The White House claims to have abandoned the House’s surtax on people making over $1 million a year, but that turns out not to be true. Well, technically it’s true, because the surtax now applies to people making over $200 thousand a year.
The provision is buried three clicks deep in the president’s health care proposal. On “high-income” households, it would impose a new 0.9 percent tax on all income, plus an additional 2.9 percent on “unearned” income. Furthermore, there’s a big marriage penalty. The threshold is $200 thousand for singles, and just $250 thousand for couples filing jointly. So if both spouses work, the threshold is actually $125 thousand per spouse.
Don’t be consoled if you make under $200 thousand. There’s no indication that the high-income threshold will be indexed for inflation, so it will bite everyone eventually. Yes, there’s a good chance that Congress with fix it every year as it does with the AMT, but that means that any deficit predictions for this proposal are worthless.
Last night, the House voted to pass the execrable Hawaiian racial sovereignty act (a.k.a. the Akaka bill). Worse, Democrats voted 225-18 to reject the Flake amendment to the bill. What did the Flake amendment say?
The Flake amendment would’ve clarified that nothing in the Akaka bill could be interpreted to exempt the Native Hawaiian Governmental Authority from complying with the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Flake amendment failed 177–233 (Democrats voted 18 for 225 against; Republicans voted 159 [to] 8 [for]).
The salient portion of the Fourteenth Amendment as pertains to the Akaka bill is as follows: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That’s right, the Democrats are on record supporting race-based government and opposing equal protection of law. Er, once again. After 144 years, the 14th amendment gained only 18 Democratic votes.
From John Yoo’s op-ed today, a stark reminder of the cost of politics in warfighting:
In 2005, a Navy Seal team dropped into Afghanistan encountered goat herders who clearly intended to inform the Taliban of their whereabouts. The team leader ordered them released, against his better military judgment, because of his worries about the media and political attacks that would follow.
In less than an hour, more than 80 Taliban fighters attacked and killed all but one member of the Seal team and 16 Americans on a helicopter rescue mission. If a president cannot, or will not, protect the men and women who fight our nation’s wars, they will follow the same risk-averse attitudes that invited the 9/11 attacks in the first place.
President Obama wants to institute price controls on health insurance premiums. This is the stupidest idea yet, in a long line of very stupid ideas. Price caps create shortages. (This is taught literally on the first day of Econ 101.) If you cap health insurance premiums, people will lose their insurance.
Of course, some are suggesting that that is the precisely the intent: to force people out of private plans and into the government plan.
It persistently strikes me as odd when politicians support tax increases even when they generate no revenue. For example, during the presidential campaign, Obama said he supported increased capital gains taxes even if they lost money (!), “for purposes of fairness.” He actually thinks it’s “fair” for the government to spend money to hurt investors.
Another example is Rhode Island’s “Amazon tax” (a sales tax on electronic retailers), which has generated no revenue, and actually costs the state income tax money. Nevertheless:
Though many in the local tech community are frustrated, House Finance Committee Chairman Steven M. Costantino, D-Providence, said there was no effort under way to repeal the “Amazon tax,” which he cast as a matter of fairness.
There’s that word again. Again, it’s “fair” for the government to lose money, as long as it can hurt somebody!
Now California is looking to go down the same path as Rhode Island. States cannot constitutionally collect sales taxes from companies without a presence in that state, so they construe Amazon’s affiliate program as a presence in the state. (Whether or not this satisfies the constitutional requirement is iffy, as it would require an affiliate to be deemed a “substantial nexus” with the state.) Amazon then closes the affiliate program in the state. Everyone loses. Hooray for “fairness”!
An analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that an influential study on which President Obama’s health care plans are based is flawed:
For much of the past year, President Obama lavished praise on a few select hospitals like the Mayo Clinic for delivering high-quality care at low costs, but a pointed analysis published Wednesday in an influential medical journal suggests that the president’s praise may be unwarranted.
Mr. Obama received his information about the hospitals from a widely cited analysis called the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, produced by the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. An article in The New Yorker magazine last year written by Dr. Atul Gawande that used the Dartmouth Atlas as its organizing principle became required reading in the White House last year.
But an analysis written in The New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Peter B. Bach, a physician and epidemiologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, suggests that much of the Dartmouth Atlas is flawed and that it should not be used to compare the relative efficiency of hospitals.
The analysis identified more than one flaw in the Dartmouth study, but most important one is that the study looked only at dead people. It grades hospitals on their efficiency based on how much money they spent on people who died, without considering the possibility that fewer people might have died with better care:
Say Hospital A and Hospital B each has a group of patients with a fatal disease. Hospital A gives each patient a $1 pill and cures half of them; Hospital B provides no treatment. An Atlas analysis would conclude that Hospital B was more efficient, since it spent less per decedent. But all the patients die at Hospital B, whereas only half of the patients do at Hospital A, where the cost per life saved is a bargain at $2.
This underlines the fundamental problem with government-run health care everywhere it’s been tried: they save money by reducing the quality of care.
Last week, in a late Friday information dump (the traditional way to release information you don’t want people to pay attention to), the Obama administration released a memorandum from David Margolis. Margolis is an associate deputy attorney general who was tasked with reviewing the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility’s work investigating the so-called torture memos. (Margolis is a career lawyer who has had the job of reviewing OPR findings since the early in the Clinton administration.) The OPR’s draft reports and draft reports, which were leaked and widely splashed throughout the media, found that Yoo and Bybee engaged in professional misconduct and recommended that their findings be referred to the bar for disciplinary action.
Margolis’s 69-page memo absolutely shreds the OPR’s work. He finds numerous problem with the work, but perhaps this one is the most telling (p. 6):
In a departure from standard practice and without explanation, OPR in its initial two drafts analyzed the conduct of the attorneys without application of OPR’s own standard analytical framework. . . This departure was not insignificant. I have held my current position within the Department for nearly seventeen years. During that time, I have reviewed almost every OPR report of investigation. OPR developed its framework over a decade ago and to the best of my knowledge has applied it virtually without exception since that time.
Amazingly, the OPR admitted (p. 8) that it did not apply the framework “in an effort to facilitate public release of the report.” Margolis also notes (p. 8) that that the OPR’s use of the framework in its final report does not exonerate them. Indeed, he quotes approvingly Yoo’s response that by retrofitting the framework onto an existing finding, OPR engaged in exactly the sort of “ends-driven legal reasoning” that the OPR criticized in Yoo and Bybee’s work.
Apropos to that criticism, Margolis also rejects (p. 65) the OPR’s finding that Yoo deliberately tried “to accommodate the client”, which was central to the OPR’s finding of intentional misconduct on Yoo’s part.
This whole mess must be laid at the door of Attorney General Holder. It’s true that much of the OPR’s shoddy work was done during the Bush administration, but the OPR deliberately stalled its report in hopes that it would find a more receptive audience with the new administration (which, of course, it did). Consequently, on the last day of the Bush administration, Attorney General Mukasey sent a 14-page memo to the incoming administration noting significant problems with the OPR’s work. As Yoo now points out, it would have been easy for Holder to concur with the assessment of his predecessor, and doing so would have shown that DOJ was above politics. But Holder did the opposite, so he now owns the mess.
With the release of the Margolis memo, the books are now almost closed on the sorry mess. All that remains is to investigate the OPR’s own misconduct both in failing to observe proper procedure and — more importantly — in all the leaks. (Although it is possible that the leaks came not from the OPR but from Holder’s own office.) I’m sure that Holder will get right on that.
POSTSCRIPT: There’s a media failure angle to this story as well. The news reports I’ve seen or heard on this (e.g., in the Washington Post, and on NPR) omit any mention of the OPR’s misconduct. Instead they focus on the only aspect of Margolis’s memo not damaging to the Obama administration, which is his assessment that Yoo and Bybee “exercised poor judgement”. It’s barely true. Margolis did conclude that Yoo and Bybee should have foreseen that the torture memos would eventually be exposed to a broader audience, and so the memos should have contained more nuance than was necessary for the memos’ intended audience. That finding was in the penultimate paragraph of a 69-page report of which the first 67-1/2 pages were dedicated to the OPR’s shoddy work.
The long-rumored New York Times hit piece on NY governor David Patterson has finally appeared. The thrust of the piece is that Patterson is lazy. It seems pretty damning. On the other hand, the NYT has a history of dishonest hit pieces, and one could easily see how a story like this could be put together by cherry-picking isolated incidents, so the story needs to be taken with a grain of salt. (Still, the NYT usually uses its powers of distortion against Republicans, not Democrats.)
But there is one fact in the story that stands out:
Mr. Paterson, who is legally blind, has always relied on trusted aides, in part because his disability forces him to turn to others for assistance with tasks like briefing himself on policy issues (he does not read Braille) and navigating crowded rooms.
The governor of New York can’t read? I guess New Yorkers knew this already, but I’m amazed. With all due sympathy for his disability, it seems like a minimal qualification for the job.
