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How to make Obama like us.

The Obama administration’s latest solar boondoggle, the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Product, which was awarded a $737 million federal loan this week, is backed by George Kaiser. Yes, the same George Kaiser who was the principal backer of Solyndra, which blew through half a billion of federal money before going bankrupt.

This smells really bad.

(Previous post.)

It’s hard to believe I was once hopeful about Arne Duncan, President Obama’s Secretary of Education. We’ve since seen that Duncan is openly political and dishonest (but I repeat myself). We have learned that he is at the center of a school-admissions scandal in Chicago, and we’ve seen him appear at a rally organized by noted racist demagogue Al Sharpton (and urge Department of Education employees to attend as well).

Now we see Duncan spearheading an openly dishonest attack on Texas’s education record, designed to hurt Governor Rick Perry’s presidential chances. Duncan’s charges were simply false (for example, he referred to “massive increases in class size” when class sizes actually remained the same or shrank). And he ignored (or did not know) the fact that Texas schools (which Perry was only indirectly in charge of anyway) did much better than Duncan’s Chicago schools.

The CLASS program in Obamacare is an obscure provision that would create a long-term care insurance program. The provision was important because it exploited Obamacare’s usual accounting gimmick (comparing ten years of revenue to just five years of expenses) to generate an (illusory) $70 billion surplus over ten years. It thus helped shift the all-important (to nervous Democrats) overall price into the black.

But the program was never designed to work. Medicare’s chief actuary wrote (as quoted by Power Line):

I can’t see how there would be enough workers participating to cover the selection costs for those with existing [activities of daily living] limitations plus the costs for the internal subsidies for students and low-income persons. Thirty-six years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant federal subsidies to continue.

And sure enough, the Obama administration seems to be shutting the program down. Its only function was to coax reluctant Democrats into voting for Obamacare, so its work is done.

I admit it; I’m not above noting this: The White House confuses Colorado and Wyoming.

Seriously though, with a Republican in office, this would have been proof of . . . well, what exactly it would be proof of would depend on the media narrative. For Bush it surely would have proven he is an idiot.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Hill reports:

Insurance costs spike, opening new Republican attacks on health law

Strictly speaking, I don’t think “we told you so” is really a new attack.

(Via Instapundit.)

Asthma sufferers who use epinephrine inhalers will be required to switch to a new medicine next year. The new medicine is twice as expensive, and probably won’t work as well for some patients to boot. The old inhalers were not environmentally friendly enough.

There’s the environmental movement in a nutshell. I would be very surprised indeed if inhalers had any kind of significant impact on the ozone layer, whereas I am certain they have an enormous impact of people’s ability to breathe. But cost vs. benefit is simply not a consideration in green policies, especially under this administration.

I would have blown off “car-free week”, just like Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick did. Of course, I wouldn’t have declared it in the first place.

An Obama fundraiser tells the truth:

There’s never been more money shoved out of the government’s door in world history, and probably never will be again, than in the last few months and in the next 18 months. And our selfish parochial goal is to get as much as it for Tulsa and Oklahoma as we possibly can.

POSTSCRIPT: I wish I was as sanguine as he that our Brobdingnagian stimulus misadventure would never be repeated.

In Chicago, union executives get to retire on a public pension:

Twenty years later, 23 retired union officials from Chicago stand to collect about $56 million from two ailing city pension funds thanks to the changes, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation found. Because the law bases the city pensions on the labor leaders’ union salaries, they are reaping retirement benefits that far outstrip the modest salaries they made as city employees.

[Pension experts] warn that it not only creates opportunities to scam the system but also robs the city of its ability to control pension costs. The city doesn’t set union salaries, the most important ingredient in determining the size of the leaders’ pensions.

Better yet, no one knows who made the rule:

No one from either the state Legislature or city government will take credit for the law, which passed in 1991, and the process of drafting pension legislation in Springfield is so shrouded in secrecy that there’s no way of knowing exactly whom to hold responsible.

But, whoever made it, it apparently can’t be fixed:

Making changes won’t be easy, however. That’s because the state constitution says pension benefits cannot be diminished once they are earned.

