No Oil for Pacifists

From Reuters, January 29th:

Obama assails Republican foes, urges bipartisan effort

(via Say Anything)

This is a guest post by reader Marc:



Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism site caught Robert Reich in an embarrassing mix of sloppy journalism and paranoia.

In his column at salon.com, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor blamed FOX News for a 1994 conservative revolt:

In December 1994, Bill Clinton proposed a so-called middle-class bill of rights including more tax credits for families with children, expanded retirement accounts, and tax-deductible college tuition. Clinton had lost his battle for healthcare reform. Even worse, by that time the Dems had lost the House and Senate. Washington was riding a huge anti-incumbent wave. Right-wing populists were the ascendancy, with Newt Gingrich and Fox News leading the charge.

One problem--FOX News was founded in 1996. If FOX News could be so influential two years before it even existed, imagine liberals' consternation now that it's the most trusted name in TV news and hosts all of the top 10 cable news programs.

salon has acknowledged the error; several days later, the Huffington Post did too. So has Reich on his blog, albeit retaining a gratuitous jibe:

(In an earlier posting I included Fox News but that gave them too much credit; their fulminations started a few years later.)

Who's fulminating now?

My advice to Mr Reich: next time you tackle political analysis, stick to the standard Democratic line and blame Bush.

Filmmaker Michael Moore may receive a Michigan state tax credit for "Capitalism: A Love Story," which flopped at the box office.

(via Carpe Diem)

UPDATE: Greenpeace too.

Not only is climate change not settled, it's not science. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls itself "a scientific body." Yet, as Donna Laframboise details, that organization frequently cites to and relies on papers published by the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group. Would oil-industry studies assessing climate (as opposed to company practice) be similarly welcome? Not.

And apart from the question of bias, few such reports appear to have been "peer reviewed" -- they're opinion pieces. Add the news that NASA and others are scrubbing cites to delete now-discredited glacier and natural disaster papers -- suggesting warming alarmists are worried.

That sound was the last shred of climate zealot credibility shattering.

UPDATE: Related figures in % of GDP terms here.

From a USA Today editorial:


source: January 25th USA Today

As the paper explains:

In reality, the nation is in a serious bind not so much because of the actions of presidents and Congresses, but because of their lack of action. More than 60% of federal spending is on autopilot. Most of this comes from benefit programs, also known as entitlements, such as Medicare and Social Security. In just four years, as the result of growing entitlements and rising interest costs on the national debt, some two-thirds of Washington's dollars will be so-called mandatory spending. . .

To be sure, there's bloat in the federal bureaucracy and defense spending. But the real drivers of looming deficits are Medicare, projected to grow from $516 billion this year to $932 billion in 2018, and Social Security, forecast to grow from $581 billion this year to $966 billion in 2018 as Baby Boomers retire.

Agreed.

See also Heritage Foundation.

(via Reason magazine, The Corner)

Senator Harry Reid, February 25, 2009:

By the end of this year, I want to do something significant dealing with health care.

Senator Harry Reid, January 28, 2010:

We are going to move forward on health care. We’re going to do health care reform this year.

(via The Corner)

January 27, 2010, during Obama's first State of the Union address:

Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don't. And if I have to enforce this discipline by veto, I will.

September 26, 2008, during Obama's first Presidential debate:

MCCAIN: How about a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs.

LEHRER: Spending freeze?

MCCAIN: I think we ought to seriously consider with the exceptions the caring of veterans national defense and several other vital issues.

LEHRER: Would you go for that?

OBAMA: The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel. There are some programs that are very important that are under funded. I went to increase early childhood education and the notion that we should freeze that when there may be, for example, this Medicare subsidy doesn't make sense.

(via Huffington Post, RealClearPolitics)

UPDATE: below

June 26, 1997 -- President Bill Clinton, addressing the United Nations:

The science is clear and compelling. . . We humans are changing the global climate.

November 25, 2009 -- Carol Browner, Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, at a White House press gaggle:

[W]e have 2,500 of the world's foremost scientists who are in absolute agreement that [warming] is a real problem and that we need to do something and we need to do something as soon as possible.

January 24, 2010 -- Professor Christopher Field, new co-chairman of the IPCC working group on climate impacts, quoted in the Times (London):

The 2007 [IPCC] study should be seen as a snapshot of what was known then. Science is progressive. If something turns out to be wrong we can fix it next time around.

Conclusion: Climategate made the data debatable. Now, the syllogism's shifted. As Glenn Reynolds says:

The science is settled, until it isn’t anymore.

So, the result remains--whether settled or snapshot, climate science is forever un-falsifiable.

MORE:

In his State of the Union address, President Obama himself favored non-falsifiability:

I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But here's the thing -- even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future.

With many clamoring for Wall Street's blood, bashing bankers is popular, particularly when the target is "big" bankers. Obama's proposed bank tax would ride this populist tiger by requiring "the Financial Sector to Pay Back For the Extraordinary Benefits Received."

Ok, how much was that, exactly? Less than you think: At its originally appropriated level of $700 billion, TARP always was small potatoes, spending wise--entitlements and interest are the core problems. And, bailouts under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) pay dividends, and the majority of "big" banks already repaid their TARP loans. So the current expected cost of TARP has shrunk below $100 billion:


source: Congressional Budget Office

Further, as the chart demonstrates, about half the TARP costs stem from the program's unwarranted expansion to include bailouts to GM and Chrysler, not banks. And the next largest piece is a product of the Making Home Affordable program, helping individual homeowners. AIG cost $9 billion--but AIG principally is an insurance company, not a bank.

Senator Obama voted to bailout banks. President Obama broadened the bailout well beyond banks. Then there's the $110 billion funded to prop-up Fannie and Freddie, government guaranteed lenders kept alive by politics, not policy.

