Apocalypse Not: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Worry About End Times
...Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”
Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes....
...Conventional wisdom has it that this fate was averted by prompt legislative action to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions from power plants. That account is largely false. There was no net loss of forest in the 1980s to reverse. In the US, a 10-year government-sponsored study involving some 700 scientists and costing about $500 million reported in 1990 that “there is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the United States and Canada due to acid rain” and “there is no case of forest decline in which acidic deposition is known to be a predominant cause.” In Germany, Heinrich Spiecker, director of the Institute for Forest Growth, was commissioned by a Finnish forestry organization to assess the health of European forests. He concluded that they were growing faster and healthier than ever and had been improving throughout the 1980s. “Since we began measuring the forest more than 100 years ago, there’s never been a higher volume of wood … than there is now,” Spiecker said. (Ironically, one of the chief ingredients of acid rain—nitrogen oxide—breaks down naturally to become nitrate, a fertilizer for trees.) As for lakes, it turned out that their rising acidity was likely caused more by reforestation than by acid rain; one study suggested that the correlation between acidity in rainwater and the pH in the lakes was very low. The story of acid rain is not of catastrophe averted but of a minor environmental nuisance somewhat abated....
...There was an international agreement to cease using CFCs by 1996. But the predicted recovery of the ozone layer never happened: The hole stopped growing before the ban took effect, then failed to shrink afterward. The ozone hole still grows every Antarctic spring, to roughly the same extent each year. Nobody quite knows why. Some scientists think it is simply taking longer than expected for the chemicals to disintegrate; a few believe that the cause of the hole was misdiagnosed in the first place. Either way, the ozone hole cannot yet be claimed as a looming catastrophe, let alone one averted by political action....
...So, should we worry or not about the warming climate? It is far too binary a question. The lesson of failed past predictions of ecological apocalypse is not that nothing was happening but that the middle-ground possibilities were too frequently excluded from consideration. In the climate debate, we hear a lot from those who think disaster is inexorable if not inevitable, and a lot from those who think it is all a hoax. We hardly ever allow the moderate “lukewarmers” a voice: those who suspect that the net positive feedbacks from water vapor in the atmosphere are low, so that we face only 1 to 2 degrees Celsius of warming this century; that the Greenland ice sheet may melt but no faster than its current rate of less than 1 percent per century; that net increases in rainfall (and carbon dioxide concentration) may improve agricultural productivity; that ecosystems have survived sudden temperature lurches before; and that adaptation to gradual change may be both cheaper and less ecologically damaging than a rapid and brutal decision to give up fossil fuels cold turkey....
Sunday, August 19, 2012
How I became George Obama's 'brother'
A few days ago I received a call from a man I recently met named George. He was a bit flustered, and soon informed me that his young son was sick with a chest condition. He pleaded with me to send him $1,000 to cover the medical bills. Since George was at the hospital I asked him to let me speak to a nurse, and she confirmed that George’s son was indeed ill. So I agreed to send George the money through Western Union. He was profusely grateful. But before I hung up I asked George, “Why are you coming to me?” He said, “I have no one else to ask.” Then he said something that astounded me, “Dinesh, you are like a brother to me.”
Actually, George has a real life brother who just happens to be the president of the United States. (George Obama is the youngest of eight children sired by Barack Obama Sr.) George’s brother is a multimillionaire and the most powerful man in the world. Moreover, George’s brother has framed his re-election campaign around the “fair share” theme that we owe obligations to those who are less fortunate.
One of Obama’s favorite phrases comes right out of the Bible: “We are our brother’s keeper.” Yet he has not contributed a penny to help his own brother. And evidently George does not believe, even in times of emergency, that he can turn to his brother in the White House for help.
So much for spreading the wealth around....
A few days ago I received a call from a man I recently met named George. He was a bit flustered, and soon informed me that his young son was sick with a chest condition. He pleaded with me to send him $1,000 to cover the medical bills. Since George was at the hospital I asked him to let me speak to a nurse, and she confirmed that George’s son was indeed ill. So I agreed to send George the money through Western Union. He was profusely grateful. But before I hung up I asked George, “Why are you coming to me?” He said, “I have no one else to ask.” Then he said something that astounded me, “Dinesh, you are like a brother to me.”
Actually, George has a real life brother who just happens to be the president of the United States. (George Obama is the youngest of eight children sired by Barack Obama Sr.) George’s brother is a multimillionaire and the most powerful man in the world. Moreover, George’s brother has framed his re-election campaign around the “fair share” theme that we owe obligations to those who are less fortunate.
One of Obama’s favorite phrases comes right out of the Bible: “We are our brother’s keeper.” Yet he has not contributed a penny to help his own brother. And evidently George does not believe, even in times of emergency, that he can turn to his brother in the White House for help.
So much for spreading the wealth around....
Emails: Geithner, Treasury drove cutoff of non-union Delphi workers’ pensions
Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company.
The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.
The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding the termination of those non-union pensions, and that administration figures violated federal law....
Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company.
The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.
The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding the termination of those non-union pensions, and that administration figures violated federal law....
Terrorism by Any Reasonable Definition
...Yet as it so happens historical facts make the case for dropping the bombs in 1945 even weaker. For one thing, the supposed half-million or so American lives saved are a post-war fabrication. The government’s estimates before the bombings indicated that fewer than 50,000 Americans might die in an invasion. Second, the virtually unprecedented demand for unconditional surrender prolonged the war. Earlier in the year, the Japanese demonstrated a willingness to surrender but they did not want to give up their emperor. In the end, the U.S. let them keep their emperor anyway. Third, many of America’s top brass condemned the atomic bombings, including Admiral William Leahy, General Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and many others. Fourth, in 1946 the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey determined the atomic bombings were basically extraneous to winning the war. The Japanese were already defeated, blockaded, starving, and neutralized.
Even after the bombing of Nagasaki and the emperor said he would surrender, the U.S. firebombed Tokyo on August 14 with a thousand-plane bombing mission. Was this last mass killing necessary? We rarely hear about it at all, perhaps because it throws into question the entire morality of U.S. strategic bombing in the Pacific War....
...Yet as it so happens historical facts make the case for dropping the bombs in 1945 even weaker. For one thing, the supposed half-million or so American lives saved are a post-war fabrication. The government’s estimates before the bombings indicated that fewer than 50,000 Americans might die in an invasion. Second, the virtually unprecedented demand for unconditional surrender prolonged the war. Earlier in the year, the Japanese demonstrated a willingness to surrender but they did not want to give up their emperor. In the end, the U.S. let them keep their emperor anyway. Third, many of America’s top brass condemned the atomic bombings, including Admiral William Leahy, General Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and many others. Fourth, in 1946 the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey determined the atomic bombings were basically extraneous to winning the war. The Japanese were already defeated, blockaded, starving, and neutralized.
Even after the bombing of Nagasaki and the emperor said he would surrender, the U.S. firebombed Tokyo on August 14 with a thousand-plane bombing mission. Was this last mass killing necessary? We rarely hear about it at all, perhaps because it throws into question the entire morality of U.S. strategic bombing in the Pacific War....
Justice in Tenaha and the Current State of Texas Forfeiture Law
…it is estimated police seized $3 million between 2006 and 2008 in at least 140 cases. Police officers routinely pulled over motorists in the vicinity of Tenaha without any legal justification, asked if they were carrying cash and, if they were, ordered them to sign over the cash to the city or face charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.
Almost all of the stops involved Black and Latino drivers. None of the plaintiffs in the case were ever arrested or charged with a crime. The seized assets were used to enrich the defendants’ offices and themselves....
...Authorities in a Texas town under investigation for allegedly shaking down motorists for their cash sometimes used the travelers’ children as bargaining chips in their attempt to seize money, records show…
“They basically said, ‘If you all want to leave without going to jail tonight and take your kids with you, then you’ll sign over your money right now,’” Jennifer Boatright, a Houston mother of two, said in an interview describing her encounter with local officials…
The involvement of children adds another element to a case that has especially troubled critics of civil asset forfeiture laws. Those laws allow authorities to seize cash or other property if they believe it’s linked to criminal activity, even in cases where defendants aren’t found guilty.
In two of the Tenaha incidents, authorities separated a small child from one couple pulled over in a traffic stop and threatened to do the same to another, according to case documents....
...Texas law states that the proceeds of any seizures can be used only for “official purposes” of district attorney offices and “for law-enforcement purposes” by police departments. According to public records obtained by CNN using open-records laws, an account funded by property forfeitures in Russell’s office included $524 for a popcorn machine, $195 for candy for a poultry festival, and $400 for catering.
In addition, Russell donated money to the local chamber of commerce and a youth baseball league. A local Baptist church received two checks totaling $6,000.
And one check for $10,000 went to Barry Washington, a Tenaha police officer whose name has come up in several complaints by stopped motorists. The money was paid for “investigative costs,” the records state....
…it is estimated police seized $3 million between 2006 and 2008 in at least 140 cases. Police officers routinely pulled over motorists in the vicinity of Tenaha without any legal justification, asked if they were carrying cash and, if they were, ordered them to sign over the cash to the city or face charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.
Almost all of the stops involved Black and Latino drivers. None of the plaintiffs in the case were ever arrested or charged with a crime. The seized assets were used to enrich the defendants’ offices and themselves....
...Authorities in a Texas town under investigation for allegedly shaking down motorists for their cash sometimes used the travelers’ children as bargaining chips in their attempt to seize money, records show…
“They basically said, ‘If you all want to leave without going to jail tonight and take your kids with you, then you’ll sign over your money right now,’” Jennifer Boatright, a Houston mother of two, said in an interview describing her encounter with local officials…
The involvement of children adds another element to a case that has especially troubled critics of civil asset forfeiture laws. Those laws allow authorities to seize cash or other property if they believe it’s linked to criminal activity, even in cases where defendants aren’t found guilty.
In two of the Tenaha incidents, authorities separated a small child from one couple pulled over in a traffic stop and threatened to do the same to another, according to case documents....
...Texas law states that the proceeds of any seizures can be used only for “official purposes” of district attorney offices and “for law-enforcement purposes” by police departments. According to public records obtained by CNN using open-records laws, an account funded by property forfeitures in Russell’s office included $524 for a popcorn machine, $195 for candy for a poultry festival, and $400 for catering.
In addition, Russell donated money to the local chamber of commerce and a youth baseball league. A local Baptist church received two checks totaling $6,000.
And one check for $10,000 went to Barry Washington, a Tenaha police officer whose name has come up in several complaints by stopped motorists. The money was paid for “investigative costs,” the records state....
Countrywide Loans Sought Favor With Fannie Mae, Report Says
...Jim Johnson, chief executive officer of Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998, earned $100 million during his time at the company. Nonetheless, Countrywide employees expressed concern about giving him a loan because he didn’t pay his bills regularly and had a low credit score, according to e-mails published in Issa’s report.
Because of Johnson’s credit report, “I’m concerned about signing on these loans,” Countrywide underwriter Gene Soda said in a 2005 e-mail to another Countrywide employee, according to the report.
Countrywide’s chief executive officer, Angelo Mozilo, who had a close relationship with Johnson, wrote back, instructing his employees to give Johnson a loan “1/2 below prime.”
“Don’t worry about” the credit score, Mozilo wrote. “He is constantly on the road and therefore pays his bills on an irregular basis but he ultimately pays them.” In another e-mail, Mozilo wrote, “Jim Johnson continues to be a source of many loans for our company and this is just a small token of appreciation for the business that he sends to us.”...
...Jim Johnson, chief executive officer of Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998, earned $100 million during his time at the company. Nonetheless, Countrywide employees expressed concern about giving him a loan because he didn’t pay his bills regularly and had a low credit score, according to e-mails published in Issa’s report.
Because of Johnson’s credit report, “I’m concerned about signing on these loans,” Countrywide underwriter Gene Soda said in a 2005 e-mail to another Countrywide employee, according to the report.
Countrywide’s chief executive officer, Angelo Mozilo, who had a close relationship with Johnson, wrote back, instructing his employees to give Johnson a loan “1/2 below prime.”
“Don’t worry about” the credit score, Mozilo wrote. “He is constantly on the road and therefore pays his bills on an irregular basis but he ultimately pays them.” In another e-mail, Mozilo wrote, “Jim Johnson continues to be a source of many loans for our company and this is just a small token of appreciation for the business that he sends to us.”...
House members' VIP loans from Countrywide excluded from subpoena, report says
A Democratic committee chairman overrode his own subpoena three years ago in an investigation of former subprime mortgage lender Countrywide to exclude records showing that he, other House members and congressional aides got VIP discounted loans from the company, documents show.
