One historical mystery solved

We get the news today that the Soviets destroyed Hitler and Eva Braun's remains in 1970. For years there had been rumors about what had really happened to their remains which the Soviet army had taken custody of when they took Berlin.

The remains of Hitler, his companion Eva Braun and the family of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels were destroyed in April 1970 on the secret orders of then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov, the Russian news agency said today. Andropov went on to become Soviet leader from 1982 until his death in 1984.

The Soviets were concerned that graves of Third Reich leaders might one day attract Nazi sympathizers, Interfax said. The remains were burned and dumped into the Biederitz River, outside the eastern city of Magdeburg, according to the news service.

The Soviet army moved the bodies from near Rathenow, west of Berlin, and reburied them at a garrison in Magdeburg in 1946, Interfax said. When the facility was returned to the East German government in 1970, Andropov decided to destroy the remains. Fragments of Hitler’s skull and jawbone are still in Russia, according to Interfax.

Health care is swallowing up the budget

Just looking at projections of future budgets from today without adding in the Democrats' health care reforms, it is clear that health care expenses are going to become the major expense unless something is done. We're going to be facing questions about how much health care for the elderly we can afford. Unfortunately, the President, instead of facing up to that reality, is working hard to expand the federal promises for providing health care. Robert Samuelson, as always, is very good on outlining the problem.

One consequence is a slow, steady and largely invisible degradation of other public and private goals. Historian Niall Ferguson, writing recently in Newsweek, argued that the huge federal debt threatens America's global power by an "inexorable reduction in the resources" for the military. Ferguson got it half right. The real threat is not the debt but burgeoning health spending that, even if the budget were balanced, would press on everything else.

"Everything else" includes universities, roads, research, parks, courts, border protection and -- because similar pressures operate on states through Medicaid -- schools, police, trash collection and libraries. Higher health spending similarly weakens families' ability to raise children, because it reduces households' discretionary income either through steeper taxes or lower take-home pay, as higher employer-paid premiums squeeze salaries.

A society that passively accepts constant increases in health spending endorses some explicit, if poorly understood, forms of income redistribution. The young transfer to the elderly, because about half of all health spending goes for those 55 and over. Unless taxes are increased disproportionately for older Americans (and just the opposite is true), they are subsidized by the young. More and more resources also go to a small sliver of the population: In 2006, the sickest 5 percent of Americans accounted for 48 percent of health spending.

The Republicans are highlighting the cuts in Medicare under the Democrats' plans. These are notable and it is interesting that AARP doesn't seem to mind those cuts. We are going to need some cuts made and all this rhetoric about the reform is going to make those inevitable choices even more difficult. But the Democrats are being, not only hypocritical, but totally deceptive.

Obama's health-care proposals may be undesirable (they are), but it's mindless to oppose them -- as many Republicans do -- by screaming that they'll lead to "rationing." Almost everything in society is "rationed," either by price (if you can't afford it, you can't buy it) or explicit political decisions (school boards have budgets). Health care is an exception; it enjoys an open tab. The central political problem of health-care nation is to find effective and acceptable ways to limit medical spending.

Democrats are no better. Obama talks hypocritically about restraining deficits and controlling health costs while his program would increase spending and worsen the budget outlook. Democrats congratulate themselves on caring for the uninsured -- who already receive much care -- while avoiding any major overhaul of the delivery system. The resulting society discriminates against the young and increasingly assigns economic resources and political choice to an unrestrained medical-industrial complex.

This is not sustainable. It is madness to expand our indebtedness for health care without any serious, non-phony way of addressing the problem that we're facing when health care will have swallowed up the entire budget.

The Baucus double standard

As news broke this weekend that Senator Baucus has recommended his girlfriend for a job as a federal U.S. Attorney, the outcry was pretty quiet. But that contrasts to a similar, albeit less egregious, breach of ethics. And from the lack of noise on the left, we're seeing how situational their ethics are. The Wall Street Journal reminds us of how different things were when the person in question was a Republican.

Here's a poser: Suppose a public official is accused of recommending his girlfriend for a promotion, though he was the one who first flagged the potential conflict of interest and officials had refused to let him recuse himself from decisions about the woman. Should he lose his job?

That's precisely what happened in 2007 to Paul Wolfowitz, who was run out of the World Bank on the pretext that he had given his girlfriend a raise. In fact, Mr. Wolfowitz had made bank officials aware that his girlfriend already worked at the bank before he accepted the job as president, and bank officials had raised no objection to the job change that removed his girlfriend from any direct reporting to Mr. Wolfowitz. The ethical uproar was a politically convenient excuse, fanned by the media, to oust Mr. Wolfowitz when his real offense was that he was too hard on corruption.

So it's going to be fascinating to see how the press corps and political class react to the news that Montana Senator Max Baucus recommended a staff member who was his girlfriend for the plum job of U.S. Attorney. Mr. Baucus disclosed the attempted sweetheart deal early Saturday after media inquiries made clear the story was breaking. The 67-year-old Senator disclosed that he had recommended Melodee Hanes and two others earlier this year for the U.S. Attorney post in Montana. While Presidents appoint U.S. attorneys, by tradition home-state Senators have significant influence in the selection, especially Senators from the same party as the President.

A spokesman said the Senator and Ms. Barnes began their relationship in mid-2008 after Mr. Baucus separated from his wife. Ms. Barnes left his payroll earlier this year, but only later did the couple come to their senses and decide to withdraw her application for the U.S. Attorney post. She nonetheless landed on her feet in another job at the Justice Department, and "was awarded the position based solely on her merit," the Baucus spokesman said. Of course she was.

As Senate Finance Chairman, Mr. Baucus is a crucial player in health-care reform, and our guess is that neither Democrats nor their media allies will want to explore this nepotistic near-miss lest it interfere with that greater political goal. But if they don't, we will learn a good deal about workplace ethics and political double standards.

Congress neglecting its main job

By spending all their time debating health care, the Senate is just adding to the delays in getting the rest of their necessary business done. We have the remaining appropriations bills since they've only passed 5 of the 12 necessary bills. So we're operating under temporary provisions. And that's not all. So what they'll end up doing is rolling all these leftover bills into one ginormous omnibus bills. These huge omnibus bills become vehicles for all sorts of pork stuffed in that no one can find and for which there is no opportunity to strip out the most egregious stuff.

Among other must-do items:

-The House voted last week to keep the current top rate for the estate tax at 45 percent for estates larger than $3.5 million. Without Senate action, the tax would disappear in 2010 but return in 2011 at a higher rate of 55 percent for estates over $1 million. Even so, the Senate might not act on it until early next year.

-There are 30 tax breaks, mainly aimed at helping businesses, that expire at the end of the year and must be renewed. The House probably will vote on them this week. Also ending is a program giving products from some 130 developing countries duty-free entry into the United States.