Now the Administration says big banks are to blame. That's both a flip-flop and false.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News polled right-of-center bloggers on their preferences for President in 2012. The top response was Sarah Palin. I was among those polled, and didn't select Palin; I chose Tim Pawlenty, who was a distant fifth.

Read the whole thing here.

Following Tuesday's Massachusetts election, a former senior Carter Administration appointee I know -- a life-long Democrat who is black -- pronounced Obama "a failed Presidency." Surely, this is premature--his term has three years left. Yet there are disturbing signs.

Last year was wasted; Obamacare is dead; cap-and-trade (thank god) still-born. The President's speechwriter likely had to bin his first 42 drafts of the State of the Union speech, which is now being re-written to talk about what the President's gonna do, as opposed to what he's accomplished. Obama still has the Executive branch, plus overwhelming (if not veto-proof) support in Congress. But where to go from here?

In one sense, the answer is obvious: triangulate. That is, move toward the center, and push policies in concert with Republicans that are likely to command broad majority support. Bill Clinton did this, successfully, after losing House and Senate in the 1994 off-year election. But Clinton lived through the experience of losing an election (an early 1980s re-election try as Arkansas governor). By contrast, the Obamessiah has been the golden boy, laying the hurt on Hillary without pause, cheered-on by the media gallery. He's never had to re-think his strategy because he's never had a set-back.

With true failure as an alternative, can Obama grow-up, quickly, this year? So far, he's never had to.

This is a guest post by reader Marc.




The Islamic Solidarity Games, scheduled for April in Iran, have been called off--over what to call the Persian Gulf:

The games federation in Saudi Arabia said the Iranian organisers had failed to address its concerns, particularly about the planned logo and medals.

These bear the words "Persian Gulf", but Arab countries, who call it the Arabian Gulf, reject the term.

The games had been postponed in October in the hope of striking a deal.

The Islamic Solidarity Sports Federation (ISSF) in Riyadh said, after an emergency board meeting, Iran's local organising committee "unilaterally took some decisions without asking the federation by writing some slogans on the medals and pamphlets of the games".

Iran "did not abide by the rules of the Islamic Solidarity Sports Federation" and "did not follow the decisions taken by the general assembly of the federation at a previous meeting in Riyadh", it said in a statement.

But Iran's committee for the games disputed the decision.

"In spite of convincing arguments made to the ISSF executive committee, regrettably and without presenting any logical reasons, the ISSF committee decided not to hold the games with Iran as the host," it said.

The games -- which are meant to strengthen ties among Islamic countries -- were first held in the Saudi city of Jeddah in 2005.

Has the Muslim world -- which invented the bazaar -- lost its ability to negotiate and compromise? Surely an alternative name can be invented. How about: the Muslim Rift, The Sea of Intolerance, The Abyss of Stupidity, the Bay of no-Fundy.

Reader suggestions welcomed in the comments.

UPDATE: below. And MaxedOutMama continues the discussion here.

I repeatedly have shown that the upper income brackets pay the lion's share of Federal taxes, and also that top earners pay higher tax rates. Confirmation comes from the Congressional Budget Office, "Data on the Distribution of Federal Taxes and Household Income":


source: CBO, April 2009

The chart on the right demonstrates that only the highest income quintile pays more in taxes than its share of income, which depicts the "progressiveness" of U.S. Federal taxes. See also Tax Foundation (2007 data).

CBO also tracks historical tax data; here's the trend of total effective Federal tax rates (including income, social, corporate and excise) by income quintile from the beginning of the Reagan Administration through 2006:


source: NOfP Chart via CBO data

Note that tax rates have dropped among all quintiles, but while the top quintile rate is down only 1 percent, all other quintiles show much steeper declines--including halving the tax rate for lower quintile earners. Indeed, in 2009, almost 47 percent of "tax units" (filers) -- mostly in low income quintiles -- paid no or negative Federal income taxes.

So why do lefties claim the rich don't pay enough and want to increase top quintile tax rates? Cause, in the self-described "reality-based community," rhetoric trumps reality.

MORE:

Extensive discussion in comments, including MaxedOutMama's linking to the 2008 quintiles, and the income per-quintile.

The current New Republic's cover story, by Gabriel Sherman, narrates the "messy collapse of a great paper":

The Post, of course, is not alone; other large newspapers are suffering financially as well. And yet, the Post’s financial decline is only part of the story. Over the past few months, I have talked to about 50 current and former reporters, editors, Web staffers, and business employees. From these conversations, a picture has emerged of a paper suffering an identity crisis. Its peers seem to have coherent strategies for saving themselves: The New York Times is doubling down on journalism in the belief that it can persevere online as the global newspaper of record; The Wall Street Journal remains the country’s definitive chronicler of business; other large papers have tried to distinguish themselves by burrowing into local issues. But the Post seems to be paralyzed-and trapped. It can’t go completely local because the local news in Washington is, in many respects, national; and its status as the paper of record for national politics is under assault from numerous competitors--competitors it isn’t clear the Post can defeat. Meanwhile, the tense, even hostile, relationship between the print and online divisions hasn’t made the paper’s search for a coherent identity any easier. And so, in a new era for journalism, The Washington Post has yet to figure out what it wants to be. The result has been a lot of lurching--some of it (like salongate) embarrassing, much of it merely ineffective, but almost all of it suggesting a newspaper in disarray. . .

Beginning in the late 1990s, a debate over the Post’s identity developed in the newsroom, as the Web made it possible to reach readers anywhere, at virtually no cost. On one side was Steve Coll, a brilliant foreign correspondent who had been promoted to managing editor. After New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger strong-armed the Grahams out of the Post’s 50 percent stake in the International Herald Tribune in 2002, Coll led a task force that proposed using up to $10 million from the proceeds of the IHT sale to build up the Post’s national and international coverage. Graham rejected the idea. "Don’s feeling at that time was it wasn’t about the dollars; at that point, the paper was minting money," a former senior staffer says. "The fear was: If we invest in the national audience, the delicate balance will shift away from the local audience." . . .

