Engagement ahead of everything

While there might be little that the United States can do to help the protesters in Iran, we shouldn't be giving the Khamenei and Ahmadinejad regime the green light to continue whatever they're doing to crack down on dissent without worrying that Obama won't be willing to "engage" with them.

President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in separate interviews this weekend, said that the accelerating crackdown on opposition leaders in Iran in recent days would not deter them from seeking to engage the country’s top leadership in direct negotiations.

In an interview with The New York Times, a day before his scheduled departure for Moscow on Sunday, Mr. Obama said he had “grave concern” about the arrests and intimidation of Iran’s opposition leaders, but insisted, as he has throughout the Iranian crisis, that the repression would not close the door on negotiations with the Iranian government.

“We’ve got some fixed national security interests in Iran not developing nuclear weapons, in not exporting terrorism, and we have offered a pathway for Iran to rejoining the international community,” Mr. Obama said.

As Jennifer Rubin writes,

No fixed interests in democracy or human rights, have we? And no fixed interests in pursuing a policy with a remote chance to bear fruit. How many Iranians must be hanged or thrown in Evin prison before Obama understands that the Iranian government is not interested in “rejoining the international community”? Is there no one in the administration who might point out the significance of the “severe disconnect between their objectives and reality”?

....The president is willing to recognize no set of facts or moral considerations that will dissuade him from pursuing “engagement” with Iran. This is the triumph of blind ideology over reason, facts, history, and common sense.

And this was supposed to be the pragmatic and realist administration that did not run foreign policy based on ideology. Yeah, right. The illusion of meaningful engagement with Ahmadinejad and Khamenei that Obama enunciated in the youtube debate has blinded him to the reality that there is no way he can negotiate with this regime on any of those fixed national issues.

Creative destruction is painful, but necessary

Kevin Hassett thinks that the Obama administration could learn some lessons from economist Joseph Schumpeter.

Obama and his team seem sharply opposed to the view that creative destruction is a valuable economic force. They seem happy with what might be called destructive destruction – the obliteration of value and wealth without any resulting positive change.

Creative destruction describes the painful effects of innovation and progress. Sometimes great inventions wipe out the existing economy, just as the Internet may be killing print newspapers. In other cases, economic failure clears the way for competition among inventive newcomers. In both scenarios, the nimble and inventive replace the calcified old guard, eventually moving economic welfare to a higher level.

This is the lesson that the administration is ignoring as it props up car companies and other dinosaurs. Such creative destruction is terribly painful, but it is the only way that an economy can grow and prosper.

When we talk about cutting spending, this is what we mean

In an entry about the Californification of North Carolina, Charlotte blogger Tara Servatius points to spending that the North Carolina legislature is still planning to make even as they plan how much to raise taxes and how much of the education budget to cut. Here is a sample of spending okayed in the budget - nice items, but not the sort of items that would outrank education in taxpayers' minds.

Last month, while teachers here and across the state were getting pink slips due to the supposedly busted budget, Perdue was kicking up her heels at a "sand breaking" for the new state-funded $22.5-million North Carolina Aquarium Pier in affluent Nags Head. When finished, the tourist destination will include a 16,000-square-foot pier house that can be rented for parties. Construction began weeks after Perdue signed a bill funding it this spring.

Last week, she claimed she feels the teachers' pain. But why, then, didn't the state cancel money for the pier or try to claw back the $2-million ACC Hall of Champions in Greensboro? What about the $2.3 million still in the budget for the state symphony? Or the $4.7 million for the zoo fund and adopt-a-trail program? Or the $536,000 for the Ergonomics Center at N.C. State University, which designs user-friendly office furniture? Then there's $1.2 million for the botanical garden at UNC-Chapel Hill, $13.1 million for the state's public television station, $300,000 to resurrect and display Blackbeard's ship, $33 million for new museums/museum expansions across the state, and more than $50 million for the arts and theater programs.

Museums are nice and I like visiting the ones in our state and elsewhere. But if legislators were really as serious as they claim to be about cutting the budget to the bone, the ACC Hall of Champions might have to wait while that money went to keep a few more teachers in their classrooms. Though wouldn't you bet that most of these items are simply earmarks put in by legislators for their home communities?

Meanwhile, as Servatius notes, North Carolina has rocketed to the top of the national ratings on taxes. If the sales tax proposal to raise it to 7% goes through, North Carolina will be second only to California on that scale. But to balance that regressive tax, there is also a proposed progressive tax increase.

It also included a boost to the top two income tax brackets to 8.25 and 8.5 percent. If that passes, only California, Vermont, Oregon, Maine, New Jersey, Iowa and Hawaii have a higher top rate. And we'll have a heck of a time recruiting business here with our new state slogan: "North Carolina -- not quite California and marginally better than New Jersey."

North Carolina: where everyone gets to pay more.

Keep Congress out of college football!

William McGurn defends the BCS as he notes that Congress is set today to hold hearings on the whole college football championship controversy.

Today the Senate antitrust subcommittee will hold hearings on perhaps the only American institution less popular than Congress itself: the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Like an earlier hearing in the House, this one will ask whether the system by which college football chooses its national champion is "fair."

....In terms of popularity, it's a contest more evenly matched than any Rose Bowl. In one corner there's Congress with its 18% approval rating, according to the latest Rasmussen poll. In the other sits the BCS, whose system makes tons of money from television for its members but is preferred by just 15% of fans, according to a 2007 Gallup poll. No real winner here.

Shamefully, this congressional overreach is being led by two Republicans - Rep. Joe Barton of TX and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. Yeesh! Don't these guys get it? Conservatives are supposed to be about lessening the reach of the federal government into every sphere of our lives, not increasing it. I know, I know. That's a practice that is "more honored in the breach than the observance," but therein lies one of the problems with the Republican Party. College football championships, at least, should be an area where most fans can honestly say that they have not been yearning for congressional hearings and governmental mandates.

I'm probably one of the few people in the country who is an agnostic on the whole debate concerning the BCS. But I know that passions on this are deeper than they are on any of the issues that I do get riled up about. Let the passions play out in the living rooms of sports fans and on sports radio. Keep Congress out of it. And here's a suggestion:

College football would be better off if those who run the BCS could recognize that the calls for playoffs are being fed by the precision their system implicitly promises but can never deliver. And Americans would be better off if Republican legislators devoted their energies to reforming our antiquated antitrust laws instead of looking for silly new ways to apply them.

When will people learn about posting on the internet?

When the wife of the head of the British secret service, M16, blows his cover on her Facebook page, you have to wonder if public officials and their families need remedial training on how not to embarrass themselves on the internet.

The wife of the new head of MI6 has caused a major security breach and left his family exposed after publishing photographs and personal details on Facebook.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in November, putting him in charge of all of Britain’s spying operations abroad.

But entries by his wife Shelley on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their friends’ identities and where they spend their holidays. On the day her husband was appointed she congratulated him on the site using his codename “C”.

Lady Sawers had put virtually no privacy protection on her account, making it visible to any of the site’s 200m users around the world who choose to be in the open-access London social network on Facebook.

Somehow I don't think that James Bond or M would have ever had Facebook pages.

UPDATE: And here's another reason to maybe limit what information you put on social networking sites.

For all the concern about identity theft, researchers say there's a surprisingly easy way for the technology-savvy to figure out the precious nine digits of Americans' Social Security numbers.

"It's good that we found it before the bad guys," Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh said of the method for predicting the numbers.

Acquisti and Ralph Gross report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they were able to make the predictions using data available in public records as well as information such as birthdates cheerfully provided on social networks such as Facebook.

For people born after 1988 — when the government began issuing numbers at birth — the researchers were able to identify, in a single attempt, the first five Social Security digits for 44 percent of individuals. And they got all nine digits for 8.5 percent of those people in fewer than 1,000 attempts.