This serves as another reminder that Chicago is run by thieves. But at least it doesn’t affect the rest of us. We would never be so stupid as to put the Chicago machine in power nationwide.

(Via Hot Air.)

Looking for a way for the government to create jobs? Looking for a fast way, that doesn’t even require an act of Congress? A good way to start might be to abolish regulations that fine businesses for hiring too many people.

(Via Instapundit.)

This exercise was eye-opening:

Why S&P Downgraded the US:
U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
Recent [April] budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:
Annual family income: $21,700
Money the family spent: $38,200
New debt on the credit card: $16,500
Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
Budget cuts: $385

I’ve been meaning for a while to post this with some commentary, but I haven’t been able to get around writing the commentary, so I’ll just summarize it: Texas’s employment figures are impressive, and all the attempts to demonstrate a hidden flaw in them are bogus.

(Via the Corner.)

“Remove the doubt, reveal the deniers” is not scientific talk.

How bad is health care nationalization? Even a report prepared by one of its architects can’t whitewash it effectively:

Naturally, Gruber’s leads with a smiley face, noting for the umpteenth time that the law is expected to increase health insurance coverage; approximately 340,000 of the state’s residents are expected to gain insurance coverage by 2016. Of course, about 170,000 of the newly covered will be shuffled into Medicaid, a program that’s wrecking state budgets and providing, at best, uncertain health benefits.

Meanwhile expanding the state’s health insurance coverage will come at a significant cost to hundreds of thousands of individuals, especially within the individual market, where the law has the greatest effect. Gruber projects that the average individual market health insurance premium will cost about 30 percent more than if ObamaCare had never passed. For most individual market enrollees, the average premium increase will be even higher: 87 percent of the individual market is projected to see a premium price increase of 41 percent.

Defenders of the law might note that more than half—about 57 percent—of those who get their insurance through the individual market will benefit from the law’s generous health insurance subsidies. But even discounting the enormous public cost of financing those subsidies (which account for roughly half of the law’s $950 billion price tag over the next decade), it’s still not much consolation for the majority of individual market enrollees.

That’s because more than half the individual market will still end up paying more: “After the application of tax subsidies,” the report projects, “59 percent of the individual market will experience an average premium increase of 31 percent.”

(Via Instapundit.)

President Obama claims to have passed the largest middle-class tax cut in history:

We said working folks deserved a break, so within one month of me taking office, we signed into law the biggest middle-class tax cut in history, putting more money into your pockets.

How can he claim that, when, of course, he has done no such thing? The White House justifies the claim saying that “largest” means going to the largest number of people:

“The point the president was making that is there is not a tax cut that has been enjoyed by such a broad section of the population,” an administration official said, pointing to a report that said that 95 percent of working families received some kind of tax cut under the Making Work Pay provision in his stimulus bill.

Ooo-kay. Give everyone a quarter and it will be bigger yet.

In contrast to most other public officials, President Obama has not put his personal wealth into a blind trust. This isn’t necessarily scandalous, if the story is right that Obama keeps most of his money in treasuries, but it’s certainly unusual.

(Via Hot Air.)

The Truth About Guns has a quick summary of the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act. There are a few areas where I would have hoped for better, but it’s still a big step forward.

It will be interesting to see what happens. Democrats can block it, of course, but they can ill-afford to energize the gun-rights movement, and they know it.

(Via Instapundit.)

I’m very disappointed to find Michelle Bachmann carrying water for the anti-vaccine hysterics. There are legitimate grounds on which one can attack Rick Perry’s HPV vaccination policy, but suggesting that it causes mental retardation is simply irresponsible. Anti-vaccine foolishness is causing great harm, and it’s wrong to give that movement any aid at all.

Australia’s left-wing government won’t rule out requiring a license to publish. Let’s not have any more nonsense about the left’s dedication to free speech, if you please.

(Via Instapundit.)

A provision of President Obama’s jobs bill would make it illegal for employers to prefer applicants who are currently employed. And as bad as that would be, the legal implications are worse. It would make it very difficult for employers even to consider work history: if one looked at the work history at all, it would be hard to prove that one was not looking at whether people were employed.

