Thursday, November 12, 2009

Ginning up fake numbers on the stimulus

 

The trend continues of local journalists digging into the numbers provided by the White House of how many jobs the stimulus provided and finding the numbers full of holes. The Boston Globe has found strongly inflated numbers for Massachusetts.

While Massachusetts recipients of federal stimulus money collectively report 12,374 jobs saved or created, a Globe review shows that number is wildly exaggerated. Organizations that received stimulus money miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures, or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started.

The Globe’s finding is based on the federal government’s just-released accounts of stimulus spending at the end of October. It lists the nearly $4 billion in stimulus awards made to an array of Massachusetts government agencies, universities, hospitals, private businesses, and nonprofit organizations, and notes how many jobs each created or saved.

But in interviews with recipients, the Globe found that several openly acknowledged creating far fewer jobs than they have been credited for.

One of the largest reported jobs figures comes from Bridgewater State College, which is listed as using $77,181 in stimulus money for 160 full-time work-study jobs for students. But Bridgewater State spokesman Bryan Baldwin said the college made a mistake and the actual number of new jobs was “almost nothing.’’ Bridgewater has submitted a correction, but it is not yet reflected in the report.

In other cases, federal money that recipients already receive annually - subsidies for affordable housing, for example - was reclassified this year as stimulus spending, and the existing jobs already supported by those programs were credited to stimulus spending. Some of these recipients said they did not even know the money they were getting was classified as stimulus funds until September, when federal officials told them they had to file reports.

“There were no jobs created. It was just shuffling around of the funds,’’ said Susan Kelly, director of property management for Boston Land Co., which reported retaining 26 jobs with $2.7 million in rental subsidies for its affordable housing developments in Waltham. “It’s hard to figure out if you did the paperwork right. We never asked for this.’’

The federal stimulus report for Massachusetts has so many errors, missing data, or estimates instead of actual job counts that it may be impossible to accurately tally how many people have been employed by the massive infusion of federal money. Massachusetts is expected to receive an estimated $1 billion more in stimulus contracts, grants, and loans.

Remember these were the numbers that the White House's own guy in charge of compiling the data joked that he'd scrubbed the numbers so hard that he had "dishpan hands."

And these are the results that they came up with when they were really trying to fix all the mistakes. Imagine that.

This follows a history of the Obama administration's economists and statisticians coming up with very suspect numbers. Samuel Staley had a critical take (subscription only) on CEA head Christine Romer's use of deceptively precise statistics to sell the stimulus package in the first place.

Beginning with a report written by Christina Romer, the current chairwoman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, now Vice President Biden’s chief economist, the White House trotted out numbers based on statistically naïve and simplistic methods in order to drum up support for the stimulus package.

Romer and Bernstein’s initial report, released prior to the president’s inauguration in January 2009, estimated that a hypothetical $775 billion stimulus plan that included government spending and tax cuts would generate jobs in a “reasonable range” of 3.3 to 4.1 million by the end of 2010. Perhaps in an effort to preserve some academic credibility, Romer and Bernstein were somewhat circumspect in their analysis: “Our estimates of economic relationships and rules of thumb are derived from historical experience and so will not apply exactly to any given episode. Furthermore, the uncertainty is surely higher than normal now because the current recession is unusual both in its fundamental causes and severity.”

If the story stopped here, few people would cry foul. Romer and Bernstein’s analysis was simply one more report issued as policymakers and academics scrambled to figure out what to do about the economy. Analysis from all quarters is useful in determining macro policy, particularly during periods of extraordinary uncertainty.

But it didn’t stop there, and that’s where questions of professional ethics arise. A well-known principle of statistics is that the accuracy of estimates falls the more specific, narrow, or infrequent the data become. Predicting economy-wide trends is easier than predicting what will happen to individual households. Even predicting statewide economic performance is tricky. Predicting local trends from macroeconomic analysis is almost impossible. These processes are fraught with all sorts of methodological land mines, not the least of which is the idiosyncratic nature of local economic growth.

But Romer and Bernstein didn't stop there. They went on to predict with fake accuracy how many jobs would be created by the stimulus in every single congressional district. There is absolutely no way that any self-respecting economist or statistician could predict with such precision how the stimulus would work in specific districts. But they needed those numbers in order to pressure politicians to vote for the stimulus.

If these estimates seem fishy because they fall into a very narrow range (between 6,500 and 9,200 for all districts in California), they should. Essentially, the job growth is distributed based on population with little or no analysis of or adjustment for local conditions, historical trends, and other economic strengths and weaknesses. Not surprisingly, no congressional district in the nation would be worse off than before the stimulus.

It’s almost as if White House economists were betting no one would examine their results closely. And they were right. Only a few conservative and libertarian bloggers (including the Reason Foundation) noticed the statistical sleight of hand.

And now they're compounding their original sin of ginning up fake numbers by ginning up more fake numbers about how many jobs have been "created or saved" when everyone acknowledges that there is absolutely no way to count "saved" jobs.

At best, the White House can be accused of adopting a naïve approach to economic analysis and statistics. At worst, its economic forecasting was a cynical misuse of applied economic analysis to manipulate people into supporting a short-term political goal. Given the high caliber of his economic team, the American public may legitimately ask whether the latter interpretation is more accurate. Either way, this misuse of data and analysis isn’t the kind of change the American people voted for when they bought into presidential Candidate Obama’s campaign message to “turn the page” on politics as usual.

The bill is coming due now. We aren't seeing the jobs that the stimulus supporters promised us. And now we're seeing that they have absolutely no way of counting the jobs that were supposedly created or saved by the stimulus. And the only debate is whether these people like Romer and Bernstein who had respectable reputations before they took on their present days are just being ignorant or if they've totally sold out.

Labels: Stimulus

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 8:51 AM 0 comments

SEIU committing fraud in an election? I'm shocked, shocked

 

The WSJ has the story of a union election in California where there are allegations of the SEIU committing substantial fraud. The election was over whether a breakaway union of health care workers would win a vote among home health care workers for their union NUHW vs the SEIU-affiliated union, UHW. The allegations come from a former UHW worker who is telling tales of how he violated state and federal laws concerning union elections.

The SEIU shipped in 950 or so staff and spent an estimated $10 million on mailings, advertising, phone banks, door-to-door canvassing and the like. The NUHW doesn't have this kind of firepower. At a rally for staff in late May, David Regan, an SEIU executive vice president who took over the UHW in January, roared that, "We gotta give a butt-whipping they will never forget." When the secret ballots were mailed in and counted, the SEIU won that vote by a sliver, 2,938 to 2,705.

