Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe

Apparently our government runs a lottery every year that normally attempts to issue 50,000 green-cards to people seeking residency here.  I say "normally" because this year the computer program that randomly selects the winners messed up.  To make matters worse the U. S. State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, which runs the program through something called the Diversity Visa Program, didn't properly test the program before 22,000 would be citizens had already been notified.  So 22,000 people who thought they were getting a chance to come to our shores may not have a chance after all.  Additionally, the computer mistakenly picked the first list of winners from applications taken in just the first week of the program rather than over the course of the entire 30-day period.  So to fix things, government officials have decided to rerun the computer lottery from a record 15 million applications.

Thus far the Obama Administration doesn't have a very good record in picking winners and losers.  Witness Solyndra, the "shovel ready" stimulus, Cash for Clunkers, Recovery Summer, the Ground Zero mosque, and its close cousin, the attempt to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan.  The Diversity Visa Program might just be another plan gone horribly awry.  In any case, why question a computer program that randomly selected its first 22,000 winners from early applications.  Does it really matter?  It's still random, right?  Good grief!    

Biased Numbers

During last night's Republican presidential debate on Bloomberg Television, a screen shot, right before a commercial, informed us that the national debt has increased $4 trillion under President Obama, but that it had gone up $5 trillion under President George W. Bush.  I'm not about to defend W for starting what would become a decade of out-of-control spending, but a little math does shed some light on this factoid.  It has taken Obama only a third of the time (34 months) to effectively achieve what Bush did in 96 months.  

How Green Was His Valley

Right before our eyes, Obama's green jobs initiative has all but withered away, dried up in the harsh light of reality.  Candidate Barack Hussein Obama promised he would invest $150 billion in solar, wind, geothermal, and other green technologies, that would create 5 million new jobs by the end of the decade.  To date, about $90 billion has been frittered away to the likes of Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, and SpectraWatt, with little but red faces to show for it.  Why? Economics.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, the Energy Information Administration estimates that the cost of electricity generated by natural gas is $63.10 per megawatt hour.  Conversely, electricity generated by wind costs $243.20 per megawatt hour.  A whopping $311.80 for solar generated power.  Get the picture?  But Obama and his bureaucrats know better.  They just dumped another $1.1 billion in new loan guarantees to green firms in Nevada and Arizona two weeks ago.  What's more unbelievable is that between them, Tonopah Solar and Sempra Energy, the two companies that will share those loan guarantees, promise only 45 permanent jobs!  Meanwhile, the Obama administration and leftist environmentalists continue to fight the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast.  This project promises 13,000 union jobs and 118,000 "spin-off" jobs at no cost to taxpayers.

Speaking of misguided policies and priorities, the U. S. Attorney for North Dakota has charged seven oil and gas companies in federal court for killing a combined 28 birds.  28 birds.  According to the American Bird Conservancy, from data derived from the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 440,00 birds are killed annually by wind turbine operations.