† Is This Any Way To Run A Transition?: It took the Obama administration more than eight months to nominate candidates to head up the Transportation Security Administration and the Customs and Border Protection agency, and the two agencies – which were created in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and are responsible for keeping terrorists from boarding planes and crossing our borders – are still being run by placeholders, reports The Associated Press. Consumed with crafting the deals necessary to win the required 60 votes to pass healthcare “reform,” Dems in the Senate have not yet scheduled a date to consider former U.S. attorney Alan Bersin for CPB, and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has blocked the nomination of former FBI agent Erroll Southers to head TSA over concerns that airport security screeners will be unionized, rendering the agency less nimble to change procedures when necessary.

† The Poor Shall Always Be With Us, If Environmentalists Have Their Way: Part II:  First, environmentalists imposed archaic, inefficient agricultural practices on African farmers that caused chronic famine. Now, the Obama administration's climate change bill goes do-gooder environmentalist NGOs one better and incentivizes farmers here in the U.S. to stop growing food altogether, reports The Washington Times:

The latest Agriculture Department economic-impact study of the climate bill, which passed the House this summer, found that the legislation would … [give] incentives to plant more forests and thus reduce the amount of land devoted to food-producing agriculture.

According to the economic model used by the department and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation would give landowners incentives to convert up to 59 million acres of farmland into forests over the next 40 years. The reason: Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does. …

The legislation would give free emissions credits, known as offsets, to farmers and landowners who plant forests and adopt low-carbon farm and ranching practices. Farmers and ranchers could sell the credits to help major emitters of greenhouse gases comply with the legislation. That revenue would help the farmers deal with an expected rise in fuel and fertilizer costs. …

The model projects that reduced farm production will cause food prices to rise by 4.5 percent by 2050 compared with a scenario in which no legislation is passed, the department found.

† Putting The “Boo” In Boomer (second item): Writing for the news site “The Awl,” Natasha Vargas-Cooper describes how the so-called idealism of baby boomers has disillusioned her, and wrecked the country:
 

Culturally, I find the Boomers tedious and unhelpful. Their confused notions about counterculture have infected our generation. The kind of water bottles you buy, car you drive, fair trade coffee you slurp: can this serve as some kind of political action? This idea is laughable. It gives the false illusion of social engagement. It leads us to the conclusion that you fight the structural problems of capitalism by buying non-mainstream things: like leggings or a Prius! But capitalism loves counterculture. It thrives on it! Just flip on your TV at 3 a.m. and watch Peter Fonda hawk the TIME LIFE GOLDEN 60S music collection!

Economically, the Boomers have devastated the country. We inherited debt, a shredded safety net; pensions went the way of the horse and buggy; largely, no one born after 1982 will ever have a full-time job. I don’t know what the new economic model is. We are a waning empire that has seen unparalleled progress and expansion in the modern era. That's unraveled.

This was the same critique that was leveled at the stultifying Eisenhower generation by the Boomers. Maybe my disappointment is just a product of being young. Or maybe the Boomers were right then and they are wrong now.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Red Is The New Blue (Dog): Using the Census Bureau’s latest population estimates, Polidata projections suggest that eight states are likely to gain one or more seats in the 435-seat House of Representatives – and may also gain as many as eight Electoral College votes in the 2012 election - while 10 states are expected to lose one or more seats. The gains will largely accrue to red-leaning states, the losses to blue-leaning states.
 

As John Fund observed in The Wall Street Journal’s “Political Diary” (E-mail subscription required), “As an incumbent, President Obama has to be counted as the favorite in the 2012 race, but his climb to reach the needed 270 will be a bit steeper after the next Census.” Now watch Dems try to mess with the Electoral College to negate any Repub advantage – ACORN writ large.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?): The Financial Times of London reports that “Nicolas Sarkozy, the most pro-American president of France for half a century, has gone cold on Barack Obama”:

A year ago Mr Sarkozy was engaged in a tussle among European leaders anxious to be the first to secure a meeting with the freshly elected Mr Obama. Mr Sarkozy described Mr Obama as “my friend” after meeting him just once as a senator.

But the French president has since clashed with his US counterpart on a series of issues, raising the question of whether Mr Sarkozy is reverting to the more Gaullist, anti-American posture of his predecessor, Jacques Chirac.

“He has now shifted from a pro-Bush position to an anti-Obama position,” said Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, international affairs spokesman for the opposition Socialists. “Neither France nor the western world have anything to gain from Barack Obama’s failure.”

As Clive Crook, one of the paper’s columnists, notes, “Foreigners and Americans naively thought the world would submit to Mr Obama’s charm. It did not.” He adds:

Yes, he brought US diplomacy back from the dead – but diplomacy is a means to an end, not an end in itself. It must be admitted that the rewards for Mr Obama’s outreach on China, Iran and the Middle East have been meagre at best. Yet this was more because the issues are so difficult, and US power so constrained, than because the approach was wrong.

Crook also slams Obama’s lack of leadership on the domestic front, as well: “[H]e went with the flow, deferring to the implacably partisan Democratic majorities. This disengagement, this reluctance to lead, is the real disappointment of Mr Obama’s first year.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Home-Grown Muslim Terrorism Discombobulates The Media): Pakistani authorities suggest that the five American Muslim men from the Washington D.C. area who were arrested in Pakistan a few weeks ago planned to attack nuclear power facilities, reports The Associated Press:

The men allegedly had a map of Chashma Barrage, a complex that along with nuclear power facilities houses a water reservoir and other structures, said Javed Islam, a senior police official in the Sargodha area of Punjab province where the men were arrested.