The NUHW immediately called for a re-run of the election, challenging voting irregularities. The two unions have traded accusations since. But now, Carlos Martinez, an immigrant from El Salvador who was on the SEIU's staff during the campaign, has come forward—so he says—to blow the whistle on his employer. Mr. Martinez went door-to-door canvassing the home-care workers during the 15-day election. Like him, many of them are native Spanish speakers; some are illiterate.

Speaking in an interview over a sandwich at a hotel in the Bay Area late last month, Mr. Martinez says he was instructed by superiors to tell the workers that if they voted against the SEIU, they could lose their medical benefits, see their green cards or citizenship revoked and possibly be deported. He says he and other staffers were also told to pressure voters to spoil ballots that had been filled out for the NUHW. In other instances he filled ballots out for them. He says he even took some to the post office, as did other SEIU campaign workers.

All of these actions, if true, are a violation of state or federal laws governing union elections. In all, he adds, he visited 550 homes. "We scared people. We took the secret ballot away from these people," he says. "It was wrong."

Perhaps the guy is lying, but there are other corroborating witnesses. Does any of this behavior surprise anyone about how SEIU conducts itself when they think that their position is at stake.

And these are the guys who want to pass card check so that they continue such methods to influence future union votes.

Labels: Labor

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 8:36 AM 1 comments

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Drinking along to paranoia

 

Matt Welch has a hilarious post on what he calls the "Richard Hofstadter Drinking Game." The reference is to the 20th century historian who achieved everlasting fame among liberals by writing about "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" which he found in 19th century populist movements as well among conservatives of the Cold War era.

"[T]he G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit," Paul Krugman warns today:

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay–

Drink!

You didn't think those cheeks got red all by themselves, did ya?Actually, you could develop a whole multi-trigger drinking game based on anti-Tea Party columns, though it may prove as potentially deadly as the Century Club. In addition to the obligatory Hofstadter reference, tip your glass whenever you read that...

2) Not only are things just like Hofstadter wrote back when interracial marriage was widely outlawed, they're actually worse. (Krugman variation: "But while the paranoid style isn't new, its role within the G.O.P. is.")

3) The real leader of the modern GOP is fill-in-the-blank non-office-holding bogeyman/woman. (Krugman's completism: "Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.")

Read the rest, but pour yourself a long, cool one first. You'll need it every time you read Paul Krugman and Frank Rich.

Then follow the link over to Jesse Walker's essay on "The Paranoid Center:How the panic over right-wing violence is being used to marginalize peaceful dissent."

We've heard ample warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president, and we're sure to hear many more throughout his term. But we've heard almost nothing about the paranoia of the political center. When mainstream commentators treat a small group of unconnected crimes as a grand, malevolent movement, they unwittingly echo the very conspiracy theories they denounce. Both brands of connect-the-dots fantasy reflect the tellers' anxieties much more than any order actually emerging in the world.

When such a story is directed at those who oppose the politicians in power, it has an additional effect. The list of dangerous forces that need to be marginalized inevitably expands to include peaceful, legitimate critics.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: Media

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 3:20 PM 5 comments

Obama's oppo research

 

I've long thought that most reporting doesn't come from reporters wearing out their metaphorical shoe leather but from their receiving leaks from self-interested figures in politics and the bureaucracy. Ben Smith reveals how true this is when he tells how he got a little scooplette about John Edwards paying $400 for a haircut. It turns out that that little bit of bad PR for Edwards was fed him by the oppo guys on the Obama team.

Not quite the "above-it-all" facade that Obama tried to portray his campaign as.

I was always interested in candidate Obama's relationship with the dark(er) political arts and asked him at his first campaign press conference why he'd hired opposition researchers; he responded that they were to check out the candidate himself and to examine high-minded policy questions.

That was not, exactly, the whole truth. Indeed, Obama's campaign had a particularly capable opposition research shop, a source of tips to many reporters, not all of them on policy. And Plouffe, in passing, outs the campaign as the source of a brief item I did in April 2007 off an Edwards campaign expenditure — probably driving as much traffic, chatter and grief as anything that short I've ever written.

"We did much less of this [opposition research] than other campaigns did," Plouffe writes a bit self-servingly, "but there were times we indulged — it was our researchers who found John Edwards's infamous $400 hair cut expenditures."

There's nothing wrong, in my book, with a candidate doing oppo research on his opponents or with journalists reporting it. That's what politicians have been doing since our nation's beginning. It's their sanctimonious pose that the politicians are purer than all that or that the reporters are not just reporting leaks that have been handed to them that is so grating.

Labels: Election 2008

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 2:37 PM 0 comments

Happy Homecomings

 

Here are some videos that will make you smile and cry: dogs welcoming their owners home from Iraq and Afghanistan. And if that doesn't start you smiling through the tears, watch the last one.

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 12:10 PM 3 comments

Our armed forces are not victims

 

David Ignatius makes an important point in his Veterans Day column today.

In the aftermath of the Fort Hood shootings, some commentaries have examined the damage to the U.S. Army from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few have spoken about the alleged shooter, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, as an extreme version of what can happen with an overstressed force.

This picture of a traumatized military is misleading. Certainly, the Army and the other services are stressed by the demands of combat. But what's striking to me this Veterans Day is how healthy the military is, given all the weight it has been carrying for the country these past eight years.

Facing a new and disorienting kind of warfare, the military has learned and adapted. Rather than complain about their problems, soldiers have figured out ways to solve them.

In truth, the U.S. military may be the most resilient part of American society right now. The soldiers are clearly in better shape than the political class that sent them to war and the economic leadership that has mismanaged the economy. (I'd give the same high marks to young civilians who are serving and sacrificing in hard places -- the Peace Corps and medical volunteers I've met abroad and the teachers in tough inner-city schools.)

Through all its difficulties, the military has kept its stride. That sense of balance comes partly from the fact that soldiers are anchored to the American bedrock. This includes the stereotypical small towns in the South and Midwest that have military service in their DNA. But it also counts plenty of hardworking, upwardly mobile Hispanic and African American families in urban America that produce some of the best soldiers I know.

On this Veterans Day, it is appropriate to pause and honor these men and women who sacrifice so much to do what many of us can't even conceive of doing.

Whose honor and integrity would you put more faith in: any 10 randomly selected members of our armed services or any 10 members of our political class?

The question answers itself.

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 9:13 AM 1 comments

Jon Corzine's overconfidence

 

Jim Geraghty links to this little tidbit from New Jersey. Apparently, the Corzine administration was so hubristic to to be certain that he would be reelected that they never budgeted money for a potential transition to a new governor.

