South Dakota Politics

The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming

My review of Rod Dreher's new book, in in the Pierre Capital Journal.  A snippet.

Dreher’s book is a tribute to his sister and also to a place. Many successful people tell him of the meaninglessness of their pursuit of wealth and accomplishment. Our rootlessness and individualism often leave our lives without purpose or meaning. A strong connection to a place can give us just that.

Dreher is not naïve about the shortcomings of small towns. They are often small-minded and provincial. Still, the book’s dedication says it all. He dedicates the book to his sister’s children, writing “This is your mother; these are your people.”

We in South Dakota have many of the same virtues as small-town Louisiana. The pastoral simplicity of our state is not for everybody, but we should recognize its value and the hazards of rootless cosmopolitanism. This is our land. These are our people. Nothing to be ashamed of there.

Senate Race, an Early Take

From the Pierre Capital Journal, by ME:

We have one announced candidate, former Republican governor Mike Rounds. On the Democratic side the conventional wisdom points to former congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin and to Sen. Johnson’s son Brendan, currently U.S. Attorney in our fair state.

No candidate is without weakness. It is not clear that Rounds’ evident popularity as governor will translate to a Senate run. Rounds’ moderate Republicanism may garner him a primary challenge on his right. Some suggest that Rep. Kristi Noem is that candidate, though one must admit that Noem is unlikely to take such a risk.

Read the whole thing.

The Administration That Wasn’t There

Barack Obama has been very good at one thing: winning elections. If he has ever been good at anything else, it has gone unreported. He certainly isn't good at hoops. From Dana Milbank at the WaPo:

At the annual White House Easter Egg Roll this week, President Obama decided to shoot some hoops with the kids. He wound up going 2 for 22.

I think I could beat that. Okay, we don't elect a President to shoot hoops but we do elect him to do something. Whatever that is, it isn't making a buffoon of himself with ridiculous gestures.

Federal workers face unpaid furloughs because of the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration. That's a serious economic hardship for many middle-class families, and whether or not Obama intended for it to happen, it's a direct result of a bill he signed into law.

And so the White House announced that Obama, "to share in the sacrifice being made by public servants," would return 5 percent of his salary to the Treasury. The gesture, matched by several Cabinet members, was meant to be roughly the same percentage by which domestic agencies are being cut. But the amount — $20,000 of his $400,000 salary — is so little for a man made wealthy by his political fame that it comes across as patronizing.

Obama and his wife reported income of $8 million in his first three years in office, largely from royalties on his memoirs, which were best-sellers because of his political fame.

Milbank's piece has the title: "Obama's feeble salary 'sacrifice'". Richard Cohen beat him to the punch with "Obama's insulting salary stunt." Is there no one in the President's inner circle who spoke up to say "this is going to get us crapped on by our best friends in the press"?

Okay, Milbank and Cohen are not the Administration's best friends in the New York Times sense of "friends". They are not inclined to hide every fault and excuse every failing. They are the kind of friends who tell you that you had better get your act together. Another friend of that kind is Joe Klein.

Let me try to understand this: the key incentive for small businesses to support Obamacare was that they would be able to shop for the best deals in health care superstores — called exchanges. The Administration has had three years to set up these exchanges. It has failed to do so.

This is a really bad sign. There will be those who argue that it's not the Administration's fault. It's the fault of the 33 states that have refused to set up their own exchanges. Nonsense. Where was the contingency planning?

The failure of the Obama Administration to implement the provisions of ObamaCare on time is no backfiring stunt. It is a dereliction of duty. ObamaCare is pretty much the one legislative achievement that the President can brag about. You might have thought he would at least see that its implementation was well managed. Well, he didn't manage it.

Klein repeats his misgivings in a second column. He refers us to another failure of the Administration to implement ObamaCare's provisions. From Steven Brill:

Here's a compelling story for any reporter who wants to shine light on a failure of basic competence – or maybe it's backbone – by the Obama administration on an issue that affects millions of middle class and poor Americans and that was supposed to be the president's number one priority.

