Month: March 2012

  • Occupy Threatens & Sprays St. Louis

    Following a confrontation between Occupy protesters and local police last Thursday, vandals have hit the city with frightening pro-Occupy graffiti.

    Buildings, walls, and statues have all been defaced.  The city’s public safety director woke up to the words, “Blood on your hands,” sprayed on his front steps.

    Similarly, a hundred-year old statue now has the words “class war” scrawled across it, and a door that says “Park Police” now reads, “Only the blood of the rich will stop Occupy.”

    via TheBlaze.com.

    Photos at the link.

    This is of course not the first time the occupy folks have destroyed property or made threats.  The question I have is when will the Occupy loving media begin covering the violence and destruction?  And when will the talking heads on the left begin to denounce these actions?

  • Chicago State Missing $3.8M in Equipment

    Chicago State University has been unable to locate $3.8 million worth of equipment, including 950 computers that could contain confidential information, according to a state audit.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    Doh!

    The story reflects that most of the equipment was actually purchased, and pilfered, during the Daley administration.

    I hope that this was discovered as a result of Rahm and Gerry Chico looking into the misadventures of Elnora Daniel the former CSU president who belongs in jail.

  • Race and the Media

    The number one post (in terms of views) on this blog thus far has been the story about the boy from Kansas City, who happened to be white, and was walking along and set on fire by two other kids, who happen to be black.

    This story came up again in the comments on a story over at CNN about a reporter using the N* word on live TV.  Kudos to “Tom” who today at 5:08 CT posted:

    Why has CNN not reported about the Black on White hate crime in Kansas City?  Two black teenagers gasoline torching a white 13 year old and not  adrop of reporting.

    So that got me thinking and I did some Googling:

    boy kansas city gasoline fire
    11,800,000 results – News Only, 28 results

    kansas city gasoline fire hate crime
    380,000 results – News Only, 16 results

    florida neighborhood watch shoots black unarmed
    522,000 results – News Only, 3,700 results

    florida neighborhood watch shoots black unarmed hate crime
    68,800 results – News Only, 103 results

    Wow!!

    It appears the media has generally ignored the Kansas City story but the blogosphere wrote about it extensively.  It also appears that both the media and the blogosphere are careful, cautious, about labeling a story a hate crime.

    UPDATE:  Changed formatting of the search results to better fit on the page.

  • Fast-n-Furious Catches and Release Top Suspect

    I’m sorry this story is a few days old, I’ve been busy.

    As a courtesy the LA Times didn’t mention Eric Holder’s name in this article.

    Seven months after federal agents began the ill-fated Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation, they stumbled upon their main suspect in a remote Arizona outpost on the Mexican border, driving an old BMW with 74 rounds of ammunition and nine cellphones hidden inside.

    Detained for questioning that day in May 2010, Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta described to agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives his close association with a top Mexican drug cartel member, according to documents obtained this weekend by the Times/Tribune Washington Bureau.

    The top Fast and Furious investigator, Special Agent Hope MacAllister, scribbled her phone number on a $10 bill after he pledged to cooperate and keep in touch with investigators.

    Then Celis-Acosta disappeared into Mexico. He never called.

    Had they arrested him red-handed trying to smuggle ammunition into Mexico, Fast and Furious might have ended quickly. Instead, the program dragged on for another eight months, spiraling out of control.

    via LA Times.

    Will the Obama administration hold ANYONE accountable for this?

  • Obama’s Selective Service Card Forged?

    Say it ain’t so Joe.

    “America’s toughest sheriff” says there is “tons” more potentially shocking information on Barack Obama in connection with his probe into the president’s eligibility, and he calls the media’s suppression of his findings of a likely forged presidential birth certificate and Selective Service Card “probably the biggest censorship blackout in the history of the United States.”

    via WND.

    The video tells the story better than I could:
    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHAM3hRI8_Y?rel=0]

  • IMF Chief: Oil Supply Matters

    Yesterday I wrote about the latest meme to come out of the White House: that the president cannot control oil prices.  This is of course ridiculous.  Should the president choose a path that would increase supply — even if not immediately — the price of oil would go down.

    Everyone knows that while the oil market (like all markets) can be manipulated, in the end when supply outpaces demand prices go down; and when supplies are tight relative to demand prices go up.

