Package Delivery

Russell Banks

2012-01-17T11:15:00.002-06:00

Birnbaum: I would like to think that people who read are keeping alive a certain sense of humanity. But then what about e-readers (laughs)?

Banks: That’s OK. It’s still story. Stories are what connect us to each other, face-to-face. When you read a novel, whether you hear it on an audio tape or see it on a Kindle, you are seeing the world through the eyes of someone other than yourself. You are inhabiting another human being. It’s a deeply personal encounter. It gives meaning to someone else’s subjective experience, a single person’s experience. That’s a different kind of experience than a movie allows. A movie—you don’t interact with it, you just accept it. It takes you over like a very powerful drug. Story is a different thing and there are many delivery systems for story.

http://whatsonstevebuscemisstoop.tumblr.com/page/5

2011-08-05T10:16:00.002-05:00

2011-07-06T14:32:00.001-05:00

Lefties Love Insurance Companies
Gov. Scott Walker's labor reforms finally took effect last Wednesday. Literally the next day, Byron York of the Washington Examiner had a report showing why they are a boon to Wisconsin's taxpayers:

***** QUOTE *****
The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it's all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous. . . .

Some of the most important improvements in Kaukauna's outlook are because of the new limits on collective bargaining.

In the past, Kaukauna's agreement with the teachers union required the school district to purchase health insurance coverage from something called WEA Trust--a company created by the Wisconsin teachers union. "It was in the collective bargaining agreement that we could only negotiate with them," says Arnoldussen. "Well, you know what happens when you can only negotiate with one vendor." This year, WEA Trust told Kaukauna that it would face a significant increase in premiums.

Now, the collective bargaining agreement is gone, and the school district is free to shop around for coverage. And all of a sudden, WEA Trust has changed its position. "With these changes, the schools could go out for bids, and lo and behold, WEA Trust said, 'We can match the lowest bid,' " says Republican state Rep. Jim Steineke, who represents the area and supports the Walker changes. At least for the moment, Kaukauna is staying with WEA Trust, but saving substantial amounts of money.
***** END QUOTE *****

Free of work rules that limited teacher hours, Kaukauna is also able to reduce class sizes.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, meanwhile, reports that the WEA Trust "is refusing to release hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal money to school districts that recently dropped the company in favor of less expensive providers."

These stories show how so-called collective bargaining in the public sector is actually a conspiracy to rip off the taxpayers. But if you've been reading this column, you already knew that. What even we didn't realize until now is that the lefties claiming to champion "worker rights" were actually defending insurance companies!

2011-06-27T14:39:00.003-05:00

Democrat Foreign Affairs Expert: Fawning Media Spare Al Gore The Mocking He Deserves

By Noel Sheppard | June 27, 2011 | 11:17

Foreign affairs expert Walter Russell Mead wrote a fabulous piece in "The American Interest" Friday that should be must-reading for those on both sides of the global warming debate - especially members of the Al Gore-loving media.

In "The Failure of Al Gore," the registered Democrat and Obama supporter listed the reasons why the former Vice President has actually been a terrible leader for the green movement, and why a "fawning establishment press" have aided and abetted his disgrace:

The state of the global green movement is shambolic. The Kyoto Protocol is withering on the vine; it will almost certainly die with no successor in place. There is no chance of cap and trade legislation in the US under Obama, and even the EPA’s regulatory authority over carbon dioxide is under threat. Brazil is debating a forestry law that critics charge will open the floodgates to a new round of deforestation in the Amazon. China is taking the green lobby head on, suspending a multibillion dollar Airbus order to protest EU carbon cutting plans.

Indeed. As Mead noted, there was a climate change meeting in Bonn earlier this month that accomplished absolutely nothing while garnering very little press. Regardless of what the global warming loving-media want people to believe, Gore's movement is dying.

Mead explained why:

The former vice president has failed to grasp the basic nature of the kind of leadership the global green cause requires. Vice President Gore, like all who aspire to lead great causes, must reconcile his advocacy with his conduct — that is, he must conduct himself in a way that is consistent with the great cause he seeks to promote.

As NewsBusters readers are well aware, we for years have been pointing out the hypocrisy that is Gore - a man that professes imminent doom and gloom at the hands of manmade carbon dioxide as he omits more of the stuff than virtually everyone on the planet while profiting mightily from his activism.

Mead agreed:

You can be a leading environmentalist and fail to pay all of your taxes. You can be a leading environmentalist and be unkind to your aged mother. You can be a leading environmentalist and squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, park in the handicapped spots at the mall or scribble angry marginal notes in library books.

But you cannot be a leading environmentalist who hopes to lead the general public into a long and difficult struggle for sacrifice and fundamental change if your own conduct is so flagrantly inconsistent with the green gospel you profess. If the heart of your message is that the peril of climate change is so imminent and so overwhelming that the entire political and social system of the world must change, now, you cannot fly on private jets. You cannot own multiple mansions. You cannot even become enormously rich investing in companies that will profit if the policies you advocate are put into place.

It is not enough to buy carbon offsets (aka “indulgences”) with your vast wealth, not enough to power your luxurious mansions with exotic low impact energy sources the average person could not afford, not enough to argue that you only needed the jet so that you could promote your earth-saving film.

You are asking billions of people, the overwhelming majority of whom lack many of the basic life amenities you take for granted, people who can’t afford Whole Foods environmentalism, to slash their meager living standards. You may well be right, and those changes may be necessary — the more shame on you that with your superior insight and knowledge you refuse to live a modest life. There’s a gospel hymn some people in Tennessee still sing that makes the point: “You can’t be a beacon if your light don’t shine.”

Bingo. There may never have been a bigger hypocrite than Gore, and the media are partially responsible:

A fawning establishment press spares the former vice president the vitriol and schadenfreude it pours over the preachers and priests whose personal conduct compromised the core tenets of their mission; Gore is not mocked as others have been. This gentle treatment hurts both Gore and the greens; he does not know just how disabling, how crippling the gap between conduct and message truly is. The greens do not know that his presence as the visible head of the movement helps ensure its political failure.

Exactly. Rather than recognize and report his hypocrisy, the media enabled it by withholding from the public how Gore was using 20 times the energy at his Tennessee home than the average citizen. They also failed to disclose his personal investments in companies that would benefit from the green policies he was advocating.

By doing so, they shielded Gore from criticism while preventing his dismissal as green leader. This only acted to further anthropogenic global warming skepticism:

What this tells the skeptics is that Vice President Gore doesn’t really believe the gospel he proclaims. That profits from his environmental advocacy enable his affluent lifestyle only deepens their skepticism of the messenger and therefore of the message. And when they see that the rest of the environmental movement accepts this flagrant contradiction, they conclude, naturally enough, that the other green leaders aren’t as worried as they claim to be. Al Gore’s lifestyle is a test case for the credibility of his gospel — and it fails. The tolerance of Al Gore’s lifestyle by the environmental leadership is a further test — and that test, too, the greens fail.

The average citizen is all too likely to conclude that if Mr. Gore can keep his lifestyle, the average American family can keep its SUV and incandescent bulbs. If Gore can take a charter flight, I don’t have to take the bus. If Gore can have many mansions, I can use the old fashioned kind of shower heads that actually clean and toilets that actually flush. Al Gore looks to the average American the way American greens look to poor people in the third world: hypocritically demanding that others accept permanently lower standards of living than those the activists propose for themselves.

There are gospels that can be preached by the comfortable and the well fed. But radical environmentalism is not one of them.

Indeed, and the richer and more opulent Gore's lifestyle became as he was preaching doom and gloom - while the media fawned and gushed over his every public appearance - the more Americans began to feel they were being conned.

You want to talk to the talk, you better walk the walk, and Gore refused to do so.

The good news for climate realists is that the media once again backed the wrong horse as global warming alarmism and the belief in this myth is fading all around the world.

We therefore should thank Gore and his adoring press for doing such a poor job at spreading their gospel.

We couldn't have done it without them.

The Master Of Disguise - The Turtle Club HD

2011-06-07T12:07:00.000-05:00

2011-04-24T20:46:00.002-05:00

Kelo Update: Guess What New Developer Wants Before Going Forward?

By Tom Blumer | April 23, 2011 | 19:00

In its infamous June 2005 Kelo vs. New London ruling, a Supreme Court majority allowed the city of New London to seize the properties of holdout homeowners in that city's Fort Trumbull area for the "public purpose" of economic development, not a "public use" as the Constitution's Fifth Amendment requires.

It has been eleven years since the litigation began, six years since the court's ruling, and almost five years since the final settlement between the City and final holdouts the Cristofaro family and Susette Kelo, whose former home now stands elsewhere as a de facto monument to the perils of overbearing government. The land involved is still vacant, and nothing of substance has since happened. In late 2009, Pfizer, the economic linchpin which supposedly drove the city's need to remake the area, announced that it was pulling out of New London.

After several false starts, the city is working with a new developer. As of February of last year, this developer wanted to put rental townhouses in an area where century-old, largely owner-occupied homes once stood.

Early Friday, the New London Day's Kathleen Edgecomb reported a new twist. Wait until you see what the developer wants before going forward.

Yep, tax abatements:

Would-be Fort Trumbull developers seek tax break

A developer hoping to build housing at Fort Trumbull said Thursday they will seek tax abatements from the city to move the project forward.

Robert and Irwin Stillman, the father and son owners of Westport-based River Bank Construction, said the abatements were necessary to make the project financially feasible.

"If abatements are not approved, we would have to reconsider,'' Robert Stillman said during a meeting Thursday afternoon with The Day's editorial board.

The city has granted tax abatements to two other residential developments over the past few years, including Harbour Towers and Shaw's Landing, both on Bank Street.

Michael Joplin, president of the New London Development Corp., said the city should offer the abatements because it will help increase homeownership and eventually bring in more taxes.

The NLDC does not look at short-term economic rewards, he said. Rather, it seeks to increase the tax base and create economic development that will be (sic) span the next 30 to 40 years.

The Stillmans said they expect the two-bedroom units, which make up 70 percent of the construction, to sell between $300,000 and $375,000. They will first be available as rental units and then sold as condominiums when the real-estate market improves.

"Our intent is to sell the units,'' Irwin Stillman said. "We do not own a single rental unit. Our history is, we are not renters.''

The 90-acre Fort Trumbull development area has been an ongoing issue in the city for more than 10 years. The NLDC presented a plan in 2000 that the city approved that in essence leveled nearly all the buildings in Fort Trumbull to make way for new construction. Several property owners fought the eminent domain taking of their land all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where eventually justices ruled in favor of the city.

Edgecomb continued what is now a disgraceful five-year tradition at The Day of not mentioning "Kelo" any time it writes a story concerning the Fort Trumbull area.

The establishment press is in the sixth year of its own tradition: Not following up on what has really happened in the area involved in the most important and disastrous property-rights ruling in several decades. Perhaps they'd prefer that the country not be aware of the post-Kelo reality, because it might cause average people who aren't necessarily politically active to question the "wisdom" of the elites who think they can do a better job with the nation's land and other resources than private property owners.

In its opinion (scroll to Section IV), the Justices opined in 2005 that "The City has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including–but by no means limited to–new jobs and increased tax revenue." In 2011, a city which could have collected five more years of property taxes from established homeowners by now is instead contemplating and appears likely to approve tax breaks to a developer of rental units it hopes to convert to condos when the real estate market gets better.

This outcome makes a complete mockery of the Supreme Court majority's belief that a "carefully formulated ... economic development plan" was ever in place. The press's five-year lack of coverage makes a mockery of its claim to be interested in meaningful story follow-up.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

2011-04-21T07:47:00.000-05:00

Government Cash Handouts Now Top Tax Revenues
By Elizabeth MacDonald
Published April 20, 2011
380

| FOXBusiness

U.S. households are now getting more in cash handouts from the government than they are paying in taxes for the first time since the Great Depression.
Households received $2.3 trillion in some kind of government support in 2010. That includes expanded unemployment benefits, as well as payments for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and stimulus spending, among other things.
But that’s more than the $2.2 trillion households paid in taxes, an amount that has slumped largely due to the recession, according to an analysis by the Fiscal Times.
Also, an estimated 59% of the 308.7 million Americans in this country get at least one federal benefit, according to the Census Bureau, based on 2009 data. An estimated 46.5 million get Social Security; 42.6 million get Medicare; 42.4 million get Medicaid; 36.1 million get food stamps; 12.4 million get housing subsidies; and 3.2 million get Veterans' benefits.
And the handouts from the government have been growing. Government cash handouts account for a whopping 79% of household growth since 2007, even as household tax payments--for things like the income and payroll tax, among other taxes--have fallen by $312 billion.
That is a tough feeding trough to take away from voters.
One of the recurring themes FOX Business has been covering is “how the world has been turned upside down – well, the business world at least,” notes FOX Director of Business News, Ray Hennessey. “In a free market, profit is generated by hard work and enterprise," Hennessey notes, adding: “Because of the labor of the worker, companies generally have the ability to prosper and make more money, both for their employees and their owners," which in turn creates tax revenues.
Seems like common sense, right? That’s because it is. But not in our country today. Somehow the DNA of our country is changing. Wealth creation is coming from DC, not from America’s entrepreneurs.
In short, Americans have the government, not private enterprise, to thank for their wealth growth.
Obviously, there are big implications to this.
For instance, Hennessey asks, if indeed more households have the government to thank for their wealth, does that mean those households are more inclined to re-elect politicians who are pushing for more government handouts?
Does the workforce erode because it is easier to collect a check than answer to an alarm clock each morning?
Is our competitiveness as a nation hurt because profit is generated not by American capitalism but by European-style socialism? Can we, as taxpayers, afford to carry the burden of government-sponsored wealth creation?
All this comes at a time when a growing number of Wall Street houses, including JPMorgan Chase (JPM: 44.56, -0.09, -0.20%) and Barclays Capital (BCS: 19.38, +0.25, +1.31%), Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) are cutting their U.S. GDP growth forecasts by as much as a percentage point or more.
It also comes as President Barack Obama is already in re-election mode, as he bets his massive spending will woo independents. It also comes as Standard & Poor’s has joined the International Monetary Fund and Pimco, which runs the world’s biggest bond fund, in downgrading their outlook on US debt.
The negative outlook comes as the government has added the equivalent of Germany and Russia combined in spending from the time Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi gaveled in as House Speaker in January 2007. The government, like never before, has put the thumb on the scale as it picks winners and losers.
Yes, the dollar rallied and Treasuries bounced higher after the news that S&P had issued a negative outlook on the U.S. debt picture. Some argued that happened because eventual austerity would slow growth, which is deflationary and in turn good for bonds.
But that ignores the flight away from rocky overseas markets toward the Treasury's safe haven status, which drives yields down. Potential sovereign debt defaults are a huge problem in the Eurozone, particularly in Greece, where yields rocketed above 13% earlier this week.
The bullish view about U.S. bond prices also ignores the fact that the Federal Reserve has been buying Treasury bonds and notes, $600 billion so far this year, more than half of the Treasury Dept.'s issuance. That keeps a lid on bond yields. When bond prices rise, the government doesn't have to lure investors with higher yields. When bond prices fall, the government offers higher yields to reel investors in.
The bullish view about U.S. bond prices also ignores the negative trend in the dollar, which has been weakening.
And it ignores the bond market’s brutal reaction to spending under President Bill Clinton, where yields spiked several percentage points higher beginning in 1994, rising from around 5% before topping out above 8%, before then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin forced austerity, leading to welfare reform.
Republicans now want to shrink the U.S. government, but Democrats want to stymie their efforts. This, after the President touted $38 billion in spending cuts as the largest in our nation’s history, just four months or so after touting the massive spending increase pushed through in the lame duck Congressional session.
And after the White House shelved the Bowles-Simpson debt commission report, a panel which the President asked for, endorsed and then ignored, hoping such hard decisions might be delayed until after the election.
President Obama had asked for the debt commission to "address the long-term quandary of a government that continually and extravagantly spends more than it takes in," only to initially set aside the commission's recommendations.
And earlier this year the White House first introduced a budget that would have added $6.7 trillion more in deficit spending over the next 10 years, yanking the national debt higher to more than 75% of gross domestic product, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That, until GOP Rep. Paul Ryan offered his $4.4 trillion in spending cuts over ten years, causing the President to offer $4 trillion in cuts over 12 years.
The Fiscal Times reports that “the only other time government income support exceeded taxes paid was from 1931 to 1936.” The Times notes that “government transfers of income to households started to overtake personal taxes at the start of 2008, and the gap has been widening.”
The difference between what households received and what they paid in taxes is about $125 billion, equal to a little more than “three times the amount Republicans and Democrats agreed to cut from government spending through Sept. 30,” the Fiscal Times said. Typically, the gap between government transfers and taxes runs the other way, the Times reports.
“In normal times the household sector gives about eight percentage points more of its income in taxes than it receives in direct transfers,” the Times quotes J.P. Morgan economist Michael Feroli as saying, adding that a return to normalcy, or this eight-percentage-point spread, is equal to about $1.2 trillion in income.
So the question is: What government policies will bring the U.S. labor market back to robust health, enough to drive economic growth, consumer spending -- and higher tax revenues?
When will the U.S. government pull back from its intervention into the U.S. economy, so the economy can try to stand on its own?

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/04/20/government-cash-handouts-exceed-tax-revenues/#ixzz1KA3CJ35C

2011-04-12T23:49:00.000-05:00

The Confederate constitution. If secession was about states rights, you'd expect a different enumeration of federal v states rights in the Confederate constitution compared to the US one, with new limitations on federal government power. Except--that doesn't happen. The only new limit on federal power, the only new right states explicitly have, is slavery.

Look at the secession resolutions. They were all about slavery.

The south went to war for slavery, and the north went to war because South Carolina fired on a US fort.

Pakistan

2011-04-11T21:09:00.002-05:00

Waziristan has been the issue since Bora Bora. We are not serious, and they know it.

