No Oil for Pacifists

Much ink has been spilled analyzing the latest stop on Obama's world apology tour: his September 23rd address to the United Nations General Assembly. The critics are right, for reasons already addressed here.

Much also has been said about Obama's mention of Israel, focusing on the President's emphasis "that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." I think Obama overstates the case, particularly by failing to realize that "land for peace" has failed, so far. Still, a compromise remains possible--but only were there a moderate, moral and trustworthy leader who could negotiate for Palestinians, a potential I rate just south of the Easter Bunny and tooth fairy.

But this post is about the very next paragraph of Obama's UN speech, quoted here in full:

The time has come -- the time has come to re-launch negotiations without preconditions that address the permanent status issues: security for Israelis and Palestinians, borders, refugees, and Jerusalem. And the goal is clear: Two states living side by side in peace and security -- a Jewish state of Israel, with true security for all Israelis; and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people.

Obama's position propounds a false premise pointing to a flat contradiction: on the one hand, the President seeks the status quo ante prior to the Six Day War; on the other hand, he casually describes the resulting Palestinian state as "contiguous." The problem is that Arab lands -- they were not Palestinian, but Jordanian and Egyptian controlled -- during the time from the 1949 Armistice to the 1967 War were not contiguous:


source: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Gaza and the West Bank are geographically separate today. As ex-UN Ambassador John Bolton confirms, "Gaza and the West Bank were never contiguous Palestinian areas before." And, perhaps stating the obvious, connecting those regions would require slicing Israel in half. As even Palestine supporters acknowledge, this is a profound pro-Palestinian posture.

Yes, Obama previously mentioned a "contiguous" Palestine. It remains radical, a-historical and wrong--and a rebuff of Israel only barely better than Zbigniew Brzezinski's.

Al Gore, September 9, 2005:

Now, the scientific community is warning us that the average hurricane will continue to get stronger because of global warming. A scientist at MIT has published a study well before this tragedy showing that since the 1970s, hurricanes in both the Atlantic and the Pacific have increased in duration, and in intensity, by about 50 %. The newscasters told us after Hurricane Katrina went over the southern tip of Florida that there was a particular danger for the Gulf Coast of the hurricanes becoming much stronger because it was passing over unusually warm waters in the gulf. The waters in the gulf have been unusually warm. The oceans generally have been getting warmer. And the pattern is exactly consistent with what scientists have predicted for twenty years. Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, engaged in the most elaborate, well organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have produced long-since a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming.

Hurricanes over the years:


source: Florida State University's Ryan Maue

Tornadoes over the years:


source: NOAA's National Weather Service

If this seems like old news, that's because it is. As WaPo columnist Joel Achenbach says, "[s]omewhere along the line, global warming became the explanation for everything."

Still, there's a silver lining among the storm clouds: although the web site for Gore's film still includes the hurricane claim, Anthony Watts reports that "Al Gore has dropped the [hurricane frequency] related slide in his traveling PowerPoint show."

Facts are stubborn things--so count me with Watts commenter Steve Sadlov:

I just figured it out. Hurricane frequency is a leading economic indicator!

Suggesting again that finance and climate change share at least one trait: their computer models are way off. Warming, if it exists, isn't driving hurricanes.

(via Watts Up With That?, twice)

The late Adrian Pierce Rogers, three-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention, from his 1996 book Ten Secrets for a Successful Family at page 138:

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it. You don't multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn't first take from somebody else.

Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don't have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don't get to enjoy the fruit of their labor.

Agreed--even Sweden knows! (Sort of related: Swedish firefighters under siege.) See also Forbes magazine.

(via Right Wing News, Maggie's Farm)

UPDATE: In our Bizarro World, the states are trying to stop the Obama Administration's proposal to compel the purchase of health insurance.


I recently addressed competition among health insurers, concluding that over-regulation, not anti-trust exemption, was responsible for high costs. In passing, I noted two examples: "absurd mandates and guaranteed issue/community rating;" the embedded links provide an excellent introduction to the topics.

Further confirmation comes in a new Manhattan Institute report on health insurance regulation in one state (footnotes omitted):

In New York, there are well over 2 million uninsured adults, representing 14 percent of the non-elderly population, a figure just below the national average. The goal of this paper is to estimate the reduction in the number of uninsured New Yorkers that would result from expanding access to unsubsidized, private health insurance.

Bills before both houses of Congress contain provisions similar to New York State laws that mandate guaranteed issue (which prohibits denial of coverage on the basis of health status) and community rating (which requires insurance companies to charge policyholders the same premium, regardless of their age, gender, or health status). Four other states have similar regulations. Yet New York’s individual-insurance market is unique in requiring insurers to offer coverage to all individuals at all times at exactly the same price. . .

The guaranteed-issue law encourages an individual without employer-based coverage to wait until he or she is sick before buying individual coverage, as insurers are forbidden to deny coverage to any individuals applying, including those already ill. . .

In addition to these laws, the New York legislature has enacted fifty-one mandates dictating coverage of certain medical conditions and inclusion of particular categories of providers in insurance plans. The state average is forty-two mandates. Accordingly, the cost of insurance in New York also exceeds the average. Certain mandates, such as coverage of alcoholism treatment and provision of emergency medical services, appear in almost every state. Others, such as ambulatory cancer treatment and hormone-replacement therapy, are found only in New York and two or three other states. . .

[G]uaranteed issue can increase premiums by as much as 100 percent.

