Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Conservatives describe Barack Obama's America with Tocqueville's words

Barack Obama's America - A timeless critique from Tocqueville.
The Weekly Standard, Mar 09, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 24

It seems that if despotism came to be established in the democratic nations of our day, it would have other characteristics: it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them. . . .

When I think of the small passions of men of our day, the softness of their mores, the extent of their enlightenment, the purity of their religion, the mildness of their morality, their laborious and steady habits, the restraint that almost all preserve in vice as in virtue, I do not fear that in their chiefs they will find tyrants, but rather schoolmasters. . . .

I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. . . .

Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?

So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizen. . . .

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which government is the shepherd. . . .

I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the external forms of freedom, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.

--Alexis de Tocqueville

From Democracy in America, volume two, part four, chapter six: "What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear" (translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop)

Monday, March 2, 2009

TNYT editorial short-sightedness during the Clinton years now reversed

NY Times Reconsiders Filibuster, by Kevin Murphy
Patterico's Pontifications, Mar 02, 2009

On March 29, 2005, the NY Times ran an editorial defending the filibuster, and lamenting its own editorial short-sightedness during the Clinton years:

The Senate, of all places, should be sensitive to the fact that this large and diverse country has never believed in government by an unrestrained majority rule. Its composition is a repudiation of the very idea that the largest number of votes always wins out. The members from places like Rhode Island, Maine or Iowa know that their constituents are given a far larger say than people from New York simply by virtue of the fact that each state has two votes, regardless of population. Indeed, as a recent New Yorker article pointed out, the Democratic senators who have blocked that handful of judicial nominees actually represent substantially more Americans than the Republican majority that wants to see them passed.

While the filibuster has not traditionally been used to stop judicial confirmations, it seems to us this is a matter in which it’s most important that a large minority of senators has a limited right of veto. Once confirmed, judges can serve for life and will remain on the bench long after Mr. Bush leaves the White House. And there are few responsibilities given to the executive and the legislature that are more important than choosing the members of the third co-equal branch of government. The Senate has an obligation to do everything in its power to ensure the integrity of the process.

A decade ago, this page expressed support for tactics that would have gone even further than the “nuclear option” in eliminating the power of the filibuster. At the time, we had vivid memories of the difficulty that Senate Republicans had given much of Bill Clinton’s early agenda. But we were still wrong. To see the filibuster fully, it’s obviously a good idea to have to live on both sides of it. We hope acknowledging our own error may remind some wavering Republican senators that someday they, too, will be on the other side and in need of all the protections the Senate rules can provide.

How soon they forget. Today, the Times runs two op-ed pieces against the “the segregationist’s tool”, and gives them prime links on the web site. The worm begins its turn.

In Jean Edward Smith’s “Filibusters: The Senate’s Self-Inflicted Wound“, the filibuster is thoroughly demonized, equating its practitioners to Klansmen and worse:

In the entire 19th century, including the struggle against slavery, fewer than two dozen filibusters were mounted. In F.D.R.’s time, the device was employed exclusively by Southerners to block passage of federal anti-lynching legislation. Between 1933 and the coming of the war, it was attempted only twice. Under Eisenhower and J.F.K., the pattern continued. In the eight years of the Eisenhower administration, only two filibusters were mounted. Under Kennedy there were four. The number more than doubled under Lyndon Johnson, but the primary issue continued to be civil rights. Except for exhibitionists, buffoons and white southerners determined to salvage racial segregation, the filibuster was considered off limits.

Pretty hard to have a civil conversation after that. Unsurprisingly, she calls for the Democrats to remove the filibuster from Senate rules.

In David R. RePass’ much calmer “Make My Filibuster“, Mr RePass argues that Reid and the Democrats should not use cloture as the test of a filibuster, but instead make the Republicans actually hold the floor. He asserts that this would quickly end the practice, but offers no real evidence.

It is up to Mr. Reid. He can do away with the supermajority requirement for virtually all significant measures and return majority rule to the Senate. This is not to say that the Democrats should ride roughshod over the Republicans. Republicans should be included at all stages of the legislative process. However, with the daunting prospect of having to mount a real filibuster to demonstrate their opposition, Republicans may become much more willing to compromise.

Expect more of this, especially when the Obama budget dies the death of 1000 cuts in the Senate, amid largescale taxpayer protests. Next up: Dissent and patriotism.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Can Newspapers Survive? Only if they work harder to earn and maintain respect

Can Newspapers Survive? By Cathy Young
Only if they work harder to earn and maintain respect
Reason, February 27, 2009

As media giants totter, battered by the Internet and the economic crisis, saving the newspapers has become a hot topic. It is richly ironic that the Net, which has both greatly facilitated the work of journalists and expanded their readership, has also left many unemployed. There are concerns that the death of journalism as we know it will leave our culture ill-informed—blogs are good for opinion and fact-checking, but they are no substitute for original reporting—and endanger democracy by removing a vital part of its checks and balances.

The debate revolves around two key questions. One, does society truly need the professional media? Two, how can professional journalism survive in a new media environment?

On the first question, my answer is a resounding, though possibly self-serving "yes." While I am a fan of blogs, I believe they work best when the "mainstream media" and the blogs complement each other. Otherwise, the blogosphere is all too liable to disintegrate into shrill partisan screaming and irresponsible rumor-mongering.

The responsible media do have a vital role to play in a democracy. However, the mainstream media's defenders would do well to acknowledge some of their failings. A recent editorial in The New Republic laments that "press-bashing"—whether from right-wing media critics such as former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg, or leftists on the Huffington Post site who accuse the media of conformism—has created a "poisonous atmosphere," undermining the authority of the press.

But what if the critiques have merit? Goldberg's anti-media broadsides may be over the top, but his basic argument—that the liberal politics of most journalists influence media coverage, not because journalists don't strive to be objective but because their cultural milieu influences their perceptions of objectivity—has a great deal of truth to it. Few people doubt that Barack Obama got breaks from the press. And there are well-documented instances of media bias leading to sloppy reporting, with journalists all but recycling the press releases of advocacy groups on such issues as domestic violence, homelessness, or the perils of gun ownership. The press has been the target of unfair criticism, but it cannot be absolved of blame for the damage to its reputation.

That said, the media's present financial woes have little to do with its real or perceived lack of balance, and everything to do with the economics of publishing. News corporations have always subsidized serious reporting and commentary with revenues from other functions of the newspapers, such as classified advertising or sports news. Today, most of those functions have been diverted to other media, including the Internet.

Promising solutions include non-profit programs to support investigative reporting and news analysis. Just because we need professional journalism does not mean that it has to come only in the traditional package of the newspaper. Independent journalists, working as individuals or as teams, may thrive if they can have access to resources outside the conventional structure of a media organization.
Far more controversial is the quest to get readers to pay for online content. In fact, there is no good reason that online content should be free, other than "people are used to it." Is it impossible to persuade people to pay for something they are used to getting for free? Not at all. Online music downloads are a good example; so is television. While TV had been free since its inception, large numbers of people proved willing to pay for cable and digital television.

A subscriber-only model for individual websites has repeatedly proven unworkable. (The Wall Street Journal—a notable exception—gets people to pay for financial information while providing most editorial content free of charge.) The main reason it cannot work is that people who read news and commentary on the Internet usually get their content from many different sites. That is the great advantage of the Internet: you can go from The Washington Post to The London Times at the click of a mouse, and follow a link within one story to read another. If every news site started hiding its content behind a pay wall, reader would face either huge bills or greatly restricted choices, and many would seek to circumvent the subscription requirements.

Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time, recently got into the fray with a proposal to make web media content available for micropayments similar to iTunes, "a one-click system with a really simple interface." If you see a link to an interesting article on, say, the San Jose Mercury News website, you don't have to buy a $20 subscription to the publication—you can pay a nickel or a dime to read the individual item.

While this is a promising idea, it has substantial drawbacks. Those nickels and dimes can add up, and if your monthly bill is high enough, you may think twice the next time you feel like clicking on a link.

A better approach may be to make news and analysis content available only through media portals or carriers, similar to cable television providers. A subscription to a carrier would give access to any news site (newspaper, magazine, blog) that is a part of its package. The subscription price could be set by level of consumption—$20 a month for 40 hours of media access, $40 for 100 hours, and so on. Or it could vary depending on which publications are included, while content outside the customer's standard package could be available for one-time micropayments. Different media portals could experiment with different fee scales. This would allow people to surf the Web without having to ponder each click of a link. Revenues could be distributed to individual websites depending on their readership.

This strategy would still require a drastic departure from Internet business as usual. The migration of participating sites behind media-portal walls would have to be coordinated. Some policing would be needed to ensure that premium content is not reposted on free-access sites. This could make the carriers look like bad guys, at least in the eyes of those for whom free online content has become an entitlement if not an article of faith.

Yet, if there is a will to adopt the media-portal subscription model, there will be a way. Even in the age of celebrity gossip sites and reality shows, millions of Americans still respect real journalism enough to be willing to pay to help keep it alive.

Provided, of course, that the media work harder to deserve and retain that respect.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. This article originally appeared at Real Clear Politics.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

On WaPo's article "Climate Fears Are Driving 'Ecomigration' Across Globe"

Swimming Against the Tide
World Climate Report, Feb 25, 2009
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/02/25/swimming-against-the-tide/

The Washington Post ran a front page story on Monday, February 23, describing ecomigration—in this case, people moving to avoid the impacts of global warming. The story was odd because in the starring role was a fellow moving his family from Montgomery County, Maryland, to New Zealand! When we think of reasons people want to leave Montgomery County, global warming doesn’t jump to the top of list—perhaps moving to try to get away from all the traffic produced by the large influx of all the other people moving into the region is a more likely candidate.

Another potential ecomigrant highlighted in the Post article who was considering fleeing from global warming’s way was a guy who was thinking of moving back to Michigan from his home in Florida. Again, someone who is apparently swimming against the tide of domestic (and otherwise) migrants into the state of Florida—one the fastest growing places in the U.S.

Now maybe these examples were selected by Washington Post staffwriter Shankar Vedantam to show that people in places other than the Pacific atolls of Tuvalu or Kiribati are concerned about the coming climate, but the choices were strange.

[As an aside, for an amusing and enlightening glimpse into what kind of earthly paradises Tuvalu or Kiribati are (not), we recommend J. Maarten Troost’s descriptions of his time spent there as chronicled in his book The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific (hint: Chapter 7 is titled “In which the Author settles into the theme of Absence, in particular the paucity of food options, and offers an account of the Great Beer Crisis, when the island’s shipment of Ale was, inexcusably, misdirected to Kiritimati Island, far, far away from those who need it most”)]
For one thing, you’ve got to wonder just how on earth the Post writer managed to find someone in Montgomery Co. moving to New Zealand because of global warming? Is there a national registry of ecomigrants somewhere?

For another, while these folks are moving out (or at least thinking about it) many tens of thousands of people are moving in. Figure 1 shows recent population growth across the U.S., and the DC area and Florida are leading the way. Apparently, these intrepid souls are throwing caution to the wind and moving (voluntarily) into places that will increase their climate risk.
Obviously, in their minds the rewards won out over the risks.

[Figure 1. Typical example of U.S. population trends, in this case, the trend from 2000 to 2003 (source: http://academic.marion.ohio-state.edu/schul/400/0003popchg.png)]

Which brings us to a question that has been nagging us for some time, and that maybe someone would be interested in helping us figure out the answer (if so let us know!)—are Americans assuming more climate risk voluntarily (by moving around) than they would be assuming involuntarily from climate change (by staying put)? If it is the case (and we would guess it is), then clearly the impacts of climate change are something that are not a major factor in our ultimate choice of our places of residence (with a few exceptions that Shankar Vedantam managed to ferret out).

That a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that found that climate change was last on our list of top rpiorities for the new Administration to deal with seems to further support this contention.

Basically, Shankar Vedantam’s article in Monday’s Post completely missed the mark, or at least did not set the proper context. In the U.S., at least, ecomigration is most likely driven to a far larger degree by “climate” rather than “climate change” (and many of our choices are made despite assuming a greater climate risk).

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

20th Anniversary of the Alar Scare

20th Anniversary of the (Scientifically Baseless) Alar Scare
The American Council on Science and Health, February 25, 2009

Twenty years ago tomorrow, a combination of environmentalists, public interest lawyers, publicists, and members of the news media foisted a bogus health scare on the American public -- the fear that apples being sprayed with Alar were exposing children to a cancer-causing chemical. The Great Apple Scare: Alar 20 Years Later , a new publication by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), depicts how this plant growth-regulating chemical was successfully demonized and provides a template for the many baseless health scares that followed.

Authored by William P. Kucewicz, formerly on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, The Great Apple Scare provides a succinct history of Alar's use, as well as the generation of anxiety and fear among American consumers. "Of course, those most concerned were parents of young children," notes Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, ACSH president. "One woman became so anxious that she chased a school bus in order to remove the apple from her child's lunchbox."

In 1968 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of Alar on apples after two years of carcinogenicity testing had shown it was safe. Additional studies were conducted after that approval. While the great majority also found no problems with Alar, studies done by one researcher supposedly did not. Evaluation by numerous experts found many scientific problems with this research.

But before this welcome news could be publicized, the CBS show "60 Minutes" termed Alar one of the most dangerous chemicals in the American food supply. Subsequently, actress Meryl Streep donned a toxicologist's mantle and helped spread the accusations against Alar.

Unfortunately, science was no match for the fear trumped up by environmental activists and associated public relations firm Fenton Communications, and in 1989 Alar was removed from the market."

The Alar saga provided a roadmap for activists to attack numerous other chemicals that never harmed anyone," stated ACSH medical director Dr. Gilbert Ross. "It should leave readers with some understanding of how baseless most of these health scares really are," he continued.

See a video commentary about the Alar scare by ACSH's Dr. Whelan here.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Industry Views: The Washington Post Again Calls for Higher Energy Taxes

The Washington Post Again Calls for Higher Energy Taxes
IER, February 19, 2009

For the third time in the past 5 months The Washington Post has called for new taxes on energy. This time the Post is calling for a carbon tax because cap-and-trade regimes for greenhouse gas emissions are flawed. According to the Post:

Cap-and-trade regimes have advantages, notably the ability to set a limit
on emissions and to integrate with other countries. But they are complex and
vulnerable to lobbying and special pleading, and they do not guarantee
success.

The experience of the European Union is Exhibit A.