He stressed that they were not carrying a specific map of a nuclear power plant, but a map of the whole Chashma Barrage. The detained men had also exchanged emails about the area, Islam claimed. "We are also working to retrieve the deleted material in their computers," he said. …

A Pakistani police official, Nazir Ahmad, told the Associated Press that the force would ask the courts to charge the five men with collecting and attempting to collect material to carry out terrorist activities in the country. If convicted, the charges carry a sentence of from seven years to life in prison, he said. …

FBI agents have been granted some access to the men, who are being held in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, and are looking into what potential charges they could face in the US. Possibilities include conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist group.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II): More evidence that the achievements of Arne Duncan - President Barack Hussein Obama's hand-picked and much hyped Secretary of Education - as the head of Chicago's school system were less than advertised (chiefly, by himself). The Washington Post reports:

Soon after Arne Duncan left his job as schools chief here to become one of the most powerful U.S. education secretaries ever, his former students sat for federal achievement tests. This month, the mathematics report card was delivered: Chicago trailed several cities in performance and progress made over six years.

Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003. …

[T]he new math scores signal that Chicago is nowhere near the head of the pack in urban school improvement, even though Duncan often cites the successes of his tenure as he crusades to fix public education.

"Chicago is not the story of an education miracle," said Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank in Washington. "It is, however, the story of a large urban system that has made some gains and has made some promising structural changes." [Contextual link added by The Stiletto; see fourth item on page.]

[Q]uestions have arisen this year about the magnitude of Duncan's accomplishments. The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which represents business, professional, education and cultural leaders, concluded in June that gains on state test scores were inflated when Illinois relaxed passing standards and that too many students still drop out of high school or graduate unprepared for college. The Consortium on Chicago School Research, a nonpartisan group at the University of Chicago, reported in October that Duncan's closure of low-performing schools often shuffled students into comparable schools, yielding little or no academic benefit.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Hunting Hokies): After a gun-wielding student killed 32 at Virginia Tech, the faculty at Colorado State University in Fort Collins moved to create the conditions under which another such tragedy could occur on their campus by banning licensed gun owners to carry concealed weapons – over the objections of students, reports the Los Angeles Times:

Colorado State's Board of Governors unanimously directed the presidents of the 22,000-student Fort Collins campus  … to draw up weapon restriction policies. …

The governors are scheduled to finalize the new policies in February.

At Fort Collins, where the student government voted to oppose any restrictions on concealed weapons, student leaders circulated a petition urging a permissive policy.

"Students were really disregarded in a lot of the discussions," said sophomore David Ambrose, a student senator majoring in business. "Banning concealed weapons on campus makes students second-class citizens compared to the rest of Colorado."

It's a rural state, and many students, professors and campus workers are hunters. Gun ownership is so widespread that the University of Colorado at Boulder has opened a gun storage facility where students can deposit their firearms. …

Most public colleges and universities around the country impose some restriction on firearms on campus. …

In 2003, Colorado's Legislature passed a law allowing holders of concealed weapons permits to carry their firearms anywhere in the state.

The University of Colorado at Boulder then banned guns on its campus and this year won a lawsuit filed by gun-rights groups who sought to overturn the ban. That victory added momentum to the Colorado State faculty's push to restrict guns. …

Advocates of the restriction point to the study, prepared by the International Assn. of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, cited by the Board of Governors.

The study found that of the 30,000 Americans killed by guns in 2005, only 147 were shot in justifiable homicides - in other words, for protection.

The literature overview – it’s a stretch to call it a “study” – by the campus law enforcement group relies on data from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Crime in The United States report. This table from the most current DOJ report shows that between 2004 and 2008 roughly 350 to 400 people are shot by armed citizens using their guns in self-defense.

This statistic does not prove that allowing properly trained and licensed people to carry their guns is ineffectual in preventing violent crime. Rather, the opposite - that too few people have the option of self defense in a life-or-death situation, especially on public college and university campuses and in most large urban areas, like New York City and Chicago.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, 10 Reasons Michelle Obama Should Be Proud – Really Proud – Of America): This latest installment in The Stiletto Blog’s ongoing series meant to help instill the necessary pride of country in Michelle Obama’s consciousness to enable her to serve as an unofficial ambassador focuses on New Jersey Symphony violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins, 38, who brings culture and gentility to an audience whose lives are lacking both. The New York Times reports:

Just three blocks from Lincoln Center, they arrived at the concert on Thursday night by shelter bus, not taxi or limousine. They took their seats around scarred, round folding tables. The menu was chicken curry and rice served on paper plates.

These concertgoers were eight tired, homeless men who had been taken to the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church shelter for the night. …

“I like sharing music with people, and they have zero access to it,” Ms. Hall-Tompkins said of her homeless audiences. “It’s very moving to me that I can find people in a place perhaps when they have a greater need for, and a heightened sensitivity to, beauty.” …

The concerts have an air of authenticity and directness that sometimes does not exist in concert halls. Not all the listeners are new to classical music. One woman at a concert said the experience had been bittersweet because it brought back memories of working at the Boston Symphony Orchestra and “how much my life has changed since.”

For the performers, it can also be bittersweet. “When I have people to play for, it means they are having really hard times,” Ms. Hall-Tompkins said. But the benefit is mutual. “The artists, I find, are just as moved as the people we’re supposedly trying to help.”