Since last week, I have reported that the Wisconsin Recall election is moving firmly in Scott Walker’s direction. Big Labor’s preferred candidate, Kathleen Falk, was trounced in last week’s Democrat primary. Scott Walker, who Big Labor assured us was universally despised, got almost as many votes as all the Democrats combined. This afternoon, we learn that the DNC has wisely decided not to waste a dime on the recall.

The report referenced by Mike Flynn of Breitbart.com comes from none other than MoveOn.org. After the performance by the unions’ candidate, Falk, and the huge showing by Walker I can’t say I blame the DNC. In spite of all the angry shouting and fists in the air, the confident and righteous proclamations that Walker is widely regarded as an embarrassing mistake it’s the reality of the situation that Gov. Walker has done in office precisely what he said he’d do as he was campaigning. Wisconsin voters preferred what Walker was offering by a margin of 52% to the Democrat Tom Barrett’s 46%. That’s a solid margin – almost precisely the margin of victory of President Obama over John McCain in the 2008 presidential election – and he’s not done anything that he said he wouldn’t do.

I thought recall elections were supposed to be to remove someone who was clearly not acting in office like they said they would while on the campaign trail, not for endlessly shouting “Do over!” to override an electoral loss by your side. No matter. The DNC looks like they know which way this is going. And in a few weeks, the rest of us will know, too.

A new national telephone survey finds that 51% of Likely U.S. Voters trust Romney more than Obama when it comes the economy, while 39% trust the president more. Ten percent (10%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

I am optomistic when I hear these things, but it’s only May and this fight is just starting in earnest.

Update: Looks like USAToday/Gallup is seeing the same thing.

There is no way any serious individual can possibly look at this and not see the clear political calculation involved in the President’s flip-flopping on this issue. He takes whatever position he needs to at the time to gain what he sees as the maximum advantage at the moment. And the laughable notion that you can even refer to this blatant swinging whichever way the wind blows as “evolving” is just desperation on the part of his supporters. Tell me, was it “evolving” between 1996 and 2008 when his solid support went to absolute opposition?

Frankly, this may have been a flip-flop too far.

I am curious, though, about how the support level for gay marriage is supposedly so high and yet these amendments keep passing by significant margins.

Wind farms have, themselves, generated a lot of controversy. From the infamous matter of Ted Kennedy’s obstruction of the Cape Wind project because he didn’t want to have to look at the turbines to the alarms of enviromentalists that such wind farms pose a hazard to wildlife to the recently reported discovery that wind farms might actually be causing warming locally, there is plenty of evidence that wind turbines cause a set of problems all their own. There are efforts being made to design wind turbines to address these matters (mostly by moving the turbines out of the problem area) one New York design firm is coming to the table with a fresh innovation. They’re suggesting removing the turbines completely.

Atelier DNA won 2nd place in a design competition by proposing the use of a technology they call a “wind stalk.” The idea uses piezoelectric materials – those that generate an electric charge when compressed – inside a very long and flexible pole extending 180 feet into the air. As the wind blows, the stalk sways in the breeze like a tree. As it bends back and forth in the wind, the movement continually compresses 1 side or the other of the internal piezoelectic and ceramic disks, generating power. The design they submitted was a proposal to build a park that contained about 1200 stalks over a patch 280,000 square feet. Their estimates are that their design would produce as much power as a conventional, turbine-based wind farm of the same size. The difference would be two-fold: the windstalk design doesn’t churn the air and so avoids the local warming problem and it’s completely silent, save for the whistle of the wind through the stalks.

It’s an ingenious design and a fascinating approach to the problem. With no large fan blades it’s not a chopping danger to local wildlife. It’s not directional, meaning it can generate power regardless of which way the wind is blowing. It doesn’t have externally moving parts that might catastrophically fail. The designers are also proposing a submarine version would would likely work even better owing to the increased denisity of water. Such “wavestalk” designs would harvest energy from the tides and be completely out of sight, thus avoiding the whole “nimby” issue.

