This is how science works. Not Al Gore's version of science

By Jennifer Carpenter

The Nobel prize for chemistry has gone to a single researcher for his discovery of the structure of quasicrystals.

Nobel win for crystal discovery

The new structural form was previously thought to be impossible and provoked controversy.

Daniel Shechtman, from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, will receive the entire 10m Swedish krona (£940,000) prize.

The Nobel prize in chemistry caps this year's science awards.

Professor David Phillips, president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, called quasicrystals "quite beautiful".

He added: "Quasicrystals are a fascinating aspect of chemical and material science - crystals that break all the rules of being a crystal at all."

Dr Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science to convince others of what he had first seen in his lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Washington - formerly called the National Bureau of Standards - on an April morning in 1982.

For years, the researcher was "ridiculed" and "treated badly" by his peers, he recounts.

The Nobel laureate first created quasicrystals by rapidly cooling molten metals, such as aluminium and manganese, by squirting the mixture onto a cool surface.

By sending an electron wave through a molten metal "grate", the Israeli researcher was able to see how the wave was diffracted by the metals' atoms.

Under the microscope he observed that the new crystal was made up of perfectly ordered, but never repeating, units - a structure that is at odds with all other crystals that are regular and precisely repeating.

Dr Shechtman himself is said to have cried "Eyn chaya kazo", which translates from the Hebrew as "there can be no such creature".

Against the grain

"The head of my lab came to me smiling sheepishly, and put a book on my desk and said: 'Danny, why don't you read this and see that it is impossible what you are saying,'" Dr Shechtman recounted in an interview with Technion.

The Israeli researcher was later told that he was a disgrace to the group and asked to leave.

On returning to Israel, Dr Shechtman published the results.

"Then all hell broke loose," he said.

Many scientists from around the world started telling him that they too had seen the same crystal structure.

Not everyone was convinced, however. To his dying day, Linus Pauling, the head of the American Chemical Society, said that Dr Shechtman was "talking nonsense".

But Bassam Shakhashiri, president-elect of the American Chemical Society, told BBC News: "This is how we make progress in science.

"[If] someone comes up with a discovery that we are sceptical about…we [have to] take time to verify the observations and discuss the conclusions among ourselves."

He added: "This is a really great example of the triumph of science.

"And an opportunity for all of us... who are curious about nature, to be vigilant, to be careful, and to engage in respectful debate about the interpretation of results."

'Quite beautiful'

Irregular shapes, similar to what Dr Shechtman was seeing, are found in the medieval Islamic mosaics of the Alhambra Palace in Spain. The tiles that line the walls and floors of the palace are regular, and follow mathematical rules, but also never repeat themselves.

Following Dr Shechtman's discovery, scientists have formed other kinds of quasicrystals in the lab, and a naturally forming example has been found among mineral samples from a Russian river.

Quasicrystal structures tend to be hard, non-sticky and are poor conductors of heat and electricity. These properties make them useful as coatings for frying pans and as insulating material for electrical wires.

They are also found in the world's most durable steel, used in razor blades and ultra-fine needles in eye surgery.

"It's a great work of discovery, with potential applications that range from light-emitting diodes to improved diesel engines," said the president of the American Chemical Society, Nancy Jackson.

Dr Andrew Goodwin, from the department of chemistry at Oxford University, added: "Shechtman's quasicrystals are now widely used to improve the mechanical properties of engineering materials and are the basis of an entirely new branch of structural science.

"If there is one particular lesson we are taking from his research, it is not to underestimate the imagination of nature herself."

The Nobel prizes have been given out annually since 1901, covering the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.

Monday's award of the 2011 prize for physiology or medicine went to Bruce Beutler of the US, Jules Hoffmann from France and Ralph Steinman from Canada for their work on immunology.

And Tuesday's award for physics went to Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess of the US and Brian Schmidt of Australia, who will divide the prize for their discovery that our Universe's expansion is accelerating.

Global warming junk science

Winter returns to the Sierra; Snow above 6,000 feet

How many jobs could this have paid for?