The procedure to keep the names secret was devised by Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y. In 2003, the 15-term congressman had two loans processed by Countrywide's VIP section, which was established to give discounts to favored borrowers.
The effort at secrecy was reversed when Towns' Republican successor as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, California Rep. Darrell Issa, issued a second subpoena. It yielded Countrywide records identifying four current House members, a former member and five staff aides whose loans went through the VIP unit. Towns was on the list....
A Democratic committee chairman overrode his own subpoena three years ago in an investigation of former subprime mortgage lender Countrywide to exclude records showing that he, other House members and congressional aides got VIP discounted loans from the company, documents show.
The procedure to keep the names secret was devised by Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y. In 2003, the 15-term congressman had two loans processed by Countrywide's VIP section, which was established to give discounts to favored borrowers.
The effort at secrecy was reversed when Towns' Republican successor as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, California Rep. Darrell Issa, issued a second subpoena. It yielded Countrywide records identifying four current House members, a former member and five staff aides whose loans went through the VIP unit. Towns was on the list....
Crime scene investigation: The premeditated assault on the prime mortgage
...As early as 1991, community activist Gale Cincotta, was laying the path for undertaking such an assault in her testimony before the Senate Banking Committee. "Lenders will respond to the most conservative standards unless [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] are aggressive and convincing in their efforts to expand historically narrow underwriting," she stressed....
...The first was the ironically named "Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992." At the behest of ACORN and other community advocacy groups and with the support of Fannie Mae, Congress imposed affordable housing (AH) mandates on Fannie and Freddie. HUD was established as their AH mission regulator. Within 18 months after passage of the 1992 Act, Jim Johnson. Fannie's chairman committed the company to "transforming the housing finance system" and vowed to "provide $1 trillion in targeted lending."
This was followed in 1995 by President Clinton's National Homeownership Strategy in which HUD formalized and greatly expanded a long-standing policy goal: the reduction of down payments. It asked "[l]ending institutions, secondary market investors, mortgage insurers, and other members of the partnership [to] work collaboratively to reduce homebuyer down payment requirements."
Also in 1995, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) regulations were revised to be more quantitative and outcome based. Banks were now measured on their use of "innovative and flexible" lending standards, and their performance was compared to market competitors. As pointed out by Fed Chairman Bernanke in 2007: "Further attention to CRA was generated by the surge in bank merger and acquisition activities that followed the enactment of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994." CRA's stick of denying a merger application was now combined with CRA's carrot of announcing a big CRA commitment to flexible lending standards to help assure merger approval. The result was trillions of dollars in CRA commitments, largely "negotiated" by community advocacy groups....
...As early as 1991, community activist Gale Cincotta, was laying the path for undertaking such an assault in her testimony before the Senate Banking Committee. "Lenders will respond to the most conservative standards unless [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] are aggressive and convincing in their efforts to expand historically narrow underwriting," she stressed....
...The first was the ironically named "Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992." At the behest of ACORN and other community advocacy groups and with the support of Fannie Mae, Congress imposed affordable housing (AH) mandates on Fannie and Freddie. HUD was established as their AH mission regulator. Within 18 months after passage of the 1992 Act, Jim Johnson. Fannie's chairman committed the company to "transforming the housing finance system" and vowed to "provide $1 trillion in targeted lending."
This was followed in 1995 by President Clinton's National Homeownership Strategy in which HUD formalized and greatly expanded a long-standing policy goal: the reduction of down payments. It asked "[l]ending institutions, secondary market investors, mortgage insurers, and other members of the partnership [to] work collaboratively to reduce homebuyer down payment requirements."
Also in 1995, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) regulations were revised to be more quantitative and outcome based. Banks were now measured on their use of "innovative and flexible" lending standards, and their performance was compared to market competitors. As pointed out by Fed Chairman Bernanke in 2007: "Further attention to CRA was generated by the surge in bank merger and acquisition activities that followed the enactment of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994." CRA's stick of denying a merger application was now combined with CRA's carrot of announcing a big CRA commitment to flexible lending standards to help assure merger approval. The result was trillions of dollars in CRA commitments, largely "negotiated" by community advocacy groups....
GM Ramps Up Risky Subprime Auto Loans To Drive Sales
...The automaker is relying increasingly on subprime loans, 10-Q financial reports shows.
Potential borrowers of car loans are rated on FICO scores that range from 300 to 850. Anything under 660 is generally deemed subprime.
Subprime Key Driver
GM Financial auto loans to customers with FICO scores below 660 rose from 87% of total loans in Q4 2010 to 93% in Q1 2012.
The worse the FICO score, the bigger the increase. From Q4 2010 to Q1 2012, GM Financial loans to customers with the worst FICO scores — below 540 — shot up 79% to more than $2.3 billion. The second worst category, 540-599, rose 28% from about $3.4 billion to $4.3 billion....
Prime loans, those above 660, dropped 42% to $676 million.
General Motors Is Headed For Bankruptcy -- Again
...Right now, the federal government owns 500,000,000 shares of GM, or about 26% of the company. It would need to get about $53.00/share for these to break even on the bailout, but the stock closed at only $20.21/share on Tuesday. This left the government holding $10.1 billion worth of stock, and sitting on an unrealized loss of $16.4 billion.
Right now, the government’s GM stock is worth about 39% less than it was on November 17, 2010, when the company went public at $33.00/share. However, during the intervening time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by almost 20%, so GM shares have lost 49% of their value relative to the Dow....
...However, additional insight can be obtained by looking at how GM’s CEO, Dan Akerson (63), stacks up against Professor Doctor Martin Winterkorn (65), the man handpicked by Ferdinand Piech in 2007 to be his replacement as CEO of Volkswagen AG.
Akerson has an engineering degree, but he also has a Master’s Degree in Economics, and his first big job was as CFO of MCI. Akerson was CEO of General Instrument, and then of Nextel, and then of XO Communications, which went bankrupt in June 2002. He joined the private equity firm, the Carlyle Group, in 2003.
Akerson got his first job in the automobile industry when he was named CEO of GM in late 2010. Recently, he has been hiring and firing top GM executives at an alarming pace, and he is understood to be working on a major reorganization of the company. Akerson recently gave a televised speech to GM employees on the need for “integrity”....
...The automaker is relying increasingly on subprime loans, 10-Q financial reports shows.
Potential borrowers of car loans are rated on FICO scores that range from 300 to 850. Anything under 660 is generally deemed subprime.
Subprime Key Driver
GM Financial auto loans to customers with FICO scores below 660 rose from 87% of total loans in Q4 2010 to 93% in Q1 2012.
The worse the FICO score, the bigger the increase. From Q4 2010 to Q1 2012, GM Financial loans to customers with the worst FICO scores — below 540 — shot up 79% to more than $2.3 billion. The second worst category, 540-599, rose 28% from about $3.4 billion to $4.3 billion....
Prime loans, those above 660, dropped 42% to $676 million.
General Motors Is Headed For Bankruptcy -- Again
...Right now, the federal government owns 500,000,000 shares of GM, or about 26% of the company. It would need to get about $53.00/share for these to break even on the bailout, but the stock closed at only $20.21/share on Tuesday. This left the government holding $10.1 billion worth of stock, and sitting on an unrealized loss of $16.4 billion.
Right now, the government’s GM stock is worth about 39% less than it was on November 17, 2010, when the company went public at $33.00/share. However, during the intervening time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by almost 20%, so GM shares have lost 49% of their value relative to the Dow....
...However, additional insight can be obtained by looking at how GM’s CEO, Dan Akerson (63), stacks up against Professor Doctor Martin Winterkorn (65), the man handpicked by Ferdinand Piech in 2007 to be his replacement as CEO of Volkswagen AG.
Akerson has an engineering degree, but he also has a Master’s Degree in Economics, and his first big job was as CFO of MCI. Akerson was CEO of General Instrument, and then of Nextel, and then of XO Communications, which went bankrupt in June 2002. He joined the private equity firm, the Carlyle Group, in 2003.
Akerson got his first job in the automobile industry when he was named CEO of GM in late 2010. Recently, he has been hiring and firing top GM executives at an alarming pace, and he is understood to be working on a major reorganization of the company. Akerson recently gave a televised speech to GM employees on the need for “integrity”....
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Oddly Static Economic Analysis from Elliot Spitzer
...The Defense Department and the city of New York are among the largest purchasers of guns. If the president and the mayor truly believe that semi-automatic weapons should not be available to private purchasers, and that magazines with more than 10 bullets should not be sold over the counter, they should simply say that, from now on, the federal government and the city of New York, as a matter of public safety, will not buy any weapons or ammunition from companies that do not agree to pull semi-automatics from their stock and refuse to produce magazines with more than 10 rounds other than for sale to the government. President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg should announce that semiautomatic handguns with high-capacity magazines — the kind used in Oak Creek; Aurora, Colo.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Virginia Tech — can no longer be sold to private citizens by any company that wants to do business with the federal government and the city of New York.
The major gun manufacturers will agree to the limits imposed by their major customers.
Use the power of the government as a purchaser, as a consumer, to get the companies marketing these products to change their behavior. And do it now. Stop blaming the legislature and act, immediately....
...The Defense Department and the city of New York are among the largest purchasers of guns. If the president and the mayor truly believe that semi-automatic weapons should not be available to private purchasers, and that magazines with more than 10 bullets should not be sold over the counter, they should simply say that, from now on, the federal government and the city of New York, as a matter of public safety, will not buy any weapons or ammunition from companies that do not agree to pull semi-automatics from their stock and refuse to produce magazines with more than 10 rounds other than for sale to the government. President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg should announce that semiautomatic handguns with high-capacity magazines — the kind used in Oak Creek; Aurora, Colo.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Virginia Tech — can no longer be sold to private citizens by any company that wants to do business with the federal government and the city of New York.
The major gun manufacturers will agree to the limits imposed by their major customers.
Use the power of the government as a purchaser, as a consumer, to get the companies marketing these products to change their behavior. And do it now. Stop blaming the legislature and act, immediately....
York: When 1,099 felons vote in race won by 312 ballots
...In the '08 campaign, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman was running for re-election against Democrat Al Franken. It was impossibly close; on the morning after the election, after 2.9 million people had voted, Coleman led Franken by 725 votes.
Franken and his Democratic allies dispatched an army of lawyers to challenge the results. After the first canvass, Coleman's lead was down to 206 votes. That was followed by months of wrangling and litigation. In the end, Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes. He was sworn into office in July 2009, eight months after the election.
During the controversy a conservative group called Minnesota Majority began to look into claims of voter fraud. Comparing criminal records with voting rolls, the group identified 1,099 felons -- all ineligible to vote -- who had voted in the Franken-Coleman race.
Minnesota Majority took the information to prosecutors across the state, many of whom showed no interest in pursuing it. But Minnesota law requires authorities to investigate such leads. And so far, Fund and von Spakovsky report, 177 people have been convicted -- not just accused, but convicted -- of voting fraudulently in the Senate race. ...
...With 1,099 examples identified by Minnesota Majority, and with evidence suggesting that felons, when they do vote, strongly favor Democrats, it doesn’t require a leap to suggest there might one day be proof that Al Franken was elected on the strength of voter fraud.
And that’s just the question of voting by felons. Minnesota Majority also found all sorts of other irregularities that cast further doubt on the Senate results.
The election was particularly important because Franken’s victory gave Senate Democrats a 60th vote in favor of President Obama’s national health care proposal — the deciding vote to overcome a Republican filibuster. If Coleman had kept his seat, there would have been no 60th vote, and no Obamacare.
Voter fraud matters when contests are close. When an election is decided by a huge margin, no one can plausibly claim fraud made the difference. But the Minnesota race was excruciatingly close. And then, in the Obamacare debate, Democrats could not afford to lose even a single vote. So if there were any case that demonstrates that voter fraud both exists and has real consequences, it is Minnesota 2008....
...In the '08 campaign, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman was running for re-election against Democrat Al Franken. It was impossibly close; on the morning after the election, after 2.9 million people had voted, Coleman led Franken by 725 votes.
Franken and his Democratic allies dispatched an army of lawyers to challenge the results. After the first canvass, Coleman's lead was down to 206 votes. That was followed by months of wrangling and litigation. In the end, Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes. He was sworn into office in July 2009, eight months after the election.
During the controversy a conservative group called Minnesota Majority began to look into claims of voter fraud. Comparing criminal records with voting rolls, the group identified 1,099 felons -- all ineligible to vote -- who had voted in the Franken-Coleman race.
Minnesota Majority took the information to prosecutors across the state, many of whom showed no interest in pursuing it. But Minnesota law requires authorities to investigate such leads. And so far, Fund and von Spakovsky report, 177 people have been convicted -- not just accused, but convicted -- of voting fraudulently in the Senate race. ...