-Three provisions of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act expire at the end of the year. Some Democrats want to make changes to better ensure that government surveillance doesn't violate privacy rights.

-The government could have to quit borrowing money if Congress doesn't act within the next few weeks to raise the debt ceiling, currently at $12.1 trillion. Fiscal conservatives from both sides are balking at a vote unless they get assurances the administration is taking deficit-cutting steps.

-The House acted in November to shield doctors from a 21 percent reduction in Medicare payments next month, a measure brought up almost every year because of a glitch in the reimbursement formula. But with a price tag of more than $200 billion and a distracted Senate, it's not clear what will happen next.

-Lawmakers have tried for several years to revamp the law governing the Federal Aviation Administration to promote airport safety, modernize air traffic control systems and ensure passenger rights. They'll probably have to settle for another three-month extension of the old law.

-Another candidate for an omnibus package is a still-unwritten jobs bill that could include such measures as promotion of green energy, infrastructure spending or hiring-related tax credits. The House could vote on a separate bill in coming weeks but again, action on it is more likely after New Year's.

Putting off some of these issues until next year - under the presumption that the health care debate will finally be over - has its own problems. Waiting in line to consume the time and attention of Congress are President Barack Obama's other major initiatives: overhauling the financial regulatory system, passing clean energy legislation and paying for his 30,000-troop expansion of the war in Afghanistan.

Climate control conference increases demand for limos

The irony is indeed rich. As they jet towards Copenhagen in their 140 private jets, all those politicians gathering to talk so sonorously about the need for us all to cut back on our carbon emissions, their gathering has greatly increased the demands for gas guzzling limousines.

At least 140 private jets are expected to transport the VIPs and more than 1,200 limos have been hired - but only five are electric or eco-friendly hybrids.

Copenhagen's biggest limo company said: "We haven't got enough limos in the country.

"We are having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

But don't fret. They've bought their offset indulgences so they're free to bun all that extra carbon to power their limos.

40,500 tonnes of CO2 produced by the summit will be offset by replacing high-polluting brick kilns in Bangladesh with 20 new, efficient ones

Of course, this is all in aid of their making phony promises about how they're going to cut carbon emissions 80% in 2050. These politicians all know that they're not going to do any such thing. But jetting in on their private jets and riding in their limos is well worth it if they can have a good PR moment. After all, doing all this by video conference just wouldn't make as nice a photo op.

Are politician robocalls part of freedom of speech?

A couple of states have placed restrictions to cover politicians' calls soliciting donations and votes under their Do Not Call restrictions. The national law exempted politicians and now some groups that solicit donations are petitioning the FEC to rule on whether states can place further limitations than the federal law.

The view of the agency and lawmakers was that such messages should enjoy broad free-speech protections. But that exemption hasn't stopped a large number of states from imposing restrictions on such calls. Two states, Arkansas and Wyoming, have even banned them.

Robocalls are one of the cheapest ways to reach voters, and some candidates and political groups have chafed under the state restrictions, many of which require a caller to obtain permission from a phone subscriber -- often through an operator -- before placing an automated call. Now an Iowa-based conservative group, [@urlAmerican Future Fund Political Action,@http://americanfuturefund.com/@] is trying to get the state laws overturned. On its behalf last month, the law firm Holtzman Vogel of Warrenton, Va., filed a request with the Federal Election Commission for an advisory opinion on whether federal election law supersedes state laws affecting elections, in the interest of national uniformity.

The issue is one of First Amendment rights, says Nick Ryan, the Iowa fund's chairman. "These regulations limit the ability of candidates and those of us who seek to advocate. It impinges on our right to communicate."

Ryan also notes that the restrictions -- which range from prohibitions to relatively minor limits on the hours of calling -- favor groups and candidates with the most money. That's because an automated call costs from 5 cents to 8 cents, by Ryan's estimate, while states that require a live operator to gain a voter's consent, such as Minnesota, drive the cost of each call to around $1. That's the same cost as a direct mail solicitation.

Once the Supreme Court has accepted campaign finance restrictions and rejected the reasoning that such limits violated the First Amendment, I don't see how restrictions on robocalls would be more of a restriction than limiting how much candidates can spend on advertising.

And let's face it. In the days of the internet, telephone solicitations are becoming so last century.

I always thought that the real reason for the exemption of politicians' calls by the federal law was not a sensitivity to free speech, but a sensitivity to the legislators' needs to raise money. Let's hope that the FEC upholds the bans in Arkansas and Wyoming. I'd love to see such a ban in my state.

Our nation's finest

The Washington Post talks to some of the cadets at West Point who were in the audience of President Obama's speech. And you just have to marvel at some of these young men and women. It reminds me of the description of the firemen and policemen at the World Trade Center on 9/11. While everyone was running away from the buildings, they were running towards them. And these are the young people who, when Iraq was at its worst in 2005-2006, applied to West Point knowing that they would very well end up going to war. The Post describes one young cadet, Eric Berlau.

"I came here to West Point for four years because I have one singular goal of serving this country while we're at war," Bernau explained, again and again. "If you're involved in sports, you don't want to spend all your time practicing and then never play in the game. It's the same thing for us. I always expected to go to war. I want to go. I'm honored to go."

Bernau had applied to West Point -- and nowhere else -- five years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks precisely because he hoped to be counted on when it mattered most. He was the first in his family to join the military, leaving behind a worried mother with roots as a religious pacifist and a miffed group of friends who later bragged about their light schedules at the University of Wisconsin. But Bernau was captivated by the purposefulness of the Army and the cohesiveness of the West Point cadets. Once a high school class clown, he absorbed the seriousness of the country's oldest military academy: the gray uniforms, gray skies and gray stone buildings; the morning roll call at 6:50 and the lunchtime count at noon, all with a military band providing a drum roll in the background.

When it came time earlier this year for Bernau to select a military branch, he asked to be assigned to infantry, with a creed demanding courage at the "heart of the fight." He liked physical sports -- camping, hiking and mixed martial arts -- that he thought would translate well into fighting an enemy on the ground. He also believed that the most noble leaders earned respect by operating "at the tip of the spear," he said.

These young people can never forget that this is what they signed up for. They hear the announcements of the deaths of former West Point cadets before they sit down for lunch.

Some of the younger cadets are hoping that there will still be a job for them to do by the time they graduate. I'm afraid that there still will be. This isn't a task that will be over in their lifetimes.

Read the rest of the article.

How many religions will the true believers have to lose this year?

Just as the holy scriptures of the global warming true-believers are being revealed to have a lot of questionable science and computer code in their foundational liturgy, worshipers in the Church of Obama are facing a revelatory moment of truth. Can they still believe in the Church of the One if he turns out to be a war president? Cognitive dissonance must be making their heads twirl. Dana Milbank catalogs their crisis of doubt.

