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Friday’s Incredible News Dump
...The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they’re still too secret to reveal.

The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to “unprecedented collection activities” by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks…...

... The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday…

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy....

...The exact nature of the program remains a mystery. This official hinted that the secret program involved assassinations overseas but declined to provide further details....

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Billions in aid go to areas that backed Obama in '08
...Counties that supported Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration's $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, a USA TODAY analysis of government disclosure and accounting records shows. That money includes aid to repair military bases, improve public housing and help students pay for college.

The reports show the 872 counties that supported Obama received about $69 per person, on average. The 2,234 that supported McCain received about $34. ...

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Blue-State Stimulus?
..."There's no politics at work when it comes to spending for the recovery," insisted White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.

Of course, he's right. No one actually sits down and directs the money to Obama supporters and away from McCain supporters.

They don't have to. It's baked in the cake. That's the way our national laws are written. They benefit supporters of Democrats, who tend to support big government, and disadvantage supporters of the GOP, who tend not to support big government.

No wonder polls show people losing faith in the stimulus.

To date, most of the $158 billion that has been made available has gone to state governments. And the bulk has gone to places like California, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey — blue states all....

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Blame The G8 For Energy Speculation
...But, more generally, the G8--and its members this week--are disingenuous when they speak about energy prices, in three ways.

1) They are trying hard to talk up the market, with regard to global growth. At the same time, the hard data continue to disappoint. Naturally, this causes volatility in oil prices.

2) They claim to see no link between their failure to converge on climate change/environmental policies and what happens to energy prices. The extent to which industrialized countries' effectively control carbon emissions will have a big impact on the longer-run demand for oil. Flip-flopping on this issue discourages investment in the energy sector (regular and alternative), and thus directly and indirectly contributes to oil price volatility.

3) The very cheap money policies of leading central banks, including the Fed, the Bank of England and arguably also the European Central Bank, lower the funding costs for big players who want to take large positions in commodities markets. Essentially, we are providing the credit that makes big speculative positions possible. Add to this mix a "too big to fail" attitude and a "yes we can, recapitalize through trading profits" deal with policymakers, and you see why major financial firms are likely to place huge commodity bets in the months ahead....

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The Obama justice system
Spencer Ackerman yesterday attended a Senate hearing at which the DOD's General Counsel, Jeh Johnson, testified. As Ackerman highlighted, Johnson actually said that even for those detainees to whom the Obama administration deigns to give a real trial in a real court, the President has the power to continue to imprison them indefinitely even if they are acquitted at their trial. About this assertion of "presidential post-acquittal detention power" -- an Orwellian term (and a Kafka-esque concept) that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares at all about the most basic liberties -- Ackerman wrote, with some understatement, that it "moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective." Law professor Jonathan Turley was more blunt: "The Obama Administration continues its retention and expansion of abusive Bush policies — now clearly Obama policies on indefinite detention." ...

...

Giving trials to people only when you know for sure, in advance, that you'll get convictions is not due process. Those are called "show trials." In a healthy system of justice, the Government gives everyone it wants to imprison a trial and then imprisons only those whom it can convict. The process is constant (trials), and the outcome varies (convictions or acquittals).

Obama is saying the opposite: in his scheme, it is the outcome that is constant (everyone ends up imprisoned), while the process varies and is determined by the Government (trials for some; military commissions for others; indefinite detention for the rest). The Government picks and chooses which process you get in order to ensure that it always wins. A more warped "system of justice" is hard to imagine.
...

...Meanwhile, former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed is engaged in what The Guardian calls "an urgent legal attempt to prevent the US courts from destroying crucial evidence that he says proves he was abused while being held at the detention camp detainee." The photographs -- which show Mohamed after he had been severely beaten and which he claims was posted on the door to his cage "because he had been beaten so badly that it was difficult for the guards to identify him" -- is scheduled to be destroyed by the U.S. Government, an act The Washington Independent's Alexandra Jaffe calls "another black mark on the Obama administration’s promised transparency."...

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Medicare's Mythical Administrative Cost Savings
...Rather, private insurers have costs that Medicare doesn't have within the agency. Private insurers bill. Medicare does too, but the IRS has its own budget--hell, its own courts--which don't show up on Medicare's balance sheet. Private insurers negotiate with suppliers. Medicare does too, but most of the negotiation takes place between lobbyists and Congressmen who again, do not show up on Medicare's balance sheet. The Federal government has all sorts of these little items which relieve government agencies of reporting certain costs. But the costs remain.

My guess would be that these explicit costs are still lower than Medicare's. But then there are implicit costs to government fiat that markets don't have. As Tyler Cowen points out, taxation has deadweight losses, and Medicare is a tax on employment, which is something we are particularly anxious not to suppress right now.

The final point is that while people commonly think of administrative costs as "wasted", in fact, they are an important part of the market system....

...Third, we're still driving quite a bit of product innovation. Our messy, organic, wasteful, unfair, irrational system allows experimentation, and they cherry pick the best results. If we stopped doing this, their system would stop looking so good.

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Detainees, Even if Acquitted, Might Not Go Free
WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission.

Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department's chief lawyer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that releasing a detainee who has been tried and found not guilty was a policy decision that officials would make based on their estimate of whether the prisoner posed a future threat.

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration argues that the legal basis for indefinite detention of aliens it considers dangerous is separate from war-crimes prosecutions. Officials say that the laws of war allow indefinite detention to prevent aliens from committing warlike acts in future, while prosecution by military commission aims to punish them for war crimes committed in the past.

Mr. Johnson said such prisoners held without trial would receive "some form of periodic review" that could lead to their release....

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Obama: “Universal Principle” Gives Presidents the Right to Keep Ruling Even If They Violate the Law
Honduras removed its would-be dictator, President Mel Zelaya, for violating his country’s constitution by seeking to extend his term in office, and replaced him with a leading Congressman. Zelaya’s removal was authorized by Articles 239 and 272 of the Honduran Constitution, and ordered by his country’s Supreme Court, after he used coercion and aid from Venezuela’s dictator to push an illegal referendum. But Obama has joined Cuban dictator Castro and Venezuelan dictator Chavez in demanding that Zelaya be reinstated.

Originally, Obama’s justification for this demand was his erroneous claim that Zelaya’s removal was “illegal.” But when Honduras’s new president, a veteran legislator, pointed to stacks of court rulings that Zelaya had violated, the fact that the Honduran Congress had voted 123-to-5 to replace Zelaya, and that the military had legally executed a warrant for Zelaya’s arrest, Obama changed his tune.

Now, Obama claims that Zelaya must be put back in power because of the “universal principle that people should choose their own leaders”. Never mind that even publications that criticized the manner of Zelaya’s removal, like the Economist, have candidly admitted that Zelaya was unpopular with Hondurans, who overwhelmingly back the removal of their president — and that Zelaya was a bullying crook with approval ratings below 30 percent. In the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other papers, Hondurans have overwhelmingly supported his removal...

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To Critics, New Policy on Terror Looks Old
Civil libertarians recently accused President Obama of acting like former President George W. Bush, citing reports about Mr. Obama’s plans to detain terrorism suspects without trials on domestic soil after he closes the Guantánamo prison.

