AEI President Arthur Brooks announced today that General David H. Petraeus will be presented with the 2010 Irving Kristol Award. General Petraeus, who commands the United States Central Command, will deliver the Kristol lecture on Thursday, May 6, 2010.
The yearly award is presented at the Institute's annual dinner to an individual, selected by the AEI Council of Academic Advisers, who has made exceptional intellectual or practical contributions to improved government policy, social welfare, or political understanding.
Fred Thompson’s Harry Reid Impression [Pete Hegseth]
As Kathryn noted, today Sen. Fred Thompson declared, “It really doesn’t matter how President Obama divides the Afghan baby, how he splits the difference between McChrystal and Biden. Because the war has been lost.” That’s right: Senator Thompson has declared America’s defeat in Afghanistan. Read it here.
I have a high regard for Senator Thompson, and greatly appreciated his robust and courageous support for the Iraq surge in 2007. But on this, he is dead — and dangerously — wrong.
Let’s go back to an interview Senator Thompson gave on Hannity and Colmeson May 1, 2007:
HANNITY: The biggest battle we have is this war on terror, this battle in Iraq. We have a really deep divide in the country. Senator Reid the war is lost. We still have to finish the job there. Where do you stand in general on the war on terror and, more specifically, in Iraq, and on the divide surrounding Iraq?
THOMPSON: Well, let's talk about Senator Reid for a moment. Right before I came over here, I was sitting outside, getting a bite to eat, before we did our interview. A young woman [former Army captain] came up and asked if she could sit down and talk to me a minute. . . . I asked her what she thought about this. She said, "How in the world can anyone, any one of our leaders, declare war, declare that the war has been lost when we've got troops in the field? My friends are over there in the field. I know what they think about this."
And, of course, it's just like all other Americans think. The very idea that they would do this and undercut our efforts over there is unprecedented. And it's not only unprecedented; it's awful politics.
We should not be fearful of these people politically. We just need to concentrate on what's right. What is right? We need to take advantage of any opportunity we've got down there. I've got a lot of faith in Petraeus. I knew him when he was at Fort Campbell when I was in the Senate. He tells me we've got a shot? We've got to take that shot.
I’m sure Senator Thompson made many similar comments in 2007, and he was right. Sen. Harry Reid’s statement was unprecedented, and it was awful politics. And if Petraeus says we have a shot, then we’ve got to take that shot.
In light of the above, what is Senator Thompson doing undercutting the mission in Afghanistan? Is the mission less justified? Is it less achievable? Or is McChrystal less capable? No. Senator Thompson’s issue with the Afghanistan mission is President Obama. And while I share many of his frustrations — indecisiveness, lack of will, unwillingness to articulate the need to win — none of them give him, or anyone, grounds to declare the war lost.
It’s awful politics, but no longer unprecedented. Senator Thompson is doing his best Harry Reid impression.
President Obama may not be many people’s preferred commander in chief, but he is our commander in chief. He still may commit sufficient resources to Afghanistan, and it’s almost certain that his generals will support additional troop levels. Our warriors will take the fight to the enemy, and hopefully turn the tide in Afghanistan.
The war is not lost, but it could be lost; especially if our political leaders, and political commentators, start making statements like this. There may be a point at which the war in Afghanistan is no longer worth pursuing, but it’s certainly not before the president announces his decision on troop levels and our top-tier generals are given a chance to execute a counterinsurgency strategy.
I’m disappointed in Senator Thompson; he knows better. His statements were political, and they do nothing but undermine our troops in the field. We cannot afford to do to President Obama on Afghanistan what the Left did to President Bush on Iraq.
Please accept this contribution for the vital work that you do. I have either subscribed, read, or otherwise followed National Review ever since my graduation from college (1979 — getting old). Carry on.
A federal judge has decided to hold the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers liable for the flooding in New Orleans that followed Hurricane Katrina. At issue is the Corps' maintenence of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), a rarely used shipping channel that hurricane experts warned for years should be shut down. I wrote about the Corps for NRODT shortly after the Katrina disaster. A scientist I talked to explained why MRGO posed a threat:
Dr. Ivor van Heerden of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center explains the geography: “The MRGO and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway [GIWW] join together in an area known as the funnel. You have the Industrial Canal in the middle of New Orleans. Heading off eastward from it is a canal that opens into a big Y — that’s where the GIWW and MRGO merge. That’s one of the very weak points in the system. When you get a surge such as Katrina, the water flowing westward amplifies the surge and leads to levee overtopping in those areas. There was very significant erosion during that levee overtopping during Katrina. It’s the design and location of the levee systems which creates this funnel effect, which caused levee overtopping and erosion and added to the flooding of eastern Orleans and St. Bernard’s parishes.”
