South Dakota Politics

Scozzafava Drops out in New York 23

The liberal Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava dropped out of the race for a New York House seat.  She was running third, behind Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman and Democrat Bill Owens.  Hoffman is in fact a Republican and this increases the chance that he will hold that seat for the GOP. 

Update:  Scozzafava has endorsed Bill Owens.  Quick Spin (D): another moderate Republican driven out of the party by the radical right.  Quick Spin (R): see, we told you she wasn't really a Republican.  Analysis: Scozzafava's nomination was a mistake.  Democrats would have voted against her because she is a Republican, which is what we mean by "Democrats".  Republicans would have voted for her for the same reason.  But Scozzafava would have cut into the enthusiasm of Republicans who, being not altogether without common sense, would not have seen the sense in voting for a Republican who would mostly vote with the opposite party in Congress. 

Halloween Movie Guide

The following is an expanded version of last year's Halloween movie post.  If you are looking for something seasonal to rent or order from Netflicks, I am your man. 

The U.S. has five holidays that are really celebrated: Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter, and Valentine's Day.  Halloween comes second in terms of store displays and yard ornaments, and, after Christmas, it is my favorite holiday.  This is due to the simple fact that I am incurably fond of the spooky story.  In case you are looking for a good Halloween movie, I have some suggestions.

The best single Halloween movie is, well, Halloween, John Carpenter's 1978 masterpiece, if only on account of its subject.  It builds on the plausible and provocative idea that real monsters lurk in the subconscious mind, and is carried by master performances: Donald Pleasance and Jamie Lee Curtis.  If you want something more suitable for children, try The Adams Family.  This superbly crafted homage to the old TV show is perfect for watching while munching on popcorn and distributing candy to miniature ghouls at the door. And don't forget Ghost Busters, which is also safe for the kids.  GB was a genuinely novel idea: demon fighters who approach their job as if they were plumbers.  Also, the mix of the supernatural and science fiction genres has roots in the beginnings of modern horror fiction.  You find it obviously in Frankenstein, and in Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Unfortunately, it all but falls out of almost all the vampire movies. 

If you want something classic, go back to the 1930's, when our four basic Halloween monsters saw their first moonlight.  Frankenstein (1931) ranks as the undisputed father of the modern monster story, with a number of scenes that have become cultural motifs.  And you gotta love Boris Karloff as the monster.  But Bela Lugosi as Dracula (also filmed in 1931) is an almost perfect horror film.  There is a collection out now that includes a Spanish version, filmed at night using the same script and sets, for Mexican audiences.  My kids got it for me for Christmas.  Karloff appeared a year after Frankenstein in The Mummy. The plot serves as a template for later versions of Dracula: resurrected man/demon pursues a woman who reminds him of his long lost love.  I think it's Karloff's best role.  Ten years after Frankenstein came Lon Chaney Jr. as The Wolf Man.  Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms, and the autumn moon is bright.  The inescapable and undeserved curse sets this one apart from all the others. 

I would add one movie to this list oldies that never gets the credit it deserves: The Tingler (1959), with Vincent Price.  It represents the best work of William Castle, the Alfred Hitchcock of B movie horror.  Like Ghost Busters, this story is based on a genuinely innovative idea.  Price plays Dr. Warren Chapin, who discovers that the tingling feeling we get when afraid is caused by a creature that lives in the spine of every human being.  When we get scared, it grows.  When we scream, it shrinks back to insignificance.  Castle actually had the seats in some theaters wired to produce a mild shock during a moment when the audience is supposed to be scared, and a narrator urges them to scream in order to save themselves.  But it needs no such theatrics.  Great acting and a strong screenplay make it a true gem.   

For a few laughs, try Mel Brook's Young Frankenstein, in my view, Brook's best movie. There is more than a little sexual innuendo, but it will fly right over the heads of most young trick-or-treaters.  Not safe for children, but delicious for more mature audiences, is The Rockey Horror Picture Show.  A good rock and roll soundtrack, and a lot of young men and women with too much time on their hands, made this into one of the most successful musicals of all time.   It's a good spoof on the Frankenstein story, with a lot of B movie sci fi thrown in.  I myself had the honor of playing the criminologist for one performance when Rockey was produced at Northern.   Finally, almost any collection of The Simpsons Tree House of Horror is good for the holiday. 

If you are looking for some more undiscovered but sinister gems, rent Bubba HoTep. This happens to be my favorite movie.  A geriatric Elvis (Bruce Campbell) and a Black man who thinks he is JFK (Ozzie Davis) battle a mummy in a nursing home.  In the climax, when Ozzie Davis starts his motorized wheel chair in motion to challenge the mummy, well, I still get tears in my eyes.  If you want something with more bite, try Cat People, with marvelous work by Natassja Kinski and Malcom McDowell.  The movie is transformed into a masterpiece by Giorgio Moroder's dense electronic score, which is every bit as good as the soundtrack from Chariots of Fire.  Another good bet is Demon Knight, a tale that pushes all my buttons.  A lone warrior who carries what amounts to the blood of Christ battles to keep a legion of demons from invading the world.  Mortally wounded, he passes his mission to a teenage girl who, like Barabbas, was a thief.  That, I submit, is a story.

If you are drawn to the zombie genre, there is no substitute for George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.  It is not easy to recommend any of the spin-offs, other than the remake Dawn of the Dead (2004).  But I warn you, the latter is a very dark and genuinely scary movie.  Also scary is 28 Days Later, a movie that introduced the fast zombie to the genre.  It's not a true zombie movie, as "the infected" are living human beings who have been turned into proto-zombies by a  rabies-like virus. If you want something cheap and cheesy, try Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972),  a very amateurish drama about a troop of amateur thespians who manage to wake up an army of corpses.  It is a cult classic that I just happened to have watched for the first time tonight. 

Finally, if you are wondering what to order from Netflicks and you are in the mood for something very dark but culturally expanding, you might dip into some Asian horror.  Three excellent choices for All Hallows Eve are Ringu (The Ring), Ju-On (The Grudge), and The Eye.  The first two have American made versions.  Unlike most A-Horror fans, I think the American Ring is as good as the Japanese original, but avoid the English version of  The Grudge.  The Eye, from Hong Kong, is wonderfully produced and acted movie with beautiful cinematography, and it is a deeply moving story.

Happy Halloween.

Lawyers, Sums, and Money

The House healthcare bill, all 1,990 pages of it, has landed in the Republic's lap. I am guessing you could global warming back on track just by burning a few copies of it. Instead, we will burning through a lot more money. Here is one account, from NASDAC:

The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday a U.S. House health-care system re-write would extend health insurance to 96% of the nonelderly U.S. population by 2019, and spend $1.055 trillion to do so.

Penalties imposed on individuals who did not purchase insurance, and employers who did not offer coverage to their workers, would raise $161 billion over that time-frame. That brings the net cost of the bill to $894 billion through 2019, CBO said.

I suppose the new definition of cheap is "under a trillion." But will this policy really be even that cheap? Republicans doubt it, but then, that is their job. From the Washington Post:

Republicans on Capitol Hill are challenging an assertion by House leaders that their new health-care package comes in under President Obama's spending limit of $900 billion over the next decade. The true cost of the measure, the GOP argues, is more than $1 trillion. A House leadership aide dismissed the charge as "GOP spin." But, in this case, the spin is essentially true.

What brings the House bill under a cool trillion is all the money that is expected to come from scofflaws who refuse to buy insurance. That, and big cuts in existing Medicare programs. That's reassuring, except that Congress will never actually make such cuts. The cost of this kind of program is always more, a lot more, than initially projected.

But you don't have to speculate. Just look at the provisions in the bill that are specifically designed to avoid cost control. Here, from Breitbart's Big Government, is one juicy morsel in the bill:

Section 2531, entitled "Medical Liability Alternatives," establishes an incentive program for states to adopt and implement alternatives to medical liability litigation. [But]…… a state is not eligible for the incentive payments if that state puts a law on the books that limits attorneys' fees or imposes caps on damages.

Now it's one thing for Congress to refuse to enact tort reform as part of its healthcare reform. It would save $54 billion over ten years, but whoever pays for healthcare reform, it ain't going to be lawyers. It's another thing to penalize states for trying to enact tort reform on their own. This is a bit more love than trial lawyers probably deserve.

If Congress can't say no to the trial lawyers, who can they say no to? I mean, besides the insurance industry? The idea that this legislation will be cheap or affordable is sheer fantasy.

Postscript on Fox, Feinberg, and the WH

Friend and frequent interlocutor A.I. and I have been arguing about one particular battle in the White House war on Fox News. I am not sure whether it's worth fighting any more on the subject, but it does speak to the question of Fox's accuracy. I recounted the story in this post, with a video clip. Here is my paraphrase of the story as Fox News reported it.

Fox's status as a real network has been confirmed in an unambiguous way, and Fox has the Obama Administration to thank for this. This week the Administration convened the White House Pool, a rotation of five news agencies that report on daily events at the President's house. The pool was to meet with White House "Pay Czar"

Obama's people made it clear that Fox News alone was not welcome. The bureau chiefs of the other four networks met together, and made it clear that unless Fox was included, they weren't coming either. The Administration caved in the face of the unlooked for opposition.

A.I. responded with a link to Talking Points Memo DC:

TPMDC dug into it, and here's what happened.

Feinberg did a pen and pad with reporters to brief them on cutting executive compensation. TV correspondents, as they do with everything, asked to get the comments on camera. Treasury officials agreed and made a list of the networks who asked (Fox was not among them).

But logistically, all of the cameras could not get set up in time or with ease for the Feinberg interview, so they opted for a round robin where the networks use one pool camera. Treasury called the White House pool crew and gave them the list of the networks who'd asked for the interview.

The network pool crew noticed Fox wasn't on the list, was told that they hadn't asked and the crew said they needed to be included. Treasury called the White House and asked top Obama adviser Anita Dunn. Dunn said yes and Fox's Major Garrett was among the correspondents to interview Feinberg last night.

In this account, Fox's exclusion was a mere accident and the other networks weren't defending Fox, they were merely correcting an oversight. In A.I.'s interpretation, Fox was exaggerating and distorting the story to advance its own agenda.