Gov.-elect Chris Christie stopped by the Jim Gearhart show on 101.5 FM radio and dropped a bomb: There are no transition funds. He told the morning radio legend: “Interestingly, the state didn’t fund the transition. They didn’t put any money in the budget for a transition so we need to talk about making sure that we get that squared away.” Four years ago there was $250,000 for the Codey transition out of the governor’s office. And $250,000 for Corzine to transition in. Incidentally, a lot less was spent than was budgeted. So, what happened here? Did the big thinkers under the Gold Dome think Corzine was a sure winner so transition funds were not necessary? Did they just forget? Where does the transition money come from in this cash-strapped state? A bake sale? Corzine makes a contribution as a parting gift?

I like the idea of Corzine having to pay for it. After all, he was willing to spend tens of millions of his own money to pay for his reelection campaign which consisted mostly of attack ads on Chris Christie. It would seem appropriate for a man who didn't think ahead to budget for a possible transition to have to pay up from his own pocket.

Labels: Politics

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 9:01 AM 1 comments

It's all about him, him, him

 

It's no surprise that Barack Obama's short video message for the fall of the Berlin Wall festivities should include a celebration of himself. Remember his wife saying that the first time she was proud of her country was when it started supporting her husband. After all, this is a man whose pride in America has long been tied to his own personal success. As he said in the 2004 Democratic convention speech that launched his national career,

“I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story ... and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”

He said it again in his race speech that he gave after the uproar over his presence in Jeremiah Wright's congregation erupted. "I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible." This is obviously a man who sees his personal success as an expression of what is best about our country. And so he couldn't help but insert that self glorification into his taped speech for the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"Few would have foreseen ... that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it," Obama said.

Of course, he couldn't spare a mention of communism at the very celebration of its great failure. That would be just too divisive.

But celebrating himself -- well, there is always time for that.

Labels: President Obama

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 8:33 AM 0 comments

If you loved HMO's, get excited about "medical homes"

 

Remember when HMOs were the bright idea that was going to lower medical costs? It turned out that people didn't like having to go to one doctor to ask for referrals for all their other treatments. Well, the PelosiCare bill passed last weekend has a similar construct for Medicare recipients. Betsy McCaughey explains,

• Sec. 1302 (pp. 672-692) moves Medicare from a fee-for-service payment system, in which patients choose which doctors to see and doctors are paid for each service they provide, toward what's called a "medical home."

The medical home is this decade's version of HMO-restrictions on care. A primary-care provider manages access to costly specialists and diagnostic tests for a flat monthly fee. The bill specifies that patients may have to settle for a nurse practitioner rather than a physician as the primary-care provider. Medical homes begin with demonstration projects, but the HHS secretary is authorized to "disseminate this approach rapidly on a national basis."

A December 2008 Congressional Budget Office report noted that "medical homes" were likely to resemble the unpopular gatekeepers of 20 years ago if cost control was a priority.

This is what AARP has endorsed. I wonder how many senior citizens are on board for these changes. But you might argue that this is what we need to do bring Medicare costs down. But that isn't all that is in this bill.

While the bill will slash Medicare funding, it will also direct billions of dollars to numerous inner-city social work and diversity programs with vague standards of accountability.

• Sec. 399V (p. 1422) provides for grants to community "entities" with no required qualifications except having "documented community activity and experience with community healthcare workers" to "educate, guide, and provide experiential learning opportunities" aimed at drug abuse, poor nutrition, smoking and obesity. "Each community health worker program receiving funds under the grant will provide services in the cultural context most appropriate for the individual served by the program."

These programs will "enhance the capacity of individuals to utilize health services and health related social services under Federal, State and local programs by assisting individuals in establishing eligibility . . . and in receiving services and other benefits" including transportation and translation services....

• Secs. 2521 and 2533 (pp. 1379 and 1437) establishes racial and ethnic preferences in awarding grants for training nurses and creating secondary-school health science programs. For example, grants for nursing schools should "give preference to programs that provide for improving the diversity of new nurse graduates to reflect changes in the demographics of the patient population." And secondary-school grants should go to schools "graduating students from disadvantaged backgrounds including racial and ethnic minorities."

How will those grants be meted out without using numerical quotas counting up how many of the correct minorities are in each school?

Labels: Health

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 8:21 AM 1 comments

Donate money and get your kid a better test grade

 

One Raleigh area middle school has come up with a novel way to increase funds raised to help the school. Give a student extra credit for bringing in $20.

Selling candy didn't raise much money last year, so a Goldsboro middle school is selling grades.

A $20 donation to Rosewood Middle School will get a student 20 test points - 10 extra points on two tests of the student's choosing. That could raise a B to an A, or a failing grade to a D.

Susie Shepherd, the principal, said a parent advisory council came up with the idea, and she endorsed it. She said the council was looking for a new way to raise money.

"Last year they did chocolates, and it didn't generate anything," Shepherd said.

Shepherd rejected the suggestion that the school is selling grades. Extra points on two tests won't make a difference in a student's final grade, she said.

It's wrong to think that "one particular grade could change the entire focus of nine weeks," Shepherd said.

When I taught in the regular public schools back in the nineties there was a rule forbidding connecting anything that students might bring in from home to their grades. We were even advised against giving assignments where some students would have an advantage because their parents might have internet access and be able to drive the kids to the library while other students wouldn't have those opportunities.

And now a principal thinks it's acceptable to give extra credit on a test for donations? Amazing.

I expect that this is a policy that will soon be reversed.

Labels: Education

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:48 AM 0 comments

What happens when everyone depends on the government?

 

Here is a depressing analysis.

By one measure, the government already plays an outsize role in our so-called free-market economy--and it has little to do with the recession. Economist Gary Shilling has calculated that 58 percent of the population is dependent on the government for "major parts of their income," including teachers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and other government employees; welfare and Social Security recipients; government pensioners; public housing beneficiaries; and people who work for government contractors. By 2018, Shilling estimates, an astounding 67 percent of Americans could be dependent on the government for their livelihood.

This has happened under both Republicans and Democrats.

Tea-party ranters might cite this as evidence of liberal policies run amok, but the growing-government phenomenon transcends party politics. In 1950, the starting point for Shilling's analysis, just 29 percent of the nation depended on government for its income. By 1980, that had risen to 61 percent--higher than it is today--thanks to demographic factors and the needs of a changing nation. The military got larger and defense spending grew as America took up its role as a superpower. Baby boomer kids required many more schoolteachers. The number of Americans receiving payouts from Social Security, enacted in 1935, increased 10-fold. Food stamps and other safety-net programs of the 1960s and '70s began to reach millions of Americans.

From 1980 to 2000, Americans became less dependent on government. California and other states cut their budgets and reduced spending. The military got smaller after the Cold War ended. Welfare reform in the 1990s kicked many people off the dole. And the private sector boomed during those two decades, accounting for a larger share of the labor force. By 2000, the portion of the population dependent on government had drifted down to 54 percent.

