So a friend of mine posted a video of Binyamin Netanyahu visiting the Ground Zero site in New York (he's in New York because of the Palestinian unilateral statehood resolution thing), and wondered what other world leaders have bothered to visit (a perfectly fair question).

Now, I remembered that Ahmadinejad was (understandably) prohibited from going to Ground Zero (understandable since Iran is a state sponsor of terror and Ahmadinejad has blamed the attacks on what he calls the "Zionist regime", sparking rebukes from everyone up to Al-Qaeda themselves).

However, I wasn't aware of which world leaders had visited. So I did some Googling.

Update: As my esteemed colleague Dr. J-Rob has pointed out, it is Keith Poole, not Ken Poole

Mark Hatfield, a former Senator from Oregon, died yesterday. He was one of those Republicans who don't exist anymore.

As the obituary notes, he increasingly became more and more out of step with his caucus. Let's look at Keith Poole's lifetime numbers. Poole's scoring is from -1 to 1, with -1 being the farthest left, 1 being the farthest right

Early in his career, in the 92nd Congress, he was the Republican with the 6th most liberal lifetime score from Keith Poole, behind Jacob Javits, Edward Brooke, Clifford Case, Charles Mathias and Lowell Weicker (who at the time was, albeit a bit more conservative). 3 other Republican Senators had lifetime scores less than; Robert Stafford, Richard Schweikert and Charles Percy. 6 more had lifetime scores between 0 and 0.1; Marlow Cook, John Sherman Cooper, George Aiken, Hiram Fong, Bob Packwood, Margaret Chase Smith and Marlow Cook.

In his last term, he was the Republican with the most liberal lifetime score. Only 3 others had lifetime scores of less than 0 (Jeffords and Specter, who later quit the party, and John Chafee, whose son Lincoln, who basically followed in his footsteps, also quit the party). Only 3 others had lifetime scores between 0 and 0.1 (Cohen, Packwood and Snowe [although Snowe may not anymore since those numbers are from 2004]).

In the 92nd Congress, Ted Stevens' lifetime score (up to 2004) of .183 placed him in the center of the Republican caucus (22nd most liberal of 45 Senators [including Prouty who died mid-Congress]). By the 104th Congress, Stevens was the 10th most liberal Republican out of 56.

So by this point, I have gotten used to the right-wing rants in the Letters to the Editor in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. However, I have not gotten used to the letters that are mind-boggingly stupid for reasons that have nothing to do with ideology.

Today's Letters to the Editor had one that really stands out in the mind-boggingly stupid category.


Seriously, Mr. Wetherington thinks "Federal Savings bonds should be used to reduce the national debt." There's just one little problem with that thought.



I apologize for the all-caps, but I feel this situation warrants it. From the Treasury Department's FAQ about the national debt:


This is really concerning that neither the author (who seems to be on the more well-read side given that I'm finding letters to the editor from him in all sorts of publications including the Christian Science Monitor) nor the Atlanta Journal Constitution staff realize how silly of a suggestion this is. Moreover, it may give a picture of just how little the American people (especially the less well-read ones) understand the national debt.

At the highest level, the national debt can be broken down into "debt held by the public" and "intergovernmental holdings." Debt held by the public is described above, while "intergovernmental holdings" refer to debt that parts of the U.S. government owe to other parts of the U.S. government.

The most recent monthly report from June 2011 gives the "debt held by the public" to be 9.742223 trillion dollars and the "intragovernmental holdings" to be 4.600864 trillion dollars.

Most of the "intragovernmental holdings" (about 4.3 trillion) is for retirement and disability trust funds, including the Social Security Trust fund and the Medicare trust fund(s).

Of the "debt held by the public", most of it (9.32 trillion) is held in various forms that can be bought and sold on the open market.

Of those types the cannot, 169,754 million dollars (or .169754 trillion dollars) is held in the form of United States Savings Bonds, which are distinct from market-tradeable bonds in that they can only be redeemed by the person in whose name they are issued.

I suppose we should expect this sort of thing from someone supported by the Koch Industries/Foundation (their money has come from oil & natural gas), but it's still disappointing that the New York Times would print the Op-Ed.

Now, my title is perhaps overly harsh, because (unlike some other Manhattan Institute Op-Eds) there is a perfectly legitimate point at the core of the Op-Ed. This point is that solar power and even more so, wind power, do, in fact, have some significant environmental costs. Second of all, (unlike some other conservative groups/institutes) the Op-Ed implicitly acknowledges that global warming exists and that greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for it, and at least he isn't praising "clean coal" in the article.
However, it's rather dishonest to claim that natural gas is "low-carbon"; the natural gas industry itself claims that for an equivalent amount of energy, burning natural gas releases 55% as much carbon dioxide as coal. That's not close to as bad as coal, of course, but it is hardly "low." Moreover, with natural gas, you have to worry about the fact that its principle component, methane, is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide; drilling inevitably results in leaks of natural gas that would have otherwise overwhelmingly stayed underground.