I responded in turn with a New York Times story which, among other things, confirmed Fox's version of the story. A.I. stuck to his guns.

Well, I chanced upon another account of the story, this one by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post. Kurtz is answering questions on a range of topics. Here is one exchange:

The great Fox News freeze-out: Howard, in your Sunday discussion on the White House vs. Fox News, you cited the recent incident where the White House "excluded" Fox News from an interview with the special assistant to the president dealing with executive pay at the companies getting a bailout. You presented it as a case where the administration tried to lock out Fox, yet there are other reports out there stating that the reason Fox wasn't getting an interview was because it didn't initially ask for an individual interview and the Treasury Department (not the White House) used the initial request list to determine who took part in the pool interview. The other networks "rose to Fox's defense" in large part because they knew this was standard procedure and because including Fox made sure the costs for the interview were split between five networks, not just four. The whole thing was supposedly settled in a very short period of time.

Is this true? Why didn't you mention this if it is true in your critique of the "incident?"

Howard Kurtz: I looked into it, checked with other networks, and the consensus was that the Treasury did try to exclude Fox from the round of Ken Feinberg interviews. Plus, Fox says the White House apologized for the incident. The five networks pay for a pool camera, so they have an interest - financial as well as journalistic solidarity - for not wanting any member excluded.

Kurtz account directly contradicts the TPMDC account, and confirms the version reported by Fox and the New York Times. It is possible, of course, that TPM has it right and the other three sources have it wrong. But the evidence surely leans the other way.

The truth of the matter is that, whatever biases Fox News may have, it is very careful and responsible when it comes to getting the facts right on its straight news programs. It has to be. For that reason it has been very difficult for Fox's enemies and critics to demonstrate exaggerations or distortions in its reporting. Being the only conservative leaning major network, and having lots of enemies, has its advantages.

To Surge or Not to Surge, that is the Question

The Pennsylvania Avenue Hamlet will, sooner or later, decide what his Afghanistan strategy is going to be. It seems unlikely that he will pull out altogether, so he is apparently trying to decide when he will decide whether to insert the troops that his handpicked general thinks are necessary, or, probably, insert some but not all of the requested reinforcements and announce a new strategy that makes sense of the decision.

I can't quite think of anything like this in recent history. To be sure, the President needs to make such a decision carefully. But to leave everyone hanging, month after month, while our troops are fighting and dying on Afghanistan's plains, does not inspire confidence.

The U.S. is expected to provide world leadership. Where else would it come from? The President right now is in danger of losing confidence among our allies. Here is the London Times:

It is now two months since General Stanley McCrystal, the commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan, told President Obama that a surge of at least 40,000 troops was required for the international mission in that country to succeed. Mr Obama is not obliged to follow his recommendation, but he is obliged to do something other than sit on his own hands. "I will never rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm's way," Mr Obama told the military, in a speech this week. This is not an unattractive sentiment. There is deliberation, nonetheless, and then there is dragging one's feet.

Now is not a time for a president to dither. Yesterday, a Taleban suicide squad stormed a United Nations guesthouse in Kabul, leaving six international staff dead and nine injured. The Taleban do not carry out such attacks at random. They understand well the context in which they act, and do so in order to sway a decision that they believe can be swayed.

And here is Der Spiegel:

The world has been waiting for clear words from the White House for months. Obama has had government and military analysts studying the military and political situation in the embattled Hindu Kush region since early January. He appointed Richard Holbrooke, probably the US's most effective diplomat in crisis situations, to be his special envoy to the "AfPak" region, he has replaced generals and he has deployed more troops. The answers Obama asked his experts to provide after taking office have been sitting on his desk for a long time.

There is no doubt that hardly a day passes in Europe without criticism of US policy. This has become a trans-Atlantic ritual. But despite this ritual, Europeans are still looking for one thing from the White House: leadership.

We're waiting, Mr. President.

Well, we are all waiting: Americans, Europe, our troops in the field, and the Taliban. But so far Hamlet is making lots of good speeches, but he isn't doing anything. This is looking like a pattern. It is eroding the President's respect among allies and enemies alike.

Election 09 Report

Two governor's seats will be awarded on Tuesday, in Virginia and New Jersey. An unusual amount of attention is focused on these two races. The reason is that they are the first real test of political climate change. Almost a year ago a lot of people were writing obituaries for the Republican Party. That was not completely silly. Two elections do not a realignment make, but they surely could have been the beginning of a strong and long lasting realignment toward the Democratic Party. What a difference eleven months make!

Virginia Projection

The Republican candidate in Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell, looks poised to crush the Democrat, Creigh Deeds. Less attention has been paid to the Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General races. Republican candidates seem likely to take both of those seats by similar margins.

Virginia Tea Leaves

Virginia has been moving left in recent elections. Democrats have held the State House for a decade, and Barack Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state in 45 years. The President has been vigorously campaigning there for Deeds. A Republican sweep of the top three offices will look like a resurrection for the Virginia GOP. Republicans will spin the election as a referendum on Obama and the Democratic Congress. Democrats, and the White House in particular, have written it off as a lost cause. Their spin: Deeds ran a bad campaign and ran away from the President.

New Jersey Projection

Incumbent Jon Corzine has been trailing Republican Chris Christie for most of the year, but in some recent polls Corzine now has a small lead. If the Quinnipiac poll is right, Corzine will win by a small but comfortable margin. If Rasmussen and PPP are right, Christie will squeak out a victory. The wild card is independent candidate Chris Daggett. Daggett can't win, but he may get 10% of the vote. The question is how big his margin is and whose voters he takes. I don't know which way to call this one, but I predict a narrow victory for Christie. Why? Because if I am right I will look smart, and if I am wrong, I will be funny.

New Jersey Tea Leaves

If the Republican does win in New Jersey, that will be very hard news for the Democrats. The GOP will spin a story of shifting tides and a spendthrift President and Congress alienating their own base. Democrats will argue that Corzine did better than Deeds because he ran left and supported the President. That same Democratic spin will work a lot better and be a lot more fun if Corzine survives. Republicans will say that Corzine once again bought an election by spending a lot of his own money, which will be true. Still, he bought it fair and square.

Summary

If Virginia goes as expected the day will belong to the Republicans. Virginia has been one of the most watched states in recent elections. Republican presidential candidates can't win without it. If Christie wins in New Jersey, it won't mean much for the long term. Republicans have no future in that state. But it will put big wind in the sails of the party nationally. If Corzine holds on, it will feed the Democratic narrative that the Party can be successful if only it holds true to its basic principles. That might be the message that saves the party, and it might be the message that wrecks it.

Chimpanzees in the Mirror

Consider this my first Halloween Post. There have been a couple of well publicized chimpanzee attacks in the U.S. in recent years. A man was mauled in an animal shelter in California by two teen age chimps, and earlier this year a woman was attacked by her friend's pet chimpanzee. Both attacks were extremely brutal, and the more recent one was fatal.

There is a very real horror story in this photograph. We see a happy family: St. James Davis, his wife, and Moe, a chimpanzee they raised from infancy. It was not Moe that attack Davis, but two other chimps in the animal shelter where Moe lived after animal control authorities decided he was too dangerous to keep in a residential neighborhood. It is pretty clear that the older of the attackers saw Davis' visit to Moe as an alliance that was a threat to his alpha status.

To anyone who knows much about them (I know a little), Chimpanzees are fascinating and frightening creatures. They are not people, and people who don't understand this sometimes come to grief for it. But they are more like us, and we like them, than either species is similar to any other.

Like us, Chimpanzees fight wars. Their sole strategy (so far observed) is to penetrate the territory of a rival group, isolate an individual, and them stomp him to death. Oh, and biting off the targets genitals (always the target is male) is a favorite moment. As forests in chimpanzee territories have been logged, chimps groups are being forced into the territory of other groups, thus increasing the incidence of war. Right now, the chimpanzees may be killing each other faster than humans are killing them.

Like us, Chimpanzees also hunt. They do so not for any real need, but more for entertainment and for political reasons. Sharing meat is one way to cement alliances with other chimps. Their favorite prey is the red colobus monkey, which they hunt in well organized teams and with rather sophisticated strategies. Advanced hunters will take advanced positions while the rest of the group funnels the fleeing monkeys toward them. The preferred target is a female with an infant. She is slower and has to keep one limb holding on to her baby. The infant is the easy meat. When they catch a monkey, they eat it alive. Here is a clip of a Chimpanzee hunt. 

Watch Chimps hunting monkeys as a team.wmv in Educational  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

But here is where the real horror comes in. Chimps in Uganda have discovered that there is a slower primate to prey upon. From the London Times:

At least eight children have died in the past seven years in Uganda and Tanzania after being taken by chimpanzees, and a further eight injured. The children were found with limbs and other parts of their bodies chewed off.

In one of the most recent attacks Jackson Alikiriza, a three-month-old baby, was snatched as he was being carried by his mother, Anet, while she harvested potatoes.

Mrs Alikiriza fled when she saw a chimp approaching, but could not outrun the animal. She said: "It grabbed my leg and I fell. Then it took my baby."

By the time help was summoned and the chimp was chased away by a man armed with a spear the baby's nose and upper lip had been eaten away. He died a week later.

This is real horror. It is typical chimpanzee behavior. We are modified chimpanzees.

I love chimpanzees. They tell us a lot about ourselves. I would like to think that their species will survive, but I don't think that it is. Stories of chimpanzees preying of human infants won't help their case.

Violence is much less common in modern civilizations than it was in any earlier period of human history. A male in any contemporary society is much less likely to die by violence than would have been true at any previous point in our past, and that is true even with all the deaths in all the modern wars combined. It gets worse the farther back you go. It might be a good thing to keep this in mind, and do whatever we can to make sure it continues. Chimpanzees provide a useful reminder.

Happy Halloween.

Clobbered News Network

The New York Times reports that CNN has hit the basement floor. Hat tip to intrepid reader George Mason.

CNN, which invented the cable news network more than two decades ago, will hit a new competitive low with its prime-time programs in October, finishing fourth – and last – among the cable news networks with the audience that all the networks rely on for their advertising.

Individually, the CNN shows were beaten resoundingly by all the Fox News programs, but also lost to all of the MSNBC programs, including a repeat of Keith Olbermann's 8 p.m. edition of "Countdown," which beat the 10 p.m. hour of CNN's signature prime-time program, "Anderson Cooper 360."

