I have a question, and Google hasn’t given me an answer yet. So I’m throwing it out here for my very erudite commenters to tackle:
If Democrats lose seats in the 2010 Congressional elections, and then enough representatives vote to repeal the health care reform bill that is probably about to be passed by this Congress, I assume that Obama can veto their repeal. Is this correct—and, if so, can they get around that by just not voting funding, or some other similar Congressional machination?
Climategate continues to get richer, as much of the world continues to ignore the growing storm.
Now the Russians appear to have confirmed that a great deal of the temperature data from their part of the world has been ignored by CRU and the IPCC, and—no great surprise—the eliminated readings do not support global warming, while the included ones do:
Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.
On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.
IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.
The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.
Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.
But these inconvenient truths are hardly affecting most AGW believers, except to make them circle the wagons. Will doubt reach critical mass among the general population at some point?
I am not at all sure that it will, no matter how much evidence is amassed that AGW, so far, has been based to an unacceptable degree on smoke and mirrors. Survey your friends: how many are even aware that Climategate involves a great deal more than a couple of emails from understandably angry scientists, upset that the truth they’ve so reliably proven has not been universally accepted?
I don’t listen to many radio talk shows. Sometimes, though, when I’m in the car and bored, I tune one in for a while.
So the other day I was listening to someone (Rush? Hannity?) for a few moments and there was a series of audio clips of Obama during the campaign, making promises about the process that would lead to health care reform legislation. Over and over, in many places and at many times, he declared in those ringing tones of his that it would be completely transparent—the deliberations, suggestions, and debates televised on C-Span for all to see.
It’s ironic to hear those promises now, especially since the subject was openness and honesty itself, and there’s been nothing open and honest about this administration. I know that politicians lie, especially in their campaign promises. But although I’ve been around for quite a while, I’ve never in my lifetime heard (in this country at least) a major politician lying so consistently and egregiously without being called on it by the MSM. Obama’s C-Span lie is only one of many promises—about raising taxes, about posting bills online for 72 hours, about earmarks—that have been broken with a brazenness that can only be called Orwellian (if that were not an insult to Orwell) and/or Soviet in its scope.
But this has been the story of Obama’s life—so far. His approval rating has been dropping, but not nearly precipitously enough for me, and not nearly as far or fast as the evidence indicates it should.
During the campaign, Obama’s broken promise about accepting public financing should have rung an alarm. He was testing the waters, seeing what he could get away with, and he discovered that boldly breaking the firmest of campaign promises caused hardly a ripple in either his fawning press coverage or the adulation of his adoring supporters. That made him think that yes, he could get away with almost anything.
And maybe he can. We’ll see.
Here’s a must-read piece on the decades-long war waged against the CIA by liberals:
This war has also been enshrined in one disastrous liberal-led “reform” of the CIA after another. The wreckage reaches back to congressional hearings conducted in the 1970s, to the disastrous cutbacks in CIA activities under Jimmy Carter, and to the Clinton administration’s ban on sharing intelligence between the CIA and domestic law enforcement.
So what is it about the CIA that makes liberals and Democrats lose their common sense?…One cannot deny that Republican administrations have made disastrous decisions regarding the CIA as well. And there is no covering over the fact that the CIA has sometimes been its own worst enemy””not least when it decides to act on the advice of its liberal critics. At any rate, a serious examination of this implacable hostility toward America’s leading spy agency on the part of the American Left over the course of the past 35 years reveals a great deal about the nature of modern liberalism itself and its often self-destructive course.
It’s a long piece, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.
The release of the Lockerbie bomber al Megrahi has become a story few follow any more. There are too many upsetting events these days, coming with ever-accelerating speed, to focus on any one for long—especially if it involves a single elderly man reported to have prostate cancer.
But here’s some background on al Megrahi to refresh your memory. And in this post, I noted that al Megrahi seems to have outlived the three months forecast that caused Scottish authorities to release him on compassionate grounds in the first place.
