It turns out that the police force in the little town of Gauley Bridge issues more speeding tickets each year than any other municipality in the state of West Virginia. To understand just how absurd that is, you need to look at population figures. Gauley Bridge has less than 800 residents, the city of Charleston has 50,000 – and yet Gauley Bridge issues more speeding tickets than Charleston? Yup. More than Charleston, more than Huntington, more than Beckley. In fact, the little town of Gauley Bridge, with maybe four miles of paved road in the whole place, issues more speeding tickets than any single county in the state.

The bottom line here is that wind energy production just isn’t very efficient yet, and we really need these massive deployments to figure out how to make it work. Besides, they’re beautiful and harmless – unless of course, you’re a NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) weasel and The View is all you give a damn about. I’m not even saying that’s a bad position to take. If you’re one of those people who worship at the altar of homeowner value, then I’m sure it’s a reasonable opinion. I’m just saying that trying to conceal your real agenda by pretending to care about the environment is obvious, fraudulent, and pathetic.

In fact, I thought he delivered a great speech, and I was onboard with him for almost all of it. Unfortunately, when he got to the part about renewing the Assault Weapons Ban, the Calderón Express pretty much derailed for me.

You want to know what I hate more than just about anything? One thing that just really pisses me off? I hate it when lies get repeated so often and so stridently that everyone starts believing they’re the truth. When the lie, over time, becomes the truth. Why does it piss me off so much? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s because it makes me wonder just how much of the historical stuff that we take for granted is just another damned lie.

This is America we’re talking about here. We cheat on our taxes. We drink before we turn 21. We buy radar detectors so we can ignore speed limits. We smoke more pot (per capita) than any other nation on Earth. We download music and movies we didn’t pay for. We glorify criminals in our music and films, and we make legends out of the ones who pulled it off. I would say that thumbing our collective nose at authority, and gleefully doing anything we think we can get away with, is an American principle as fundamental as free speech and the right to privacy.

But the second some poor bastard (who is just a little too swarthy) hops a fence somewhere, we all turn into Elliott Ness.

See, there’s an entire industry out there that is built on stoking your outrage. They need you to be outraged. They need you to be furious. They need these things because that way you will buy their books, and watch their TV shows, and listen to their radio programs. You are being played like a fiddle, and the folks who are playing you are whistling the tune all the way to the bank. They are making a killing, and the hotter they can make you, the more they make.

Look, I despise mountaintop removal as much as anybody, and speaking as someone who has spent the last 15 years trying to figure out a way to go back home, it’s an issue I’ve paid close attention to. After all, if the whole place looks like the surface of the moon by the time I get around to retiring and can actually move back there, I’m going to be pretty disappointed.

The crack ABC News team, in conjunction with some official sounding organization, set up some scenarios. They put safety masks on a bunch of students, gave one of the students a paintball gun, and put them all in a room that looked like a college lecture hall. Then they had a simulated whackjob with a paintball gun of his own crash through the door and start shooting people.

Here’s the deal: Medical care just plain costs too much, and you’re never going to fix that until you make it cost less. In order to reduce the money going into the health care system, we’re going to have to reduce the amount of money coming out.