Blue Crab Boulevard

This is absolutely insane. Michelle Obama has just proven herself to be utterly clueless or utterly phony - take your pick on this one. She has been extremely well-compensated for the jobs she has held, has lived the American dream and moved up into a very nice standard of living. 

And she's preaching that others must not follow her and sacrifice instead.

I have a new story today about Michelle Obama's visit to Zanesville, Ohio, where she met with a group of women at a local day care center.  According to the U.S. Census, Muskingum County, where Zanesville is located, had a median household income of $37,192 in 2004, below both the Ohio and national averages.  Just 12.2 percent of adults in the county have a bachelor's degree or higher, also well below the state and national averages.  About 20 percent don't have a high school degree.  Nevertheless, Mrs. Obama urged them to foreswear lucrative professions like corporate law or hedge fund management and go into the helping industry, even if the sacrifice is great:

As she has many times in the past, Mrs. Obama complains about the lasting burden of student loans dating from her days at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She talks about people who end up taking years and years, until middle age, to pay off their debts. “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids,” she says.

“Barack and I were in that position,” she continues. “The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books… It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.” A former attorney with the white-shoe Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin, Obama explains that she and her husband made the choice to give up lucrative jobs in favor of community service. “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

Who does she think will be paying these people for their "helping" jobs? The story reports that she was paid $316,962 in 2005. Apparently, she believes everyone "helping" can earn that kind of money. Which of course neglects how she got that very well-paid job. That is by getting that fancy education, taking out those loans and then proving her worth as an employee. She did not sacrifice - she worked.

But other people should sacrifice. Talk about pulling up the ladder behind her.  

Some pretty neat pictures from the Daily Mail of a sparrowhawk attacking a starling. Nature in action, so to speak. The story, however, is marred by the bizzaro comments from the nature "lovers" who express horror that the photographer  did not "rescue" the starling. So, the hawk should starve to death? 

I hate the disneyfication of nature. I really do. 

Not as bad as these folks. Trust me. Having a 50-ton crane drop through a brand new house can ruin your whole day.

Something is badly off in the way this story about the deadly toxin ricin found in a Las Vegas hotel is changing. Reports keep insisting that this is not terrorism related. Except now there is a man who is hospitalized who is in a coma. This report says that the ricin was found in the man's room - not having been brought to the hotel desk.

LAS VEGAS - Police say a man is in critical condition after the deadly toxin ricin was found in his Las Vegas motel room.

Las Vegas police Lt. Lewis Roberts says the man has been in a coma since he was found in his room at the Extended Stay America Motel on Thursday.

He's one of seven people hospitalized after the ricin was discovered. Police have said most were examined as a precaution.

Roberts says police don't think foul play is involved, and the FBI says the case doesn't appear to be terrorism-related.

But authorities aren't sure why the man had a vial of powdered ricin in his room.

While an earlier story in a Las Vegas paper says ricin and castor beans were found - and that the ricin was brought to the front desk. 

A toxic biological agent was found in a suite on Valley View Boulevard near Flamingo Road on Thursday afternoon, but Las Vegas police said they were not searching for a suspect and nobody was harmed by the substance.

Ricin, a substance used for cancer research that has "no other medical use," was discovered about 3 p.m. by a man who was cleaning out a suite at the Extended Stay America at 4270 S. Valley View Blvd., Joseph Lombardo, a Las Vegas police captain and Homeland Security Bureau chief, said at a news conference about 9:30 p.m.

The man, who told police the toxic agent did not belong to him, took the powdery substance to the manager's office, and the manager called police.

Lombardo did not elaborate on who the man was.

The man, along with three employees of the long-term stay hotel, were taken to a hospital as a precaution, although they had no signs of being affected by the substance, police said.

Police were not sure about the origin of the substance or why it was in the room. The ricin and castor beans, from which ricin is derived, were found in the suite, although Lombardo did not say how much of the substance was found. 

I'm not sure what is happening here, but the story is changing awfully fast - and in a major way.  

Investigators believe they have found a package of ricin at a Las Vegas motel. Seven people have been taken to the hospital.

LAS VEGAS — Preliminary tests indicate that a package found at a motel contained the toxin ricin, and seven people have been taken to hospitals, authorities said.

Police were called to the Extended Stay America Motel on Thursday and retrieved a package from the motel manager that was determined to be a chemical or controlled substance, Officer Ramone Denby said.

The man who brought the substance to the manager told police he found it in a suite and it did not belong to him, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Two preliminary tests indicate it contained ricin, Denby said. Results from further tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a second local lab are expected Friday, he said.

"Ricin has no medical uses other than cancer research," police Captain Joseph Lombardo said at a news conference Thursday night. "An individual citizen other than being involved in cancer research or cancer prevention would not have any legal means or proper means of having that."

Investigators did not immediately believe the substance was intended for an attack. "This is not a terror incident at this point," Lombardo said. 

