No Oil for Pacifists

John Hawkins of Right Wing News queried right of center bloggers about the remaining Republican candidates. The results are here.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (who Hawkins himself has endorsed) was the favorite; Mitt Romney came in second. Romney also was rated the least favored candidate for the nomination.

I was among the bloggers polled. My answers were:

1) If you had to pick the GOP's 2012 presidential nominee today, which of the following candidates would you select? -- Mitt Romney

2) Out of these 3 candidates, which one would you least like to see as the GOP nominee in 2012? -- Newt Gingrich

3) If your top choice couldn't get the nomination, which candidate would be your second choice? -- Rick Santorum

4) Which candidate do you consider to be the most "electable" against Obama? -- Mitt Romney

5) Which candidate do you consider to be the most conservative? -- Rick Santorum

Complete results here.

Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin on "The New Authoritarianism" in the Winter 2012 City Journal:

The president and his coterie could have responded to the 2010 elections by conceding the widespread public hostility to excessive government spending and regulation. That’s what the more clued-in Clintonites did after their 1994 midterm defeats. But unlike Clinton, who came from the party’s moderate wing and hailed from the rural South, the highly urban progressive rump that is Obama’s true base of support has little appreciation for suburban or rural Democrats. In fact, some liberals even celebrated the 2010 demise of the Blue Dog and Plains States Democrats, concluding that the purged party could embrace a purer version of the liberal agenda. So instead of appealing to the middle, the White House has pressed ahead with Keynesian spending and a progressive regulatory agenda.

Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.

The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. The country’s largely suburban and increasingly Southern electorate does not see big government as its friend or wise liberal mandarins as the source of its salvation. This sets up a potential political crisis between those who know what’s good and a presumptively ignorant majority. Obama is burdened, says Joe Klein of Time, by governing a "nation of dodos" that is "too dumb to thrive," as the title of his story puts it, without the guidance of our president. But if the people are too deluded to cooperate, elements in the progressive tradition have a solution: European-style governance by a largely unelected bureaucratic class. . .

Their authoritarian progressivism--at odds with the democratic, pluralistic traditions within liberalism--tends to evoke science, however contested, to justify its authority. The progressives themselves are, in Daniel Bell’s telling phrase, "the priests of the machine." Their views are fairly uniform and can be seen in "progressive legal theory," which displaces the seeming plain meaning of the Constitution with constructions derived from the perceived needs of a changing political environment. Belief in affirmative action, environmental justice, health-care reform, and redistribution from the middle class to the poor all find foundation there. More important still is a radical environmental agenda fervently committed to the idea that climate change has a human origin--a kind of secular notion of original sin. But these ideas are not widely shared by most people. The clerisy may see in Obama "reason incarnate," as George Packer of The New Yorker put it, but the majority of the population remains more concerned about long-term unemployment and a struggling economy than about rising sea levels or the need to maintain racial quotas.

See also Holman Jenkins in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal:

Presidents make traps for themselves: Signature initiatives cannot fail; they can only be doubled down on, as Mr. Obama was expected to do in Tuesday's State of the Union even as he also tried to make peace with the natural-gas fracking boom. Only fresh waves of rhetoric praising electric cars will suffice when taxpayers are figuring out that Obama policy has them subsidizing electric playthings for the affluent. Solyndra must be defended all the more fiercely now that solar is collapsing globally as countries repent of foolish subsidies. Green energy must be hugged to Mr. Obama's breast all the more tightly as the shale revolution renders hopeless any chance of wind and solar becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels.

Mr. Obama is engaged in a "long game," says Andrew Sullivan, writing in Newsweek, making a point that no one doubted. But there's a difference between playing the long game and playing it well. The Obama long game is exactly how green energy metamorphosed from a policy notion into a political strategy and then into a dead weight his campaign must lug to November.

Still, let us admire the high-rolling political risk Mr. Obama takes in spurning affordable, strategically convenient energy from Canada. That risk includes, between now and Election Day, looking like a chump if oil prices surge because of the world's vulnerability to the narrowness of the Strait of Hormuz.

Still can't look at a computer screen.

President Obama, in Tuesday's State of the Union Address:

[W]e will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits. . . Let’s never forget: Millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules every day deserve a government and a financial system that do the same. It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom. No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts.

