to the significant number of “deniers,” as noted in a Friday Investor’s Business Daily editorial:

Global warm-mongers say they can’t name a single scientist who doesn’t agree with them. Well, here’s one: Nobel laureate Ivan Giaever (pictured at right), who just left a scientific society because he believes the debate isn’t over.

We keep hearing from Al Gore and others that the debate is over, that the “consensus” is that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are heating the planet. The only scientists who don’t believe in global warming, we are told, have been bought and paid for by big polluters.

So what do they do with Giaever? He won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1973 for his work on superconductors. He was a professor in the School of Engineering and School of Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He also supported Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign.

But the Norwegian scientist is no longer a member of the American Physical Society, the second-largest organization of physicists in the world. He resigned last week because he “cannot live” with the APS’ position that there is “incontrovertible” evidence that man’s CO2 emissions are causing global warming.

Clearly, Giaever doesn’t believe the debate is over.

“In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multiuniverse behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?” he asked APS in his resignation e-mail.

When Giaever looks at the data, he sees evidence contrary to the APS position.

Of course he does, because his eyes aren’t blinded by dreams of massive wealth redistribution and de-industrialization.

IBD goes on to note that Giaever is far from alone:

… Giaever is hardly the sole dissenter among scientists. Thousands have signed the Oregon Petition, the Leipzig Declaration and the Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming, three efforts that challenge the claim of a scientific consensus on global warming.

… Physicist Hal Lewis, who has since died, resigned in October of last year.

“Global warming,” Lewis wrote, “is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life.” There, in a mere 17 words, he summed up the climate change scare.

To think that public policy is being driven by this fraud is more scary than the scaremongering itself.

From Marengo, Illinois:

Conjoined twin girls born almost two weeks ago in Chicago were doing fine, their mother announced on her blog.

Amanda Schulten, 21, of northwest suburban Marengo, came under pressure to have an abortion because of the dire predictions for her twins, but as a Catholic she believed that would interfere with God’s will.

Her twins, Faith and Hope — who share a heart — were born Sept. 6 at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

“Faith is eating now,” Schulten wrote on her blog, Amanda-faithhopelove.blogspot.com on Friday. “The girls are getting a lot bigger. From what I can remember, I think they gained almost a pound already.”

Schulten said she gave Faith the nickname “Smiles,” and she nicknamed Hope “Bubbles.”

“When I suction their mouths, Hope has a million bubbles,” Schulten said. “Faith is always smiling and awake for me. She’s always looking around at the world. I wonder what she’s thinking?”

Go here for the rest of the story. Schulten’s blog announcement is here.

This list ignores Solyndra, LightSquared, Gunwalker, and other more recent items, and has been prepared in support of a Pajamas Media column which will appear in the next few days (Update: It’s here). Gunwalker is a longer-running matter, but because it for the most part hasn’t broken through an establishment press blockade, I’m addressing it in the column.

It isn’t necessarily (and probably isn’t) complete. Other suggestions are welcome, and I will consider adding them to the list as they are submitted. When evaluating potential additions, use the first dictionary definition of “scandal” at dictionary.com (“a disgraceful or discreditable action, circumstance, etc.”) as a guide.

Here goes:

• Obama’s refusal to seek Congressional approval before going to war in Libya.
• The administration’s voiding of disfavored secured creditors’ contractual rights during the Chrysler bankruptcy, as well as the accompanying intimidation.
• The Sestak and Romanoff job offer(s).
• The dropped Black Panther Pennsylvania voter-intimidation prosecution.
• The defiant reissuance of a virtually identical deep-water drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico after a federal judge declared the original null and void.
• The President’s clearly anti-constitutional signing statement preserving the positions of his czars in direct defiance of Congress, which specifically de-funded them.
• The scuttling of terror finance prosecutions against co-founders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and others for what appear to be purely political reasons.
• The Justice Department’s refusal to enforce or defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). I know it’s quaint to refer to the Constitution, but the last time I checked, the executive branch is supposed to carry out and defend laws passed by Congress, not act as if it’s all three branches in one and ignore the law.
• Obama’s false claim, serially repeated, that his mother lacked adequate health insurance coverage in the year before her death as she was fighting ovarian cancer. In Ann Althouse’s words, Obama “lied about a central fact about his own life which he used — powerfully — to push health care reform.” The fact is that Stanley Ann Dunham had health insurance, but that her application for private disability coverage was denied.