The mandate having the next-largest effect on the size of premiums is community rating. It is responsible for a 20-27 percent increase in premiums and is also accompanied by a decline in consumer demand, as such increases usually are. . .

Although New York’s guaranteed-issue and community-rating laws were adopted with the best of intentions, they have not been effective in substantially reducing the size of the state’s uninsured population. In fact, as a result of a significant increase in the cost of private-insurance coverage for individuals, the market for individual health insurance in New York has nearly disappeared, declining by 96 percent since 1994.

The study concludes that "repeal of New York’s community-rating and guaranteed-issue laws would have the greatest impact, potentially reducing the price of individual insurance coverage by 42 percent and encouraging up to 37 percent of the uninsured to buy coverage."

All told, a helpful paper, with excellent charts and cites. But the Administration already has rejected inter-state insurance competition. Meaning, as American Spectator's Philip Klein says:

Instead of seeing failed experiments in New York and other states as a clear example of why government interference makes things far worse, Democrats have decided to impose most of these same policies on the nation as a whole, while attempting to solve problems created by government by calling for yet more government.

Conclusion: In 1975, Washington seemed to want New York to "drop dead." Given the Democrats' overly-regulatory healthcare proposals, New York soon may be able to return the favor.

(via Critical Condition)

No, not ACORN's absurd defense against fraud; rather, according to FOX News:

There's a new turn in the debate over high occupancy toll lanes or HOT lanes.

A lawsuit filed by Arlington County last month claims the lanes benefit wealthy white people and discriminates against minorities. While the only rule to get in the HOV lanes on Interstate 395 is you must have three people in the car, Arlington claims adding HOT lanes would cut out poor and minorities by defacto.

That claim doesn't sit well with Fairfax County Supervisor Pat Herrity (R-Springfield).

"I don't think race or class warfare has any standing in this argument," Herrity said.

Buried in the lawsuit filed last month, county attorneys argued the HOT lanes, "encourage and enable a financially-able, privileged class of suburban and rural, primarily Caucasian residents from Stafford and Spotsylvania counties operating single occupancy vehicles ("SOV") unimpeded access on toll lanes."

In other words, it benefits wealthy white people.

Jimmy Carter was right, sort of: in America, anything will be re-interpreted to be racist. England too.

(via JammieWearingFool)

California unemployment stands at 12.2%. The bottom is not in sight, as the economy shrank even more in the last six months. The rate was 10.5% only six months ago. California has the fourth highest rate in the nation, only Michigan, Nevada and Rhode Island, at 15.2%, 13.2% and 12.8%, respectively, are faring worse. California construction jobs down 18.5%, manufacturing down 8.6% The only sector that is growing is the education and health care sector (the government supported sector). Even government employment is down 0.7%.


The total California labor force stands at 18.3 million people, down from an all time high of 18.5 million, as people have started to leave the state for who knows where. And now this shocker:

Regulations on small businesses in California have cost the state 3.8 million jobs, according to a report quietly released by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office this week.

The report, authored by Sanjay B. Varshney, the dean of the business school at California State University Sacramento and Dennis H. Tootelian, a marketing professor at Sacramento State, totaled the "direct, indirect and induced" costs of regulation to calculate the [burden of] $134,122 per small business in 2007 and caused about one job loss per small business.

"This study provides the most comprehensive and complete analysis of the total regulatory burden in California," the authors wrote in their findings.

They relied on data compiled by Forbes and used a complicated formula to calculate the primary and secondary costs of regulations. They concede that "much more work will need to be done to determine the exact nature of potential remedies to the regulatory burden."

So regulations cost the average small business $134 thousand dollars? How about some examples of that? Recall this from June:

Bureaucrat scuffs dream of homeless shoe shiner

He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie. It's a reminder of how he has turned things around.
In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month's rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.

"I had $573 ready to go," Moore said, who needs $600 for the rent. "This tore that up. But I've been homeless for six years. Another six weeks isn't going to kill me."

Even the bootstrapping homeless sidewalk vendor has to pay off the Government Mafia. It is far easier for him to be homeless in San Francisco, and when he tries to help himself, some bureaucrat has to push him down. Indeed, the homeless flock to San Francisco. Just one reason why California has nearly a third of the welfare recipients in the country.

So, the bottom line is that the California legislature manufactures job-killing regulations, then has to create the biggest welfare program in the country to care for the out-of-work and ne'er do wells. These people have too much time, too much influence and too little sense.

There is hope -- a movement in California to change the full-time legislature to a part-time legislature. Of course, nothing energizes government workers like the thought they might lose their plushy do-nothing jobs.

Prediction: Part Time Legislature in a Landslide next November!

I've previously shown that governmental budget shortfalls are driven by growing entitlement programs, not the war on terror or defense spending more generally. A September 16th Heritage Foundation report concurred, in some nifty charts:


source: Heritage SR-67 at 11


source: Heritage SR-67 at 12

Indeed, President Obama plans to spend more on welfare in 2010 ($697 billion, at page 17) than the cumulative funding for the Iraq war through early this year ($642 billion, at 8):


source: Heritage SR-67 at 18

So much for "welfare reform," and no wonder Medicare is nearly bankrupt.

(via Van Helsing at Right Wing News)

Michael Coulter in the September 19th Western Australia Today:

There is not, now, much value in arguing about the science of climate change. Even if it's wrong, enough people now believe it that it may as well be right.

Sound familiar? It should be:

Timothy Wirth, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs for President Clinton, proclaimed "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing."