...With 1,099 examples identified by Minnesota Majority, and with evidence suggesting that felons, when they do vote, strongly favor Democrats, it doesn’t require a leap to suggest there might one day be proof that Al Franken was elected on the strength of voter fraud.
And that’s just the question of voting by felons. Minnesota Majority also found all sorts of other irregularities that cast further doubt on the Senate results.
The election was particularly important because Franken’s victory gave Senate Democrats a 60th vote in favor of President Obama’s national health care proposal — the deciding vote to overcome a Republican filibuster. If Coleman had kept his seat, there would have been no 60th vote, and no Obamacare.
Voter fraud matters when contests are close. When an election is decided by a huge margin, no one can plausibly claim fraud made the difference. But the Minnesota race was excruciatingly close. And then, in the Obamacare debate, Democrats could not afford to lose even a single vote. So if there were any case that demonstrates that voter fraud both exists and has real consequences, it is Minnesota 2008....
Sunday, August 05, 2012
The Police: Useless, but not Harmless
...In his lawsuit, Mahaffy noted Officer Hanson and his partner arrested him without conducting an investigation – which would have meant, at very least, hearing his side of the story and interviewing eyewitnesses on the scene. In its ruling dismissing thelawsuit, the U.S. District Court for Minnesota noted that Hanson and his partner “responded to a call indicating an off-duty officer needed assistance. Under such circumstances, officer safety is considered the first priority.” (Emphasis added.)
Of course, officer safety is ever and always the first – and only – priority.
Accordingly, when mere Mundanes were beaten and robbed in front of the precinct station, it was entirely appropriate for Hanson to cower behind a locked door, and then seek reinforcements to help repel persistent pleas for aid from the victims. For the same reason, when a Mundane was beaten by fellow officers as summary punishment for accidentally inflicting trivial damage on a cop’s automobile, however, the department responded in force when the assailants called for “assistance.”
By coming to the aid of his friends, Rafael Lopez acted as a peace officer – an individual who interposed himself to protect innocent people from criminal violence. Officer Hanson, who fraudulently collects a tax-funded paycheck for supposedly providing that service, was studiously indifferent to any consideration apart from his own physical safety and the institutional needs of his department. This is exactly what we should expect from a state functionary of his ilk. We should be grateful to him for offering such a compelling illustration of the fact that government police agencies are useless – but not harmless....
...Police departments exist to enforce the will of the municipal corporations that employ them. Any actual service they render with respect to the protection of person and property is incidental to that mission. Fortunately – albeit tardily – tax victims across the country are finally starting to understand this fact, as the financial burden of supporting the state’s enforcement caste becomes unbearable....
...In his lawsuit, Mahaffy noted Officer Hanson and his partner arrested him without conducting an investigation – which would have meant, at very least, hearing his side of the story and interviewing eyewitnesses on the scene. In its ruling dismissing thelawsuit, the U.S. District Court for Minnesota noted that Hanson and his partner “responded to a call indicating an off-duty officer needed assistance. Under such circumstances, officer safety is considered the first priority.” (Emphasis added.)
Of course, officer safety is ever and always the first – and only – priority.
Accordingly, when mere Mundanes were beaten and robbed in front of the precinct station, it was entirely appropriate for Hanson to cower behind a locked door, and then seek reinforcements to help repel persistent pleas for aid from the victims. For the same reason, when a Mundane was beaten by fellow officers as summary punishment for accidentally inflicting trivial damage on a cop’s automobile, however, the department responded in force when the assailants called for “assistance.”
By coming to the aid of his friends, Rafael Lopez acted as a peace officer – an individual who interposed himself to protect innocent people from criminal violence. Officer Hanson, who fraudulently collects a tax-funded paycheck for supposedly providing that service, was studiously indifferent to any consideration apart from his own physical safety and the institutional needs of his department. This is exactly what we should expect from a state functionary of his ilk. We should be grateful to him for offering such a compelling illustration of the fact that government police agencies are useless – but not harmless....
...Police departments exist to enforce the will of the municipal corporations that employ them. Any actual service they render with respect to the protection of person and property is incidental to that mission. Fortunately – albeit tardily – tax victims across the country are finally starting to understand this fact, as the financial burden of supporting the state’s enforcement caste becomes unbearable....
Catching Hell for Hiring a Muslim
...The new hire, Samar Ali, is a Tennessee native, Vanderbilt law graduate, a recent White House Fellow, a former associate attorney at Hogan Lovells and has one of the most impressive resumes of international humanitarian service I’ve ever seen.
She’s also Muslim.
As a result, several county Republican groups and a Tea Party group went berserk and began churning out petitions and resolutions calling for Ali to step down and for Haslam to receive “appropriate action.”
A couple of resolutions also condemn Haslam for allowing “open homosexuals to make policy decisions in the Department of Children’s Services.”
Apparently this small, but loud, group of local loons believe that anyone who isn’t Christian and straight shouldn’t have the opportunity to work for state government in Tennessee....
...The new hire, Samar Ali, is a Tennessee native, Vanderbilt law graduate, a recent White House Fellow, a former associate attorney at Hogan Lovells and has one of the most impressive resumes of international humanitarian service I’ve ever seen.
She’s also Muslim.
As a result, several county Republican groups and a Tea Party group went berserk and began churning out petitions and resolutions calling for Ali to step down and for Haslam to receive “appropriate action.”
A couple of resolutions also condemn Haslam for allowing “open homosexuals to make policy decisions in the Department of Children’s Services.”
Apparently this small, but loud, group of local loons believe that anyone who isn’t Christian and straight shouldn’t have the opportunity to work for state government in Tennessee....
THE ENEMIES LIST, THEN AND NOW
...This past week, one of [Obama's] campaign websites posted an item entitled “Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney’s donors.” In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having “less-than-reputable records,” the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that “quite a few” have also been “on the wrong side of the law” and profiting at “the expense of so many Americans.”
These are people like Paul Schorr and Sam and Jeffrey Fox, investors who the site outed for the crime of having “outsourced” jobs. T. Martin Fiorentino is scored for his work for a firm that forecloses on homes. Louis Bacon (a hedge-fund manager), Kent Burton (a “lobbyist”) and Thomas O’Malley (an energy CEO) stand accused of profiting from oil. Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of a home-products firm, is slimed as a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”...
...Mr. VanderSloot has since been learning what it means to be on a presidential enemies list. Just 12 days after the [Obama campaign] attack, the Idahoan found an investigator digging to unearth his divorce records. This bloodhound—a recent employee of Senate Democrats—worked for a for-hire opposition research firm.
Now Mr. VanderSloot has been targeted by the federal government. In a letter dated June 21, he was informed that his tax records had been “selected for examination” by the Internal Revenue Service. The audit also encompasses Mr. VanderSloot’s wife, and not one, but two years of past filings (2008 and 2009).
Mr. VanderSloot, who is 63 and has been working since his teens, says neither he nor his accountants recall his being subject to a federal tax audit before. He was once required to send documents on a line item inquiry into his charitable donations, which resulted in no changes to his taxes. But nothing more—that is until now, shortly after he wrote a big check to a Romney-supporting Super PAC.
Two weeks after receiving the IRS letter, Mr. VanderSloot received another—this one from the Department of Labor. He was informed it would be doing an audit of workers he employs on his Idaho-based cattle ranch under the federal visa program for temporary agriculture workers....
...This past week, one of [Obama's] campaign websites posted an item entitled “Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney’s donors.” In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having “less-than-reputable records,” the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that “quite a few” have also been “on the wrong side of the law” and profiting at “the expense of so many Americans.”
These are people like Paul Schorr and Sam and Jeffrey Fox, investors who the site outed for the crime of having “outsourced” jobs. T. Martin Fiorentino is scored for his work for a firm that forecloses on homes. Louis Bacon (a hedge-fund manager), Kent Burton (a “lobbyist”) and Thomas O’Malley (an energy CEO) stand accused of profiting from oil. Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of a home-products firm, is slimed as a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”...
...Mr. VanderSloot has since been learning what it means to be on a presidential enemies list. Just 12 days after the [Obama campaign] attack, the Idahoan found an investigator digging to unearth his divorce records. This bloodhound—a recent employee of Senate Democrats—worked for a for-hire opposition research firm.
Now Mr. VanderSloot has been targeted by the federal government. In a letter dated June 21, he was informed that his tax records had been “selected for examination” by the Internal Revenue Service. The audit also encompasses Mr. VanderSloot’s wife, and not one, but two years of past filings (2008 and 2009).
Mr. VanderSloot, who is 63 and has been working since his teens, says neither he nor his accountants recall his being subject to a federal tax audit before. He was once required to send documents on a line item inquiry into his charitable donations, which resulted in no changes to his taxes. But nothing more—that is until now, shortly after he wrote a big check to a Romney-supporting Super PAC.
Two weeks after receiving the IRS letter, Mr. VanderSloot received another—this one from the Department of Labor. He was informed it would be doing an audit of workers he employs on his Idaho-based cattle ranch under the federal visa program for temporary agriculture workers....
Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem
...The creative destruction that is at the heart of a growing economy is now seen as evil. Americans increasingly appear to accept the mind-set that kept the world in poverty for millennia: If you've gotten rich, it is because you made someone else poorer.
What happened to turn the mood of the country so far from our historic celebration of economic success?
Two important changes in objective conditions have contributed to this change in mood. One is the rise of collusive capitalism. Part of that phenomenon involves crony capitalism, whereby the people on top take care of each other at shareholder expense (search on "golden parachutes").
But the problem of crony capitalism is trivial compared with the collusion engendered by government. In today's world, every business's operations and bottom line are affected by rules set by legislators and bureaucrats. The result has been corruption on a massive scale. Sometimes the corruption is retail, whereby a single corporation creates a competitive advantage through the cooperation of regulators or politicians (search on "earmarks"). Sometimes the corruption is wholesale, creating an industrywide potential for profit that would not exist in the absence of government subsidies or regulations (like ethanol used to fuel cars and low-interest mortgages for people who are unlikely to pay them back). Collusive capitalism has become visible to the public and increasingly defines capitalism in the public mind....
...The creative destruction that is at the heart of a growing economy is now seen as evil. Americans increasingly appear to accept the mind-set that kept the world in poverty for millennia: If you've gotten rich, it is because you made someone else poorer.
What happened to turn the mood of the country so far from our historic celebration of economic success?
Two important changes in objective conditions have contributed to this change in mood. One is the rise of collusive capitalism. Part of that phenomenon involves crony capitalism, whereby the people on top take care of each other at shareholder expense (search on "golden parachutes").
But the problem of crony capitalism is trivial compared with the collusion engendered by government. In today's world, every business's operations and bottom line are affected by rules set by legislators and bureaucrats. The result has been corruption on a massive scale. Sometimes the corruption is retail, whereby a single corporation creates a competitive advantage through the cooperation of regulators or politicians (search on "earmarks"). Sometimes the corruption is wholesale, creating an industrywide potential for profit that would not exist in the absence of government subsidies or regulations (like ethanol used to fuel cars and low-interest mortgages for people who are unlikely to pay them back). Collusive capitalism has become visible to the public and increasingly defines capitalism in the public mind....
Doctor Shortage Likely to Worsen With Health Law
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — In the Inland Empire, an economically depressed region in Southern California, President Obama’s health care law is expected to extend insurance coverage to more than 300,000 people by 2014. But coverage will not necessarily translate into care: Local health experts doubt there will be enough doctors to meet the area’s needs. There are not enough now.
Other places around the country, including the Mississippi Delta, Detroit and suburban Phoenix, face similar problems. The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that in 2015 the country will have 62,900 fewer doctors than needed. And that number will more than double by 2025, as the expansion of insurance coverage and the aging of baby boomers drive up demand for care. Even without the health care law, the shortfall of doctors in 2025 would still exceed 100,000....
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — In the Inland Empire, an economically depressed region in Southern California, President Obama’s health care law is expected to extend insurance coverage to more than 300,000 people by 2014. But coverage will not necessarily translate into care: Local health experts doubt there will be enough doctors to meet the area’s needs. There are not enough now.
Other places around the country, including the Mississippi Delta, Detroit and suburban Phoenix, face similar problems. The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that in 2015 the country will have 62,900 fewer doctors than needed. And that number will more than double by 2025, as the expansion of insurance coverage and the aging of baby boomers drive up demand for care. Even without the health care law, the shortfall of doctors in 2025 would still exceed 100,000....
Former SEIU leader indicted
Not long ago, Tyrone Freeman was a rising young star in the national labor movement, already the head of California’s biggest union local and a force in Democratic politics from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.