Michelle Obama’s taxpayer-funded spending is an embarrassment for the White House

Seriously, the government does not create jobs. They either get in the way or get out of the way.

Global Warming Psychosis Enters its Final Stages

Carbon credits tarnished by human rights 'disgrace'

The reported killing of 23 Honduran farmers in a dispute with the owners of UN-accredited palm oil plantations in Honduras is forcing the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) executive board to reconsider its stakeholder consultation processes.
In Brussels, the Green MEP Bas Eickhout called the alleged human rights abuses "a disgrace", and told EurActiv he would be pushing the European Commission to bar carbon credits from the plantations from being traded under the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

Several members of the CDM board have been "personally distressed" by the events in Bajo Aguán, northern Honduras, according to the board's chairman, Martin Hession, who said they had "caused us great difficulties."

"Plainly, the events that have been described are deplorable," he told EurActiv. "There is no excuse for them."

But because they took place after the CDM's stakeholder consultations had been held, and fell outside the board's primary remit to investigate emissions reductions and environmental impacts, it had been powerless to block project registrations.

Another board member told EurActiv that Aguán was a "hot potato," which struck at the heart of the emissions trading scheme's integrity. "We all regret the situation extremely," he said.

Hmmm. Isn't Durbin a Democrat?

Durbin says Obama’s jobs bill will likely need changes for Congress to pass By Daniel Strauss

Leftist thuggery

CBS reporter: White House, DOJ reps ‘yelled’ and ‘screamed’ at her over ‘Fast and Furious’ scandal

Did the White House try to strong-arm a journalist in the wake of the Justice Department’s “Operation Fast and Furious” scandal? CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson says government leaders took a very aggressive tack following her revelations earlier this year.

On Tuesday’s Laura Ingraham Show, Attkisson said DOJ spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler and White House associate communications director Eric Schultz yelled and screamed at her over the story.

“The DOJ woman was just yelling at me,” Attkisson said. “The guy from the White House on Friday night literally screamed at me and cussed at me. Eric Schultz — oh, the person screaming was Tracy Schmaler. She was yelling, not screaming. And the person who screamed at me was Eric Schultz at the White House.”

Attkisson explained the vicious tongue-lashing:

“In between the yelling that I received from the Justice Department yesterday, the spokeswoman — who would not put anything in writing — I was asking for her explanation so there would be clarity and no confusion later over what had been said. She wouldn’t put anything in writing,” she said.

“So we talked on the phone and she said things such as ‘the question Holder answered was different than the one he asked.’ But the way he phrased it, he said very explicitly, ‘I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.’”

Attkisson also said the DOJ and White House representatives complained that CBS was “unfair and biased” because it didn’t give the White House favorable coverage on the developing scandal.

“Is it sort of a drip, drip. And I’m certainly not the one to make the case for DOJ and White House about what I’m doing wrong,” she added. “They will tell you that I’m the only reporter, as they told me, that is not reasonable. They say The Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, The New York Times is reasonable — I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it.”

Listen:

Follow link at top for video

The Social Contract

Dale Franks provides the best response I've seen so far to Elizabeth Warren's youtube rant that has become so popular with the left.

This week seems to be the week for the more leftward-leaning members of the political elite to try to sneak past a unilateral revision to the "social contract". Bruce pointed out one example from Paul Krugman, and now I want to address another one, from Elizabeth Warren, formerly of the Obama Administration and now candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Ms. Warren opined:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Let’s unpack this idiocy a little bit, shall we?

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.

This is a meme the Left has been pushing in recent years. The trouble is that it’s not just wrong, but it’s self-evidently wrong. It wasn’t "society" that gave Mark Zuckerberg the idea for Facebook, any more than it it gave Dale Carnegie the idea of teaching public speaking, or turned Bob Williamson from an alcoholic, drug-addicted homeless drifter to the Founder and CEO of WASCO and Horizon Software. Nor did society have to do much with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak selling homemade computers out of Woz’s garage. There are any number of lists of people who started with little or nothing, and who became extraordinarily wealthy due to their drive, entrepreneurship, and talent.

"Ah," say the Lefties, "but without society, none of this would have been possible!"