And just last week, Maria Margaronis agreed in The Nation:

Climate change is not an environmental issue. It's about resources and global justice, about the future direction of capitalism, about where the next wars will be.

Again: warming alarmism isn't science, it's socialism.

(via Watts Up With That?, Ed Driscoll)

Three prior posts detailed the Administration's illegal and outrageous attempt to target arts subsidies to support legislation Obama favors. Though the mainstream media mostly avoided the topic, coverage from right-leaning blogs got:

1. Yosi Sergant fired: Sergant was the NEA's "Communications Director" who organized the call between NEA-funded artists and White House staff. Early this week, he was "reassigned" to other, unspecified, duties, but resigned on Thursday. The NEA says Sergant was wrong but acted without either authority or approval--but that doesn't lessen the culpability of the White House personnel involved. And it's not like this sort of abuse is unknown under Obama.



2. NEA to whitewash its homepage: Until early this week, the "resources" on NEA's webpage included a "Health Insurance" heading that linked to the Artists’ Health Insurance Resource Center (AHIRC), which urged artists to lobby Congress for health care reform. By Wednesday, the NEA link disappeared, and the AHIRC page deleted the reference to legislation and Congressional contact--a good thing because, as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization, AHIRC is barred from "attempting . . . to influence legislation." Oops: more illegality, and a conspiracy, without the outrage that would have ensued during the Bush Administration.

Conclusion: The notion that Republican government is corrupt while Democrats are pure is nonsense. Though perhaps the perception is understandable--when the media covers up Democrat cover-ups.

UPDATE: below

Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander says "We're about to destroy the environment in the name of saving it," in the Wall Street Journal:

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar recently announced plans to cover 1,000 square miles of land in Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah with solar collectors to generate electricity. He's also talking about generating 20% of our electricity from wind. This would require building about 186,000 50-story wind turbines that would cover an area the size of West Virginia--not to mention 19,000 new miles of high-voltage transmission lines.

Is the federal government showing any concern about this massive intrusion into the natural landscape? Not at all. I fear we are going to destroy the environment in the name of saving the environment.

The House of Representatives has passed climate legislation that started out as an attempt to reduce carbon emissions. It has morphed into an engine for raising revenues by selling carbon dioxide emission allowances and promoting "renewable" energy.

The bill requires electric utilities to get 20% of their power mostly from wind and solar by 2020. These renewable energy sources are receiving huge subsidies--all to supposedly create jobs and hurry us down the road to an America running on wind and sunshine described in President Barack Obama's Inaugural Address.

Yet all this assumes renewable energy is a free lunch--a benign, "sustainable" way of running the country with minimal impact on the environment. That assumption experienced a rude awakening on Aug. 26, when The Nature Conservancy published a paper titled "Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America." The report by this venerable environmental organization posed a simple question: How much land is required for the different energy sources that power the country? The answers deserve far greater public attention.

By far nuclear energy is the least land-intensive; it requires only one square mile to produce one million megawatt-hours per year, enough electricity for about 90,000 homes. Geothermal energy, which taps the natural heat of the earth, requires three square miles. The most landscape-consuming are biofuels--ethanol and biodiesel--which require up to 500 square miles to produce the same amount of energy.

Coal, on the other hand, requires four square miles, mainly for mining and extraction. Solar thermal--heating a fluid with large arrays of mirrors and using it to power a turbine--takes six. Natural gas needs eight and petroleum needs 18. Wind farms require over 30 square miles.

Agreed.

MORE:

In comments, reader OBH refers to his solar power post, which is here.

(via Planet Gore)

I've previously reported outbreaks of climate change fascism at think tanks, faculty clubs and the New York Times op-ed page. Now, the un-democratic delusion has infected Obama's cabinet:

When it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions, Energy Secretary Steven Chu sees Americans as unruly teenagers and the Administration as the parent that will have to teach them a few lessons.

Speaking on the sidelines of a smart grid conference in Washington, Dr. Chu said he didn’t think average folks had the know-how or will to to change their behavior enough to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

"The American public. . . just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act," Dr. Chu said.

Later, Energy Department spokesman Dan Leistikow denied Chu was comparing Americans to teenagers. Welcome to Humpty Dumpty world--where alarmists either win or forecast war.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News polled right-of-center bloggers seeking the 10 LEAST respected right-of-center people. The results are here. The overall number one result was Olympia Snowe--who I consider a leftist. John McCain was number two.

I was among those polled. My (un-ranked) least-list (with links):

Ron Paul
George Will
Colin Powell
Orrin Hatch
Pat Buchanan
Bill O'Reilly
Dinesh D'Souza
Dick Morris
James Baker
Pat Robertson

Senator McCain nearly made my list, but there still are ample areas where we agree.

BTW, I assumed no one still rated Andrew Sullivan -- who came in at number twelve -- a righty.

You can fire a state University human resources VP for opposing gay marriage, but not a special-ed teacher after killing her own child:

Back in June of 2004, Jessica Elgie, a Special Education teacher in Buffalo, was sentenced in State Supreme Court for the crime of Endangering The Welfare Of A Child.

The child in question was her own five year old adopted son, Casey.

While at home one day, Elgie's little boy swallowed laundry detergent and then, despite her son becoming violently ill, Elgie waited hours before taking him to a hospital where he died.

Once Elgie was sentenced, the Buffalo School System suspended her -- with pay -- as is required by law, and then began the process of trying to fire her.

It took more than 14 months, and cost taxpayers close to $200,000 in costs before an arbitrator ruled that the School District had the right to fire Elgie.