However, by far the most dishonest part of the article is the part pertaining to California's new mandate for 33% of its electricity to be generated from renewable sources by 2020.


Now, the last sentence, while not the most egregious part of the paragraph, nevertheless is pretty bad. It sets up a straw man of assuming that increased solar capacity will have to be from building large-scale solar projects at all. It can be from solar panels on rooftops. In fact, The Luskin Center at UCLA recently released a major, detailed study estimating that Los Angeles County alone has a potential rooftop solar capacity of 19,000 megawatts, which, using Robert Bryce's numbers, would meet the 1/3 renewable requirements of the entire state of California on its own.

However, the worst and most dishonest part of the article is this:


What's so dishonest about that? It ignores all of renewable energy capacity/production California already has; primarily hydroelectric, wind and geothermal, with some biomass and a bit of solar. If you look at data files from the Energy Information Administration and do some calculating in the spreadsheets that they provide, you will see that back in 2009, California was already generating 26.09% of its electricity from renewable sources.

In fact, for the first three months of 2011, California already MET its renewable energy standard (35.47% of its electricity was from a renewable source). Now, this is primarily from significantly higher-than-usual hydroelectric generation rather than from the smaller increase in capacity for wind, solar (and maybe geothermal?). Nevertheless, if they installed another 17,000 MW of capacity of renewable, California would easily be getting a majority of its electricity from renewable sources.

I have not talked up the additional geothermal capacity in California, but it does exist (Disclaimer: I am invested in two geothermal companies).

Above, is a scatterplot I made comparing the July 2009 Census Bureau estimated populations of cities with at least 100,000 people (according to the Jul 2009 estimates).

You can look at the spreadsheet I used/created for this here

Missing are the cities with over 1,000,000 people (because they make the rest of the scatterplot too small) as well as those cities with between 100,000 and 1,000,000 people from states the Census Bureau still has to release ( Maine, Massachusetts,Michigan,New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina and West Virginia).

Notice how the data fits very well(even though the populations in July 2009 were slightly different from those in April 2010), with one glaring exception-the city of Atlanta, where, as it so happens, I now reside.

The July 2009 Estimate put Atlanta's population at 540,922. Today's Census 2010 release of Georgia put the April 1, 2010 population of Atlanta at 420,003, just barely up from the April 1, 2000 Census population of 416,474.

Putting aside that it just seems like there MUST have more than a 3,500 person gain based on residential development in Atlanta in the last 10 years, the chances of a city (in this case Atlanta) being more than 6 standard deviations away from the mean (no other city was more than 2.67 standard deviations away from the mean) is 1 in 500 million (assuming the error here is normally distributed, which it looks to be).

That is to say, it seems MUCH more likely that there's either a typo or a serious undercount of Atlanta's population (I tend to think they undercounted in a lot of places and not just Atlanta personally ...)

This is a very serious issue; the difference in population here is enough to account for about 1/6th of a seat in Congress, 2/3 of a seat in the Georgia Senate, and 2.25 seats in the Georgia House of Representatives, not to mention millions in population-based federal block grants.

I would strongly urge Mayor Kasim Reed to sue the Census Bureau over an undercount of Atlanta.

Anyway, all of that being said, there is the possibility that they somehow majorly majorly overlooked the "black flight" phenomenon, as the official 2010 Census numbers show a 17% increase in the white population of Atlanta but a 12% decrease in the black population (a whopping 65% increase in the Asian population, which is probably due largely to expansion of Georgia Tech). More on black flight later.

OK, so the obvious part of the stupidity in Mike Huckabee's recent statement is that President Obama grew up in Kenya. I don't even think that's a widely held view among the Birthers.

But consider the context of where Huckabee said it.


I guess he's got a point. I mean, look at the kind of terrible things Kenyan revolutionaries said about then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill.


or about the British in general


Wait, those weren't Kenyan revolutionaries; that's in the Declaration of Independence (referring to King George) and in Common Sense (Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet).

Most Americans ARE taught that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted our ancestors (if we had ancestors in the country at the time). Perhaps Arkansas schools were too busy teaching the "War of Northern Aggression" and the terrible persecution of the South to have any time to teach about the British.

Hey, maybe that racist environment he grew up in is what's causing Mr. Huckabee to try to paint a black president as foreign/less-than-American. Huckabee certainly needs to answer some questions on the subject.