For the month, CNN averaged 202,000 viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 – the group that television news organizations use as their basis of success because of their advertising sales. That was far behind the dominant leader, Fox News, which averaged 689,000. But it also trailed MSNBC, which had 250,000 viewers in that group and HLN, which had 221,000.

Now that is about as bad as bad news gets for a TV network. When your "signature" prime time show gets beat by a two hour old rerun on the second place network, well… CNN's decline has been precipitous. By contrast, Fox News' dominance continues to be amazing. Fox is drawing more views than the next three networks combined.

All this calls for some explanation. The Times thoughtfully provides one:

The results demonstrate once more the apparent preference of viewers for opinion-oriented shows from the news networks in prime time.

That would provide a little emotional comfort to CNN: we are dying because we are more virtuous. Except that it isn't true.

At 7 p.m. CNN's host, Lou Dobbs was fourth, barely beaten by Jane Velez Mitchell on HLN, 166,000 to 162,000. The big winner was Shepard Smith on Fox with 465,000 viewers. Second was Chris Matthews and "Hardball" on MSNBC, with 179,000 viewers.

Shepard Smith's show is a traditional news hour, presenting a series of stories from the day's news. Lou Dobbs and Chris Matthews are "opinion-oriented" if anyone is. Dobbs, in fact, is on the other side of Glen Beck. But Shepard Smith still draws more than twice as many viewers as both shows combined.

Why do people watch cable news in prime time? They watch it because they don't want to watch what is offered on the main networks (mostly non-news programming) or the non-news content of cable. Among that news hungry crowd, Fox is cleaning up.

SDP Report

Thanks to all our readers and commenters.  We are getting well over a thousand page views a day and that is very good for a blog of this nature.  I think it has a lot to do with the quality of comments that our readers leave.  I love all of you and I welcome your participation.  I read every comment, and if I can't respond to every one, that is a sign of mortality and not a sign of lack of interest. 

The War against Fox Explained

Fox News is not only a real news network, it is the only news network that is singularly necessary in today's media environment. If you don't believe me, ask the New York Times.

I often rake the Gray Lady over the coals and for good reason. The Times has been guilty of a lot of embarrassingly partisan and irresponsible journalism. But it is not without redeeming qualities, one of which is that is it quite capable of being embarrassed.

Consider Public Editor Clark Hoyt's mea culpa for the Times' tardiness in picking up the ACORN story. The whole thing is worth reading, but this is the best paragraph, out of several describing letters to the Paper of Record:

Here's an example, from Leigh Allen of San Francisco, who said she relies on The Times to keep her informed: "I often don't hear about the latest conflict until I read a Facebook rant from an old high school friend or talk on the phone with my mother (both in conservative Orange County, Calif.). It's embarrassing not to be able to respond with facts when I hadn't even heard about the issue." Michele Cusack of Novato, Calif., said that when someone asked if she had heard the latest about Acorn, "I had to answer 'no' because I get all my news from The New York Times."

It seems to me that that last sentence is damning for the country's most famous paper: I didn't know what was going on because I read the New York Times. In fact, you wouldn't have known if you relied on the rest of the mainstream media. But you knew if you watched Fox or keep in contact with an old high school friend who watches Fox.  Anyway, at least the New York Times has concluded that it has a problem. 

It is this fact that motivated the Obama Administration's decision to go to war against Fox. Jim Rutenberg at the NYTs has this:

Late last month, the senior White House adviser David Axelrod and Roger Ailes, chairman and chief executive of Fox News, met in an empty Palm steakhouse before it opened for the day, neutral ground secured for a secret tête-à-tête.

An attempted rapprochement! However:

By the following weekend, officials at the White House had decided that if anything, it was time to take the relationship to an even more confrontational level. The spur: Executives at other news organizations, including The New York Times, had publicly said that their newsrooms had not been fast enough in following stories that Fox News, to the administration's chagrin, had been heavily covering through the summer and early.

The rest of the news networks were realizing that Fox was consistently scooping them. In other words, it wasn't Fox and its stories, exactly, that the Administration was worried about. It was that the other networks might be forced to drop the protection that they had so far provided to Obama and Company. They might start covering stories as soon as they appeared on Fox or, horrors, actually start doing such stories on their own. That is why the Administration went to war against Fox News.

Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of mostly liberal columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, Mr. Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about the network, according to people briefed on the conversation.

That is the sort of room in which Barack Obama is comfortable: one in which everyone loves him and vows to protect him. Except, I'd keep an eye on Maureen Dowd. She's unpredictable.

It is also clear from the Rutenberg article that Fox's account of the Feinberg incident was fair and balanced.

In a sign of discomfort with the White House stance, Fox's television news competitors refused to go along with a Treasury Department effort on Tuesday to exclude Fox from a round of interviews with the executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg that was to be conducted with a "pool" camera crew shared by all the networks. That followed a pointed question at a White House briefing this week by Jake Tapper, an ABC News correspondent, about the administration's treatment of "one of our sister organizations."

The Administration tried to exclude Fox from the circle of "real" news networks, and the other networks, acting responsibly, defended their "sister organization."

Barack Obama set out to marginalize and neuter a network that did not report the news to his liking. Though we can now understand the strategy, it still looks stupid. The actual result was to confirm Fox's status as a legitimate news organization and, I suspect, to make it more visible and influential that ever before. Fox is not only real it is indispensible, at least if you care about a free press.

It’s a Swine of the Times

Well, the President may be dithering over Afghanistan, but he is not dithering over the H1N1 pandemic. From RealClearPolitics:

President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, giving his health chief the power to let hospitals move emergency rooms offsite to speed treatment and protect noninfected patients.

No doubt the fringe elements among the President's critics will see this as another step in the establishment of a police state. As for me, the extension of the government's powers to pay hospitals for tents more than three hundred yards away from the hospital doors is very low on my list of concerns. I am more concerned that the distance from the hospital doors makes a difference.

It's hard to blame the President for wanting to get out in front of this one, and he pretty much has to take the most authoritative medical advice he can get. But when you step back and look at this thing, it's hard to see why the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control are treating it as a global emergency.

Health authorities say more than 1,000 people in the United States, including almost 100 children, have died from the strain of flu known as H1N1, and 46 states have widespread flu activity.

Well, that sounds pretty serious, doesn't it? But then there is this bit:

"Many millions" of Americans have had swine flu so far, according to an estimate that CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden gave Friday. The government doesn't test everyone to confirm swine flu so it doesn't have an exact count. He also said there have been more than 20,000 hospitalizations.

Well, they don't really know how many hospitalizations and deaths are from swine flu and how many are from non-swine flu, do they? Meanwhile, how do these numbers compare to the garden variety types of flu that sweep the nation every year? The CDC has this:

CDC estimated that about 36,000 people died of seasonal flu-related causes each year, on average, during the 1990s in the United States. This figure includes people dying from complications of seasonal flu. This estimate came from a 2003 study published in the Journal of the American Medication Association (JAMA), which looked at the 1990-91 through the 1998-99 flu seasons [10]. Statistical modeling was used to estimate how many flu-related deaths occurred among people whose underlying cause of death on their death certificate was listed as a respiratory or circulatory disease. During these years, the number of estimated deaths ranged from 17,000 to 52,000.

Michael Fumento points out that WHO did a very strange thing when it declared an H1N1 pandemic:

When the sacrosanct World Health Organization (WHO) made its official declaration in June, we were 11 weeks into the outbreak, and swine flu had only killed 144 people worldwide — the same number who die of seasonal flu worldwide every few hours. The mildest pandemics of the 20th century killed at least a million people worldwide. And even after six months, swine flu has killed about as many people as the seasonal flu does every six days.

In order to justify the pandemic label, WHO eliminated severity (large numbers of deaths and illnesses) as a criterion.

That's also how we can have a "pandemic" when six months of epidemiological data show swine flu to be far milder than the seasonal variety. New York City statistics show it to be perhaps a 10th as lethal.

In Australia and New Zealand, flu season has ended, and almost all cases have been swine flu. Yet even without a vaccine, these countries are reporting fewer flu deaths than normal. (In New Zealand, that's just 18 confirmed deaths compared with 400 normally.) Swine flu is causing negative deaths! The best explanation is that infection with the milder strain (swine flu) is inoculating against the more severe strain (seasonal flu) it has displaced.

If Fumento's account is accurate, the reaction of public health agencies is altogether disproportionate to the threat. That matters, because we all have to trust these people to get it about right, most of the time. Crying wolf when all you are faced with one of the lesser pigs will make it all the harder to mobilize the public when and if the wolf actually shows up.

I don't know what's going on here, but I know this: the ability to rationally evaluate a health threat, which means above all to put it in context, is fundamental to an effective public health regime. Just right now it is hard to see that the CDC and WHO have such an ability.

Fox News Gets Real

When I first joined the faculty at Northern, I enjoyed the company of a couple of old school liberals. These guys were uncompromising leftists, of various degrees, but they were scrupulously respectful of people like me. I never heard them suggest that the conservative position was illegitimate.

The American left has changed. When thousands of people show up at town hall meetings or the U.S. capital to criticize their elected representatives, these aren't real people. They aren't real citizens showing up to express their opinions. They are astroturfed people! Only anti-war rallies, hostile to a Republican administration, are real.

When one cable news network is slanted to the right, instead of reflexively solicitous of a Democratic administration, this isn't a real news network! It's Fox.

The President and the left in general have every right and reason to criticize Fox News and its culture. But in claiming that Fox News isn't a real news network, they discredit themselves. Fox adheres as well or better than the other networks to the standards of responsible journalism. It is far less often embarrassed by getting the facts wrong is less prone to fall for partisan canards. It doesn't try to spike stories that depart from some party line agenda. If it is biased in one direction, it is hardly more so than the other major networks in the other direction.

But Fox's status as a real network has been confirmed in an unambiguous way, and Fox has the Obama Administration to thank for this. This week the Administration convened the White House Pool, a rotation of five news agencies that report on daily events at the President's house. The pool was to meet with White House "Pay Czar"

Obama's people made it clear that Fox News alone was not welcome. The bureau chiefs of the other four networks met together, and made it clear that unless Fox was included, they weren't coming either. The Administration caved in the face of the unlooked for opposition.

