June 29, 2009
The June 12 Revolution
Selected stuff on Iran from the last few days...
UPDATE 6/30: Daily updates at Berman Post (via IP)
Miscellany
Miscellaneous stuff that's been gathering at my delicious page for a couple weeks or more...
Andy McCarthy - Negotiating With Terrorists
Spiegel Online - "Breaking Ranks - How to Become an Accidental Conservative"
George Will on green jobs. More from Joshua Green in The Atlantic.
Joshua Muravchik - The Abandonment of Democracy
Ron Radosh - Eric Alterman- the Left’s Most Dishonest Journalist-and the Controversy over “Spies.”
Robert Stacy McCain - Obama Plays Hardball With Watchdogs
The Truth Rundown - The St. Petersburg Times' revealing investigation of Scientology.
Graceless
It really is remarkable how Obama has labored to avoid crediting his predecessor for the many anti-terror policies he previously denounced and has subsequently adopted, (let alone allowing Iraq to be defined as a success of any stripe.) The flip-flops themselves are welcome and responsible. The insulting thing is the attitude that there's no need for the least humility....even civility...that might be appropriate now that he has acted on so many fronts in direct contradiction to his previous promises.
It's as if he doesn't think (or care) that people were paying any attention to his campaign, or even his current daily rhetoric. He has gone five months now without so much as a gracious word for the former president, much less an acknowledgment that Bush policies might have been carefully considered, effective, and taken in a good faith effort to protect the country...and that's why they are being replicated in the Obama administration. It smacks of hubris and spite, and it's unbecoming. But that's just to set up two more examples of the current dishonesty...or demonstrations of the naked cynicism of the Obama presidential campaign.....or both.
Here's Ed Morrissey on unlimited detention...
Obama has essentially endorsed the detention policies of George Bush without the courtesy of apologizing for slandering him over the last two and a half years. Obama and his allies screeched endlessly about indefinite detentions, and not just in Gitmo, either. They specifically railed against the holding of terrorists without access to civil courts in military detention facilities around the world, specifically Bagram, but in general as well. Not even six months into his term of office, Obama realized that Bush had it right all along.Did he even have the grace to admit that? No. Instead, the White House took the cowardly method of a late-Friday leak to let people know that Obama had adopted the Bush policy all over again. Barack Obama just appeared at a press conference this last Tuesday to discuss Iran, energy policy, and ObamaCare, where he could have told the national press that he had changed his mind on indefinite detention. Instead, he kept his mouth shut, and had his media staff whisper it into phones to a couple of White House favorites in the press.
It’s a shameful performance, and the measure of the man in charge.
Jim Geraghty has more on the famed Obama audacity...
Ever since Barack Obama declared his candidacy for president, it’s been easy — and great fun — to spotlight when his promises and statements come with “expiration dates.” The list is long: Public financing. Renegotiating NAFTA. His promise to support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies. His inability to disown Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The release of detainee photos. Denouncing Turkey for genocide.Flip-flops are nothing new in politics, but every once in a while, a president breaks a promise or an important pledge on such an epic level that it defines him, at least in part: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” “We did not — repeat — did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages — nor will we.” Even “I will never lie to you.”
Barack Obama’s sudden about-face on taxing employer-provided health insurance deserves to rank among these classics. Not because it’s as laughable as Bill Clinton’s, or as emphatic as George H. W. Bush’s, but because it takes a certain moral venality to casually adopt, as president, a position that was a dominant theme of your argument for why your opponent should not be president.
read 'em all.
UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson on the "Noble Lies" of Barack Obama
June 25, 2009
Western Swing
The blog has been neglected (even more so than in recent months) owing to a little vacation trip out west to see relatives and friends in Idaho and Montana. It was our first time in Big Sky country, and we were just continuously awed by nature's splendor everywhere we looked. As our friend who left Ohio 30 years ago for Missoula said to us this week, "I don't remember exactly why I came out here, but I sure know why I stayed."
Now, so do we.
June 14, 2009
A Case of Politics Trumping Law
Stuart Taylor thinks there is much to admire about Sonia Sotamayor, and he may well eventually support her confirmation, but the more he looks at her New Haven firefighters decision, the more he finds it indefensible. Firefighters Case: What Really Happened
June 13, 2009
"Divine Assessment"
Hot Air has a roundup of reports and reaction to the apparently rigged election in Iran. Allahpundit wonders why the regime didn't try to make the result appear somewhat convincing....