Elgie's case is not an isolated one.

Through a Freedom Of Information request, 2 On Your Side has learned that over the last six years, Buffalo taxpayers have paid millions of dollars to teachers not to teach.

Twelve different teachers have collected $2.25 million in salary while under suspension and waiting for disciplinary hearings during that time.

And that amount doesn't include the costs for substitutes and the hearings themselves.

The average wait for those hearings: three years.

In an entirely unrelated development, I remind you that the largest teachers union, the National Education Association, is the seventh largest political donor over the past two decades--91 percent of the contributions of which went to Democrats.

(via Warner Todd Huston at Right Wing News)

Even before Jimmy Carter's latest atrocity, moogrogue had the flowchart:


source: Missourah.com

(via reader Marc)

Nile Gardiner in the September 23rd Telegraph (U.K.):

Barack Obama is highly likely to receive a warm reception when he addresses the United Nations General Assembly today, whereas his predecessor in the White House was greeted with undisguised contempt and stony silence.

It is not hard to see why a standing ovation awaits the president at Turtle Bay. Obama’s popularity at the UN boils down essentially to his willingness to downplay American global power. He is the first American president who has made an art form out of apologizing for the United States, which he has done on numerous occasions on foreign soil, from Strasbourg to Cairo. The Obama mantra appears to be -- ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do to atone for your country. This is a message that goes down very well in a world that is still seething with anti-Americanism.

It is natural that much of the UN will embrace an American president who declines to offer strong American leadership. . .

The president scores highly at the UN for refusing to project American values and military might on the world stage, with rare exceptions like the war against the Taliban. His appeasement of Iran, his bullying of Israel, his surrender to Moscow, his call for a nuclear free world, his siding with Marxists in Honduras, his talk of a climate change deal, have all won him plaudits in the large number of UN member states where US foreign policy has traditionally been viewed with contempt.

Simply put, Barack Obama is loved at the UN because he largely fails to advance real American leadership. This is a dangerous strategy of decline that will weaken US power and make her far more vulnerable to attack.

Gardiner's post-speech reaction:

It’s always a bad sign when a US president gets several rounds of heavy applause at the UN General Assembly, as Barack Obama did this morning in New York. Needless to say, the loudest cheers from the gathering of world leaders came when he condemned the actions of a close US ally, Israel, in continuing to build settlements in the West Bank. You can always rely on attacks on the Israelis to generate the biggest roars of approval at any meeting of the United Nations, and Obama dutifully obliged. . .

Overall this was a staggeringly naïve speech.

See also Michael Barone in the September 23rd Washington Examiner: "Obama's time warp: The U.S. is still the bad guy"

(via Instapundit)

Last week, I explained why the Federal antitrust exemption for "the business of insurance" isn't to blame for insufficient health insurance competition. And earlier today, I wrote a follow-up on the Administration's attempt to twist arts funding to political purposes. Question: what result were the two stories combined?

Answer: The Administration already is trying:

The Obama administration warned insurance companies Monday they face possible legal action for allegedly trying to scare seniors with misleading information about the potential for lost benefits under health care legislation in Congress.

"As we continue our research into this issue, we are instructing you to immediately discontinue all such mailings to beneficiaries and to remove any related materials directed to Medicare enrollees from your Web sites," said a notice from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.

Teresa DeCaro, an agency official, sent the notice to all companies that sell private Medicare coverage and stand-alone drug plans to seniors. The warning came as President Barack Obama's health care legislation is moving toward key tests in a Senate committee over the next several days, and with public polls showing widespread skepticism among seniors.

In particular, the letter to Humana says (emphasis in original):

CMS has learned that Humana has been contacting enrollees in one or more of its plans and alleging that current health care reform legislation affecting Medicare could hurt "millions of seniors and disabled individuals [who] could lose many of the important benefits and services [emphasis in original document] that make Medicare advantage health plans so valuable." The message, which is included in an envelope that states it contains "important information about your Medicare Advantage plan--open today!," makes several other claims about the legislation and how it will be detrimental to enrollees, ultimately urging enrollees to contact their congressional representatives to protest the actions referenced in the letter.

CMS is concerned that, among other things, this information is misleading and confusing to beneficiaries, represents information to beneficiaries as official communications about the Medicare Advantage program, and is potentially contrary to federal regulations and guidance for the MA and Part D programs and other federal law, including HIPAA. As we continue our research into this issue, we are instructing you to end immediately all such mailings to beneficiaries and to remove any related materials directed to Medicare enrollees from your website.

The Humana letter was prompted by a complaint from Senator Baucus (D-Mont.). Of course, the already-converted are encouraged to proselytize for the Administration.

Conclusion: The President isn't just bribing artists to become parrots. He's attempting to outlaw debate. To the applause of progressives--who still claim conservative critics are unhinged. What happened to free speech? (NOfP note: link specifically addresses speech by regulated corporations.)

All those promises about transparency?--just fooling!

(via Villainous Company)

UPDATE: The White House promises to sin no more, and the NEA blames the Watergate plumbers (sort of).

FURTHER UPDATE: The WSJ's James Taranto lowers the boom.

THIRD UPDATE: The Iowahawk has landed.

Two previous posts provided details about the Administration's attempted hijack of the National Endowment for the Arts. The story was broken by Patrick Courrielche at Big Hollywood, who described two conference calls where the White House and others tried to corral NEA grant-supported artists into advocating Obama's legislative agenda--and apparently succeeded in provoking an outpouring of pro-Administration art. I showed that creating "fake culture" for politics was unlawful and contrary to NEA's statutory mission. The whole plan borders on tyranny.