For smaller states their accuracy was considerably higher than in larger ones.

The researchers recommend that the Social Security Administration adopt randomization of the numbers and, finally, the SSA acknowledges that, unrelated to this study, they are planning to randomize the numbers.

Approaching the nadir of society

People are hawking their tickets to the Michael Jackson memorial. For reasons that elude me this apparently excites quite a few people.

Lucky fans celebrated when they got an e-mail saying they had scored the hottest ticket in town. "Congratulations, your application was successful," said the message sent to Deka Motanya, 27, of San Francisco.

She immediately Twittered: "OMG OMG OMG OMG i got tickets to the michael jackson memorial service!!!"

On eBay, bids were reaching as high as $3,000, though it was impossible to verify the seriousness of those offers. Others on Monday were submitting bids more in the $100-$200 range.

Imagine going public with four OMG's to celebrate going to a memorial. It's beyond me.

Blogger call with Senator Sessions

I just finished participating in a blogger conference call with Senator Jeff Sessions about the upcoming confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor. Senator Sessions sounded the expected notes about doubts about her judicial philosophy. The Republicans are also expressing concern about her work as, the New York Times terms it, a top policy maker for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, at a time when the Fund was filing complaints in cases such as in Hispanic Society of the Department of Sanitation v. N.Y.C. Dep’t of Sanitation, the Fund represented the plaintiffs "in regard to a claim that the Supervisor Examination has a severe disparate impact upon Hispanic test-takers." In a case with echoes of the Ricci firefighters case, the Fund claimed that "Hispanics comprised 5.2% of the test-takers and only 3.8% of the passers" and that this was proof of discrimination. The PRLDEF claims that Sotomayor didn't have an active role in these cases.

The Fund's pres. and general counsel, César Perales, told the AP yesterday that Sotomayor was simply on the litigation board of the Fund and didn't participate in cases. He said she set broad policy and guidelines.

"She was on the board of directors, she was not a member of the legal staff," Perales said, "so she was not directly involved in the legal arguments that we presented. Her role was to help us raise funds, set policy, hire the person who would run the organization."

I don't think that, even if she'd participated in litigating these cases, that it would make any difference since clearly that is a position held by liberal judges. Just witness that the four liberal justices who ruled against Ricci in this most recent disparate impact case.

In addition to her positions on disparate impact, there are clearly other issues where Republicans can use the hearing to shed a little light on positions that she's taken that are out of the mainstream of American opinion. One blogger asked about her dissent on a felon voting rights case. I don't think that the majority of Americans believe that felons have a constitutional right to voting based on concerns about the racial disparity among convicted felons despite the clear wording of the 14th Amendment that allows the states to restrict the voting rights for convicted felons. Another issue that we can expect be brought up is her position on the incorporation of the Second Amendment.

Expect to also hear question about her views on using the reasoning from foreign sources in making Supreme Court decisions.

However, the Senator denied that a candidate should be denied confirmation solely on the basis of her or his ideology unlike Senator Schumer who had endorsed that view when the president was a Republican. But there are enough issues with her judicial philosophy and approach to key issues to oppose her confirmation.

I asked whether the Republicans on the committee had organized the logistics of which senator would press on which issue and he denied that he had the authority to influence what other senators asked. I just hope that there is more going on behind the scenes to make sure that the Republicans use their time wisely so that they make sure that each issue they want to bring up at least gets asked and that we don't waste time, as the Democrats often did with senators like Joe Biden talking so much that a question didn't even get asked. There is plenty of material to bring up that Republicans should minimize the time spent wasting their breath in bloviation. But they're senators, so perhaps that is too much to expect.

What none of us expect is for her to be denied confirmation. She'll probably get all the Democratic votes and several Republican ones. But this also the time when the Republicans can use center stage to air their judicial philosophy and positions on issues where they are more in line with the majority opinion than the Democrats are.

The Puerto Rican firefighter whom Sotomayor would have denied a promotion

The New York Times profiled the one Hispanic firefighter who was denied a promotion by the appeals court decision that Sotomayor signed on to that allowed New Haven to throw out the results of their promotional exam. He sounds like quite a guy.

When the Hispanic firefighters’ association and its members — including Lieutenant Vargas’s brother — refused to publicly stand behind him, he quit the organization.

Lieutenant Vargas, who posted the sixth-highest score on the exam, was ridiculed as a token, a turncoat and an Uncle Tom — all of which, he said, “made my resolve that much stronger.”

When the United States Supreme Court ruled this week in the firefighters’ favor, Lieutenant Vargas, 40, the son of Puerto Rican parents, found himself celebrating amid an awkward racial dynamic: As the lone Hispanic among the 18 plaintiffs who had challenged an affirmative action policy, he had also challenged an appeals court decision joined by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court.

“She’s from Puerto Rico, and I’m from Puerto Rico,” he said. “She obviously feels differently than I do.”

I guess she didn't have empathy for his situation.

Painting the puppy poop pink

Officials in a community in Scotland have come up with one colorful way to force dog-owners to pick up their doggie waste.

Shetland Islands Council is recruiting an army of volunteer "poo spotters" to scour the islands for signs of fouling. To highlight where owners have failed to clear up after pets, they will be armed with canisters of bright pink dye, which they will spray on the unwelcome deposits the dogs leave behind.

Despite fines for not cleaning up after their dogs and rewards for doing so, some dog owners continue to let their dog poop without picking it up. Tsk tsk. As if spraying pink paint will deter them when fines failed to do so.

And another community is even more devoted to the paint solution.

Shetland is not the first local authority to tackle dog fouling in this fashion. In Cheltenham, dog wardens have been armed with cans of dye. On initial discovery of dog mess, they spray a circle around it. If it is still there a week later, a yellow circle is added and, after another week, a white one.

Only after it has been left for two weeks is it cleaned away.

Cheltenham Borough Council claims the amount of dog mess left on the streets has declined.

Instead of hiring dog wardens to come around three times to paint targets around the doggie waste, wouldn't it be cheaper to pick it up the first time? And if you fear that would increase owner laziness, increase the fines substantially. Somehow, I don't think that the people who got away with not cleaning away the poop the first time is going to be so shamed after a target has been painted around it to change their evil ways.

The teachers union messing up a good thing

We've seen example after example of charter schools that have succeeded partly by requiring longer work weeks for the students. They come to school earlier and leave later and often have Saturday school. Such a regime requires, of course, teachers to work longer hours. And the unions can't stand for that. Jay Mathews writes of the plight of a high-achieving KIPP charter school in Baltimore that the teachers union is threatening.

Sometime last year, while negotiating a teacher contract for the KIPP Ujima Village charter middle school in Baltimore, founder Jason Botel pointed out that his students, mostly from low-income families, had earned the city's highest public school test scores three years in a row. If the union insisted on increasing overtime pay, he said, the school could not afford the extra instruction time that was a key to its success, and student achievement would suffer.

Botel says a union official replied: "That's not our problem."

Such stories heat the blood of union critics. It is, they contend, a sign of how unions dumb down public education by focusing on salaries, not learning.

Yup, you can't have teachers working longer hours, even if they're willing to do so and even if they are getting paid more than other Baltimore teachers. mathews reports that teachers got an 18% bonus for their longer work week, however, that still isn't enough for the unions. Because of the union demands, the school is going to have to cut back on its nine-hour day and Saturday school. As Mathews points out, there are other forms of compensation besides the monetary one and the union ignores the value to talented teachers of working at a school surrounded by other dedicated teachers and with a supportive administration that helps create an environment of learning.

[Baltimore Teachers Union President Marietta] English and the Baltimore union's outside counsel, Keith Zimmerman, convinced me they are sincerely committed to making Ujima Village and all other Baltimore schools wonderful places to learn. But they did not once mention an important motivator for union members such as Brad Nornhold, 31, a star math teacher at Ujima Village.