It was only the latest instance in which critics have argued that Mr. Obama has failed to live up to his campaign pledge “to restore our Constitution and the rule of law” and raised a pointed question: Has he, on issues related to fighting terrorism, turned out to be little different from his predecessor?...

...“President Obama may mouth very different rhetoric,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “He may have a more complicated process with members of Congress. But in the end, there is no substantive break from the policies of the Bush administration.”...

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Obama's embrace of Bush terrorism policies is celebrated as "Centrism"
...In his New Republic article today, Goldsmith reviews what he calls the "eleven essential elements" of "the Bush approach to counterterrorism policy" and documents how -- with only a couple of minor exceptions -- Obama has embraced all of them. In those cases where Obama has purported to "change" these elements, those changes are almost all symbolic and ceremonial, and the few changes that have any substance to them (banning the already-empty CIA black sites and prohibiting no-longer-authorized torture techniques) are far less substantial than Obama officials purport. None of Goldsmith's analysis is grounded in the proposition that Obama hasn't yet acted to change Bush policies, thus rendering a nonsequitur the response that "Obama needs more time; it's only been 4 months." Goldsmith is describing affirmative steps Obama has already announced to adopt the core Bush "terrorism" policies.

Just consider some of Goldsmith's examples: Obama makes a melodramatic showing of ordering Guantanamo closed but then re-creates its systematic denial of detainee rights in Bagram, and "[l]ast month Secretary of Defense Gates hinted that up to 100 suspected terrorists would be detained without trial." Obama announces that all interrogations must comply with the Army Field Manual but then has his CIA Director announce that he will seek greater interrogation authority whenever it is needed and convenes a task force to determine which enhanced interrogation methods beyond the Field Manual should be authorized. He railed against Bush's Guantanamo military commissions but then preserved them with changes that are plainly cosmetic.

Obama has been at least as aggressive as Bush was in asserting radical secrecy doctrines in order to prevent courts from ruling on illegal torture and spying programs and to block victims from having a day in court. ...

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Parsing the Health Reform Arguments
...- "Forty-five million people in the U.S. are uninsured."

Even if this were true (many dispute it) should we risk destroying a system that works for the vast majority to help 15% of our population?

- "The cost of treating the 45 million uninsured is shifted to the rest of us."

So on Monday, Wednesday and Friday we are harangued about the 45 million people lacking medical care, and on Tuesday and Thursday we are told we already pay for that care. Left-wing reformers think that if they split the two arguments we are too stupid to notice the contradiction. Furthermore, if cost shifting is bad, wait for the Mother of all Cost Shifting when suppliers have to overcharge the private plans to compensate for the depressed prices forced on them by the public plan.

...- "U.S. companies are at a disadvantage against foreign competitors who don't have to pay their employees' health insurance."

This would be true if the funds for health care in those countries fell from the sky. As it is, employees in those countries pay for their health care in much higher income taxes, sales or value-added taxes, gasoline taxes (think $8 a gallon at the pump) and in many other ways...

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Deadbeat: Not Just A Circumstance, A State of Mind
Lose what little faith you still have in your fellow Americans with the new Mortgage Metrics Report. For the first time, the quarterly report [pdf] from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision includes information on redefault rates for modified mortgage loans.

That is, lenders are increasingly offering supposedly distressed borrowers substantial reductions in principal and interest payments. (See page 25 to see how rapidly these modifications are becoming much more charitable to the borrowers.) Redefault data track how many of these renegotiated loans end up back in trouble. There's a wide variety in types and degrees of trouble — everything from 30 days' tardiness on payments to completed foreclosures.

But one pattern emerges when you add up all the redefaults per quarter and compare them to the total number of loan modifications: When you take deadbeats and give them a free opportunity to get out of contractual obligations they willingly signed before God and country, a fairly reliable majority of them — and often a fillibuster-proof 60+ percent — end up deadbeating again.

In general, the more loans you modify, the higher the percentage of redefaults: In the first quarter of 2008, 68,001 loans were modified, and 40,206, or 59 percent, of those have ended up 30 days late again, or worse. In the first quarter of 2009, 185,156 loan mods were done, and of those, 120,067, or 64 percent, ended up in trouble....

...But even that isn't really encouraging, because some of the "trouble" categories were artificially depressed in that period (through, for example, statewide foreclosure moratoriums in effect in some of the most deadbeat-rich areas). Also, the terms of loan mods are getting much more generous: Where last year banks tended to offer only small gestures like maturity-lengthening or a slightly better interest rate, now they're offering to reduce principal, pay all closing costs for new mortgages etc....

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Obama Backs Dictatorship in Honduras
Honduras removed its bullying, autocratic President after he began behaving as a dictator, and its Congress replaced him with a less power-hungry member of his own political party. Now Obama is joining the Cuban dictator Castro and Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez in demanding the Honduran ruler’s return. This is simply outrageous....

...If Richard Nixon had been impeached and convicted for Watergate, and then refused to leave office, until being forced out by the military, would that have been a “military coup”? Of course not. But Obama and many in the press are taking a similarly extreme position in demanding the reinstatement of Honduras’s would-be despot...

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Busting the Adminstrative Cost Benefit Myth
...In fact, President Obama has made this claim several times. This statistic about Medicare's low administrative costs has become one of the linchpins in the argument for a "public option" on health care. The only problem, not surprisingly, is that it's hogwash.

The explanation is really quite simple, and it's provided here by Robert Book of the Heritage Foundation. The statistic cited by Alter and Krugman uses administrative costs calculated as a percentage of total health care costs (For Medicare it's roughly 3 percent and for private insurers it's roughly 12 percent).

But here's the catch: because Medicare is devoted to serving a population that is elderly, and therefore in need of greater levels of medical care, it generates significantly higher expenditures than private insurance plans, thus making administrative costs smaller as a percentage of total costs. This creates the appearance that Medicare is a model of administrative efficiency. What Jon Alter sees as a "miracle" is really just a statistical sleight of hand.

Furthermore, Book notes that private insurers have a number of additional expenditures which fall into the category of "administrative costs" (like state health insurance premium taxes of 2-4%, marketing costs, etc) that Medicare does not have, further inflating the apparent differences in cost.

But, as you might expect, when you compare administrative costs on a per-person basis, Medicare is dramatically less efficient than private insurance plans. As you can see here, between 2001-2005, Medicare's administrative costs on a per-person basis were 24.8% higher, on average, than private insurers....

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Regime Uncertainty in the 1930s: A New Deal Insider’s Account
...But beyond that, what had been done? For one thing, the confusion of the administration’s utility, shipping, railroad, and housing policies had discouraged the small individual investor. For another, the administration’s taxes on corporate surpluses and capital gains, suggesting, as they did, the belief that a recovery based upon capital investment is unsound, discouraged the expansion of producers’ capital equipment. For another, the administration’s occasional suggestions that perhaps there was no hope for the reemployment of people except by a share-the-work program struck at a basic assumption in the enterpriser’s philosophy. For another, the administration’s failure to see the narrow margin of profit on which business success rests - a failure expressed in an emphasis upon prices while the effects of increases in operating costs were overlooked - laid a heavy hand upon business prospects. For another, the calling of names in political speeches and the vague, veiled threats of punitive action all tore the fragile texture of credit and confidence upon which the very existence of business depends.