The Post’s answer to the flaws with cap-and-trade schemes is to implement a carbon tax instead. Cap and trade and carbon taxes have a similar goal—increase the price of energy to encourage conservation. Carbon taxes increase the price of anything that uses oil, coal, or natural gas an input. This includes nearly all goods or services in the United States because 85 percent of the energy we use comes from coal, oil, or natural gas.

Increasing the costs of doing business in American makes it harder for American businesses to compete with foreign companies. The high price of natural gas in the United States has already contributed to the loss of 3.1 million manufacturing jobs since 2000.[1] Higher energy taxes will further drive more businesses overseas and make life more difficult for American consumers struggling to make ends meet.

It is not clear what The Washington Post hopes to accomplish with a carbon tax. The earth has warmed over the past 30 years, but not as much as the climate models predict. Climate alarmists point to the models as evidence of catastrophic warming, even though there has been no warming trend since 2001 according to the satellite data.

One thing that is clear is that a unilateral carbon tax imposed on U.S. citizens will do little to nothing about global warming. Global carbon dioxide emissions are not driven by the United States, but by the developing world. According to data from the Global Carbon Project, between 2000 and 2007 the U.S.’s carbon dioxide emissions increased 3% while China’s increased 98% and became the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. By way of comparison, from 2000 to 2007 India’s carbon dioxide emissions increased 36%, the global total increased 26%, Russia’s increased 10%, and Japan’s increased 3%. These data are displayed in the graph below:

[see graph here]

The U.S. will emit a smaller and smaller share of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions[2] making unilateral efforts, such as a domestic carbon tax, ineffective at influencing climate. If the U.S. were to completely cease using fossil fuels, the increase from the rest of the world would replace U.S. emissions in less than eight years.[3]

The Washington Post says that “A carbon tax, by contrast, is simple and sure in its effects.” This is correct. A carbon tax is simple, and we can indeed be sure of its effects: it will harm America economically with few corresponding environmental benefits.

References

[1] Paul N. Cicio, Testimony of Paul N. Cicio, President of Industrial Energy Consumers of America before the House of Representatives, Dec. 6, 2007, http://www.ieca-us.com/documents/IECAHouseTestimony-NaturalGas_12.06.07.pdf.
[2] According to the Global Carbon project in 2007 China emitted 21% of the world’s carbon equivalent and the U.S. emitted 19%.
[3] Calculated using the emission data from the Global Carbon Project. According to these data, the U.S. emitted 1,586,213 GgC in 2007. Without the U.S., the world’s emissions were 5,203,987 GgC in 2000, increasing to 6,884,787 GgC in 2007.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Slaying of two dissidents, Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova

Murder in Moscow, by Stephen Schwartz
Press criticism, KGB-style.
The Weekly Standard, Feb 23, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 22

Vice President Joseph Biden has told the Europeans that the new administration wishes to "reset" relations with Vladmir Putin's Russia. But the January 19 slaying of two dissidents, 34-year-old human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalism student Anastasia Baburova, 25, on a Moscow street is one of several recent reminders that Americans cannot be comfortable in Putin's embrace.

Markelov, head of the Institute for the Supremacy of Law, may well have been murdered as a result of the release from custody, one week before, of Russian army colonel Yuri Budanov, who had been sent to prison for crimes he committed while serving in Chechnya. Markelov had been crucial to Budanov's 2003 conviction in the kidnapping, torture, multiple sexual assault, and murder of an 18-year-old Chechen girl, Elza Kheda Kungaeva. Budanov, although he admitted his guilt and was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment, had benefited from an early release.

On the day he perished, Markelov delivered a statement to the press. Representing the family of the Chechen female victim, he accused the Russian authorities of improperly arranging for Budanov to be let go. He then walked to a metro station near the Kremlin with Baburova. The killer, wearing a ski mask, approached from behind and shot Markelov in the back of the head. Baburova pursued the shooter, who turned and fired into her forehead. She died several hours later.

Anticipating her graduation from journalism school, Baburova was working for the daily Novaya Gazeta, which has employed a distinguished roster of liquidated investigative journalists. Novaya Gazeta is co-owned by Alexander Lebedev, an ex-KGB official and billionaire turned political reformer, who purchased the ailing London Evening Standard on January 21, only two days after Baburova's death.

As the largest individual shareholder in Novaya Gazeta--he owns 39 percent--Lebedev is responsible for a publication that has experienced the high-profile killing of several of the country's leading reporters. Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in the elevator of her apartment building in 2006, was his top staffer; she too had exposed atrocities in Chechnya, and Markelov was her lawyer. Igor Domnikov was killed in a brutal beating in 2000. His colleague Yury Shchekochikhin was poisoned in 2003.

Indeed, the poison cabinet seems to have become a favored anti-dissident weapon of the Russian state, as it was under Stalin. Politkovskaya herself was poisoned (though not fatally) in 2004 when she tried to travel to Beslan during the hostage crisis there. And less than two months after her eventual murder, Alexander Litvinenko, another former KGB agent critical of the Putin regime, was killed in a highly unusual poisoning in London.

In the aftermath of the Markelov-Baburov assassinations, the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists reported that Lebedev, perhaps spurred by his KGB experiences, had announced the intention of Novaya Gazeta journalists to petition to arm themselves if necessary. Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov denounced the Russian government for its inability to protect the press and asserted, "We have three options. The first one--to leave and turn off the lights. . . . The second--to stop writing about the special services, corruption, drugs, fascists; to stop investigating the crimes of the powerful. . . . The third option is to somehow defend ourselves."

Russian political life has increasingly assumed a pogrom atmosphere. Markelov had extended his investigation of human rights violations from Chechnya to the central Russian republic of Bashkortostan, which has a Turkic Muslim majority, but has not been the scene of Chechen-style rebellion against Russian rule. At the end of 2004, local police beat up to 1,000 people in Bashkortostan over a period of four days. Markelov had warned against "the spread of the Chechnya syndrome throughout other regions of Russia" and exposed the existence of a secret "order number 870" issued by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 2003, which authorized the police to declare states of emergency without informing the public and to follow them up with repressive actions.

One of his closest friends, an academic named Vladislav Bugera, described Markelov as a perhaps naïve product of the old Soviet way of life. Writing in the online periodical Johnson's Russia List, Bugera called the dead lawyer a "socialist and an internationalist" whose many causes included an independent labor union, but whose socialism was "moderate . . . and reformist. . . . He was a reliable person. You could always be sure of him. . . . He is my hero."

Needless to say, a return to socialist ideals would stand no chance of protecting human rights from state abuse. Russia has been through its dark eras of internal strife and compulsory social experiment; Putinism, now aggravated by the global economic crisis, represents an attempt to revive aspects of both. The staggering challenge before Russian supporters of democracy is to find a way to construct a new and unburdened system of individual rights, secured by due process. Russian democrats and those abroad who would help them can ill afford to look away from the blood of Russian lawyers and journalists shed in the street.

Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Greenhouse Gases Up, Global Temperatures Down

Greenhouse Gases Up, Global Temperatures Down. By Chip Knappenberger
Master Resource, February 17, 2009

Over the weekend, a widely-distributed story by AP science writer Randolph Schmid voiced the concerns of several scientists that humans were emitting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a rate much faster than anyone expected. Funny thing is, Schmid failed to mention that during the same time, global warming proceeded at a rate much slower than anyone expected.
Schmid described the situation like this:
Carbon emissions have been growing at 3.5 percent per year since 2000, up
sharply from the 0.9 percent per year in the 1990s, Christopher Field of the
Carnegie Institution for Science told the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS].