Now, this is perfectly true, I suppose, but not in any way helpful to their argument. Without society, half of children would die in infancy, life expectancy would be somewhere in the low 40s, a significant number of people would be eaten by wild animals. Pretty much everybody else would be carried away at a young age by disease, infection, injury, or roving bands of sadistic steppe horsemen. So, sure, society helps, in the sense that the Zuckerberg/Winklevoss dispute wasn’t ended when their craniums ended up a pile of skulls deposited by a detachment of Genghis Khan’s hordes after razing their small farming village, but in courts of law to which everyone has access.

But the Progressive argument about the usefulness of society is different, and silly.

You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

But, of course, those roads didn’t get built, and those workers didn’t get educated so that capitalists could oppress the proletariat. That stuff got built because they were universally seen as a positive good in and of themselves. Millionaires aren’t taking advantage of roads, everyone is. For instance, it’s how the millionaires get all that food delivered to our supermarkets, and iPods to our electronics stores. We benefit from the millionaire using the roads in delivering stuff we want to us. The only reason millionaire is using our roads because we want the stuff he makes and that’s how he delivers it to us.

Everyone uses the roads. Everyone benefits from education. Everyone benefits from fire and police protection. We have those things not because they are a positive good—though they are—but because they comprise the minimal requirements for maintaining a civilization that we all derive benefits from.

So, not only do the millionaires not derive some additional benefit from their existence, we would still want them even if millionaires didn’t use them at all. And we’d still pay for them, because we all derive an equal benefit from having them. They provide no special advantage to the millionaire that the rest of us don’t enjoy.

What the millionaire does—the only reason he’s even a millionaire—is to provide us with goods and services we willingly purchase. If we didn’t buy his product, he wouldn’t be a millionaire. Whatever advantages he accrues comes not from some benefit he derives from our roads, or teachers or our police. He accrues them because of our desire to give him money for his product. We are the beneficiaries, because we put a higher value on his product than we do on our money, or on someone else’s products. We choose to make him a millionaire, because we value his product more highly than other things. He doesn’t send hulking thugs to our door demanding our money. We go out and buy his product intentionally.

And let’s dispense that the millionaires are using services "the rest of us" paid for. The millionaire is using services that he paid for along with us. And he probably paid more for them, in absolute terms, than most other people. He also indirectly pays for maintaining society through the salaries for all those "workers the rest of us paid to educate". The payments those workers provide to maintain society only exist because the millionaire’s business provided their jobs. Without those jobs, society’s overall wealth would be smaller, and our ability to maintain that society would be proportionally lessened.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

That’s not the social contract. The social contract is "We maintain civilization because we all benefit from it. And we all have a responsibility to pay for it." Ms. Warren’s version of the social contract boils down to, "You have to pay more for maintaining our society because you can, and we outnumber you, and can force you to do so." That’s not a contract. That’s just extortion by majority. The millionaire’s responsibility is not to "pay forward" any more than any of the rest of us, because he doesn’t benefit any more than the rest of us.

I've excerpted most of it, but by all means follow the link to read the whole thing or just to explore the rest of QandO.

Funding wishful thinking is a waste of funding.

‘Green jobs’ farm in Colorado sheds jobs after receiving $200M in stimulus funds

President Barack Obama’s “green jobs” initiatives suffered another major blow late Monday, as the nonprofit National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado, announced a plan to lay off roughly 10 percent of its staff through a voluntary buy-out plan.

According to the Denver Post, the lab plans to eliminate between 100 and 150 of its 1,350 jobs. The Obama administration supported the NREL in 2009 with roughly $200 million in stimulus grants. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu visited Golden in May 2009 to promote the NREL as a beneficiary of those funds.

At the time, the Associated Press reported that the stimulus grants included $68 million to build a demonstration model of an energy-efficient office building; $19.2 million for solar, geothermal and fuel cell equipment; $10 million for testing and evaluation of wind technology; and $45 million to research and test drive-train systems for wind turbines.

The lab’s mission is to handle U.S. Department of Energy research and development programs.