Everyone expected the margin to be close after such a nasty campaign; a close Ahmadinejad win, with Mousavi victorious in the urban areas he was supposed to carry, would have been credible. I guess they figured that a narrow defeat would be treated as even more suspect by Mousavi’s supporters, so they went in the opposite direction and made it a landslide — to an implausible degree, as it turned out. Two: With the regime more illegitimate than ever, where does this leave The One vis-a-vis nuke negotiations? He’s been careful in the past to distinguish Khamenei from the more toxic Ahmadinejad, but Khamenei blessed the results today as a “divine assessment.” His credibility’s shot now, too. If Obama meets with him anyway, it’ll put the U.S. on the side of a sham government against the Iranian people more starkly than ever before.
Michael Ledeen had warned of the illegitimacy of this exercise well before the event, and has a follow-up report in the aftermath.
Ever since the proclamation of Ahmadinezhad’s “triumph,” the streets of the cities have been boiling with anti-regime demonstrations, with the predictable violent crackdown from the security forces. There is hardly a city anywhere in the country where demonstrations are not taking place, and you can gauge the seriousness of the situation by the regime’s response:- Mousavi and Karrubi, the two “reformist” candidates in Friday’s “elections” are under house arrest, along with dozens of their followers;
- “Reformist” journalists and activists have been rounded up and jailed;
- Cell phones (including, after a day’s delay, international cell phones) have been blocked, access to internet has been filtered, facebook is unreachable, and you can’t tweet (can the silencing of Western reporters be far behind?);
- In Tehran, student dormitories are surrounded by security forces.
Stalin would be proud. But even his Soviet Union eventually succumbed to the dissidents, and while the regime has most all of the guns, the chains, the clubs, the tear gas cannisters, and the torture chambers, there are tens of millions of Iranians who hate the regime. The question is whether they are prepared to face down the Basij, the police, and the Revolutionary Guards.
When the candidates must be pre-approved by the dictators, whatever the result may be, it is not democracy. It's unfortunate that this sham was lauded in advance by the Obama people as a legitimate expression of the will of the Iranian people. Now would be a wonderful time for Obama to make a strong public statement of support for the Iranian people's right to select their own leadership. Or at least something beyond Saturday's statement that..."We continue to monitor the entire situation closely, including reports of irregularities." Stephen Hayes says now would be a good time for some of that "smart power" we've been hearing about.
Don't miss Michael Totten....lots of video and links.
UPDATE 6/15:
“I don’t think the middle class is ever going to go out and vote again”
Taranto is noting the good news in the Iranian election story....that erstwhile apologists for the Iranian regime like Roger Cohen and Juan Cole are now chastened by reports of fraud and post-election brutality and oppression. Then there's the bad news...albeit with a silver lining...
The bad news that Iran is still ruled by a vicious, lunatic regime that not only abuses its own people but threatens Israel with annihilation and the entire region with a nuclear arms race. This is very bad, though it's news only to regime apologists like Cohen--and, as we noted Friday, it would have been true even had challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi prevailed in the vote. A Mousavi victory, however, would have made the nature of the regime easier to deny. Clarity is the one unquestionable benefit of the outcome.
Losing Momentum? Obamacare Bringing Hope
Yuval Levin and Bill Kristol make the case to - Dare to Defeat ObamaCare
As long as the health care reform plan envisioned by the Obama administration and congressional Democrats was just a series of slogans, it was easy for the left to build support for it and difficult for the right to imagine how it could be stopped. It is hard, after all, to object to vague promises to cut health care costs and cover the uninsured and improve health outcomes. The brute fact of Democratic domination of Washington gave key health industry players an incentive to look as if they wanted to cooperate with the Obama administration. The whole affair began to assume an air of inevitability.But as general slogans give way to particular plans, reality is setting in. Outlines and drafts of the key House and Senate bills began to emerge last week, and the grim reality of what the Democrats in fact have in mind has started to exercise an undeniable effect upon the politics of health care.
The AMA bailing out has to count for something. Let the debate begin.
June 10, 2009
Best Ever
An incredible Jim Brown highlight video. We occasionally see brief clips of Brown...whenever they talk on TV about the greatest running backs ever. But this four minutes of all Jim Brown was a treat. Makes my day.