But if there is no legitimate reason for having a package of a very deadly substance, what other reasons for it being found there exist? Let's hope it is a false positive, otherwise, there is a problem.

USA Today, hardly a rightwing news outlet, points out that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have it completely wrong when they attack NAFTA. That treaty is not causing the net loss of jobs, it has nothing to do with the real reasons the manufacturing landscape has changed. Rather it is productivity gains that have managed to cut manufacturing employment yet increase the total amount of US manufacturing output by a stunning 66% since 1993. Yes, this is being done with fewer workers and there are real issues. But NAFTA is not one of them.

NAFTA opponents point to the 2.4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs that have disappeared since NAFTA took effect in 1994, a drop of about 14%. In Ohio, site of Tuesday's hotly contested primary, manufacturing jobs are down by nearly 200,000, or 20%, during the same time.

NAFTA supporters — this page among them — usually respond by pointing out that 39 million jobs outside of manufacturing have been created in that time in the USA. Even Ohio has seen a net gain of 900,000 jobs, including 60,000 in finance, 80,000 in professional services and almost 190,000 in health care.

The reality is that NAFTA has relatively little to do with either the overall job losses or job gains. China is a far larger factor. But the number that best displays the nonsensical nature of the debate is 66% — the increase in the manufacturing output of American industry since 1993.

It's impossible to look at an economy that has increased its manufacturing output so dramatically while simultaneously cutting its manufacturing workforce and not see a much larger force at work than NAFTA.

That force has been the unprecedented and sweeping gains in worker productivity that have allowed U.S. companies to churn out more goods with fewer people. Some of this has come from outsourcing the most labor-intensive parts of manufacturing, particularly to Asia. But much of it is from the use of more automated systems for assembly lines and high-tech inventory management.

Put another way, the main job killer of the past 14 years has not been the "giant sucking sound" of jobs going to Mexico, as enunciated by Ross Perot. Rather it has been that giant humming sound of machines replacing humans.

USA Today points to an educational system that is failing to turn out graduates with technical skills. They are right about this, look at the trouble companies are having finding skilled machinists. They say the right ideas are to educate and retrain displaced, low-skilled workers, not to erect trade barriers.

Steve Huntley, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times , points out that hoping for the best is not a viable foreign policy. Yet that is exactly what Barack Obama has been running on. 

The political salvos over Iraq between Barack Obama and John McCain the other day made for good political theater. More important, the exchange offered a revealing contrast between the politics of realism and the politics of hope.

It began with a question to Obama during the Democratic presidential debate Tuesday. Obama has pledged to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq and was asked if he reserved the right to go back into Iraq. He responded that "if al-Qaida is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad."

The next day McCain mocked Obama, ''I have some news. Al-Qaida is in Iraq." Obama fired back, ''I do know that al-Qaida is in Iraq and that's why I have said we should continue to strike al-Qaida targets. But I have some news for John McCain. There was no such thing as al-Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq."

So what is Obama's Iraq strategy? It seems to be that he knows al-Qaida is in Iraq but he's going to pull out anyway. But if al-Qaida establishes a base in Iraq, he will go back in. Does that sound confused to you? Me, too.

His policy, in a nutshell, seems to be this: Pull troops out of Iraq and hope for the best. And anyway, the real issue is what cowboy Bush and McCain did five years ago.

Obama has said he would meet without preconditions with the leaders of states who export terror. And hope things work out, apparently. Unfortunately, that strategy would simply lend the prestige of the office of the President of the United States to some unrepentant American haters. Hope may be good politics for Obama, but would be a disaster for America and our allies as well as a boon to our enemies. And yes, they are our self-proclaimed enemies. 

The electrical grid operator in Texas  had to invoke stage two emergency load shedding when the wind suddenly stopped. When the 1,700 MW of wind generation suddenly dropped to 300, they had a big problem and had nothing more to put into the grid as the frequency began to drop. By quickly cutting off large industrial customers, they managed to keep the grid from going down.

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A drop in wind generation late on Tuesday, coupled with colder weather, triggered an electric emergency that caused the Texas grid operator to cut service to some large customers, the grid agency said on Wednesday.

Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said a decline in wind energy production in west Texas occurred at the same time evening electric demand was building as colder temperatures moved into the state.

The grid operator went directly to the second stage of an emergency plan at 6:41 PM CST (0041 GMT), ERCOT said in a statement.

System operators curtailed power to interruptible customers to shave 1,100 megawatts of demand within 10 minutes, ERCOT said. Interruptible customers are generally large industrial customers who are paid to reduce power use when emergencies occur.

No other customers lost power during the emergency, ERCOT said. Interruptible customers were restored in about 90 minutes and the emergency was over in three hours.

ERCOT said the grid's frequency dropped suddenly when wind production fell from more than 1,700 megawatts, before the event, to 300 MW when the emergency was declared.

I have explained why this can happen before, of course. It will get worse as fewer and fewer reliable production facilities are constructed and more and more fickle generation is mandated.