Go Tigers!!!

The Detroit Tigers defeated the Yankees in New York in Game 5 of their American League Division Series, 3-2, to advance to the AL Championship Series against the Texas Rangers.

One more thing: Yeah, Baby!!!!!!

What Do We Want? Free Stuff! When Do We Want It? Now!

The kids from OccupyWallStreet are, um, occupying Wall Street. Or at least hanging out there.

The MSM is doing its best to promote this, portraying it as the left-wing version of the Tea Party. Of course, the Tea Party was notably lacking in disruption, misbehavior and arrests. The Tea Party is democracy in action. OccupyWallStreet and its affiliates are more like adolescent temper tantrums.

Some of you may ask, what is this all about? Good question and one I don't even think the protestors have an answer to.


As my friend Warner Todd Huston discovered a few weeks ago, the protestors themselves were not sure. They took a poll for their "one demand" and came up with around a hundred of them ("four-hour work day"?).

This weekend Citizen Outreach's David Mansdoerfer discovered this page with quite a list of demands by one participant. The list is quite a compilation of economy-killing proposals. "Guaranteed living wage regardless of employment"? That's the way to create jobs.

This page contains another, more official(?), list of demands. What many of these demands have in common are they have been on liberal wish lists for decades and require more government control over individuals and the economy, which is why they've been on liberal wish lists for decades.

Actually doesn't differ much from the Hope and Change platform when you think about it.

UPDATE: Good column from David Freddoso on why these protests are not resonating with the rest of America.

Who Needs Oil; We Have the Magic Box

You've got to see this video from RedState. They asked a participant in a protest against the Keystone pipeline what we could use for power instead of oil. His idea is, as far as I can gather, some kind of...box. See for yourself. And just think, it is your tax dollars that have educated Magic Box Dude and millions like him.



The Magic Box also appears to be an integral part of the Obama administration's energy strategy.

Steven Moore, who was guest speaker at the NPRI dinner last week, reports on the emergence of North Dakota as the next Saudi Arabia and the frustration one of the people most responsible for this amazing story, Harold Hamm, has with Washington.

His only beef these days is with Washington. Mr. Hamm was invited to the White House for a "giving summit" with wealthy Americans who have pledged to donate at least half their wealth to charity. (He's given tens of millions of dollars already to schools like Oklahoma State and for diabetes research.) "Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, they were all there," he recalls.

When it was Mr. Hamm's turn to talk briefly with President Obama, "I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this."

The president's reaction? "He turned to me and said, 'Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.'" Mr. Hamm holds his head in his hands and says, "Even if you believed that, why would you want to stop oil and gas development? It was pretty disappointing."

The government's energy policy is not the only area of frustration.

Washington keeps "sticking a regulatory boot at our necks and then turns around and asks: 'Why aren't you creating more jobs,'" he says. He roils at the Interior Department delays of months and sometimes years to get permits for drilling. "These delays kill projects," he says. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission is now tightening the screws on the oil industry, requiring companies like Continental to report their production and federal royalties on thousands of individual leases under the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules. "I could go to jail because a local operator misreported the production in the field," he says.

It appears as though the government is loaded with Magic Box Dudes and they are in charge of our regulatory policy.

The Media Has Begun Its Presidential Re-election Campaign

To the same media that was utterly uninterested in digging into the history of one Presidential candidate four years ago, a rock with a word on it that was painted over thirty years ago is newsworthy.

This is a non-story. However, expect stories like this to be the constant refrain from the media and the left - to try to impugn whomever is the Republican nominee, portray him as racist or whatever vile smear they can. The more unpopular Obama is and/or the more popular the Republican is the worse it's going to be.

UPDATE: The NYT piles on the Perry story but seems strangely silent on a similar report. This excerpt from the Times article is interesting.

David Axelrod, the chief strategist for the re-election campaign of President Obama, declined to comment on the specifics of the Texas matter. But he said it was an example of the challenges that candidates like Mr. Perry face.

“Campaigns are like an MRI for the soul — whoever you are, eventually people find out,” Mr. Axelrod said in an interview Sunday night. “Time will tell whether this comes to reflect him or not.”

Unfortunately for the country, too many people didn't find out about Mr. Axelrod's candidate until after he was elected. He is the only candidate for President during my lifetime to avoid this sort of vetting by the media. In fact, avoid even the most cursory vetting by the media.

Which brings us to this. While the media is trying to use a word on a rock that was painted over 30 years ago to tar Perry, they are steadfastly ignoring Obama's ties to an overtly racist group as recently as during his last Presidential campaign.

If a politician consorts with racists and the media doesn't want to hear it, does it make a sound?

Nevada vs. The World

The George Bush Institute recently released a great new website called The Global Report Card which was assembled by Dr. Jay P. Greene, University of Arkansas and Joshua B. McGee. The database compares thousands of U.S. school districts with national results and the combined education results more than two dozen of the world's most developed nations.

Greene and McGee followed up the website with "When the Best is Mediocre" highlighting some of their findings. Greene and McGee find that many of America's most affluent suburban white school district's in the nation can only achieve mediocre results compared to the global average.  This is interesting because the average American is about 33 percent more affluent than the average European but performs below average on math and reading compared to their European counterparts. In other words, American public education is so bad, compared to other nations, there really is very little refuge from poor performing school districts.

The United States has a higher GDP per capita than the vast majority of nations on the planet yet only ranks 25th on education achievement out of 34 of the world's most developed countries. Interestingly, Nevada has an above average GDP per capita but below average national results.

Not surprisingly, Nevada performs poorly compared to the rest of the U.S. and considerably worse than highly developed nations. The results vary widely with Mineral County School District and Pershing County School District performing the worst on math (23 percent of students would beat the global average) and Eureka County School District performing the best (54 percent of students would beat the global average).

The following tables measure the number of students in each county school district which would score as high as, or beat the national/world average.

2007 Math
County	vs. Nation	vs. World
Clark	38%	27%
Washoe	44%	32%
Carson City	43%	31%
Churchill	47%	35%
Douglas	54%	42%
Elko	44%	32%
Esmeralda	48%	36%
Eureka	66%	54%
Humbodlt	51%	38%
Lander	41%	29%
Lincoln	49%	36%
Lyon	42%	30%
Mineral	33%	23%
Nye	38%	27%
Pershing	34%	23%
Storey	43%	31%
White Pines	37%	26%

2007 Reading
County	vs. Nation	vs. World
Clark	38%	36%
Washoe	45%	43%
Carson City	45%	43%
Churchill	51%	48%
Douglas	61%	59%
Elko	47%	45%
Esmeralda	48%	45%
Eureka	72%	70%
Humboldt	50%	48%
Lander	51%	48%
Lincoln	51%	48%
Lyon	48%	46%
Mineral	33%	31%
Nye	44%	42%
Pershing	33%	31%
Storey	59%	47%
White Pines	42%	40%