My memory of seeing Brown live several times when I was a 10-12-year old may be a little fuzzy. But what I do remember is that whenever Jim Brown got the hand-off, 80,000 people in the stadium would stand together in excitement....in anticipation of the possibility that he could run for a touchdown on any play. I have never seen anything like this phenomenon at a football game since.
June 07, 2009
True Believers - The Myers Case
I didn't pay a lot of attention Friday when the news broke of the arrests of long-time State Dept. analyst Walter Kendall Myers and his wife on charges of spying for Cuba for 30 years. So much Internet...so few hours in the day and all.
But tales of Americans driven to treason by the utopian impulse are irresistible to me...such is my curiosity about this alien sentiment, I guess. And this one turns out to be a "truth is stranger than fiction" type of spy story.
In a fascinating piece at AT, Clarice Feldman reveals Myers as a true Washington D.C. blue blood, and a fawning fellow traveler who was identified and recruited by the Cubans early on in his government career.
The circumstances of how he got from Washington DC to South Dakota for a year or two in the late 70's are unclear, but that's where he met his second wife Gwendolyn, who was working there as a staffer for Sen. John Abourezk, a renowned Friend of Fidel, and she had presumably traveled with the senator on his two trips to Cuba in 1977. Feldman speculates that she might have been working with Cuban intelligence even before she met Myers. Maybe it's why she met Myers.
Plenty of intrigue in the man's background...a criminal matter in South Dakota....a tragic incident in his car when he struck and killed a 16-year old girl....but what seems clear is that Myers spied for the Communists because he believed in the cause, and not necessarily because they had something on him. And he's still a true believer. Read the whole thing.
The Washington Post account of the arrest somehow manages to work an anti-Bush quote from a 'neighbor' of the Myers into an article about a man who sold out the United States during the Carter administration 30 years ago. That's not easy.
Also at AT, are there More Cuban Spies?
June 05, 2009
Sorry If You Got Tagged
No, I didn't send photos.
But if you got an email from me saying I sent you photos, I'm sorry. If you haven't already, please delete it...and don't sign up or register for tagged.com, for heaven's sake.
I got taken in by an email "phishing" scam, and I'm afraid I inadvertently sent similar nuisance emails to my entire gmail address book. I should have known better. So, if you're tracking me down to yell at me...or worse, let me apologize up front, and throw myself on the mercy of the court in abject shame and contrition. Did I mention I was sorry?
If Only Israel Were Smaller...
A couple of things on Israel's settlements being at the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict, if not of all Islamic grievance. The new Commentary features several pieces on the theme of "no more peace plans", instead offering essays promoting other ideas, including Caroline Glick's Stabilization Plan (NAWS). Her piece is much broader in scope than the so-called settlements issue, but if I may borrow a slice of subscriber content, here she notes some of the false assumptions that have helped to foil the seven previous attempts at imposing a 'two-state solution' just since 1993...
First, they assume that the Middle East conflict as a whole is a function of the Palestinian conflict with Israel, and consequently, once the Palestinian conflict with Israel is solved, the wider Middle East conflict in all its disparate aspects will be resolved.Second, they all assume that the root of the Palestinian conflict with Israel is the absence of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River that must include Judea and Samaria (otherwise known as the West Bank), Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip—areas Israel took control over in the 1967 Six Day War.
Third, they presume that it is Israel’s refusal to cede all of these lands to the Palestinians that stands at the root of the Palestinian conflict with Israel and forms the basis of the Arab-Israel conflict and the Islamic-Israel conflict. So long as Israel maintains even a residual presence in any of these areas, it is to blame for the absence of peace in the region. That is, from the Iranian mullahs to al Qaeda, from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to the Saudi-financed mosques in London, Israel’s size is the cause of angst, frustration, violence, and hatred. Stemming from this view, the two-state solution’s fourth assumption is that the internal pathologies of the Palestinians, the Arab world, and the larger Islamic world are largely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that Israel is too big.
As Glick goes on to point out, Israel has never been unwilling to negotiate on its size, from the Golan to Gaza to the Sinai, and the suggestion that their communities in the West Bank areas are the obstacle to peace rather than the refusal of Palestinians and their patrons and sponsors to recognize Israel's right to exist is, well...a canard.