But it reversed course after that, and it seems poised to keep going up. The size of government has generally held steady since 2000, but globalization, technology, and other factors have led to weak private-sector job creation over the past decade. And that was before the recession destroyed more than 8 million jobs. So the government has employed an increased share of Americans. The other big change since 2000 has been a near tripling of food-stamp recipients, as low earners got left out of the housing and stock-market booms and then suffered worse during the recession.

The next big shift will come as baby boomers begin to retire, boosting the number of Social Security recipients 27 percent by 2018 and threatening the solvency of the program. Shilling has another dire prediction: Economic growth will be so weak for the next several years that without government support, the unemployment rate will rise to 23 percent in 2018. Since that's politically intolerable, government will continue to spend money to create jobs, he predicts, with nearly 25 million additional Americans employed as a direct outcome of government spending by 2018.

I know that liberals support government running as much as possible rather than evil private enterprise. But at some point, you need non-governmental workers to be working and building the rest of the economy to pay for all the lovely things that people look to the government to do.

Labels: Economics

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:13 AM 6 comments

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Code Pink are truly callous and dreadful people

 

Big Government highlights this video from Halloween. The children from military families, White House staff, and D.C. families were invited to the White House to trick or treat. I thought it was a very nice idea. However, Code Pink thought it was a great opportunity to parade in front of the little children dressed as the ghouls and ghosts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Observe the confused looks on the faces of the children waiting with their treat bags as Code Pink ghouls chant their anti-war slogans.

Dressed in fatigues with a bloody bandage wrapped around her head, Benjamin loudly moaned as she emoted being a ‘zombie soldier’, while holding a black cut-out of a rifle and wearing a pink sign that read, “The White House is haunted by the ghosts of Bush’s war.”

That’s just what children of soldiers fighting for our freedom should see, yes? Well, if your intent is to wage psychological warfare on the families of our troops to aid our terrorist enemies then the answer would indeed be, “yes.”

Fairooz, convincingly portraying a witch (as the Buck Owens song says, all she had to do was ‘act naturally’), called out to the children, telling them she wanted “young blood” for the war.

It is one thing to protest politicians who have some say in the conduct of the war. It is sinking to a new low to target the young children of those serving abroad with such taunts and attacks.

Labels: War on Terror

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:49 AM 5 comments

Is the Supreme Court about to discover a new right?

 

It was just a few years ago when the Supreme Court decided that "cruel and unusual punishment" included the execution of someone who committed a crime a few months short of his 18th birthday. Now the question before the Court is whether or not it would be cruel and unusual to sentence someone to a lifetime sentence for a crime committed before the 18th birthday. Few states have such provisions, but there are some that do and those sentences were challenged Monday at the Supreme Court.

The court in 2005 decided that it was unconstitutional to execute juveniles who had committed murder. Now, advocates for youthful offenders are asking the court to declare that sentencing juveniles convicted of nonlethal crimes to "die in prison" should also be forbidden.

Attorney Bryan S. Gowdy, who represents a man who was sentenced to life without parole at age 17, told the justices that his client and others imprisoned as juveniles deserve a right to prove that they have changed.

He said his client, Terrance Graham, now 22, seeks a "meaningful opportunity" at some point to show that he is "fit to live in society. That's all -- that's all we're asking for."

Graham was sentenced after he violated his probation by taking part in a home invasion. A year earlier, he had been convicted of armed robbery.

The justices also heard a second case from Florida, which imprisons more than 70 percent of juveniles sentenced to life without parole nationwide. Joe Harris Sullivan, now 34, was one of only two 13-year-olds in the nation to receive the sentence -- in his case, for two counts of sexual battery.

The lawyers said such sentences violate the Eighth Amendment, an argument that found little favor with the court's more conservative justices.

The question is not whether this is good policy. The question is whether such sentences rise to the level of cruel and unusual and so can be determined unconstitutional over the choice of the individual state legislatures.

It sounds, as Lyle Denniston writes, as if the Chief Justice is going to try to construct a new solution with a proportionality test that could be applied depending on how old the juvenile was at the time and how gruesome was the crime.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., made a strong — and repeated — effort on Monday to recruit a majority of the Supreme Court in favor of giving juveniles more chance to use their age to challenge life-without-parole prison terms, as an alternative to a flat constitutional bar against ever imposing that sentence. With a number of Justices wondering where to draw an age line if the categorical approach were used, the Chief Justice’s initiative seemed to have a good chance of gaining adherents as the Court heard Graham v. Florida (08-7412) and Sullivan v. Florida (08-7621).

Lawyers for the two youths, who committed non-homicide crimes at age 16 and 13, sought to persuade the Court that the only way to deal constitutionally with no-release sentences for minor offenders was to declare all such sentences forbidden. While there was much sympathy evident among some — not all — of the Justices for treating juveniles differently, it did not appear that there was a clearcut majority for taking away altogether the life-without-parole option even in cases where the victim of a youth’s crime did not die.

The Chief Justice’s alternative would apparently be a declaration that the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment required judges to take the offender’s youth into account in setting any sentence for a term of years, then judge whether that sentence was “proportional” both for an offender of that age and for the particular crime. The question on how attractive that option might be — say, to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — was whether that would be a meaningful inquiry that would in reality give youths’ some chance of avoiding having the state give up on them entirely.

It sounds like the kind of a compromise that could draw in Justice Kennedy and bring in those on both sides. Whether that was what the Founders had in mind when they wrote the 8th Amendment is another question.

Labels: Civil Liberties, Supreme Court

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:37 AM 1 comments

The bliss of experiencing the fall of the Berlin Wall

 

Anne Applebaum has a very perceptive comment on all the celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Despite all the problems that there have been for the former East Germans and the other inhabitants of the Soviet bloc countries since the end of the Soviet Union, they are still doing so much better than might have been expected 20 years ago. And nothing about that progress was predictable.

But what did we think Central Europe would look like 20 years after Nov. 9, 1989? I can promise you, having been in Berlin then myself, that no one had the slightest idea. Angela Merkel herself has said that she thought it was ridiculous even to speculate on the possibility of a united Germany, so absurd did that idea seem -- even after the fall of the wall. Indeed, so outlandish did the notion of NATO expansion seem that when officials in the new democratic government of Poland first raised the idea, American diplomats in Warsaw angrily told them to forget about it.

Back then, most of those who did make predictions saw a dark future. The rise of virulent, angry nationalism was forecast by more than one expert. Others foresaw the rise of anti-Semitism and the growth of neo-Nazism; Germany was going to become "the Fourth Reich." Many in the West protested, preemptively, against the "witch hunts" that might be conducted against former communists. Now that he is a revered symbol of freedom, nobody remembers that the Polish Solidarity leader, Lech Walesa, was tapped as a potential right-wing demagogue, too.