[N]one of these developments, however promising, changes the fact that the Post remains a newspaper in distress--in late October, [new executive editor Marcus] Brauchli had to physically intervene when an editor punched a writer in the newsroom--and, most importantly, one without a strong identity. And so, the paper’s institutional lurches continue. On November 24, the Post announced that it was shuttering its remaining domestic bureaus to focus its resources in Washington--a sign that, once again, local journalism had won out. Then, in December, the Post printed a news piece on the national debt in partnership with a publication called The Fiscal Times--without disclosing that the organization is backed by financier Pete Peterson, a well-known deficit hawk. Again, the Post found itself at the center of an ethics scandal. And another attempt at experimenting seemed to have backfired.

The results, graphically, here. Read the whole thing.

(via reader Ken R.)

From the January 18th New York Times:



source: New York Times

(via Bob in LA)

From the Telegraph (U.K.):

Myleene Klass, the broadcaster and model, brandished a knife at youths who broke into her garden -- but has been warned by police that she may have acted illegally.

Miss Klass, a model for Marks & Spencer and a former singer with the pop group Hear'Say, was in her kitchen in the early hours of Friday when she saw two teenagers behaving suspiciously in her garden.

The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away.

Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an "offensive weapon" -- even in her own home -- was illegal.

(via Powerline)

From Nate Beeler in the Washington Examiner:


source: Tuesday's Washington Examiner

Thursday's Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United is being lauded by conservatives and loathed by liberals (including the Obama Administration). I thought Justice Kennedy's majority opinion, broadly rejecting limits on the speech of corporations (or unions), unusually good, and Justice Stevens' dissent unpersuasive for the reasons set forth in Justice Scalia's concurrence. But that's not today's topic.

Instead, this post is about Friday's editorials in both the New York Times and Washington Post decrying, as the Times headlined, "The Court's Blow to Democracy." Set aside the merits; my objection is to each paper's failure to disclose the conflict of interest inherent in their position. Remember, the Court voided a law banning for-profit corporate/union "electioneering" just before Federal elections, but exempting media companies from the prohibition. So, before Thursday, broadcasters and newspapers (like the Times and Post) had somewhat of a monopoly on election advocacy in the month or two prior to elections: uniquely among for profit corporations, they could (and obviously, did) endorse or oppose Federal candidates. This made those companies' voices relatively more visible and, possibly, more lucrative.

Thus, the press had an economic interest in the former law. Yet, the two leading papers failed to disclose that fact when editorializing. (An Adam Lipak Times story on Friday hinted at the issue.) So much for journalism's code of ethics -- which is enforced solely to shield news staff, not ensure neutrality.

Stephen Asma in the Chronicle Review of Higher Education:

Feeling unworthy is still a large part of Western religious culture, but many people, especially in multicultural urban centers, are less religious. There are still those who believe that God is watching them and judging them, so their feelings of guilt and moral indignation are couched in the traditional theological furniture. But increasing numbers, in the middle and upper classes, identify themselves as being secular or perhaps "spiritual" rather than religious.

Now the secular world still has to make sense out of its own invisible, psychological drama--in particular, its feelings of guilt and indignation. Environmentalism, as a substitute for religion, has come to the rescue. Nietzsche's argument about an ideal God and guilt can be replicated in a new form: We need a belief in a pristine environment because we need to be cruel to ourselves as inferior beings, and we need that because we have these aggressive instincts that cannot be let out.

Instead of religious sins plaguing our conscience, we now have the transgressions of leaving the water running, leaving the lights on, failing to recycle, and using plastic grocery bags instead of paper. In addition, the righteous pleasures of being more orthodox than your neighbor (in this case being more green) can still be had--the new heresies include failure to compost, or refusal to go organic. Vitriol that used to be reserved for Satan can now be discharged against evil corporate chief executives and drivers of gas-guzzling vehicles. Apocalyptic fear-mongering previously took the shape of repent or burn in hell, but now it is recycle or burn in the ozone hole. In fact, it is interesting the way environmentalism takes on the apocalyptic aspects of the traditional religious narrative. The idea that the end is nigh is quite central to traditional Christianity--it is a jolting wake-up call to get on the righteous path. And we find many environmentalists in a similarly earnest panic about climate change and global warming.

ABC News reporter Bill Blakemore in June 2006:

The study reconfirms what scientists have been warning about: man-made global warming is real and underway. Americans can see effects right now out the kitchen window: five inches of rain in five hours in Toledo, Thursday. Downpours so sudden and massive. . .

This on top of the great downpours causing havoc in Houston this week and in the Northeast the spring. All fit exactly the weather patterns predicted for years by scientists warning us about effects of global warming. More frequent extreme weather they said, including heavier downpours. And all for one simple reason: the warmer the air, the more evaporated water it can hold. So winds pick up more moister from the hotter gulf and oceans as they sweep toward land and then dump it out in far heavier downpours. They'll be more frequent now say scientists as global warming heats the air.

ABC News reporter Bill Blakemore in January 2010:

No, the cold snap in some parts of the northern hemisphere (New York, Florida, Beijing, Northern India, Europe) does not mean that manmade global warming is not happening, or even that it's happening just a little less. . .

Bottom line -- fast and simple? . . . Weather is not climate. . .

Weather is short-term and local -- say, the next five or 10 days in the Tri-State Area.

Climate is long-term and regional (or bigger) -- say, the average over the next 20 years in the American Northeast.

Also compare the Guardian in June 2007 with the Guardian in January 2010.