So why didn't the Corps close MRGO down? The short answer is that even though traffic was declining and residents of New Orleans hated it, a few influential companies still preferred the channel, and they joined the Port of New Orleans in lobbying to keep it open. The Corps, like most government agencies, hates to give up anything in its portfolio, and the Louisana congressional delegation likes to bring home the bacon, so MRGO stayed open in spite of the risks.
In other words, don't just blame the Corps. Congress has the final say on the Corps' budget, and the Port of New Orleans played a role. The larger issue is that the Corps — again, like most government agencies — is prone to being captured by special-interest groups and used by Congress as a vehicle for pork spending. This might be the only time in history that pork kept an artery unclogged, when it would have been better to plug it up.
Robert P. Casey, the deceased former governor of Pennsylvania, spent his political career defending the principle that every human life is of infinite value. It cost him politically within his own party; but for Casey, politics was a calling to a higher cause — fidelity to the founding principles of the Declaration of Independence. In a 1995 speech at Notre Dame, he said this:
You know, for eight years, I served as governor of Pennsylvania. All the problems that America confronts today, health care, the level of taxation, education, economic growth, crime, welfare, the environment — you name it, a state like Pennsylvania — we see it all. All these things are important, they're very important. They concern the day to day business of government. They were my life for eight years. But, in the end, they are relative problems. And they demand relative solutions. They are about how we shall live as a people in America. Of course the economy is of urgent concern to everyone, and properly so — the issue of how we make our livelihood, how we pay our bills, how we invest for our future. But the need to protect the unborn child is just as urgent as the economic concerns that confront our country.
In the case of the unborn child we're dealing not just with our livelihoods, but with lives . . . not just how comfortably we will live, but how comfortably we will live with our consciences. Think about it, why do all parties to this debate routinely call abortion a "social issue"? Because deep down we know that the fate of one life touches us all. In a way, all the talk about values misses the point. Because we are talking about a thing of infinite value. Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself. The value of everything else is weighed against it. The abortion debate is not about how we shall live, but who shall live. And more than that, it's about who we are.
Now the governor’s son and namesake, the current junior senator from Pennsylvania, will be tested by the standard his father set. If he votes for cloture on the motion to proceed on the health-care bill, he will be making possible the greatest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade, and mandating that all citizens participate through federal funding. Senate majority leader Harry Reid needs all 60 Democratic senators to bring the legislation to the floor and make it the order of business. So Senator Casey has the fate of the bill completely in his power. If he adds his vote, that will mean that any effort to add the pro-life Stupak language from the House bill will require 60 pro-life votes, which, as Senator Casey knows, are not there. Casey’s original vote to proceed will have stacked the deck against defending life.
Everyone will be watching how the senator votes — including, perhaps most poignantly, the man who said of abortion, “it’s about who we are.”
— Frank Cannon is a principal of Capital City Partners, a Washington consulting firm.
Here's to helping ease the twinge of guilt from getting something this good for free. Without your valuable service many of us would be lost in a liberal morass.
Using actual stimulus spending data from Recovery.gov, my colleague Jerry Brito and Eileen Norcross of the Mercatus Center have launched the new version of Stimulus Watch.
The website, unlike the administration’s one, allows you to search for contracts and grant awards by state and city, by awarding agency, or by recipient. And they will even have a keyword search soon. The really cool aspect of the site is that once you find an award that interests you, you can vote on whether you are satisfied with it or not, add to the wiki description of the project, and join in the conversation about the award in the comments section.
With this website, it will become obvious which contracts are bogus, which ones are wasteful, or which ones simply don't exist!
Back in February, Brito and Norcross made the list of "shovel-ready projects" available in the same way and it proved to be a very valuable tool in exposing the ridicule of these projects (see this for instance). This version promises to do even more.
Check it out and be ready to laugh and cry at the same time when see that your tax dollars are used to pay for picnic tables or replace the motor on a boat.
I'm a Canadian who thinks that one of the most important things for the world is that the US remain prosperous, free, and engaged in spreading freedom. NRO is an important voice in support of those goals. Good luck!
You are getting the donation that I otherwise would have made to the Republican National Committee this year. NRO is definitely making more headway in the fight for conservative values! Keep up the great work.
Two boys in parochial school, wife totals her car two weeks ago, uncovered medical expenses, really cannot afford this, but you guys are my sanity in times of collective national irrationality. I will skip lunch for a month or two . . .
Final thought, slip some prozac in Derb's tea, he needs to cheer up, we are not totally doomed, it just feels that way as BHO reminds the current generation why great societies are based on capitalism, not collectivism.
