CLOCKWISE

Trash-Talking TEA Parties

2010-11-14T02:09:00.002-05:00

Kip's Law: "Every advocate of central planning always — always — envisions himself as the central planner.”

The monument to Soviet central planning was . . . a heap of surplus left boots without any right ones to match them. ~ The Economist

The mid-term elections are over. The liberal Democrats have been vanquished from elected government posts, but the TEA Parties' task of righting the tradition of American freedoms is ever ongoing. A small skirmish erupted in the town of Fountain Hills, AZ, located just south of Phoenix.

In Fountain Hills, it seems, residents were permitted to contract with any private trash hauler that they chose. Restrictions generally provided for the level of service the private haulers must provide but left the decision of picking a hauler and right-pricing service in the hands of the town residents. This was red, white and blue American capitalism at work!

Now enter Town Manager Rick Davis with an apparent predisposition toward big government solutions and possibly influenced by big corporation malarky ultimately designed to stymy competition:

I have to be honest . . . I had not yet served in a city that hosted multiple haulers by resident subscription. This was a new concept to me, In my last community, the city contracted with a hauler to provide trash services. Every five years we went out to bid and awarded the contract to the lowest responsible bidder.

The first encounter was won by liberal-leaning environmentalists on the Town Council but two TEA Party organizations, Fountain Hills Tea Party and Campaign for Liberty Arizona, have already began the process to voicing displeasure to these usurpers of individual rights and freedoms. But a contract is a contract, so unless the actions of the Town Council can be legally challenged, the award to Allied Waste Services will have to be honored. Allied Waste Services is a subsidiary of Republic Services, Inc, Crooks & Liars tells us that:

Republic Services has a long-standing reputation for spreading around campaign contribution love, particularly with local and state-level campaigns . . .

So the insidiousness of ever-growing government intrusion is becoming exposed to the light of day. Contractors and government employee unions have become the means by which elected politicians retain their elite political status, as in: "You scrub my back and I'll scrub yours."

In the new deal with Fountain Hills, Allied Waste reduces its fee from $18 per month to $11 per month in exchange for only picking up trash once per week instead of twice (Such a deal!). The twice-per-week service was a required level imposed by Fountain Hills government upon all private haulers in the past, but this has now been swept away by fiat. So the haulers will travel less miles, and get paid more per mile for making less pickup stops. How much of a kickback do you suppose is in play here? Sounds like an investigative job for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio ... who just happens to live in Fountain Hills.

So the TEA Parties have lost because of the vote of only four out of seven officials that they helped to elect. What do you expect will happen when the next municipal election is held?

“I just don’t want Wells Fargo to steal it."

2010-02-13T18:08:00.005-05:00

The Times-News of Twin Falls, Idaho reports this most distressing story:

A retired miner and rancher in southern Idaho, who found long-lost certificates of deposits estimated to be worth more than a half-million dollars, was informed by the bank holding the CDs that they aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

Bill Coffey, who still holds the original certificates, said an attorney representing Wells Fargo sent him a letter earlier this month stating the bank had no way of determining whether or not the CDs had already been cashed-in without being submitted.

The certificates date back to 1979, when Coffey and his son, Ed Coffey, bought about $290,000 in CDs from a bank in Rio Rancho, N.M. The six-month CDs had an interest rate of 10.315 percent, but the rate was required to reset every six months. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Wells Fargo bought the Rio Rancho bank in 1999 — including the bank’s CDs.

In other words, the bank cannot find the original records from the New Mexico bank, so the depositor is being asked to prove that he didn't receive the proceeds from the CD's. Apparently, redeeming CDs without the actual certificate is not an unheard of practice in banking circles. Some banks, it seems, actually accept a simple photo ID in order to make a cash distribution.

There are many missing details that can effect this case. For example, we do not know if the Rio Rancho bank failed and Wells Fargo was designated through the FDIC as the "white knight" banker to take over or whether Wells simply purchased the NM bank. Adequate record-keeping is primary to obtaining FDIC protection on CD's so the acquiring bank certainly had to exercise "due diligence" when the bank operation was transferred.

Bill Coffey is about to hire an attorney, so we will have to wait a while for the "rest of the story."

“It’s not that I need the money because I’m doing fine financially,” Coffey said. “I just don’t want Wells Fargo to steal it. To me, it’s just a matter of principle — they’ve had my money to work with for 30 years, and now I want it back.”

Obama's Mysterious College Thesis

2009-10-23T19:37:00.008-04:00

This post starts at the end ... well almost the end of the tale of Obama's Columbia college thesis entitled “Aristocracy Reborn,” the first ten pages of which were allegedly shown to Time Magazine's Joe Klein. Today Mr. Klein posted this denial on the magazine's Swampland blog page.

A report is circulating among the wingnuts that I had a peek at Barack Obama's senior thesis. It is completely false. I've never seen Obama's thesis. I have no idea where this report comes from--but I can assure you that it's complete nonsense.

The question before the house is whether or not we should believe Joe Klein after he repeatedly lied about his authorship of the Clinton political novel "Primary Colors."

Setting out to trace the source of the Obama thesis story, I was frustrated to find that the earliest posting of the story came from an unsubstantiated article by Brian Lancaster on August 25, 2009 in the Jumping in Pools blog. Pajamas Media blogger Michael Ladeen picked up the story on October 21 and apologized today. Rush Limbaugh carried the story on his program today, and after being made aware of the apparant hoax, advised his audience. Media Matters gloated in what they portrayed as his "fake but accurate" defense. This is the same organization which used fake quotes to smear Rush in order to prevent his acquiring a partial ownership of the St. Louis Rams. Karl Frisch of Media Matters, a far left organization sponsored by George Soros, admitted on MSNBC that they knew that two of the Limbaugh quotes used were "not accurate."

Source verification and substantiation is important, especially on the internet. Dymphna, a blogger over at Gates of Vienna takes verification of assertions very seriously.

Earlier this month I received several essays from ... one of our readers. They make for fascinating reading, but the writer provided no links for his assertions. We discussed this in subsequent emails and he did send me a few references, but no actual bloggeresque-type links.

When he said in one email, “This essay is sweeping in purview. Documentation is readily available but would become onerous if complete”, I left this aside to think about it. Now I’ve thought about it, done a little research (Google is your friend, mostly), and here we are. Like many non-bloggers, our author is not accustomed to the necessity for links to one’s assertions so the two references above were the best he could give me. I did a very brief search on ... [the subjects].

Well, ... we've been blogging long enough to know that when you post on controversial subjects and you don't provide links, those who oppose your pov will appear in the comments with flame-throwers in hand. There will be more heat than light.

When we were newbies, Bill Quick was willing to advise us. One of the things he said was "provide links to your information". So we do. I realize that the MSM "journalists" don't do that, but otoh, we never want to be mistaken for journalists.

As a postscript, to at least ameliorate the carelessness of the of the right wing blogesphere, "because it was plausible." It turns out that Obama's attitude toward the Constitution is precisely why those "in the know' were duped. The Tea Party of Northern Colorado blog points out that the language in the apparent hoax is virtually the same as Obama's words on PBS in 2001.

Here’s a passage from “Aristocracy Reborn”:
… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.
You would perhaps expect this pablum from a post-modernistic Ivy League undergraduate up to his gills in multiculturalism and (as he says on page 100 of his autobiography) “Marxist Professors, structural feminists, and punk-rock performance poets.”
Here, however, is Barack Obama twenty years later, in 2001:
The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society…. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution … that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted, and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change…. I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through courts… The Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day … The Framers had that same blind spot … the fundamental flaw of this country.

Believe it or not, we are not yet done with Obama's senior thesis at Columbia. As a result of right wing inquires made during the presidential primaries comes this TNR blog post, dated 7/24/08, on the missing senior thesis that Obama wrote at Columbia (conveniently, neither Obama nor Columbia could find a copy). The paper supposedly was "an analysis of the evolution of the arms reduction negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States,”

GIVE THE MONEY BACK!

2009-10-22T19:18:00.005-04:00

This important commentary and question from economist Russ Roberts at Cafe' Hayek.

This is the weirdest story of the year:
A top White House economist says spending from the $787 billion economic stimulus has already had its biggest impact on economic growth and will likely not contribute to significant expansion next year.Christina Romer, the chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said Thursday that the $194 billion already spent gave a jolt to the economy that contributed to growth in the second and third quarters of the year. She told a congressional panel that by the middle of next year, the impact of the stimulus will level off.
So if the biggest impact has already happened and the effect is going to level off, can we have the other $593 billion back, please?

UK government TV climate ad is propaganda

2009-10-22T15:45:00.002-04:00

Telegraph (UK) blogger Janet Daley, a liberal American emigrant, attacks the British Government:

The government is trying to terrify you. That is the only possible interpretation of its latest television advertising campaign on the supposed dangers of global warming. Whether or not you accept the scientific premises behind the “bedtime story” advert which is now to be investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority after attracting over 350 complaints from the public, there is no question that it is propaganda in the strict technical sense of the word.

That is to say, it is an attempt by the state to manipulate opinion and evoke emotional reactions without offering argument or evidence for its case. It accepts uncritically the most extreme rendition of the anthropogenic global warming narrative as if it were entirely uncontentious and presents it in the most sentimentally evocative possible way (ie as a threat to one’s own children and to defenceless creatures generally). It uses the techniques once associated with totalitarian societies not to persuade (which is what advertising properly does) but to coerce: to create fear and guilt. And to what purpose? Without offering constructive argument or serious explanation of the options, we can only assume that this is a campaign designed to browbeat the public into accepting any new restrictions or “green” taxes which government may choose to impose. Fortunately, it seems that ordinary people still have the independence of mind to know when they are being bullied.

At least there is an agency in the UK to address complaints against false government propaganda. In America, we have to put up with the twisted themes of the EPA and the DOE adverts using Ad Council radio and TV spots.

Hope -N-Change and Unemployment

2009-10-21T21:19:00.000-04:00

Don Surber reports on information released today by Republicans serving on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee released a chart on how the $787 billion stimulus has worked so far.

Not very well.

49 of the 50 states — and D.C. — had net loss in jobs.

Only North Dakota had a net gain of jobs — 1,800.

If his term ended tomorrow, Barack Obama would be the first president since Herbert Hoover to have a net loss in jobs during his presidency.

Interestingly, Obama has projected a 3,460,000 job gain by December 2010 but with only 13 months to go there is a net loss of jobs totaling (2,708,600). Surber has a breakout by state on his blog.

How's that Hope-N-Change working for you?

Take Me To Your Whiners

2009-10-19T20:44:00.003-04:00

Take me to your whiners. A raging controversy over an "Illegal Alien" Halloween costume which denigrates no particular nationality and actually is supposed to represent a Roswell space alien has sent Hispanics and the liberal press into conniption fits. The "Illegal Alien Adult Costume," in question is manufactured by Forum Novelties.

"He didn't just cross a border, he crossed a galaxy!" according to the costume's description. "He's got his green card, but it's from another planet!

In an interview with Univision's Jorge Ramos, RNC Chairman Michael Steele spoke for the majority of Americans on the subject of illegal aliens saying although you can dress it up any way you want, but undocumented immigrants are still here illegally.

RAMOS: Why do you refer to undocumented immigrants as illegal aliens? I’ve spoken with John McCain and Barack Obama, to give you two examples, and they don’t use those terms they call them undocumented immigrants. Why do you call them illegal aliens?

STEELE: Well, if they are here illegally I got a call it what it is. I mean if you can be undocumented — look you can dress it up any way you want the reality of it is the status is the key feature here, and if the status is such that you did not come through the regular process, that you did not present yourself properly, to be documented then you are here illegally.

Fox and Friends handled the non-issue as it should have been handled.

H/T: SondraK

Fighting the Sioux and the NCAA

2009-10-11T17:34:00.009-04:00

The University of North Dakota's sports teams have been called the "Fighting Sioux" since 1930 in honor of the Indian tribe that is intricately linked to state history and to the very state name of Dakota. Retired UND President Charles E. Kupchella has defended the Fighting Sioux name:

Since the Sioux actually call themselves "Sioux" hardly anyone considers the term to be inherently derogatory or stereotypical, as for example, would be terms like "Savages" or "Redskins." ... We do not have a mascot or any kind of derogatory comical caricature of an American Indian as a logo. Our logo was designed by a respected Indian artist [Bennet Brien] and is similar to the respectful images found on U.S. coins, North Dakota Highway patrol cars, etc.

In 2005, NCAA president Myles Brand, (former president of Indiana University who fired coach Bobby Knight) forged a social policy unrealistic to the purpose of an organization charged with setting sports competition rules among universities. His policy declared Indian images, names and mascots as hostile and abusive toward Indian tribes ... subject, of course, to quasi-legal hearings that permitted the NCAA to mete out judgments and penalties to member universities. As might be expected, justice was most certainly not even-handed among affected schools.

Presented with the "Fighting Sioux" controversy in 2000, the North Dakota Board of Education first ruled that the nickname could stay with UND. Later after an exchange of lawsuits between the university and the NCAA, and after coming out on the the wrong end of two appeals, the NDBofE agreed to end the use of the nickname in 2010 unless the North Dakota Sioux reservations, Spirit Lake and Standing Rock, agreed to support the UND nickname through tribal referendums. Earlier this year the Spirit Lake Sioux passed such a resolution but leaders of the Standing Rock Lakotas refused to conduct such an elections since tribal by-laws prohibited it.

But hope springs eternal, and on October 2, an election took place among the Standing Rock Sioux. From the Bismarck Tribune comes this news:

The Standing Rock Sioux have a new tribal leader and the Sioux nickname may still have a fighting chance.

Wednesday's reservation vote propelled former chairman Charles Murphy back into leadership by nearly a two-to-one margin over current chairman Ron His Horse Is Thunder.

Murphy won by 1,233 votes to 695.

A popular leader, Murphy has since 1983 won six of the last eight chairman elections.

While it isn't certain that the newest Murphy administration will be able to swing a hurry-up referendum on the Fighting Sioux logo at the University of North Dakota, there is at least a new chance.

In recognition of the tribal election, the State Board of Higher Education Thursday voted to extend its deadline and give the reservation 60 days to hold a referendum.

Archie Fool Bear, former councilman and a chairman candidate during the primary, said "I predict a landslide" of support for UND's continued use of the Fighting Sioux name. "A lot of people really wanted to have a vote," Fool Bear said.

The state is up against a February deadline by the NCAA to end use of the Sioux logo and nickname, though a court settlement said it could continue if there was nickname consent from both North Dakota Sioux reservations. Spirit Lake approved its use by a wide margin earlier this year.

The Standing Rock Sioux, whose elders formally conferred the name four decades ago, have been denied a vote because the council, under His Horse Is Thunder, declined to schedule one.

Nothing lasts forever, however, and perhaps Charles Trimble, a prolific writer and an Oglala Lakota Indian, has the right idea:

I have never felt offended by their name Fighting Sioux. And I think there are many Lakotas, Dakotas and Nakotas, both on the UND campus and elsewhere, who feel as I do about it. It is an apt name, and if you want proof just go to a Council meeting on any reservation in North or South Dakota. It anything, the name is a redundancy.

I still would like to hear ... suggestions for a new name for the North Dakota folk up at their University. Think about it: What is North Dakota noted for? With the flattest topography on the continent, it is the wind, of course. How about the name "Blowing Wind?" Or perhaps "Breaking Wind?" The natural motto would be "Wind Power," which is so "in" these days. With that image and perhaps a million-dollar honorarium, they might even get Father Nature Al Gore to give a commencement address.

I laughed at his Al Gore humor and the "Breaking Wind" name, but Mr. Trimble seriously missed an important aspect of the wind ... it is always chilling. So change the nickname to the "Cold Wind" or revert to an unofficial UND nickname from the past which could allow the continued use of the Indian Head logo ... "Nodaks." Since there is no Indian tribe (past or present), the Nodak name (a shortening of North Dakotan) will pass muster. This would put the University of North Dakota in the same weird class of nicknames as the Indiana Hoosiers, St. Olaf Oles, Williams College Ephs, Virginia Tech Hokies and Georgetown Hoyas.

Congress Defunds ACORN For One Month Only

2009-10-08T23:28:00.000-04:00

KTLK, Minneapolis interviews Congresswoman Michelle Bachman on the unbelievable news surrounding funding for ACORN.

K-TALK also posts the Republican Legislative Digest published by Mike Pence (R-IN) which confirms the news that the defunding is short-lived.

I can only conclude that the political criminals that represent the Democrats are supporting the RICO violations of ACORN.

Big Government PSA

2009-10-08T22:07:00.000-04:00

Mimicking Oprah's Harpo Productions "Obama I Pledge" video . . .

Evidence Mounts: U.S. Will Reduce Troops in Afghanistan

2009-10-04T22:34:00.001-04:00

Just seven short weeks ago, our all-knowing, all-caring president addressed the issue of the war in Afghanistan in a speech to a gathering of the Veterans of Foreign Wars:

"This is not a war of choice,this is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people."

Since then "change" has once again entered Obama's mind probably as a result of pressure from anti-war leftist radicals and their allies in the media. Two weeks ago, in a whirlwind tour of the TV talk shows, Obama offered these comments:

Appearing on CNN on Sunday, Obama asked, "Are we pursuing the right strategy?" On NBC, he said he would expand the counterinsurgency effort only if it contributed to the goal of defeating Al Qaeda.

"I'm not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan . . . or sending a message that America is here for the duration," Obama said.

To begin with, Army General Stanley McChrystal had the audacity to warn that failure may occur in prosecuting the counterinsurgency approach to this war unless additional troops follow the 21,000 sent to Afghanistan in August. Military "experts" in the Obama administration , namely V.P. Joe Biden and Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel disagree with the Afghan War Commander, arguing instead for a much more limited approach that could reduce the approved troop target of less than 68,000.

Polls are giving mixed signals.

Fox News/Opinion Dynamics from October 1 reports that 43% approved but 43% disapproved of sending more troops to Afghanistan. Democrats however disapproved by 58%. On a related question 66% Americans say they trust U.S. military commanders more to decide next steps in Afghanistan — that's more than three times as many as say they trust the president more (20 percent).

A CBS/NYT poll, heavily weighted to Democrats, from September 24 nevertheless shows that most Americans do not see an immediate need to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan - only 32% think troop levels should be decreased. Opposition to a increase is 59% overall but this is greatly influenced by 70% of Democrats opposed.

The New York Times seeks to gain Conservative support for winding down the Afghan War:

The conservative pundit George Will suggested as much in a recent column in which he argued for a reduced, rather than enhanced, American presence in Afghanistan. Mr. Will cited the testimony of George Kennan, the diplomat and scholar, to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Vietnam in 1966: “Our country should not be asked, and should not ask of itself, to shoulder the main burden of determining the political realities in any other country. ... This is not only not our business, but I don’t think we can do it successfully.”

Whether Afghanistan is at all similar to Vietnam is another debate all together, but two after-the-fact conclusions can be reached about our abandonment of the Vietnam peninsula. First of all, millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians lost their lives to Communist oppressors after we retreated and secondly. the world Communist movement wained despite their victory in Vietnam.

The War on Terrorism is not Obama's cup of tea since he wants to pull the plug on America's military might and end our role as the world's law enforcer. However the continued backpedaling from fights will only embolden our enemies in Russia, Iran and among the Muslim Jihadists. Walking from Afghanistan will be much worse than leaving Vietnam.

SNL Makes Fun of Obama

2009-10-04T15:48:00.001-04:00

I just about fell out of my chair last night when the opening monologue came on for Saturday Night Live. Even the liberals are making fun of him. this is F-U-N-N-Y.

Enjoy.

Climate Change Fanaticism Is All About Governance

2009-09-25T21:52:00.001-04:00

I am not a scientist, nor am I qualified to judge the value of the scientific data now being gathered about the Earth's climate. I have, however, spent more-years-than-I-care-to-admit advising businesses in matters related to financial, investment and budgetary decisions. Because of the nature of accounting work, professionals usually acquire the mental discipline to find the pertinent facts necessary to justify decisions made. This disciplined mindset tends to sweep aside the murky gray and to reveal situations as black or white, yes or no, up or down.

Until today, I considered myself a climate skeptic, and as a result, I entered into debates on every issue put forward covering unsubstantiated claims and useless proposals from the Alarmist crowd covering such topics as taxing carbon, CO2 levels, oil drilling, renewable energy, global warming, er cooling, and wild projections of our doom as a result of human-caused environmental changes. I was and I remain convinced that there has been no empirical evidence presented that human activity is the cause of changing climate conditions.

Today I reviewed two writings that took my mind above the fray. Now I will no longer engage in idiotic ideological discussions with environmental whackos, those unduly influenced by them and those who will benefit from the implementation of immense unneeded projects. First of all, there is the breathtaking Prologue to Jurassic Park, written by Michael Crichton. The second article is a review of Mike Hulme's book, Why We Disagree about Climate Change, Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity.

Michael Crichton takes our minds above the magnificent sphere that we live on and reminds us that we are but mere piss-ants in the scheme of our environment:

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land.

Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years.

Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety.

Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine.

When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time.

A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Mike Hulme is a UK academic deeply involved with the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which influences the climate policies of governments individually (including the U.S.) and worldwide through the UN. He is among those who has declared that the global man-made warming debate is over. He says that climate change is useful:

“Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.”

In other words, socialists like Hulme can frame the global warming issue to achieve unrelated goals such as sustainable development, income redistribution, population control, social justice, and many other items on the liberal/socialist wishlist.

Like the notorious Stephen Schneider, who once said, “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts one might have. ... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest,” Hulme writes, “We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilize them in support of our projects.”

These “myths,” he writes, “transcend the scientific categories of `true’ and `false’.”

"The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved. Solving climate change should not be the focus of our efforts any more than we should be ‘solving’ the idea of human rights or liberal democracy. It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come."

I have concluded that climate change controversy does not arise from "intoxicating vanity" as Crichton imagined but from political arrogance imposed on us to further the power of the government over the governed; while, at the same time, lining the pockets of the politicians and power brokers. World socialistic tendencies have now become Marxist and the present government in Washington is marching lockstep with this new world order.

Bibi asks UN: "Have you no shame?"

2009-09-24T15:11:00.001-04:00

ACORN Stupidly Sues McKeefe, Giles and Breitbart

2009-09-24T14:55:00.004-04:00

Politico reports that ACORN has filed suit in Baltimore against filmmakers James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles along with Andrew Breitbart, whose Big Government web-log displayed the videos.

The complaint: "The video and audio footage was taken without the knowledge of Williams and/or Thompson and in violation of Maryland's Courts and Judicial Proceedings Code §§ 10-402(a) and 10-410, which requires two party consent to all electronic surveillance. Violation of the law is a felony, and entitles parties whose rights were violated to sue."

ACORN, which apparently is unlicensed to operate in the state of Maryland, is risking further inquiry into its shady operations by challenging the legality, rather than the content of the videos. The criminal lawsuit filed by ACORN, et al brings back memories of another Democrat Party scandal in 1999:

Linda Tripp, whose secretly recorded phone conversations with Monica Lewinsky led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, was charged Friday with illegal wiretapping, making her the only major figure in the sex scandal to face a criminal charge. A grand jury indicted Tripp on two counts of breaking Maryland's wiretapping law. [Prosecutors decided to drop the case when Lewinsky's testimony was suppressed.]

Leon H. Wolf evaluates the ACORN case over at RedState:

Here is the text of the suit, which is brought under the MD Wiretap Act. The suit alleges that Andrew Breitbart, working in concert with O’Keefe and Giles, intercepted an “oral communication” using an electronic device, which would indeed be a violation of the act. The problem, however, is that the statute specifically defines “oral communication” in section 10-401(2)(i) as: “any conversation or words spoken to or by any person in private conversation.”

What this means, as established by the clear text of the statute (and Maryland caselaw, including Fearnow v. Chesapeake & Potomac Tel. Co. of Maryland, 342 Md. 363 (Md. 1996)) is that at least one of the parties to the conversation must have had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the conversation. In other words, if someone stands up in the town square and shouts out loud and someone else records it, that is not a violation of the act.

The problem for ACORN is that, as a matter of law, the employees at ACORN had no reasonable expectation of privacy in what they said to members of the public who entered their offices. As made clear by Katz v. United States and its progeny (made applicable specifically to the Maryland Wiretap Act by cases such as Malpas v. State, 695 A.2d 588, 595 (Md. Ct. Spec. App. 1997)), “What a person exposes knowingly to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection.”

Get that? The conversations in question were knowingly exposed in a place of business to two customers who walked in off the streets. There is and can be absolutely no expectation of privacy for the ACORN employees in question. As such, the conversations are not “private conversations” under the Maryland Wiretap Act as a matter of law.

Furthermore, to the extent that ACORN wants to go after Breitbart (and I hear they are wanting to go after Fox next!) for publishing this information of clear public concern, they might want to check the First Amendment jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court on that question before getting themselves in further trouble.

Global Climate Data Scandal

2009-09-23T23:58:00.003-04:00

The narrative that follows comes from Patrick J. Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and the author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know. The expose' appears only on conservative blogs such as What's Up With That and National Review Online.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”

Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.

So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.

Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were “confidentiality” agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre’s blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.

Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:

"Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data."

The statement about “data storage” is balderdash. They got the records from somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of the world’s surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979.

If we are to believe Jones’s note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?

All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can’t be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there’s no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.

WaPo Goes Full Circle

2009-09-22T18:35:00.027-04:00

If you were given to platitudes, you would dub this an instance of What Goes Around Comes Around. Karma. Give a little, and—30 years later—watch it land a publishing deal. [2002 Washington Post 8 May C1]

Dan Calabrese at North Star National makes a brilliant observation. He asks that we imagine this newspaper coverage of Watergate in 1972:

Post Reporters Deny Using Questionable Tactics to Entrap Nixon

The proposition seemed outlandish. Two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, would accept information from a secret source who would only be known as “Deep Throat.” This information would be so damaging to president of the United States, it would unleash a scandal that would shake the foundations of the nation’s government to its core.