And now we learn—quelle surprise!—that al Megrahi’s gone missing. He’s not in the hospital, nor is he at home, and when the Scottish authorities call to see why he’s been so remiss in his required correspondence with them, al Megrahi’s nowhere to be found:
Libyan officials could say nothing about the whereabouts of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, and his Scottish monitors could not contact him by telephone. They will try again to speak to him today but if they fail to reach him, the Scottish government could face a new crisis.
Under the terms of his release from jail, the bomber cannot change his address or leave Tripoli, and must keep in regular communication with East Renfrewshire Council.
If I were asked to offer one piece of evidence for the precipitous decline of common sense in the Western world, and our culture’s resultant inability to effectively combat the threats arrayed against it (at times even seeming to conspire in our own demise), I would be hard-pressed to find a better example than the idiocy of the members of the Scottish government who approved the travesty of al Megrahi’s original release, as well as the cluelessness of the East Renfrewshire Council.
What possible leverage did they think they would have with al Megrahi once he once safe in Tripoli? They are now reduced to the level of the whining elderly mother who complains, “you never call, you never write.”
Yes, of course it’s possible that al Megrahi will turn up soon. And it’s even possible his disappearance is due to the fact that his health has declined. But that appears unlikely; wouldn’t that fact be highly publicized? In the past, his visits to the hospital were covered by the press, and the hospital itself now claims to know nothing of his whereabouts. The Times even did a bit of investigative reporting to find out what’s going on, and this was the result:
One of three security officers sitting in a grey Mercedes car outside [al Megrahi’s house] said: “They’ve all gone.” He refused to elaborate.
Not everyone in Scotland has lost his/her mind, however:
Richard Baker, Labour’s justice spokesman in the Scottish Parliament, said the whole affair was turning into a shambles and putting Scotland’s reputation at risk. “This flags up just how ludicrous it is that East Renfrewshire Council, a local council thousands of miles away from Libya, is responsible for supervising al-Megrahi’s conditions of licence,” he said.
Ludicrous, yes. If I were a terrorist, I’d be laughing myself silly at the antics of the Western world right about now.
And if I were KSM, I’d not only be getting a good lawyer, I’d be getting myself a sympathetic doctor.
[ADDENDUM: Honey, I’m home!]
Senate Democrats have devised bill after bill on health care reform, with provision after provision, only to be unsuccessful in getting the sixty votes required. Now, public opinion has tanked in its support for all of the bills. And yet this Congress perseveres. Why? Isn’t it a form of political suicide?
Byron York tackles the answer here:
In the House, the view of [California Rep. Henry] Waxman and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi is that we’ve waited two generations to get health care passed, and the 20 or 40 members of Congress who are going to lose their seats as a result are transitional players at best,” [a Democrat strategist] said. “This is something the party has wanted since Franklin Roosevelt.” In this view, losses are just the price of doing something great and historic…”At the White House, the picture is slightly different,” he continued. “Their view is, ‘We’re all in on this, totally committed, and we don’t have to run for re-election next year. There will never be a better time to do it than now.'”
“And in the Senate, they look at the most vulnerable Democrats — like [Christopher] Dodd and [Majority Leader Harry] Reid — and say those vulnerabilities will probably not change whether health care reform passes or fails. So in that view, if they pass reform, Democrats will lose the same number of seats they were going to lose before.”…
“…[T]hey think they know what’s best for the public,” the strategist said. “They think the facts are being distorted and the public’s being told a story that is not entirely true, and that they are in Congress to be leaders.”
But in the comments section to the York article you see a different story. It goes something like this: Byron, you’re being naive. Do you really think their motivation is so noble?
These commenters have a different idea of what’s going on. The Democrats are out for power through the creation of another huge and perpetual entitlement program. They’ll cook the books in the next election via ACORN and won’t lose many seats after all. If enough illegal aliens come in and get to vote through motor voter and other ploys, they’ll have a permanent majority. They’re creating a huge constituency for big government, and delivering the goods is the most important thing. They (especially Obama) want to further the dream of socialism at any cost.
I’m with the commenters.
