Northrup Grumman backs out of bid to build refueling tanker

Boeing got a big win Monday with the announcement by Northrop Grumman that it was pulling out of the competition to build a new Air Force refueling tanker.

The Air Force initially awarded the $35 billion contract to Northop Grumman, along with its European partner, EADS, the maker of Airbuses.

But such a stink was was raised by Boeing and lawmakers unhappy that a European company stood to benefit from the initial contract that the Pentagon conducted a special review of and eventually decided the Air Force should rebid the contract.

That process was underway when Northrop decided it wasn't worth its while. More specifically, the aerospace company indicated it couldn't justify the costs of competing for the contract again, and neither could its suppliers.

Governor Haley Barbour wasted no time offering a statement of his own to show his disgust with the news.

Miss. senate passes career-track courses bill

The Mississippi Senate has sent the governor a bill that allows the state’s high schools to offer career-track courses for students who don’t plan to attend a four-year university.

The Senate on Monday passed the bill, which had earlier passed the House.

The bill outlines 20 course unit requirements for the so-called career track curriculum. Students who choose to go that route would still have to earn four units of English and at least three each in math, science and social studies.

The legislation also allows a student to have a dual enrollment in a community or technical college.

The Associated Press

Madison County School Board expected to vote on water park and amphitheater tonight.

The Madison County School Board tabled a vote March 1st on whether to allow a developer to build a water park and amphitheater in Gluckstadt off Interstate 55. The developer said the project will bring millions to the area. Some neighbors are skeptical. Proponents and opponents alike will get the word tonight from the school board on whether it will be allowed.

School board members have toured a 66-acre site where developers want to build a new water park and a 15,000 seat amphitheater. Developers said they're willing to pour $40 million into the project.

Oil and Gasoline Prices Begin to Creep Up

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Crude oil and gasoline prices are inching up again.

Various factors combined Monday to lift the prices of crude oil and gasoline. Here, fuel is delivered to gas pumps in Lynnfield, Mass.

A combination of reasonably upbeat economic data, new tensions in oil-producing Nigeria and reports that China intends to build up its strategic reserves lifted crude prices to around $82 on Monday, about a $10 increase over the last month.

Prices at the pump have followed suit, with the average national price for a gallon of gasoline rising 5 cents in the last week.

“That’s a drag on the economy,” said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service, who estimated that consumers are paying just over $1 billion a day at the pump, about $250 million more than this time a year ago.

Mr. Kloza predicted that gasoline prices would top $3 a gallon between April and June as warm weather encourages more driving, before dropping to as low as $2.50 after the summer driving season. “We’re in the fourth or fifth inning of the typical end of winter, early spring rise in gasoline prices,” he added.

The New York Times

Sen. Kerry lobbies for climate compromise; actual bill to come

By Jim Snyder

The three senators writing compromise climate legislation are lobbying business groups in hopes of winning their support for the effort. One obstacle: the absence of an actual bill.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) briefed a group of electric utility executives this week on a broad outline of the plan. Kerry and his cohorts, Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), have also reached out to Tom Donohue, the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who has been among the harshest critics of a climate bill stalled in the Senate.

Kerry, Graham and Lieberman have worked for weeks to break the impasse and craft a measure to reduce heat-trapping gases that could win centrist support. A key to their effort will be reducing the level of angst among business, given high unemployment levels and the effects that capping carbon dioxide could have on the economy. Supporters say climate legislation could create jobs by spurring growth of a clean energy industry in the United States.

As he tries to sell the legislation, Kerry is de-emphasizing its relation to climate change.

“What we are talking about is a jobs bill. It is not a climate bill. It is a jobs bill, and it is a clean air bill. It is a national security, energy independence bill,” he told reporters in the Capitol this week.

The Hill

Program Will Pay Homeowners to Sell at a Loss

By DAVID STREITFELD

In an effort to end the foreclosure crisis, the Obama administration has been trying to keep defaulting owners in their homes. Now it will take a new approach: paying some of them to leave.

This latest program, which will allow owners to sell for less than they owe and will give them a little cash to speed them on their way, is one of the administration’s most aggressive attempts to grapple with a problem that has defied solutions.

More than five million households are behind on their mortgages and risk foreclosure. The government’s $75 billion mortgage modification plan has helped only a small slice of them. Consumer advocates, economists and even some banking industry representatives say much more needs to be done.

For the administration, there is also the concern that millions of foreclosures could delay or even reverse the economy’s tentative recovery — the last thing it wants in an election year.

The New York Times

Voter ID push wins spot on Miss. ballot

Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann says petitioners gathered more than enough signatures to put a voter ID initiative on Mississippi’s ballot in November 2011.
Hosemann said Monday his office had determined that 131,678 signatures of registered voters were collected. That’s significantly more than the minimum 89,285 needed.

Republican organizers submitted the signatures last month, and the secretary of state’s office spent weeks double-checking the numbers.

Mississippians will be asked to decide whether the state constitution should be amended to require each voter to show a government-issued photo identification at the polls.

Supporters say voter ID would help deter fraud, while opponents say it could decrease turnout among older black voters who were once subject to Jim Crow laws.

The Associated Press

Congress should do the right thing—nothing

The same ethical advice for doctors also makes sense for Congress as it considers several pending global warming bills – first do no harm. Given serious questions about global warming science as well as the efficacy of costly proposals to address it, the best choice for Washington is none of the above.
With economy-wide cap and trade stalled in the Senate, a number of slightly scaled back variants have been proposed, including measures targeting selected industries or a carbon tax. All threaten to do more harm than good.