Woodward and Bernstein deny being beholden to left-wing interests, but admit taking advice in their reporting from left-wing editor Ben Bradlee. They insist that no left-wing organization bankrolled their reporting efforts.

The politics of 1972 were a little more civil than today's leftists, so we never saw a newspaper article that questioned the integrity of Woodward and Bernstein. But Calabrese points out that The Washington Post now has political issues to promulgate, so they employ Alinsky tactics in this critical article written on the BigGovernment.com expose' of ACORN in which the veracity of James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles is questioned:

O’Keefe insists that he and Giles’s work was done independently and rejects liberal suggestions that the videos were bankrolled by conservative organizations. He does, however, acknowledge receiving help and advice from a conservative columnist and Web entrepreneur.

As Power Line points out, the "Iron Lady" attempted to infer that there was racist motivation behind the investigation, when the newspaper wrote:

Though O'Keefe described himself as a progressive radical, not a conservative, he said he targeted ACORN for the same reasons that the political right does: its massive voter registration drives that turn out poor African Americans and Latinos against Republicans.

"Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization," he said. "No one was holding this organization accountable. No one in the media is putting pressure on them. We wanted to do a stunt and see what we could find."

So we can contemplate, as North Star National did, exactly what would have happened "if only they'd had YouTube in 1972."

ACORN and RICO

2009-09-21T23:51:00.006-04:00

Barack Obama's former employer, ACORN, is now being exposed as a radical leftist organization steeped in the philosophy and lawlessness of Saul Alinsky. The Washington Times editorial on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) makes some damning points:

Allegations are that ACORN's get-out-the-vote efforts have produced thousands of fraudulent registrations. Since 2004 it has come under scrutiny for producing thousands of fraudulent registrations, and 15 employees intent on exploiting their pay-per-registration policy to make money have been indicted or convicted of voter registration fraud.

ACORN's work has been primarily focused on affordable housing for low-income families first through community activism to force improvements to public housing. In 1991, ACORN began using its community organizing and protest activities to encourage home ownership, lobbying for banks to offer low-interest loans to people of limited financial means with little to no collateral. ACORN's work to defeat the weakening of the Community Reinvestment Act in 1991 found members protesting in the halls of Congress.

Peter Roff reported in Newsweek:

This latest round of problems for ACORN may be the best documented, but they are not the first nor, for that matter, are they the most serious. A report issued last summer by the Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, according to Sunday's Washington Times, "presented evidence that ACORN had engaged in criminal misconduct."

Among the findings, the report said, ACORN:

Engaged in tax evasion, obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting a cover-up of nearly $1 million embezzled by Dale Rathke, brother of group founder Wade Rathke;

Committed investment fraud, depriving the public of the right to "honest services," and engaging in a racketeering enterprise affecting interstate commerce;

Conspired to defraud the United States by using taxpayer dollars for partisan political activities;

Submitted false filings to the Internal Revenue Service, and the U.S. Department of Labor; and,

Violated the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act.

Any one of these is a serious allegation. Taken together, they give ACORN most every appearance of being some sort of massive criminal enterprise worthy of a federal investigation of the sort made under the terms of the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act—or RICO. In fact the group and its affiliates are currently the target of more than a dozen lawsuits related to voter fraud in the 2008 election alone.

We will know that Obama is serious about shutting down ACORN's community organizing racket when an independent counsel begins an actual investigation of the organization. Since George Soros and the radical leftist base of the Democrat party will not support such an action, nothing will happen.

Americans Unwilling to Pay for Health Reform

2009-09-13T23:27:00.001-04:00

Healthcare Finance Newsreports on an important study published by Hoover Institution fellows Daniel P. Kessler and David W. Brady in Health Affairs. Their paper, entitled "Putting The Public's Money Where It's Mouth Is" reveals that Americans are unwilling to pay for health reform.

Many Americans may support the idea of health reform, but only a minority are willing to pay higher taxes to accomplish it, according to a study published in the journal Health Affairs.

In a January 2009 online survey, researchers at Stanford University's Hoover Institution asked Americans whether they would be willing to pay the higher taxes to cut the number of uninsured Americans by either a half or a quarter, through either Medicaid expansion or government subsidies to help low- and moderate-income people and their employers purchase insurance.

Researchers at the conservative think tank also asked whether survey participants would pay higher taxes to support a government subsidy to help chronically ill people purchase health coverage. Respondents were told that this last option would have only a small impact on the overall number of uninsured people, but that it would help everyone else get insurance by subsidizing the sickest people in the market.

Economic Domestic Terrorism Continues With China Tire Tariff

2009-09-12T16:28:00.000-04:00

Obama is wrong again . . . this time in imposing an additional 35% tariff on Chinese tire imports at the urging of the Steelworkers Union and without consent of the Congress. The Truth About Cars editorializes on the soon-to-be-coming trade war. We are now engaged in a pissing match with our largest creditor which imported $11 billion in US automobiles in the first half of this year. Below is the cogent points of the editorial but be sure to read the entire editorial here:

President Obama paid his outstanding union dues and slapped a 35 percent punitive tariff on Chinese car and light truck tires exported to the USA. The new duty will take effect on September 26 and comes in addition to an existing 4 percent duty, Reuters reports. Everybody, except for the United Steelworkers, agrees that this is one of the most boneheaded decisions of the new administration.

No American tire manufacturer supported the case. Cooper Tire even publicly opposed it. No wonder: US tire companies are the biggest offenders (in the eyes of the United Steelworkers), having moved most if not all of their budget segment tire production to low labor cost overseas sites. Chinese tires are not in the USA because China wants to rape and pillage the market. Chinese tires are here, because US tire companies set up joint ventures in China to make what the market demands: Tires for less.

China is not the only exporter of budget tires to the USA. According to the Wall Street Journal, 43 percent of the tires sold in the USA are imported. Only 11 percent are imported from China. The far larger share is imported from low labor cost countries such as Malaysia, India, or Central Europe. What the boneheaded decision does is simply shift tire production from China to other low cost producing countries. These countries can take advantage of 11 percent of the tires effectively removed from the US market. The low cost producers can raise their prices until the market settles. The American consumer will bear the cost. Not a single new job is created in US tire companies. Jobs will be lost at tire distributors and dealers. This decision achieves nothing for America except higher prices and troubles with China.

The American Consuming Industries Trade Action Coalition wrote in a letter to the US Trade Representative John Kirk: “The absence of tires from China in the market will raise costs to downstream consuming industries, including automobile manufacturers, will limit consumer choices and affect most seriously those with the fewest resources. Thus, these tariffs will be the most regressive of taxes.”

Obama's Narcissism and the Straw Man

2009-09-10T23:22:00.003-04:00

Writing in Commentary's Contentions blog, Peter Wehner focuses on perhaps the most outrageous "straw man" put forth last night by the president in his unbelievable speech in defense of his government-run health care initiative. Obama said:

But what we have also seen in these last months is the same partisan spectacle that only hardens the disdain many Americans have toward their own government. Instead of honest debate, we have seen scare tactics. Some have dug into unyielding ideological camps that offer no hope of compromise. Too many have used this as an opportunity to score short-term political points, even if it robs the country of our opportunity to solve a long-term challenge. And out of this blizzard of charges and counter-charges, confusion has reigned. Well the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action. Now is when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together, and show the American people that we can still do what we were sent here to do. Now is the time to deliver on health care. … Some of people’s concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost.

Narcissistic people see the actions of others as results of their own deep-seeded mores and thought patterns. Obama's own twisted thinking is automatically portrayed in the motives he attributes to others. How dare these people disagree with their government? He really thinks, how dare they disagree with me?

Peter Wehner continues his commentary:

This is a case of what is known as projection. It is by now hard for one person to keep up with all the false, misleading, or fantastic claims President Obama has made about his efforts to nationalize our health-care system. They include, but are not limited to, Obama’s claim that the reforms he has endorsed would cut the cost of health care (they would increase them); that they would not add to the deficit (they would add hugely to it); that Medicare benefits would not be cut (they most certainly would); that eliminating “waste and fraud” is enough to cover their proposed reductions in future Medicare spending (the claim is risible); that under his reform, “if you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period” (millions would not); that his plan would not mean government funding for abortion (it would).

It is not enough for Obama to repeat his false claims, day after day, speech after speech. No, he must also portray himself as America’s Socrates, our voice of reason amidst the angry mob, an intrepid truth teller, a singularly unifying and visionary figure, and a man astonishingly free from the ideological baggage that defines his critics. He views himself as the adult in a world of children.

He is also a man of astonishing arrogance. “I am not the first President to take up this cause [health care],” Obama said last night, “but I am determined to be the last.”

Victor Davis Hanson identified Obama's personality defect here, which I believe can only be described as malignant narcissism.

Obama's Radical Propaganda Video

2009-09-06T16:49:00.008-04:00

Following closely on the heels of the brouhaha surrounding Barack Obama's nationwide address to schoolchildren during school hours comes word that propaganda is already being disseminated. The leftist video below was produced by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions:

Children at Eagle Bay Elementary School in Farmington, Utah were shown this short video on August 28. Danny Davids at SearchWarp defines the issues with the video:

It appears there are two issues with the video. The first is that some of the causes these celebrities pledge to support, like stem cell research, are "hot button" issues that already cause concern among a significant portion of the American population. The second is two statements made towards the end of the video. The first is issued by Anthony Kiedis of the band Red Hot Chili Peppers. As he kisses his tattooed biceps, he says, "I pledge to be of service [kiss] to Barack Obama [kiss]." Later as Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher stand side by side, they say, "I pledge to be a servant to our president and all mankind." It's the idea promoted in this video that the people of the United States should pledge to be a servant to the President, rather than the President being the servant of the people, that has opponents so upset.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami hammers home the reality of American exceptionalism that Obama, with his foreign upbringing will never understand:

American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the "mandate of heaven" is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.

There is no doubt in my mind that an "I pledge" video would be better accepted if it started or ended with: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America . . ."

Keep Away From Our Children!

2009-09-02T21:17:00.005-04:00

Listen to Glenn Beck and read the advice from ByteStyle.tv:

This Tuesday Sept. 8th President Obama is planning to address the nation's school children DIRECTLY, through a live internet broadcast at 12 noon. If you do not want Obama to have access to your children to say whatever he wants to them during their school hours without you being there, there are a few things you can do:

-Call the school's principal to find out whether the school was planning to show the speech, and if they are, let the principal know that you feel the role of the school is to educate, not to indoctrinate, and that you do not consent to have your child spoken to directly by any politician or government official, for any reason. Maybe if enough parents call, the school will not show the speech to students.

-If the school is going ahead with plans to show the speech, you can keep your child out of school that day.

-You can write up a consent form that would allow a parent of your choice, in your community, to remove your child (and all other children whose parents consent to it) from the area where the speech is being broadcast, and for that period of time, engage the children in some alternate educational activity, such as reading the text of the Constitution, for example.

Here is the government website, with details of the event:
http://www.ed.gov/index.jhtml

and a letter from Education Secretary Arne Duncan to School Principals, encouraging them to broadcast the speech, and to accompany it with other activities promoting the same agenda:
http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/academic/bts.html
[Check out the suggested activities that are meant to accompany the speech-- I think the intention is for schools to make this a day-long event in honor of the President]

The ostensible message that students should work hard to educate themselves may seem relatively benign, but the insidious subtext is that you should work hard not for yourself and your own individual happiness, but for the country, society, the state-- to make America more competitive in the world, to raise standards of living (through redistribution, presumably) for all Americans, etc... I personally don't want my children to grow up believing that they exist to serve the state, that it is somehow normal to think this way.
But fundamentally, it doesn't really matter what it is that Obama is planning to tell American children on Tuesday. What does matter is that it is totally inappropriate for him to be addressing children directly at a time when they are away from their parents, and a captive audience in their classrooms. State indoctrination of children is a hallmark of totalitarian government. Don't let it happen here.

Helicopter Ben Lives On

2009-08-25T22:19:00.012-04:00

From Bubble Meter comes the explanation of Ben Bernanke's nickname: "Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is known by the derogatory nickname 'Helicopter Ben.' The nickname comes from a speech he gave in 2002, in which he referenced Milton Friedman's metaphor of a helicopter dropping money on a community as a way to rescue the economy." Bubble Meter then waxes poetic:

Real estate was
The way to get rich.
Just buy a home
And give it a flip.

If you bought more house
Than you can afford,
Helicopter Ben
Will dump cash your door.

He's Helicopter, Helicopter,
Helicopter Ben,
The money-throwing man
Who works at the Fed.

Money from the clouds,
Money from the sky,
Manna from heaven,
Thank that helicopter guy.

Everybody loves Ben, including Prez Zero, who just re-appointed Bernanke for his second term as head of the Fed. "As an expert on the causes of the Great Depression, I’m sure Ben never imagined that he would be part of a team responsible for preventing another." Russell Roberts from Cafe Hayek considers the effect of government bailouts:

Yes, we have avoided a depression. But let us count the costs.

Financial firms that made irresponsible and imprudent decisions have been rescued, propped up and bailed out.

AIG has received about $180 billion. That is almost $2,000 for every American household. That money has gone to sustain the bonuses of AIG and the financial health of its counterparties, such as Goldman Sachs. This is an obscene travesty.

The Fed currently holds $600 billion worth of Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie mortgage-backed securities. I am not optimistic about how that will turn out.

The Fed has injected hundreds of billions of reserves into member banks. This will fuel future inflation unless Bernanke is willing to raise interest rates when the recovery begins. There will be tremendous political pressure on him not to do so. So inflation is likely to come along with any recovery.

Worst of all, Bernanke, Paulson and Timothy Geithner have continued the disastrous policy of sustaining bondholders and creditors of reckless financial institutions. Capitalism is a profit-and-loss system. The profits encourage risk-taking. The losses encourage prudence. The bondholders and creditors are the single most important check on imprudence. They care only about one thing: solvency. By making them whole, their incentive to restrain recklessness has been greatly weakened. This sows the seeds of the next financial crisis.

I feel sorry for Bernanke. In one sense, as the world's greatest living authority on the Great Depression, he is the best man for the job. But because he is the world's greatest living authority on the Great Depression, another catastrophic economic debacle of a similar magnitude would be particularly embarrassing were it to occur on his watch. I believe he has gone too far in the other direction.

So perhaps Bernanke can explain why he supported appointment of Denis Hughes, president of the New York state branch of the AFL-CIO, as the new Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Hughes has never worked in banking.

MacGuffie's Readers

2009-08-23T15:31:00.010-04:00

After the Obama Stimulus package made its way through congress with only Democrat votes and support, representatives from East Coast states caught up in liberal orthodoxy found angry constituents when they arrived home for the June break. Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) found an angry mob waiting at his Setauket, Long Island town hall event on June 22. Suffolk county is not particularly known as a Republican stronghold.

On June 4, Rep. Jim Himes held a town hall meeting in Southport, CT that was described as a "sometimes raucous public forum" covering the issues of stimulus, cap and trade, health care and school vouchers. Prosperous Fairfield County, Ct. has its fair share of Republicans but Rep.Himes is a Democrat and a former VP for Goldman Sachs.

These two meetings became a part of the focus of Think Progress, a really radical liberal blog, to make a case that right-wing protesters required that police be used to free Rep. Bishop from the grasp of angry protesters and that a national conservative group had organized the Connecticut protest employing "astroturfing" techniques. But as Mickey Kaus, writing in Slate, noted: "If an "astroturfing" campaign gets real people to show up at events stating their real views, isn't it ... community organizing?"

Fixed into Think Progressive's sights was a document published by the titular head of a small Connecticut PAC called Right Principles. That document contains instructions on the best way to get you points across in a town hall meeting and the author was Bob MacGuffie. So now Democrats and their media supporters at ABC News, the Washington Post, CNN, The New York Times, CBS and Media Matters have declared town hall events as organized rather than spontaneous protests. As Townhall's Meredith Jessups has pointed out, the Dems were getting nowhere with Limbaugh so Bob MacGuffie became the isolated and ridiculed victim of Alinsky Rule #12. However , a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Liberal 'astroturfing" documents appeared such as this one.

The most enjoyable part of Think Progressive's tirade against the Right is this story about the town hall protesters faced by Moderate Republican Mike Castle (R-DE).

The event rapidly devolved into a moblike atmosphere as conservative activists challenged Castle with the full spectrum of right-wing conspiracy theories:
‘Socialized Medicine’ Will Destroy The Nation ‘Faster Than The Twin Towers.’ Audience member: “I don’t have the answers for how to fix the broken pieces of our health care system, but I know darn well if we let the government bring in socialized medicine, it will destroy this thing faster than the twin towers came down.” [Applause and cheers]

The Cap And Trade ‘Tax’ Will Kill The American Economy. Audience member: “Do you have any idea what that cap and trade tax thing, bill that you passed is going to do to the Suffolk County poultry industry? That’s how chicken houses are heated, with propane. It outputs CO2. I mean, I’m outputting CO2 right now as I speak. Trees need CO2 to make oxygen! You can’t tax that!”

Global Warming Is A Hoax. Audience member: “I’m actually hopeful that this vote that you made was a vote to put you out of office. [Raucous applause and cheers.] … You know, on this energy thing, I showed you, I had in my email to you numerous times there are petitions signed by 31,000 scientists that that know and have facts that CO2 emissions have nothing to do and the greenhouse effect has nothing to do with global warming. It’s all a hoax! [Applause.] First of all, I cannot for the life of me understand how you could have been one of the eight Republican traitors!” [Applause and whoops.]

Global Warming, Like Darwinian Evolution, Is Just A Theory. Audience member: “It’s still a theory, so is Darwin’s theory of evolution! And yet we have the audacity to say global warming is accurate, it’s more than a theory? How about how cold it’s been this spring. Personal data, data shows that since 1998 average temperatures have been cooling!”

The Swine Flu Epidemic Is A Conspiracy To Force AIDS-Infected Vaccines On The American Public. Audience member: “The virus was built and created in Fort Dix, a small bioweapons plant outside of Fort Dix. This was engineered. This thing didn’t just crop up in a cave or a swine farm. This thing was engineered, the virus. Pasteur International, one of the big vaccine companies in Chicago, has been caught sending AIDS-infected vaccines to Africa. Do you think I trust — I don’t trust you with anything. You think I’m going to trust you to put a needle full of dead baby juice and monkey kidneys? Cause that’s what this stuff is grown on, dead babies!”

President Obama Is Not A Citizen Of The United States. Audience member: “Congressman Castle, I want to know. I have a birth certificate here from the United States of America saying I’m an American citizen, with a seal on it. Signed by a doctor, with a hospital administrator’s name, my parents, the date of birth, the time, the date. I want to go back to January 20th and I want to know why are you people ignoring his birth certificate? [Applause and cheers.] He is not an American citizen! He is a citizen of Kenya!” [Applause]

I love it! Wish I had been there.

Semper Fi, Marine!

2009-08-22T19:05:00.005-04:00

Catch 22 for Milk Carton Politicians

2009-08-21T21:43:00.005-04:00

The liberal Portsmouth (NH) Herald has some stern words for congressional wallflowers at the Health Care Town Hall dance.

The congressional schedule lists Aug. 8 to Sept. 7 as "district work period."

That means go home and meet and talk with the people of your district. And that's what many members of Congress do.

However, this year members of Congress came home to find some of their constituents concerned about the direction Washington and the Obama administration are taking the country. Some are angry about the bailouts of the banking and automobile industries. Some think the country is being pushed toward becoming a socialistic state. And some are scared about — and don't want — potential changes in health care being spurred on at a rapid pace by the president. As a result, in some districts outside New England, there have been instances of people disrupting the typical so-called town hall meetings that members hold by angrily shouting down the senators or representatives and just plain disrupting the purpose of the event.

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania . . . said, "Traditionally, people who come to town meetings have objections. They may not be representative of America, but they are significant, and their views have to be taken into account."

What he was saying is members of Congress can't duck the tough questions and expect to continue to be respected, or even re-elected.

N.H. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen had a telephone town meeting conference call a couple of weeks ago and Rep. Carol Shea-Porter's spokeswoman said the congresswoman who represents the Seacoast plans to hold a phone call session as well. But she does not plan to hold any town hall meetings.

The whole concept of a telephone town hall meeting is flawed. We live in New England, where the town meeting form of government originated and where it still thrives. We know how a town meeting is supposed to work, and it certainly isn't by telephone. It is neighbors meeting face-to-face to discuss the issues.

In the words of Jamie Radice, a Shea-Porter spokeswoman: "The purpose of town halls is to allow members of Congress to hear from their constituents, provide information about legislation, and to exchange ideas and perspectives."

Correct. So why isn't she having any?

The conclusion has to be that she doesn't want to face questions from people who disagree with her positions, particularly on health care. We find this curious and regrettable . . .

Leo Morris, Editorial Page Editor of The News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne, Indiana shows us the comedic side of this very serious failure of congress to interact with constituents. In his Opening Arguments blog, Leo writes:

Well, that’s not too cowardly, is it? I’m reminded of Major Major, one of the characters in Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.” As Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope summarizes:
Major Major is a commander who doesn’t command. He hates dealing with people, and is somewhat frightened of them. He therefore instructs his receptionist/orderly that, whenever he is in his office, any visitors should be told he is out. When he leaves his office (sneaking out the back window), the receptionist can send visitors in to see him. In short, the only time you can see Major Major in his office is when he’s out. If he’s in, you can’t see him.

Tom Ridge: Book Income Trumps Loyalty

2009-08-21T15:31:00.008-04:00

“The bastards are watching.”

"We can never guarantee we will be free from another attack. We must also understand that every day thousands and thousands of our fellow citizens work here and abroad to take us to a new level of readiness and security. For in the end, Americans do not live in fear. We live in freedom. And we will let no one take that freedom away."

—Tom Ridge, from THE TEST OF OUR TIMES

No one has read Tom Ridge's "tell all" book but his publishing house, Macmillan, is hyping the book with these tidbits:

When our nation called, Tom Ridge answered. Appointed by the President to head up domestic security, Ridge established the Department of Homeland Security. In this probing and surefooted memoir, Ridge takes us through the challenges he and his new department faced, including Anthrax scares and reports (both real and false alarms) of new Al-Qaeda operations sprouting up in the United States.

A “law and order” Republican who was on the shortlist to be John McCain’s running mate in 2008, Ridge writes with refreshing candor on both the successes and missteps of the DHS. He details the obstacles faced in his new post—often within the administration itself—as well as the failures of Congress to provide for critical homeland security needs, and the irresponsible use of terrorism by both parties to curry favors with voters. Ridge also reveals:

• How the DHS was pressured to connect homeland security to the international “war on terror.”

• How Ridge effectively thwarted a plan to raise the national security alert just before the 2004 Election.

• How Ridge had pushed for a plan (defeated because of turf wars) to integrate DHS and FEMA disaster management in New Orleans and other areas before Hurricane Katrina.

The New York Times reported these additional details contained in the book:

Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, asserts in a new book that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national threat level just before the 2004 election in what he suspected was an effort to influence the vote.

After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

Members of George W. Bush's staff have an entirely different view of the events cited in Mr. Ridge's book. The NY Times interviewed several key administration officials:

Keith M. Urbahn, a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld, said the defense secretary supported letting the public know if intelligence agencies believed there was a greater threat, and pointed to a variety of chilling Qaeda warnings in those days, including one tape vowing that “the streets of America will run red with blood.”

“Given those facts,” Mr. Urbahn said, “it would seem reasonable for senior administration officials to discuss the threat level. Indeed, it would have been irresponsible had that discussion not taken place.”

Mr. Urbahn said “the storyline advanced by his publisher seemingly to sell copies of the book is nonsense.”

Mr. Ashcroft could not be reached for comment. But Mark Corallo, who was his spokesman at the Justice Department, dismissed Mr. Ridge’s account. “Didn’t happen,” he said. “Now would be a good time for Mr. Ridge to use his emergency duct tape.”

Frances Fragos Townsend, who was Mr. Bush’s homeland security adviser, said that “there was a fulsome debate” about the threat level but that “the politics of it were not ever a factor.”

Politico talked to more Bush administration folks:

“We went over backwards repeatedly and with great discipline to make sure politics did not influence any national security and homeland security decisions,” former White House chief of staff Andy Card told POLITICO. “The clear instructions were to make sure politics never influenced anything.”

“I’m a little mystified,” former homeland security adviser Fran Townsend added in an interview. “Never in my experience did I see any political influence exerted on the cabinet secretary.”

Townsend said Thursday that the accusations do not match her recollection of events and that any suggestion that the White House’s political team tried to alter the threat level is untrue.

“Under no circumstance was Tom Ridge or anyone else directed to change the threat level,” Townsend said. “It didn’t work that way, and it certainly didn’t work that way in 2004. It was always an apolitical process.”

“At no point when I was working with him did he express concerns about the raising or the lowering of the threat alert level,” Townsend said.

Townsend and Card also said that the process used to change the terror threat level made almost any claim of political influence impossible. Both said any change originated with DHS and was then referred to the National Security Council. The NSC then made a recommendation to the president which was then either agreed to or rejected.

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, whose own tell-all book was disputed by several top members of the Bush team, suggested in an e-mail to POLITICO that Ridge’s claim may have some validity, though he predicted that if the former Cabinet secretary cannot completely back his claim, his former colleagues will push back hard.

“It is one thing if he is saying he simply felt it was politically motivated. It is quite another if he has specific information showing it was politically motivated,” McClellan wrote.

Tom Ridge is certainly entitled to his opinion on the motivation for elevating the color-coded security level in August 2004, but opinion counts for little these days.