How lost is the Obama administration when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program? Here’s a hint:
The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog also confirmed that Iran had indeed enriched uranium to nearly 20 percent, a claim made by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during revolutionary anniversary festivities last week but rebuffed by the White House.
“We do not believe they have the capability to enrich to the degree they say they are enriching,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said at last Thursday’s daily briefing.
But the IAEA report said that Iran had hit 19.8 percent enrichment on two days last week.
The news from Iran is bad enough, but the news from the White House is possibly worse. Are they really so clueless that they don’t even know as much as the freakin’ IAEA?
I’m worried that the White House is closing its eyes to the mounting evidence that the Iranian threat is serious and time-critical, because admitting that would mean admitting that President Obama’s strategy (which is predicated on the assumption that there’s always more time for talk) is wrong.
Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc. has drawn a fierce backlash from Capitol Hill and the White House by posting premium increases for some customers in its California Anthem Blue Cross plan. California officials say 700,000 households face increases averaging 25 percent overall and as high as 39 percent for some.
The company was forced to postpone the hikes while [Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen] Sebelius ordered an inquiry and other lawmakers publicly railed against the company. . . Sebelius suggested the increases were unwarranted and needed to be checked.
“While we don’t want companies to be insolvent … to suggest that this is entirely in line with even health care costs … these profits are wildly excessive, are way over anybody’s estimate,” Sebelius said Thursday.
In a letter last week to Anthem Blue Cross, Sebelius said the increases were “difficult to understand” given that WellPoint earned $2.7 billion in the last quarter of 2009.
If Sebelius had ever worked in the private sector, she might understand that WellPoint’s overall profit has no bearing on what the price of a particular policy should be. In a for-profit enterprise, each endeavor must pay for itself. A for-profit company doesn’t use its profits in one area to subsidize another area that is losing the company money. Yes, sometimes a company will subsidize an endeavor because they think it will be profitable in the future, or because it generates some non-pecuniary benefit like good PR, but that doesn’t change the overall point. Each endeavor must justify itself; businesses don’t allow one area to hemorrhage money just because another area is doing well.
It turns out that WellPoint made nearly all of its profit from a one-time transaction, and is actually losing money on individual health plans:
The bulk of its fourth-quarter profits, $2.2 billion, came from the sale of a business, and WellPoint told Sebelius that it actually suffered a loss in 2009 for the unit selling individual policies to people not covered through their jobs.
WellPoint needs to make this part of its business profitable or shut it down. Sebelius may be able to prevent WellPoint’s price increase, but it can’t stop them from leaving the market. That’s what’s going to happen if the government won’t let them charge a rate that turns a profit.
POSTSCRIPT: In light of Sebelius’s moral preening over WellPoint’s “wildly excessive” profits, it’s worth remembering that she is a tax cheat and a demagogue.
Thomas Friedman (who is a fascist, by the way), is an idiot. In his latest, he opines:
Of the festivals of nonsense that periodically overtake American politics, surely the silliest is the argument that because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable energy, solar panels and carbon taxes.
Okay, fair enough. Today’s weather does not refute global warming. Of course, he might have made the same argument when people were bellowing that hurricanes (or, even more stupidly, earthquakes and tsunamis) are the result of global warming. But we all know which side of Friedman’s bread is buttered. We’ll let it go.
The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.
What? Friedman can’t even be consistent from one end of a column to the other! Now he says daily variations in weather do prove something. No matter what those variations are, warmer, colder, wetter, drier, it’s all global warming.
The only thing that’s not evidence for global warming now is for everything to stay exactly the same, which is the one thing we know won’t happen. How fatuous is that? I find it both amusing and sad that Friedman can simultaneously claim to be standing up for science, and propound a theory that can never be falsified.
The Democrats have settled on how to deal with the tea party movement. They are going to try to co-opt the movement, by speaking positively about its aims and backtracking on their most radical agenda items such as health care nationalization and cap-and-trade. They are also going to look at how to make serious cuts in entitlement spending.
Ha ha! Just kidding! No, the real plan is to get the personal destruction machine going:
Big Government has learned that Clintonistas are plotting a “push/pull” strategy. They plan to identify 7-8 national figures active in the tea party movement and engage in deep opposition research on them. If possible, they will identify one or two they can perhaps ‘turn’, either with money or threats, to create a mole in the movement. The others will be subjected to a full-on smear campaign. (Has MSNBC already been notified?)
Big Government has also learned that James Carville will head up the effort.
I had a debate today in which someone used, as an example of the “delusional” beliefs of the tea party movement, a claim made at the tea party convention that the government wants to dictate the color of our cars. Not so fast, I said. I hadn’t heard of that, but the government tries to control a lot of things. Let’s google it.
News that California may ban the sale of black cars for climate protection reasons raised the hackles of many a petrolhead yesterday.
At the root of the stir was a presentation . . . by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Resources Board (CARB). The Cool Paints initiative suggests that the state should set a minimum level of reflectivity for all car paints and windows.
More reflective vehicles, goes the idea, could stay up to 10 °C cooler in the sunshine state – this in turn could reduce the need to have air conditioning on and thereby cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
However, as black paints can’t currently achieve this level, every cool dude’s favourite hue would effectively be banned. Motoring blogs lamented the end of consumer freedom to buy a car in their preferred colour, saying that “mud-puddle brown” could be the new black, as that’s what you get once you’ve added the reflective ingredients.
UPDATE: It turns out that this plan has been shelved for now. Good.
This is very old news, but it came up in conversation today and I seem never to have blogged it. The California government wants to control the temperature of your house:
California utilities would control the temperature of new homes and commercial buildings in emergencies with a radio-controlled thermostat, under a proposed state update to building energy efficiency standards.
Customers could not override the thermostats during “emergency events,” according to the proposal, part of a 236-page revision to building standards. The document is scheduled to be considered by the California Energy Commission, a state agency, on Jan. 30.
The description does not provide any exception for health or safety concerns. It also does not define what are “emergency events.”
ASIDE: Have no fear, the New York Times wants us all to know that it’s silly to be worried about this.
Fortunately, cooler heads (so to speak) prevailed, and the remote controllable thermostats were given a manual override. For now.
I’m quite surprised by this, but credit where credit is due:
The New York Times learned of the operation [that captured Mullah Baradar] on Thursday, but delayed reporting it at the request of White House officials, who contended that making it public would end a hugely successful intelligence-gathering effort. The officials said that the group’s leaders had been unaware of Mullah Baradar’s capture and that if it became public they might cover their tracks and become more careful about communicating with each other.
The Times is publishing the news now because White House officials acknowledged that the capture of Mullah Baradar was becoming widely known in the region.
I wonder why the NYT set aside its usual policy of exposing every secret operation it can. Maybe this is a benefit of having a Democratic president; the NYT may be more inclined to cooperate with the White House on national security when a Democrat is in office.
The darker question is who leaked the capture to the NYT. Did someone at CIA want this operation blown?
Western forces in Afghanistan are operating under rules of engagement, or ROE, that restrict them from acting against people unless they commit a hostile act or show hostile intent. American troops say the Taliban can fire on them, then set aside their weapon and walk freely out of a compound, possibly toward a weapons cache in another location.
“The inability to stop people who don’t have weapons is the main hindrance right now,” McMahon said after the firefight. “They know how to use our ROE against us.”
If this is true, it’s idiotic, and it’s going to get good people killed.
The DEA is continuing to raid medical marijuana growers, despite the Obama administration’s new stated policy that it will not enforce federal laws against medical marijuana in states that allow it.
Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) will not run for re-election. Before, it looked possible but tough for the GOP to pick up that seat. Now it looks likely. The Intrade price for a Republican victory has jumped from 40 to 80 today. That means that the GOP is now favored to pick up eight of the ten seats it needs to regain control of the Senate.
But the eight include Nevada. Unfortunately, the “Tea Party of Nevada” will be fielding a candidate in the US Senate race in Nevada, possibly endangering a Republican pick-up of that seat, which otherwise looks likely. (Via Instapundit.)
UPDATE: Bob Owens makes a convincing case that the “Tea Party of Nevada” is a false flag operation. (Via Instapundit.)
The Washington Post reports that the government is no longer trying to capture high-value terrorists for interrogation, preferring simply to kill them instead. This is understandable, when you have no interrogators and are trying to get rid of the prison as well. For years the left has been trying to argue that we never get any useful intelligence from interrogating terrorists, but it’s alarming that they actually seem to believe it.
Fortunately for the political fortunes of the Obama administration, we will never know what information we might have gained from interrogating terrorists, so it’s unlikely that anyone will ever be able to say specifically what this policy cost us.
UPDATE: The capture of Mullah Baradar (the Taliban’s #2) is great news; I’m glad we didn’t just blow him up. Also, it shows how we are coping with our new lack of interrogation and detention capabilities: we’re outsourcing it to Pakistan. In the interest of shutting down the (supposedly) inhumane facilities at Guantanamo, we’re leaving prisoners in Pakistani custody. I’m sure Pakistani intelligence will treat them much better. Good thinking.