“It is now outside the entire envelope of possibilities” considered in the
2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change, he said. The IPCC and
former vice president Al Gore received the Nobel Prize for drawing attention to
the dangers of climate change.

The largest factor in this increase is the widespread adoption of coal as
an energy source, Field said, “and without aggressive attention societies will
continue to focus on the energy sources that are cheapest, and that means
coal.”

When it comes right down to it, carbon dioxide emissions are not bad in and of them selves; in fact, they are a direct fertilizer for the earth’s plant species. The potential problem surrounds how and how much they may impact the climate. So to complete his coal-is-bad tale, Schmid should have included some comments about how badly the earth’s climate was behaving.

Problem is, such data is getting hard to come by. In fact, while Schmid was busy covering the AAAS meeting in Chicago, Dr. Patrick J. Michaels testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment that global warming was proceeding at a rate that was at the lowest values projected by a large suite of climate models. Dr. Michaels further told the Subcommittee members in the nation’s capital that another year or so of little warming would put global temperature trends outside the accepted range model prognostications.

So, clearly, the picture is a lot more complicated than CO2 in/catastrophic climate change out. It is just that most environmental alarmists (reporters included) don’t like to think of it as such.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed the slanted reporting coming from the coverage of the AAAS meeting. University of Colorado researcher and renowned climatologist Roger Pielke Sr. had this to say at over at his ClimateScience blog:
Since papers and weblogs have documented that the warming is being
over-estimated in recent years, and, thus, these sources of information are
readily available to the reporters, there is, therefore, no other alternative
than these reporters are deliberately selecting a biased perspective to promote
a particular viewpoint on climate. The reporting of this news without
presenting counter viewpoints is clearly an example of yellow
journalism
;

“Journalism that exploits, distorts, or exaggerates the news to create
sensations and attract readers.”

When will the news media and others realize that by presenting such biased
reports, which are easily refuted by real world data, they are losing their
credibility among many in the scientific community as well as with the
public.

Good question.

WaPo: Domestic abuse suspects shouldn't be able to keep their guns

Armed and Dangerous. WaPo Editorial
Domestic abuse suspects shouldn't be able to keep their guns.
WaPo, Tuesday, February 17, 2009; page A12

GAIL PUMPHREY came to dread meeting her ex-husband to transfer custody of their children. Sometimes he would curse at her. Once, she said, he spit in her face. On Thanksgiving Day two years ago, he fatally shot Ms. Pumphrey and their three children -- ages 7, 10 and 12 -- before killing himself. He used a .22-caliber rifle, the same gun Ms. Pumphrey had asked a court to confiscate just three weeks before.

The Maryland General Assembly is considering two bills that would make it harder for those accused of domestic violence to keep their guns. The legislation comes too late to save Ms. Pumphrey and her children but would help prevent such tragedies in the future.

One bill would give judges the option of confiscating the firearms of domestic abuse suspects against whom temporary protective orders have been issued. The other would require judges to order the seizure of guns from suspects once final protective orders are in place. A number of states, including North Carolina and California, already have such measures. Even Virginia, not known for limiting gun ownership, prohibits domestic violence suspects from buying or carrying guns when protective orders have been issued against them.

Inexcusably, such legislation has died in the House Judiciary Committee in past years. The committee, chaired by Del. Joseph F. Vallario Jr. (D-Prince George's), has a reputation for protecting the rights of the accused -- sometimes at the expense of reasonable policy. Mr. Vallario, a criminal defense lawyer, told The Post's Lisa Rein that his main concern was that law enforcement officers accused of domestic abuse would not be able to carry their guns for work. It seems to us that Mr. Vallario should be more concerned about the safety of an abused spouse than the ability of an officer suspected of domestic violence to carry a gun.

Other critics contend that the bills unfairly target firearms. After all, they say, a spouse or partner can be harmed with a baseball bat or a knife. The statistics tell a different story: Female victims of domestic violence are more likely to be killed in shootings than through all other methods of violence combined. In Maryland, guns accounted for more than half of domestic-violence-related deaths from June 2007 to July 2008.

Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown (D) spoke passionately last week before the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee about the need for tougher domestic violence laws. Mr. Brown no doubt drew upon a recent family tragedy: His cousin Catherine Brown was shot to death by an estranged boyfriend last year. Advocates for victims of domestic violence believe the legislation has a chance this year because of the O'Malley administration's support. We hope they're right. Mr. Vallario and his colleagues have the chance to save the next Gail Pumphrey.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Earth to the New York Times: Clinton's China policy isn't new

Earth to the New York Times: Clinton's China policy isn't new. By Christian Brose
Shadow Government/FP, Sun, 02/15/2009 - 5:38pm

In keeping with Dan Twining's excellent observations about Asia, I found this New York Times article about Hillary Clinton's trip, well, strange:
Signaling a new, more vigorous approach to China, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared Friday that the United States had nothing to fear from an economically ascendant Beijing and that it would press Chinese leaders on delicate issues like human rights and climate change.

In her first major speech as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton drew a clear line between the Obama administration’s approach and that of the Bush White House, which viewed China more as a rival than a partner and kept relations fixed on economic matters like exchange rates.

“Some believe that China on the rise is by definition an adversary,” she said at the Asia Society in New York on the eve of a trip to China and other Asian countries. “To the contrary, we believe the United States and China benefit from, and contribute to, each other’s successes.”
Now, when it comes to Clinton's speech at the Asia Society last Friday, what is remarkable about it is simply that I could have written about 95 percent of it for Condoleezza Rice. This is a good thing, of course, as it reminds us of the large degree of bispartisan agreement that defines U.S. policy in Asia today, including on China policy.

When it comes to the New York Times, however, what is remarkable is how completely ignorant they seem to be of any of this. It's as if the Times had been living under a rock these past eight years. Because last I checked, it was the Bush administration, in its second term, that finally got us beyond the tired old debate about whether China is a "strategic partner" to be engaged (Bill Clinton's approach) or a "strategic threat" to be contained (Bush's first-term approach), recognizing instead that China's rise is a geopolitical fact and the real question now is how China will use its great power. In short, will China be a free-rider on U.S. global leadership or a responsible stakeholder?

The Bush administration's preference was the latter, and that's why it expanded U.S.-China cooperation on global issues such as nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea, pandemic diseases like avian influenza, global trade and development, climate change and energy security, and even the violence in Darfur -- all the while hedging against China's untransparent military build-up to give Beijing a hard incentive to choose the responsible stakeholder path.

This, in a nutshell, is exactly the alleged "shift" in China policy that Clinton laid out and that the Obama administration will likely follow. Is it too much to ask the New York Times to recognize this?

Conservative views: Hyperventilating About the Exclusionary Rule

Hyperventilating About the Exclusionary Rule, by Matthew J. Franck
Bench Memos/NRO, Feb 16, 2009

For the second time in a little more than a fortnight, writers named Adam at the New York Times are getting altogether too excited about the grim fate that awaits the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule under the Roberts Court. First there was Adam Liptak, successor to Linda Greenhouse in covering the Court, who suggested on January 31 that "the exclusionary rule itself might be at risk" thanks to a January 14 ruling in Herring v. United States. Today it's editorial writer Adam Cohen sounding the same alarm, saying that "Chief Justice John Roberts's conservative majority on the Supreme Court is working to undo the exclusionary rule." Both Adams remind us that, as a young lawyer working in the Reagan Justice Department, Roberts wrote a memo critical of the exclusionary rule.