Sign of the Times

2009-08-19T20:17:00.003-04:00

H/T: Doug Ross

Sage Health Care Commentary

2009-08-17T22:26:00.005-04:00

The government's proper role in health insurance is to help subsidize those who cannot afford it, to ensure transparency so that people can shop intelligently, and to prosecute fraud, abuse, and anti-competitive behavior.

But the government should not create a state-run market that inevitably will limit competition, inflate costs, and prevent innovation. As in the rest of the economy, the American public should shop for itself.

~"Obamanopoly", by Regina Herzlinger, professor of business at Harvard University, in the National Review

H/T: Mark Perry

Obama's Latest Health Care Lie

2009-08-16T21:54:00.004-04:00

Dick Morris considers Obama's message sent through his minions on the Sunday talk shows.

President Obama's retreat from his previous insistence on establishing a government owned insurance company to compete with private health insurers will do nothing at all to mitigate the massive rationing in medical care to the elderly his legislation will force.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, in a rare moment of profundity, said that government alternative to private health insurance is "not the essential element" of the administration's healthcare overhaul.

How right she is.

The fundamental equation that means worse and worse medical care for our seniors remains exactly as it was before the public option was abandoned: Fifty million new patients to be treated and no extra doctors or nurses to care for them. The result will be precisely the same whether or not there is a public option -- massive rationing of medical services to the elderly.

The legislation still plans to achieve 40% of its savings from cuts in Medicare, slicing reimbursement rates to doctors and hospitals encouraging them shortchange their elderly patients as a matter of economic necessity and shrinking further the population of doctors.

The standards and protocols of the newly established Federal Health Board are just as likely to direct the denial of care to seniors for such surgeries as hip and knee replacements and even coronary artery bypass as before the Obama retreat.

Socialized single-payor health insurance remains as Obama's objectve. As Morris pointed out, the progressive money machine that backs Obama have outspent opponents $56 million to $9 million. HHS Secretary Katherine Sabelius spouted the party line:

Under a proposal by Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., consumer-owned nonprofit cooperatives would sell insurance in competition with private industry, not unlike the way electric and agriculture co-ops operate, especially in rural states such as his own.

With $3 billion to $4 billion in initial support from the government, the co-ops would operate under a national structure with state affiliates, but independent of the government. They would be required to maintain the type of financial reserves that private companies are required to keep in case of unexpectedly high claims.

“I think there will be a competitor to private insurers,” Sebelius said.

The "initial" $3 billion plus in government support is troubling as Alamo City Pundit explains:

Insurance Plans like Life, Auto, or Home Insurances are required to have Reserves, as Secretary Sebelius notes. Health Insurance is about managing cash flow; the cash comes in (from monthly premiums) and gets paid out almost immediately for treatments, visits, etc. There are no cash reserves in Medical Insurance – the money comes right in and goes right out.

Noted author and lifelong Insurance salesman Marcus Henderson Wilder had these observations:

1. The co-ops will get all the uninsurables.
2. Costs will go through the roof.
3. Costs will go into orbit.
4. The government will have to bail out the co-ops again or let them crash.
5. Higher premiums will drive away the healthy.

Dafydd over at Big Lizards is thinking along the same lines:

The problem is structurally similar to the government option: If co-ops are allowed by law to operate at a loss or subsidized whenever they lose money, they can always undercut any private health-care plan; thus, employers will feel irresistable pressure to force all employees into the co-op plan... and in effect, you have a mandatory government "option" by proxy.

As a thought experiment, . . . imagine if food co-ops were allowed to operate at a loss and were continually replenished by tax money; this would give them cover to sell food at such artificially low prices that the free market could never compete. Eventually, private grocers would be driven out of business, and the government -- operating through its stalking-horse co-ops -- would be the sole provider of provender... a situation fraught with peril: Whenever government gains a monopoly, it introduces political considerations into the decision of who is allowed access to that product or service, whether food or health care.

However, if the health-insurance co-ops are not subsidized, and especially if mismanagers are allowed to go bankrupt and disappear, that would be a huge improvement in the bill.

When these considerations are factored in the health care fight by opponents should continue. Unfortunately, this cooperative ply (thanks for nothing, Senator Conrad) will likely sway fence-sitting Republican Senators Conrad, Grassley, Collins, Snow and Enzi.

Green Cars? Maybe Not

2009-08-16T12:05:00.015-04:00

We have been inundated with news heralding the advent of the emissions free, petroleum free electric car. First the newly-minted Government Motors announced that their almost all-electric Chevrolet Volt would run 236 miles per gallon of gasoline equivalents. The following day, Nissan announced that it will launch the all-electric Nissan Leaf in selected locations worldwide next year.

Not to be outdone, the spender of our children's children's life savings, Prez Zero, announced $2.4 billion in stimulus grants to battery manufacturers including a grant to LG Chemical, a Korean firm, to build a Michigan plant to produce Chevy Volt batteries and money to GM to build a 200 car Volt test fleet.

The NY Post, however, points out that all that glows is not green:

Chevrolet notes that the key to high-mileage performance to the tune of 230 miles per gallon "is for a Volt driver to plug into the electric grid at least once each day" to get "40 miles of electric-only, petroleum-free driving."

But that won't be "petroleum-free" in much of the country -- because so many utilities use heavy fuel oil to generate that electricity.

At current electricity-production levels, these plants emit as much as hundreds of thousands of cars on the road each day. If a few thousand well-meaning dupes plug a few thousand new Chevy Volts into electrical outlets (especially in urban centers), you could actually add millions of pounds of dangerous, dirty, unregulated pollution and carbon into the air we breathe -- possibly more pollution than would be offset by putting the Volts on the road.

That's if the electricity grid can handle the added load. In fact, all across the nation, the grid is fragile, antiquated and maxed out.

This rush to make electric cars the designated replacement for petroleum-based vehicles may be, like all government "instant-gratification" schemes, ill-advised. Development focus need to concentrate on two far more important factors - infrastructure and commercial viability. To its credit, Nissan, along with its majority owner and partner Renault, has been defining, developing and emphasizing new-wave infrastructure to support its EV technology. The heavy lifting on this development work has been done by start-up Better Place, which eventually will provide charged batteries to electric vehicle drivers. Israeli entrepreneur and Better Place CEO, Shai Agassi's idea is similar to designing buildings with seven foot doorways which then require only those over seven foot tall to duck.

Agassi, formerly an executive with the global software company SAP, struck upon what he thinks will become a paradigm shift for the auto. In his plan, owners of electric vehicles subscribe with his company. In exchange for the fees they pay, they get the right to swap their batteries at a large network of re-fueling stations, or charge up at special plug-in spots located at work or even their home. The car’s computer shows the way when the charge is low.

What about the notorious range problem for all-electric vehicles? Better Place claims their vehicle, developed by the Renault-Nissan Alliance, will have a range of 100 miles. Roughly 95% of all daily auto trips in the U.S. are less than 30 miles, and over 99% are less than 100 miles. Given a liberal smattering of battery changing stations, the range problem is vastly reduced.

The monthly charging fees will be configured much like cell phone fees.

Agassi also gave more details on how Project Better Place will sell its service and mimic cell-phone plans. First off, the consumer will buy the car, which will be similar to or below the cost of a traditional car — the electric car in Israel will be half the price of a normal gasoline car, and in Denmark could be as low as $20,000, he said.

Then he named three different possible subscription plans:

* The Prepaid card model: The EV car owner could buy, say, 300 miles in advance and ‘pay as you go.’
* The Rollover Plan model: Under this plan the consumer could buy a certain amount of packaged miles every month, and take the miles and move them from one month to the next. It’s like cell phone’s “rollover” minutes, but Agassi quipped that rollover miles might not be the best name for the car industry. Agassi said that if a car owner bought 1,000 miles, Project Better Place would guarantee the price, and focus groups have found that the average time people might want that plan is 3.5 years.
* The MetroPCS plan: The way MetroPCS offers something like $75 per month, and you can drive as much as you want and have as many drivers as you want. Like the one-rate, all-you-can-eat-plan. Agassi says if consumers sign up for that plan for a fixed amount of time, maybe six years in Israel, they’ll give away the car for free.

The real problem with electric vehicles will come from the environmentalists and their political allies. Free enterprise profitability will suffer when tax policy is imposed to guarantee that cars will be electric. In Israel, for example, the tax on a new vehicle purchase will be 10% for EVs, 79% for gasoline vehicles and 30% for hybrids. Sales demand will be curtailed by such high tax rates. Commercial viability will be a huge accomplishment when and if standardization of batteries, charging systems and customer acceptance, especially here in America is tested. Like the folks in Pennsylvania holding onto their guns and bibles, it might be difficult to wrest the Nissan Maxima keys from an aficionado, even if another Nissan is part of the swap.

All electric cars will be a long time coming to America because there is no effort to fix our electric infrastructure and I cannot say that that bothers me. What does bother me is the huge waste of financial resources here that scatters our tax money to every freaking environmentalist cause without regard to financial payback.

'lectric 'rithmetic

2009-08-14T16:20:00.003-04:00

The bad news is that the Chevy Volt will sell for $40,000. The good news:

WARREN, MICH — General Motors Corp. said Tuesday its Chevrolet Volt rechargeable electric car should get 230 miles per gallon of gasoline in city driving, more than four times the mileage of the current champion, the Toyota Prius.

The Volt is powered by an electric motor and a battery pack with a 40-mile range. After that, a small internal combustion engine kicks in to generate electricity for a total range of 300 miles. The battery pack can be recharged from a standard home outlet.

GM came up with the 230-mile figure in early tests using draft guidelines from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for calculating the mileage of extended range electric vehicles, said Tony Posawatz, GM's vehicle line director for the Volt.

The problem, of course is that "figures don't lie, but liars figure." The 230 MPG works when a trip is under 40 miles. Read the small print:

The 230 MPG number, according to GM's Frank Weber, global vehicle line executive for the Volt, is a measurement of the car's "city driving cycle" — that's the 40 miles it can go without gas, plus one daily electric charge-up, plus a little extra help from the gasoline it might need to continue to charge its batteries when they get low while driving in the city. It's basically measuring the Volt's electric-only-mode (with some help) mileage capacity. If the Volt got out on the highway — where it's powered largely by gasoline — and traveled 200 miles the MPG would drop like a stone, and likely be more in line with other hybrids.

Comparable hybrids, Toyota's Prius and Honda's Insight will sell in the $25,000 range. OOPS! Nissan adds insult to injury with its recent tweet:

"Nissan Leaf = 367 mpg, no tailpipe, and no gas required. Oh yeah, and it'll be affordable too!"

The Nissan Leaf will debut at the same time as the Volt. It is an all-electric vehicle with a 100 mile range on a single charge. Oh yeah, and it'll sell for about $25,000.

Going, Going, Gone Postal

2009-08-11T21:07:00.003-04:00

Pity the poor, really poor, U. S. Postal Service. First came the ugly financial results for the nine months ended June 30 which show a $4.7 billion dollar loss on the way to a $7.0 billion deficit for the year. Then the ultra-liberal, big government, work-for-Obama media giant, The New York Times suggested (gasp) that the USPS be privatized.

Instead of trying to find short-term, piecemeal solutions to the current crisis, those involved in managing and overseeing the Postal Service ought to be thinking harder thoughts about blowing up its business model. Maybe the Postal Service should turn itself into a giant out-sourcer, handling some tasks but handing out others, for a fee, to more efficient companies. Maybe the government should allow companies to bid on lucrative urban delivery — with the proviso that they also deliver to rural areas. Maybe some areas should get mail deliveries less frequently than others. Maybe there should be radically different pricing structures. Maybe it should even lose its monopoly on first-class mail. I mean, why not?

Mr. [Rick] Geddes, the Cornell professor, says he believes that the only solution is for the Postal Service to become “just another company” — lose its monopoly, shed its bureaucratic mind-set, become able to negotiate freely with its unions, and answer to shareholders instead of Congress, which is always going to resist significant change that might upset a constituent. Only when that happens will it be able to bring its costs in line with its revenue.

Even Prez Zero stepped all over his beloved big quasi-government agency today while fumbling to justify government-run health care.

Jon Stossel drives home the final nail in to the USPS coffin:

Give me a break.

I’m sure that years ago, people wailed when their ice man went out of business. Should government have propped him up? “Where will I get my block of ice?!”

The postal service, like all government monopolies, is an inefficient sinkhole. Private companies like UPS and Federal Express give much better service. Consumer Reports found that, again and again, the private deliverers get it there faster.

The private competitors also make a profit doing it, so they don’t ask for taxpayer handouts. They outperform the post office, even though the post office has huge advantages. It pays no federal tax, no state tax, and no parking tickets. Often they don't even pay rent. They don't pay to register their vehicles. Check out a license plate spot on a post office truck -- nothing there.

The postal service always promises future solvency, but keeps losing your money: $7 billion this year despite a 2-cent rate increase.

The monopoly should be allowed to die, as free marketers have argued for years.

Continued sophistication of electronic applications via the internet are accelerating the Post Office demise, but the politicians seem content to continue to make and deliver ice. Ultimately, there will be no mail to deliver because the electronic competiton is already here in the form of Microsoft's postal project (which could become their first venture into a retailing business) and Earth Class Mail. These businesses will "cherry-pick" business mail first because large customers are more interested in cost savings. Businesses eventually have to deal with individual buyers at the retail level, so delivery to connected consumers will follow quickly . . . and unless the Congress changes the law, USPS has no monopoly hold on electronic mail.

Sayonara, U.S Postal Service. Don't let the door slam you in the ass!

Attack on Birthers

2009-08-02T18:05:00.009-04:00

Democrat leaders and their government-controlled allies in the press are on the attack against those who ask for empirical proof of Obama's qualifications under the Constitution to be president. These folks, usually conservative bloggers and media personalities are labeled as ”birthers” (after the “truther” kooks who believe that 9/11 was a U.S, government conspiracy) and ridiculed as sore losers and racists, all those who cannot accept Obama's victory. Ridicule is, of course, Rule #5 among Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

The noise levels has now turned up to such an extent now that “new evidence” proves Obama's Hawaiian birth. The new data, which isn't new at all, includes a second Honolulu birth announcement and a second statement from Hawaii Department of Health's director reasserting that she has seen and has examined Barack Obama's birth certificate. The simple truth is that Barack Obama has not produced even a certified copy of his original birth certificate for view by the American public nor has he shown it to any public officials or the courts in the other "57" states (at least none who will so testify). Oh, his supporter and past employer, the Annenberg Foundation, on their FactCheck website, declare that they have seen the COLB, touched it, and offer nine images to "prove" that a Certification of Live Birth (not a birth certificate) exists. However the documents shown at FastCheck.org may be just as phony as the images at Fight the Smears and Daily Kos which were photoshopped.

Lefty blogger Daily Kos commissioned a poll ( I wonder if Soros was involved) that found that 58% of "Repubs" believed that Prez Zero was not a citizen. Lou Dobbs is being told by CNN not to talk to or about birthers. Dobbs, Limbaugh, Mark Steyn and Hannity support open questions about the missing COLB. Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, National Review Online, Power Line, Little Green Footballs and some Pajama Media guys think that Obama is qualified to be president or that the theory is distracting and unproductive controversy. Another Soros site, Media Matters spends all day every day trying to knock down Limbaugh and the other talkers, but the controversy lives.

Surprisingly, Mark Joseph at the left-wing Huffington Post gets the controversy right:

The only thing weirder than the Birthers are the anti-Birthers, who blame the Birthers for being conspiracy theorists yet actively feed the conspiracy by refusing to call for President Obama to release his birth certificate.

To date some 60 lawsuits have been filed to contest Obama's citizenship. Obama's legal bills must be mounting into the millions of dollars. Since every lawsuit could have been settled before any hearings simply by filing a certified copy of his detailed Certificate of Live Birth from Hawaii, the courtrooms full of defense lawyers raises more questions than answers. Judges, God love them, do not want to be drummed out of the judiciary for bringing down a seated government administration, so all cases are being dismissed for lack of standing . . . and the beat goes on.

UPDATE: WND reports that Hawaii DOH refused to authenticate either the COLB at Obama's Fight the Smears site nor the Certification of Live Birth shown in FactCheck.org's website.

Just a cop, Skip, and a chump

2009-08-02T12:22:00.004-04:00

H/T: Patterico's Pontifications

Quote of the Week

2009-08-01T22:35:00.003-04:00

"Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd? I may be just a renegade hockey mom, but I'm not blind!"
-- SARAH PALIN

"Free Market Warrior" Kiosk Booted From Simon Mall

2009-08-01T16:49:00.012-04:00

Simon Malls loves bad publicity. First the world's largest mall owner shut down a 4th of July Tea Party in Atlanta's Gwinnett Place Mall and now a kiosk (mall cart) was kicked out of their Concord Mills (NC) Mall for selling what a single liberal female called "provocative , conservative merchandise" (such as baby bibs reading “My parents chose life. Thanks Mom and Dad!”)

"Impeach Obama."

"Al Qaeda's favorite days: 9/11/01 and 11/04/08."

"Work Harder. Obama needs the money."

The bumper stickers and posters sold at "Free Market Warrior" at Concord Mills are meant to be "biting," the kiosk's owner Loren Spivack said.

At least one passerby found them racist and bigoted, and took time to tell the mall in a letter and a letter to the editor of the Charlotte Observer.

The kiosk chain's owner shared e-mail correspondence with NewsChannel 36 that explains that the mall management has decided that the items sold are not "neutral" enough. The lease will be allowed to expire July 31, 2009 without an option to renew.

Spivack, who first leased the space this spring, says the decision came as a shock to him. He says mall management seemed pleased with the kiosk just a few weeks ago.

"Nobody in that mall is selling anything from a conservative perspective. Plenty of people are selling things with a liberal perspective, with a pro-Obama perspective," he said. "Given that we are in America and not North Korea, we probably should have some stuff on the other side."

Spivack says he is careful not to sell things that personally attack a politician and wants a fair exchange of ideas. "The material that I sell is about politics and ideas," he told Newschannel 36. "It's all legitimate criticism."

Spivak pointed out to the Charlotte Observer:

“It's completely about politics,” said Loren Spivack, owner of the Free Market Warrior. “Half the stores in that mall sold pro-Obama merchandise for months. All I did was present an alternative opinion, and that's what became so controversial.”

He notes that Mel Simon, co-chair of mall owner Simon Property Group, has given generously to Democratic candidates.

Spivack also says he's found other stores at the mall that sell T-shirts and other merchandise with offensive X-rated slogans.

At the Free Market Warrior website, Loren Spivak relates that the end to his tenant relationship with Simon Malls has occurred. Simon agreed to permit the kiosk to remain in the mall if certain merchandise was removed from sale. Future merchandise offered would rest with Simon's sole discretion as to whether or not the merchandise was "offensive".

This is probably a good moment for America, as Simon Property group’s sole discretion is laid bare. It is time for millions of consumers to start exercising their sole discretion about where to shop. There’s a Simon Mall near you. There’s also another option near you. That’s a beautiful thing about free markets.

Free Market Health Care Debate

2009-07-30T17:59:00.006-04:00

Writing in Forbes Magazine this week, Shikha Dalmia tells of the American myth regarding health care:

Both ObamaCare’s supporters and opponents believe that –unlike Europe– America has something called a free market health care system. So long as this myth holds sway, it will be exceedingly difficult to prescribe free market fixes to America’s health care woes–or, conversely, end the lure of big government remedies.
[...]
The major difference between America and Europe of course is that America does not guarantee universal health insurance whereas Europe does. But this is not as big a deal as it might seem. Uncle Sam, along with state governments, still picks up nearly half of the country’s $2.5 trillion annual health care tab.

Ms Shickha goes on to explain that although U.S. health care costs are higher as a percent of GDP than those of Germany and France, it is because these EU countries ration health care by restricting access.

But the most potent form of rationing in France and Germany–and indeed much of Europe–is not overt, but covert: delayed access to cutting-edge drugs and therapies that become available to American patients years in advance.

The point is that there is no health care model, whether privately or publicly financed, that can offer unlimited access to medical services while containing costs. Ultimately, such a model arrives at a cross roads where it has to either limit access in an arbitrary way, or face uncontrolled cost increases. France and Germany, which are mostly publicly funded, are increasingly marching down the first road. America, which is half publicly and half privately funded, has so far taken the second path. Should America offer even more people such unlimited access through universal coverage, it too will end up rationing care or facing national bankruptcy.

The only sustainable system that avoids this Hobson’s choice is one that is based on a genuine free market in which there is some connection between what patients pay for coverage and the services they receive. That is emphatically not what America or any Western country has today. Looking to these countries for solutions as Obama and other advocates of universal health coverage are doing will lead to false diagnoses and false cures.

Don Watkins over at the Ayn Rand Center believes that it is time for a debate on the morality of universal health care:

Ezra Klein asks: What happened to the moral case for health care reform? Why is the Obama administration relying on the argument that its plan will save the government money rather than supposedly ethical notions such as “equal treatment for everybody”? According to Klein, those are the kinds of arguments that could sway the American public toward accepting socialized medi…, sorry, “national health care.”

Well, let me register my agreement with Ezra: it is time for a moral debate about health care.
* It’s time for a debate between those who demand “equal treatment for everybody” (except those who are to be unequally taxed to pay for it)–and those who demand equal freedom for Americans to purchase as much health care as they can afford.

* It’s time for a debate between those who believe it’s proper to force some people to pay for the health care needs of others–and those who believe that individuals should pay for their own health care or else appeal to private charity.

* It’s time for a debate between those who think doctors should be made into state employees, taking orders from bureaucrats who will decide which tests to perform and which treatments to offer–and those who believe that doctors have a right to offer their services to willing consumers on a free market.

* It’s time for a debate between those who think that the government should be able to dictate the private choices of individuals on the grounds that “society” is picking up the tab for their behavior–and those who think that each individual should be free to act on his own judgment, while taking responsibility for his own choices.

* It’s time for a debate between those who appeal to an entitlement mentality that demands the unearned–and those who believe in paying for what they get.
The health care debate is ultimately about morality. We face a choice between European-style health care based on European-style egalitarianism and envy–and American-style freedom in medicine based on American-style individualism. So, Ezra, which do you think is consistent with America’s founding principles?

Winter Soldier Chronicles and the Media

2009-07-27T19:29:00.007-04:00

Another war has ended and the bottom-feeding media is having difficulty selling newsprint. Soldiers have returned to life in America and a nasty recession has greeted their return. Transferred to the post at Fort Carson, just outside of Colorado Springs, a few acclimating soldiers committed violent crimes and others suffered from stress disorders. When caught by the authorities, the criminal perpetrator's "devil in the details" seems somehow to begin with the Iraqi war halfway around the world.

Just as John Kerry testified before Congress as a member of the Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW)during the Winter Soldier Hearings in April of 1971, another set of stories are emerging from ex-soldiers interviewed by the Colorado Springs Gazette. First let's remember Kerry's testimony as related by Mark Steyn:

In his testimony to Congress in 1971, Kerry asserted a scale of routine war crimes unparalleled in American history -- his "band of brothers" (as he now calls them) "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads . . . razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan." Almost all these claims were unsupported. Indeed, the only specific example of a U.S. war criminal that Kerry gave was himself. As he said on "Meet The Press" in April 1971, "Yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I used 50-caliber machine-guns, which we were granted and ordered to use."

The Gazette starts its military hit piece by setting up a "universal truth" argument:

For as long as wars have been waged, soldiers have been sent to kill or be killed. The lucky ones survive. Some return home unscathed; others are shell-shocked and emotionally scarred for life.

That’s been true forever. But something changed in Iraq. Thanks to modern medicine, transportation and gear, soldiers survived injuries that would have killed yesterday’s troops. They patrolled streets without battle lines, where smiling civilians waved one day and silently watched ambushes the next. Multiple deployments moved soldiers from war to home and back, again and again.

Most found a way to cope. But in one Fort Carson unit that took heavy casualties, men began to break.

Fort Carson houses some 20,000 regular Army troops including 3,700 from 4th Infantry's mechanized 4th Brigade Combat Team. The Colorado Springs newspaper's story, written by Dave Phillips, is about 10 members of the 4th Brigade, who "have been arrested and accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter since 2006."

Doing the math, ten violent crimes from a total population 20,000 troops is a very small percentage (.05%) and it is less than .3% of the 4th Brigade's troops. The percentage numbers get even smaller when you consider that 100% of the troops will be rotated out of unit assignments about every three years, so the affected troop personnel are at least one third higher than static headcounts. As a benchmark, violent crimes in Denver last year represented .63% when measured against population.

But this two part series on the perceived effects of war on these soldiers was a gut-wrenching intrusion into their privacy and that of their relatives. How much of the articles detail is speculation and how much ot the writing is empirical fact is not easily decipherable :

[Antonio Marquez] used a stun gun to repeatedly shock a small-time drug dealer . . . over an ounce of marijuana, then shot him through the heart.

In August 2007, Louis Bressler, 24, robbed and shot a soldier he picked up on a street in Colorado Springs.

In December 2007, Bressler and fellow soldiers Bruce Bastien Jr., 21, and Kenneth Eastridge, 24, left the bullet-riddled body of a soldier from their unit on a west-side street.

In May and June 2008, police say Rudolfo Torres-Gandarilla, 20, and Jomar Falu-Vives, 23, drove around with an assault rifle, randomly shooting people.

In September 2008, police say John Needham, 25, beat a former girlfriend to death.

These facts are indisputable but the conversations detailed in the report, while interesting, are certainly not all truth. Some soldiers interviewed admitted to lying to superiors. As can be seen in all feature stories based largely on personal interviews, the holes in the story are often filled in by the writer's speculations and assessments of what might have been.

Read Part I here and Part II here. The Cliff Notes version is at the Washington Examiner. Please keep in mind that this is not Winter Soldier II.

