Stephen Colbert (a comedian!) testifies (satirically!) under oath before the US congressional subcommittee hearing, on the plight of migrant farm workers and the immigration reform. Via The Hill: “I don’t want a tomato picked by a Mexican, I want it picked by an American,” Colbert said, appearing to parrot statements made in the past by Republicans. But then he continued, “And sliced by a Guatemalan and served by a Venezuelan, in a spa, where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian.”

Is anyone else shocked by this? …anyone? I swear my buddy Bill Tucker and all the bloggers writing this up is pulling my leg. But it looks like a real C-SPAN coverage…

RT @alexlobov on twitter, who is perpetually tuned in to the broad scope of news around the world, says: “Haha. No it’s definitely cspan. Hell, if Elmo can testify in character, why not Colbert? ;-)”

The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World posits just one of the major reasons why smart immigration policy is needed:

…the competition for academic talent has gone global, with universities all over the world chasing the brightest students. Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge are now competing with the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Indian Institutes of Technology, and even the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, among others…

The international competition for the brightest minds illuminates a major problem with our immigration system: it is sometimes extraordinarily difficult for people we want to attract to work here to get visas. Whether it is a farmer who wants fruit pickers, an engineering firm that wants an engineer, or students who have graduated from U.S. universities with specialized skills, it often takes years to secure the right visa.

By making it difficult for these brilliant students to stay in America, Congress is dissipating the value America receives from taxpayers’ investments in research. For, the fact is that a significant fraction of graduate students in the United States are assisted financially with funds that come from the federal government, especially in science, technology, and engineering.

In 2007, the most recent data available, the federal government spent more than $55 billion on science and engineering research at American universities and research institutions. This funding helps finance PhD programs, which are heavily populated with foreign students.

Almost $29 billion of this research spending is health related. Other funders include the Defense Department, $6.5 billion, and the Department of Energy, $6 billion.

Our universities rely on graduate students for research assistance and technical expertise. Most research does not require security clearances, and little if any research is restricted to American students.

American universities are among the world’s leading research institutions, attracting the top minds, not only those from America but also from many other countries. National Science Foundation data show that 149,233 foreign graduate students studied science and engineering in American universities in 2007, up from the previous peak of 147,464 in 2003. As Wildavsky reports, other countries are trying to catch up.

The number and percentage of PhDs in science and engineering awarded to Americans and permanent residents have declined dramatically over the past decade. Fewer Americans, and more foreigners, are being awarded PhDs in scientific and engineering fields, even as the total number of new doctorates has increased.

In computer science, and engineering, more than half of PhDs are awarded to foreigners. In 1998, 59% of PhDs in physics were awarded to Americans. In 2008, the latest data available, it had fallen to 46%. In 1998, 57% of PhDs in computer sciences went to Americans – in 2008, this had declined to 36%. In 1998, 66% of chemistry PhDs went to Americans, compared to 55% in 2008.

America attracts the cream of international students, trains them at great expense to American taxpayers, and then asks many of them them to leave.

For one, I’m disappointed with the administration’s slow response to this crisis. I’m surprised that Obama issued a statement last Friday still supporting the expansion of offshore oil and gas production in US waters, but I agree. I’m not surprised there was not a chorus of Democrats jumping on this statement.

Here’s a nice technical blow-by-blow of the Deepwater Horizon explosion by one of the workers on the rig:

Welcome to the World of Deep-water Risk

As I’ve said before, this accident is Mother Nature’s wake-up call to everyone. Deep-water drilling is a high-stakes game. It’s not exactly a “casino,” in that there’s a heck of a lot of settled science, engineering and technology involved.  But we’re sure finding out the hard way what all the risks are. And it’s becoming more and more clear how the totality of risk is a moving target. There’s geologic risk, technical risk, engineering risk, environmental risk, capital risk and market risk.

With each deep well, these risks all come together over one very tiny spot at the bottom of the ocean. So for all the oil that’s out there under deep water — and it’s a lot — the long-term calculus of risk and return is difficult to quantify.

This is big news all through the offshore industry. There are HUGE environmental issues, and certainly big political repercussions.