Breathe into the paper bag, boys. The Herring decision is really pretty ordinary, and simply applies a principle established a quarter century ago in United States v. Leon: that when law enforcement officers rely in good faith on what they believe to be a valid warrant, and that warrant is subsequently found to be invalid, the evidence the officers obtain by virtue of it will not be excluded. The exclusionary rule is not, the Court emphasized in the Leon case, a command of the Constitution itself. It is a remedial rule the Court itself invented as a deterrent to police misconduct. When its application would have no deterrent effect, its use is inappropriate. Leon and Herring are practically indistinguishable. In the 1984 case, an evidentiary hearing long after the search resulted in the warrant being invalidated because an affidavit was held insufficient to establish probable cause. In last month's case, an unintended failure to keep computer records up to date across local jurisdictions resulted in officers acting on a warrant they had no way of knowing had been withdrawn. No police misconduct occurred in either case, and it's hard to see how future deliberate misconduct could slip under the umbrella of either ruling, so long as courts remain interested in the validity of warrants and the honesty of policemen.

I would not be sad to see the exclusionary rule go. It is a perverse instrument for vindicating the Fourth Amendment, and was wholly unknown to the founding generation. But there's no sign that the Roberts Court has lost its interest in maintaining it. Neither is there any reason to suppose that Herring, which like Leon involved a case where there was a warrant (apparently) at the time the officers acted, will lead to a broad approval by the Court of searches where no warrant was ever in existence at all.

But facts are no deterrent to New York Times writers. In today's piece, Cohen even has the gall to write that "in the last few years" while a supposedly terrible (but actually nonexistent) erosion of the rule has been happening, "the federal government engaged in an illegal domestic wiretapping program." Is there some requirement that writers for newspapers keep up with the news? As we learned last month, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review held last August that the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement does not apply "when surveillance is conducted to obtain foreign intelligence for national security purposes and is directed against foreign powers or agents of foreign powers reasonably believed to be located outside the United States."

Time to take the bag away from one's face and look around, don't you think?

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

CO2 emissions and renewable energies

Costs With No Benefits . . . Sounds Like a Plan. By Drew Thornley
Planet Gore/NRO, Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Der Spiegel Online has an interesting exposé on Europe’s fight to reduce CO2 emissions via renewable energies like wind and solar, a story highlighted at the top of this morning’s Daily Peiser.

Despite Europe's boom in solar and wind energy, CO2 emissions haven't been reduced by even a single gram. Now, even the Green Party is taking a new look at the issue — as shown in e-mails obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Germany's renewable energy companies are a tremendous success story. Roughly 15 percent of the country's electricity comes from solar, wind or biomass facilities, almost 250,000 jobs have been created and the net worth of the business is €35 billion per year.

But there's a catch: The climate hasn't in fact profited from these developments. As astonishing as it may sound, the new wind turbines and solar cells haven't prohibited the emission of even a single gram of CO2.

Experts have known about this situation for some time, but it still isn't widely known to the public. Even Germany's government officials mention it only under their breath. No one wants to discuss the political ramifications.

It's a sensitive subject: Germany is recognized worldwide as a leader in all things related to renewable energy. The environmental energy sector doesn't want this image to be tarnished. Under no circumstances does Berlin want the Renewable Energy Law (EEG) — which mandates the prices at which energy companies have to buy green power — to fall into disrepute.

In truth, however, even the Green Party has recognized the problem, as evidenced by an e-mail exchange last year between party energy experts and obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE. One wrote the following message to a colleague: "Dear Daniel, sorry, but the EEG won't do anything for the climate anyway." Ever since the introduction of the emissions trading system, the Renewable Energy Law had become "an instrument of structural change, but not an instrument to combat climate change."

Indeed, when it comes to climage change, investments in wind and solar energy are not very efficient. Preventing one ton of CO2 emissions requires a relatively large amount of money. Other measures, especially building renovations, cost much less — and have the same effect.
The e-mail exchange ends with a conciliatory "What do you think?" But it is quickly followed by a bitter PS: "Do the Greens think that this problem (of climate change) will solve itself if we just screw solar panels onto our rooftops?"


The article doesn’t mention it, but energy and electricity prices in Europe are considerably higher than those in the United States. So, Europe agrees to the Kyoto Protocol, mandates that large amounts of their energy supplies come from renewables, and the result is higher prices for producers and consumers and no benefit to the climate. Unfortunately, this is exactly where the U.S. is headed, if the Obama administration’s energy plans are realized. If we turn our backs on coal power, refuse to ramp up nuclear power, and mandate “green” energies before they are proven, commercially viable technolgies, the days of relatively affordable (and reliable) energy and electricity are numbered.

Why isn't there more consensus among economists?

Why isn't there more consensus among economists? Tyler Cowen
Marginal Revolution, February 10, 2009 at 09:57 AM

Clive Crook asks that question about the fiscal stimulus (by the way, Paul Krugman responds to the part of the column about him). I do think there is more of a consensus than the current debates in the media, and the blogosphere, might imply. I take the general consensus of macroeconomics to be not too far from the position articulated by Alice Rivlin. That means accelerate the truly stimulative parts of the proposal and ponder the rest at greater length, plus emphasize aid to state and local governments. I'm not suggesting that you have to bow down and yield to that view, only that the view makes sense to a large number of macroeconomists.

In part the appearance of so much disagreement is driven by the fact that both MSM and the blogosphere select for opinions which deviate from the mainstream. Many segments of MSM are willing to represent the mainstream opinion, but there is then a sense that some new point of view must be offered, if only to hold the interest of the reader or viewer. And some parts of MSM are openly partisan and thus they skew toward extreme points of view. In the blogosphere libertarians are overrepresented, relative to their numbers in the profession. On the Democratic side, Paul Krugman is the most influential figure, and I would place him to the left of most Democratic economists. Progressives, like libertarians, are overrepresented on the web, relative to their numbers in the economics profession or elsewhere.

It is good that so many different points of view are being reflected, but we need to keep the biases of our filters in mind. Repeating a moderate view, again and again and again, isn't always the best way to attract or keep an audience.

President Prescreens Reporters at Press Conference?

Obama's Press List. WSJ Editorial
Membership shall have its privileges

About half-way through President Obama's press conference Monday night, he had an unscripted question of his own. "All, Chuck Todd," the President said, referring to NBC's White House correspondent. "Where's Chuck?" He had the same strange question about Fox News's Major Garrett: "Where's Major?"

The problem wasn't the lighting in the East Room. The President was running down a list of reporters preselected to ask questions. The White House had decided in advance who would be allowed to question the President and who was left out.

Presidents are free to conduct press conferences however they like, but the decision to preselect questioners is an odd one, especially for a White House famously pledged to openness. We doubt that President Bush, who was notorious for being parsimonious with follow-ups, would have gotten away with prescreening his interlocutors. Mr. Obama can more than handle his own, so our guess is that this is an attempt to discipline reporters who aren't White House favorites.

Few accounts of Monday night's event even mentioned the curious fact that the White House had picked its speakers in advance. We hope that omission wasn't out of fear of being left off the list the next time.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Excited with capital E! - White House social secretary is stylish, focused

White House social secretary is stylish, focused. By By Lola Ogunnaike, CNN Entertainment Correspondent
CNN, Feb 08, 2009

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Every Sunday after an interminable 90 minutes at our family church in Washington, my parents would drive the family (me, baby brother and sis) past the White House as we headed back to our modest home in the suburbs of northern Virginia.

