Filed under: Environment, Global Warming, Science/Technology, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Climate Change, IPCC, Scientific Uncertainty
The October 2009 issue of the “Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society,” has a new survey that indicates that a significant number of professional meteorologists doubt that manmade sources of greenhouse gases are the cause of global warming. The survey was vetted by an advisory board of climate experts, including representatives from several climate-science organizations as well as the EPA, the Pew Center and many members of the AMS.
- When asked about the UN’s IPCC statement that “Most of the warming since 1959 is very likely human-induced,” a full 50% either disagreed or strongly disagreed. 25% were neutral, and only 24% agreed or strongly agreed.
- 52% of the meteorologists disagreed with the statement that “Global climate models are reliable in their projections of a warming of the planet.” Only 19% agreed with the statement.
- Almost a third agreed or strongly agreed that “global warming is a scam.”
- When the meteorologists were asked to identify “the greatest obstacle to reporting on climate change,” their top answer (41%) was “too much scientific uncertainty.”
The credibility of theories of global warming and the accompanying alarmism, or any notion that international climate controls are either desirable or possible are fading. The president has admitted that no climate treaty will be signed in Copenhagen this year. This will mean another fortuitous nail driven into the coffin of proposed U.S. climate legislation such as the Waxman-Markey bill in the House or the Kerry-Boxer bill in the Senate.
Every nail is well-deserved.
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Economy, Health Care, Statism, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Democrat Lies/Dirty Tricks, Harry Reid, Socialism
It looks as if Harry Reid has the 60 votes he needs to pass his health care bill to the floor. This is a procedural vote, but an important one, and Republicans may not be able to keep the bill from passing. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has used every trick in the book to get the votes he needs. Scheduling the vote for a Saturday night when all the senators were anxious to be off on their Thanksgiving vacation provides an extra bit of urgency. Bribes for reluctant Blue Dog Democrats ((moderates) like the $100 million for Louisiana Senator Landrieu’s constituents written into the health care bill show how it is done.
I would dearly love to see a quiz ordered, on the senate floor, to see just what the senators know about the bill that they are voting for. I suspect not much. After all it has only been available for a couple of days, and it is 2074 pages long. No one has had time to read the whole thing, understand it and analyze its consequences.
The gimmicks (cheats) used to get a favorable rating from the Congressional Budget Office are quite amazing. The “Doc-Fix” is a big one. They cut the Medicare reimbursements to physicians for their services, and right now the payments to doctors are far under the doctors costs. What happens when you do not reimburse doctors fairly? They quit accepting Medicare patients. (Same thing for Medicaid). Senators know this, so will pass a separate bill putting back the reimbursements they removed. Since only the cut is part of the bill, the CBO will find that it cuts costs. (Lie, Cheat, Fraud).
The CBO estimates costs over a ten-year period. So the taxes and fees commence next year, but the bill doesn’t take full effect until 2014 when the costs begin. That’s how you make it seem cheaper. Over 20 years, the true costs will be $4.9 trillion, though every health care bill anywhere, Medicare, Medicaid, the States’ plans have all cost far more than estimated — except for the Medicare Drug Plan. That came in costing less than the estimates because of the “donut hole” provision which encouraged seniors to make wise choices to keep the cost of their prescriptions down. The Democrats, of course, plan to eliminate the “donut hole.” There is no end to their folly.
How about this bit: according to Keith Hennessey, 16 million uninsured Americans pay a penalty tax. 8 million uninsured illegal aliens will not have to pay a penalty tax.
Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) have been increasingly popular. In 2006 only about 1% of adults with private insurance had HSAs, by this year it is up to 4%.
The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, whose members dominate the HSA market, says that enrollees are more likely than those with traditional insurance to be better consumers. They’re more likely to track expenses (63% to 43%), save for the future (47% to 18%), and search for information on physician quality (20% to 14%). They’re also more likely to participate and see results from wellness programs like weight loss, fitness and smoking cessation. This makes intuitive sense: They’ve got skin directly in the game.
David Goldhill, a media executive, recently wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that if a 22-year-old starts at his company today earning $30,000 and health costs grow at 3%, by the time he retires he’ll have paid out $1.77 million in premiums, lower wages, out-of-pocket costs and both sides of the Medicare payroll tax.