At 25, I'm a third generation National Review subscriber. My grandfather and my father have both subscribed to NR for years and I began reading it occasionally in high school and college. I only became a devotee after I graduated from college and started working full time. Then I fully realized the importance of a commentary magazine w/ a convservative point of view. My wife sometimes laughs at me for sitting down and reading my new NR cover to cover when it comes in the mail, but as any NR subscriber knows, once you start reading it's pretty hard to put down.
Thank you for all you do and PLEASE keep up the great work. We need conservative views and arguments more than ever and I don't know of a better place to find and hear those arguments than National Review.
In September, he revealed that a famous graph using tree rings to show unprecedented 20th century warming relies on thin data. Since its publication in 2000, University of East Anglia professor Keith Briffa's much-celebrated image has made star appearances everywhere from U.N. policy papers to activists' posters. Like other so-called "hockey stick" temperature graphs, it's an easy sell—one look and it seems Gadzooks! We're burning ourselves up!
"It was the belle of the ball," Mr. McIntyre told me on a recent phone call from Ontario. "Its dance card was full."
At least until Mr. McIntyre reported that the modern portion of that graph, which shows temperatures appearing to skyrocket in the last 100 years, relies on just 12 tree cores in Russia's Yamal region. When Mr. McIntyre presented a second graph, adding data from 34 tree cores from a nearby site, the temperature spike disappears...
Prior to the Briffa graph revelation, he had also caught a statistical error that undercut another exalted "hockey stick" graph prominently featured by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC, this one by Michael Mann, head of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center... In 2007, Mr. McIntyre found a technical gaffe that forced NASA to correct itself and admit that 1934, not 1998, was the warmest year recorded in the continental U.S.
"The science is settled" means: The politics is settled. So the science has to follow.
Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has decided not to run for governor of New York next year after months of mulling a candidacy, according to people who have been told of the decision.
His decision is a blow to many Republican leaders, who had viewed Mr. Giuliani as the strongest potential candidate in a year in which voter anger and anti-Albany sentiment appear to be swelling.
P.S. I think Matt Yglesias is right to doubt that the unemployment rate will have as much effect on the midterm elections as Douthat thinks it will. As bad as the high-unemployment 1982 elections were for Republicans, for example, we shouldn't forget that it was the first election under the district lines of the 1980s, which were generally more favorable to congressional Democrats than those of the 1970s. (Republicans did fine in the Senate elections that year.)
She's Sending, but He Ain't Receivin' [Mark Steyn]
Did David Frum really say this about Sarah Palin? Apparently so, and on PBS:
This is a woman who has got into a position of leadership by sending very powerful sexual signals. And we see that in the way that men like her much more than women do.
With this line of attack, David seems to be channeling his inner Andrew Sullivan.
(By the way, when I saw her campaign in N.H., I was surrounded by moms with strollers.)
In purporting to refute Sen. Lindsey Graham's contention that the Obama administration has turned the war into a legal issue, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy proved Graham's point. The Hill reports:
"The red herring that my friend [Sen.] Lindsey Graham [R-S.C.] was covering is not realistic," Leahy said during an appearance on "Washington Journal" on C-SPAN. "For one thing, capturing Osama bin Laden — we've had enough on him, we don't need to interrogate him," Leahy added.
That's September 10th counterterrorism for you. Who cares what intelligence the head of al-Qaeda might be able to give us about ongoing mass-murder plots? Who cares that by interrogating bin Laden at great length we might be able to save lots of lives? The only thing that matters is whether we have sufficient evidence to convict him at a trial beyond a reasonable doubt. Since, by Leahy and Holder's lights, we already have an overwhelming legal case against him, so we don't need to worry about the fact that Miranda means we can't interview him. The litigation will be successful, so therefore it's somehow a national security success, too.
This is exactly the problem Graham homed in on when he told the attorney general:
The big problem I have is that you're criminalizing the war, that if we caught bin Laden tomorrow, we'd have mixed theories and we couldn't turn him over — to the CIA, the FBI or military intelligence — for an interrogation on the battlefield, because now we're saying that he is subject to criminal court in the United States. And you're confusing the people fighting this war.
By the way, the situation is actually even worse than Sen. Graham suggested. It's not just that bin Laden, if captured, would be entitled to Miranda warnings because he'd then be in custody (Miranda is required for all custodial interrogation in the U.S.). As Attorney General Holder noted, bin Laden has already been indicted (in 1998). Under American law, that means he is already an "accused" — the formal legal case against him has begun. If we are going to treat him like a civilian defendant with Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights, he has a right to counsel now — before we ever capture him.
Of course, KSM was also under indictment (since around 1996) when we captured him. But the Bush administration regarded that as irrelevant because KSM was an enemy combatant in wartime.