Obama probably things that barring discrimination against the unemployed will make it easier for them to get jobs. It won’t. On the contrary, if employers cannot look at past job history, every hire will be a risky stab in the dark, so employers will be reluctant to hire anyone at all.

No, not because “it’s a very difficult district for Democrats”. Sheesh. It was because of President Obama’s persistent hostility to Israel.

Whatever the Democrats pretend to believe, they have certainly received the message. Obama’s actions over the next year will be telling. We will find out whether hostility to Israel is one of Obama’s core beliefs, or something he is willing to set aside temporarily to be re-elected.

A new Associated Press poll finds that Americans oppose the individual mandate by an overwhelming 82-16 margin. The results are essentially unchanged from one year ago.

In theory, this shouldn’t matter to the ongoing litigation, but it may nonetheless. When the matter finally arrives at the Supreme Court, someone like Anthony Kennedy is going to be more willing to strike Obamacare down if it’s overwhelmingly unpopular.

Yes:

Despite the obvious importance of science, one group of people does everything in pure defiance of scientific methods: politicians.

What do politicians do when they think they have a great idea? They just go and implement it. It’s like someone thinking he’s got a cure for cancer and immediately injecting it into everyone he can. That’s a madman, not a scientist. You always have to at least try out your idea on monkeys to make sure it doesn’t kill them.

. . .

In science, when testing things on people, you always use a control group. If you have a drug you think will cut cholesterol, you give it to one set of test subjects. If everyone in the group that took the drug turns purple and starts choking but the control group is fine, we scientifically conclude there’s a problem with the drug.

We have an economy that’s turning purple and choking. Did the stimulus cause that? If we had a control group that looked fine, we’d know.

So what we need to do is isolate part of the country to be the control group. They’ll be free from new taxes, won’t take part in government programs and regulations and can have all the guns they want. In the rest of America, politicians can go crazy with every Keynesian idea, ban trans fats and salt and just generally control everything. Then we can compare the results of the two groups and finally have a scientific answer on what works.

I’d like to volunteer for the control group.

(Via Instapundit.)

I’m sure we all remember how, in the days following 9/11, the nation set partisanship aside came together. People rallied to the flag and filled houses of worship to bursting. Bitter adversaries in Congress held hands and sang together on the Capitol steps.

Obviously it couldn’t last. Our political divisions are just too deep. But for a while we united to meet a horrifying new threat. It sounds cliched, but the terrible events of that day brought out the best in America.

But for Paul Krugman, that short period of national unity is a shameful period. What a little, little man.

POSTSCRIPT: Yes, Mr. Krugman, I agree that the 9/11 commemorations are subdued in a way, but, unlike you, I don’t think it odd. We are remembering an atrocity that killed three thousand people, you weasel. What are you remembering?

UPDATE: James Taranto: “History’s smallest monster.“

The number of times President Obama used the word “stimulus” in his speech calling for yet another stimulus plan: zero.

The term stimulus is now radioactive. That, at least, is progress. Too bad it cost $787 billion to accomplish.

Yuval Levin sums up the president’s jobs speech:

Spend $450 billion dollars now, it will create jobs, and I’ll tell you how I’m going to pay for it a week from Monday. If you disagree, you want to expose kids to mercury.

When a union leader like Jimmy Hoffa threatens violence, it’s not an idle threat. In a labor dispute in Washington State, union longshoremen went on a rampage and took hostages Thursday:

Hundreds of Longshoremen stormed the Port of Longview early Thursday, overpowered and held security guards, damaged railroad cars, and dumped grain that is the center of a labor dispute, said Longview Police Chief Jim Duscha.

Six guards were held hostage for a couple of hours after 500 or more Longshoremen broke down gates about 4:30 a.m. and smashed windows in the guard shack, he said.

Then they fought the police (which I suppose isn’t so surprising from kidnappers). Their criminal conduct then worsened on Friday:

With officers far outnumbered by protesters, Sheriff’s deputies, police officers and Washington State Patrol troopers had to back off to a defensive position during Wednesday’s ILWU rally due to threats to their safety.

