If Scott Brown wins today (86% on Intrade), the Democrats have indicated that they will try to pass the Senate bill in the House.
That will be hard. In November, the House passed the Democratic bill by a razor-thin 220-215 margin. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and this morning Joseph Cao (R-LA) have vowed to oppose the Senate bill due to its funding of abortion. That leaves the vote at 218-217, if no other votes change.
Can the House Democrats get every single vote that they had for their own bill to vote for the Senate bill as well? Here’s what has to happen: Every single member of the pro-life Democrat coalition other than Stupak himself caves. Not a single progressive follows through on their threat to vote against a bill without a public option. (Okay, that sounds pretty likely.) Not a single vote is swayed by union opposition to the “Cadillac tax”. And, not a single blue dog gets scared straight by the spectacle of a Republican winning the Massachusetts Senate race despite appearances by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Scott Brown has won a moral victory already, but I’m starting to believe he could carry off an actual win. Several last minute polls give him a measurable lead: Politico/InsiderAdvantage +9, ARG +7, PPP +5, Suffolk +4, among others. Only the Daily Kos poll and the “leaked” Coakley internal poll fail to give Brown the lead. Stuart Rothenberg calls it “lean takeover”. And Brown is trading at 77 on Intrade.
The Boston Globe has not seen fit to report Martha Coakley’s preposterous allegation that Curt Schilling is a Yankees fan, according to a search at Boston.com:
0 results for “coakley schilling” from Boston Globe
Stories published between Jan 14, 2010 and Dec 31, 2010
Sorry, your search did not match anything in our database.
UPDATE: I think Coakley made the remark on January 14. Hence the search.
Twenty-six patients at Cuba’s largest hospital for the mentally ill died this week during a cold snap, the government said Friday.
Human rights leaders cited negligence and a lack of resources as factors in the deaths, and the Health Ministry launched an investigation that it said could lead to criminal proceedings.
A Health Ministry communique read on state television blamed “prolonged low temperatures that fell to 38 degrees Fahrenheit (4 Celsius) in Boyeros,” the neighborhood where Havana’s Psychiatric Hospital is located. . .
The statement came in response to reports from the independent Cuban Commission on Human Rights that at least 24 mental patients died of hypothermia this week, and that the hospital did not do enough to protect them from the cold because of problems such as faulty windows. . .
Communist Cuba provides free health care to all its citizens but, though the quality of its medical system is celebrated in leftist circles around Latin America, it is also plagued by shortages. Patients are expected to bring their own sheets and towels and sometimes their own food during hospital stays.
Martha Coakley seems to think “he’s a Yankee fan” is a generic insult she can use on anyone. Against Rudy Giuliani it works. Against Curt Schilling, the legendary Red Sox pitcher, not so much.
It can be dangerous to wade into a topic you know nothing about. It’s doubly dangerous when the topic is sports, where so many ordinary people are knowledgeable, and care much more than they should.
A new poll taken Thursday evening for Pajamas Media by CrossTarget – an Alexandria VA survey research firm – shows Scott Brown, a Republican, leading Martha Coakley, a Democrat, by 15.4% in Tuesday’s special election for the open Massachusetts US Senate seat. The poll of 946 likely voters was conducted by telephone using interactive voice technology (IVR) and has a margin of error of +/- 3.19%.
This poll is as close as you can get to a controlled experiment in politics:
New polling released yesterday and today by Public Policy Polling (D) provides some solid, empirical evidence that a vote against the health care bill may be the better bet for swing-seat Democrats. Or at least, that seems to be the message for freshman Rep. Larry Kissell (D-NC), who voted against the bill.
The new polls show that Kissell easily leads several potential Republican opponents, by margins of 14-18 points. He also leads a potential Democratic primary challenger, 2002 nominee Chris Kouri, by 49%-15%. But a close look at the polls shows just how people think he voted on the bill — and how this could be affecting their decisions about him.
It turns out that a 44% plurality of the likely general election electorate falsely believe that Kissell voted for the bill, with only 29% giving the correct answer that he voted against it, and 28% are unsure. . . I asked PPP for some customized cross-tabs — which reveal that among people who think he voted for it the race is very close, with a landslide lead among the folks who think he voted against it.
This is very revealing. It shows two results for the exact same guy: If he voted for the bill, he’s tied. If he voted against the bill, he wins by a landslide.
The big sticking point between the House and Senate health care bills, we’re told, is the “Cadillac tax” on (supposedly) too-expensive health care plans. The House didn’t have such a tax, because it was strongly opposed by labor unions that have such plans.
Negotiators have reportedly come to an agreement, which seems obvious in retrospect. They are simply going to exempt unions from paying the tax. Problem solved! (More precisely, unions don’t have to pay the tax until 2018, but we can expect that date to be extended in perpetuity.)
It’s so blatantly corrupt I can’t even believe it. The Democrats are going to have to face a backlash over this, aren’t they? Aren’t they?
Q: Right, if you are a Catholic, and believe what the Pope teaches that any form of birth control is a sin . . . ah you don’t want to do that.
Martha Coakley: No we have a separation of church and state Ken. Let’s be clear.
Q: In the emergency room you still have your religious freedom.
Martha Coakley: The law says that people are allowed to have that. You can have religious freedom but you probably shouldn’t work in the emergency room.
Wow. (Cue to 9:30 here for the audio.) Also, when asked if health care professionals should be able to refuse to perform abortions as conscientious objectors, she says no, referring to abortion as a service that is “required under the law and under Roe vs. Wade”. (Cue to 9:00.)
And with that, Coakley is officially an extremist.
Business Week is reporting an alarming development. The Obama administration is looking for ways to push investors into retirement annuities rather than other securities:
U.S. investors oppose federal initiatives that would force them to give up control over their 401(k) accounts, the Investment Company Institute said. Seven in 10 U.S. households object to the idea of the government requiring retirees to convert part of their savings into annuities guaranteeing a steady payment for life, according to an institute-funded report today. . .
The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are spearheading the effort. . .
Some lawmakers have questioned the public-policy value of the tax benefits for people investing in retirement accounts, the ICI said in a report today. . . Senator Herb Kohl, chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, proposed legislation on Dec. 16 to require fund companies to do more to ensure 401(k) options are appropriate for workers. The Wisconsin Democrat cited reports that target- date funds designed for people retiring in 2010 invested in high-yield, high-risk corporate bonds.
If investors wanted annuities, we would have bought them. (Economists call this “revealed choice”.) Having the flexibility to do what we want is better than a fixed revenue stream. Plus, if we die before our retirement funds are fully spent (which is the plan), we want our family to inherit.
Anyway, who thinks that the administrations plan to boost annuities will consist just of public service announcements and the like? No, those guys simply don’t think that way. Whatever they do, it will be coercive. In their view, people must be forced to do (what they consider to be) the right thing. So we can look forward to some sort of penalty on 401k and IRAs that don’t invest enough in annuities.
That would be bad enough, but this guy thinks that qualifying annuities will be required to invest in treasuries. I’m afraid that sounds plausible, if not right away then a few years down the road. After all, the premise of this whole thing is that the private sector cannot be trusted. (And the government can? Sheesh.)
If the government requires you to “invest” in a government security, that’s no different than the confiscation of retirement savings that Argentina carried out a year ago. We already have a government annuity plan of dubious value called Social Security. Many don’t expect to see a single penny from it. We don’t want our real retirement savings, which we own, to be forced into a similar vehicle.
Powerful House Democrats are eyeing proposals to overhaul the nation’s $3 trillion 401(k) system, including the elimination of most of the $80 billion in annual tax breaks that 401(k) investors receive.
House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, are looking at redirecting those tax breaks to a new system of guaranteed retirement accounts to which all workers would be obliged to contribute.
Jane Hamsher (of the leftist FireDogLake.com) writes in the Huffington Post about how the White House manufactured the appearance of academic support for its health care plans:
Up until this point, most of the attention regarding the failure to disclose the connection between [MIT economist] Jonathan Gruber and the White House has fallen on Gruber himself. Far more troubling, however, is the lack of disclosure on the part of the White House, the Senate, the DNC and other Democratic leaders who distributed Gruber’s work and cited it as independent validation of their proposals, orchestrating the appearance of broad consensus when in fact it was all part of the same effort.
The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber’s “assumptions” to justify key portions of the Senate bill such as the “Cadillac tax,” which they allowed people to believe was independent verification. Now that we know that Gruber’s work was not that of an independent analyst but rather work performed as a contractor to the White House and paid for by taxpayers, and economists like Larry Mishel are raising serious questions about its validity, it should be made publicly available so others can judge its merits.
Gruber began negotiating a sole-source contract with the Department of Health and Human Services in February of 2009, for which he was ultimately paid $392,600. The contract called for Gruber to use his statistical model for evaluating alternatives “derived from the President’s health reform proposal.” It was not a research grant, but rather a consulting contract to advise the White House Office of Health Reform, headed by Obama’s health care czar, Nancy-Ann DeParle, to “develop proposals” for health care reform.
How did the feedback loop work? Well, take Gruber’s appearance before the Senate HELP Committee on November 2, 2009, for which he used his microsimulation model to make calculations about small business insurance coverage for his testimony. On the same day, Gruber released an analysis of the House health care bill, which he sent to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post. Ezra published an excerpt.