If, as Holder and Obama insist, we must adhere to the "rule of law" (a phrase they construe as "the rules and procedures of the civilian justice system"), we have to adhere to all of the "rule of law." If they are going to pick and choose which rules they're going to follow, how are they different from what they have spent years condemning?
On passage of a health-care bill in light of the differences between the House and Senate versions:
Well, it will depend on whether these numbers are anywhere near real. We just heard Harry Reid throw out a number, and I don't know where it came from, three-quarters of a trillion dollars he said are going to be saved as a result of this [Senate health-care bill]. I don't know where that came out of. If that holds up, I will eat my hat.
There are already loopholes that Mort talked about, the doctor fix, and there is something else. In the House bill, and I'm sure in the bill that we will hear about tomorrow in the Senate, it's ten years of people paying in, and six or seven years of health care [paying out] because [the benefits] kick in later.
So that is how you make the numbers look good. But annually it runs at a huge deficit.
On President Obama’s interview with Fox News’ Major Garrett:
Let me say how good it was to see the president sit down with Major. It constitutes the most important truce … since the Korean armistice in 1953, and I would say that we are South Korea …
[Present Obama] said "people" are warning us about a loss of confidence. He means the Chinese and the others whom he has been speaking with. Meaning that: He is a little bit wary about attacking the jobs issue with another huge stimulus because the people who buy our bonds, who he has been speaking with in Asia, are extremely nervous about that and are discouraging any attempt to blow up our debt on the jobs issue, also on health care and other [parts] of Obama's ambitious domestic agenda.
So it looks as if he wants to scale back. And in fact, the example he used, he mentioned earlier in the [Fox] interview, which we said: One thing we could do is to increase our exports to Asia by one percent, that would create a lot of jobs and it wouldn't be a drain on the treasury.
And that is so. But if he wants any progress on that, he's got to get [the] Chinese to … readjust their currency.
And on that he just got stiffed. … On Sunday, at the APEC summit, the Asian summit, the clause in the communique that called for a market-oriented currency exchange, which is code for raising the Chinese currency, was stopped and didn't enter the communique at all.
On Obama’s remarks to Garrett on Israeli settlement construction:
Well, he returned to his hard line again, in which he says that Israeli settlements are making it hard for a re-launch of the peace negotiations.
Apart from what anybody thinks about the virtue of settlement, the ideological import of it, look at the historical fact. For 16 years, in the absence of a freeze of settlements, there were negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. In fact, a year ago Abbas, the leader of the Palestinians, was deep in negotiations with the Israeli prime minister at a time when there was an increase in settlements.
So it was Obama who comes in. He calls for a settlement freeze. The Palestinians, of course, endorse it, and then say that unless Israel imposes a freeze, that there won't be any negotiations.
This was a self-inflicted wound on the part of the administration, completely unnecessary, and that's what has stopped the negotiations.
I have a mention of bowing in my column today — now, how would that subject have come up? — and have received a fair amount of related mail. Some of it is from Japan: where they know how to bow (as Obama does not). I mean, if you’re going to do it — certainly before the emperor — you might as well do it right. I thought I would publish one letter, not from Japan, but from Omaha, Neb.:
Dear Jay,
When I was 15, I went to an international Boy Scout jamboree that was held in Sweden. This was 1979. It was originally scheduled for Iran, but the shah got ousted and the organizers decided Sweden would be safer. Anyway, I was among a group of Scouts who were selected to meet Carl XVI Gustaf, the king of Sweden. Beforehand, we were told how to act: Don’t wear your hat, don’t shake hands unless he first extends his (he never did), and don’t bow. Why? Because we were not his subjects. We were frickin’ Boy Scouts and we didn’t bow to somebody else’s king. But I did enjoy meeting him. He was very nice and I appreciate that he came to meet us.
And if a Boy Scout did bow — which he wouldn’t, before a foreign king — he would be prepared.
I went to Yale. I live in SoCal. If it wasn't for NRO providing me with much needed sanity, I would probably throttle my friends and family. Thank you for preventing this aggression.
On Wednesday, Iran spurned a U.N.-brokered deal that would have sent its stockpile of low-enriched uranium out of the country. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton tells NRO that if the Obama administration continues with its “near religious faith in negotiations,” then Iran’s nuclear program will continue to be a threat.
“This is a graphic lesson for what is still a relatively new administration. Iran will not be talked out of their nuclear-weapons program,” says Bolton. “If President Obama is capable of learning from his experiences, then he would see that further negotiations with Iran are not going to produce results. This has been obvious for seven years, and Iran’s recent decision is just one more brick in the wall.”
President Obama said in Seoul earlier today that there will be now be “consequences” for Iran. The Associated Press reports that the U.N. Security Council’s permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia, and the U.S. — plus Germany will meet Friday in Brussels to discuss what measures can be taken.