"I appreciate what the union has tried to do for me," Nornhold said, "but we weren't necessarily contacted before they started these negotiations. This is a school of choice for teachers, too. I knew what I was getting into." Ujima Village teachers were already the highest-paid in Baltimore for their experience level, and the union's demands seem to overlook the appeal of what Nornhold called "the freedom to teach the way I want to teach." The union ignores the lure of a school that supports teachers and structures their day so they can raise student achievement to levels rarely seen in their city. "To teach in a school that works, that's nice," Nornhold said.

I asked English what she thought of Botel's argument. By forcing Ujima Village to cut back its nine-hour school days and Saturday classes, is she making her members at that school less effective? "I disagree with that," she said. "Effective teachers can get the same results in a seven-hour-and-five-minute day."

To that I say: Show me.

Exactly. If it were that easy, we'd be seeing similar results in all of the Baltimore schools. But KIPP charters have shown around the country that their template of longer school hours coupled with a focused teaching environment that doesn't put up with students wasting class time in misbehavior has achieved results that regular public schools can't touch.

This is such a shame to see the unions being able to mess with a successful program and to hear the union president spout such nonsense. But then, what would you expect of teachers unions after you read stories like the 700 New York City teachers who are paid to do nothing while they wait for sometimes years for their cases to be adjudicated.

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that's what they want to do.

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its "rubber rooms" — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

"You just basically sit there for eight hours," said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. "I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.' `I've been sitting here for six months.' That sort of thing."

Ramos was an assistant principal in East Harlem when he was accused of lying at a hearing on whether to suspend a student. Ramos denied the allegation but quit before his case was resolved and took a job in California.

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

Lovely. And the same sort of union that negotiated that these teachers are paid for years to sit around and paint, do crosswords, or read until their cases are resolved now want to prevent willing teachers from achieving success with low-income students in Baltimore. It is so very infuriating.

When government runs a business

Washington State had a liquor shortage these past few weeks due to a computer mess-up at the government run distribution center. It's taken them over a month to get close to catching up. Meanwhile, the delays have played havoc with bars that can't get certain alcohols delivered for specialty drinks.

State workers are scrambling to fix a distribution problem that has crimped the flow of alcohol to customers across the state, as liquor stores and restaurants are gearing up for one of the busiest weekends of the year.

"For us, the timing is really brutal," said Anthony Anton, president and CEO of the Washington Restaurant Association, who said some restaurants have been unable to get key ingredients for their most popular cocktails. "For a small-margin industry like ours, where every sale counts, that's an issue."

Dozens of "temporarily out of stock" signs dot the shelves of some state liquor stores, and store managers say they're not sure when their complete product line will again be available.

State officials blame the difficulties on a glitch in a new software system that controls the movement of 18,000 cases of liquor a day through the state's distribution center on East Marginal Way South in Seattle.

In addition to shortages in June and July, alcohol drinkers in Washington are also facing higher taxes in August.

Hanning said the pinch is compounded by the fact that a state alcohol surcharge takes effect Aug. 1, which will force bar owners to increase prices.

The surcharge, which will add between $1 and $3 to the price of most bottles of booze, was enacted to raise about $80 million to replace money legislators took from a liquor-reserve fund to balance the state budget.

One more reason why states shouldn't be in the alcohol business. Or, for that matter, why we don't want the government running health care either.

Story via The Pegu Blog which has cool pictures of the distribution system. Link via Instapundit.

Has anyone seen Sandy Berger these days?

The National Archives is, apparently, missing scores of precious documents.

_From 1969 to 1980, the patent file for the Wright Brothers Flyer was passed around multiple Archives offices, the Patents and Trademarks Office and the National Air and Space Museum. It was returned to the Archives in 1979, and was last seen in 1980.

_In 1962, military representatives checked out the target maps for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The maps have been missing ever since.

_In May 2004, one of FDR's grandsons asked to see a portrait of his grandfather at the Roosevelt presidential library in Hyde Park, N.Y. It couldn't be found, and hasn't been seen since 2001.

_Shaun Aubitz, a former employee at the Archives' facility in Philadelphia, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 21 months in prison in 2002 for stealing—among other items—71 pardons signed by Presidents James Madison, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes and Lincoln. The Archives recovered 59 of the records that had been sold to manuscript dealers and collectors.

_In 2005, researcher Howard Harner was sentenced to two years in prison, two years probation, and a $10,000 fine after pleading guilty to stealing more than 100 Civil War-era documents from the Archives between 1996 and 2002. Fewer than half were recovered.

_A 40-year-old National Archives intern in Philadelphia stole 160 Civil War documents. About half were sold on eBay. The documents included telegrams about the troops' weaponry, the War Department's announcement of Lincoln's death sent to soldiers, and a letter from famed Confederate cavalryman James Ewell Brown Stuart.

A financially strapped Denning McTague was sentenced in the case to 15 months in prison in 2007. He had told a psychiatrist that he was angry that his internship was unpaid.

Yeah, as if he didn't know going in that his internship would be unpaid.

The Archives staff claims that there is no way that they can keep up with every document.

The agency has two missions that sometimes are in conflict: preserving documents and making them available to the public in monitored research rooms with surveillance cameras.

"We do not have item-by-item control," said Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper. "We can't. We have 9 billion documents. We don't know exactly what's in each of those boxes. There's no point in preserving materials that cannot be used."

Back in my undergraduate days I did research at the Archives and I remember being given a cart full of boxes of miscellaneous documents from our delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the subject of my research. I remember thinking how easy it would have been to have made off with a few of those documents since clearly there was no more detailed catalog of what exactly was in each box. Not that any of it would have been worth anything, but I can picture rows and rows of such boxes for every subject that is saved. However, you'd think that some items, like a portrait of FDR, would be easier to track. And other items that were checked out should be able to be traced. And they're still missing a computer disk with information from the Clinton White House.

It sort of diminishes your confidence about having the national government keep track of everyone's medical records, though, doesn't it?

Just how bad is Waxman Markey?

Let us count the ways. Steven Spruiell and Kevin Williamson have done a masterful job of listing 50 reasons why this is such a god-awful bill. Any one of the reasons should be enough to oppose it. The Republicans can cut an ad a day for a month and a half highlighting all that is awful in this bill and hanging the "yes" votes around the neck of all the Democrats in the House who yielded to Pelosi's pressure to vote for this mess. As they detail, the bill is a sop to special interests but will end up costing the average consumer lots while doing extremely little to lower global warming.

For just a taste of why this bill is ludicrous:

1. The big doozy: Eighty-five percent of the carbon permits will not be sold at auction — they will be given away to utility companies, petroleum interests, refineries, and a coterie of politically connected businesses. If you’re wondering why Big Business supports cap-and-trade, that’s why. Free money for business, but higher energy prices for you.

7. Agribusiness is exempted from cap-and-trade controls, but the farm lobby will be given permits to sell and to profit from anyway. All carrot, no stick — precisely what this powerful industry lobby is accustomed to receiving from Washington.

11. The farm lobby will be rewarded for practices that do little or nothing to reduce greenhouse gases. One such practice is “no till” planting, in which farmers forgo plowing and plant seeds directly into the soil. Two peer-reviewed scientific papers suggest that no-till either does nothing to decrease carbon dioxide or actually increases the level of greenhouse-gas emissions by upping emissions of nitrous oxide — a much more powerful greenhouse gas. Now it’s not clear that no-till will reduce greenhouse gases, but the practice does make weed-control more difficult, meaning that it supports the market for herbicides such as Monsanto’s RoundUp. Guess who’s spending millions lobbying for no-till?