White House blogger Jesse Lee then promoted both Gruber’s Senate testimony and Ezra Klein’s article on the White House blog. “We thought it would all be a little more open and transparent if we went ahead and published what our focus will be for the day” he said, pointing to Gruber’s “objective analysis.” The “transparent” part apparently stopped when everyone got to Gruber’s contractual relationship to the White House, which nobody in the three-hit triangle bothered to disclose.
The White House commissioned Gruber’s work (not as a research grant, but as a consulting contract) and then passed it off as independent confirmation. Hamsher has much, much more on the scam, from which I’ll highlight just this bit:
On the 29th Nancy-Ann DeParle, head of the very White House Office of Health Reform that Gruber was hired to consult for, posted perhaps the most misleading column of all on the White House blog:
MIT Economist Confirms Senate Health Reform Bill Reduces Costs and Improves Coverage
She identified Gruber as an “MIT Economist who has been closely following the health insurance reform process” who had “issued a compelling new report.” There was no acknowledgment that her very own White House office had commissioned Gruber’s work.
$393k sounds like a pretty good price to buy “broad consensus” for its trillion-dollar scheme.
Martha Coakley says there are no more terrorists in Afghanistan. I guess the suicide bomber a week ago was the very last one. And Democrats wonder why they’re not trusted on national security.
Chavez to nationalize electricity and telecommunications
Venezuela President Hugo Chavez yesterday announced plans to nationalize Venezuela’s electrical and telecommunications companies, pledging to create a socialist state in a bold move with echoes of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba.
Behind the drama unfolding in the streets of Iran, the regime is quietly clamping down on some of the nation’s best students by derailing their academic and professional careers.
On Wednesday, progovernment militia attacked and beat students at a school in northeastern Iran. Since last Sunday’s massive protests nationwide, dozens of university students have been arrested as part of an aggressive policy against what are known as Iran’s “star students.”
In most places, being a star means ranking top of the class, but in Iran it means your name appears on a list of students considered a threat by the intelligence ministry. It also means a partial or complete ban from education.
The term comes from the fact that some students have learned of their status by seeing stars printed next to their names on test results.
Mehrnoush Karimi, a 24-year-old law-school hopeful, found out in August that she was starred. She ranked 55 on this year’s national entrance exam for law schools, out of more than 70,000 test-takers. That score should have guaranteed her a seat at the school of her choice. Instead, the government told her she wouldn’t be attending law school due to her “star” status. . .
More than 1,000 graduate students have been blocked from higher education since the practice began in 2006, according to statements by Mostafa Moin, a former education minister, in official media in September. . .
The regime identifies star students by tapping the same network of security forces and informants it uses to keep society generally in check. The intelligence ministry routinely monitors email and phone conversations of people it considers dissidents and activists.
The Obama administration has taken some heat and mockery for using the nebulous and non-economic term of jobs being “saved or created” by the $787 billion stimulus program.
So it’s gotten rid of it.
In a little-noticed December 18, 2009 memo from Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag the Obama administration is changing the way stimulus jobs are counted.
The memo, first noted by ProPublica, says that those receiving stimulus funds no longer have to say whether a job has been saved or created.
“Instead, recipients will more easily and objectively report on jobs funded with Recovery Act dollars,” Orszag wrote.
In other words, if the project is being funded with stimulus dollars – even if the person worked at that company or organization before and will work the same place afterwards – that’s a stimulus job.
Trying to count and then to take credit for jobs that already exist was an awfully silly enterprise by an awfully foolish administration. Indeed, the very idea that the jobs could be counted was contrary to the entire premise of the stimulus plan.
The media too has to accept some blame for playing along and pretending that the administration’s announced goal of 3.5 million jobs created/saved was somehow meaningful. Ed Pound, the communications director for recovery.gov was more honest when he replied to a question about the created/saved numbers by saying “Who knows, man? Who really knows?”
You can see here how the stimulus package has performed relative to a meaningful prediction.
The latest Rasmussen poll shows no significant change in opinion on health care “reform”. The public continues to oppose the plan by a double-digit margin. A near majority remains strongly opposed. A majority continues to believes that it will hurt the quality of care. And, as before, hardly anyone (17%) believes that it will cut costs.
England basically invented individualism, liberty, and classical liberalism, so it’s really sad to see it going down the tubes. Here’s two stories from a single day showing how far England has sunk. First, there’s this:
The TV presenter and Marks & Spencer model Myleene Klass has been warned by police for waving a knife at teenagers who were peering into a window of her house late at night.
Klass was in the kitchen with her daughter upstairs when she spotted the youths in her garden just after midnight on Friday. She grabbed a knife and banged the windows before they ran away.
Hertfordshire police warned her she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon”, even in her own home, was illegal. . .
The warning issued to the model comes after a pledge by the Conservative party last month that they would make it more difficult for people who tackle burglars to be prosecuted.
It’s illegal in England today, even in your own home, to wave a knife a intruders. Never mind actually using it, merely suggesting that you might defend yourself is illegal.
But at least they didn’t arrest Klass, perhaps due to her celebrity. This next fellow wasn’t so lucky:
A wealthy businessman was arrested at home in front of his wife and young son over an email which council officials deemed ‘offensive’ to gipsies – but which he had not even written.
The email, concerning a planning appeal by a gipsy, included the phrase: ‘It’s the ‘do as you likey’ attitude that I am against.’
Council staff believed the email was offensive because ‘likey’ rhymes with the derogatory term ‘pikey’.
The 45-year-old IT boss was held in a police cell for four hours until it was established he had nothing to do with the email, which had been sent by one of his then workers, Paul Osmond.
Forget for a moment that he didn’t even write the letter. They arrested this man because (they thought) he said “likey”, which rhymes with something else that they found offensive! This is the most asinine thing I’ve heard in a long time.
And they didn’t even release the guy because it was a stunning violation of his human rights. They only released him because they had the wrong guy. The other guy was arrested and had to make bail. And even the innocent guy is going to have his DNA on file permanently.
More broadly speaking, this incident shows how hate speech laws are utterly incompatible with free speech. This proves that absolutely anything can be offensive to someone. If you use a word that rhymes with an obscure racial slur, that’s hate speech. In England, that’s enough to send you to jail.
We already knew that the stimulus boondoggle is a complete failure, but now the Associated Press is figuring it out:
Ten months into President Barack Obama’s first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found.
Spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it didn’t matter, the AP analysis showed: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much stimulus money Washington poured out for transportation, raising questions about Obama’s argument that more road money would address an “urgent need to accelerate job growth.”
But at least one person hasn’t figured it out yet:
Obama wants a second stimulus bill from Congress that relies in part on more road and bridge spending, projects the president said are “at the heart of our effort to accelerate job growth.”
A reminder that racism is at least as prevalent on the left as the right:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) apologized today for referring to President Barack Obama as “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect” in private conversations during the 2008 presidential campaign.
“I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words,” said Reid in a statement. “I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments.”
Reid called the president today to apologize and reiterated his regret for making the comments, his spokesman Jim Manley said Saturday afternoon.
Recall that Trent Lott lost his position as Senate Majority Leader for making racially foolish remarks. It will be instructive to see what happens to Reid. I predict nothing will.
Obama in 2010: “I accepted Harry’s apology without question.”
Obama in 2002: “The Republican Party itself has to drive out Trent Lott.”
BONUS: In the same 2002 remarks, Obama referred to Lott as “the current president of the Senate”. For the record, the president of the Senate is the Vice-President, not the majority leader. Wasn’t Obama supposed to have been a professor of constitutional law or something?
Remember how Massachusetts Democrats had to change the law to allow the Democratic governor to appoint a senator, after just changing the law a few years earlier to prevent the Republican governor from appointing a senator. Supposedly it was because of the great importance of the state having representation in the Senate.
But — surprise, surprise — that was a load of crap, because now that it looks like Scott Brown (the Republican) might just have a chance of winning, Massachusetts Democrats say that if Brown won, they would stall his swearing-in until after health care passes.
Nancy Pelosi scoffs at Barack Obama’s campaign promises:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, piqued with White House pressure to accept the Senate health reform bill, threw a rare rhetorical elbow Tuesday at President Barack Obama, questioning his commitment to his 2008 campaign promises. A leadership aide said it was no accident. . .
A reporter reminded the San Francisco Democrat that in 2008, then-candidate Obama opined that all such negotiations be open to C-SPAN cameras.
“There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail,” quipped Pelosi, who has no intention of making the deliberations public.
It’s rare that I find anything to agree with from Nancy Pelosi, but her attitude toward the president’s promises is certainly justified.
Starting in November 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under Timothy Geithner began urging American International Group, the huge insurer that the government had bailed out, to limit disclosure on payments made to banks at the height of the financial crisis. . .
The e-mail exchange between the bailed-out insurance giant and its regulator portray a strange reversal of roles, with A.I.G. staff arguing for the disclosure of certain details on payments for credit-default swaps to major banks, only to be discouraged by officials at, or representing, the Federal Reserve. . .
In a draft of one regulatory filing, A.I.G. stated that it had paid banks . . . the full value of C.D.O.’s, or collateralized debt obligations, that they had bought from the company. In the response to that draft from the law firm Davis Polk and Wardwell, which represented the New York Fed, that crucial sentence was crossed out, and did not appear in the final version filed on Dec. 24, 2008.
By the end of that month, A.I.G. had become the proxy in a tug-of-war between government agencies, with the Securities and Exchange Commission asking the company to revise its disclosure, which the regulator saw as falling short of full compliance.
Geithner’s appointment keeps looking worse and worse.