President Obama, in Tuesday's State of the Union Address:

On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen. In exchange for help, we demanded responsibility. We got workers and automakers to settle their differences. We got the industry to retool and restructure. Today, General Motors is back on top as the world’s number-one automaker. Chrysler has grown faster in the U.S. than any major car company. Ford is investing billions in U.S. plants and factories. And together, the entire industry added nearly 160,000 jobs.

We bet on American workers. We bet on American ingenuity. And tonight, the American auto industry is back.

What’s happening in Detroit can happen in other industries.

It's like having two Presidents in one!

(via reader Warren)

One of the more controversial books inside the beltway is The Obamas, by Jodi Kantor. Even the White House has raised questions about the author's access to sources and the accuracy and knowledge of those sources. Is there a scandal?

Well, not if you believe the New York Times. The paper's January 9th review of the book dismissed the doubts in a single sentence:

In lesser hands "The Obamas" would be an act of astonishing overreach, but Ms. Kantor, who covered the Obamas for The New York Times during the 2008 presidential campaign, and is currently a Washington correspondent for the paper, has earned the voice of authority.

Huh? As Andrew Ferguson says in the Weekly Standard:

The reviewer didn’t go on to explain what exactly Jodi Kantor did to earn her authority, other than to work for the New York Times.

I can hear the skeptics already--should we really trust the word of the New York Times about the trustworthiness of the New York Times? Perhaps the skeptics get hung up on the circular reasoning, not realizing that it is this circularity that perpetuates the grand reputation of the Times and its many writers and reporters: Why can you trust the New York Times? Because it employs authoritative reporters like Jodi Kantor. How do we know Jodi Kantor is authoritative? Because otherwise she wouldn’t work for the New York Times.

The Times and its readers remain trapped in the late Pauline Kael's bizarrely naive "hermetic liberal provincialism." Good: that's how leftists lose elections.

From political observer extraordinaire Michael Barone:

There is a near-unanimous sentiment among the high-minded that negative advertising is a bad thing. It pollutes the air even more than carbon dioxide. It breeds cynicism about politics and government. It is somehow unfair.

In response, let me say a few words in praise of negative ads.

First, elections are an adversary business, zero-sum games in which only one candidate can win and all the others must lose. Sometimes it's smart for competitors to concede points to their opponents. But it's irrational to expect one side to sing consistent praises of the other.

In second-grade elections, it may be considered bragging to vote for yourself. But it is silly to expect adults to behave this way.

It is especially foolish to expect that candidates who seem headed to win elections should escape criticism on television. Every candidate has weak points and makes mistakes. It's not dirty pool for opponents to point them out.

Second, it is said that negative ads can be inaccurate and unfair. Well, yes -- but so can positive ads. An inaccurate or unfair ad invites refutation and rebuttal, by opponents or in the media, and can boomerang against the attacker. So candidates have an incentive to make attacks that can be sustained.

Sometimes voters respond negatively even to fair attacks. That's why in multicandidate races, an attack by candidate A on candidate B can hurt A as well as B, and end up helping candidate C or D.

That's why many campaigns hesitate before attacking. And it also gives them a motive to make attacks that can be sustained because they are accurate and fair.

Third, advertising is not always decisive. Other things can matter more. The barrage of negative ads against Gingrich hurt him in Iowa and New Hampshire, but in South Carolina (which has not yet voted as I write) it did not prevent him from overtaking first Santorum and drawing even with Romney in the polls. Debate performances trumped attack spots.

Behind the disdain of the high-minded for negative campaign spots is a fear that they will erode Americans' faith in politics and government. These folks like to cite polls showing Americans once had great confidence in institutions and that now they lack it.

But polls have been showing lack of faith in institutions going back to the late 1960s. The only time when pollsters found high levels of confidence was when the questions were first asked in the 1950s. That was during the two decades when American institutions -- big government, big business, big labor -- enjoyed enormous prestige after they led the nation to victory in World War II and presided over the unexpected growth and prosperity of the postwar era.

To those who decry the money spent on campaign advertising, I note that in the 2008 election cycle, Presidential candidates combined spent $711.5 million on "media" (broadly defined to include consultants and loans). For comparison, a single company -- Proctor & Gamble -- had an advertising budget of "approximately 8.68 billion dollar[s] in 2009." Negative or positive, American politicians don't over-spend on ads.

UPDATE: below


Germany is the least damaged country in the Euro-zone. And although that status has lost much of its luster, Germany's continued growth and economic reform is necessary for preservation of the Euro (leaving aside whether saving the common currency is worth it).