The eternal problem of language obtruded itself at this point. To the businessman words have fairly exact descriptive meanings. The blithe announcement by a New Deal subordinate that perhaps we have a productive capacity in excess of our capacity to consume and that perhaps new fields for the employment of capital and labor no longer exist will terrify the businessman. To the politician, such an extravagant use of language is important only in terms of its appeal to the prejudices and preconceptions of a swirling, changeable, indeterminate audience. To the businessman two and two make four; to the politician two and two make four only if the public can be made to believe it. If the public decides to add it up to three, the politician adjusts his adding machine. In the businessman’s literal cosmos, green results from mixing yellow and blue. The politician is concerned with the light in which the mixture is to be seen, the condition of the eyes of those who look....

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MIT's unscientific, catastrophic climate forecast
...The Financial Post asked us to look at a report last month from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, titled "Probabilistic Forecast for 21st Century Climate based on uncertainties in emissions (without policy) and climate parameters."

The MIT report authors predicted that, without massive government action, global warming could be twice as severe as previously forecast, and more severe than the official projections of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The MIT authors said their report is based in part on 400 runs of a computer model of the global climate and economic activity.

While the MIT group espouses lofty-sounding objectives to provide leadership with "independent policy analysis and public education in global environmental change," we found their procedures inconsistent with important forecasting principles. No more than 30% of forecasting principles were properly applied by the MIT modellers and 49 principles were violated. For an important problem such as this, we do not think it is defensible to violate a single principle.

For example, MIT forecasters should have shrunk forecasts of change in the face of uncertainty about predictions of the explanatory variables; in this case the variables postulated to influence temperatures. More generally, they should also have been conservative in this situation of high uncertainty and instability. They were not....

...When one looks at long series of Earth's temperatures, one finds that they have gone up and down irregularly, over long and short periods, on all time scales from years to millennia. Moreover, science has not been able to tell us why. There is much uncertainty about past climate changes and about the strength and even direction of causal relationships. To wit, do warming temperatures result in more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or is it the other way round -- or maybe a bit of both? Does warming of the atmosphere result in negative or positive feedback from clouds? There are many more such questions without answers. All this strongly suggests that a no-change forecast is the appropriate benchmark long-term forecast....

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PROMISES, PROMISES: Indian health care's victims
...The U.S. has an obligation, based on a 1787 agreement between tribes and the government, to provide American Indians with free health care on reservations. But that promise has not been kept. About one-third more is spent per capita on health care for felons in federal prison, according to 2005 data from the health service....

...When it comes to health and disease in Indian country, the statistics are staggering.

American Indians have an infant death rate that is 40 percent higher than the rate for whites. They are twice as likely to die from diabetes, 60 percent more likely to have a stroke, 30 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease....

...His Horse is Thunder often travels to Washington to lobby for more money and attention, but he acknowledges that improvements are tough to come by.

"We are not one congruent voting bloc in any one state or area," he said. "So we don't have the political clout."...

...Dorgan has led efforts in Congress to bring attention to the issue. After many years of talking to frustrated patients at home in North Dakota, he says he believes the problems are systemic within the embattled agency: incompetent staffers are transferred instead of fired; there are few staff to handle complaints; and, in some cases, he says, there is a culture of intimidation within field offices charged with overseeing individual clinics...

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There's No Such Thing as Free Health Care
President Obama says government will make health care cheaper and better. But there's no free lunch.

In England, health care is "free"—as long as you don't mind waiting. People wait so long for dentist appointments that some pull their own teeth. At any one time, half a million people are waiting to get into a British hospital. A British paper reports that one hospital tried to save money by not changing bedsheets. Instead of washing sheets, the staff was encouraged to just turn them over. ...

..."The more time I spent in the Canadian system, the more I came across people waiting for radiation therapy, waiting for the knee replacement so they could finally walk up to the second floor of their house." "You want to see your neurologist because of your stress headache? No problem! Just wait six months. You want an MRI? No problem! Free as the air! Just wait six months."

Polls show most Canadians like their free health care, but most people aren't sick when the poll-taker calls. Canadian doctors told us the system is cracking. One complained that he can't get heart-attack victims into the ICU.

In America, people wait in emergency rooms, too, but it's much worse in Canada. If you're sick enough to be admitted, the average wait is 23 hours....

...It's true that America's partly profit-driven, partly bureaucratic system is expensive, and sometimes wasteful, but the pursuit of profit reduces waste and costs and gives the world the improvements in medicine that ease pain and save lives.

"[America] is the country of medical innovation. This is where people come when they need treatment," Dr. Gratzer says.

"Literally we're surrounded by medical miracles. Death by cardiovascular disease has dropped by two-thirds in the last 50 years. You've got to pay a price for that type of advancement."

Canada and England don't pay the price because they freeload off American innovation. If America adopted their systems, we could worry less about paying for health care, but we'd get 2009-level care—forever. Government monopolies don't innovate. Profit seekers do.

We saw this in Canada, where we did find one area of medicine that offers easy access to cutting-edge technology—CT scan, endoscopy, thoracoscopy, laparoscopy, etc. It was open 24/7. Patients didn't have to wait.

But you have to bark or meow to get that kind of treatment. Animal care is the one area of medicine that hasn't been taken over by the government. Dogs can get a CT scan in one day. For people, the waiting list is a month....

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Washington Post cancels lobbyist event amid uproar
Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff." ...

..."Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate," says the one-page flier. "Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. ... Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders."

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The Next Top Model?
...In recent decades, Foreign Affairs' readers (and editors) have seen the nuclear winter melt down, the energy crisis metastasize into an oil glut, and the population bomb implode. This breathtaking string of global systems modeling fiascos leaves some analysts asking why climate models are deemed sacrosanct when variables as critical as the sensitivity of the climate to the doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have failed to converge on uncontroversial values....

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Canadian Physician Exodus Benefits United States, Hurts Canada
Canada has quietly emerged as a major supplier of physicians to the United States in the past several years, second only to India in the number of doctors it produces for the American medical market, according to a new study in the April 10 Canadian Medical Association Journal.

During the past 30 years, about 19,000 physicians trained in Canada have crossed the border into the United States and depleted the Canadian supply of physicians in the process, says the study, which was conducted by the AAFP's Robert Graham Center, the department of pediatrics at New York University and the department of family medicine at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. According to "The Canadian Contribution to the U.S. Physician Workforce," in 2006, 8,162 Canadian-educated physicians were providing direct patient care in the United States. That figure accounts for about one in nine Canadian-trained physicians, which is equivalent to having two average-sized Canadian medical schools dedicated entirely to producing physicians for the United States. ...

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5 Climate Studies That Don't Live Up to Their Hype
A leading climate scientist argues that overbroad claims by some researchers—coupled with overblown reporting in the media—can undermine the public's understanding of climate issues. Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate modeler, author and PM editorial advisor, concurs with the consensus view that the planet's temperature is rising due largely to human activity. But, he says, many news stories prematurely attribute local or regional phenomena to climate change. This can lead to the dissemination of vague, out-of-context or flat-wrong information to the public.