Peter Orszag used to be the director of the Congressional Budget Office. Now he runs the White House’s OMB and coaches Democrats on how to game the CBO numbers.
In August 2008, Orszag wrote that Social Security would be in good shape for the foreseeable future:
CBO projects that [Social Security] outlays will first exceed revenues in 2019 and that the Social Security trust funds will be exhausted in 2049.
Ed Morrissey reports that August 2008 was the very month that Social Security slipped into the red.
One advantage to the Guantanamo prison is it’s completely escape-proof. Even if someone were to escape from the prison, they would merely find themselves in the Guantanamo naval base, with a heavily armed and mined frontier between them and Cuba.
Yesterday, Robert Gibbs refused to answer any questions about President Obama breaking his C-SPAN promise. His pretext for refusing was that he had already answered that question on Tuesday. Video here.
You can judge how truthful Gibbs’s claim is for yourself. Here’s his “answer” from Tuesday:
Q A question on health care. CSPAN television is requesting leaders in Congress to open up the debate to their cameras, and I know this is something that the President talked about on the campaign trail. Is this something that he supports, will be pushing for?
MR. GIBBS: I have not seen that letter. I know the President is going to begin some discussions later today on health care in order to try to iron out the differences that remain between the House and the Senate bill and try to get something hopefully to his desk quite quickly.
“I have not seen that letter.” That’s all the answer we get. And by the way, if Gibbs hasn’t seen the letter, it’s because he doesn’t want to.
Actually, that’s not the entire discussion from Tuesday, because the press didn’t let it go so easily:
Q Okay, just lastly, why can’t you answer the C-SPAN question —
MR. GIBBS: I did.
Q Well, you didn’t, because you said —
MR. GIBBS: I said I hadn’t seen the letter, which I haven’t —
Q Why do you need to see a letter? I mean, this is something the President said during the campaign and he talked about he wants everything open on C-SPAN —
MR. GIBBS: Dan asked me about the letter and I haven’t read the letter.
Q Well, I’ll just ask you about having it on C-SPAN —
MR. GIBBS: I answered Dan’s question and I answered this before we left for the break, Keith. The President’s number-one priority is getting the differences worked out, getting a bill to the House and the Senate. We’ve filled your newspaper and many others with the back-and-forth and the details of what’s in these bills. I don’t want to keep that from continuing to happen. I don’t think there’s anybody that would say that we haven’t had a thorough, robust, now spanning two calendar years’ debate on health care.
Q There are a lot of reasons not to do it on C-SPAN — people could showboat. Does he regret making that statement during the campaign?
MR. GIBBS: No.
I find it a little amazing that Gibbs can do this with a straight face. Telling a lie when your audience doesn’t know the truth is one thing. But this guy says “I answered Dan’s question” despite the fact that everyone was there only a few minutes earlier when he refused to answer Dan’s question.
Britain told American intelligence agents more than a year ago that the Detroit bomber had links to extremists, according to Downing Street.
The prime minister’s spokesman indicated that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was named in a file of people based in Britain who had made contact with radical Muslim preachers. The file was said to have been sent to the US authorities in 2008.
White House sources disputed the Downing Street account, stating that no such intelligence information was passed by Britain before the attempted Christmas Day attacks. The White House declined to respond officially.
Now everyone is backpedaling, with the US admitting that it did get information and the UK denying that any of it was actionable:
Barack Obama is under pressure to disclose what information MI5 passed to the American authorities about the Detroit bomber after Downing Street disclosed that a file had been “shared” with the CIA in 2008.
After initially denying that they had received British intelligence, senior American sources confirmed last night that they were “reviewing” what British information had been received on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. . .
A US counter-terrorism official did not deny that information on Abdulmutallab had been received from Britain but told The Daily Telegraph: “It’s wrong to think that there was, from any source, information that identified Abdulmutallab as a terrorist, let alone a terrorist who was planning to carry out an attack in the United States.”
Yesterday morning, the Prime Minister’s spokesman issued a revised statement that said: “There is no suggestion that the UK passed on information to the US that they did not act on.”
As far as the intelligence goes, I think the only way to read this is that the UK gave the US some intelligence that included Abdulmutallab. Like most intelligence, it was probably of dubious quality and was dismissed by US intelligence. But given how we disregarded other warnings about the guy, including one from his own father, it seems reasonable to wonder if we should have put things together.
More interesting, however, is what the kerfuffle tells us about relations between the White House and Downing Street. The president snubs of the prime minister and the State Department’s loose talk about ending the “special relationship” with Britain have clearly taken their toll. Don’t forget, this is called “smart diplomacy”.
As many as one in five former Guantanamo Bay detainees are suspected of or are confirmed to have engaged in terrorist activity after their release, U.S. officials said, citing the latest government statistics.
The 20 percent rate is an increase over the 14 percent of former inmates an April Pentagon report said were thought to have joined terrorist efforts, said the officials, who requested anonymity.
The head of C-SPAN has implored Congress to open up the last leg of health care reform negotiations to the public, as top Democrats lay plans to hash out the final product among themselves.
C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb wrote to leaders in the House and Senate Dec. 30 urging them to open “all important negotiations, including any conference committee meetings,” to televised coverage on his network. . .
Democratic leaders could bypass the traditional conference committee process, in which lawmakers from both parties and chambers meet to reconcile differences between the House and Senate versions of a bill. Top Democrats in the House, Senate and White House were meeting Tuesday evening to figure out the final product in three-way talks before sending it back to both chambers for a final vote. . .
This format would seem ideal for closed-door meetings, which congressional Democrats have used many times to figure out sensitive provisions in the health care bill — though President Obama pledged during the campaign to open up health care talks to C-SPAN’s cameras.
“That’s what I will do in bringing all parties together, not negotiating behind closed doors, but bringing all parties together, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are,” Obama said at a debate against Hillary Clinton in Los Angeles on Jan. 31, 2008.
Calling on the president to keep a campaign pledge? Good luck with that.
UPDATE: There’s a better video here, with eight different occasions on which Obama promised to carry out the negotiations in public, on C-SPAN. It seems it was part of his stump speech. As a bonus, there’s also video of Robert Gibbs repeatedly refusing to answer a question on the subject.
In 2006, Harry Reid gave a speech attacking the use of manager’s amendments. (This is an omnibus amendment that basically rewrites a bill.) In 2009, Harry Reid used a manager’s amendment, exhibiting every single problem he attacked in 2006, to pass a health care bill.
Hypocrisy? Of course. But mostly I’m reminded of Michael Barone’s first rule: All process arguments are insincere.
Mr. Obama’s top advisers say they no longer believe the key finding of a much disputed National Intelligence Estimate about Iran, published a year before President George W. Bush left office, which said that Iranian scientists ended all work on designing a nuclear warhead in late 2003.
After reviewing new documents that have leaked out of Iran and debriefing defectors lured to the West, Mr. Obama’s advisers say they believe the work on weapons design is continuing on a smaller scale — the same assessment reached by Britain, France, Germany and Israel.
Well, it’s served its purpose now, which was to paralyze us at a critical juncture and to help get Obama elected. (For example, consider this Time piece from December 2007.) Never mind that it was clearly nonsense all along.
So why did Bush’s director of national intelligence publish the NIE? I suppose we’ll never know, but I’ve long suspected that he was expecting it to leak, or knew that it already had.
Our stimulus boondoggle has nothing on the Chinese. Neither does our reckless real estate speculation. Chinese officials built an entire city that now stands empty, waiting for someone to move there. Cue to 1:13 in this video:
Economic theory already shows that planned economies do not allocate resources efficiently, but this story makes the inefficiency much easier to visualize.
Of course, President Obama’s numbers have been plummeting in nearly every poll, but Rasmussen comes in for particular opprobrium because his polls have consistently shown Democrats and liberal opinions a few points behind most other polls. There are three remarks worth making.
First, as Glenn Reynolds puts it, attacking the pollsters is seldom a good sign. Put more simply, attacking the polls is loser talk. I know this from personal experience. Back in 1992, I and many other Republicans were in denial that George Bush could actually lose the presidential election to someone like Bill Clinton. The talk on the right was all of how the polls were wrong. Of course, they were not and Clinton won the election handily. So when Democrats attack the polls, I think we’re seeing a similar phenomenon on the left.
Second, there is a simple reason why Rasmussen’s polls have been more friendly to Republicans than other polls. Unlike most other pollsters, Rasmussen polls likely voters all the time. (The Politico story gets around to mentioning this point near the bottom of page two.) Most pollsters poll registered voters or even the general public most of the time, and shift to likely voters just before elections, resulting in a bump for the GOP right around elections. I think Rasmussen is right to use the same methodology all the time.
Third, and most importantly, Rasmussen’s national polls are objectively among the best. We can benchmark a poll’s quality by comparing its election predictions with actual results. RealClearPolitics has a table of the final 2008 polls from various pollsters.
Quite a few polls did a good job of producing a good central estimate, but with varying margins of error. To measure the quality of polls against each other, we want a measure that takes both the poll’s accuracy and precision into account. To do this, I calculated the root-mean-square error for each poll, evenly balanced throughout the margin of error. (ASIDE: Basically, I’m assuming a uniform distribution throughout the indicated margin of error. This isn’t exactly right, of course, but the published numbers don’t give enough information to reconstruct the true distribution, and it would be too much trouble to do so anyway.) I computed the error based on Obama’s share of the two-party vote, which eliminates discrepancies due to treatment of minor parties and “don’t know” responses.