Krauthammer's The Settlements Canard
The entire "natural growth" issue is a concoction. It's farcical to suggest that the peace process is moribund because a teacher in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is making an addition to her house to accommodate new grandchildren -- when Gaza is run by Hamas terrorists dedicated to permanent war with Israel and when Mahmoud Abbas, having turned down every one of Ehud Olmert's peace offers, brazenly declares that he is in a waiting mode -- waiting for Hamas to become moderate and for Israel to cave -- before he'll do anything to advance peace.In his much-heralded "Muslim world" address in Cairo Thursday, Obama declared that the Palestinian people's "situation" is "intolerable." Indeed it is, the result of 60 years of Palestinian leadership that gave its people corruption, tyranny, religious intolerance and forced militarization; leadership that for three generations -- Haj Amin al-Husseini in 1947, Yasser Arafat in 2000, Abbas in December 2008 -- rejected every offer of independence and dignity, choosing destitution and despair rather than accept any settlement not accompanied by the extinction of Israel.
As they say, read the whole thing.
Glick's says the Palestinians must be made to pay a price for their ongoing intransigence, or it will never end. As long as institutions like UNRWA thrive, she says, they will continue to radicalize Palestinians (like this?), and make stability impossible.
Peter Wehner says Obama's words will soon be forgotten, but what he said about Israeli settlements will survive...
....to insist that Israel do what Obama wants even before negotiations begin will have unintended consequences. It will reinforce Arab intransigence. Arab nations will (understandably, from their perspective) wait for America to force concessions from Israel on a range of issues rather than give up anything to win them. Good feelings mean very little unless they can be translated into tangible, concrete progress. In this case, the results of Obama’s speech will, in my estimation, take us further down the wrong path.
Jonathan Tobin comments on Obama's interview with Tom Brokaw in Dresden
June 04, 2009
June 4, 1989
Radley Balko posts the iconic photo of 20 years ago today, and throws out a call to action...
Today ought to be a day to celebrate and promote human liberty, and to remember the abuses governments have heaped upon their subjects over the centuries.So go find your own metaphor for the government tank pictured above.
Then put yourself in front of it.
Claudia Rosett was there. So was Nicholas Kristof
More from Ms. Rosett here.
Jeff Jacoby - "China's 'socialist road' to misery"
Samuel Chi - "Deng Xiaoping's Bloody Tiananmen Power Play"
June 02, 2009
Genetic Similarities
Jonah Goldberg is interviewed by NRO on the occasion of the release of Liberal Fascism in paperback. It's all good reading, including links to TNR and NYT reviews of the book, and Jonah's response. Most interesting to me was his noting of the book's coincidental timeliness...
LOPEZ: Speaking of Liberal Fascism’s endurance, what do you make of events since the book came out, specifically the election of The One?GOLDBERG: Well, first of all I think I have to thank Barack Obama. Here I wrote a book, working on the assumption that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee (hardly a harebrained assumption at the time), about how contemporary progressivism is a political religion with its roots in German state theory, sharing a close family resemblance to fascism. Among the anatomical and genetic similarities: cult of unity, sacralization of politics, philosophical pragmatism, corporatism, relativism, Romanticism, hero-worship, collectivism, and so on. And out of nowhere comes a guy who campaigns as a secular messiah, spouting deeply spiritualized political rhetoric, claims the Progressives as his inspiration, and proudly sees himself as carrying out FDR’s mission. I haven’t counted them, but I’d guess I’ve received a couple hundred e-mails from readers telling me how they thought the whole book was written with Obama in mind, even though I finished it before he was even ahead in the Democratic primaries.
After the election, sales of the book spiked through the roof for a reason. I used to joke that the same people loading up on bottled water and handguns were buying extra copies of the book as a field guide or something.
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If you look at how most liberals think about economics, they want big corporations and big government working in tandem with labor, universities (think industrial policy), and progressive organizations to come up with “inclusive” policies set at the national or international level. That’s not necessarily socialism — it’s corporatism. When you listen to how Obama is making economic policy with “everyone at the table,” he’s describing corporatism, the economic philosophy of fascism. Government is the senior partner, but all of the other institutions are on board — so long as they agree with the government’s agenda. The people left out of this coordinated effort — the Nazis called it the Gleichschaltung — are the small businessmen, the entrepreneurs, the ideological, social, or economic mavericks who don’t want to play along. When you listen to Obama demonize Chrysler’s bondholders simply because they want their contracts enforced and the rule of law sustained, you get a sense of what I’m talking about.