Iran’s parliament speaker announced that his country will “speed up” its nuclear work if the Obama administration continues to target the Gulf country with sanctions, Iran’s state-run PressTV reported.
“Even if U.S. President Barack Obama dares to repeat threats of tougher sanction against us as much as ten times, we will still be determined to pursue our enrichment program, but with a much faster pace,” said Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, reported by PressTV.
You mean that nuclear program that is intended only for peaceful energy generation? That program? You’re threatening to start generating electricity sooner?
This threat only makes sense if Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Which of course it is. And which everyone knows, even if they pretend they don’t. But in light of this threat, it looks more foolish than ever to pretend we don’t all know what Iran is doing.
Mary Patrice Brown, the DOJ lawyer who is “investigating” the dismissal of voter intimidation case against the Black Panthers, is being vetted for the bench by the same people she is supposedly investigating. Since the DOJ inspector general (uniquely among all IGs) has no power to investigate anything, there cannot be an independent investigation unless the Attorney General appoints a special counsel. I’ll be holding my breath.
The winter storm hit nearly a week ago, and Pittsburgh still has yet to clear the roads. It’s not as though it can’t be done. The surrounding municipalities, at least in the east, managed to clear the roads promptly. Wilkins Township, where I live, is not particularly well run, but it had the roads cleared the day after the storm. Even Wilkinsburg (a poor suburb) has managed to clear its major roads. But not Pittsburgh.
Why is Pittsburgh unable to accomplish what nearly everyone else in the area can accomplish? Bad management can muddle along in normal times; it’s during a crisis that the quality of leadership is tested. We see now how bad that leadership is.
Luke Ravenstahl has been mayor since 2006, and was on the city council for three years before that. He has created a city administration that is unable to perform its basic functions in a crisis situation. Then, on the eve of the storm — a storm that everyone knew was coming — he left town to celebrate his birthday at a ski resort.
President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.
Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
This would break President Obama’s firm no-tax pledge:
Honestly, though, I don’t see why this is such a big deal. The White House has already backtracked on the pledge, and indeed has already raised some taxes on people below the $250k lines. And, frankly, of course Obama is going to raise taxes; that’s what Democrats do.
I’m at a loss to explain why the Democrats can be perceived by many as the defenders of civil liberties. They’re awful, not only on the rights they oppose, like the Second Amendment, but also on the ones they supposedly support, like the Fourth:
Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. . . The Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.
Those claims have alarmed the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, which have opposed the Justice Department’s request and plan to tell the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia that Americans’ privacy deserves more protection and judicial oversight than what the administration has proposed.
I can’t figure these guys out. According to the Democrats, an intelligence agency conducting surveillance on a foreign terrorist overseas should stop listening whenever they call someone in the United States, or even route a communication through the United States. But on the other hand, they think the government should be free electronically to track the movements of US citizens at home. What is wrong with these guys?
I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer.
You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. I spent — I’ve been there 17 times now. I go about every two months — three months. I know every one of the major players in all the segments of that society.
It’s impressed me. I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.
Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and nearly every other Democrat voted for the anti-surge resolution that opposed the policy change that finally won the war in Iraq. Obama said that we should withdraw from Iraq even if doing so would lead to genocide.
Now, having inherited a stable Iraq and a plan for removing our remaining troops, the administration that opposed everything that made that possible wants to take credit? Unbelievable.
UPDATE: My gosh, they are actually serious about this. Robert Gibbs gives the president the credit for getting our troops out of Iraq. (No mention of his opposition to the surge, or his tolerance of genocide.) When a reporter points out the status of forces agreement was signed by President Bush, Gibbs actually argues that pressure from Barack Obama made it possible.
Most of the commentators, including Rush, are astounded. But relatively speaking, the administration’s achievement is no more astounding than Bull Connor’s passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Kruschev’s reunification of Germany, or Jefferson Davis’s preservation of the Union.
When the Democrats locked up 60 votes in the Senate through two surprises (Al Franken’s outlawyering of Norm Coleman and Arlen Specter turning his coat), we were spared a piece of political theater that seemed inevitable with Barack Obama’s election: the rediscovery of the evils of the filibuster.
A year ago I noted how the New York Times’s opinion of the filibuster was, shall we say, highly correlated with who was doing the filibustering. In March 2009 the NYT had reversed itself yet again on the probity of the filibuster, but the issue went to the backburner when Specter switched parties, giving Democrats 60 votes. (Or rather, the prospect of 60 votes once Franken was seated.)
With Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, the putative evil of the filibuster is front and center once again. Paul Krugman inveighs thusly:
The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.
Don’t hold your breath. As it is, Democrats don’t even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents’ obstructionism.
It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis.
It seems Krugman was not paying attention. Republican obstructionism was a central message in the Massachusetts race. More precisely, it was a central message from Scott Brown. Brown promised that if he were elected, he would put the brakes on the Democratic agenda, especially the health care bill. And he won.
With Republicans more trusted than Democrats on nearly every issue, and with 75% angry about the government’s policies, the public today is pro-obstruction.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security conducted a threat assessment of local pro- and anti-abortion rights activists before an expected rally last year, even though they did not pose a threat to national security.
The DHS destroyed or deleted its copies of the assessment after an internal review found it violated intelligence-gathering guidelines by collecting and sharing information about “protest groups which posed no threat to homeland security,” according to a department memo written last year.
The report was only shared with police in Middleton and with the director of the Wisconsin Statewide Information Center, an intelligence-gathering hub, according to the memo, which was signed by general counsel Ivan Fong and inspector general Richard Skinner.
It concluded the report was unlikely to “have any impact on civil liberties or civil rights” given its limited dissemination. But anti-abortion groups and the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin on Monday both criticized the federal government’s collection of information on law-abiding protesters.
The people running our government today would surely claim to favor free speech and freedom of association. I’m sure they would be outraged if the DHS had compiled dossiers on peaceful anti-war protesters. But they have a peculiar moral blindness; they just don’t see those principles as applying to their political opponents. That makes them dangerous, because when it comes to their opponents, there’s no telling what they’ll be willing to do.
After weeks of trying, Argentine president Kirchner succeeded in sacking the president of the Argentine central bank. The head banker balked at Kirchner’s plan to seize $6.6 billion of the central bank’s foreign currency reserves to pay the government’s debt. With a more obedient central banker in place, the plan will now presumably go forward.
Argentina’s government is running out of money to confiscate. It already defaulted on most of its debt in 2001. In 2008 it confiscated the nation’s private retirement savings, to the tune of $30 billion. The latest money grab amounts to 17% of the central bank’s $48 billion in foreign currency reserves. The remainder will probably go quickly, and it’s hard to see where the government will find more money to steal. Then it will be time to run the presses.
The head of Iran’s atomic agency said the Islamic Republic would not enrich uranium to a higher level if the West provides the fuel it needs for the Tehran research reactor.
Iran is set to start enriching its stockpile of uranium to 20 percent on Tuesday, in a move sure to antagonize Western nations who fear that the process of enrichment could eventually yield material for a nuclear weapon.
France and the U.S. said Monday the latest Iranian move left no choice but to push harder for a fourth set of U.N. Security Council sanctions to punish Iran’s nuclear defiance.
Ali Akbar Salehi, a vice president as well as the head of the country’s nuclear program, said the further enrichment would be unnecessary if the West found a way to provide Iran with the needed fuel.
You have to give Salehi credit for chutzpah. The West did find a way to provide Iran with the needed fuel, but Iran reneged on the deal. They were supposed to send their enriched uranium to France, who would fashion it into fuel rods and send it back. That would have made Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium unusable for nuclear weapons, which of course is why Iran reneged.
The ayatollahs think they can play us for fools again. Are they wrong?
Authorities lifted curfew and alcohol restrictions in King on Sunday, but said a state of emergency declaration remained in effect until Monday.
Authorities said the state of emergency declaration would continue until Monday 9 a.m., barring any unforeseen circumstances or severe changes. . . Other restrictions included a ban on the sale or purchase of any type of firearm, ammunition, explosive or any possession of such items off a person’s own premises.
I liked this ad. In fact this and the Tebow ad are the only ones I remember in a positive light.
For some reason, the ad that they have up now isn’t quite the same one as aired last night. Last night, the flight the guy googled was DL-something, now it’s AA120. Also, I think some of the background chatter is different. That seems insignificant; I wonder why they decided to change it. (Alas, a Google search does not answer the question.)
The U.S. Census Bureau’s “Snapshot of America” Super Bowl 44 ad has met with harsh criticism from television writers, media pundits and the Kellogg School of Management, which gave the Census ad an “F” grade — the lowest of any commercial that ran during Sunday’s game. . .