“Our expectation is that over the next several weeks, we will be developing a package of potential steps we could take that will indicate our seriousness to Iran,” said Obama. “I continue to hold out the prospect that they may decide to walk through this door. I hope they do.”
Bolton says that Obama is missing the point. “We need to declare that we’re tired with negotiations,” says Bolton. “We need to be willing to ratchet up sanctions. But most importantly, we need to understand that there is no way to deal with nuclear weapons without regime change or force. The chances that the Obama administration understands this are not even between slim and zero — there’s simply no chance. They can’t see the reality of the situation.”
“I’ve always though that the (proposed U.N. deal) was a distraction from the real issue,” says Bolton. “The real issue with Iran has always been its uranium enrichment, not where it is shipped. This decision just takes us back to where we were before talks of a deal got started.”
We should expect “very little” to come out of the meeting in Brussels, adds Bolton. “Iran has done what it needed to do. The inspectors did not find centrifuges, so the board of the IAEA is not likely to do anything with incomplete evidence.”
I don’t really want to shut him up. I want him to change. Take those enormous talents and make all the arguments that he can legitimately make. Keep the cutesy gimmicks (I understand that we’re talking entertainment here), but have an iceberg of evidence beneath the surface. Fox is making so much money from the show that it can afford the staff to do the homework.
Absent that change, and I’m not holding my breath, let me suggest to my colleagues who want a better public policy debate that we’ve got to avoid the if-I-were-God fallacy. It’s not in our power to decide whether Glenn Beck’s show continues. He will save the Republic or fail to save it whatever we do. All we can do is be honest about what we think. I’ll go first. I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it. What Beck does is propaganda. Maybe propaganda has its place, but let’s not kid ourselves. Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann are brothers.
The American Version of the French 35-Hour Workweek Model [Veronique de Rugy]
Back in the '90s, the French government thought it would be great idea to force employees to work fewer hours each week (with no salary reduction) so that employers would have to hire more people. The idea was basically to use two people to do the job of one in order to reduce unemployment in the country.
While this model hasn't worked as well as the French government hoped it would (see this paper, for instance), the Democrats are thinking that it would be great idea to spend roughly $600 million and try this in the U.S.
Senate Democrats crafting a job creation bill are considering a proposal to give money to workers who cut their hours in order to avoid layoffs.
A bill sponsored by Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) would give unemployment compensation to employees who accept a reduced work schedule to allow their companies to avert layoffs or to hire more employees. Reed's proposal for work-sharing was mentioned during the Senate Democrats' lunch Tuesday, when Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) announced that an initiative focusing on jobs would soon be a priority, Reed's office said.
Democratic Sens. John Kerry (Mass.), Paul Kirk (Mass.) and Patrick Leahy (Vt.) have signed on as co-sponsors.
I am not even sure where to start. How can these guys think that making employees more expensive, rather than less, is going to help create jobs? This model increases the cost of labor and reduces the incentives for employers to hire people without subsidies. Also, what ends up happening, as we saw in France, is that employers don’t hire more people — employees' work hours are reduced, but their workloads aren’t. It increases the stress of employees in the workplace and leads to the use of more sick days. Finally, employees see their salaries frozen to compensate for the increase in labor costs. Overall, it is a terrible idea.
If the U.S. captures Osama bin Laden, there's no need to interrogate him, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Thursday.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the chairman of that committee, said that arguments raised by Republican senators about whether bin Laden would be afforded Miranda rights if he were captured was a "red herring."
"The red herring that my friend [Sen.] Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was covering is not realistic," Leahy said during an appearance on "Washington Journal" on C-SPAN.
"For one thing, capturing Osama bin Laden — we've had enough on him, we don't need to interrogate him," Leahy added.
The report CBO provided late last night has some interesting information. For example:
The cost curve goes UP
— “Under the legislation, federal outlays for health care would increase during the 2010–2019 period, as would the federal budgetary commitment to health care.” (page 6)
Deficit reduction?
— While Democrats will point to $127 billion in possible deficit reduction, that is made possible in part by delaying the benefits until the fifth year of the 10-year budget window. And even then, the $127 billion is LESS than the deficit that was already spent in October of this year. In other words, any possible savings over 10 years of this bill are already erased by the deficit spending of last month alone.
— And remember, CBO predicts that the 2019 deficit will be $722 billion. So their projected deficit reduction, as uncertain as it is, over the second 10 years won’t erase even the 10th year’s deficit.