Particularly outrageous was the left's reaction: the mainstream media mostly ignored it (until George Will made it impossible) and progressive blogs denied it and/or characterized it as a conservative witch hunt. The NEA also denied the claims. "Hypocrisy," said reader OBH. Assistant Village Idiot in comments observed that "[b]elief that it's only wrong if you get caught is a characteristic symptom of sociopaths."

Well, deny this: Courrielche has released a full transcript and audio recordings of the first (August 10th) call.¹ And the contents are damning: the Administration plainly was pushing grant-funded artists to produce partisan propaganda, and knew what it was doing was unlawful. Still, Daily Kos is quiet--or dismissive.

Yes, ACORN is being de-funded (despite Obama's distancing), and Van Jones resigned. But Attorney General Holder appointed a special prosecutor to re-open previously completed investigations of detainee interrogation. I still oppose special prosecutors (I prefer the Constitutional scheme: elections). Yet, during the Bush Administration, the NEA's transgression and cover-up already would have spawned a flock of impeachment bumper stickers (compare the (lawful) U.S. Attorney firings). Where's the outrage now?

And, as Nick Gillespie observes, let's have no more of the meme that artists are the "vanguard" of the people's will. Everyone knows the new vanguard is bloggers.
______________________

¹ I note that the recording and publication of the call's contents raises legal issues. State law on the topic is simple: most states (and DC) require only the consent of the recording party, but Courrielche lives in California, a two-party consent state, requiring broader approval before recording. Federal law (see 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d)) also adopts "one party consent." Yet, the legality of recording interstate telephone calls is so complicated that I once wrote a book chapter about it (sadly, now out of print). Although not free from doubt, Federal government-initiated conference calls are more likely to be subject to Federal, not state, law, meaning that only the consent of the recording party was required, making the recording lawful. The subsequent disclosure of the contents of the call, however, may be unauthorized.

The September 11th Daily Telegraph (U.K.):

Polar bears face extinction in less than 70 years because of global warming, scientists have warned.

Melting ice is causing their numbers to drop dramatically, they warn.

Others also at risk include ivory gulls, Pacific walruses, ringed and hooded seals and narwhals, small whales with long, spiral tusks.

One of the problems is that other animals are moving north, encroaching on their territory, spurred by increasing temperatures, pushing out native species.

The animals are also struggling with the loss of sea ice.

"The Arctic as we know it may soon be a thing of the past," said Eric Post, associate professor of biology at Penn State University, who led the latest study, publied in the journal Science.

"Recent projections suggest polar bears could be extinct within 70 years.

The truth:

• January 3, 2007, Wall Street Journal:

  
  source: WSJ
  
  [T]here are in fact more polar bears in the world now than there were 40 years ago, as the nearby chart shows. The main threat to polar bears in recent decades has been from hunting, with estimates as low as 5,000 to 10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s. But thanks to conservation efforts, and some cross-border cooperation among the U.S., Canada and Russia, the best estimate today is that the polar bear population is 20,000 to 25,000.

• March 6, 2007, National Post:: "The latest government survey of polar bears roaming the vast Arctic expanses of northern Quebec, Labrador and southern Baffin Island show the population of polar bears has jumped to 2,100 animals from around 800 in the mid-1980s."



• May 3, 2007, Christian Science Monitor: "Despite global warming, an ongoing study says polar bear populations are rising in the country's eastern Arctic region."

No kidding--not that leftists will listen.

(via Watts Up With That?)

According to the Jerusalem Post:

The United States is laying the groundwork for sanctions against Iran after having become increasingly disenchanted with the strategy of engagement, two senior administration officials told Jewish leaders in Washington on Thursday.

William Burns, US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, said the Obama administration wants to prepare for sanctions now, so that it will be ready to implement them at the end of the year if it comes to that, and not have to start from scratch at that point.

Top White House Middle East adviser Dennis Ross, appearing beside Burns at the panel discussion with the Jewish leaders, explained that the administration's focus on diplomatic engagement had shifted following the Iranian elections, and indicated that the White House now had a more skeptical view of that approach which could give way to sanctions.

It's about time.

(via Little Green Footballs)

UPDATE: A comprehensive, must-read is MaxedOutMama's "Democrats ARE Stupid (on Healthcare)" and her related follow-up.

Grace-Marie Turner and Joseph Antos list the top 10 reasons why Medicare is no model for healthcare reform:

1) Medicare is going bankrupt. The Medicare Trustees estimate that the program will run short of money starting in 2017. Medicare will drown in a sea of red ink, with spending over the next 75 years outpacing dedicated revenues by nearly $38 trillion. . .

4) Low administrative costs are a mirage. The claim that Medicare's administrative costs are only 3% is fantasy. If all Medicare costs--such as revenue collection, personnel and enforcement--were accounted for, its administrative expenses would be at least twice as high. And it still wouldn't be providing services private insurers do, such as nurse hotlines, decision-support tools and fraud detection, or paying the income, property and provider taxes that private plans must pay. . .

8) Payments are too low. Washington decides how much doctors, hospitals and other providers will be paid down to the smallest detail, with mountains of regulation and paperwork to track the politically driven process. Medical professionals are in a perpetual battle with Congress over their payment rates, and many physicians refuse to accept new Medicare patients because payment rates are so low. With few exceptions, Medicare's solution to cost containment is the club of price-controls, not innovation and efficiency.