USA Today’s ad meter compiled the responses of 250 adult participants in McLean, Va., and San Diego, Calif., by “electronically chart[ing] their second-by-second reactions to ads during the Super Bowl.” Among this test group, the Census spot placed 52nd out of 63 ads.
John Zirinsky, a senior analyst at the Lombardo Consulting Group, spent some time testing a potential ad for this year’s Super Bowl, using focus groups, in-depth interviews, and “just about every contemporary methodology.” His take on the Census ad is that it failed several essential tests for a successful Super Bowl ad.
“The first, most basic criteria for a successful ad is that it must be understood—on some level—by those watching.”
I guess billions are chump change in the budget today, so $2.5 million ought to be beneath notice. But did they have to advertise the fact that they are wasting our money on the freaking Superbowl?
It’s hard to understand to understand what Audi was thinking when they decided to run this ad campaign:
I would have thought that companies, particularly German companies, would be reluctant to associate themselves with fascism. But I guess environmental fascism is different.
The White House is trying to assert copyright over the work of the official White House photographer. They are attaching this notice to each photo on the White House Flickr account:
This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.
I’m not sure what the law is regarding the unauthorized use of a photo to imply an endorsement, but the rest of this is garbage. US Government work is in the public domain. In fact, each page of the White House Flickr account includes a link to a page at US.gov that explains exactly that:
A work that is a United States Government work, prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties, is not subject to copyright in the United States and there are no U.S. copyright restrictions on reproduction, derivative works, distribution, performance, or display of the work.
So, in honor of the White House’s ham-handed effort illegally to limit the use of its photos, here’s a photo of the back of the president’s head:
POSTSCRIPT: The White House may be skirting the law even by claiming this copyright. The US Copyright code says:
Fraudulent Copyright Notice. — Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500.
I imagine that the “fraudulent intent” proviso gets them off-the-hook though.
How can you misreport the content of a 30-second Superbowl ad? The AP manages:
And a commercial by conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, perhaps the most anticipated ad of the night, hinted at a serious subject although it took a humorous tone too. Heisman winner Tim Tebow and his mother talk about her difficult pregnancy with him and how she was advised to end the pregnancy—implying an antiabortion message—but ended with Tebow tackling his mom and saying the family must be “tough.”
The ad didn’t say anything about how she was advised to end the pregnancy. The closest it came was “he almost didn’t make it into this world”.
Also, it wasn’t Tim but Pam that said the family must be tough. Aside from that, their reporting was spot on.
The latest Sarah Palin scandal is out and it’s a doozy. It seems that before her speech and Q&A session at the Tea Party convention, she wrote some talking points on her hand.
Yep, that’s the whole scandal. Seriously. See for yourself. No, I don’t get it either.
There’s nothing to do about such a ridiculous non-scandal but mock it, so that’s exactly what Palin did. Before a campaign stop for Texas governor Rick Perry, she wrote “Hi Mom!” on her hand. Heh.
Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.
A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced. . .
It also emerges that documents which [Jones’s collaborator, Wei-Chyung] Wang claimed would exonerate him and Jones did not exist. . .
The temperature data from the Chinese weather stations measured the warming there over the past half century and appeared in a 1990 paper in the prestigious journal Nature, which was cited by the IPCC’s latest report in 2007.
Climate change sceptics asked the UEA, via FOI requests, for location data for the 84 weather stations in eastern China, half of which were urban and half rural.
The history of where the weather stations were sited was crucial to Jones and Wang’s 1990 study, as it concluded the rising temperatures recorded in China were the result of global climate changes rather the warming effects of expanding cities.
The IPCC’s 2007 report used the study to justify the claim that “any urban-related trend” in global temperatures was small. Jones was one of two “coordinating lead authors” for the relevant chapter.
The Guardian also notes that Jones withheld the information when it was requested under the freedom of information act. Of course, that sort of behavior from Jones and his colleagues is old news now.
However, it has been reported that when climate sceptics asked for the precise locations of the 84 stations, Professor Jones at first declined to release the details. And when eventually he did release them, it was found that for the ones supposed to be in the countryside, there was no location given.
The point was to disprove the urban heat-island effect, so the non-urban measurements are key. And those are the ones that seem likely to be bogus.
Remember almost two years ago when Barack Obama said that rural Pennsylvanians “cling to guns or religion” because they are “bitter” over their poor job prospects? It’s very old news now, but I recently learned something I didn’t hear at the time.
During the campaign, I often noted that Obama seemed to be temperamentally unable to admit to being wrong. This, it seems was no exception:
After the remarks were reported by the liberal blog Huffington Post on Friday, Obama initially defended them, and on Saturday he continued to say the tenor of them was correct, even if the phrasing was off. He argued that Clinton and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whose campaign also criticized the remarks, were turning something “everybody knows is true” into political fodder.
It wasn’t merely an off-the-cuff remark. He was still defending it nearly a week later.
The mainstream media really doesn’t like James O’Keefe. When Salon runs a story alleging that he manned a literature table at a conference of white supremacists, that’s just too good to check. That last thing you want to do is look carefully into whether he really was manning a literature table there, or whether the event in question really was a conference of white supremacists. You might lose a perfectly good attack story if you checked the facts.
The answer, incidentally, seems to be no on both counts. I wasn’t going to bother to report this incident when it was just a Salon story picked up by the Village Voice. (In the Village Voice, O’Keefe had actually morphed into an organizer of the event.) But now the story is appearing in the supposedly respectable press, like the Newark Star-Ledger. Retracto is on the case.
In recent days, three errors in the IPCC report on global warming have been identified, ranging from extremely serious to minor:
Most seriously, an estimate of when the Himalayan glaciers would disappear was off by more than three centuries from the best available science. Worse, the scientists who wrote the report knew the estimate was bogus, but included it anyway to put pressure on world leaders.
An assessment that the Amazon rainforest was endangered by global warming turned out to have no basis whatsoever.
The reported amount of the Netherlands that lies beneath sea level was off by a factor of two. (Oddly, this minor mistake was the one that led the Dutch government to call for an investigation of the IPCC.)
Let’s set the Dutch sea-level mistake aside. The two serious mistakes were both the result of the IPCC incorporating unreviewed claims from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Given these mistakes, one has to wonder how much else in the report is wrong.
The IPCC has issued a statement on the glacier debacle. It’s pretty weaselly. It doesn’t even say what the mistake is, but rather forces you to find it yourself:
It has, however, recently come to our attention that a paragraph in the 938-page Working Group II contribution to the underlying assessment2 refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. . .
2 The text in question is the second paragraph in section 10.6.2 of the Working Group II contribution and a repeat of part of the paragraph in Box TS.6. of the Working Group II Technical Summary of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
They go on to defend the overall integrity of their report:
The Chair, Vice-Chairs, and Co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance. This episode demonstrates that the quality of the assessment depends on absolute adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of “the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source into an IPCC Report” 3. We reaffirm our strong commitment to ensuring this level of performance.
So, how good are the “well-established” procedures that the IPCC is reaffirming? How many times did the report incorporate claims from the WWF and like organizations? Often, I’m sad to say.
Donna Laframboise used the report’s search feature to look for WWF citations. The search turned up dozens of hits, out of which she counted at least sixteen WWF citations. She also turned up eight Greenpeace citations.
One of them caught my attention:
Deforestation threatens the cradle of reef diversity. World Wide Fund for Nature, 2 December 2004. http://www.wwf.org/
A citation is supposed to provide enough information that the reader can find the source. Pointing the reader to “somewhere on the WWF web site” is a less than serious effort. But the title is pretty distinctive so I was able to find it here. It’s a blog post. Whatever merit it might have, it is not a scientific source.
The most important [new potential inaccuracy] is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.
This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim.
The IPCC report cites a single paper for the crop failure prediction. The paper was published by a Canadian NGO and does not appear to have been peer-reviewed. I sure hope it wasn’t peer-reviewed, because it’s very shoddy work. The claim appears on page 5 with reference to “studies”. No citation of the study is given, which is presumably why the IPCC report cited the paper and not the (imaginary?) original study.
Here’s the latest in the annals of unsurprising science. Scientists have have devised a psychology experiment that supports the hypothesis that power corrupts.
What was a bit more surprising was a second finding: Power corrupts people who believe they deserve their power. Those who didn’t exhibited a strange phenomenon the scientists dubbed hypercrisy (i.e., the opposite of hypocrisy), in which they were harder on themselves than others.
I’m not sure how significant the second finding is in practical terms. Should we choose our leaders by lottery? There’s a certain appeal to that, but I doubt it would really work out well. Also, I think that people pretty quickly come to believe that they deserve their good fortune.