If all that money were instead available via an HSA, including by borrowing against future contributions, “wouldn’t you be able to afford your own care?” Mr. Goldhill asks. “And wouldn’t you consume health care differently if you and your family didn’t have to spend that money only on care?”
About 40% of tax-filers with HSAs earn under $60,000 a year. Naturally the Democrats eliminate Health Savings Accounts. And of course, the Reid bill subjects all private health insurance (you didn’t think you would escape this, did you?) to detailed Federal regulation. Those clever bureaucrats (who can’t even read the bills they vote for) know better than you or your doctor what health care you should be allowed to have.
The Republican plan would shrink the deficit by $61 billion at least, without accounting gimmicks. Can’t have that!
ADDENDUM: The National Federation of Independent Business has come out in full force against the Senate health care bill. It does not address their number one problem: the unsustainable cost of healthcare. They oppose it due to the amount of new taxes, the creation of new mandates, and the establishment of new entitlement programs. The costs far outweigh any benefits that businesses might have reallized. Why are they speaking up only now? The bill has just become available — all 2074 pages.
Filed under: American Elephant, Global Warming, Junk Science, Statism | Tags: American Elephant, Debunking Liberal Lies
Filed under: American Elephant, Democrat Corruption, Politics | Tags: 1st Amendment, FOX News, Obama
Filed under: Domestic Policy, Health Care, Law, Statism, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Breast Cancer Screening, Mammograms, Survival Rates
The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force tossed out long-time guidelines for breast cancer screening, and has caused a well-deserved uproar. This should alert anyone paying attention as a preview of the coming political decisions about cost-control and medical treatment that are central to ObamaCare.
In 1983, the American Cancer Society began recommending that all women get screened beginning at age 40. Since 1990 mortality from breast cancer has dropped by about 30 percent, after remaining constant for nearly 50 years.
This week, the task force, which includes neither oncologists nor radiologists, recommended that patients under 50 or over 75 without special risk factors no longer needed mammograms, and other screening techniques aren’t worth the money.
Did something change? The panel decided to review the data with an eye to health care spending as a core concern.
ObamaCare is “predicated on the assumption that the federal government has the knowledge, capacity, and will to drive greater efficiency in American health care,” noted James Capretta.
The health care bills under consideration would hand over to the federal government nearly all power for organizing American health care. And there is not a shred of evidence that Congress or the administration can handle these tasks well. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that, in a crunch to control costs, politicians will do what they always do, which is impose across-the-board payment-rate cuts. …It’s cuts for all providers, no matter how well or badly they treat patients.
The task force admitted that the benefits of early detection are the same for all women, but there are fewer cases of breast cancer in younger women. So you get into statistical abstractions about how many screenings it takes to save one life, and how many false positives there are in each age group.
At the bureaucracy level, this sort of recommendation is usually adopted by Medicare when it makes coverage decisions for seniors, and Medicare’s decisions usually influence the private insurance market.
The American Cancer Society objects. They acknowledged the limitations to mammography, but said the task force underestimates its lifesaving value. You can’t treat a tumor until you find it, and mammography has led to finding tumors when they are smaller and more treatable.
Today, the task force from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force hastily said — We didn’t mean— we’re not telling your doctor what to do — not issuing rules. So that is where it stands, with more to come.
What it does is provide an example of political decisions by bureaucrats looking at statistical abstractions and numbers and deciding what treatment your doctor may order for you and your loved ones.
Filed under: Law, Military, National Security, Terrorism, The Elephant's Child | Tags: 9/11 Trial in New York, Civilian Trial, Military Commission
The potential trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York civilian court is causing a well-deserved uproar. Attorney General Eric Holder testified today before the Senate Judicial Committee, and was thoroughly taken to task by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.
There is enormous confusion about semantics, the law, the Constitution, military law and international law. Since I am not a lawyer, have no special knowledge of the law and am completely unqualified to comment on this, I will explain. The law is the group of rules that a society agrees to adhere to for the sake of domestic peace and some semblance of fairness.
We don’t really agree on even the most basic things — for example in the case of murder, some believe in the death penalty and some abhor it. No middle ground there.
What could be clearer than “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech?” Yet look at all the trouble that one has caused — speech codes, hate speech, the fairness doctrine, political correctness — we fight these out over and over because there is no agreement. That’s why we have judges and courts who are, after all, only fallible humans.