The Speech Obama Hasn't Given

2011-03-25T07:36:00.000-05:00

"It all seems rather mad, doesn't it? The decision to become involved militarily in the Libyan civil war couldn't take place within a less hospitable context. The U.S. is reeling from spending and deficits, we're already in two wars, our military has been stretched to the limit, we're restive at home, and no one, really, sees President Obama as the kind of leader you'd follow over the top. "This way, men!" "No, I think I'll stay in my trench." People didn't hire him to start battles but to end them. They didn't expect him to open new fronts. Did he not know this?

He has no happy experience as a rallier of public opinion and a leader of great endeavors; the central initiative of his presidency, the one that gave shape to his leadership, health care, is still unpopular and the cause of continued agitation. When he devoted his entire first year to it, he seemed off point and out of touch. This was followed by the BP oil spill, which made him look snakebit. Now he seems incompetent and out of his depth in foreign and military affairs. He is more observed than followed, or perhaps I should say you follow him with your eyes and not your heart. So it's funny he'd feel free to launch and lead a war, which is what this confused and uncertain military action may become.

What was he thinking? What is he thinking?"....

Muslims around the world survey

2011-03-08T09:15:00.001-06:00

http://pewglobal.org/2010/12/02/muslims-around-the-world-divided-on-hamas-and-hezbollah/#prc-jump

Wisconsin

2011-03-07T21:08:00.000-06:00

Here is a text of a published letter from one of the WI senators.

"Dear friends,

I know most of you are aware of what has been transpiring in Madison over the last weeks.

Amidst a looming budget deficit of $3.6 billion, the State of Wisconsin is facing an immediate $137 million deficit in the fiscal year that ends of June 30th. Every day that we don't take action to correct this fiscal crisis, we fall further behind.

Governor Walker introduced a budget repair bill that includes, amongst many other things, asking government workers to pitch in for 5.8% of their pension benefit, and contribute 12.6% of the cost of their health insurance benefits. The bill also includes some changes to collective bargaining procedures for these workers. There are many questions surrounding this bill, and I have attached below some material that may be useful to you.

I would also like to share that I firmly believe in my democrat colleagues' right to disagree with and oppose this bill. What I do not agree with is how they have handled themselves over the past weeks.

Last November, the citizens of Wisconsin elected Governor Walker and new majorities in the State Senate and State Assembly with the expectation that fiscal sanity will be restored in our great state. The various questionable actions to impede passage of this bill - most notably 14 Senators fleeing the state - do nothing but disenfranchise the voters of the last election. When the missing 14 Senate Democrats walked out of the Senate and into Illinois, they walked out on a 160-year old institution and their constituents.

Lastly, while these Senators have been gone, I have received threats of violence. I have been yelled at while entering and exiting the Capitol building. I have personally watched opponents of this bill attempt to intimidate my colleagues into changing their position on this legislation. Please know that no matter how long it takes for the 14 elected officials to come back to Wisconsin, no amount of personal or political threats will keep me from coming to Madison to do the job that you elected me to do.

Sincerely,

Randy Hopper

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What will be the required pension contribution for state employees?

A: State, school district, and municipal employees that are members of the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) would be required to contribute 50% of their annual pension payment. The payment amount for WRS employees is estimated to be 5.8% of salary in 2011.

Q: What will be the required health insurance contribution for state employees?

A: State employees would be required to pay at least 12.6 percent of the average cost of annual health insurance premiums. Local employers participating in the Public Employers Group Health Insurance Plan would be prohibited from paying more than 88% of the lowest cost plan. Local government employers who use other health insurance plans or are self-insured would be able to set the contribution rate and the subject would be prohibited from the process of collective bargaining.

Q: Will legislators and the Governor be required to contribute the same amount to their pensions and health insurance coverage?

A: All elected officials including legislators and the Governor will be required as of April 1, 2011 to make these contributions for health care and pensions. For elected officials the pension contribution is estimated to be 6.65% of salary in 2011.

Q: Why is the Governor proposing a budget repair bill when the Legislative Fiscal Bureau says that the state will end the biennium with a surplus?

A: The LFB revenue memo from January 31st indicated a general fund surplus of $121.4 million, but also indicated several appropriation shortfalls. In practical terms, this means that the legislature did not appropriate enough money for these purposes in the last biennial budget. Here is a list of our bills:

• Deficit in Medical Assistance Programs to fulfill spending requirements under current law ($153.2 million)

• Deficit in Medical Assistance admin services ($16 million)

• Deficit in Income Maintenance Activities ($5 million)

• Deficit in State Public Defenders Office ($3.5 million)

• Deficit in Department of Corrections ($21.7 million)

• MN Reciprocity Payment ($58.7 million)

This results in a Fiscal Year 2010-11 Net General Fund Deficit of $136.7 million.

In addition, Wisconsin still owes $200 million to the Injured Patients and Families Compensation Fund.

Q: Why won't the Governor negotiate with the unions?

A: We simply cannot afford to wait. Over the last ten years, ALL state employee contracts have been signed late - on average, 15 months late - even thought they ALL contained net compensation increases. Wisconsin faces a current year deficit of $136.7 million and a biennial budget deficit of $3.6 billion. Both must be fixed no later than June 30th.

Q: Aren't the collective bargaining changes in the budget repair bill non-fiscal?

A: All aspects of public employee collective bargaining reform affect the bottom lines of state and local governments. Requiring bargaining over everything from work rules to health care policy details limits the ability of state and local governments to effectively manage their budgets and provide value to the taxpayers.

Public employee collective bargaining excesses have also affected the quality of government services. Under the current system, employees are compensated based primarily on seniority rather than merit, talent and work load. This promotes longevity over innovation and creates a stifling effect on reforming the way government works.

There are countless examples of both of these effects, here are just two:

• In 2009, Madison's highest paid employee was a city bus driver. He earned $159,258, including $109,892 in overtime.

• In 2010, a teacher who had been named an Outstanding First Year Teacher was laid off from Bradley Tech High School in Milwaukee because she lacked seniority. The principal at Bradley Tech was quoted as saying, "Based on the pressures we're under as a low-performing school, I absolutely would have chosen a different nine (for layoffs)."

Q: Will public employees still be allowed to form unions?

A: Yes, public employees will still be allowed to form unions, however, members will not be required to pay dues and the unions must collect dues - not the employer. Also, an annual vote will be required to maintain the certification of the union. In order for the union to remain certified, 51% of the members of the union must vote in favor to certify.

Q: Will any collective bargaining be allowed?

A: Collective bargaining will continue for the base wages for public employees represented by unions.

Q: Will base pay be capped?

A: Base wages cannot increase in excess of the consumer price index (CPI) unless it is approved by a referendum.

Q: Will this bill affect current leave benefits (e.g. vacation, legal holidays, personal holidays, sick leave)?

A: No. Accrual of leave benefits will remain the same.

Q: Does this bill include wage cuts or furlough days?

A: No. There are no wage cuts and no furlough days in the budget repair bill or the 2011-2012 Biennial Budget.

Q: What will happen to items like overtime, premium pay, merit pay performance pay, pay schedules, and automatic pay progressions?

A: These items will be determined by the local employer (school board, local municipality, county board, etc.).

Q: What will happen to workplace rules that are currently bargained for collectively?

A: At the local level these items will be managed and approved by the local employer. For state employees, work place rules would be developed by Office of State Employment Relations and approved by the legislature's Joint Committee on Employment Relations.

Q: What protections will remain for public employees after passage of the Budget Repair Bill?

A: Budget Repair Bill does nothing to alter Wisconsin's civil service system - one of the strongest in the nation. These protections include, but are not limited to:

• Civil service hiring (by merit vs. seniority) remains

• Access to other state positions through transfer, promotion, etc., is still available, although application process may vary

• Just cause requirement for discipline; due process must still be followed

• Still assured a discrimination-free, harassment-free work environment

• Same access to health insurance and other insurance benefits

• Layoff process, if it were to become necessary, is the same

Also, the bill requires that a local government employer either adopt WCSS or establish a grievance system that covers at least all of the following: a) a grievance procedure that addresses employee; b) employee discipline; and c) workplace safety. If a local governmental unit creates a grievance process under the above provisions, the process must contain at least all of the following elements: a) a written document specifying the process that a grievant and an employer must follow; b) a hearing before an impartial hearing officer; and c) an appeal process in which the highest level of appeal is the governing body of the local governmental unit.

Q: Opponents argue that that the bill is being pushed through the legislature with little public input. Is that true?

A: The Joint Committee on Finance held a public hearing which lasted 17 hours - longer than any public hearing in recorded history. Not to mention, the State Assembly debated the bill on the floor for an astounding 60 hours.

There have been a lot of rumors and misinformation regarding this pivotal bill, and I hope that the above information helps to clarify some common misunderstandings.

Earlier this week, Governor Walker introduced his proposed 2011-2013 Biennial Budget. As the budget process continues, I am sure there will be many questions, and I will keep you posted about budget developments as they occur. You can read my initial reaction here."

Chicago

2011-02-28T11:59:00.001-06:00

2011-02-24T14:28:00.002-06:00

We know of one genuine and effective Alinskyite provocateur on the American scene today. Andrew Breitbart is his name, and "taking down the institutional left" is his game. As we noted last July, Breitbart "has no authority, only the inexpensive integrity of a rascal who is honest about what he is." If you've read "Rules for Radicals," you know that description also fit Alinsky to a T.

"The basic tactic in warfare against the Haves is a mass political jujitsu," Alinsky wrote:

***** QUOTE *****
The Have-Nots do not rigidly oppose the Haves, but yield in such planned and skilled ways that the superior strength of the Haves becomes their own undoing. For example, since the Haves publicly pose as the custodians of responsibility, morality, law, and justice (which are frequently strangers to each other), they can be constantly pushed to live up to their own book of morality
***** END QUOTE *****

A great example, which we noted earlier this month, is the way Breitbart shamed the left-wing corporation Common Cause by publishing a video depicting participants in a Common Cause rally calling for the assassination of Supreme Court justices and others.

Speaking of which, do you remember the middle-aged white man with the mustache who said that Justice Clarence Thomas should be put "back in the fields," that Justice Samuel Alito "should go back to Sicily," and that Fox News chief Roger Ailes "should be strung up and--but, ah, I don't know. Kill the bastard"? Breitbart has now identified him as Don Wallace, a former president of a public-sector union, the United Firefighters of Los Angeles.

2011-02-23T11:58:00.000-06:00

"And still, yes still, they can successfully convince multitudes of voters of the notion that the financial problems in this country are teacher's salaries and collective bargaining."----

In many states, public sector pensions and benefits ARE one of the main causes of pending financial doom. Take California, long essentially a single party state where public sector unions dominate the scene like almost nowhere else:

'This year we're spending 10% less on higher education than we were 10 years ago, parks and recreation 40% less, environmental protection 80% less, while spending on pensions is UP 2500% PERCENT.'-David Crane, former Gray Davis and Arnold staffer and a Jerry Brown supporter in the last election.

Many progressives, at least in California as the problem there is a decade more advanced than states like Wisconsin, recognize the problems these unfunded liabilities pose. All of these people see money intended to go for infrastructure, stimulus, welfare, environmental protection, etc going instead to public employee bishopric. Over the next decade, California is slated to pay out $400-500 billion in pensions and benefits to public employees...and the revenue of California last year wasn't even $95 billion!

----"They can deftly organize to attack, once again, the little people and the safety mechanisms put into place to protect the little people..." ----

Who exactly are the 'little people'? The unions are BIG money. Five of the top ten contributors to congressional and presidential campaigns since 1989 are labor unions. In the last election, 10 of the top 20 PACs were union PACs. 'Little people'???

I don't agree with everything that is going on in an effort to combat this epic problem, but to pretend that the benefits and pensions that public sector unions have secured over the past decades aren't a HUGE problem is absurd. At the state and local levels they are the biggest budget issue on the plate.

The Federal government, however, has different issues and their employees benefits are far down the list. In fact, they dealt with this problem back in the early 80's when the pension system was scrapped for a more 401K type of retirement. "

I thought this was interesting take on WI from CA based Gawker commenter

Obama / O'Reilly Interview

2011-02-06T16:06:00.000-06:00

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/48913.html

This was pretty enjoyable He would benefit from increased exposure to 'center-right' media- he is a likable guy. We spend too much time preaching to choir, not enough trying to explain positions. Good for him.

Storm 2011 pics

2011-02-05T12:01:00.001-06:00

State multiculturalism has failed

2011-02-05T11:58:00.000-06:00

Enviornmental Forecasts

2010-12-31T08:02:00.001-06:00

2010-12-22T11:45:00.001-06:00

Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C. S. Lewis

2010-12-13T10:46:00.001-06:00

2010-12-07T14:38:00.003-06:00

Why Me? I'm So Complacent!

In a USA Today op-ed, Tom Krattenmaker of Portland, Ore., "a writer specializing in religion in public life," puzzles over why a terrorist would consider bombing his city:

"For several good reasons, many of us Portlanders are having a hard time wrapping our minds around the horrific thought of a 19-year-old from the local suburbs wanting to kill and destroy. Why would Portland, of all places, be the site of a terror attack?

The "People's Republic of Portland"--so dubbed for its liberal ways--seems so utterly different from New York, Mumbai, London, or the other places that one associates with terrorist attacks. Portland is so much smaller, light years from the figurative front lines. This is a laid-back city where the red-hot rhetoric around terrorism, Islam, the "ground zero mosque," and the like runs cooler. It's a place where a live-and-let-live spirit extends ample latitude to anyone who might otherwise stand out--whether it's for wearing a Santa hat and pedaling around on a unicycle playing bagpipes (which my wife actually witnessed last year), covering every inch of your arm with tattoos, or wearing a head scarf and praying at a mosque rather than a church or synagogue."

This guy really needs to get out more. Portland is liberal, welcoming of weirdos, and munificent toward Muslims, and he thinks that sets it apart--from New York? And how self-absorbed do you have to be to think, almost a decade after 9/11, that terrorists won't target you because of your "live-and-let-live spirit"?

2010-12-07T08:37:00.001-06:00

Examine the origins
It's time we begin to hear complaints against nativity scenes, "Silent Night" being sung in schools, even "Christmas" trees or vacation -- any instance of religion entering our public life.

In the State Dining Room at the White House, the fireplace mantle contains a prayer by President John Adams that President Roosevelt had carved into the stone fireplace below a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

"Praise be to God" is inscribed on the cornerstone of the Washington Monument and "Preserve me, God for in thee do I put my trust," is inscribed in a window of the U.S. Capitol's chapel.

An image of the Ten Commandments is engraved in bronze on the entrance floor of the National Archives. The Lincoln Memorial quotes Lincoln: "He who made the world still governs it."

In the House chamber is the inscription, "In God We Trust."

A book by Newt Gingrich, "Rediscovering God in America," gives these and many other examples of the beliefs of our country's founders and leaders. Those who want to ignore it are free to, but why try to stop everyone else?

JOYCE PAHLKE
Southeast Portland

Wikileaks

2010-12-03T17:07:00.002-06:00

2010-11-11T12:55:00.001-06:00

so-sick-of-the-tea-party

2010-11-11T12:48:00.003-06:00

Calhoun Says:

What I never cease to find comical is that while parroting the conventional wisdom of the moment Leftists manage to convince themselves that they are being iconoclastic and individualistic. They still think they are being rebellious and “edgy” when they lampoon religious faith or tradition or Christianity or the South or what-have-you, when all they are really doing is repeating by rote the beliefs of the bi-coastal elite, which they were entirely taught by – God help us – the (aptly named) idiot box. The messages from the Brady Bunch and All In The Family et al are still echoing across the empty canyons of Liberal brains, and most have literally never taken a moment to sincerely question whether their favorite celebrities might be wrong. That is where this smugness comes from – knowing subconsciously that on your side are ALL the people that matter: filmmakers, actors, hip hop rappers and other such celebrities. It is the smugness that comes from knowing that one is safely regurgitating Establishment arguments, from knowing that rather than engaging in the dangerous business of speaking Truth to Power, one is speaking for Power, and to the unwashed, filthy, unfashionable masses. It is the smugness of the small child who taunts loudly and cruelly knowing he has a bully at his back.

I think it is no exaggeration to state that progressivism, as exemplified here, is not so much a political philosophy as a fashion statement. It is conformism in the most depressing sense, dressed in a gaudy yet threadbare nonconformist costume.

Do better.

11.11.10 at 12:16 pm

2010-11-10T08:49:00.001-06:00

Bush Agonistes? Not Quite

In an interview, the former president makes the case for his 'freedom agenda' and defends his record on the economy and spending.

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

Dallas, Texas

The former leader of the free world sits in a comfy chair wearing Crocs. As twilight sets in, George W. Bush keeps one eye on a muted World Series game. "That's what I'm talking about," he tells the TV in his home library after one impressive Rangers play.

The 43rd president of the United States looks healthy, rested and confident. That last is especially notable, considering he's not yet two years out of what can only be called a controversial presidency.

Mr. Bush ran as a uniter, but the hung 2000 election bequeathed him a divided nation. The terrorist attacks of September 11 brought brief national cohesion, but it was soon shattered by recriminations over the Iraq war. A difficult second term—overshadowed by war turmoil and capped by a financial crisis—saw him leave office with anemic approval ratings. But as readers of "Decision Points," his memoir set to hit stands today, will discover, this is not a president agonizing over the big decisions he made or wringing his hands about history's judgment.

The book is not the usual chronological fare; Mr. Bush wrote thematically, with 14 chapters chronicling decisions he made in life and office, and it is very much in his own voice. We get his insights on his decision to quit drinking, on stem cell research, Hurricane Katrina and enhanced interrogations. Six chapters deal with the momentous foreign and domestic policy decisions that followed from 9/11.

Terry Shoffner

George W. Bush

The president does write about his regrets and his desire to have done some things differently. But both in his memoir and in an interview he granted me 10 days ago, Mr. Bush sounds entirely secure about the major decisions of his presidency. The last lines of the book perhaps put it best: "Whatever the verdict on my presidency, I'm comfortable with the fact that I won't be around to hear it. That's a decision point only history will reach."