This was an unlooked for moment of backbone and professional responsibility. If Fox News is banned for not toeing the Administration line, that is a threat to all the news agencies. It's one thing to reflexively protect Obama. It is another for the Obama to lay down the law to any network, even Fox.

The Obama Administration's behavior is outrageous. The President does not get to decide how the press will behavior, or what kind of stories it will publish. This incident makes it perfectly clear that Fox News is a "real" news network. If anyone has the right to decide that question, it is the community of news networks. By that standard, Fox has been confirmed.

The confirmation came in a way that is very happy for a free republic. Democratic governments need a free and vigorous opposition. Only Fox News consistently provides that. It is a bad mark on Obama and his team and his legion of defenders that they refuse to acknowledge this.

The White House Enemies List

If you Google the coinage "Richard Milhous Obama" you get a lot of hits. President Nixon was famous for, among other things, having a enemies list. President Obama seems to have no problem with a five o'clock shadow, but he does have his own enemies list.

The health insurer Humana got on it this way:

The government is investigating a major insurance company for allegedly trying to scare seniors with a mailer warning they could lose important benefits under health care legislation in Congress.

One might have thought that even an insurance company could send a letter expressing a particular political opinion without being investigated for that.

The health insurance industry as a whole is now on it for sponsoring a report arguing that the Baucus plan would lead to increased premiums for most Americans who now have health insurance. The Administration responded to the heinous act of doing a study by threatening punitive legislation.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is on it for, well, being the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Fox News, however, seems to be occupying the position of enemy number one. The White House has waged a public campaign against Fox. A number of Administration officials have openly declared that Fox News isn't a real news agency. The Administration also seems to be boycotting Fox. This is less serious than the sort of legislative threats and investigations that insurers have to worry about, but it is serious nonetheless.

Fox News is biased. Its straight news programming is clearly slanted in favor of conservative positions and Republicans in general. The Fox panels are usually stacked about three to one with conservative and liberal pundits respectively. Its opinion shows, with the likes of Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Shawn Hannity, are clearly conservative shows.

That said, Fox is no more biased than the major news networks. Consider that curing the recent election campaign the New York Times ran a piece suggesting that John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist. The piece was utterly without foundation, and the Times was duly embarrassed. But the Times couldn't be bothered to investigate credible, and as it turns out, true rumors about John Edward's love child. CNN recently fact checked a Saturday Night Live routine poking fun at President Obama, for which they were justly skewered by John Stewart. The fact is that all the major networks, along with the public networks, are biased in favor of Democrats and the Left.

I am a conservative, but I have long read more left-center periodicals than conservative ones. I know what the conservative ones are going to say, and I prefer to be challenged by the sensible left (the New Republic) and occasionally even the Twilight Zone left (Harpers). But when it comes to daily TV news, I watch Fox.

The reason is simply that Fox News is more reliable. When I compare Fox reporting with that of any TV news outlet, or news magazine, or newspaper, Fox usually presents more interesting information and more points of view. More importantly, I can't think of one major story that Fox missed but the other networks picked up on. I can think of several that would never have seen the light of day had not Fox gone after them.

That, of course, is why Fox is on the President's enemies list. With Fox around, he can't count on getting away with as much. Fox runs circles around other cable news networks, and speaks to a large portion of America, including a lot of independent voters. When the President boycotts Fox, he is writing off a lot of Americans. So much for his promise to be a uniter rather than a divider.

Fiscal Madhouse 2

My friend and fond interlocutor, A.I. has this to say about my previous Fiscal Madhouse post:

If being conservative has some connection with being Republican and managing debt is supposed to be the forte of both, history doesn't bear that out. Here are the stats on public debt under Republican and Democratic administrations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms. They may just indicate Republicans have borrowed attempting to buy prosperity while Democrats have borrowed to build self-sustaining economies. I'm not sure if that is a thought or liberal regurgitation, but it will have to do for now.

I think that rather proves my point. The nation is driving toward a fiscal precipice, Thelma and Louise style, and A.I. want to argue about whose fault it is. Maybe we should figure out where the breaks are first?

Not to doubt Wikipedia, I went to the CBO. Here is an interesting chart..

This presents Federal Debt as a percentage of GDP. Now look at the two dotted lines on the right of the chart. Those are two projections of the debt into the future. Both see the public debt climbing with time. That means that no one in Congress or the White House has any plans for reducing the public debt or halting its growth up to at least 2035.

But also notice that one line is a lot more alarming than the other. If it is what happens, then public debt will approach 200% of the GDP in about 30 years.  Two hundred percent.

Now: what's the difference between the two. The lower line represents what happens if Congress keeps all the promises it is making or has made in the past to cut spending in the future. The latter shows what happens if Congress instead behaves like it has always behaved.

For example, suppose Medicare reimbursements to physicians are cut as current law requires? That, among other provisions in current law, gives you the lower line. But suppose Congress continues to wave the cuts, as it has always done in the past? That gives you the upper line.

Well, what did the Senate just do? While the Baucus plan projects the cuts that have never happened yet in order to appear fiscally sound, Senator Debbie Stabenow was busy restoring the money in a separate bill.

So you tell me which line is the realistic one. This is five kinds of crackers.  Is there any realistic way of paying this down without a major blow to American prosperity?  I doubt it.  But right now neither the Congress nor the White House are paying the slightest attention.  

A Culture of Corruption

Corruption at the top of a political party gets the lion's share of attention. If you don't believe me, ask the lion of Harlem, Charlie Rangel. Corruption at the bottom often goes undetected, but it is far more pervasive, far more debilitating institutionally, and usually has much worse consequences for a lot more ordinary people.

The recent scandal involving ACORN was an unusual case in so far as a culture of corruption was exposed in a way that made for a flamboyant story. But now comes a story of a much more concrete and bitter kind of corruption, and I am guessing, one that will get a lot less attention.

The Washington Post runs Debbie Cenziper's "Staggering Need, Striking Neglect" in its Sunday edition. It is an appalling read.

In a city ravaged by the highest rate of AIDS cases in the nation, the D.C. Health Department paid millions to nonprofit groups that delivered substandard services or failed to account for any work at all, even as sick people searched for care or died waiting.

More than $1 million in AIDS money went to a housing group whose ailing boarders sometimes struggled without electricity, gas or food. A supervisor said she was ordered to create records for ghost employees.

About $400,000 was paid to a nonprofit organization, launched by a man who once ran one of the District's largest cocaine rings, for a promised job-training center that has never opened.

More than $500,000 was earmarked for a housing program whose executive director had a string of convictions for theft, drugs and forgery. After the D.C. Inspector General's Office could find no evidence that he was operating an AIDS nonprofit group, the city terminated the grant but never sought repayment.

All told, the Health Department's HIV/AIDS Administration awarded more than $25 million from 2004 to 2008 to nonprofit agencies marked by questionable spending, a lack of clients, or lapses in record-keeping and care, a 10-month Washington Post investigation found. Many of the groups have since closed or are no longer providing AIDS services.

That's just the first five paragraphs in a rather long article. But it presents a pretty good summary of what follows. Allow me to boil it down a little more: $25 million was went to organizations that were essentially fraudulent, and provided little if any benefits to the sick and needy. Meanwhile, honest and legitimate organizations have had to cut back services for lack of funding. What does that mean in human terms?

Renee Paige, 50, once threw birthday parties for her two daughters in her apartment in Southeast Washington, where she'd cook beef stew for elderly neighbors and always had bus fare for a friend. But AIDS and two bouts of pneumonia had left her weak, homeless and unable to care for herself.

She came to a community meeting in April after spending the night on a park bench in heavy rain, with no place to go. "I have AIDS," she told the group, "and I am soaking wet."

Weeks later, she died alone, on the bench, one mile from the HIV/AIDS Administration and within two miles of a dozen nonprofit groups that help people with AIDS.

That's what corruption means. It means Renee Paige died on a bench, a mile from the Office that was supposed to help her.

Cenziper lays out, in disgusting detail, the dysfunctional history of the D.C. HIV/AIDS Administration. A few things stand out. One is that an awful lot of the people who ran the Administration itself and the numerous "nonprofit agencies" had no obvious qualifications other than a history of criminality. Consider the case of Debra Rowe, the D.C. HIV/AIDS Administration Housing chief.

Rowe had rebuilt her life after a troubled past, like others in the city's network of AIDS workers. In 1991, when Rowe was 31, she was convicted of heroin possession and cocaine distribution, serving 15 months in prison. Months after her release, Rowe's husband, who had been convicted in a separate case of felony drug distribution, was shot and killed on U Street NW, records show.

Rowe later received a master's degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and joined the HIV/AIDS Administration in 1999. In 2004, she was promoted to run the $10 million-a-year AIDS housing program, funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Rowe enjoyed what the Left calls "authenticity": heroin, prison, and a master's degree. That, and five years on the job, qualified her to run a $10 million-a-year program. She ran it into the ground.

Like most cities, D.C. is monolithically Democratic. There is no Republican Party to complain about misspent millions. So it is left to the press. The WaPo did its job. But how many more such stories are waiting for the New York Times and other national newspapers?

Dunn Conundrum

Well, Glenn Beck continues to score points against Obama Administration apparatchiks, if only because the later seem to go about pointing to the big red targets on their chests. In case anyone doesn't know it, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who has taken point in one war the Obama Administration isn't conflicted about, against Fox News, said some interesting things about Mao Tse-tung. Apparently giving some kind of pep talk earlier this year, she said this:

The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Theresa -- not often coupled with each other, but the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is 'you're going to make choices; you're going to challenge; you're going to say why not; you're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before.

And this:

In 1947, when Mao Tse Tung was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai‑shek and the Nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side. And people said, "How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this against all of the odds against you?" And Mao Tse Tung said, you know, "You fight your war, and I'll fight mine."

Now I think it is silly to suggest that Ms. Dunn ought to resign over this. Saying something painfully stupid, especially when she didn't seem to be acting in her official capacity, is not usually a firing offense. Give enough speeches, write enough blog posts, and sooner or later you will discover that you have done it.

