Marco Rubio Fiscal Conservative?
Vicki Impoco, Florida Today blog
Florida Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio whose campaign mantra blasts excesses of government spending charged grocery bills, car repairs and other personal expenses to a GOP issued credit card during his tenure as speaker of the Florida State House. According the Miami Herald and The St. Petersburg Times charges covered by the party as political expenses include:
    $765 at Apple's online store for computer supplies.
    $25.76 from Everglades Lumber for supplies.
    $53.49 at Winn-Dixie in Miami for food.
    $68.33 at Happy Wine in Miami for beverages.
    $1,000 charge at Braman Honda in Miami for repairs to the family car.
    $1,024 in three payments to a Tallahassee property management group.
    Six plane tickets for his wife.
    ...

Bust the Health Care Trusts
Robert Reich, NY Times
Insurers have been seeking to raise premiums 24 percent in Connecticut, 23 percent in Maine, 20 percent in Oregon and a wallet-popping 56 percent in Michigan. How can insurers raise prices as much as they want without fear of losing customers? Astonishingly, the health insurance industry is exempt from federal antitrust laws, which is why a handful of insurers have become so dominant in their markets that their customers simply have nowhere else to go. But that protection could soon end: President Obama on Tuesday announced his support of a House bill that would repeal health insurers’ antitrust exemption, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled that she would put it toward an immediate vote.

Energy follows its bliss
John Michael Greer, Energy Bulletin
Industrial civilization is a complicated thing, and its decline and fall bids fair to be more complicated still, but both rest on the refreshingly simple foundations of physical law. That's crucial to keep in mind, because the raw emotional impact of the unwelcome future breathing down our necks just now can make it far too easy to retreat into one form or another of self-deception. Plenty of the new energy technologies discussed so enthusiastically on the internet these days might as well be poster children for this effect.

The new wave: Harnessing the power of the ocean
CNN
Producing electricity using the power of the oceans could start a new wave in renewable energy. But some fear that "wave farms" could damage the livelihoods of fishermen by rendering coastal waters off limits..wave power is still an untapped resource, which some believe could one day generate a tenth of the world's renewable energy.

Rehearsals for a Civil War
James Howard Kunstler, kunstler.com
Amid the general incoherence of the Tea Party rebels and the failure of progressives to recognize the structural changes underway in a peak oil world, lies a deadly swamp of paradox where all parties may drown in the quicksand of their own muddled intentions.
The Tea Party appeals to the swelling numbers of the new former middle class angry at the sudden vanishing of their accustomed perqs and entitlements to a predictably comfortable suburban existence. They're mad at the government and hot for "liberty."

Our world balances on a sea of debt
Darius Guppy, The Telegraph
The truth is not that these institutions have suddenly become insolvent but that they were never really solvent in the first place. By rolling over their debts they have been able to keep them on their books as "assets" rather than losses and forestall the evil hour..It is a simple and devastatingly effective swindle, but largely invisible because it has become so deeply embedded in our culture. The consequences of that swindle - the desperate need for economic growth; the environmental and cultural despoliation it engenders - require some radical thinking one encounters nowhere in any of today's political parties.

Wall Street Targets the Elderly: Looting Social Security
Paul Craig Roberts, Silver Bear Cafe
Hank Paulson, the Gold Sacks bankster/US Treasury Secretary, who deregulated the financial system, caused a world crisis that wrecked the prospects of foreign banks and governments, caused millions of Americans to lose retirement savings, homes, and jobs, and left taxpayers burdened with multi-trillions of dollars of new US debt, is still not in jail. He is writing in the New York Times urging that the mess he caused be fixed by taking away from working Americans the Social Security and Medicare for which they have paid in earmarked taxes all their working lives. Wall Street’s approach to the poor has always been to drive them deeper into the ground.

Sustainability, lasting recovery, and other myths
Peter Pogany, Energy Bulletin
The contradiction between sustainability and vigorous growth is shrouded by the myth that Mammon-worshiping, Pareto optimal pugilism in unregulated markets is the sole path to the betterment of mankind. The approach that has proved to be successful in developing and mass producing consumer goods and shuffling around resources of lesser importance is turning into a catastrophe-maker. Failure of the long-run rise in the marginal cost of oil to cause market-induced conservation (reduced demand and decisive substitution) signals a new age just as convincingly as passing the Pillars of Hercules heralded another world for ancient mariners. Increasingly nasty encounters between the human overflow and hard physical obstacles are likely to lead to a macrohistoric mutation.

Peak demand: The cornucopians reach for a fig leaf
Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Archcornucopian Daniel Yergin, who kept calling for mushrooming oil supplies throughout the last decade, now tells us that flat production is really the consequence of peak oil demand. Developed nations will from this day forward require no greater quantities of oil. He does acknowledge that demand may grow in China in the years to come. His firm, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), is on record suggesting that oil production capacity will likely grow 25 percent from now through 2030. But the forecast is later hedged..

Copenhagen & Economic Growth - You Can't Have Both
Chris Martenson, chrismartenson.com
Before and during Copenhagen (and after, too, we can be sure), politicians and central bankers across the globe have worked tirelessly to return the global economy to a path of growth..But the consensus coming out of Copenhagen is that carbon emissions have to be reduced by a vast amount over the next few decades. These two ideas are mutually exclusive. You can't have both. (Martenson's website and "crash course" provide an excellent introduction to the intertwined issues of energy/environment/economy. - Bob)

"Glacier gate" - how the Murdoch press have got it wrong on the Himalayan big melt
Damien Lawson and David Spratt, Climate Action Center
Recently, the Murdoch press have continued their campaign of climate denial and delay by giving front-page prominence to a five-day-old story attacking the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions of glacial melt in the Himalayan-Tibetan ranges by 2035.."The Times" (UK) and subsequently "The Australian" and other Murdoch papers have tried to shift from a debate about TIMING to a questioning of global warming.

Biophysical economics: Putting energy at the center
Kurt Cobb, Scitizen
Many scientists have long complained that standard economics fails to account for the biological and physical systems that form the basis of the economy. In short, the economy is a subset of the environment and governed by the same biological and physical laws as every other system on the planet.

Saudi Arabia and the oil bank
Chris Cook, Asia Times
I believe that it is macro manipulation by oil producers, funded by cheap money from investors, which has been the principal reason for recent movements in the oil price. The advantage producers have over oil traders is that producers are able to store their oil in the ground for free.

My View: Zygote fanatics push Personhood Amendment
Gary J. Whittenberger and Richard Hull, Tallahassee Democrat 
According to legend, one night in 1775, Paul Revere made his famous ride and shouted, "The British are coming! The British are coming!" inspiring the Sons of Liberty to action. Today, in similar manner, we declare, "The zygote fanatics are coming! The zygote fanatics are coming!" These fanatics constitute a small, vocal group of Floridians and outsiders trying to get 670,000 registered voters to sign a petition aimed at placing an amendment to the state constitution on the ballot in November 2010. If approved by 60 percent of voters, this amendment would cause the word "person" to be applied to all "human beings" from the "beginning of biological development." The beginning is the formation of a single-celled human zygote, resulting from the union of a sperm and an egg, which is smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. The zygote fanatics want every human zygote to be treated legally as if it were an adult human being! This ludicrous idea that would have devastating effects on our state.