Some truly awful things did happen: In Yugoslavia there was a bitter war. In Russia, revanchism has returned. Authoritarian dictators run several of the former Soviet republics. But the heart of Central Europe -- Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Romania and Bulgaria -- is peaceful and democratic. More than that: The inhabitants of Central Europe are healthier, more prosperous and more integrated with the rest of the continent than they have been for centuries.

This, then, is what I think was bothering me about the commemorations: Too many of them treat too much of the past two decades as a foregone conclusion, focusing on what didn't happen rather than what did. Too many have taken the achievements for granted. Too many of us forget that there are few historical precedents for the past two decades. "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." When Wordsworth wrote those words about the French Revolution, the post-revolutionary terror was a recent memory, the Napoleonic wars were still raging and his poem was an ironic comment on the naivete of youth. But we are now as far from the events of 1989 as Wordsworth was from 1789, and here in Central Europe there is no need for irony at all: Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

That is why this celebration is so important. We must remember all that was achieved and that none of it was written in stone that it had to happen that way. For those countries that have not slid back into authoritarianism like Russia, this anniversary is truly something to savor.

Labels: History

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 5:59 AM 1 comments

Monday, November 09, 2009

The miserable end to the Kelo case

 

Remember how New London, CT thought it was so crucial to take over private property including Susette Kelo's perfectly fine home in order to give the land to Pfizer who would build a plant and presumably employ people in the area. The result was the notorious Kelo v. the City of New London case that set the precedent that a municipality could use eminent domain to take property from one private owner and give it to another if they thought that it would contribute to economic growth in the area.

So Susette Kelo lost the property where she'd lived in for her adult lifetime, although the house itself was saved and moved to another location.

But the real irony is revealed today. Pfizer has decided not to build the plant that was supposed to help out New London enough to justify taking away people's private property to give to the drug company.

Pfizer Inc. will shut down its massive New London research and development headquarters and transfer most of the 1,400 people working there to Groton, the pharmaceutical giant said Monday.

The move comes in the wake of Pfizer's recent merger with Wyeth, and is part of a global consolidation of the two companies' research operations. Groton will be the biggest of the company's five major global research sites, the company said. The move from New London to Groton will take place over the next two years.

Pfizer is now deciding what to do with its giant New London offices, and will consider selling it, leasing it and other options, a company spokeswoman said.

The company has not said how many of its 5,000 Connecticut employees will lose their jobs, but the broader consolidation will "result in staff reductions" and cut the combined companies' research footprint by 35 percent.

New London became a byword for a community that would override people's private property rights. And now it's suffering the final degradation as the whole project is abandoned. Now they'll have to hope that some other company will want to buy the vacant lot where Susette Kelo's home and those of her neighbors once sat.

Weeds, glass, bricks, pieces of pipe and shingle splinters have replaced the knot of aging homes at the site of the nation's most notorious eminent domain project.

There are a few signs of life: Feral cats glare at visitors from a miniature jungle of Queen Anne's lace, thistle and goldenrod. Gulls swoop between the lot's towering trees and the adjacent sewage treatment plant.

But what of the promised building boom that was supposed to come wrapped and ribboned with up to 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenues? They are noticeably missing.

Proponents of the ambitious plan blame the sour economy. Opponents call it a "poetic justice."

"They are getting what they deserve. They are going to get nothing," said Susette Kelo, the lead plaintiff in the landmark property rights case. "I don't think this is what the United States Supreme Court justices had in mind when they made this decision."

Instead of having a neighborhood of taxpaying homeowners they now have an overgrown abandoned lot.

Labels: Civil Liberties

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:45 PM 4 comments

Is Obama getting squishy on abortion?

 

Remember this?

Here is the President speaking on September 9 before a joint session of Congress:

And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up – under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.

Sounds pretty definite, doesn't it?

Yet, here is the President's press spokesman today.

When asked whether the president supported Rep. Bart Stupak's (D-Mich.) amendment to prohibit the public insurance plan from covering abortion services, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs dodged the question -- multiple times.

"Well, ask me that right before Christmas and the end of the New Year," Gibbs said during today's press briefing, noting the president still expected to sign a healthcare bill before the year's end.

The press secretary later clarified, "We will work on this and continue to seek consensus and common ground."

....But Gibbs on Monday offered little insight into whether the president would meet with pro-life or pro-choice House members in the coming days, much less where Obama -- who emphasized his pro-choice positions on the campaign trail in 2008 -- might ultimately side in the new debate.

"I'm going to leave it at the earlier answer that we're going to continue to work through and make progress on these issues," he repeated to reporters.

Sounds rather mushy, doesn't it? Sounds like another promise Obama is willing to go back on, if he has to. He's sounding tough when he talks to Jake Tapper today, but he still is leaving the door open for further negotiations to make both pro-choice and pro-life people happy. He's not going to be able to find some magic language that both funds abortion with federal dollars and doesn't fund it. And that is what the debate is about.

You know the pro-choice Democrats who are so outraged by the Stupak amendment and making threats about voting against the bill if it remains in are betraying that they don't really believe that private insurance companies will remain in business after Obamacare passes. If they truly believed it, they wouldn't be so upset about the Stupak amendment which is about maintaining the status quo of the Hyde Amendment which is what we have now - no federal funding of abortions. But private insurance policies could still fund abortions. That's the situation we have now. If the Democrats believed all their promises about how they're just offering a choice to health insurance and that no one's private health insurance would change under their plans, they would be willing to vote for the Stupak Amendment. People could get the private plans if abortion coverage was so important to them.

But if, as conservatives argue, the federal option will soon crowd out private plans and eventually be our sole choice for health insurance as private plans find they can't compete with a public plan that can regulate prices and use the taxpayers' money to make up shortfalls, then those who want an abortion plan wouldn't be able to depend on their private options.

The fact that pro-choice Democrats are so outraged indicates that they don't truly believe their soothing promises about how nothing will change about our private plans once a public option is enacted.

However, one more thing I don't believe is that these 41 Democrats who are writing Nancy Pelosi with their threats will remain strong about not voting for a conference report that doesn't include funding of abortion. If a conference bill does come out with what the Democrats want otherwise, they'll swallow hard and vote for it, holding onto the faith that they'll be able to slip abortion funding in later.

Labels: Health

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:20 PM 15 comments

The tradeoffs of the stimulus spending

 

Brian Riedl asks the natural and important question about the close to $800 billion stimulus bill? What could that money otherwise have been spent?

Those dissecting the White House claim that the $200 billion spent on the stimulus has created or saved 650,000 jobs have focused on the arithmetical errors in counting the hirings. They are ignoring a much more fundamental issue. Before Congress could inject $200 billion into the economy, they had to borrow $200 billion out of the economy. So the more central question is thus: If injecting $200 billion into the economy supported 650,000 jobs, then how many jobs were lost by first borrowing that $200 billion out of the economy?