Delayed costs
— To make costs appear smaller, major provisions of the plan are pushed back an additional year—to 2014
“Starting in 2014, the legislation would…” (page 4)
Government plan would have higher premiums
— “CBO’s assessment is that a public plan paying negotiated rates would attract a broad network of providers but would typically have premiums that were somewhat higher than the average premiums for the private plans in the exchanges.” (page 9)
Effect of the Medicare cuts
— “Whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care is unclear.” (Page 17)
The basics
— Spending:The actual spending in the bill is $1.2 trillion and the cost of the bill is $2.5 trillion over 10 years of full implementation (2014-2023).
— Taxes Increases: Taxes will go up $493.6 billion—nearly half a trillion dollars.
I’m in India right now and the top headline of the “Times of India” while Obama was in China was: “Obama wants Beijing to police South Asia”. Obama probably said something that to him was a throwaway line about China helping resolve the Pakistan situation, but it didn’t look like a throwaway line from here.
The increasingly versatile Robert Costa makes his debut as a podcast interviewer as we discuss my new novel, The First Assassin. We talk about the plot, what Washington was like in 1861, how I named one of the characters after a Metro stop on the blue line, and much more.
At Big Hollywood, I describe how the movies helped me write The First Assassin.
On HeyMiller.com (my website), I've posted reactions from some of the first people to finish the book.
Finally, according to this, I am #3 on a list of "conservative and libertarian novelists of the future."
Ten Percent of Jobs on Recovery.gov Were Not Created by Stimulus [Veronique de Rugy]
According to a new report, nearly one out of ten jobs on the website Recovery.gov have nothing to do with the stimulus funding. The Government Accountability Office's new report shows that as many as 4,000 potential recipients of stimulus funds reported creating 58,000, though they had not yet received any money. What's more, some 9,200 recipients reported receiving a total of $965 million, yet didn't have any jobs to show for that money.
In fact, Earl Devaney, the guy in charge of monitoring how the stimulus dollars are spent, declared to ABC News that he couldn't guarantee any of the jobs reported on the website. Not even one?
Interestingly, Joe Biden has been making a big push lately to convince people that there have been no reports of widespread misuse of stimulus funding (obviously, the VP doesn't read the Corner). Yet, according to the Washington Post this morning, "GAO is pursuing at least eight allegations of waste or abuse of stimulus funds from more than 100 reported. The audit agency has referred at least 33 other allegations to federal inspectors general, according to the report."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has finally released the text of his version of the Democrats’ health care bill. The roughly 2,000 page bill is a monstrosity, pure and simple.
It is fiscal madness, for one thing. CBO’s 10-year projection scores its cost at $848 billion, since CBO is required to use a 10-year window that starts at enactment and the bill is designed to start collecting taxes well before it starts spending money. If you look at the first 10 years of actual implementation, when both the spending and the taxes are in effect, the 10-year cost is $2.5 trillion. The Democrats are proudly pointing to the fact that even with its high cost the CBO says the bill will not increase the deficit in the first ten years, but what that actually means is that in the midst of an economic downturn it raises taxes (and also cuts Medicare for the elderly) enough to cover the gargantuan cost. In fact it raises taxes by almost half a trillion dollars over ten years (including taxes on employers, on the uninsured themselves, and on drugs and medical devices and more), and cuts Medicare by nearly as much. And of course, the deficit neutrality calculation assumes things that will never happen (which, as usual, the CBO does its best to signal to readers of its analysis of the bill, even if it cannot say it outright.) It is based, for instance, on the bill’s claim that some key Medicare physician payments would be cut by 23% in 2011 and would not be restored—which will happen well after hell freezes over.
As the CBO carefully puts it: “The legislation would put into effect a number of procedures that might be difficult to maintain over a long period of time,” and “the long-term budgetary impact could be quite different if key provisions of the bill were ultimately changed or not fully implemented.” This is Washington-speak for “someone is holding a gun to my head.”
Meanwhile, the bill would do basically nothing to address the actual problem at the heart of our health care woes: rising costs. It would bend the government’s health care cost curve up, not down, and it contains all the ingredients that the other Democratic bills have contained for an increase in the cost of private health insurance premiums.
It also does not include the abortion language that was in the House bill to prevent public funding of abortion coverage, which will (or at least should) be a problem for Senator Ben Nelson and perhaps a few other Democrats (let alone for any eventual conference committee). And it does include a public option (which will be a problem for Senator Lieberman and a few others). And of course it consists of a fundamentally unwise approach to financing health care coverage.
So, to sum up: the idea is to spend trillions even as our debt is mounting, inflict massive tax increases on a troubled economy, impose costly mandates on employers as unemployment hovers above 10%, squeeze money out of Medicare not to fix the program’s finances but to create a whole new enormous federal entitlement alongside it, insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients, and cause millions of middle-class families to lose the employer-based insurance they have today, pay even higher premiums, and find themselves herded toward a government insurance provider. Oh, and at the end of it all, if we use the methods of counting the uninsured favored by the Democrats, there are still 24 million people without health insurance.