Simply put, as American Spectator's Paul Chesser says, "Weather is Not Climate, Except When It Is."

(via Planet Gore)

The liberalization of U.S. natural gas production and distribution began in 1978. By 1992, virtually all price controls had been removed. So what has deregulation accomplished? The January 12th Bloomberg News answers:

The U.S. overtook Russia as the world’s largest natural-gas producer last year as U.S. suppliers tapped unconventional resources while demand in Russia plunged amid the country’s worst economic decline on record.

U.S. output in January through October advanced 3.9 percent from a year earlier to 18.3 trillion cubic feet (519 billion cubic meters), according to the latest Department of Energy data. Russian output, about four-fifths of which comes from state-run OAO Gazprom, plunged 17 percent in the period to 462 billion cubic meters.

"Minimal hurricane disruptions and significant growth in production from onshore shale basins have contributed to the increase in domestic supply," the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency said on its Web site last month.

The figures for U.S. natural gas production in the 30 years since deregulation started:


source: NOfP chart via EIA data

Think how much more could come were the U.S. to allow extraction from currently excluded domestic and off-shore areas. Additional evidence that the free market itself will overcome fears for "peak oil."

(via Carpe Diem)

From Deborah Solomon's interview with ex Bush lawyer/Berkeley law prof John Yoo, in the January 3rd New York Times magazine:

Were you close to George Bush?
No, I’ve never met him. I don’t know Cheney either. I have not gone hunting with him, which is probably a good thing for me.

Weren’t you invited to the White House Christmas party during your two years at the Department of Justice?
I don’t think so. That’s the way the government works. There’s the attorney general, then the deputy attorney general and then an associate attorney general. Then there’s the assistant attorney general, who was the head of my office.

So you’re saying you were just one notch above an intern, you and Monica Lewinsky?
She was much closer to the president than I ever was.

See also Moe Lane.

(via reader Marc)

Lefties love the "Head Start" pre-kindergarten Health and Human Services-driven pre-school. We've pumped over $ 100 billion into the program, and the Obama Administration "stimulated" funding by further billions.

Only problem: Head Start doesn't work. If you don't believe me, read the just-released study by HHS itself (at xvi, xxxviii):

[T]he advantages children gained during their Head Start and age 4 years yielded only a few statistically significant differences in outcomes at the end of 1st grade for the sample as a whole. . .

[T]his report finds that providing access to Head Start has benefits for both 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds in the cognitive, health, and parenting domains, and for 3-year-olds in the social-emotional domain. However, the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for the program population as a whole.

And even such small positives might be overstated. Head Start's simply not cost effective. Not that the mainstream media's noticed.

The Administration's reaction? 1) Hide the ball. 2) Expand the program:

"These results make it clear that we need to build a more coordinated system of early care and education, and to focus on key improvements to teaching and learning in the early grades," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Proving you can't kill a government subsidy, no matter how wasteful.

(via Instapundit)

I've previously shown that trying in Federal Court non-citizen detainees captured abroad isn't legally required. I predicted that such proceedings will become a zoo, as lawyered-up Al Qaeda defendants try to put the government, not terrorists, on trial. Turns out I was overly optimistic.

This week, a Manhattan Federal District Court began the trial of Aafia Siddiqui, formerly the most wanted women in the war on terrorism. Time magazine summarizes:

Siddiqui, 37, an MIT-educated neuroscientist and suspected al-Qaeda operative, is charged with attempted murder for allegedly shooting at a group of U.S. soldiers and FBI agents in Afghanistan. The incident occurred in the city of Ghazni in July 2008, after she was detained by local police near one of the city's mosques on suspicion that she was a suicide bomber. At the time of her arrest, she allegedly had with her a flash drive with references to specific "cells" and "enemies" and various chemicals in cold-cream jars, including a quantity of sodium cyanide. Prosecutors say that the following day, as a contingent of U.S. soldiers and FBI agents prepared to question her at a nearby police station, Siddiqui grabbed an unsecured M-4 automatic rifle from one of the soldiers and opened fire. She hit no one but was herself shot twice in the abdomen by a U.S. warrant officer.

On the trial's first day, she was ejected from the court for interrupting the first witness and challenging the legitimacy of the proceedings. Which is what I expected.

The surprise: not content with attacking the government, Siddiqui's blaming the Jews:

A Pakistani scientist who is the only woman accused of working with the al-Qaeda leadership has demanded that Jews should be excluded from the jury at her trial in New York.

Aafia Siddiqui called for jurors to undergo genetic testing in an outburst in federal court in Manhattan yesterday.

"If they have a Zionist or Israeli background . . . they are all mad at me," Ms Siddiqui, an American-educated neuroscientist, said. "I have a feeling everyone here is them [sic] -- subject to genetic testing. They should be excluded if you want to be fair," she told the judge.

Further,

as [Judge] Berman quizzed the jury pool on whether their 9/11 experiences would influence their deliberations, Siddiqui piped up from the defense table.

"The next question will be on anti-Semitism, Israel was behind 9/11. That's not anti-Semitic," she said before being escorted out.

Which kinda makes sense, at least to those believing Jews had advance warning of the 9/11 attacks, and so are over-represented in a New York City jury pool.

By the way, good luck trying to establish motive: "Prosecutors also are barred from bringing up Siddiqui's alleged ties or sympathies with Al Qaeda because they would create a bias." Meaning that, under the Obama Administration, the only violence not treated as a hate crime is a terrorist's attempt to murder.

The KSM trial will be worse.

(via Berman Post)

Remember former weapons inspector Scott Ritter? Remember anything else? Well, you can forget him again.