The U.S. Post Office is Self Sufficient

2009-07-26T22:36:00.006-04:00

The U.S. Post Office is self sufficient. Just ask them. Well, maybe we should ask The WaPo:

Combine the impact of new technologies with the gut punch of the recession, and in the past year alone, the Postal Service has seen the single largest drop-off in mail volume in its 234-year history, greater even than the decline from 1929 to 1933 during the Great Depression. That downward trend is only accelerating. The Postal Service projects a decline of about 10 billion pieces of mail in each of the next two years, going from a high of 213 billion pieces of mail in 2006 to 170 billion projected for 2010.

The situation is so dire that the Postal Service, which is projecting a $6 billion shortfall by the end of September despite a recent postage rate increase, will go to Congress this month to seek emergency relief, looking to cut home mail delivery from six days a week to five. Already, the Postal Service has cut hours at hundreds of post offices across the country, including 56 of the Washington area's 386 outlets. It has consolidated routes, dropping 158 delivery routes locally [in DC], offered workers early retirement and imposed hiring and salary freezes. Still, said Postmaster General John E. Potter, the service is in "acute financial crisis."

The bottom line:

Over the next three months, more than 3,200 post offices and retail outlets — out of 34,000 — will be reviewed for possible closure or consolidation.

Downsizing is a business imperative, says Linda Welch, acting vice president of delivery and post office operations at the Postal Service. “Revenues have declined, and mail volume continues to decline,” she says.

Not only have e-mail and electronic bill paying made for a skinnier mail stream, but the recession has caused a sharp pullback in advertising mail that has hurt the Postal Service even more.

How To Cut School District Spending

2009-07-26T12:30:00.010-04:00

School board members across the country are well "schooled" [pun intended] in the political art of squeezing more property tax and state-provided support from local taxpayers and state legislators. The methodology is simple. First draw up and submit a generous spending budget packed with all the bells and whistles. Provide alternate budget data that shows that any deviation from the budget will result in the cutting of classroom teachers and a significant increase in class sizes. Then the board should emphasize that this path is not good "for the children."

In Fort Wayne, IN, property tax bills for the year have reached the taxpayers and the new state law governing property tax caps is already affecting the hallowed halls of Fort Wayne Community Schools (if you are to believe the very liberal Journal-Gazette).

FWCS will collect $1.1 million less in property tax revenues this year as a result of the caps, most of it lost to the 2.5 percent cap on rental properties. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. When the tax caps are fully phased in next year, the credits are expected to grow to $23.6 million, with an estimated loss of $2.6 million to the school district.

Kathy Friend, chief financial officer for FWCS, said the money will reduce all but one of the district’s property tax-supported funds, including the capital projects fund that covers much-needed improvements to school buildings. Debt service obligations are the only expenses exempt from the loss, which is why circuit-breakers aren’t truly a cap. Taxes can still increase with voter-approved projects.

By 2011, tax credits countywide are estimated to reach $29 million – a figure too great to make up with simple budget trims. Local government officials will ultimately have to look at either raising other taxes to bridge the shortfall or slash public services – or both.

Fort Wayne city schools will enroll about 31,200 students for the 2009-10 school year distributed among 35 elementary, 12 middle and 7 high school buildings using a fleet of about 250 buses at a cost of $11,359 per student. Last year the school district employed 1931 (FTE) teachers with an average pay of $51,277 . . . along with a generous fringe benefit package which includes underfunded pension entitlements.

So with a $356 million budget, how badly will the chump change of $1.1 million be missed? Well, predictably the school corporation laid off 108 teachers whose salaries total over $5 million. Then they ran out and hired 95 of them back when the federal stimulus funds were granted to the district.

The district will receive more than $7.1 million from President Obama’s package to dedicate to Title I and more than $6.8 million for special education over two years.

Now lets look a school district with a real funding problem . . . Olmsted Falls, OH.

The failure of operating levies in both November 2008 and February 2009 have led District officials to begin the process of implementing the Educational Reduction Plan approved by the Board of Education this past January. With no significant improvement in poll results between the February and November elections, the Board of Education has made the decision to not place the operating levy back on the ballot in May 2009 (which would have been the next opportunity to do so). In the meantime, cuts to programs and services, which will take effect with the start of the 2009-2010 school year or sooner, include but are not limited to:

• Elimination of all High School busing (for public, private and parochial schools)

• Reduction in K-8 busing services (details to be provided as they are finalized)

• Implementation of salary freeze for administration (enacted at 3-17-09 Board of Education meeting)

• Shifting of custodial maintenance work week to reduce weekend overtime (new schedule already in place)

• Implementation of hourly fee for weekend usage of school buildings (effective April 6, 2009)

• Reduction of summer maintenance personnel (effective Summer 2009)

• Elimination of Summer Discovery / Magic programs (effective June 2009)

• Elimination of HS Business program (enacted for 09-10 school year)

• Elimination of HS German program (enacted for 09-10 school year)

• Reduction of HS Industrial Arts courses (enacted for 09-10 school year)

• Reduction of HS Latin courses (enacted for 09-10 school year)

• Additional Reductions in District Personnel (in areas of physical education, music, technology and media centers)

• Reduction of all building supply budgets (completed)

• No purchase of new Language Arts textbooks and related curriculum materials

The Board will continue discussions regarding exactly when to next place the operating levy back on the ballot - August 2009 and November 2009 are the next two ballot opportunities

There is speculation that the Olmsted falls board will also implement an "extra-curricular participation fee" policy whereby parents will have to shell out up to $1,000 for their children to play sports, sing in the choir or take part in other activities beginning this fall.

Olmsted voters have not approved a supplemental operating funds initiative in ten years, but they did approve the building of an additional school two years ago.

Healthcare Lies and Damn Lies

2009-07-16T17:51:00.005-04:00

The Associated Press reminds us that Obama's healthcare rhetoric included the promise that private insurance plans would remain an option under his proposed reforms that would also include a "public option."

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama seems to leave little room for doubt when he promises that his health care plan will let people keep the coverage they have. His vow sounds reassuring and gets applause, but no president could guarantee such a pledge.
Employers sponsor coverage for most families, and Obama's plan still leaves companies free to change their health plans in ways that workers may not like. Employers can even drop insurance altogether.
"No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people," Obama said Monday, addressing the American Medical Association. "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."
He didn't let up.
"If you like what you're getting, keep it," Obama said. "Nobody is forcing you to shift."

Lo and behold! IBD picked up the the House version of the new legislation . . . and what did they find?

It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.
When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.

It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:
"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law."
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.

From the beginning, opponents of the public option plan have warned that if the government gets into the business of offering subsidized health insurance coverage, the private insurance market will wither. Drawn by a public option that will be 30% to 40% cheaper than their current premiums because taxpayers will be funding it, employers will gladly scrap their private plans and go with Washington's coverage.

The nonpartisan Lewin Group estimated in April that 120 million or more Americans could lose their group coverage at work and end up in such a program. That would leave private carriers with 50 million or fewer customers. This could cause the market to, as Lewin Vice President John Sheils put it, "fizzle out altogether."

What wasn't known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.

The legislation is also likely to finish off health savings accounts, a goal that Democrats have had for years. They want to crush that alternative because nothing gives individuals more control over their medical care, and the government less, than HSAs.

With HSAs out of the way, a key obstacle to the left's expansion of the welfare state will be removed.

The public option won't be an option for many, but rather a mandate for buying government care. A free people should be outraged at this advance of soft tyranny.

Washington does not have the constitutional or moral authority to outlaw private markets in which parties voluntarily participate. It shouldn't be killing business opportunities, or limiting choices, or legislating major changes in Americans' lives.

It took just 16 pages of reading to find this naked attempt by the political powers to increase their reach. It's scary to think how many more breaches of liberty we'll come across in the final 1,002.

The strange thing about this is that a recent Rasmussen poll shows that 70% of Americans rated their present health insurance plan "good" or "excellent." So we will now spend $4 Trillion to displace 79 million Americans from their present coverage.

Bill Gates Ego Trumps Common Sense

2009-07-14T23:04:00.007-04:00

Equity Private at finem respice spots this news about Bill Gates and friends filing a patent for a method to stop hurricanes. TechFlash reports:

Microsoft's chairman is among the inventors listed on a new batch of patent applications that propose using large fleets of vessels to suppress hurricanes through various methods of mixing warm water from the surface of the ocean with colder water at greater depths. The idea is to decrease the surface temperature, reducing or eliminating the heat-driven condensation that fuels the giant storms.

I am reminded of Michael Crichton's writings in his prologue to Jurassic Park where he derides man's "intoxicating vanities" that would permit belief that man is capable of altering or harming the earth:

This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Dr. Crichton also rightfully observed that things environmental are not always as they seem:

Most people assume linearity in environmental processes, but the world is largely non-linear: it's a complex system. An important feature of complex systems is that we don’t know how they work. We don’t understand them except in a general way; we simply interact with them. Whenever we think we understand them, we learn we don’t. Sometimes spectacularly.

Equity Private was thinking the same way when she wrote this about "Gates' Folly."

It is difficult to connect with the concept that complex systems are... well... complex. That is, just pulling a lever or two on the "input" is not guaranteed to get you either the results you want, nor assure you won't get worse results in some other way. This is easy to recognize as the not-a-law "law of unintended consequences," but very difficult to apply critically to grand ideas by charismatic visionaries with a talent for public relations- the somewhat crass art that has become the central skill requirement in modern politics.
The deeper issue from my perspective is still one of conceit. "Hurricanes are caused by warm surface water. Let's just cool the surface water. Problem solved." Not quite, I suspect.

Who exactly would be liable for the sudden weather changes on the African West Coast?

Sarah Palin, Political Genius

2009-07-13T18:14:00.002-04:00

Today, The New York Times and the Obama media have begun piling on Sarah Palin with opinion hit pieces such as this, this, and this.

Low and behold, from an unexpected extreme liberal source comes an assessment of Governor Palin that only her stanch conservative supporters believe and understand totally. Ladies and Gentlemen: Straight from the Socialist Republic of San Francisco, I present the one, the only . . . "Da Mayor" Willie Brown!

The pundits are wrong. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Sarah Palin's decision to step down as Alaska governor was a brilliant move.

Palin has some of the best political instincts I have ever seen. She became a pop-culture superstar overnight when John McCain made her his veep pick, and she's still second only to President Obama among politicians the public is interested in. Even in liberal San Francisco, she'd be front-page news if she ever came to town.

But that kind of celebrity comes at a high price. What a lot of people don't know is that Palin entered Alaska politics as a reformer attacking the corruption of the state's Republican establishment. As such, she was the darling of the Democrats - until she hooked up with McCain.

After the election, with Palin back home but positioning herself for a 2012 presidential run, it was clear she would catch nothing but ridicule from Alaska's Democrats. It was not going to be pretty.

If Palin wants to play on the national field, she has to be free to move around. She has to be able to drop into Indiana, Ohio or Tennessee and help Republican candidates raise money. She has to be available for radio and TV.

She has to be like Gavin Newsom, free to roam around the country, safe in the knowledge that things will pretty much take care of themselves back home.

Instead, Palin faced the prospect of being constantly pinned down in a state that is a day and a half away from the rest of America. She would have been totally isolated in every sense of the word.

Now she can study up on issues where she is lacking and become a full-time political celebrity.

The pundits call her a quitter, but let's be honest - the pundits never liked her to begin with. Better to take one hit for stepping down and move on than to stay in Alaska and die a death by a thousand cuts.

Governor or not, Palin is still the biggest star in the Republican galaxy. After all, who else have they got?

Justice Ginzberg does not favor Eugenics

2009-07-11T13:32:00.008-04:00

Writer Emily Bazelon conducted an interview for the New York Times Magazine with Ruth Bader Ginzberg on "The Place of Women on the Court." The questions were carefully crafted to elicit only the liberal feminist view of the necessity for women on the Supreme Court and to discuss only the "woman's rights" aspect of Roe v. Wade. I am saddened to see that many reputable conservative bloggers used a partial quotation from the interview to the twist the meaning of the justice's remarks (see here, here, here, and here).

The interview questions were all pro-female and anti-male in nature obviously emphasizing female sexism. I cannot bring myself to recite all of the leading questions and the generally narcissistic responses from Ginzberg. The Roe v. Wade discussion unexpectedly elicited a mistaken view that Justice Ginzberg favored Eugenics otherwise known as Social Darwinism. The dialogue was as follows:

Q: If you were a lawyer again, what would you want to accomplish as a future feminist legal agenda?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often.

Q: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

Obviously, her final sentence wiped away the eugenics part of her answer.

Sarah Palin's Slow Fade

2009-07-07T23:16:00.006-04:00

J.B. White at RattlerGatorBlog magically ties together two political leaders that he deeply admired. Enjoy.

Keep on Keepin' On, Sarah!

If you've read my blog for some period of time beyond the last few months you know that I love Sarah Palin. I still have a difficult time figuring out what's not to love. All of the critiques friends and pundits have delivered ultimately embarrass them far more than Sarah. So it is with her decision to step down. I received an excited call on Saturday while driving to Jacksonville asking if I had heard the news about Palin. No, I replied, worried that something tragic had happened to her.

She resigned!

Resigned, I asked? (Relief swept over me; something like, "Oh. Okay.") What happened, I asked?

Once the basic information was given to me, I immediately determined this was a savvy move -- regardless of what her ulterior motive might have been. I explained to my friend that the Democrats ginned up manufactured B.S. scandals during the last election cycle. I know, because I received repeated calls about this or that obviously ridiculous phony scandal. I wanted to ask my friend this: did he really believe they wouldn't continue to do the same? Did he doubt there was a set-up waiting for her within the realm of Alaska Democrat politics? With a very willing D.C. and New York media at the ready?

I get extremely upset by people who should know better participating in the outrageous sliming of this good woman. And my recollection is similar to John Hayward's and I acutely remember all of this because it reflected my conventional wisdom at the time and all of those around me, including my mentors:
From my endless archives, a few samples of how the major media wrote off Ronald Reagan repeatedly:

Newsweek, 1971, “Ronald Reagan’s Slow Fade,” ended with the judgment that “the somber truth is that Sacramento may mark the end of Ronald Reagan’s political road. . . By every normal measure, Ronald Reagan ought to be entitled to any political future he wants. A close aide said, 'The Presidency? Oh, he’s not interested. Four more years and I think you’ll see Ronald Reagan riding one of his horses off into the sunset.'” And see Stephen Roberts in the New York Times Magazine: “In 1976, the reasoning goes, Reagan would be 65, and too old to run.” “When a guy’s built on celluloid,” Democratic State Senator George Moscone said, “he goes up fast, but he burns out quickly.”

After the 1976 campaign, Newsweek offered a reprise, “Into the Sunset": "The concluding line of Reagan’s convention speech — 'There is no substitute for victory' — could also turn out to be a epitaph for his own political career."

And not to be left out, John Coyne wrote in some magazine called National Review that "Reagan seems somewhat out of step with the new political stirrings, a man very much of the Sixties. . . . For a decade he has been a central symbol of everything that is best in what we call the conservative movement, and if his approach and his ideas are obsolete, then so are those many of us who believe in him. And it’s never much fun to be a middle-aged anachronism."

Everyone should apply the appropriate discount to the Palin commentary and analysis they read today.
I'd like to tell all of Sarah Palin's enemies to put that in their "sho' nuff pipe" and smoke it till you gag, fool!

Where Have You Gone, Ron Wilson Reagan?

2009-07-06T20:24:00.001-04:00

On September 12, 2009 The Tea Party Movement goes to Capital Hill!

H/T: The Other McCain

TEA Time For Sarah?

2009-07-05T13:59:00.005-04:00

Bloggers are beginning to speculate on the underlying purpose of Sarah Palin's resignation as Alaska's governor. Early on, influential conservative bloggers such as Bill Kristol and Mark Levin marked Palin's July 3rd press conference as the beginning of her 2012 presidential campaign. As time has passed, another theory is emerging.

Yesterday my mind was moved to another distinct possibility by Richard Fernandez at his Belmont Club blog on Pajamas Media

The text of her announcement, as excerpted by the AP suggests that she may be aiming to position herself as the center of a movement — in effect going outside the system – rather than aspiring to be just another one of the Republican Presidential candidates for 2012. Sarah Palin may be calculating that, with employment rates at their lowest point in decades and with polls showing a widespread fear for the country’s future, that a crisis is brewing or will soon burst. A real crisis would seek a natural center, a point around which to rally; and she would be it. For the Republican Party, a Palin at the center of “Tea Parties” and other unconventional protests would raise the risk of draining away support from the party, which to be fair, has done precious little to harness dissent itself.
In a hastily arranged news conference at her home in suburban Wasilla, Palin said she will formally step down July 26, and Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will be inaugurated at the governor’s picnic in Fairbanks. She said she had decided against running for re-election as Alaska’s governor, and believed it was best to leave office even though she had two years left to her term.

Palin hinted she had a bigger role in mind, saying she wanted to make a “positive change outside government.” But she kept supporters in suspense, promising on Twitter: “We’ll soon attach info on decision to not seek re-election … this is in Alaska’s best interest, my family’s happy … it is good. Stay tuned.”
If something resembling a crisis does break out in the next six months then Sarah Palin’s “unconventional” or “puzzling” move will be retroactively described as an act of genius. But if nothing impends, then Sarah Palin will risk wearing herself out on the public stage even before the 2012 election season begins. Whether or not she has made the right move remains to be seen. In politics as in all else, “something must be left to chance; nothing is certain … [but] no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside the enemy.”

The "Tea Parties" idea appeals to me, but it is not without its dangers. In the discussion following his post, Richard (posting as Wretchard) observes:

If Sarah Palin continues to be politically active she will have a destabilizing effect, the only question being who she destabilizes more, the Democrats or the Republicans. Her greatest impact would be if she led “movements”, which by their nature focus on a particular issue and draw support from across party lines. Movements are far more volatile political beasts than electoral political parties. They can grow explosively or get out of hand. Unless they are revolutions “movements” don’t capture power by themselves. However their effect is normally captured by electoral parties.

The real challenge for the Republican Party is to re-architecture itself so that it can derive impetus from the grassroots movements instead of feeling threatened by them. But the Republican Party may have to lose many more hacks and opportunists before it can do so.

So far in 2009, there have been approximately 2000 TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Parties across the United States, but the government-controlled media has managed to minimize their effect upon the citizenry. What is needed is a lightning rod personality to spark the grassroots effort to reign in "government terror by taxation and spending." Sarah Louise Heath Palin is the right person at the right time, because unlike the Obama administration, which spends all its time telling us what we cannot do, Palin has always told us what we are capable of doing.

Tea, anyone?

Sarah Palin: One Day Later

2009-07-04T23:41:00.003-04:00

Sarah Palin has now posted her reaction to the media storm that followed her press conference announcing her resignation as Governor of Alaska. This Facebook posting indicates that we have not heard the last of Sarah in American politics:

For months now, I have consulted with friends and family, and with the Lieutenant Governor, about what is best for our wonderful state. I even made a few administrative changes over that course in time in preparation for yesterday. We have accomplished so much and there's much more to do, but my family and I determined after prayerful consideration that sacrificing my title helps Alaska most. And once I decided not to run for re-election, my decision was that much easier - I've never been one to waste time or resources. Those who know me know this is the right decision and obvious decision at that, including Senator John McCain. I thank him for his kind, insightful comments.

The response in the main stream media has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans who are sick of the "politics of personal destruction". How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country. And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make. But every American understands what it takes to make a decision because it's right for all, including your family.

I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint. I hope you will join me. Now is the time to rebuild and help our nation achieve greatness!

God bless you! And I look forward to making a difference - with you!

Grand Old Gang

2009-07-01T23:49:00.007-04:00

“Grand Ol’ Gang” by Andy Thomas is one of two paintings Thomas has done depicting U.S. Presidents gathered together for a friendly game of poker.

So I said to him, "Barack, I know Abe Lincoln, and you ain't Abe Lincoln."

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence.
You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.
......Abraham Lincoln

H/T: Doug Ross

CEI Releases Suppressed EPA Report

2009-06-29T22:28:00.007-04:00

The Competitive Enterprise Institute made public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of passing the "Cap and Trade" bill regulating and taxing carbon dioxide emmissions.

The following are extracts from the Executive Summary of the draft EPA Report, Proposed NCEE Comments on Draft Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions Under the Clean Air Act, which the Obama Administration has been hiding from the public for months because the findings run counter to its prevailing metanarrative.

The current Draft TSD is based on the IPCC AR4 report, which is at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field. There have been important developments in areas that deserve careful attention in this draft. The list includes the following five:
• Global temperatures have declined--extending the current downtrend to eleven years, with a particularly rapid decline in 2007-8; in addition, the PDO went negative in September 2007 and the AMO in January 2009 respectively. At the same time, atmospheric CO2 levels have continued to increase and CO2 emissions have accelerated.

• The consensus on past, present and future Atlantic hurricane behavior has changed. Initially, it tilted towards the idea that anthropogenic global warming is leading to (and will lead to) more frequent and intense storms. Now the consensus is much more neutral, arguing that future Atlantic tropical cyclones will be little different from those of the past.

• The idea that warming temperatures will cause Greenland to rapidly shed its ice has been greatly diminished by new results indicating little evidence for the operation of such processes.

• One of the worst economic recessions since World War II has greatly reduced GHG [Greenhouse Gas] emissions compared to assumptions made by the IPCC. To the extent that ambient GHG levels are relevant for future global temperatures, these emissions reductions should greatly influence the adverse effects of these emissions on public health and welfare. The current draft TSD does not reflect the changes that have already occurred nor those that are likely to occur in the future as the result of the recession. In fact, the topic is not even discussed to our knowledge.

• A new 2009 paper finds the crucial assumptions in the GCM models used by the IPCC concerning strongly negative feedback from water vapor is not supported by empirical evidence, and that the feedback is actually negative.

• A new 2009 paper by Scafetta and West suggests that the IPCC used faulty solar data in dismissing the direct effects of solar variability on global temperatures. Their research suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in the world's global temperature.
These six developments alone should greatly influence any assessment of "vulnerability, risk and impacts" of climate change within the U.S. But these are just a few of the new developments since 2006. Therefore, extensive portions of the EPA's endangerment TSD which were based upon the old science are not longer appropriate and need to be revised before a new TSD is issued for comments.

Not only is the science of the TSD out of date, but there are a number of other disturbing inconsistencies between the temperature and other scientific data, and the GHG/CO2 hypothesis that need to be carefully explored and explained if the draft TSD is to be credible. Despite the complexity of the climate system, the following conclusions appear to be well supported by the available data:

A. By far the best single explanation for global temperature fluctuations is variation in the PDO/ENSO. ENSO appears to operate in a 3-5 year cycle. PDO/AMO appear to operate in about a 60-year cycle. This is not really explained in the draft TSD, but needs to be, or, at the very least, there needs to be an explanation of why OAR believes that these evidence cycles do not exist, or why they are much more unimportant than we believe them to be.

B. There appears to be a strong association between solar sunspots/irradiance and global temperature fluctuations. It is unclear how this operates, but it may be through indirect solar variability on cloud formation. This topic is not really explored in the draft TSD but needs to be, since otherwise the effects of solar variations may be misattributed to effects of changes in GHG levels.

C. Changes in GHG concentrations seem to have so little effect that it is difficult to find any effect in the satellite temperature record, which started in 1978.

D. The surface measurements (HADCRUT) are more ambiguous than the satellite measurements in that the increasing temperatures shown since the mid-1970s could either be due to the rabid growth of urbanization and the heat island effect, or by the increase in GHG levels. However, since no such increase is shown in the satellite record, it appears more likely that urbanization and the UHI effect are the most likely cause. If so, the increases may have little to do with GHGs and everything to do with the rapid urbanization during the period. Given the discrepancy between surface temperature records in 1940-75, and 1998-2008 and the increases in GHG levels during these periods, it appears even more unlikely that GHGs have much effect on measured surface temperatures either. These points need to be very carefully and fully discussed in the draft TSD if it is to be scientifically credible.

E. Hence, it is not reasonable to conclude that there is any endangerment from changes in GHG levels based on the satellite record, since almost all fluctuations appear to be due to natural causes and not human-caused pollution as defined by the Clean Air Act. The surface record is more equivocal but needs to be carefully discussed, which would require careful revision of the draft TSD.

F. There is a strong possibility that there are some other natural causes of global temperature fluctuations that we do not yet fully understand, and which may account for the 1998 temperature peak which appears on both the satellite and surface temperature records. This possibility needs to be fully explained and discussed in the draft TSD. Until and unless these and many other inconsistencies referenced in these comments are adequately explained it would appear to be premature to attribute all or even any of what warming has occurred to changes in the GHG/CO2 atmospheric levels.

These inconsistencies are so important sufficiently abstruse that in our view EPA needs to make an independent analysis of the science of global warming, rather than adopting the conclusions of the IPCC and CCSP without much more careful and independent EPA staff review than is evidenced by the draft TSP. Adopting the scientific conclusions of an outside group such as the IPCC or CCSP without thorough review by EPA is not in the EPA tradition, anyway, and there seems to be little reason to change the tradition in this case. If there conclusions should be incorrect and EPA acts on them, EPA will be blamed for inadequate research and understanding, and reaching a possibly inaccurate determination of endangerment. Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.

Finally, there is an obvious logical problem posed by steadily increasing U.S. health and welfare measurements and the alleged endangerment of health and welfare discussed in this draft TSD during a period of rapid rise in at least CO2 ambient levels. This discontinuity either needs to be carefully explained in the draft TSD or the conclusions changed.

The Madness of Recycling

2009-06-28T16:14:00.008-04:00

From Per Bylund at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute:

"Imagine a whole population spending time and money cleaning their garbage and driving it around the neighborhood rather than working or investing in a productive market! "

As a Swede I get to hear a lot of the myths of how wonderful a country Sweden supposedly is — the "prosperous socialism" it stands for, a role model for the rest of the world. For instance, quite a few friends from around the world have commended me on Swedish recycling polices and the Swedish government's take on coercive environmentalism.