Freeman’s quick climb up the ranks of the powerful Service Employees International Union burnished his reputation as an effective advocate for the disadvantaged, a man who helped improve the lot of about 190,000 workers paid about $9 an hour to provide in-home care for the infirm.
On Tuesday, however, Freeman was indicted on federal charges of stealing from those workers to enrich himself, including by billing the union for costs from his Hawaii wedding....
Not long ago, Tyrone Freeman was a rising young star in the national labor movement, already the head of California’s biggest union local and a force in Democratic politics from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.
Freeman’s quick climb up the ranks of the powerful Service Employees International Union burnished his reputation as an effective advocate for the disadvantaged, a man who helped improve the lot of about 190,000 workers paid about $9 an hour to provide in-home care for the infirm.
On Tuesday, however, Freeman was indicted on federal charges of stealing from those workers to enrich himself, including by billing the union for costs from his Hawaii wedding....
The Court Affirms Our Social Contract
In civics class we learn that federal courts decide whether laws passed by Congress and the state legislatures are constitutional. Therefore the federal courts are the guardians of our Constitution. That is certainly true, but it not the whole story. In fact, the most important function of the federal courts is to legitimate state building by the political branches. That is the best way to understand what happened in the Health Care Case. It also helps explain why Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion is written the way it is....
...Whenever the federal government expands its capabilities, it changes the nature of the social compact. Sometimes the changes are small, but sometimes, as in the New Deal or the civil rights era, the changes are big. And when the changes are big, courts are called on to legitimate the changes and ensure that they are consistent with our ancient Constitution. In this way, courts ratify significant revisions to the American social contract....
...My own view is that the Court as a whole performed the traditional function of federal judges in our constitutional system. The political branches sought to build out the American state and change the terms of the American social contract. The Court legitimated this result, but set new ground rules for politics going forward....
In civics class we learn that federal courts decide whether laws passed by Congress and the state legislatures are constitutional. Therefore the federal courts are the guardians of our Constitution. That is certainly true, but it not the whole story. In fact, the most important function of the federal courts is to legitimate state building by the political branches. That is the best way to understand what happened in the Health Care Case. It also helps explain why Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion is written the way it is....
...Whenever the federal government expands its capabilities, it changes the nature of the social compact. Sometimes the changes are small, but sometimes, as in the New Deal or the civil rights era, the changes are big. And when the changes are big, courts are called on to legitimate the changes and ensure that they are consistent with our ancient Constitution. In this way, courts ratify significant revisions to the American social contract....
...My own view is that the Court as a whole performed the traditional function of federal judges in our constitutional system. The political branches sought to build out the American state and change the terms of the American social contract. The Court legitimated this result, but set new ground rules for politics going forward....
Mayhem at GM
...I’m having trouble understanding all this. I’ve been told that after its Rattnerized bailout GM is “back,” a dramatic ”success story.” The president himself has boasted “General Motors is back on top.” Yet now a few weeks later Bloomberg says the company is in a “slump”–it’s right there, in the headline: “slump.” How can the bailed out, comebacked, turned around success story GM be in a slump when the U.S. auto market as a whole is growing rapidly? It’s almost as if an easily spun media wildly underestimated the problems at GM (and the inadequacy of the administration’s fixes) in a way that helped President Obama’s favored narrative (and pleased a major advertiser at the same time!)...
...I’m having trouble understanding all this. I’ve been told that after its Rattnerized bailout GM is “back,” a dramatic ”success story.” The president himself has boasted “General Motors is back on top.” Yet now a few weeks later Bloomberg says the company is in a “slump”–it’s right there, in the headline: “slump.” How can the bailed out, comebacked, turned around success story GM be in a slump when the U.S. auto market as a whole is growing rapidly? It’s almost as if an easily spun media wildly underestimated the problems at GM (and the inadequacy of the administration’s fixes) in a way that helped President Obama’s favored narrative (and pleased a major advertiser at the same time!)...
Exclusive: Five ATF officials found responsible for Fast and Furious
WASHINGTON -- Republican congressional investigators have concluded that five senior ATF officials -- from the special agent-in-charge of the Phoenix field office to the top man in the bureau’s Washington headquarters -- are collectively responsible for the failed Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation that was “marred by missteps, poor judgments and inherently reckless strategy.”
The investigators, in a final report likely to be released later this week, also unearthed new evidence that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix initially sought to hide from the Mexican government the crucial information that two Fast and Furious firearms were recovered after the brother of a Mexican state attorney general was killed there....
WASHINGTON -- Republican congressional investigators have concluded that five senior ATF officials -- from the special agent-in-charge of the Phoenix field office to the top man in the bureau’s Washington headquarters -- are collectively responsible for the failed Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation that was “marred by missteps, poor judgments and inherently reckless strategy.”
The investigators, in a final report likely to be released later this week, also unearthed new evidence that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix initially sought to hide from the Mexican government the crucial information that two Fast and Furious firearms were recovered after the brother of a Mexican state attorney general was killed there....
Saturday, August 04, 2012
Colorado Man Still Can't Get The Squatters Out Of His Home
Two Colorado squatters managed to skirt around a court-ordered eviction notice by filing personal bankruptcy, according a local CBS affiliate.
Last month, a judge ordered the pair, Veronica Fernandez-Beleta and Jose Rafael Leyva-Caraveo, to turn the property over to the rightful owners.
But before the county sheriff could evict them, they used the one loophole they had left: filing bankruptcy.
“The sheriff’s office will not proceed with an eviction if there is a bankruptcy in question,” Arapahoe County Undersheriff David Walcher told CBS....
Two Colorado squatters managed to skirt around a court-ordered eviction notice by filing personal bankruptcy, according a local CBS affiliate.
Last month, a judge ordered the pair, Veronica Fernandez-Beleta and Jose Rafael Leyva-Caraveo, to turn the property over to the rightful owners.
But before the county sheriff could evict them, they used the one loophole they had left: filing bankruptcy.
“The sheriff’s office will not proceed with an eviction if there is a bankruptcy in question,” Arapahoe County Undersheriff David Walcher told CBS....
Forgive me IPCC, for I have sinned...
...Except, like many a modern faith healer’s performance, there’s something dodgy about this widespread interpretation. For starters, Muller was hardly what you would call a climate-change sceptic. By and large, he has been very accepting of the IPCC’s view of the problem of climate change. His claim to being a sceptic seems to relate to his acceptance that the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, which was the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report and suggested that current temperatures are unprecedented, was simply the product of some sloppy science.
But even then, Muller still put the case for the ‘consensus’ view. In 2004, he wrote: ‘If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions.’ Another article from 2006 quotes Muller as saying that the odds that humans are to blame for global warming are ‘two in three’....
...It’s worth noting in passing that Muller’s work has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal and that one reviewer, the hockey-stick critic Ross McKitrick who Muller has agreed with in the past, has now published the critical reviews of Muller’s work he provided for the Journal of Geophysical Research. Sadly, Muller seems to have ignored McKitrick’s criticisms. (For more on this, see Andrew Orlowski’s latest article in the Register.) Hypocritically, climate-change alarmists – who are normally utterly dismissive of anything that has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal – are only too happy to proclaim Muller’s results.
Moreover, another piece of research released in the past few days, led by meteorologist Anthony Watts, claims that the corrupting of those weather stations by urbanisation has gone much further than Muller and others have accounted for. Essentially, Watts – with the support of many volunteers – went out to check America’s weather stations and reclassify them according to the degree to which changes in their surroundings might affect their readings. Watts and his colleagues conclude that when these effects are taken into account, the rise in US temperatures has been only about half that suggested by the previous datasets...
...Except, like many a modern faith healer’s performance, there’s something dodgy about this widespread interpretation. For starters, Muller was hardly what you would call a climate-change sceptic. By and large, he has been very accepting of the IPCC’s view of the problem of climate change. His claim to being a sceptic seems to relate to his acceptance that the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, which was the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report and suggested that current temperatures are unprecedented, was simply the product of some sloppy science.
But even then, Muller still put the case for the ‘consensus’ view. In 2004, he wrote: ‘If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions.’ Another article from 2006 quotes Muller as saying that the odds that humans are to blame for global warming are ‘two in three’....
...It’s worth noting in passing that Muller’s work has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal and that one reviewer, the hockey-stick critic Ross McKitrick who Muller has agreed with in the past, has now published the critical reviews of Muller’s work he provided for the Journal of Geophysical Research. Sadly, Muller seems to have ignored McKitrick’s criticisms. (For more on this, see Andrew Orlowski’s latest article in the Register.) Hypocritically, climate-change alarmists – who are normally utterly dismissive of anything that has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal – are only too happy to proclaim Muller’s results.
Moreover, another piece of research released in the past few days, led by meteorologist Anthony Watts, claims that the corrupting of those weather stations by urbanisation has gone much further than Muller and others have accounted for. Essentially, Watts – with the support of many volunteers – went out to check America’s weather stations and reclassify them according to the degree to which changes in their surroundings might affect their readings. Watts and his colleagues conclude that when these effects are taken into account, the rise in US temperatures has been only about half that suggested by the previous datasets...
Republicans: Obama administration hiding big job losses from sequester
Republicans accused the Obama administration Tuesday of intimidating defense contractors and seeking to hide job losses from pending cuts to the Pentagon’s budget in order to help the president’s reelection campaign.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other Republicans pointed to guidance issued Monday by the Department of Labor that said it would be “inappropriate” for defense firms to issue layoff notices to employees before the election due to the pending cuts.
“The president doesn’t want people reading about pink slips in the weeks before his election, so the White House is telling people to keep the effects of these cuts secret — ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ he says, ‘keep it a secret’ — until, of course, after the election,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Tuesday....
Sen. Obama supported layoff warnings; now sees no need
...President Obama's administration doesn’t see the need for defense contractors to warn employees about possible layoffs from across-the-board budget cuts, but in 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama railed against employers for failing to notify workers who were in danger of losing their jobs.
“The least employers can do when they’re anticipating layoffs is to let workers know they’re going to be out of a job and a paycheck with enough time to plan for their future,” Mr. Obama said in a news release on July 17, 2007, while campaigning for president.
The Obama administration said Monday in guidance from the Labor Department that federal contractors don’t need to warn their employees that they could lose their jobs because of the looming budget cuts that are slated to begin Jan. 2. The agency said it would be “inappropriate” for employers to send such warnings because the $110 billion in cuts are still speculative. Defense programs would be the target of about half of the cuts.
The Labor Department’s letter came after a Pentagon official said Defense Department contractors could be sending layoff notices days before the Nov. 6 presidential election. ...
Republicans accused the Obama administration Tuesday of intimidating defense contractors and seeking to hide job losses from pending cuts to the Pentagon’s budget in order to help the president’s reelection campaign.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other Republicans pointed to guidance issued Monday by the Department of Labor that said it would be “inappropriate” for defense firms to issue layoff notices to employees before the election due to the pending cuts.
“The president doesn’t want people reading about pink slips in the weeks before his election, so the White House is telling people to keep the effects of these cuts secret — ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ he says, ‘keep it a secret’ — until, of course, after the election,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Tuesday....
Sen. Obama supported layoff warnings; now sees no need
...President Obama's administration doesn’t see the need for defense contractors to warn employees about possible layoffs from across-the-board budget cuts, but in 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama railed against employers for failing to notify workers who were in danger of losing their jobs.
“The least employers can do when they’re anticipating layoffs is to let workers know they’re going to be out of a job and a paycheck with enough time to plan for their future,” Mr. Obama said in a news release on July 17, 2007, while campaigning for president.
The Obama administration said Monday in guidance from the Labor Department that federal contractors don’t need to warn their employees that they could lose their jobs because of the looming budget cuts that are slated to begin Jan. 2. The agency said it would be “inappropriate” for employers to send such warnings because the $110 billion in cuts are still speculative. Defense programs would be the target of about half of the cuts.
The Labor Department’s letter came after a Pentagon official said Defense Department contractors could be sending layoff notices days before the Nov. 6 presidential election. ...
New Excitement in the Climate Change Controversy (Updated)
...I’ve reached Dr. Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, who was a co-author of the first four BEST papers but who declined to be listed as an author of this one. She was in an airport, and has promised me more tomorrow, but in the meantime she referred me to the New York Times Dot Earth blog and her quote...
...There is broad agreement that greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to the warming in the latter half of the 20th century; the big question is how much of this warming can we attribute to greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t think this question can be answered by the simple curve fitting used in this paper, and I don’t see that their paper adds anything to our understanding of the causes of the recent warming....
