No Oil for Pacifists

If you want to see a bipartisan compromise -- a bill that can pass both houses of Congress and that I can sign -- let your members of Congress know. Make a phone call. Send an email. Tweet. Keep the pressure on Washington, and we can get past this.

At 10:55 a.m. the Times’s Jennifer Preston suggested that administration officials might create a hashtag, so tweeting Democrats could jointly target Republicans who are now trying to pass their own debt ceiling plan.

Preston tweeted to a White House rep, saying "@macon44 Hi there. I heard the President ask the people to tweet re: debt ceiling. Are you guys using specific hashtag?"

A minute later, she tweeted a followup to White House staffer Jesse Lee, saying, "Hi Jesse, what’s the hashtag that you guys are urging people to use in their tweets to Congress re: debtceiling." Lee is the White House’s s director of progressive media & online response.

Eight minutes later, at 11:04, the White House’s press shop announced a new hashtag for Democrats to use when targeting GOP members of Congress: "@NYT_JenPreston People responding to POTUS shld use #compromise. As he said, it is ‘time for #compromise on behalf of the American people.’"

At 11:31, The Washington Post reported out the new hashtag, and at 12:32, staffers at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget re-tweeted the same message. "RT @postpolitics: The @whitehouse new media team has said people responding to the President on Twitter should use #compromise."

#compromise You want 2 terms. I want you to have zero. Let's compromise and call it 1.

Today, The Climate Reality Project (formerly the Alliance for Climate Protection) announced a new global campaign to broadcast the reality of the climate crisis and mobilize citizens to help solve it. The campaign kicks off with 24 Hours of Reality, a worldwide, live streamed event on September 14-15.

During the 24 Hours of Reality event, people all around the globe living with the impacts of climate change will connect the dots between recent extreme weather events -- including floods, droughts and storms -- and the manmade pollution that is changing our climate. From Tonga to Cape Verde and Mexico City to Alaska, the event will feature scientists, celebrities, business leaders and concerned citizens, along with former Vice President Al Gore.

I have been asked by many people whether . . . we can now attribute some fraction of the global trend in disaster losses to greenhouse gas emissions, or even recent disasters such as in Pakistan and Australia.

I hate to pour cold water on a really good media frenzy, but the answer is "no." . . . But still, can't we just connect the dots? Isn't it just obvious? And only deniers deny the obvious, right?

What seems obvious is sometime just wrong. This of course is why we actually do research. . .

Connecting the dots is fun, but it is not science.

This spring, he told me that economic growth in the United States and Europe was set to slow again. This was partly because some emergency policy measures, such as the Obama Administration’s stimulus package, would soon come to an end; partly because of the chronic indebtedness that continues to weigh on these regions; and partly because China and other developing countries would be forced to take drastic policy actions to bring down inflation. Now that the slowdown appears to have arrived, Dalio thinks it will be prolonged. 'We are still in a deleveraging period," he said. "We will be in a deleveraging period for ten years or more."

Dalio believes that some heavily indebted countries, including the United States, will eventually opt for printing money as a way to deal with their debts, which will lead to a collapse in their currency and in their bond markets. "There hasn’t been a case in history where they haven’t eventually printed money and devalued their currency," he said. Other developed countries, particularly those tied to the euro and thus to the European Central Bank, don’t have the option of printing money and are destined to undergo "classic depressions," Dalio said. The recent deal to avoid an immediate debt default by Greece didn’t alter his pessimistic view. "People concentrate on the particular thing of the moment, and they forget the larger underlying forces," he said. "That’s what got us into the debt crisis. It’s just today, today."

Dalio’s assessment sounded alarmingly plausible. But when one plays the global financial markets a thorough economic analysis is only the first stage of the game. At least as important is getting the timing right. I asked Dalio when all this would start to come together. "I think late 2012 or early 2013 is going to be another very difficult period," he said.

There was an initial assumption in the West that the end of the cold war in 1991 brought universal jubilation. But time has proved and the show suggests otherwise. Free-market capitalism brought its suppressions and exclusions, as artists discovered. Among other things, some felt, it undermined the purpose and value of art.

Under Communism artists had limited professional opportunities. Those whose work didn’t adhere to state guidelines found no market. They had to support themselves with day jobs, doing whatever they could. If their art touched on hot-button political issues, it was censored, slapped down.

For some artists repression had a psychological upside. It gave their work a clear-cut sense of importance. It established art’s primary value as moral, not monetary; instrumental, not formal. If what you were doing was censorable, you could trust you were doing something right; heroic, even. And this attitude fostered solidarity and the growth of a counterculture in which experimentation, individuality and iconoclasm were protected and nurtured.