The result is a single measure that indicates how well each poll predicted the 2008 election. Rasmussen and Pew come in first, with accurate estimates and small margins of error. ABC/Washington Post, Fox, IBD/TIPP, and NBC/WSJ also did well:
1
Rasmussen
1.34
1
Pew
1.34
3
ABC/WPost
1.76
4
Fox
1.86
5
IBD/TIPP
1.98
6
NBC/WSJ
1.98
7
CNN/Opinion Research
2.05
8
Ipsos/McClatchy
2.11
9
CBS
2.18
10
Gallup
2.19
11
Diageo/Hotline
2.28
12
Fairmodel
2.31
13
Battleground (Lake)
2.36
14
Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby
2.62
15
Marist
2.64
16
CBS/NYT
2.89
17
Battleground (Tarrance)
3.39
18
Newsweek
3.63
Note that the Fair model came in 12th place. The Fair model is not a poll, but an econometric model devised by Yale economist Ray Fair that predicts the outcome of presidential elections. The Fair model does no polling and doesn’t even know who the candidates are, but it still does as good a job at predicting election outcomes as many major polls. Any poll that comes in behind Fair can be safely regarded as a bad poll — you would be better off not polling at all.
The results speak for themselves. In 2008, Rasmussen and Pew were the best, and several polls were literally worse than no poll at all.
LED traffic lights save electricity, but they generate less heat. That is a problem in colder climates: the cold bulbs allow snow and ice to accumulate and obscure the light. This is being blamed for a fatal accident in Oswego, Illinois. The solution being adopted is to send out road crews to clean the lights, which eliminates some or all of the cost savings. But at least they’re creating “green jobs”!
THERMODYNAMIC POSTSCRIPT: Above I said “but they generate less heat”, but I could just as well have said “because they generate less heat”. All the energy a bulb uses has to go somewhere. LED’s use less electricity precisely because they don’t generate as much waste heat. (LEDs also don’t waste energy on light invisible to the human eye, but I don’t think that’s much of a factor.)
LEDs and fluorescent bulbs are cold by design. Traffic light failures are a dramatic consequence, but there is a more commonplace one. In a home that uses electric heat, LEDs and fluorescent bulbs will save no energy during the heating months. Any heat that is not generated by lighting will be made up joule-for-joule by electric heaters, coming out precisely even. As a result, estimates of the energy saved by such lighting are substantially overstated (again, in homes with electric heat).
Ben Nelson says that the special deal for Nebraska in the Senate health care bill isn’t his fault:
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) reached out Thursday evening to South Carolina GOP Attorney General Henry McMaster, the leader of a group of 13 Republican state attorneys general who are threatening to file suit against the Senate health care bill, and urged him to forgo any legal action, POLITICO has learned. . .
“Senator Nelson insisted that he had not asked for the Cornhusker Kickback to be placed in the U.S. Senate version of the health care bill to secure his vote. Senator Nelson told the attorney general that it was simply a ‘marker’ placed in the U.S. Senate version of the bill and assured the attorney general that it would be ‘fixed,’” [according to a memo sent by McMaster’s chief of staff to other GOP state attorneys general detailing the call.]
The document goes on to say: “Senator Nelson said it would be ‘fixed’ by extending the Cornhusker Kickback (100% federal payment) on Medicaid to every state.”
Senate Democratic leaders have made no reference to a plan to expand the Nebraska deal to the remaining 49 states — a move that would be prohibitively expensive to the federal government and raise serious questions about whether health reform would lower the expected federal deficit, as President Barack Obama claims it would.
Nelson isn’t going to be able to distance himself from this. Whether he “asked” for it or not, he accepted it as his price for his vote. Also, there’s obviously no way that the kickback can be extended to every state, because it would explode the bill’s delicate CBO score.
In November I noted that Erroll Southers, President Obama’s nominee to run the TSA, had been censured for running an illegal background check on his ex-wife’s boyfriend. The homeland security committee approved his nomination on November 19. The next day, Southers remembered that the information he gave the committee was false:
Southers first described the episode in his October affidavit, telling the Senate panel that two decades ago he asked a San Diego Police Department employee to access confidential criminal records about the boyfriend. Southers said he had been censured by superiors at the FBI. He described the incident as isolated and expressed regrets about it.
The committee approved his nomination Nov. 19. One day later, Southers wrote to Lieberman and Collins saying his first account was incorrect. After reviewing documents, he wrote, he recalled that he had twice conducted the database searches himself, downloaded confidential law enforcement records about his wife’s boyfriend and passed information on to the police department employee, the letter said. . .
“I am distressed by the inconsistencies between my recollection and the contemporaneous documents, but I assure you that the mistake was inadvertent, and that I have at all times taken full responsibility for what I know to have been a grave error in judgment,” the letter said.
He simply forgot that he did illegal searches on multiple occasions and passed the information on to others? And then he remembered the day after his nomination was approved?
Well, I’m sure that the Democratic party, strong advocate of civil liberties that it is, will call Southers back to the committee to account for this new revelation. Right?
A spokesman said Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) will work quickly to overcome DeMint’s procedural block and force a vote when the Senate reconvenes this month.
Am I the only one that finds this defense of Singapore’s speech regulation unconvincing?
SIR – Philip Bowring’s account of the Far Eastern Economic Review’s encounter with the Singapore government is inaccurate (Letters, October 17th). In 1987 the government restricted the circulation of the Review after it had engaged in Singapore’s domestic politics. But an advertisement-free version was distributed widely at bookshops and supermarkets, and sold more than 1,000 copies. In March 1988 the Review applied to produce a similar version. The government agreed, subject to a ceiling of 2,000 copies, but the Review refused its offer. Would this have happened in Maoist China and North Korea?
Michael Eng Cheng Teo
High commissioner for Singapore
London
Singapore: better than Maoist China or North Korea!
What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. If all the means of production were vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of “society” as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us.
Who can seriously doubt that a member of a small racial or religious minority will be freer with no property so long as fellow-members of his community have property and are therefore able to employ him, than he would be if private property were abolished and he became owner of a nominal share in the communal property? Of that the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am able to be allowed to live or to work? And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?
A Pew poll released a month ago found that a majority (54%) think that using torture to obtain information from terrorists is often or sometimes appropriate. That’s surprising to me, because I would have thought that the prevailing opinion was rarely-but-not-never. Certainly that’s how waterboarding (if we agree, for the sake of discussion, that waterboarding is torture) was used by the Bush administration. The often/sometimes/rarely number is 70%. In other words, the vast majority of the public disagree with President Obama’s position.
The Pew poll was taken before the attempted bombing of flight 253, at a time when the threat of terrorism had lost its urgency for many people. It also suffers from confusion over exactly what constitutes torture.
A new Rasmussen poll corrects those problems. It is more timely, and instead of using the vague and loaded term “torture”, it asks specifically about “waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques”. More importantly, it asks about a specific case (Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber), which I think gives a more informative result than asking in the abstract. The poll found that 58% believe that waterboarding (etc.) should be used on Abdulmutallab.
Personally, I’m not so sure. I think that they ought to find out how he responds to a normal interrogation first. But we won’t be doing that either, because the administration immediately put him into the criminal justice system, thereby protecting him from any interrogation at all. Rasmussen didn’t ask whether people agreed with that decision, but if they had, I’m sure the number would be microscopic.
The US has released the leader of an Iranian-backed Shia terror group behind the kidnapping and murder of five US soldiers in Karbala in January 2007.
Qais Qazali, the leader of the Asaib al Haq or the League of the Righteous, was set free by the US military and transferred to Iraqi custody in exchange for the release of British hostage Peter Moore, US military officers and intelligence officials told The Long War Journal. The US military directly implicated Qais in the kidnapping and murder of five US soldiers in Karbala in January 2007.
The White House is making a point of the fact that it is rebranding the war on terror:
Unlike the last Administration . . . we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies. And we will prosecute that war as long as the American people are endangered.
It seems like a simple point; the “war on terror” was always a rather odd phrase. But it turns out that the phrase was the result of careful consideration. As Douglas Feith explained in his book (p. 8-9):
The U.S. government could not simply define the enemy as a set of terrorist organizations together with states that helped them in one war or another. If we did, we could find ourselves declaring war against all countries that gave safe haven, funds, or ideological and other types of support to terrorists — a list that would include Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria. This was clearly an unrealistic idea. It further complicated matters that the United States considered some of these states important friends. Moreover, a formal list of terrorist enemy organizations would require continual revision, reflecting the mergers, acquisitions, splits, and name changes that were common among them. We needed a better way to define the enemy, one that would cover all the relevant bases but preserve our flexibility regarding how, when, and against whom we should act.
We did not solve this puzzle on the aircraft. The President eventually dealt with it by coining the term “war on terror,” declaring, in effect, that the enemy was not a list of organizations and states but certain inherently evil activities that included both terrorism and state support for terrorism. Though the term was imperfect — many commentators have noted the peculiarity of declaring war against a method of attack — I considered it an intelligent and useful stopgap that acknowledged the unprecedented nature of the challenge represented by 9/11. It avoided the problem of lists, gave the President flexibility, and called attention to the differences between us and our enemies on the issue of respect for human life.
In contrast to the considerations that went into “war on terror”, the Obama administration’s decision to discard the term is revealed to be shallow, not thoughtful. It’s not at all clear whether the current administration even wrestled with those issues, but they made a decision (possibly without realizing it) all the same. In essence, President Obama is dealing with the problem of lists by putting exactly one name on the list: al Qaeda.