12. Waxman-Markey provides an excuse for trade protectionism. The bill will give the Obama administration broad new powers to enact tariffs on imports from jurisdictions that have not had the poor sense to enact similar legislation, meaning that it invites both politically driven trade protectionism and retaliatory measures from abroad in the service of an empty green dream.

17. The renewable standard excludes sources of power like nuclear and coal gasification, and perhaps that’s to be understood. Even though these sources are cleaner than traditional coal-burning plants, they violate a number of green taboos. What’s less understandable is the way “qualified hydropower” is narrowly defined to exclude hydropower from Canada. Again, the thing to remember is that Congress is less concerned with greening the environment and more concerned with greening the pockets of parochial interests.

For a party that prides itself on not being bound to special interests, this bill is a pork-a-palooza of giveaways to certain special interests. Even if you believe in the logic of the cap and trade principle for lowering carbon emissions, the giveaways were so immense that any sort of benefit is lost. As the WSJ wrote,

Meanwhile, Congress had to bribe every business or interest that could afford a competent lobbyist. Carbon permits are valuable, yet the House says only 28% of the allowances would be auctioned off; the rest would be given away. In March, White House budget director Peter Orszag told Congress that "If you didn't auction the permit, it would represent the largest corporate welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States."

Naturally, Democrats did exactly that. To avoid windfall profits, they then chose to control prices, asking state regulators to require utilities to use the free permits to insulate ratepayers from price increases. (This also obviates the anticarbon incentives, but never mind.) Auctions would reduce political favoritism and interference, as well as provide revenue to cut taxes to offset higher energy costs. But auctions don't buy votes.

Oh, and you can add in this little gem:

The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported, according to energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie in Houston. Contrary to President Barack Obama’s goal of reducing dependence on overseas energy suppliers, the bill would incent U.S. refiners to import more fuel, said Clayton Mahaffey, an analyst at RedChip Cos. in Maitland, Florida.

Mona Charen points to the irony of the administration that brags about making decisions based on data not ideology to have bought into the hokum in this bill.

Note that nuclear power, the one “green” source that is empirically proven to provide relatively inexpensive power without producing greenhouse gases, is not even on the president’s agenda. Is this returning “science” to its rightful place? Here’s an irony: If the environmentalists had not so successfully blocked nuclear power after the Three Mile Island accident (which didn’t hurt a soul), the U.S. would now be in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol targets for CO2 emissions.

Huber also makes the commonsense point that by making carbon more expensive for American consumers we will reduce demand for it and thereby make it even cheaper for Third World nations to buy. Perhaps reflecting this reality, the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that, under Waxman-Markey, emissions of CO2 will not be reduced by the year 2020.

The Waxman-Markey bill will have little to no impact on world production of greenhouse gases, which are supposed to be responsible for global temperature increases that stopped nearly a decade ago. This massive tax increase on energy will not harm the already weakened U.S. economy; it will strengthen it. Got that? Aren’t you glad we have an empirical president!

Now that the vote has been taken, people can actually start reading this bill. Don't expect criticisms to stop at 50. The Democrats might be hoping that they will be able to smoothe things over with sweet talk about how this is going to help the environment, but in a recessionary economy, voters will be less likely to swallow that bilge and be more interested in what legislation is actually going to accomplish. And the answers for this bill are not pretty.

Smart education move in Louisiana

Louisiana just passed a controversial education bill that shows a lot of common sense. The bill establishes a separate path to high school graduation for those who are not college bound.

High-schoolers in Louisiana will soon be able to opt for a "career diploma" – taking some alternative courses instead of a full college-prep curriculum. The new path to graduation – expected to be signed into law by Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) in the coming days – bucks a trend in which many states are cranking up academic requirements.

The legislation puts the state in the center of a national debate about where to set the bar for high school graduation.

Advocates of the new diploma option say it will keep more struggling students in school and will prepare them for jobs, technical training, or community college. Critics doubt the curriculum will be strong enough to accomplish such goals and say it shortchanges students in the long run, given the projections that a large number of future jobs will require a college degree.

I've long thought that we have made a mistake in trying to prepare every student for college. Many jobs don't need a college degree and some kids do so poorly at the college-track courses that they end up dropping out. They can't see a point in writing papers on poetry or doing geometry proofs and they get discouraged and end up leaving school early. It would be so much better to put them on what used to be called a vocational path to prepare them for those sorts of jobs.

I've long remembered an 8th grade student I had my first year teaching when I was given a low-skills English class. She was a gregarious girl with very low writing skills and not very much academic ambition. But she did have a definite ambition to open her own hairdressing salon one day. She was very good at doing other girls' hair. But she was very depressed about how she was doing in school academically. At the time I thought that it was such a shame that she was going to go on to high school where North Carolina had just raised the math requirements for graduating. I feared that she was headed towards dropping out just as she said her mother had done. She would have benefited so much more from business and accounting classes rather than being forced to pass geometry and Algebra II. She would have understood the need to pass the former and have been able to succeed in classes that were relevant to her dream. I don't know what happened to her and I certainly hope she achieved her ambitions. But if she did, it would have been despite the North Carolina curriculum which tries to prepare every student to go off to college.

Critics of Louisiana's plan think that this is a move backward away from the ideal of college for everyone.

With the new measure, Louisiana will join roughly half the states in offering less demanding pathways for a diploma, says Michael Cohen, president of Achieve Inc., a Washington-based education-reform coalition. "What Louisiana has done is take a step backwards," he says.

In recent years, more than 20 states have "identified a rigorous core [curriculum] intended for all or nearly all kids," Mr. Cohen says. Louisiana had been one leader in that trend.

I know that President Obama has spoken of every student going to college. Such an ambition is great for the bank accounts of colleges, but just serves to drive up college costs and funnel a lot of kids into four or five years of unnecessary classes that will not correspond to the actual training they need to do many jobs.

A college degree has become more of a signaling device to employers that a student had decent enough test scores and grades to get in and the ability to study and pass tests to graduate. And that's great for many, if not most, young people. But there are still kids for whom college is not the answer. Rather than discouraging them and increasing the possibility that they will drop out, better this sort of career training that could get them started on a different sort of job path that doesn't require a college degree. So I applaud Louisiana's decision to allow those students a different choice.

Why the Democratic health care plan means you will lose your private health insurance

Although President Obama and the Democrats like to claim that they have no plan to make any of us who likes our health care plan drop it in favor of the public option, that is just a pretense to lull the public so that we won't notice that that is exactly what is happening until it is too late.

David Freddoso explains how this will all happen. The Senate Democrats under the leadership of Senator Dodd have given some hints of their new proposal which is supposedly a lot cheaper than their previous idea that was scored as costing more than a trillion dollars.

It includes a so-called "public option" for government-run insurance, and it also requires that employers either provide coverage or pay a $750-per-year fee to the government for each non-covered employee.

To put things into perspective, the average American employer pays $5,800 per year from his own pocket for each employee covered by a company health plan, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

So let's say I have 100 employees who make $50,000 on average. Health insurance costs are a problem for me, but I care enough about my employees (and about keeping them) that I'm not going to leave them hanging when it comes to health insurance. Suddenly, this bill passes, meaning that my employees can easily get coverage from the government. They can't even be turned down or charged more because of their health condition. In fact, most of my employees will be eligible for a subsidy -- Dodd's bill offers them to anyone making up to 400 percent of poverty ($73,000 for a family of three).

What this means is that I would, at the very least, phase out all insurance coverage for new employees -- perhaps I'd even dump coverage for current employees and give them part of my taxpayer-subsidized savings back in the form of a raise. If Sen. Max Baucus's (D-Mont.) plan to tax health benefits goes through, there will be nothing to deter such a course of action. Within a few years, President Obama will have completely "shredded" the employer-based insurance system, as he put it himself during the campaign while criticizing John McCain's plan.