(via Instapundit)

I've recently mentioned the "preemption" justification for invading Iraq, and posted several pieces on Iran's apparent intention to acquire nuclear weapons. I'd assumed that any possible military strike against Iran would rely on the preemption rationale. But Alex Fiedler argues that the case against Iran is even stronger in an interesting op-ed in last month's Jerusalem Post:

Chattering classes and media invoke the fact that the US invaded Iraq and has yet to find weapons of mass destruction, the raison d'être for invading. Because Saddam Hussein did not have an active program, or rather, because one was not found, these people conclude that the war in Iraq constituted bad policy. This is the greatest difference between Iraq and Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency, US, Israel, European Union, Russia, the Gulf states and most importantly Iran, acknowledge an active nuclear program. This fact is not in doubt.

An international inspection following a strike against Iran would not magically reveal that there was no WMD program. The only disputes among these actors are how advanced the Iranian nuclear program is, and whether or not the weaponization program is active. But can honest disputants deny weaponization in the face of Iran's continual testing of long-range missile and its desire to enrich uranium to higher levels?

For an honest policy debate on Iran, it is critical to reframe the issue in two ways. Most importantly, a military strike must be posed as one of retaliation, not preemption, not prevention. Secondly, when relying on historical analogies to explain the situation in Iran, proper analogies must be used. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, there is no analogy for a nation like Iran acquiring a nuclear capability.

I'm not certain I agree, but it's thought-provoking. And see also Normblog.

Investor's Business Daily is publishing excerpts from economist Thomas Sowell's latest book. Confirming what I've written about income mobility, the first two articles are well worth reading and bookmarking. Here's part of the second:

Under the headline "Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind," a front-page New York Times article dubbed the "top 0.1% of income earners -- the top one-thousandth" as the "hyper-rich" and declared that they "have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year."

Once again, the confusion is between what is happening to statistical categories over time and what is happening to flesh-and-blood individuals over time, as they move from one statistical category to another.

Despite the rise in the income of the top 0.1% of taxpayers as a statistical category, both absolutely and relative to the incomes in other categories, as flesh-and-blood human beings those individuals who were in that category initially had their incomes actually fall by a whopping 50% between 1996 and 2005. It is hardly surprising if people whose incomes are cut in half drop out of the top 0.1%.

What happens to the income of the category over time is not the same as what happens to the people who were in that category at any given point in time. But many among the intelligentsia are ready to seize upon any numbers that seem to fit their vision.

Behind many of those numbers and the accompanying alarmist rhetoric is a very mundane fact: Most people begin their working careers at the bottom, earning entry-level salaries.

Over time, as they acquire more skills and experience, their rising productivity leads to rising pay, putting them in successively higher income brackets.

These are not rare, Horatio Alger stories. These are common patterns among millions of people in the United States and in some other countries.

More than three-quarters of those working Americans whose incomes were in the bottom 20% in 1975 were also in the top 40% of income earners at some point by 1991.

Only 5% of those who were initially in the bottom quintile were still there in 1991, while 29% of those who were initially at the bottom quintile had risen to the top quintile. Yet verbal virtuosity has transformed a transient cohort in a given statistical category into an enduring class called "the poor."

Just as most Americans in statistical categories identified as "the poor" are not an enduring class there, studies in Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Greece show similar patterns of transience among those in low-income brackets at a given time.

Just over half of all Americans earning at or near the minimum wage are from 16 to 24 years of age -- and of course these individuals cannot remain from 16 to 24 years of age indefinitely, though that age category can of course continue indefinitely, providing many intellectuals with data to fit their preconceptions.

Only by focusing on the income brackets, instead of the actual people moving between those brackets, have the intelligentsia been able to verbally create a "problem" for which a "solution" is necessary. They have created a powerful vision of "classes" with "disparities" and "inequities" in income, caused by "barriers" created by "society." But the routine rise of millions of people out of the lowest quintile over time makes a mockery of the "barriers" assumed by many, if not most, of the intelligentsia.

(via Carpe Diem)

American healthcare is among the world's best. Claims about the number of uninsured are wildly overstated. Cost control concerns have some validity, because -- as with European-style socialized medicine -- the system's greatest flaw is simple: free goods are over-used. Veronique de Rugy starkly depicts American consumers' declining responsibility for medical care:


source: The American


As she observes:

In 2008, consumers were only directly responsible for 11.9 percent of total national healthcare expenditures, down from 43 percent in 1965, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This means that someone other than consumers pays roughly 88 percent of all healthcare costs, giving consumers little incentive to mind costs and much incentive to over-consume. . .

Much of the rationale behind the current reform of the healthcare system is about controlling inflation in healthcare costs. However, based on the trend presented above, a better alternative to the semi-nationalization that the president has in mind would be to increase individual responsibility for medical decisions and costs. When people aren’t exposed to the true cost of their care--even if they pay for it in foregone wages and higher taxes--they consume more.

Agreed--instead of Obamacare, we should sever the link between health insurance and employment.

(via The Corner)

UPDATE: below

Econ prof Donald Boudreaux at Pajamas Media:

The ultimate tragedy in Haiti isn’t the earthquake; it’s that country’s lack of economic freedom. The earthquake simply but catastrophically revealed the inhuman consequences of this fact.

Registering 7.0 on the Richter scale, the Haitian earthquake killed tens of thousands of people. But the quake that hit California’s Bay Area in 1989 was also of magnitude 7.0. It killed only 63 people.

This difference is due chiefly to Americans’ greater wealth. With one of the freest economies in the world, Americans build stronger homes and buildings and roads, are better nourished, and have better health care and better search and rescue equipment. In contrast, burdened by one of the world’s least-free economies, Haitians cannot afford to build sturdy structures and roads. (Haitian builders often add sand to their concrete because concrete is so expensive there. The result is weaker buildings.) Nor can Haitians afford the health care and emergency equipment that we take for granted here in the U.S.

See also Claudia Rosett comparing the U.N. and U.S. response.