The White House says zero. Their job numbers assume all $200 billion is “new” and supports jobs that would not otherwise exist.

This is absolutely implausible. How can adding $200 billion to one part of the economy support 650,000 jobs, but removing $200 billion from another part of the economy not cost a single job anywhere?

Some assert that this $200 billion is new spending because it was borrowed from savers. But that assumes the people who lent Washington the money would have otherwise saved exactly 100 percent of it. Even if one conservatively assumes they’d have saved half of it, then (by their Keynesian theory) only $100 billion would be “new” spending supporting new jobs. The other half merely replaced private spending/jobs with government spending/jobs. So cut the jobs created/saved figure in half.

But wait, there’s more. Even the money borrowed from savers isn’t “new money.” Savings do not fall out of the economy. They are invested or deposited in banks — which then lend them out to others to spend. Even when recession-weary banks hesitate to loan money, they invest it in Treasury bills instead. They don’t hoard customer deposits in massive basement vaults. Consequently, one person’s savings quickly finances another person’s spending. (And even foreign borrowing is financed by an increased trade deficit, negating the effect.) So borrowing from savers doesn’t add new spending, either.

Thus, it is possible that all $200 billion in government spending (and jobs) merely displaced private spending (and jobs) dollar-for-dollar and job-for-job. And this is why the unemployment rate is not dropping.

The White House is telling us that adding $200 billion to one part of the economy created/saved 650,000 jobs, but removing $200 billion from another part of the economy has not cost a single job. They need to be taken to task for such implausible economics.

Once again, a little economics explains so much that liberals seem not to understand. In every expense there are tradeoffs of how that money could be spent in other ways. Sometimes liberals seem to think that this money just appears and would never have had any effect if spent otherwise. It is not so.

Labels: Economics, Stimulus

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:33 AM 10 comments

Edging towards bankruptcy

 

There comes a point in a child's life when they realize that their parent's resources aren't limitless and there are just some things that Mommy and Daddy can't afford to buy them. Most of us learn that lesson when very young. Some still seem oblivious to the fact that the United States just doesn't have the money to pay for everyone's health care insurance. Fred Hiatt explains,

Here is the dilemma: The bill also could take America a step closer to bankruptcy. And for progressives in particular -- for those who believe that government has a mission to help the poor and protect the vulnerable -- that prospect should be alarming. If federal debt continues rising on its present path, hastened by a $1 trillion health-care bill, it is the poor and vulnerable who will be most harmed.

President Obama has acknowledged this dilemma and offered three broad answers: Health-care reform should not add to the deficit. It should control health-care costs. And, once reform is passed, the government will get serious about deficit reduction.

Unfortunately, the House bill fails his first test. True, the Congressional Budget Office has said that the bill is paid for. But the CBO is not allowed to count $250 billion in projected Medicare payments to doctors over the next 10 years, because the House -- after first acknowledging that cost in its reform bill -- decreed it had nothing to do with reform because lawmakers didn't want to pay for it.

Nor is the CBO permitted to ask whether Congress will truly cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare programs in coming years, as the House bill assumes. History suggests that legislators will not be deaf to the complaints of seniors and those who treat them when it comes time for the axe to fall.

As Post health reporter Ceci Connolly explained in a front-page story last week, the House bill also does not do much to lower costs. It includes some valuable pilot programs. But it doesn't end the tax break for employer-provided insurance, a break that is both highly regressive and encourages spending. It doesn't allow for much evidence-based medicine that could wring excess treatment out of the system. It doesn't empower an independent commission that could make cost-control decisions that are too hard for Congress. It doesn't target the cost of malpractice litigation and defensive medicine.

Obama's third answer is welcome, but can he succeed? If he could not or chose not to raise revenue more substantially or reduce entitlement benefits while pleasing the Democratic faithful with universal health care, why would he fare better when he has no goodies left to offer?

The root difficulty is Obama's insistence that the nation can afford a large new social program without raising taxes on anyone who earns less than $250,000 per year.

Under his plan, according to a CBO analysis, the government will be spending 24.5 percent of gross domestic product -- the total value of the national economy -- by 2019 while raising only 19 percent in revenue: a huge, unsustainable gap.

In the kind of fiscal crisis that might ensue, as progressive budget expert Robert Greenstein said recently, "the risk is high that the people with the least political power in this country could bear a disproportionate share of the burden even though, by and large, they're lower on the income scale." The government would spend more and more on interest payments while likely stinting on college scholarships, inner-city schools, and, above all, aid to the poor and near-poor here and abroad.

Even if the federal government ended all of those things, it would still not equal the expenses that we're going to be on the hook for in the Democrats' health care bill.

And remember, they're planning all this when unemployment is over 10%. It's just amazingly and stubbornly blind. Are they totally oblivious to reality? Just because they might get the votes to pass the thing, that doesn't mean that their magic numbers will work. Separating out the doctor fix doesn't make that money go away. Get ready for more taxes and less health care. And more unemployment.

Just focus a bit. The Democrats have crafted a bill where the benefits don't start for a few years, but the payments start now. As the WSJ writes,

Perhaps the most unsurprising news in this drama was the collapse of the Blue Dog "deficit hawks." Enough of them always cave in the end to give Mrs. Pelosi her way. It's nonetheless worth noting the surrender of that most vocal scourge of deficits, Tennessee's Jim Cooper, who voted aye on grounds that the bill can be improved in the Senate.

But Max Baucus's Finance Committee bill includes a similar gimmick of making the numbers look good by using 10 years of new taxes to finance only seven years of spending (six in the House). The deficits explode in the second decade and beyond in both bills.

The House also contains a new government long-term insurance program that starts collecting premiums in 2011 but doesn't starting paying benefits until 2016 and then runs out of money in 2029. North Dakota Democrat Kent Conrad called it "a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of" in an interview with the Washington Post in late October. Mr. Cooper has with a single vote made his entire career irrelevant.

And what happens afterwards, when we're in the second decade of the program and we don't have a headstart on taxes to pay for that decade's worth of health care? Michael Barone notes today how young voters didn't turn out in Tuesday's election. What happens when it dawns on all those bright-eyed young people that the Democrats have just voted away all hope of fiscal sanity for their generation?

UPDATE: My husband links to this chart of anticipated costs of federal health care programs and the reality of what they really cost.

(Click to enlarge)We'll be lucky if the costs only double from what originally estimated. But the projects you're hearing today are all bogus and way understate what the final costs will be.