So every time you hear Obama promise that no one will have to abandon their health care plan under their proposal, you can add in the asterisk that this is just baloney. Or just slick phrasing - you won't have to abandon your plan - it will abandon you. And there will be nothing you can do about it. Whether you want to the government to provide your health insurance, that is exactly the situation we'll all be in if the Democratic plans go through.

Happy Independence Day

Happy 4th of July to everyone!

While you're celebrating, relaxing, watching fireworks, take a time to think about what the soldiers went through who fought for independence. Here is a famous excerpt from the diary of Albigence Waldo, a surgeon in the Continental Army from his time at Valley Forge.

The Army which has been surprisingly healthy hitherto, now begins to grow sickly from the continued fatigues they have suffered this Campaign. Yet they still show a spirit of Alacrity and Contentment not to be expected from so young Troops. I am Sick - discontented - and out of humour. Poor food - hard lodging - Cold Weather - fatigue - Nasty Cloaths - nasty Cookery - Vomit half my time - smoak'd out my senses - the Devil's in't - I can't Endure it - Why are we sent here to starve and Freeze - What sweet Felicities have I left at home; A charming Wife - pretty Children - Good Beds - good food - good Cookery - all aggreable - all harmonious. Here all Confusion - smoke and Cold - hunger and filthyness - A pox on my bad luck. There comes a bowl of beef soup - full of burnt leaves and dirt, sickish enough to make a Hector spue - away with it Boys - I'll live like the Chameleon upon Air. Poh! Poh! crys Patience within me - you talk like a fool. Your being sick Covers you mind with a Melancholic Gloom, which makes every thing about you appear gloomy. See the poor Soldier, when in health - with what cheerfulness he meets his foes and encounters every hardship - if barefoot, he labours thro' the Mud and Cold with a Song in his mouth extolling War and Washington - if his food be bad, he eats it notwithstanding with seeming content - blesses God for a good Stomach and Whistles it into digestion. But harkee Patience, a moment - There comes a Soldier, his bare feet are seen thro' his worn out Shoes, his legs nearly naked from the tatter'd remains of an only pair of stockings, his Breeches not sufficient to cover his nakedness, his Shirt hanging in Strings, his hair dishevell'd, his face meagre; his whole appearance pictures a person forsaken and discouraged. He comes, and crys with an air of wretchedness and despair, I am Sick, my feet lame,my legs are sore, my body cover'd with this tormenting Itch - my Cloaths are worn out, my Constitution is broken, my former Activity is exhausted by fatigue, hunger and Cold, I fail fast I shall soon be no more! and all the reward I shall get will be - "Poor Will is dead." People who live at home in Luxury and Ease, quietly possessing their habitations, Enjoying their Wives and families in peace,have but a very faint Idea of the unpleasing sensations, and continual Anxiety the Man endures who is in Camp, and is the husband and parent of an aggreeable family. These same People are willing we should suffer every thing for their Benefit and advantage, and yet are the first to Condemn us for not doing more!!

Just imagine being out there in the snow wearing only socks with holes in them and being fed some sort of broth made from leaves and gosh knows what else. As I always remind my students, when we study history we must remember that the people at the time didn't know how the story would turn out. Despite the morale-lifting surprise victories at Trenton and Princeton, it had mostly been bad news for the Continental Army. Washington's soldiers could also look back at humiliating defeats at New York, Brandywine, and Germantown. There was no certainty drawing a line from those moments in the winter of 1777 to Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown. They were barely paid, terribly fed and clothed. Yet these soldiers stuck with it.

The Fourth of July is a time when we look back to our Founding Fathers signing on to the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. And rightly so. But also let's remember those poor boys living off of their broth made from bark and leaves.

The end of the Palin era

Wow, Sarah Palin has just dropped a major bombshell on both Alaska and the political world by announcing that not only will she not run for reelection but that she will resign as Alaska's governor.

There is no political explanation that could explain this move since any future run for political office would be met with skepticism that she would stay and see the job through. As Allahpundit and Jim Geraghty speculate, this is the end of talk of her running for president in 2012.

With higher office ambitions off the table, we could perhaps simply take her word for it - that this is what she believes would be better for Alaska and her family. The new governor won't be a lame duck and her family can get out of the spotlight.

The Anchoress speculates that there is some health-related reason.

Color me unmoved by the thought of a Palinless political future. While I was very excited about her when McCain chose her and after her convention speech, she left me disappointed during the rest of the campaign. She couldn't seem to move beyond clichés in both her speeches and debate appearances. And no matter how supporters tried to spin it, her interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric were disappointing. That is why I am totally in agreement with Jonah Goldberg's timely essay today advising Palin to stay home and do her homework. He is so right that she couldn't build a successful political career complaining about unfair media coverage. Yes, the media has been awful about her and her family in a manner that is totally shameful and anyone can understand her not wanting to put her family through more of that. But she must have suspected that would happen when she accepted the nomination knowing that her teenage daughter was pregnant. But Goldberg hits the nail on the head to advise her to stick to learning more about policy instead of taking the bait on media hits on her and her family.

For starters, every time I see you on TV, you’re whining about unfair press coverage. Don’t get me wrong: Much of it is unfair, and some of it deserves a response. But it’s not presidential. It’s not even gubernatorial. You are constantly taking the bait, taking up the fights your biggest fans want you to take up.

But here’s the thing: Don’t listen to your biggest fans. Don’t alienate them either, but don’t think that because the Palin4Pres crowd cheers, you’re making progress. Politics is ultimately about persuasion, and you seem entirely uninterested in that, preferring instead to play the victim. Well, victims don’t get elected president. Ronald Reagan was a laughingstock for liberals and despised by the press. But he didn’t whine or take the bait.

Perhaps we'll learn, maybe when she writes her memoirs, how she went from being such a seemingly ambitious and driven person into deciding to take a step back from politics. While she's still a hot commodity she can maybe make a living now giving speeches to conservative audiences. But I'd expect to see a lot less of her now. And that is a good thing.

As Goldberg writes, the future for the GOP belongs now to the wonkier politicians.

Yes, you can talk well about the stuff you know — oil drilling, energy, etc. — but beyond your comfort zone, you fall back on bumper-sticker language that sounds fine to the people who already agree with you but is useless in winning over skeptics.

President Bush had the same problem you do, which is why there’s a hunger for Republicans who can effectively articulate and sell our policies and philosophy. That’s why the wonks have the upper hand. Mitt Romney, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, and other hands-on types are what the party wants and, frankly, needs.

Exactly. I don't have much hope for the GOP prospects against Obama in 2012, but I would like someone who can explain clearly why Obama's economic policies have been a mistake and what he or she would do differently and why those are better choices for the country. Even if that candidate goes down, there will be a value to laying out those explanations for the country and setting the stage for 2016. I don't know if any of those guys that Goldberg mentions are the ones who can do that, but I do have more faith in their ability to speak in arguments rather than platitudes. I didn't have that faith for Sarah Palin. I'm deeply sorry that she and her family have undergone this battering in the public eye, but I'm not going to miss her. And I'm certainly not going to miss all the ugly Palin jokes on late night TV and the internet. This has not been a pretty chapter in the annals of American politics. I can't help wondering what the contrafactual path would have been for Palin if McCain hadn't picked her and she'd still been that promising-sounding governor that conservative writers, but no one else, were beginning to take notice of. Unfortunately, we can't put that toothpaste back in the tube.

So, farewell, Sarah and best of luck to you and your family in the new path you've chosen.

Are we seeing the death throes of affirmative action?

Charles Krauthammer writes today that the Ricci case spells a major blow to affirmative action. Would that it were so. As the Ginsburg dissent indicates, supporters of affirmative action do not accept that, after 45 years, it's time to end special consideration of race in hiring and college admissions decisions.