The way it has been presented to me, Sweden has succeeded with what most other governments at best dream about: creating an efficient and profitable national system for saving the environment through large-scale recycling. And the people are all in on it! Everybody's recycling.

The latter is actually true: everybody is recycling. But that is the result of government force, not a voluntary choice. The state's monopolist garbage-collection "service" no longer accepts garbage: they will only collect leftovers and other biodegradables. Any other kind of garbage that accidentally finds its way to your garbage bin can result in a nice little fine (it really isn't that little) and the whole neighborhood could face increased garbage collection rates (i.e., even larger increases than usual — they tend to increase annually or biannually anyway).

So what do you do with your waste? Most homes have a number of trash bins for different kinds of trash: batteries in one; biodegradables in one; wood in one; colored glass in one, other glass in another; aluminum in one, other metals in another; newspapers in one, hard paper in another, and paper that doesn't fit these two categories in a third; and plastic of all sorts in another collection of bins. The materials generally have to be cleaned before thrown away — milk cartons with milk in them cannot be recycled just as metal cans cannot have too much of the paper labels left.

The people of Sweden are thus forced to clean their trash before carefully separating different kinds of materials. This is the future, they say, and it is supposedly good for the environment. (What about the economy?)

But it doesn't end with the extra work at home and the extra space in each and every kitchen occupied by a variety of trash bins. What do you do with the trash that isn't collected? The garbage collection service (which nowadays doesn't offer collection too often, usually biweekly or monthly, even though the rates mysteriously seem to be much higher than before) only accepts certain types of garbage, generally only biodegradable food leftovers. But do not worry; it is all taken care of.

The authorities have established trash collection centers in most neighborhoods where you get to throw away your trash. These "centers" offer numerous containers where you can throw away your trash — there is one container dedicated for each and every kind of trash and they are all neatly color-coded to help you find the right one. But this means you better have separated your aluminum from your other metals and your newspapers from your soft and hard papers before you get here. You wouldn't want to throw away dirty milk cartons or unsorted paper, would you?

But it seems people do just that: they cheat if they believe they are better off doing so. So the authorities have responded by making it more difficult to cheat. Their first measure was to redesign all containers so that it is more difficult throwing the "wrong" trash in them. For instance, containers for glass have only small, round holes where you put your bottles, and containers for hard paper and carton materials have only letter-slit shaped holes (you need to flatten all boxes before recycling — that's the law).

Well, that didn't do the trick. People kept on cheating. And the more difficult the authorities made it to cheat, the more difficult it was to get rid of the trash even if you intended to put it in the right place. So people went to these centers and simply put everything next to the containers instead — why bother? The authorities responded by appointing salaried "trash collection center spies" (!) to document who was cheating so that they could be brought to justice. (There have actually been a few court cases where people have been tried for not following recycling laws.) Need I say the attempt to appoint spies didn't work either? After a rather hot-spirited debate in the media, all spying at trash collection centers was abolished.

But the real question here is not to what degree the authorities are ignorant of what spurs human action. We already have numerous examples of this ignorance being quite huge. The question is: does this recycling structure work? The answer is that, from a government point of view, while it can probably be thought of as working, from an environmental point of view, the answer is definitely "no."

As Mr. Bylund discusses more details, the sheer magnitude of the "1984" government controls emerge.

reasontv - ObamaCare

2009-06-27T11:37:00.001-04:00

Noted Pediphile Dead at 50

2009-06-26T22:35:00.003-04:00

From The Nose On Your Face:

Noted Pedophile And Skin Bleacher Michael Jackson Dead At 50

Michael Jackson, the man-child serial pedophile who spent most of the last decade in courtrooms or trying to become white through surgery, is dead at 50.

Jackson is best known for building the Neverland Ranch, an amusement park situated near his home that allowed for the unsupervised seduction and transfer of young boys from the park to his bed. Jackson’s resources and creativity made his a cult-hero among pedophiles; NAMBLA (The North American Man-Boy Love Association) gave him the coveted Jolly-Rancher Award in 2005.

Jackson was also on the cutting edge of plastic surgery, slowly morphing from a young black man to a horrid white ghoul with a detachable nose over the course of the last 15 years.

When he wasn’t giving horsie rides to poor white boys with compliant moms or at the dermatologist office, Jackson enjoyed juggling his own small children.

Jackson also moonlighted as a singer and dancer. He is survived by a drug-addled, parasitic traveling circus.

Healthcare Monopsony

2009-06-25T23:17:00.004-04:00

John Hinderacker writes about the insidious side of single-payer healthcare:

[I]n fact, having the public "option" crowd out private insurance will result in a monopsony not a monopoly....i.e., one buyer rather than one seller.

This is, of course, the whole point of the plan... constructively, a single payer system which is, by definition, a monopsony which will exercise monopsony purchasing power....in effect confiscating as much of the incomes of providers as it can get away with...and managing the resulting supply shortage by its complementary monopoly position as a seller (or provider) of insurance to the public....only one place to go on either side of the trade....nice work if you can get it.

What is being overlooked this time around compared to 1993 [HillaryCare] is this: to prevent "leakage" from the system, draining of supply to other providers of insurance/purchasers of health care services...the "public option" has to effectively outlaw them. The mechanisms will be various and include provisions in law such as a prohibition on "topping off" fees paid independently by patients to physicians or hospitals above the public option's reimbursement rates to get better service or, indeed, any service at all in some circumstances (already in Medicare, I believe). A prohibition against taking private patients if a provider accepts ANY public patients...it's an all or none situation...unless your entire practice is exclusively private, you must accept the government's terms and conditions and no others. Severe penalties for the economic "crime," probably deemed to be medical fraud, of engaging in free market medicine, for violators. Private provision and private insurance is all but forbidden in Canada (despite the provincial court decision a few years ago) and that is where we would be headed, too.

Otherwise....you get a two-tier system...wealthy people will pay their health care tax but then just opt out of the system...analogous to public schools vs. private schools.....a very few health care providers will cater to them and not need the public option...they would then "disproportionately" "consume" medical "resources" and the best resources...but only a very, very few....and there will be nowhere to hide...no suburban school district to flee to that is the equivalent of private school. So that's how Bill and Hillary would avoid standing in that line at the clinic. And why it is ESSENTIAL that all public employees and those on public pensions be required to participate in the public option...make Congress have the exact same requirements as everyone else.

Unfortunately, Barack Obama has staked out only the best care for hs family.

You Can Call Me “Babs"

2009-06-20T22:39:00.002-04:00

This bit of humor from William Kevin Stoos of CFP:

Mrs./Ms./Madam/Missus Barbie Boxer Apologizes to General

“Gawd, I really looked like a bitch!” exclaimed Mrs. Barbara Boxer, a California politician who occupies a political office in Washington, D.C., as she watched a replay of her disrespectful interruption of Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh, of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, during his testimony on the Hurricane Katrina restoration process. The General--who has served his country admirably, risked his life and limb, and devoted his life to preserve the lady’s freedom to disrespect him and others in uniform who are trained to refer to ladies as “Ma’am” and gentlemen as “Sir”--was rudely “dressed down” as they say in the military, as he dared to preface an answer to one of Boxer’s questions with a polite “Ma’am.”

At this point, Ms. Boxer interrupted the General and reminded him that she, Madam Boxer, worked hard to gain a seat in the legislative body of which she is a member, and was therefore entitled to the ultimate respect, deference, and tribute that comes with being a liberal, professional politician whose main accomplishment in Washington has been to tax other people and spend their money.

Invited by Missus Boxer to watch the replay, Stoos Views reporter Hugh Betcha--Chief of The Washington News Bureau--met with Barb at her request so she could issue an apology to the General for her inexcusable disrespect of a United States Army military officer. “I am so sorry for my indefensible behavior,” Missus Boxer stated, “I realize now that the term ‘Madam’ was not meant to be disrespectful to me as a revered member of the elite Washington Political Class. Rather, I understand now that it is a term of respect used by members of the lower and servant classes, such as military people, waiters, laborers, normal people with manners, and anyone else who does not occupy a seat in a privileged political club, such as I do. I was wrong to be so rude and I understand that the General was just trying to be nice to me, Mrs. Stewart Boxer. I was wrong to scold the great General and I hope he can see fit to forgive me.”

After promising to release this apology on behalf of Ms. Boxer, the Stoos Views reporter bid farewell to Stewart Boxer’s wife, saying “Goodbye, Madam,” as he went. “Please, call me Babs,” she replied, as she showed him the door.

H/T: Curmudeonly & Skeptical

Almost Heaven?

2009-06-20T19:00:00.004-04:00

Christina Davidson has begun a motor tour across America for Atlantic Magazine to observe the "cataclysmic hemorrhaging" caused by economic recession in the contiguous 48 states. Ignoring strife and poverty in Washington, D.C. where she works, she heads straight to my home state of West (By God) Virginia. In her Recession Road Trip column, she writes:

West Virginia has endured pervasive poverty throughout its history. With a median per capita income at around $35,000, the state ranks second--after Mississippi--as the poorest in the nation. The people of West Virginia feature as stock characters in jokes referencing poor, uneducated "hillbillies." But within the state, the ruggedly self-sufficient culture that endemic poverty has engendered represents strength and independence--a thing of pride for residents. Most importantly--for the purposes of this project--that natural state of being for West Virginia has acted as a kind of buffer against some of the heartbreak and despair the recession has visited upon wealthier parts of the country.

Well, she almost got out of the first paragraph unscathed, but she blew a key statistic . . . West Virginia's average per capita income is $22,725, not $35,000. So an average family of four is required to survive on $90,800 instead of $140,000 per year. Damn, those coal miners still make good money!

Ms. Davidson is not through trying to trash those backward hicks while tooling along in her green car:

Since my journey is not simply a poverty tour, but intended specifically to document how people are adjusting to dramatically changed economic circumstances, I pointed my rental Prius in the direction of Pocohantas County. Sliding from 5.6% unemployment in late 2007, to 16.9% today, Pocahantas has arguably taken the hardest hit of any county in West Virginia.
I knew driving north on US 219 would take me through some of the most lush and pristine wilderness that can be found anywhere in the country. What I did not realize was that the route would pass by the birthplace of Pearl Buck. Since I brought The Good Earth in my traveling library, it seemed fated that I stop for a visit.

I am not at all sure how she knew that route 219 would go through pristine wildness but not realize that it went through Hillsboro. but she says she didn't know. I would have guessed that her Prius would have a GPS. Anyhow, at the Pearl Buck house she ran into two salt-of-the-earth West Virginia ladies who were not typical soup line liberals with hands extended. Marietta Stemple and Betty Morrison had many nuggets for Christina:

"When you got nothin', you got nothin' to lose. That's recession in West Virginia."
“I don't feel like the recession has hit us as hard as other places because we're more independent. Prices can hurt us because of gas, utilities, and groceries, but we know how to live lean.”
“I've always raised my own garden and canned. It's something I was raised up with, that my mother was raised up with, that my grandmother was raised up with. I buy basics like meat and cheese at the grocery store, but I grow the rest.”

Our rambling reporter hightailed it out of Pocahontas and was next seen in Hurricane, WV off of I-64 between Charleston and Huntington. On the way she passed Don Surber who toils at the Charleston Daily Mail. Don thinks that Ms. Davidson missed the other side of the story.

This is a dangerous article for many reasons, not the least of which is glossing over the poverty and the unemployment that the area suffers.

West Virginia is a welfare state.

Is Davidson’s purpose to make the entire nation a welfare state?

For every $1 in taxes, West Virginia receives $1.76 in benefits.

Highways are a small portion of that $1.76.

The overwhelming portion of that $1.76 is in food stamps, free school lunches, free school breakfasts, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, disability checks, and dozens of welfare programs.

West Virginia is not a self-sufficient state. It is a dependency.

“Valuable recession lessons can be gleaned from the West Virginia experience: Never buy what you don’t need,” wrote Davidson.

Nice.

Romantic.

Nuts.

If poverty is so good, then why do we have anti-poverty programs? Using her logic, we should have pro-poverty programs.

She should have listened to that resident of Marlinton [who said] . . ., “When you got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose. That’s recession in West Virginia.”

Far from being a pleasant experience, poverty leads to depression, anxiety and misery.

Yes, I have noticed the materialism — especially the $5 cups of coffee — is unhealthy and ridiculous.

Most of what you think you need is just expensive garbage.

And I love West Virginia. As long as I can eke out a living, I will stay.

But let us not kid ourselves.

We have built the best economy in the world (one which liberals are quickly dismantling) and that has provided the $1.76 on which West Virginia survives.

The $134 Billion T-Bill Caper

2009-06-19T13:26:00.006-04:00

The Financial Times reports today:

One summer afternoon, two "Japanese" men in their 50s on a slow train from Italy to Switzerland said they had nothing to declare at the frontier point of Chiasso. But in a false bottom of one of their suitcases, Italian customs officers and ministry of finance police discovered a staggering $134 billion in US Treasury bills.
Whether the men are really Japanese, as their passports declare, is not entirely clear, but Italian and US secret services working together soon concluded that the bills and accompanying bank documents were most probably counterfeit, the latest handiwork of the Italian Mafia.
Few details have been revealed beyond a June 4 statement by the Italian finance police announcing the seizure of 249 US Treasury bills, each of $500m, and 10 "Kennedy" bonds, used as inter-government payments, of $1 billion each. The men were apparently tailed by the Italian authorities.
Yesterday the mystery deepened as an Italian blog quoted Colonel Rodolfo Mecarelli of the Como provincial finance police as saying the two men had been released. The colonel and police headquarters in Rome both declined to respond to questions from the Financial Times.
"They are all fraudulent, it's obvious. We don't even have paper securities outstanding for that value,'' said Mckayla Braden, senior adviser for public affairs at the Bureau of Public Debt at the US Treasury department. "This type of scam has been going on for years.''
The Treasury has not issued physical Treasury bonds since the 1980s - they are handled electronically - though they still issue savings bonds in paper format.
In Washington a US Secret Service official said the agency, which is working with the Italian authorities, believed the bonds were fake.

Conspiracy theories have popped up at CFP and with Karl Derringer at The Market Ticker who observes:

If they're real, what government (the only entity that would have such a cache) is trying to unload them?
If they're fake, this is arguably the biggest counterfeiting operation ever, by a factor of many times. I've seen news about various counterfeiting operations over the years that have made me chuckle, but this one, if that's what it is, is absolutely jaw-dropping.

Derringer further speculates:

Are we willing to assume that all the "issue" of Treasury bonds has been done "above board" as required by law. If Treasury has been surreptitiously issuing bonds to, say, Japan, as a means of financing deficits that someone didn't want reported over the last, oh, say 10 or 20 years . . .
Who could have possibly been complicit in such a scheme? I can come up with only two nations (and only nations could be involved due to size): The Japanese and Chinese. Since the two individuals who were arrested were reported to be Japanese nationals. . .

Even after US authorities declared the bonds to be counterfeit, Derringer continues to have questions:

Why did it take Treasury six days to issue a statement that these bonds are "clearly fakes"? Does it really take more than one business day for the Italians to email someone a photo of the faces of the bonds, showing serial numbers and such? Either they're real or they're not - was Treasury hoping the story would "just die"?
Exactly who are the two who got caught with these things and where the hell are they? If they're not under indictment from the US side with an extradition request to Italy, why not? After all, counterfeiting $134 billion in alleged bonds is rather more serious than the usual guy who gets caught printing up a bad $20 or two, right?
Do we have a Treasury confidence problem? Maybe. The latest data released Monday shows that China was a net seller of Treasuries in April. Given that we think we can issue $2 trillion of new ones over the next year or so to pay for our profligate government spending programs. . .

Of course, this was not the only multi-billion dollar counterfeit T-Bill bust in our history. In 2001 US and Philippine authorities seized $2 Billion in fake bonds and in 2004 seized an undetermined amount of bogus bonds originating in the Philippines in denominations of $500 thousand, $100 Million and $500 Million.

Shortly, we hope to see some black helicopters setting back down into their well-protected helipads.

The White Roof Scam

2009-06-15T21:13:00.005-04:00

Steven Chu, Obama's Energy Secretary has suggested that a proposal to use geo-engineering (deliberate manipulation of the Earth's biosphere) is a positive approach to counter global warming/climate change. Chu is quoted in the Independent (UK):

“Now you smile, but if you look at all the buildings and make all the roofs white, and if you make the pavement a more concrete-type of colour than a black-type of colour, and you do this uniformly… It’s the equivalent of reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world by 11 years,” he said.
“It’s like you’ve just taken them off the road for 11 years. It’s actually geo-engineering.”
Professor Chu said that his thinking had been influenced by Art Rosenfeld, a member of the California Energy Commission, who drove through tough new building rules in the state. Since 2005 California has required all flat roofs on commercial buildings to be white; the measure is being expanded to require cool colours on all residential and pitched roofs.
Dr Rosenfeld is also a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, of which Professor Chu was director. Last year Dr Rosenfeld and two colleagues from the laboratory, Hashem Akbari and Surabi Menon, calculated that changing surface colours in 100 of the world’s largest cities could save the equivalent of 44 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide — about as much as global carbon emissions are expected to rise by over the next decade.

Greg Pollowitz over at Planet Gore finds that the motivation may be greed. It seems that Chu's cohorts over at LBNL are seeking to get their hands on $3 billion in stimulus money for this project.

Dr. Anthony Lupo at ICECAP did a bit of independent investigating.

For those who are proponents of the idea that humankind is harmfully warming the climate by adding greenhouse gasses to the earth’s atmosphere, it is also an article of faith that we can engineer our own solutions through policy prescriptions or burdensome regulations. So it is with Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu who claimed that we can offset a large part of the expected human‐induced warming by changing roofs to white and urban surfaces to a lighter, more reflective color.
There are many real climate scientists out there who question such silly statements and are not afraid to point out that trying to modify urban areas on such a grand scale would be a very expensive endeavor while delivering a small payoff. Dr. Roy Spencer convincingly demonstrates that such a prescription would offset only a very small portion of the expected CO2 emissions, and thus probably not make much of a difference in global temperatures. Dr. Lubos Motl also performs some back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations to demonstrate that the impact of Steven Chu’s prescription might result in a global temperature change on the order of .01 degree C or less.

Dr. Lupo goes on to relate three of his own experiments that support the findings of Spencer and Motl. You can read the detail here.

The final nail in the coffin to bury this bad idea comes from Dr. Robert Ferguson at the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI). Writing as "The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley," Ferguson humorously covers an unfunny subject with some frightful cost projections supported by calculations.

To achieve the 0.2 Fahrenheit reduction in “global warming” that the Chu-Chu’s grand design might bring about, we’re going to have to paint 0.5% of the Earth’s surface, and keep it painted every three years for a century. That won’t come cheap.
The Earth’s surface covers 510 million square kilometers, and 0.5% of that comes to about 2,550,000 square kilometers, or 2550 billion square meters. We’re going to need two coats of white gloss every three years: that’s 66 coats this century, times 2550 billion square meters, which is 168 trillion square meters of paint. Don’t you love it when big government thinks big? At your expense, of course.
We won’t be able to cover more than about 10 square meters for every liter of paint, because we’re painting rough exterior surfaces. Trust me on this: I’ve checked with the head gardener, and he hasn’t been wrong since 1963. Let’s call that 40 square meters per gallon. So, in 100 years, we’re going to get through 4.2 trillion gallons of paint.
At Wal-Mart, if they’re selling bin-ends of low-grade paint, they occasionally charge as little as $5 a gallon. But we need high-quality gloss-white exterior-grade paint, which is more expensive than most paints – often as much as $80 a gallon. But we’re buying in bulk, so we’ll get a gummint discount. Let’s call it $4 a gallon. So, Mr. Taxpayer, it’s going to cost you $17 trillion to reduce global temperature by just 0.2 Fahrenheit degrees. You may not think this is a particularly sound investment.

Healthcare Reformation

2009-06-13T17:28:00.012-04:00

Wretchard posted a piece on his Belmont Club blog at Pajamas Media related the American Medical Association's objections to government-oriented reform of the US healthcare system. A NY Times article provides the basis for discussion:

As the health care debate heats up, the American Medical Association is letting Congress know that it will oppose creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan, which President Obama and many other Democrats see as an essential element of legislation to remake the health care system.
While committed to the goal of affordable health insurance for all, the association had said in a general statement of principles that health services should be “provided through private markets, as they are currently.” It is now reacting, for the first time, to specific legislative proposals being drafted by Congress.

At the heart of the president's restructuring is a reduction, rather than an increase, in Medicare and Medicaid spending over the next decade to the tune of $313B, in order to provide health care to all Americans(and probably all illegal aliens as well).

Therein lies the rub, as explained so very well by Leo Linbeck III in his comments to the Belmont Club blog post:

The market for healthcare services today is greatly distorted by the intervention of the Federal Government, which is the largest payor for those services.
In 2007, Americans spent about $2.2T on healthcare. Of that, about 20% was spent on Medicare, 18% was spent on Medicaid, and 7% was spent in other public programs. This means that about 45% of all healthcare spending was controlled by government. The Federal Government sets its prices through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS). It establishes the reimbursement for doctors, physicians, drug companies, etc.
Reimbursement rates set by CMMS do not cover the cost of healthcare. As a result, private payors effectively subsidize healthcare for Medicare and Medicaid users. Last year, according to Millican, a healthcare consulting firm, hospitals lost $30B on Medicare. Hospitals get about 32% of total Medicare dollars, so this equates to about $141B in revenues, meaning a margin of about -21%. If everyone in the country moved onto a Medicare system, this would mean that Medicare healthcare reimbursement to hospitals would be about $704B, and hospital losses would grow to $148B - an annual increased loss of more than $100B. These losses would bankrupt the entire hospital sector. And the economics of Medicaid are much, much worse.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Rome burns while the emperor fiddles. According to watchdog reports, Medicare Part A is already out of money and the whole system will collapse of its own weight by 2018.

Professor Linbeck not only succinctly identified the problem, he has the solution that Obama says he needs to solve the healthcare dilemma.

At the end of the day, there are only two ways to match supply and demand: a market and a queue. The question of universal access is a crock. Today, everyone in the US has access to healthcare; the problem is that not everyone can afford to pay for the access they would like to have. But this is true of all goods and services - I have access to a private jet, if I can pay for it. But I can’t, so I have to fly on commercial airlines (or ride the bus, or drive my car, or walk).
Right now, the system uses market mechanisms, but the price-setting role of CMMS is straining the system in the extreme. How much longer can private payors subsidize government healthcare expenditures? We are essentially faced with a choice between:
a) moving away from government price-setting toward letting buyers and sellers set the price (i.e. a market), and
b) moving toward a government-controlled system, which will result in healthcare rationing (i.e. a queue.)
It seems to me that the best way to reform the system is to implement the following:
1. A catastrophic healthcare insurance program funded through taxes. Essentially, this is a high-deductible insurance policy that will keep people from being wiped out by a catastrophic illness. This is what insurance is for - a low-probability, high-damage event - not what it is currently being used for - reimbursement of regularly-consumed goods and services.
2. Removal of the tax-deductibility of health insurance and reduce tax rates to compensate. Why should healthcare be paid with pre-tax dollars? After all, food is paid with after-tax dollars, and it is more critical to our survival. Forcing people to rely on their employers to purchase their health insurance is a huge distortion of the market. Removing this would allow individuals to purchase policies on the same basis as corporations, and put the consumer in control of the type of healthcare they wish to buy. If they don’t want to buy any, that’s fine; after all, they will have a catastrophic policy that will cover costs if they have a really bad illness. Otherwise, they should decide whether they want to buy healthcare or some other good. This would significantly shrink the private insurance market, but who cares? If people want to purchase insurance, fine. But a lot of folks would be better off paying as they go, and avoiding the cost of insurance. Insurance is a lousy vehicle for most folks to finance the consumption of goods and services.
3. Transparent pricing. Require healthcare providers to provide prices for their various healthcare services. Let consumers decide where and from whom to purchase their services, and let prices be used to match supply and demand. Currently, if you ask a hospital how much, say, a bunion removal costs, you might get a quote of $15,000. But, when you look at what a private insurer actually pays, the number might be $5,000. You have no idea how much a particular procedure costs, so no one can shop based upon price.
Of course, with the current leadership in Washington, this sort of approach has approximately zero chance of being adopted. Rather, if the Obama Administration gets its way, we will eventually end up with a government-controlled system, i.e. Washington sets all prices. This means a queue for matching supply and demand. This means healthcare rationing. Sorry, it’s just the way it works.
Think bread lines in the Soviet Union. Not good for bread eaters, not good for bakers, not good for society. A true lose-lose-lose system.

Obama's Malignant Narcissism

2009-06-09T19:22:00.007-04:00

Narcissus, in Greek mythology, was a handsome fellow who fell in love with his own reflection. Severe narcissism results in a pathological behavior disorder (NPD) characterized by self-absorption, intolerance toward others' perspectives, insensitivity to others' needs and indifference as to what effect such egocentricity might have on others.

Victor Davis Hanson captures this personality defect of Barack Obama in this Pajamas Media piece that requires your full reading.