MORE:

Anne Applebaum in Monday's Washington Post:

Though the earthquake itself was powerful, its impact was multiplied many, many times by the weakness of civil society and the absence of the rule of law in Haiti. As Roger Noriega has written, "you can literally see the dysfunction from space." Satellite photos of Hispaniola, the island split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, show green forests on the Dominican side and bare, deforested hills on the Haitian side. Mudslides and collapsing houses were routine in Haiti even before this disaster. Laws designed to prevent erosion, and building codes designed to prevent criminally shoddy construction, were ignored. The rickety slums of Port-au-Prince were constructed in ravines and on steep, unstable hills. When they collapsed, they collapsed completely.

So incredibly weak were Haiti's public institutions that nothing is left of them either. Parliament, churches, hospitals and government offices no longer exist. Haiti's archbishop is dead. The head of the U.N. mission is dead. There is a real possibility that violent gangs will emerge to take the place of leadership, to control food supplies, to loot what remains to be looted. There is a real possibility, in the coming days, of epidemics, mass starvation and civil war.

See also why America will be blamed whatever happens.

(via Instapundit, Tigerhawk)

Last month, I noted that -- contrary to lefty assumptions -- the Afghan people support the presence of coalition forces in-country. Contrary to progressive visions of an indigenous liberation movement, a recent survey said the same, confirming widespread opposition to the Taliban.


source: Poll page 8



source: Poll page 10


BTW, the poll was:

conducted for ABC News, the BBC and ARD by the Afghan Center for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research (ACSOR) based in Kabul, a D3 Systems Inc. subsidiary. Interviews were conducted in person, in Dari or Pashto, among a random national sample of 1,534 Afghan adults from 11-23 December, 2009.

(via Powerline)

University of Chicago economists Gary Becker, Steven Davis and Kevin Murphy say Obama and the Dems are choking economic recovery in the January 4th Wall Street Journal:

[I]t was a serious economic mistake to press for a hasty, major transformation of the U.S. economy on the heels of the worst financial crisis in decades. A more effective approach would have been to concentrate first on fighting the recession and laying solid foundations for growth. They should have put plans to re-engineer the economy on the backburner, and kept them there until the economy emerged fully from the recession and returned to robust growth. By failing to adopt a measured approach to economic policy, Congress and the president may be slowing the economic recovery, and thereby prolonging the distress from the recession.

(via Tigerhawk)

From Pajamas Media's Frank Fleming:

The threat of the so-called "crotch bomber" has led once again to some of America’s worst impulses. Instead of pulling together after these trying events, people are calling for a certain group of people to be singled out and excluded. That group, of course, is our latest scapegoat: terrorists.

People fear terrorists, so they don’t try to understand them and therefore remain ignorant of their ways -- or maybe people are ignorant of terrorists and thus fear them. What is certain is that the combination of fear and ignorance in regards to terrorists leads to hate. Unless the hate leads to the fear and the ignorance -- or it occurs somewhere between the two. Anyway, whenever terrorists are brought up in this country, there is some sort of mixture of fear, ignorance, and hate, and it is eroding America’s soul.

Just listen to the rhetoric we often hear about terrorists:

"We should lock up terrorists."

"Terrorists shouldn’t be in this country."

"I hope the government is keeping a close watch on terrorists."

"We should hunt down and kill terrorists."

"I hope this restaurant doesn’t serve terrorists."

"Terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to vote."

"I don’t want my daughter marrying a terrorist."

Does any of that sound familiar? Of course it does. Those are the same hateful things that used to be said about many other minority groups. It’s almost like we’re regressing. Any day now, there’ll probably be a proposal for America to have separate drinking fountains for terrorists.

(via Instapundit)

UPDATE: 2008 per capita GDP (at PPP) data from the World Bank via Carpe Diem; Europe still well poorer than U.S. average.

In the January 10th New York Times, Paul Krugman extols Europe's economic success:

Even calmer conservatives have been issuing dire warnings that Obamacare will turn America into a European-style social democracy. And everyone knows that Europe has lost all its economic dynamism.

Strange to say, however, what everyone knows isn’t true. . .

The real lesson from Europe is actually the opposite of what conservatives claim: Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.

Actually, Europe’s economic success should be obvious even without statistics. . . In any case, the statistics confirm what the eyes see.

I've addressed this misconception before, but surf to Political Calculation's nifty interactive chart from a year ago, and sort by per capita GDP (last column) [added 1/19: Political Calculation's interactive chart of 2008 per capita GDP comparisons]. Professor Mark Perry summarizes:

If France became a U.S. state it would rank #48 out of 51 by per capita GDP, just barely ahead of America's two poorest states -- West Virginia and Mississippi. Belgium, Finland, U.K. Germany and Spain would rank in the bottom 20% of U.S. states by per capita GDP, just barely ahead of Arkansas but below Kentucky. Although Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark are among Europe's wealthiest countries, as U.S. states they would be between 14.5% and 18% below the U.S. average.

(via Greg Mankiw)

It's been a busy new year for lawyers and judges defending or tolerating terrorism. First, the good news: in Al-Bihani v. Obama, Docket 09-5051 (D.C. Cir. Jan. 5, 2010), Judge Janice Rogers Brown's opinion for the D.C. Circuit "embraced a fairly expansive assertion of the federal government’s detention authority." In particular, the majority (at 18) confirmed:

Unlike either Hamdi or Al-Marri, Al-Bihani is a non-citizen who was seized in a foreign country. Requiring highly protective procedures at the tail end of the detention process for detainees like Al-Bihani would have systemic effects on the military’s entire approach to war. From the moment a shot is fired, to battlefield capture, up to a detainee’s day in court, military operations would be compromised as the government strove to satisfy evidentiary standards in anticipation of habeas litigation.