"People think that if there's a trend, it has to be connected to this bigger trend," he says. "You often get this kind of jumping the gun." Sometimes researchers are citing a potential connection to global warming to get noticed, he says, and sometimes journalists are focusing on that connection to make the story more compelling. "There's a bit of a backlash amid people who have a brain," says Schmidt. "It's akin to [the media's reporting on] medical studies. It adds to people's confusion."

Here are 5 studies Schmidt points to that made unfulfilled promises, used loose, questionable climate connections to sensationalize a story or predicted events that never came to be. ...

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Here We Go Again: How to Read Those HELP Numbers
...After all, you're interested in the HELP bill because it's a vehicle to enact health care reform. But health care reform necessarily involves a few more pieces--pieces outside of HELP's jurisdiction.

In particular, there's going to be a substantial expansion of Medicaid, which will cost money. There will also be reforms to Medicare and Medicaid that save money. And that's in addition to whatever new revenue reform claims, whether in the form of cap on the employer tax exclusion, President Obama's proposal for itemized deductions, or some other resources.

Since we have a pretty good idea of the size of the Medicaid expansion, we can estimate its impact very roughly. It should reach somewhere in the neighbrohood of another 20 million people. ...

...But that's wrong, too. If you want to factor in the coverage effects of the Medicaid expansion--which, again, is being done by another committee--then you need to factor in the cost effects too. That will probably inflate the program's total outlays to somewhere between $1 and $1.3 trillion--which, by the way, is more or less what experts have been saying all along....

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Obama's Top Five Health Care Lies
...Obama took his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, to the mat for suggesting that it might be better to remove the existing health care tax break that individuals get on their employer-sponsored coverage, but return the vast bulk--if not all--of the resulting revenues in the form of health care tax credits. This would theoretically have made coverage both more affordable and portable for everyone. Obama, however, would have none of it, portraying this idea simply as the removal of a tax break. "For the first time in history, he wants to tax your health benefits," he thundered. "Apparently, Sen. McCain doesn't think it's enough that your health premiums have doubled. He thinks you should have to pay taxes on them too."

Yet now Obama is signaling his willingness to go along with a far worse scheme to tax employer-sponsored benefits to fund the $1.6 trillion or so it will cost to provide universal coverage. Contrary to Obama's allegations, McCain's plan did not ultimately entail a net tax increase because he intended to return to individuals whatever money was raised by scrapping the tax deduction. Not so with Obama....

...Ignoring the reality that Medicare--the government-funded program for the elderly--has put the country on the path to fiscal ruin, Obama wants to model a government insurance plan--the so-called "public option"--after Medicare in order to control the country's rising health care costs. Why? Because, he repeatedly claims, Medicare has far lower administrative costs and overhead than private plans--to wit, 3% for Medicare compared to 10% to 20% for private plans. Hence, he says, subjecting private plans to competition against an entity delivering such superior efficiency will release health care dollars for universal coverage.

But lower administrative costs do not necessarily mean greater efficiency. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office analysis last year chastised Medicare's lax attitude on this front. "The traditional fee-for-service Medicare program does relatively little to manage benefits, which tends to reduce its administrative costs but may raise its overall spending relative to a more tightly managed approach," it noted on page 93....

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Canada's Single-Prayer Health Care
Ava Isabella Stinson was born last Thursday at St. Joseph's hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. Weighing only two pounds, she was born 13 weeks premature and needed some very special care. Unfortunately, there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joseph's — or anywhere else in the entire province of Ontario, it seems.

Canada's perfectly planned and cost-effective system had no room at the inn for Ava, who of necessity had to be sent across the border to a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital to suffer under our chaotic and costly system. She had no time to be put on a Canadian waiting list. She got the care she needed at an American hospital under a system President Obama has labeled "unsustainable." ...

...Infant mortality rates are often cited as a reason socialized medicine and a single-payer system is supposed to be better than what we have here. But according to Dr. Linda Halderman, a policy adviser in the California State Senate, these comparisons are bogus.

As she points out, in the U.S., low birth-weight babies are still babies. In Canada, Germany and Austria, a premature baby weighing less than 500 grams is not considered a living child and is not counted in such statistics. They're considered "unsalvageable" and therefore never alive.

Norway boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world — until you factor in weight at birth, and then its rate is no better than in the U.S.

In other countries babies that survive less than 24 hours are also excluded and are classified as "stillborn." In the U.S. any infant that shows any sign of life for any length of time is considered a live birth.

A child born in Hong Kong or Japan that lives less than a day is reported as a "miscarriage" and not counted. In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby is not counted as a baby if it is less than 30 centimeters in length....

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The Pitfalls of the Public Option
...Even if one accepts the president’s broader goals of wider access to health care and cost containment, his economic logic regarding the public option is hard to follow. Consumer choice and honest competition are indeed the foundation of a successful market system, but they are usually achieved without a public provider. We don’t need government-run grocery stores or government-run gas stations to ensure that Americans can buy food and fuel at reasonable prices.

An important question about any public provider of health insurance is whether it would have access to taxpayer funds. If not, the public plan would have to stand on its own financially, as private plans do, covering all expenses with premiums from those who signed up for it.

But if such a plan were desirable and feasible, nothing would stop someone from setting it up right now. In essence, a public plan without taxpayer support would be yet another nonprofit company offering health insurance. The fundamental viability of the enterprise does not depend on whether the employees are called “nonprofit administrators” or “civil servants.”

In practice, however, if a public option is available, it will probably enjoy taxpayer subsidies. Indeed, even if the initial legislation rejected them, such subsidies would be hard to avoid in the long run. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants created by federal law, were once private companies. Yet many investors believed — correctly, as it turned out — that the federal government would stand behind Fannie’s and Freddie’s debts, and this perception gave these companies access to cheap credit. Similarly, a public health insurance plan would enjoy the presumption of a government backstop....

...It is natural to be skeptical. The largest existing public health programs — Medicare and Medicaid — are the main reason that the government’s long-term finances are in shambles. True, Medicare’s administrative costs are low, but it is easy to keep those costs contained when a system merely writes checks without expending the resources to control wasteful medical spending....

...If the government has a dominant role in buying the services of doctors and other health care providers, it can force prices down. Once the government is virtually the only game in town, health care providers will have little choice but to take whatever they can get. It is no wonder that the American Medical Association opposes the public option.

To be sure, squeezing suppliers would have unpleasant side effects. Over time, society would end up with fewer doctors and other health care workers. The reduced quantity of services would somehow need to be rationed among competing demands. Such rationing is unlikely to work well.

FAIRNESS is in the eye of the beholder, but nothing about a government-run health care system strikes me as fair. Squeezing providers would save the rest of us money, but so would a special tax levied only on health care workers, and that is manifestly inequitable....

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The Dirty War Against Clean Coal
...More important, the technology already exists to make huge reductions in greenhouse emissions from coal, allowing power companies to begin cutting the carbon footprint of coal today. Instead, advanced-technology coal power sits on the shelf while regulators wait to see what happens with a project that may be just an expensive boondoggle.

The big project, a public-private partnership called FutureGen, was first announced by George W. Bush in 2003. Dreading facing up to the problem of greenhouse gases from electricity generation, the Bush White House suggested that decisions should wait while FutureGen developed a coal-fired power with no emissions. FutureGen’s administrators spent five years on studies, proposals and studies of studies, but never broke ground for a test installation. ...