A problem: Germans were more committed to un-competitive renewable energy than to competitiveness and prosperity. Most of the EU implemented solar power subsidies that upped electricity prices by over €60 billion or, in Germany, €130 per household annually. This was done via artificial "feed-in tariffs," that over-paid for wind and solar generation, stimulating economically inefficient power production that accounted for a fraction of Germany electric generation demand. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work, according to Der Spiegel:

The Baedeker travel guide is now available in an environmentally-friendly version. The 200-page book, entitled "Germany -- Discover Renewable Energy," lists the sights of the solar age: the solar café in Kirchzarten, the solar golf course in Bad Saulgau, the light tower in Solingen and the "Alster Sun" in Hamburg, possibly the largest solar boat in the world.

The only thing that's missing at the moment is sunshine. For weeks now, the 1.1 million solar power systems in Germany have generated almost no electricity. The days are short, the weather is bad and the sky is overcast.

As is so often the case in winter, all solar panels more or less stopped generating electricity at the same time. To avert power shortages, Germany currently has to import large amounts of electricity generated at nuclear power plants in France and the Czech Republic. To offset the temporary loss of solar power, grid operator Tennet resorted to an emergency backup plan, powering up an old oil-fired plant in the Austrian city of Graz.

Solar energy has gone from being the great white hope, to an impediment, to a reliable energy supply. Solar farm operators and homeowners with solar panels on their roofs collected more than €8 billion ($10.2 billion) in subsidies in 2011, but the electricity they generated made up only about 3 percent of the total power supply, and that at unpredictable times.

The distribution networks are not designed to allow tens of thousands of solar panel owners to switch at will between drawing electricity from the grid and feeding power into it. Because there are almost no storage options, the excess energy has to be destroyed at substantial cost. German consumers already complain about having to pay the second-highest electricity prices in Europe.

Having already wasted over €100 billion on solar subsidies, and with German wind power "in the doldrums," Germany's Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen recently decided to start scaling back the solar subsidy immediately, ending it in 2017 (automatic translation here). Share prices in solar companies promptly sunk like a stone.

An overdue correction. But though the operation could be a success, the German economy may die on the table. Already burdened by the country's likely decision to close its nuclear generation plants -- at a cost of €1.7 trillion ($2.15 trillion) by 2030 -- German industry may already have fled. According to the January 18th Südwest Presse (Ulm) (automatic translation here):

One fifth of every German industrial company has moved activities to foreign countries, or plans to do so, because of the uncertain energy and raw material supply. This is the outcome of a survey conducted by the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK), in which 1520 companies participated. DIHK-President Hans Heinrich Driftmann finds this alarming: He fears that Germany is losing its appeal for foreign investors in the wake of its energy supply transformation.

Not the euro crisis, but rising energy prices, are cited as by companies as their biggest problem: 86 percent fear it's getting worse for their business. More than half also identified worry about possible power outages or voltage fluctuations.

Conclusion: Planning for predicted increases in power demand isn't easy; India, for one, could fall well short (despite abundant coal), because of corruption and market inefficiencies. But Germany has has no such excuses:

Unfortunately, Germany’s green politicians here were too dim-witted to foresee the obvious consequences. Now reality has since caught up. The German electricity market is on the verge of collapse. The scale of the EEG Renewable Energy Feed-in Act is of unprecedented stupidity, a folly that will certainly go down in German history textbooks.

Let the record reflect that it took a concept as crazy as green energy to destroy German industrial capitalism--the engine of the country's post-war success. And if Germany falters, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, etc., are doomed.

MORE:

Et tu the United States?, wonders Robert Samuelson in Wednesday's Washington Post:

But we don’t view energy this way. We clamor for grander goals: becoming energy "independent" or stopping global warming. And these -- as the EIA report also shows -- are unreachable anytime soon, if ever. Barring vast new discoveries, we won’t produce enough oil to meet our needs. Indeed, the EIA’s assumption about biofuels, which roughly triple by 2035, could be too optimistic. If so, oil imports would exceed EIA projections. (In 2035, the EIA expects biofuels to account for 12 percent of liquid fuel use, up from 4 percent in 2010.)

The same is true of global warming. It’s hard to see how, under plausible assumptions, greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced substantially in the foreseeable future. The pressures of population and economic growth overwhelm improved energy efficiency or shifts to "green" energy. For example, renewable fuels (wind, solar, geothermal, biomass) are projected to more than double by 2035. Still, including hydropower, they account for only 16 percent of electricity generation in 2035. Coal and natural gas dominate.