“Our teams of 4 or 5 officers were confronted by baseball bat and axe handle wielding protesters.” Said Cowlitz County Sheriff Mark Nelson. “They had their protest signs attached to bats and axe handles. When we attempted to make simple, misdemeanor arrests for trespassing, the officers were rushed by the crowd. Officers were literally holding people back to protect other officers attempting to make lawful arrests.” Nelson said. . .

Also continuing is the investigation in to the Thursday morning assault and carjacking that took place on the EGT plantsite after security was overrun by a mob of ILWU supporters. At around 4:30 a.m., hundreds of supporters tore down fences, smashed windows, cut air hoses to a grain train, and opened the rail cars, spilling grain all over the ground. Several pieces of evidence, including bolt cutters, pipes, ILWU signs and fliers were left lying around the facility.

Also of great concern was the perception of safety by the security personnel on scene. After seeing all the cars and people massing, then pouring through their gates, smashing out the guardshack window with a baseball bat, and causing damage, the officers had no way out. They were blocked from leaving down E. Mill Road, and there was no other open access out of the facility. At some point they felt that their personal safety was at too great a risk, and they ran for a vehicle and headed towards a back gate. They reported that a group tried to block them in, but the lights of approaching law enforcement vehicles stopped the group and the officers were able to flee.

One of the most frightening parts of the incident was when several saboteures, blocked a Columbia Security officer, (a 48 year old Longview man) dragged him out of his security patrol vehicle, took the vehicle and after recklessly driving it around the EGT facility, crashed it into an embankment.

(Emphasis mine.)

I’m not sure why the state police aren’t involved, since the local police are clearly outnumbered.

ASIDE: Ed Morrissey notes that, ironically, the union thugs’ dispute isn’t even against a non-union shop, but against another union:

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union believes it has the right to work at the facility, but the company has hired a contractor that’s staffing a workforce of other union laborers.

This should give you a picture of what is going on. It’s the wrong frame of reference to look at this as a political dispute; this is a mob fighting for its turf.

A local television station went to the Longshoremen’s headquarters to ask them for their side. They were not welcomed, to put it mildly (CONTENT WARNING: union language):

ASIDE: When a Fox News host asked DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to comment on Hoffa’s threats, she countered by asking “How many times have you called out coarse language at tea party rallies? Almost never.” Calling President Obama a socialist is not coarse language. This is coarse language.

Returning to Hoffa, for a little more perspective on what can be on order when the Teamsters threatens violence, David Frum dredges up a 2003 settlement between the Teamsters and one of their targets, and suggests that we imagine what must have led to such a settlement. I’ll excerpt it after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

What a buffoon the vice-president is:

Car and Driver magazine: [Should we have] A repeat of Cash for Clunkers?

Joe Biden: Probably not. But it makes sense. One role of government is to go where venture capital won’t. In the Civil War, you had a president pay the railroads $16,000 for every mile of track they laid. You had Eisenhower invest $25 million in a defense agency called ARPA that came up with a thing that became the internet. We not only won’t get another Cash for Clunkers, but we’re having trouble keeping our friends on the other side of  the aisle from doing away with what’s left of the seed money for innovative technologies that bring billions off the sidelines.

Look, Cash for Clunkers was not an investment in capital. We were paying people to destroy capital. Its total economic cost exceeded its benefits by $1000 per car. We literally would have done better simply to burn $1 billion in cash.

If you can’t understand the difference between creating capital and destroying capital, you should really avoid opining on economics altogether.

(Via the Corner.)

Fox News reports:

It may seem a cruel irony that the one U.S. automaker that took no bailout money is now at greater risk of a national strike as it continues labor negotiations with union leaders.

Based upon initial tallies last week, rank and file Ford United Auto Worker members were leaning overwhelmingly toward a national strike authorization against their employer. With the current national labor contracts set to expire September 14 at General Motors, Chrysler and Ford, local union representatives at Ford were reporting 97 percent of their membership was voting to authorize a strike, if necessary. . .

Ford is the only one of the Big Three domestic automakers where, legally, workers can strike. Both GM and Chrysler and their union workers agreed in accepting the federal government’s auto bailout in 2009 to resolve contract issues through binding arbitration.