[NOTE: The following is an excerpt from one of the earliest blog posts I ever wrote. It’s from January 12, 2005, and deals with—of all things—health care reform. I thought it was worth reprinting right now,]
Socializing anything, including health care, tends to lead inexorably to wider availability of a more mediocre service. I am reminded of the drab high-rises of eastern Europe under the Soviets, the norm of tiny apartments shared by multiple families, the hackneyed art, the lack of variety in the stores, the dullness of reduced expectations for everyone. Everyone, that is, except the elites.
For, as even a casual observer of human nature is forced to admit, ye shall always have the elites with you. The Soviet elites got whatever they wanted, Communism or no Communism—spacious apartments, fancy clothes, plentiful food, dachas on the Don (or wherever dachas are). In the US, the rich certainly get better health care, which is one of the many reasons people want to get rich—to have access to better food, clothing, shelter, vacations, and health care. And in Canada, the rich also get better health care—the only difference is that they have to travel to do it, mostly to the US. And travel they do. The Canadian health care system might not be able to function even at its current level if not for the safety valve afforded by the exodus of the rich to the US for their health care.
In the US, we don’t lack for proposals to solve our health care system’s problems, but my guess is that all of them are flawed because they all involve difficult choices about allocating resources. I think most people would agree (although not the most extreme Social Darwinists) that we need to have some sort of bottom line health care for everyone, although we don’t agree on how to provide it, how much would be enough, or at what point it would kick in (at death’s door, or preventatively, or somewhere in between?). The answers to these questions depend on the answers to the larger questions: how far are we willing to go towards health care equality, and how low will our standards of general health care have to dive in order to attain it (and isn’t it the case that the rich will always find a way to get better care under any such system—and, might that not even be a good thing in some ways, since it provides motivation and energy for work and achievement )?
Nominations are open. Voting should begin soon. Dare I ask for a repeat?
Remember this satisfying scene from “Annie Hall?” Woody Allen calls on Marshall McLuhan to silence an obnoxious blowhard spouting off while waiting in a movie line:
“Boy, if life were only like this,” Allen muses at the end of the scene, shaking his head. Well folks, every now and then, life imitates art, and today we have this news:
Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.
In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
Gore’s office later said that the figure came from a ballpark estimate Dr. Maslowski gave him in a private conversation years ago. The article goes on to say that most estimates from other scientists—even those who believe the northern polar cap is going in that direction—are for a far greater period of time. And it ends with this:
Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “[Maslowki]’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”
But of course, the science is settled. Copenhagen sure isn’t. It now appear likely that no decision will be reached, except for a review of the situation in six years.
My favorite composer is Chopin. My love for his music began when I was a four-year-old child in dance class, although I didn’t know it was Chopin at the time. All I knew was that the music I heard—performed on a tinkly old piano by my British dance teacher, who never looked at the instrument at all but watched us like a hawk as she played—was part of the reason I loved the lessons so much.
It never occurred to me at the time that the music had a composer; it just seemed to spring from the piano and my teacher’s hands, fully formed. But later on I’d hear a familiar piece on the radio or at a concert, and it was attributed to Chopin. Then I’d hear another, and think, “Oh, that’s Chopin too; what a coincidence!” That led to the slowly dawning realization that a great deal of that dance music I had loved was also Chopin.
By the time I came to purchase some of my very first records (I was in graduate school at the time, because until then I hadn’t had discretionary funds for such frivolities—how strange does that seem, in this day and age?), Chopin led the way. The waltzes were acquired first, followed in short order by his nocturnes. Then I got a boxed set of his entire oeuvre, and still have it somewhere, even though I no longer have a record player setup.
I had quit piano lessons around the age of nine, before I had mastered much of anything except the early John Thompson books. But in graduate school I lived in a house with four other women and an upright piano. In my spare time (mostly gained by procrastination on my work) I decided I would learn to play a piece by Chopin.
I bought the sheet music to his waltzes. And that’s when I learned that this was going to be a lot harder than I had thought. There were a great many notes there, and a great many sharps and flats, far beyond what John Thompson had prepared me for.