Some parishioners in the Church of Obama discovered last week that their spiritual leader is a false prophet.

Consider the blow suffered by the liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, who issued a plaintive plea to the president on the eve of his announcement that he was sending 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan. By escalating the war, Moore wrote:

"[Y]ou will do the worst possible thing you could do -- destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true -- that all politicians are alike."

Obama, of course, was not moved by his follower from Flint. The real question is why Moore, and those millions and multitudes of whom he wrote, thought that Obama would do otherwise.

As Milbank points out, Obama had campaigned on carrying on the fight in Afghanistan. Why is Michale Moore and Code Pink and their compatriots so shocked, shocked that he's actually doing what he said he would do?

It was bound to happen eventually. Obama had become to his youthful supporters a vessel for all of their liberal hopes. They saw him as a transformational figure who would end war, save the Earth from global warming, restore the economy -- and still be home for dinner. They lashed out at anybody who dared to suggest that Obama was just another politician, subject to calculation, expediency and vanity like all the rest.

Ah, the reality-based community just wasn't so interested in reality, were they?

All the adulation was helpful in getting him elected and he didn't really do anything to discourage it. Statements about how his clinching the nomination was the moment when the oceans stopped rising and the planet began to heal were standard gospel from The One. And these people swallowed all the tripe. And now they're disappointed in him because the planet, gosh darn it, isn't starting to heal and there are still nasty places that he wants to send our troops to. Isn't that a shame. As Milbank concludes,

This is what happens when true believers mistake a mortal for a messiah.

If they can't believe in the Obamessiah and there are doubts about the holy word on global warming, where now will they worship?

Garbage in, Garbage out

Even the BBC is coming to realize that the information revealed by the Climategate leaks raises serious questions about the data inputting problems used by the community of global warming alarmists at East Anglia University. What is clear is that there were major problems writing the code and that even those who aren't skeptical of human-caused climate change are deeply skeptical about the computer programming that went in to generating the data that was used to reach CRU's conclusions.

Link via Newsbusters

The report highlights just the criticisms that global warming skeptics have themselves been highlighting: the lack of clean data and explanations of adaptations made in the data. As the expert points out, this isn't the sort of coding you'd expect to see in source code from private business.

"The programming language actually has a problem," Graham-Cumming said. "And they put in some code to deal with that error. Unfortunately, in doing so they produced another error. And the upshot of this is the error occurs - the underlying error, they will skip over data that they're trying to plot without any warning to the end user. So in some sense there is data that is being lost."

And the reporter asks the key question: would you feel comfortable making decisions worth billions, even trillions of dollars, based on this code? And the answer is clear. Absolutely not.

That is why the British Meteorological Office is beginning a review of all its data and is asking all the nations involved for permission to release the raw data.

THE British Meteorological Office is to launch a review of its temperature data and has asked 188 nations - including Australia - for permission to release raw weather data in the wake of the so-called ''Climate-gate'' email scandal.

The investigation of temperature and global weather information by the Meteorological Office is significant because its database is one of three main sources of the temperature analyses that the United Nations climate change science body relied on for its assessment that global warming posed a major threat to world safety and wellbeing.

The decision comes in the wake of the theft - and publication on the internet - of thousands of emails and text files from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU).

The emails, many of them written by its director, Professor Phil Jones, appeared to suggest that there were attempts to manipulate temperature data and to stymie the public release of information on raw data. The university has announced an investigation and Professor Jones, who denies the claims as ''rubbish'', has stood down while the inquiry takes place.

The Age reported on Saturday that a 247-page text file by one of the university's most senior computer programmers has also revealed frustration and anxiety about the integrity of the raw data provided from weather stations around the world and that Australian data came in for particular criticism.

The programmer found the Australian weather data to be riddled with entry errors, duplication and inaccuracies and described as a ''bloody mess'' attempts to homogenise information and entries.

In his text file, the programmer documents his attempts to make sense of the reams of raw historical data that was used by the CRU. He railed that the global information he has to work with has ''no uniform integrity''.

As AJ Strata points out, in the real world where decisions have to be made on the basis of what scientists and programmers produce, there is no room for programs written with poor codes that have "no uniform integrity." The results would be too catastrophic. Strata delineates a difference between what he derisively calls PhD code and NASA code.

There is a well known problem when research scientists have to interact with the real world: they hate to be bothered with rules, regulations, laws, etc. At NASA the lowest quality code you will find is in the science processing chain. It is just not held to the same quality standards as the operational code the runs all the flight and ground HW.

For example: you can’t have PhD quality code launching massive rockets over this countries large cities running up the eastern coast. You can’t have PhD level code controlling large antennas, since you don’t want them be destroyed as you move these massive machines or fry someone by turning them on when people are working on them. You don’t want PhD quality code landing the Space Shuttle. It’s that simple and no NASA PhD will argue that point.

The truth is the science teams don’t get enough funds to do it right, but that is only half the problem. The other half is the scientists like to write crappy code only they can use – creates a lot of job security. For much of science this is a livable and reasonable arrangement. Let the PhD’s dabble in exploring the unknown, and leave the designing, operating and safety of large complex systems (which can kill lots of people if things go wrong) to lesser people – like engineers.

When the global warming canard migrated from niche research into trillions of dollars of policy changes effecting every human being on the planet, the PhD level of quality control should have been ejected immediately. With the fate of humanity at risk, it is not too much to ask for professional quality code, analysis, and a true peer review process. Not that silly science journal review process by the good ol’ PhDs network, a real review like we do when we launch people into space or build a rail system or a new airplane.

Ouch!

How delicious that all these politicians are going to be meeting in Copenhagen to discuss climate change and what sort of statement they can issue and promises they can make that will sound good but not totally tank their economies just at the moment when the shoddiness of the research underlying the whole climate change industry has been brought to light. Let's have that analysis by the British Meteorological Office looking at all their data gathering and at the coding done in the computer programs. Until they can vouch for the integrity of both their data and their coding, let's hold off on vast economic changes that will affect the world's economy for decades. As George Will writes,

China, nimble at the politics of pretending that is characteristic of climate-change theater, promises only to reduce its "carbon intensity" -- carbon emissions per unit of production. So China's emissions will rise.

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.

Let the politicians make their fancy speeches, which is what they're good for, but no country in its right mind should make the kind of economic decisions that Al Gore and his allies have been advocating for over a decade until they can prove that the whole scare isn't based on garbage data and garbage programming.