Obama Versus the Way of the Universe
I wish the President well, but he is butting up against human nature. And that is a fight one cannot win. If one runs up nearly a $2 trillion annual deficit, and then persists in such red-ink to the point of adding another $9 trillion, all to reach an aggregate $20 trillion national debt, there are not too many options. If there were, everyone-both states and individuals-would simply spend, call it stimuli, and then find academics to offer contorted explanations why it was OK and the money need not really have to be paid back. Does Obama think his debt is like buying a house in a down market with an up market inevitable?–that is, we borrow to the max and then count on our equity to come to bail us out? But houses do not always go up, and we can’t quite sell off the US to capture our speculative profit.
So we all know the old rules, because the universe works according to time-honored precepts: we either must tax all of us (there are not enough of those evil “they” who make between $200-500K or even enough of the noble generous rich who make over $10 million a year and think Obama should increase inheritance taxes so that their children get only $1 billion instead of $2, while the hardware store owner’s kids sell the business) in insidious ways; OR simply cut government expenditures elsewhere to pay the annual interest payments, OR print money and screw the Chinese, European, etc. , debtors, inflating our way out via the late 1970s.
Sorry, there are no other real alternatives.
The only mystery? How the choice of payment is rhetoricized in the hope and change mode.
Deficit Foreign Policy Too
So it is with foreign policy as well. Obama’s make-over will have positive short-term effects, as he reminds the world ad nauseam that he is black, sorta, kinda from a Muslim family, and the son of an African who is more like the world than he like most Americans-and not George Bush and not a thieving capitalist and not a warmongering imperialist and not (fill in the blanks). (My favorite Cairo line was the apology on Gitmo where inmates have laptops and Mediterranean food, spoken to millions whose societies kill and maim tens of thousands in Gulags on a yearly basis.)
But in the long run?
He hits against human nature. Most of you readers-in business, law, the professions-don’t continually praise your friends, competitors, and enemies (e.g., “Glad you got that job, Home Depot-we at Lowes didn’t really need it; what a wonderful bid you submitted, Hilton, much better than ours here at the Four Seasons; it was my fault here at Goldman Sachs that I didn’t match your better offer at Credit Suisse; I grew up working for the Royals, and can empathize why you Yankees don’t like us; it’s time we at Citibank apologized to Chase for our past cutthroat competition; we are just too arrogant over here at Delta and wanted to let you guys at United know that.”)
Sorry
The world sadly does not work that way. If one were to do that, we know the outcome: a group of rival execs would say “Hmmm, time to steal market share from Citibank, or Hilton isn’t really up to the arena anymore, let’s move in on its Western region, etc.”
Only someone who has not been in the real world, but only marketed rhetoric without consequences (e.g., if Obama had a bad day organizing, or legislating, was he fired?) could believe such things.
Postmortem
Obama will come to his senses with his ‘Bush did it’, reset button, moral equivalency, soaring hope and change, with these apologies to Europeans, his Arab world Sermons on the Mount to Al Arabiya, in Turkey, in Cairo, etc., his touchy-feely videos to Iran, his “we are all victims of racism” sops to Ortega, Chavez, and Morales. It is only a matter of when, under what conditions, how high the price we must pay, and whether we lose the farm before he gains wisdom about the tragic universe in which we live.
A sojourn at an elite university, you see, can sometimes become a very dangerous thing indeed.

Methinks that the Professor's optimism about Barry gaining wisdom is naive, but then J. B. White over at Rattler Gator is ever the optimist.

As Hanson indicates, the only true question is: what will BHO do in the face of a mugging by reality? Specifically, "The only mystery? How the choice of payment is rhetoricized in the hope and change mode." Payment, mind you, whether foreign or domestic. For me, there is an acknowledgment in this question/statement from VDH that Obama is, first and foremost, a politician.
No,Obama doesn't understand the country. No, he doesn't know how to properly respect military service or the imperative to serve in our armed forces, nor does he know how to properly admire a corporation surviving the gauntlet of initial start-up, then finding, developing and servicing a market. Hell, the fact of the matter is that he doesn't even believe in the CIA or its mission.
But he does understand politics.
I'm going to hold onto that little nugget and believe (hope?), along with VDH, that our President is going to "get it" when the inevitable occurs. And I'm going to work to see that he's a one-term wonder because (as someone said in one of Hanson's comments) his was the most un-serious election of my lifetime. As a black man, I remain firmly convinced he NEVER should have been the first African American elected to the Presidency but . . . he was! And I have to respect that.

Worse Than Fiction

2009-06-08T23:12:00.004-04:00

Last week, I covered the idiotic claims by Kofi Annan et al on a "study" on climate change causing over 300,000 deaths annually. Opinion Journal fills in all the missing points that I missed:

Global warming alarmists are fond of invoking the authority of experts against the skepticism of supposedly amateur detractors -- a.k.a. "deniers." So when one of those experts says that a recent report on the effects of climate change is "worse than fiction, it is a lie," the alarmists should, well, be alarmed.
The latest contretemps pits former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, now president of the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum, against Roger Pielke, Jr., an expert in disaster trends at the University of Colorado. Mr. Annan's outfit issued a lengthy report late last month warning that climate change-induced disasters, such as droughts and floods, kill 315,000 each year and cost $125 billion, numbers it says will rise to 500,000 dead and $340 billion by 2030. Adding to the gloom, Mr. Annan predicts "mass starvation, mass migration, and mass sickness" unless countries agree to "the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated" at a meeting this year in Copenhagen.
Even on its own terms, the numbers here are a lot less scary when put into context. Malaria kills an estimated one million people a year, while AIDS claims an estimated two million. As for the economic costs, $125 billion is slightly less than the GDP of New Zealand. Question: Are targeted campaigns using proven methods to spare the world three million AIDS and malaria deaths a year a better use of scarce resources than a multitrillion-dollar attempt to re-engineer the global economy and save, at most, a tenth that number? We'd say yes.
But the Annan report deserves even closer scrutiny as an example of the sleight of hand that so often goes with the politics of global warming. Unlike starvation, climate change does not usually kill anyone directly. Instead, the study's authors assume a four-step chain of causation, beginning with increased emissions, moving to climate-change effects, thence to physical changes like melting glaciers and desertification, and finally arriving at human effects like malnutrition and "risk of instability and armed conflicts."
This is a heroic set of assumptions, even if you agree that emissions are causing adverse changes in climate. Take the supposedly heightened risk of conflict: The authors suggest that "inter-clan fighting in Somalia" is a product of climate change. A likelier explanation is the collapse of a functioning Somali government and the rise of jihadists in the region.
Enter Mr. Pielke, who, we hasten to add, does not speak for us (nor we for him). But given the headlines the Annan report has garnered, his views deserve amplification. Writing in the Prometheus science policy blog, Mr. Pielke calls the report a "methodological embarrassment" and a "poster child for how to lie with statistics" that "does a disservice" to those who take climate change issues seriously.
Mr. Pielke's critique begins by citing a recent peer-reviewed paper by three German researchers that "it is generally difficult to obtain valid quantitative findings about the role of socioeconomics and climate change in loss increases." Reasons for this, the researchers explain, include "the stochastic [random] nature of weather extremes, a shortage of quality data, and the role of various other potential factors that act in parallel and interact."
The report does admit to a "significant margin of error," but this hardly excuses the sloppiness of its methodology. "To get around the fact that there has been no attribution of the relationship of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions and disasters," Mr. Pielke notes, the Annan "report engages in a very strange comparison of earthquake and weather disasters in 1980 and 2005. The first question that comes to mind is, why? They are comparing phenomena with many 'moving parts' over a short time frame, and attributing 100% of the resulting difference to human-caused climate change. This boggles the mind."
It gets worse. The Annan report cites Hurricane Katrina as a case study in the economic consequences of climate change. Yet there's not even remotely conclusive evidence that temperature increases have any effect on the intensity or frequency of hurricanes. The authors also claim that global warming is aggravating the El Niño effect, which has "ruined livelihoods, led to lost lives and impaired national economies." Yet new research "questions the notion that El Niños have been getting stronger because of global warming," according to Ben Giese of Texas A&M.
We could go on, except we're worried about the blood pressure of readers who are climate-change true believers. Our only question is, if the case for global warming is so open and shut, why the need for a report as disingenuous as Mr. Annan's?

Obama Deficits Expected To Continue

2009-06-06T04:13:00.005-04:00

The Heritage Foundation reports that America's Deficit level as a percentage of GDP is expected to increase from a not-so-good 40.8 percent in 2008 to an astounding 54.8% in 2009 . . . with no end in sight.

A year to year increase of this size hasn’t occurred since World War II. While the main causes of this massive increase – $787 trillion economic “stimulus” and the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) – are sure to be debated for some time, the truly freighting [sp ...frightening] revelation should be not what has already taken place, but what our elected officials have planned.
President Obama’s budget, if passed, would send debt to levels 26.3 percent of GDP over current law. Although President Obama has publicly stated his desire to both bring down deficits and reform entitlements under his watch, his actions don’t match his words.

According to the Washington Post, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had little optimism about the current state spending levels:

"Even as we said, take steps to address the recession and threats to financial stability," he "maintaining the confidence of the financial markets requires that we, as a nation, begin planning now for the restoration of fiscal balance."
Mr. Bernanke did not say explicitly that there is no such plan in Mr. Obama's budget -- at least not according to the CBO, whose estimates of the president's budget show annual deficits lingering indefinitely above 4 percent of GDP. . . . He did not say that Mr. Obama and Congress have done nothing so far to deliver on the president's pledge of entitlement reform. But if the Fed chairman had said those things, he would have been absolutely right.

Palestinian History According To Obama

2009-06-04T22:41:00.010-04:00

James Taranto at the Opinion Journal detected this misrepresentation of history by Barack Obama during his "Muslim outreach" speech.

Obama is presenting an ignorant or dishonest account of history:
Threatening Israel with destruction--or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews--is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.
On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people--Muslims and Christians--have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations--large and small--that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.
To hear this, you'd think that Palestinians have lived under Israeli "occupation" for 60 years. In fact, the West Bank and Gaza were under Arab occupation (by Jordan and Egypt, respectively) until 40 years ago (we're following Obama's convention of rounding to the nearest decade).
What happened 60 years ago was that the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Jewish and Arab states in what was then Palestine. The existing Arab states--Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria--rejected the plan, declared war on Israel, and urged Palestinian Arabs to flee their homes, promising their return upon the Arabs' victory.
Israel won instead. Palestinians remain in "refugee camps" in large parts because Arab states, except for Jordan, refuse to allow them to resettle. (By contrast, Israel has absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing persecution in Arab countries.) Rather than accept their share of responsibility for the Palestinians' plight, the Arab states still promise the "right of return" upon Israel's defeat.
The president continues:
For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers--for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel's founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.
Obama presents a false choice: between seeing the conflict "only from one side or the other" and treating Palestinian complaints about "the displacement brought by Israel's founding" and Israeli ones about "the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond" as equivalent and offsetting.
In truth, Israel's founding was not sufficient to bring about Palestinian displacement. Also necessary for the latter was the Arab states' violent rejection of the former. And the perpetuation of the Palestinians' plight is far more the fault of the Arab states (joined recently by Iran), not only for refusing to permit Palestinian immigration but also for giving both material and rhetorical support to Palestinian terrorism against Israel.
Probably it would have been diplomatically unwise for Obama in Cairo to put the matter as bluntly as we have done here. But no real resolution of the conflict is possible so long as the Arab states remain major players and are held to no standard of responsibility for their own actions.

The world according to Obama will never include honesty, James.

GM Bailout /Bankruptcy Only Delays Inevitable

2009-06-02T23:10:00.003-04:00

Tracy Corrigan writes in the Telegraph:

So far, the US taxpayer has ploughed more than $50 billion into General Motors, the 100-year-old car manufacturer which filed for bankruptcy yesterday. GM, Americans joke, now stands for Government Motors, since the state owns 60 per cent of it.
There is a new American dream: that a slimmed-down GM will emerge from bankruptcy to prosper in the private sector. But it is not at all clear that huge amounts of government money should be injected to bring about this result. The US bankruptcy system is usually rather good at allowing companies to restructure and relaunch themselves, so why drag in the taxpayer?
The most appealing argument for doing so – that it will save jobs – is also among the weakest. First of all, GM will shed at least 20,000 more workers anyway. Yet even that may not be enough – it is doubtful that demand, particularly for GM's inefficiently-produced cars, will ever bounce back to previous levels. In which case additional government funding will be needed to avoid further redundancies.
In other words, the latest infusion of cash will not save jobs at GM and its suppliers; it will only delay the fall of the axe for some workers. That is not nothing – particularly since the delay will also help diffuse the broader economic impact of GM's blowout – but it is not enough to justify intervention on this scale. As Robert Reich, the former US labour secretary, has argued, if the only practical purpose is to slow the decline of GM to allow workers, suppliers, dealers and communities to adjust to its eventual demise, then the funds would be better spent helping the Midwest economy diversify away from cars.
A slightly stronger case for hitting up the taxpayer is that the private-sector financing that would speed a leaner GM through the restructuring process is hard to come by, given the state of the US economy and its car industry. However, this presupposes that a viable – and reasonably sizeable – business will come out at the other end. If private money, which seems to be flooding into other distressed assets, isn't available to make this bet, there may well be a good reason.
Global car production is, on the other hand, currently twice as great as demand, and GM is not best placed to survive the inevitable cull.

Ho Hum . . . Another Classical Gasser

2009-06-02T01:38:00.002-04:00

Tim Cavenaugh over at Reason's Hit & Run blog describes the efforts by GM to sell its Hummer brand. His piece de resistance is in this final point:

I was hoping Hummer would be one of the brands that didn't survive, not because I object to the gas-guzzling but because I object to the deterioration of language the nearly two-decade brand represents. A boxy, militaristic all-terrain vehicle that drives like a truck and probably shouldn't be on civilian roads is called a HUMVEE. That's an iconic vehicle, developed by the truly great and lamented American Motors Corp. A HUMMER is a blowjob, and it still will be long after the last SUV has been replaced by dilithium-powered antigravity cars built by the Japanese.

Sex With Ducks And Gay Marriage Are One In The Same

2009-05-30T21:43:00.001-04:00

Death By Climate Shift

2009-05-30T17:11:00.012-04:00

Planet Gore blog at NRO Weekend reports that the Global Humanitarian Forum headed by the infamous Kofi Annan has issued a new report on climate change.

LONDON, England (CNN) — The first comprehensive report into the human cost of climate change warns the world is in the throes of a "silent crisis" that is killing 300,000 people each year.
More than 300 million people are already seriously affected by the gradual warming of the earth and that number is set to double by 2030, the report from the Global Humanitarian Forum warns.
"For the first time we are trying to get the world's attention to the fact that climate change is not something waiting to happen. It is impacting seriously the lives of many people around the world," the forum's president, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, told CNN.

Annan admitted that the report had an ulterior motive. He told CNN: "The U.S. administration has joined the mainstream about fighting climate change and that is a big step, and I hope that will also put a new momentum into the negotiations." Incredibly, it took a piece in the New York Times to offer some balance to the reporting.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies disaster trends, said the forum’s report was “a methodological embarrassment” because there was no way to distinguish deaths or economic losses related to human-driven global warming amid the much larger losses resulting from the growth in populations and economic development in vulnerable regions. Dr. Pielke said that “climate change is an important problem requiring our utmost attention.” But the report, he said, “will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed.”

Even those involved with the report admitted its flaws and the ulterior motives of the climate-change nutroots.

However, Soren Peter Andreasen, a social scientist at Dalberg Global Development Partners who supervised the writing of the report, defended it, saying that it was clear that the numbers were rough estimates. The report appeared aimed at world leaders, who will meet in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a new international climate treaty.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, an economist, was one of 12 experts who vetted the report for the forum. He acknowledged that some of the report’s conclusions were oversimplified. Still, he said, he endorsed the report’s message.

UPDATE: Whats Up With That finds the Kofi Annan quotation not published in the news media:

Mr Annan said the report could never be as rigorous as a scientific study, but said: “We feel it is the most plausible account of the current impact of climate change today.”

Little Green Cars From Government Motors

2009-05-29T18:47:00.010-04:00

On June 1, 2009 General Motors will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from its creditors . . . including the US government and its taxpayers. With $20 billion in TARP funds already sunk into the automaker, the Sotera administration will pledge an additional $50 billion in debtor-in-possession financing and assumption of product guarantees and employee legacy costs. Larry Kudlow sums up the situation nicely:

Get ready folks: America is about to own a car company. As of Monday, we the taxpayers will own more than 70 percent of GM. Whether the company will be formally renamed Government Motors remains to be seen. But that’s what it will be.
Instead of putting the failed car enterprise into bankruptcy six months ago -- where Carl Icahn or Wilbur Ross could have bought it -- the Bush administration chose Bailout Nation. Under Team Obama, that bailout has morphed into full-scale government ownership. Twenty-billion dollars of TARP money is already invested in GM, with another $50 billion on the way. And that number could easily double unless GM car sales miraculously climb back to 14 million this year. That’s highly unlikely, with car sales presently hovering around 9 million a year.
In other words, taxpayers are not going to get their money back. Yes, we the people will be left holding the bag for the mistakes of GM’s management and labor leaders over the last four decades.
And with CAFE mileage-standards ratcheting up -- all while GM is going down -- Team Obama’s green vision for the economy will soon be crystal clear. With President Obama in the driver’s seat, we’re going to get little green two-door cars that most folks won’t want to buy.

Big government socialists will never understand capitalism and the imperial presidency and its willing congressional and media allies continue to take us down the path of economic destruction. From a book entitled Failure and Progress comes this memorable quote:

Economic failure is to the economy what physical pain is to the body. No one enjoys pain, but without it the body would lack the information needed to maintain its health. Government subsidies to prevent business failure simply keep pouring money into businesses that are relatively unsuccessful at satisfying consumer desires. They are, among other things, censorship of vitally needed information. Employees, entrepreneurs, and investors need to know where their money and talent are most valuable. Profits and losses are key indicators of that.

Speaking of profits, the South Park guys have discovered GM's business plan:

H/T: The Foundary

Worse Than Souter

2009-05-26T23:41:00.001-04:00

Earlier I did a piece on Justice Souter recalling his misdeeds in Kelo v. City of New London. Now it seems that BarryO's choice for the next Supreme has already far outstripped Souter's wrecking of Constitutional law related to eminent domain.

Coyote Blog has the whole story of Judge Sotomayor's abuse of property rights. Read his entire post but note Warren Meyer's UPDATE opinion:

I guess given his actions in Chrysler, Obama was happy to nominate a Supreme Court justice who gives a legal pass to outright blackmail.

Chrysler Dealers And The Chicago Way

2009-05-26T22:05:00.006-04:00

I have earlier blogged about the heavy-handed, absolutely illegal political maneuvering at work inside the Obama administration to circumvent the bankruptcy court in the case of Chrysler here and here. Now comes arguments from lawyers representing dismissed Chrysler dealers that the shedding of 789 of the company's dealerships was not Chrysler's idea:

Lawyer Leonard Bellavia, of Bellavia Gentile & Associates, who represents some of the terminated dealers, said he deposed Chrysler President Jim Press on Tuesday and came away with the impression that Press did not support the plan.
"It became clear to us that Chrysler does not see the wisdom of terminating 25 percent of its dealers," Bellavia said. "It really wasn't Chrysler's decision. They are under enormous pressure from the President's automotive task force."

Chrysler, of course, denied the charge:

A spokeswoman for Chrysler said the decision to cut a quarter of the dealers was "not coming from the task force."
"Our position is that the market can't support the number of dealers that are out there," said spokeswoman Carrie McElwee. "This has been our plan for more than 10 years to combine Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep under one roof."
The decision about cutting dealers took into consideration factors like location, customer satisfaction, and sales potential, she said. Nearly half of the terminated dealers also carry non-Chrysler brands, and most rely on used vehicles for the bulk of their sales.

Well . . . not so fast, now, Miss Carrie. Evidence now being assembled on the blogesphere is providing substantial evidence that the Chrysler dealers cut generally supported GOP candidates. Doug Ross over at Directorblue blew the lid off Chrysler's official position on the bases for choosing the dealerships to close.

Solutioneering Two State Solutionism

2009-05-24T16:07:00.007-04:00

Jeffrey Goldberg, now an American journalist, lived in Israeli kibbutz and worked as a guard in an Israeli prison overseeing Palestinian inmates. As a result he wrote a book entitled “Prisoners: A Tale of Friendship and Terror.” In the book, he wrote about being asked about why he was in Israel:

I could have said: I’m here because I believe with perfect faith in the catechisms of solutionism, the American national religion, which holds that for every intractable problem there is a logical and available answer. I could have said: I am here in search of the secret afflictions of the Palestinian heart. I am here exploring the contradictions of Jewish power. I am here seeking the elimination of ambiguity. I’m looking for the bridge that will carry me across the black hole of cognition that separates Arab and Jew. I’m here to quiet the conflict in my heart. I’m here because I’m alive to hope. I’m here in search of the key to all mythologies. I’m here because I’m a fucking idiot.

Today, Rick Richmond critiques Goldberg's review of Benny Morris' book: “One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict”.

Jeffrey Goldberg has written amusingly about his susceptibility to “solutionism” - the “American national religion, which holds that for every intractable problem there is a logical and available answer.” The related faith-based belief system known as two-state solutionism (the conviction that a Palestinian state would live side by side with Israel in peace and security, because — well it just will) increasingly depends on “explainawayism” - which holds that for every Palestinian rejection of a second state there is a logical and available reason why it was Israel’s fault.

"Explainawayism" is another way of saying "solutioneering", which is defined as putting forth the solution without first having flushed out the problem. According to Richmond, Goldberg's hangup is with Israeli intractability in resolving incidents of armed conflicts without providing PA leaders the opportunity to demonstrate that Israel had conceded key points to the Arab side. The real sticking point is in PA failure to honor the words of its leaders. For example, Haaretz reported that:

Abbas, in honor of the completion of the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip . . . declared, “From this day forth, there will be no more security turmoil and weapons chaos and abductions, which are not characteristic of our culture.” . . . .
Palestinian Minister Mohammed Dahlan, who was in charge of coordinating the withdrawal, said the Palestinians were ready to deal with any scenario . . . .

What followed these words was more Palestinian vio

lence and the election of Hamas terrorists as the legitimate government of Palestine.

The future of "two state solutionism" is indeed bleak as Benny Morris describes:

This is not to overlook the great dysfunction among the Palestinians, whose national liberation movement remains, 89 years since the third Palestine Arab Congress, bloody-minded and incompetent. Gaza, after all, is currently ruled by a cult that sanctifies murder-suicide. But there are many Palestinians on the West Bank, and even in Gaza, who reject the Hamas way and seek dignity and quiet within the framework of an independent state that coexists with Israel.

Not to worry though . . . Obama will find a way!

Why Close Dealerships?

2009-05-23T15:18:00.005-04:00

The circumstance that brought about the of firing of 900 Chrysler and 2,600 GM dealerships either originated from Obama's administration or the option was suggested to the "know-nothing auto task force" by the manufacturers.

Restructuring demands from President Barack Obama's administration include cutting labor costs, reducing debt, shedding dealerships and brands, and closing excess factories.

Never mind that little is being done in the Chrysler bankruptcy model to reduce labor costs, since Obama is protecting the UAW instead of allowing the court to void its' labor contracts.

So tell tell me again why independent dealerships need be forcefully closed by the government.

GM spokeswoman Susan Garontakos said the company can't maintain its current dealer network given poor sales.
"The infrastructure that's now in place is too big," she said.
"If they are not ordering cars, we can't thrive on that. Most dealers are unable today to borrow money to maintain their inventory."
The dealer network is a cost to the manufacturer, she said, in administrative expense, incentives and rewards programs, and technology infrastructure.
"They pay for some of it; not all of it," Ms. Garontakos said.

All of the costs of which Ms. Garontakos speaks are sales related, directly tied to the actual sale of the vehicles. If these costs decline sales decline. There are few if any fixed costs associated with the sales that have not already been chased out by lessened consumer demand. So if we assume that automaker selling costs are variable except for advertising, there can be no reason to screw with independently owned dealerships. If sales demand remains low for new vehicles, the market will find and take out any weak dealers.

It has been suggested that the whole dealer franchise model needs to be modernized. Changes to state laws that would permit open new car sales seven days a week by any financially stable retailer and at a service dealer location, on the internet or at the mall or almost anywhere would become permissible. Sales by Sam's Club, Costco, CarMax, Amazon, even direct sales and shipments by the automakers, come to mind. Whatever changes might come from such a rearrangement would work its way through the economy naturally. Service work has always been a mixed bag with local garages supplementing expensive dealership garages. This proposal is secondary to the consideration of deliberately putting 3,400 businesses into turmoil, facing closure or bankruptcy.

The irony of the government invasion of private enterprise is highlighted by two addition facts. First of all, no Canadian dealerships of either GM or Chrysler, are being closed and Ford is not actively pursuing large cuts in its dealer net.

The scariest part of this mess is that government should not have involved itself in the auto industry, but now it has and blood has been tasted. Mussolini-style Fascism is upon us.

Obama and the Constitution

2009-05-21T22:09:00.003-04:00

In a speech today on Guantanamo, our leader said:

My own American journey was paved by generations of citizens who gave meaning to those simple words – “to form a more perfect union.” I have studied the Constitution as a student; I have taught it as a teacher; I have been bound by it as a lawyer and legislator. I took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution as Commander-in-Chief, and as a citizen, I know that we must never – ever – turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, the search is on for Justice Souter's replacement on the Supreme Court.

President Barack Obama began interviewing potential Supreme Court candidates Tuesday, while a senior White House official defended the president's stated preference for a nominee who will give the powerless "a fair shake."
White House adviser David Axelrod said the U.S. Constitution, like any document of its vintage, must be subject to interpretation in a modern context.
"Fidelity to the Constitution is paramount, but as with any document that was written no matter how brilliantly centuries ago, it couldn't possibly have anticipated all the questions that would be asked in the 21st century," Mr. Axelrod said.

First on President Obama's search was an interview with Judge Diane P. Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago, believed to be among the top contenders.

SCOTUSBLOG quickly found Judge Wood's view of the constitution, which agrees with Axelrod and is counter to Obama's high-sounding rhetoric.

Articulating her understanding of constitutional interpretation in a lecture entitled, “Our 18th Century Constitution in the 21st Century World,” Seventh Circuit Judge Diane P. Wood laid out her view that judges should not confine their interpretation of the Constitution to the narrowest reading of the text. Rather, the Framers understood that courts would find “unwritten” law that allowed the text to adapt to contemporary needs: “[t]here is no more reason to think that they expected the world to remain static than there is to think that any of us holds a crystal ball. The only way to create a foundational document that could stand the test of time was to build in enough flexibility that later generations would be able to adapt it to their own needs and uses.”