Why the BEST papers failed to pass peer review
...On July 29 2012 Richard Muller launched another publicity blitz (e.g. here and here) claiming, among other things, that “In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects [including those related to urbanization and land surface changes] unduly biased our conclusions.” Their failure to provide a proper demonstration of this point had led me to recommend against publishing their paper. This places me in an awkward position since I made an undertaking to JGR to respect the confidentiality of the peer review process, but I have reason to believe Muller et al.’s analysis does not support the conclusions he is now asserting in the press.
I take the journal peer review process seriously and I dislike being placed in the position of having to break a commitment I made to JGR, but the “BEST” team’s decision to launch another publicity blitz effectively nullifies any right they might have had to confidentiality in this matter. So I am herewith releasing my referee reports....
...I’ve reached Dr. Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, who was a co-author of the first four BEST papers but who declined to be listed as an author of this one. She was in an airport, and has promised me more tomorrow, but in the meantime she referred me to the New York Times Dot Earth blog and her quote...
...There is broad agreement that greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to the warming in the latter half of the 20th century; the big question is how much of this warming can we attribute to greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t think this question can be answered by the simple curve fitting used in this paper, and I don’t see that their paper adds anything to our understanding of the causes of the recent warming....
Why the BEST papers failed to pass peer review
...On July 29 2012 Richard Muller launched another publicity blitz (e.g. here and here) claiming, among other things, that “In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects [including those related to urbanization and land surface changes] unduly biased our conclusions.” Their failure to provide a proper demonstration of this point had led me to recommend against publishing their paper. This places me in an awkward position since I made an undertaking to JGR to respect the confidentiality of the peer review process, but I have reason to believe Muller et al.’s analysis does not support the conclusions he is now asserting in the press.
I take the journal peer review process seriously and I dislike being placed in the position of having to break a commitment I made to JGR, but the “BEST” team’s decision to launch another publicity blitz effectively nullifies any right they might have had to confidentiality in this matter. So I am herewith releasing my referee reports....
Truck owner wants DEA to pay up after botched sting
...Commandeered by one of his drivers, who was secretly working with federal agents, the truck had been hauling marijuana from the border as part of an undercover operation. And without Patty's knowledge, the Drug Enforcement Administration was paying his driver, Lawrence Chapa, to use the truck to bust traffickers.
At least 17 hours before that early morning phone call, Chapa was shot dead in front of more than a dozen law enforcement officers - all of them taken by surprise by hijackers trying to steal the red Kenworth T600 truck and its load of pot.
In the confusion of the attack in northwest Harris County, compounded by officers in the operation not all knowing each other, a Houston policeman shot and wounded a Harris County sheriff's deputy....
...Commandeered by one of his drivers, who was secretly working with federal agents, the truck had been hauling marijuana from the border as part of an undercover operation. And without Patty's knowledge, the Drug Enforcement Administration was paying his driver, Lawrence Chapa, to use the truck to bust traffickers.
At least 17 hours before that early morning phone call, Chapa was shot dead in front of more than a dozen law enforcement officers - all of them taken by surprise by hijackers trying to steal the red Kenworth T600 truck and its load of pot.
In the confusion of the attack in northwest Harris County, compounded by officers in the operation not all knowing each other, a Houston policeman shot and wounded a Harris County sheriff's deputy....
NSA Boss Wants More Control Over the 'Net
...The decentralized nature of the Internet, and the fact that the global network is built from a thicket of independent public and private networks, is limiting efforts to protect against such attacks, said Alexander, because it doesn't allow the NSA or law enforcement to easily track Internet activity. "We do not sit around our country and look in; we have no idea if Wall Street is about to be attacked," said Alexander....
Facebook Abstainers Could Be Labeled Suspicious
..."According to this article printed in tagesspiegel.de, not having a Facebook account could be the first sign that you are a mass murderer.(German) As examples they use Norwegian shooter Anders Breivik, who used MySpace instead of Facebook and the newer Aurora shooter who used adultfriendfinder instead of Facebook. They already consider those with Facebook accounts, who lack friends to be suspicious, but now they are suggesting that anyone who abstains from Facebook altogether may be even more suspicious."...
...The decentralized nature of the Internet, and the fact that the global network is built from a thicket of independent public and private networks, is limiting efforts to protect against such attacks, said Alexander, because it doesn't allow the NSA or law enforcement to easily track Internet activity. "We do not sit around our country and look in; we have no idea if Wall Street is about to be attacked," said Alexander....
Facebook Abstainers Could Be Labeled Suspicious
..."According to this article printed in tagesspiegel.de, not having a Facebook account could be the first sign that you are a mass murderer.(German) As examples they use Norwegian shooter Anders Breivik, who used MySpace instead of Facebook and the newer Aurora shooter who used adultfriendfinder instead of Facebook. They already consider those with Facebook accounts, who lack friends to be suspicious, but now they are suggesting that anyone who abstains from Facebook altogether may be even more suspicious."...
Doctor Shortage Likely to Worsen With Health Law
...Health experts, including many who support the law, say there is little that the government or the medical profession will be able to do to close the gap by 2014, when the law begins extending coverage to about 30 million Americans. It typically takes a decade to train a doctor.
“We have a shortage of every kind of doctor, except for plastic surgeons and dermatologists,” said Dr. G. Richard Olds, the dean of the new medical school at the University of California, Riverside, founded in part to address the region’s doctor shortage. “We’ll have a 5,000-physician shortage in 10 years, no matter what anybody does.”...
...Health experts, including many who support the law, say there is little that the government or the medical profession will be able to do to close the gap by 2014, when the law begins extending coverage to about 30 million Americans. It typically takes a decade to train a doctor.
“We have a shortage of every kind of doctor, except for plastic surgeons and dermatologists,” said Dr. G. Richard Olds, the dean of the new medical school at the University of California, Riverside, founded in part to address the region’s doctor shortage. “We’ll have a 5,000-physician shortage in 10 years, no matter what anybody does.”...
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Has Gaia Betrayed The Greens?
...Again, for people who base their claim to world leadership on their superior understanding of the dynamics of complex systems, greens prove over and over again that they are surprisingly naive and crude in their ability to model and to shape the behavior of the political and economic systems they seek to control. If their understanding of the future of the earth’s climate is anything like as wish-driven, fact-averse and intellectually crude as their approach to international affairs, democratic politics and the energy market, the greens are in trouble indeed. And as I’ve written in the past, the contrast between green claims to understand climate and to be able to manage the largest and most complex set of policy changes ever undertaken, and the evident incompetence of greens at managing small (Solyndra) and large (Kyoto, EU cap and trade, global climate treaty) political projects today has more to do with climate skepticism than greens have yet understood. Many people aren’t rejecting science; they are rejecting green claims of policy competence. In doing so, they are entirely justified by the record....
...Again, for people who base their claim to world leadership on their superior understanding of the dynamics of complex systems, greens prove over and over again that they are surprisingly naive and crude in their ability to model and to shape the behavior of the political and economic systems they seek to control. If their understanding of the future of the earth’s climate is anything like as wish-driven, fact-averse and intellectually crude as their approach to international affairs, democratic politics and the energy market, the greens are in trouble indeed. And as I’ve written in the past, the contrast between green claims to understand climate and to be able to manage the largest and most complex set of policy changes ever undertaken, and the evident incompetence of greens at managing small (Solyndra) and large (Kyoto, EU cap and trade, global climate treaty) political projects today has more to do with climate skepticism than greens have yet understood. Many people aren’t rejecting science; they are rejecting green claims of policy competence. In doing so, they are entirely justified by the record....
Gordon Crovitz: Who Really Invented the Internet?
...But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.
According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with."
So having created the Internet, why didn't Xerox become the biggest company in the world? The answer explains the disconnect between a government-led view of business and how innovation actually happens.
Executives at Xerox headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., were focused on selling copiers. From their standpoint, the Ethernet was important only so that people in an office could link computers to share a copier. Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox's venture-capital division invested $1 million in Apple, with the requirement that Jobs get a full briefing on all the Xerox PARC innovations. "They just had no idea what they had," Jobs later said, after launching hugely profitable Apple computers using concepts developed by Xerox....
...But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.
According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with."
So having created the Internet, why didn't Xerox become the biggest company in the world? The answer explains the disconnect between a government-led view of business and how innovation actually happens.
Executives at Xerox headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., were focused on selling copiers. From their standpoint, the Ethernet was important only so that people in an office could link computers to share a copier. Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox's venture-capital division invested $1 million in Apple, with the requirement that Jobs get a full briefing on all the Xerox PARC innovations. "They just had no idea what they had," Jobs later said, after launching hugely profitable Apple computers using concepts developed by Xerox....
Nearly one in 10 employers to drop health coverage
...Nine percent of companies said they expect to stop offering coverage to their workers in the next one to three years, the Wall Street Journal reported. Around 81 percent said they would continue providing benefits and 10 percent said they weren't sure.
The companies, though, said a lot will depend on how future provisions of the law unfold, since most of the key parts are scheduled to take effect in 2014. One in three respondents said they could stop offering coverage if the law requires them to provide more generous benefits than they do now, if a tax on high-cost plans takes effect in 2018 as scheduled or if they decide it would be cheaper for them to pay the penalty for not providing insurance....
...Nine percent of companies said they expect to stop offering coverage to their workers in the next one to three years, the Wall Street Journal reported. Around 81 percent said they would continue providing benefits and 10 percent said they weren't sure.
The companies, though, said a lot will depend on how future provisions of the law unfold, since most of the key parts are scheduled to take effect in 2014. One in three respondents said they could stop offering coverage if the law requires them to provide more generous benefits than they do now, if a tax on high-cost plans takes effect in 2018 as scheduled or if they decide it would be cheaper for them to pay the penalty for not providing insurance....
‘I have committed intellectual blasphemy’
...One way in which critics are silenced is through the accusation that they are ignoring ‘peer-reviewed science’. Yet oftentimes, peer review is a nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. The history of peer review and how it developed is not a pretty sight. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Many people who fall back on peer-reviewed science seem afraid to have out the intellectual argument.
Since I started writing essays challenging the global-warming consensus, and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt almost witch-hunted. There has been an hysterical reaction. One individual, who was once on the board of the Sierra Club, has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted. I wrote a series of articles on climate change issues for The Nation, which elicited a level of hysterical outrage and affront that I found to be astounding - and I have a fairly thick skin, having been in the business of making unpopular arguments for many, many years.
There was a shocking intensity to their self-righteous fury, as if I had transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed blasphemy. I sometimes think to myself, ‘Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live in the 1450s’, because I would be out in the main square with a pile of wood around my ankles. I really feel that; it is remarkable how quickly the hysterical reaction takes hold and rains down upon those who question the consensus....
...One way in which critics are silenced is through the accusation that they are ignoring ‘peer-reviewed science’. Yet oftentimes, peer review is a nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. The history of peer review and how it developed is not a pretty sight. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Many people who fall back on peer-reviewed science seem afraid to have out the intellectual argument.
Since I started writing essays challenging the global-warming consensus, and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt almost witch-hunted. There has been an hysterical reaction. One individual, who was once on the board of the Sierra Club, has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted. I wrote a series of articles on climate change issues for The Nation, which elicited a level of hysterical outrage and affront that I found to be astounding - and I have a fairly thick skin, having been in the business of making unpopular arguments for many, many years.
There was a shocking intensity to their self-righteous fury, as if I had transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed blasphemy. I sometimes think to myself, ‘Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live in the 1450s’, because I would be out in the main square with a pile of wood around my ankles. I really feel that; it is remarkable how quickly the hysterical reaction takes hold and rains down upon those who question the consensus....
Thursday, July 26, 2012
The New Artisan Economy
...While the idea creators—those who design iPhones and develop new drugs—will continue to be the drivers of prosperity, more than a few crumbs may fall to the workers who support them. For example, Moretti estimates that Microsoft alone is responsible for adding 120,000 low-skill jobs to the Seattle area, where the company is based. This is because of the support workers required to style the hair, cut the grass, and yes, build the houses, of all those Microsoft engineers and computer scientists. ...
... In the longer run, the bottom 20 percent—indeed the bottom 99 percent—will need to be retrained and re-educated to get a larger share of U.S. GDP. Eminent Harvard labor economist Larry Katz sees a future where many lower-skilled workers are employed in the service sector supporting America’s innovative class....
...While the idea creators—those who design iPhones and develop new drugs—will continue to be the drivers of prosperity, more than a few crumbs may fall to the workers who support them. For example, Moretti estimates that Microsoft alone is responsible for adding 120,000 low-skill jobs to the Seattle area, where the company is based. This is because of the support workers required to style the hair, cut the grass, and yes, build the houses, of all those Microsoft engineers and computer scientists. ...
