tradeoff is that to give up the Keystone Pipeline and replace that power with solar thermal power would require over 100 of these 3,500 acre plants. Or, to think of it another way, 3.5 days of flow through Keystone XL would provide the annual energy equivalent of the BrightSource project. | keeptheshuttleflying.com

http://keeptheshuttleflying.com/?p=889&preview=true&preview_id=889&preview_nonce=c400dcc9fb


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Fwd: Be United On Border Security

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Begin forwarded message:

From: Dick Morris Reports <subscribers@dickmorris.com>
Date: July 31, 2013 12:39:20 PM GMT-06:00
To: Subscriber <Bobbygmartin1938@gmail.com>
Subject: Be United On Border Security

Be United On Border Security By DICK MORRIS Published on TheHill.com on July 30, 2013 Printer-Friendly Version House Republicans would like to vote for an immigration reform approach that hews to the amendment introduced by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), which would require that the border be sealed, with 90 percent of illegal immigration prevented, before any legalization or amnesty process could begin for illegal immigrants already here. Border security legislation emerging from the House Judiciary Committee will likely satisfy their concerns. Although it is not likely to prescribe how to cut illegal immigration, leaving that to the administration to figure out, it will tie further progress on reform to the successful completion of the border security mission. OK, say House Republicans, what happens if we pass this border security bill and it goes into the conference committee alongside the Senate bill that does not predicate legalization on actual progress on the border? They worry that the "compromise" that comes out of committee will closely parallel the Senate bill and leave border security far behind in the dust. Looming in the background is their legitimate fear that such a bill would easily pass the House with solid Democratic support and a smattering of Republicans, leaving them to vote against it in frustration and impotence. But would the conference committee play out that way? It depends on how its work is perceived. If the Senate Democrats push for immigration reform and the House Republicans say they want border security first, the Republicans will win that debate. Latinos favor border security. A recent poll by John McLaughlin showed 57 percent of U.S. Latino voters back a bill along the lines suggested by Cornyn. And Anglos and blacks in the Democratic House districts will fail to understand why their congressmen are giving priority to amnesty over border security. It's a bit like the confrontation between then-President Clinton and the Gingrich-led Republican Congress in 1995-1996. In that battle, as long as the Gingrich budget cuts were the only path to a balanced budget, voters accepted their necessity and agreed to them. But when Clinton laid out a path to a balanced budget that did not include the more severe of the Gingrich cuts, voters happily backed Clinton and turned against the Republican cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment. Now, if the only path to immigration reform and legalization of those already in the United States is the Democratic approach, voters will accept it even without real guarantees of border security. But if the Republicans provide a way to achieve both reform and border security, voters will tilt their way. In the polarized world of Washington, one is either for reform-first or border-security-first. But voters want them both. And the Republican approach offers that. The Democrats will, of course, argue that the Senate bill does too, but voters will side with the Republicans when they point out that the Obama administration, having failed to seal the border over the past five years, is not likely to do it now unless it is forced to do it in order to begin legalization. Republicans still have the majority in the House. If Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) gives his majority appropriate assurances that he will oppose any compromise that does not put border security first, he will assuage conservative concerns and will probably be able to get an almost unanimous Republican vote around the Cornyn approach. After all, we have to realize that if Boehner is forced to go to Democrats for votes, they will weaken the bill, costing additional Republican votes until we end up with the Senate bill. If Boehner can keep his caucus united and immune to the seductions of the Senate bill, nobody need fear a conference committee. If the committee were to deadlock over border security, Democrats would be perceived as refusing to pass tough border legislation even if it means gutting immigration reform. Neither their Latino nor their other voters will be pleased. View my most recent videos in case you missed them! Fighting ObamaCare - Dick Morris TV: Lunch Alert! The New Hillary-McAuliffe Scandal - Dick Morris TV: Lunch Alert! NSA Funding: Assault On Liberty - Dick Morris TV: Lunch Alert! Hoover And The Revisionist View Of The Great Depression - Dick Morris TV: History Video! Crony Capitalism And The Fed - Dick Morris TV: Lunch Alert! Subscribe to Dick's Newsletter Other Useful Links DickMorris.com Follow Dick on FACEBOOK Follow Dick on TWITTER See Dick's YouTube Videos Sign up at DickMorris.com to get Dick's breaking thoughts on the most critical events of the day. Please forward this email and help us spread the word! To Advertise with DickMorris.com Click Here About Dick Morris Dick Morris is well known for his insightful and hard-hitting political commentary. With his wife, Eileen McGann, Dick has written 14 books, including 10 NY Times best-sellers. Together they pen almost daily columns for their website www.DickMorris.com, the New York Post, Newsmax, the Hill Magazine and many other publications. Domestically, Morris has handled the winning campaigns of more than 30 Senators and Governors, including President Bill Clinton and Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Internationally, he has piloted the successful campaigns of the president or prime minister of Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Kenya, Hungary, Poland, Taiwan, and Japan. Morris' and McGann's latest book is Here Come the Black Helicopters!:UN Global Governance and the Loss of Freedom. Related Links: DickMorris.com Follow Dick on FACEBOOK Follow Dick on TWITTER See Dick's YouTube Videos   COPYRIGHT 2013, DICK MORRIS AND EILEEN MCGANN. REPRINTS WITH WRITTEN PERMISSION ONLY. To unsubscribe from all Dick Morris Reports emails, please click here Triangulation Strategies LLC 1801 S. Federal Hwy Delray Beach, FL 33483