The defenders of the old racial order, led by Ginsburg, objected sternly, declaring that the white firefighters "had no vested right to promotion." Of course they didn't, but they did have a vested right to fairness, to not being denied promotion because of their skin color.

Of course no one has a vested right to promotion. Isn't that why they gave those tests in the first place? Isn't that why for the past, oh, 125 years we have been using objective civil service exams to allocate government jobs not on the basis of right -- or patronage or favoritism or racially discriminatory advantage -- but on the basis of merit and job-related skill?

It's the Ginsburg dissent that, in effect, grants a vested right to promotion -- to African Americans, simply because of their race -- and makes the frustration of that specious right the basis for denying promotion to white (and Hispanic) firefighters who had objectively qualified for promotion.

But we were just one Supreme Court justice away for solidifying the logic that says that any outcome where blacks don't do as well as other racial groups is, by its very nature whether or not you can prove it, discriminatory.

The major conundrum of the civil rights age remains. The 14th Amendment bans discrimination on the basis of race. But the Civil Rights Act, which bans "disparate impact" discrimination -- procedures (such as exams) that yield racially unbalanced results -- affirmatively mandates racial favoritism to undo those results. The evil day will come, writes Justice Antonin Scalia in his concurrence, when this contradiction will have to be resolved.

He is right. For decades we have been finessing the issue with a mess of compromises, euphemisms, incoherences and pretenses such as banning racial quotas but promoting racial "goals." Anyone who has ever had to make hiring or admission decisions knows that this angel-on-the-head-of-pin distinction is 95 percent a matter of appearances, gestures and lawsuit-avoiding paperwork.

And yet we have muddled our way through, permitting a large dose of intentional discrimination to ameliorate past discrimination -- and present inadvertent imbalances -- without totally abandoning the ideal of colorblindness.

The result? At the near half-century mark of the Civil Rights Act, racial minorities have seen remarkable social advancement. The younger generation is infinitely more racially tolerant and accepting. We've made great racial progress. But the fundamental unfairness that underlies the racial spoils system continues to rankle. That's what animated the Ricci case.

We're 45 years beyond passage of the Civil Rights Act. We have a black attorney general and a black president. As with every passing year we move generationally away from the era of Jim Crow, it becomes less and less justified for the government to mandate "remedial" racial discrimination.

As people celebrate the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor simply because of her ethnic background and not because of her judicial background, we know that giving people a leg up solely because of their ethnicity is nowhere near over. Justice Scalia might want to begin tangling with the whole concept of disparate impact but there will be four justices who will oppose any such reconsideration. And you know that few politicians would be courageous or foolhardy enough to introduce an end to federal laws that indicate that evidence of disparate impact is by itself proof of racism. So businesses will have to keep jumping through hoops to lay the groundwork to defend themselves against allegations that their chosen merit exam was not racially biased. And if they don't have as comprehensive a proof as the New Haven fire department had to exculpate themselves of the accusations of racial bias, then they better watch out. Even New Haven, knowing that there was no racial bias in their test, was worried enough about discrimination allegations that they gave in to the racemongers mau mauing them for the outcome of the tests. Employers in the future might have the Ricci case to back them up but they would still have to be confident enough of their promotion or hiring procedures to risk a court case. This case might be one battle in the fight over affirmative action, but I wouldn't start celebrating the end of such race-based policies just yet.

The Washington Post pimping-itself-to-lobbyists scandal

As Howard Kurtz reports on the whole little scandalette of the Washington Post trying to sell itself as arranging meetings between lobbyists, journalists, and politicians, has blown over because the Post canceled the meetings once it blew up yesterday across the internet.

"Absolutely, I'm disappointed," Weymouth said in an interview. "This should never have happened. The fliers got out and weren't vetted. They didn't represent at all what we were attempting to do. We're not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom."

The fliers were approved by a top Post marketing executive, Charles Pelton, who said it was "a big mistake" on his part and that he had done so "without vetting it with the newsroom." He said that Kaiser Permanente had orally agreed to pay $25,000 to sponsor a July 21 health-care dinner at Weymouth's Northwest Washington home, and that Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) had agreed to be a guest. Pelton, who serves as general manager for conferences and events, said he had invited two-dozen business executives, advocates and presidential health adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle. But a White House spokeswoman said no senior administration officials had agreed to attend, and an aide to DeParle said she had received no such invitation.

Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said he was "appalled" by the plan. "It suggests that access to Washington Post journalists was available for purchase," Brauchli said. The proposal "promises we would suspend our usual skeptical questioning because it appears to offer, in exchange for sponsorships, the good name of The Washington Post."

The Post Co. fliers offered an "intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth." The fliers, which said participants would be charged $25,000 to sponsor a single salon and $250,000 to underwrite an annual series of 11 sessions, were reported yesterday by Politico.

The full-color flier for the July 21 dinner said: "Bring your organization's CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama Administration and Congressional leaders . . . Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it." The dinner, it said, would involve "health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post . . . an exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done."

So according to Katharine Weymouth the real sin was how it was marketed, not that they were planning to hold them in the first place. And she can't pretend to be so very shocked since the dinners were scheduled to be held at her very own house. It's not as if this could have been arranged without her knowledge.

As Roger Kimball writes, the idea of the Post pimping out contact between lobbyists and Obama administration figures wasn't all that surprising.

So what do you think? What if the fliers hadn’t gone public: would the salons have proceeded as planned? How much of Ms. Weymouth’s disappointment and Mr. Brauchli’s feelings of being “appalled” are due to the squamous light of publicity, not to say ridicule?I don’t know the answer to that question. But here’s another: were you surprised when you read that the mighty Washington Post was offering lobbyists access to senior Obama administration officials in exchange for a hefty pile of shekels? Or did you react as I did, with a snort of contempt and the muttered exclamation: “it figures”?

Quite a few people, I reckon, had precisely that reaction. And whether it accurately reflects what went on at The Washington Post is of only incidental concern. What matters is the increasingly low opinion the public has of the legacy, formerly the “mainstream,” media. At a moment when a [7] major television network chooses to act as a satellite branch of the Obama administration’s press office, why should we be surprised if a major newspaper endeavors to arranges liaisons between lobbyists and the favorite-ever administration?

The only thing more obvious than the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the legacy media is its breathtaking arrogance.

Everyone involved has backed off and claimed that they are shocked, shocked at how this was portrayed and that it's just a marketing disaster. Not that they really planned to organize something so fishy sounding. In fact, Kurtz points out several examples of the cozy arrangements between media, lobbyists, and movers and shakers. Of course, they're not calling them lobbyists, but corporate sponsors so I guess that makes all the difference.

This week, for instance, Atlantic Media is sponsoring the Aspen Ideas Festival, underwritten by Altria, Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, Ernst & Young, Mercedes-Benz, Philips, Shell and Thomson Reuters. Speakers include White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, along with journalists for Atlantic and other media outlets.

Atlantic Editor James Bennet said the festival, co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute, "is open to the press . . . and we're videotaping it. We have editorial control over it. We decide what the panels are and who's on them. There are absolutely no constraints put on it at all."

In March, the Wall Street Journal brought together global finance leaders -- including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd -- for a two-day conference sponsored by Nasdaq and hosted by Robert Thomson, the Journal's top editor, and other editors and reporters. Outside journalists were invited to the session, which was on the record and webcast by the Journal. Participants, who paid several thousand dollars to attend, also had a White House meeting with economic adviser Lawrence Summers, which was off the record at his request.

The Journal also holds conferences with its All Things Digital unit. A session in May, described as offering "unmatched access to the technology industry's elite," was sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and Qualcomm, among others, and featured the CEOs of Microsoft, Yahoo, NBC Universal, AT&T and Twitter, as well as Weymouth.

The New Yorker hosts an annual festival in Manhattan featuring its editors and writers along with other journalists, authors and entertainers. The gathering planned for October is sponsored by American Airlines, Delta, Westin Hotels and Banana Republic.