It’s not clear that the Democrats have learned the lesson of Scott Brown’s election, but the Economist surely has. The week before Brown was elected, the Economist was lauding the health care bill nearing passage and saying that Obama’s biggest failing was not being tough enough:
The week after the Massachusetts election, they ran this cover:
The Economist reports that Hugo Chavez is done pretending:
Hugo Chávez worries ever less about maintaining a semblance of democracy
OPPONENTS of Hugo Chávez have often bewailed his knack of cloaking authoritarianism in outwardly democratic forms. So perhaps they should be grateful that the Venezuelan president is increasingly abandoning the pretence. On January 23rd—a date on which the country commemorates the 1958 uprising that ousted its last military dictator—cable-television operators were told to stop carrying RCTV, a pro-opposition channel. It was the latest in a series of recent moves that have placed Mr Chávez’s elected regime within a hair’s breadth of dictatorship.
Three years ago RCTV’s broadcasting licence was not renewed, confining it to cable. Now the government has ruled that, despite being a cable channel, it (and many other channels) must obey a broadcasting law that requires it, among other things, to transmit the president’s lengthy speeches live, whenever he feels like it. The urge came over him almost immediately, at a political rally. When RCTV declined to oblige him, its fate was sealed. . .
If the September elections were run according to the constitution, which mandates proportional representation, Mr Chávez would surely lose his strong parliamentary majority. But a new electoral law allows the largest single group to sweep the board. The government-dominated electoral authority redrew constituency boundaries this month, with the effect of minimising potential opposition gains. The closure of RCTV, one of the main outlets for anti-Chávez voices, seems to follow the same logic.
In his annual address to Parliament, earlier this month, the president announced (to no one’s surprise) that he was now a Marxist. He no longer pays lip-service to the separation of powers, which in practice disappeared some time ago. The head of the Supreme Court, Luisa Estella Morales, said last month that such niceties merely “weaken the state”. A leading member of the ruling United Socialist Party, Aristóbulo Istúriz, called for the dismantling of local government, which Mr Chávez wants to replace with communes.
The 1999 constitution guarantees property rights and the existence of private enterprise. But the president now says that private profit is the root of all evil. Callers to the government’s consumer-protection body, Indepabis, find its hold-music is a jingle about evil capitalists. Insisting that his recent currency devaluation was no excuse for price rises, Mr Chávez had Indepabis close down hundreds of stores for “speculation”. He told Parliament to change the law on expropriations and seized a French-controlled supermarket chain to add to the government’s new retail conglomerate, Comerso.
I thought that Chavez was doing a perfectly lousy job pretending already, but I’m glad (in a way) that it’s beyond dispute now.
The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan said Thursday that security there is no longer deteriorating, a view that represents his most optimistic assessment yet.
Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal . . . pointed to signs of stability that, though difficult to quantify, indicate that Afghans also see improvements in many areas of commerce and daily life.
“I still will tell you the situation in Afghanistan is serious,” he said. “I do not say now it is deteriorating.”
During the summer, McChrystal described the security picture as deteriorating as Taliban influence expanded, especially in Pashtun tribal areas of southern Afghanistan.
“I feel differently now,” McChrystal said. “I am not prepared to say we have turned the corner. The situation is serious, but we [made] significant progress in setting conditions in 2009 and we will make real progress in 2010.”
The Dutch environment minister, Jaqueline Cramer, on Wednesday demanded a thorough investigation into the 2007 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change after a Dutch magazine uncovered it incorrectly states 55 percent of the country lies below sea level. . . Only 26 percent of the Netherlands is really below sea level.
Richard Shelby (R-AL) is blocking all of President Obama’s outstanding nominations (over 70) in a battle over an earmark for his state. He needs to stop. Not only is it wrong, but it’s politically stupid: It gives the White House a rhetorical weapon to wield against the GOP’s legitimate opposition to some nominees (most recently Patricia Smith, who was confirmed as Solicitor of Labor despite lying to Congress).
Kim Strassel has the feel-good story of the day, on how Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, tried to hook itself onto the big-government gravy train and got burned for it. Pfizer promoted Democrats into key lobbying positions, dramatically shifted its political contributions toward Democrats, and aggressively campaigned for the Democratic health plan. (ASIDE: The industry spent $150 million campaigning for the Democratic health plan. Democrats aren’t against corporate speech when it serves their purposes!) In return:
Mr. Kindler surely believed Democrats would treat his industry gently. The strategy: The industry would pledge $80 billion to reform. In return it would get greater volume and a requirement that people buy brand-name drugs. Democrats would also fight against drug reimportation and forgo price controls. . .
Critics warned the legislation would lead to a government takeover and price controls. They warned Democrats would take the money and double-cross them. None of it fazed the industry, right up until ObamaCare imploded.
Mr. Kindler and Co. are left with the ashes. Having got this far (with Big Pharma’s help), Democrats are more desperate than ever to pass “something.” It won’t include any upside for drug companies. There is talk instead of “popular” stand-alone legislation, including reimportation, Medicare price controls, and slashing the industry’s 12-year exclusivity on biologics.
There’s nothing not to like about this: Health care nationalization is apparently dead. Pfizer’s rent-seeking blew up in its face. And everyone now knows that the Democrats can’t be trusted, which might make the next would-be crony capitalist think twice.
Given my low opinion of our government, it takes a lot to outrage me, but this manages it: Jim Treacher, a writer at the Daily Caller in Washington, DC, was crossing the street (with the light) when he was hit by a car driven by a State Department security agent making an illegal left turn. It appears that the car left the scene of the accident without stopping, but the story is not entirely clear on that point.
Then the State Department arranged for the DC police to issue Treacher a jaywalking citation in his hospital bed! We know that the State Department was involved with the citation because they sent an official along with the policeman.
Then, to add a coda to the insult already added to the (literal) injury, when they finally issued a brief statement, it concluded:
At all times, Diplomatic Security acted responsibly and appropriately and displayed due diligence in caring for the injured.
In other words, they will protect their own and to hell with all of us.
UPDATE: The story is still not entirely clear about what the driver did, but he did not leave the scene without stopping.
Every economist, from the left and the right, has said, because of the Recovery Act, what we’ve started to see is at least a couple of million jobs that have either been created or would have been lost.
What?! Every economist? Every single one? Come on, at least tell a believable lie.
Amazing. In response to a call for his office to investigate the Justice Department’s dismissal of voter intimidation charges against the Black Panthers, the Justice Department’s inspector general says unfortunately he has no power to investigate the incident. In the Justice Department, unlike other departments, all internal investigations answer to the Attorney General. By law, there is no one that can conduct an independent investigation of DOJ wrongdoing. So what is the DOJ IG for then?
You might not be shocked to learn that the rule was put into place by Janet Reno. It was codified in law in 2008.
Of course, Brown is a politician, which means he’s due to start disappointing us at 5:01 today. But if he succeeds in killing health care nationalization, I’ll be satisfied.
In the wake of the Citizens United ruling, Democrats want a constitutional amendment to limit the free-speech rights of persons who work for corporations. It will never go anywhere, of course, but that’s no reason not to condemn them for it.
A widespread belief among liberal social engineers is that abstinence education doesn’t work and “safe sex” is better. But no one had ever looked carefully at the subject, until now. A new study shows that the conventional wisdom has it completely backwards:
Sex education classes that focus on encouraging children to remain abstinent can persuade a significant proportion to delay sexual activity, researchers reported Monday in a landmark study that could have major implications for U.S. efforts to protect young people against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
Only about a third of sixth- and seventh-graders who completed an abstinence-focused program started having sex within the next two years, researchers found. Nearly half of the students who attended other classes, including ones that combined information about abstinence and contraception, became sexually active. . .
The study is the first to evaluate an abstinence program using a carefully designed approach comparing it with several alternative strategies and following subjects for an extended period of time, considered the kind of study that produces the highest level of scientific evidence.
The study shows not only that abstinence education works, but “safe sex” education is harmful. Students who were taught both abstinence and safe sex did slightly better than the control group but much worse than the abstinence-only group. Students who were taught safe sex only (not abstinence) did slightly worse than the control group:
Over the next two years, about 33 percent of the students who went through the abstinence program started having sex, compared with about 52 percent who were taught only safe sex. About 42 percent of the students who went through the comprehensive program started having sex, and about 47 percent of those who learned about other ways to be healthy did.
When Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) complained that “you have repeatedly said, most recently at the State of the Union, that Republicans have offered no ideas and no solutions,” Obama replied:
I don’t think I said that. What I said was within the context of health care—I remember that speech pretty well. It was only two days ago.
I said I’d welcome ideas that you might provide. I didn’t say that you haven’t provided ideas. I said I’d welcome those ideas that you’ll provide.
Saying that you’re waiting to hear ideas strongly implies that you haven’t heard them yet, doesn’t it? But never mind that. The president and his underlings have directly stated what he only implied in the State of the Union address. Most conspicuously, there was the September 2009 speech to which Peter referred last week:
I’ve got a question for all those folks [opponents of his plan]: What are you going to do? What’s your answer? What’s your solution? And you know what? They don’t have one. Their answer is to do nothing. Their answer is to do nothing.
And three more examples of senior White House personnel, if that’s not enough.