UPDATE, Sept. 20: A commenter has mentioned the Gerald Walpin affair, which definitely qualifies.

David Lewis is running for Congress as a Republican in Ohio’s Eighth Congressional District for the seat House Speaker John Boehner currently holds. To be kind, Lewis doesn’t stand a chance. To be not as kind, the establishment press is using Lewis’s candidacy as an excuse to attempt to cast doubt on the ability of Tea Party activists and the GOP establishment to get along. To be clear, there’s plenty of reason for the existence of such doubts, but David Lewis’s candidacy is certainly not one of them.

To the chagrin of the GOP establishment, I’m a fan of serious primary efforts, especially against incumbents who may have lost their way. But Lewis’s effort is not serious. It is fundamentally flawed in its premise and completely miscasts Boehner’s current prolife record. It also has given the press an opportunity to distort the priorities of the Tea Party movement.

(more…)

From a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Mary Anastasia O’Grady:

In a study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute and released last week, the energy consultancy Wood MacKenzie estimates that pro-development policies could, by 2030, “support an additional 1.4 million jobs, and raise over $800 billion of cumulative additional government revenue.”

On the other hand, according to the study, current policies “which slow down the issuance of leases and drilling permits, increase the cost of hydraulic fracturing through duplicative water or air quality regulations, or delay the construction of oil sands export pipelines such as Keystone XL, will likely have a detrimental effect on production, jobs, and government revenues.”

A serious jobs proposal would address these issues. Mr. Obama doesn’t have one.

Note that the amount cited, after allowing for a delay of three years before significant receipts might arrive, would average $50 billion per year from 2015-2030 if prorated over those 16 years. This annual amount exceeds what Team Obama wants to raise annually from “the wealthy” through tax increases.

Extracting oil and natural gas creates jobs. Extracting money through taxation from “the wealthy” (really “high individual-year income-earners) which amounts to a punishment for success doesn’t.

Passing on the opportunity to accelerate energy development demonstrates how fundamentally unserious the Obama administration is about economic growth and job creation.

From Hawaii (video at link):

Posted: Sep 16, 2011 1:53 AM EDT
Updated: Sep 17, 2011 6:37 AM EDT

John Schmitt cherished his Super Bowl ring. He earned it as the starting center of the New York Jets when the AFL Jets upset the Baltimore Colts of the NFL in Super Bowl III on January 12, 1969.

“Nobody gave us a cut dogs chance of winning that Super Bowl. I mean even our own league made fun of us,” Schmitt once told someone who asked about the Jets upset victory.

Two years after the Jets victory, in February of 1971, Schmitt took his first surfing lesson in the waves off Waikiki Beach while on vacation in Hawaii. He paddled out in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, his Super Bowl ring snug on his finger.

“I never thought about the fact that if you stay out in the water for 5 or 6 hours, your hands shrink and the ring fell off about a quarter mile out from the shore,” Schmitt told Hawaii News Now.

When he got back to the beach he noticed the ring was missing and immediately launched his own search mission.

“I got a snorkel and some flippers and I went out and I dove until I was blue. I’m not kidding you. It must have been three hours I was out there looking. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I was just exhausted. I virtually could not swim or flip my legs anymore and I just went in broken hearted,” Schmitt said.

Few knew of the treasure that lay somewhere on the ocean floor off Waikiki. John Ernstberg certainly did not know. Ernstberg was a Waikiki lifeguard living the beach boy life. He was always at the beach rescuing visitors who got in too deep, taking people on canoe rides, and surfing the gentle swells that help make Waikiki such a popular attraction.

“One day he came home. He handed my aunt Mary Ernstberg a ring and both of them, not thinking about looking at it, just put it in a little box and put it way. And all he stated to her was, he found this in the water of Waikiki,” said Cindy Saffery, John Ernstberg’s great niece.