It’s the biggest ecological catastrophe for the US, with far-reaching ramifications across the entire economy and politics. Energy sustainability is now more than ever a hot-button political topic, and a highly emotional one especially since knowledge of the energy sector is so minimal and greenwashed. Through various energy, social and market policies over the past fifty years the US has built up every aspect of the national infrastructure around oil and solidified our dependence on it. Projections for the most viable alternatives are decades away. And now we’re watching while the rest of the world races each other to implement clean energy industries while we’re mired in bureaucracy and catering to a fickle electorate’s every caprice. Hope this tipping point for energy policy isn’t squandered yet again.

Here’s a GREAT letter to Congress by @nelderini on what our energy policy should aim for, within a global context and in light of our current energy infrastructure. Here’s an excerpt but the entire piece is not long so you should read it:

It’s time to come up with a real plan, an honest plan, to rebuild America under a new energy paradigm. One with serious, achievable 30-year and 50-year milestones that will slash our need for fossil fuels.

A plan based on facts and science, not political expediency. One that will create true, long-term wealth, prosperity, resiliency, and self-sufficiency.

We need a Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security to prepare the country for the decline of oil, not sweet lies from the EIA which completely ignore it. As Lester Brown observed, “only Sweden and Iceland actually have anything that remotely resembles a plan to effectively cope with a shrinking supply of oil.”

We want to stop spending half a trillion dollars a year for imported oil, and develop a defense strategy for the day when our imports dry up.

We need stable, simple feed-in tariffs, which have been proven successes in Germany, Japan and Spain…not complex, corruptible, ineffectual policies like cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax. And we need them for 30 years, not one.

We want solar on every rooftop, a wind turbine in every field and a micro-hydro turbine in every running stream, wherever viable resources exist. Distributed generation is resilient, and brings value to every community. Along with it, we need distributed power storage, and a smart grid with micro-islanding so we can fall back on our own resources if the grid goes down.

We want a plan to manage our resources for the long term health of our society, like Norway and Saudi Arabia have. Instead of planning to use our remaining oil and gas so we can drive in inefficient cars more cheaply, we should be planning to convert it into the renewables and efficiency gains we’ll need in the future.

We want a defensive strategy for our grid with hardening against cyber-attacks.

We need to reverse the long process of globalization and bring manufacturing back home. Instead of a society now dependent on complex, world-spanning, highly optimized supply chains, we need local resiliency, redundancy, and diversity in all the essential sectors: energy, water, food, and security.

Finally, we need energy education at all levels — from the street to the universities, from business to government employees.

I usually do this by reading opposing views on a topic. But headlines are increasingly hijacked by rabid partisan politics and monied interests (especially given the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning corporate spending limits). The news is like an entertainment industry anymore (eg talk show radio). It’s insidiously not limited to their viewership, diverting the national attention and precious energy away from constructive dialogue, which the country so badly needs.

Being outside the country probably makes it easier to find rationale reasoned scholarship; I’m amazed at the poor quality of dialogue on the mainstream media outlets when I was in the US for six weeks at the end of last year, not to mention the numerous paid infomercials dominating the airwaves. I’m so grateful to twitter and the blogosphere for triangulating the news these days.

One thing I find interesting is the purge among the GOP of many of its bright minds who refuse to be blinded by rigid ideological purity. This religion of “American exceptionalism” needs dialogue, but that seems not forthcoming. Dissent is un-American according to the GOP. With such appalling characters in the public eye (eg Palin), I wonder why there aren’t any conservative comedians?

So these days the following moderate conservatives are on my reading list, many of whom I suppose have been rejected by their party: Andrew Sullivan, Clive Crook, David Frum, Julian Sanchez, Megan McArdle, David Brooks, Bruce Bartlett, Tyler Cowen. Who else should I read that isn’t frothing at the mouth resentful, angry-at-the-world, raving fanatics?

Quoted from Silicon Alley Insider, the chart above by Calculated Risk…

… shows the decline in jobs as a percentage of the work force at the peak.

To date in this recession, we’ve lost more than 8 million jobs.  The decline as a percentage of the workforce is the worst since the Great Depression, matching the sharp but short drop in 1948, as the war machine wound down.

Equally important, the duration of these job losses, as well as the lack of a sharp recovery (at least so far), suggests that the problem will be with us for a long while.  We’re now 24 months into this decline, and we’re still at the bottom.  By this point in most previous recessions, we had already recovered all of the lost jobs.

Wow.