    More proof:

    IMF chief Christine Lagarde warned Tuesday that crude oil prices may spike by up to 30 percent if Iranian supplies were disrupted, causing “serious consequences” for the global economy.

    The standoff between Iran, the world’s second-largest supplier of oil, and the West over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program is seen as a flashpoint that could sharply increase world crude prices.

    “Clearly it would be a shock to economies if there was a major shortage of exports of oil out of Iran, it would certainly drive up prices for a period of time,” Lagarde told reporters in New Delhi, wrapping up a two-day visit.

    The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has calculated that an interruption in oil supplies from Iran could increase oil prices by 20 to 30 percent, said Lagarde, who arrived in India at the weekend from neighbouring China.

    via FRANCE 24.

  • Chicago Police Supt. Promises To Curb Gang Violence

    Garry McCarthy says the intelligence is there. It’s just a matter of getting the information to beat officers so they can anticipate a retaliatory gang shooting.

    “We’re going to get our head around this thing and we’re going to turn it around is what it boils down to,” McCarthy told reporters on Monday. “If we were sitting here saying we don’t know what’s going on, we don’t know what to do, that would be a different situation. We know what’s going on. We’re putting pieces in place to make sure we can stem this tide.”

    via CBS Chicago.

    So if I understand this correctly, McCarthy is saying that he believes beat officers are supposed to be able to “anticipate a retaliatory gang shooting”?  The problem thus far has been that “It’s just a matter of getting the information to beat officers.”

    This is a most amazing pile of tripe.  I can’t believe CBS published this without any follow-up comments.  I guess they’re the new PR dept. for City Hall and McCarthy.

    1. It’s the beat officers who do predict when a retaliatory gang shooting is going to happen; soon after a previous gang hit.
    2. The beat officers are so busy going from call to call that there is no time to be “policing” the gang members until something bad happens at which time they get the call.
    3. All the special units which used to handle these gang matters were dissolved by Rahm in order to “put 1,000 25 new cops on the street.

    Manpower is an issue:

    [FOP talking head Pat] Camden says the department loses 50 officers a month to attrition, leaving police short-handed on the street.

    “I don’t think they’ve hired 600 officers in the past five years,” he said.

    Worse, Rahm (and Alderman Beale) have specifically planned to reduce the number of police on the street.

    Police Supt. Garry McCarthy told the Chicago Sun-Times earlier week that he’s been asked to cut $190 million from the Police Department’s $1.3 billion-a-year budget and would only get halfway there by eliminating 1,400 police vacancies.

    via Chicago Sun-Times Sept. 02, 2011.

    And for those who don’t remember, these were not police who were working, these were vacancies.  Open budgeted spots where Daley was too busy with flower boxes to bring on new officers.

    CPD is short manpower & we’re all suffering because of it.

  • Ayers Family Put ‘Foreigner’ Obama Through School

    Hulton says that in conversations with Mary Ayers while on his route he learned of the couple’s enthusiasm and support for a black foreign student. One bright, warm Chicagoland day, he recounts, he met the student who fit Mary Ayers’ description in front of the Ayers home in Glen Ellyn, Ill. That young man, Hulton is convinced, was Barack Obama.

    Hulton delivered mail to the Ayers, who are both deceased, when he was stationed at the post office in Glen Ellyn, an upper-middle class suburb 25 miles west of downtown Chicago, from late 1986 to 1997. He was a USPS employee from March 28, 1962, through March 30, 2001.

    via WND.

    Simply amazing.  The MSM… asleep at the wheel.

    Everyone should go read this story and decide from themselves.

  • Most Bedbug Infested Cities

    Orkin announced its top 50 bed bug cities for the past year and several of them are popular spring break destinations. The following cities are ranked in order of the number of bed bug treatments Orkin performed from January to December 2011.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    Thoroughly revolted that we’re number 2.

  • A President’s Control of Oil Prices

    A new meme is carefully being inserted into society: that a president generally, and Obama specifically, cannot control oil prices.   Like all good lies there is just enough truth in this meme in order to not make it laughable.  The notion is absolutely true in the short term (Obama cannot make $2.50/gal gas appear overnight, or even in a few months) but over the long term however, a President can have remarkable sway over oil prices.

    Who knows where the meme started but it’s just about everywhere now: Bloomberg, CNN, MSNBC, … even some cannabis and psychedelic drug using blogger.  So the idea’s getting around.

