Pennsylvania’s township officials are taking aim at unfunded mandates, which they say waste millions in tax dollars every year.

Close to 4,000 local leaders attended the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors’ 90^th Annual Educational Conference last week in Hershey, where they launched a campaign to eliminate the mandates that Harrisburg and Washington pass on to local governments without accompanying dollars.

Township officials wore green stickers, which featured a rifle’s crosshairs over the words “Unfunded Mandates” throughout the conference.

In particular, PSATS members have set their sights on the state’s outdated legal advertising requirements — studies say reforming these would save municipalities $23 million a year — and the prevailing wage, which can add up to 30 percent to public project costs.

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From the Derrick:

North Dakota oil drillers pumped 17.8 million barrels in March, with a daily average of 575,490 barrels, Assistant State Mineral Resources Director Bruce Hicks. That compares to 17.5 million in Alaska, though still far behind Texas.

The state’s oil patch is drilling at record levels and shows little sign of slowing down. The 152.9 million barrels of crude oil produced in 2011 set a record, surpassing the previous year’s mark by nearly 40 million barrels, according to the state Industrial Commission. The number of wells in the state jumped from 6,726 in February to a record 6,921 in March, Hicks said.

North Dakota owes its rapid rise from No. 9 just six years to improved horizontal drilling techniques in the rich Bakken shale and Three Forks formations in the western part of the state.

“No. 2, who would have thought?” said Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, which represents several hundred companies working in the state’s oil patch.

“In 1999, we had zero rigs working and people left this industry for dead in North Dakota. Technology, geology, price and the business climate changed that.”

Ness and Hicks said the achievement is bittersweet, as North Dakota continues to surpass states that have seen a decrease in oil production, including California and Louisiana.

“It’s unfortunate the way we overtook them,” Hicks said. “We need to get domestic production up so we can wean ourselves from foreign oil.”

North Dakota’s oil boom also has pushed the state’s population to record levels and its unemployment rate the lowest in the nation.

“This is more than oil — it’s opportunity,” Ness said. “We want these other states moving in the right direction, too. This nation needs to look at energy development. Federal regulatory policies have an impact.”

Alaska, which pumped 17.5 million barrels in March, has seen its oil production slip by about 15 million barrels a year since 2008, Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation statistician Steve McMains said. The state expects to tally fewer than 200 million barrels this year. Alaska produced a record 738.5 million barrels in 1988.

North Dakota crude was fetching about $93.30 a barrel on Tuesday, about $3 less than one year ago. Records show 210 rigs were drilling on Tuesday in the state.

To shake Texas from the top spot, North Dakota would have to nearly double its production. The most recent production numbers from Texas show it produced 1.1 million barrels daily in February and 32.9 million barrels for the whole month. And Texas’ oil production has increased more than 8.2 million barrels from February 2011 to February 2012, records show.

“It’s going to be tough to catch someone who also is inclining,” Hicks said. “There are people out there who say we (North Dakota) could hit a million barrels a day, but it’s way too early to say.”

Natural gas, a byproduct of oil production in North Dakota, also was pegged at a record 620.8 million cubic feet in March — but about a third of it is being flared because the state lacks collecting systems and pipelines needed to move it to market. Less than 1 percent of natural gas is flared from oil fields nationwide, according to the Energy Information Administration in Washington, D.C.

Officials say about $3 billion in infrastructure improvements are planned in the state to process natural gas and move it to market.

Lloyd Marcus:  Surprisingly, many on our side — Republicans and conservatives — are still clueless about the Tea Party or have a negative view of it.  They have fallen prey to the mainstream media’s rhetoric that we are a bunch of anti-government extremists with a few redneck racists thrown in for good measure.

But folks, this is not an accurate description of the Tea Party.  Not by a long shot.

Ten years ago, at a social event, a politician told me he ran for office as a Republican and lost.  Without skipping a beat, he said he was running again as a Democrat because they promised him better financial support.  I thought, how is this possible?  How can someone reverse their values to further their political career?  Man, was I naive.

Though referring to Republicans, my buddy Joe eloquently nailed the problem in politics today: “As long as this is a party of men who seek power, rather than fight for principles seared into their souls, then the Republican Party stands for nothing other than being the opposing party to the Democrats.”

“Principles seared into their souls.”  Such are the kind of candidates we in the Tea Party are seeking and rallying around: character-driven candidates who say what they mean and mean what they say.  It is truly a sad commentary on the decline of our culture when such expectations are deemed fanatical.  Good Lord, how far we have fallen.

Two conservative lawmakers are teaming up to urge appropriation leaders in the House and Senate to defund the Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB), which is asking for $445 million advance for FY 2015.

This week, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) prepared letters for the heads of the appropriation committees, saying defunding the entity “should be one of the easiest decisions to make,” while searching for cuts in a government $15 trillion in debt.

“CPB’s requested appropriation represents no reduction from its prior year appropriation level,” DeMint and Lamborn wrote. “While so many Americans are making sacrifices around the country to make ends meet, CPB appears unwilling to do the same.”