NREL spokesman Bob Noun blames Congress for the organization’s failures. The Denver Post reports that he believes the gridlocked U.S. Congress forced the NREL to find $8 million in new budgetary savings.

“We don’t see any budget scenario where the lab doesn’t face budget cuts,” Noun said. “We just want to be proactive in managing the budget so we continue our core mission.”

Amy Oliver of Colorado’s conservative Independence Institute said one way to look at these potential “green jobs” shortcomings is that the NREL is exaggerating its claims. Oliver told The Daily Caller that the government-funded lab has seen a surge in government funding in recent years.

“Their funding for 2008 was $328 million,” Oliver said in a phone interview. “In 2010 it was $536.5 million. They’ve had a 64 percent increase in their funding during the Obama administration.”

Oliver acknowledges that the $8 million NREL projects in savings is a significant amount, and told TheDC she was impressed to learn that its leadership would even consider cutting their budget. But, she says, while the saved $8 million doesn’t represent a real budget cut, it’s a better outcome than more spending.

Oliver also suggested that the NREL layoffs may indicate another failure of the Obama administration’s “green jobs” agenda. Candidate Obama pledged in 2008 that he would add 5 million green jobs to the economy, but Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C. now say the White House has stretched what it defines as a “green job” in order to pad its numbers.

At one recent House oversight committee hearing, Republicans prodded Obama’s Labor secretary Hilda Solis to explain why a bus driver who happens to drive a vehicle powered by “green” or “renewable” energy is classified by Obama administration officials as holding a “green job.” Solis struggled with the answer, instead arguing with Florida GOP Rep. Connie Mack, who asked her the question.

Oliver told TheDC that ordinary jobs with peripheral connections to “renewable energy” are frequently misclassified as “green jobs” in Colorado. With Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter in charge, a strong environmental lobby using local, state and federal government to protect its interests, and news media unwilling to push for answers, Oliver said progressive causes have abused taxpayer dollars at institutions like NREL for years.

Because NREL is technically a private non-profit organization, and not a governmental agency, its financial and operational records aren’t public records. The lab is also exempt from compliance with the Freedom of Information Act and state and local open-records laws.

So, the government is more important then any other creditor, right?

APNewsBreak: Obama seeks debt collector proposal

Bringing down the Euro with it.

Greece Falls Into 'Death Spiral': Rising Debt, No Growth

Greece, Spain, Portugal. What do they have in common? They are socialist welfare states.

Eric Holder liar

ATF Fast and Furious: New documents show Attorney General Eric Holder was briefed in July 2010

Wha a turnabout from Obama's pre election endorsement of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel

Clinton, in a Sharp Turnaround, Warns Against Even Symbolically Recognizing Jerusalem as Capital of Israel

By RICK RICHMAN, Special to the Sun | September 27, 2011

http://www.nysun.com/foreign/clinton-in-a-sharp-turnaround-warns-against-even/87496/

Secretary of State Clinton, in a sharp departure from her stance when she was a senator, is warning that any American action, even symbolically, toward recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel must be avoided for the reason that it would jeopardize the peace process.

Her warnings were issued in a brief she has just filed with the Supreme Court — in which she is arguing that a law she voted for when she was Senator is unconstitutional because it could require the U.S. government to give to an American citizen born at Jerusalem papers showing the birthplace as Israel.

The law requiring the government to issue such documents on request passed the Senate unanimously at a time when Mrs. Clinton was a member. But Presidents Bush and Obama have taken the position that the law infringes on the president’s prerogatives in respect of foreign policy. Mrs. Clinton is being sued by an American youngster, Menachem Zivotofsky, who was born at Jerusalem in 2002 to American parents who want his birthplace to be listed on his passport as Israel.

In addition to citing the peace process as the excuse for not issuing the birth document the Congress wants issued, Mrs. Clinton’s brief adds a new twist to the story of the White House photos first disclosed last month by the New York Sun. The story involved the discovery that even while the White House was fretting over the requirement to list Jerusalem, Israel, as Master Zivotofsky’s birthplace, the White House’s own website was featuring a series of pictures from Vice President Biden’s 2010 trip to the Jewish state and identifying the pictures as showing him at “Jerusalem, Israel.” The Sun queried whether the Zivotofsky case really rose to constitutional proportions, since the White House on its own website treated Jerusalem as being in Israel.