... In the longer run, the bottom 20 percent—indeed the bottom 99 percent—will need to be retrained and re-educated to get a larger share of U.S. GDP. Eminent Harvard labor economist Larry Katz sees a future where many lower-skilled workers are employed in the service sector supporting America’s innovative class....
The Price of Gun Control
...Tell a gun owner that he cannot be trusted to own a firearm—particularly if you are an urban pundit with no experience around guns—and what he hears is an insult. Add to this that the bulk of the gun-buying public is made up of middle-aged white men with less than a college degree, and now you’re insulting a population already rubbed raw by decades of stagnant wages.
The harm we’ve done by messing with law-abiding Americans’ guns is significant. In 2010, I drove 11,000 miles around the United States talking to gun guys (for a book, to be published in the spring, that grew out of an article I wrote for this magazine), and I met many working guys, including plumbers, parks workers, nurses—natural Democrats in any other age—who wouldn’t listen to anything the Democratic party has to say because of its institutional hostility to guns. I’d argue that we’ve sacrificed generations of progress on health care, women’s and workers’ rights, and climate change by reflexively returning, at times like these, to an ill-informed call to ban firearms, and we haven’t gotten anything tangible in return. ...
...Tell a gun owner that he cannot be trusted to own a firearm—particularly if you are an urban pundit with no experience around guns—and what he hears is an insult. Add to this that the bulk of the gun-buying public is made up of middle-aged white men with less than a college degree, and now you’re insulting a population already rubbed raw by decades of stagnant wages.
The harm we’ve done by messing with law-abiding Americans’ guns is significant. In 2010, I drove 11,000 miles around the United States talking to gun guys (for a book, to be published in the spring, that grew out of an article I wrote for this magazine), and I met many working guys, including plumbers, parks workers, nurses—natural Democrats in any other age—who wouldn’t listen to anything the Democratic party has to say because of its institutional hostility to guns. I’d argue that we’ve sacrificed generations of progress on health care, women’s and workers’ rights, and climate change by reflexively returning, at times like these, to an ill-informed call to ban firearms, and we haven’t gotten anything tangible in return. ...
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Spies in the sky signal new age of surveillance
..."If you're concerned about it, maybe there's a reason we should be flying over you, right?" said Douglas McDonald, the company's director of special operations and president of a local chapter of the unmanned vehicle trade group. "But as soon as you lose your kid, get your car stolen or have marijuana growing out at your lake place that's not yours, you'd probably want one of those flying overhead."...
..."If you're concerned about it, maybe there's a reason we should be flying over you, right?" said Douglas McDonald, the company's director of special operations and president of a local chapter of the unmanned vehicle trade group. "But as soon as you lose your kid, get your car stolen or have marijuana growing out at your lake place that's not yours, you'd probably want one of those flying overhead."...
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Doc says ‘physicians have reached a tipping point’ [VIDEO]
...In 1995, Westchester Orthopedic employed one person to perform administrative tasks. By the late ’90s, they employed one per doctor.
Mark Smith, president of physician recruiter Merritt Hawkins in Irving, Texas, said there are more regulations today than ever before. Doctors in his association report spending 60 percent of their time on completing regulatory paperwork.
“There have even been reports of small practices going out of business,” Smith said. “This has been unheard of in my 24 years in this organization.”
In 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act mandated specific data collection that increased costs on doctor’s private practices without increasing reimbursements. The next year, the Obamacare decreased reimbursement and specified more reporting requirements — again increasing costs....
“He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”
“Who?”
“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”
She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
Obama to Americans: You don’t deserve what you’ve earned
...There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet....
Government Didn’t Create the Internet
The Internet is a trillion dollars of fiber optic cables laid in the ground and under our oceans. Fiber optic technology was developed by corporations, such as Corning Glasworks, not the government. The trillion dollars in capital that was used to pay for laying cable came from Wall Street, not the government.
The one thing you might be able to credit the government with is standards. The early days of computing were a hodge-podge of networking standards. Only computers from the same vendor could talk to each other -- indeed, often only the same model of computers. The situation was like the railroad network in the pre Civil-War South: each state’s rail network had different gauge tracks, different widths, different turn radiuses, different slopes. As cargo was shipped across the South, it needed to be offloaded from one rail network and loaded onto another, several times. After the Civil War, the U.S. government decreed a common railroad standard for the entire country so that it could move troops quickly to anywhere in the country to suppress insurrections.
In much the same way, around 1980, governments around the world, working with international standards organizations, created the "OSI" or "Open Systems Interconnect" group. The purpose of OSI was to create a single standard for all networks, to create a world wide "internetwork" that all computers could be connected to. By 1990, developed countries (US, Europe, Japan) had laws called "GOSIP" or “Government OSI Profile” that required all computers purchased by the government must support the OSI network standard. All large corporations, such as IBM and HP, supported this standard with their computers.
What’s important about the Internet is that the OSI standard failed. It’s not the standard of today’s Internet. The government backed the wrong horse, so to speak. Instead, today’s Internet is based on TCP/IP -- a networking standard the government tried to kill off....
Obama: “If You’ve Been Successful, You Didn’t Get There On Your Own”
The wealthy already pay more taxes than everyone else, both as a percentage of total federal taxes collected and as a percentage of their own income. So unless Obama is seeing different facts than the rest of us, upper-income earners are definitely not getting a free ride, or even half of a free ride, on the backs of middle-class earners. So the “somebody” who “invested” in “publicly funded widget XYZ” is actually the wealthy person Obama is bashing....
Mankiw: Middle Class Receives More in Government Benefits Than They Pay in Taxes
Because transfer payments are, in effect, the opposite of taxes, it makes sense to look not just at taxes paid, but at taxes paid minus transfers received. For 2009, the most recent year available, here are taxes less transfers as a percentage of market income (income that households earned from their work and savings):
Bottom quintile: -301%
Second quintile: -42%
Middle quintile: -5%
Fourth quintile: 10%
Highest quintile: 22%
Top one percent: 28%
The negative 301% means that a typical family in the bottom quintile receives about $3 in transfer payments for every dollar earned....
Obama's Soft-Core Socialism
...The contempt for small business was aptly summarized by Hillary Clinton back in 1993, when she was pushing her plan to nationalize health care. Told that her proposals would devastate small companies, she replied: "I can't be responsible for every undercapitalized small business in America."...
“Who?”
“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”
She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
Obama to Americans: You don’t deserve what you’ve earned
...There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet....
Government Didn’t Create the Internet
The Internet is a trillion dollars of fiber optic cables laid in the ground and under our oceans. Fiber optic technology was developed by corporations, such as Corning Glasworks, not the government. The trillion dollars in capital that was used to pay for laying cable came from Wall Street, not the government.
The one thing you might be able to credit the government with is standards. The early days of computing were a hodge-podge of networking standards. Only computers from the same vendor could talk to each other -- indeed, often only the same model of computers. The situation was like the railroad network in the pre Civil-War South: each state’s rail network had different gauge tracks, different widths, different turn radiuses, different slopes. As cargo was shipped across the South, it needed to be offloaded from one rail network and loaded onto another, several times. After the Civil War, the U.S. government decreed a common railroad standard for the entire country so that it could move troops quickly to anywhere in the country to suppress insurrections.
In much the same way, around 1980, governments around the world, working with international standards organizations, created the "OSI" or "Open Systems Interconnect" group. The purpose of OSI was to create a single standard for all networks, to create a world wide "internetwork" that all computers could be connected to. By 1990, developed countries (US, Europe, Japan) had laws called "GOSIP" or “Government OSI Profile” that required all computers purchased by the government must support the OSI network standard. All large corporations, such as IBM and HP, supported this standard with their computers.
What’s important about the Internet is that the OSI standard failed. It’s not the standard of today’s Internet. The government backed the wrong horse, so to speak. Instead, today’s Internet is based on TCP/IP -- a networking standard the government tried to kill off....
Obama: “If You’ve Been Successful, You Didn’t Get There On Your Own”
The wealthy already pay more taxes than everyone else, both as a percentage of total federal taxes collected and as a percentage of their own income. So unless Obama is seeing different facts than the rest of us, upper-income earners are definitely not getting a free ride, or even half of a free ride, on the backs of middle-class earners. So the “somebody” who “invested” in “publicly funded widget XYZ” is actually the wealthy person Obama is bashing....
Mankiw: Middle Class Receives More in Government Benefits Than They Pay in Taxes
Because transfer payments are, in effect, the opposite of taxes, it makes sense to look not just at taxes paid, but at taxes paid minus transfers received. For 2009, the most recent year available, here are taxes less transfers as a percentage of market income (income that households earned from their work and savings):
Bottom quintile: -301%
Second quintile: -42%
Middle quintile: -5%
Fourth quintile: 10%
Highest quintile: 22%
Top one percent: 28%
The negative 301% means that a typical family in the bottom quintile receives about $3 in transfer payments for every dollar earned....
Obama's Soft-Core Socialism
...The contempt for small business was aptly summarized by Hillary Clinton back in 1993, when she was pushing her plan to nationalize health care. Told that her proposals would devastate small companies, she replied: "I can't be responsible for every undercapitalized small business in America."...
All Claimed July Warming In The US Is Due To Data Manipulation
...The unadjusted graph shows no warming since 1895, with the hottest July occurring in 1901. All of the claimed July warming is due to data manipulation....
New paper blames about half of global warming on weather station data homgenization
...Here’s the part I really like: of 67% of the weather stations examined, questionable adjustments were made to raw data that resulted in:
“increased positive trends, decreased negative trends, or changed negative trends to positive,” whereas “the expected proportions would be 1/2 (50%).”
And…
“homogenation practices used until today are mainly statistical, not well justified by experiments, and are rarely supported by metadata. It can be argued that they often lead to false results: natural features of hydroclimatic times series are regarded as errors and are adjusted.”...
...The unadjusted graph shows no warming since 1895, with the hottest July occurring in 1901. All of the claimed July warming is due to data manipulation....
New paper blames about half of global warming on weather station data homgenization
...Here’s the part I really like: of 67% of the weather stations examined, questionable adjustments were made to raw data that resulted in:
“increased positive trends, decreased negative trends, or changed negative trends to positive,” whereas “the expected proportions would be 1/2 (50%).”
And…
“homogenation practices used until today are mainly statistical, not well justified by experiments, and are rarely supported by metadata. It can be argued that they often lead to false results: natural features of hydroclimatic times series are regarded as errors and are adjusted.”...
Why Our Elites Stink
Through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Protestant Establishment sat atop the American power structure. A relatively small network of white Protestant men dominated the universities, the world of finance, the local country clubs and even high government service.
...As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.
The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service...
Through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Protestant Establishment sat atop the American power structure. A relatively small network of white Protestant men dominated the universities, the world of finance, the local country clubs and even high government service.
...As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.
The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service...
The Polluted Waters of 50 Shades of Grey, Etc.
...however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed....
...True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity. When authority is honored according to the word of God it serves and protects — and gives enormous pleasure. When it is denied, the result is not “no authority,” but an authority which devours....
...however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed....
...True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity. When authority is honored according to the word of God it serves and protects — and gives enormous pleasure. When it is denied, the result is not “no authority,” but an authority which devours....
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Newly found weather records show 1930′s as being far worse than the present for extreme weather
...It also is useful for putting the recent heat wave in perspective. Despite the 24/7 caterwauling, only two new state records—South Carolina and Georgia—are currently under investigation. And, looking carefully at Shein et al. dataset, there appears to be a remarkable lack of all-time records in recent years.
This is particularly striking given the increasing urbanization of the U.S. and the consequent “non climatic” warming that creeps into previously pristine records. Everything else being equal—and with no warming from increased greenhouse gases—most statewide records should be in or near big cities. But they aren’t.
This year there were a huge number (many thousands) of reports of daily high temperature records being set across the eastern two-thirds of the country in recent weeks, and even a large number (a few hundred) reports of all-time records high temperatures being set for a particular location. But if only two new statewide records were set, that’s hardly an historic heat wave when considered in its totality....
The Other Scandal In Unhappy Valley
...Michael Mann, like Joe Paterno (and to a lesser degree, Jerry Sandusky) was a rock star in the context of Penn State University, bringing in millions in research funding. The same university president who resigned in the wake of the Sandusky scandal was also the president when Mann was being investigated. We saw what the university administration was willing to do to cover up heinous crimes, and even let them continue, rather than expose them. Should we suppose, in light of what we now know, they would do any less to hide academic and scientific misconduct, with so much at stake?
It’s time for a fresh, truly independent investigation.