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President Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget proposal would double the interest rate on federally backed student loans from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent–eight months after the November presidential election.

The White House fiscal year 2013 plan calls for maintaining the current 3.4 percent interest rate for federally guaranteed student loans, but only through July 1, 2013, at which point it would automatically increase to 6.8 percent. Neither the president’s plan nor the Democrats’ legislation would extend the low rate beyond another year.

The president’s budget calls for “Suspending an Increase in Student Loan Interest Rates.” (See page 97).

“Under current law, interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans are slated to rise this summer [July 1] from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent,” reads the Obama budget. “At a time when the economy is still recovering and market interest rates remain low, it makes no sense to double rates on student loans. The Budget suspends the scheduled increase for the coming year, so that rates will remain at 3.4 percent.”

The Senate bill favored by Democrats states, “in the matter preceding clause (i), by striking ‘and before July 1, 2012,’ and inserting `and before July 1, 2013.’”

The Republican alternative legislation would also extend the low rate for only another year.

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Tens of thousands of U.N. officials, government representatives and activists will head back to Rio de Janeiro this summer in an attempt to advance the “sustainability” cause.

In what the world body’s Division for Sustainable Development says will be the biggest conference ever organized by the U.N., some 135 heads of state and government (or their deputies) have committed to attend the June 20-22 Conference on Sustainable Development, dubbed “Rio+20.”

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Gov­er­nor Cor­bett has made it clear he’s going to push gov­ern­ments to con­vert to nat­ural gas-powered vehi­cles over the next few years. Speak­ing to Philadelphia’s WPHT-AM last week, Cor­bett pointed out declin­ing nat­ural gas prices have led to a slow-down in drilling at Penn­syl­va­nia sites. He said the state gov­ern­ment can play a role in bring­ing the price back up, telling host Dom Gior­dano, “One of the areas where we’re look­ing now, is how do we help peo­ple increase the demand?”

In addi­tion to build­ing more pipelines to trans­port the gas, Cor­bett said he wants the state to “start con­vert­ing the fleets of cars…to nat­ural gas vehi­cles. …So that [drillers] have a mar­ket so they can go to Detroit to get Detroit to start build­ing the vehicles.”

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Former Sen. Arlen Specter often changed his ideological persona during his lengthy career, shifting left, then right, then left again as political exigencies required. But one thing that never changed was his remarkable ability to annoy on a bipartisan basis.

And that peculiar candor abounds, for better and for worse, in the former Pennsylvania Senator’s autobiography, “Life Among the Cannibals: A Political Career, a Tea Party Uprising, and the End of Governing as We Know It,” which laments what Specter considers to be the death of the political center and points fingers at his former GOP colleagues and tea party activists for the partisan divide now gripping Congress.

Specter — a GOP centrist who abandoned his party in 2009 when it became clear his chances of winning a Republican primary for his long-held Senate seat were doomed — also calls out the “silent moderate majority” in Congress. This group, according to Specter, “sits on its hands,” and its members cast votes along party lines merely to ensure their own re-election.

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The lingering headline on the front pages this week is that JP Morgan Chase suffered a massive loss on a hedging strategy, costing them $2 billion. That’s no small mistake, and it’s an example of how bad decisions in the free market can cost big money. But just because mistakes have consequences doesn’t mean that the mighty hand of government needs to step in to save us from ourselves. However, that’s what some on the left are now calling for.

The news of this blunder hit last week when JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon revealed that the bank took a $2 billion loss over the past six weeks in a strategy intended to hedge against risks to the bank’s assets that could come from market volatility caused by the Euro crisis. On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Dimon admitted, “In hindsight, we took far too much risk. The strategy we had was badly vetted. It was badly monitored. It should never have happened.”

The company is certainly paying the price in losses, as are those responsible for the bad decision making. The Los Angeles Times reports that the bank’s stock fell 12% since it disclosed the loss last week, the executive who oversaw the department responsible for the loss retired on Monday, and JP Morgan’s reputation as an extremely well managed bank has been damaged.

But does the flawed strategy and the resulting loss mean that Washington should step in with more regulation of Wall Street? Yesterday, White House press secretary Jay Carney used the news of JP Morgan’s loss to call for more regulations, remarking, “The president fought very hard against Republicans and Wall Street lobbyists to get Wall Street reform passed . . . I think that this event merely reinforces why the President was right to take on this fight and why we still need to make sure it’s implemented.”

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Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) accused President Obama of seriously misleading the American public on deficit reduction.

Johnson said Obama has repeatedly made unrealistic promises on how much of the deficit he could reasonably cut.

“In 2009, largely because of the very partisan stimulus package the president passed, the deficit wasn’t $1.2 trillion, it was $1.4 trillion. That was followed in 2010 by $1.29 trillion and then in fiscal year 2011 1.3 trillion, and the latest [Congressional Budget Office] estimate for our deficit for this year will be 1.25 trillion — almost $1.3 trillion,” Johnson said Monday.

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