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Fwd: This Is the End

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Begin forwarded message:

From: The Weekly Standard <editor@updates.weeklystandard.com>
Date: July 31, 2013 9:01:15 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Recipient" <Bobbygmartin1938@gmail.com>
Subject: This Is the End
Reply-To: The Weekly Standard <r-mqbqccynplcstwclsktmqdpzqnmjtdzvmqndpgyyzmmyyyyj@updates.weeklystandard.com>

For a better read, view email in your browser. July 31, 2013 By Jonathan V. Last COLD OPEN Last week, Charles Krauthammer resurrected a fine maxim from economist Herb Stein: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Krauthammer was, of course, talking about Detroit. When Motown declared bankruptcy, liberals were forced to cast about for scapegoats—Paul Krugman hilariously blames suburban sprawl. Salon blames racist Republicans. Bankruptcy always involves two problems: income and spending. Too little of the first and too much of the second. And so it is with Detroit. In its bankruptcy filing the city of Detroit shows $18.25 billion in debt, against $1.52 billion in general revenues. Sit with that multiple for a minute. Then, for a sense of comparison, look at a couple other American metropolises. New York City is in a spot of financial difficulty, too. They're sitting on $105 billion in debt. But that's against $69.9 billion in revenue. Which is less than two times. Chicago was recently downgraded by Moody's because they have $30 billion in debt against $4 billion in revenue—seven times. Detroit's debts are 12 times revenues. The falling revenues in Detroit are largely tied to the declining tax base—from 2 million taxpayers in 1950 to 680,000 today. At the same time, their debts—$9.2 billion of them—have been driven by pension and benefit obligations to municipal employees. So Detroit has failed on both ends of the equation. They couldn't maintain income by retaining residents, and they couldn't control spending by being more responsible in granting benefits to city employees. If Detroit had only failed at one of these tasks, they would still be muddling along on a slow-walk to insolvency. Because they failed at both, everyone is now standing in line for a haircut. Detroit's failure is titanic enough that you can ascribe all sorts of factors to it, and nearly all of them might be culpable. Even if only to a small degree. But the two big forces at work are declining revenues and increasing pension benefits. And if those forces are constantly moving in opposite directions, then breakdown is inevitable. Detroit might be the first (or at least the first of the really big cities—Stockton, Harrisburg, and other mid-sized towns have already gone under), but it won't be the last. LOOKING BACK "Andrew Cuomo has been running for office for years. The official announcement of his candidacy for governor of New York finally came on January 29, 2001, just nine days after his tenure as secretary of housing and urban development ended with the close of the Clinton administration. Cuomo's friends threw a homecoming bash to honor the former cabinet member and his wife, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo. "'People have asked what am I going to do now I'm back in New York,' the candidate told the crowd. 'First, I'm going to get a good bagel. I'm going to get a good piece of pizza. I'm going to get a good egg roll, and I'm going to get some good ribs. And then, my friends and my family, I want you to know that I intend to run for governor of the State of New York.'" —Stephen F. Hayes, "Prince Andrew of New York," from our July 30, 2001, issue. Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe.   Delay Obamacare Don't defund.   Reborn? Hayes on al Qaeda.   