This important, because — without any announcement — Obama has significantly narrowed the target of our efforts from all practitioners of terrorism down to just one. He has made the war retrospective (targeted at those who hurt us in the past) rather than prospective (targeted at those who would hurt us in the future).
This narrowing is essential, because the left’s opposition to the war in Iraq (which is really the centerpiece of their foreign policy) depends on it. The White House points out that Iraq “had no al Qaeda presence before our invasion.” This may be true (although there are some indications to the contrary), and the left certainly believes it, but what of it? It is undisputed that Saddam’s Iraq offered haven and support to international terrorism, including Ansar al Islam, the Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, and Abu Nidal. In order to oppose the liberation of Iraq, the left must narrow the war to exclude all the terrorists that found support in Iraq.
We have already seen pernicious consequences of the war’s rebrand. In a development that would have been unbelievable in the fall of 2001, the administration now finds itself confused whether we even must oppose the Taliban. Last October, while the administration debated sending additional troops to Afghanistan, the White House floated a trial balloon suggesting that the Taliban could be left in power in Afghanistan. It has fortunately backed away from that suggestion, but the very thought that it was contemplated is unnerving.
The bottom line is that our new, retrospective war is not about protecting the United States. To protect the United States requires vigilance — and yes, preemption — against new terrorist threats, and not a simple-minded focus on the one organization that attacked us on 9/11. Instead of protection, our new war, prosecuted by the left, is about retribution.
Al Gore made the goal of vengeance explicit in a speech in 2002 attacking President Bush’s Iraq policy. (I guess it’s not always so horrible for a former VP to criticize the sitting administration’s foreign policy.) He said:
I don’t think we should allow anything to diminish our focus on the necessity for avenging the 3,000 Americans who were murdered and dismantling that network of terrorists that we know were responsible for it. The fact that we don’t know where they are should not cause us to focus instead on some other enemy whose location may be easier to identify.
He states clearly here the view that the Obama administration has come to adopt. Our goal is solely to “avenge” 9/11, and not to deal with any other enemies that might threaten us.
Now, I’m not entirely against retribution. It’s important for us to make clear that no regime can attack us and survive. But such retribution serves a greater purpose, to deter any future attack. Ultimately, the aim must be (or ought to be, at least) to protect our nation.
By narrowing the war on terror, the Obama administration has lost sight of that ultimate aim. I wish that al Qaeda posed the only threat to our nation, but it does not. And our enemies are paying attention.
After the attempted bombing of flight 253, Dick Cheney reiterated his criticism of the Obama administration, saying that it doesn’t seem to believe that we are at war. Within hours, the White House had its response up. I think it merits a fisking:
There has been a lot of discussion online and in the mainstream media about our response to various critics of the President, specifically former Vice President Cheney, who have been coming out of the woodwork since the incident on Christmas Day. I think we all agree that there should be honest debate about these issues, but it is telling that Vice President Cheney and others seem to be more focused on criticizing the Administration than condemning the attackers. Unfortunately too many are engaged in the typical Washington game of pointing fingers and making political hay, instead of working together to find solutions to make our country safer.
Oh please. Are you really suggesting that Dick Cheney — Mr. Waterboard himself — is soft on the terrorists? That’s not going to fly. More to the point, a public denunciation of the terrorists by a former Vice President isn’t going to accomplish anything much. His pressure on the administration to adopt the right policies just might.
And as for pointing fingers versus working together, wait just a moment.
First, it’s important that the substantive context be clear: for seven years after 9/11, while our national security was overwhelmingly focused on Iraq – a country that had no al Qaeda presence before our invasion – Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s leadership was able to set up camp in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they continued to plot attacks against the United States. Meanwhile, al Qaeda also regenerated in places like Yemen and Somalia, establishing new safe-havens that have grown over a period of years.
The old Iraq talking point, check! Moving on.
It was President Obama who finally implemented a strategy of winding down the war in Iraq, and actually focusing our resources on the war against al Qaeda – more than doubling our troops in Afghanistan, and building partnerships to target al Qaeda’s safe-havens in Yemen and Somalia. And in less than one year, we have already seen many al Qaeda leaders taken out, our alliances strengthened, and the pressure on al Qaeda increased worldwide.
Actually, it wasn’t President Obama that prepared the administration’s plan for Afghanistan; it was the outgoing Bush administration. In the fall of 2008, the Bush administration did a thorough review of Afghanistan policy and then briefed the incoming Obama administration. The Obama team asked the Bush team not to announce its results, and the Bush team agreed. Then, in March, the Obama team essentially adopted the plan they had been handed by Bush team.
This is exactly the sort of “working together to find solutions to make our country safer” that the White House now says we need. But instead of acknowledging the Bush administration’s contribution, or at least remaining silent on the subject, the White House has claimed that the Bush administration had no plan and made no effort to come up with one. To put it plainly, it is the current administration that is “pointing fingers and making political hay”. The Obama team’s chutzpah and bad faith in this instance is awfully hard to bear.
To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the President.
More of the “finger pointing” but never mind that. Let’s focus on the astonishing statement: “this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action.” This statement is astonishing because the remainder of the statement (we’re only halfway through) is dedicated to cataloging President Obama’s bellicose rhetoric. I won’t bother to quote it.
Indeed, President Obama has, on several occasions, spoken to the effect that we are at war. The White House evidently thinks that such rhetoric proves the point. But the president’s actions prove the opposite, and this the greater part of Cheney’s point.
Cheney’s brief statement made five points. Two of them deal with rhetoric, the other three deal with actions. Briefly, Cheney criticized the administration for: (1) giving Abdulmutallab a lawyer immediately and not conducting any interrogation, (2) bringing Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a civilian trial, and (3) closing the Guantanamo prison and contemplating the release of its terrorists. Cheney’s remarks only scratch the surface of the examples he could have cited.
All of these criticisms go to the administration’s actions, and none of them are addressed by the White House response. The response defends the president strictly on the basis of his rhetoric. To put it clearly, while the White House claims to be focused on actions rather than rhetoric, its statement proves exactly the opposite.
POSTSCRIPT: The response ends with this:
We are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies. And we will prosecute that war as long as the American people are endangered.
There’s more to be said about this, but I’ll defer it to another post.
UPDATE: You can take this post as a bonus fisking of today’s Eugene Robinson column. Robinson adds some ad hominems and calls Cheney a liar, but aside from that, I don’t think he makes a single point that the White House didn’t make in its post yesterday. (Via Hot Air.)
The Obama administration sees the attempting bombing of flight 253 as a political problem, not a national security problem. The White House’s thin-skinned response to Dick Cheney’s continued criticism of President Obama’s national security decisions is just the tip of the iceberg, if this report from the American Spectator is accurate:
On December 26, two days after Nigerian Omar Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to use underwear packed with plastic explosives to blow up the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight he was on, and as it became clear internally that the Administration had suffered perhaps its most embarrassing failure in the area of national security, senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and new White House counsel Robert Bauer, ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns — if any — from the Bush Administration.
“The idea was that we’d show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could,” says a staffer in the counsel’s office. “We were told that classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and that we’d declassify it if necessary.”
The White House, according to the source, is in full defensive spin mode. . . “This White House doesn’t view the Northwest [Airlines] failure as one of national security, it’s a political issue,” says the White House source. “That’s why Axelrod and Emanuel are driving the issue.”
Axelrod, who has no foreign policy or national security experience beyond occasionally consulting with liberal or progressive candidates running for political office in foreign countries, has been actively participating in national security briefings from the beginning of the administration. He has also sat in on Obama’s “war council” meetings, providing Obama with suggestions in both venues based on what he knows about polling and public opinion data, say several White House sources. . .
Axelrod’s presence in the meetings has raised some eyebrows, as previous political advisers in the White House have typically not participated in such meetings. Bush Administration sources, for example, say that political adviser Karl Rove was not present at national security meetings.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, but I still am, by the idea that the White House would respond to an attack on the United States by doing opposition research against a past administration.
The federal government said Wednesday that it will take majority control of troubled auto lender GMAC and provide an additional $3.8 billion in aid to the company, which has been unable to raise from private investors the money it needs to staunch its losses.
The Treasury Department has said for months that GMAC would need more federal money, but the decision to increase the government’s ownership stake came as a surprise, cutting against the grain of the Obama administration’s recent efforts to wind down its bailout of large banks.
I’ve written on this blog before (here and here) that I am against network neutrality, because it is a technically flawed and almost universally misunderstood solution to an as-yet nonexistent problem.
Now people are beginning to call for “search neutrality”. Technically there is no relation at all between network and search neutrality, but the two are likely to become politically entangled. The idea to search neutrality is that search providers (i.e., Google) ought not use their power deliberately to direct customers to some services in which they have a financial interest (particularly theirs) over others.
There are two immediate differences we can observe between search neutrality and network neutrality. First, there are no technical problems with search neutrality. Unlike network neutrality, search neutrality would not hurt network performance or stifle innovation. Second, search neutrality is targeted at a problem that actually exists. Google does use its search influence to direct customers to its own services.
Is search neutrality therefore a good idea? That’s not so clear.
Generally I’m against government intervention in the marketplace, but I make an exception in the case of monopolistic (and oligopolistic) behavior. It is appropriate for the government to take action to protect individuals in non-competitive markets. Of course, in most cases, monopolies exists because of the action of the government. In such cases, the government should simply remove the barriers to entry that it has erected itself. There also exists a few instances of natural monopolies, typically utilities. The science of regulating public utilities to ensure efficient resource allocation is fairly well-understood.