Ernstberg died in 1991. His wife Mary passed away in 1995. Their estate went to Saffery and her husband Samuel. Curiosity eventually prompted them to take the ring to a jeweler to find out if it is authentic.

They went to Brenda Reichel, an accredited gemologist and owner of Carats & Karats fine jewelry, antiques, and collectibles store in the Aina Haina Shopping Center. After examining the ring – she was sure. It is a real Super Bowl ring, the ring given to #52 of the Jets, John Schmitt.

“It was made by the Balfour Company which had the contract to do the Super Bowl rings that year,” Reichel said while looking at the ring through jewelers magnifying glass.

Reichel and the Safferys contacted the Jets, discovered Schmitt lives on Long Island, and gave him a call.

“He actually called back yesterday and said, ‘Yes, I lost my ring in 1971 off the shore of Waikiki at the Royal Hawaiian and I went looking for it and I never found it and you mean to tell me after 40 years someone has my ring?’” Reichel explained.

“I couldn’t believe it. I mean I honestly couldn’t believe it. I mean 40 years,” Schmitt said after contacted by Hawaii News Now. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Too generous, duplicative, and fraud-riddled — yet ever-expanding.

____________________________

Note: This column went up at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Thursday.

____________________________

As shown previously, the economy has been extraordinarily and historically unimpressive since the recession as traditionally defined ended in June 2009. Nevertheless, during the intervening 26 months, according to the more comprehensive Household Survey at the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, seasonally adjusted employment, since bottoming out in December 2009, has grown by 1.67 million, or about 1.2% of the workforce.

This degree of job growth should have caused the number of those enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), still popularly known as Food Stamps, to level off or at least grow only slightly, right? Dream on. Food Stamp enrollment during the eighteen months ending in June of this year increased by 6.2 million, or 16%. In the past 3-1/2 years, Food Stamp enrollment has grown by 72%, from 26.3 million to June’s 45.2 million. In 2007, about one in eleven Americans was receiving Food Stamps; now it’s about one in seven.

The Food Stamp program is a case study in good intentions gone wild, and a direct rebuke to those who believe we can’t reduce spending on government welfare and entitlement programs, and reduce or eliminate many other federal programs and departments, without harming the vulnerable.

The original 1964 legislation creating the program was a result of a classic “win-win” logrolling arrangement between urban politicians who wanted to feed poverty-stricken families and rural reps who sought increases in farm subsidies. Predictably, both groups got what they wanted, while taxpayers lost. Uncle Sam’s Agriculture Department originally predicted that the program “would eventually reach 4 million, at a cost of $360 million annually.” By the end of 1974, the number of participants (15 million) and the cost ($2.7 billion, or $1.6 billion in 1964 dollars) had both essentially quadrupled those original estimates. The tab in calendar 2011 will easily top $70 billion.

Individual and family benefits have recently skyrocketed for no defensible reason. During the last few years of the Bush administration, leftists ramped up an orchestrated PR campaign called the Food Stamp Challenge. It was designed to prove how absolutely impossible it was to survive on the program’s average benefit of $21 per person per week. Among those who agreed to participate in what they claimed was the grocery-store version of Mission: Impossible were several congresspersons, Oregon’s governor, and many journalists.

But the $21 benchmark was a fraudulent figure. It was the average net benefit after legally mandated deductions from gross benefits for family income and assets, the reasonable idea being that the government would make up the difference between 30% of a household’s income and what recipients could afford to pay for food from their own resources. Depending on household size, individuals and families deemed as having no available resources were getting $27-$36 per person per week in benefits — amounts that roughly coincided with what the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the time considered to be the cost of its “thrifty” but adequately nutritional meal plan. Rather than argue the merits of the income- or asset-based deductions, Food Stamp Challenge promoters refused to even recognize their existence, falsely insisting that the net benefit was all recipients had to spend on food. Meanwhile, during August 2007, Colorado activist Ari Armstrong and his wife demonstrated that they could live within even the artificially low Food Stamp Challenge amount without undue hardship, and spent a whopping 44% less than the gross benefit amount.