The president—thoughtful, spirited, and at times making fun of my clumsiness with a tape recorder—gamely answered everything I threw at him.

If his book has an overriding theme, it is Mr. Bush's case for his "freedom agenda." He defines it broadly: from Afghanistan and Iraq, to his African AIDS work, to tax cuts. One major criticism of his Iraq policy is that the turmoil in that country has empowered Iran, which continues to move toward a bomb.

"The notion that we went into Iraq and therefore the Iranians became emboldened—it was the opposite," Mr. Bush says. "The Iranians, it turns out, suspended their program," he continues, referring to a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate finding that Tehran had halted its weapons program in 2003. He says that it wasn't until mid-2005 that Iranian elections brought to power Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who announced the process of nuclear enrichment would accelerate.

As for those who feel Mr. Bush wasn't aggressive enough, the president disputes the notion that Iran can be compared to Iraq. "Diplomacy was just beginning in Iran, the world was just beginning to focus," he says. Mr. Bush takes credit for "helping focus" that attention.

One revelation in the book is the degree to which Mr. Bush's Iran strategy hinged on internal political revolt. His goal, on the one hand, was to "slow down" the Iranian "capacity to develop a weapon," which he chose to do with sanctions. On the other hand, his administration tried to "speed up" the ability of reformers to institute change. He writes of his belief that the success of the surge and a free Iraq would "help catalyze that change," and he points to last year's massive street protests following Ahmadinejad's re-election.

What about the critique that Afghanistan was left to fester while the president dealt with Iraq, setting up a return of the Taliban and the need for President Obama to send more troops? "What I say is, we had a large coalition of troops in Afghanistan and it looked like we were making progress." He notes that "when it became apparent that the NATO coalition was not able to cohesively deal with the Taliban," he ordered a 2006 "silent surge" in Afghanistan—a 50% troop increase. "We were plenty capable of doing two things at the same time."

Mr. Bush writes that one of two major "setbacks in Iraq" was not finding WMD. He writes it still gives him a "sickening feeling." I ask why, given the myriad reasons he lays out for removing Saddam. The problem, he says, was what the lack of WMD meant for the public's perception of the war.

"The world is better off and more secure without Saddam Hussein in power. But so much of the case—and so much of the focus—was on WMD, that the failure to find it made the task of convincing the American people to hang in there harder." The Bush doctrine rested on "going on offense." And in Mr. Bush's mind, this failure risked a "wave of isolationism that would effect U.S. security" by putting Americans off future pre-emptive action.

Should he have fought back harder against those who accused him of lying about WMD, as Karl Rove argued in his memoir? "His point is that I should have gotten in their face about the lying, and I chose not to do that because I thought it would diminish the presidency. . . . You start calling names, it makes it even harder to hold the support of the American people."

President Bush has studiously refrained from commenting on Mr. Obama—and doesn't here. Though when I ask him what is the most devastating thing that could happen to Iraq now, he shoots out unequivocally: "No U.S. presence. We need to work with the Iraqi government and respond to any requests they may have about a presence."

Given Mr. Bush's reputation as an international cowboy, readers will be intrigued by his descriptions of his relationships with world leaders—including frank appraisals of those he did and didn't like. The latter category would come to include Vladimir Putin, despite the president's 2001 comment that he'd seen into the Russian leader's "soul."

I ask the president when exactly he became aware of Mr. Putin's true political character. "When they started suspending rights," he responds. Mr. Bush's theory is that the mid-decade rise in oil prices emboldened Mr. Putin, giving him "an opportunity to spread economic hegemony" to a Europe reliant on Russia's natural gas. Why wasn't there more pushback from the White House? Russia was a "disappointment," Mr. Bush admits, but he adds that "it's hard to know if we could have done anything differently. Russia is a sovereign nation, they elected their leaders, and they entrenched themselves."

Then there are the anecdotes about Jacques Chirac, who at several points lectures the U.S. on the folly of morality or idealism. When I ask the president if he wants to expand, he starts, stops, and gives that Bush chuckle. "Let's just say he wasn't a freedom-agenda guy."

Mr. Bush devotes his final chapter to the financial meltdown: The White House anxiety he describes nearly equals his narration of 9/11. He heaps most of the blame on Wall Street. As for too-loose Federal Reserve policy, which many see as the groundwork for the housing bubble, Mr. Bush refers to "easy money" only once among a list of contributing factors.

I ask if anybody ever specifically warned him about the Fed's feeding of the mortgage beast. "No, not really. I think that the only place, the main place, where we get credit for having seen a potential crisis is Fannie and Freddie." (The administration's proposed reforms were blocked by Congress.) "The crisis blindsided us."

While a Democratic Congress this year passed a slew of financial regulations, Mr. Bush argues this wasn't "a lack-of-regulation crisis, except for the extent to which Fannie and Freddie were allowed to run wild. . . . This was a regulated house of cards—regulators were watching it all. . . . This was a crisis that was caused in large part by bad business decisions."

If that was the case, why weren't more banks left to fail? Did the administration discuss what particular institutions were too big to fail? "No," Mr. Bush answers, adding that he believes in letting the market punish bad decisions but in this case the economy was in the balance. "We didn't want any of them to fail because we were really worried that there would be a domino effect."

Unprompted, he adds that this fear is why the administration bailed out General Motors. Did he genuinely believe that a GM bankruptcy would cause an economic freefall? "That's what I was told. I think at that point in time it would have been still pretty risky." I must still look skeptical because he adds: "I hope I conveyed in the book this sense, that we were," he throws his hands in the air, as if to summon the anxiety of those weeks. "We were pretty risk-averse at this point. We really were."

Why did the administration inject TARP money directly into banks—a move that tarred healthy banks along with sick ones—rather than proceed with the original idea to buy up toxic assets? "Because it was too cumbersome. It was an interesting idea, but it wasn't going to work quickly enough. Whose assets? How do you buy them? . . . We didn't have a lot of time." With capital injections, the money went "boom, right into the system."

Will the fact that the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression happened on his watch overshadow his accomplishments on the war on terror? Again, that confidence. "Naaaaah. I think history will eventually say that the Bush administration dealt with this in a way that saved the economy. . . We didn't have a depression—and I thought one was coming. I did."

One perception the president is determined to shift is that of his spending record. "Decision Points" contains one graphic: a table comparing, among other things, President Bush's average spending-to-GDP (19.6%) to that of Bill Clinton (19.8%), Bush 41 (21.9%), and Reagan (22.4%). It also shows that his deficit-to-GDP was 2%—half that of Bush 41 and Reagan.

I come armed with a slew of spending questions. Why didn't he veto more GOP spending bills? Why didn't he use the war as a reason to cut back on domestic spending? But he shuts me down by referring to the chart. I point out that, chart or no, there is a perception he oversaw fiscal profligacy.

"Yes, there is," he concedes. "I think the Medicare reform caused certain conservative writers to say 'Bush has been fiscally irresponsible.' And they did not look at the facts. And the facts are that we have a very solid fiscal record"—despite spending "a lot of money" on war, homeland security, and Hurricane Katrina.

But what about 2003 Medicare reform, which saw Republicans add a major new prescription drug entitlement? He rejects the premise of the question. "The entitlement already existed, and the entitlement was Medicare. And that's the threshold question—should we have Medicare? If the answer is no, my attitude is fine, go debate it. If the answer is yes, then let's modernize it." The prescription-drug program is about allowing Medicare to give seniors a "$15 drug in order to prevent a $30,000 operation that your taxpayer money would be committed to paying."

Congress will soon be debating the fate of the Bush tax cuts. They were the centerpiece of his 2000 campaign and have been an unadulterated supply-side victory. As the memoir notes, what followed the 2003 legislation—which included important cuts in top marginal rates, capital gains and dividend taxes—was 46 consecutive months of growth.

Isn't the point here that not all tax cuts are created equal, and that there's more value in the 2003 supply-side winners, than in, say, Mr. Bush's 2008 one-time tax "rebates" that caused only a temporary GDP blip? "I don't want to differentiate," he responds, though he does a bit. "I do know this, 70% of new jobs in America are created by small businesses . . . and the rates matter to small business. And capital gains matter to investment." His bigger point is that all the cuts come down to a "philosophy" that's pretty simple to follow: "We'd rather you spend your money than the government spend your money."

There's a lot of emotion in Mr. Bush's memoir—much of it for the families of troops who died protecting the country. But when it comes to the policy decisions we discuss during the interview, this does not seem like a man going to bed tortured by what-ifs or what-will-comes.

What will future historians say? "I'd hope they'd say he had certain principles that were the foundation of his presidency, and on which he was unwilling to compromise."

And what about those who believe he wasn't really a conservative—that he's to blame for setting the stage for the Obama ascendancy? He smiles. "I say read the book."

Ms. Strassel writes the Journal's Potomac Watch column.

Obama's half brother in Kenya says he married teen

2010-10-15T11:52:00.002-05:00

2010-09-22T12:26:00.002-05:00

Eight Dems Arrested in Bell, CA 'Corruption on Steroids' - Not a Single Mention of Party Affiliation From Media

By Lachlan Markay | Tue, 09/21/2010 - 15:19

Today, eight city council members were arrested in Bell, California for what Los Angeles County District Attorney labeled "corruption on steroids." Thus far, every major news outlet that has reported on the story has omitted the fact that all eight individuals arrested are Democrats.
These glaring omissions come only weeks after NewsBusters reported that of the 351 stories on the then-brewing controversy, 350 had omitted party affiliations, and one had mentioned they were Democrats only in apologizing for not doing so sooner.
ABC, CBS, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the San Francisco Chronicle all reported on the arrests today without mentioning party affiliations.

Our money. Wrong on every level.

2010-09-22T10:41:00.000-05:00

GM Resumes Political Giving

By JOSH MITCHELL

General Motors Co. has begun to once again contribute to political campaigns, lifting a self-imposed ban on political spending put in place during the auto maker's U.S.-financed bankruptcy restructuring last year.

The Detroit company gave $90,500 to candidates running in the current election cycle, Federal Election Commission records show.

Washington Wire

GM Resumes Campaign Contributions

The beneficiaries include Midwestern lawmakers, mostly Democrats, who have traditionally supported the industry's legislative agenda on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) and Rep. John Dingell (D., Mich.).

The list also includes Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Republican Whip, who would likely assume a top leadership post if Republicans win control of the House in November.

It isn't unusual for big companies like GM to spend on political campaigns, but complicating GM's situation is that the company is majority-owned by the U.S. government. GM is planning to return to the public stock markets later this year, allowing the U.S. to begin to sell off its roughly 61% stake in the company.

GM spokesman Greg Martin said the company stopped making political contributions in spring 2009 to focus on its taxpayer-financed bankruptcy reorganization.

"As we've emerged as a new company, we're not going to sit on the sidelines as our competitors and other industries who have PACs are participating in the political process," Mr. Martin said. He called GM's political action committee is "an effective means for our employees to pool their resources and have their collective voice heard."

Mr. Martin added that the company has supported members of both parties who "approach issues thoughtfully" and "support a strong auto industry."

http://streetbonersandtvcarnage.com/blog/jet-fuel-cocktail-kenyan-moonshine/

2010-09-16T09:16:00.001-05:00

Taranto

2010-08-16T13:52:00.002-05:00

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
From the Boston Globe:

It's happening in offices across the country. Employees leave, and their vacant cubicles remain.

Rather than let this "empty-desk syndrome'' serve as a daily reminder of laid-off colleagues and days of bigger profits gone by, some companies are getting creative. They're putting up walls and subletting part of their space to another firm, or moving in with another company and sharing a receptionist.

Others have found ways to capitalize on the extra space, ripping out vacant cubicles to set up new meeting areas, or adding new facets to their business. A few are doing away with their offices altogether.

The headline: "With Layoffs, Room for Creativity." We have to say, when the Democrats no longer in power, we're going to miss these cheery stories about the dismal economy.

2010-08-16T13:22:00.001-05:00

Two Papers in One!--I

"There's a problem: conservative politicians, clinging to an out-of-date ideology--and, perhaps, betting (wrongly) that their constituents are relatively well positioned to ride out the storm--are standing in the way of action. No, I'm not talking about Bob Corker, the Senator from Nissan--I mean Tennessee--and his fellow Republicans. . . . I am, instead, talking about Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and her economic officials, who have become the biggest obstacles to a much-needed European rescue plan."--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, New York Times, Dec. 15, 2008
"Why is Europe falling short? Poor leadership is part of the story. European banking officials, who completely missed the depth of the crisis, still seem weirdly complacent. And to hear anything in America comparable to the know-nothing diatribes of Germany's finance minister you have to listen to, well, Republicans."--Krugman, New York Times, March 16, 2009
"The euro area economy grew 1 percent in the second quarter of this year, a much better rate than had been expected, as Germany's best quarterly performance since reunification compensated for slow growth in Spain and Italy and a sharp decline in Greece, according to data released Friday."--news story, New York Times, Aug. 14, 2010

Two Papers in One!--II

"The bursting of the real estate bubble and the ensuing recession have hurt jobs, home prices and now Social Security. This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office."--news story, New York Times, March 25, 2010
"Social Security's attackers claim that they're concerned about the program's financial future. But their math doesn't add up, and their hostility isn't really about dollars and cents. Instead, it's about ideology and posturing. . . . Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century."--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, New York Times, Aug. 16, 2010

2010-07-27T10:35:00.001-05:00

We Demand the Berth Certificate!
"Sen. John Kerry, who has repeatedly voted to raise taxes while in Congress, dodged a whopping six-figure state tax bill on his new multimillion-dollar yacht by mooring her in Newport, R.I.," the Boston Herald reports:

Could the reason be that the Ocean State repealed its Boat Sales and Use Tax back in 1993, making the tiny state to the south a haven--like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Nassau - for tax-skirting luxury yacht owners?

Cash-strapped Massachusetts still collects a 6.25 percent sales tax and an annual excise tax on yachts. Sources say Isabel sold for something in the neighborhood of $7 million, meaning Kerry saved approximately $437,500 in sales tax and an annual excise tax of about $70,000.

Kerry's chief of staff, the delightfully named David Wade, denies that the haughty, French-looking former junior senator, who by the way served in Vietnam, chose the out-of-state berth for tax reasons. Meanwhile,CNSNews.com reports:

Speaking at a town hall-style meeting promoting climate change legislation on Thursday, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) predicted there will be "an ice-free Arctic" in "five or 10 years."

What will he do with all the money he saves when he can move his yacht there?

2010-07-20T09:36:00.000-05:00

James Taranto-

A spat has broken out between the U.N.'s World Health Organization and Amnesty International, a left-leaning human-rights group, over Pyongyang's patient care, the Associated Press reports:

Amnesty's report on Thursday described North Korea's health care system in shambles, with doctors sometimes performing amputations without anesthesia and working by candlelight in hospitals lacking essential medicine, heat and power. It also raised questions about whether coverage is universal as it--and WHO--claimed, noting most interviewees said they or a family member had given doctors cigarettes, alcohol or money to receive medical care. And those without any of these reported that they could get no health assistance at all.

WHO's Paul Garwood claims that Amnesty's report is "not up to the U.N. agency's scientific approach to evaluating health care":

The issue is sensitive for WHO because its director-general, Margaret Chan, praised the communist country after a visit in April and described its health care as the "envy" of most developing nations. . . . Garwood and WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib insisted that Amnesty's report was complementary to their boss' observations. . . . Asked Friday what countries were envious of North Korea's health, Chaib said she couldn't name any.

Islamism

2010-07-15T08:19:00.003-05:00

2010-06-28T08:05:00.001-05:00

2010-06-28T07:51:00.002-05:00

Fedor himself was the picture of civility following his first real career loss:

"I was made into a kind of an idol," he said at the post-fight press conference. "I'm a normal human being as all of us, and if it is God's will, the next fight I will win."

http://cache.dealbreaker.com/uploads/2010/05/TCF-2010-Speech.pdf

2010-05-27T09:36:00.001-05:00

2010-05-06T12:31:00.001-05:00

Obama’s “I apologize for America, defending Islam is on of my top priorities” rhetoric just doesn’t seem to be turning those Al Quaeda frowns upside down.

2010-05-03T15:23:00.002-05:00

Fooled Again
This is from Reuters, not the Onion:

North Korea's health system would be the envy of many developing countries because of the abundance of medical staff that it has available, the head of the World Health Organization said on Friday.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan, speaking a day after returning from a 2-1/2 day visit to the reclusive country, said malnutrition was a problem in North Korea but she had not seen any obvious signs of it in the capital Pyongyang.

North Korea--which does not allow its citizens to leave the country--has no shortage of doctors and nurses, in contrast to other developing countries where skilled healthcare workers often emigrate, she said.

Reuters also notes--seriously, we are not making this up--that Chan found no signs of obesity among North Koreans. "News reports said earlier this year that North Koreans were starving to death," the wire service deadpans in response.

Recently a reader sent us a 2007 New York Times editorial purporting to debunk the "delusion" that America has the best health-care system in the world. Among the paper's evidence: "Seven years ago, the World Health Organization made the first major effort to rank the health systems of 191 nations. France and Italy took the top two spots; the United States was a dismal 37th." The Times didn't mention how the Norks did, but remember Margaret Chan's stunningly fatuous comments the next time someone cites WHO as an authority.

2010-04-27T07:48:00.000-05:00

http://nevergetbusted.com/2010/audio/National-Public-Radios-This-Ame-Barry-and-His-Recent-Arrest.mp3

Firemen

2010-04-26T14:40:00.002-05:00

2010-04-26T14:14:00.001-05:00

The Associated Press has some good--albeit highly anecdotal--news on the unemployment front:

When laid-off toy company executive Paul Nawrocki hit the streets of Manhattan wearing a sandwich board and handing out his resume, he became the face of the recession.

At the end of 2008, with the giants of Wall Street collapsing and bank accounts dwindling, this lone, mustachioed job hunter with the sign proclaiming he was "almost homeless" seemed like a mirror of a slumping nation's fears and troubles. . . .