Big Government is all over the many, many news outlets that have reported, inaccurately, that James O’Keefe’s arrest had something to do with attempted wiretapping. (It didn’t.) They have sixteen so far.
News from the land of free, government-run health care:
Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams is set to undergo heart surgery this week in the United States. . .
The premier’s office provided few details, beyond confirming that he would have heart surgery and saying that it was not necessarily a routine procedure.
The Canadian left (and, sadly, much of their right) says they’re against “two-tier health care”, meaning that no one should be able to buy better health care than anyone else can get. In fact, they have two-tier health care already. The second tier, offering superior care to those who can afford it, is called the United States.
If North Korea is telling the truth (which obviously is hardly a sure thing), this is quite possibly the stupidest man on earth:
An American man detained by North Korea after allegedly entering the communist country illegally has sought asylum and wants to join its military, a news report said Saturday.
South Korea’s Dong-a Ilbo newspaper said the man crossed into North Korea from China on Monday.
It said an unidentified source in North Korea told the newspaper the 28-year-old man said he came to the country because he did not “want to become a cannon fodder in the capitalist military,” and “wants to serve in the North Korean military” instead.
The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.
Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.
The Jan. 25 article “Is the President Panicking” originally stated that Fox News led the charge against Bill Clinton in the ’94 midterm elections. Fox News did not come into being until 1996. The story has been corrected.
Awesome. Seriously, how do you make a mistake like this? Unless you’re just making stuff up.
A data breach at the National Archives and Records Administration is more serious than previously believed. It involved sensitive personal information of 250,000 Clinton administration staff members, job applicants and White House visitors, as well as the Social Security number of at least one daughter of former Vice President Al Gore.
The data, which included more than 100,000 Social Security numbers, was stored on a computer hard drive that the NARA discovered missing last April from a data processing room in Maryland. It’s unknown if the drive was lost or stolen. . .
The NARA was harshly criticized for another potential data breach it may have suffered involving the records of 70 million U.S. military veteran. The records were on a defective hard drive that the agency sent to the drive vendor for repair. The agency failed to delete data on the drive before sending it to the vendor. When the vendor determined the drive couldn’t be repaired, it passed the drive to another company for recycling.
But don’t worry, they’ll be much more careful with our medical records.
But they won’t face any consequences, the London Times reports:
The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.
The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.
The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.
The mainstream media doesn’t like James O’Keefe. When O’Keefe and Helen Giles caught ACORN conspiring to assist with underage prostitution and human trafficking, the media ignored it as long as they could. But, when O’Keefe was arrested at the office of Sen. Landrieu (D-LA), the media rushed to press without getting the facts straight.
POSTSCRIPT: It seems as though O’Keefe was probably trying to show that Sen. Landrieu had rigged her phones to block incoming calls. He should have gotten legal advice before trying such a stunt.
Another alarming prediction in the IPCC report on climate change has been shown to be bogus. A finding that much of the Amazon rainforest is endangered actually referred to logging, not climate change:
In the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), issued in 2007 by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists wrote that 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest in South America was endangered by global warming.
But that assertion was discredited this week when it emerged that the findings were based on numbers from a study by the World Wildlife Federation that had nothing to do with the issue of global warming — and that was written by a freelance journalist and green activist. . .
It has now been revealed that the claim was based on a WWF study titled “Global Review of Forest Fires,” a paper barely related to the Amazon rainforest that was written “to secure essential policy reform at national and international level to provide a legislative and economic base for controlling harmful anthropogenic forest fires.”
EUReferendum, a blog skeptical of global warming, uncovered the WWF association. It noted that the original “40 percent” figure came from a letter published in the journal Nature that discussed harmful logging activities — and again had nothing to do with global warming.
If you’re counting, that’s three errors in the IPCC now (that we know of), all resulting from faulty scholarship.
From the president’s State of the Union address last night, one whopper in particular is getting a lot of attention:
With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections. I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people.
This bit has gotten a lot of attention because Justice Alito’s silent but barely visible objection, shaking his head and mouthing the words “not true”.
Alito is right. First, Citizens United v. FEC reversed Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which was decided in 1990. For those without a calculator handy, that was 20 years ago. So Citizen United reversed two decades of law, not a century. (Furthermore, Austin itself overruled a series of cases going back to 1936 — over 50 years of precedent.)
Second, the decision did not open the door for foreign corporations to spend in American elections. The decision invalidated 2 USC §441b, which forbids corporate spending in elections (see page 50 of the opinion), but the decision said nothing about §441e, which forbids foreign spending. (Via the Corner.)
Third, not only was §441e not at issue in Citizens United, but the decision expressly disclaims any conclusion regarding foreign contributions (pp. 46-47):
We need not reach the question whether the Government has a compelling interest in preventing foreign individuals or associations from influencing our Nation’s political process. . . Section 441b . . . would be overbroad even if we assumed, arguendo, that the Government has a compelling interest in limiting foreign influence over our political process.
In short, President Obama’s statement is completely false, which, as a scholar of constitutional law, he must be perfectly aware.
According to a new CNN poll, the Democratic health care “reform” bill is down 20 points: 58% oppose it versus just 38% that support it. When asked what Congress should do, the strong winner was to start over (48%). To pass the Democratic bill was well behind at 30%. Another 21% said Congress should stop work entirely.
The results are even more striking when you note that CNN polled adults in general, not likely voters or even registered voters. One has to guess that likely voters would put the Democrats even further behind.
According to a new Franklin & Marshall poll, Pat Toomey leads Arlen Specter by 14 points (45-31), and leads Joe Sestak by 22 points (41-19). In the Democratic primary, Specter leads Sestak by 17 points (30-13), but both are running well behind Other/don’t know (57%).
President Obama’s budget reportedly will cut all funds for human space flight. Once the last space shuttle is retired, we will rely on Russia to get into space, not just for a few years (as previously planned) but for the forseeable future.
This is madness. The United States will have access to space only through the cooperation of one of its adversaries? I’m sure the Russians are delighted by the idea.
CBO director Doug Elmendorf explains what ought to be obvious, but somehow is not — at least to our lawmakers:
Fiscal policy is on an unsustainable path to an extent that cannot be solved by minor tinkering. The country faces a fundamental disconnect between the services the people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are willing to send to the government to finance those services. That fundamental disconnect will have to be addressed in some way if the budget is to be placed on a sustainable course.
(Emphasis mine.) He includes some charts that show, not only how bad our fiscal situation is, but how much worse it is than the official numbers. Here’s the deficit, comparing the official numbers that the CBO is required to produce with a more realistic projection:
Fat lot of good the president’s proposed spending freeze will do us now. We’ve already blown the budget with the stimulus boondoggle. A spending freeze just locks in the current spending level. We need to cut spending back, not just to pre-stimulus levels, but to pre-Bush levels.
The $15 billion that the president’s spending freeze would save isn’t even a tithe of a tithe of our annual deficit. (And that’s assuming it happens, which isn’t bloody likely.) We need real cuts, such as those in President Bush’s proposed 2009 budget. If we had adopted Bush’s budget instead of Obama’s, today’s deficit would be $750 billion smaller.
Of course, it’s amusing to go back and watch video of Obama ridiculing John McCain’s call for a spending freeze, but it’s also sad. Even back then, a spending freeze wasn’t enough. Obama, however, said it was too much, claiming we need a scalpel, not a hatchet. (As if you can fix our budget problems by cutting out tiny little bits. Sheesh.) Forget the scalpel and the hatchet. What we needed then was a chain saw. What we need now is a wrecking ball.
UPDATE: I should also have mentioned that hardly any of the budget would be subject to the spending freeze anyway. Here’s a good graphic:
A week before Citizens United, the Supreme Court settled another interesting case in Hollingsworth v. Perry. It did so on a 5-4 decision, and the liberal dissent gave an interesting window into the thinking of the liberal justices and their disdain for the rule of law.
The matter at issue was whether the federal court of the Northern District of California has acted properly in amending its rules to allow broadcast of the court proceedings in the legal battle over California’s proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage. Ed Whelan puts the rule change into context, as part of Judge Walker’s aim to turn the proceedings into some kind of show trial. For my part, I have no strong opinion about what the outcome of the trial ought to be, but I am very concerned by the judge’s failure to follow proper procedure.
The court manifestly did not follow proper procedure in amending its rules. Federal law requires that the court “give appropriate public notice and an opportunity for comment” when changing its rules, except when presented by “immediate need”. Legal precedent establishes that “appropriate” notice is no less than thirty days. The court failed to do so:
It first announced the rule change on December 17 with no advance notice or comment period whatsoever. Some interested parties complained that doing so was illegal.
On December 31, the court removed the announcement of the rule change, and replaced it with an announcement of a proposed rule change. Public comments were to be submitted by Friday, January 8. (The alert reader will note that 8 is less than 30.) The date was not arbitrary; the trial was due to open the following Monday, January 11.