Cruel irony, perhaps, but this is also completely predictable. Ford’s labor is controlled by the UAW, which now owns Ford’s competition, GM and Chrysler. The UAW has every incentive to avoid labor strife at GM and Chrysler (hence the binding arbitration agreement) and to promote labor strife at Ford.

Democrats don’t want anything so pedestrian as the free market to decide the allocation of resources, they want the government to “invest in the future”. But how well does the government do in picking the companies of the future?

President Obama faces political catastrophe in the form of Solyndra — a San Francisco Bay area solar company that he touted as a gleaming example of green technology. It has announced it will declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy. More than 1,100 people will lose their jobs. . .

During a visit to the Fremont facility in spring of 2010, the President said the factory “is just a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world, the best technology in the world, and most importantly the best workers in the world. “

That “testament to American ingenuity and dynamism” went belly-up after spending $527 million of $535 million in federal loan guarantees.

Moreover, a lot of people were skeptical of Solyndra all along:

While Energy Department officials steadfastly vouched for Solyndra — even after an earlier round of layoffs raised eyebrows — other federal agencies and industry analysts for months questioned the viability of the company. Peter Lynch, a longtime solar industry analyst, told ABC News the company’s fate should have been obvious from the start.

“Here’s the bottom line,” Lynch said. “It costs them $6 to make a unit. They’re selling it for $3. In order to be competitive today, they have to sell it for between $1.5 and $2. That is not a viable business plan.”

Worse still, the Obama administration rushed to “invest” in Solyndra without even doing due diligence:

Other flags have been raised about how the Energy Department pushed the deal forward. The Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News and ABC disclosed that Energy Department officials announced the support for Solyndra even before final marketing and legal reviews were in. To government auditors, that move raised questions about just how fully the department vetted the deal — and assessed its risk to taxpayers — before signing off.

Why so eager? Perhaps it wasn’t mere incompetence: One of the biggest stakeholders in Solyndra was George Kaiser, a major fundraiser for President Obama, and House investigators say they have uncovered evidence that the White House involved itself in the process.

(Via Instapundit, and Patterico.)

POSTSCRIPT: Solyndra is being called Obama’s Enron, but that’s not really fair. President Bush’s connection to Enron was much more tenuous than Obama’s connection to Solyndra.

UPDATE: Joe Biden: “One role of government is to go where venture capital won’t.” Venture capitalists wouldn’t have sunk half a billion dollars in Solyndra without a viable business plan, that’s for sure.

Jimmy Hoffa, the president of the Teamsters, opening for President Obama’s at Obama’s Labor Day rally:

Let’s take these son of a bitches out!

Oh, but let’s be fair about the context:

We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war. The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what? They’ve got a war, they got a war with us and there’s only going to be one winner. It’s going to be the workers of Michigan, and America. We’re going to win that war . . .

President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. . . Let’s take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.

If this were a Republican, he would surely be accused of inciting violence. (And from a union leader, that’s no idle threat.) At the least, it’s some of that intemperate, martial language that the left says we shouldn’t be using.

And we’re not. You can’t find any major political figures on the right saying this sort of thing. (If you could, the left wouldn’t need to make it up.) But they are. And they’re doing it from the president’s podium.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: When Obama came on, he listed Hoffa among a bunch of other union presidents and said “we are proud of them.” I wonder if anyone in the White House press corps will ask about this.

UPDATE: Jake Tapper asked chief White House press flack Jay Carney and grilled him when he tried to defect the subject. Carney refused to condemn the remark, saying no one (but Carney) spoke for the president. Tapper ultimately backed Carney into the corner, resulting in this priceless exchange:

TAPPER: The precedent you are setting right now for the 2012 election is, the Republican candidates are the ones that we need to pay attention to; and those who introduce them at rallies, their surrogates, we don’t need to pay attention to anything they say.

CARNEY: I think I’ve said what I can say.

TAPPER: Is that the standard now?

CARNEY: You can report it as you like. [Crosstalk]

TAPPER: I’d rather not have to do this Washington kabuki every time something happens, but if that’s the standard?