THE READING LIST Red-light camera bloopers. * * * Memo to Republicans: You can blame Tagg Romney for 2012. * * * The sad decline of Nature Boy Ric Flair, the greatest wrestler of all time. INSTANT CLASSIC "One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today's civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?" —Shelby Steele on the end of the civil rights movement, July 21, 2013 THE LAST WORD While we're on the subject of things coming to an end, it seems that Moore's Law might be breaking down. Moore's Law was formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 when he proposed that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles roughly every two years. In its popular deployment, Moore's Law has evolved over the years and been applied to just about every aspect of computing: chip speed, throughput, memory price, battery tech. The governing philosophy for the computer world has always been, "If we don't have the hardware capabilities you need, wait a couple cycles and Moore's Law will deliver it." And because this philosophy has shaped our thinking about hardware, it has also molded our ideas about what computers can do, and will be able to do. It's not too much of a stretch to say that our entire idea of future tech is predicated on Moore's Law. Because it was assumed—against all rationality—that Moore's law would extend to the horizon. But what if Moore's Law can't go on forever, either? What if Moore's Law stops? Wade Roush has a great line from comp-sci professor Peter Kogge about Moore's Law: "The party isn't exactly over, but the police have arrived, and the music has been turned way down." The problem, as Roush explains it, is that computing speed has run up against some formidable physical limits: energy and heat. We've gotten our processors about as fast as they can go using reasonably energy inputs, and at this speed they're putting out so much heat that it's getting very hard to keep the chips cool. Here's Roush: You could build a computer that runs 100 times faster than Cray's 1-petaflop Blue Waters machine at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, but "you'd need a good-sized nuclear power plant next door," not to mention a huge, dedicated cooling system, Kooge observed. We're now seeing the law of diminishing returns beginning to subsume Moore's law. Clock-rates of commercial microprocessors haven't really improved since 2006 and—geek alert—the advances we've gotten in chip speed have come from jerry-rigging multiple processors on a single chip. That's quite ingenious, but it's only netted speed gains for 10 percent to 20 percent a year. Which is way down from the height of Moore mania. Now, this isn't the end of the world. Computers will still get better. Engineers will find ways to achieve efficiencies with software that they once got with hardware. Eventually, quantum computing might happen. Which could, in theory, change everything we know about computers in a single evolutionary leap. Or perhaps we'll sit on a tech plateau for a good long while and the hardware will be as stagnant as big portions of the app space have become. The point here isn't to predict the future but to emphasize that we can never really know the future. No matter how much we try to talk ourselves into believing that we do because of our "mastery" of the world. There are precious few things that we really and truly do know for sure. And one of them is that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Keep calm and carry on. And remember, you can always email me with tips, thoughts, etc., at editor@weeklystandard.com. Best, Jonathan V. Last  Share P.S. To unsubscribe, click here. I won't take it personally. MORE FROM THE WEEKLY STANDARD A Viable Political Strategy? Democrats embrace late-term abortion at their peril. Read more…   George 'Bud' Day, 1925-2013 An American hero. Read more…   Mitch vs. Zinn The Scrapbook defends Mitch Daniels. Read more…     Online Store Squeeze the head to the left to relieve stress. Yes you can! Only at our store.     Subscribe Today Get the magazine that The Economist has called "a wry observer of the American scene."   Read probing editorials and unconventional analysis from political writers with a dose of political humor at weeklystandard.com.  Share To unsubscribe, click here.