From the Cato Institute:
The rationale for your proposed tax on high-cost health insurance plans is that it would encourage people to purchase less-comprehensive coverage and thereby reduce health care spending.
If that’s a good idea, then why is it bad when insurers raise premiums?
I didn’t really intend to do two Global Warming posts in a row, but after talking to some friends that said they were completely ignorant of Climategate, I thought I’d post about it. A few months ago, hackers broke into and stole the e-mail records of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. This is one of the most influential Global Warming research outfits in the world. They were heavily influential on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that proclaimed the Global Warming situation dire.
It turns out that they have been engaged in some very shady things – blocking research critical of their findings, “losing” raw data so their findings couldn’t be checked, circumventing Freedom of Information Requests. Eventually, the head of the CRU had to step down. Yesterday, he was questioned by the British Parliament. The Guardian (which isn’t exactly a right-wing, global warming denier outfit) has a rather unflattering writeup. A few quick highlights:
But for the first time he did concede publicly that when he tried to repeat the 1990 study in 2008, he came up with radically different findings. Or, as he put it, “a slightly different conclusion”. Fully 40% of warming there in the past 60 years was due to urban influences. “It’s something we need to consider,” he said.
Also:
[T]he committee will be hard pressed to ignore the issue after the intervention of no less a body than the Institute of Physics. In 13 coruscating paragraphs of written evidence to MPs, it spoke of “prima facie evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law”, “manipulation of the publication and peer review system”, and “intolerance to challenge … which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process.” Ouch.
Ouch indeed.
A post over at Watts Up With That a few months ago caused quite a stir in the global warming debate. I meant to post about it then, but forgot until now.
Of particular note over the last few years was the “Hockey Stick Graph”, which showed a rapid rise in temperatures, and is featured frequently in discussions on Global Warming. The graph has come into some controversy, as a growing number of people question it’s accuracy. But the unique thing about the Watts Up With That post is that it puts aside those arguments and says, “Let’s assume it’s correct for a minute. Let’s look at it in the context of historical ice-core samples from Greenland and the Antarctic”. The result, to my mind, is pretty damning of the hysteria surrounding Global Warming.
In it, it shows that, if one frames the graph over the last 600 years or so, you end up with a picture very similar to the Hockey Stick graph. But, as one stretches out the view to include more time, the change in temperature becomes smaller and smaller, eventually becoming irrelevant when compared to the much larger variations that have occurred over the last half-million years.
I wanted to get some sort of confirmation of what I was seeing, and sure enough, I checked out the Wikipedia article on Ice Cores, and there was a plotting of Vostok Ice Core data the mirrored what was compiled by Watts Up With That.
In fact, one gets the impression that the whole of modern human civilization has occurred during a relatively brief warm period, and that the temperature variations we’ve seen over the last hundred or so years are insignificant compared to what happens naturally. Perhaps we should stop worrying about how to deal with things beyond our control and focus on things that we can. Clean, renewable sources of energy are worth-while in their own right, not because the world is going to end in the next ten years.
Reportedly, Dubai is looking for twenty-six suspects in the murder of the Hamas commander a few weeks ago. Twenty-six suspects? Seriously, a small army was sent to kill the guy?
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that he fully expects that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be found guilty and executed in an interview over the weekend. This is a sentiment that I’ve heard a couple times coming from the White House. It has always bugged me, as it sounds suspiciously like the Obama administration is conducting a show trial. That isn’t to say I feel that they’re railroading KSM or that KSM is anything other than guilty, but rather that the Obama administration and their supporters are going down a very dangerous path without fully considering the implications of pursing this policy.
Neo-conservatives have always objected to criminal trials for terrorists, but I feel as though their position is terribly misunderstood by the liberals that oppose them. I get the impression that there is the impression amongst the left that the neo-conservative position taken by the early Bush administration and Republicans is borne out of a simplistic, ultra-nationalistic desire to “get ‘em” and “punish the wrongdoers”. In fact (and if you ever watch the Daily Show interviews with Cliff May and John Yoo, one can get a sense of the depth of consideration given to the problem), there are real problems of how to deal with terrorists in a legal and procedural way in such that it does not compromise our moral standing but also does not compromise the integrity of the Geneva Conventions.
When it comes to political pundits, I choose my battles over who to get worked up over. People like Keith Olbermann and Sean Hannity wear their partisanship on their sleeves, and it becomes obvious as to what their biases are pretty quickly. I’m not going to complain that DailyKos is too liberal or that the WeeklyStandard is too conservative. If you are watching or reading them, you know what you are getting. Becoming indignant over what they say doesn’t serve much purpose because their audiences already know they’re getting spin or don’t care.
Whom I do get upset over are people like Joe Klein. He’s a “reporter” and a “respected journalist”. He’s well known in political circles, but not, I suspect, by the public at large. He writes for Time Magazine, and is a frequent guest on This Week and other serious political talk shows. As such he is exposed frequently to the populace at large, and has the ability to drive the discussion on political and policy topics. The credentials he brings to any discussion give him immediate clout, but don’t belie his ideological leanings, or just how wacko the guy is. So when he says something outrageous, that is something I rant about.