We need to view matters as they are, not as we wish them.

(via Global Warming Policy Foundation)

This is a guest post by reader Morgan:


In a recent Top Ten List, late-night libertine David Letterman went beyond living in a glass house. He mocked Newt Gingrich over revelations in the candidate's ex-wife’s interview, including:

9. Their towels were monogrammed "His" and "Current Wife's"

7. He never leaves home without a set of blank divorce papers

3. Newt was once briefly married to Kris Humphries

1. He once had sex with a vending machine

Letterman even varied his list's normal format by airing a fictional animation of #1.

Once again, reader Morgan came up with a fitting top ten list about Letterman. [NOfP note: Fortunately, Morgan provided no video.]

Top Ten Revelations In The Interview With David Letterman’s Current Wife

10. Letterman never bothered to ask her about having an open marriage

9. His towels are labeled "His" and "Use this one, bitch"

8. Dave likes his wife to call him "my big gapped-tooth stud"

7. On his Montana ranch, she caught him in the barn with a goat dressed as a CBS page

6. On Tuesday sex nights, he likes her to dress in a dominatrix outfit and Jay Leno mask as Dave screams, "Beat me, Jay, beat me again and again and again you big-chinned devil"

5. To avoid a costly divorce, Dave agreed to have a police ankle bracelet strapped to his little Letterman

4. He’d love to marry Kris Humphries -- except he can’t stand tall people looking down on his bald spot

3. He has a tattoo of President Obama on his lower back.

2. The "pants" in Worldwide Pants doesn’t refer trousers but to breathing in short, quick breaths when Dave's sexually excited

1. When hard up, Dave has sex with a Mr. Coffee

Peggy Noonan in Saturday's Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama this week blocked Keystone pipeline, a decision that means tens of thousands of jobs lost, new energy possibilities rejected. It is a decision so bad, so political, that it amounts to a scandal. But it just sort of eased through the news, blurrily. All the cameras were focused on the Republicans, who were distracted by their own dramas. They did not, together, in one voice, protest, as they should have. Keystone happened while they were busy looking like the Keystone Kops.

See also the WaPo's Robert Samuelson:

President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and -- beyond the symbolism -- won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his reelection that, through some sort of political calculus, he believes that placating his environmental supporters will improve his chances.

See also Rush Limbaugh:

We haven't had a week like this since the salad days of the Clinton administration. We've had everything. We've had class envy, charges of adultery, adultery, people defending adultery. It's no wonder the soap operas are going off the air. They can't compete with American politics! They have no hope.

Health issues are forcing me to slow blogging even more.

The Boston Globe, which claims to be among the nation's largest newspapers, has been owned by the New York Times for almost two decades. Which was obvious from Monday's nutty Metro section story headlined "Couple found love at Occupy Boston." The article, by Martine Powers, focused on a "bond forged in crowd who shared fervent beliefs" between 25 year-old Robert Stitham and 18 year-old Anya Karasik. The piece included a picture of the two (Stitham shirtless) embracing as if it were Times Square on V-J day.

One problem--according to the Boston Herald, Robert "Red" Stitham, "is a Level 3 sex offender":

A quick Google search of his name turns up his sex offender notification -- complete with his photo -- on the website of the police department in Plymouth, where Stitham grew up. A search on the state Sex Offender Registry Board website shows Stitham now lives in a homeless shelter in Boston.

"The Board has determined that these individuals have a high risk to re-offend and that the degree of dangerousness posed to the public is such that a substantial public safety interest is served by active community notification," the registry site reads.

In 2007, a Barnstable County jury convicted Stitham of two counts of indecent assault and battery on a person over 14, and he was sentenced to 18 months with time served, court records state.

According to online state Appeals Court records, the victim testified that she was assaulted by Stitham and another man after the trio decided to go swimming at a beach after midnight on June 7, 2005. The victim testified that she did not consent to having sex with Stitham or the other man, according to court records. The state Appeals Court denied his appeal for a new trial in 2010.

Reached by phone yesterday, Stitham acknowledged he’s a Level 3 sex offender. He also said his girlfriend, Karasik, knows all about his criminal history.