So the implication is that this is all just fine if it's marketed as an "ideas festival" rather than access to journalists and important public figures. All the Washington Post did that was wrong was be completely open in their marketing of what was going on.

Think of how the media gets all upset at the idea of a conflict of interest if a Supreme Court justice sits on a case of someone he goes fishing with or of a company that he or she holds stock in. Or all the fretting if a congressman accepts a dinner from a corporation. Why shouldn't all this socializing between journalists and policy makers made possible by corporate sponsors make readers question the objectivity of journalists who then cover the people that they just shared an enjoyable week in Aspen with? They might regard these corporate sponsors as nothing different from the corporations that take out ads in their papers. But there seems to be a qualitative difference in sponsoring a nice weekend retreat that allows journalists to club around with CEOs or policy makers over drinks and congenial seminars and taking out an ad in the paper. Why is a congressman immediately suspect if he accepts a fine dinner provided by a corporation but a journalist is still pure if he goes to a whole weekend underwritten by a corporation. It just goes to show that the idea of journalistic objectivity has always been more of an ideal than a reality. I wish they'd all be as open as Newsweek is and finally unveil themselves as opinion journalists and drop all this faux objectivity pose.

Mangling the National Anthem

For some holiday fun, here are the worst renditions of The Star Spangled Banner.

Barney Frank doesn't ever change

Barney Frank has successfully downplayed the connection between his encouragement of Fannie and Freddie to make mortgages to minorities and the poor and our financial meltdown. Sure the right-wing bloggers and conservative journalists point this out, but he keeps on doing what he's always been doing. So here he comes yet again to try to repeat some of the same policies that got us into this mess. Byron York reports on how he wants to take money that the government received from TARP paybacks and dividend funds from banks in order to shovel more money into the federal government help out low-income people who got mortgages that they weren't able to afford.

But now Rep. Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has come up with a proposal to spend any TARP profits before they can be returned to the taxpayers. Last Friday, Frank introduced the "TARP for Main Street Act of 2009," a bill that would take profits from the program and immediately redirect them toward housing proposals favored by Frank and some fellow Democrats.

In exchange for receiving TARP money, financial institutions were required to hand over shares of preferred stock that paid a dividend for the government. In theory, if a financial institution paid the dividend faithfully, and then repaid the TARP money, then the government would turn a profit. Last month, the General Accountability Office (GAO) reported that, through June 12, 2009, the government had received $6.2 billion in dividend payments. The original TARP legislation required that money made from the program "shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury for reduction of the public debt."

Frank, however, wants to spend the money before it can be used to pay down anything. First, the "TARP for Main Street" proposal would take $1 billion "from dividends paid by financial institutions that have received financial assistance provided under…the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act" and apply it to a trust fund that Frank has long wanted to create for low-income rental housing. (The measure, unfunded, was part of last year's bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.) Next, Frank would take $1.5 billion from TARP dividends for a so-called "neighborhood stabilization" fund. Republican critics have charged that both measures might allow federal dollars to be distributed to activist groups like the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, or ACORN.

The "TARP for Main Street" bill would also spend $2 billion, apparently from remaining TARP funds, to subsidize people who are delinquent on their mortgages, and another $2 billion to "stabilize multifamily properties that are in default or foreclosure."

The government has been spending money as fast as it could print it or borrow it from bondholders like the Chinese and Saudis. President Obama wants to boast that these TARP funds actually made a profit for the country. But instead of using those profits to pay down our debt or just to go back into the Treasury to fund spending that has already been voted on, Frank wants to continue his same ol', same ol', and start up a new program built on the same lines as his old failed policies.

The ugly origins of the Ricci firefighters case

Michael Barone reminds us of how the Ricci case originated. After it turned out that 19 whites and one Hispanic had gotten the highest scores on the qualifying exam, a despicable racemonger went to work to get the results thrown out.

Ricci is also something else: a riveting lesson in political sociology, thanks to the concurring opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. It shows how a combination of vote-hungry politicians and local political agitators -- you might call them community organizers -- worked with the approval of elite legal professionals like Judge Sotomayor to employ racial quotas and preferences in defiance of the words of the Civil Rights Act.

One of the chief actors was the Rev. Boise Kimber, a supporter of Mayor John DeStefano; the mayor testified for him as a character witness in a 1996 trial in which he was convicted of stealing prepaid funeral expenses from an elderly woman. DeStefano later appointed Kimber the head of the board of fire commissioners, but Kimber resigned after saying he wouldn't hire certain recruits because "they just have too many vowels in their name." After the results of the promotion test were announced, showing that 19 white and one Hispanic firefighter qualified for promotion, Kimber called the mayor's chief administrative officer opposing certification of the test results.

The record shows that DeStefano and his appointees went to work, holding secret meetings and concealing their motives, to get the Civil Service Board to decertify the test results. Kimber appeared at a board meeting and made "a loud, minutes-long outburst" and had to be ruled out of order three times.

City officials ignored the inconvenient fact that they had hired an independent and experienced firm -- this is a thriving business -- to draw up a bias-free test and paid a competing firm to draw up another test. Its head testified that the first firm's test was biased without seeing it. The board capitulated and decertified the test. DeStefano was prepared to overrule it if it had gone the other way....

This is the sort of thing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described in the text as just the workings of politics. Writing in Slate, Yale Law faculty member Emily Bazelon goes further. She laments that the promotion test rewarded memorization and that it favored " 'fire buffs' -- guys who read fire suppression manuals on their down time." She is outraged that a fire department might want to promote firefighters who know more about suppressing fires, rescuing victims and protecting their colleagues rather than simply promote a predetermined number of members of specific racial groups whose self-appointed political spokesmen back the politicians in office.

Rising costs in health care

Thomas Sowell explains why health care costs are rising in the United States.

Most political and media discussions of medical care have an air of unreality reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. There is an abundance of catch-phrases but remarkably few coherent arguments.

Let's start at square one. Why is there alarm about American medical care? The most usual reason given is because its cost is high and rising.

That is certainly true. We were not spending nearly as much on high-tech medical procedures in the past because there were not nearly as many of them. And we weren't spending anything at all on some of the new pharmaceutical drugs because they didn't exist.

This general pattern is not peculiar to medical care. Cars didn't cost nearly as much in the past, when they didn't have air conditioning, power steering and high-tech safety features. Homes were cheaper when they were smaller, had fewer bathrooms and lacked such conveniences as built-in microwave ovens.

Benefit Fairy

We would like to have all these things without the rising costs that come with them. But only with medical care is such wishful thinking taken seriously, with government regarded as a sort of fairy godmother who will give us the benefits without the costs.

A cynic is said to be someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If so, then it is political cynicism to point to other countries that spend less on medical care, including some countries where there is "universal health care" provided "free" by their governments.

Add in the distortions to the market because we mostly have a third payer market where most of those consuming health care don't bear the entire cost so they have little incentive to cut down on all the tests required and doctors have an incentive to require more tests just to forestall any malpractice suit and you can explain our health care costs. Now ask yourself if there is any way that a government option can lower those costs except by rationing health care.

Debunking health care myths

George Newman writes a valuable clip-and-save column in the WSJ today attacking many of the arguments that a pro-public option health care reform bill have been proposing. Here are a few of his arguments.

- "The American people overwhelmingly favor reform."

If you ask whether people would be happier if somebody else paid their medical bills, they generally say yes. But surveys on consumers' satisfaction with their quality of care show overwhelming support for the continuation of the present arrangement. The best proof of this is the belated recognition by the proponents of health-care reform that they need to promise people that they can keep what they have now.

- "The cost of health care rises two to three times as fast as inflation."

