Everything Michele Bachmann knows about energy policy, she has apparently learned in the past month. And the lessons appear to have been a little too cursory. I was listening to  Bachmann on MPR just now in the car as she prated about her  new drill-here, drill-everywhere energy plan. I didn’t catch the whole thing, but I did hear Bachmann allude to our domestic natural gas reserves as so many millions or billions of "cubic square feet" of the stuff–not once, but twice. As anyone who has ever comparison-shopped for a tank of propane for the grill knows, the customary metric for volume of natural gas is cubic feet.

As rudimentary mistakes go, it’s a little like failing to understand that the "bbl" notation in oil reserve estimates stands for "barrels," not "bubbles."