But it was painfully stupid. To begin with, whatever Mother Theresa and Mao were, they weren't political philosophers. I remember when George W. was asked to name his favorite political philosopher, and he named Jesus. Christ wasn't a political philosopher either. Bush didn't escape criticism, and neither should Ms. Dunn.

And it doesn't help to claim that she got the comparison from Bush 41 advisor Lee Atwater or to say, as some of her defenders have said, that a strategist for Barry Goldwater once claimed to follow Mao's guidance. It was a dumb thing for anyone on either side to do.

Mao Tse-tung was the most prolific and monstrous mass murderer in the history of prolific and monstrous mass murderers. In raw numbers, neither Hitler nor Stalin can compete. He was probably responsible for the death of almost, and perhaps more than, a hundred million people. During the "Great Leap Forward," he caused the starvation of tens of millions. His personal physician recounted that Mao would eat turtle soup and listen to glowing reports of economic progress, while just outside his window the streets were lined with corpses. During the "Cultural Revolution" he set virtually every one of his subjects against every other, creating a horror such as the world may never have known before or since.

Now it's true that Mao was effectively ambitious, and it's logically possible to admire his ambition and some of his talents apart from the fact that he was a monster. But for purposes of rhetoric, this is a very bad idea. Imagine if George W. Bush had spoken admirably of the executive efficiency and fiscal management of Francisco Franco! This just isn't the best way to go about inspiring people. Besides, it risks sending some very bad messages.

Ms. Dunn spoke the way she did because she suffers from the common blindness of the Left when it comes to "progressives" like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. But that's okay. She only the White House Communications Director.

Fiscal Madhouse Run by Inmates

The chief concern of the United States Congress for most of the past year has been whether the Federal Government should enter the insurance business. While we have been thus at loggerheads over the public option, the Federal deficit for this year alone has swelled beyond the imagination of economists. From the New York Times:

The Obama administration said Friday that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was $1.4 trillion, nearly a trillion dollars greater than the year before and the largest shortfall relative to the size of the economy since 1945.

The shortfall for the fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30, translates to 10 percent of the economy, according to a joint statement from the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter R. Orszag. For the 2008 fiscal year, the deficit of $459 billion was 3.2 percent of the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product.

Economists generally agree that annual deficits should not exceed 3 percent of the G.D.P., and that is the level President Obama had vowed to reach by the end of his first term in 2013.

Allow me to ask a couple of questions. Is there any realistic prospect that these astronomical deficits can be paid off? And if not, what then are we facing? I doubt that anyone knows the answer to either question, but that is not reassuring.

So what is Congress and the White House bending their minds and wills to? Creating a new, gargantuan, public welfare program. We were told at the outset that we had to address the healthcare system in order to get our fiscal house in order. Then we got to see what Congress actually had in mind. The House plan would add hundreds of billions to the deficit. The Senate's Baucus plan is nominally revenue neutral, but it is now clear that that is a shell game. Revenues are front loaded to make the first ten years look like a fiscal wash, but even that is a canard. Savings that balance the Baucus books are just spent in parallel bills. Cuts in Medicare that the CBO scoring includes are the kind of cuts that Congress has never been able to make in the past.

If Congress and the President were to pay attention to fiscal realities, what might they do? Tony Blankley has a thought.

Here's a thought: As shrinking the unsustainable deficit is a critical pre-requisite for a healthy economy, why not just enact the $400 billion of Medicare cuts and $400 billion of health insurance tax increases [included in the Baucus Bill] - thereby reducing the 10-year deficit by about $1 trillion (when you count reduced interest payments) - but don't provide the new entitlement benefits that were the purpose of the bill.

Helping the uninsured might be a nice notion some day, but the first priority now is to avoid permanently destroying our economic capacity - as we are rapidly doing - by the insanity of adding to entitlement programs while the dollar begins to fail and the CBO predicts we will never recover from the current debt and deficit level. So cut the 10-year deficit by that almost $1 trillion.

That's the kind of thing you might think of doing if you were concerned about

Polls show that Americans are most concerned with the economy. Healthcare reform is a very distant concern. The Democrats are all about healthcare reform, and seem to regard the economic fortunes of the Republic as a minor annoyance. What is the President's big idea just now? Since Social Security recipients aren't going to get a cost of living increase, because the cost of living hasn't increased, President Obama wants to give every old person $250. Well, what's another $14 billion among friends?

The inmates are in charge of the asylum.

The truth about medicare cuts

The Baucus Bill accounting involves big cuts in Medicare spending.  So what is Congress doing right now?  See Mickey Kaus for the grim details:

Mickey's Assignment Desk: Senate Dems quietly move a bill to countermand a 21% cut in Medicare fees for doctors, which will add $247 billion to the deficit over ten years. Of course, the Baucus health care reform bill achieves its famed deficit neutrality through cuts in Medicare fees, mainly to non-physicians--saving (by my reading of the CBO analysis) at least $184 billion from Medicare over the same period. Plus there is a special panel set up to recommend further cuts.

Jonathan Cohn and Ezra Klein might productively explain a) Why this isn't a shell game, with Dems granting Medicare increases in one bill and then taking ostentatious credit for partly-offsetting cuts in a separate bill; b) Why Congress' unwillingness to put up with the scheduled Medicare doctors' cuts this year doesn't indicate that it won't put up with scheduled cuts in future years--that, as Megan McArdle among others argues, the projected Medicare cuts in Baucus' bill simply won't happen. ...

P.S.: I'm still for health care reform, of course, even if the accounting that scores it as deficit neutral proves to be a fantasy. We make the mess now. We make it work and pay for it later. Stuff the beast!  If it turns out that to get the reform passed Dems have to resort to a shell game--with phony peas to boot--well, just keep it between us, OK?. ...

Norwegians & Russians, Prizes & Bad Policies

The Nobel Committee has been somewhat rattled by the reaction to their recent award, and has for a second time publically explained why President Obama deserved the peace prize. From the Politico:

Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee defended their decision to award this year's Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama. Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland told AP, "We simply disagree that he has done nothing. He got the prize for what he has done."

Jagland cited Obama's outreach to the Muslim world and the way the president "modified" a Bush-era proposal for an anti-missile shield in Europe as two key accomplishments.

That's two items. The first part continues a pattern that is well-established in the short history of this Administration: a confusion of sentiment with action. I have noted that, in his speech before the U.N., the President himself presented his decision to close the Guantánamo Bay prison as one of his achievements. I noted that the New York Times repeated his language in their defense of the President.

I also noted that the President had done no more than state a decision to close it. He has not in fact closed it, nor is there any indication yet of a coherent plan to close it. Maybe one will eventually materialize, but in the meantime a pious intention does not count as an achievement. To state boldly that it does, as the President and the Times both did, confuses mere words with deeds.

Something of the same is true of the President's "outreach to the Muslim world." To be sure, the President is talking nice. Perhaps his rhetoric is different from that of the previous Administration, and perhaps the fact that he is saying it, and not Bush, means a lot more. But granting that, has the President really proposed anything concrete that has promise of bring the two worlds together? It is difficult to see any real movement on any actual issue. Like the Times, the Nobel Committee can't seem to see the difference between pious words and effective actions.

By contrast, the President's decision to abandon our promise to include Poland and the Czech Republic under NATO's anti-missile defenses was a real deed. It effectively undermined the confidence of these central European nations that they are really part of NATO. See Ms. Flint's post on this topic. Does that advance the cause of world peace?

Well, it might have, conceivably, if it had resulted in a change in Russian policy toward Iran. The Russians have been one of two big obstacles to effective international sanctions against Iran (the other being China). If the Russians had come around, that would have been at least some substantial progress on dissuading Iran from its nuclear ambitions.

Well, now we know how that is working out. From the New York Times:

Denting President Obama's hopes for a powerful ally in his campaign to press Iran on its nuclear program, Russia's foreign minister [Sergey V. Lavrov] said Tuesday that threatening Tehran now with harsh new sanctions would be "counterproductive."…

Mr. Lavrov's resistance was striking given that, just three weeks before, President Dmitri A. Medvedev said that "in some cases, sanctions are inevitable." American officials had hailed that statement as a sign that Russia was finally coming around to the Obama administration's view that Iran is best handled with diplomacy backed by a credible threat of sanctions.

Now those two paragraphs alone tell the story of a foreign policy failure. The President left two young democracies feeling as though they had been betrayed and sold to the Russians. From Yahoo News:

"Betrayal! The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back," the Polish tabloid Fakt declared on its front page.

It is clear that the Administration what it thought it was getting out of this sale. Of course, Nobel prizes are not given for advancing national interests. But did giving the Russians the gift of more leverage over Central Europe advance the cause of world peace? Did the failure to move the world toward real pressures against a nuclear Iran really earn our President a Peace Prize? That the Nobel Committee thinks so is a sign of moral rot.

Scoring the Baucus Bill

From Meagan McArdle at Atlantic:

The CBO projects $180 billion in "gross cost" of the coverage expansion--i.e., what the government will spend on Medicaid and SCHIP expansions, operating the exchanges, and subsidizing the purchase of standardized policies therein.  It turns out that about $58 billion, or just about one third of that cost, is being paid for by expecting employers to substantially lower their costs and pass through all the savings to their employees, who then pay taxes on them.

As revenue-raising mechanisms go, this is pretty indirect.  And with so many links in the chain, you can see lots of places where this could go wrong.  What if employers just cut their costs and don't raise their employees wages, because they're in a dying unionized industry?  What if they shift workers to other forms of tax-deferred compensation, like 401(k) matching or HSAs?  What if smart lawyers figure out a way to structure health plans to avoid the tax?  What if all the people who leave employer insurance for the exchange, or have their benefits cut, are low wage workers with low marginal tax rates?

Conservatives complained for a long time that, in calculating the cost of tax cuts, the CBO didn't take into account any of the dynamic effects.  If you cut taxes, people have more to spend, and spending generates economic growth and hence more taxes. 

Maybe conservatives shouldn't complain now that the CBO is suddenly in love with dynamic effects.  But why the change of heart?  The dollars going out under the Baucus bill are real dollars.  The dollars being relied upon to pay for large parts of the costs are based on rather complicated speculation.  What if, as Ms. McArdle asks, the speculations are wrong? 