The global change true believers have long been outraged at the temerity of anyone challenging their apocalyptic visions. They likened critics to Holocaust deniers as if asking questions about research that tries to reconstruct past temperatures for a millennium while also projecting temperatures for a century into the future is equivalent to questioning something that is a historic fact in many people's own lifetime. George Will rightly compares the climate change activists to true believers in a religion who wish to excommunicate those who don't ascribe to the right doctrine.

The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate-change models partially based on the problematic practice of reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. On such models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars -- and substantially diminished freedom.

Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes. They seem to suppose themselves a small clerisy entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. On it, and hence on them, the planet's fate depends. So some of them consider it virtuous to embroider facts, exaggerate certitudes, suppress inconvenient data, and manipulate the peer-review process to suppress scholarly dissent and, above all, to declare that the debate is over.

Consider the sociology of science, the push and pull of interests, incentives, appetites and passions. Governments' attempts to manipulate Earth's temperature now comprise one of the world's largest industries. Tens of billions of dollars are being dispensed, as by the U.S. Energy Department, which has suddenly become, in effect, a huge venture capital operation, speculating in green technologies. Political, commercial, academic and journalistic prestige and advancement can be contingent on not disrupting the (postulated) consensus that is propelling the gigantic and fabulously lucrative industry of combating global warming.

Copenhagen is the culmination of the post-Kyoto maneuvering by people determined to fix the world's climate by breaking the world's -- especially America's -- population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments. But Copenhagen also is prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth's last chance, until the next one.

The problems revealed in that CRU source code underline the differences between true science and religion. In science, honest scientists embrace the scientific method and accept that other scientists want to use their data to try to replicate their results. Willis Eschenbach's post at Watts Up With That reveals how the researchers at CRU were scrambling and stonewalling to avoid doing exactly that.

Science works by one person making a claim, and backing it up with the data and methods that they used to make the claim. Other scientists then attack the claim by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand. So blocking the FOIA allowed Phil Jones to claim that his temperature record (HadCRUT3) was valid science.

This is not just trivial gamesmanship, this is central to the very idea of scientific inquiry. This is an attack on the heart of science, by keeping people who disagree with you from ever checking your work and seeing if your math is correct.

If CRU wasn't interested in true science, then the conclusion is clear - no decision based on their research should be made by any policy-maker. The irony is that President Obama and his supporters all trumpeted how they would be making their decisions based on science, but now they're all averting their eyes to what Climategate has made obvious - the science behind the United Nations' claims about global warming was done by a bunch of true believers who felt they had dispensation to ignore the rules of the scientific method simply because their motives were so pure.

Separation of Power supporters - beware!

If a president will try to wrap up even his social secretary under the cloak of separation of powers, something is awry. While it hasn't yet gotten as far as the administration claiming the protection of executive privilege for Desiree Rogers to keep her from having to submit to embarrassing testimony before the House, her refusal to testify and Robert Gibbs' citation of separation of powers as a reason for her not to testify raises the question: if the White House will keep even a social secretary from having to testify before Congress, whom would they let testify?

Clearly, executive privilege wouldn't apply in the case of asking a social secretary why she was schmoozing with the guests instead of making sure that the Secret Service knew who was and wasn't on the guest list. As the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Nixon, a president is entitled to keep his conversations with aides private recognizing that there is a

valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties; the importance of this confidentiality is too plain to require further discussion. Human experience teaches that those who expect public dissemination of their remarks may well temper candor with a concern for appearances and for their own interests to the detriment of the decisionmaking process.

But such a description doesn't apply to Desiree Rogers and her job as social secretary. The woman apparently got the job because she's a longtime friend and contributor to the Obamas. She enjoys the spotlight. But she isn't good at the job she's been given which is to be an unobtrusive manager of White House social functions. While not assigning aides to help the Secret Service, she broke protocol by seating herself as one of the invited guests.

But the White House is protecting this friend of Barack and the Democrats don't seem eager to challenge her refusal to testify.

While this story is overblown and congressional investigations are probably unnecessary since the Secret Service has done its own investigation and seems to be willing to take the bullet for the deficiencies of Desiree Rogers, the precedent of the White House invoking separation of powers as a defense to keep a social secretary from testifying should alarm anyone who complained about the Bush White House's assertion of executive privilege for what were, after all, aides involved in substantive decision-making, not party planning.

Boy, that jobs summit worked fast

Just as President Obama was meeting with all his jobs summiteers, the White House also announced that he'd be giving a speech next week on jobs. That was fast! His meeting was supposed to give him ideas on how to address the stagnant jobs picture. And he already knew he'd learn so much that he could schedule a speech for Tuesday.

That's just one more indication that the summit was for the pictures. He already knew what he wanted to do. As Jason Zengerle writes,

Indeed, in the age of Obama, the summit has replaced the vaunted bipartisan commission as the ultimate empty gesture. Where a president once kicked a nettlesome political problem down the road by assembling a panel of bipartisan worthies to produce a report on entitlement reform, say, or how we made the mistake of thinking Saddam had WMDs, Obama now holds a confab to jawbone the problem to death. Even better, unlike with a bipartisan commission, with a summit, there’s no final report to have to contend with. That’s not to say Obama’s wonkery and love of deliberation is a pose. It isn’t. It’s just that we know he’s doing it for real when, as in the case of Afghanistan, he does it behind closed doors.

UPDATE: For those inclined to celebrate today's job report as demonstrating that the jobs summit actually worked retroactively to last month's labor numbers, here is one strong caveat.

Most attention will be focused on the fact that the unemployment rate fell from 10.2 percent to 10 percent. However, the unemployment rate fell because many people dropped out of the labor force entirely. Teenagers, who have the highest unemployment rate, were the most likely to leave the labor force. High-school dropouts and high-school graduates also left the labor force, and these groups also have high unemployment rates. The drop in the unemployment rate is due to these groups leaving the workforce. The unemployment rate will climb once more workers return to the labor force, so it is very likely that the unemployment rate will continue to climb well into 2010.

The sourest news was that unemployed workers continue having difficulty finding new jobs. The number of long-term unemployed — those out of work for more than six months — increased by 293,000, and the average and median length of unemployment both increased by about one and a half weeks.

Yes, 10% is better than 10.2%. But it's still not time to break out the champagne.

Why Obama's ambivalence to the Afghanistan misssion matters

President Obama's speech was being listened to not only by Americans, but by our enemies. And they now know that Obama is so ambivalent to his mission that all they have to do is hunker down and wait until we pull out. And those in the area who have to decide whether or not to support our efforts at dangerous risks to themselves and their families must weigh Obama's unwilling decision against the implacable will of the Taliban and other terrorists in the group. Charles Krauthammer lays this out.

Which made his last-minute assertion of "resolve unwavering" so hollow. It was meant to be stirring. It fell flat. In August, he called Afghanistan "a war of necessity." On Tuesday night, he defined "what's at stake" as "the common security of the world." The world, no less. Yet, we begin leaving in July 2011?