...The Obama administration’s FutureGen plan calls for yet another year of study before any actual action; test runs may not begin for a decade. No wonder the project’s nickname is “NeverGen.” This is part of a Washington tradition — beginning pie-in-the-sky projects that create an excuse to avoid forms of conservation and greenhouse-gas reduction that are possible immediately. Companies including General Electric have already perfected technology to reduce emissions substantially, called “integrated gasification combined cycle” power. (Yes, it needs a better name.)

Current coal-fired power plants burn pulverized coal using a combustion process that hasn’t changed in a half a century. The new approach turns coal into a gas similar to natural gas, which runs through a device similar to a jet engine. Such plants can achieve near-zero emissions of toxic material and chemicals that form smog, and they require about a third less coal than regular coal-fired power plants to produce an equal amount of energy, which means about a third lower greenhouse gases. ...

... The first commercial gasification power plant, designed by General Electric for Duke Energy, is being built in Indiana. Yet, absurdly, most state public-utility commissions have denied requests to construct these environmentally friendly systems. Last year, Virginia denied a major utility’s request to build a coal-fired power plant that would have sequestered nearly all its carbon output.

One reason Virginia gave for the denial was the higher up-front cost of a gasification plant. Yet, once greenhouse gases are regulated (and President Obama’s cap-and-trade plan would in effect tax carbon), the economics of gasification plants may become attractive, with low-emission plants costing less to run.

Another reason for the denials is that utility commissions are waiting for the outcome of the FutureGen experiment. This is a classic instance of the best being enemy of the good. Rather than starting to cut coal-caused carbon emissions right now, we are waiting to see if a hypothetical system could achieve perfection decades from now. Meanwhile, emissions continue willy-nilly....

... Reflecting this mindset, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said he opposes integrated gasification plants — only new solar, wind and geothermal facilities should be allowed. Environmentalists who correctly point out there can never be absolutely “clean coal” thus end up in the position of opposing coal that’s far cleaner than what we are using.

Yet coal use is a future certainty. Half of our power comes from coal, versus about 2 percent from solar and wind: in the next few decades, green power simply cannot grow quickly enough to eliminate the need for coal....

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The Secret History
...Panetta was also absorbing criticism from the left. The day before, a group of progressive human-rights advocates had been given an off-the-record briefing with Obama, where they discussed his plans for handling terrorism suspects; some of the advocates were enraged at what they saw as a tacit continuation of the Bush approach. According to a participant, Obama warned the group that such comparisons were “not helpful.” Nevertheless, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, who also attended the briefing, went on to denounce the Administration for considering “preventive detention”—incarcerating certain terror suspects indefinitely, without trial. Obama’s position, Roth said, “mimics the Bush Administration’s abusive approach.”...

...Nevertheless, many critics believe that the agency must reckon with the legacy of the Bush era. In the past few years, irrefutable evidence has emerged that after 9/11 the agency lost its moral bearings. A confidential Red Cross report has come into public view, along with formerly classified government documents, leaving no doubt that the agency subjected scores of terror suspects to prolonged physical and psychological cruelty. Officers shackled prisoners for weeks in contorted positions; chained them to the ceiling wearing only diapers; exploited their phobias; propelled them head first into walls. At least three prisoners died....

...The C.I.A. has apparently done nothing to penalize the officer who oversaw one of the most notorious renditions—that of a German car salesman named Khaled el-Masri. He was abducted while on a holiday in Macedonia, and flown by the agency to Afghanistan, where he was detained in a dungeon for five months without charges, before being released. From the start, the rendition team suspected that his case was one of mistaken identity. But the C.I.A. officer in charge at Langley—the agency asked that the officer’s name be withheld—insisted that Masri be further interrogated. “She just looked in her crystal ball and it said that he was bad,” a colleague recalls. Masri says that he was chained in a freezing cell with no bed, and given water so putrid that he could smell it across the room. He was threatened and stripped, and could hear other detainees crying all around him. After several weeks, the C.I.A. officer in charge learned that Masri’s German passport was not a forgery, as was originally suspected, and that he was not the terror suspect the agency thought he was. (The names were similar.) Even so, the officer in charge refused to release him. Eventually, Masri went on a hunger strike, losing sixty pounds. Skeptics in the agency went directly over the officer’s head to Tenet, who realized that his agency had been brutalizing an innocent man. Masri was released after a hundred and forty-nine days. But the officer in charge was not disciplined; in fact, a former colleague says, “she’s been promoted—twice.” Masri, meanwhile, has been unable to sue the U.S. government for either an apology or damages, because the courts consider the very existence of rendition a state secret—a position that the Obama Justice Department has so far supported.

No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as the result of mistreatment. In the first case, an unnamed detainee under C.I.A. supervision in Afghanistan froze to death after having been chained, naked, to a concrete floor overnight. The body was buried in an unmarked grave. In the second case, an Iraqi prisoner named Manadel al-Jamadi died on November 4, 2003, while being interrogated by the C.I.A. at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad. A forensic examiner found that he had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs. Military pathologists classified the case a homicide. A third prisoner died after an interrogation in which a C.I.A. officer participated, though the officer evidently did not cause the death. (Several other detainees have disappeared and remain unaccounted for, according to Human Rights Watch.)

During his tenure at the C.I.A., John Helgerson, the former inspector general, forwarded the crucifixion case, along with an estimated half-dozen other incidents, to the Justice Department, for possible prosecution. But the case files have languished. An official familiar with the cases told me that the agency has deflected inquiries by the Senate Intelligence Committee seeking information about any internal disciplinary action. (Helgerson told me, “Some individuals have been disciplined. And others no longer work at the agency.”) ...

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THE NEW YORKER on Countrywide
...In 1992, shortly after Mozilo became chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston issued a report stating that it had found systemic discrimination by mortgage lenders against African-American and Hispanic borrowers. Robert Gnaizda, former general counsel of the Greenlining Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on minority rights, sent the report to Mozilo and other mortgage bankers. "I received a harsh response from Mozilo," Gnaizda told me. Privately, however, Mozilo was appalled. He ordered that all Countrywide's records on rejected minority applicants be sent to him, and he retroactively approved about half of them. Then he dispatched African-Americans, posing as prospective borrowers--he called them "mystery shoppers"--to Countrywide branches, and concluded that they were indeed treated differently from white borrowers.

Countrywide opened new offices in inner-city areas, created counseling centers, and loosened some lending standards, to include borrowers with less than pristine credit histories. Between 1993 and 1994, the company's loans to African-American borrowers rose three hundred and twenty-five percent, and to Hispanics they increased a hundred and sixty-three per cent. In 1994, Countrywide became the first mortgage lender to sign a fair-lending agreement with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. ...

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Krugman Redefines Treason
Paul Krugman, never one to hold back on comments, now has declared that anyone who doe s not believe as he does on global warming is guilty of "treason against the planet." Lest a reader think I am exaggerating, here is what he wrote:

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason -- treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

...This truly is amazing. Krugman pretty much now holds the view that HE is the standard of good and proper thought. Remember, throughout history, the punishment for "treason" has been death. By the way, don't think that people like Krugman are going to back off. Holocaust "denial" in parts of Europe is punishable by prison...