Then there’s the rarest of all cases, in which a company establishes a dominant position through superior business practices or technical insight that, for some reason, other companies are unable to duplicate. It’s impossible to make any universal rule in such a case, but I would make two related observations: First, the government always seems to overreact in such circumstances. (Witness the government’s persecution of IBM and the ham-handed AT&T breakup.) Second, such circumstances are invariably far more temporary than people seem to suppose.
On general libertarian principles, I’m against forcing Google to order its search results in any fashion other than how they choose. With a 65% market share, Google isn’t a monopolistic player yet, so there’s no need yet to contemplate an exception on such grounds. Furthermore, it would be very hard to fashion a rule that would prevent search rigging while permitting legitimate innovation.
On the other hand, Google should be pressured to reveal their methodology. Their official blog contains a weak explanation of why their purported dedication to openness does not apply to their search algorithm. Basically they say that their page-ranking algorithm is not robust (my words, not theirs) and publishing it would make it easy for people to manipulate it. That might be so. But there is no reason why they shouldn’t publish the exceptions they make to their page-ranking algorithm. The only reason I see for keeping the exceptions secret is their publication might make Google look bad.
POSTSCRIPT: When I say that Google isn’t a monopolistic player yet, I’m referring of course to web search. They are a monopolistic player in the business of stealing books. Astonishingly, a federal court has not only given Google approval to steal copyrighted books, it has also made Google the only one that can do so. (Again, most monopolies exist due to government action.) There’s also other good reason to dislike Google, such as its growing record of censorship. So if Google did face some government persecution, my sympathy for them would be limited.
Since selling out on the health care bill, Ben Nelson (D-NE) has taken a dive in the polls. According to Rasmussen, he now trails by 31 points in his re-election bid. (Unfortunately, he is not up for re-election until 2012.) His disapproval rating is at 62%, and interestingly there is no statistical difference between insured and uninsured.
Just 17% of Nebraska voters approve of his “cash-for-cloture” deal. Two-thirds of Nebraskan voters disapprove of the bill, and a majority strongly disapprove.
Politiken, Denmark’s second-largest newspaper (according to Wikipedia), editorializes:
He comes from humble beginnings and defends the weak and vulnerable, because he can identify himself with their conditions.
And no we are not thinking of Jesus Christ, whose birthday has just been celebrated – – but rather the President of the United States Barack Hussein Obama. . .
From the start, Obama’s critics have claimed that his supporters have idolised him as a saviour, thus attempting to dismantle the concrete hope that Obama has represented for most Americans.
The idea was naturally that the comparison between Jesus and Obama – which is something that the critics developed themselves – would be comical, blasphemous, or both.
If such a comparison were to be made, it would, of course, inevitably be to Obama’s advantage.
POSTSCRIPT: If the comparison weren’t bizarre (and, yes, blasphemous) enough, what’s this about how Obama’s critics are responsible for the comparison? That sort of outlandish claim would be better supported by a few examples. At least then I’d know what they are talking about.
Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. . . American officials agreed to send the two terrorists from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia where they entered into an “art therapy rehabilitation program” and were set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.
The attempted plane bombing has given the Obama administration some clarity:
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed “credit” for the failed attack on the Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day, claiming that the attempted terrorist attack was retaliation for the December 17 airstrike against al Qaeda in Yemen. . .
A senior administration official rejects entirely the idea that the attempted attack was retaliatory, pointing out that Omar Abdulmutallab was in the field long before that airstrike. (He purchased his plane ticket in Ghana the day before, in fact, and had been in Yemen for months before.)
“He had been deployed before December 17,” the official said. “They’d like to make this seem like retaliation, but the reason they tried to blow up the plane is because they have a hateful, murderous agenda. And that’s why we’re on the forward lean against them.”
Ding! That’s right, Al Qaeda’s espoused motives for their attacks are typically lies. What they say amongst themselves may be informative; what they proclaim to the world is not.
I’m glad the administration is finally learning this basic fact. Perhaps they’ll even learn to generalize from it. A good next step would be to realize that Islamic extremists do not hate America because of Guantanamo.
If you want to see what happens when progressives are given an unfettered hand, you look to Berkeley, California. Here’s what happens when progressives run the schools:
Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.
The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High’s School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley’s dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.
Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.
If there were a prize for the year’s worst letter to the editor, this letter to the Boston Globe would surely win:
I AM a math teacher at Brockton High School, the site of a school shooting earlier this month.
Current school security procedures lock down school populations in the event of armed assault. Some advocate abandoning this practice as it holds everyone in place, allowing a shooter easily to find victims.
An alternative to lockdown is immediate exodus via announcement. Although this removes potential hostages and makes it nearly impossible for the shooter to acquire preselected targets, it unfairly rewards resourceful children who move to safety off-site more shrewdly and efficiently than others.
Schools should level playing fields, not intrinsically reward those more resourceful. A level barrel is fair to all fish.
Some propose overturning laws that made schools gun-free zones even for teachers who may be licensed to securely carry concealed firearms elsewhere. They argue that barring licensed-carry only ensures a defenseless, target-rich environment.
But as a progressive, I would sooner lay my child to rest than succumb to the belief that the use of a gun for self-defense is somehow not in itself a gun crime.
For some time a majority has believed that the Democratic stimulus plan has not helped the economy (i.e., that it either hurt or had no impact). Now a plurality believes that the stimulus plan actually hurt: 38% say it did, while 30% say it helped and 28% say it had no impact. (Other than spending a whole ton of money we don’t have.) Among independents, 52% say that the stimulus plan has hurt. That’s actually higher than the Republican number (47%).
Unsurprisingly, a majority opposes a new stimulus plan. In fact, a majority also says that we would be better off if we cancelled the unspent portion of the old stimulus plan. Much of it has not been spent yet; we should absolutely do that. But we won’t. Here’s why.
Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican turned Democrat, said the bill could’ve been better if Republicans had participated in the process.
“If some of the Republicans would come forward with suggestions, offer a vote or two, or three or four, to take away the need to have every last one of the 60 Democrats, you’d have a much better bill in accordance with the tradition of the Congress, especially the Senate, on bipartisanship,” Specter said, adding that Republicans are more interested in “plotting ways to beat President Obama in 2012.”
Republicans did offer suggestions (here’s mine), but Democrats weren’t interested in liberty-preserving, free-market reforms. The Democratic leadership was dead set on a government takeover of the health care system, or as close to one as they could get. So Republicans participated in the process in the appropriate manner, by doing everything they could to stop it. They weren’t able to stop the bill, but GOP “obstructionism” did make it a much better bill, by enabling a Democratic holdout to strip out the public option and the medicare expansion. And GOP “obstructionism” may still stop the bill from funding abortion.
And let’s compare with when Republicans wanted to reform social security. Did the Democrats behave the way Specter says they should? Did the Democrats offer suggestions and a few votes? Of course not. They obstructed the process with all their strength, and they cheered (literally) when reform went down.
The Homeland Security secretary says that the system worked because “everyone played an important role” and within an hour DHS was instituting additional useless precautions everywhere. She also takes credit somehow for the actions of the passenger who saved the day.
The system didn’t work; we got lucky. If not for an incompetent bomber and an alert passenger, flight 253 would have gone down. The bomber was on the terror watch list. If the system had worked, he wouldn’t have been on the plane in the first place. None of the myriad inconveniences we face at the airport stopped him. Now DHS is patting itself on the back for promptly introducing a new legion of ineffective inconveniences after the fact.
Napolitano sees her job as closing the barn door after the cows escape. She needs to be fired. But she won’t.
Byron York notes that the White House is making deliberate efforts to handle yesterday’s incident better than the Fort Hood shootings. After Fort Hood, the president was disengaged and dismissive of the possibility that the shooting were an act of terrorism. After Flight 253, the White House has been working the press to emphasize that the president (who is vacationing in Hawaii) is fully briefed.
There’s not much for the president to do in relation to this incident (yet, anyway), so I guess there’s no problem with the White House making positive press coverage its top priority. But John Hinderaker noticed something odd. Here’s the AP, reporting what the White House told the press:
President Barack Obama’s Christmas Day began with a briefing about a botched attack on an airliner in Detriot and ended with a visit to a dining hall for members of the military. . . Obama’s military aide told the president about an incident aboard a plane as it was landing in Detroit just after 9 a.m. here. The president phoned his homeland security adviser and the chief of staff to the National Security Council for a briefing.
(Emphasis mine.)
Okay, so the president was briefed at 9 am (Alaska-Hawaii standard time). The plane landed at 12:01 pm Eastern time, which is 7:01 am in Hawaii. So the president wasn’t briefed until two hours after the plane landed. So maybe it wasn’t quite the priority the White House is now making it out to be.
Now, let’s return to the sentence from the AP story. There are two ways to read it. One parse says the briefing took place as the plane was landing. This is the grammatically correct reading, but it doesn’t match the facts. The other parse, which makes “just after 9 a.m. here” into a dangling participle, says the incident happened as the plane was landing, and the briefing happened just after 9 a.m. This parse has the advantage of matching the facts.
So is this bad grammar from the AP, or did they intend the first parse? If it’s the latter, that probably means that the White House lied in an effort to make the president look better. There’s no way to know. I would note that AP writers write sentences for a living, and politicians lie for a living. On the other hand, the AP writer did misspell Detroit.
Hannah Rosenthal is the president’s latest czar; her job is to monitor and report on anti-Semitism. (The position dates to the last administration.) She decided to use her first official remarks to attack the Israeli ambassador.