In my younger years, it was the perfect panacea after a morning spent praying and singing hymns about lambs and lepers.

As I grew older and more cynical, I wanted little to do with the White House jaunts. I longed for something a little edgier.

"Can we please drive through Georgetown?" I'd ask, with attitude to spare.

Checking out boutiques like Commander Salamander and Up Against the Wall, with their baggy jeans and Doc Martens boots, had become my idea of a fun-filled Sunday afternoon.

Flash forward more than a decade, and I'm actually making my way into the White House. And to my utter surprise I'm actually excited - excited with a capital E.

By now I've worked as a reporter at the New York Daily News and The New York Times, written for every publication from Rolling Stone to Elle magazine, attended every major event in Manhattan.

None of that was a match for the armed guards, the meticulously manicured grounds, and the 55,000 square feet of space that greeted me as I walked into the White House.

I was there to meet with Desirée Rogers, the White House's first African-American social secretary. As she strode into the room for our interview, I couldn't help but notice her impeccable style and her youthful face. Not a wrinkle on her 49-year-old face. And I was this close.

In articles she has been variously described as no-nonsense and focused. All true. This was her first television interview. Some answers sounded scripted. Others sounded like they could have casually been served over crust-free sandwiches and ice tea.

We talked about the family dog (it will arrive in the spring, she said) and her first days at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ("I used to get lost a lot," she said, smiling).

She wants to make the White House accessible to all Americans. Why shouldn't Jane the waitress have a chance to mix it up with Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy?

After nearly an hour, Rogers and I parted ways. She already has 14 events under her designer belt and she is in the throes of planning dozens more. I left her in her East Wing office to fret over seating charts and stemware.

I asked my colleagues Ethel Bass and Daria Shelton to capture as many magical moments as their digital cameras would hold. For me, the White House will never look the same.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Commentary on US News and World Report on Vouchers

US News and World Report Gets it Wrong, by Andrew J. Coulson
Cato at Liberty, Feb 02, 2009

US News and World Report contributing editor Bonnie Erbe writes that “school vouchers… have already drained federal tax coffers of hundreds of millions of dollars.” With all due respect, this is not true.

There is only one federal school voucher program, in Washington, DC. That program is serving fewer than 2,000 children with an average voucher amount below $6,000, for an annual price tag under $12 million. It is in its fifth year of operation. Perhaps Ms. Erbe can explain to her readers how 5 * $12 million can be made to exceed $100 million?

Of course, even if the value of the vouchers to date did exceed $100 million, that wouldn’t mean it had “drained federal coffers” as Erbe claims. That’s because, as I wrote in the Washington Post and on this website, DC’s public schools spent $24,600 per pupil in 2007-08 — more than four times the average voucher cost. Much of the DC school system’s budget comes from the federal government, and the DC voucher program is saving taxpayers a great deal of money for every child it serves in place of the exorbitant district schools.

Ms. Erbe’s misrepresentation of the cost of federal vouchers calls into question the reliability of the US News and World Report. A correction is in order.

Friday, January 30, 2009

Does The Ledbetter Law Benefit Workers, Or Lawyers?

Does The Ledbetter Law Benefit Workers, Or Lawyers? By Stuart Taylor Jr.
Democrats and the media have distorted the facts underlying the new equal-pay law.
National Journal, Saturday, Jan. 31, 2009

This has been a good week, and may be a good year, for lawyers, civil-rights groups and others who think that America needs many more lawsuits to combat what they portray as pervasive job discrimination against women, minorities, the elderly, and the disabled.

Things are not going so well for those of us who fear that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which President Obama co-sponsored as a senator and signed on Thursday, and other job discrimination bills in the congressional pipeline may be bad for most workers and may benefit mainly lawyers.

These measures seem likely to make it harder than ever for employers to defend themselves against bogus (as well as valid) discrimination claims, effectively adding to the cost of each new hire.

This would be justified if job discrimination were indeed pervasive. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Study after study has, for example, cast grave doubt on what appears to be the myth that sex discrimination in the workplace remains rampant more than 40 years after Congress adopted one law broadly banning job discrimination and another requiring equal pay for women and men doing equal work.

Congressional Democrats, liberal groups, and the media have thoroughly distorted the facts underlying the Ledbetter law to advance their agenda of opening the door wide to all manner of job-discrimination lawsuits.

The new law will virtually wipe out the 300-day time limit (180 days in Alabama and some other states) during which employees can file claims of discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Disgruntled employees will now be free to wait many years before hauling employers into court for supposedly discriminatory raises, promotions, or any other actions affecting pay.

The longer the wait, the more difficult it will be for the employer to contest an employee's one-sided and perhaps false account of the case, because key witnesses may have retired or died and records such as performance evaluations may have been discarded.

Indeed, some of the Ledbetter law's vague language could be construed as opening the doors for people to sue a company even years after retiring, on the theory that each new pension check is too small because of some claim of discrimination by some long-since-departed (or dead) supervisor.

This law represents an overreaction to a May 2007 Supreme Court decision, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., that provoked an explosion of ill-informed media outrage and propelled the losing party, retired Goodyear employee Lilly Ledbetter of Alabama, to a speaking role at last year's Democratic National Convention.

The 5-4 decision reasonably (if debatably) held that the 180-day time limit for Ledbetter to file her Title VII claim had started running with the most recent act of intentional discrimination that affected her pay in the ensuing years. Ledbetter had argued -- and the new law now provides -- that the 180-day clock should restart with each new paycheck.

For this, the conservative majority was widely reviled as having denied any remedy to Ledbetter, because employees often don't know what their co-workers are paid and thus might not learn that they are victims until more than 180 (or 300) days after the supposed discrimination occurred.

But some critical facts -- ignored by the media and Congress -- belie their portrayal of the case, as detailed in my June 9, 2007, column.

First, Ledbetter waited more than five years after learning that she was paid substantially less than most male co-workers to file her Title VII claim for back pay, compensatory, and punitive damages. Second, by that time a key supervisor -- whom she belatedly accused of holding down her pay raises after she rejected his sexual advances -- had died. Third, Ledbetter chose not to pursue a claim under the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which has a much longer time limit (three years) than Title VII but does not (yet) provide for big-bucks damage awards.

Fourth, her years of poor performance evaluations, plus repeated layoffs that affected her eligibility for raises, convinced a federal magistrate judge (although not the jury) that her relatively low pay did not prove sex discrimination. Maybe Ledbetter was a victim of discrimination, as the jury found. Maybe not. The evidence is too stale to allow for a confident conclusion -- which is one reason the justices ruled against her.

That said, it would have been reasonable for Congress to amend Title VII by specifying (as some lower courts have held) that the clock does not start running until the employee is or should be aware that she is earning less than co-workers.

Instead, Congress chose to shift the balance dramatically against employers by effectively eliminating time limits for filing all manner of discrimination claims that have some impact on pay.

Another bill that may reach President Obama is the House-passed Paycheck Fairness Act. Its confusingly worded amendments to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 seem designed -- or at least likely -- to force pay raises for women who have never been victims of anything that most people would call discrimination.