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The Phony Time-Gap Alibi For The Community Reinvestment Act
Perhaps one of the most misleading points made by those who wish to completely exonerate the Community Reinvestment Act’s role in encouraging lenders to adopt loose standards for mortgages is to insist that a statute originally put in place in 1977 could not have played a role in a housing bubble 25 years later. This point ignores the profound changes in the CRA and related fair housing that occurred in the subsequent years.

In the first place, it should be noted that the attempt to exonerate the CRA seems to turn on the idea that the act didn’t encourage much lending at all. This, of course, runs completely contrary to the advocates of the CRA during the housing boom. Back then, they were bragging about how effective the CRA had been in spurring lending....

...In 1989, President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Financial Institutions Reform Recovery and Enforcement Act that included provisions to increase public oversight of the way the CRA was enforced. Regulators were required to issue public, written performance evaluations of banks, including a system that rated bank compliance as Outstanding, Satisfactory, Needs To Improve or Substantial Non-Compliance. This public scrutiny began to push banks to make more loans to low-income borrowers, a process that often involved putting in place relaxed lending standards.

Shortly afterward, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac addressed bank fears that the low-income lending with relaxed standards would unduly increase risk by beginning to securitize “affordable” mortgages. This was the beginning of subprime lending. It was the “pull” factor that complimented the “push” factor of the CRA.

The Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, which opened the door for interstate banking and encouraged a new wave of banking M&A, made the ratings under the CRA a test for determining whether acquisitions would be allowed. That same year, the Fed refused to allow a Hartford, Connecticut bank to acquire a New Hampshire bank on fair housing and CRA grounds.

This was the first time the Fed had ever taken this kind of action, and it had profound effects through the banking sector. It sent a strong signal to the banks that the Fed would closely scrutinize lending practice, limiting the ability of banks to grow or make acquisitions if they were found to have insufficient low income or minority lending. Banks immediately responded by lowering down payment requirements and using more flexible income criteria.

The CRA defenders like to claim that the statute did not require these things, but the enforcement of the act did. Banks knew what kind of lending would increase their CRA compliance and meet with the approval of the regulators. CRA defenders often like to say that banks didn’t need to adopt standards that involve high loan-to-value ratios, low down payments, and loosey-goosey income tests. But this counter-factual claim is without basis in reality: the defenders cannot point to banks that did pass scrutiny of regulators and received top ratings from regulators without adopting these standards. The fact is that banks loosened standards because that is what regulators required. Any proposals that other strategies could have been employed is simply conjecture and second-guessing.

And there can be no doubt that the regulators were pushing for “no down payment” loans and 100 percent loan-to-value ratios. They also urged automated under-writing and reliance on credit scoring, two more factors that have since been viewed as contributing to overly-risky lending...

...After all, one of the tests for whether banks were engaged in discriminatory lending was whether they had adopted standards that were stricter than those approved of by regulators. Stricter standards were assumed to be evidence of discrimination, and if they had a disparate impact the matter was even worse. So when a Fed governor tells banks that they should be making no down-payment, 100% LTV loans based on credit scores and automated underwriting, we shouldn't be surprised that they started making these kind of loans.

In 1995, regulators began to enforce the CRA in a very different way than they had in the past. Instead of focusing on the process of bank lending, the new regulations were focused on objective performance evaluations. At the same time, regulators began disclosing more information about particular banks. As one commenter put it at the time, “We have learned from 30 years of CRA policy that what is measured gets done.” In short, publicly measuring low-income loans encouraged more of it. And the way regulators advised making low income loans involved features we now regard as toxic....

...In early 2005, largely at the behest of the banking sector, the Office of Thrift Supervision implemented new rules that were widely perceived as weakening the CRA. Supervision of banks with under $1 billion in assets was loosened, and larger banks were allowed to voluntarily reduce the amount of regulator scrutiny of their “investment” and “service”–two long-standing categories of assessment under the CRA.

This had two unintended consequences that would later prove to be very costly. In the first place, it increased CRA scrutiny of larger banks, who were now the main focus of regulators. This put even more pressure on the banks to make CRA loans. Secondly, by allowing banks to de-emphasize “investment” and “service,” the new regulations created an even greater incentive for banks to meet CRA obligations by making home loans.

As we’ve shown elsewhere, the CRA had a clear and strong role in loosening lending standards. Those who claim the long time gap between its original passage are probably ignorant of the profound changes in the law and the way it was enforced...

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E-mails indicate EPA suppressed report skeptical of global warming
The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision."

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be an independent review process inside a federal agency--and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, said in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. "It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else," Carlin said. "That was obviously coming from higher levels."

E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to "have any direct communication" with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.

"I was told for probably the first time in I don't know how many years exactly what I was to work on," said Carlin, a 38-year veteran of the EPA. "And it was not to work on climate change." One e-mail orders him to update a grants database instead. ...

...Carlin has an undergraduate degree in physics from CalTech and a PhD in economics from MIT. His Web site lists papers about the environment and public policy dating back to 1964, spanning topics from pollution control to environmentally-responsible energy pricing.

After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. "My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide)," he said. "There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They're not going up, and if anything they're going down."

Carlin's report listed a number of recent developments he said the EPA did not consider, including that global temperatures have declined for 11 years; that new research predicts Atlantic hurricanes will be unaffected; that there's "little evidence" that Greenland is shedding ice at expected levels; and that solar radiation has the largest single effect on the earth's temperature. ...

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Southern Baptists tackle member losses
Southern Baptists are facing a membership decline that could shrink the nation’s largest Protestant denomination by nearly half in 40 years, its convention president said Tuesday....

...The denomination is declining at a rate that could shrink its membership from 16.2 million to 8.7 million by 2050, Hunt said. Total membership of Southern Baptist churches was 16,228,438 last year, down nearly 38,400 from 2007, according to LifeWay, the convention’s research and publishing arm....

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Outside Agitator
...Both Klein and Lewis are skeptical about Barack Obama. “I’ve been at rallies and seen him speak, and I feel that feeling that one feels,” Lewis says. “It is thrilling. And it’s churlish not to allow yourself to be thrilled. We crave inspiration, and it’s a bleak life to always be dissecting things. But the main feeling that Obama creates in me is fear, because I see people fooling themselves. If you actually look at his policies, what they reflect is the triumph of the right-wing political paradigm since Reagan, and I think he could set things back dramatically, because for young people who are getting engaged in politics for the first time, for them to be disillusioned is very, very damaging.” Because Klein doesn’t expect much from any politician, she doesn’t spend time wishing Obama were more progressive. “I don’t want to appear too cynical, but when I first saw the ‘Yes We Can’ rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first response was ‘Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike’s,’ ” she says. “The ‘Yes We Can’ slogan means whatever you want it to mean. It’s very ‘Just Do It.’ When you hear it, you catch yourself thinking, Yeah! We’re gonna end torture and shut down Guantánamo and get out of Iraq! And then you think, Wait a minute, is he really saying that? He’s not really saying that, is he? He’s saying we’re going to send more troops to Afghanistan. He’s telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in the back rooms he’s making deals and signing on to the status quo. But if people don’t like where Obama is they should move the center.” To this end, Klein has been taking every opportunity to call for the nationalization of the oil companies. “It’s the job of the left to move the center,” she says. “Get out there and say some crazy stuff! And then, suddenly, it’ll seem more reasonable for politicians to take riskier positions.”...