According to a new paper, vaccines are being allocated the wrong way. Rather than using scarce vaccines on the population that is most at risk from a disease, the authors argue that they should be used on the population that is most likely to spread the disease. This would create herd immunity and save more lives overall.
A new technology for electricity generation uses osmotic pressure to drive a turbine. It’s not ready for practical use yet, but a Norwegian firm hopes to build a commercial plant by 2015.
It sounds technically cool, but I’m a bit skeptical. The technology works by making fresh water salty. Unfortunately, fresh water is precious in much of the world, while there are other cost-effective ways to generate electricity. It seems like it might be reasonable to build an osmotic plant where a river meets the sea already, but those areas tend to have ecosystems that environmentalists get exercised about. The article mentions the possibility of a plant between the Red Sea and Dead Sea, where you could move salt water into even saltier water, but how many such places exist?
When Arlen Specter switched parties, he said he would “not be an automatic 60th vote” for the Democratic agenda, but that’s pretty much what he has been:
In nearly 30 years as a Senate Republican, Arlen Specter was tough to pin down, frequently breaking ranks with his party and giving its leadership fits. Yet in the half-year since he crossed the aisle, Mr. Specter has become a remarkably reliable Democratic vote.
According to a Congressional votes database compiled by The Washington Post, Mr. Specter has voted with the Democrats 94.2 percent of the time since switching parties — an identical figure to his fellow Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Casey Jr. and in the middle range of his party’s caucus.
Since Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Delaware County, joined the race in late May, Mr. Specter has voted even more consistently with his party: a 96.4 percent rate, excluding a handful of votes on which he abstained. . .
When he was a Republican, Mr. Specter was a frequent objector. A tally of divisive votes by Congressional Quarterly showed that, as of mid-August, Mr. Specter had a “party unity” score of 90.5 percent with the Democrats — far higher than he ever had with the Republicans. The Washington-based publication calculated that Mr. Specter averaged a 58 percent party unity score from 1981 through 2008.
The story goes on to note that Specter has reversed his position on the “public option” and on the card-check bill.
There’s a lesson here for the rest of us. Specter has his seat today because Republicans were persuaded to support him over Pat Toomey in the 2004 primary. At the time, it seemed that it was better to keep a nominal Republican in that seat than to risk losing it to a Democrat. Oops.
The Obama administration pledged Thursday to provide unlimited financial assistance to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. . . But even as the administration was making this open-ended financial commitment, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disclosed that they had received approval from their federal regulator to pay $42 million in Wall Street-style compensation packages to 12 top executives for 2009.
The compensation packages, including up to $6 million each to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s chief executives, come amid an ongoing public debate about lavish payments to executives at banks and other financial firms that have received taxpayer aid. But while many firms on Wall Street have repaid the assistance, there is no prospect that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will do so.
You wouldn’t expect the pay caps to apply to Fannie and Freddie. Fannie and Freddie are run by Democrats.
President Obama is consistent about one thing: his own purported consistency. He frequently claims to have always been consistent, and he is consistently lying. To wit:
Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill.
and
I didn’t campaign on the public option.
It’s not true. At all. Matt Welch and Jake Tapper deconstruct this brazen revisionism. Welch looks at a variety of elements on which Obama campaigned that are not in the bill; Tapper focuses specifically on the public option.
President Obama has issued an executive order that gives Interpol full diplomatic immunity.
Why? It’s not a rhetorical question; I really don’t get it. There’s an obvious downside: an international police force that is not answerable to the law. But what is the upside? Even looking for a cynical political benefit, I can’t see one. Steve Schippert thinks it’s a part of a scheme to get America into the International Criminal Court.
POSTSCRIPT: “Diplomatic immunity” is probably a term of art with someone. I’m not using it that way. (You can read the article to find out exactly what the order does.) But the order definitely gives Interpol privileges that no police force should have, especially an international one.
The majority leader of the Pennsylvania House directed campaign activities by legislative employees and raised campaign funds from inside the Capitol, according to witness testimony in transcripts obtained by The Associated Press.
The witnesses in the widening probe, which has reached top levels of the state General Assembly, allege conduct by Todd Eachus similar to that for which 25 others have been charged.
Eachus has not been charged, and the allegations date to before he was elected majority leader a year ago.
John Paul Jones, a $62,000-a-year legislative research specialist until December 2007, told the grand jury that Eachus, D-Luzerne, brought him onto the state payroll after the November 2006 election, which returned Democrats to the majority in the House, with a cover story about his legislative work.
“That was sort of like the code of, here’s what I do, but really I was solely there as a political guy,” Jones said.
Jones testified that Eachus told him he considered the General Assembly’s capability to produce public service announcements a free tool to help incumbents get re-elected.
For nearly three years, state Attorney General Tom Corbett has been investigating whether state lawmakers and their aides used legislative employees and state-owned equipment for campaign purposes.
The scandal began with news that millions in bonuses had been quietly handed out to employees of the General Assembly, and a series of five grand jury reports has alleged that many of those bonuses were part of a conspiracy that also involved state contracts and computer equipment, as well as some of the highest-ranking members of the state House and aides. . .
In a May 2008 grand jury appearance, Jones said that while he was working for the House Democratic Campaign Committee in the run-up to that pivotal 2006 election, he and another campaign committee employee worked closely with Eachus out of an office in the Capitol’s East Wing.
He said they helped Eachus phone Democratic state representatives to pressure them either to donate to the campaign committee or promise to spend a certain amount on their own races.
“As Todd would often say, he wanted to spend what he called soft dollars, which were government dollars, on public service announcements so that we had to ultimately spend less hard campaign dollars,” Jones testified.
Jones said that for a time he and two other legislative aides spent nearly all day on political matters, raising money and performing other campaign-related duties.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration today publicly released its review of the IRS’s ability to verify taxpayer eligibility for tax benefits and credits provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The Recovery Act contains 56 tax provisions with a potential cost of more than $325 billion that are intended to provide tax relief for individuals and businesses. . .
TIGTA found that the IRS is unable to verify taxpayer eligibility for the majority of Recovery Act tax benefits and credits at the time a tax return is processed. This includes 13 of the 20 benefits and credits for individual taxpayers and 26 of the [36] tax provisions benefiting businesses.
So two-thirds of the stimulus bill’s tax provisions are invitations for fraud. But why should Congress worry about this? It’s not as though it’s their money being wasted. . .
If Harry Reid is right in saying that 45 thousand people die each year due to lack of health insurance, then why does his plan wait until 2014 to do anything? A four-year delay will kill 180 thousand people, right?
ASIDE: Okay, that’s not fair. The Reid bill doesn’t get to universal coverage; according to the CBO it would only cut the number of uninsured in half. So the delay is only killing 90 thousand people.
The answer, of course, is budget gimmickry. In order to make the 10-year budget forecast come out in the black, the bills needs to balance 10 years of taxes against just 6 years of spending. The left even admits this.
POSTSCRIPT: Reid alludes to a study just published in the American Journal of Public Health. It’s on-line here. The article is behind a pay wall unfortunately. A press release summarizes the article here. Since the uninsured can get treatment at nearly any hospital emergency room, I’m dubious about the result. I strongly suspect that uninsured status is serving as a proxy for something else, but not having read the study, I can’t hazard a guess what that might be.
POST-POSTSCRIPT: But let’s put this in perspective. The Reid bill subsidizes abortion. (Thank you, Ben Nelson!) Lower prices mean increased consumption, but by how much? It’s hard to know exactly what effective price cut will result from the subsidy; let’s say 2.5%. (That seems low, but it makes the numbers come out neatly.) The price elasticity for abortion is about -0.81, so that means a 2% increase in abortions, which works out to about 24 thousand more abortions per year. That’s about the same as the number of people Reid claims his bill would save.
American Thinker has the story of an absolutely conclusive case of academic misconduct at International Journal of Climatology. Here’s the short version:
One group of authors writes a paper that is critical of some existing work in climate research. The paper is accepted for publication after the usual peer-review process.
A second group of authors (led by researchers at the Hadley CRU, of course) obtains the paper’s page proofs before it is published. They plot to discredit it. They don’t want merely to submit a comment, because then the paper’s authors would get a chance to respond.
The second group colludes with the journal’s editor to delay the paper’s print publication until a response paper can be published. As a full paper, rather than a comment, the first group would not get to respond.
The editor takes unusual steps to speed the response paper through the peer-review process. Most significantly, he removes a “cranky” referee who raised issues with the paper.
An author from the first group learns of the response paper and asks for an advance copy. Astonishingly, the second group refuses to send him a copy!
Both papers appear in the same issue of the journal. The first paper waited over 11 months after being published on-line; the second waited for just 36 days.
The story is fully documented by emails from the Hadley leak. Here are three key quotes. The offer:
He also said (and please treat this in confidence, which is why I emailed to you and Phil only) that he may be able to hold back the hardcopy (i.e. the print/paper version) appearance of Douglass et al., possibly so that any accepted Santer et al. comment could appear alongside it.
the only thing I didn’t want to make more generally known was the suggestion that print publication of Douglass et al. might be delayed… all other aspects of this discussion are unrestricted
As you’ll see, Reviewer 1 was very happy with the revisions we’ve made to the paper. Reviewer 2 was somewhat crankier. The good news is that the editor (Glenn McGregor) will not send the paper back to Reviewer 2, and is requesting only minor changes in response to the Reviewer’s comments.