Five days later, the White House removed “Israel” from each of the Biden pictures, without announcing the deletion. The State Department also quietly deleted “Israel” from references to “Jerusalem, Israel” on numerous official documents on its own website, dating from the Bush administration.

Mrs. Clinton’s brief alleges that any American action that “symbolically or concretely” signals it recognizes Jerusalem being in Israel would “critically compromise the ability of the United States to work with Israelis, Palestinians and others in the region to further the peace process.” The brief contends that American policy is to remain neutral over all sovereignty issues, leaving them to negotiations, and that the U.S. thus “does not recognize Palestinian claims to current sovereignty” in the West Bank or Gaza either.

It is that latter statement that requires further revision to the Biden photos on the White House website. Two of the photos from Biden’s trip show him meeting with Palestinian officials in the “Palestinian Territories.”

The proper reference is to “territories” – the word used in U.N. Resolution 242, the foundational document of the “peace process,” which did not affix the adjective “Jordanian” or “Arab” or “Palestinian” to the territories, nor require that “all of the” territories be relinquished by Israel, but rather left an unspecified portion to be traded for a defensible peace. America has never assigned that land to the “Palestinians” and maintains that only negotiations can create Palestinian sovereignty there.

So far, Israel has made three offers of a Palestinian state, and the Palestinians rejected all three. They currently refuse to negotiate a fourth, unless Israel concedes the 1949 armistice lines as the basis of a Palestinian state before negotiations begin — while rejecting on their own part any recognition of a Jewish state, defensible borders, or an “end of claims” agreement.

If an adjective is necessary, the term Israel uses is “disputed territories.” Palestine was designated by the League of Nations in 1922 as the national home of the Jewish people. In response to Arab opposition, Britain’s Peel Commission in 1937 proposed two states, which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected. In 1947, the Arabs rejected the UN two-state proposal, and Jordan illegally occupied a portion of Palestine in the ensuing war that the Arabs commenced.

That occupation ended in 1967, when Jordan joined a new war against Israel and lost the land it unlawfully held. The UN thereafter adopted Resolution 242 as the basis for peace, under which any Israeli withdrawal, and the extent thereof, is subject to the establishment of “secure and recognized boundaries.” Hence it is a contradiction of the neutrality principle asserted in the Clinton brief for the adjective “Palestinian” to be affixed to the territories prior to a negotiated agreement.

If the Obama administration believes in the neutrality principle it is asserting in the Supreme Court — and that the mere mention of “Jerusalem, Israel” on its website, or putting “Israel” on an individual’s passport, would violate that principle – the question will arise as to whether it will also scrub also the references to the “Palestinian” territories.

If it does not treat both situations the same, the Supreme Court may legitimately question whether the Clinton brief is asserting the true reason for the administration’s adamant opposition to the designation of “Israel” in the passport of Master Zivotofsky.

How true...

Stimulus Has Been a Washington Job Killer

The political graveyards are full of politicians who thought that temporary, targeted economic policies would get them re-elected.

Another Obama success..

Cuba's Repression Escalates

Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson returned home from an attempted hostage-rescue mission to Cuba last month empty-handed and "still scratching [his] head" as to why the Castro regime double-crossed him. What is truly baffling is why Mr. Richardson expected anything different from a dictatorship operating in extreme-repression mode.

In a Sept. 14 interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Mr. Richardson said he had been invited to the island to discuss the release of U.S. Agency for International Development contractor Alan Gross. Mr. Gross was arrested in December 2009 and is serving a 15-year sentence.

Enlarge Image

Ladies in White

Civil rights protester Sonia Garro after a seven-hour interview with Cuban state security.

Mr. Richardson admitted that he got stiffed by Cuba's "foreign ministry, which a lot of the people there I know and have been friends" with. What he could not grasp is why those "friends"—a strange designation for individuals who might one day be hauled before an international human-rights tribunal—don't appreciate the Obama administration's outreach. Yes, they are "hardliners," he admitted, but they ought to understand that the White House has been bending over backward to get along.