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White House Weighs Order on Detention
Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that an order, which would bypass Congress, could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said. ...

Obama contemplates Executive Order for detention without charges
...This specific article is even worse than the usual one of its type, since it's particularly uncritical in passing along administration claims without any skepticism (I addressed each of the "justifications" for Obama's preventive detention proposal -- Obama has to do this because of what Bush did; we can't get convictions because of Bush's torture; it's common in War to do things like this, etc. etc. -- here). Worse, the article does not provide any information about the Obama officials whose mission the reporters are dutifully carrying out, so there's no way to assess their motives.

Those journalistic practices produce egregious sentences like this: "'Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order', the official said." I'd love to know which so-called "civil liberties groups" are pushing the White House for an Executive Order establishing the power of indefinite detention. It's certainly not the ACLU or Center for Constitutional Rights, both of which issued statements vehemently condemning the proposal (ACLU's Anthony Romero: "If President Obama issues an executive order authorizing indefinite detention, he’ll be repeating the same mistakes of George Bush"). ...

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‘The Police Became a Mob’
... Men punched Jude’s face and torso; when he fell to the ground, they kicked his head and thighs. The partygoers behaved as a mob. Not a single person in the house tried to stop the attack or even to call for aid. Jon Clausing, who had slashed Harris’s face, explained his conduct as “just kind of going along with everybody.” That is the way of the mob. Society has police forces to pose a counterweight to mobs, yet here the police became a mob.

Schabel and Martinez were on duty and had not been drinking, so they should have put a stop to the violence. Instead Schabel joined it, while Martinez watched. On being told that Jude had stolen Spengler’s badge, Schabel called Jude a “motherfucker” and stomped on his face until others could hear bones breaking. After telling Martinez “I’m really sorry you have to see this,” Daniel Masarik picked Jude off the ground and kicked him in the crotch so hard that his body left the ground. Jon Bartlett then took one of Schabel’s pens and pressed it into each of Jude’s ear canals, causing severe injury and excruciating pain. The men also broke two of Jude’s fingers by bending them back until they snapped. Spengler put a gun to Jude’s head and said: “I’m the fucking police. I can do whatever I want to do. I could kill you.” Bartlett used a knife to cut off Jude’s jacket and pants, leaving him naked on the street in a pool of his own blood...

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Medicare Costs Are Higher, Not Lower
...Dr. Robert Book, in a new Web Memo entitled “Medicare Administrative Costs Are Higher, Not Lower, Than for Private Insurance,” argues against the claims put forth by Dr. Hacker:

Health care reform is a complex problem, of which administrative costs is only one component. However, for policymakers and ordinary Americans to understand these issues, journalists, analysts, and advocates have an obligation to avoid “playing with numbers”–either through inadvertent misunderstanding of what the numbers represent or through a deliberate choice of misleading numbers that appear to support a desired policy.

The fact is that, in recent years, Medicare administrative costs per beneficiary have substantially exceeded those costs for the private sector, this despite the fact that, as critics note, private insurance is subject to many expenses not incurred by Medicare. Contrary to the claims of public plan advocates, moving millions of Americans from private insurance to a Medicare-like program will result in program administrative costs that are higher per person and higher, not lower, for the nation as a whole....

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"As Naked an Abuse of Government Power as Could be Imagined"
...The controversy centers on Sotomayor's vote in a 2006 eminent domain case, Didden v. Village of Port Chester. New York entrepreneur Bart Didden says Port Chester condemned his land after he refused to pay $800,000 (or grant a 50 percent stake in his business) to a developer hired by the village. One day after Didden refused to pay those bribes, Port Chester began eminent domain proceedings against him.

As University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein put it, "The case involved about as naked an abuse of government power as could be imagined." But that didn't stop Judge Sotomayor and two of her colleagues on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals from upholding the district court decision that ruled in favor of the village....

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Unions’ Health Benefits May Avoid Tax Under Proposal
...The U.S. Senate proposal to impose taxes for the first time on “gold-plated” health plans may bypass generous employee benefits negotiated by unions.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, the chief congressional advocate of taxing some employer-provided benefits to help pay for an overhaul of the U.S. health system, says any change should exempt perks secured in existing collective- bargaining agreements, which can be in place for as long as five years.

The exception, which could make the proposal more politically palatable to Democrats from heavily unionized states such as Michigan, is adding controversy to an already contentious debate. It would shield the 12.4 percent of American workers who belong to unions from being taxed while exposing some other middle-income workers to the levy. ...

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The Climate Change Climate Change
...Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon....

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Government Health Plans Always Ration Care
Only by expanding government control of health care can we bring down its cost. That's the faulty premise of the various proposals for health reform now being batted around Washington. The claimed cost control depends on politically safe ideas such as preventive care or the adoption of electronic health records. And neither--even according to the Congressional Budget Office--will do much to reduce spending.

If these proposals are implemented and fail to produce savings, government will turn to a less appealing but more familiar tool to cut costs: the regulation of access to drugs and medical services. Medicare is already going down this path. What will be new about government-run health care is the instrument of regulatory control. There will be an omnipotent federal health board. Buried in current reform proposals, this board deserves closer scrutiny.

Our best look at this construct comes from a bill released by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. The bill calls for a "Medical Advisory Council" to determine what medical products and services are "essential benefits" and those that shouldn't be covered by a public insurance plan....

...Like Medicare's recent decisions to curtail the use of virtual colonoscopies, certain wound-healing devices, and even a branded asthma drug, the board's decisions will be one-size-fits-all restrictions. Such restrictions don't respect variation in preferences and disease, which make costly products suitable for some even if they are wasteful when prescribed to everyone.

Moreover, these health boards prove that policy makers know they'll need to ration care but want to absolve themselves of responsibility. Some in Congress and the Obama administration recently tipped their hand on this goal by proposing to make recommendations of the current Medicare Payment Advisory Committee (MedPAC) legally binding rather than mere advice to Congress. Any new health board's mission will also expand over time, just as MedPAC's mandate grew to encompass medical practice issues not envisioned when it was created.

The idea of an omnipotent board that makes unpopular decisions on access and price isn't a new construct. It's a European import. In countries such as France and Germany, layers of bureaucracy like health boards have been specifically engineered to delay the adoption of new medical products and services, thus lowering spending....

...In short, other countries where government plays a large role in health care aren't shy about rationing. Mr. Obama's budget director has acknowledged that rationing reduces costs. Peter Orszag told Congress last year when he headed the Congressional Budget Office that spending can be "moderated" if "diffusion of existing costly services were slowed."...

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Fannie, Freddie asked to relax condo loan rules: report
Two U.S. Democratic lawmakers want Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax recently tightened standards for mortgages on new condominiums, saying they could threaten the viability of some developments and slow the housing-market recovery, the Wall Street Journal said.

In March, Fannie Mae (FNM.N)(FNM.P) said it would no longer guarantee mortgages on condos in buildings where fewer than 70 percent of the units have been sold, up from 51 percent, the paper said. Freddie Mac (FRE.P)(FRE.N) is due to implement similar policies next month, the paper said.

