Indiana’s 2007 exports jumped 14% which was better than the 12% jump nationally. Interesting fact: Haiti’s largest export is cadavers for medical research. Indiana isn’t exporting corpses, so far as I know, but instead is exporting vehicles, machinery, and pharmaceuticals.

Seven years ago today, religious zealots from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, operating out of Afghanistan, used box cutters to hijack three four airliners to knock down the World Trade Center buildings, damage the Pentagon, and kill almost 3,000 people.

Let’s all commemorate the dead and condemn the religious zealots.

The potential innuendos and double entendres are legion in this story. So, I’ll just stick with my headline for now. Dina Capiello, writing for the Associated Press, reports on an investigation finding that “Government officials handling billions of dollars in oil royalties improperly engaged in sex with employees of energy companies they were dealing with and received numerous gifts from them.”

Thirteen employees in the Department of the Interior apparently rigged contracts, had sex with oil company employees, accepted golf and ski trips from oil companies, and worked part-time as oil consultants.

The report primarily concerns the Denver Minerals Management Service office. Oil companies are supposed to pay royalties for the right to drill on federal lands. Instead of paying cash royalties, they are apparently allowed to pay “in kind” — in other words, giving oil to the federal government. The Denver office was responsible for marketing that oil received or placing it in the strategic reserve. The government received $4.3 billion in in-kind payments last year.

DRILL BABY DRILL!

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

The Oil Accountability Project reviews some of the ways in which the public is getting screwed.

Some other stories:
Wall Street Journal
Houston Chronicle

I think politics runs in a sort of parallel universe to governing. I’m not sure it ought to, but it does. Recognizing that, I’m not sure how to react to this angle noted by KagroX at DailyKos reporting on an inquiry sent by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden to Samuel Bordman, Secretary of the Department of Energy.

Wyden notes the recent frothiness of drill now, drill everywhere, DRILL DRILL DRILL approach to energy policy advocated by the GOP in its political campaigns. He asks the Secretary of Energy, then, how he could approve of exporting Alaskan natural gas to Japan.

The Administration is trying to have it both ways – arguing that we need to drill everywhere because we don’t have adequate energy supplies, while finding that we have so much energy that big oil companies can export it overseas and keep prices here at home higher than they would otherwise be.

Here is where “Country First” apparently conflicts with free markets.

The Bush administration continues to turn in enormous deficits. I would suggest that the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and, to a significantly lesser extent, Afghanistan haven’t helped matters.

This year’s deficit will be more than double last year’s $161 billion, and it will rise from 1.2 percent of the gross domestic product to nearly 3 percent. If the next president extends some or all of President Bush’s signature tax cuts, as both candidates have promised, annual deficits could balloon to as much as 5 percent of the economy, rivaling the dark fiscal days of the early-1990s and those of the Reagan administration, said Peter Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office.

The budget picture is likely to grow even bleaker once government analysts factor in the anticipated costs of the Treasury Department’s decision last weekend to take over struggling mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

I’d suggest reinstating the Clinton tax structure and winding down the wars as significant steps in getting back to some sort of fiscal sanity. Running our government on a credit card is begging for trouble.

John Cole on the rumblings surrounding Lehman Brothers.

We know how this dance goes. A few days of “too big to fail” murmering, followed by a quick bailout by the fed and golden parachutes for the CEO’s, then we forget about it for a few months until Edward Jones or whoever else is next fails.

Dan McFeely, writing for the Indy Star, has a fairly long article on the Interim Study Committee on Immigration Issues’ recent hearing. Legislators were cautioned that their options were potentially limited in the area of immigration regulations by federal preemption. So, Indiana could well find itself spending millions of dollars on enforcing whatever illegal immigration legislation it passes only to find that it had no authority to attempt regulating this area.

The number of illegal immigrants in Indiana has increased from maybe 85,000 to maybe 100,000 in the last decade. The numbers are difficult to come by for obvious reasons. There was apparently a fair amount of discussion of the total Hispanic population in Indiana which ought to be irrelevant, but clearly isn’t since at least some of the concern over illegal immigration is fueled by a more general sort of xenophobia where those concerned aren’t really kept awake at night by whether Hispanics have a piece of paper saying the federal government approves their presence, but really by the fact that the cultural composition of their communities are changing. Lake, Cass, Clinton, and Elkhart Counties have Hispanic populations that are greater than 10%.

The gubernatorial candidates responded to the issue delicately. Gov. Daniels says that the legislature should proceed cautiously and gather more facts, but said he said Indiana needs more people who are willing to work hard. (Apparently all our hard workers are employed? Just the lazy ones are unemployed? Is this an unfair inference? Probably.) Jill Long Thompson said that the legislature shouldn’t impose burdens on small businesses, making them police whether their employees are here legally.

The committee will hold three more hearings.

What strikes me is that, after all the sound and fury over the past year or two, immigration seems almost dead as an issue this election season.

A non-partisan report says that the U.S. remains dangerously vulnerable to chemical, biological and nuclear attacks seven years after 9/11.

Efforts to reduce access to nuclear technology and bomb-making materials have slowed, thousands of U.S. chemical plants remain unprotected, and the U.S. government continues to oppose strengthening an international treaty to prevent bioterrorism[.]

. . .

The report and supporting studies describe the failure of international cooperation to prevent terrorists from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, which they call a major problem. Many countries continue to ignore a United Nations mandate to prevent the spread of weapons; the ability of many countries to monitor potential bioterrorism is “essentially nonexistent,” and dangerous chemical weapons stockpiles remain in some countries, including Russia and Libya, the report said.

Perhaps we should lecture these countries more sternly about their ongoing failure to be American and yell at them a little bit to do what we want. Diplomacy, of course, is for wimps.

Bob Herbert, in a column in the New York Times, provides a laundry list of stuff about which Mitt Romney must be complaining when he bemoans the (current) liberal Washington:

*Civil Rights
*Women’s Rights
*Social Security
*Unemployment Insurance
*Medicare
*Medicaid
*Clean Air & Water
*Workplace Safety
*Head Start
*Food Safety

For those of you who have read Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle, think about the way food was manufactured. Think about the working conditions and the general conditions of life for working men and women back at the turn of the 20th century. Life has become substantially less nasty, brutish, and short than it was then. Was it liberals or conservatives who were responsible for the substantial improvement between then and now?

Liberals and their policies are certainly not perfect; but I think it’s beyond question that Mitt Romney is full of shit: a) because Washington hasn’t been controlled by liberals for a long time now; and b) because liberalism is responsible for some substantially positive developments in this country.

From the ethics portion of the lesson, speaking of the Indiana Disciplinary Commission: If you’re involved in disciplinary proceedings, innocent or not, it’ll suck to some extent or another. Don’t bury your head in the sand and hope it goes away. Be honest. No, really, be honest. You might get burned for whatever you’re being investigated for. You will get burned for lying to the commission.