On January 4, the court set aside even its abbreviated comment period and announced that the rule change was in effect, using the “immediate need” exception.
On January 6, the court decided — with no surprise to anyone — that the Prop. 8 case would be broadcast.
After an appeal, the Supreme Court then issued its ruling, which barred the proceedings from being broadcast on the grounds the rule change enabling the broadcast was invalid. It noted that:
Courts enforce the requirement of procedural regularity on others, and must follow those requirements themselves.
This, however, seems to be the central point of disagreement.
Justice Breyer, in the liberal dissent, raises various technical objections to the ruling, including the remarkable argument that the Supreme Court has no business “micromanag[ing] district court administrative procedures”. (If a lower court violates its procedures, the liberal justices believe that the wronged party has no legal recourse?!) As to the central issue, he says that the court did provide sufficient opportunity for comment, because the possibility of broadcasting the trial had been discussed for months before the rule change was officially proposed. (He makes no effort to defend the lower court’s invocation of “immediate need”.)
In other words, Breyer argues the letter of the law need not be observed because the considerations that motivated the law were addressed in another way. This is a dangerous viewpoint for justices of the nation’s highest court to take.
My department operates on what we call the “reasonable person principle”, which says that we will try to do what a reasonable person would do, rather than tie ourselves down in legalistic rules. In a small, friendly environment, this is a good system. (It may even be a good system in the large, mostly friendly environment my department has now.) However, it is not at all a good system in an adversarial environment.
In an adversarial environment, such as a court or election (or sporting competition), the rules must be set down precisely and enforced punctiliously. This is essential so that all parties can plan strategy and act with the confidence that they know the rules of the game. In a friendly situation it may be beneficial to all to deviate from the rules, but in an adversarial situation any deviation has a winner and a loser.
This goes to the essence of the rule of law. As Friedrich von Hayek put it in The Road to Serfdom:
[The rule of law] means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand — rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.
When the court sets aside its rules in favor of nebulous principles whose application cannot be reliably predicted, we are no longer under the rule of law. Alas, this is the arrangement that four justices of the Supreme Court believe we should adopt. Fortunately, it’s only four.
A few days I quoted a thoughtful analysis by Ramesh Ponnuru of the problem of pre-existing conditions. He pointed out that one cannot merely require that health insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions at no extra cost, because people would simply delay buying insurance until they got sick. To deal with that problem, you must require everyone to buy health insurance, and that sets in motion a whole chain of necessary government interventions that result in something akin to Obamacare.
Ponnuru is right, of course, but on further reflection, the problem is worse than he suggests. Even the individual mandate doesn’t address the wait-until-you’re-sick problem. Here’s the thing: When you get sick, the individual mandate may require you to have insurance already, but it doesn’t stop you from switching to a better insurance plan. The new plan can’t reject you because of the pre-existing condition, nor can it charge you more.
It’s not hard to see what happens. Whenever people get sick, they switch to better plans, and then switch back to cheaper plans when they get well. Consequently, good plans will serve a disproportionate number of sick people and lose money, while bad plans serve healthy people and make money. Obviously, this provides a strong disincentive to provide high-quality care. Pretty soon, all plans will become equally bad.
So requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions destroys the quality of care, even with an individual mandate. What happens next? Presumably a government takeover. (This might well have been the plan all along.)
A whole new climate scandal is now erupting, and this one has nothing to do with the leaked emails from the Hadley CRU. Last December, a climate scientist named Madhav Khandekar raised issues with the 2007 IPCC report’s prediction regarding the Himalayan glaciers. Writing on the blog of Roger Pielke (another climate scientist who might be described as a moderate skeptic), he pointed out that there was no support in peer-reviewed literature for the claim that the Himalayan glaciers would be entirely gone by 2035. In fact, the only paper on the subject predicted that the glaciers would survive until 2350. He speculated that the 2035 date was nothing but a typo, and added:
In summary, the glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating, but NOT any faster than other glaciers in the Arctic and elsewhere. The two large and most important glaciers of the Himalayas show very little retreat at this point in time. . . It is premature at this stage to link global warming to the deteriorating state of Himalayan glaciers at this time.
The IPCC’s 2035 prediction was a huge deal. As Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker explains:
To understand why the future of Himalayan glaciers should arouse such peculiar passion, one must recall why they have long been a central icon in global warming campaigners’ propaganda. Everything that polar bears have been to the West, the ice of the Himalayas has been – and more – to the East. This is because, as Mr Gore emphasised in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, the vast Himalayan ice sheet feeds seven of the world’s major river systems, thus helping to provide water to 40 per cent of the world’s population.
The IPCC’s shock prediction in its 2007 report that the likelihood of the glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high” thus had huge impact in India and other Asian countries.
At first, the IPCC tried to defend the prediction. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, mocked a contrary report from the Indian government, calling it “voodoo science”. Ultimately, however, the IPCC was forced to admit the mistake:
One of the most alarming conclusions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a widely respected organization established by the United Nations, is that glaciers in the Himalayas could be gone 25 years from now, eliminating a primary source of water for hundreds of millions of people. But a number of glaciologists have argued that this conclusion is wrong, and now the IPCC admits that the conclusion is largely unsubstantiated, based on news reports rather than published, peer-reviewed scientific studies.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the IPCC admitted that the Working Group II report, “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” published in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007), contains a claim that “refers to poorly substantiated estimates. ” The statement also said “the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedure, were not applied properly.” . . .
The error has been traced to the fact that the IPCC permits the citation of non-peer-reviewed sources, called “grey literature,” in cases where peer-reviewed data is not available. It requires that these sources be carefully scrutinized, but that didn’t happen in this case.
In fact, the literature that supported the 2035 prediction was very grey indeed:
The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.
This brings us to the latest development. So far, this could be written off as a bad case of scientific malpractice, but now it is revealed as a deliberate fraud:
The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.
Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.
‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’
One misrepresentation in the IPCC report could be written off as an isolated incident. Combine it with this fraud, and the whole report now must be questioned.
To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
Well, Krugman got his housing bubble, and we all know how it worked out. Perhaps we should think twice before heeding this guy’s advice in the future.
Air America, the liberal talk-radio network that helped boost the careers of Al Franken and Rachel Maddow, said Thursday that it was declaring bankruptcy and going off the air. . .
It was troubled almost from the start. The company had difficulty lining up affiliates and attracting a sizable audience. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-court protection just 30 months after its inception and was resold to an investor group in early 2007 for $4.25 million. . .
Since last summer, Air America has been heard in the Washington [D.C.] area on WZAA (1050 AM). Its audience has been so small that Arbitron, which compiles radio ratings, was unable to detect any listeners for WZAA during several weeks in December.
Of course, it required various frauds for Air America to survive as long as it did.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC is a big victory for free speech. Unfortunately, it was a 5-4 decision, with the “liberal” justices opposing free speech. (How badly screwed up is our political nomenclature when the preceding sentence makes sense?)
The liberals complain that corporations are not real people, and thus are not entitled to free speech rights. Of course, no one says that a corporation is a real person: they can’t vote, serve on juries, etc. But who exactly, do the “liberals” think make up a corporation? Androids? Ghosts? Aliens? No, corporations are made up of people, just as are all other organizations. The “liberal” position is that a person should go to prison for speaking about a candidate during an election, if that speech was part of the activities of a corporation. Make no mistake, the “liberals” want to send real people to prison for engaging in speech.
But only certain people. The “liberals” want to criminalize the speech of some but not others: If you’re part of a sole proprietorship or a partnership, you’re good. If you’re an individual who extracted his wealth from a corporation, you’re good. If you’re part of certain corporations (those that have a media component), you’re good. But certain people that work for certain organizations (i.e., corporations without a media component) should go to jail for speaking. And keep in mind, it’s not just big for-profit corporations, it’s also (as the court’s opinion notes) groups like the Sierra Club, NRA, or ACLU whose members could be sent to jail for speaking about a candidate during an election.
The “liberals” also complain about how radical the decision is. In fact, the decision merely reverts to the precedent that was in play until fairly recently. For example, in its 1978 First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti decision, the court ruled (as quoted in Citizens United):
We thus find no support in the First . . . Amendment, or in the decisions of this Court, for the proposition that speech that otherwise would be within the protection of the First Amendment loses that protection simply because its source is a corporation that cannot prove, to the satisfaction of a court, a material effect on its business or property. . .
In the realm of protected speech, the legislature is constitutionally disqualified from dictating the subjects about which persons may speak and the speakers who may address a public issue.
It was not until 1990 that the free-speech train went off the rails in the Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce decision. That decision invented a flimsy new government interest (antidistortion) that the Obama administration didn’t even bother to defend. Even more bizarrely, Austin somehow found that a complete ban on political speech by corporations was narrowly tailored to address the antidistortion interest. Citizens United is a good decision, and one that never should have been necessary.