The Baucus Bill

The Baucus Bill passed out of the Senate Finance Committee with one Republican vote (Olympia Snowe of Maine). Or at least an outline of the bill passed. We don't yet have legislative language. But it is clear that the Democrats are really intent on passing some kind of legislation. This is surely a temporary win for the reform side, but it raises more questions than it answers.

But the evil insurance companies, which up to now have been playing ball with the reform forces, have finally shown their color. The American Health Insurance Providers issued a report that projects rising insurance premiums for a lot of American voters. Of course they are evil, and, to be sure, motivated by interest. But the logic of the report is hard to escape.

If you are going to extend coverage to a lot of people who can't pay for it now, the money has to come from somewhere. One place a lot of cash was supposed to come from was young workers and others who can afford some insurance but choose not to purchase it. The bill had included a pretty severe set of sanctions to force them to open their wallets, and that would have been a source of revenue for private insurers. But the sanctions have been weakened to the point of ineffectiveness. Since the bill would also prohibit denying coverage to people with pre-existing illnesses, it will make sense for the recalcitrant uninsured to pay the modest penalties and keep on being uninsured. After all, if they do get sick they can pick up coverage then.

All this means that private insurers will have to cover a lot of new people with little if any new revenue. I'm no economist, but I think that means that premium costs will have to rise significantly. Of course a public option might take care of this, but that means the costs will be borne by public, and the price of the legislation will balloon. Houston, we have a problem.

Politically speaking, we now see two powerful forces arrayed against the Baucus plan. One is the insurance industry, and the other is the labor unions. They don't want their extremely generous healthcare packages, painstakingly negotiated, to be punitively taxed, as would happen under the Baucus plan.

It seems to me that a little momentum for reform has been generated, but that nothing much has been settled.

Matthew Shepard

Eleven years ago today Matthew Shepard died in a Colorado hospital. He had been robbed and fatally beaten by two men: Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. He was left wounded and tied to a fence post for eighteen hours before he was found and taken to the hospital. Because Shepard was gay, and because his homosexuality played a role in his murder, he was elevated to the status of a martyr. His martyrdom is part of contemporary gay politics, and especially of the case for hate crimes legislation.

Several years ago the ABC News show 20/20 ran a story on the Shepard case that purported to debunk the standard account. I have not seen it, but I gather that the gist was that it was not a hate crime at all but merely a bungled robbery and that drugs may have been involved.

So what was it: a hate crime, or a bungled robbery? The answer is yes. It seemed unlikely from the start that McKinney and Henderson were primarily motivated by prejudice, though their lawyers did, unwisely, employ a "gay panic" defense. The two murderous thugs were motivated by two things that motivate such people: greed, and the desire to beat the daylights out of someone.

But the fact of Shepard's homosexuality is a vital element in the story. As I understand it, they lured Sheppard out of a bar with the promise of sex. That in itself doesn't make this a hate crime. But such predators as these choose their victims carefully, if unreflectively. They are frequently attracted to victims that they believe do not enjoy the protection of society. That is why prostitutes for example, or Blacks or immigrants in some situations, are deemed to be cheap targets. "Is it really illegal," one defendant in a 19^th century murder trial asked, exasperatedly, "to kill a Chinaman?"

Paradoxically, the Shepard case makes a better argument for hate crimes legislation if you assume that McKinney and Henderson were not acting primarily out of prejudice against homosexuals. People who are prepared to assault someone out of a murderous hatred of gays, Blacks, Mexicans, women, or Republicans for that matter, are least likely to be deterred by legal sanctions. But those who consider some category of the population to be easy marks can get the message that that criteria of victim selection will cause the law to come down on them like a ton of bricks.

For that reason, I am in favor of hate crimes laws. Most conservatives are not. They tend to think that such legislation creates special rights for favored groups, as if it were worse to kill a Black lesbian than a White, heterosexual, Baptist preacher. But such legislation can easily be crafted to protect everyone. All of us are minorities according to some criteria. I don't know if there is anyone out there who has it in for short, bearded, conservative, Darwinists, but if there is, I would like them to know that I enjoy the same protection as the Matthew Shepards of the world. The point is not that I need it, I hope I don't. The point is that such a wide definition of hate crimes would appeal to a much larger constituency.

There is nothing wrong with the fact that gay activists are using the late Mr. Shepard as a martyr. That's politics. But interpreting a crime in the way that is most emotionally satisfying is not always the best way to figure out what to do about it. McKinney and Henderson probably weren't textbook homophobes. They were textbook predators. We all have to fear such appalling creatures. If Shepard's memory helps us deal with them, we all will have a reason to remember his passing.

Remembering Russ Keen

The Aberdeen American News is reporting that Russ Keen died in a traffic accident tonight. Keen was a fine writer and a fine fellow and I am both shocked and sorry. I remember him reporting on school events when I was in elementary school. He had a way of staying in the background, so at times, students barely noticed he was there. But he captured the events he covered perfectly.

He could make even the most insignificant events seem important. When I was in fourth or fifth grade, my school pushed an anti-bullying campaign. The principal wanted kids who were interested to do an anti-bullying rap. Only two of us showed up and we were geeky as all get out. But Keen made us feel important and snapped our photos anyway. He made what could have been an embarrassing memory a happy one.

That is the sort of kindness and skill I will remember him for.

Rest in peace, Russ Keen. You will be missed.

Global Cooling

Paul Hudson is the "Climate Correspondent" for the BBC. The fact that such a job exists is evidence of the BBC's commitment to the climate change orthodoxy. You would think that his job would be to explain how the news, no matter what it is, confirms the theory. But that is not what he did. Perhaps he thinks his job is to accurately report the news of climate change. I will be more than mildly surprised if he is right about that. Here is what he says:

For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. So what on Earth is going on?

So let's consider this. There has been no increase of global temperatures over the last eleven years. That's curious because anyone who follows the climate news knows that all sorts of disasters are happening right now (glaciers receding, etc.) because of global warming. But how can this be if global warming isn't exactly happening, right now?

We also note that the climate models on which the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis are based aren't accurate, over the last ten years. Man-made carbon emissions have sure enough been increasing, but clearly that has not produced warmer climates. What on earth is going on?

Hudson tells us this:

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences. The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature. And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees. He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures. He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month. If proved correct, this could revolutionize the whole subject.

Well, maybe Corbyn is right. If he is, it would indeed "revolutionize the whole subject," if by "revolutionize" you mean refute the orthodoxy. It's amazing how inconvenient science can be.

It's not just Corbyn or Hudson who have doubts.

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers. But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

The theory of anthropogenic global warming has not been refuted at all. We should take it seriously, and be working on plans to deal with it if indeed it reemerges as a problem. But it's not a problem right now and we can't be sure how much of a problem, if any, it will be in the future.

Only relatively wealthy nations can afford to care about the environment. Or to put it more directly, only such nations will in fact care and act about it. If we act so as to hobble our economies on the basis of slim evidence, we run the risk of discrediting science and provoking an anti-scientific backlash. If you really want to promote responsible environmental policies, you have to make sure that economic growth is restored.

The Unbearable Lightness of the Nobel Committee

In awarding the Nobel Prize to Barack Obama the Nobel Committee probably thought it was doing him a favor. It is pretty clear now that what it did was embarrass him. It is equally clear that it deeply embarrassed itself, the prize it controls, and everything the prize is supposed to stand for.

It is no surprise that conservatives were quick to attack the award, as it so clearly shines the spotlight on Obama's meager record. Otherwise, we would have had to make do with a Saturday Night Live routine. Obama's least thoughtful defenders could easily dismiss conservative reactions as "fanning the sparks of political and racial hatred." What is a surprise is how much of the mainstream press and the left reacted to the award with disdain, if not disgust.

Michael Gerson at the WaPo's "opinion writers" blog, has this:

Apparently, they now give out a Nobel Peace Prize for good intentions. Unless I have missed something, President Obama has not yet achieved a nuclear free world -- which was also, by the way, Ronald Reagan's good intention.

Ruth Marcus, at that same site, called the award "ridiculous, embarrassing even." Mark Phillips, at CBS News' World Watch, wrote: "The sound you could hear this morning was of heads being scratched around the world." Jennifer Loven, at the normally Obamaffectionate AP, exclaims: "He won! But what for?" Gee, are all these professional journalists fanning the sparks of racial hatred? Apparently so.

And then there is the card-carrying left. Richard Kim at The Nation posts with the scathing title "The Aspirational Nobel." Michael Tomasky at the UK Guardian agrees with this blogger that Obama should not have accepted the award. He begins his exasperated column with this:

Did Barack Obama earn this Nobel peace prize? Obviously not. The world's stockpile of nuclear weapons (the main specific area of his "work" named in the citation) hasn't decreased by one that I'm aware of since he took office. He hasn't made a dent in the Middle East yet. Iran hasn't suddenly seen the light.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones asks (one imagines him waving his hands as I did this morning): "Is anyone defending this?" Well, Mr. Drum, see the first link above. The most thorough and thoughtful piece I have read today comes from thorough and thoughtful liberal John Dickerson at Slate, who has some experience in this sort of thing.

Having worked at Time magazine when it occasionally named a Person of the Year who evoked a similar "Huh?" reaction, I recognize this language: It the sound of words groaning for a rationale.

A lot of the leftist comments contain a lament that this will be fodder for the wingnuts, which is to say, the right. But the right has been proven to be, well, right a lot lately. We thought that ACORN was a legally and morally irresponsible organization and, guess what, it is. We have thought for a long time that the Nobel Committee is politically corrupt and bereft of any sense of professional responsibility and, guess what?

Few periodic awards programs look good under scrutiny. Titantic swept the Oscars. Will anyone ever watch it again? How many Grammy winning recordings are in the remainder bins? That may not matter, but the Nobel Prize has a pretense of seriousness. Consider the reaction of the center-right London Times:

Mr Obama becomes the third sitting US President to receive the prize. The committee said today that he had "captured the world's attention". It is certainly true that his energy and aspirations have dazzled many of his supporters. Sadly, it seems they have so bedazzled the Norwegians that they can no longer separate hopes from achievement. The achievements of all previous winners have been diminished.

Yes. This award diminishes the achievement of those who really deserved it. It diminishes the prospects of the American President, who might one day have deserved it. It contributes powerfully to the growing impression that he is not really up to the job of world leader. It also diminishes respect for international institutions at a time when we may really need them.