Well, if Paul Nawrocki is a sign of the times, then times are looking up.

Because last month, after collecting 99 weeks of unemployment, Nawrocki finally found a job.

Ninety-nine weeks, eh? Want to see an amazing coincide? This is from the Web site of the New York State Department of Labor:

New York State now provides 73 additional weeks of unemployment benefits, as well as the usual 26 weeks of regular benefits.

Get a calculator, and punch in "73+26=." Spooky, isn't it?

2010-03-22T09:08:00.001-05:00

2010-03-15T13:11:00.002-05:00

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/rich-noyes/2010/03/15/media-reality-check-year-spin-liberal-obamacare

2010-03-11T09:08:00.001-06:00

Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned up yesterday at the Washington conference of the National Association of Counties, and she engaged in a little cheerleading for ObamaCare:

You've heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don't know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention--it's about diet, not diabetes. It's going to be very, very exciting.

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.

2010-03-09T11:27:00.002-06:00

Mary Pahlke

Pahlke, Mary 64 09/25/1945 03/02/2010

Mary McBroom was born in Boise, where she grew up with her two younger sisters. She attended Boise State University where, while working in the cafeteria, she met her future husband John Pahlke, who came back for seconds. They moved to Portland, married in 1967 and started their family. After raising their two boys, Mary embarked on a 20-year career with Nordstrom that began in Oregon and ended in Virginia. Mary and John were avid boaters and loved nothing more than cruising the Chesapeake Bay. Upon leaving Nordstrom, Mary and John spent two years traveling the country in a motor home seeing amazing sights and creating lifelong memories. Mary was an avid artisan her entire life, weaving, cross-stitching, knitting and sewing. Those who have some of these pieces will treasure them forever. Mary was small in stature, but a giant in the fight against cancer. Sadly, it was a fight that she lost while surrounded by her family and friends. She was preceded in death by her best friend, and the love of her life, her husband, John. Mary is survived by her sisters, Barbara and Janice; sons, John and Tom; three grandchildren; and several nieces and nephews. A celebration of Mary's life will be held Sunday, March 7, 2010, at her sister's home, 5290 S.E. Hillwood Road, Milwaukie. Friends may stop by anytime between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Published in The Oregonian on March 6, 2010

2010-02-23T13:48:00.002-06:00

John Stossel: More Anarchist Than Most

Posted by Gavin McInnes on February 17, 2010

The Anarchists in Vancouver are not happy about the Winter Olympics being held there and recently marched through town smashing windows, covering their faces, and yelling about everything from capitalism to the seal hunt to indigenous land. Some of their beefs are valid. The Olympics is a big waste of taxpayers’ money and in a city where one junkie dies every day, the local government could afford to be focusing on more serious problems. However, when reading the “manifestos” of today’s anarchists, one thing becomes abundantly clear, they hate capitalism more than they hate government.
I grew up going to anarchist conventions and don’t regret the various A’s I have tattooed up and down my arms in the slightest (in fact, I just got two more). We looked exactly like the 2010 Olympic protestors when we did things like protest outside the Chinese Embassy for China’s human rights violations in 1988. But back then, only a handful of anarchists would cover their faces. It drove us nuts because we were out there screaming about government ineptness and guys are acting like our adversary knows what he’s doing. “You realize your assumption that they are recording your face and putting you in some kind of massive database implies they know what they’re doing, right?” we’d ask them. This seemingly small detail is actually indicative of a much bigger split in the anarchist community: government aptitude.

“Politics is Hollywood for ugly people and the White House is just a big DMV with Greek columns out front.”
Anarchists with covered faces smashing the windows of retail stores are in fact, communists. Sure, the wage discrepancy between CEOs and factory workers is disgusting. I also hate the way big business ships in illegals and lowers the minimum wage to zero but if anyone has dealt with government at any level in their adult life they’d realize big business is the lesser of two evils by a long shot.
Today’s anarchists want money out of entrepreneur’s hands and into government hands where it can rot. They advocate unions like it was the 1930s and guys with tweed caps needed to get compensation for black lung. Nice sentiment but today’s teacher’s union is the most powerful political lobby in the world and has more cronies on both the Democratic and the Republican side than any other group in Washington. These unions are essentially mobsters who shake down anyone who dares pay electricians less than $50 an hour plus time-and-a-half for overtime plus double time-and-a-half for holidays. That’s more than architects and doctors make when they start out. Is $700 a day the fair wage the anti-capitalists want for the workingman? It’s more money than I ever made and I’m rich.
I often visit the anarchist squat Dial House where the founders of anarcho punk, Crass set up shop in the early 70s and are still there today. I had a seven-hour argument with the patriarch of the commune, Penny Rimbaud because I had the gall to point out it was ridiculous Mugabe was still alive and said if I was a Zimbabwean, he would have been blown up long ago. The Taliban did a seamless job of assassinating Massoud and all it took was a trick camera so why can’t the MDC do something similar? Like all anarchists, Rimbaud was stunned I didn’t know this wasn’t all part of the big government plan. “Zimbabwe is needed to cart diamonds out of South Africa,” he explained. “America needs him there the same way they need Iraq to get oil out.”
I don’t get it. If government is such a powerful monster, why do anarchists want to give it The Gap’s profits? They can’t seem to decide if the government is this elaborate network James Bond reports to or a quaint group of intellectuals who want to empower the poor. The truth is. It’s neither. They are not all-knowing they are know nothings. They are not a “secret society” (as Crass once said) they can’t even keep an infidelity secret. Since the president got caught using a cigar as a dildo, we’ve learned: John Edwards was screwing his biographer, governor Mark Sanford was boning his Argentinean mistress, senator Larry Craig was fishing for blowjobs in the bathroom, and Spitzer was fucking prostitutes with his socks on. Politics is Hollywood for ugly people and the White House is just a big DMV with Greek columns out front.
Danny Schechter’s new book Plunder! Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, makes it crystal clear: the government is everything bad you can say about big business but without the “employing people and manufacturing stuff” part. This sentiment is what attracted me to the anarchist movement in the first place—not Marx’s intellectual claptrap about his “dialectic.”
This is why, as an adult, I’m drawn to libertarians like John Stossel. Sure there’s flaws like a love of open borders which I see as a chance for big business to go on an exploitation bender (anarchists also want open borders which I never quite got), but Stossel’s show spends 90 percent of its time pointing out government incompetence and exposing the way they oppress the everyman. During each episode he holds up a tiny book that’s about half the size of the communist manifesto and explains this is the bill of rights and the constitution combined. Then he shows us the endless piles of documentation the government uses for even the most insignificant rule. “This is all we need,” he says holding up the small book. That’s the closest I’ve seen to a plausible anarchist goal in America—ever.
Then Stossel gets specific. We learn about swimming pools that have diving boards revoked because of impending danger and then cause more accidents because kids no longer know where the deep end is. We hear local governments in Texas are strangling restaurants with insanity like “No Outside Dancing” laws (a bizarre rule New York’s previous mayor used to close down clubs he didn’t like). Stossel is very vocal about big money firms like Goldman Sachs and how much they’ve benefited from Obama’s new big government plans. From daycare workers being muscled into joining unions to California being bankrupted by bureaucrats, John Stossel has done more to mobilize hatred for government than any punk kid in black sweatshirt could ever hope to.
If the fashionable punks in Vancouver really cared about personal freedom and really wanted to abolish as much of the government as possible, they would swallow their prejudice, tune into Fox, get over his moustache, and take notes from the most articulate and driven anarchist in America today. In short, it’s time for crusty punks to Get Stosselized!
(I’m trademarking that so don’t even think about stealing it.)
Article URL: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/john_stossel_more_anarchist_than_most/

Food expiration dates bullshit!

2010-02-18T14:40:00.002-06:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2244249/

2010-02-17T09:50:00.001-06:00

Consensus or Con?

The global warmists are the real deniers.

By JAMES TARANTO

This column was scoffing at global warming back when global warming was still cool. But even we have been surprised at the extent of the past three months' "meltdown" of global warmism, to use the metaphor that everyone seems to have settled on.
As we've written on various occasions, we didn't know enough about the substance of the underlying science to make a judgment about it. But we know enough about science itself to recognize that the popular rendition of global warmism--dogmatic, doctrinaire and scornful of skepticism--is not the least bit scientific. The revelations in the Climategate emails show that these attitudes were common among actual scientists, not just the popularizers of their work.
Still, we would not have gone so far as to say that global warming was just a hoax. Surely there was some actual science to back it, even if there was a lot less certainty than was claimed.
Now, though, we're wondering if this was too charitable a view. London's Sunday Times reports that scientists are "casting doubt" on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's "claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution," a claim the IPCC describes as "unequivocal":

"The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change," said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

"The story is the same for each one," he said. "The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development."

Meanwhile, the BBC carries an extraordinary interview with Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the central Climategate figure. In the interview, Jones admits that the periods 1860-80 and 1910-40 saw global warming on a similar scale to the 1975-98 period, that there has been no significant warming since 1995, and that the so-called Medieval Warm Period calls into question whether the currently observed warming is unprecedented.
And then there's this exchange:

When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over," what exactly do they mean--and what don't they mean?

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.

So "the vast majority of climate scientists" don't think the debate is over? Someone had better tell the IPCC, Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee and most of our colleagues in the media, who have long been insisting otherwise--and indeed, who continue to do so. An example is this piece from yesterday's Washington Post:

With its 2007 report declaring that the "warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won a Nobel Prize--and a new degree of public trust in the controversial science of global warming.

But recent revelations about flaws in that seminal report, ranging from typos in key dates to sloppy sourcing, are undermining confidence not only in the panel's work but also in projections about climate change. Scientists who have pointed out problems in the report say the panel's methods and mistakes--including admitting Saturday that it had overstated how much of the Netherlands was below sea level--give doubters an opening.

It wasn't the first one. There is still a scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change. But . . .

That sentence beginning "There is still . . ." seems a rote recitation of an editorial position, sort of like when a news story refers to "a procedure that opponents call 'partial-birth abortion,' " or when Reuters puts scare quotes around "terrorism." (Or, for that matter, like when we refer to John Kerry as "the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who by the way served in Vietnam," except that we are satirizing the practice.) The gist of the Post's story is that the so-called consensus no longer exists, if it ever did. So why is the paper compelled to assert that it still does?
For an amusing example, listen to this New Yorker podcast on Climategate, featuring writers Elizabeth Kolbert and Peter J. Boyer. Boyer acknowledges that the emails raise serious questions about Climate science, but Kolbert denies it. Listen, though, to Kolbert's tone of voice: She sounds extremely defensive, as if she feels personally threatened by questions about global-warmist doctrine.
And maybe she does. There are, no doubt, lots of true believers in global warming--not scientists, but people, including many journalists, who have embraced global warmism as a political and quasireligious doctrine based, they have been led to believe, on the authority of science.
Even Phil Jones acknowledges climate science is rife with uncertainty, but global warmism's popularizers refuse to brook any doubt or acknowledge that the "consensus" they have touted is a sham.
And they used to call us deniers.

2010-02-12T11:47:00.001-06:00

We Blame George W. Bush
Remember when liberating Iraq was the worst foreign-policy mistake in American history? Now it turns out to have been anything but. The Los Angeles Times's Andrew Malcolm notes that Iraq is now so successful that the Obama administration, speaking via Vice President Biden, is taking credit for it. Here is what Biden said last night on CNN's "Larry King Live":

I am very optimistic about--about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.

I spent--I've been there 17 times now. I go about every two months--three months. I know every one of the major players in all the segments of that society. It's impressed me. I've been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.

Malcolm notes that Biden and President Obama both opposed the 2007 surge, and that Biden once had some crazy plan for partitioning Iraq. But all's well that ends well. And as for former president George W. Bush, just remember Reagan's dictum: "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit."

2010-02-12T11:45:00.001-06:00

Keo Capestany, 73, got stung twice, first by a bee and then by a hospital. Danny Westneat, a columnist for the Seattle Times, reports that Capestany ate a piece of steak at a picnic, not noticing that "a yellow jacket was clinging to the bottom side. It stung or bit him right on the tongue."
Capestany's tongue got swollen, and he worried that it might obstruct his breathing. So he went to the Harborview Medical Center. After almost a day on a Benadryl drip, doctors gave him a clean bill of health and sent him home from the hospital:

Two weeks later, though, he got stung again: The bill was $8,200. The IV costs alone were $2,469. The emergency room fee: $2,822. The pharmacy tab ran to $964. . . .

Capestany found out that though he spent about 22 hours there in a room, his treatment is considered "outpatient."

His insurance (Medicare Part A and his wife's policy) only give broad coverage for inpatient hospitalizations, not outpatient visits. . . .

Harborview couldn't discuss Capestany's bill with me, but said it's Medicare that sets the rules on whether someone is an inpatient or out.

In fact, Medicare puts out a six-page guide--with charts--on how to tell which is which. It's so complicated, they advise that if you're ever in a hospital for more than a few hours, you better ask about your status. I wonder: Would staff even know the answer?

It seems Capestany is stuck with the bill. And here is the lesson columnist Westneat draws from the story:

I sure don't know what would work. A single-payer system, competing insurance exchanges, health savings accounts--all seem better than what we have now.

Yet some say no, slow down. Leave health care until we repair the economy.

At $8,200 for a bee sting, health care could become all that's left of the economy.

If only the federal government ran health care, we wouldn't have to worry about Medicare rules. Brilliant!

2010-02-11T11:43:00.001-06:00

2010-02-02T07:48:00.001-06:00

Times to City: Drop Dead
The Obama administration appears to be backing away from one of its most grievous mistakes, the New York Post reports:

The trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed won't be held in lower Manhattan and could take place in a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, sources said last night.

Administration officials said that no final decision had been made but that officials of the Department of Justice and the White House were working feverishly to find a venue that would be less expensive and less of a security risk than New York City.

The back-to-the-future Gitmo option was reported yesterday by Fox News and was not disputed by White House officials.

The Guantanamo detention facility, of course, was supposed to have closed a week and a half ago. So much for that. MSNBC.com quotes Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, repeating a threat Obama himself once made:

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going to meet justice and he's going to meet his maker," said President Barack Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs. "He will be brought to justice and he's likely to be executed for the heinous crimes that he committed in killing and masterminding the killing of 3,000 Americans. That you can be sure of."

A few years ago, we asked then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales why the Bush administration had placed such emphasis on trying terrorists for war crimes, as opposed to detaining them to keep them off the battlefield. He gave us an unsatisfying answer--something about how the families of terrorism's victims wanted to see the perpetrators "brought to justice." It occurred to us later that he might have been obliquely referring to the prospect of an execution--something he couldn't mention explicitly because it would create the appearance that the U.S. was running show trials.
It seems the Obama administration wants people to think it is running show trials.
The New York Times predictably denounces the administration for failing to stick to its insane position. The editorial titled "It Happened in Our Backyard"--in fact, the Times offices are miles away from Ground Zero and the federal courthouse where the trials would have taken place--begins with the assurance that "we sympathized with the concerns about security and inconvenience raised by the Justice Department's plan to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed" in Manhattan.
No such sympathy was evident, though, in the original editorial praising the decision in November. Here is what the paper said back then about critics of the administration's plan: "Republican lawmakers and the self-promoting independent senator from Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman, pounced on the chance to appear on television." The Times is as ideologically zealous as ever, but at least its editors now feel obliged to give lip service to New Yorkers who live in the real world.

2010-01-29T08:30:00.002-06:00

"All industrial nations, mainly the big ones, are responsible for the crisis of global warming," he says in the tape, which has not been verified but is thought to be Bin Laden, according to the BBC. "This is a message to the whole world about those who are causing climate change, whether deliberately or not, and what we should do about that." He added that "Bush the son, and the [US] Congress before him, rejected this agreement [the Kyoto protocol] only to satisfy the big companies."

2010-01-28T13:04:00.001-06:00

The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests. We did.

2010-01-26T10:03:00.001-06:00

The Continuing Global-Warmist Crack-Up
London's Mail on Sunday reports on the latest climate-science scandal:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report's chapter on Asia, said: "It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

"It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in."

London's Times, meanwhile, reports that the IPCC's head, Rajendra Pachauri, "admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report":

"I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I'm in no mood to oblige them," he told The Times in an interview. "It was a collective failure by a number of people," he said. "I need to consider what action to take, but that will take several weeks. It's best to think with a cool head, rather than shoot from the hip."

The Sunday Times turns up more errors:

The United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny--and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

But politicians have picked up on these false claims:

Ed Miliband, the [British] energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods--such as those in Bangladesh in 2007--could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: "More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent."

We are supposed to believe the politicians when they warn us about global warming because they have the authority of scientists behind them. The more we learn, however, the more it seems that scientists are merely playing politics.

http://stprocopiusstockchallenge.blogspot.com/

2010-01-25T15:11:00.001-06:00

http://stprocopiusstockchallenge.blogspot.com/

2010-01-12T15:00:00.002-06:00

The Brutal Afghan Winter Vacation

Here's a blast from the past--an excerpt from a New York Times story of Dec. 24, 2001:

The Predator has problems. It is slow- moving and operates at relatively low altitudes, making it easy prey for antiaircraft fire. At least two Predators have crashed in Iraq this year, presumably shot down, officials said. They are also extremely vulnerable to icing, and it is not clear whether they can operate in the brutal Afghan winter.

"The brutal Afghan winter" became a punch line for early "warbloggers" mocking the defeatism of the media. But today's Times reports that the Afghan winter isn't brutal enough:

Afghanistan's high mountains and harsh weather once meant that winter was a respite from much of the war's violence, but as the deaths of six Western soldiers in three separate attacks on Monday show, this winter is proving to be different.

American military leaders and Taliban commanders are vowing to carry the fight to each other and skip the traditional winter vacation, and there is every sign that they are doing just that.