Absolutely amazing poll results from CNN today about the $787 stimulus package: nearly three out of four Americans think the money has been wasted. On second thought, they may be right: it’s been wasted on them. Indeed, the largest single item in the package–$288 billion–is tax relief for 95% of the American public. This money is that magical $60 to $80 per month you’ve been finding in your paycheck since last spring. Not a life changing amount, but helpful in paying the bills.
. . .
So, two thoughts:
1. The Obama Administration has done a terrible job explaining the stimulus package to the American people…especially since there have been very few documented cases of waste so far.
2. This is yet further evidence that Americans are flagrantly ill-informed…and, for those watching Fox News, misinformed.
It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens. It is impossible to be a citizen if you don’t make an effort to understand the most basic activities of your government. It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you’re a nation of dodos.
Do I think a “magical” $60 a month is nice? Sure. Do I think it actually solves anything? No, and neither, it seems, does Klein. So why is he so dismissive of the argument that adding $288 billion to the deficit, when we’ve managed to add several trillion over the last two years, is probably a bad idea? Because he’s a partisan and an arrogant elite without a sense of hubris (except to point out the flaw in others).
I “get” the idea behind the stimulus. At it’s basic core, it’s Keynesian economics. That doesn’t mean that I agree with it, or that I think that even within the framework of Keynesian economics it would work, but I at least understand the intellectual ground from whence it sprang. It’d be nice if Klein at least gave those of us in opposition to it the same courtesy and at least conceded that we aren’t just a bunch of ignorant hicks that take our marching orders from Roger Ailes. Of course, I get the feeling that Klein isn’t too upset at the idea that we’re ignorant hicks, but that we aren’t taking our marching orders from *him*.
I meant to write about this last week, but the Supreme Court corrected itself when it ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to eviscerate the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act, as it should have done earlier in the decade when the law was first passed.
What surprised me was the reaction of the left to the ruling. I’ve rarely seen such widespread knee-jerk anger over something before. I pop over the The Progressive and am greeted with a call to amend the Constitution. DailyKos is ranting about it too. Something about corporations not being people or some such. Which, of course, entirely misses the point. It’s as if when you say the word “corporation”, all they see is Pepsi, GE and Halliburton, and miss fact that the NRA, the ACLU, the New York Times and both Republican and Democratic parties are all incorporated.
Corporations act like individuals for legal purposes, which has it’s pluses and minuses, but in this case is generally irrelevant. The point of the matter is that corporations are collections of individuals organized towards a common goal. In that sense, the ability of these organizations to express their opinions on the issues and politicians in an election seems to me to be pretty fundamental to a healthy civic society. That’s why the ACLU filed an amicus brief on behalf of the plaintiffs seeking to overturn the ban on corporate spending.
The National Review has a pretty good defense of the ruling.
Reconciliation is an obscure Senate rule established in the 1970’s under what is known as the “Byrd Rule” to allow for the bypassing of filibusters in certain circumstances. Democrats have started to process to use the rule to pass the House version of national health care (H.R. 3200). National Review interviewed Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis) to get a little bit of background:
“The reconciliation process was designed for the budget and to help reduce deficits and debt. Now it’s being used to create new entitlement programs. . . .”
“[B]oth sides will have an argument with the Senate parliamentarian about the Byrd rule, which says that parts of a bill can be eliminated if they do not directly reduce the deficit. It also says that you can’t bring incidental things into the bill. It’s like going to court.”
“Then the Democratic-appointed parliamentarian comes down with a ruling, saying whether this provision is in or out of the bill. It will look at subsidies, too,” says Ryan. “The question will be whether community rating — where health-insurance companies are mandated to provide coverage — is a direct-spending policy. The argument will revolve around these policies, and their need to go into effect, or not, and their fiscal outcomes.”
“A few years ago, we tried to pass medical-liability reform, which is always filibustered in the Senate,” recalls Ryan. “We said that if we stick it in reconciliation, we can pass it, since tort reform, according to the CBO, will reduce the federal government’s health-care costs. The parliamentarian said no, saying it was not a money-saving policy. We lost that one. We’ve also tried to stick ANWR [drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] in reconciliation before, arguing that it was a revenue-raising provision. We got it in there, but it didn’t work.”
“Using reconciliation is an art form, not a science,” says Ryan. Republicans “will have a lot of room to fight.”
“Using the tort-reform precedent from our own experience a few years ago, Republicans will be able to argue that a lot of the junk the Democrats want can’t go in the bill,” says Ryan. “That’s where Republican leaders like Senator Jon Kyl will be able to make some major arguments against the use of reconciliation.”
I suspect we’re going to be seeing a lot of abuse of this rule in the future, and a lot of discussion about whether or not to eliminate it.
Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The submission deadline for candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize is February 1st. That means Obama was nominated only weeks after becoming President.
Who can say, in all honesty, that Obama is even remotely more deserving of the award than Morgan Tsvangirai, a man who had is skull split open and repeatedly beaten by government thugs for peacefully opposing the corrupt and disastrous Mugabe regime? A man, who just last year, without violent revolt or armed resistance, became Prime Minister of Zimbabwe?
The Nobel Peace Prize is a farce.