The bill would, for example, expose an employer to liability for paying a woman less than a man in a similar job unless the employer can convince a jury that the differential is "job related" and "consistent with business necessity" -- and also that no "alternative employment practice exists that would serve the same business purpose."

What's that parade of nebulosities supposed to mean? I think it would invite judges and juries to go beyond providing remedies for real discrimination and to play Robin Hood by second-guessing justifiable pay disparities. It would force some employers who are entirely innocent of sex discrimination to settle unwarranted lawsuits.

An employer that has long paid higher salaries to employees with more experience or better scores on written tests of their job-related skills might be hit for a big damage award for failing instead to provide special training for inexperienced women or to use a different test.

A very big damage award, perhaps: The Paycheck Fairness Act would allow unlimited awards of both compensatory and (in cases of "reckless indifference") punitive damages. Other proposals likely to emerge during this Congress would eliminate the current caps on damages in Title VII lawsuits as well.

Worse, the Paycheck Fairness Act would allow lawyers to include masses of women who have little or no interest in suing in class-action lawsuits, excepting only those who go to the trouble of "opting out." This is a formula for lawyer-generated lawsuits to extort millions of dollars from companies without proving that they ever intentionally discriminated against anyone.

One of the myths underlying this bill is that, as then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York said on January 8: "It is disgraceful that... women in this country still earn only 78 cents on the dollar" earned by men.

No, it's not disgraceful. Nor is it true that "in many instances, the pay disparities can only be due to continued intentional discrimination or the lingering effects of past discrimination," as stated in the findings attached to the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Labor Department data and academic studies show that much of the male-female pay differential is explained by such factors as disproportionate child-rearing and caregiving responsibilities.These cut into women's working hours and motivate many to sacrifice higher pay for shorter hours and the flexibility to take career breaks.

The data also demonstrate that women who work 40 hours a week make 88 percent as much as men who work 40 hours. Economics professor June O'Neill of Baruch College reported in a 2003 article that the female-to-male wage ratio rises to 95 percent when other data -- on child-related factors, demographics, academic majors, work experience, and occupational characteristics -- are also taken into account. The "gender gap can be explained to a large extent by nondiscriminatory factors," O'Neill concluded.

"Men and women generally have equal pay for equal work now -- if they have the same jobs, responsibilities, and skills," wrote Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the conservative free-market Hudson Institute. She added, in a January 21 commentary published by Reuters, that the 5.9 percent unemployment rate for adult women is lower than the 7.2 percent for adult men.

This is not to suggest that sex discrimination is no longer a serious problem. I worry that my two daughters may run into the barriers that still lurk in some unknown percentage of workplaces. But I worry more that they and their peers will have a harder and harder time finding jobs in the first place if the government burdens employers with lawsuits that make it more and more expensive to bring in new hires.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

On WaPo's position on giving DC a regular seat in the House of Representatives

Pass the Bill and Pass the Buck, by Matthew J. Franck
Bench Memos/NRO, Jan 28, 2009

The editors of the Washington Post are at it again today, impatient to pass a bill to give the District of Columbia a regular seat in the House of Representatives—without senators and without statehood. Continuing its practice of misleadingly calling this a "voting rights" bill, when D.C. residents currently have all the voting rights to which the Constitution entitles them, the Post thinks all debate on this matter should come to an end. Referring to a hearing yesterday before a House Judiciary subcommittee, the editors write:

Much of yesterday's discussion came down to the now familiar back-and-forth over whether the measure is constitutional. There are valid legal arguments for and against, with noted scholars on both sides, but the question is best left to the courts to decide. The use of such concerns to block the bill is a ruse by those who lack the political will to enfranchise D.C. residents.

It's nice for the Post to concede there are "valid" constitutional arguments on both sides. But I think they mean "plausible," since in a world where the Constitution means what it says, only one side can have the "valid" argument—i.e., the correct one. Having examined this matter as closely as anyone I know, I can say that in 30 years of studying the Constitution I've never come across a real (non-hypothetical) constitutional question that is easier than this one. The arguments on the other side, with all due respect to those who make them, are not only invalid but hardly even rise to the level of "plausible," requiring the tortuous misinterpretation of one clause in the text of the Constitution and the suppression of several others. For the short course, go to this recent post of mine, and follow the links for more elucidation.

But the Post, in its anxiety to remedy what it calls an "intolerable injustice," commits an injustice of its own in calling opposition on constitutional grounds a "ruse" by people who are somehow hostile or indifferent to "enfranchis[ing] D.C. residents." The constitutional grounds for a "no" vote on this bill are so compelling that the Post has long since ceased attempting to respond to them, and resorts only to name-calling and temper tantrums. Those grounds are so compelling that members of Congress who vote "no," as they should, can sleep the sleep of the just, knowing they have kept their oath to the Constitution. They don't need to be slandered by the capital's dominant newspaper as heartless bigots where D.C. is concerned.

The Post's editors, by contrast, have enough doubt about their position to recommend that the constitutional issue be "left to the courts to decide"—as if it were a) difficult, b) easy to hand off to the courts in a fashion that shapes it into a question courts can address, and c) appropriate for judicial rather than legislative resolution even if that were done. It is none of the above.
The Post writes also that "[n]o one at yesterday's hearing—even those who vehemently oppose the bill—could argue it's okay for the hundreds of thousands of Americans living in the nation's capital to be taxed, sent to war and governed without any real say in what their government does." I confess I don't get that exercised about the alleged injustice. But if that really concerned the editors, don't you think they'd want D.C. residents to have full representation in Congress—with senators too? Maybe those Americans could, you know, live in a state, which would automatically take care of the problem?

D.C. doesn't need or deserve statehood on its own. The best solution for D.C. residents to get "voting rights" in Congress is for the residential parts of the District to be "retroceded" to Maryland. This is how residents of Alexandria and Arlington, Virginia got to vote for congressmen again.

Majority leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland was a witness at yesterday's hearing and was in high dudgeon about the poor "disenfranchised" residents of D.C. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that he just doesn't want them back as fellow citizens of Maryland.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Chernobyl, Three Miles Island and thyroid cancer

Nuke Those Fears! By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
Greens dismiss nuclear energy based on little more than greatly exaggerated depictions of the supposed dangers and difficulties of its use.
American Council on Science and Health, Jan 27, 2009

Excerpts:

The environmental mantra these days has two main components -- clean energy and green (sustainable) energy -- anything but oil and coal. Proponents strongly encourage the development of solar and wind energy, neither of which is ready yet for widespread commercial use. But they ignore or downplay the use of a well understood and already commercialized technology -- nuclear energy -- based on little more than greatly exaggerated depictions of the supposed dangers and difficulties of its use.

One fear that has been widely promoted is that of large-scale accidents in nuclear power plants. Anti-nuclear activists point to two examples of that -- the explosion at the Russian Chernobyl reactor in 1986, and the partial meltdown of the fuel rods at the Three Mile Island reactor in 1979.

The Chernobyl explosion was due to errors made by the operators during a test and a lack of adequate safety features and procedures that could have prevented such errors. It will surprise many that, with the exception of workers who were on the scene and received massive acute doses of radiation, there has been no evidence of increased radiation-caused mortality. In contrast to the Chernobyl plant, modern nuclear facilities have redundant safety features to prevent such errors.