I don’t think Obama wants a brutal tyranny any more than Hillary Clinton does (which is to say I don’t think he wants anything of the sort). But I do think they honestly believe that progress is best served if everyone falls in line with a national agenda, a unifying purpose, a “village” mentality expanded to include all of society. That sentiment drips from almost every liberal exhortation about everything from global warming to national service. But to point it out earns you the label of crank. As I said a minute ago about that “We’re All Fascists Now” chapter, I think people fail to understand that tyrannies — including soft, Huxleyan tyrannies — aren’t born from criminal conspiracies by evil men; they’re born by progressive groupthink. I have an abiding faith in the liberty-loving nature of the American people. But I think we are laying down the foundation for a challenge to that nature the likes of which we haven’t seen since Wilson was in office.
June 01, 2009
Huh?
In his speech today on cybersecurity, President Obama said
And this is also a matter of public safety and national security. We count on computer networks to deliver our oil and gas, our power and our water. We rely on them for public transportation and air traffic control. Yet we know that cyber intruders have probed our electrical grid and that in other countries cyber attacks have plunged entire cities into darkness.
Taranto has a few questions. Like...Really?.... When?.... Where?
May 25, 2009
May Miscellany
At The New Atlantis..."The Road to Rationing- How 'Medicare Plus' will destroy private insurance".
Lots of related critiques of the proposed Obamacare plan are about. Three members of Congress propose an alternative here. And James Capretta lays out some market-based reforms at NRO.
Jeffrey H. Anderson, writing at The Weekly Standard - "Three Strikes for Obamacare"
And David Gibberman looks at government-run health care as it is currently being practiced in Canada and the UK.
David Brooks says the projected cost savings in Obama's healthcare reforms are speculative at best, and since they are supposed to pay for the rest of his ambitious domestic agenda, the plan could "hasten fiscal suicide." (Jen Rubin questions our president's commitment to his new era of responsibility..."I don’t see how we wound up with a fiscal policy that is the equivalent of going to Vegas with the grocery money.")
See also NRO's interview with Sally C. Pipes exploding health care myths.
Capretta and Yuval Levin collaborated on another very good piece in the Standard. And check out Capretta's health care blog at The New Atlantis, called Diagnosis.
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Convinced that his multicultural credentials are in order, Matt Labash sends "postcards from the diversity follies", a business primer on exploiting real or perceived disadvantage, complete with the characteristic Labashian humor.
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An 8-part interview with H.L. Mencken, reported here to be the only recording of Mencken's voice still in existence, on YouTube. (via Cafe Hayek) I simply must throw in this Mencken quote....just because....."I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting."
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A Ph.D. who chooses to make a living as a motorcycle mechanic makes "The Case For Working With Your Hands", at The New York Times Magazine
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Laura Vanderkam on self-employment, at City Journal - "The Promise and Peril of the Freelance Economy".
About That Meeting....
In light of Ahmadinejad taking Obama up on the offer of a personal meeting, it's worth revisiting this video from a 2008 Democratic campaign debate...
It won't happen, and it shouldn't....least of all in the U.N. General Assembly, where the Iranian would be right in his America-hating element. And Ahmadinejad has preemptively ruled out any progress on the issues we care about anyway. Obama has sensibly and responsibly walked back many of his unserious campaign positions on national security matters. His far-left supporters are furious, and I read most conservatives as relieved, if not in full gloat over it. Some representative samples here, here, and here.
Here's VDH
I think we now have come to the end to the five-year left-wing attack theme of Bush "shredding the Constitution."Except for the introduction of euphemisms and a few new ballyhooed but largely meaningless protocols, there is no longer a Bush-did-it argument. The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq, Afghanistan — and now Guantánamo — are officially no longer part of the demonic Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld nexus, but apparently collective legitimate anti-terrorism measures designed to thwart killers, and by agreement, after years of observance, of great utility in keeping us safe the last eight years.
Add in the Holder statements about Guantánamo in the 2002 interview, the Pelosi/Rockefeller/et al. waterboarding briefings, the need to consider torture in past statements by senators such as Schumer, and I think historians will now look back at these "dark years" as largely a collective, bipartisan effort.
All of which leaves us a final musing: If so, what was the hysteria of 2001-2008 about other than simple politics.
Which was my point in starting this post....regardless of what you think of Obama essentially making Bush counter-terrorism policies his own, can we dispense with the notion that he's a "different kind of politician"?
May 24, 2009
Waxman-Markey: Failing to Solve A Non-Problem
In a classic example of bureaucratic inertia rearing its ugly head, the U.S. Congress is moving ahead with its own answer to a problem that growing segments of both the scientific community and the American people no longer consider to be the dangerous threat they once feared it might be.
Even the most skeptical critics of the PC global warming alarmism have to acknowledge the slight warming (approx one degree Celsius) of the planet over the last 150 years, and many of us concede that man-made carbon emissions may have been a factor in that warming. But by now the facts on the ground should be forcing those same alarmists to acknowledge that there are other forces at work as well...apparently even more powerful forces than anthropogenic global warming, as it appears they have been able to counteract AGW over the past decade, effecting a net cooling of the planet over that time. Alas, Congress and their White House enablers either didn't get the memo, or more likely, simply have an agenda that doesn't have a lot to do with slowing the rise in global temperature.
And as Terence Corcoran said in the National Post, the more Americans learn about cap-and-trade legislation...specifically the Waxman-Markey bill, the less they like it. Spread the word.
Last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released an economic study projecting lost jobs, slower growth, higher energy costs and damaged vital energy sectors of the U.S. economy. Also coming under fire is the cap-and-trade energy pricing system proposed by President Obama. Charlie Munger, CEO of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, called the plan “monstrously stupid.” In an interview with CNBC, Mr. Munger said: “It would be a huge shock to the economy and it wouldn’t accomplish very much given the fact that the vast majority of the pollution, or rather the CO2, is coming from a place like China. And so I think it would be almost demented if we would rush into cap-and-trade right now in the middle of this economic crisis.”
Hey, man...that's our Congress you're talking about. Monstrously stupid and almost demented is what we do there.
There seems to be wide agreement that the proposed Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation will severely harm the U.S. economy, slashing GDP, dramatically increasing energy costs, and killing hundreds of thousands of jobs per year. Consider as one source this detailed study of the economic effects of cap-and-trade legislation done by the George C. Marshall Institute. (via Power Line, which provides some general facts about atmospheric CO2 in this post)
The San Francisco Examiner calls it "a license to cheat and steal".....
This cap-and-trade bill — actually called the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, or the Waxman-Markey bill — would mandate severe reductions in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Since emissions are mostly generated by energy use (heating your home, cooling your groceries, driving to work, etc.), these targets would effectively mandate energy rationing. Since these targets are not based on economic or technological realities, there can only be one outcome: much higher energy prices.Severe limitations on emissions could easily turn well-intentioned policy into an opportunity for shady moneymaking schemes at the expense of the environment and American households.
Research indicates that implementation of a U.S. emissions market could drive up energy costs for Americans anywhere from $324 to a whopping $3,100 per year. And because low-income families spend a greater percentage of their earnings on energy, this burden would fall heaviest on those least able to afford it.
In contrast, the financial benefits would be enjoyed by Wall Street opportunists and special-interest groups. The government-regulated trade of carbon dioxide opens the door to the creation of risky financial tools like the derivatives, hedges and credit default swaps that led to our recent economic crisis and the scandals associated with it.
Anyone who doubts this risk need only look at the experience of Europe’s cap-and-trade system. Not only has it been plagued with fraud and abuse, it failed to meet its emissions-reduction targets.
Even The Economist says it's full of "handouts and loopholes", and calls it "worse than expected".
Business leaders, even those already positioning themselves to benefit by the carbon wars, have begun to see that cap-and-trade emissions credits will be anything but "free".
And a congressman is sponsoring legislation to force utilities to identify the costs of the legislation on consumers' utility bills, no doubt in part to hold Obama to his pledge not to increase "by one dime" the taxes of 95% of Americans.
Since the supporters of cap-and-trade legislation haven't put forth a cost-benefit analysis to justify the massive taxation regime they are proposing, the estimable Jim Manzi has put one together. Go read it all, but Manzi says that "In the end, clarity about costs and benefits is the enemy of Waxman Markey."
There's little debate that the bill would have significant negative impact on the economy. So why are we doing it again? Even the proponents, to the extent they even speak anymore of "warming", concede the total net effect on global temperature would be minimal... a fraction of one degree Celsius, as little as 0.1 to 0.2 degrees...total!...by the end of the century! Incredibly, the bill's supporters aren't even embarrassed by the meager projection of "preventing" a mere two years of warming. In other words, global temperature would reach the same level in 2102 that it would have reached in 2100 without this destructive legislation. What a bargain!
But I guess if they're not embarrassed by plowing ahead with an economy-busting, job-killing, record-setting tax increase...all to combat a slight warming trend that itself has been non-existent since 1998....what would cause them embarrassment?
In a later post, Manzi addresses the people who claim that the U.S. should act unilaterally on carbon emissions, thus setting an example and (somehow?) increasing our negotiating leverage to persuade China and India to reverse their longstanding opposition to purposely slowing their own economic growth. Talk about the triumph of hope over experience...
Will Wilkinson notices that this thinking runs counter to a key liberal argument...
The idea is that coordinated international action toward carbon reduction is a global public good, and that the probability of effective coordination increases significantly if the U.S. acts unilaterally. HOW DOES THIS WORK? Standard statist-liberal reasoning about public goods is that they will not be provided unless there is a coercive mechanism in place (e.g., a state) to solve the assurance problem. But there is no state with global jurisdiction. So am I to understand that folks making the argument about the crucial role for Waxman-Markey in solving the international collective action problem don’t really believe the standard story about the need for coercion in assuring compliance? Because that would sure change a lot of debates about a lot of things! To put it another way: if you think that the probability is low that smaller-scale public goods can be provided through voluntary mechanisms without government, shouldn’t you think the probability is even lower the larger the scope of the coordination problem?
The Examiner editors found this gem among other "surprises" buried deep in the Waxman-Markey legislation...
“Title IV, Subtitle B, Part 2, Section 426, of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 states: ‘An eligible worker (specifically, workers who lose their jobs as a result of this measure) may receive a climate change adjustment allowance under this subsection for a period of not longer than 156 weeks…80 percent of the monthly premium of any health insurance coverage…up to a maximum payment of $1,500 in relocation allowance…and job search expenses not exceed[ing] $1,500.’”If cap-and-trade is an energy and global warming bill, why is a three-year package of unemployment benefits, job training and relocation expenses buried deep within its fine print? And why is a federally subsidized “job bank” needed if laid-off workers would quickly be rehired for higher-paying “green” jobs? The fact that generous unemployment benefits are buried in the bill means that “green jobs are bunk,” the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Ben Lieberman told The Examiner.
A Heritage analysis also found that Waxman-Markey is the largest, most intrusive energy tax increase in American history. It would reduce the nation’s GDP by $7.4 trillion, raise electricity rates 90 percent and gasoline prices 74 percent. Apparently, the authors of this legislation were unaware that a recent poll found six out of 10 Americans oppose energy policies that raise their electricity bill by even one cent, much less practically double it. And the final kicker is that the bill’s effect on greenhouse gases emissions would be just barely measurable.
After listing a number of the various mandates contained in the Waxman-Markey legislation, this CEI article concludes that government coercion for its own sake is part of the attraction for our leadership...
These measures are economically and environmentally irrational even if you believe that global warming is a “planetary emergency.” As the Charles River Associates (CRA) report for the National Black Chamber of Commerce points out, the renewable electricity, CCS, electric vehicle, and energy efficiency mandates will not yield net emission reductions beyond what the bill’s emission caps already require. The targeted interventions may accelerate GHG reductions in some industries or sectors, but that just allows emissions to increase elsewhere in the economy without breaking the cap.The rationale for cap-and-trade is that it allows the market to find the least-costly methods of reducing emissions. By superimposing renewable electricity, CCS, electric vehicle, and energy efficiency mandates on that system, Waxman-Markey dictates the means as well as the goals.
There are two possible outcomes. First, which is exceedingly unlikely, the cap motivates reductions in exactly the same ways as the targeted mandates and incentives. In that case, observes CRA, the mandates “would waste resources on needless monitoring, measuring, enforcement and compliance.”
If, as almost certainly would happen, the mandates compel different actions and investments than industry would otherwise undertake to meet the cap, then the same emission reductions would be achieved at higher cost. The targeted mandates and incentives “can only substitute more costly GHG cuts for those that could have been made at lower cost.”
So what is the point? Why tout cap-and-trade as an “efficient,” “market-based” solution and then gunk it up with cookie-cutter, command-and-control measures?
Several reasons come to mind including deep distrust of markets, an abiding belief in old-fashioned central planning, the desire to rig market outcomes to benefit or punish certain interests, and the desire to create more work (endless full employment) for bureaucrats and lawyers.