Judge Brown also wrote a concurring opinion (at 1):

[I]t is important to ask whether a court-driven process is best suited to protecting both the rights of petitioners and the safety of our nation. The common law process depends on incrementalism and eventual correction, and it is most effective where there are a significant number of cases brought before a large set of courts, which in turn enjoy the luxury of time to work the doctrine supple. None of those factors exist in the Guantanamo context. The number of Guantanamo detainees is limited and the circumstances of their confinement are unique. The petitions they file, as the Boumediene Court counseled, are funneled through one federal district court and one appellate court. See Boumediene, 128 S. Ct. at 2276. And, in the midst of an ongoing war, time to entertain a process of literal trial and error is not a luxury we have.

I believe I called that one right.

The mixed news came in the next day's ruling by D.C. Federal District Judge Thomas Hogan in Suhail Abdu Anam v. Obama, Civ. Act. No. 04-1194 (D.D.C. Jan 6, 2010). There, Judge Hogan decided to exclude more than two dozen confessions from the upcoming terrorism trial of Musa'ab Omar Al Madhwani. Some statements were made to interrogators in Afghanistan where he captured; others at Guantanamo Bay, where Al Madhwani was "was suspended in his cell by his left hand and that guards blasted his cell with music 24 hours a day." Hogan did ok use of three detainee admissions, finding insufficient evidence of coercion.

The D.C. Federal District Court is subordinate to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, but it's not clear how the recent decisions will be effected. One good sign is that District Judge Kessler has called for additional briefing on how Judge Brown's Al-Bihani opinion affects Judge Hogan's Suhail Abdu Anam ruling.

Some things remain clear:

• KSM's trial in NY Federal criminal court will be a zoo. Defendents' lawyers will employ full Bill-of-Rights protections to put the government on trial.



• It's been widely reported that the underwear bomber "was singing like a canary"--until, treated like an ordinary criminal, he was "Mirandaized" and went silent. So much for advance warning of future terrorist attacks.



• Obama's confirmation of his decision to close the Git'mo terrorist detention facility makes no sense. Git'mo is a humane facility, preferable -- say the inmates -- to a general prison. And it's hardly a Jahadi rallying point, as Charles Krauthammer wrote in Friday's Washington Post:

  Imagine that Guantanamo were to disappear tomorrow, swallowed in a giant tsunami. Do you think there'd be any less recruiting for al-Qaeda in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, London?
  
  Jihadism's list of grievances against the West is not only self-replenishing but endlessly creative. Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwa commanding universal jihad against America cited as its two top grievances our stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia and Iraqi suffering under anti-Saddam sanctions.
  
  Today, there are virtually no U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. And the sanctions regime against Iraq was abolished years ago [some minor exceptions]. Has al-Qaeda stopped recruiting? Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's No. 2, often invokes Andalusia in his speeches. For those not steeped in the multivolume lexicon of Islamist grievances, Andalusia refers to Iberia, lost by Islam to Christendom -- in 1492.
  
  This is a fanatical religious sect dedicated to establishing the most oppressive medieval theocracy and therefore committed to unending war with America not just because it is infidel but because it represents modernity with its individual liberty, social equality (especially for women) and profound tolerance (religious, sexual, philosophical). You going to change that by evacuating Guantanamo?

• The media and Obama Administration reject both Git'mo and military tribunals because Bush favored them. But pique is a poor way to decide policy. Git'mo is lawful and worked; released detainees have a 20 percent recidivism rate.

Conclusion: Keep the terrorists in, or send them to, Guantanamo. Because the Bill of Rights does not apply to non-citizen belligerents captured abroad.

(via SCOTUSBlog, Volokh Conspiracy, Ace of Spades, reader Marc)

From the January 8th NY Times:

An appraisal on Dec. 31 about David Levine, the caricaturist for The New York Review of Books who died on Dec. 29, may have left the incorrect impression that the Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin, the subject of one of Mr. Levine’s drawings, was homosexual. The description of Pushkin as "a gay man" was a reference to his demeanor, not his sexual orientation.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

(via Powerline)

What explains the left's half-century love affair with Cuba? A combination of idiocy, gullibility and anti-Americanism. For forgetful progressives, some reminders:

• Late last month, Cuba blocked 14 Portland Oregon Unitarians from entering the country for "religious reasons." Church members didn't fault Cuba, instead blaming an "unfortunate American held in a Cuban prison accused of trying to 'destabilize'" the regime.



• The December 22nd Seattle Times, echoing Washington Senator Maria Cantwell, praised the Democrats for reversing a Bush Administration policy that supposedly stopped export of U.S. foodstuffs. Sounds serious--except that "[e]xports of U.S. crops, meats and farm products [to Cuba] totaled $707 million in 2008," and, in 2007 the U.S. was "Cuba's main supplier of food and farm products."



• Last week, Spain proposed watering-down the EU's Cuba policy, "to move the EU away from a policy dating from 1996 that makes improved relations with the communist-run island contingent on Havana improving its human rights record and moving toward democratic reform."



• Remember the supposedly capable Cuban doctors? They're defecting to the United States.



• When Cuba's economy collapsed after Moscow's subsidies expired along with the Soviet Union, the mainstream media lauded Cuba for solving its obesity crisis.



