Little Rhody Weekend

My wife and I went up to Newport, RI for a wedding this past weekend. I also got the chance to re-connect with some cousins that I don't see very often so, all around, it was a good weekend, if a little hectic at times.

Some observations along the way:

The reception was held at a private beach club. The wait staff was mostly young people from Eastern Europe - Poland, to be specific. Now, with unemployment running at over 9%, do we still need to import Eastern Europeans for service jobs?

We flew Southwest Airlines. It's been years since I've flown with them. The 737s on all four legs of our trip were full. Not almost full - FULL. No more seats available. In a recession! Clearly, they are doing something right. In a casual conversation with a seat mate. he told us that he commuted from DC to home on weekends with Southwest because they were cheaper than that government run institution known as AMTRAK.

Be Kind to Dogs

Sabra has a post about an Iraqi dog that was saved by a US serviceman.

It reminded me of the shipyard in Astrakhan, Russia where I worked back in 1999. The yard was over run with dogs. They had been sorta adopted by the shipyard workers but they received no veterinary care and little food. These Russian shipyard dogs led a hard life. Very little food and lots of disease. They were the most miserable looking things I have ever seen. And, like loose dogs everywhere, they bred more of their kind.

The puppies were cute as could be and would visit our construction trailers often. Some of the guys made it a policy not to feed them. "Give them food and they'll just keep coming around", they would say. But I thought about how my favorite niece would feel if her Uncle PE ignored these little critters.

Besides, the breakfast bag the hotel gave us was usually some sort of mystery meat on a bun. Most of the time it was tongue. (There's nothing so tasty as a tongue sandwich for breakfast) So I would open the window, whistle a couple of times and share my breakfast with the puppies.

It is my belief that people that abuse animals are reincarnated as dogs in a Russian shipyard.

Death of the US Oil and Gas Industry IV

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that implementing HR 2454, otherwise known as the 2009 Clean Energy and Security Bill, or Cap and Trade to you and me, will cost an additional $846,000,000,000 (that's 846 Billion dollars) in new taxes. Seems I remember the Big "O" saying something about reducing taxes but maybe I was dreaming. This bill is out of committee so its probably a good time to write your Congresscritter about it. More news here.

And the Washington Post, hardly a conservative rag, has something to say about it here. Did you know that it would allow the feds to dictate building codes? Thinking about building a new house soon?

And there's more bad news about the federal regulation of hydraulic fracturing that I wrote about earlier. The American Petroleum Institute estimates that if it is passed, it will reduce domestic production by more than 20%. Wasn't there campaign talk about energy being a matter of national security? How is decreasing domestic production going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil?

The Saudi Spin

Sometimes the news takes on a different spin when reported by other countries. For example, the Saudi press put a special spin on the meeting between Big "O" and King Abdullah. In their reporting, the King issued an "ultimatum" to Obama concerning the Palestinians. He said that that issue was also the "magic key" to all other problems in the region. The Saudi press reported that "King Abdullah told President Obama that the United States was not taking part seriously enough in solutions proposed to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict"

That's a little different from what the MSM reported back to the USA. Of course, they were under a few restrictions on their reporting that Obama and Hillary agreed to ahead of time.

To read the story, go here.

Death of the US Oil and Gas Industry III

Obama's 2010 budget contains changes to the tax code that are targeted at domestic oil and gas companies. They are not beneficial to the industry. The net effect will be that oil companies will change the way they analyse a prospect and marginal wells will be cut from the program. Net result will be a decrease in domestic production, more reliance on foreign oil and a loss of good paying jobs. Of course, the Big "O" will tell you that production and jobs will be replaced with green energy - a technology that we have yet to develop because the economics of it can't compete with oil and gas. There will be no "bridge" or gradual movement from hydrocarbons to green energy. We will be forced into it by changing a few simple tax laws.

The public will not even know that these tax laws changed because they are buried deep in the 2010 budget. Go here for more details.

History, Rewritten Again

In BHO's speech from Cairo the other day he stated that a Muslim nation was the first to recognize the US in the Treaty of Tripoli.

What he neglected to say was that the treaty was made because the US had to make protection payments to the Barbary pirates to prevent them from hijacking our ships. (We didn't have a navy at the time so we were forced to pay tribute to the Muslims.) The treaty went south when the Pasha of Tripoli demanded an increase in payments to Jefferson (Thomas, not Dollar Bill). This led to the First Barbary War in 1801 and the inclusion of that "shores of Tripoli" line in the Marine Hymn.

The lesson of that bit of history is that appeasement didn't work. It didn't work for John Adams and it won't work for BHO.

Head, errr, Tail Count

The final count is in. Over 334,000 nutria have been harvested in this years hunt. The Dept. of Wildlife and Fisheries pays $5 per tail. The story is here.

Seems like they could combine this hunting program with the food stamp program. That's a lot of tasty nutria meat, and several nice fur coats.