Labels: Health

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:55 AM 9 comments

How the Democrats rewarded the labor unions in the health care bill

 

It's no surprise that the Democrats have tucked all sorts of little bonuses for the labor unions into the almost 2000 pages of the health care bill recently passed. It's all part of the quid pro quo that they have going with the unions. The unions spend millions and send out their myrmidons to work to elect Democrats. And then the Democrats turn around and reward them. Kevin Mooney summarizes some of the treats for labor slipped into the bill.

Small wonder then that the push for health care "reform" has assumed a heightened importance, as it would provide union bosses with new privileges and authority that have escaped media attention and public scrutiny.

Consider the language contained in section 2531 submerged deep within the House version. Here the bill stipulates that any participating health care employer "provides wages and benefits to its nurses that are competitive for its market or that have been collectively bargained with a labor organization."

"This phrase 'competitive for its market' is not defined," said Greg Mourad, the main author of the NRTWC study. "This means the Obama administration will be free to define the phrase using Davis-Bacon standards and this would make it almost impossible for non-union employees to qualify."

The approach is similar to what has been done with apprentice programs in federal construction work, Stefan Gleason, vice-president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, explained.

"This is a scheme that is used to fund union organizations that are supposedly doing job training but are often doing other activities," he said. "The scenario that is set up essentially black-balls non-union contractors from even being eligible to work on federal contracts at all. There is a similar strategy at work here with health care."

Section 2531 also provides for state training partnership programs that include "even more explicit unionization requirements," according to the NRTWC study.

"The state training partnership flows in one direction and it does not have a provision for a non-union employee organization," Mourad said. "It has to be a labor organization."

.... Under section 164 of the House bill, union bosses who have mismanaged benefits for their own members are poised to receive a $10 billion bailout from U.S. taxpayers in the form of a "reinsurance program" that has been folded into the health care bill. Union health insurance funds only have about 30 cents available to cover each dollar of anticipated claims, according to the Lewin Group and other research firms.

There's more. Sections 123, 124 and 2251 of H.R. 3200 all create new avenues for union control on newly formed committees that administration officials could stack with union appointees.

Meanwhile, the Senate version includes language that could force home health care workers to into unions. California has a set the precedent here by re-classifying these workers as public employees for the purpose of collective bargaining.

A lot of back-scratching going on here. No surprise.

Labels: Labor

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:45 AM 0 comments

Misunderstanding health care costs

 

Thomas Sowell tries to explicate for the Democrats who don't seem to understand that government can't wave a wand and make health care costs suddenly come down.

There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like a pea in a shell game at a carnival. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor's office and more in taxes-- or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.

Costs are not reduced simply because you don't pay them. It would undoubtedly be cheaper for me to do without the medications that keep me alive and more vigorous in my old age than people of a similar age were in generations past.

Letting old people die would undoubtedly be cheaper than keeping them alive-- but that does not mean that the costs have gone down. It just means that we refuse to pay the costs. Instead, we pay the consequences. There is no free lunch.

Providing free lunches to people who go to hospital emergency rooms is one of the reasons for the current high costs of medical care for others. Politicians mandating what insurance companies must cover is another free lunch that leads to higher premiums for medical insurance-- and fewer people who can afford it.

Despite all the demonizing of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies or doctors for what they charge, the fundamental costs of goods and services are the costs of producing them.

If highly paid chief executives of insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies agreed to work free of charge, it would make very little difference in the cost of insurance or medications. If doctors' incomes were cut in half, that would not lower the cost of producing doctors through years of expensive training in medical schools and hospitals, nor the overhead costs of running doctors' offices.

What it would do is reduce the number of very able people who are willing to take on the high costs of a medical education when the return on that investment is greatly reduced and the aggravations of dealing with government bureaucrats are added to the burdens of the work.

Britain has had a government-run medical system for more than half a century and it has to import doctors, including some from Third World countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors' income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences.

Any one of us can reduce medical costs by refusing to pay them. In our own lives, we recognize the consequences. But when someone with a gift for rhetoric tells us that the government can reduce the costs without consequences, we are ready to believe in such political miracles.

Apparently, the Democrats, as witnessed in the health care bill they just passed in the House don't understand the fundamental difference between price and cost. They still, however, seem to believe in that government magic wand. So they'll be so very surprised at the unintended consequences of the monstrosity that they're supporting.

Labels: Economics, Health

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:39 AM 1 comments

The fall of the Berlin Wall

 

As we commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall, we should take time to reflect on why it fell and what it symbolized. The WSJ expresses it well today.

Yet if the West's stand in Berlin demonstrates anything, it is that moral commitments have a way of reaping strategic dividends over time. By ordering the airlift in 1948, Harry Truman saved a starving city and defied Soviet bullying. As importantly, he showed that the U.S. would not abandon Europe to its furies, as it had after World War I, thus helping to pave the way for the creation of NATO in April 1949.

By holding firm for 40 years, Truman and his successors transformed what was supposed to be the Atlantic alliance's weakest point into its strongest. To know what the West stood for during most of those years, one merely had to go to Berlin, see the Wall, consider its purpose, and observe the contrasts between the vibrant prosperity on one side of the city and the oppressive monotony on the other.

Those contrasts were even more apparent to the Germans trapped on the wrong side of the Wall. Barbed wire, closed military zones and the machinery of communist propaganda could keep the prosperity of the West out of sight of most people living east of the Iron Curtain. But that wasn't true for the people of East Berlin, many of whom merely had to look out their windows to understand how empty and cynical were the promises of socialism compared to the reality of a free-market system.

We'd like to think that the United States was truly united in the Cold War, but that would be seeing history through rose-colored glasses. The Media Research Council has done a report on what some were saying at the time and it's a reminder of how, especially after the Vietnam War, we were actually divided in not only fighting the Cold War but in how we perceived it. Cal Thomas summarizes some of the more egregious statements that the MRC reports.

Reading these quotes, in light of history, resembles a “Saturday Night Live” comedy skit.

In 1987, before the wall collapsed, CBS anchor Dan Rather said, “Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.”

Strobe Talbott, then of Time magazine and soon to be an influential member of the Clinton administration, wrote on Jan. 1, 1990, “(Soviet leader) Gorbachev is helping the West by showing that the Soviet threat isn’t what it used to be, and what’s more, that it never was.” How is it possible to simultaneously have been a threat, but not a threat? The millions who died in gulags, starved to death or were assassinated might have a different interpretation of Russian history under communism.

After the liberation of Eastern Europe, according to the MRC, some journalists attacked capitalism for “exploiting” the newly freed workers. A Los Angeles Times reporter touted “communism’s ‘good old days,’ when the hand of the state crushed personal freedom but ensured that people were housed, employed and had enough to eat.”

In fact, Soviet communism spread misery through its own 12 time zones and in many parts of the world, though NBC’s John Chancellor refused to see it. In 1991, as the Soviet coup unraveled, Chancellor said, “the problem isn’t communism; nobody even talked about communism this week. The problem is shortages.” Wait, according to the Los Angeles Times reporter, there were no shortages because everyone was housed, employed and had enough to eat? Both can’t be true.