Liberals like to favor the underdog. That may make them feel noble, but underdoggieness has no place either in civilian law or in military law. Terrorists, by definition, use terror and breaking all the rules of law to accomplish their ends. That they do not necessarily have all the elaborate equipment of a formal army does not make them underdogs who are entitled to some special compassion. William McGurn explains in the Wall Street Journal:
We don’t often speak of incentives in war. That’s a loss, because the whole idea of, say, Geneva rights is based on the idea of providing combatants with incentives to do things that help limit the bloodiness of battle. These include wearing a uniform, carrying arms openly, not targeting civilians, and so on.
Terrorists recognize none of these things. They are best understood as associations of people plotting and carrying out war crimes, whether that means sowing fear with direct and indiscriminate attacks on marketplaces, offices and airlines—or by engaging enemy troops without distinguishing uniforms, so that the surrounding civilians essentially become used as human shields. Terrorists reject both the laws of war and the laws of American civil society. To put it another way, they reject both the authority and the obligations their legal rights imply. (…)
The perversity here is that the overwhelming evidence of their war crimes gain them protections denied a soldier fighting in accord with the rules of war.
It even gains them more protections than their associates who attack military targets. This double standard means that the perpetrators of the USS Cole bombing are sent to military tribunals while the perpetrators of 9/11 are sent to federal court.
Andy McCarthy, who was the lead prosecutor of the “Blind Sheik” in the first bombing of the World Trade Center adds:
The decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other top al-Qaeda terrorists to New York City for a civilian trial is one of the most irresponsible ever made by a presidential administration. That it is motivated by politics could not be more obvious. That it spells unprecedented danger for our security will soon become obvious.
John Yoo, law professor at U.C. Berkeley and an official in the Justice Department from 2001-2oo3 writes that:
Trying KSM in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda and the hostile nations that will view the U.S. intelligence methods and sources that such a trial will reveal. The proceedings will tie up judges for years on issues best left to the president and Congress.
Whether a jury ultimately convicts KSM and his fellows, or sentences them to death, is beside the point. The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism. It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war.
This is another bad move by the Obama administration. It paints a large target directly on New York City, will take years to resolve, and is completely unnecessary. One would hope that the Senate would refuse to go along with Attorney General Holder’s irresponsible plans.
Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: Creating or Saving Jobs, Incompetence, Unemployment
The government’s Web site, recovery.com, that is supposed to be the administration’s effort at transparency in informing taxpayers just how their stimulus dollars are being spent — and which spends $84 million to do so — shows that $6.4 billion has been spent to create jobs in 440 congressional districts that do not exist.
For example, the 15th Congressional District of Arizona, where 30 jobs were saved with $761,420 in spending, according to Recovery.gov, the official government Web site. ABC News reports:”There is no 15th Congressional District in Arizona, the state has only eight districts.”
The site reports that North Dakota”s 99th district received $2 million in stimulus funding. North Dakota has only one congressional district. Washington D.C. supposedly contained 35 congressional districts according to the Web site.
Phantom Congressional districts are only part of the problem. The administration wants to laugh the whole thing off as ordinary human mistakes. Republicans in Congress warned that the hastily passed stimulus bill would be subject to massive fraud. Though creating non-existent districts is a little over-the-top. It didn’t even take an Inspector General to find this fraud.
There have been reports, long before the fake districts surfaced, of pretend jobs, of pay raises called new jobs, of stimulus funds going to supporters, and even simple confusion about government paperwork. There are no indications that the administration will fess up, nor that anyone will get more than their hands slapped, in spite of Michael Ramirez’s wonderful cartoon from Investors Business Daily.
Jonah Goldberg reported on “Chicago Math,” November 4, in the Corner: from the AP:
President Barack Obama’s economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan. Trouble is, only 508 people work there.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Some Head Start preschool programs reported that stimulus money saved the job of every staff member who received a cost-of-living pay raise, according to their filings. Some colleges and universities counted every part-time student work-study position as a full-time job, according to their reports, which are published online at recovery.gov. (…)
“Holy moly, that’s not right,” Teresa Cox, executive director of the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency in Salem, Ore., said of her organization’s report. It indicated that 205 jobs were created or saved with the agency’s $397,761 federal grant. The money, she said, was used for pay raises.
Economist Veronique de Rugy noted in The American that stimulus funds did not target high-unemployment states, and has a lovely chart to plot the number of “jobs created” for each 100,000 people in every state’s labor force and the corresponding unemployment rate in that state.