But I persevered. I taught myself one of Chopin’s waltzes, measure by laborious measure, over about a year’s time (yes, I was/am a strange sort). I chose this particular one not only because I liked it, but because it was in the least complicated key (no sharps! no flats!) and had a deceptively simple beginning.
The piece was Opus 34-2, and I knew it cold after a year of that lengthy learning process. For about a decade afterward, I could have played it in my sleep—which didn’t make me Horowitz, although it made me a one-trick pony sensation at gatherings that included a piano:
Somewhere along the line I lost access to a piano, and my skills degenerated. But at my peak I had also mastered the fast part of this one (it begins at 00:56 and repeats later). I got pretty good at it; practice makes—better. But it sure didn’t make me Rubinstein:
Or Horowitz:
Remember that promise the Obama administration made, that health care reform would be financed by cost-saving machinations that would eliminate waste while maintaining quality? Turns out that those measures are unspecified and unknown, theoretical and untested, and that major players such as Jonathan Skinner “mused recently that ‘the key lesson’ from a new study challenging some of his findings ‘is how little we know about the science of health-care delivery.'”
That’s no surprise, really; I’ve explored the problem at some length previously, here and here.
What may be news is that it has become apparent that the Obama administration has known about the difficulties of cost-savings for quite some time, and has been grasping at the straw of waste-cutting in order to sell a program it knows will cost the American people a great deal of money. The track record of such cost-saving measures in the past is dismal:
The new cost-control apologists concede that there isn’t any actual plan for controlling costs: Throw enough speculative policies against the wall, they say, and some breakthrough will stick. Yet Mr. Orszag’s no-less-confident predecessors spent decades trying to pull down Medicare spending with little to no success…More relevant examples include Medicare’s “relative value” payment scale, which was designed in 1985 by the Harvard economist William Hsiao to encourage more primary care. That’s this year’s rallying cry too. “Diagnosis-related groups” were introduced into Medicare in 1983 to alleviate hospital cost growth, and what a monumental success that turned out to be. With only brief periods of relatively slower growth, nominal Medicare spending has risen on average at an annual rate of 9.6% since 1980. Over the same period total Medicare spending has grown 13-fold, climbing from 1.2% of the economy to 3.2% today.
The real problem?
(a) Modern state-of-the-art health care is expensive.
(b) To insure everyone would be very expensive.
(c) There is no magic rabbit to pull out of a hat; no free lunch.
But liberals and the Left like to pretend otherwise.
President Obama says “”I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street.”
No, of course not. He ran for office to be helping out his own fat cat friends and special interest groups, as well as to destroy the incentives for bankers to lend money to small businesses and get the economy growing again.
Obama displays either a profound misunderstanding of the way capitalism works, or a profound dislike for it, or perhaps both. Bankers are neither social workers nor saints, nor are they expected to be. They are in the business of making money. If you want them to lend money to others, you have to create a climate in which that seems like a profitable idea.
Part of the process of creating that atmosphere would be to refrain from demonizing them, especially when you have absolutely no experience in the business or private sector yourself. Another part might consist of sending the message that you are working in an intelligent and focused manner to solve the problems that led to the meltdown last year, rather than to spend us into ever-increasing debt by funding your pet projects and ignoring the cost to the economy.
But I suppose that’s not what Obama was elected to do. He was elected to blame people, and to call on their sense of self-sacrifice. And maybe to have a little private chat with them, Chicago-style. As Larry Summers says:
[Obama]’s going to have a serious talk with the bankers…The country did incredible things for the banking industry. Those things had to be done to save the economy, but no major bank would be intact, in a position to pay bonuses, if that extraordinary support had not been provided. The bankers need to recognize that. They need to recognize that they’ve got obligations to the country after all that’s been done for them…President Obama is going to be talking with them about what they can do to support enhanced lending to customers across the country. We were there for them. And the banks need to do everything they can to be sure they’re there for customers across this country.