Climate was HOTTER in Roman, medieval times than now: Study
...A new study measuring temperatures over the past two millennia has concluded that in fact the temperatures seen in the last decade are far from being the hottest in history.
A large team of scientists making a comprehensive study of data from tree rings say that in fact global temperatures have been on a falling trend for the past 2,000 years and they have often been noticeably higher than they are today - despite the absence of any significant amounts of human-released carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back then.
"We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," says Professor-Doktor Jan Esper of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, one of the scientists leading the study. "Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy."
They certainly are, as it is a central plank of climate policy worldwide that the current temperatures are the highest ever seen for many millennia, and that this results from rising levels of atmospheric CO2 emitted by human activities such as industry, transport etc.
If it is the case that actually the climate has often been warmer without any significant CO2 emissions having taken place - suggesting that CO2 emissions simply aren't that important - the case for huge efforts to cut those emissions largely disappears....
The other foreclosure crisis: Losing a home over $400 in back taxes
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- People are losing their homes over unpaid tax bills that, in some cases, add up to just a few hundred dollars.
Outdated state laws that allow local governments to sell tax liens on delinquent properties to investors in order to more quickly collect on overdue property taxes is sparking a second "foreclosure crisis," a report from the National Consumer Law Center said Tuesday....
...The report cited a case of an 81-year-old Rhode Island woman who fell behind on a $474 sewer bill. A corporation bought the home in a tax sale for $836.39. The woman was evicted from the home she had lived in for more than 40 years and the corporation resold the place for $85,000, the report said....
Applying Title IX to science enrollment – what possibly could go wrong?
...Quotas limiting the number of male students in science may be imposed by the Education Department in 2013. The White House has promised that “new guidelines will also be issued to grant-receiving universities and colleges” spelling out “Title IX rules in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.” These guidelines will likely echo existing Title IX guidelines that restrict men’s percentage of intercollegiate athletes to their percentage in overall student bodies, thus reducing the overall number of intercollegiate athletes. (Under the three-part Title IX test created by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, where I used to work, colleges are allowed to temporarily comply by increasing the number of female athletes rather than cutting the number of male athletes, but the only viable permanent way to comply with its rule is to restrict men’s participation relative to women’s participation, reducing overall participation.) Thus, as Charlotte Allen notes, the Obama administration’s guidelines are likely to lead to “science quotas” based on gender....
Applying Title IX to science enrollment – what possibly could go wrong?
...Quotas limiting the number of male students in science may be imposed by the Education Department in 2013. The White House has promised that “new guidelines will also be issued to grant-receiving universities and colleges” spelling out “Title IX rules in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.” These guidelines will likely echo existing Title IX guidelines that restrict men’s percentage of intercollegiate athletes to their percentage in overall student bodies, thus reducing the overall number of intercollegiate athletes. (Under the three-part Title IX test created by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, where I used to work, colleges are allowed to temporarily comply by increasing the number of female athletes rather than cutting the number of male athletes, but the only viable permanent way to comply with its rule is to restrict men’s participation relative to women’s participation, reducing overall participation.) Thus, as Charlotte Allen notes, the Obama administration’s guidelines are likely to lead to “science quotas” based on gender....
83% of doctors say they might quit over Obamacare, according to new poll
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the median debt at graduation from medical school is $150,000 at public institutions and $180,000 at private institutions. Add to that malpractice insurance premiums that can as high as $200,000 a year, and you begin to get a sense of why American physicians might be wary of government intrusion into the practice of medicine.
One new survey shows the disenchantment running so high that 83% of doctors queried say they are thinking of hanging up their stethoscopes permanently now thatObamacare stands poised to remain the law of the land....
Saturday, July 14, 2012
NY Times Columnist: Glass-Steagall Wouldn't Have Prevented the JPMorgan Loss or the Financial Crisis
...A meme around Glass-Steagall has been created, repeated so often that it has almost become conventional wisdom: the repeal of Glass-Steagall led to the financial crisis of 2008. And, the thinking goes, has become almost religious for some people, that if the law were reinstated, we would avoid the next crisis.
The facts — basic facts — just aren’t that convenient. While the repeal of Glass-Steagall has seemingly become the sine qua non of the financial crisis, it is pure historical revisionism. [...]
Glass-Steagall wouldn't have prevented the last financial crisis. And it probably wouldn't have prevented JPMorgan’s $2 billion-plus trading loss. The loss occurred on the commercial side of the bank, not at the investment bank. [...]
The first domino to nearly topple over in the financial crisis was Bear Stearns, an investment bank that had nothing to do with commercial banking. Glass-Steagall would have been irrelevant. Then came Lehman Brothers; it too was an investment bank with no commercial banking business and therefore wouldn't have been covered by Glass-Steagall either. After them, Merrill Lynch was next — and yep, it too was an investment bank that had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall.
Next in line was the American International Group, an insurance company that was also unrelated to Glass-Steagall. While we're at it, we should probably throw in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which similarly, had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall....
6 charts that show the Welfare State run amok
– In the 1960s, there were 18 workers per Medicaid recipient. Today that number is 2.5.
– The number of Americans on disability has risen 19% faster than jobs created during this recovery.
– There are just 1.2 private sector workers per 1 person on welfare or working for government.
– There are now just 1.65 employed persons in private sector per 1 person on welfare assistance.
The Politics of Cognitive Dissonance
"Don't repeat conservative language or ideas, even when arguing against them."
That bit of advice, No. 1 on a list titled "The 10 Most Important Things Democrats Should Know," comes from the promotional material for "The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic" by George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling. (You may remember them from our June 12 column.) In a PJMedia.com essay, the anonymous blogger whose pen name is Zombie draws out the implications:
Many politicians, pundits and talking heads have taken Lakoff's recommendation to heart. This is why conservatives and liberals can't seem to have the simplest conversation: liberals intentionally refuse to address or even acknowledge what conservatives say. Since (as Lakoff notes) conservatives invariably frame their own statements within their own conservative "moral frames," every time a conservative speaks, his liberal opponent will seemingly ignore what was said and instead come back with a reply literally [sic] out of left field.
Thus, he is the progenitor of and primary advocate for the main reason why liberalism fails to win the public debate: Because it never directly confronts, disproves or negates conservative notions--it simply ignores them. . . .
By intentionally refusing to challenge, disprove, understand or even acknowledge the existence of the other side's argument, you allow that argument to grow in strength and win converts.
This is an important insight, not only into the way the left debates and otherwise communicates, but into the way the left thinks--or fails to think. The book's subtitle, after all, promises an instruction in "Thinking and Talking Democratic." Lakoff and Wehling command their readers not only to act as if opposing arguments are without merit, but to close their minds to those arguments. What comes across to conservatives as a maddening arrogance is actually willed ignorance....
The Coming Middle-Class Anarchy
...What’s really important is that law-abiding middle-class citizens are deciding that playing by the rules is nothing but a sucker’s game.
Just like the poker player who’s been fleeced by all the other players, and gets one mean attitude once he finally wakes up to the con? I’m betting that more and more of the solid American middle-class will begin saying what Brian and Ilsa said: Fuckit.
Fuck the rules. Fuck playing the game the banksters want you to play. Fuck being the good citizen. Fuck filling out every form, fuck paying every tax. Fuck the government, fuck the banks who own them. Fuck the free-loaders, living rent-free while we pay. Fuck the legal process, a game which only works if you’ve got the money to pay for the parasite lawyers. Fuck being a chump. Fuck being a stooge. Fuck trying to do the right thing—what good does that get you? What good is coming your way?
Fuckit.
When the backbone of a country starts thinking that laws and rules are not worth following, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to anarchy.
TV has given us the illusion that anarchy is people rioting in the streets, smashing car windows and looting every store in sight. But there’s also the polite, quiet, far deadlier anarchy of the core citizenry—the upright citizenry—throwing in the towel and deciding it’s just not worth it anymore.
If a big enough proportion of the populace—not even a majority, just a largish chunk—decides that it’s just not worth following the rules anymore, then that society’s days are numbered: Not even a police-state with an armed Marine at every corner with Shoot-to-Kill orders can stop such middle-class anarchy.
Brian and Ilsa are such anarchists—grey-haired, well-dressed, golf-loving, well-to-do, exceedingly polite anarchists: But anarchists nevertheless. They are not important, or powerful, or influential: They are average—that’s why they’re so deadly: Their numbers are millions. And they are slowly, painfully coming to the conclusion that it’s just not worth it anymore. ...
Americans Revolt Billions of Times a Day
...And most people have absolutely no moral compunction about any of these violations, either of the spirit or the letter of the law, because deep down they no longer believe that the law, especially the tax code, represents any compelling moral principle, nor do its dictates seem any longer to be fair. They don’t think their home state has earned taxes on the Amazon purchases or that it deserves any share of the mutually beneficial exchange between you and your dry wall guy.
I bet you can think of a few dozen more examples, and increasingly we’re all in business and in personal life thinking of more and more ways to game a system which we have less and less faith in.
It’s not civil disobedience that I’m talking about. It’s the opposite: Civil disobedience is meant to be noticed. It is a price paid in the hope of creating social change. What I’m talking about is not based on hope; in fact, it has given up much hope on social change. It thinks the government is a colossal amoeba twitching mindlessly in response to tiny pinpricks of pain from an endless army of micro-brained interest groups. The point is not to teach the amoeba nor to guide it, but simply to stay away from the lethal stupidity of its pseudopods.
The amoeba does not get smarter but it does get hungrier and bigger. On the other hand, we get smarter. More and more of our life takes place outside of the amoeba’s reach: in the privacy of our own homes, or in capital accounts in other nations, or in the fastest growing amoeba avoidance zone ever created, cyberspace. We revolt decision by decision, transaction by transaction, because we believe deep down that most of what government tells us to do is at bottom illegitimate....
Saturday, July 07, 2012
Florida Cop Fired for Planting Dope, Says He Did That and More Under Orders
...“I advised my supervisor of my findings and my supervisor advised me ‘if I was in your shoes I’d get marijuana from the SWAT closet and add it to what you found,’ ” he said in the letter.
“I again was in fear of losing my job and felt obligated to do as instructed by my supervisor,” he added....
Countrywide Loans Sought Favor With Fannie Mae, Report Says
Countrywide Financial Corp. gave discount loans to former and current members of the U.S. Congress and executives at Fannie Mae (FNMA) as it lobbied to scuttle legislation that would have diminished its sale of sub-prime mortgages, according to a report released today by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa.
The report, which caps a three-year inquiry by the panel, concluded that between 1996 and 2008, Countrywide executives used a special VIP loan program to try to stop legislation that would have restrained the company’s business with Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored mortgage company. Countrywide had an exclusive agreement to sell billions of dollars in mortgages to Fannie Mae at a discounted rate, according to the report....
...Jim Johnson, chief executive officer of Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998, earned $100 million during his time at the company. Nonetheless, Countrywide employees expressed concern about giving him a loan because he didn’t pay his bills regularly and had a low credit score, according to e-mails published in Issa’s report.
Because of Johnson’s credit report, “I’m concerned about signing on these loans,” Countrywide underwriter Gene Soda said in a 2005 e-mail to another Countrywide employee, according to the report.
Countrywide’s chief executive officer, Angelo Mozilo, who had a close relationship with Johnson, wrote back, instructing his employees to give Johnson a loan “1/2 below prime.”
“Don’t worry about” the credit score, Mozilo wrote. “He is constantly on the road and therefore pays his bills on an irregular basis but he ultimately pays them.”
In another e-mail, Mozilo wrote, “Jim Johnson continues to be a source of many loans for our company and this is just a small token of appreciation for the business that he sends to us.”...
After Right to Work Takes Effect in Indiana, Unions Seek a Judicial Bailout
...The union’s primary complaint, however, is that the law reduces its revenues. In a revealing affidavit, a union organizer explained that, in light of the right-to-work law, union members would have the freedom to pursue their own self-interest, to the detriment of the union: “I believe the ability to cease paying dues completely may prove too attractive for some of our members to resist. If just 10 percent of the Union’s Indiana members resign, the Union will lose at least $600,000 in annual revenues.” Remarkably, the union essentially concedes that a significant portion of its members would leave the union if they were free to pursue their own self-interest....
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
The Downside of Liberty
...Consider America during the two decades after World War II. Stereotypically but also in fact, the conformist pressures of bourgeois social norms were powerful. To dress or speak or live life in unorthodox, extravagantly individualist ways required real gumption. Yet just as beatniks were rare and freakish, so were proudly money-mad Ayn Randian millionaires. My conservative Republican father thought marginal income tax rates of 91 percent were unfairly high, but he and his friends never dreamed of suggesting they be reduced below, say, 50 percent. Sex outside marriage was shameful, beards and divorce were outré — but so were boasting of one’s wealth and blaming unfortunates for their hard luck. When I was growing up in Omaha, rich people who could afford to build palatial houses did not and wouldn’t dream of paying themselves 200 or 400 times what they paid their employees. Greed as well as homosexuality was a love that dared not speak its name.