Does he think that such ambivalence is not heard by the Taliban, by Afghan peasants deciding which side to choose, by Pakistani generals hedging their bets, by NATO allies already with one foot out of Afghanistan?

Instead we got a politician's speech.

Obama's surge speech wasn't that of a commander in chief but of a politician, perfectly splitting the difference. Two messages for two audiences. Placate the right -- you get the troops; placate the left -- we are on our way out.

And apart from Obama's personal commitment is the question of his ability as a wartime leader. If he feels compelled to placate his left with an exit date today -- while he is still personally popular, with large majorities in both houses of Congress, and even before the surge begins -- how will he stand up to the left when the going gets tough and the casualties mount, and he really has to choose between support from his party and success on the battlefield?

....And this commander in chief defended his exit date (vs. the straw man alternative of "open-ended" nation-building) thusly: "because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own."

Remarkable. Go and fight, he tells his cadets -- some of whom may not return alive -- but I may have to cut your mission short because my real priorities are domestic.

Has there ever been a call to arms more dispiriting, a trumpet more uncertain?

Watch the Democrats bury this.

Will they support a provision forcing them to get the same exact health care plan that they're devising for the rest of us? Senators Vitter and Coburn are preparing just such an amendment to propose in the Senate.

The current amendment would go further — not only barring members of Congress from exempting themselves from a public plan, but actually forcing them into it. Vitter is also considering proposing banning physician services currently available to legislators at the Capitol as well as special privileges they are allowed at military hospitals. Specifically, members of Congress receive taxpayer-subsidized medical care at Bethesda Medical Center and the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Vitter plans to announce the amendment on Friday. U.S. Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) has introduced a similar measure in the House.

Maybe the senators could be forced to vote for it in the Senate where it may be forced to the floor. But it will never be brought to a vote in the House and will die away. However, it is just sublime to see Democrats argue against the measure because it will be reducing their choices.

Most Democrats called the Coburn-Vitter effort “a world-class gimmick” that undercuts the party’s effort to create more choices and also allow Americans to keep their current plan.

“The whole point of what we’re trying to do is create more choice, and that would include keeping the plan people have now,” said Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.). “I understand the point they’re trying to make, but I can’t support that.”

“What they want to do is to try to have us say ‘no’ and then say ‘Why, isn’t it good enough for you?’" Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said of Coburn and Vitter. “The fact is they oppose the public option and they want to ridicule and diminish it.”

Of course, it is a gimmick. But it's a clever one. They have to admit that the new plan would reduce choices from those who are happy with their own plan. And it's just a rhetorical lie to say that they're creating more choices when they're providing the incentives for companies to end their own health insurance plans and let their employees get health care from a public option.

“If there's this brave new world where coverage is guaranteed one way or another, a lot of people are going to get dumped,” he said. “That's just competitive and economic reality. The rule for this should be the same as it is for doctors: First do no harm.”

Look in the mirror, Mr. President, for why jobs aren't rebounding

Would you make a decision on how to spend a major amount of money for your company if you didn't have a good idea what taxes, regulations, or health care expenses you'll be facing in the coming years? Making decisions in such uncertainty is a risky thing and, if possible, business leaders would need to wait to see what measures the government is going to take that will affect you. With such a huge agenda in the Democrats in-box, it is no surprise that we have such a stagnant jobs market.

James Pethoukokis writes today how Obama's very policies are freezing up the jobs market.

Let’s assume that the much-hyped White House “jobs summit” turns out to be a free-flowing exchange of ideas and views. Could happen. If that’s the case, then President Barack Obama shouldn’t be shocked if a few CEOs dare suggest that the sweeping-yet-stalled Obama agenda might … actually … you know … no offense, Mr. President … be contributing to the jobless recovery. (The union and academic invitees will protest mightily, natch.)

CEOs are saying as much amongst themselves. At a recent symposium, Intel boss Paul Otellini, a contributor to both parties, expressed concern about the “amount of variability in the system” created by the state of policy flux in healthcare, energy and tax policy. “It is very difficult to make a hiring decision,” he said. General Electric chief executive Jeffery Immelt, a strong supporter of Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal, added he would just like to “know what the rules are.”

All in all, a disturbing replay of the 1930s when FDR’s big changes left business reeling with uncertainty and confusion. The “devil you don’t know” and all that.

Small business is certainly with Big Business on this, particularly regarding the mercurial nature of healthcare reform. The substance of ObamaCare continues to morph daily — from the state of the public option to employer mandates to financing expanded coverage – as Senate leader Harry Reid scrounges for votes. On energy, the president will make big promises at Copenhagen even though cap-and-trade looks stillborn in the Senate.

As for financial reform, Senate banking committee chair Chris Dodd has proposed sweeping changes, while the Tim Geithner-Barney Frank version in the House seems beamed in from a universe where the credit crisis never happened. Compromise could prove elusive. Even Obama’s tax reform panel has delayed releasing its findings.

Perhaps some of the CEOs there today could explain how Obama's own proposals are exacerbating the business picture. But such straight talk is not what they're there for.

(And that gets at another critical flaw with the jobs summit. As any of the executives could tell Obama, brainstorming sessions are often the tool-of-choice of the highly ineffective manager. Such confabs are frequently used to give team members the illusion that they are contributing to the idea generation process. In fact, the manager has already made his decision. And that is, more or less, the case with Obama. At the very least, don’t expect any CEO suggestions of lowering personal, corporate or investment tax rates to get even a whiff of consideration from the White House.)

Of course, Obama could pivot and revamp healthcare reform into a more incremental, targeted bill that might actually pass with decent margins in both houses. And while cap-and-trade is gasping for air, a deficit-neutral carbon tax (offsetting payroll taxes) might actually pull in significant Republican support. Maybe even a fat payroll or corporate tax cut.

But the tendency toward election-year gridlock is fast approaching. And for frazzled Corporate America and a frozen job market, gridlock – and the uncertainty that goes with it – is not good.

UPDATE: Robert Samuelson has more on how Obama hasn't helped the employment picture.

But the perception that the administration will tolerate, despite rhetoric to the contrary, permanently large deficits could ultimately rattle investors and lead to large, self-defeating increases in interest rates. There are risks in overaggressive government job-creation programs that can be sustained only by borrowing or taxes.

Obama can't be fairly blamed for most job losses, which stemmed from a crisis predating his election. But he has made a bad situation somewhat worse. His unwillingness to advance trade agreements (notably, with Colombia and South Korea) has hurt exports. The hostility to oil and gas drilling penalizes one source of domestic investment spending. More important, the decision to press controversial proposals (health care, climate change) was bound to increase uncertainty and undermine confidence. Some firms are postponing spending projects "until there is more clarity," Zandi notes. Others are put off by anti-business rhetoric.