But maybe it serves some purpose. The cult of Obama is about as discredited as a cult can get. The idea that Obama has redeemed the world by talking differently than his predecessor, while pursuing pretty much the same policies, has been exposed in a very public and unambiguous way. That, at least, is something.

The Unbearable Lightness of Barack Obama

If you have a lot of hope invested in the Obama Presidency, this might be the moment to unload your stock. Barack Obama, a man who failed to qualify for an honorary degree from Arizona State University, has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At a moment when political events have been very dicey, and his approval ratings hover at fifty percent, God hands him a great gift. No one could have expected it, but anyone with an ounce of genuine self-regard should have known what to do with it.

All President Obama needed to do to cash in on his prize was refuse to accept it. And he should not refuse politely, as Mickey Kaus recommended, but angrily.

What is wrong with you people? I haven't been President for a year, yet! Come back in four years and judge my record then. To give me this prize right now is a slap in the face of those clearly have earned this prize. Nelson Mandela spend decades in prison for his principles, and you want to put me on the same shelf after a few months? You cheapen the prize by this nonsense. You think you are showing me honor, but this kind of honor is indistinguishable from contempt.

That or something like it is what the President might have said, if he did have an ounce of genuine self-regard. Had he said it, he would have reversed the fortunes of his office in an instant. He would have looked like a genuine person, someone you might be able to trust to reform America's healthcare system. But of course he accepted the award.

This looks like a disaster to me. Anyone who suspects that the Barack Obama phenomenon is built on air has now had his suspicions powerfully and unambiguously reinforced. There are a lot of such someones just now among America's independents.

This award accomplished the amazing feat of making the Nobel Peace Prize look even more like a joke. I wouldn't have guessed that were still possible. But Barack Obama was only beginning to look like joke. I suspect that this prize will be part of the future repertoire. Just think: Obama can be awarded a life time achievement award at the Oscars for all the movies he will no doubt make when he leaves office! And maybe he deserves one of those genius awards, not that he has had any brilliant ideas. But he has created a better atmosphere for the idea of brilliant ideas!

The only result of his prize is that it is harder to take the prize itself or Obama seriously.

Obama Wins the Nobel Peace Prize

Some of our snubbed allies may have bitter thoughts about President Obama, but Norway, or at least, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is besotted with him. The committee has awarded the President the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama now sits among the likes of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi.

"Why?" one might ask. "Did he go through the struggles of Wiesel, or fight for human rights, in spite of great personal peril, like Ebadi?  Well, no. According to Norwegian Nobel Committee, Obama is being awarded for, "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between people."

Perhaps the committee was referring to Obama's recent moves toward cooperation with Poland and the Czech Republic.

The committee also praised Obama's, "vision and work for a world without nuclear weapons." What work, one wonders, is the committee referring to? Perhaps the president's abandonment of that nasty, Bush-era missile shield. Or perhaps his scolding of Iran.  Of course, Bush took stronger measures to rid the world of suspected nuclear weapons plan, but the world hates him for that. One wonders why the committee has such adulation for Obama.

None of these reasons seems very convincing. But the committee gives a third reason, which makes sense. Obama, says the committee, "has created a new climate in international politics that has focused on multilateral diplomacy and an emphasis on the role of the United Nations and other international institutions." That part makes sense. Bush was willing to disregard the desires of international organizations. Obama may be more inclined to cooperate with them. Does this possibility make him more qualified than other candidates to win the prize?

Other candidates included Ingrid Betancourt, who, after being held hostage by the FARC for six years, bravely campaigned for the release of other prisoners and Hu Jia, who has fought for Democracy in China, in spite of imprisonment. Has Obama had any sort of struggle equal to these? I do not know of any.

Healthcare Reform Heats Up

I have been skeptical that significant healthcare reform will pass, and I remain so. But I am less certain right now. Democrats are convinced that they suffered in 1994 because they failed to pass healthcare reform. If that conviction holds, they have enough votes to pass something like the Baucus bill and all the other bits of legislation working their way through Congress. The public option is not yet quite dead.

But it's far from certain that they can pull it off. The Congressional Budget Office scored the current version of the Baucus bill well, declaring that it will actually reduce the deficit in the first decade. But the CBO is an easy standard, as it takes the bill's promises at face value.

I see few big problems. One is that Baucus relies on huge cuts in the current Medicare program. It's very hard to take that seriously, and if the cuts don't happen, the bill will be much more expensive. The Baucus bill also turns on a trick: the revenue part kicks in a couple years before the benefits start. That reduces the cost over the first decade, but it's a onetime trick. It is also only part of the total legislation, and it is hard to imagine that the rest of the Senate bills that would be part of the finished product won't increase the cost.

The House by contrast has been much less disciplined on the fiscal side. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi came out of a meeting and addressed the press today. They acted like a couple heading toward a divorce, except that only one of them knew it. Reid kept telling the reporters about the things they agreed on, and Pelosi made little not really faces and exasperated sounds. The bill may yet unite both sides against the middle.

It occurs to me that the Democrat's basic premise may be wrong. Perhaps they lost the confidence of the electorate in 1994 not because they failed to pass anything, but because what they tried to pass was deeply unpopular. If that's true, what are we to make of the current polls on healthcare reform? It has been steadily losing support all year. Now comes the Pew Research poll.

Overall, support is 34% in favor/47% opposed. Public opinion is strongly weighted against Congress on this matter. Now some of the opposition may come from the left, which wants stronger reform than it thinks it will get. That part of the electorate will be pleased if the finished product is bigger and more expensive.

But the really alarming news for proponents of reform is the 20% very strong support vs. 35% very strong opposition. I am guessing that 35% is almost all opposed to the reform effort altogether.

Other bad news is that two key groups of voters, independents and the elderly, show very little support for reform. Are Democrats really going to pass a major overhaul of the American healthcare system with no Republican support and strong opposition from the public? That would require amazing courage.

Of course, that courage will be rewarded if the legislation passes and Americans find out, fast, that they like it. If, instead, they find out that they don't like it, the results will be catastrophic for the Democrats. This is genuinely exciting! 

ps.  Yuval Levin at NRO's The Corner, notes the skepticism expressed in the CBO scoring on the Baucus plan.  Here is a passage from page 12 of the report:

These projections assume that the proposals are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation.

One of the reasons for public skepticism, I think, is precisely that no one has any confidence in Congressional promises of responsible behavior. 

Zombieland is a Gas!

SDP has been unwavering on one vital point of public policy: protecting America from the Zombie menace. In fact, our commitment to gun rights is largely motivated by our stern conviction that only an armed citizenry has any chance against hordes of the walking dead.

So, over the years, we have paid attention to zombies in film and literature. In that spirit my colleagues Dr. Schaff and Dr. Grettler accompanied me to Zombieland. I think we all agreed that it was about as much fun as any movie we have seen this year.

It stars Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine). The four are survivors of the zombie plague that has killed nearly everyone, and they are known to each other by their hometowns: Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita, and Little Rock. Columbus, a nerdy college student who was afraid of everything and could only dream of having a girlfriend, is finally driven out into the world by its near demise. He serves as narrator and gives us a list of rules (#2: always shoot the zombie twice) that is simultaneously hilarious and worth writing down in case the real thing happens.

Small spoiler: the zombies are pz2 class creatures. They are pseudo-zombies, which is to say, not really dead but living human beings converted into zombie-like beings by a virus. The "2" indicates that they are fast pseudo-zombies, as opposed the staggering speed creatures that once populated the genre.

The excellence of the movie depends on two things. First, it maintains an almost perfect balance between horror movie seriousness and comic relief. Second, it is chock full of very funny, very original and unexpected lines. Example: "You're like a giant cockblocking robot made by the government," and "God Bless Rednecks! Big trucks and bigger guns."

End of the world movies are very popular. Zombies walk through a lot of them. I don't think there is much seriousness in this movie, though there is at least a vague we only came alive when everyone else died theme, and a weird sort of pro-family theme. But it is consistently delicious.

Political Box Scores

One of the two gubernatorial races this year has turned into a real contest. Chris Christie is now only about three points ahead of Governor Corzine in the polls. It is, after all, New Jersey. But this one is too close to call.

In Virginia, Republican McDonnell is well ahead of Deeds, and this one is probably in the bag.

Another interesting bit of news is that in Delaware, Republican Mike Castle is entering the race for Joe Biden's Senate seat. Castle has been in politics for 40 years and has never lost an election. He is favored to win. Slate puts it this way:

Castle's announcement gives some serious momentum to the GOP, Marc Ambinder writes at the Atlantic: now "it's possible—not probable but possible—that the seats formerly held by Barack Obama ... Hillary Clinton ... Harry Reid and Joe Biden could all be in jeopardy in 2010."

I wouldn't count on Republicans winning all those senate seats. But it does look a lot better for Republicans than it did a few months ago. Unless something changes, the Democratic advantage in Congressional strength that Obama currently can rely on will be a thing of the past after November 2010.

Twins Win!

Wow, what a game! I like the Metrodome more than most Twins fans like it.  It is like watching a baseball game in a very large living room.  Of course, I don't have to track fly balls there.  But it has been the Twins home for a long time, and tonight our boys gave it a very good send off. 

The lead changed hands several times.  Both pitching and batting were on fine display.  And there were a number of magnificent defensive plays executed by both sides.  Sliding catches, elegantly executed double plays, and pitchers shutting down the offense with the bases loaded, that is what I call baseball! 

And best of all, our boys took the American League Central.  After a mostly mediocre season.  After closing a seven game deficit.  After winning what, sixteen of their last twenty games?  This is a team with heart. 

Of course, about eighteen hours after Alexi Casilla batted in Carlos Gomez, the Twins will have to play the Yankees.  I believe.  I believe.  It's silly, but I believe. 

Obama and his Generals

I find myself in the unusual and somewhat uncomfortable position of agreeing with Eugene Robinson. Here is a snip from his column at the Washington Post:

How to proceed in Afghanistan will be among the most difficult and fateful decisions that President Obama ever makes. But he's the one who has to decide, not his generals. The men with the stars on their shoulders -- and I say this with enormous respect for their patriotism and service -- need to shut up and salute.