Why does the Times even bother mentioning the weather? All we need to know is the globe is warming and America is losing.

http://gawker.com/5440648/jacob-zuma-president-of-dancing-awesomely

2010-01-05T15:23:00.001-06:00

2010-01-04T08:33:00.002-06:00

2009-12-08T09:34:00.001-06:00

I just got a ticket to see him Saturday at the Royal George!

2009-12-03T09:53:00.000-06:00

http://www.rickyjay.com/newyorker.htm

2009-12-03T08:52:00.003-06:00

Obama did, as is his wont, devote some time last night to rehashing complaints about the previous administration, and he now stands accused of delivering false information. The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb has the statement from Donald Rumsfeld, who served as defense secretary from 2001 through 2006:

"In his speech to the nation last night, President Obama claimed that "Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive." Such a bald misstatement, at least as it pertains to the period I served as Secretary of Defense, deserves a response.

I am not aware of a single request of that nature between 2001 and 2006. If any such requests occurred, "repeated" or not, the White House should promptly make them public. The President's assertion does a disservice to the truth and, in particular, to the thousands of men and women in uniform who have fought, served and sacrificed in Afghanistan.

In the interest of better understanding the President's announcement last night, I suggest that the Congress review the President's assertion in the forthcoming debate and determine exactly what requests were made, who made them, and where and why in the chain of command they were denied."

Something tells us that will not be rehashed. Those now in power in Washington are interested in rehashing the preceding administration only when they can use it to produce excuses for themselves.

The policy Obama adopted after months of ostentatious dithering is about as good as anyone could have expected, but the tone of his speech doesn't seem to have inspired anyone. Here's Tunku Varadarajan's review:

"What has struck me most about Obama's Afghan enterprise--and his speech did not cause me to alter my view--is how obvious it is that he doesn't really want to do it. He wants to do health care. Obama has tried every delaying trick in the book--waiting for three months after Gen. McChrystal's request for more troops, having meeting after meeting after meeting, sending Gen. Jones to tell McChrystal not to ask for more troops, having his economic team say it will cost too much, framing the venture in terms of "exit strategies" rather than victory, etc. His ambivalence was on naked display [last night]. Can you imagine Churchill delivering a speech like this, one so full of a sense of the limitation of national possibilities? No wonder Hillary [Clinton]--when the camera panned to her--looked like she needed a drink. No wonder the cadets all looked so depressed. Would you want Eeyore for commander in chief?"

2009-12-01T08:37:00.002-06:00

It sounds as though, after months of indecision, the president has finally resolved to be irresolute. It seems that his central strategic goal is to displease no one. Unless the speech turns out to be markedly different from what the Times leads us to expect--and let us hope it does--it will only reinforce the impression that he is a ditherer.

Last week Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post tried to rebut this stereotype. Here's how his story began:

President George W. Bush once boasted, "I'm not a textbook player, I'm a gut player." The new tenant of the Oval Office takes a strikingly different approach. President Obama is almost defiantly deliberative, methodical and measured, even when critics accuse him of dithering. When describing his executive style, he goes into Spock mode, saying, "You've got to make decisions based on information and not emotions."

Obama's handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory. The strategic review began in September. Again and again, the war council convened in the Situation Room. The president mulled an array of unappealing options. Next week, finally, he will tell the American public the outcome of all this strategizing.

"He's establishing his decision-making process as being almost diametrically the opposite of the previous administration," says Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's chief of staff. Wilkerson, who teaches national security decision-making at George Washington University, says the Bush-Cheney style was "cowboy-like, typical Texas, typical Wyoming, and extremely secretive."

This story appeared on page A1. That is, at the Washington Post, it is still front-page news that "the new tenant of the Oval Office," who has been there for nearly a quarter of a term," is different from his predecessor. But actually, there's a lesson here, for journalists and politicians alike. With Achenbach's comments about Bush in mind, read this excerpt from the former president's Jan. 10, 2007, speech announcing the surge in Iraq:

It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq. So my national security team, military commanders and diplomats conducted a comprehensive review.

We consulted members of Congress from both parties, allies abroad, and distinguished outside experts.

We benefited from the thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. In our discussions, we all agreed that there is no magic formula for success in Iraq. And one message came through loud and clear: Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.

It was a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory. Or it would have been, if anyone remembered it. But no one does, because the stereotype of Bush as "cowboy-like" stuck. The stereotype of Obama as indecisive, detached and irresolute is sticking, too. Achenbach has made a manful effort to counter it, but let's look at another passage from his piece and see how well he did:

Stephen Wayne, who teaches about the presidency at Georgetown, said: "He's not an instinctive decision-maker as Bush was. He doesn't go with his gut, he thinks with his head, which I think is desirable." Referring to the Afghanistan decision, Wayne said, "I don't think he is an indecisive person, I just think this is a tough one."

The defense of Obama is that he's not indecisive, he just has trouble making tough decisions. When decisions are easy, bang, he makes them just like that! Imagine him sitting in a diner:

Waiter: Would you like eggs for breakfast?

Obama: Yes, I most certainly would!

2009-11-20T12:12:00.001-06:00

2009-11-20T12:11:00.000-06:00

Accountability Journalism An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We'd like to compare this dispatch to the AP's dispatch earlier this week "fact checking" Sarah Palin's new book. Here goes:

Number of AP reporters assigned to story:
ObamaCare bills: 2
Palin book: 11

Number of pages in document being covered:
ObamaCare bills: 4,064
Palin book: 432

Number of pages per AP reporter:
ObamaCare bill: 2,032
Palin book: 39.3

On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That's what they call accountability journalism.

2009-11-18T10:09:00.001-06:00

Is America at war, or not?
Posted: November 16, 20096:50 pm Eastern© 2009

Are we at war – or not?
For if we are at war, why is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed headed for trial in federal court in the Southern District of New York? Why is he entitled to a presumption of innocence and all of the constitutional protections of a U.S. citizen?
Is it possible we have done an injustice to this man by keeping him locked up all these years without trial? For that is what this trial implies – that he may not be guilty.
And if we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that KSM was complicit in mass murder, by what right do we send Predators and Special Forces to kill his al-Qaida comrades wherever we find them? For none of them has been granted a fair trial.
When the Justice Department sets up a task force to wage war on a crime organization like the Mafia or MS-13, no U.S. official has a right to shoot Mafia or gang members on sight. No one has a right to bomb their homes. No one has a right to regard the possible death of their wives and children in an attack as acceptable collateral damage.
Yet that is what we do to al-Qaida, to which KSM belongs.
We conduct those strikes in good conscience because we believe we are at war. But if we are at war, what is KSM doing in a U.S. court?
Minoru Genda, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, a naval base on U.S. soil, when America was at peace, and killed nearly as many Americans as the Sept. 11 hijackers, was not brought here for trial. He was an enemy combatant under the Geneva Conventions and treated as such.
When Maj. Andre, the British spy and collaborator of Benedict Arnold, was captured, he got a military tribunal, after which he was hanged. When Gen. Andrew Jackson captured two British subjects in Spanish Florida aiding renegade Indians, Jackson had both tried and hanged on the spot.
Enemy soldiers who commit atrocities are not sent to the United States for trial. Under the Geneva Conventions, soldiers who commit atrocities are shot when caught.
When and where did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed acquire his right to a trial by a jury of his peers in a U.S. court?
When John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, alleged collaborators like Mary Surratt were tried before a military tribunal and hanged at Fort McNair. When eight German saboteurs were caught in 1942 after being put ashore by U-boat, they were tried in secret before a military commission and executed, with the approval of the Supreme Court. What makes KSM special?
Is the Obama administration aware of what it is risking by not turning KSM over to a military tribunal in Guantanamo?
How does Justice handle a defense demand for a change of venue, far from lower Manhattan, where the jury pool was most deeply traumatized by Sept. 11? Would not KSM and his co-defendants, if a change of venue is denied, have a powerful argument for overturning any conviction on appeal?
Were not KSM's Miranda rights impinged when he was not only not told he could have a lawyer on capture, but told that his family would be killed and he would be waterboarded if he refused to talk?
And if all the evidence against the five defendants comes from other than their own testimony under duress, do not their lawyers have a right to know when, where, how and from whom Justice got the evidence to prosecute them? Does KSM have the right to confront all witnesses against him, even if they are al-Qaida turncoats or U.S. spies still transmitting information to U.S. intelligence?
There have been reports that in the trials of those convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing, sources and methods were compromised, weakening our security for the second attack on Sept. 11.
If the trial is held in lower Manhattan, how much security will be needed to protect against a car bomber who wants the world to see a mighty blow struck against the Great Satan? And if, as some suggest, the trial should be held on Governors Island, would that not make the United States look like a nation under siege?
What do we do if the case against KSM is thrown out because the government refuses to reveal sources or methods, or if he gets a hung jury, or is acquitted, or has his conviction overturned?
In America, trials often become games, where the prosecution, though it has truth on its side, loses because it inadvertently breaks one of the rules.
The Obamaites had best pray that does not happen, for they may be betting his presidency on the outcome of the game about to begin.

Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party's candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of seven books.

(Also: BHO guaranteeing convictions proves these are SHOW TRIALS only, so we can impress Euros I guess ... - TP)

2009-11-17T11:53:00.001-06:00

Two Presidents in One! • "Mr. Obama used the forum at Shanghai's Museum of Science and Technology to make a plea for a free flow of information, saying it makes societies stronger and holds political leaders accountable. People in positions of power may bristle at criticism, he said, but open criticism 'makes our democracy stronger, and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don't want to hear.' "--The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 16

• "Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of mostly liberal columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, Mr. Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about [Fox News Channel], according to people briefed on the conversation."--New York Times, Oct. 23

2009-11-17T11:50:00.001-06:00

Two Papers in One! • "The argument against unions--that they unduly burden employers with unreasonable demands--is one that corporate America makes in good times and bad. . . . The real issue is whether enhanced unionizing would worsen the recession, and there is no evidence that it would. There is a strong argument that the slack labor market of a recession actually makes unions all the more important."--editorial, New York Times, Dec. 29, 2008 •

"The New York Times News Service will lay off at least 25 editorial employees next year and will move the editing of the service to a Florida newspaper owned by The New York Times Company. . .The plan for the news service calls for The Gainesville Sun, whose newsroom is not unionized and has lower salaries, to take over editing and page design."--news story, New York Times, Nov. 13, 2009

2009-11-11T14:03:00.000-06:00

Oh No, an Intrusion!
The New York Times is troubled by only one aspect of the monstrous ObamaCare bill:

When the House narrowly passed the health care reform bill on Saturday night, it came with a steep price for women's reproductive rights. Under pressure from anti-abortion Democrats and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, lawmakers added language that would prevent millions of Americans from buying insurance that covers abortions--even if they use their own money.
The restrictions would fall on women eligible to buy coverage on new health insurance exchanges. They are a sharp departure from current practice, an infringement of a woman's right to get a legal medical procedure and an unjustified intrusion by Congress into decisions best made by patients and doctors.

"An unjustified intrusion into decisions best made by patients and doctors" is an apt description of the entire ObamaCare effort.

2009-11-10T12:48:00.001-06:00

Here's another straw in the wind, from London's Daily Telegraph:

Hasan worshipped at a mosque led by a radical imam said to be a "spiritual adviser" to three of the hijackers who attacked America on Sept 11, 2001.
Hasan, the sole suspect in the massacre of 13 fellow US soldiers in Texas, attended the controversial Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, in 2001 at the same time as two of the September 11 terrorists, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt. . . .
The preacher at the time was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni scholar who was banned from addressing a meeting in London by video link in August because he is accused of supporting attacks on British troops and backing terrorist organisations.
Hasan's eyes "lit up" when he mentioned his deep respect for al-Awlaki's teachings, according to a fellow Muslim officer at the Fort Hood base in Texas, the scene of Thursday's horrific shooting spree.

The Middle East Media Research Institute last month excerpted a blog post from al-Awlaki's Web site in which he cheerleads for America's enemies:

America failed to defeat the mujahedeen when it gave its president unlimited support, how can it win with Obama who is on a short leash? If America failed to win when it was at its pinnacle of economic strength, how can it win today with a recession--if not a depression--at hand?
The simple answer is: America cannot and will not win. The tables have turned and there is no rolling back of the worldwide Jihad movement.

Today al-Awlaki has a post titled "Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing":

Nidal Hassan is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn't exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier. The US is leading the war against terrorism which in reality is a war against Islam.

Fall of the Wall

2009-11-06T10:58:00.000-06:00

On Eve of Fall of Berlin Wall, Recalling the Liberal Media’s Take on Communism
By Rich Noyes (Bio | Archive)
November 5, 2009 - 10:48 ET

As readers of Cal Thomas’s
As readers of Cal Thomas’s latest syndicated column already know, the Media Research Center is releasing a new report today on the media’s coverage of communism, timed to coincide with the 20 anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Monday. Sad to say, but before, during and after those momentous events two decades ago, many in the liberal media continuously whitewashed the true nature of communism, or suggested free-market capitalism was somehow worse.

For our report, Better Off Red?, Scott Whitlock and I combed through the MRC’s archives; the quotes (and 19 audio/video clips) we pulled together show some liberal journalists utterly failed to accurately depict communism as one of the worst evils of the 20th century, and often aimed their fire at those who were fighting communism rather than those who were perpetuating it. The full report has more than 70 quotes; here's a sample from the Executive Summary:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/rich-noyes/2009/11/05/eve-fall-berlin-wall-recalling-liberal-media-s-take-communism

2009-11-03T07:55:00.000-06:00

The Worst Bill Ever
Epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting: The Pelosi health bill has it all.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she's prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that's what it takes to pass ObamaCare, and little wonder. The health bill she unwrapped last Thursday, which President Obama hailed as a "critical milestone," may well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced.
In a rational political world, this 1,990-page runaway train would have been derailed months ago. With spending and debt already at record peacetime levels, the bill creates a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.
Yet at this point, Democrats have dumped any pretense of genuine bipartisan "reform" and moved into the realm of pure power politics as they race against the unpopularity of their own agenda. The goal is to ram through whatever income-redistribution scheme they can claim to be "universal coverage." The result will be destructive on every level—for the health-care system, for the country's fiscal condition, and ultimately for American freedom and prosperity.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

•The spending surge. The Congressional Budget Office figures the House program will cost $1.055 trillion over a decade, which while far above the $829 billion net cost that Mrs. Pelosi fed to credulous reporters is still a low-ball estimate. Most of the money goes into government-run "exchanges" where people earning between 150% and 400% of the poverty level—that is, up to about $96,000 for a family of four in 2016—could buy coverage at heavily subsidized rates, tied to income. The government would pay for 93% of insurance costs for a family making $42,000, 72% for another making $78,000, and so forth.
At least at first, these benefits would be offered only to those whose employers don't provide insurance or work for small businesses with 100 or fewer workers. The taxpayer costs would be far higher if not for this "firewall"—which is sure to cave in when people see the deal their neighbors are getting on "free" health care. Mrs. Pelosi knows this, like everyone else in Washington.
Even so, the House disguises hundreds of billions of dollars in additional costs with budget gimmicks. It "pays for" about six years of program with a decade of revenue, with the heaviest costs concentrated in the second five years. The House also pretends Medicare payments to doctors will be cut by 21.5% next year and deeper after that, "saving" about $250 billion. ObamaCare will be lucky to cost under $2 trillion over 10 years; it will grow more after that.
• Expanding Medicaid, gutting private Medicare. All this is particularly reckless given the unfunded liabilities of Medicare—now north of $37 trillion over 75 years. Mrs. Pelosi wants to steal $426 billion from future Medicare spending to "pay for" universal coverage. While Medicare's price controls on doctors and hospitals are certain to be tightened, the only cut that is a sure thing in practice is gutting Medicare Advantage to the tune of $170 billion. Democrats loathe this program because it gives one of out five seniors private insurance options.
As for Medicaid, the House will expand eligibility to everyone below 150% of the poverty level, meaning that some 15 million new people will be added to the rolls as private insurance gets crowded out at a cost of $425 billion. A decade from now more than a quarter of the population will be on a program originally intended for poor women, children and the disabled.
Even though the House will assume 91% of the "matching rate" for this joint state-federal program—up from today's 57%—governors would still be forced to take on $34 billion in new burdens when budgets from Albany to Sacramento are in fiscal collapse. Washington's budget will collapse too, if anything like the House bill passes.
• European levels of taxation. All told, the House favors $572 billion in new taxes, mostly by imposing a 5.4-percentage-point "surcharge" on joint filers earning over $1 million, $500,000 for singles. This tax will raise the top marginal rate to 45% in 2011 from 39.6% when the Bush tax cuts expire—not counting state income taxes and the phase-out of certain deductions and exemptions. The burden will mostly fall on the small businesses that have organized as Subchapter S or limited liability corporations, since the truly wealthy won't have any difficulty sheltering their incomes.
This surtax could hit ever more earners because, like the alternative minimum tax, it isn't indexed for inflation. Yet it still won't be nearly enough. Even if Congress had confiscated 100% of the taxable income of people earning over $500,000 in the boom year of 2006, it would have only raised $1.3 trillion. When Democrats end up soaking the middle class, perhaps via the European-style value-added tax that Mrs. Pelosi has endorsed, they'll claim the deficits that they created made them do it.
Under another new tax, businesses would have to surrender 8% of their payroll to government if they don't offer insurance or pay at least 72.5% of their workers' premiums, which eat into wages. Such "play or pay" taxes always become "pay or pay" and will rise over time, with severe consequences for hiring, job creation and ultimately growth. While the U.S. already has one of the highest corporate income tax rates in the world, Democrats are on the way to creating a high structural unemployment rate, much as Europe has done by expanding its welfare states.
Meanwhile, a tax equal to 2.5% of adjusted gross income will also be imposed on some 18 million people who CBO expects still won't buy insurance in 2019. Democrats could make this penalty even higher, but that is politically unacceptable, or they could make the subsidies even higher, but that would expose the (already ludicrous) illusion that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit.
• The insurance takeover. A new "health choices commissioner" will decide what counts as "essential benefits," which all insurers will have to offer as first-dollar coverage. Private insurers will also be told how much they are allowed to charge even as they will have to offer coverage at virtually the same price to anyone who applies, regardless of health status or medical history.
The cost of insurance, naturally, will skyrocket. The insurer WellPoint estimates based on its own market data that some premiums in the individual market will triple under these new burdens. The same is likely to prove true for the employer-sponsored plans that provide private coverage to about 177 million people today. Over time, the new mandates will apply to all contracts, including for the large businesses currently given a safe harbor from bureaucratic tampering under a 1974 law called Erisa.
The political incentive will always be for government to expand benefits and reduce cost-sharing, trampling any chance of giving individuals financial incentives to economize on care. Essentially, all insurers will become government contractors, in the business of fulfilling political demands: There will be no such thing as "private" health insurance.
***
All of this is intentional, even if it isn't explicitly acknowledged. The overriding liberal ambition is to finish the work began decades ago as the Great Society of converting health care into a government responsibility. Mr. Obama's own Medicare actuaries estimate that the federal share of U.S. health dollars will quickly climb beyond 60% from 46% today. One reason Mrs. Pelosi has fought so ferociously against her own Blue Dog colleagues to include at least a scaled-back "public option" entitlement program is so that the architecture is in place for future Congresses to expand this share even further.
As Congress's balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can't regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine.
Mr. Obama rode into office on a wave of "change," but we doubt most voters realized that the change Democrats had in mind was making health care even more expensive and rigid than the status quo. Critics will say we are exaggerating, but we believe it is no stretch to say that Mrs. Pelosi's handiwork ranks with the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act as among the worst bills Congress has ever seriously contemplated.