President Obama in South Korea yesterday: "Iran has taken weeks now and has not shown its willingness to say yes to this proposal . . . and so as a consequence we have begun discussions with our international partners about the importance of having consequences."
So there we have it: Iran now is threatened with a lecture by the international community about the importance of the consequences that it might face. And pretty soon Mr. Obama and "our international partners" will consider the possibility of weighing the option of exploring the alternative of choosing among packages of consequences. I'm sleeping better already. — Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.
A note on that "ecstatic communal dancing" that was such a feature of the hunter-gatherer ur-religion, and that I predicted might make a comeback in the religion of the future. Razib reminds us in his review that such dancing was regarded as a threat to order when urban societies came up, and largely disappeared from religious ceremonies. The very constrained, bourgeois societies of the European industrial age separated it from religion altogether and tamed it down into the stateley minuets you see in TV period dramas. When the real thing wells up, sensible people bolt their doors. So perhaps it can't be allowed in any society organized on a large scale. We're stuck with Dancing with the Stars.
Contrasting Obama's and Reagan's Speeches about Freedom [Veronique de Rugy]
Cato Institute's VP David Boaz has this interesting post comparing Obama's and Reagan’s definitions of freedom. The analysis — based on President Obama's speech to Chinese college students on Monday and Pres. Ronald Reagan's speech to Moscow State University students in 1988 — reveals some striking differences.
Obama, Boaz writes, gave an eloquent defense of freedom, and in particular "freedoms of expression and worship — of access to information and political participation," which he identifies as core American and universal values. Yet the president leaves out "freedom of enterprise, property rights, and limited government as American values. Those are not only the necessary conditions for growth and prosperity, they are the necessary foundation for civil liberties."
In other words, he doesn't truly get what freedom is about.
How Hard Can AG Holder Have Studied The KSM Question? [Andy McCarthy]
Attorney General Holder's exchange with Senator Lindsey Graham yesterday has, quite appropriately, gotten lots of attention. I want to drill down for a moment, though, on one element of it. The lawyer's stock in trade is precedent. Whether you're a prosecutor or any other lawyer faced with a policy question, the first thing you want to know is what the law says on the subject: Has this come up before? Are there prior cases on point? What have the courts had to say? Those are the first-order questions — always.
Here's the relevant transcript:
SEN. GRAHAM: Yeah, nor do I. But here's my concern. Can you give me a case in United States history where a enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?
ATTY GEN. HOLDER: [ACM: LONG PAUSE] I don't know. I'd have to look at that. I think that, you know, the determination I've made —
SEN. GRAHAM: We're making history here, Mr. Attorney General. I'll answer it for you. The answer is no.
ATTY GEN. HOLDER: Well, I think —
SEN. GRAHAM: ... The Ghailani case — he was indicted for the Cole bombing before 9/11. And I didn't object to it going into federal court. But I'm telling you right now. We're making history and we're making bad history.
How could Holder possibly not know the answer to this fundamental question — how could he, in fact, be stumped by it. If he studied and agonized over this decision as he says he did, this would have been the first issue he'd have considered: the fact that there was no legal precedent for what he wanted to do. Or, put another way, if there was a single case that supported Holder's decision, it would have been the only case we'd have been hearing about — from DOJ, the academy, and the media — for the last ten months.
Of course, if, as I've suggested, this is a political decision rather than a legal one, it would make perfect sense that the Attorney General wasn't up to speed on legal precedent. The law isn't what's driving this train.
I've been reading the Corner for a few years now — I find that you fill the intellectual gap created by today's media. I find most journalists today don't answer the basic who, what, why, and when, and it leaves me wanting. Thanks for helping a guy get up to speed.
"Death Panels" is an emotional term (to put it mildly) that, as a practical matter, is not necessarily inaccurate. Here are two stories from right-of-center British newspapers (the Daily Mail is the more tabloidy of the two) about the prescribing (or not) of one drug (sorafenib and Nexavar are the same compound) that show some of the issues involved in the way that the British system actually works.
Liver cancer sufferers are being condemned to an early death by being denied a new drug on the Health Service, campaigners warn. They criticised draft guidance that will effectively ban the drug sorafenib - which is routinely used in every other country where it is licensed. Trials show the drug, which costs £36,000 a year, can increase survival by around six months for patients who have run out of options. The Government's rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) said the overall cost was 'simply too high' to justify the 'benefit to patients'....