Actually they do understand, and that's why they treated him so badly.

Mr. Richardson told Mr. Blitzer that he was "flabbergasted" when, after a "delightful" three-hour lunch discussing how U.S.-Cuba relations might be improved—including, he told me by phone Friday, the possibility of removing the country from the list of state sponsors of terrorism after the release of Mr. Gross—the foreign minister "slammed me three ways: one, no seeing Alan Gross; no getting him out; and no seeing Raul Castro."

What happened was very predictable. The "loosened travel restrictions" and increased "remittances [from] Cuban-Americans" that Mr. Richardson cited as signs of Mr. Obama's willingness to deal are read as weakness by the bullying regime. It has something, i.e., somebody, the U.S. wants back very badly, and the administration acts as if it is powerless. Why should Castro deal?

Mr. Richardson did even less for Cuba's dissidents. One Richardson pearl of wisdom, shared on CNN, was that Cuba's "human-rights situation has improved." In fact, human rights in Cuba are rapidly deteriorating. To claim otherwise is to abandon the island's brave democrats when they most need international solidarity.

Related Video

Mary O'Grady on the status of the South Korea, Panama, and Colombia free trade agreements.

Ask Sonia Garro, pictured in the nearby photo. For years Ms. Garro has denounced the regime's discrimination against Afro-Cubans. Despite her own poverty, in 2007 she created a recreation center in her home for poor, unsupervised children, according to a report by an independent Cuban journalist. One of her goals: to get young girls out of prostitution. Ms. Garro is also a member of Ladies in Support, a group that pledges solidarity to the Ladies in White, which was founded by the wives, sisters and mothers of political prisoners in 2003 to work for their liberation.

In October 2010, Ms. Garro was detained by state security and held for seven hours. She emerged from the ordeal with a broken nose. Another woman taken into custody with Ms. Garro had her arm broken.

The nongovernmental organization Capitol Hill Cubans has reported that in the first 12 days of September, authorities detained 168 peaceful activists. These "express detentions" are designed to break up dissident gatherings, which risk spreading nonconformist behavior. Locking up offenders for long periods would be preferable, but the regime wants people like Mr. Richardson to go around saying that human rights have improved. The regime is also making greater use of civilian-clothed "rapid response" brigades that are trained, armed and organized to beat up democracy advocates.

The Americas in the News

Get the latest information in Spanish from The Wall Street Journal's Americas page.

Mr. Richardson told me he considers Cuba's record improved because 52 political prisoners were sent to Spain in 2010. Yet exiling promising opposition leadership hardly qualifies as a humanitarian gesture. Nor are gruesome Cuban prisons anything to ignore.

Last month in a speech in New York, one former prisoner, Fidel Suárez Cruz, described his seven years and seven months of solitary confinement, including two years and eight months in a cell with no windows, ventilation or artificial light. One favorite pastime of his torturers: Four military men would pick him up and then drop him on the floor. His testimony, posted on Capitol Hill Cubans website, is required viewing for anyone who doubts the evil nature of this regime.

Nevertheless, Cuba's dissidents remain relentless, and there are signs that the regime is giving up on the express-detention strategy. Fearless democracy advocate Sara Marta Fonseca and her husband Julio León Pérez have been in jail since Sept. 24. Ms. Fonseca's son has seen her and says she is black and blue all over and has an injury to her spinal column. Word is the regime is preparing to charge the couple; 11 other dissidents are awaiting trial. Meanwhile, Yris Pérez Aguilera, the wife of the prominent dissident Jorge Luis García Pérez "Antúnez," and two peers were detained on Sept. 26. Their whereabouts are unknown.

Any hope of protecting these patriots lies in international condemnation. Mr. Richardson could help by returning to CNN to correct the record.

class warfare

BET's Robert Johnson To Obama: Stop Attacking The Wealth

Paying off the teacher unions one year at a time

Obama Plan: Teacher Jobs One Year Only

After a year, there’s no federal funding for the added jobs

By Don Carrington

RALEIGH — President Barack Obama stood before thousands of screaming supporters at North Carolina State University Sept. 14, urging Congress to pass the American Jobs Act, his $450 billion plan to create jobs and stimulate the economy.