2009-10-30T14:03:00.001-05:00

Andrew Jackson was provoked into a duel by a man who insulted his wife's honor. Charles Dickinson, the man who levied the insult, was known as a crack pistol shot, and many of Jackson's associates thought Dickinson had been paid to goad Jackson into a duel by political rivals. As the challenged, Dickinson shot first. Jackson reportedly did not stagger; did not waver; did not move an inch. Dickinson cried out in disbelief that he must have missed altogether. Not quite: He intended to kill Jackson and shot with sufficient accuracy to shatter Jackson's ribs and punctured a lung. With fiery resolve, Jackson cocked his pistol and shot Dickinson in the chest. Jackson's opponent collapsed, and would die of the wound later that night. Jackson said that if he'd been able to, he would have moved to Dickinson's bleeding form and struck it. Jackson's collapsed lung never healed correctly, leaving him with a life of persistent tremors and bloody, hacking coughs. The bullet was lodged close enough to his heart that doctors could not safely remove it, and it remained in his chest for the rest of his life. He suffered these symptoms in silence, never speaking about them or regretting them, but believed that they were just part of preserving his wife's honor.
Later, Jackson would, while in pursuit of a band of fleeing Indians, conquer the whole of Spanish Florida. This was bad news for then-President Monroe, who was in negotiations with the Spanish to buy Florida. Although Spain called for severe punishment, Jackson was never reprimanded, and Spain signed a treaty with America cedeing the Territory without any payment at all. President Monroe gave tacit reward to Jackson by naming him the governor of the territory.While president, Jackson was the target of a gun-wielding assassin. The guns both misfired, prompting the sixty-seven year old Jackson to beat his erstwhile assassin with a cane.

War - Huh! Good God Ya'll...

2009-10-21T07:20:00.001-05:00

http://www.smallwars.quantico.usmc.mil/sw_past.asp
http://www.smallwars.quantico.usmc.mil/sw_today.asp

North America
1. U.S. vs. State and Non-State Terrorists - Global War on Terror (2001 to Present)
2. U.S. vs. Global Production and Distribution of Narcotics - War on Drugs (1971 to Prsent)
3. Mexico vs. Zapatista/Chiapas Rebels (1994 to Present)
4. Haitian Anarchy - Civil War (2003 to Present)
South America
1. Colombia vs. FARC and Narco-paramilitaries (1964 to Present)
2. US and Colombia - PLAN COLOMBIA (2000 to Present)
3. Peru vs. Shining Path and MRTA (1980 to Present - suspended since 2000)
Europe
1. Spain vs. Basque Separatists - ETA (1958 to Prsent)
2. Moldova vs. Trans - Dniester (1991 to Present)
Middle East
1. Israel vs. Palestinians (1947 to Present)
2. Israel vs. Syria Border Clashes (1967 to Present)
3. Israel vs. Iran and Non-State Terrorists (1979 to Present)
4. Turkey vs. Kurdish Rebels (1984 to Present)
5. Iraqi Sunni vs. Iraqi Shi’ites (1991 to Present)
6. Afghanistan vs. Taliban Holdouts and Tribal Warlords (2001 to Present)Asia
1. India vs. Pakistan – Kashmir Border Conflict (1948 – Present)
2. India vs. Pakistan (Kashmir – 1948 to Present)
3. Myanmar Civil War (1948 to Present)
4. Pakistan vs. Baluchistan Separatists and Rebel (1948 – Present)
5. Peoples Republic of China vs. Taiwan (1949-Present)
6. North Korea vs. South Korea (1953 – Present)
7. People’s Republic of China vs. Tibet (1959 to Present)
8. India vs. Naxalite Guerrillas (1967 to Present)
9. Indonesia vs. Irian Jaya and Aceh (1969 to Present)
10. Philippines vs. MNLF and NPA (1969 to Present)
11. Laos vs. Hmong Insurgency (1975 to Present)
12. Bangladesh Civil War (1975 to Present)
13. Sri Lanka vs. Tamil Eelam (1978 to Present)
14. India vs. Assam Rebellion (1980 to Present)
15. India vs. Punjab (1982 to Present)16. Myanmar Narco-guerrillas vs. U.S. (1988 to Present)
17. India vs. Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (1989 to Present)
18. Papua New Guinea vs. Bougainville (1989 to Present)
19. Republic of Georgia vs. Abkhasia and South Ossetia (1992 to Present)20. Tajikistan vs. Popular Democratic Front (1992 to Present)
21. Russia vs. Chechen Separatists (1994 to Present)
22. People’s Republic of China vs. Uighur or Xianjiang (1996 to Present)
23. Nepal vs. Communist Party of Nepal Maoist or CPNM (1996 to Present)24. Singapore and Malaysia vs. Piracy in Straits of Malacca (2000 to Present)
25. Thailand vs. Muslim Separatists (2003 – Present)
Africa
1. Chad vs. Muslim Separatists (1965 to Present)
2. Ethiopia vs. Oromo Liberation Front (1973 to Present)
3. Angola vs. UNITA (1975 to Present – currently suspended)
4. Somalia Civil War and Anarchy (1978 to Present)
5. Casamance Rebellion in Senegal (1980 to present)
6. Zimbabwe Civil Unrest (1980 to Present)
7. Sudan vs. Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (1983 to Present)
8. Liberian Civil War (1989 to Present)
9. Nigeria vs. Cameroon Border Dispute (1991 – Present)
10. Kenya vs. Kikuyu Rebels (1991 to Present)
11. Algeria vs. FIS and GIA (1991 to Present)
12. Cameroon vs. Nigeria (1994 to Present)
13. Democratic Republic of the Congo vs. Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi (1997 to Present)
14. Congo Civil War (1997 to Present)
15. Namibia vs. Caprivi Liberation Army (1999 to Present)
16. Chad vs. Central African Republic (2002 to Present)

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"It's too expensive, so we are going to let you die"

2009-10-15T10:25:00.001-05:00

NewsBusters links to a Morgen Richmond YouTube clip, this one of a speech that Robert Reich, who served as President Clinton's labor secretary, delivered on the subject in 2007:

I will actually give you a speech made up entirely--almost at the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is, and a candidate will never say, but what candidates should say if we were in a kind of democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice of citizenship, and they were educated in terms of what the issues were, and they could separate myth from reality in terms of what candidates would tell them:"Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health-care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. [laughter] That's true, and what I'm going to do is I am going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people. But that means you--particularly you young people, particularly you young, healthy people--you're going to have to pay more. [applause] Thank you."And by the way, we are going to have to--if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive, so we're going to let you die. [applause] "Also, I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid--we already have a lot of bargaining leverage--to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. But that means less innovation, and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market, which means you are probably not going to live that much longer than your parents. [applause] Thank you."

As noted in our transcription, Reich's Berkeley, Calif., audience applauded the idea of taxing the young, killing the old, and stifling lifesaving innovations. One suspects that these ideas would not be greeted as warmly in most other American locales, which is why elected politicians who are actually trying to sell such ideas cloak them in euphemisms about "universal care," "reform," "cost cutting" and so forth.

2009-10-08T07:24:00.003-05:00

How did Paul Krugman get it so Wrong?
John H. Cochrane[1]
September 16, 2009

Many friends and colleagues have asked me what I think of Paul Krugman’s New York Times Magazine article, “How did Economists get it so wrong?”
Most of all, it’s sad. Imagine this weren’t economics for a moment. Imagine this were a respected scientist turned popular writer, who says, most basically, that everything everyone has done in his field since the mid 1960s is a complete waste of time. Everything that fills its academic journals, is taught in its PhD programs, presented at its conferences, summarized in its graduate textbooks, and rewarded with the accolades a profession can bestow, including multiple Nobel prizes, is totally wrong. Instead, he calls for a return to the eternal verities of a rather convoluted book written in the 1930s, as taught to our author in his undergraduate introductory courses. If a scientist, he might be a global-warming skeptic, an AIDS-HIV disbeliever, a creationist, a stalwart that maybe continents don’t move after all.
It gets worse. Krugman hints at dark conspiracies, claiming “dissenters are marginalized.” Most of the article is just a calumnious personal attack on an ever-growing enemies list, which now includes “new Keyenesians” such as Olivier Blanchard and Greg Mankiw. Rather than source professional writing, he plays gotcha with out-of-context second-hand quotes from media interviews. He makes stuff up, boldly putting words in people’s mouths that run contrary to their written opinions. Even this isn’t enough: he adds cartoons to try to make his “enemies” look silly, and puts them in false and embarrassing situations. He accuses us of adopting ideas for pay, selling out for “sabbaticals at the Hoover institution” and fat “Wall street paychecks.” It sounds a bit paranoid.
It’s annoying to the victims, but we’re big boys and girls. It’s a disservice to New York Times readers. They depend on Krugman to read real academic literature and digest it, and they get this attack instead. And it’s ineffective. Any astute reader knows that personal attacks and innuendo mean the author has run out of ideas.
That’s the biggest and saddest news of this piece: Paul Krugman has no interesting ideas whatsoever about what caused our current financial and economic problems, what policies might have prevented it, or what might help us in the future, and he has no contact with people who do. “Irrationality” and advice to spend like a drunken sailor are pretty superficial compared to all the fascinating things economists are writing about it these days.
How sad.

That’s what I think, but I don’t expect you the reader to be convinced by my opinion or my reference to professional consensus. Maybe he is right. Occasionally sciences, especially social sciences, do take a wrong turn for a decade or two. I thought Keynesian economics was such a wrong turn. So let’s take a quick look at the ideas.
Krugman’s attack has two goals. First, he thinks financial markets are “inefficient,” fundamentally due to “irrational” investors, and thus prey to excessive volatility which needs government control. Second, he likes the huge “fiscal stimulus” provided by multi-trillion dollar deficits.

Efficiency.
It’s fun to say we didn’t see the crisis coming, but the central empirical prediction of the efficient markets hypothesis is precisely that nobody can tell where markets are going – neither benevolent government bureaucrats, nor crafty hedge-fund managers, nor ivory-tower academics. This is probably the best-tested proposition in all the social sciences. Krugman knows this, so all he can do is huff and puff about his dislike for a theory whose central prediction is that nobody can be a reliable soothsayer.
Krugman writes as if the volatility of stock prices alone disproves market efficiency, and efficient marketers just ignored it all these years. This is a canard that Paul knows better than to pass on, no matter how rhetorically convenient. (I can overlook his mixing up the CAPM and Black-Scholes model, but not this.) There is nothing about “efficiency” that promises “stability.” “Stable” growth would in fact be a major violation of efficiency. Efficient markets did not need to wait for “the memory of 1929 … gradually receding,” nor did we fail to read the newspapers in 1987. Data from the great depression has been included in practically all the tests. In fact, the great “equity premium puzzle” is that if efficient, stock markets don’t seem risky enough to deter more people from investing! Gene Fama’s PhD thesis was on “fat tails” in stock returns.
It is true and very well documented that asset prices move more than reasonable expectations of future cashflows. This might be because people are prey to bursts of irrational optimism and pessimism. It might also be because people’s willingness to take on risk varies over time, and is lower in bad economic times. As Gene Fama pointed out in 1970, these are observationally equivalent explanations. Unless you are willing to elaborate your theory to the point that it can quantitatively describe how much and when risk premiums, or waves of “optimism” and “pessimism,” can vary, you know nothing. No theory is particularly good at that right now.
Crying “bubble” is empty unless you have an operational procedure for identifying bubbles, distinguishing them from rationally low risk premiums, and not crying wolf too many years in a row. Krugman rightly praises Robert Shiller for his warnings over many years that house prices might fall. But advice that we should listen to Shiller, because he got the last one right, is no more useful than previous advice from many quarters to listen to Greenspan because he got several ones right. Following the last mystic oracle until he gets one wrong, then casting him to the wolves, is not a good long-term strategy for identifying bubbles. Krugman likes Shiller because he advocates behavioral ideas, but that’s no help either. People who call themselves behavioral have just as wide a divergence of opinion as those who don’t. Are markets irrationally exuberant or irrationally depressed? It’s hard to tell.
This difficulty is no surprise. It’s the central prediction of free-market economics, as crystallized by Hayek, that no academic, bureaucrat or regulator will ever be able to fully explain market price movements. Nobody knows what “fundamental” value is. If anyone could tell what the price of tomatoes should be, let alone the price of Microsoft stock, communism would have worked.
More deeply, the economist’s job is not to “explain” market fluctuations after the fact, to give a pleasant story on the evening news about why markets went up or down. Markets up? “A wave of positive sentiment.” Markets went down? “Irrational pessimism.” ( “The risk premium must have increased” is just as empty.) Our ancestors could do that. Really, is that an improvement on “Zeus had a fight with Apollo?” Good serious behavioral economists know this, and they are circumspect in their explanatory claims so far.
But this argument takes us away from the main point. The case for free markets never was that markets are perfect. The case for free markets is that government control of markets, especially asset markets, has always been much worse.
Krugman at bottom is arguing that the government should massively intervene in financial markets, and take charge of the allocation of capital. He can’t quite come out and say this, but he does say “Keynes considered it a very bad idea to let such markets…dictate important business decisions,” and “finance economists believed that we should put the capital development of the nation in the hands of what Keynes had called a `casino.’” Well, if markets can’t be trusted to allocate capital, we don’t have to connect too many dots to imagine who Paul has in mind.
To reach this conclusion, you need evidence, experience, or any realistic hope that the alternative will be better. Remember, the SEC couldn’t even find Bernie Madoff when he was handed to them on a silver platter. Think of the great job Fannie, Freddie, and Congress did in the mortgage market. Is this system going to regulate Citigroup, guide financial markets to the right price, replace the stock market, and tell our society which new products are worth investment? As David Wessel’s excellent In Fed We Trust makes perfectly clear, government regulators failed just as abysmally as private investors and economists to see the storm coming. And not from any lack of smarts.
In fact, the behavioral view gives us a new and stronger argument against regulation and control. Regulators are just as human and irrational as market participants. If bankers are, in Krugman’s words, “idiots,” then so must be the typical treasury secretary, fed chairman, and regulatory staff. They act alone or in committees, where behavioral biases are much better documented than in market settings. They are still easily captured by industries, and face politically distorted incentives.
Careful behavioralists know this, and do not quickly run from “the market got it wrong” to “the government can put it all right.” Even my most behavioral colleagues Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book “Nudge” go only so far as a light libertarian paternalism, suggesting good default options on our 401(k) accounts. (And even here they’re not very clear on how the Federal Nudging Agency is going to steer clear of industry capture.) They don’t even think of jumping from irrational markets, which they believe in deeply, to Federal control of stock and house prices and allocation of capital.