Before considering these measures, Congress should first get to the bottom of Climategate, Glaciergate, Hurricanegate, Amazongate, and other scandals that raise troubling questions about scientific credibility. Virtually every scary claim used to justify precipitous action—unprecedented temperatures, rapidly melting glaciers, increasing hurricanes, plummeting crop yields, disappearing rainforests—is under genuine suspicion. The fact that temperatures have been statistically flat since 1995 is another reason not to treat global warming as a dire crisis.

Haste in light of these scientific doubts is all the more troublesome given the cost of cracking down on fossil fuels, no matter how imposed. All of the legislative proposals have one thing in common—they reduce carbon dioxide emissions by driving up the cost of energy so that individuals and businesses are forced to use less. Inflicting significant economic pain (likely trillions of dollars and millions of jobs for cap and trade, somewhat less for watered down measures) is how this all works.

These measures have another thing in common—their uselessness. Even if one still believes the worst case scenarios of global warming, unilateral action against the American people and American economy would hardly dent the upward trajectory of emissions. China alone out emits the U.S. and its emissions growth is projected to be nine times higher than ours. And it is hard to ignore Chinese government officials’ frequent and unambiguous statements that they will never impose similar restrictions on themselves, though some global warming activists still try.

Washington cracking down on fossil fuels in the name of addressing global warming would result in much economic pain for little if any environmental gain. First do no harm.

The Heritage Foundation

Pitching for America

By Patrick J. Buchanan

It was Father’s Day, 1964, when the Phillies’ Jim Bunning, a father of seven, took the mound against the Mets.

Ninety pitches later, Bunning had struck out 10 and allowed not one batter to reach first base. Twenty-seven up, 27 down. The first perfect game in 86 years in the National League, and the finest hour of the Hall of Famer’s baseball career.

Beginning last week, Jim Bunning took the Senate floor for five straight days to object to Harry Reid’s call for unanimous consent to waive through a $10 billion spending bill. First, the Kentucky senator demanded, show me how we’re going to pay for it.

His own leadership abandoned Bunning. Susan Collins of Maine assured the Senate and country that Republicans did not back their colleague: “Senator Bunning’s views do not represent a majority of the caucus. It’s important that the American people understand that there is bipartisan support for extending these vital programs.”

Vital programs?

Had Bunning blocked rescue flights to Port au Prince or Santiago, or ammunition for the Marines in Marja?

No. Bunning had held up for a couple of days a vote on a $10 billion bill to extend unemployment benefits, make payments to doctors under Medicare and extend satellite TV to rural America. Reportedly, some 2,000 Transportation Department workers were furloughed for a few days.

“If we cannot pay for a bill that all 100 senators support,” Bunning said, “how can we tell the American people with a straight face that we will ever pay for anything?”

Good question.

Indeed, the behavior of senators suggests that neither party appreciates the depth of the crisis we are in or the pain that will be required to get us out. Last week, Bunning did more than any senator in many moons to raise the consciousness of the country to the magnitude of the deficit-debt crisis.

His taking to the barricades may have inconvenienced some, but Bunning forced us all, briefly, to stare into the chasm.

Consider. Congress this year will spend $1.6 trillion more than it collects in revenue, with the largest outlays in that FY 2010 budget for defense at $719 billion and Social Security at $721 billion.

Thus, if the U.S. Government on Oct. 1, 2008, had shut down the Pentagon and furloughed every soldier and civilian here and around the world, and announced that it would not send out a Social Security check for a full year to any of the 50 million retired and elderly, we would still be $160 billion short of balancing the budget. If you zeroed out federal benefits to veterans for a full year, that, added in, would bring us close.

Such is the magnitude of the fiscal crisis facing the country.

To balance the budget this year would require a 43 percent across-the-board cut in every category of federal spending — defense, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Homeland Security, highways, etc. — or, if one used taxes alone, a 72-percent increase in federal tax revenues.

Budget cuts of that magnitude are impossible. They would cause a revolution. And any attempt at tax hikes of that magnitude would drain off all available consumer capital and hurl the economy into another Depression.

For the foreseeable future, then, this nation is going deeper into debt.

And when Harry Reid and colleagues wave through yet another $10 billion for unemployment checks and making sure farm folks get yard dishes to see reruns of “The Sopranos,” the United States must go to Beijing, Tokyo or Riyadh and borrow the money.

That is the hole we are in.

And when one stares at some of those budget numbers, the priorities of the Obama administration seem almost surreal.

In George W. Bush’s last full year in office, we spent $29 billion for “international affairs.” The lion’s share of that was foreign aid. In FY 2011, the year for which Congress has begun to budget, spending for international affairs and foreign aid is to jump to $54 billion and continue to surge through the Obama years.

What is the rationale for the United States, the world’s greatest debtor nation, putting itself deeper in debt to China to send foreign aid to nations that will never repay us and that vote habitually with China and against us in the United Nations?

This city does not seem to grasp that the days of wine and roses are over. We are not in the 1950s or 1960s anymore. Then, we could throw open our markets to imports from the world. Then, we could dish out foreign aid and fight wars in Vietnam with 500,000 men, while maintaining 50,000 troops in Korea and 300,000 in Europe.

America is headed for a time when, like the British Empire, she is going to have to make painful choices, or have them forced upon us.

He may have been booed all last week, but Jim Bunning pitched one of the best games of his career.

Patrick J Buchanan