One that should not be discounted, though, is the pleasure some people derive from placing their heels on other people’s necks. Politics is chiefly about the organization and application of power. It tends to attract people who enjoy bullying and coercing others. To regulate is to coerce. Command-and-control regulation is more coercive than the market-based variety. So despite their real or feigned enthusiasm for cap-and-trade, many climate activists are hopelessly addicted to mandates.
Related:
May 17, 2009
Who's Teaching the Teachers?
A couple of recent articles on the state of the nation's education schools....
Charlotte Allen attended the convention of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) , where she observed Bill Ayers and his colleagues in the education school establishment. While there are rays of hope in what she saw there, for the most part it's a pretty dreary picture she paints of the constructivists, Marxists and self-appointed social activists who control the ed-school training of our nation's teachers. - 'Why Can't a Girl Have a Penis?'
And Sol Stern at City Journal examines the ed-school fascination with one particular book...
Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs. In 2003, David Steiner and Susan Rozen published a study examining the curricula of 16 schools of education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report—and found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their philosophy of education courses. These course assignments are undoubtedly part of the reason that, according to the publisher, almost 1 million copies have sold, a remarkable number for a book in the education field.The odd thing is that Freire’s magnum opus isn’t, in the end, about education—certainly not the education of children. Pedagogy of the Oppressed mentions none of the issues that troubled education reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most.
Shifting With The Breeze
The Pelosi tap dance has been a "pass the popcorn" moment for the right, and Mark Steyn is part of the entertainment. Here's a longish excerpt, but do read it all......Pelosi's tortured performance
It's worth noting that, by most if not all of her multiple accounts, Nancy Pelosi is as guilty of torture as anybody else. That's not an airy rhetorical flourish but a statement of law. As National Review's Andy McCarthy points out, under Section 2340A(c) of the relevant statute, a person who conspires to torture is subject to the same penalties as the actual torturer. Once Speaker Pelosi was informed that waterboarding was part of the plan and that it was actually being used, she was in on the conspiracy, and as up to her neck in it as whoever it was who was actually sticking it to poor old Abu Zubaydah and the other blameless lads.That is, if you believe waterboarding is "torture."
I don't believe it's torture. Nor does Dick Cheney. But Nancy Pelosi does. Or so she has said, latterly.
Alarmed by her erratic public performance, the Speaker's fellow San Francisco Democrat Dianne Feinstein attempted to put an end to Nancy's self-torture session. "I don't want to make an apology for anybody," said Senator Feinstein, "but in 2002, it wasn't 2006, '07, '08 or '09. It was right after 9/11, and there were in fact discussions about a second wave of attacks."
Indeed. In effect, the senator is saying waterboarding was acceptable in 2002, but not by 2009. The waterboarding didn't change, but the country did. It was no longer America's war but Bush's war. And it was no longer a bipartisan interrogation technique that enjoyed the explicit approval of both parties' leaderships, but a grubby Bush-Cheney-Rummy war crime.
Dianne Feinstein has provided the least worst explanation for her colleague's behavior. The alternative – that Speaker Pelosi is a contemptible opportunist hack playing the cheapest but most destructive kind of politics with key elements of national security – is, of course, unthinkable. Senator Feinstein says airily that no reasonable person would hold dear Nancy to account for what she supported all those years ago. But it's OK to hold Cheney or some no-name Justice Department backroom boy to account?
Well, sure. It's the Miss USA standard of political integrity: Carrie Prejean and Barack Obama have the same publicly stated views on gay marriage. But the politically correct enforcers know that Barack doesn't mean it, so that's okay, whereas Carrie does, so that's a hate crime. In the torture debate, Pelosi is Obama and Dick Cheney is Carrie Prejean. Dick means it, because to him this is an issue of national security. Nancy doesn't, because to her it's about the shifting breezes of political viability.
The related Pelosi links below are a few days old, but still worth a look...
Power Line - In which Nancy Pelosi tortures the truth
Update from Hot Air
May 09, 2009
Desensitizing New Yorkers to Low-Flying Jets Chased By Fighter Planes
So they fired a White House staffer, and promised it wouldn't happen again (really?) ...and released the photo. Even though this was an incredibly ill-conceived and thoughtless political stunt, which caused literal panic in the streets of New York, and cost the better part of a half-million dollars for a photograph, I don't want to make more of this incident than it merits.
But at a minimum, it means we shouldn't have to hear about the "Mission Accomplished" banner ever again.....like that'll happen.
More at Hot Air, including Cheney's comments.