Ted Turner, the former CNN mogul, is always good for an outlandish quote and when it came to Soviet Russia, he offered a cornucopia of self-deluded statements, none better than this one: “(Gorbachev is) moving faster than Jesus Christ did.” But Time magazine bested him with this howler when it described Gorbachev as both “the communist pope and the Soviet Martin Luther.”

Never ones to admit failure for their favorite theories, the Left still refuses to acknowledge their errors. They simply moved on to new errors, in this case to Cuba. In 2006 an Associated Press story said, “For all its flaws, life in Cuba has its comforts. Many Cubans take pride in their free education system, high literacy rates and top-notch doctors. Ardent Castro supporters say life in the United States, in contrast, seems selfish, superficial and — despite its riches — ultimately unsatisfying.” Is that why so many Cubans have risked their lives to reach America?

Again, Ted Turner on North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il: “I saw a lot of people over there. They were thin and they were riding bicycles instead of driving cars.” An incredulous Wolf Blitzer replied, “A lot of those people are starving.” Turner said, “I didn’t see any brutality.” (Read more at www.mrc.org.)

It's a good reminder of how the mainstream media chose to portray communism in the decade before the fall of the Soviet Union. How much else do they get exactly wrong because of the ideological blinders they wear?

Labels: History, Media

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:16 AM 3 comments

Friday, November 06, 2009

Moveon's war on Democratic moderates

 

While we pause from the wall-to-wall coverage of the "war within the Republican Party," we can pause to notice that there is a little internecine conflict over on the left. Byron York reports that Moveon.org has raised money to target Democratic moderates. They should acknowledge what the Republicans are starting to learn. Certain districts aren't ideologically one way or the other. The only way a candidate will win there is to play to the middle. Just as the Republicans should accept a Mike Castle in Delaware or a Mark Kirk in Illinois as the best they can do to win in those states, the liberals have to accept their moderates or they can kiss their majorities good-bye.

The other goal of the Moveon'ers is to strip Democratic moderates of their Senate chairmanships.

And now, working in conjunction with Howard Dean's old organization Democracy for America, MoveOn is starting a drive to take away the committee chairmanships of any Democrat who fails to live up to MoveOn's progressive standards. "Many of these senators hold coveted committee chairmanships that give them significant power within the Senate," Ruben writes. "Our friends at Democracy for America have launched an open letter urging Senate Democrats to strip committee chairmanships from any Democrat who filibusters health care." Ruben says that more than 66,000 MoveOn and Democracy for America members have pledged to contribute.

"Chairing a committee is a privilege, not a right," Ruben continues. "So if a member of the Democratic Congress joins with Republicans in the most important vote in a generation, then they certainly don't deserve a position of power controlled by Democrats."

I predict that the leftists will have just as much luck at doing that as conservative Republicans had in trying to remove a Republican like Mark Hatfield from his Senate chairmanship after the 1994 takeover. There was a push to remove him from his chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee after he voted against the balanced budget amendment, thus sinking it. Rick Santorum led that movement. But then the caucus went behind closed doors and Mark Hatfield emerged with his chairmanship intact. I predict the same thing will happen behind closed doors of the Democratic caucus. When it comes down to it, respect for seniority will trump any desire to enforce ideological purity. Senators will start to wonder what will happen to their positions if they strike down the old rules. Robert Byrd will totter up and make a passionate speech evoking the sacred rules of the Senate and caucus and the move will die.

But, by all means, let's have Moveon.org get out there and run ads attacking their own members and running primary challenges. We'll see if the media regards that with as much simulated dismay as they regarded the move to push out Dede Scozzafava.

Labels: Democrats, Politics, Senate

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:21 AM 2 comments

The realignment myth

 

Liberals have long been crowing about a political realignment from Republican to Democrat that was heralded by Obama's victory in 2008. As Charles Krauthammer argues today, that was a myth and the pendulum is swinging back.

In the aftermath of last year's Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics -- most prominently, rising minorities and the young -- would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed "The Death of Conservatism," while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.

This was all ridiculous from the beginning. The '08 election was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.

The results from yesterday put a lie to the myth of the Democratic realignment. And should give President Obama and the Democrats pause as they seek to remake the country like pushing through a huge new reform that will create vast new bureaucracies and affect every single person's health care on a rushed strictly partyline vote.

What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent; the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they'd gone narrowly for Obama in '08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.

White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the '09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it's Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.

The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African American president.

November '08 was one shot, one time, never to be replicated. Nor was November '09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm -- and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.

The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm -- deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years -- because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his "New Foundation" for America -- from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.

Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama's hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt -- the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters -- as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.

I doubt if Fox News and talk radio has the power to muscle through the sort of reaction we saw at the voting booth yesterday. Democrats might want to hug the victory in NY-23 to themselves like a security teddy bear and mutter that this is a sign that Republicans are involved in a civil war that will break the party. Keep on thinking that, but ask yourselves, what are the chances that the anomalous situation in NY-23 will be repeated elsewhere - that party leaders will meet together and pick a Democrat-in-all-but name to run without any primary and that a conservative will be forced to run on third-party line? That isn't going to happen again.

The idea of a political realignment is greatly exaggerated. We perhaps saw one in 1896 with McKinley's election and in 1932 with FDR's. But mostly what we see is the pendulum swing. A party wins, gets in power, and then goes too far beyond where the country would like to be and then there is a corresponding swing back. One of the surest predictions after last year's election was that the Democrats would go too far and lose the support of many in the American public. If the Republicans were to take over the country, they would also.

I return to what Jay Cost wrote soon after Obama's reelection on whether or not it portended a realignment.

For the Republicans, much depends on how well Obama governs. If he governs to the public's satisfaction - the GOP could be in the minority for a while. If he does not - its return may be speedier.

Well, we have our answer now.

Labels: Politics

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:38 AM 14 comments

Simply dreadful

 

My heart goes out to the families and friends of the victims of the Fort Hood shooting yesterday. I keep thinking of the families so happy to have their soldiers home and then for this to happen.

What strikes me is how much of the original reporting was wrong on this story. Just follow the automatic updates that Allahpundit put up yesterday and see how much of the original story facts were just wrong.

As people plunge through this man's biography, they will try to come up with generalizations about the stresses of combat or his Muslim religion. It's dangerous to make a generalization based on the one incident. Especially when we're just at the preliminary stage of learning about this guy. Better to say that this was one seriously disturbed and twisted, evil man and not try to use his crime to score political points. But the media had a whole evening to fill without much information so a whole lot of fallacious speculating and reporting went on last night.

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:22 AM 20 comments