The [Times] said it had a net loss of $119.7 million in the second quarter, in part because of a noncash write-down of $161.3 million to reflect the declining value of its regional newspapers. . .

But the second quarter also showed how challenged the print advertising market remained. Revenue declined 2.2 percent, to $576.7 million from $589.6 million, in large part because of a 4 percent decrease in advertising. . .

Excluding one-time items like the write-down and severance costs, the company’s operating profit in the quarter was $82.9 million, compared with $92.6 million in the period a year earlier. On a per-share basis, the net loss translated into 81 cents, in contrast to a profit of 21 cents a share, or $32 million, in the period a year earlier.

[T]he Census report massively undercounts the economic resources provided to poor people. The Census asserts that a household is poor if its "money income" falls below a specified threshold. In 2009, the poverty income threshold for a family of four was $21,756. However, in counting the money income of households, the Census ignores virtually the entire welfare state. For example, there are over 70 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, and social services to poor and low-income persons. Major means-tested welfare programs include Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; Supplemental Security Income; the Earned Income Tax Credit; food stamps; the Women, Infants, and Children food program; public housing; and Medicaid. (Social Security and Medicare are not means-tested welfare programs.)

In 2008, federal and state governments spent $714 billion on means-tested welfare programs, but the Census counted only about 4 percent of this as "money income" for purposes of determining whether a household was poor. The bottom line is that the economic resources available to poor persons are vastly greater than the Census claims.

[T]here’s a general cultural anomie that seems content to watch movies about people in space, but indifferent to any plans to put them there. This makes me grind my teeth down to the roots, but I suppose that’s a standard reaction when the rest of your fellow citizenry doesn’t share the precise and exact parameters of your interests and concerns. That’s the problem when you grow up with magazines telling you where we’re going after the moon, with grade-school notebooks that had pictures of the space stations to come, when the push to Mars was regarded as an inevitable next step. . .

I can see the reason for taking our time -- develop new engines, perfect technology, gather the money and the will. It’s not like anything’s going anywhere. But it’s not like we’re going anywhere if we’re not going anywhere, either -- when nations, cultures stop exploring, it’s a bad sign. You’re ceding the future.

Just got hung up on the "why?" part, it seems. Also the "how" and the "how much" and other details.

So let's prime the pump. Terminate all NASA's current missions, and redirect their efforts to an unmanned-Mars lander. That lander would carry a tiny payload--an unconditional note issued by the United States promising to pay the bearer $20 billion. Upon the successful Mars touchdown, NASA would publish a detailed map of the landing site--and then close. No more federal budget, no more agency. Just a potential future liability.

It worked for longitude--why not similarly jump-start the technological innovation necessary to get to Mars?

Even without a heated argument, a calm discussion is difficult to have with many liberals because they limit themselves to so few sources of information. An interesting exchange is foreclosed by their willful ignorance. It can be like talking with a cult member whose involvement forbids contact with anything that isn’t cult-approved.

When your interlocutor reads the New York Times and The New Yorker, listens to National Public Radio, and watches The Rachel Maddow Show -- all uncritically and in the mistaken belief that these are objective sources of accurate information, what you’re dealing with is a person with an extremely restricted understanding of the country and the world. These parochial news sources reinforce one another. And even worse, the liberal will usually refuse to expose him-or-herself to a wider variety of sources. I, myself, had the experience of emailing a liberal acquaintance a link to an insightful op-ed piece that appeared in a newspaper that is, apparently, on the liberal "do not read" list. In reply, he wrote, "The Wall Street Journal? Please take me off your distribution list, Belladonna." Wouldn’t even read it. He saw the source, knew it wasn’t approved, and that was that.

What not to do: Don’t think you can convert a liberal to your views. Political affiliation has become a matter of tribal and personal identification with a group. Although it may appear to be rational, it isn’t, entirely. It’s emotional. The desire to remain a liberal, even in the face of all the evidence of its failures, is born of humanity’s -- and all living creatures’ -- deepest instincts to affiliate with others and to retain that affiliation regardless of logic or facts.

Two critics of grade inflation have published a new analysis finding that the most common grade at four-year colleges and universities is the A (43 percent of all grades) -- and that Ds and Fs are few and far between.

Further, by comparing historical data to contemporary figures, the authors charge that there has been an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988 in the percentage of As awarded in higher education.


source: NOfP chart via Inside Higher Ed

Rojstaczer and Healy write that the abundance of As is a real problem:

"When A is ordinary, college grades cross a significant threshold. Over a period of roughly 50 years, with a slight reversal from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, America’s institutions of higher learning gradually created a fiction that excellence was common and that failure was virtually nonexistent," they write. "The evolution of grading has made it difficult to distinguish between excellent and good performance. At the other end of the spectrum, some students who were once removed from school for substandard performance have, since the Vietnam era, been carried along. America’s colleges and universities have likely been practicing some degree of social promotion for over 40 years."

Almost all discussions about Medicare reform ignore one key factor: Medicare utilization is roughly 50% higher than private health-insurance utilization, even after adjusting for age and medical conditions. In other words, given two patients with similar health-care needs--one a Medicare beneficiary over age 65, the other an individual under 65 who has private health insurance--the senior will use nearly 50% more care.

Several factors help cause this substantial disparity. First and foremost is the lack of effective cost sharing. When people are insulated from the cost of a desirable product or service, they use more. Thus people who have comprehensive health coverage tend to use more care, and more expensive care--with no noticeable improvement in health outcomes--than those who have basic coverage or high deductibles.

In addition, Medicare's convoluted benefit structure encourages the purchase--either individually or through an employer--of various forms of supplemental insurance. Medicare covers roughly three-fourths of total costs, but about 85% of the Medicare population has expanded coverage with small to limited cost sharing. This additional cost insulation pushes seniors' out-of-pocket costs toward zero, thereby increasing overall utilization.

When the next report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is issued in two years, it will include a forecast for how high the world's oceans might rise by 2100. With 146 million people in the world currently living less than one meter above sea level, the forecast will be vital in determining how much money governments must spend on measures to protect people from the rising waters and to resettle those in the most acute danger.

Eighteen scientists from 10 countries are involved in the task, and their first step is to determine which of the myriad studies relating to climate change's effect on ocean levels to consider. In the end, they are to establish a possible range, with the maximum being the most decisive -- and most contested -- number. Even more challenging, the estimates currently differ by almost five meters (16.5 feet). . .

On the one hand, researchers have published forecasts that are far higher than the result reported in the last IPCC report. On the other, sea level measurements have yet to prove any meaningful rise though there is agreement that they are, on global average, rising.

A Sydney gangster armed with a World War II pistol has been shot dead in a botched Gold Coast home invasion believed to be linked to drugs.

The man, 34, was shot in the leg with a vintage Luger pistol after a struggle with the homeowner at Silvereye Circuit in Gilston in the Gold Coast Hinterland in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Sources say the 29-year-old homeowner told police he arrived home about 1.40am to be confronted by four masked men inside the house.

He told police he wrestled with one of the intruders and the gun discharged, the bullet hitting the man's femoral artery.

Bleeding profusely, he staggered outside and into the street where he dropped dead, leaving a 50m blood trail in his wake.

This afternoon, police charged the homeowner with manslaughter. He is expected to face Southport Magistrates Court tomorrow morning.

[L]et us all remember that the Obama Administration has already pushed through massive tax increases, most of which will fall on the "rich," that go in to effect in 2013 and thereafter. The Wall Street Journal has a nice summary of them here. So the question is not whether the "rich" will pay new and more taxes, but whether there will be another round of increases on top of those already legislated.

"I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd," President Obama warned CBS Evening News viewers about Social Security Tuesday night. "There may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it." But how can that be? Haven't Washington's professional politicians been telling us for decades that Social Security is in no danger of bankruptcy because of those trillions of dollars supposedly just sitting there in the Social Security Trust Fund? Why can't Obama use the money in the trust fund to cover the Social Security checks due to be sent out Aug. 3?

The reality is that the Social Security Trust Fund is, and always has been, an accounting fiction. For almost all of Social Security's history, the amount of money the program received from payroll taxes has exceeded the amount of money it paid out in benefits. The excess revenues, by law, are "invested" in special-issue, nonmarketable Treasury bonds. These bonds are marked on the government's balance sheet as "assets" of the Social Security program, but they are also counted as debts owed by the U.S. government. In fact, $2.6 trillion of our $14.3 trillion debt consists of bonds owed to the Social Security Trust Fund. . .

So will the U.S. Treasury have enough money to cover Social Security checks that are supposed to go out Aug. 3? American taxpayers will dispatch an estimated $200 billion to the Treasury in August. Instead of scaring millions of American seniors, Obama could simply instruct his Treasury secretary to pay Social Security benefits from that $200 billion. But Obama won't do that because he would rather use the prospect of no Social Security checks to scare seniors into pressuring Republicans to raise taxes. There is a word for that: demagoguery.

I do not understand what I think is the maligning and maliciousness [toward] this president. Why is he different? And in my community, that is the question that we raise. In the minority community that is question that is being raised. Why is this president being treated so disrespectfully? Why has the debt limit been raised 60 times? Why did the leader of the Senate continually talk about his job is to bring the president down to make sure he is unelected?. . .

I am particularly sensitive to the fact that only this president -- only this one, only this one -- has received the kind of attacks and disagreement and inability to work, only this one. . .

Read between the lines. What is different about this president that should put him in a position that he should not receive the same kind of respectful treatment of when it is necessary to raise the debt limit in order to pay our bills, something required by both statute and the 14th amendment?

Germany doesn't have the transmission capacity to route the power around to make up for the shut nuclear plants, so it is using portions of grids in neighboring countries. Everybody is suing everyone. The Greens are complaining about power prices, because they just don't grasp the fact that the production cost of wind has nothing to do with the cost of incorporating a very highly variable power source into the grid. The Greens are also very unhappy about the new coal plants. The neighboring countries are very unhappy because when winter hits, Germany's transmission problems may cause them problems -- their lines will be flooded and they might face blackouts themselves. The auto companies in the south are very worried because they may be forced to shut down this winter to conserve power.

Oh, yeah, and just look at where Germany's household electricity rates are. And they have to go higher! The entire boondoggle in Germany would make an Austrian economist weep buckets. . .

This will cost the German economy for decades. It's sad, because Germany was just coming out of a very long period of suppressed economic performance due in large part to reunification costs. The entire situation is highly regressive. Energy mistakes are one of the things that destroy economies. The German economy is particularly vulnerable to high energy costs because it is reliant on heavy manufacturing.

However Germany's idiocy is quite good for the Poles, the Czechs, and possibly the Hungarians. It is likely that more heavy manufacturing will be moved from the country to the eastern bloc.

They [plaintiffs] alleged that since homes in predominantly African-American neighborhoods in New Orleans generally had lower property values, black residents tended to receive lower amounts of federal payouts than other homeowners. Thus, other homeowners were supposedly more likely to receive their damage costs than African-Americans who would most often receive their pre-storm home value. HUD has now agreed with the plaintiffs’ claim that this had a racially "discriminatory impact on African-American homeowners" because they faced larger gaps than white families between the grant amount and the cost to rebuild (where the cost to rebuild exceeded what their homes were worth before the damage).

If you have an accident in your 10-year-old automobile, your insurance company is liable for the cost of repairing the car up to the pre-accident value of the car. It would be foolish and reckless underwriting for the company to be liable for the total cost of repairs if they exceed the fair market value before the accident.

When Obama flew to Hawaii in August 1959, he left behind a young Kenyan wife already pregnant with their second child. . . In the fall of his second year, hardly six weeks elapsed before one new female classmate, 17-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham, became pregnant with their child. The university’s foreign student adviser told U.S. immigration agents, who took an active interest in foreign students whose visas required annual renewal, that she already had cautioned the married Kenyan about his dating habits. When Obama informed her in April 1961 that he and Dunham had married two months earlier, Obama also asserted that he had divorced his Kenyan wife. The adviser told the immigration agency she was dubious of that claim, but that Obama had told her that "although they were married they do not live together.. . ."

Within weeks of Barack Jr.’s birth, Dunham and the baby left Honolulu for her previous home town of Seattle, leaving behind the husband with whom she had never lived. When Obama prepared a resume just before leaving Hawaii for graduate school at Harvard in 1962, he listed "a wife and two children in Kenya," Jacobs reports. "He made no mention of Dunham or Barack Jr.". . .

Obama’s admission to Harvard’s PhD program in economics attested to his academic success in Hawaii, but once again his freewheeling personal life attracted official criticism. A Unitarian minister complained to U.S. immigration that Obama was intimately involved with a young Kenyan woman attending a Boston-area high school, and after two years, Harvard’s international student adviser told immigration agents that the university did not want Obama’s visa to be extended for a third year. Obama had passed the examinations qualifying him to begin writing his dissertation, but Harvard’s action -- expressly motivated by animus toward his personal conduct, and with no academic rationale -- forced the visibly upset graduate student to return to Kenya with only a master’s degree.

But had white antipathy toward his unrestrained personal life not shattered Obama’s life dream of a Harvard PhD, whiskey might not have derailed a brilliant alcoholic from a life of far greater length and achievement.

I remember my mother. She was 53 years old when she died of ovarian cancer, and you know what she was thinking about in the last months of her life? She wasn’t thinking about getting well. She wasn't thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality. She had been diagnosed just as she was transitioning between jobs. And she wasn’t sure whether insurance was going to cover the medical expenses because they might consider this a preexisting condition. I remember just being heartbroken, seeing her struggle through the paperwork and the medical bills and the insurance forms. So, I have seen what it's like when somebody you love is suffering because of a broken health care system. And it's wrong. It's not who we are as a people.

BROKAW: Quick discussion. Is health care in America a privilege, a right, or a responsibility? . . .

OBAMA: Well, I think it should be a right for every American. In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills -- for my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they're saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don't have to pay her treatment, there's something fundamentally wrong about that.

[Health insurance is] also personal for me. I talked about this when I was campaigning up here in New Hampshire. I will never forget my own mother, as she fought cancer in her final months, having to worry about whether her insurance would refuse to pay for her treatment. And by the way, this was because the insurance company was arguing that somehow she should have known that she had cancer when she took her new job -- even though it hadn't been diagnosed yet. So if it could happen to her, it could happen to any one of us.

It was a simple and powerful story, one Obama would tell many more times as president during the national health care debate. But now we're learning the real story of Ann Dunham's health coverage is not quite what her son made it out to be.

The news is in "A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother," a generally admiring new biography written by former New York Times reporter Janny Scott. According to the book, Ann Dunham, an anthropologist who spent most of her working life in Indonesia, moved from Jakarta to New York in 1992 to work for a nonprofit called Women's World Banking, which encouraged micro-lending in Third World countries. Unhappy in New York, in 1994 Dunham took a job with an American company called Development Alternatives, which had a contract with the Indonesian State Ministry for the Role of Women. Dunham returned to Jakarta to work, and Scott reports the job provided Dunham with health insurance, a housing allowance, and a car.

At the time she took the job, Dunham was increasingly worried about her health; she was suffering from intense abdominal pains. In November 1994, Dunham went to an Indonesian doctor who diagnosed appendicitis. As Dunham debated whether to leave the country for surgery, she called her boss at Development Alternatives. "You've got health insurance, that's taken care of," the boss told her. "We can cover the airfare."

Dunham decided to stay in Jakarta, where she underwent an appendectomy. But the pain did not go away, and Dunham feared, correctly, that she was terribly ill. In January 1995 she left Indonesia to go home to Honolulu, where she was diagnosed with advanced uterine and ovarian cancer. She began a regime of surgery and chemotherapy.

That is the time during which Obama says his mother battled insurance companies to cover her illness. But Scott, who had access to Dunham's correspondence from the time, reveals that Dunham unquestionably had health coverage. "Ann's compensation for her job in Jakarta had included health insurance, which covered most of the costs of her medical treatment," Scott writes. "Once she was back in Hawaii, the hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month."

Scott writes that Dunham, who wanted to be compensated for those costs as well as for her living expenses, "filed a separate claim under her employer's disability insurance policy." It was that claim, with the insurance company CIGNA, that was denied in August 1995 because, CIGNA investigators said, Dunham's condition was known before she was covered by the policy.

Dunham’s health insurer had in fact reimbursed her medical expenses with nary an objection. The actual coverage dispute centered on a separate disability insurance policy.

Channeling document forger Dan Rather’s "fake, but accurate" defense, a White House spokesman insisted to the Times that the anecdote somehow still "speaks powerfully to the impact of pre-existing condition limits on insurance protection from health care costs" -- even though Dunham’s primary health insurer did everything it was supposed to do and met all its contractual obligations.

No matter. Expanding government control over health care means never having to say you’re sorry for impugning private insurers. . .

The president’s Dunham sham-ecdote is just the latest entry in an ever-expanding catalogue of Obamacare fables:

-- Otto Raddatz. In 2009, Obama publicized the plight of this Illinois cancer patient, who supposedly died after he was dropped from his Fortis/Assurant Health insurance plan when his insurer discovered an unreported gallstone the patient hadn’t known about. The truth? He got the treatment he needed in 2005 and lived for nearly four more years.

-- Robin Beaton. Also in 2009, Obama claimed Beaton -- a breast cancer patient -- lost her insurance after "she forgot to declare a case of acne." In fact, she failed to disclose a previous heart condition and did not list her weight accurately, but had her insurance restored anyway after intense public lobbying.

-- John Brodniak. A 23-year-old unemployed Oregon sawmill worker, Brodniak’s health woes were spotlighted by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof as a textbook argument for Obamacare. Brodniak was reportedly diagnosed with cavernous hemangioma, a neurological condition, and was allegedly turned away by emergency room doctors. Kristof called the case "monstrous" and decried opponents of Democrats’ health care proposals as heartless murderers. The truth? Brodniak not only had coverage through Oregon’s Medicaid program, but was also a neurology patient at the prestigious Oregon Health and Science University in Portland (a safety-net institution that accepts all Medicaid patients). Kristof never retracted the legend.

-- Marcelas Owens. An 11-year-old boy from Seattle, Owens took a coveted spot next to the president in March 2010 when Obamacare was signed into law. Owens’ 27-year-old mother, Tiffany, died of pulmonary hypertension. The family said the single mother of three lost her job as a fast-food manager and lost her insurance. She died in 2007 after receiving emergency care and treatment throughout her illness. Progressive groups (for whom Marcelas’ relatives worked) dubbed Marcelas an "insurance abuse survivor." But there wasn’t a shred of evidence that any insurer had "abused" the boy or his mom. Further, Washington State already offered a plethora of existing government assistance programs to laid-off and unemployed workers like Marcelas’ mom. The family and its p.r. agents never explained why she didn’t enroll.

-- Natoma Canfield. The White House made the Ohio cancer patient a poster child for Obamacare in 2010 after she wrote a letter complaining about skyrocketing premiums and the prospect of losing her home. After Obama gave Canfield a shout-out at a health care rally in Strongsville, Ohio, and promised to control costs, officials at the renowned Cleveland Clinic, which is treating her, made clear that they would "not put a lien on her home" and that she was eligible for a wide variety of state aid and private charity care.

This sorry spectacle raises two questions: What is Obama lying about now, and how long will the media be able to cover it up for him?

We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.

Before the fall brings us down, before the election season begins in earnest with all its nastiness and vulgarity, before the next batch of stupid scandals and gaffes, before Sarah Palin tries to convert her movie into reality and Joe Biden resumes his imitation of an embarrassing uncle and Newt and Callista Gingrich creep us all out, can we just enjoy Obama for a moment? Before the policy choices have to be weighed and the hard decisions have to be made, can we just take a month or two to contemplate him the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer or a guitar lick by the early-seventies Rolling Stones or a Peyton Manning pass or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement? Because twenty years from now, we're going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph. Whatever happens this fall or next, the summer of 2011 is the summer of Obama.

Since George W. Bush first became president, Democratic senators have used the filibuster 10 times to block the confirmation of nominees for federal court judgeships. They chose their targets cautiously -- more than 200 other nominees were confirmed, some of them men and women whose records were extremely conservative. . .

The Senate, of all places, should be sensitive to the fact that this large and diverse country has never believed in government by an unrestrained majority rule. Its composition is a repudiation of the very idea that the largest number of votes always wins out. . .

While the filibuster has not traditionally been used to stop judicial confirmations, it seems to us this is a matter in which it's most important that a large minority of senators has a limited right of veto. Once confirmed, judges can serve for life and will remain on the bench long after Mr. Bush leaves the White House. And there are few responsibilities given to the executive and the legislature that are more important than choosing the members of the third co-equal branch of government. The Senate has an obligation to do everything in its power to ensure the integrity of the process.

[T]he use of the filibuster as an everyday tool of legislation stands the idea of democratic government on its head. Instead of majority rule in the Senate, the tyranny of the minority prevails.

In the last two Congressional terms, Republicans have brought 275 filibusters that Democrats have been forced to try to break. [NOfP note: wrong--the Times and others confuse cloture with filibuster.] That is by far the highest number in Congressional history, and more than twice the amount in the previous two terms.

These filibusters are the reason there was no budget passed this year, and why as many as 125 nominees to executive branch positions and 48 judicial nominations were never brought to a vote. They have produced public policy that we strongly opposed, most recently preserving the tax cuts for the rich, but even bipartisan measures like the food safety bill are routinely filibustered and delayed.

[In] the last few years in the United States Senate, . . . virtually every measure is filibustered.

Any senator can object to a bill, and often kill it, by triggering the 60-vote threshold. Bills that pass are often watered down or seriously compromised to win the last few votes, long after a majority has consented. As noted recently by Matthew Yglesias, a blogger with the Center for American Progress, the supermajority rule has blocked pricing limits on carbon use and the Dream Act for young immigrants, limited the 2009 stimulus bill, and diluted the reform of health care and the financial system -- just since the beginning of the Obama administration.

[T]here have been many talented and qualified presidential nominees whose appointments have never even been considered because one senator blocked them. . .

Supermajority requirements allow small groups of people to exert undue influence.

The New York Times position on filibusters is easily understood. When Republicans are in power, filibusters are good. When Democrats are in power, filibusters are evil.

Germany to fund new coal plants with climate change fund cash

The German government wants to encourage the construction of new coal and gas power plants with millions of euros from a fund for promoting clean energy and combating climate change.

The plan has come under stiff criticism, but the Ministry of Economics and Technology defended the idea. A spokeswoman said it was necessary as the government switches from nuclear to other renewable energy sources and added that the money would promote the most efficient plants possible.

Funding for the initiative is limited to five percent of the energy and climate change fund’s annual expenditure between 2013 and 2016.

Annual funding for the new plants could total more than €160 million per year between 2013 and 2014 alone, the Berliner Zeitung newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The fund was first established to encourage nuclear plant operators to develop new, renewable forms of energy production. Now that nuclear power is to be phased out by 2022, the fund will pay for research into reducing carbon dioxide emissions from buildings, developing renewable energy sources and storage technologies for them.

Opposition politicians and environmental groups said the plan was wrong because it would promote what they argued were climate-damaging plants.

The German public wants no nukes. It wants reliable electricity. It wants environmentally clean sources of energy. It wants not to pay too much for energy. These desires are going to have to be balanced out.

Entitlements are not the problem for the federal debt in 2011.

Now, calm down. Entitlements are a debt problem. But they are not the reason the federal debt has increased 35% under Obama. I’ll say that again. Entitlements are not the reason the federal debt has increased 35% under Obama.

Obama has not added so dramatically to our national debt by putting new money into Social Security and Medicare. His multi-trillion-dollar deficit-fest has not pumped cash into Social Security and Medicare. Do I need to put this in three or four more ways in order to get the point across? Entitlements are a systemic, long-term debt problem, but they are not what has caused the national debt to spiral from 2009 to 2011.

It’s all the Obama spending on other things -- not on the two user-contribution entitlement programs that America’s seniors now rely on -- that has caused the debt to skyrocket.

The wind turbine backlash: Growing public opposition thwarts green energy drive

Plans to cover Britain with wind farms are being thwarted by a growing tide of public opposition.

Nearly half of all onshore wind farms in England and Wales are being refused planning permission, figures reveal.

The percentage of such developments being refused planning permission has risen sharply over the last five years.

According to data obtained by law firm McGrigors, in 2005 29 per cent were turned down by planners -- rising to 33 per cent in 2009 and 48 per cent last year. . .

Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is sceptical of the Government's climate change policy, including its plans for building wind farms, said: 'The public backlash against wind farms is not surprising.

'It is the inevitable and inexorable consequence of a costly, unpopular and completely pointless policy that is butchering Britain's green and pleasant landscape without having any effect on the climate.

'These green projects are only viable because of multi-million subsidies supporting a few hundred wealthy landowners and a handful of energy companies.

'By opposing wind farms, a growing number of neighbourhoods and communities are protecting both their local environments and their purses from blind exploitation.'

Hamas arrests male hairdresser for Gaza woman's haircut

The Hamas government in Gaza has begun enforcing a law introduced last year banning men from cutting women's hair.

Until now, the law had not been enforced, but this week at least one male hairdresser in Gaza was arrested.

Male hairdressers for women are regarded by many Muslims as against Islamic tradition.

The move is seen as an attempt to bolster Hamas's Islamic credentials against critics who say it has become too moderate.

Italy, long a bystander to the euro-zone's debt woes, was thrust into the maelstrom Monday, as investors fled the country's bonds and Europe's leaders struggled to keep the crisis from infecting the Continent's third-largest economy.

Fears over Italy's solvency and political stability were compounded by market frustration that Europe's leaders haven't yet come up with a solution to Greece's deepening debt problems: The gap between the yields on Italy's 10-year sovereign bonds and safer German Bunds jumped by more than 100 basis points, or a whole percentage point, to a record high of 285.6, compared to a week ago.

No American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.

That isn’t the whole story, however. Unemployment was at 7.2% in 1984 when Ronald Reagan ran for reelection, and he won a landslide. Why? Because unemployment was falling noticeably from its recession high of 10.8% in December 1982.

George H.W. Bush lost his presidency in 1992 with an unemployment rate scarcely different from Reagan’s in 1984. Why? Because the rate had accelerated from the 5.3% when Bush was first elected. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 debate line resonated anew in 1992, to the detriment of his chosen GOP successor: "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"

And look at the flip side of the employment coin. If unemployment were the alpha and the omega of presidential politics, then the Democrats would have won landslides in 1968 and 2000. Instead, Hubert Humphrey and Al Gore lost (the latter, one admits, on a technical knockout). HHH had as strong an employment picture as a candidate could hope to see; the nation was at almost full employment (3.4% unemployment). But the Vietnam War dominated the election, and produced the Nixon presidency. In 2000, ethics and personality arguably counted for as much as the Democrats’ low 3.9% unemployment rate, getting George W. Bush within striking range.