H/T: QandO

Honda Provides Insight into Future Cars

2009-05-19T23:13:00.004-04:00

Today Barack Obama announced new CAFE fuel efficiency standards to raise average automaker miles per gallon to 35.5 by 2016.

President Barack Obama is asking consumers to put their money — up to $1,300 per new vehicle by 2016 — behind his plan for higher efficiency standards for cars and trucks and tougher rules on their greenhouse gas emissions. In return, Obama said Tuesday in unveiling the plan, drivers would make up the higher cost of more fuel-efficient, cleaner vehicles by buying less gas at the pump.
It would take just three years to pay off the investment and would, over the life of a vehicle, save about $2,800 through better gas mileage, the president said.

Jeremy Clarkson at TimesOnline provides "timely insight" (pun intended) into the future with "putt-putt" cars, as Rush Limbaugh called them today. Clarkson's review of the Honda Insight requires a full read here.

But before you read the review, savor these highlights:

Much has been written about the Insight, Honda’s new low-priced hybrid. We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days.
So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.
So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.
Because the Honda has two motors, one that runs on petrol and one that runs on batteries, it is more expensive to make than a car that has one. But since the whole point of this car is that it could be sold for less than Toyota’s Smugmobile, the engineers have plainly peeled the suspension components to the bone. The result is a ride that beggars belief.
There’s more. Normally, Hondas feel as though they have been screwed together by eye surgeons. This one, however, feels as if it’s been made from steel so thin, you could read through it. And the seats, finished in pleblon, are designed specifically, it seems, to ruin your skeleton. This is hairy-shirted eco-ism at its very worst.

H/T: Commentary

California Mobocracy Leading To Bankruptcy

2009-05-19T19:56:00.008-04:00

California's mobocracy, called "direct democracy" by the state's natives, has finally put the the state over the edge. The reasons for failure of a "democratic" government are simple, yet complex. The Blockbuster Democracy Blog explains:

In the direct democracy world, you can expect to see lots of action in the state. All kinds of groups, from various points on the political spectrum, are readying ballot initiatives that seek to capitalize on the crisis by imposing major changes. Could we see the end of the two-thirds super-majority requirement for the budget and/or taxes? Could we send harsh new restrictions on immigrants? Could we have a constitutional convention?
Direct democracy -- the Switzerland-inspired system of initiatives, referenda and recalls that allows voters to make and repeal laws in 24 states -- is poorly understood. It isn’t even very direct. Direct democracy has become blockbuster democracy: a half-billion-dollar international industry of signature gatherers, consultants, and election lawyers who use ballot measures less as a method of making law and more as a tool of mega-communications to boost some politicians, hurt others, and supplement lobbying campaigns.

Direct democracy in California has become mobocracy . . . rule by mob. As explained in Muck and Mystery, here and here, democracy assumes a single level of government and small units of governed such as villages, but it turns out that democracy is not scalable ... it fails when multiple villages and multiple layers of government appear.

The Economist describes "The Ungovernable State."

On May 19th, Californians will go to the polls to vote on six ballot measures that are as important as they are confusing. If these measures fail, America’s biggest state will enter a full-blown financial crisis that will require excruciating cuts in public services. If the measures succeed, the crisis will be only a little less acute. Recent polls suggest that voters are planning to vote most of them down.
The occasion has thus become an ugly summary of all that is wrong with California’s governance, and that list is long. This special election, the sixth in 36 years, came about because the state’s elected politicians once again—for the system virtually assures as much—could not agree on a budget in time and had to cobble together a compromise in February to fill a $42 billion gap between revenue and spending. But that compromise required extending some temporary taxes, shifting spending around and borrowing against future lottery profits. These are among the steps that voters must now approve, thanks to California’s brand of direct democracy, which is unique in extent, complexity and misuse.
A good outcome is no longer possible. California now has the worst bond rating among the 50 states. Income-tax receipts are coming in far below expectations. On May 11th Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor, sent a letter to the legislature warning it that, by his latest estimates, the state will face a budget gap of $15.4 billion if the ballot measures pass, $21.3 billion if they fail. Prisoners will have to be released, firefighters fired, and other services cut or eliminated. One way or the other, on May 20th Californians will have to begin discussing how to fix their broken state.
California has a unique combination of features which, individually, are shared by other states but collectively cause dysfunction. These begin with the requirement that any budget pass both houses of the legislature with a two-thirds majority. Two other states, Rhode Island and Arkansas, have such a law. But California, where taxation and budgets are determined separately, also requires two-thirds majorities for any tax increase. Twelve other states demand this. Only California, however, has both requirements.
If its representative democracy functioned well, that might not be so debilitating. But it does not. Only a minority of Californians bother to vote, and those voters tend to be older, whiter and richer than the state’s younger, browner and poorer population, says Steven Hill at the New America Foundation, a think-tank that is analysing the options for reform.
Representative democracy is only one half of California’s peculiar governance system. The other half, direct democracy, fails just as badly. California is one of 24 states that allow referendums, recalls and voter initiatives. But it is the only state that does not allow its legislature to override successful initiatives (called “propositions”) and has no sunset clauses that let them expire. It also uses initiatives far more, and more irresponsibly, than any other state.
Direct democracy in America originated, largely in the Western states, during the Populist and then Progressive eras of the late 19th and early 20th century. It came to California in 1911, when Governor Hiram Johnson introduced it. At first, it made sense. The Southern Pacific Railroad dominated politics, society and the courts in the young frontier state, and direct democracy would be a welcome check and balance. The state in 1910 had only 2.4m residents, and 95% of them were white. (Today it has about 37m residents, and less than half are white.) A small, homogenous and informed electorate was to make sparing and disciplined use of the ballot to keep the legislature honest, rather as in Switzerland.

The Economist continues with in-depth analysis of the events that lead up to the this crisis. The entire long essay is required reading here.

Ironically, Arnold Schwarzenegger was not in the state today for the ballot initiatives election. Instead he traveled to Washington to accept praise for the state's tough CAFE fuel efficiency standards which president Obama announced as the model for his new rules which will now reek havoc on America's auto industry

Voter Fraud Dooms Early Voting Centers in Indiana

2009-05-17T19:02:00.012-04:00

Today, in a carefully worded editorial, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette criticized Indiana governor Mitch Daniels' veto of legislation purportedly designed to make voting more convenient.

Senate Bill 209 passed in the Senate 48-0 and in the House 55-43. It allows the three-member county election boards to create multiple early-voting sites by a 2-1 majority board vote rather than the previous requirement for a unanimous 3-0 vote. Every county must have one early-voting center, but the decision to open additional satellite early-voting centers must be unanimous. That provision was designed to eliminate partisan skirmishes similar to the long legal battle that occurred in Lake County last fall. Democratic members of the Lake County election board opened more early-voting centers to meet demand, but Republican members opposed the move and asked the courts to close the sites.
Daniels’ veto makes it clear he objects to the early-voting bill. A statement released by Daniels said, “While this bill contains provisions that would make the act of voting more convenient, it does not contain sufficient safeguards against fraud and abuse and removes long-standing bipartisan checks and balances in the conduct of elections.”
But the statement doesn’t go far enough in explaining exactly what it would take to win his support. His office said there would be no further comment or explanation, including offering suggestions to legislators about what safeguards the bill needs to make it acceptable to Daniels.

The editorial skates lightly around the details surrounding outright voter fraud in NW Indiana. Snuggled up against Chicago in the far NW corner of the state in Lake County, Obama's hired hands from ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) were busy illegally helping the Democrats register phony voters in the run up to the elections. According to the Wall Street Journal,"Lake County, Indiana, ... has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the deadline. 'All the signatures looked exactly the same,' said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board." Pajamas Media supplies The Complete Guide to ACORN Voter Fraud here.

The "devil in the details" of this story in Lake County that goes even deeper than ACORN and we thank Advance Indiana and Frugal Hoosiers for the details written last fall:

Lake County Democrats are determined to open up satellite voting centers in Lake County for this year's general election by hook or crook. Indiana law requires a unanimous vote of a county election board in order to open up satellite voting centers where voters can vote prior to election day. Lake County GOP members voted against the plan, however, because Democrats would only agree to open up voting centers in the Democratic cities of Gary, Hammond and East Chicago and no areas of the county where Republicans are more dominant. Lake Co. GOP Chairman John Curley says he had an understanding with Rudy Clay to have voting centers during the primary but not the general election. Curley says Clay changed his mind because the Democratic gubernatorial campaign of Jill Long Thompson had pulled his street money (i.e. unreported expenditures in the form of cash used by political operatives in any way they please to win votes) for the general election. A press release from Curley says:
Rudy Clay, Lake County Democratic Chairman, negotiated a plan with me in the spring of 2008 to open satellite voting locations for the primary. I said I was not in favor of the satellites but would go along with him then but NOT in the fall. He agreed. Chairman Clay approached me again a few weeks ago and I reminded him of our agreement. He said Jill Long has pulled his “street money” and he needs the satellites. I declined.

Notwithstanding Indiana law requiring a unanimous vote, Democrats plan to go ahead and open up the early voting centers illegally according to the Gary Post-Tribune. So what does this have to do with the Obama campaign? Curley claims that Obama's Chicago office approached him recently and offered assistance in garnering votes for Gov. Mitch Daniels if the Republicans would agree to go along with the satellite voting centers. Here's how Curley describes the exchange with the Obama campaign representative:
A representative of Obama’s Chicago organization asked to meet personally with me to discuss satellites. He specifically offered to procure votes for Governor Daniels at those satellites stating that Jill Long can not win and the governor is in “good shape.” He then asked if there was anything he could do to get this accomplished. I told him “No way.” It seems that Chicago politics is now invading NW Indiana.

Mitch Daniels: Hoosiers Say "No" to Cap & Trade

2009-05-16T21:33:00.010-04:00

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal with the all-telling but totally superfluous sub-headline:

"No honest person thinks this will make a dent in climate change."

This week Congress is set to release the details of the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, a bill that purports to combat global warming by setting strict limits on carbon emissions. I'm not a candidate for any office -- now or ever again -- and I've approached the "climate change" debate with an open-mind. But it's clear to me that the nation, and in particular Indiana, my home state, will be terribly dis-served by this cap-and-trade policy on the verge of passage in the House.

The largest scientific and economic questions are being addressed by others, so I will confine myself to reporting about how all this looks from the receiving end of the taxes, restrictions and mandates Congress is now proposing.

Quite simply, it looks like imperialism. This bill would impose enormous taxes and restrictions on free commerce by wealthy but faltering powers -- California, Massachusetts and New York -- seeking to exploit politically weaker colonies in order to prop up their own decaying economies. Because proceeds from their new taxes, levied mostly on us, will be spent on their social programs while negatively impacting our economy, we Hoosiers decline to submit meekly.

The Waxman-Markey legislation would more than double electricity bills in Indiana. Years of reform in taxation, regulation and infrastructure-building would be largely erased at a stroke. In recent years, Indiana has led the nation in capturing international investment, repatriating dollars spent on foreign goods or oil and employing Americans with them. Waxman-Markey seems designed to reverse that flow. "Closed: Gone to China" signs would cover Indiana's stores and factories.

Our state's share of national income has been slipping for decades, but it is offset in part by living costs some 8% lower than the national average. Doubled utility bills for low-income Hoosiers would be an especially cruel consequence of the Waxman bill. Forgive us for not being impressed at danglings of welfare-like repayments to some of those still employed, with some fraction of the dollars extracted from our state.

And for what? No honest estimate pretends to suggest that a U.S. cap-and-trade regime will move the world's thermometer by so much as a tenth of a degree a half century from now. My fellow citizens are being ordered to accept impoverishment for a policy that won't save a single polar bear.

We are told that although China, India and others show no signs of joining in this dismal process, we will eventually induce their participation by "setting an example." Watching the impending indigence of the Midwest, and the flow of jobs from our shores to theirs, our friends in Asia and the Third World are far more likely to choose any other path but ours.

Politicians in Washington speak of a reawakened appreciation for manufacturing and American competitiveness. But under their policy, those who make real products will suffer. Already we observe the piranha swarm of green lobbyists wangling special exemptions, subsidies and side deals. The ordinary Hoosier was not invited to this party, and can expect at most only table scraps at the service entrance.

No one in Indiana is arguing for the status quo: Hoosiers have been eager to pursue a new energy future. We rocketed from nowhere to national leadership in biofuels production in the last four years. We were the No. 1 state in the growth of wind power in 2008. And we have embarked on an aggressive energy-conservation program, indubitably the most cost-effective means of limiting CO2.

Most importantly, we are out to be the world leader in making clean coal -- including the potential for carbon capture and sequestration. The world's first commercial-scale clean coal power plant is under construction in our state, and the first modern coal-to-natural gas plant is coming right behind it. We eagerly accept the responsibility to develop alternatives to the punitive, inequitable taxation of cap and trade.

Our president has commendably committed himself to "government that works." But his imperial climate-change policy is government that cannot work, and we humble colonials out here in the provinces have no choice but to petition for relief from the Crown's impositions.

Since these thoughts came from the opposition, Mitch probably wasted his time in writing the editorial. Like all politicians, however, he is woefully uninformed about the the junk science of limiting CO2 emissions and no one in his position can afford indecision about "climate change."

This is not the time for wishy-washy politician-speak . . . it is time to fully and unconditionally support your base, Governor.

Wikipedia In Wonderland

2009-05-08T19:23:00.002-04:00

From the Irish Times comes a lazy journalism tale by Shane Fitzgerald, a student at University College Dublin. Shane's piece is mirrored in today's Topper from Dilbert.

Watching Sky News, Shane worried about the veracity of the news being reported.

The speed with which the story was reported got me thinking about the potential pitfalls relating to the media rush for up-to-the-minute news bulletins. In the era of 24-hour news coverage, the internet is no doubt the lifeline for reporters in their never-ending scramble to report a breaking news story in time for the on-the-hour news slots, or for journalists racing to get a story written before the paper is sent to the printers.

Just how reliant reporters are on the world wide web was the question that suddenly gave me the idea of carrying out an internet hoax. The global world is connected through the internet, and news reporters are relying on this resource more than ever. I wanted to prove that this was indeed the case, and show the potential dangers that arise.

When Sky News reported the death of French composer Maurice Jaffe on March 30, Shane executed his hoax.

I immediately grabbed my laptop, went to Maurice Jarre’s Wikipedia page, clicked the edit button on screen and proceeded to lay the trap for my unsuspecting prey, the journalists.

“One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack,” I wrote into the Wikipedia entry. “Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head and that only I can hear.”

This was a totally fake quote and neither Maurice Jarre, nor anyone else, has ever been on record as uttering these words.

Shane expected news reporters to rush to Wiki for basic information to include in a Jaffe obituary piece, but he was surprised that few writers spent any time verifying the accuracy of the internet encyclopedia's data.

While I expected online blogs and maybe some smaller papers to use the quote, I did not think it would have a major impact. I was wrong. Quality newspapers in England, India, America and as far away as Australia had my words in their reports of Jarre’s death. I was shocked that highly respected newspapers would use material from Wikipedia without first sourcing and referencing it properly.

The issues about the media and quality reporting that this experiment raises requires a whole new article by itself – because the implications are far-reaching. If I could so easily falsify the news across the globe, even to this small extent, then it is unnerving to think about what other false information may be reported in the press.

Shane has obviously not been paying much attention to the ongoing incessant propaganda being spewed by the mainstream media.

Chrysler Bankruptcy & The Chicago Way

2009-05-05T22:30:00.014-04:00

"THE CHICAGO WAY: When crime is a way of life for the authorities, where does justice begin?" Mark Mahon

Equity Private of the Finem Respice blog works her day job in the private equity and hedge fund business.

Write about finance long enough with the same electronic mail address and a number of interesting anecdotes will flutter your way. Write just a little bit longer and a shocking tale will pass under your eyes once or twice. Stick it out for two and half a hundred weeks and one is like to hear something quite disturbing. Hang in for more than a pair of years and a truly horrifying, bone chilling narrative will eventually confront you. Today, I have the distinctly unpleasant distinction of being on the receiving end of exactly this sort of recollection. That is, a bit of dialogue so genuinely awful that- were it not from a source I consider impeccable, and unimpeachable- I would not dare to credit at all. Unfortunately, I must do precisely this, and personally believe it to be totally, frightfully accurate. I take no pleasure in relaying it, instead hoping that someone more directly in the business of running such matters down and printing them will carefully document it and- if true- expose it, or- if not- discredit it quickly and finally. This (as yet unproven) yarn goes exactly like this:

Confronting the head of a non-TARP fund holding Chrysler debt and unwilling to release it for any sum less than that to which it was legally entitled without compelling cause, this country's "Car Czar" [Steven Rattner] berated the manager of said fund with an outburst of prose substantially resembling this:

Who the fuck do you think you're dealing with? We'll have the IRS audit your fund. Every one of your employees. Your investors. Then we will have the Securities and Exchange Commission rip through your books looking for anything and everything and nothing we find to destroy you with.

Faced with these sorts of threats, in this environment, with valued employees in the crosshairs and AIG a fresh, open wound upon the market, the fund folded.

It is a tale literally so outlandish and difficult to picture that, in these circumstances and given the source, it rings absolutely true. Consider all this in a larger context where:

You see Non-TARP entities claiming that:

...we have been systematically precluded from engaging in direct discussions or negotiations with the government; instead, we have been forced to communicate through an obviously conflicted intermediary: a group of banks that have received billions of TARP funds.

...not to mention the fact that the salary, bonus and "stress test" results for TARP banks are all within Treasury's control.

Then you have White & Case attorney Tom Lauria, describing the experience of one of his clients, holders of Senior debt in Chrysler, to Frank Beckmann:

Lauria: One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House, and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight. That's how hard it is to stand on this side of the fence.

Beckmann: Was that Perella Weinberg?

Lauria: That was Perella Weinberg.

We see the White House Chief of Staff (whose primary finance and economics qualifications appear to be a Bachelor of the Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College- apparently appealing because of its strong ballet program- and a Master of the Arts in Speech and Communications) calling the plays over at Treasury for the last several months. To wit:

On Jan. 20, Timothy Geithner took control of the Treasury Department, directing the government's response to the financial crisis.

Within three weeks, the White House tightened its grip, alarmed by the poor reaction to Mr. Geithner's performance during the rollout of his rescue plan, government officials say. Since then, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been so involved in the workings of the Treasury that "Rahm wants it" has become an unofficial mantra among some at the Treasury, according to government officials.

We have senior government officials apparently ordering, or at least strong-arming, the Chief Executive of a publicly-held firm to make or avoid certain disclosures and to close a merger, "or else."

We watch the White House fire the Chief Executive of General Motors after he makes the most generous settlement offer to bondholders (to whom he owes fiduciary duties) up to that point, and smile gently when Wagoner's successor [Fritz Henderson] puts the screws to financial creditors and eases up on the UAW.

Justice David Souter: A Supreme Non-Entity

2009-05-02T20:21:00.001-04:00

Captain Ed Morrissey reminds us that David Souter has done little to contribute to landmark legal decisions in his nineteen years on the Supreme Court. The most famous decision that he wrote was Kelo v. City of New London.

In Kelo v. City of New London (2005), the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the government to condemn property and transfer it to other private owners in the name of "economic development." Upholding the forced transfer of land in New London, Connecticut, to private developers, the Court ruled that virtually any potential public benefit satisfies the Fifth Amendment's requirement that the authorities can take property only for a "public use." Traditionally, a public use had meant a government-owned facility or a public utility with legally mandated access for the general public. With an economic development taking, property is simply transferred from one private party to another, without any public access requirement.

Interestingly, Congress and many state legislatures reacted immediately to right the judicial wrong, but,as related in this post at Captain's Quarters the most attention "didn’t come from any brilliant Souter erudition on the topic but from an effort to have his home confiscated under Kelo by people in New Hampshire in order to make a point".

The Mark Twain Option

When I wrote about my reaction to the Kelo decision, I included a portion of a letter written by Mark Twain over 120 years ago that I felt spoke directly to the issue. After losing a copyright case that he clearly should have won, Twain wrote the following in a letter to a Massachusetts group seeking to honor him with an award:

It does look as if Massachusetts were in a fair way to embarrass me with kindnesses this year. In the first place, a Massachusetts judge has just decided in open court that a Boston publisher may sell, not only his own property in a free and unfettered way, but also may as freely sell property which does not belong to him but to me; property which he has not bought and which I have not sold. Under this ruling I am now advertising that judge's homestead for sale, and, if I make a good a sum out of it as I expect, I shall go on and sell out the rest of his property.

It now looks as if activists have taken Twain to heart. An investment group now seeks to build a hotel with a museum dedicated to documenting the decline of property rights in Weare, New Hampshire [consider the possible movie title, "We Are New Hampshire"], the home of Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Actually, they want to build the hotel in place of the home of Supreme Court Justice David Souter:

Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land.

The proposed development, called "The Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Cafe" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged."

Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans.

"This is not a prank" said Clements, "The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development."

People who want to see Justice Souter's land put to better use than single-family ownership can e-mail the city at this link. Tell them that you'd plan on spending a week in the town as tourists at the new hotel and museum complex. That should get them to give serious consideration to the Mark Twain option.

And, if we're successful, we can move on to Justice Kennedy's house next, as Twain himself might have suggested.

Mexican Flu Pandemic?

2009-05-02T18:03:00.002-04:00

This may be May 1st, but there is little cause for the invoking the international "Mayday" distress call about the N1A1 or Swine or more properly (according to the historic precedence which names influenza outbreaks according to country of origin) the Mexican Flu. Yesterday, the World Health Organization raised the alert status for the virus to level 5 out of a possible 6, which means a pandemic is near . . . or does it? This is the most recent alert from WHO:

Influenza A(H1N1) - update 8.1

1 May 2009 -- The situation continues to evolve. As of 23:30 GMT, 1 May 2009, 13 countries have officially reported 367 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infection.

The United States Government has reported 141 laboratory confirmed human cases, including one death. Mexico has reported 156 confirmed human cases of infection, including nine deaths.

The following countries have reported laboratory confirmed cases with no deaths - Austria (1), Canada (34), China, Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region (1), Denmark (1), Germany (4), Israel (2), Netherlands (1), New Zealand (4), Spain (13), Switzerland (1) and the United Kingdom (8).

It has now been 25 days since Mexican authorities began investigating an outbreak of severe respiratory illness and we now know that 10 people (2.75%), all Mexican, have died from the disease. According to the LA Times, the current virus strain is much weaker than than those in past pandemics and perhaps even weaker than normal annual flu epidemics. In a typical flu season in the U.S., "between 5% and 20% of the population becomes ill and 36,000 people die -- a mortality rate of between 0.06% and 0.24%."

It is now time for the 24 hour cable networks and the "drive-by" media to back off from a non-event.

UPDATE: Dr. Marc Siegel at Fox News tells us that Swine Flu is not the killer we think it is.

In the current swine flu scare the virus is assumed to be a more powerful human killer than it actually is. In reality it appears to losing virulence as it spreads human to human and is not that transmissable, and is NOT becoming widespread.

Do You Feel Safer?

2009-04-30T23:08:00.001-04:00

Privatize USPS

2009-04-30T21:17:00.001-04:00

Government inattention to running its own businesses profitably does not bode well for the investment banks and auto companies now in the grips of government incompetence due to the bailout fiascoes. The US Postal Service, a quasi-government entity not unlike Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is in real financial trouble. Conservatives With Attitude comments:

The Postal Service was $2.8 billion in the red last year and is facing even larger losses this year due to a sharp decline in mail volume in the weak economy. Postmaster General John Potter broached the possibility of cutting mail delivery from six days to five in January, but the idea has not been warmly received in Congress. “We are facing losses of historic proportion,” he told a House subcommittee. “Our situation is critical.”

“Without a change we will exhaust our cash resources,” Potter said. “We can no longer afford business as usual.” He estimated that delivering mail five days a week instead of six would save $3.5 billion per year.

Like the auto companies, USPS suffers from legacy costs and high labor costs that impede profitablity.

The total payment for 2009 for retiree health benefits is estimated at approximately $7.4 billion. This includes the scheduled payment of $5.4 billion, as mandated by the PAEA, and an estimated $2 billion for current retiree health benefit premiums.
Unlike other federal agencies, the Postal Service is required by law to fund the cost of health benefits premiums for both current and future retirees. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) requires the Postal Service to pay into the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund regularly scheduled payments through 2016. As of September 30, 2008, this fund had a positive balance of $32.6 billion.

Georg Jensen at The American Interest Online proposes necessary changes at the Post Office:

Here is what to do, and the order in which to do it:

1. Replace the USPS senior management team with proven corporate executives who know how to run a $76 billion company with vision and accountability to stakeholders.

2. Negotiate with the unions to gain the concessions necessary to get the USPS’s labor costs in line. To be competitive with private competitors, the USPS will need to pay its workforce less than the $42 average hourly wage they receive today. Between layoffs and renegotiated compensation and benefits, drop the payroll costs from 80 percent of USPS’s expenses to 60 percent.

3. Invest in modernization of the sorting centers to gain long-term efficiencies, but tighten up the network so that unprofitable centers and unprofitable post office branches are closed.

4. Normalize the pricing differences between first-class, second-class (publications) and standard mail (advertising) to reflect actual delivery costs, and end the ratepayer and taxpayer subsidization of Big Mail. USPS subsidizes U.S. businesses by means of the fees it collects from ordinary postal customers. For example, if you wish to mail someone a large envelope weighing three ounces, you’ll pay $1.17 in postage. A business can bulk-mail a three-ounce catalog of the same size for as little as $0.14.