The Globe added a note to the story Wednesday:

Editor’s note: A story in Monday’s paper about relationships that began during Occupy Boston featured a man, Robert Stitham, who is a registered sex offender. Had his status been discovered during reporting, the story would not have been published.

Translation: had Ms Powers known how to use Google, the story would not have been published.

The Boston subsidiary of the New York Times failed to live up to its motto and print the "whole truth." Why does anyone believe the media? Good thing the Internet led to Layne's Law.

(via reader Warren)

Section 201 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), Pub.L. 110-140, signed by President Bush on December 19, 2007 (codified at 42 U.S.C. § 7545(o)), amended the Clean Air Act to require the EPA mandate that domestic transportation fuel contain a specified volume of renewable fuel, including "cellulosic biofuel." Cellulosic biofuel is made from cellulose, "the leaves, stems, and other fibrous parts of a plant." EISA originally set average annual cellulosic fuel targets of (Section 7545(o)(2)(B)(I)(iii)) 100 million gallons in 2010, 250 million 2011 and 500 million for 2012. A failure to meet the cellulosic standards in any year would oblige fuel providers to buy "waivers" from the EPA at "the higher of $0.25 per gallon or the amount by which $3.00 per gallon exceeds the average wholesale price of a gallon of gasoline," adjusted for inflation since 2008 (42 U.S.C. § 7545(o)(7)(D)).

Environmentalists were ecstatic about the mandate, certain that the volume of cellulosic biofuels available by 2010 would "far exceed the mandate." Whoops. It turned out that processing leaves to fuel wasted nearly half the cellulosic biomass, yielding only about 4 percent ethanol. The EISA law allowed the EPA to reduce the alternative fuel quotas. Recognizing reality, the EPA reduced the cellulosic fuel requirement for 2010 first to 12.95 million gallons then down to 6.5 million for 2010, and 6.6 million gallons in 2011.

Whoops twice: the EPA acknowledged that, through July 2011, exactly zero gallons of cellulosic biofuel were produced. 77 Fed. Reg. 1320, 1323 (Jan. 9, 2012). But that's not going to stop the EPA from forcing fuel producers to buy cellulosic fuel "waivers" (a euphemism for "paying fines"), according to the New York Times:

When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.

But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.

The $6.8 million figure is based on the waiver price EPA set last year: $1.13/gallon. (Obligated companies can carry over un-met quotas for one year, but not a second year, a problem since no cellulosic biofuel existed in 2010 either.)

Undeterred, the EPA perpetuated its "misguided optimism" by upping this year's cellulosic fuel additive quota to 8.65 million gallons. 77 Fed. Reg. at 1323. Yet, few believe this goal can be reached: one possible producer, Range Fuels, wasted $65 million in state and federal subsidies and closed its cellulosic fuels plant before being sold for pennies on the dollar. Another company, Poet, isn't scheduled to begin commercial cellulosic fuel production until 2013.

A third possible source is Mascoma, a company partly owned by General (i.e., Government) Motors--but Mascoma only completed construction financing on December 14th, courtesy of an $80 million Department of Energy grant. Given that timing and ownership, Mascoma is more likely to experience a Solyndra-style bankruptcy than produce a barrel of cellulosic fuel this year. Maybe they should switch to dilithium crystals.

So I'm betting on a third "whoops." Fortunately, the EPA is dropping the price of cellulosic fuel waivers (fines) to $0.78 for 2012.

Conclusion: This isn't just crony capitalism. It's not merely starry-eyed EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson joining Obama on the unicorn, rather than real, world, to the detriment of the economy. And it's beyond a parody of the President's promise to "restore science to its proper place."

Most importantly, punishing companies for failing to sell non-existent fuel also is a complete breakdown in the rule of law. Criminal laws with which citizens or companies cannot conform, however hard they try, are unconstitutionally vague. City of Chicago v. Morales, 527 U.S. 41 (1999). Calling a multi-million dollar administrative sanction a "waiver fee" can't change the result without turning law -- and law enforcement -- into a cruel joke.

I didn't think this was encouraged at Harvard Law.

(via reader Warren)

Brett Stephens calls the November election a "U.S. Referendum on Europe" in the January 3rd Wall Street Journal:

The conventional wisdom about this year's presidential election is that it's mostly about domestic issues and barely about foreign policy. That's wrong. What kick[ed] off . . . in Iowa is America's referendum on whether it wants to become an honorary member of the European Union.