Agreed--so why expect Obamacare to be any different?

(via Critical Condition)

From the Institute for Energy Research:

President Obama has frequently cited Denmark as an example to be followed in the field of wind power generation, stating on several occasions that the Danes satisfy "20 percent of their electricity through wind power." The findings of a new study released this week cast serious doubt on the accuracy of that statement. The report finds that in 2006 scarcely five percent of the nation’s electricity demand was met by wind. And over the past five years, the average is less than 10 percent -- despite Denmark having ‘carpeted’ its land with the machines.

"As climate officials descend upon Copenhagen later this year to continue their work to engineer a world in which energy is rendered less reliable, less affordable and increasingly scarce, the eyes of the world will naturally fall upon the host country as well," said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), which commissioned the report.

"In the case of Denmark," added Pyle, "you have a nation of 5.4 million, occupying some of the most wind-intense real estate in the world, whose citizens are forced to pay the highest electricity rates in Europe -- and it still doesn’t even come close to the 20 percent threshold envisioned by President Obama for the United States. This may indeed be the model for the future -- but only if you believe that a combination of smoke, mirrors and prohibitively high utility rates are the key to our economic and environmental salvation."

(via Power Line)

Today is my 50th birthday--which I'm celebrating on a beach with an iPod full of Wagner. No posting this weekend; back Monday.

From econ prof Mark Perry:

source: Carpe Diem

The chart above displays GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita in 2008 using data from the CIA World Factbook (data available here) for various European countries, the European Union as a group, Japan, and the U.S. The chart also shows an estimate of GDP per capita for America's poorest state of Mississippi ($34,968), adjusted for purchasing power by applying a factor of .7439 to U.S. per capita GDP adjusted for PPP of $47,000, based on Mississippi's unadjusted GDP per capita compared to the U.S. average (data here).

On a PPP basis, all European countries in the graph except the U.K. have per capita GDP below America's poorest state. In other words, if Italy, France, or Germany left the European Union and joined the U.S., they would be the poorest of the U.S. states, and the same would apply to the European Union as a group, and the same would apply to Japan.

Agreed--though progressives deny it.

(via ShrinkWrapped)

The Washington Post carries a strangely apologetic skeptical take on global warming. And the New Scientist predicts climate change forecasts "are about to go seriously out of kilter."

Finally, the UN concedes a global treaty isn't possible:

The Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Yvo De Boer ruled out the possibility that a "comprehensive" international climate treaty will be ratified at Copenhagen in December.

De Boer, speaking at a press conference during the ongoing Summer Davos in Dalian, Northeast China said it is "impossible to craft and draft" a detailed climate treaty in "the time that remains" to address climate change.

"That is not possible. But it is also not necessary," he said, "I think what Copenhagen has to achieve is a basic political understanding" on the essential issues of climate change.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference takes place in Copenhagen, Denmark in December and expectations were raised that a possible climate treaty could be signed by both developed and developing nations.

There is a gap between developing and developed countries on how much they should reduce their carbon emissions based on the 1990 level.

Developing countries such as China and India have said that developed countries should offer at least a 40 percent reduction by 2020.

So why are we aiming for an agreement to impoverish the West to benefit the developing world? Oh yeah: socialism.

(via Planet Gore)

The mainstream media is famously contemptuous of the Internet--on the September 6th Meet the Press, NY Times columnist Tom Friedman called the net "an open sewer." But explain to me how newspapers are better: on September 6th, the Washington Post reported the resignation of Obama environmental adviser Van Jones, quoting his letter and blaming "weeks of pressure from the right over his past activism." The Sydney Morning Herald reprinted the WaPo story under the headline "Right-wing 'lies' force Obama adviser out". Last weekend, Herald columnist Paul Sheehan apologized:

A week ago, the Herald ran a story which, in its essence, was not true. The paper did not know this. It was the unwitting victim of a distortion created at The Washington Post, which produced the original story. The Herald's headline, which reflected the story, said: "Right-wing 'lies' force Obama adviser out".

The story began: "The White House environmental adviser, Van Jones, a towering figure in the environment movement, has resigned after weeks of controversy stemming from his past activism . . . In a statement announcing his resignation, Jones said, 'They [his critics] are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.'"

No. The distortions have come from Jones. . .

[W]hen Jones's past, his vicious rhetoric, his wild conspiracy theories, his Marxist economics and his paucity of managerial experience began to emerge, the same mainstream media, locked into its own political biases, did not want to know about this story, and did not want their audiences to know about the other side of this newly installed green hero.

Prior to Jones's resignation, despite revelation after revelation which made his position untenable, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the major networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, carried not a word. They preferred to be beaten on a big story than to even acknowledge it.

While the Fox News Channel, which drove the Van Jones story, has been one of the biggest media success stories of the past decade, becoming highly profitable and highly influential, during the same decade The New York Times Company has plunged in market value. It is one of numerous once-powerful media companies which would rather die than change an ideological agenda hidden under a false mask of objectivity.

Well, sort of. As USS Neverdock says:

While I'm glad to see them calling the left wing Washington Post out on the Post's "lies", it's ridiculous to claim they were an "unwitting victim". Van Jones was outed by a blogger using Google. If the SMH can't do as well it's time to get out of the business. If they're smart, and it's doubtful they are, they'll stop blindly recycling America's left wing newspapers.