5. Redefine the Universal Service Obligation [six day delivery] so that it makes sense in the 21st century. Use available online technology that enables the Postal Service to know when customers don’t need delivery or would forego a default delivery option to have their mail delivered electronically, redirected elsewhere or destroyed.

6. As consumers switch to all-electronic delivery of postal mail, modify the USPS’s delivery fleet with in-vehicle dynamic routing systems such UPS and FedEx use, so that USPS vehicles don’t have to stop at every house, every day.

7. Follow the international model for liberalization. Having competitors in the marketplace will force the USPS to become more efficient and truly competitive. Customers will have a choice, just as they do today with phone-service providers. Better yet, move to privatize the USPS before the option disappears.

Behind The Scenes At The Rescue Off Somalia

2009-04-23T19:23:00.001-04:00

Doug Ross has this interesting and entertaining insight into the rescue of Captain Phillips by Navy Seals here.

Susan Boyle: The Rest of The Story?

2009-04-20T21:12:00.003-04:00

If you haven't been keeping "pace" (as they say in Britain), Susan Boyle is avoiding the paparazzi in order to prepare for her next solo for the Britain's Got Talent competition. The song will be "Whistle Down the Wind," by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Meanwhile, more information on the world's most famous person trickles in. Before I continue, I would like to say that I have speculated here and here that Susan may be a savant.

Watching the incredible Susan Boyle video, I was struck by her stumbling and bumbling during the initial interview, and after the performance when she hesitated, then began to leave the stage before her exit interview. She seemed confused by the discussions about her performance, and about her three “yes” votes and the offstage interview.

It occurs to me that she may be a savant. According to the Wisconsin Medical Society, “music is generally the most common savant skill.”

The comments of her priest seem to confirm my initial thoughts. Catholic News Service publishes this enlightening information from the perspective of her priest, Father Basil Clark:

He has seen the situation unfold many times before, having regularly accompanied Boyle, 47, on the annual Legion of Mary pilgrimage to the Marian shrine in Knock, Ireland.
"When I watched the judges' faces it reminded me of what I was like when I first saw Susan singing -- absolutely blown away by the quality of the singing and by that fantastic voice," said Father Clark, dean of West Lothian, the district that covers Boyle's home village of Blackburn.
"Anyone who sees her for the first time behaves the same way. I have never heard her sing badly, though she might lose the words if the stress gets too much," he told Catholic News Service in an April 16 telephone interview.

Apparently, Susan Boyle was brain-damaged at birth, as a result of oxygen deprivation, and she has lived in her family home, sleeping in the same bedroom where she was born. Father Clark goes on to express his joy for her good fortune and his concerns about her future:

"When she gets up to sing it can either be wonderful or you can get the unpredictable eccentric behavior, but it is to do with the fact that she has learning difficulties.
"In a sense, there is a beautiful voice trapped in this damaged body," he said. "It is an absolute contrast. There she was on television acting very peculiarly and the audience was expecting peculiar things to happen and then a voice of an angel comes out -- and that's Susan."
Father Clark said that local people who knew Boyle, the youngest of nine children of a family descended from Irish migrants, were "enormously proud of her and wish her the best but they are aware of the risks she is running," adding that her behavior has previously drawn cruel taunts from children.
"People are slightly worried about what might happen after this bout of fame," he explained.
"I am quite worried for her," he added. "I think it's great at one level. It might just be the thing that will make her, but she is a very vulnerable person and it could be quite difficult.
"It is a great opportunity for her and as far as I am concerned she should make the best of it, and if it lasts, it lasts, and if it doesn't, then it's still more than almost any one of us will ever achieve," he added. "It is important in sustaining her and making sure this is all a very, very beneficial experience."

Ethanol Not Economically Viable Nor A Sane Alternative Fuel

2009-04-18T18:46:00.001-04:00

From the WSJ comes the bad news about ethanol:

Consumers were asked to suspend disbelief as policy makers blurred the lines between economic reality and a business model built on fantasies of a better environment and energy independence through ethanol. Notwithstanding federal subsidies and mandates that force-feed the biofuel to the driving public, ethanol is proving to be a bust. In the fourth quarter of 2008, Aventine Renewable Energy, a large ethanol producer, lost $37 million despite selling a company record 278 million gallons of the biofuel. Last week it filed for bankruptcy. California's Pacific Ethanol lost $146 million last year and has defaulted on $250 million in loans. It recently told regulators that it will likely run out of cash by April 30.

How could this be? The federal government gives ethanol producers a generous 51-cent-a-gallon tax credit and mandates that a massive amount of their fuel be blended into the nation's gasoline supplies. And those mandates increase every year. This year the mandate is 11 billion gallons and is on its way to 36 billion gallons in 2022.
To meet this political demand, VeraSun, Pacific Ethanol, Aventine Renewable Energy and others rushed to build ethanol mills. The industry produced just four billion gallons of ethanol in 2005, so it had to add a lot of capacity in a short period of time.

Three years ago, ethanol producers made $2.30 per gallon. But with the global economic slowdown, along with a glut of ethanol on the market, by the end of 2008 ethanol producers were making a mere 25 cents per gallon. That drop forced Dyersville and other facilities to be shuttered. The industry cut more than 20% of its capacity in a few months last year.

What's more, as ethanol producers sucked in a vast amount of corn, prices of milk, eggs and other foods soared. The price of corn shot up, as did the price of products from animals -- chickens and cows -- that eat feed corn.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry reacted by standing with the cattlemen in his state to ask the Environmental Protection Agency last year to suspend part of the ethanol mandates (which it has the power to do under the 2007 energy bill). The EPA turned him down flat. The Consumer Price Index later revealed that retail food prices in 2008 were up 10% over 2006. In Mexico, rising prices led to riots over the cost of tortillas in 2007. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization and other international organizations issued reports last year criticizing biofuels for a spike in food prices.

Ethanol is also bad for the environment. Science magazine published an article last year by Timothy Searchinger of Princeton University, among others, that concluded that biofuels cause deforestation, which speeds climate change. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration noted in July 2007 that the ethanol boom rapidly increased the amount of fertilizer polluting the Mississippi River. And this week, University of Minnesota researchers Yi-Wen Chiu, Sangwon Suh and Brian Walseth released a study showing that in California -- a state with a water shortage -- it can take more than 1,000 gallons of water to make one gallon of ethanol. They warned that "energy security is being secured at the expense of water security."

For all the pain ethanol has caused, it displaced a mere 3% of our oil usage last year. Even if we plowed under all other crops and dedicated the country's 300 million acres of cropland to ethanol, James Jordan and James Powell of the Polytechnic University of New York estimate we would displace just 15% of our oil demand with biofuels.

Florida International Is Isiah Thomas' Next Victim

2009-04-15T21:46:00.001-04:00

First we get the news from Rivals:

MIAMI (AP)—Isiah Thomas sat in his new gym for an hour, at one point turning his gaze toward the Florida International players he’ll now coach.

“There’ll be a lot of ups,” Thomas said, almost in a cautionary tone. “There’ll be a lot of downs.”

He’s experienced plenty of both, of course.

Without the ups, FIU wouldn’t have wanted Thomas.

Without the downs, Thomas wouldn’t have needed FIU.

And so begins a surprising basketball marriage that got under way Wednesday when Thomas was introduced as FIU’s new coach, three days shy of the 1-year anniversary of his firing as coach of the New York Knicks. Thomas will not accept a salary in his first season, instead donating that money back to FIU, and will earn somewhere around $275,000 in the final four years of his deal.

That doesn’t count the $12 million or so the Knicks will continue paying him over the next two years.

“I did not come here for the money,” Thomas said.

Instead, he’ll have a chance to rebuild his tarnished Hall of Fame image.

As a player at Indiana and in the NBA, Isiah "Zeke" Thomas attained All American and Top 50 NBA honors but as Bill Simmons over at SonicsCentral notes, his post-playing career has been a "trainwreck".

Zeke takes over the Raptors as Executive VP and in a short 4 year period manages to wear out his welcome. A dispute with then-Raptors management over inappropriate conduct with team staff (sound familiar?) and improper giveaways to NCAA players results in his dismissal. Undaunted, Zeke flashes that cheesy sh*t-eating grin and moves on to the NBA on NBC, where his stilted, self-serving color commentary leads NBA to add Bill Walton to improve things.

Let me say that again - Zeke was SO bad they added Bill Walton to the broadcast to make it better.

After leaving NBA on NBC commentary in the capable hands of stoner Walton and East Coast know-nothing blowhards like Peter “Toys R Us” Vecsey, Zeke moves on yet again, this time to:

The Continental Basketball Association. The CBA used to be the NBA’s minor league, the precursor to today’s NBDL but a hell of a lot more organized. Even coaches like George Karl and Phil Jackson paid their dues in the CBA and it brought forth more than a few players who played sizeable roles on some very good teams; Vincent Askew, Tim Legler, Mario Elie. It was thought that under Zeke’s leadership the CBA might grow into a successful feeder league for the NBA itself. On August 3, 1999 an investment group headed by Zeke purchased the whole shebang including licensing and marketing for about $10 million.
Like any good incompetent executive who wants to look good for his shareholders the first thing Isiah did was cut salaries. And believe me, these guys weren’t making much money to begin with … about $1500 a week, which was then cut down to $1100 a week with players being responsible for many of their own travel expenses.

About eight months later Zeke was offered the head coaching job of the Indiana Pacers, who apparently came to this decision after Larry Bird consulted sheep entrails or huffed some serious glue. Isaiah signs a letter of intent to sell to the NBA Player’s Union but then ends up putting himself first, running away to coach the Pacers while putting the CBA in a blind trust … a mere 18 months after Zeke taking over league operations the CBA folds. That’s got to be some kind of record considering the league had been around over 50 years before he became involved with it.
Isiah did OK, not great with the Pacers … After getting cut loose from the Pacers the Knicks move in to sweep him up. Why God, why??? What the hell in his miserable resume would ever make anyone think this jerkoff was qualified to run a lemonade stand, let alone one of the premier franchises in the sport???

Things didn't go well with the Knicks as Rivals notes:

Thomas wants to move past the problems that marred his tenure with the Knicks, such as being the central figure in a sexual harassment lawsuit and, according to authorities, being found unconscious in his New York-area home last fall after someone at the residence called 911 to report someone overdosed on sleeping pills.

The only mystery here is why FIU would want a coach with an obvious morals problem and a backpack full of failure.

Obama Did Not Give Order To Kill Pirates

2009-04-12T20:35:00.001-04:00

Despite the efforts by the Drive-By Media to make Obama a decisive leader and hero, the fact is that he did not order the pirates to be taken out. Blackfive tells how the rescue happened:

I just finished listening to the press conference w/ ADM Gortney about the rescue of Captain Phillips. At the time it happened the USS Bainbridge was towing the lifeboat to calmer waters as the sea state was deteriorating. One of the pirates was on board the Bainbridge as the talks about obtaining Phillip's release continued. The lifeboat was approx. 25 m behind the Bainbridge when snipers on the fantail observed one of the pirates in the pilot house of the lifeboat pointing an AK-47 at the back of a tied up Phillips and the other two pirates on board were visible (at least shoulders and heads). The standing authority gave them clearance to engage the pirates if the life of the captain was in imminent danger. The on scene commander deemed this to be true and gave the order to fire. All three bad guys were taken out and then a rigid inflatable boat went to the lifeboat to retrieve Phillips. Iti is unknown at this point whether the shooters were SEALs or Marine Scout Snipers as both would have been available. This was not a rescue attempt ordered by National Command Authority i.e. the President. It was a reaction by the on scene commander under standard authority to safeguard the life of a hostage.
The AP is reporting that President Obama gave the order to use military force to rescue the hostage, that is misleading.

WASHINGTON (AP)—Administration officials say President Barack Obama approved the military operation that rescued a U.S. captain held hostage by Somali pirates.
The officials say Obama ordered the Defense Department to use military resources to rescue Richard Phillips from a lifeboat off the Somali coast.
He did affirm the military's authorization to use force if the captain's life was in danger, but they already would have had that authorization as part of their standard rules of engagement. If there are innocents about to be slaughtered the same reasoning that authorizes self defense also covers an imminent execution unless the ROE specifically forbid it.The AP is making it sound like there was an active rescue ordered by the President. It was not, there was an imminent threat and the local commander gave the order to fire. Good on Obama for ensuring their authorization was clear, but let's also be clear that he did not authorize or order an active rescue attempt.

Nobel Prize for Peace . . . of the Grave

2009-04-12T00:32:00.001-04:00

Dr. Arthur Robinson, President and Research Professor of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, wrote this sobering article for Human Events:

And so it has begun. Word is beginning to spill into the news of food riots and starvation in poor countries, as a result of shortages and the resulting high prices for grain. This suffering is a direct result of the unprincipled actions of self-interested people in developed countries who are promulgating the scientifically refuted myth of human-caused global warming.

Frightened by this myth, U. S. federal and state governments have diverted a significant amount of the American grain supply into the production of ethanol -- an entirely counterproductive action that has helped to cause these grain shortages.

There is no intrinsic shortage of food. Since, however, food is perishable; the market produces each year an amount of food comparable to that which will be consumed. Stored food -- primarily grain -- usually suffices to smooth fluctuations due to weather and other factors. Prices fluctuate within a range narrow enough that most of the world’s people have sufficient food at a price they can afford. When, however, a large amount of grain is suddenly withdrawn from the market, severe shortages can result.

This current food shortage is only the beginning.

We have been down this road before. Unprincipled opportunists [including Rachel Carson through her book, Silent Spring]-- falsely claiming that DDT is dangerous to the environment -- managed to engineer a world-wide ban of DDT. DDT had eradicated malaria from the developed world and was well on its way to eradicating it from the less developed countries at the time this ban of DDT was instituted. The initiation of DDT use against malaria was rewarded by a Nobel Prize, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that DDT had saved hundreds of millions of lives.

One of the principal political figures who worked to ban DDT was none other than Al Gore.

As a result of the DDT ban, more than 30 million children in Africa and Asia have died from DDT-preventable malaria, and an estimated 500 million adults are today chronically ill from this disease. The ban of DDT was the worst act of technological genocide in human history.

Now, Mr. Gore is the recognized leader of an effort to ban at least 90% of world use of hydrocarbon fuels. Once again, his claims are based upon bogus science and are motivated by personal financial and political self interest. Mr. Gore has been joined by the United Nations and its IPCC process. The goal of the United Nations is clear. It wants the power to tax and ration world energy supplies. This would place essentially unlimited power and money in the hands of the United Nations and cooperating world political entities.

As acts of genocide, the potential effects of the human-caused global warming industry are so profound that the DDT genocide is minor in comparison.

Hundreds of millions of human beings live today on the very edge of existence -- with all of their available resources consumed in the quest for food, shelter, and the minimum necessities of life. Without world technology and the energy that makes that technology possible, these people will slip from the lower rungs of human existence and will die. By abruptly lowering world hydrocarbon use, the human-caused global warmers are going to kill these people.

Politicians in the United States have given us a first taste of the horrible suffering of human beings that is to come. By responding to the myth of human-caused global warming by mildly diminishing American grain supplies -- in a futile, politicized attempt to burn grain as fuel, American politicians have given the world a slight taste of the starvation and slaughter that is to come.

Many people are responsible for promulgating the myth of human-caused global warming – environmentalists, politicians, businessmen, media personalities, and a relatively small band of self-interested scientists. They have done this regardless of an overwhelming body of scientific information that definitively refutes the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. [See Robinson, Robinson, and Soon, Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.]

In the case of DDT, the truth did not matter. The Environmental Protection Agency’s own scientific review board had reviewed the scientific literature and proclaimed DDT entirely safe and very useful. In the case of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming, the truth is also becoming increasingly irrelevant, as perceived political reality replaces reality in public discourse.

Al Gore has surpassed himself. Having helped to kill tens of millions of helpless African, Asian, and South American children and to sicken hundreds of millions of other people with his support for the ban of DDT, Mr. Gore is now attempting to deprive the survivors in these same countries of energy -- life-giving energy that makes possible their meager existences.

Industrially useful energy is fungible. It flows back and forth throughout the world with ease. A projected reduction in supply in the United States and an ill-considered reaction to that projection has caused current world food shortages. These shortages are only very small reminders of the vast shortages that will occur if hydrocarbon use is truly curtailed.

No greater act of genocide has ever been proposed in human history than the proposal to abruptly end the use of much of the world’s hydrocarbon energy.

Al Gore and his United Nations retainers have received the Nobel Prize for Peace. The only peace that they are offering to the world’s people, however, is the peace of the grave.

Blot Out the Sun?

2009-04-09T21:18:00.001-04:00

Steve Malloy, of Junkscience.com, provides this pithy criticism of presidential advisor John Holdren's solution to global warming:

Presidential advisor John Holdren's suggestion that we consider using geoengineering as a last resort to manage global warming is a terrific barometer of how far over the edge climate alarmism has gone. Holdren, formerly a Harvard physicist, is actually suggesting that we consider putting substances in the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays to reduce global temperature.

So how would that affect, say, plants that need solar radiation for photosynthesis? What about humans who need sunlight to make vitamin D? President Obama talks a lot about solar power; how, exactly, would solar power work with reduced solar radiation? What if we reduced the solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface at the same time, say, as a drop-off in solar activity -- a phenomenon that may now be occurring. What would we do then? Vacuum up the substances we put in the atmosphere? How would be calibrate any of this to start with? What is the ideal average global temperature or the ideal global climate?

Holdren is no stranger to half-baked ideas about our civilization and planet. As a population control-guru, Holdren has warned of ecoside, strained planetary resources and advocated government-sponsored sterilization programs. Though Holdren has been continually wrong on all counts, he somehow has gotten himself elevated to the top science advisor to the President of the United States. Now he wants to consider blotting out the sun. Perhaps Holdren is not really serious and is just trying to scare the public into pushing for hasty action on greenhouse gases. Either way, I don't think this is the sort of change that America voted for last November.

The Bailout Mascot

2009-04-08T17:51:00.001-04:00

H/T: Curmudgeonly & Skeptical

The Real Life and Times of Martin Luther King

2009-04-04T21:09:00.002-04:00

Mark Royden Winchell wrote a compelling, well researched, essay entitled "Canonizing Martin Luther King" which draws heavily on the work of MLK biographer David J, Garrow's "Bearing The Cross; Martin Luther King , Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference." The entire "Canonizing" article is well worth your time to read here.

The likes of David Duke and the white supremacist group Stormfront have been attempting for sometime to discredit Martin Luther King and his leadership in righting the wrongs of racial segregation. I hesitated writing this piece because I certainly do not want to be be perceived as sympathizing with these weirdos.

However, history shows that Reverend King suffered all the foibles of his humanity which were quickly swept under the rug because of the potential tainting of his image and the civil rights cause after his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. King's judgment was questionable in associating with New York lawyer and Communist apparatchik Stanley D. Levison, who became one of King's most trusted advisers.

Levison was ...a key factor in the FBI's later surveillance of King: there were allegations of a connection between Levison and the Communist Party that formed one of the legal bases for wiretaps of King's telephone communications. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover ordered those wiretaps as well as surveillance of King, of King's advisors outside the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and of their relationships to Communism ... The FBI hoped to use the information to discredit King and his organization.

From the FBI surveillance tapes came the infamous Willard Hotel recordings that detractors use to cite King's frequent adulterous sexual activities. The Jan 19, 1998 edition of Newsweek contained this statement:

January 6, 1964, was a long day for Martin Luther King Jr. He spent the morning seated in the reserved section of the Supreme Court, listening as lawyers argued New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, a landmark case rising out of King's crusade against segregation in Alabama. The minister was something of an honored guest: Justice Arthur Goldberg quietly sent down a copy of Kings account of the Montgomery bus boycott, "Stride Toward Freedom," asking for an autograph. That night King retired to his room at the Willard Hotel. There FBI bugs reportedly picked up 14 hours of party chatter, the clinking of glasses and the sounds of illicit sex--including King's cries of "I'm f--ing for God" and "I'm not a Negro tonight!"

So, was Reverend Doctor King a socialist? From "Canonizing Martin Luther King" we find these confirming words from M.L. King:

We are now making demands that will cost the nation something. You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry. . . . Now this means that we are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong . . . with . . . capitalism. . . . There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.

Doctor King's womanizing was legendary. One kiss-and-tell book was written by Georgia Davis Powers, entitled: "I Shared the Dream: The Pride, Passion, and Politics of the First Black Woman Senator from Kentucky."

One of the places to which "M. L." summoned her was Memphis in April of 1968. But on that particular occasion, Ms. Davis would have to wait her turn. On Wednesday night, April 3, after telling an enthusiastic throng of followers that he had "been to the mountaintop," King and two of his closest colleagues, Bernard Lee and Ralph Abernathy, were invited to a steak dinner at the house of one of Martin's lady friends. After dinner, Lee and Abernathy preferred taking cat naps to pursuing a closer relationship with the two women who had been provided to keep them company. When Abernathy awoke, some time after one a. m., he noticed King and their hostess coming out of her bedroom. When they got back to the Lorraine Motel, Bernard Lee retired for the evening, but King and Abernathy noticed a light on in A. D. King's room. Although A. D. was occupied with a white woman, Georgia Davis was also there to greet Martin. Seeing that his friend had plenty of company, Abernathy excused himself and headed for the room he and Martin were sharing. Leaving the door unlocked, Ralph went to sleep around three a. m.

Although King had not come back to his room by dawn, a third woman had arrived looking for him. Between seven and eight a. m., King finally made it upstairs to his floor of the motel. But instead of returning to his room, he stopped off to see the woman who had been seeking him earlier. By the time King did get back to his room, he had obviously had a fight with this most recent paramour and now implored Abernathy to call her to make things right. Unfortunately, she was so angered that she hung up on the dutiful aide after a string of abuse. Minutes later, the woman was in the room of the two legendary civil rights leaders, engaged in a shouting match with King, which ended when he shoved her across the room. Her bags packed, this young woman took the next plane out of town. That evening, King was gunned down on the hotel balcony.

MLK plagiarism was revealed after his death. "Canonizing" tells the story:

In 1984, Coretta Scott King authorized the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project to gather the writings of her late husband. A team of researchers directed by the Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities later began editorial work on this project. At the same time, Keith D. Miller, a young English professor at Arizona State University, was preparing a study of King's rhetoric and its various sources. Miller and the Carson team were all ardent admirers of King and his many undeniable accomplishments. As a result, they were loath to think ill of the good doctor. Nevertheless, their research made it unmistakably clear that, beginning in graduate school, an alarming number of King's speeches and published writings were plagiarized. The pattern was too obvious and too persistent to be blamed on careless scholarship. King willfully took the ideas and words of others and claimed them as his own.

Although the full extent of King's plagiarism did not become widely known until the early 1990s, evidence of his pilfering was uncovered by Ira G. Zepp, Jr., in a Ph.D. dissertation that he completed at St. Mary's University and Seminary in 1971. In his book "Stride Toward Freedom" (1958), King appropriated "phrases, sentences, even large parts of paragraphs" from Paul Ramsey's "Basic Christian Ethics" and Anders Nygren's "Agape and Eros", both of which were required reading in a course that King took at Crozer Theological Seminary in the spring of 1951. What Zepp and few other people realized at the time was that the dissertation for which King received his doctorate in theology from Boston University in 1955 included substantial unattributed passages from a similar dissertation written by a student named Jack Boozer, which had been accepted in that same department three years earlier.
In his book "Plagiarism and the Culture War" (1998), Theodore Pappas produces seven extensive passages that King stole almost word-for-word from Boozer's thesis. As Pappas makes clear, these passages merely represent a larger pattern of intellectual theft. King was so careless that he incorporated a few of Boozer's lapses in his own work. When he did deviate from his source, he was apt to venture into error. Intellectually, King was so out of his depth in comparing the conceptions of God in the thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman that he probably could not have written a competent dissertation on his own. And even as a plagiarist, he appears to have been singularly inept. If King's air of godliness was called into question by his marital infidelity, his proud use of the title "Dr." also was based on a lie.

In one of the more revealing passages in her shameless memoir, Georgia Davis Powers recalls the time in 1968 when The Dreamer got off the phone with a close advisor, the Communist apparatchik Stanley Levison:
I didn't hear all the conversation, but I heard Martin repeat something Levison said to him. After he hung up, he was still repeating this phrase. "Cowardice asks, is it safe? Expediency asks, is it political? Vanity asks, is it popular? But conscience asks, is it right?"
I asked, "Will you use that in your speeches?"

He smiled, "I will use it when it is appropriate."

I said, "M. L., is anything we do and say original?"

He replied, "Originality comes only from God. Everything else has, is, and will be used by someone else before you."

Finally, Mark Royden Winchell comments on the support of Martin Luther King exhibited by conservatives:

Neoconservatives who argue that King would oppose racial preferences were he alive today are obviously ignorant of positions he took during his lifetime. In his book "Why We Can't Wait" (1964), he wrote: "[I]t is obvious that if a man is entered in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat to catch up with his fellow runner." He went on to tell of a conversation he had with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru concerning "the difficult problem of the untouchables, a problem not unrelated to the American Negro dilemma."

In addition to passing anti-discrimination laws and spending "millions of rupees annually developing housing and job opportunities in villages heavily inhabited by untouchables," the Indian government required that when "two applicants compete for entrance into a college or university, one of the applicants being an untouchable and the other of high caste, the school is required to accept the untouchable." When King's traveling companion, Lawrence Reddick, asked the prime minister if this didn't amount to discrimination, Nehru replied, "Well it may be. But it is our way of atoning for the centuries of injustice we have inflicted upon these people." King clearly advocated that America go forth and do likewise.

It is unclear whether King would have endorsed the payment of outright reparations to African Americans, but he agreed with the principle behind this demand and saw both affirmative action and social welfare programs as down payments on the debt that America owed to the descendants of slaves. A few pages after describing his encounter with Nehru, King drives this point home:
No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. . . . Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.