Now that the real unemployment rate — the one that includes people who have quit looking, those who are working part-time while wanting full-time employment — has climbed to over 17 percent, the administration is going to have a symposium on trying to figure out how to create jobs. The problem is that they have no idea, no idea at all.
ADDENDUM: Watchdog.org has posted a guide to the Stimulus, District by (Phantom) District. Learn to what non-existent districts in your state, real funds have supposedly gone. According to the list, Washington state’s (phantom) 39th district got $300,000, but didn’t create a single job. The OO district created three jobs for only $2.25 million. Since the districts don’t exist, where oh where has the money gone?
Filed under: American Elephant, Media Bias, News, Politics | Tags: Associated Press, Obama, Sarah Palin
The Associated Press has assigned 11 reporters to “fact check” every page of Sarah Palin’s new 432 page memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life. The number of reporters they assigned to fact check recent books by Obama, Biden, Pelosi, both Clintons and Ted Kennedy? Zero.
That’s not reporting, that’s an agenda.
Filed under: History, News, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Good Whiskey, Nimrod Expedition, Sir Ernest Shackelton
They are going to drill! Greg Pollowitz reports in Planet Gore:
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A beverage company has asked a team to drill through Antarctica’s ice for a lost cache of some vintage Scotch whiskey that has been on the rocks since a century ago.
The drillers will be trying to reach two crates of McKinlay and Co. whiskey that were shipped to the Antarctic by British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton as part of his abandoned 1909 expedition.
Whyte & Mackay, the drinks group that now owns McKinlay and Co., has asked for a sample of the 100-year-old scotch for a series of tests that could decide whether to relaunch the now-defunct Scotch.
Workers from New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust will use special drills to reach the crates, frozen in Antarctic ice under the Nimrod Expedition hut near Cape Royds.
This is Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition hut near Cape Royds. It is clear that we have been using the wrong incentives. We want them to drill for oil. 100-year-old Scotch beats petroleum any time. (I could have gone off into a long rant here about putting corn into our gas tanks and not into moonshine, but I will spare you).
Filed under: American Elephant, Liberalism, News, Politics, Pop Culture | Tags: Nutroots, Obama, The Onion
Not yet, but really, it’s inevitable after this isn’t it?
(h/t Hot Air)
Filed under: Energy, Environment, Science/Technology, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Climate Models, Climate Science, Temperature Records
Dr. John Christy is a prominent University of Alabama in Huntsville climate scientist. He has testified before Congress many times, and often begins a speech by reminding his audience that “consensus is not science.” Dr. Christy spoke to the Huntsville Rotary last week, and the Huntsville Times outlined his basic argument, clear and simple, which is worth sharing:
* The data being used to predict catastrophic warming is suspect.
* Models generated from that data “overstate the warming” actually taking place. The earth is warming, but not that much, and it has warmed and cooled for eons.
* The Earth’s atmosphere is nowhere near as sensitive to carbon dioxide as some environmentalists believe.
* Any “solution” to perceived global warming must balance the growing worldwide demand for energy against cutting carbon dioxide output.
* Fleet mileage requirements now proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency “would reduce global temperatures by about 1/100th of a degree,” Christy said.
* You would need to replace 1,000 coal-fired power plants with 1,000 nuclear plants to change global climate even .15 of a degree, he said.
” This is the scale (of global climate) we are talking about,” Christy said.
In his talk, Christy also took aim at several other widely discussed pronouncements.
* One cost of mandating harsh energy controls is the migration of industry to areas where requirements are less, Christy said.
* Temperatures in the Arctic have increased over the last 100 years, he agreed, but that’s only because 100 years ago “was the coldest it’s been in a long time.”
* Arctic ice has melted, but ice has grown in Antarctica. Between the two, there’s about as much ice as always.
* There are more polar bears now, not fewer. Canada issues 800 bear-hunting permits each year, he pointed out.
* Temperatures may be warmer in Greenland, but scientific experiments with ice fields show “that 4,000 years ago, it was warmer in Greenland than it is today.
* Greenland did not melt,” Christy said.
* Why is the apocalyptic view of climate change so widespread?
“Funding comes if you have an alarming story,” Christy said.
He also cited “group think” and said scientists revel in the attention their views about climate brings. “It’s almost a drug,” Christy said.