UPDATE: This story from Richard Lindzen (who is very well-regarded, despite being a skeptic) makes me wonder if this sort of misconduct might have been common:
When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an “Iris Effect,” wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as “discredited.”
Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl has asked city council to shelve his proposed tuition tax, saying instead that a broad-based “New Pittsburgh Coalition” will work to solve the city’s pension problem.
The mayor is willing to cancel the tuition tax vote that could have occurred today in spite of the fact that he can’t claim to have landed the $15 million-a-year needed to right the pension fund, nor the $5 million compromise demand he made earlier this month. . . The University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and insurer Highmark have pledged to make larger voluntary donations to the city than they did in the years 2005 through 2007, but neither they nor city officials would not say how much they will give, nor for how many years. . .
Mr. Ravenstahl introduced the 1 percent tuition tax proposal in his Nov. 9 budget address. . . But the state-picked Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority forced him to remove revenue from the tax from the 2010 budget, saying it was too speculative. State Rep. Paul Costa, D-Wilkins, introduced legislation to preempt the levy. And the bare majority of council members who said they’d vote for the tax showed signs of instability, with two members, Theresa Smith and Tonya Payne, embarking on a desperate attempt to find a middle ground and avoid a vote.
I think the whole thing was an attempted shakedown. It failed because Ravenstahl’s hand was just too weak.
“The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would no-where be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”
A health care facility that provides research, inpatient tertiary care, or outpatient clinical services. Such facility shall be affiliated with an academic health center at a public research university in the United States that contains a State’s sole public academic medical and dental school.
Somebody’s being bribed, and we don’t even know who. One Republican quipped, “If taxpayers are going to be expected to sign the check, Democrats should at least let them know who to make it out to.”
Could this process be any more corrupt? I suppose it could, but it’s hard to picture.
A report from the American Medical Association reveals that Medicare denies insurance claims more than any private insurer, and more than twice as often as the average private insurer.
That’s a useful statistic to use when someone asserts that we need government-run health care to protect us from evil insurance companies denying our claims. But we shouldn’t be surprised; private firms need to satisfy their customers (generally at least) or they lose business. The government does not.
Ben Nelson, the supposedly pro-life Democrat, okays a health care bill that allows federal funding for abortions, in exchange for a package of deals for his home state (paid for by the taxpayer).
Politics disgusts me.
But I can’t say I’m surprised.
UPDATE: The bill’s sham provision against abortion funding doesn’t satisfy Bart Stupak (D-MI). Hopefully he can bring it down when the bill returns from conference. I wouldn’t count on it. We need not only Stupak but also a few of his Democratic colleagues to stand on principle, against all the pressure the Democratic leadership can bring and all the bribes money can buy.
We won the military victory last year, but that victory has finally trickled into public sentiment. A new NBC/WSJ poll finds that a strong majority now sees Iraq as a success.
Fifty years after jazz legend Miles Davis recorded “Kind of Blue,” the House voted Tuesday to honor the landmark album’s contribution to the genre.
Davis collaborated on the record with saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb.
Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat who sponsored the measure, said the group “made musical history and changed the artistic landscape of this country and in some ways the world.” The resolution recognizing the album’s 50th anniversary passed on a 409-0 vote.
I don’t know enough about jazz to say whether Blue Train is the best ever, but it’s definitely among the best. I wish Congress spent more time on meaningless (i.e., harmless) stuff like this.
UK diplomatic sources confirmed there had been a major setback after China took huge offence at remarks by President Obama over the need to independently monitor every country carbon emissions.
In his speech President Obama said: “Without any accountability, any agreement would be empty words on a page” – remarks the Chinese interpreted as an attempt to humiliate them, prompting Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to return to his hotel.
President Obama will now hold a second round of talks with Mr Wen in an attempt to patch up the disagreement.
Robert Mugabe lectures the Copenhagen delegates on carbon emissions. I think that makes sense. What Mugabe has done in Zimbabwe is probably the only workable scheme for getting carbon levels down where the greens want them.
A group of scholars at George Mason University have done an econometric analysis of spending under the stimulus bill. They wanted to see what factors influenced the allocation of stimulus funds. For example, they wanted to see whether variables such as unemployment or mean income had a significant impact, which might indicate that the bill was tailored to stimulate the economy.
Their analysis found no correlation between stimulus spending and any economic variable. In fact, there was only one variable with a significant impact, and that was which party represented the district: Democratic districts obtained significantly more stimulus funding than Republican ones. Party was significant at the 99.9% confidence level (p < 0.001).
The other variable with some impact was whether the district was politically “marginal”, meaning that the district’s representative won by less than 5% of the vote. Politically marginal districts received less funding than non-marginal ones. Marginality was significant at the 90% level but not the 95% level.
Put these two together and you get a clear picture of how to get stimulus funding: be strongly Democratic. Weakly Democratic districts get less, and Republican districts get much less.
So the purpose of the stimulus travesty is empirically revealed. The biggest peacetime spending scheme in history is a massive transfer payment from Republicans and independents to Democrats.
The US Commission on Civil Rights has written a letter to Senate leaders complaining about the health care bill’s use of “racially discriminatory provisions”.
It’s an intriguing paradox–the success of a film as technologically elaborate and ambitious as James Cameron’s Avatar will come down to a simple question: Will audiences marvel at the movie’s groundbreaking production methods enough to forgive Cameron’s curious choice to frame everything on a script that is, almost above all else, obsessed with the evils of technology in the wrong hands? . . .
Unlike Lucas’ more playful science fiction epic, Cameron reaches for a heavy environmental message. Avatar is every militant global warming supporter’s dream come true as the invading, technology-worshiping, environment-ravaging humans are set upon by an angry planet and its noble inhabitants. But the film’s message suffers mightily under the weight of mind-boggling hypocrisy. Cameron’s story clearly curses the proliferation of human technology. In Avatar, the science and machinery of humankind leads to soulless violence and destruction. It only serves to pollute the primitive but pristine paradise of Pandora.
Of course, without centuries of development in science and technology, the film putting forth this simple-minded, self-loathing worldview wouldn’t exist. You’d imagine Cameron himself would be bored to tears on the planet he created. There are no movies on Pandora, so he’d be out of a job. The Na’vi rarely visit a multiplex. They sit around their glowing trees, chanting; they don’t build and sink titanic ocean liners, and they don’t construct deep-sea mini-subs enabling certain filmmakers to spend countless days exploring said cruise ships.
“At a time when the international community has offered Iran opportunities to begin to build trust and confidence, Iran’s missile tests only undermine Iran’s claims of peaceful intentions,” White House spokesman Mike Hammer said.
They undermine Iran’s claims of peaceful intentions?! Seriously?!
The missile test does not undermine Iran’s claims, because Iran’s claims were already not the tiniest bit believable.
Oh, but it gets worse:
“Such actions will increase the seriousness and resolve of the international community to hold Iran accountable for its continued defiance of its international obligations on its nuclear program,” he said.
Aha, the action will increase our seriousness and resolve. Not enough to do anything about it, mind you, but we might consider using some really strong words. If we can get the Chinese and Russians to go along with them, that is.
A provision has been added to the health care bill, at the behest of Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), to exempt three Florida counties from cuts to Medicare Advantage.
First thought: I find it astonishing, even taking into account the low ethical standards of Democrats, that they would craft a bill that would, as matter of law, treat a few influential (and strongly Democratic) counties differently from the rest of the nation.
Second thought: We’ve been told that cutting Medicare Advantage wouldn’t hurt anyone. Why then would Palm Beach, Dade, and Broward counties need an exemption?
I had hoped that the climate scandal would lead climate scientists to change their ways and begin making their data available for public scrutiny. Obviously, the data that has been destroyed cannot be published, but at least they can publish what they still have.
Alas, it appears that the Hadley CRU, at least, will not be taking that tack. In fact, quite the opposite. CRU has taken down its entire web site, thereby withdrawing all their data that used to be publicly available.
The Senate has rejected a proposal to allow drug reimportation as part of the health care bill. Appallingly, 51 senators voted for this idiocy, but 60 votes were required.
I explained here why drug reimportation makes no sense whatsoever. Supporting it is an indication of economic illiteracy.
The Justice Department has told the federal attorneys who filed a civil complaint against the New Black Panther Party for disrupting a Philadelphia polling place last year not to cooperate with an investigation of the incident by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
The commission last week subpoenaed at least two Justice Department lawyers and sought documents from the department to explain why the complaint was dismissed just as a federal judge was about to punish the New Black Panther Party and three of its members for intimidating voters.
Joseph H. Hunt, director of the Justice Department’s Federal Programs Branch, ordered the lawyers’ silence in a letter to the attorney for J. Christian Adams, the lead attorney for the department in the New Black Panther case. . . In the letter, Mr. Hunt said the Civil Rights Commission “possesses no authority to initiate criminal prosecution of anyone” and has the ability only to make referrals to the Justice Department recommending that a criminal case be opened. The commission does not have the authority to enforce subpoenas, he added.
The latest calculation of the National Debt as posted by the Treasury Department has – at least numerically – exceeded the statutory Debt Limit approved by Congress last February as part of the Recovery Act stimulus bill.
The ceiling was set at $12.104 trillion dollars. The latest posting by Treasury shows the National Debt at nearly $12.135 trillion.
A senior Treasury official told CBS News that the department has some “extraordinary accounting tools” it can use to give the government breathing room in the range of $150-billion when the Debt exceeds the Debt Ceiling.
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