In a letter to the CEO's of both companies, Representatives Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Anthony Weiner warned that a 70 percent sales threshold "may be too onerous" and could lead condo buyers to shun new developments, according to the paper.

The legislators asked the companies to "make appropriate adjustments" to their underwriting standards for condos, the paper added....

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Tilting at Green Windmills
The Spanish professor is puzzled. Why, Gabriel Calzada wonders, is the U.S. president recommending that America emulate the Spanish model for creating "green jobs" in "alternative energy" even though Spain's unemployment rate is 18.1 percent -- more than double the European Union average -- partly because of spending on such jobs?

Calzada, 36, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has produced a report that, if true, is inconvenient for the Obama administration's green agenda, and for some budget assumptions that are dependent upon it.

Calzada says Spain's torrential spending -- no other nation has so aggressively supported production of electricity from renewable sources -- on wind farms and other forms of alternative energy has indeed created jobs. But Calzada's report concludes that they often are temporary and have received $752,000 to $800,000 each in subsidies -- wind industry jobs cost even more, $1.4 million each. And each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries because of the political allocation -- sub-optimum in terms of economic efficiency -- of capital....

...The president's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was asked about the report's contention that the political diversion of capital into green jobs has cost Spain jobs. The White House transcript contained this exchange:

Gibbs: "It seems weird that we're importing wind turbine parts from Spain in order to build -- to meet renewable energy demand here if that were even remotely the case."

Questioner: "Is that a suggestion that his study is simply flat wrong?"

Gibbs: "I haven't read the study, but I think, yes."

Questioner: "Well, then. [Laughter.]" ...

...Still, one can be agnostic about both reports while being dismayed by the frequency with which such findings are ignored simply because they question policies that are so invested with righteousness that methodical economic reasoning about their costs and benefits seems unimportant. When the president speaks of "new green energy economies" creating "countless well-paying jobs," perhaps they really are countless, meaning incapable of being counted.

For fervent believers in governments' abilities to control the climate and in the urgent need for them to do so, believing is seeing: They see, through their ideological lenses, governments' green spending as always paying for itself. ..

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California's dubious distinction
If you want to see how the Obama big-government agenda will play out for us in the future, look no further than California, his dream high-tax state which votes overwhelmingly Democrat.

If you follow the Democratic agenda, you end up with financially-strapped states from which businesses and taxpayers are leaving in droves. Even with the highest tax rates in the USA (10 percent plus, not counting city taxes), these states run the biggest deficits. Compare that to the zero income tax state of Texas, which balances its budget and created more jobs in 2008 than all 49 other states combined....

...Hollywood is still in bed smoking a cigarette, celebrating the afterglow of its love affair with Obama. The "environmental president" recently flew his crew out to California ($265,000 in Air Force One costs) for two Democratic fundraisers in L.A. Because Hollywood is always a model of equality and fairness, there were two-tiered donor events.One hosted by Stephen Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg cost $15,000 a head to attend, the other was $1,000 per person, presumably hosted by Carrot Top and Kathy Griffin. Even as they celebrate diversity, egalitarianism and affirmative action, our Hollywood elite feel it important for the nation to not to lose sight of a fundamental truth: there should always be an A-list and a B-list....

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Viewpoint: Questions Arise Over IndyMac Loan Mods
...Perhaps the single largest question for anyone watching the unfolding saga over loan modifications, and the political posturing on Capitol Hill and by regulators over the need to “do more” to help troubled homeowners, has been this: what about IndyMac Federal Bank?

The bank, seized by regulators and placed into the hands of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in August after an Alt-A lending binge left it too vulnerable to a collapse of much of the U.S. mortgage market, has become the veritable poster child for government-led intervention into troubled mortgages. On August 20, FDIC officials rolled out an ambitious plan for mortgage modifications, one they said at the time would set the example for how aggressive loan modifications should work. Implicit in the program was an indictment of existing servicers, who ostensibly weren’t doing enough to help their borrowers....

...Nonetheless, a 50 percent recidivism rate on loan modifications suggests that loan modifications — IndyMac led or not — aren’t usually the sort of world-saving panacea that many regulators and lawmakers expect.

As for the performance results, file them under “patently obvious” to any mortgage market participant that has ever been around loan servicing before. More than a few people versed in the field — myself included — rolled our eyes at the insinuation that the FDIC could do better than other loan servicers at modifying troubled mortgages. While we still don’t know for sure, this type of data is exactly the reason why. It’s not that anyone wishes the FDIC fails in its attempt; Ms. Bair’s heart is in the right place, after all. It’s just that we know better...

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Modified mortgages often re-default
...The FDIC has already modified more than 5,000 delinquent mortgages owned or serviced by failed lender IndyMac /quotes/comstock/11i!idmcq (IDMCQ 0.03, 0.00, -1.54%) and Bair's broader proposal is modeled on those efforts.

Under the IndyMac program, eligible homeowners have been offered more affordable monthly payments through reduced interest rates on the loans, extended amortization and deferred principal payments.

Lender Processing Services told analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods that the results of such modification are often uninspiring.

"Industry evidence indicates that in a majority of instances loan modifications simply delay the timeline from default to foreclosure but don't prevent them from taking place," Nathaniel Otis and William Clark, analysts at KBW, wrote in a note to investors on Tuesday.

For the industry in general, after mortgages are modified roughly 25% go delinquent again after just one post-modification payment and more than half end up delinquent after several post-modification payments, Lender Processing Services told the analysts. ...

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Is Government Health Care Constitutional?
...The Supreme Court created the right to privacy in the 1960s and used it to strike down a series of state and federal regulations of personal (mostly sexual) conduct. This line of cases began with Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 (involving marital birth control), and includes the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

The court's underlying rationale was not abortion-specific. Rather, the justices posited a constitutionally mandated zone of personal privacy that must remain free of government regulation, except in the most exceptional circumstances. As the court explained in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), "these matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life."

It is, of course, difficult to imagine choices more "central to personal dignity and autonomy" than measures to be taken for the prevention and treatment of disease -- measures that may be essential to preserve or extend life itself. Indeed, when the overwhelming moral issues that surround the abortion question are stripped away, what is left is a medical procedure determined to be "necessary" by an expectant mother and her physician.

If the government cannot proscribe -- or even "unduly burden," to use another of the Supreme Court's analytical frameworks -- access to abortion, how can it proscribe access to other medical procedures, including transplants, corrective or restorative surgeries, chemotherapy treatments, or a myriad of other health services that individuals may need or desire?

This type of "burden" analysis will be especially problematic for a national health system because, in the health area, proper care often depends upon an individual's unique physical and even genetic history and characteristics. One size clearly does not fit all, but that is the very essence of governmental regulation -- to impose a regularity (if not uniformity) in the application of governmental power and the dispersal of its largess. Taking key decisions away from patient and physician, or otherwise limiting their available choices, will render any new system constitutionally vulnerable.

It is true, of course, that forms of rationing already exist in our current system. No one who has experienced the marked reluctance to treat aggressively lethal illnesses in the elderly can doubt that. However, what may be permissible for private actors -- including doctors and insurance companies -- is not necessarily lawful when done by the government....