CARNEY: The standard is, we should focus on the actions we can take to grow the economy and create jobs.

So it’s official. Policy is what matters, and all that civility stuff was just so much demagoguery. Sure, we knew that all along, but it’s good to hear the White House say it explicitly.

UPDATE: The White House communications director:

What everyone should do is make their best judgment of how they be civil.

Oh, so the White House’s position is it’s not appropriate to criticize the speech of others? That position won’t last long.

UPDATE: An amusing counterpoint: Although the White House says that everything from the podium is the speaker’s alone and has nothing to do with the president, they actually vet the opening prayers at the president’s events. (Via Patterico.)

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Much of the media has been running with the claim that a president’s request to speak to Congress has never been rejected until this week. Various Capitol Hill “historians” have been quoted saying that House Speaker John Boehner took unprecedented action when he cited the difficulty of hosting President Obama on the president’s requested date of Sept. 7. We’re not so sure. . .

The June 24, 1986, edition of The Wall Street Journal featured a story headlined, “President’s Bid to Address the House On Nicaragua Is Rejected by Speaker.” That’s right, no quibbling over the date and time, just a flat-out rejection. In that case, President Ronald Reagan wanted to address the House before its critical vote on funding for the anti-communist “Contra” rebels in Nicaragua.

(Via Hot Air.) (Previous post.)

The economy created zero net jobs last month. The Secretary of Labor’s response:

I do feel like we’re going in the right direction.

I must confess, I am amused by the whole jobs-speech-scheduled-to-preempt-the-debate affair. Of all the liberals trying to get themselves worked up over Boehner’s request to move the date one-day, I’ve not seen any that even pretend to believe the White House’s story that the date was a coincidence. Instead, they bellyache about how “unprecedented” it is for the Speaker of the House not to grant a presidential request for a join session.

Is it unprecedented? I wouldn’t be surprised. (UPDATE: Actually, it’s not unprecedented.) But there’s a lot about this that is unprecedented. It’s unprecedented, as far as I know, for the president to use the scheduling of joint session of Congress in such a transparently petty way. And, it’s unprecedented, or nearly so, for the president to announce such a session without clearing it with the speaker first.

ASIDE: The White House initially claimed that it did clear the date with the speaker, but the Speaker’s office denied that, and the White House later backtracked:

“Cleared” officially downgraded to “consulted.” So someone at WH anonymously passed along inaccurate information to several journos. Nice.

(Via Hot Air.)

So I like the way Boehner handled this. Faced with a White House absurdly claiming that the debate preemption was just a coincidence and this really, really was the best possible date, Boehner countered in like fashion. In asking the White House to postpone for a day, he made a similarly absurd claim, that it had nothing to do with the debate and he really, really just couldn’t fit it onto the schedule.

The bottom line here is the White House was holding a losing hand. The president can’t address the Congress without the speaker’s permission, so they were playing a dangerous game by trying to put the speaker on the spot. Apparently they felt that the speaker wouldn’t want to look bad by refusing the president’s request, no matter how unreasonable, but they failed to consider how bad the president looked by making the unreasonable request in the first place. They didn’t have the upper hand in the perception game. Plus, the president has much more to lose by looking bad than the speaker does.

POSTSCRIPT: I was going to add that presidential addresses to joint sessions of Congress, apart from the State of the Union, are generally reserved for weighty matters of state such as war, not for political speeches like President Obama calling for more stimulus or more regulation or whatever other nonsense he’s come up with.

But it turns out that isn’t actually true. If you go through the list, there are several examples of non-SOTU political addresses, mostly by Democrats by also occasionally by Republicans. Neither Bush gave any, but by my reckoning, the other presidents going back to Kennedy gave one apiece. Before 1913 they were unheard of, but Woodrow Wilson gave them incessantly. Harding gave several, but then the tradition was thankfully broken by Coolidge. Roosevelt naturally revived it, giving many such addresses, and the tradition was continued by Truman before Eisenhower broke it again.

Still, I wish it were true, and it speaks well of Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Bush, and Bush that they abstained from the practice. One State of the Union per year is quite enough.

UPDATE: My, now this is interesting.