The Wonk Room

The USAF’s F-22 fighter has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, the F-15, confidential Pentagon test results show.

President Obama is due in Ghana today, “generating excitement in the west African nation and envy among its neighbors with many seeing his visit as sending a message to governments over their poor records on stability. President Obama says he chose Ghana partly because of the country’s commitment to democracy.”

An Iranian regime crackdown since the re-election of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a disputed vote four weeks ago “has failed to keep supporters of his defeated challenger off the streets of Tehran.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told E&E News he plans “to send a final comprehensive energy and climate change bill to President Obama’s desk before U.N. climate negotiations conclude this December in Copenhagen, Denmark,” while Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) argues there’s “not any way in the world” that it will pass the Senate.

At the G8 Summit, U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern told reporters “the status quo is not a sustainable thing,” building a low-carbon economy is “the right economic move to make,” because the “high carbon path is simply untenable.”

“Rising seas, a rapid weakening of the Indian monsoon and spiraling costs of adapting to a warmer, drier world are just some of the looming risks from rapid climate change,” a report for the Australian government says.

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate approved a $42.9 billion Homeland Security appropriations bill which focused on beefing up the border and enforcing immigration laws.

As California’s lawmakers struggle to fix their $26.3 billion budget deficit, the state is looking at cutting the benefits of undocumented immigrants and their U.S. citizen children.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted to appropriate $200 million for Secure Communities, an immigration enforcement program that checks the fingerprints of all arrested individuals against immigration databases before they are even determined to be guilty of a crime.

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan “scolded the heads of the country’s largest banks,” telling them to pick up the pace of mortgage modifications under the Making Home Affordable program. “We believe there is a general need for servicers to devote substantially more resources to this program for it to fully succeed,” they said.

AIG is asking the Obama administration’s compensation czar “whether it should pay previously agreed-to retention bonuses, including about $235 million pending for employees at the insurer’s controversial financial products unit.”

Are speculators driving up commodity prices? George Korniotis at the Federal Reserve says no.