• Food remains rare and rationed, according to a January 6th post by Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez:

  The new ration book surprised us at the end of December, just when speculation was growing about the demise of this booklet with its grid-paper pages. It arrived, like every year, surrounded by anxiety and annoyance, submerging us in that approach-avoidance conflict generated by the subsidized. In its little pages I notice the absence of many products that once made up the monthly quota, now reduced to just a monotonous repertoire with insufficient nutritional values and rising costs. . .
  
  
  source: Generation Y
  
  I see my name written next to Teo’s and I’m afraid that his children, too, will receive milk only until the age of seven, be allotted washing soap every two months or a tasteless toothpaste to clean their teeth. I shudder imagining that in thirty years we will still have to prove, with a doctor’s certificate, that we have an ulcer to have the right to a few ounces of meat or a container of soy yogurt. With its minimal quantities and doubtful quality, the ration market has also instilled in us an unhealthy gratitude and a guilt complex that cannot be our legacy to those yet to come. If another December arrives and we receive a new ration book, it will not be because we have avoided the economic cuts, but rather because we have fallen another step lower in our citizen autonomy.

Conclusion: Supporting the current Cuban regime requires shutting ones eyes. As Alberto de la Cruz says:

Twisting in the wind is an all too familiar feeling for millions of Cubans both on the island and in exile throughout the world. For more than half a century a lawless and murderous regime has raped and plundered the island nation, killing innocent Cubans by the tens of thousands. All the while, a disinterested and apathetic world sits idly by, turning their eyes away from the helplessly twisting victims that hang from their necks, their mouths gagged and their hands and feet bound. . .

So that leaves only despots and hypocrites dancing around the tree to the sweet song of rapprochement and dialogue. The hypocrites will always allow the despots to lead and they take extra care not to clumsily step on their feet. Meanwhile, Cubans continue to hang from that proverbial tree, twisting in the gentle wind of apathy.

That's because lefties prefer empty protests to preemptive action and blaming the West for all the world's woes. Remember my rule:

The number of human rights violations in a country is inversely proportionate to the number of human rights complaints about that country.

I'll wager most complaints naming Cuba are aimed at the American terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Meanwhile, not even the elevation of the Obamessiah has moderated the despotic Cuban regime or the suffering of the Cuban people.

(via Babalu Blog, NewsBusters, Carpe Diem, TaxingTennessee)

From CNN:

James Cameron's completely immersive spectacle "Avatar" may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.

On the fan forum site "Avatar Forums," a topic thread entitled "Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible," has received more than 1,000 posts from people experiencing depression and fans trying to help them cope. The topic became so popular last month that forum administrator Philippe Baghdassarian had to create a second thread so people could continue to post their confused feelings about the movie.

"I wasn't depressed myself. In fact the movie made me happy," Baghdassarian said. "But I can understand why it made people depressed. The movie was so beautiful and it showed something we don't have here on Earth. I think people saw we could be living in a completely different world and that caused them to be depressed."

A post by a user called Elequin expresses an almost obsessive relationship with the film.

"That's all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about 'Avatar.' I guess that helps. It's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na'vi will never happen."

(via reader Josh A.)

Megan McArdle in The Atlantic:

One of the most persistent narratives of the recent crisis portrays a nation of unsophisticated home buyers led astray by greedy bankers. Supposedly those bankers were willing to write risky loans because they intended to pass them on to some unwary investor. But this explanation falters in the face of a legion of failing commercial deals. Prospective landlords had all the expertise they should have needed to put a fair price on properties--and the majority of lenders who were originating loans for their own portfolios had ample incentive to perform careful due diligence.

Agreed--twice.

(via Instapundit)

Lefties sometimes invoke the "precautionary principle" as justifying climate change public policies such as an emissions cap or carbon tax. This has the advantage (for them) of inverting the burden of proof and affirmatively using doubt against skeptics--even if the science isn't settled, they say, we must act immediately to avoid the worst case. This post assumes the soundness and validity of such logic.

I drafted this last weekend on the road without time for external research and links, but it occurred to me that I've seen this debate before--and progressives were on the other side. Specifically, President Bush adopted a new "preemption" policy, which was the first of three rationales he cited for invading Iraq. He reasoned that the widely-shared apprehension of Iraqi WMDs meant we could not wait for a threat to become "imminent."

Of course, it turned out that Iraq had few WMDs (though toppling Saddam advanced Bush's other two objectives). But assessing whether or not Saddam had WMDs demanded predictive judgment, which the Bush Administration made on the basis of the best info available. Whether or not Iraq had WMDs required assessing incomplete and ambiguous intelligence and then deciding: yes or no?

Fair-minded observers should agree that predicting earth's future climate is far more complex. True, analyzing the data is similar to reading intel. But climate numbers are only inputs to computer models of enormous complexity. (The fact that climate models often have been wrong is indirect evidence of the degree of difficulty.) Further, the models output high and low estimates of expected warming, not a binary choice. Such possible ranges (i.e., confidence or expected error) are both huge and hugely significant: some warming might be tolerable or even good, or better mitigated in other ways. So there are multiple possible scenarios supporting numerous public policy determinations.

Finally, my question: if we must act now to reduce alleged global warming based on disputed evidence, doesn't that validate the Iraq invasion? I ask because of the high correlation between warming alarmists and Iraq invasion opponents. Might this syllogism at least slow the carbon cut train wreck while progressives pause and parse: "Uh, um. . ."?

I'm back from CES, with some new client work and another flu. So it's gonna take a few days to build up content here. As always, guest-post submissions welcomed.

President Barack Obama, January 7, 2010:

Over the past two weeks, we've been reminded again of the challenge we face in protecting our country against a foe that is bent on our destruction. And while passions and politics can often obscure the hard work before us, let's be clear about what this moment demands. We are at war. We are at war against al Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, and that is plotting to strike us again. And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them.

French paper Le Monde, January 8, 2010 (automatic translation):

War, but not quite like George Bush's war. . . Carefully, Barack Obama has seconded [Bush's] words. "We are at war." . . . Immediately after, he qualified: "We are at war against al-Qaida, an extensive network of violence and hatred", a way to stand out from his predecessor George Bush and his catch-all concept of the "war on terror."

Isn't terror a "network" of "violence" and "hatred"? See also Mark Steyn.

(via The Corner)