This is the kind of effort I love to see. New approaches to the problems we face that actually do something as opposed to simply complaining about the issue are the sort of things that need to be rewarded. And, I’ll point out, that Atelier DNA hasn’t chewed up $500 million of taxpayer money doing it, either.

It’s been a rough couple of months for Team Obama, too. They’ve tried desperately to make the election about anything except Obama’s record in office and the economy. In spite of his allies in the press, he’s been unable to force the attention sideways to the distractions he’d prefer to make everyone talk about and it just keeps coming back to the policies and programs he’s espoused failing miserably to fix the problems. There’s solid argument that they have, in fact, made things worse. Mitt Romney submitted a column to the Cleveland Plain Dealer ahead of Obama’s tepid kickoff event on Saturday. In it, he pointedly asks, “Where’s the jobs?”

Dear Mr. President,

Welcome to Ohio. I have a simple question for you: Where are the jobs?

As we enter the fourth year of your term, unemployment is over 8 percent and has been for your entire term. Nearly 23 million men and women are unemployed, underemployed or are no longer even looking for work. In the face of such challenges, many Americans have simply given up hope.

That last bit is especially important as the media have all but trumpeted that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1%. The reason it dropped at all is because so many people have simply quit looking for work and the government simply quits counting them when they do. The rate dropped not because more people got work but rather because more people simply gave up.

As I said back when he was 1st nominated, Obama simply lacks the experience to do the job the nation hired him to perform. He’s got zero experience in the business world, and – unless you count the last 3 years of flailing failure – he lacks any executive experience of any kind. Mitt Romney has experience in all of these areas. He’s been a successful business owner, both with those he started and those he acquired, and he know how to turn around enterprises that are in fiscal trouble. He’s been a governor which gives him the needed experience at the head of a government apparatus. We need someone with this expertise to turn us around and get us back to solid economic footing. That’s not Obama, not in any way.

We need Mitt Romney as our President.

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) conducted a drug raid in the San Diego area and scooped up UC San Diego student Daniel Chong. They hauled him back to their facility, conducted a 4-hour interrogation, and then locked him in a holding cell. And then, apparently, they just left him there – alone, untended – for 5 days. No food, no water, no sanitation, no communication, nothing. Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-CA) has opened an inquiry into the matter:

Representative Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) sent a letter to DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart asking the agency to comply with an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the detention of 23-year-old Daniel Chong. The UC San Diego engineering student was arrested during a drug raid, interrogated for four hours, then locked in a holding cell and left there for five days without food, water, or access to a toilet.

During those five days, Chong was forced to drink his own urine. Fearing that he would die in the cell, he broke the lens of his glasses and attempted to carve a message to his mother on his arm using a shard. Chong then tried to commit suicide by swallowing the broken pieces of his eye glasses. He was discovered unconscious and covered in feces, and admitted to a San Diego hospital suffering from dehydration, kidney failure, and a punctured esophagus.

I am all for conducting a thorough investigation and I certainly don’t want anyone just stood up in front of a firing squad without knowing the details of what happened. But I have to be honest: I cannot fathom a set of circumstances that would even remotely justify or excuse this. When dealing with material evidence, there’s a process law enforcement agencies follow called a “chain of custody” wherein that evidence is guided from 1 set of hands to the other throughout the investigation so that the evidence is never tainted nor is it simply lost. At the very best, that process wasn’t followed where Chong was concerned. Some agent locked him in that holding cell and knew for a fact he was there. How does someone get put in a holding cell in a DEA office and no one know? Did that agent positively advise the next person in the chain that he was there? Did that next person simply drop the ball? Did someone in the DEA office there in San Diego simply die and break the chain? Is there no procedure in place where the holding cells are checked daily just to see if anything’s going on in there? Where was the case file and was there any notation made that a suspect was – here’s that word again – in custody?