Mark Steyn agrees:

[G]iven what Jonah [Goldberg] calls the "Pravdaesque" coverage of the Acorn/Census Bureau split, it seems undeniable that many U.S. media outlets have decided there's a lucrative niche market in providing news to people who'd prefer to be kept in the dark. It's easy to see why, say, a liberal schoolteacher in Westchester County would rather not have her illusions discombobulated. Less easy to see why so many other "reporters" around the world who repeat the Times/Post line as dutifully as believers reciting the Koran should be so eager to join the club.

Or why the mainstream media still sees bloggers as morons in pajamas. As Goldberg himself notes: "Friedman and Brokaw disparag[ing] the Internet as a useless news medium makes them sound like cranky old monks lamenting that flash-in-the-pan printing press."

The WaPo knows it's doomed. The Times sees some of its flaws. But both will stay biased 'till the end--as an overwhelming majority of Americans recognize.

Advantage: bloggers.

(via American Daughter, Don Surber, Instapundit)

I had my annual physical two weeks ago, providing my left-wing doctor the opportunity to berate conservative politics immediately after making me assume a posture from which dispute would be ill-advised. Later in the exam, the discussion heated up (Dr.: "A government program like Medicare is the answer"; NOfP: "Isn't it true you don't accept Medicare?"). And it ended when my doc insisted that the main flaw in healthcare is that insurance companies are exempt from the antitrust laws. He asserted that the exemption gave insurers excessive market power over doctors and other care providers, thus increasing healthcare prices.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid agrees, as do many progressives and the mainstream media. Indeed, a pending bill (HR 1583) would repeal the exemption. Are they right?

Background: 15 U.S.C. § 1012 exempts "the business of insurance" from, among other things, antitrust law except "to the extent that such business is not regulated by State Law." This provision is part of the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson Act, passed in response to a 1944 Supreme Court decision classing insurance as "interstate commerce" subject to Federal law, including antitrust law. Previous court decisions were to the contrary, for reasons beyond the scope of this post.

Purpose: The exemption wasn't merely a corporate give-away. Insurance is grounded on risk pooling---aggregating sufficient individual risks to a more predictable average (via the law of large numbers), and therefore spread risks. But the efficient accessing, pricing and marketing of risks requires sharing information about a basis to assess the probability of liability, as noted in a 2005 General Accounting Office report (at 3) about another type of insurance:

To price insurance policies, property/casualty insurers need to project loss costs--the amount insurers use to cover claims and the costs of adjusting those claims--into the future. Projecting loss costs requires large amounts of data on historical losses and actuarial expertise, and single insurers are not likely to have sufficient data or expertise in all of the insurance lines they sell.

In addition, insurers further spread risk through reinsurance, where, in return for a premium, one company indemnifies a portion of the risks of another. As a 2007 Congressional Research Service report concluded (at 5), "the specific economics of the insurance industry [suggest that] cooperation among insurers may very well result in greater efficiencies."

The net result, in theory, is to make insurance more affordable to consumers. As a rough analogy, consider the antitrust exemption for labor unions. Obviously, without such an exemption, collective bargaining would be unlawful--but joint employee negotiations with management is the core public interest rationale behind unionization. In each case, economics suggests that a limited antitrust waiver achieves pro-competitive results.

Scope: In practice, the breadth of the McCarran-Ferguson carve-out is severely limited by two factors. First, the "business of insurance" exempted from antitrust has been narrowly construed by courts to activities central to the purposes described above. The Supreme Court summarized the criteria for antitrust exemption in a 1982 case:

first, whether the practice has the effect of transferring or spreading a policyholder's risk; second, whether the practice is an integral part of the policy relationship between the insurer and the insured; and third, whether the practice is limited to entities within the insurance industry.

As a result, the clause does not, for example, sanction all mergers between insurance companies. Indeed, the Department of Justice has blocked several proposed mergers, and required pro-competitive divestiture in others--and has always had the authority to preserve an open marketplace. Relatedly, Section 1013 of the act preserves the applicability of Federal antitrust law to "any [insurance] agreement to boycott, coerce, or intimidate, or act of boycott, coercion, or intimidation."

Second, the exemption applies only to activities outside of state oversight and control. The effect of McCarran-Ferguson was to preserve the states' lead role in the regulation of insurance:

Each state has a department within the executive branch to regulate insurance. The head of the department is usually called the commissioner or director of insurance. A handful of states elect their insurance commissioner. In the remaining states, the insurance commissioner is appointed by the governor and serves at the governor’s pleasure. The insurance department typically has broad, legislatively delegated powers to enforce state insurance laws, promulgate rules and regulations, and conduct hearings to resolve disputed matters.

The specifics, and degree, of oversight varies among states, but overall:

The goals of insurance regulation articulated by most states include fair pricing of insurance, protecting insurance company solvency, preventing unfair practices by insurance companies, and ensuring availability of insurance coverage. For example, all states have the power to approve insurance rates, to periodically conduct financial examinations of insurers, to license companies, agents, and brokers, and to monitor and regulate claims handling.

Indeed, states often cooperate in joint actions against insurance companies. While states have been slow to regulate some aspects of insurance -- derivatives, swaps and similar financial products that some blame for the financial melt-down -- these are not at issue in heath insurance.

Net effect: Considering the pro-competitive intent of Section 1012 of the McCarran-Ferguson Act, its narrow reach in practice, and the existence of comprehensive state regulation of state health insurance, the exemption of "the business of insurance" from Federal antitrust laws, that provision does not give health insurers unfair advantages over patients, doctors, drug companies or hospitals. So the law isn't likely the cause of the asserted flaws in American healthcare.