But then came the late 1960s, and over the next two decades American individualism was fully unleashed. A kind of tacit grand bargain was forged between the counterculture and the establishment, between the forever-young and the moneyed.
Going forward, the youthful masses of every age would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes or social opprobrium.
“Do your own thing” is not so different than “every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it, whether that means smoking weed and watching porn and never wearing a necktie, retiring at 50 with a six-figure public pension and refusing modest gun regulation, or moving your factories overseas and letting commercial banks become financial speculators. The self-absorbed “Me” Decade, having expanded during the ’80s and ’90s from personal life to encompass the political economy, will soon be the “Me” Half-Century....
Touré Descends Into Self-Parody On The Cycle, Calls For Government Mandate Upon Mandate
...“Government must pull us into the future even as a large swath of the electorate kicks against and screams against it like petulant children.” He continued on to say that opposition to the health-insurance mandate will fade over time because “the people are sometimes like Mikey from that old Life cereal commercial; they hate it until they don’t.”
Seriously? “The people” … are like the petulant child from a cereal commercial? What condescension. You almost want to believe this some elaborate theater act where Touré parodies the quintessential “holier than thou” big government liberal. But maybe not. He continued on:
“Perhaps if there’s a second term for Obama after health care is enacted and people see it working well and get used to it, he’ll float to a new level of power.”
Yeah! If and when the unwashed masses accept the president’s health-insurance mandate, he’ll float to some magical new level of executive power, uninhibited by those pesky obstacles like, you know, the constitution or democracy or, ugh, personal liberty.
And on this Cloud Nine of Power, what would Touré like President Obama to do?
“Maybe he’ll go even further trying to bolster his legacy by enacting new paternalistic mandates meant to make the nation better. Saying all Americans must vote, because government works better when all participate in selecting leaders. Eat your vegetables! Maybe mandate that all citizens must go to some sort of post high school college — maybe liberal arts, maybe technical — because America works better when we are better educated and trained. Eat your vegetables! How about a mandate of a year or two of public service after college?”...
...Well, hey, Touré said exactly that: “I’m just saying, sometimes the people don’t know what’s best for them.”...
David Brooks: The Follower Problem
...Maybe before we can build great monuments to leaders we have to relearn the art of following. Democratic followership is also built on a series of paradoxes: that we are all created equal but that we also elevate those who are extraordinary; that we choose our leaders but also have to defer to them and trust their discretion; that we’re proud individuals but only really thrive as a group, organized and led by just authority.
I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else.
In his memoir, “At Ease,” Eisenhower delivered the following advice: “Always try to associate yourself with and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you do, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.” Ike slowly mastered the art of leadership by becoming a superb apprentice.
To have good leaders you have to have good followers — able to recognize just authority, admire it, be grateful for it and emulate it. Those skills are required for good monument building, too.
Sunday, July 01, 2012
CBS: Roberts Switched His Vote From Invalidating the Mandate to Upholding It
...Because Roberts was the most senior justice in the majority to strike down the mandate, he got to choose which justice would write the Court’s historic decision. He kept it for himself.
Over the next six weeks, as Roberts began to craft the decision striking down the mandate, the external pressure began to grow. Roberts almost certainly was aware of it.
Some of the conservatives, such as Justice Clarence Thomas, deliberately avoid news articles on the Court when issues are pending (and avoid some publications altogether, such as The New York Times). They’ve explained that they don’t want to be influenced by outside opinion or feel pressure from outlets that are perceived as liberal.
But Roberts pays attention to media coverage. As Chief Justice, he is keenly aware of his leadership role on the Court, and he also is sensitive to how the Court is perceived by the public.
There were countless news articles in May warning of damage to the Court – and to Roberts’ reputation – if the Court were to strike down the mandate. Leading politicians, including the President himself, had expressed confidence the mandate would be upheld.
Some even suggested that if Roberts struck down the mandate, it would prove he had been deceitful during his confirmation hearings, when he explained a philosophy of judicial restraint.
It was around this time that it also became clear to the conservative justices that Roberts was, as one put it, “wobbly,” the sources said.
It is not known why Roberts changed his view on the mandate and decided to uphold the law. At least one conservative justice tried to get him to explain it, but was unsatisfied with the response, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation....
Police Fatality Statistics Show 2012 On Pace To Be Safest Year For Police In 60 Years
...We're now about halfway through 2012, and this year is on pace to be the safest ever for America's police officers. Oddly, no one is reporting it.
Fifty officers have died on duty so far this year, a 44-percent decrease from last year, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF). More remarkably, 17 have died from gunfire, down 55 percent from last year. (21 died in traffic accidents, the remaining 12 in various other incidents.) If the second half of this year follows the first, fewer officers will have died on duty this year than in any year since 1944, a time when there were far, far fewer police officers.
Not only aren't media outlets reporting on the dramatic drop this year, some are still using last year's figures to push the line that anti-police violence is on the rise. As recently as April, the New York Times ran a front-page story based on the 2011 figures under the headline, "Even as Violent Crime Falls, Killing of Officers Rises." Like those before it, the April Times article speculated on why violence against cops is on the rise. Some sources blamed the economy, which led to cutbacks in police departments, and emboldened criminals or meant officers to provide backup during emergencies. Police officers talking about the dangers of the job....
Police: 'Threat matrix' dictated SWAT team response at Powell Avenue home
EVANSVILLE — Stephanie Milan, 18, was relaxing in her family’s living room Thursday watching the Food Network when a heavily armed squad of Evansville police officers arrived on the front porch.
Dressed in full protective gear, police broke the storm door of the home at 616 East Powell Ave. — the Milans’ front door was already open on the hot summer day. They also broke a front window. They tossed a flashbang stun grenade into the living room that made a deafening blast. A short distance away, a local television crew’s cameras were rolling. The police had invited the station to videotape the forced entry of the residence....
...After speaking to Milan and her grandmother, Louise, police determined those inside the house had nothing to do with their investigation.
Police were executing a search warrant for computer equipment, which they said was used to make anonymous and specific online threats against police and their families on the website topix.com.
“The front door was open. It’s not like anyone was in there hiding,” said Ira Milan, Stephanie's grandfather and owner of the property for many years. “To bring a whole SWAT team seems a little excessive.”
Ira Milan said the perpetrator of the threats likely used Stephanie’s Internet service connection from an outside location, which led police to the East Powell Avenue address....
Did a CIA Agent Work for the Mob? Excerpt from Evan Wright’s New Book
In 2008, Jon Roberts, a convicted cocaine trafficker, made a startling claim to me: that more than three decades earlier he had participated in a murder with a man named Ricky Prado, who later entered the Central Intelligence Agency and became a top American spy. The murder to which Roberts referred was one of Miami’s most infamous, that of Richard Schwartz, stepson of the legendary mobster Meyer Lansky. Schwartz was killed on the morning of October 12, 1977, behind a restaurant. He was exiting his car when a person unknown approached him and fired twice with a shotgun. The murder has never been solved.
Roberts claimed that Prado was the shooter, provided by a local Cuban drug kingpin named Alberto “Albert” San Pedro, for whom Prado worked as an enforcer and occasional hit man. What made Roberts’s story unbelievable was his claim that shortly after the shooting, Prado joined the CIA.
Not long after Roberts told his tale, I found there was a CIA officer named Enrique "Ricky" Prado, who joined the agency in 1982 and eventually attained the rank of SIS-2, the equivalent of a two-star general. He served as a supervisor in the bin Laden unit, and by the time of the 9/11 attacks, he was a top official in the CIA's counterterrorist center. He later ran the "targeted assassination unit"—first at the agency and then at Blackwater, where he served as vice-president from 2004 to 2008. During much of his career in and out of the CIA, Prado worked closely with J. Cofer Black, now a top adviser to Mitt Romney.
It was impossible to believe that Roberts's allegations about Prado had merit until I found long- suppressed files from a 1991 federal RICO and murder investigation that targeted Prado for his alleged role as a criminal enforcer for San Pedro prior to joining the CIA. No charges were filed against Prado. A subpoena compelling him to testify before a federal grand jury was quashed. His rise in the CIA continued after the case disappeared. Officers who know him described him to me as a “good guy.”...
Commentary: America's taxpayers lost big in UAW bailout
The Treasury Department estimates the taxpayers will lose enormous sums in the auto bailout — more than $20 billion. That is more than Michigan spends on public education, more than the federal government spends on NASA, and more than America gives in foreign aid.
None of these losses were necessary to keep General Motors and Chrysler in business. The entire net cost of the bailout came from subsidizing the United Auto Workers' pay and benefits....
ATF leader’s email could be Fast and Furious smoking gun and Holder admitted Obama can’t shield it
A single internal Department of Justice email could be the smoking-gun document in the Operation Fast and Furious scandal — if it turns out to contain what congressional investigators have said it does.
The document would establish that wiretap application documents show senior DOJ officials knew about and approved the gunwalking tactic in Fast and Furious. This is the opposite of what Attorney General Eric Holder and House oversight committee ranking Democratic member Rep. Elijah Cummings have claimed.
It appears that email would also prove senior DOJ officials, likely including Holder himself, knew in March 2011 that a Feb. 4, 2011 letter from the DOJ to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley falsely denied guns were permitted to “walk” into Mexico. The DOJ allowed that false letter to stand for nine more months, only withdrawing it in December 2011.
During the June 24 broadcast of Fox News Sunday, House oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa cited the email as a “good example” of a specific document his committee knows Holder is hiding from Congress.
“The ATF director, Kenneth Melson, sent an e-mail. And he had said to us in sworn testimony that, in fact, he had concerns,” Issa said. “And we want to see that e-mail because that’s an example where he was saying, if we believe his sworn testimony, that guns walked. And he said it shortly after February 4, and [on] July 4. When he told us that, we began asking for that document....
Lawmakers reworked financial portfolios after talks with Fed, Treasury officials
...Boehner is one of 34 members of Congress who took steps to recast their financial portfolios during the financial crisis after phone calls or meetings with Paulson; his successor, Timothy F. Geithner; or Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, according to a Washington Post examination of appointment calendars and congressional disclosure forms.
The lawmakers, many of whom held leadership positions and committee chairmanships in the House and Senate, changed portions of their portfolios a total of 166 times within two business days of speaking or meeting with the administration officials. The party affiliation of the lawmakers was about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, 19 to 15....
...Boehner is one of 34 members of Congress who took steps to recast their financial portfolios during the financial crisis after phone calls or meetings with Paulson; his successor, Timothy F. Geithner; or Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, according to a Washington Post examination of appointment calendars and congressional disclosure forms.
The lawmakers, many of whom held leadership positions and committee chairmanships in the House and Senate, changed portions of their portfolios a total of 166 times within two business days of speaking or meeting with the administration officials. The party affiliation of the lawmakers was about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, 19 to 15....
It’s Really Getting to be Silly Season
Stephen Spaulding, Staff Counsel at liberal pressure group Common Cause, says that Republicans, unlike Democrats, understand that the court is a partisan body: “I think that progressives have approached the court as a place of justice, whereas the right wing has approached the court as a place of pure power.”
Stephen Spaulding, Staff Counsel at liberal pressure group Common Cause, says that Republicans, unlike Democrats, understand that the court is a partisan body: “I think that progressives have approached the court as a place of justice, whereas the right wing has approached the court as a place of pure power.”
E-mails reveal retaliation, cover-up at ATF, DoJ following Fast & Furious exposure
...In a Friday letter to the DOJ’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Grassley and Issa said they’re now concerned retaliation is much more likely following Thursday’s votes to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal and civil contempt of Congress.
“We just learned that ATF senior management placed two of the main whistleblowers who have testified before Congress about Fast and Furious under the supervision of someone who vowed to retaliate against them,” they wrote before describing how senior political figures have made dangerous threats before.
Grassley and Issa said that in early 2011, right around the time Grassley first made public the whistleblowers’ allegations about Fast and Furious, Scot Thomasson – then the chief of the ATF’s Public Affairs Division – said, according to an eyewitness account: “We need to get whatever dirt we can on these guys [the whistleblowers] and take them down.”
Thomasson also allegedly said that: “All these whistleblowers have axes to grind. ATF needs to f—k these guys.”
According to Grassley and Issa, when Thomasson was asked about whistleblowers’ allegations that guns were allowed to walk, Thomasson said he “didn’t know and didn’t care.”...
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