Stimulus
Most of all, Krugman likes fiscal stimulus. In this quest, he accuses us and the rest of the economics profession of “mistaking beauty for truth.” He’s not clear on what the “beauty” is that we all fell in love with, and why one should shun it, for good reason. The first siren of beauty is simple logical consistency. Paul’s Keynesian economics requires that people make logically inconsistent plans to consume more, invest more, and pay more taxes with the same income. The second siren is plausible assumptions about how people behave. Keynesian economics requires that the government is able to systematically fool people again and again. It presumes that people don’t think about the future in making decisions today. Logical consistency and plausible foundations are indeed “beautiful” but to me they are also basic preconditions for “truth.”
In economics, stimulus spending ran aground on Robert Barro’s Ricardian equivalence theorem. This theorem says that debt-financed spending can’t have any effect because people, seeing the higher future taxes that must pay off the debt, will simply save more. They will buy the new government debt and leave all spending decisions unaltered. Is this theorem true? It’s a logical connection from a set of “if” to a set of “therefore.” Not even Paul can object to the connection.
Therefore, we have to examine the “ifs.” And those ifs are, as usual, obviously not true. For example, the theorem presumes lump-sum taxes, not proportional income taxes. Alas, when you take this into account we are all made poorer by deficit spending, so the multiplier is most likely negative. The theorem (like most Keynesian economics) ignores the composition of output; but surely spending money on roads rather than cars can affect the overall level.
Economists have spent a generation tossing and turning the Ricardian equivalence theorem, and assessing the likely effects of fiscal stimulus in its light, generalizing the “ifs” and figuring out the likely “therefores.” This is exactly the right way to do things. The impact of Ricardian equivalence is not that this simple abstract benchmark is literally true. The impact is that in its wake, if you want to understand the effects of government spending, you have to specify why it is false. Doing so does not lead you anywhere near old-fashioned Keynesian economics. It leads you to consider distorting taxes, how much people care about their children, how many people would like to borrow more to finance today’s consumption and so on. And when you find “market failures” that might justify a multiplier, optimal-policy analysis suggests fixing the market failures, not their exploitation by fiscal multiplier. Most “New Keynesian” analyses that add frictions don’t produce big multipliers.
This is how real thinking about stimulus actually proceeds. Nobody ever “asserted that an increase in government spending cannot, under any circumstances, increase employment.” This is unsupportable by any serious review of professional writings, and Krugman knows it. (My own are perfectly clear on lots of possibilities for an answer that is not zero.) But thinking through this sort of thing and explaining it is much harder than just tarring your enemies with out-of-context quotes, ethical innuendo, or silly cartoons.
In fact, I propose that Krugman himself doesn’t really believe the Keynesian logic for that stimulus. I doubt he would follow that logic to its inevitable conclusions. Stimulus must have some other attraction to him.
If you believe the Keynesian argument for stimulus, you should think Bernie Madoff is a hero. He took money from people who were saving it, and gave it to people who most assuredly were going to spend it. Each dollar so transferred, in Krugman’s world, generates an additional dollar and a half of national income. The analogy is even closer. Madoff didn’t just take money from his savers, he essentially borrowed it from them, giving them phony accounts with promises of great profits to come. This looks a lot like government debt.
If you believe the Keynesian argument for stimulus, you don’t care how the money is spent. All this puffery about “infrastructure,” monitoring, wise investment, jobs “created” and so on is pointless. Keynes thought the government should pay people to dig ditches and fill them up.
If you believe in Keynesian stimulus, you don’t even care if the government spending money is stolen. Actually, that would be better. Thieves have notoriously high propensities to consume.

The crash.
Krugman’s article is supposedly about how the crash and recession changed our thinking, and what economics has to say about it. The most amazing news in the whole article is that Paul Krugman has absolutely no idea about what caused the crash, what policies might have prevented it, and what policies we should adopt going forward. He seems completely unaware of the large body of work by economists who actually do know something about the banking and financial system, and have been thinking about it productively for a generation.
Here’s all he has to say: “Irrationality” caused markets to go up and then down. “Spending” then declined, for unclear reasons, possibly “irrational” as well. The sum total of his policy recommendations is for the Federal Government to spend like a drunken sailor after the fact.
Paul, there was a financial crisis, a classic near-run on banks. The centerpiece of our crash was not the relatively free stock or real estate markets, it was the highly regulated commercial banks. A generation of economists has thought really hard about these kinds of events. Look up Diamond, Rajan, Gorton, Kashyap, Stein, and so on. They’ve thought about why there is so much short term debt, why banks run, how deposit insurance and credit guarantees help, and how they give incentives for excessive risk taking.
If we want to think about events and policies, this seems like more than a minor detail. The hard and central policy debate over the last year was how to manage this financial crisis. Now it is how to set up the incentives of banks and other financial institutions so this mess doesn’t happen again. There’s lots of good and subtle economics here that New York Times readers might like to know about. What does Krugman have to say? Zero.
Krugman doesn’t even have anything to say about the Fed. Ben Bernanke did a lot more last year than set the funds rate to zero and then go off on vacation and wait for fiscal policy to do its magic. Leaving aside the string of bailouts, the Fed started term lending to securities dealers. Then, rather than buy treasuries in exchange for reserves, it essentially sold treasuries in exchange for private debt. Though the funds rate was near zero, the Fed noticed huge commercial paper and securitized debt spreads, and intervened in those markets. There is no “the” interest rate anymore, the Fed is attempting to manage them all. Recently the Fed has started buying massive quantities of mortgage-backed securities and long-term treasury debt.
Monetary policy now has little to do with “money” vs. “bonds” with all the latter lumped together. Monetary policy has become wide-ranging financial policy. Does any of this work? What are the dangers? Can the Fed stay independent in this new role? These are the questions of our time. What does Krugman have to say? Nothing.
Krugman is trying to say that a cabal of obvious crackpots bedazzled all of macroeconomics with the beauty of their mathematics, to the point of inducing policy paralysis. Alas, that won’t stick. The sad fact is that few in Washington pay the slightest attention to modern macroeconomic research, in particular anything with a serious intertemporal dimension. Paul’s simple Keynesianism has dominated policy analysis for decades and continues to do so. From the CEA to the Fed to the OMB and CBO, everyone just adds up consumer, investment and government “demand” to forecast output and uses simple Phillips curves to think about inflation. If a failure of ideas caused bad policy, it’s a simpleminded Keynesianism that failed.

The future of economics.
How should economics change? Krugman argues for three incompatible changes.
First, he argues for a future of economics that “recognizes flaws and frictions,” and incorporates alternative assumptions about behavior, especially towards risk-taking. To which I say, “Hello, Paul, where have you been for the last 30 years?” Macroeconomists have not spent 30 years admiring the eternal verities of Kydland and Prescott’s 1982 paper. Pretty much all we have been doing for 30 years is introducing flaws, frictions and new behaviors, especially new models of attitudes to risk, and comparing the resulting models, quantitatively, to data. The long literature on financial crises and banking which Krugman does not mention has also been doing exactly the same.
Second, Krugman argues that “a more or less Keynesian view is the only plausible game in town,” and “Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions.” One thing is pretty clear by now, that when economics incorporates flaws and frictions, the result will not be to rehabilitate an 80-year-old book. As Paul bemoans, the “new Keynesians” who did just what he asks, putting Keynes inspired price-stickiness into logically coherent models, ended up with something that looked a lot more like monetarism. (Actually, though this is the consensus, my own work finds that new-Keynesian economics ended up with something much different and more radical than monetarism.) A science that moves forward almost never ends up back where it started. Einstein revises Newton, but does not send you back to Aristotle. At best you can play the fun game of hunting for inspirational quotes, but that doesn’t mean that you could have known the same thing by just reading Keynes once more.
Third, and most surprising, is Krugman’s Luddite attack on mathematics; “economists as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.” Models are “gussied up with fancy equations.” I’m old enough to remember when Krugman was young, working out the interactions of game theory and increasing returns in international trade for which he won the Nobel Prize, and the old guard tut-tutted “nice recreational mathematics, but not real-world at all.” He once wrote eloquently about how only math keeps your ideas straight in economics. How quickly time passes.
Again, what is the alternative? Does Krugman really think we can make progress on his – and my – agenda for economic and financial research -- understanding frictions, imperfect markets, complex human behavior, institutional rigidities – by reverting to a literary style of exposition, and abandoning the attempt to compare theories quantitatively against data? Against the worldwide tide of quantification in all fields of human endeavor (read “Moneyball”) is there any real hope that this will work in economics?
No, the problem is that we don’t have enough math. Math in economics serves to keep the logic straight, to make sure that the “then” really does follow the “if,” which it so frequently does not if you just write prose. The challenge is how hard it is to write down explicit artificial economies with these ingredients, actually solve them, in order to see what makes them tick. Frictions are just bloody hard with the mathematical tools we have now.

The insults.
The level of personal attack in this article, and fudging of the facts to achieve it, is simply amazing.
As one little example (ok, I’m a bit sensitive), take my quotation about carpenters in Nevada. I didn’t write this. It’s a quote, taken out of context, from a bloomberg.com article, written by a reporter who I spent about 10 hours with patiently trying to explain some basics, and who also turned out only to be on a hunt for embarrassing quotes. (It’s the last time I’ll do that!) I was trying to explain how sectoral shifts contribute to unemployment. Krugman follows it by a lie -- I never asserted that “it take mass unemployment across the whole nation to get carpenters to move out of Nevada.” You can’t even dredge up a quote for that monstrosity.
What’s the point? I don’t think Paul disagrees that sectoral shifts result in some unemployment, so the quote actually makes sense as economics. The only point is to make me, personally, seem heartless -- a pure, personal, calumnious attack, having nothing to do with economics.
Bob Lucas has written extensively on Keynesian and monetarist economics, sensibly and even-handedly. Krugman chooses to quote a joke, made back in 1980 at a lunch talk to some business school alumni. Really, this is on the level of the picture of Barack Obama with Bill Ayres that Sean Hannity likes to show on Fox News.
It goes on. Krugman asserts that I and others “believe” “that an increase in government spending cannot, under any circumstances, increase employment,” or that we “argued that price fluctuations and shocks to demand actually had nothing to do with the business cycle.” These are just gross distortions, unsupported by any documentation, let alone professional writing. And Krugman knows better. All economic models are simplified to exhibit one point; we all understand the real world is more complicated; and his job is supposed to be to explain that to lay readers. It would be no different than if someone were to look up Paul’s early work which assumed away transport costs and claim “Paul Krugman believes ocean shipping is free, how stupid” in the Wall Street Journal.
The idea that any of us do what we do because we’re paid off by fancy Wall Street salaries or cushy sabbaticals at Hoover is just ridiculous. (If Krugman knew anything about hedge funds he’d know that believing in efficient markets disqualifies you for employment. Nobody wants a guy who thinks you can’t make any money trading!) Given Krugman’s speaking fees, it’s a surprising first stone for him to cast.
Apparently, salacious prose, innuendo, calumny, and selective quotation from media aren’t enough: Krugman added cartoons to try to make opponents look silly. The Lucas-Blanchard-Bernanke conspiratorial cocktail party celebrating the end of recessions is a silly fiction. So is their despondent gloom on reading “recession” in the paper. Nobody at a conference looks like Dr. Pangloss with wild hair and a suit from the 1800s. (OK, Randy Wright has the hair, but not the suit.) Keynes did not reappear at the NBER to be booed as an “outsider.” Why are you allowed to make things up in pictures that wouldn’t pass even the Times’ weak fact-checking in words?
Most of all, Paul isn’t doing his job. He’s supposed to read, explain, and criticize things economists write, and real professional writing, not interviews, opeds and blog posts. At a minimum, this style leads to the unavoidable conclusion that Krugman isn’t reading real economics anymore.

How did Krugman get it so wrong?
So what is Krugman up to? Why become a denier, a skeptic, an apologist for 70 year old ideas, replete with well-known logical fallacies, a pariah? Why publish an essentially personal attack on an ever-growing enemies list that now includes practically every professional economist? Why publish an incoherent vision for the future of economics?
The only explanation that makes sense to me is that Krugman isn’t trying to be an economist, he is trying to be a partisan, political opinion writer. This is not an insult. I read George Will, Charles Krauthnammer and Frank Rich with equal pleasure even when I disagree with them. Krugman wants to be Rush Limbaugh of the Left.
Alas, to Krugman, as to far too many ex-economists in partisan debates, economics is not a quest for understanding. It is a set of debating points to argue for policies that one has adopted for partisan political purposes. “Stimulus” is just marketing to sell Congressmen and voters on a package of government spending priorities that you want for political reasons. It’s not a proposition to be explained, understood, taken seriously to its logical limits, or reflective of market failures that should be addressed directly.
Why argue for a nonsensical future for economics? Well, again, if you don’t regard economics as a science, a discipline that ought to result in quantitative matches to data, a discipline that requires crystal-clear logical connections between the “if” and the “then,” if the point of economics is merely to provide marketing and propaganda for politically-motivated policy, then his writing does make sense. It makes sense to appeal to some future economics – not yet worked out, even verbally – to disdain quantification and comparison to data, and to appeal to the authority of ancient books as interpreted you, their lone remaining apostle.
Most of all, this is the only reason I can come up with to understand why Krugman wants to write personal attacks on those who disagree with him. I like it when people disagree with me, and take time to read my work and criticize it. At worst I learn how to position it better. At best, I discover I was wrong and learn something. I send a polite thank you note.
Krugman wants people to swallow his arguments whole from his authority, without demanding logic, or evidence. Those who disagree with him, alas, are pretty smart and have pretty good arguments if you bother to read them. So, he tries to discredit them with personal attacks.
This is the political sphere, not the intellectual one. Don’t argue with them, swift-boat them. Find some embarrassing quote from an old interview. Well, good luck, Paul. Let’s just not pretend this has anything to do with economics, or actual truth about how the world works or could be made a better place.
[1] University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Many colleagues and friends helped, but I don’t want to name them for obvious reasons. Krugman fans: Please don’t bother emailing me to tell me what a jerk I am. I will update this occasionally, so please pass on the link rather than the document, http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/Papers/#news.

Great Leader

2009-10-08T07:21:00.001-05:00

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/10/07/school_kids_sing_for_health_care_reform_on_set_of_cnn.html

Varones

2009-09-28T07:36:00.000-05:00

Canada's National Post:

Obama: “We must never stop until we see the day when nuclear arms have been banished from the face of the earth.”

Sarkozy: “We live in the real world, not the virtual world. And the real world expects us to take decisions.”

The rest of Sarkozy’s remarks were, well, remarkable:

“President Obama dreams of a world without weapons … but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.
“Iran since 2005 has flouted five security council resolutions. North Korea has been defying council resolutions since 1993. I support the extended hand of the Americans, but what good has proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state off the map,”
he continued, referring to Israel.

The sharp-tongued French leader even implied that Mr Obama’s resolution 1887 had used up valuable diplomatic energy.
“If we have courage to impose sanctions together it will lend viability to our commitment to reduce our own weapons and to making a world without nuke weapons,” he said.

Mr Sarkozy has previously called the US president’s disarmament crusade “naive.”

2009-09-23T08:29:00.001-05:00

1. If Pelosi and Co. wish to be taken seriously - Read the bills; Debate the bills loudly and publicly. Lets have a full and impartial discussion and analysis of what the bills will cost and whether they infringe on the Constitution. Partisan calls for unity suggest that Representatives work for the party or the speaker, not the people who voted them into office.
2. Stop the crocodile tears over dissent being mean-spirited. Nothing is more mean-spirited than elected representatives stateing they have not read bills that are voted on party lines. We did not elect you, give you DC staff, local staff and offices, and then become a rubber stamp for the national party. This goes for both parties.
3. The double standard over "Civility" is stunning; 8 years of boos in the house and "Chimpy-Bush-Hitler-Nazi" screams from protesters. Now seniors actually want to know how Government health care will affect them at town halls are disruptive? Stop the name calling and actually discuss issues. That is your job. Do it.
4. Medicare, Medicaid are functionally bankrupt. SSA is the biggest Ponzi scheme on the planet. Cash for Clunkers was a boondoggle and now sales are slumping. Given the track record, shouldn't we pick one of above, fix same, and then tackle healtthcare for then entire country?

Taranto on NEA

2009-09-22T09:33:00.001-05:00

Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood is out today with new details on the National Endowment for the Arts scandal, including a full transcript and audio recording, as well as a CliffsNotes summary by John Nolte, of the notorious Aug. 10 conference call in which administration officials urged artists to help promote President Obama's legislative agenda.Formally, the call was led by Michael Skolnik, who is not a government employee. But Skolnik declares at the start of the call that he is acting on behalf of the administration:

"I have been asked by folks in the White House and folks in the NEA about a month ago in a conversation that was had. We had the idea that I would help bring together the independent artists community around the country."

Several administration officials also participate in the call: Nell Abernathy of United We Serve, part of the Corp. for National and Community Service; Buffy Wicks of the White House Office of Public Engagement; and Yosi Sergant, then communications director for the NEA (he has been "reassigned" since the scandal broke).
The administration participants seem to realize that they are treading on shaky ethical and legal ground. When one artist asks Abernathy "what we can do to help on critical advocacy issues like health care reform, cap-and-trade policy," she replies:

"Yeah, I can address that a little bit, and the reason only a little bit is largely because in my role at a federal agency, I'm precluded from going too far down the specific steps what people can do to advocate. . . .I could get that information to Michael [Skolnik] and he could get it out. We can't sort--as a representative of the corporation, I'm not capable of giving you more guidance than just sending you to the right person."

Yet she is capable of participating in the call. What happened after the call ought to raise eyebrows too. As Nolte reports:
Sergant then turns the call over to Thomas Bates from "Rock the Vote," who offers up an example of local environmental activism involving a garbage sculpture. Within days after this call Rock the Vote would launch a "health care design contest." A mere two days after the call a group of 21 art organizations endorsed health care reform.Of those 21 organizations, "16 of the groups and affiliated organizations received nearly $2 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in the 150 days before the conference call." The NEA Web site describes its mission as follows: "supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education." Organizing propaganda for the party in power is not mentioned, nor is financially rewarding politically friendly artists...This is not the first time the NEA has sparked controversy. Nearly two decades ago, during the George H.W. Bush administration, it was at the center over a battle over taste: The NEA had given grants to photographers who produced sexually explicit or religiously offensive work (Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano) and to "performance artists" who ranted and raved and took off their clothes (most memorably Karen Finley).We covered that NEA battle as a young writer for a sparsely circulated, now-defunct newspaper. It was a classic culture-war skirmish, but it was not especially partisan. Indeed, it was a Democratic Congress that imposed restrictions on grants for indecent art, while the Republican-appointed NEA head, John Frohnmayer, took the side of the target artists. Indeed, in 1990 we attended a lecture in which Julianne Davis, general counsel to the Bush NEA, described religious-right critics of the endowment as "our enemies" and falsely ascribed extreme theological views to one of them.It was obvious back then that much of the so-called arts community leaned left politically. At the time, Frohnmayer's NEA notwithstanding, the administration in power did not, so that artists could pose as oppositional figures, speaking truth--or at least shouting obscenities--to power.Now that their side is in power, however, that adversary attitude stands exposed as a sham. The so-called oppositional artists are only too willing to act as handmaidens of the powerful. We backhandedly salute the Obama administration for exposing this.Meanwhile, as with Van Jones and Acorn, the mainstream media have had little to say about this scandal. The New York Times hasn't even reported it at all. What we said about artists in the preceding paragraph applies to the so-called adversary press as well.

2009-09-11T11:35:00.000-05:00

2009-09-02T08:56:00.001-05:00

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10582301/President-Obama’s-Address-to-Students-Across-America-September-8-2009

"Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president"

Jesus Christ.