“Pass this jobs bill, and there will be funding to save the jobs of up to 13,000 North Carolina teachers, cops, and firefighters,” he said. But he didn’t say that his bill would fund the jobs only for one year. Nor did he say how the jobs would be paid for after that — or whether state and local governments would have to lay off other public employees to maintain the jobs of those hired under the bill.

A White House press release describing the benefits to North Carolina was more specific. “These funds would help states and localities avoid and reverse layoffs now, and will provide $900,300,000 in funds to North Carolina to support 13,400 educator and first responder jobs.”

As in the president’s comments, the White House press release does not specify how long the jobs would be funded. Dividing $900,300,000 by 13,400 yields $67,186.57 to cover salary, benefits, and any other costs associated with providing each job in North Carolina. Since the average annual cost of teacher pay and benefits in the state is $56,000, funding in Obama’s jobs bill would cover a little more than one year of compensation.

Sections 204-209 of the bill include provisions requiring states to “meet the requirements” of the law for an additional two years. A White House spokeswoman told Carolina Journal that the bill includes no unfunded mandates. But unless North Carolina picks up the funding for these positions after the first year, it’s unclear how the teachers and first responders supported by it would be paid.

Moreover, the traditional school year began before Obama made his speech at N.C. State. Local school districts have hired teachers and classes are under way. Even if the bill became law quickly, it’s unclear how North Carolina government agencies could accept the federal money and achieve the president’s job goals during the current fiscal year.

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction Chief Financial Officer Philip Price told CJ that the average cost of teacher pay and benefits in North Carolina was $56,000 per year. He said his staff is just beginning to analyze the components of the bill that applied to public schools.

Price also said approximately 4,000 North Carolina teacher positions are being supported currently by EduJobs, a program that was part of Obama’s previous stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Price said the money for those jobs would run out in September 2012.

Across the country

Obama’s American Jobs Act specifically includes $35 billion for state and local government employees: $30 billion to hire or preserve the jobs of public school teachers, and $5 billion for police officers, firefighters, and other first responders. In the White House analysis for each state, the categories are combined. One-seventh, or 14 percent, of the money covers first responders.

A Carolina Journal analysis of the planned allotment and estimated jobs from each state yields a nationwide average cost per job of $74,757.

Obama has crisscrossed the country selling his plan. “All across the country, budget cuts are forcing superintendents to make choices they don’t want make,” he said at a speech at Lincoln High School in Denver on Sept. 27. “It’s unfair to our kids, it undermines their future, and it has to stop. Tell Congress to pass the American Jobs Act, and there will be funding to save the jobs of thousands of Colorado teachers — and cops and firefighters, too,” he said.

But in Colorado he failed to mention the specific number who would be hired, and again failed to state how long those jobs would be funded with federal tax dollars.

The White House summary for Colorado states that his plan will award $478,600,000 to provide 7,000 jobs. Simple division yields an amount of $68,371 per job.

Background information provided to CJ by the White House bases the distribution of funds to each state primarily on population. The job estimates rely on public sector labor costs obtained from each state.

(Story continues after graphic.)




(For an Excel spreadsheet with the state-by-state breakdown, click here.)


CJ’s analysis places North Carolina 31st among the states nationally in the cost per job, with the state receiving $67,187 for each of its 13,400 jobs. In neighboring states, Virginia would receive $68,731 for 10,800 jobs, South Carolina $67,109 for 6,400 jobs, and Tennessee $63,604 for 9,400 jobs.

At the extreme ends of the rankings, South Dakota would receive the least money per job and New York the most.

South Dakota would get $77,600,000 for an estimated 1,600 jobs, or $48,500 per job. New York, by contrast, would receive $1,769,800,000 for an estimated 18,000 jobs, or $98,322 per job.

California ranks second to New York with $3,621,300,000 for an estimated 37,300 jobs, $97,086 per job.