Robinson links to another WaPo article about the "public campaign" that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is apparently waging.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who commands the 100,000 U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, warned bluntly last week in a London speech that a strategy for defeating the Taliban that is narrower than the one he is advocating would be ineffective and "short-sighted." The comments effectively rejected a policy option that senior White House officials, including Vice President Biden, are considering nearly eight years after the U.S. invasion.

Now I can understand McChrystal's position. He wants to go all in, and apparently believes that he cannot achieve his mission or protect his troops without that kind of commitment. The Administration is obviously having second thoughts about that, but probably won't make a decision to pull all out. That would leave his general to fight a whole war with half a commitment. McChrystal doesn't want to be in charge of a war he is not allowed to win.

But Robinson is clearly right: it is not the role of a general to engage in a public debate with his commander in chief, if that is what he is doing. It up to President Obama, and him alone, to decide the policy. It is up to his generals to do or resign. In the Republic, people in suits tell people in uniforms what to do.

I can't resist suggesting that, were the tables turned, and a general publicly disagreeing with George W. Bush about the surge policy in Iraq, Robinson would be offering the opposite advice. But since I can only speculate about that, I withdraw the suggestion. Robinson is right on this one.

No Hello Dalai

One of the arguments made in defense of the President's unlucky jaunt to Copenhagen was that "right wingers" would have blasted him had he not gone. I thought that a silly argument. No President had gone before the IOC before, so all President Obama would have had to say was: "did Bush go?" And as the President's defenders usually admit, right wingers are going to blast him no matter what he does.

But now I notice this story, from the Washington Post:

In an attempt to gain favor with China, the United States pressured Tibetan representatives to postpone a meeting between the Dalai Lama and President Obama until after Obama's summit with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, scheduled for next month, according to diplomats, government officials and other sources familiar with the talks.

For the first time since 1991, the Tibetan spiritual leader will visit Washington this week and not meet with the president. Since 1991, he has been here 10 times. Most times the meetings have been "drop-in" visits at the White House. The last time he was here, in 2007, however, George W. Bush became the first sitting president to meet with him publicly, at a ceremony at the Capitol in which he awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress's highest civilian award.

If the President were really worried about inviting right wing criticism, he surely would have thought twice about this.

The President is nothing if not consistent on this policy: be very nice to our enemies and openly insult our friends. You'd think that would have started working out by now. No doubt the benefits will kick in any day now.

Barney v Polanski

I was tempted to write some scathing remarks about those who support Roman Polanski because they believe he is a great artist. But then I realized two things. One was that Dr. Blanchard had beaten me to the punch. The other was that those of us who are moviegoers or moviestayers (I am a huge fan of Netflix), are guilty of the same kind of support.

Consider the case of Nicole Kidman. In 2004, she starred in the movie Birth, where she plays a widow who believes that a ten-year-old boy is her husband reincarnate. The movie features a bathtub scene with Kidman and ten-year-old actor Cameron Bright. At one point, Kidman asks Bright, "How can you take care of my needs? Have you ever made love to a woman?" This is, to say the least, highly inappropriate. Nevertheless, in 2006, Kidman was the highest paid actress in the industry and fans still attend her movies.

Now, of course, filming a bathtub scene with a child is not as bad as child rape, but there is something on par with child-rape that the majority of Hollywood actors and actresses seem to support. That is abortion. Americans love actresses like Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow. I am as guilty of that as anyone else. I particularly liked Judd in her appearances on Star Trek and I think Paltrow shines as Jane Austen's Emma. It is easy to say to yourself, "Well, I don't really support their politics, but I love their acting." But by supporting these actresses and their movies, we sponsor their support of abortion. Both Judd and Paltrow are strong "pro-choice" activists. If you understand abortion to be the termination of a baby's life, then this is worse than supporting a child-rapist. It is supporting those who opt to kill children before they are born. Is this any better than supporting Roman Polanski?

I also think that the attitude of pro-choicers extends past the abortion issue. In order to justify abortion,

We have to believe that a woman's choice is more important than her child's life. That attitude, I think, has led us to devalue children. Some now even think of children as punishment. Obama, for instance, once remarked that he would never punish anyone with a baby. Meanwhile, Margaret Cho voiced her concerns that Sarah Palin, if elected might "take away that right not to be a mom."

Children have often been painted in a negative light. We have forgotten the value of innocence.

In 1994, Chala Willig Levy of Parents Magazine criticized Barney for its "refusal to recognize the existence of unpleasant realities." Indeed, said Levy, "Along with his steady diet of giggles and unconditional love, Barney offers our children a one-dimensional world where everyone must be happy and everything must be resolved right away." I think that we have now gone the other way. We have refused to recognize the existence of pleasant realities. We have become so convinced that life must be miserable, dark and adult that we cannot abide joy or childlike wonder. We would have done better to error on the side of Barney than on that of Polanski.

We'll see you on Tuesday.

Twins and Tigers both win.  Playoff in two days.  I believe.  I believe.  It's silly, but I believe. 

Does Cap & Trade Work?

My esteemed Keloland colleague, Cory Heidelberger has a series of posts on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454—ACESA), commonly referred to as the Cap & Trade bill. This topic is probably moot because the Administration has admitted that the bill will not pass this year. The Administration is saying it's because there is too much else on Congress's plate, which is true and a lot of people were warning about that all along. But the real reason the legislation is in trouble is because it's bitterly unpopular. It strikes me as very unlikely that it will pass next year, with an election approaching. And after that, well, it seems likely that there will be a lot more Republicans in both houses of Congress. I have been saying all along that this legislation would never make it to the President's desk, and I see no reason to retract that claim.

But we might as well look at the merits. As evidence that Cap & Trade works, Cory cites the Clean Air Act of 1990. But that isn't very helpful because there the cap and trade device addressed much smaller and more manageable environmental and technological problems than global carbon emissions. The problem was this: existing legislation required new power plants to meet stringent pollution standards in order to reduce acid rain, etc. Older power plants could not meet those standards, but they could be made at least a little bit cleaner. But under the existing legal regime, as soon as they tried to retool they were classified as new and then came under the new standards. Thus legislation aimed at cleaner energy was inhibiting changes in older plants that would have resulted in cleaner energy. Cap and Trade provisions in the Clean Air Act allowed older plants to buy allowances from newer, cleaner plants (thus the trade). My impression is the same as Cory's: that the legislation worked pretty well.

But it worked because there were affordable alternatives to the older, dirtier technologies. This is not the case when it comes to carbon emissions. At present, there are no cost effective alternatives to carbon emitting technologies like coal except for nuclear power, and it can't make up more than a part of the supply.

If you want to know whether it works, the test would be to look at nations that have tried to use it to curb carbon emissions. I posted on the reasons for this last June. What you will find is that it failed miserably in the European countries where it was tried.

So the available evidence is that cap and trade doesn't work for carbon emissions, and that the legislation can't pass anyway.

Twins Pull Even With Tigers

Twins beat Royals 5-4.  White Sox beat Tigers 5-1.  I believe.  I believe.  It's silly, but I believe.  Tomorrow or Tuesday will decide the American League Central. 

Not Even the Bronze

That was the Chicago Tribune header as it broke the bad news that everyone in the Windy City must already have digested: Chicago will not host the next summer Olympics. The loss to Rio de Janeiro is easy enough to explain away. Isn't it time South America got to host the event? But it was a bit embarrassing that Chicago got just 18 of 94 first round votes from the International Olympic Committee, and so was eliminated immediately. If this were a baseball team, you'd fire the manager.

Unfortunately for the U.S., Barack Obama decided to step into the role of manager at the last moment, just in time to be humiliated. He flew to Copenhagen with his wife and America's greatest cultural asset, Oprah Winfrey, to try to sway the sages of the IOC. That puts a lot of smelly egg on his face at a time when he needs his face.

I find myself shocked that no one in the Administration talked him out of getting involved in this, even though I know better. It doesn't matter how many wise people the President has around him, he is the central mover of the administration. When he can't make sound decisions, they don't get made.

To be sure, other national leaders whose cities were in contention showed up to make the case. But the US is in the unique position of providing global leadership. No American President has gone to lobby the IOC before. Obama is in the middle of sensitive negotiations with Iran. He is trying to rally the nations to take action on climate change. Here at home, he is trying to get healthcare legislation passed. Maybe going to bat for his old hometown wasn't really something to put at the top of his agenda just now.

But the worst thing about today's debacle is that it feeds the growing perception at home and abroad that Obama is weak. Dana Milbank filed a story before the IOC decision with the title: "A White House That Acts With All Deliberate Deliberation." That was not a complement. The point of the story is that Obama is perceived in the American press as lacking backbone. So it sort of matters when David Jackson at USA Today opens his story on the Olympic disappointment with "He came, he spoke — and he finished last." And it is not just domestically that Obama has an esteem problem. Denis Boyles at National Review catalogs the reason Obama's stature in Europe has been steadily diminished over the last year. The central exhibit in this museum of Carteresque limpness is surely the dressing down that Obama received from French President Sarkozy. You talk about a nuclear free world, Sarkozy chided, but isn't that silly when we can't get our act together on Iran and North Korea? See Charles Krauthammer.

If all this weren't enough, the IOC decision comes on the same day that a very bad jobs report was issued by the labor department. 263,000 jobs were lost in September, driving the unemployment rate to a 26 year high. It would be a good time to hear from the President, but he was in Denmark hearing bad news that he considered more important while Vice President Joe Biden, cheerleader in chief for the President's stimulus package, was left to face the economic numbers.

If the President had had some reason to believe that he would be successful, his Olympic adventure would have made a little sense. A victory, however small, would have at least been a victory. But going without such an assurance looks like an unforced error at a critical point in the game. A lot of us worried about such an untested man taking residence at the White House. Well, now he is being tested.

Twins Win. Tigers Lose.

Except for Delmon Young's grand slam, it was an ugly win.  The Twins were up eight to nothing and then managed to give up seven runs.  The other ugly thing is that I am now in the existentially troubling position of rooting for the White Socks.  But baseball does drama and tension better than any other sport, and the AL Central has that in spades.  I believe.  I believe.  It's silly, but I believe.  Stop, Uncle Fred!  Stop!