2009-08-31T15:04:00.001-05:00

Two Columnists in One! •

"Basically we have a world-class budget deficit not just as in absolute terms of course--it's the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world--but it's a budget deficit that as a share of GDP is right up there. It's comparable to the worst we've ever seen in this country. It's biggest than Argentina in 2001. Which is not cyclical, there's only a little bit that's because the economy is depressed. Mostly it's because, fundamentally, the government isn't taking in enough money to pay for the programs and we have no strategy of dealing with it. So, if you take a look, the only thing that sustains the U.S. right now is the fact that people say, 'Well America's a mature, advanced country and mature, advanced countries always, you know, get their financial house in order,' but there's not a hint that that's on the political horizon, so I think we're looking for a collapse of confidence some time in the not-too-distant future."--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, interview with "Lateline," ABC (Australia), Nov. 3, 2004 •

"So new budget projections show a cumulative deficit of $9 trillion over the next decade. According to many commentators, that's a terrifying number, requiring drastic action--in particular, of course, canceling efforts to boost the economy and calling off health care reform. The truth is more complicated and less frightening. Right now deficits are actually helping the economy. In fact, deficits here and in other major economies saved the world from a much deeper slump. The longer-term outlook is worrying, but it's not catastrophic."--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, New York Times, Aug. 28, 2009

Two Papers in One! •

"But the real significance of the spat [between Nevada and California] is that it furthers a dangerous and phony economic myth--that hordes of nomadic businesses are roaming the country, plopping down for a year or two in a tax haven and then packing up and moving on the minute a neighboring state bats an alluring low-tax eye. The fact is the come-hither look is useless: Relatively few businesses, once they're formed, pick up and move across state lines."--op-ed piece, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 27 •

" 'It just made sense for Toyota to pull the plug,' said Dennis Virag, president of the Automotive Consulting Group in Ann Arbor, Mich. 'When you look at states like Kentucky and Tennessee, California just isn't competitive in manufacturing with its taxes, regulations and overall cost of doing business.' The costs apparently outweighed a package of incentives put together by state and local officials in an effort to persuade Toyota to stay in Fremont."--news story, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 28

2009-08-27T12:57:00.000-05:00

Amarillo Slim

You can go here to listen to a great interview with Amarillo Slim by National Public Radio, be shur to select the extended version.http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1273380

Slim’s Greatest Bets

1. Playing Minnesota Fats in one-pocket with a broom.
2. Taking 211/2 points on the Jets and winning a big bet on Broadway Joe in Super Bowl III.
3. Hitting a golf ball a mile on a frozen lake—inspired by Titanic Thompson.
4. Wagering that a cat could pick up a Coke bottle.
5. Betting on which sugar cube a fly would land on in an Arkansas jail.
6. Outrunning a horse for a hundred yards (no one ever said nothing about the race being a straight-away).
7. Holding a horse’s tail for a quarter of a mile in San Angelo, Texas.
8. Broad jumping farther than a superior athlete at Rogers Municipal Golf Course.
9. Winning the World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe in 1972.
10. Rafting down the River of No Return in winter in a wetsuit made by Jacques Cousteau–a bet that earned me $31,000 from Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder.
11. Beating Evel Knievel in golf with a carpenter’s hammer and betting that two out of thirty cab drivers in Dallas would have the same birthday.
12. Shooting free throws with a football against a Hall-of-Fame basketball coach.
13. Beating Bobby Riggs playing Ping-Pong with a skillet.
14. Beating a world champion Ping-Pong player with a Coca-Cola bottle.
15. Betting that a champion bowler couldn’t bowl seventy blindfolded (and that a driver with a little physical impairment could).
16. Finding (a) person who could eat a quail a day for thirty days.
17. Beating Willie Nelson out of $300,000 playing dominoes in Las Vegas.
18. Riding a camel through Casino El Mamounia in Marrakesh, Morrocco.
19. Pitching coins with Bob Stupak for $65,000 at the Orleans in Las Vegas.
20. Playing Larry Flynt head-up poker at the Fips Club in Los Angeles.
21. Betting a prominent politician that George W. Bush would win the 2000 Presidential election.

Taranto

2009-08-25T11:10:00.000-05:00

Here's a blast from the past. The New York Times, July 9, 2001, reports on George W. Bush's first summer vacation as president:

On Friday, as new unemployment figures painted a newly troubling portrait of the American economy, Mr. Bush placed himself in the same scenes--golfing and fishing in a New England paradise--that once caused his father electoral grief.

Simply amazing.

Here's the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, dated July 6, that "painted a newly troubling portrait of the American economy":
The unemployment rate was little changed at 4.5 percent, five-tenths of a percentage point higher than the average for 2000.
As Barack Obama embarked on his first summer vacation as president last week--also in a "New England paradise," Martha's Vineyard--the most recent unemployment rate was 9.4%, more than double the summer 2001 figure. Covering the Obama jaunt, the Times offers no hint that there's anything wrong with a president taking a vacation during a time of genuine crisis. Indeed, it offers this justification:

Mr. Obama, whom aides described as being amused by all of the gloom-and-doom prognosticating over his health care agenda, did not even consider skipping his vacation. Last year, he talked about the importance of taking a break to avoid "making mistakes."

That makes sense--and in any case, it's not as if the president actually escapes his responsibilities when he goes on "vacation." But the Times's coverage of Obama is a useful contrast to the paper's petty partisan sniping against Bush.

2009-08-24T08:53:00.000-05:00

Africa wants $67 bln a year in global warming funds
Mon Aug 24, 2009

By Tsegaye Tadesse

ADDIS ABABA, Aug 24 (Reuters) - African leaders will ask rich nations for $67 billion per year to mitigate the impact of global warming on the world's poorest continent, according to a draft resolution seen by Reuters on Monday.

Ten leaders are holding talks at African Union (AU) headquarters in the Ethiopian capital to try to agree a common stance ahead of a U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December.

Experts say Africa contributes little to the pollution blamed for warming, but is likely to be hit hardest by the droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels forecast if climate change is not checked.

The draft resolution, which must still be approved by the 10 leaders, called for rich countries to pay $67 billion annually to counter the impact of global warming in Africa.

It said there had been serious limitations on Africa's ability to negotiate in the past because of a lack of a coherent stance on global warming by African governments.

"The negotiating team need to be backed with the political weight at the highest level in the continent to ensure that the African voice on climate change negotiations is taken with the seriousness it deserves", the document said.

Madoff

2009-08-20T09:27:00.001-05:00

At the Willard, Weinstein wrote, she learned one of his many secrets that they discussed by telephone a few days later.

“Bernie had a very small penis,” she wrote. “Not only was it on the short side, it was small in circumference. That he was now pointing it out to me was telling. It clearly caused him great angst. I wanted to be careful how I responded. Men and their penises have a strange and unique relationship.”

Still, she said: “I liked this man and didn’t want to emasculate him. His tiny penis hadn’t prevented me from climaxing.”

“On the bright side,” she concluded, because of its size, “oral sex would be a breeze.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aqmm.UC6lL6E

Paglia on Obamacare

2009-08-12T10:07:00.000-05:00

"But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises -- or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn't conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it's the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan -- it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.

With the Republican party leaderless and in backbiting disarray following its destruction by the ideologically incoherent George W. Bush, Democrats are apparently eager to join the hara-kiri brigade. What looked like smooth coasting to the 2010 election has now become a nail-biter. Both major parties have become a rats' nest of hypocrisy and incompetence. That, combined with our stratospheric, near-criminal indebtedness to China (which could destroy the dollar overnight), should raise signal flags. Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

What does either party stand for these days? Republican politicians, with their endless scandals, are hardly exemplars of traditional moral values. Nor have they generated new ideas for healthcare, except for medical savings accounts, which would be pathetically inadequate in a major crisis for anyone earning at or below a median income.

And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the "mob" -- a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it."

2009-08-12T09:35:00.001-05:00

Cash-strapped Cuba says toilet paper running short
Mon Aug 10, 9:32 am ET

HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba, in the grip of a serious economic crisis, is running short of toilet paper and may not get sufficient supplies until the end of the year, officials with state-run companies said Friday.

Officials said they were lowering the prices of 24 basic goods to help Cubans get through the difficulties provoked in part by the global financial crisis and three destructive hurricanes that struck the island last year.

Cuba's financial reserves have been depleted by increased spending for imports and reduced export income, which has forced the communist-led government to take extraordinary measures to keep the economy afloat.

"The corporation has taken all the steps so that at the end of the year there will be an important importation of toilet paper," an official with state conglomerate Cimex said on state-run Radio Rebelde.

The shipment will enable the state-run company "to supply this demand that today is presenting problems," he said.

Cuba both imports toilet paper and produces its own, but does not currently have enough raw materials to make it, he said.

One of the measures taken to address the cash crunch is a 20 percent cut in imports, which in recent days has become evident in the reduction of goods in state-run stores.

Cuba imports about 60 percent of its food.

Despite the shortages, prices will be cut between 5 percent and 27 percent for some food, drugs and personal hygiene products, officials said.

A visit to a store in Havana's Vedado neighborhood on Friday found that prices had dropped for mayonnaise, barbecue sauce and canned squid.

One customer, who gave his name only as Pedro, complained that "it doesn't look like prices have been lowered for the fundamental products" such as cooking oil.

Ana Maria Ortega, deputy director for military-run retail conglomerate TRD Caribe, said there will be no shortage of basic goods.

"The conditions are in place to maintain the supply of essential products," she said on the same radio program.

Cubans receive a subsidized food ration from the government each month that they say meets their needs for about two weeks.

President Raul Castro told the National Assembly last week that the government had cut its spending budget for the second time this year and has been renegotiating its debt and payments with foreign providers.

Cuba has long blamed the 47-year-old U.S. trade embargo against the island for many of its economic problems. It also said that last year's hurricanes did $10 billion worth of damage that forced the government to spend heavily on imports of food and reconstruction products.

Castro, who replaced his ailing older brother Fidel Castro as president last year, also has complained that Cuba's productivity is too low.

He has taken various steps to boost output, including putting more state-owned land in private hands and pushing for salaries to be based on productivity.

(Reporting by Nelson Acosta and Esteban Israel; Editing by Jeff Franks and Will Dunham)

Copyright © 2009 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.Questions or CommentsPrivacy PolicyTerms of ServiceCopyright/IP Policy

2009-08-06T10:00:00.001-05:00

Global Warming and the Poor
Why India and China don’t care much about climate change.
By BRET STEPHENS

Comments (152)

A funny thing happened on the way to saving the world’s poor from the ravages of global warming. The poor told the warming alarmists to get lost.
This spring, the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum, led by former U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan, issued a report warning that “mass starvation, mass migration, and mass sickness” would ensue if the world did not agree to “the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated” on global warming at a forthcoming conference in Copenhagen.
According to Mr. Annan’s report, climate change-induced disasters now account for 315,000 deaths each year and $125 billion in damages, numbers set to rise to 500,000 deaths and $340 billion in damages by 2030. The numbers are hotly contested by University of Colorado disaster-trends expert Roger Pielke Jr., who calls them a “poster child for how to lie with statistics.”
But never mind about that. The more interesting kiss-off took place in New Delhi late last month, when Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told visiting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there was no way India would sign on to any global scheme to cap carbon emissions.
“There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions,” Mr. Ramesh told Mrs. Clinton. “And as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours.” The Chinese—the world’s largest emitter of CO2—have told the Obama administration essentially the same thing.
Roughly 75% of Indians—some 800 million people—live on $2 a day or less, adjusted for purchasing power parity. In China, it’s about 36%, or about 480 million. That means the two governments alone are responsible for one in every two people living at that income level.
If climate change is the threat Mr. Annan claims it is, India and China ought to be eagerly beating the path to Copenhagen. So why aren’t they?
To listen to the climate alarmists, it’s all America’s fault. “What the Chinese are chiefly guilty of is emulating the American economic model,” wrote environmental writer Jacques Leslie last year in the Christian Science Monitor. “The United States passed up the opportunity it had at the beginning of China’s economic transformation to guide it toward sustainability, and the loss is already incalculable.”

He has more important things to worry about.

Facts tell a different story. When Deng Xiaoping began introducing elements of a market economy in 1980, Chinese life expectancy at birth was 65.3 years. Today it is about 73 years. The numbers are probably a bit inflated, as most numbers are in the People’s Republic, but the trend line is undeniable. In India, life expectancy rose from 52.5 years in 1980 to about 67 years today. If this is the consequence of following the “American economic model” then poor countries need more of it.
But what about all the pollution in India and particularly China? In Mr. Leslie’s telling, CO2 emissions are part-and-parcel with common pollutants such as particulate matter, toxic waste, and everything else typically associated with a degraded environment. They’re not. The U.S. and China produce equivalent quantities of carbon dioxide. But try naming a U.S. city whose air quality is even remotely as bad as Beijing’s, or an American river as polluted as the Han: You can’t. America, the richer and more industrialized country, is also by far the cleaner one.
People who live in Third-World countries—like Mexico, where I grew up—tend to understand this, even if First-World environmentalists do not. People who live in oppressive Third World countries, like China, also understand that it isn’t just greater wealth that leads to a better environment, but greater freedom, too.
To return to Mr. Leslie, his complaint with China is that it has become too much of a consumer society, again in the American mold. Again he is ridiculous: China has one of the world’s highest personal savings rates—50% versus the U.S.’s 2.7%. The real source of China’s pollution problem is a state-led industrial policy geared toward production, and state-owned enterprises (especially in “dirty” sectors like coal and steel) that strive to meet production quotas, and state-appointed managers who don’t mind cutting corners in matters of safety or environmental responsibility, and typically have the political clout to insulate themselves from any public fallout.
In other words, China’s pollution problems are not a function of laissez-faire policies and rampant consumerism, but of the regime’s excessive lingering control of the economy. A freer China means a cleaner China.
There’s a lesson in this for those who believe that the world’s environmental problems call for a new era of dirigisme. And there ought to be a lesson for those who claim to understand the problems of the poor better than the poor themselves. If global warming really is the catastrophe the alarmists claim, the least they can do for its victims is not to patronize them while impoverishing them in the bargain.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

Denard!

2009-07-29T10:22:00.001-05:00

Zelaya

2009-07-29T08:16:00.000-05:00

The White House’s Latin Connection
Is Greg Craig driving U.S. Latin America policy?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203609204574312363465346516.html#mod=djemBestOfTheWeb

2009-07-21T16:02:00.002-05:00

2009-07-08T08:19:00.000-05:00

Some global warmists seem to have goals other than "saving" the "planet," as suggested by this Reuters report:

"To fairly divide the climate change fight between rich and poor, a new study suggests basing targets for emission cuts on the number of wealthy people, who are also the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, in a country. Since about half the planet's climate-warming emissions come from less than a billion of its people, it makes sense to follow these rich folks when setting national targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions, the authors wrote on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.As it stands now, under the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol, rich countries shoulder most of the burden for cutting the emissions that spur global warming, while developing countries--including fast-growing economies China and India--are not required to curb greenhouse pollution.Rich countries, notably the United States, have said this gives developing countries an unfair economic advantage; China, India and other developing countries argue that developed countries have historically spewed more climate-warming gases, and developing countries need time to catch up."

If carbon is really destroying the planet, why in the world would it be desirable for developing countries to "catch up"? "Climate change" here appears a convenient pretext for reviving socialist ideas that have been economically discredited--although somehow we have a feeling Al Gore would somehow manage to stay rich even under a regime of class warmfare.

2009-07-07T10:47:00.003-05:00

Marion Barry Has Bizarre Story As Usual

Gawker

By Hamilton Nolan, 10:06 AM on Tue Jul 7 2009, 936 views (Edit post, Set to draft, Slurp)

Marion Barry—master politician, crack aficionado, crazy man, national treasure for reporters (and still married, btw!)—says he didn't really stalk his girlfriend last weekend, as much as he had a "spat" with her, but she's unstable. Or...something.
So Marion Barry is still technically married but he and his wife have been separated for years, and he has an ex-girlfriend named Donna Watts-Brighthaupt, and she and Barry decided to take a drive up to Rehoboth Beach, but somewhere around Annapolis they got in a spat and decided to turn around and go home, and then a few hours later Marion Barry was arrested by the god damn US Park Police, who are always on his ass about something. What happened, there? All we know for sure is that Marion Barry and those he associates with have a very loose definition of an "ex."

There is no disagreement that the couple returned to Watts-Brighthaupt's home in Southeast Washington, where her ex-husband, Delonta Brighthaupt, was staying to watch her West Highland terrier. After some time, Barry left in one car, and Watts-Brighthaupt and Brighthaupt left in another. Both cars ended up in Anacostia Park.

So Barry happened on his ex-girlfriend with her ex-husband. Who the hell knows where his wife was, at the time. Hundreds of miles away, if she's lucky. So somewhere in there his ex-girlfriend told cops Marion Barry was "bothering her," and boom, right into the clink he goes! Fucking Park Police, again!

In 2002, Park Police said they found traces of marijuana and crack cocaine in his car. Barry said the drugs were planted. No charges were filed. In 2006, Park Police pulled Barry over for driving too slowly and cited him for driving on a suspended license; he accused the agency of unfairly targeting him.

God damn park cops, they're worse than mall cops! Marion Barry is currently on the DC City Council so he has to play his cards very carefully. He had his attorney lay it on the line:
Cooke, who would not let Barry speak, accused Watts-Brighthaupt of "instability."
Uh. Of course she is. Who else would take a trip to the shore with her "ex," Marion Barry?[WP. Pic via]

2009-07-01T09:07:00.001-05:00

Al Sharpton Won't Stop Til He Gets Enough The Reverend Al Sharpton dances with an anonymous woman at the Apollo Theater's tribute to Michael Jackson last night in Harlem. [Pic via Stan Honda/Getty]

Honduras and Democracy

2009-06-29T07:57:00.000-05:00