Time again for a link dump. Too many shortcuts on my desktop!

The 68 million acres of leased but inactive federal land have the potential to produce an additional 4.8 million barrels of oil and 44.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day. This would nearly double total U.S. oil production, and increase natural gas production by 75 percent. It would also cut U.S. oil imports by more than one-third, reducing America’s dependency on foreign oil.

So they have plenty of leases — on public lands — under which there are plenty of barrels of oil, but none of those are apparently good enough for the oil industry or our President, because we just have to lift the restrictions on offshore drilling.

Governor Perry, Mr. Transparency in Government himself, isn’t so transparent when it comes to letting news organizations know when and where he will be publicly appearing, because someone might use that information to “cause him harm.” Well, how about he just stops making public appearances so we don’t have to look at or listen to him anymore. That would suit me just fine.

Richard Bryan Smith is suing his neighbors, saying they keep spreading a false accusation that he’s a registered sex offender.

Smith shares a name and a birth date with another Richard Bryan Smith, who has served time for sex offenses against a child. Both Smiths are white men, 41, with thin features who like to wear their hair long, and both lived for a time in Southern California.

Which are the only similarities and hasn’t stopped some of his neighbors from being royal class asses.

If you have a problem with school officials strip searching 13-year-olds for Advil – or if you care about the government’s standards for informant use and invasive searches – you can take relief in yesterday’s ruling by a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled 6-5 that students cannot be strip-searched based on the uncorroborated word of another student who is facing disciplinary punishment.

Really? Strip searching 13 year old girls looking for horrible, nasty Advil? REALLY?

During this past week: McCain called the most important entitlement program in the U.S. a disgrace, his top economic adviser called the American people whiners, McCain released an economic plan that no one thought was serious, he flip flopped on Iraq, joked about the deaths of Iranian citizens, and denied making comments that he clearly made — TWICE. All this and it is not even Friday! Yet watching and reading the mainstream press you would think McCain was having a pretty decent political week, I mean at least Jesse Jackson didn’t say anything about him.

Read the details here. It’s worth reading, even if it is at The Huffington Post.

Aaah … nice empty desktop.