In the article about healthcare prices that I wrote last month for TIME, I reported that supposedly non-profit hospitals not only charge ridiculously inflated prices (from a price list called the chargemaster) to people who are uninsured or underinsured, but they also routinely sue and demand that those full prices be paid. It's a prime reason medical bills are the cause of more than 60% of personal bankruptcies and even more demolished credit ratings across the country.

ObamaCare included language that addressed this problem, but it required the Administration to create a set or rules to govern the case. Don't hold your breath. Whether from a lack of competence or backbone (not mutually exclusive), no progress has been made. So Klein puts it this way:

I am really growing concerned about the sloppiness of this Administration. Bill Clinton, by contrast, was a governor. He cared about the "how" of government—how the Arkansas Department of Motor Vehicles dealt with its customers, for example…

Barack Obama is not a "how" President. Oh, he pays lip service to government reform. His people can tell you the number of unnecessary regulations they've eliminated. It barely scratches the surface of what needs to be done—there is no creative destruction in government, regulations pile up on top of each other like silt, generation after generation. And while the Democrats are feeling pretty smug these days, given the overwhelming silliness of the Republicans, the President may be paving the way for a conservative revival—if Obamacare turns out to be as nasty a mess as, say, the Veterans Administration.

No, Barack Obama is not a "how" President. He is very good at telling large audiences whatever they want to hear. When it comes to governing, he is the Man Who Wasn't There. Even when it comes to his signature piece of legislation, when all is said and done a powerful lot was said and very little was done.

Of course it isn't just ObamaCare. The Administration fought the sequester battle, telling us that it was some kind of grave doom hanging over us, while all the while failing to produce its own budget on time.

Klein has it right. Bill Clinton was governor before he was President. When Barack Obama took office, he had no experience at running any organization. When he leaves office, much the same will be true.

Global Warming Flatlines

I have been blogging about global warming for years and I have been consistently right. I have argued that the world's governments are not going to pursue policies, individually or collectively, that would have a significant effect on global greenhouse emissions. That certainly has been confirmed. The Kyoto treaty, modest as it was, was not even a modest success. No follow up treaty has been achieved or is on the horizon.

I have recognized the evidence that we have seen significant global warming over the last century and I have taken seriously the proposition that human activity is in part forcing this warming. I also pointed out that it is very difficult to know how much of a factor this has been.

That the evidence has been kinder to me than to the climate alarmists is evident from the recent bombshell in the London Economist. The Economist has beating the climate alarm drum for many years. They once pushed hard for a global treaty that would have put a heavy burden on industrial production, on the grounds that something had to be done quick to avoid an ecological catastrophe.

So it is a milestone that they are now trimming their sails on the issue.

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth's surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, "the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade."

I have been skeptical of world climate modeling projected into the future for the same reason as I am skeptical of anyone who claims to have discovered a formula that will predict the next winner of the World Series. It is possible to build a formula that corresponds to what has happened so far; it is another thing to guess what will happen next.

The Economist admits what is patently obvious: the climate isn't following the script.

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.

The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.

In other words, we don't understand the collection of forces that is responsible for the climate history that we observe and we don't know what is going to happen next.

Does this mean that we should relax and forget about climate change? I am tempted to say that we might as well because that is what we are going to do anyway. China and India aren't going to hobble their economies and neither are the governments in Europe or the U.S.

What I do say is that we should continue to pay close attention to what the climate does while doing what we can to deal with it. The U.S. has made considerable progress when it comes to moderating its greenhouse emissions, but all of that progress owes to new technologies designed to extract fossil fuels. The various green technologies that Western governments have invested heavily in have contributed nothing.

One thing that we cannot project into the future is the nature of technological development. New sources of energy under the ocean floor will be exploitable very soon and it may be possible to put some of the carbon back when we got the energy. If we really want to solve the problems that our environment poses, the only hope lies in new technologies. The only way to get those is to promote economic growth. This is a lesson that the environmental left desperately wants not to learn.