Competition: Importantly, I'm not asserting that there's sufficient competition in the heath insurance industry. Indeed, I've consistently favored legislation that eliminate insurers' current disincentive to compete to serve individual consumers. And to allow interstate competition between insurers. But both such flaws are the products of over-regulation: tax-laws tying health insurance to employment, so limiting much competition to the employer, not employee, level, plus absurd mandates and guaranteed issue/community rating imposed by state insurance regulators.

There are legitimate disagreements over whether a single national insurance regulator is preferable to multiple state bodies. But if the inevitable consequence of state-by-state regulation is a lack of interstate competition among insurers, then unified Federal regulation of insurance might be preferable. Yet, according to Obama adviser Tom Daschle on the September 6th This Week (ABC), selling insurance across state lines would be a "race to the bottom" as states compete for the lowest cost insurance offerings. I thought that was the goal--which illustrates the extent to which the Administration is utterly out-of-touch.

Conclusion: Interstate insurance competition would require revising McCarran-Ferguson to remove the deference to state oversight. But not to repeal the antitrust exemption. Contrary to my doctor -- and Senators, lefty bloggers and the mainstream media -- that's not the problem.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal agrees.

From James DeLong in The American:


source: August 26th American

DeLong explains:

Think of it this way: From 1990 to 2006, GDP expanded by $7 trillion. If healthcare had retained its 1990 share of 12.1 percent of GDP, it would have grown by $847 billion, leaving an extra $6.153 trillion to be spent on houses, food, video games, etc. Instead, healthcare grew by $1.4 trillion, leaving only an extra $5.6 trillion for other purposes.

From this perspective, during this 16-year period from 1990 to 2006, the nation shifted its collective preferences a bit, deciding to allocate an extra 7 percent of its $7 trillion increase in GDP into health and away from other sectors.

Such a change seems rather minor in the great scheme of things, and indicative not of a crisis but of an assessment that the state of healthcare technology has improved to the point where it is delivering steadily increasing value for the money, and that as people meet more basic wants of food and shelter they move up the chain of desires and spend more on other things.

See also Robert Fogel concluding "the long-term income elasticity of the demand for healthcare is 1.6--for every 1 percent increase in a family’s income, the family wants to increase its expenditures on healthcare by 1.6 percent."

(via Greg Mankiw)

According to the September 9th Bloomberg News:

A racing pigeon called Winston carrying four gigabytes of data strapped to its leg beat Telkom South Africa Ltd.’s ADSL data service download time by flying from Howick in South Africa’s Kwazulu-Natal province to Durban, Sapa reported.

The flight took an hour and eight minutes, the agency said citing Kevin Rolfe, the head of information technology company, The Unlimited IT. In total it took just under three hours for the bird to fly to the port city of Durban and have the data uploaded onto the call center’s system, Sapa said.

In the same amount of time the ADSL transmission of the same data size had only completed 4 percent of its upload, the news agency said.

(via reader Ken R.)

Camille Paglia on Salon:

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

(via Maggie's Farm)

UPDATE BELOW

In my high school class on journalism, the definition of news we used was "the difference that makes a difference." America's march on Washington on September 12th, 2009 was probably the largest protest in the nation's capital ever. It is historic. It is huge news. It is record setting. Yes, it makes a difference.

So how many people were there? Given the historical nature of this event -- some say the biggest ever -- we should expect the so-called main-stream media to have a credible estimate of the crowd size. Except, they do not.

The New York Times -- "All the news that is fit to print." Catchy slogan. Some say the inspiration for Johnny Cochrane's closing argument in the OJ trial. You would expect the New York Times would have some estimate, given it was one of the largest protests in the history of the country. The NYT buried the story and just said 'thousands'. Thousands?! When it was Hundreds of Thousands! That is a lie of omission.

The Daily Mail and other credible sources said 1.2 to 2 million people. It was probably close to a million.

It begs the question: Why doesn't the Times want you to know the size of the biggest rally opposing the federal government ever? At One Million, was it bigger than Vietnam protest? (The Democrats war?) Bigger than Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream Speech? Bigger than the so-called million-man march?

Remember that the New York Times does not want you to know.

More people went to Washington DC to protest than ever before. They went there because they reject the liberal plans to expand government and take over the health care industry.

The simple high school lesson, that this is a 'difference that makes a difference' is not lost on the New York Times. The Times staff simply prefers to pretend not to know. Ignorance is bliss.

Even if the New York Times wants to ignore the story, the Washington Times is quoting the White House's David Axelrod on the protest participants: "I don't think it's indicative of the nation's mood," David Axelrod, the president's top adviser, said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "My message to them is, they're wrong."

Prediction: The more the White House and the New York Times try to ignore the protests -- the louder they will be. President Obama is the first president to be a lame duck in his first year in office. Don't hold your breath on the NYT covering that fact either. They ought to return to high school journalism fundamentals.

UPDATE: Jane Q. Republican notes:

The largest protest rally in American history occurred in front of the U.S. Capitol on Saturday, September 12, 2009. That’s right. We out rallied all the professional protesters. MoveOn.org, ACORN, CodePink, NOW, NAACP, Rainbow/PUSH… all of them. Not a single activist group has ever mounted a protest that even comes close to comparing to what we pulled off on Saturday. We did it honestly, organically, and on the cheap. (Perhaps even more notably, we have momentarily silenced them all.)

How were we able to get such an “accurate” account of the number of people at the Obama inauguration, but the number of people at this protest is such a complete mystery?

The answer is simple. The powers that be DO NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW.