Cartoon of the Day

From Nate Beeler in the Washington Examiner:


source: Tuesday's Washington Examiner

Leftist Media Bias of the Day

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.

QOTD

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.

Leftist Media Bias of the Day

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)

Chart of the Day

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)

QOTD

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)

Money For Nothing

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)

Circus, Day 1

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)

Where Are They Now?

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

(via Instapundit)

Iran More Dangerous Than Saddam?

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.

QOTD

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)

Chart of the Day

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)

QOTD

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)

Charts of the Day

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)