Even though benefits were already adequate, and even though the cost of food at home increased by a bit less than 5% during the two years involved, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid’s Congress, with George W. Bush acquiescing, increased gross benefits in fiscal 2009 by 9%. Once Barack Obama became president, gross benefits went up two times in just over eight months by a total of 13%. These increases, combined with rules changes in many states easing income, asset and other eligibility tests, caused the average net benefit over those two years to explode by 40%. Gross benefit levels have stayed the same since October 2009, but they’re still way above the reasonable levels of three years ago. The bottom line is that we no longer expect recipients to be thrifty with their taxpayer gifts.

What ordinary people would see as obvious abuse is clearly on the rise. In Southwestern Ohio in early 2009, a couple with $80,000 in the bank and a paid-off $300,000 home qualified; it was not an isolated incident. Colleges have actively encouraged their students, no matter how well-off their parents might be, to get with the program. In a sign of how widespread student abuse of food stamps might be, Michigan has removed 30,000 of them from the rolls so far this year.

Duplication of benefits between other federal programs is rampant. Children in Food Stamp-eligible families are often if not usually getting free lunches and/or breakfasts at school. It’s not mean or nasty to observe that such families are getting 21 meals’ worth of benefits each week their kids are in school, but only have to figure out how to feed their kids 11 or 16 times. Many college students on food stamps are receiving financial aid based on their school’s officially published cost of attendance, which includes tuition, fees, room — and board.

Thrift being no longer necessary, the next stage is apparently removing the expectation that recipients prepare their own meals. The program’s new frontier is permitting the purchase of restaurant meals. This “feature” is currently limited to four states and is in theory only available to the elderly, disabled, and homeless. If you believe that every fast-food cashier is verifying whether every person paying with their SNAP card really qualifies, I’ve got a Microsoft Sweepstakes-winning email to forward to you. It should be no surprise that lobbying efforts to expand restaurant merchant eligibility are well under way. I sense that another “win-win” at taxpayers’ expense, which will also serve to cement currently too-high benefit levels, is on the horizon.

Finally, the Food Stamp program, like so many other federal efforts, is riddled with fraud. Ohio alone replaces 200,000 supposedly “lost” food stamp cards per year out of a current pool of 1.6 million recipients, or perhaps 500,000 households. Many if not most of the cards are being sold for cash or drugs.

To contend that this and other federal programs and departments can’t be cut — real cuts, not just reductions in projected, artificially jacked-up spending — is absurd. Unless we’re gunning to be the next Greece but without anyone who will bail us out, we can’t afford not to.

Via Yahoo Sports:

September 12, 2011

Ten years after a television-show booker persuaded John Thompson Jr. not to take the hijacked 9/11 plane that crashed into the Pentagon, the former Georgetown coach finally had the chance to thank the man who saved his life.

Thompson was sharing the story on Monday of how he switched his flight just a few days before the Sept. 11 attacks when national radio host Jim Rome surprised the legendary coach by connecting him on air with Danny Swartz.

It was Swartz who cajoled the notoriously stubborn Thompson into flying to Los Angeles a day later than he originally planned to appear on Rome’s former TV Show, Fox Sports Net’s “The Last Word .” Thompson originally refused to make the appearance on the 12th instead of the 11th because he wanted to make it to Las Vegas the night of the 12th for a birthday party the following day, but Swartz managed to assure the former Georgetown coach he’d arrange the travel details.

“He told me, ‘Coach, if you promise me you’ll come on the 12th, I will get you back to Vegas immediately after we do the taping and I will make certain you get there in time,’” Thompson told Rome. “I’m sitting there saying, ‘Oh hell, I don’t want to do it,’ but the guy was nice.

“Without this kid doing his job in a professional manner, I would have been in trouble. I mean, it would have been over. It really would have been over. But the way you did your job, particularly dealing with a person like me … I certainly do appreciate it. And I’m telling you, if you ever come to Washington , boy, look me up. I’m going to make time for you.”

It didn’t initially occur to Thompson that it could have been his plane that hit the Pentagon even after he felt the crash miles away at his condominium in Arlington, Va. Only after Georgetown academic adviser Mary Fenlon called and told him later that day that was supposed to be his flight did Thompson realize how close he came to dying.