The recovery's vigor will determine whether unemployment declines rapidly or stays stubbornly high, and the recovery's vigor depends heavily on private business. Obama declines to recognize conflicts among goals. Choices were made -- and jobs weren't always Job One.

Clarence Thomas gives a smackdown to John Paul Stevens

In the death row case that the Supreme Court declined to take up yesterday, Justice Stevens and Breyer offered up their novel reason to overrule the death penalty. Fortunately, they seem to be the only two who ascribe to this theory that they seem to have just made up out of whole cloth.

A man was executed last night in Tennessee after having spent 29 years on death row. Stevens and Breyer voted to accept the case before the Court but couldn't get two other justices to go along with them. Part of the reasoning by John Paul Stevens for taking the case is his idea that spending so long on death row is in itself cruel and unusual punishment.

“This case deserves our full attention,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens in an opinion joined by Justice Stephen G. Breyer as the full Court refused to hear a final plea on Johnson’s behalf. The Stevens opinion added that “this is as compelling a case as I have encountered for addressing the constitutional concerns” over holding an inmate for many years, awaiting execution. For more than 14 years, one or both of those Justices has been calling for review of the question of whether it is “cruel and unusual punishment” to put off execution for a long time, at least when that is due to delays that are not the fault of the inmate.

Such delays as Johnson had undergone, Stevens said, subject death row inmates “to decades of especially severe, dehumanizing conditions of confinement.” In addition, he wrote, long delays do not “further public purposes of retribution and deterrence,” but rather only “diminish whatever possible benefit society might receive” from the inmate’s ultimate death. “In other words, the penological justifications for the death penalty diminish as the delay lengthens.”

Clarence Thomas wrote a sharply worded response that takes Stevens to task for making up a brand new exception to the Eighth Amendment.

Justice Clarence Thomas, in a spirited response, said Johnson spent 29 years challenging his conviction and sentence and “now contends that the very proceedings he used to contest his sentence should prohibit the state from carrying it out.”

Thomas said Stevens first proposed his “novel” Eighth Amendment argument 14 years ago. There was no support for the argument then and there is no support now, wrote Thomas.

Noting Stevens’ dissent and his criticism last week of states executing inmates before their appeals process has concluded, Thomas added, “In Justice Stevens’ view, it seems the state can never get the timing just right.” The reason, he said, is that Stevens believes the death penalty is wrong.

“But that is where he deviates from the Constitution and where proponents of his view are forced to find their support in precedent from the `European Court of Human Rights, the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe, the Supreme Court of India, or the Privy Council.’”

There are alternatives to current procedural safeguards, added Thomas. As Blackstone observed, he said, the principle that punishment should follow the crime as early as possible was expressed in an English statute decreeing that “in case of murder, the judge shall in his sentence direct execution to be performed, on the next day but one after sentence passed.”

Thomas wrote, “I have no doubt that such a system would avoid the diminishing justification problem Justice Stevens identifies, but I am equally confident that such a system would find little support from this Court.”

Slash.

The Jobs Summit isn't about creating jobs

What actually happens at a White House jobs summit? Do you think that all these big wigs come in and actually make policy? As if the CEOs of major companies would make major decisions sitting around a table with a whole bunch of other CEOs. Nope, it's just a glorified photo op - a more grandiose way for Obama to do what George H.W. Bush tried when he said "Message: I care."

Evan Newmark (not a relation) writes in the WSJ about his experiences at such summits and it sounds like some of the more useless education conferences I've been at.

And here’s how it will likely play out. A senior White House official — perhaps the president — will give a welcome pep talk to the 130 gathered “summiteers.” He’ll ply them with thanks and stirring patriotic words.

But then he’ll urge them to not waste the day in conference fuzzy talk. Instead, the summiteers should turn words into actions and actions into jobs. After all, it is a “jobs” summit.

And then the summiteers will shuffle off to one of six working groups — where of course they’ll end up wasting the day in conference fuzzy talk.

It’s inevitable. Prepared remarks, banal anecdotes and empty debates are the stuff of these mushy forums. I can count on one hand the number of memorable moments from the dozens of my Davos sessions on technology super-revolutions, entrepreneurial innovation and world peace.

That’s because the VIPs at these things aren’t there to say or do anything unexpected.

Do you think that FedEx CEO Fred Smith and United Steelworkers President Leo Girard will somehow reach agreement that the best way to create jobs is to kill the union-card check?

Do you think that Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, will suddenly serve up innovative ideas for trade unions to assist small businesses?

It seems unlikely.

It often strikes me, while sitting bored in some meeting, that there are people who just like meetings and then there are the rest of us who don't. The people who like meetings are usually the ones who rise to positions of power to call such meetings while the rest of us just put our heads down and do our jobs. But meetings among all these disparate groups of people is not what builds jobs.

And so the jobs summit will fail for the same reason Obamanomics is failing: The White House mistakenly believes economic growth and new jobs are created by society’s stakeholders — business, labor and government — cooperatively working together.

But that’s not the way capitalism works. It doesn’t take a village to create a new job. It takes a businessman trying to make another buck.

Of course, you won’t hear too much of this “greed is good” uber-capitalism stuff at the jobs summit. Not too many of the summiteers would dare. Do you think Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, now in the middle of acquiring NBC Universal, will tell the gathering what he really thinks of government intervention in the economy?

Of course not. but it would be delightful if the summiteers actually gave all the politicians at the summit a little tutorial on how capitalism works and how a bunch of leaders sitting around and posing before the cameras with the President are not going to create any jobs.

But in Washington, it’s the form that counts more than the substance. And no doubt, this summit will have plenty of good form. Each of the summit working groups will work their whiteboards and somehow come up with a list of “deliverables” and “next steps.” There will be nice words drafted for White House press releases.

At the end of the day, the President will stand up, thank everyone and close the jobs summit by declaring it a “success”.

And then everyone will file out of the White House and go back to their regular jobs, having done little to nothing on December 3rd to create any new ones.

One way to accelerate the decline: reverse a zero

Charles Martin highlights a hilarious mistake by the IPCC. The head of the IPCC has been trumpeting the imminent melting of the Himalayan glaciers. In fact, if we don't do something fast, the IPCC claims that the glaciers will have melted away by 2035.

IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri reacted angrily citing the IPCC 2007 climate change reports which asserted that the (Himalayan) glaciers are receding faster than in any other part of the world and if the present rate (of melting) continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps even sooner is very high if the earth keeps warming at the current rate.

Wow! The Himalayans to melt away in just 26 years! That's amazing!

Except that this apocalyptic prediction is the result of a typo! The IPCC inserted an extra zero to read the original prediction as 2035 instead of what was actually estimated as occuring in 2350. They're off by over 300 years.

These guys and their models couldn't predict the last ten years of cooling that we've experienced and they think that they can estimate the climate three centuries from now? I guess it's a lot easier to do that if you just reverse the position of the zero.

Voting for Obamacare won't reverse the mistake of not voting for Hillarycare

Bill Clinton has tried to argue to the Democrats that not voting for Obamacare will result in the sorts of losses that the Democrats suffered in 1994. In Clinton's mind, that Democratic debacle was the result of Congress not supporting Hillary's health care plan. Other Democrats and analysts have endorsed that meme, including Barack Obama.

Yesterday, I posted about why the passage of the healthcare bill will not raise Obama's numbers. And the Democrats shouldn't look to Hillarycare as the reason why they lost control of Congress in 1994. Sean Trende has the historic analysis which the politicians are ignoring. He points out that the real problem in those early years of Clinton's presidency was that the Democrats failed to convince the public that Hillarycare was the right prescription for problems with health care. That's why they never even brought the program up for a vote. They knew it was unpopular so they just let it die on the vine.

To fully appreciate this, we need to gain a better understanding of what the 1994 elections were about. 1994 was fundamentally a culling of Democrats who were too liberal for their Republican-leaning districts. Republicans defeated 34 incumbents that year. Twenty six of these incumbents came from districts that had Republican PVIs[1] {districts that were more Republican than the nation as a whole]; of the remaining eight incumbents, one was under indictment, one had proclaimed how proud he was to grow his own marijuana, four came from Washington state (which had a tsunami-within-a-tsunami), and two were just kind of unlucky.

There were two controversial pieces of legislation that defined the Clinton Administration for Republican-leaning voters: the assault weapons ban and the first Clinton budget (a.k.a. the tax hike). If we look at the fifteen Democrats who voted against both pieces of legislation, only one lost (she represented a district that gave Bush a 15-point win in 1992). In fact, about half of them saw their share of the vote increase or stay roughly the same from 1992!

Read the rest of his evidence.

The Democrats are facing a parallel problem today in that they have quite a few Democrats who were represent conservative districts. That is what happens when a party wins two wave elections in a row, especially when several Republicans handed them the gift of GOP corruption scandals. The downside of such victories is that the representative is now an ideological mismatch for that district. Pelosi has already forced several votes that are turning out not to be popular with the public: votes for the stimulus, the big budget for this year, the auto bailout, cap and trade, and now for health care.

It is skewed political thinking to believe that these politicians will be better off making one more tough and unpopular vote for Obamacare.

The 1994 elections weren’t caused by Democrats not supporting Clinton enough. They were caused by Democrats supporting him too much. Democrats who support President Obama more than their districts allow risk suffering a similar fate in 2010, and there are enough of them to cost the Democrats their majority.

As for President Obama, he needs to remember that the failure of Clintoncare didn't mark the destruction of Clinton's Presidency. In fact, it marked its rejuvenation. It set that Administration back on the centrist track that saw him leave office with 60%+ approval ratings. I don't know whether America is center-right or center-left, but I do know that whatever the answer, "center" deserves to be in "all caps" font. The President and his party would do better to remember this.

Close your eyes for a minute and imagine the rest of Clinton's presidency if he'd had a Democratic majority in both houses. Without Newt and the GOP to play off against, would he even have been reelected? Would he have been able to cut the budget deficit? Unlikely.

Perhaps Obama should be secretly hoping to lose his majorities in Congress next year. It might even help his presidency.

On the President's speech

Overall, I think the President is doing what needs to be done in Afghanistan. I applaud his finally following General McChrystal's recommendatin for a surge. I like that he enunciated once again that the United States has been a force for good in the world's history.

Since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, and the service and sacrifice of our grandparents, our country has borne a special burden in global affairs. We have spilled American blood in many countries on multiple continents. We have spent our revenue to help others rebuild from rubble and develop their own economies. We have joined with others to develop an architecture of institutions – from the United Nations to NATO to the World Bank – that provide for the common security and prosperity of human beings.

We have not always been thanked for these efforts, and we have at times made mistakes. But more than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades – a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down, markets open, billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress, and advancing frontiers of human liberty.

For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for – and what we continue to fight for – is a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.

It's nice to hear President Obama make that statement. He might consider making it again next time he travels abroad.

There are a couple of questions I'd like him to have to answer. Given that he opposed the surge in Iraq and pronounced it a failure during the campaign, why does he support a surge now in Afghanistan? Was he perhaps, gasp, wrong before?

And secondly, what has changed in the plan he's endorsing now from the plan that General McChrystal gave him back in August? He was sure to defend himself against criticisms that he was dithering. Fine. I'm just wondering what was lacking in the proposal before that he is satisfied to have now. Is the only difference that he added a deadline for leaving?

He still seems to use the first person pronoun quite a lot.

I'm not the audience for this speech, because I already support the policy. I don't know that someone who was undecided or even opposed to the speech would find this convincing. As I heard Stephen Hayes point out, in one sentence he tells us that the security of the world depends on our success and in the next he tells us that we'll be pulling out in 18 months.

For what’s at stake is not simply a test of NATO’s credibility – what’s at stake is the security of our Allies, and the common security of the world.

Taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.

In fact, the announcement of sending the troops is in the exact same paragraph as the announcement that they're going to be coming home.

And as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

I can't think of any other president who sent troops to fight a war in such a "Push Me Pull You" manner." I'm glad that it wasn't a hard time limit, but still there is something disheartening about saying that this is a crucial mission and then immediately announcing we'll leave in a year and a half. What if our goals aren't achieved by then? The same argument about why we wouldn't name a date certain for pulling out of Iraq holds now for Afghanistan. You don't let the enemy that they just have to lay low for a year and a half and then we'll leave. What do we do if we aren't done in 18 months? Won't it still be crucial to our national security a year and a half from now? Or will it just not matter then?

When the President spends so much time in the speech talking about when we're going to get out, it just comes out as sounding so very defensive rather than a vigorous rallying cry for the country.

Would this speech convince someone opposed to the war there? I have no idea. What do you guys think?

Jennifer Rubin at Contentions didn't think that it worked for Obama to go to West Point for the speech. I disagree. These are some of the young men and women who will be risking their lives to follow this President's orders. It was fitting that he should address his remarks to them.

UPDATE: I see from Powerline that Chris Matthews referred to the President going to West Point as his going to the "enemy camp." Geez. They might not be enthusiastic about Barack Obama as their Commander-in-Chief, but they are not his enemies. They're willing to go fight and die when he orders them into battle. Hint to Chris: the President's enemies are not Americans but those we're going over to fight.

I have two former students at West Point. One is a senior and knows that he may well be deployed to Afghanistan when he graduates. That is what he signed up for and he says he's ready. I kept wondering if he were in the audience there tonight and what he was thinking. Those young men plus another student who's in the Marines ROTC and another who is applying for the service academies for next year are on my mind a lot these days. I've always thought that it takes a special person to sign on to the military in a time of war. Bless them.

Stop us before we spend another few trillion

Recognizing that voters are getting mighty concerned about all the government spending that is going on, some in Congress are making noises about trying to develop some new method of budgeting to reduce the deficit. However, acknowledging that they don't have the willpower themselves to stop spending, they want to create something akin to the Base Closing Commission that could do the deficit-cutting for them.

The Democrats still haven't taken care of 7 out of the 12 major appropriations bills that they must pass to keep the government running. Add in all the spending involved with increasing the fighting in Afghanistan and the proposed health care reforms.

If you are wondering why this increasing debt is a ticking time bomb, go read Niall Ferguson's essay in Newsweek. It's a depressing, but prescient picture of what lies down this road we're traveling.

In other words, there is no end in sight to the borrowing binge. Unless entitlements are cut or taxes are raised, there will never be another balanced budget. Let's assume I live another 30 years and follow my grandfathers to the grave at about 75. By 2039, when I shuffle off this mortal coil, the federal debt held by the public will have reached 91 percent of GDP, according to the CBO's extended baseline projections. Nothing to worry about, retort -deficit-loving economists like Paul Krugman. In 1945, the figure was 113 percent.

Well, let's leave aside the likely huge differences between the United States in 1945 and in 2039. Consider the simple fact that under the CBO's alternative (i.e., more pessimistic) fiscal scenario, the debt could hit 215 percent by 2039. That's right: more than double the annual output of the entire U.S. economy.

Forecasting anything that far ahead is not about predicting the future. Everything hinges on the assumptions you make about demographics, Medicare costs, and a bunch of other variables. For example, the CBO assumes an average annual real GDP growth rate of 2.3 percent over the next 30 years. The point is to show the implications of the current chronic imbalance between federal spending and federal revenue. And the implication is clear. Under no plausible scenario does the debt burden decline. Under one of two plausible scenarios it explodes by a factor of nearly five in relation to economic output.

Another way of doing this kind of exercise is to calculate the net present value of the unfunded liabilities of the Social Security and Medicare systems. One recent estimate puts them at about $104 trillion, 10 times the stated federal debt.

Read the rest.

Congress is going to have to vote to raise the debt ceiling over the $12.1 trillion where it stands now. Not a fun vote, but without it the government can't issue more debt. So some are proposing attaching a proposal to create commission for looking at how to decrease the deficit. Such a commission would be allowed to propose cuts that would go through automatically unless Congress could get a three-fifths majority to amend those proposals.

Separately, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the panel's top Republican, have proposed creating a deficit reduction task force that includes congressional and administration officials. Congress could be required to vote quickly on its proposals, amendments probably wouldn't be allowed and it would take a three-fifths majority to win approval, virtually requiring bipartisan support.

I always find it bitterly amusing when Congress admits that they just can't help themselves in voting for more spending and so they need some extra gimmick to stop them. We've seen similar proposals before. You might remember the Gramm-Rudman Act of 1985 to force automatic sequesters to require across-the-board percentage cuts of all federal programs if the president and Congress couldn't agree on spending cuts. Congress soon found ways around that. Then they imposed the Budget Enforcement Act in 1990 to cap discretionary spending. That worked for a while until they found ways around that. Both parties are guilty.

The truth is that the problem is not the discretionary spending, but the mandatory spending. And now they want to add in a massive new health care program. Voting for a new little deficit commission might make them feel better, but how about exercising more control when the time comes to vote on that new entitlement?

The financial incentives for doom-saying the climate

Bret Stephens points to the financial incentives that there are for researchers to keep decrying the warming of the planet. There is a whole lot of government and private money out there to be scooped up by such researchers. For skepticism - not so much.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.

That doesn't mean that they are pocketing the money, but their livelihoods are caught up in the crisis that they're hawking.

None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Keep that in mind as you read through the thousands of leaked e-mails. No wonder they get all worried when the data don't show the warming that they've been predicting. And no wonder that they somehow neglected to let people know that they don't have the original data and don't want to share with other researchers the adjustments that they had made to the data.

Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.

The meeting in Copenhagen may, if we're lucky, be looked back on as the last gasp of the doomsayers' control over international policy.

Don't look to passing health care to raise Obama's numbers

In the face of Obama's declining poll numbers, his administration and supporters are searching for some hope that his numbers will end their decline and start moving in the other direction. Some of them are asserting that passing health care reform will move those numbers back up. They shouldn't pin their hopes on that.

Brendan Nyhan at Pollster.com argues that Democrats shouldn't put their hopes in passage of the health care reform package for increasing Obama's poll numbers. Nyhan looks at previous presidents and their poll numbers before and after the passage of their major domestic goal in their first year in office. So he looks at the passage of Reagan's tax cuts, Clinton's deficit reduction bill, and George W. Bush's tax cuts. And he adds in LBJ's poll numbers before and after the passage of Medicare. In none of these examples did the presidents' poll numbers move much at all after the passage of a major domestic legislative priority. While the parallels are, of course, not exact between those presidents and President Obama, this history certainly weakens the argument, put forth by the New York Times, that the Democrats need to pass the bill or Obama's numbers will continue their decline. We get this anonymous analysis from the New York Times.

If Congress passes Mr. Obama’s health care bill, the White House — and many independent analysts — believe that the accomplishment of a signature campaign promise is likely to push the president’s approval ratings back up.

Nyhan's analysis argues otherwise.

The larger story here is that many journalists and political operatives have a wildly exaggerated view of the president's ability to change public opinion outside of a foreign policy context (as with the Obama's health care speech). The reality is that Obama, like his predecessors, is largely at the mercy of the economy and external events unless a new war or foreign policy crisis emerges.

I would offer this explanation for the lack of movement of those presidents' numbers after the passage of their signature bill: the public had already fit each president's support for those particular bills into their opinion of that president. If they liked the proposal, then they already had decided they liked the president. And vice versa. It's similar to how the market might not move when news of some company's performance is announced because the market has already figured that performance into their assessment of the company. So people who like the health care proposals coming out of the Congress, already have a positive view of Obama. And those who don't aren't going to turn around and decide they like the President simply because he got passed a bill that they don't like. And why would those people in the middle who don't have an opinion suddenly decide that they are so happy that a bill that they were undecided about has passed that they will think better of the President than they did previously.

Now if unemployment suddenly and markedly decreased, that might move his numbers. Until that happens, unless there is some new foreign news, his numbers will be hostage to people's perceptions of how the economy is doing.