Filed under: Entertainment, Humor, Politics, Television, The Elephant's Child
This seems to be a French TV commercial. I don’t know what else to say about it except that it is highly creative, and seems to be advertising the creator of the commercial. I thought we needed at least a brief break from disapproving of the policies of the Obama administration.
Besides, it’s funny.
Filed under: History, Humor, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: Arrogance and Apology Tour, Colorful Personal Narrative, Pacific President
President Barack Obama is heavily invested in his “colorful personal narrative,” a turn of phrase that I shamelessly stole from the gentlemen at Power Line because it is so accurately descriptive. The claim, however, that he is America’s first “Pacific President” is goes a little too far.
John J. Pitney Jr., the Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College, took on the claim:
It is true that the president was born in Hawaii (sorry, birthers), lived from ages six to ten in Indonesia, and attended a Honolulu prep school. But he is not our first Pacific president. Richard Nixon was born in California in 1913, and spent much more of his life in the Pacific region than the current president has. Moreover, while Barack Obama made his career in Chicago and Springfield, Ronald Reagan made his in Los Angeles and Sacramento.
And the incumbent is hardly the first chief executive to have lived in another Pacific Rim country. William Howard Taft was governor-general of the Philippines. Dwight Eisenhower had military postings in the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone. Herbert Hoover worked as a mining engineer in Australia and China; he even learned to speak Mandarin. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush 41 all served in the Pacific during the Second World War. What they did as adults was perhaps more consequential than what Obama did as a child.
Filed under: Law, Military, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: Culture War, Diversity, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, Political Correctness/Multiculturalism
Mark Steyn is always brilliant, sometimes he’s just more brilliant than usual. Today he pointed out the specific arrangements we have put in place to make sure that terrorist attacks were unlikely, because an alert citizenry was on the case. And yet, there was evidence that Major Nidal Hasan deserved attention:
You didn’t have to be “alert” to spot Maj. Nidal Hasan. He’d spent most of the last half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying “JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK.” But we (that is to say, almost all of us — and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign. Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.
“The truth is we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder,” Steyn said. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said Gen. George Casey, the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a tragedy here.”
“Diversity” is more important than 14 dead, dozens wounded? That is undoubtedly not what he meant, but “diversity” is the ultimate meaningless politically correct notion.
If you have an African-American who immigrated 5 years ago from Ethiopia, and an African-American whose family has lived in America for 150 years, the important thing to them is the color of their skin? The latter person may have far more in common with someone whose origins were in Mexico, but who was also raised as an army brat. Mothers of toddlers care a lot more about playmates of the same age than their ethnicity.
The differences within ordinary people are far larger than ethnicity. Political, disinterested, scholarly, cannot read, abused as a child, handicapped, twin, mountain climber, pianist. hunter, animal trainer,potter, vegetarian, homeless, chemist. artist — but only their ethnicity matters? Please.
The notion that what is important about a person is their race or ethnicity may result in checking off the right little boxes on a census questionnaire but has little to do with the lives of real people. Are those diversity numbers so important? When it comes to lawsuits, or publicity or promotions the checked-off boxes may matter. When counting boxes becomes more important than real people, political correctness does more damage than it is worth.
And shame on you, General Casey.
Filed under: Foreign Policy, History, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Emperor Akahito, Japan, Protocol
He’s at it again. Obama goes abroad to puff up himself and disparage his country. In Japan, he proclaimed himself “America’s first Pacific president.” He spoke of the importance of “multilateral organizations that can advance the security and prosperity of this region.”
I know that the United States has been disengaged from these organizations in recent years. So let me be clear; those days have passed.”
What? Yes, this was intended to be the now-routine dig at President Bush. It has never mattered whether the blame-Bush bit is true. “Let me be clear” is always an indication that Obama is making things up again. This one is particularly classless in view of President Bush’s long history in the region.
The “first Pacific president” hooey is the back to the me, me, me theme. Born in Hawaii, kid in Indonesia, “colorful personal narrative.” And he once again ignores American protocol that American presidents never bow to royalty, nor dip the flag except when warships may dip their flag in response to a dip from another. Ideological multiculturalism. Sigh.
ADDENDUM: Hot Air Pundit has assembled pictures of other heads-of-state greeting the Emperor of Japan. Somebody should show this to President Obama.