“[She said], ‘Look at your itinerary. You were supposed to be on that plane,’” Thompson said. “‘That plane was the plane you were booked on. If that kid hadn’t talked you out of it, you would have been on that plane.’” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Part 1 on the Associated Press’s September 16 evening story (“Obama admin reworked Solyndra loan to favor donor”; saved here at my web host for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) by Matthew Daly and Jack Gillum criticized the reporters and the wire service for making it appear as if all the findings in the story were the result of original work.

Two other paragraphs in the report in my opinion represent a blatant but clumsy attempt to give the impression that the bankruptcy of a major beneficiary of Department of Energy stimulus-driven loans was a bipartisan fiasco:

Argonaut is an investment vehicle of the George Kaiser Family Foundation of Tulsa, Okla. The foundation is headed by billionaire George Kaiser, a major Obama campaign contributor and a frequent visitor to the White House. Kaiser raised between $50,000 and $100,000 for Obama’s 2008 campaign, federal election records show. Kaiser has made at least 16 visits to the president’s aides since 2009, according to White House visitor logs.

Madrone Partners is affiliated with the Walton family, descendants of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. Rob Walton, the eldest son of Sam Walton, contributed $2,500 last year to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Y’all get the point, don’t you? George Kaiser, Democrat. Rob Walton, Republican. Therefore, the takeaway is supposed to be that donors to both parties were somehow involved in convincing the government to allow their January Argonaut-Madrone loan of $69 million to have senior status over all other debt, including money the company owed Uncle Sam.

Even ignoring the huge difference in amounts given — Give me a break. But it’s far worse than that. Rob Walton gave far more money to Democrats in 2008 when it arguably would have been far more relevant to getting Solyndra’s original funding. Additionally, I couldn’t even find the $2,500 contribution to the RNC the AP reporters claim occurred.

Madrone Partners may be funded by the Waltons, and I don’t want to pretend that they have no influence, but as seen here, the investment firm’s two executives, Greg Boyd Penner and Thomas A. Patterson, are not family members. In addition, the investment firm appears to have no publicly identified board or committees, which would not be particularly unusual for such an operation.

Readers will note at this Business Week link that Penner and Patterson have 115 and 39 “relationships,” respectively. These “relationships” are described at each gentleman’s link as “Board Members Affiliated.” Those listed appear to be members of other boards on which Penner and Patterson serve. Patterson’s detailed affiliation page indicates that he has no common board link to anyone named Walton. Penner has two Walton links, one with “S. Robson Walton” of Greener Capital, who is the “Rob Walton” to whom AP refers, and another with “Jim Walton” of Arvest Bank Group. The common affiliation is that all three gentlemen are on Wal-Mart’s board.

In contrast to how it reported Kaiser’s involvement as head of the Kaiser Family Foundation which has invested in and runs Argonaut, note that the AP reporters did not specifically say that “Rob Walton” has any active involvement in Madrone or the foundation funding it. This may be because he doesn’t. If he really doesn’t, why name him? If he does, why not specify what his involvement is?

Daly and Gillum were also strangely selective in identifying the political contributions of S. Robson Walton aka “Rob Walton” (2008 OpenSecrets.org link; 2010 link; note that searches on “Rob Walton” and “Robert Walton” at the Heavy Hitters section of OpenSecrets.org both came up empty):

First, note that the $2,500 contribution the AP specifically named in its story isn’t present. Second, and far more important, note that Rob Walton and his wife donated far more than $2,500 to the DNC and Barack Obama in 2008. The combined 2008 total of $34,100 is about 14 times larger than the unlocated $2,500 contribution the wire service claims Rob Walton made to the RNC. If one is going to allege quid pro quo — and again, if Rob Walton even has anything to do with Madrone, which the AP never really established — the money going to Democrats in 2008 in anticipation of regime change is far more relevant.

It appears that Matthew Byers and Jack Gillum might have thought that their story was too harsh on Democrats and felt like they need to throw in something — anything — that would make it appear that Republicans also got their hands dirty with Solyndra. If so — Nice try, guys; no sale. But, again if my take on things is correct, what an incredibly irresponsible and deceptive thing to do.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.