It’s now clear that unemployment is an imperfect forecasting tool for presidential elections.

A Pacific Research Institute study I authored found that the costs of the two flagship federal health care programs--Medicare and Medicaid--have risen far more than the costs of all other health care in the United States. From 1970 through 2008, the costs of Medicare and Medicaid each rose one-third more, per patient, than the costs of all other health care in America--the vast majority of which is purchased privately. And that’s without counting the Medicare prescription drug program.


soure: Weekly Standard

The U.S. health care system is terrible at controlling costs. But it has nothing to do with any phony distinction between "public" and "private" health care spending. It has everything to do with how U.S. government policy protects American health care consumers from out of pocket health care spending.

Consider employer-funded health insurance tax preferences. Tax policy incentivizes employers to compensate their employees, not through cash, but through generous first-dollar coverage health insurance plans. Because the owners of these policies do not have to pay anything out of pocket for most of the care they receive, they have been anesthetized to most health care costs. Meanwhile, doctors have every incentive to push for more treatments at higher costs. So, all thanks to public policy, none of the parties that actually make most private sector health care decisions (neither the doctors providing the care nor the patients receiving it) have any incentive to keep costs low. But this is all labeled "private" spending. The dollars go from the employer, to the health insurance company, to the doctor. No money ever touches government hands so it is not "public" spending.

There are better measures. The OECD also keeps data on out of pocket health care spending by country. Turns out, American health care consumers, as a percentage of total health care spending, pay far less out of pocket than most other OECD countries do. In 2009, U.S. consumers paid less out of pocket, 12.3 percent, than all but three other OECD countries (France, United Kingdom, and Luxemborg). Not surprisingly, France also spends more on health care as a percentage of GDP than all but two OECD countries (the U.S. and the Netherlands). Correlation does not equal causation, but as the graph below shows, generally, the higher percentage a country’s consumers pay for their own health care, the less that country spends on health care as a percentage of GDP:


source: Washington Examiner via OECD dataset

Reducing third-party payments is the key to lower health care costs. As Arnold Kling wrote last year:

You can have the government tell people what they can and cannot have. Or you can have individuals pay for a larger fraction of the medical procedures that they consume. It really comes down to those choices.

[T]he manufacturing sector is as strong as ever. The only thing that has changed is that manufacturing’s share of employment has declined. Yesterday’s blue collar worker is now a service or office worker.

It is particularly odd that the Left should today be the one’s lamenting the job shift away from manufacturing and expressing nostalgia for the 1950′s. When I grew up in the 1970′s, the soul-sucking mindless dangerous awfulness of manufacturing work was a big concern of the Left. They wanted nice, clean, more cerebral and rewarding jobs for manufacturing workers, but now, never satisfied, they want the opposite.

Reports of harassment, death threats, and legal challenges have created a hostile environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas and makes it difficult for factual information and scientific analyses to reach policymakers and the public. This both impedes the progress of science and interferes with the application of science to the solution of global problems.

AAAS vigorously opposes attacks on researchers that question their personal and professional integrity or threaten their safety based on displeasure with their scientific conclusions. The progress of science and protection of its integrity depend on both full transparency about the details of scientific methodology and the freedom to follow the pursuit of knowledge. The sharing of research data is vastly different from unreasonable, excessive Freedom of Information Act requests for personal information and voluminous data that are then used to harass and intimidate scientists. The latter serve only as a distraction and make no constructive contribution to the public discourse.

[W]e think it would be unfortunate if policymakers became the arbiters of scientific information and circumvented the peer-review process. Moreover, we are concerned that establishing a practice of aggressive inquiry into the professional histories of scientists whose findings may bear on policy in ways that some find unpalatable could well have a chilling effect on the willingness of scientists to conduct research that intersects with policy-relevant scientific questions.

Especially when the health of our planet and its stewards are at stake, decisions should be grounded on facts and science not faith and politics.

The U.S. unemployment rate is 9.1%. In right-to-work states the average is 7.9% -- 8.6% adjusted for population.

Between 1977-08, employment grew 100% in right-to-work states vs. the national average of 71% and 56.5% in non-right-to-work states. That's according to a January study that Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder did for the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.

In this period, real per capita income in the right-to-work states grew 62.3% vs. the national average of 54.7% and 52.8% for non-right-to-work states.

Vedder has studied right-to-work laws for decades and argues that this success is not a coincidence.

"I've been looking for ways to show that these laws don't really (impact) anything. But I haven't found it yet," Vedder said.