That's like comparing the price of hamburger 30 years ago with the price of filet mignon today and calling the difference inflation. Or the price of a 19-inch, black-and-white TV 30 years ago with the price of a 50-inch HDTV today. The improvements in medical care are even more dramatic, leading to longer life, less pain, fewer exploratory surgeries and miracle drugs. Of course the research, the equipment and the training that produce these improvements don't come cheap.

Read the rest.

So when will that stimulus start taking effect?

Rick Klein of ABC notes that the administration has started to move the goalposts now claiming that we shouldn't expect to see the effects of the stimulus in the summer and fall.

However, that wasn't what they used to be claiming. When it passed they had a much quicker horizon for when we'd see the impact. In fact, earlier they had claimed that we were already seeing the effects.

But top Obama advisers haven’t always been so cautious in predicting how long the stimulus would take to be felt.

Back in February, with Congress moving swiftly to approve President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, White House budget director Peter Orszag said the benefits of the stimulus would “take weeks to months” to be felt.

Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council, was even more optimistic: “You'll see the effects begin almost immediately,” Summers told CNN in February.

Just last month, Jared Bernstein, Vice President Joe Biden’s top economic adviser, joined administration officials in asserting that the stimulus was already working, despite rising unemployment rates.

....Then there’s the case of the now-famous chart, prepared in January by the Obama transition team to forecast employment rates with and without a stimulus bill in place.

Obama’s economic advisers saw unemployment cresting at just below 8 percent with the stimulus in place; without it, they forecast the national rate topping out around 9 percent.

The stimulus, of course, did pass, though the national unemployment rate is now 9.4 percent. Two weeks ago, President Obama predicted that unemployment will top 10 percent this year.

Here's the graph of what the Obama folk originally predicted and what we're facing now. No wonder they want to move the goalposts and even ABC is catching them on this.

At the time of the debate (in public, but not in Congress which rushed it through with very little substantive study or debate) over the stimulus package many people were warning that the proposed stimulus would do little to fight unemployment any time soon.

Based on a report from the head of the CBO, Bruce Bartlett reminds us of all the reasons why the stimulus was never about fighting unemployment in the near term.

Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf recently presented a report to the International Monetary Fund in which he walked through some of the problems with implementing the stimulus program.

First of all, 60% of the stimulus package was never going to have much of a stimulative effect. These were programs like extending unemployment benefits and tax credits with no incentive effects that may have been justified on the merits, but don't really do anything to increase growth or reduce unemployment.

For a program to be stimulative, it must bring forth economic activity that otherwise would not have taken place. The classic example is public works. When a new road or bridge is built, construction companies have to purchase concrete, steel and other materials that create business for other companies. They also employ workers that otherwise would not be working, paying them wages that they will spend, producing jobs and incomes for other workers.

If this works the way it is supposed to, stimulus spending has a multiplier effect throughout the economy. A Council of Economic Advisers study estimated that government purchases of goods and services raise the gross domestic product by $1.57 for every $1 spent. By contrast, tax credits and income transfers are much less stimulative, raising GDP by considerably less than $1 for every $1 rise in the deficit.

Since 60% of the stimulus package had a multiplier effect of less than one, only 40% of the package went to programs like public works that have a high multiplier. Moreover, the programs with a low multiplier were the fastest ones to implement; those with a high multiplier take much more time to come online. According to Elmendorf, by the end of fiscal year 2009, which ends on Sept. 30, about a third of the least stimulative spending will have been spent vs. only 11% of the highly stimulative spending.

Even at the end of fiscal year 2010, we will have spent only 47% of the highly stimulative spending. By the end of fiscal year 2011, more than a quarter of the stimulative spending will still remain unspent.

The CBO bases this estimate on many years of experience with various types of government programs. Increases in defense spending are the quickest to stimulate because 65% of the money is usually spent in the first year, rising to 88% the second year and 96% in the third. By contrast, only 27% of highway spending is spent the first year, rising to 68% the second year and 84% the third. Spending on water projects is even slower to come online, with only 4% spent the first year, rising to 24% the second year and 54% the third.

The reason is simple. Much of what the Defense Department buys involves things that also have civilian uses. In effect, it is buying off the shelf so spending can be done quickly. But to build a new highway or dam is much more complicated. Plans have to be drawn up, land acquired, environmental impact statements prepared, public comments solicited, political and other objections dealt with, contracts written and put out for bid, etc. This takes years and years.

Remember that the Democrats, holding control of Congress, were the ones to choose Douglas Elmendorf to head the CBO. This is not a right-wing hack. Yet he finds that defense appropriations would have been the fastest way to use stimulus money to alleviate unemployment. But that would have been verboten to a Democratic Congress and president. So we kept hearing about "shovel-ready" projects. But that was just a myth.

Of course, there were a few shovel-ready projects for which all the preliminary work had been done that only needed money to start work. But there were far fewer of these projects than generally believed. Moreover, as Popular Mechanics reported, many of those that were ready to go were those that had been shelved because they were outdated or had other flaws.

Even the simplest public works projects such as road repaving take months to get moving from the time a federal check arrives. And in the short run such small projects have very little stimulative potential because state and local governments will simply use the workers and materials they already have on hand to do the work.

And, as Christina Hoff Sommers writes in her article "No Country for Burly Men", feminist lobbying helped transform the stimulus from being a proposal to target manufacturing jobs to one to also help professions, relatively unhurt by the recession, in which women predominate.

Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women's groups has made it all but impossible.

After a big push, the feminist activists achieved their goal.

t is now four months since the bill was signed into law. A recent Associated Press story reports: "Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over 'Shovel-ready' Projects." A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services. According to Chris Whately, director of the Council of State Governments, "We all talked about 'shovel-ready' since September and assumed it was a whole lot of paving and building when, in fact, that's not the case." At the same time, the Labor Department's latest (June 5) employment report shows unemployment rates of 8 percent for women and 10.5 percent for men. "Unprecedented" is what Harvard economist Greg Mankiw called the new 2.5 percentage-point gender gap. "It's the highest male-female jobless rate gap in the history of BLS [Labor Department] data back to 1948," said Mark Perry.

There is great room for debate over the effectiveness of government stimulus programs, and over how much impact a focused "shovel-ready" spending program would have achieved by now. What is not debatable is that changes in the American economy and workforce are favoring service sectors where women are abundant and that the current severe contraction is centered on sectors where men, especially working-class men, predominate. That an emergency economic recovery program should be designed with gender in mind is itself remarkable. That, in current circumstances, it should be designed to "skew" employment further towards women is disturbing and ominous.

....Recall that the Obama administration has taken extraordinary steps to insulate itself from the machinations of organized lobbyists, establishing strict limits and procedures for contacts and communications of every sort. Yet its first major policy initiative was transformed by an orchestrated barrage of emails, op-eds, online petitions, open letters, faxes, phone calls, scripted handshakes, and meetings. And the administration went to great lengths to satisfy its petitioners that their proposals had been adopted directly into law. The administration (and Congress) must have been thinking that groups such as NOW and the Feminist Majority were crusading for social justice, when in fact they were lobbying for their share of the action, to the detriment of urgent necessities.

A Washington feminist establishment that celebrates the "happily-ever-after" story of its victory over burly men cannot represent the views and interests of many women. Those men are fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, and friends; if they are in serious trouble, so are the women who care about them and in many cases depend on them. But NOW and its sister organizations see the world differently. They see the workplace as a battlefront in a zero-sum struggle between men and women, where it is their job to side with women. Unless the Obama administration and Congress find the temerity to distance themselves from the new feminist lobby, the "man-cession" will deepen and further mischief will ensue.

So don't be surprised that a stimulus plan that always had little to do with providing jobs where they were most needed is now not providing those jobs. Just today we've heard that June unemployment has increased to 9.5% That is why the administration needs to move its goalposts. Expect some further movement in a few months as these estimates fail yet again.