One cannot help but think that the real reason the left is so upset about Citizens United is that they think it will hurt them. In that regard, I think that they are worrying for nothing, for two reasons:
First, Citizens United unshackles labor unions in addition to corporations. True, corporations have more money, but labor unions are much more political. We can expect that labor unions will use their new freedom much more than corporations typically will.
Second, large corporations obviously have more money to throw around than small corporations, and while small business overwhelmingly tends to support small government (and therefore the GOP), big business often supports big government. While excessive regulation strangles small businesses, large businesses have the resources to survive it. In fact, large businesses often lobby for regulation because it drives out their smaller and more nimble competition. Plus, businesses love it when the government buys things with tax money that individuals weren’t interested in buying on their own.
So I don’t think that the post-Citizens-United landscape favors the GOP as much as the left fears it does. In fact, I think it favors the Democrats in the long term. In the short term, however, the Democrats have been so flagrantly anti-business that they probably will take a hit. They deserve it.
Finally, one prediction. Citizens United exacerbates an already strange political situation in which the politicians have the weakest voice in politics. Fund-raising limitations put severe burdens on politicians and parties that others who spend their own money don’t have. Since politicians make the rules, I would be surprised to see them remain disadvantaged for long. Expect very soon to see proposals to raise or even to remove limits on campaign fund raising.
There’s a lot of talk about the Senate rules right now. Without their 60-vote supermajority, Democrats want to use reconciliation to pass a health care bill. The problem is that under Senate rules reconciliation can be used for budget items only. That means no individual mandate, no requirement that insurers ignore pre-existing conditions, etc. Any bill that comes through reconciliation will be a ghost of what the Democrats want. (Keith Hennessey looks at the possibilities here.)
Or will it? What all this analysis ignores is the fact that the Democrats can change the rules any time they want. Yes, it’s true that it takes a 2/3 supermajority to change the rules officially, but the majority has a sleazier tactic at its disposal: it can simply ignore them.
Here’s how it works. The chair rules that the Byrd rule (that’s the rule governing reconciliation) doesn’t apply to the health care bill. This is clearly false, but it doesn’t matter. A ruling from the chair is sustained by a simple majority. Done. (There’s a bit of parliamentary maneuvering that is required, but in the end it takes a majority.)
In fact, they needn’t be so narrow about it. They can simply rule that cutting off debate requires only 51 votes. This is what Republicans proposed to do in 2005 in regards to judicial nominations. It is also what the Democrats did in 1975 to lower the majority required to end a filibuster from 67 to 60 votes. (At the time, Democrats had 62 votes.)
In short, although it takes 67 votes to change the rules, it only takes 51 votes to break them. The Democrats can pass health care reform if they choose. There would certainly be public outrage if they did (not just over the bill, but over the flagrant disregard of the Senate’s rules), but Democrats might decide it’s worth it.
One of the media’s tricks for spreading misinformation is to quote someone uncritically who is telling a lie. The story may be technically truthful, if the person really did say it. Nevertheless, if the lie is reported without any rebuttal or caution that it might not be true, the story gives the impression that the lie is true, particularly when the lie is woven into the broader narrative of the story. That’s dishonest.
Indeed, my definition of “lie” is to make any statement with the deliberate intention to cause the audience to believe something that the teller thinks is false. By that definition, Bob Kerrey and the New York Times lied about Scott Brown:
“If he’s running against 60 votes and wins, that is not good,” said Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska. “It says that in Massachusetts, they are willing to elect a guy who doesn’t believe in evolution just to keep the Democrats from having 60 votes.”
“Scott Brown believes in evolution but in the case of Bob Kerrey he’s willing to make an exception.”
Here’s where the story gets interesting. The NYT revised its story to remove the portion of the quote that referred to evolution. But it did so without noting a correction.
ASIDE: As of today, the original story still appears at the Seattle Times, with a byline indicating the story is from the New York Times. Also, Patterico has a screenshot of the Google cache.
What justification could the NYT have for airbrushing the story without a correction? If Kerrey didn’t really make the remark (the likelihood of this seems vanishingly small), then they’ve libeled Kerrey and they need to run a retraction. Much more likely, the NYT was being called on the lie and pulled it. Leaving out the evolution bit would have been the right thing to do in the first place, but they didn’t do that, and now it’s out there. Once they’d helped to spread misinformation, the NYT needed to issue a correction.
So why didn’t they? I can only see one explanation: Issuing a correction would draw attention to the fact that Democrats were lying about Scott Brown. Obviously, the NYT wanted Martha Coakley to win. That’s why they ran the lie in the first place, and if they ran the correction, the whole matter would have been a net positive for Brown. From the NYT’s perspective, that was unacceptable. Better just to leave the lie out there, and take the rip from people who hate the NYT already.
POSTSCRIPT: We can now look forward to Clark Hoyt’s column on the matter, in which Hoyt will defend the paper (as he nearly always does) writing that although they made an error in judgement, that error was not the result of bias.
Dishonesty in the New York Times is not limited to politics and international affairs, we can also find it in the gossip/fashion pages. The NYT admits distorting a photograph of actress Christina Hendricks to make her look big. They claim it was an accident “during routine processing”. You can decide whether to believe that; I’ll just point out that the distortion happened to be exactly what the article needed to support its catty point, a point that the original photograph failed to support.
A new PPP poll shows that Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are each tied with President Obama in a hypothetical matchup. Huckabee has an insignificant lead over Obama; Romney trails insignificantly. The only Republican that Obama would clearly beat in the poll is Sarah Palin.
Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race was lifted by strong support from union households, in a sign of trouble for President Barack Obama and Democrats who are counting on union support in the 2010 midterm elections.
A poll conducted on behalf of the AFL-CIO found that 49% of Massachusetts union households supported Mr. Brown in Tuesday’s voting, while 46% supported Democrat Martha Coakley. The poll conducted by Hart Research Associates surveyed 810 voters.
Some of this has to be the unique appeal of Scott Brown and the unique unappeal of Martha Coakley, but that can’t be all of it. If the Democrats have moved left of the unions, we truly are due for a correction.
Sec. 3. Closure of Detention Facilities at Guantánamo. The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order. . .
BARACK OBAMA
THE WHITE HOUSE,
January 22, 2009.
The credulous press reported this as a done deal (e.g., “Obama Upends Bush, Will Close Guantanamo“) despite the administration having no plan to carry it out. They still have no plan to carry it out.
In the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, the majority of Americans (55%) favor Congress’ putting the brakes on its current healthcare reform efforts and considering alternatives that can obtain more Republican support. Four in 10 Americans (39%) would rather have House and Senate Democrats continue to try to pass the bill currently being negotiated in conference committee.
Ramesh Ponnuru has a good analysis of the problem of pre-existing conditions:
The political paradox of pre-existing conditions is that the ban is popular but can’t be accomplished in a popular way. The ban requires all kinds of other government interventions to sustain it. For example, you have to force everyone to buy insurance: Otherwise people would wait until they got sick and buy policies knowing that the insurance companies could not turn them down or charge them extra. You have to define what insurance policies have to cover, or else that mandate can be evaded. You have to offer subsidies for people who can’t afford the insurance policies that you’ve just made more expensive. Pretty soon you’ve got Obamacare.
It seems to me that the problem of pre-existing conditions arises from a pecularity of health insurance. If you get into a car accident just before your insurance expires, the insurance is still on the hook for the cost. Shouldn’t health insurance work the same way? If you have a problem before you switch insurance, shouldn’t your old insurer cover it?
I’ve never read anyone else suggest this, so maybe I’m being naive, but I don’t see how.
Food handouts were shut off Tuesday to thousands of people at a tent city here when the main U.S. aid agency said the Army should not be distributing the packages.
It was not known whether the action reflected a high-level policy decision at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or confusion in a city where dozens of entities are involved in aid efforts.
“We are not supposed to get rations unless approved by AID,” Maj. Larry Jordan said.
Jordan said that approval was revoked; water was not included in the USAID decision, so the troops continued to hand out bottles of water. The State Department and USAID did not respond to requests for comment.
There needs to be an investigation of what jackass gave this order. I want to see that guy forced to say into the cameras that he’d rather see people starve than be fed by the military.
As I predicted, Nancy Pelosi has concluded she cannot get the Senate health bill through the House. The two-bill scheme (pass the Senate bill and promise another bill to fix it) doesn’t look feasible either. We’ll see if the Democrats decide to “go nuclear”.
It is a mark of the degree of political malpractice the Democrats have been guilty of over the past year, of the degree of their overreach and recklessness, that being left with 59 senators—a huge majority by any measure, and the same majority they had when Obama was inaugurated a year ago—is now somehow enough to make it seem as though they are powerless and is likely to kill the core (and almost the entirety) of their domestic agenda, and leave them rudderless and reeling.
They are of course not in fact powerless at all. But they have adopted an agenda that only a supermajority could pass. . . They have made it impossible for themselves to change course without a massive loss of face and of political capital. But however costly, that change will now need to come.
Posted by K. Crary 
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