Nice had claimed it was approving more drugs under End of Life policies introduced in January meant to benefit small numbers of terminally ill people.So far two drugs have been approved for three cancers. But two drugs have been banned under the rules, with a ban pending on three further drugs including sorafenib...It is three years since Ann Marie Rogers won her famous court victory which forced the Health Service to give her - and other breast cancer victims - access to the wonder drug Herceptin. The drug had been turned down by rationing watchdog Nice but Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt told trusts that they could not deny the drug on grounds of costs. Now another group of cancer sufferers are facing a similar battle but it is unlikely that we will see Andy Burnham, the current Health Secretary, taking a similar stance —because this time the drug that has been turned down, Nexavar, is one that helps against liver cancer. The problem for campaigners is that liver cancer is not as high profile as breast cancer. This is partly down to the fact that fewer people get cancer of the liver than are diagnosed with breast cancer - around 3,000 a year compared with 45,000. But that is not the whole story. Breast cancer has two charities fighting its corner - Breakthrough Breast Cancer and Breast Cancer Care - both of which attract millions of pounds in donations, and help boost the profile. Other cancers tend to fade into the background. There is, for example, still no prostate cancer screening programme that compares to the major screening programme for breast cancer.
For patients with advanced liver cancer the decision made by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) not to approve a drug that may extend their lives is a bitter blow. They and their families will feel like their last hope has been pulled out from beneath their feet. But the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence has to make dispassionate decisions for the good of all NHS patients. The painful truth is that Nexavar is an expensive drug that extends life by, on average, less than three months. It is not a cure and these patients will still die from their cancer. Data submitted to Nice shows that supplying the drug to the 600 to 700 people with advanced liver cancer would cost a total of £7.7m.
That would give those people the chance of an extra precious few months and admittedly some have lived for six months or longer on Nexavar. But the data shows that the median survival benefit is 2.8 months, and that means that for those who may gain six months, some will gain a lot less or nothing at all. Nice has decided that the £7.7m would be better spent elsewhere in the NHS, that could be on other cancer treatments, or heart transplants, on intensive care facilties for premature babies, or hip replacements. This will be of no comfort to those with liver cancer or their families but unless taxpayers are willing to increase their contribution to the health service, hard decisions like these will have to be taken.
Hard, horrible decisions, certainly. Then the ugly question comes: Who should take them? And on what basis? Note, too, the role that political clout (as indirectly represented in the Daily Mail story by the discussion of the influence of different cancer charities) has to play.
The nation's leading think tanks are continuing to produce critical information for challenging the growth of Big Government and promoting the advancement of liberty in America and throughout the world. Check out these recent releases.
• Writing for the Cato Institute, researchers from Cal State-Northridge and New York Presbyterian Hospital have a new study showing how and why America leads the world in medical innovation:
In general, Americans tend to receive more new treatments and pay more for them — a fact that is usually regarded as a fault of the American system. That interpretation, if not entirely wrong, is at least incomplete. Rapid adoption and extensive use of new treatments and technologies create an incentive to develop those techniques in the first place. When the United States subsidizes medical innovation, the whole world benefits. That is a virtue of the American system that is not reflected in comparative life expectancy and mortality statistics.
• The Heritage Foundation’s indispensable Robert Rector and two of his colleagues have just produced their latest summary of federal welfare spending. Years ago, Rector exploded the myth that only cash assistance to families with children was “welfare,” showing that Washington and the states spent hundreds of billions of dollars more on means-tested health benefits, day care, housing, and many other in-kind and cash programs strewn across dozens of agencies. For the 2008 fiscal year, the total welfare bill was $714 billion. Three-quarters came from the federal budget, the rest from the states.
An e-mailer makes a good point, in response to this:
In a recent post on NRO you offered some reasons that academics do not care for popular, narrative history, including ideology, a preference for jargon, and envy of popular writers' success.
I'm completing a dissertation in history, and I would point to another factor: professional historians are already familiar with the narrative that popular histories tell, at least in their given area of expertise. If you are a specialist in the American Revolution or early republic, there is little new to be learned from, say, McCulloch's biography of John Adams. Of course, popular histories don't claim to break new ground. They are intended for a different audience.
Also, academics want arguments rather than narratives, since the basic facts are often well known and it is what the facts mean that is in dispute.
I agree that ideology and prejudice play a role. I do a lot of narrative, and I'd like to do more. Popular histories can be great. But the structure of the discipline, I think, needs to be part of the explanation for why there's a divide between popular and academic works.
The last thing we need, of course, is every professional historian in the land thinking that he must retell the Battle of Gettysburg.
At the same time, it's worth asking what this scholarship is really worth. I don't want to knock the importance of original research into obscure subjects, but I also suspect that the quality of a lot of this work is quite low—and that broadly speaking, we'd be better served if more professors performed less scholarship and did more teaching. Mark Bauerlein of Emory has addressed this question in an excellent paper for AEI (pdf here).