Or is there some darker force at work, here? Did the agents fully intend to lock him away, intent on making Chong feel like he was being left to die in order to get some bogus confession out of him? And then, for reasons unknown, they simply let it go on too long?

Chong has filed a lawsuit against the DEA. I’m not usually a big fan of huge lawsuits – Chong is asking for $20 million – but perhaps it’s going to take a big stick upside the metaphorical agency head to get their attention. And I’m inclined to say that regardless of whether this was intentional or simply stunning incompetence the agents responsible should not be given the protection of official immunity from their actions. Either way, the identities of those agents and the exact sequence of events should be released to the public. Feel free to wait until after the investigation but no “disciplinary actions have been taken and procedures put in place to avoid this again” kind of announcement is going to suffice.

With that little irritation acknowledged, however, I’ve been perfectly happy to give credit where it’s due and to applaud Obama for making the right decision to green-light the operation that took Bin Laden out. I have to say, however, that it never occured to me that the credit for that decision was due to someone else.

As reported by Big Peace, Time magazine has obtained a memo written by Leon Panetta, then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency and now-Secretary of Defense, that says “operational decision-making and control” was really in the hands of William McRaven, a three-star admiral and former Navy SEAL.

“The timing, operational decision-making and control are in Adm. McRaven’s hands,” the memo says. “The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the president. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the president for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and, if he is not there, to get out.”

In other words, it was McRaven’s call to pull the trigger or not on the raid.

To put a finer point on it, what Obama did was sublet the decision to someone he could throw under the bus if anything went wrong. Yeah, now that’s a real profile in courage and leadership, there. As the IBD editorial I’ve linked points out there will be those who protest, saying Obama gave the thumbs-up and then allowed McRaven to make the go/no-go decision based upon conditions in the field. And, as IBD say, if that’s the situation then the credit rightly goes to George W. Bush who’s the one started the hunt to begin with. Either way, Obama’s taking credit for the decision when it’s not his, just as he shifts the blame when it most certainly belongs to him.

It’s not surprising that he trumpets this operation as a victory for himself. It’s just about all he has to point to, virtually all else that he’s attempted to push through being little more than abject failure. He’s been a failure at the position we hired him for. His contract should not be renewed in November.

One of the efforts that’s been underway involves the use of quantum mechanics to encode and encrypt data. Theoretically, it becomes possible to inscribe data within the quantum characteristics of a single photon of light. Rather than encode the data in a series of “on’s” and “off’s” of a laser shining down a fiber optic, you can literally send complex data in a stream of photons, each one carrying distinct data instead of being just 1 bit of an information flow. The speed of transmittal would increase phenomenally. Such a technology would also raise security concerns.

There are ways to detect an unauthorized tap into an electrical circuit. Current laser transceivers have an operating limitation that makes it far more difficult to replicate that kind of detection. When they fire, they emit several photons at the same time, making it possible that someone can receive the information being sent and do so in such a way that the authorized recipient would never know. The issue has made it critical to find a way to make a photon gun that can actually fire only 1 photon at a time. Via Instapundit I read this fascinating article over at the technology review blog, published by MIT.

One of the significant weaknesses of current quantum cryptographic systems is the finite possibility that today’s lasers emit photons in bunches rather than one at a time. When this happens, an eavesdropper can use these extra photons to extract information about the data being transmitted.

So there’s no shortage of interest in developing photon guns that emit single photons and indeed various groups have made significant progress towards this.

Against this background, Michael Fortsch at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany, and a few pals today say they’ve made a significant breakthrough. These guys reckon they’ve built a photon emitter with a range of properties that make it far more flexible, efficient and useful than any before–a kind of photon supergun.

This “Quantum Rainbow Color Gun” manages to fire 2 entangled photons at a time, but photons with different properties. The one of them is being refered to as a photon herald, definitively announcing that the gun has fired and that a 2nd photon is on the way. The 2nd one carries the encoded data. This effectively removes all doubt as to whether the gun is leaking data. It’s an important step in the development of the next generation of computing devices.