    Bloomberg wants to blame the oil refineries:

    Actually, the President doesn’t have that kind of pricing power. The more likely reason behind the price increase, though certainly less compelling as a political argument, is the recent spate of refinery closures in the U.S. Over the past year, refineries have faced a classic margin squeeze. Prices for Brent crude have gone up, but demand for gasoline in the U.S. is at a 15-year low. That means refineries haven’t been able to pass on the higher prices to their customers.

    As a result, companies have chosen to shut down a handful of large refineries rather than continue to lose money on them. Since December, the U.S. has lost about 4 percent of its refining capacity, says Fadel Gheit, a senior oil and gas analyst for Oppenheimer. That month, two large refineries outside Philadelphia shut down: Sunoco’s plant in Marcus Hook, Pa., and a ConocoPhillips plant in nearby Trainer, Pa. Together they accounted for about 20 percent of all gasoline produced in the Northeast.

    via Businessweek.

    A careful reader will note the the literary slight of hand.  Brent crude is up, demand is down, refiners are stuck in the middle, some have lost money, and thus it makes simple business sense to shut down.  Therefore gas is expensive.  This is a logical fallacy of Ignoring a Common Cause.  This story makes the case that given facts A & B & C & D & E  that  E is the cause of high gas prices.  A refinery shuts down in the Northeast thus making gas expensive in the Northeast.  That’s the “E”.  This ignores high gas prices in the Midwest.  The common cause of high gas prices is “A” — high oil prices.

    This is further proved by a piece from the other side of the country:

    The oil company BP is zeroing in on a cause for last week’s explosion at its big Cherry Point refinery near Ferndale, Washington. …

    The Cherry Point refinery supplies about 20 percent of the transportation fuels for Washington and Oregon. Since the shutdown, gasoline prices in the region have spiked. …
    According to AAA, the average price of regular unleaded shot up 23-24 cents per gallon just in the past week in western Washington and Oregon. By comparison, the average price at the pump in Idaho went up by 14 cents in the past week.  Idaho and eastern Washington receive most of their gasoline from refineries in Montana and Utah, which are operating normally.

    via Northwest Public Radio.

    Yes, oil prices drove up the cost of gas throughout the Northwest, however in the area directly served by the Cherry Point refinery gas prices went up almost twice as much.  With no mention of other factors, it appears the refinery bottleneck is responsible for nearly 1/2 of the total price increase.

    Further, back to Bloomberg/Businessweek:

    “The U.S. refining industry is undergoing a huge, regional transformation,” says Ben Brockwell, a director at Oil Price Information Services. “If you look at refinery utilization rates in the Midwest and Great Lakes areas, they’re running at close to 95 percent capacity, and on the East Coast it’s more like 60 percent,” he says.

    via Businessweek.

    So while claiming that shutting down refining operations is that cause of gas price increases it actually turns out that there’s amply refining supply.  The refiners CAN refine more oil into gas; they’re choosing not to because the gas demand is so low that it doesn’t make any sense to make more gas.

    One hundred years of economics turned on its head; the Bloomberg argument is that low demand is the cost of high prices.  But this story is not about logic… it’s about advancing the meme that Obama cannot control oil prices.

    So let’s just ask, how closely does the price of gas track oil prices?

    Wow!  So I guess that closes the question about what’s really causing high gas prices… it’s high oil prices.

    So the next question would be to determine if a president can control oil prices.

    Well we know what Obama thinks:

    Democrat Barack Obama on Friday blamed high gasoline prices on Washington and a political establishment that he says hasn’t stood up to oil companies, his two rivals for the presidency included.

    “The candidates with the Washington experience – my opponents – are good people. They mean well, but they’ve been in Washington for a long time and even with all that experience they talk about, nothing has happened,” Obama said in remarks delivered at a gas station. “This country didn’t raise fuel efficiency standards for over 30 years.”

    The result, the Illinois senator said, is that consumers are suffering.

    “So what have we got to show for all that experience?” Obama asked. “Gas that’s approaching $4 a gallon.”

    via CBS News June 18, 2009.

    It appears that [candidate] Obama believed that Washington can effect gas prices.  Further, Obama at least used to believe that one such measure for controlling gas prices was to raise the fuel efficiency standard — often referred to as the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards.  Interestingly, the CAFE standards to which Obama refers are under the direct control of the NHTSA and the EPA, both of which a president has direct control over.

    By Obama’s own argument he has some control over the price of gas.