GOP-leaning voters generally get this: Warning against the "European social democrat" model is one of Mitt Romney's better talking points. The problem for Mr. Romney is that he represents something of another European specialty: the dispassionate technocrat, data-driven, post-ideological, lacking in soul. GOP-leaning voters get that, too.

Many on the left also understand American politics as a referendum on Europe, and it wasn't all that long ago that they were more-or-less prepared to say it. For example:

• "Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works." -- Paul Krugman, Jan. 10, 2010



• "The European Dream, with its emphasis on collective responsibility and global consciousness. . . . represents humanity's best aspirations for a better tomorrow." -- Jeremy Rifkin, "The European Dream," 2004



• "If we took Europe as a guide, we would do a lot better at capitalism." -- Thomas Geoghegan, "Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?" 2010

These views have now become a bit embarrassing, intellectually speaking. But it hasn't done much to change the basic terms of the debate President Obama will have with whoever emerges as his challenger.

The contours of that debate are familiar enough. Should government be an engine of employment growth? Does government investment in favored industries or technologies make economic sense? May government compel individual economic choices in the name of a social good? Should the rich pay an ever-rising share of the total tax burden? Are higher taxes the best way to close a budget deficit? Is financial regulation generally effective? Are labor unions good for overall employment? Is inclusiveness the best test of fairness? Must environmental concerns (or phobias) take precedence over economic interests? Is consensus-seeking the ideal mode for international conduct?

To all these questions, Mr. Obama's record answers yes: the Solyndra and Fisker subsidies; the Keystone XL pipeline postponement/ cancellation; Dodd-Frank; the SEIU's Andy Stern as the top White House visitor; the growing government work force; the individual mandate; the nonstop rhetorical assaults on Wall Street; federal debt moving north of 100% of GDP; the "balanced approach" to deficit reduction; the perpetual deference to the United Nations.

That's the Obama presidency in a nutshell. It's also how Europe, mutatis mutandis, became what it is today.

UPDATE: below

Yesterday, I was wrong twice. First, I missed President Obama's tepid endorsement of domestic shale gas exploration (corrected the same day via an update).

Next, toward the end of the post, I noted I was "betting Obama finds a way to kick the can on Keystone once again." It's worse than that: According to Politico, the Administration formally will reject the Keystone XL pipeline permit application later today.

Score another for green zealots; zero for cost-effective energy, jobs, and economic recovery.

MORE:

The Presidential statement denying the Keystone pipeline permit is here.

A male reporter would be lynched for this, but that doesn't make S.E. Cupp's December 15th NY Daily News column, "Newt Gingrich, natural woman," any less delicious:

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. No one in the modern era, save maybe Lorena Bobbitt, has proved the axiom more true than our gal pal Newton Leroy Gingrich, who is now -- let’s face it -- a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. . .

It all started when that no-good prom king Mitt Romney did Newt terribly wrong. Everybody knows you don’t double-cross the most popular girl in school, and Newt was just that, for a little while at least. Mitt should have known who he was up against. Newt didn’t get to where she was by being nice. She knows how to fight dirty -- she’s had years of practice.

So when Mitt unexpectedly stole Newt’s thunder, everyone in school could see the writing on the wall. Ms. Gingrich was going to lose it. And lose it she did.

There was the catty talk on the campaign trail about Romney’s posse, his Super PAC brat pack. There were the nasty rumors about Mitt’s past as a Bain Capital ne’er-do-well. And then, in New Hampshire, there was the debate mudslinging over Romney’s reputation. Washington outsider? "Pious baloney! In this high school -- GOP High -- them’s fighting words, and they marked the beginning of the end.

And now that the end is near for Ms. Gingrich, she is getting even more desperate. She’s always taken high school politics personally (remember the time she threatened to shut down the school because she didn’t get a seat at the cool lunch table?) So it’s no surprise to any of us that she’s taking this latest catfight to heart. . .

Well we all have those fantasies. Who among us hasn’t wanted to rip the throat out of some guy who betrayed us? But my message to Ms. Gingrich is simple: Snap out of it. Have some dignity, woman, and do what we all do in times like these.

You get yourself in a bubble bath. Inhale a tub of ice cream in the privacy of your own home while watching a "Toddlers and Tiaras" marathon. And when that tub of ice cream is done, you follow it up with a bag of potato chips and a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. Then cut up all his pictures and burn them in the fireplace. But whatever you do, this public psycho trip has got to stop.

(via reader Warren)