Although it has also been used as an example of a large-scale accident, there was actually little release of radioactivity from the Three Mile Island reactor -- even though about half of the fuel melted. The level of radioactivity received by the surrounding area was not significantly greater than that normally supplied by natural background sources. In other words, the containment precautions were effective. Of course, the anti-nuclear fanatics' propaganda pays no attention to these simple facts.

Another fear that has been widely promoted is that release of radioactivity from a nuclear plant -- specifically the radioactive iodine, I131 -- would cause thyroid cancer in exposed children. This fear actually has some biological basis in that the thyroid gland avidly takes up iodine. It can be prevented from absorbing the radioactive iodine, however, by giving a large dose of non-radioactive iodine. An even simpler preventive measure: avoid drinking milk for a week or two after such an (unlikely) event. Of course prevention of I131 release is a much better option.

It is true that a year after the Chernobyl accident screening studies revealed an increased occurrence of thyroid cancer in exposed children. However, many scientists have questioned whether this was really due to the Chernobyl-related exposure, since thyroid cancer typically has a latency period of thirty years. Further, it is important to note that prior to the explosion, there was very little screening of children in the Chernobyl area -- but around 90% were screened afterwards. This fact alone very likely contributed to the increased incidence observed. In addition, the incidence of thyroid cancer was actually lower in the highly contaminated region than in the general Russian population.

[...]

Dr. Ruth Kava is Director of Nutrition at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org, HealthFactsAndFears.com).

Monday, January 26, 2009

IER on Oil Speculation

60 Minutes Spectacle on Speculators
Institute for Energy Research, Jan 26, 2009

Excerpts:

The January 11 edition of 60 Minutes featured a segment on oil speculation. Correspondent Steve Kroft interviewed hedge fund manager Michael Masters and others who blamed the run-up in oil prices on hedge funds and other investors. Unfortunately, Kroft failed to interview a single person who explained the benefits of hedging and even speculation on oil contracts. The 60 Minutes takeaway message—that government should increase regulation of commodities futures markets—could actually increase volatility in the oil market and hurt consumers.

[...]

The Benefits of Futures Markets

As we explained in an IER study issued last summer, the commodities futures markets perform a vital function by allowing parties to “lock in” a price of oil months or even years in advance. By removing their exposure to huge price swings, both oil producers and major consumers (such as refiners and airlines) can more confidently plan their future operations.

For example, the owner of an oil field might be willing to sink new wells if he expects oil prices to average at least $50 per barrel in 2010, while an airline might expand its service area to include a new city, but only if it can buy oil at less than $75 per barrel throughout 2010. If there were no futures markets, the oil producer and airline might decide to play it safe, rather than investing millions in projects that could prove unprofitable if oil prices move the wrong way. But fortunately with sophisticated financial markets, the two enterprises can hedge away this risk with futures contracts. The oil producer can sell (“go short”) futures contracts, agreeing to sell his output in 2010 for, say, $65 per barrel, and the airline can take the other side of the contracts. Both parties benefit by locking in the price of $65, rather than being subject to the volatile spot price of oil.


Successful Speculation Reduces Price Volatility

Just about everyone agrees on the benefits of futures markets when the buyers and sellers are those who physically deal with oil by the nature of their business. But even non-traditional “speculative” buyers—who plan on unloading their futures contracts before taking physical delivery—perform a useful service if they accurately forecast price moves.

The motto of the speculator is to “buy low, sell high.” (Or a more sophisticated version is to “short-sell high, cover low.”) But these actions reduce the volatility in the market, because the speculator’s buying pulls up prices when they are too low, while the speculator’s selling pushes down prices when they are too high. This is exactly what consumers want speculators to do. When the price strays from where they “ought” to be, an astute speculator comes along and knocks it back into line.

Now it’s true that many investors piled into commodities through the summer of 2008, thinking they would move ever higher—and then they had the rug pulled out from them in August and September. But we don’t need the government to impose penalties on such faulty speculation (which pushed prices the wrong way), because these investors lost their shirts! The market itself provides the appropriate reward and punishment for wise or foolish forecasts.

People often forget that for every speculator who “went long” on oil futures contracts, there was another party who had to go short. Indeed, after the 60 Minutes piece aired, investment manager Kevin Duffy reminded us of his warnings to clients over the summer that oil was overpriced. His hedge fund, Bearing Fund, shorted futures contracts and made money from the accurate call.

Another wrinkle in the typical complaint against speculators is that the statistical evidence shows the causality ran in the opposite direction. According to the CFTC’s analysis of confidential data, it was far more typical for a price change in oil to precede a change in investors’ holdings, rather than vice versa. Yes, big investors were enlarging their clients’ exposure to commodities in 2007 and 2008, but this was often because these sectors were outperforming others. So it wasn’t that a bunch of pension funds rushed into oil, and pushed up its price. Rather, the rising price of oil led to more and more investment in oil futures, by fund managers who were trying to shield their clients from skyrocketing energy prices. The process was mutually reinforcing, but the line between hedging and speculation is blurred. After all, soaring oil prices were hurting stock performance. By diversifying holdings to include commodities, fund managers were trying to limit the volatility in their clients’ returns.

A final point is that the presence of large, institutional investors provides more liquidity to the futures markets, allowing the traditional hedgers (such as producers and airlines) to use these contracts more flexibly. New regulations that restricted the ability of “speculators” to enter these markets would ironically hurt even the non-speculators because of higher bid-ask spreads.


Was It Speculators, or Supply and Demand?

A recurring theme in the 60 Minutes segment was that the price swings in oil weren’t due to the fundamentals of supply and demand, and so they must have been the fault of the insidious speculators [...].

The true situation is far more nuanced. Part of what happened on Sept. 22 was that the dollar fell sharply against other currencies; recall that these weeks involved the bailout of AIG and the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Because oil is traded internationally but quoted in U.S. dollars, a fall in the dollar translates into a higher quoted price for oil, which is perfectly consistent with “fundamentals.”

Moreover, Sept. 22 was the last trading day before the expiration of the October futures contracts. There were investors who had shorted oil—they were pushing down its price, betting that it would fall further—and they needed to unwind their positions, because they didn’t actually have physical barrels to deliver to the holders of the contracts. According to oil economist James Williams, the Nymex contracts had a delivery point of Cushing, Oklahoma, but the inventories in Cushing were low because of the hurricane drawdown. The situation led to a “short squeeze” where short-sellers were trying to buy back their positions and were scrambling for the unusually tight supplies. Thus the 60 Minutes piece is right that speculation was involved that day, but it’s the opposite of their interpretation: The people pushing down oil prices hit a temporary snag, caused by a physical bottleneck, and so the price popped back up briefly.

Masters’ analysis of the EIA data is also misleading. It is true that world oil supply had been steadily increasing every quarter since the beginning of 2007, while world oil demand finally peaked in the fourth quarter of 2007 and then began falling in 2008. But what Masters neglects to mention is that world oil demand was always higher than supply, up until April 2008, as the EIA data (XLS spreadsheet) show.

The market price of oil during this period did exactly what consumers would want. Starting in 2006, the world began consuming more barrels of oil per day than producers could deliver to market. The deficit was covered by drawing down on previously accumulated stockpiles. In this environment of a supply crunch, the market price needed to rise rapidly in order to call forth greater supply and curtail demand.

Even as late as the first quarter of 2008, on average there was more than a million barrel a day deficit, where world oil demand exceeded supply. Of course the “fundamentals” would drive higher prices in this environment. And then, after years of rising oil prices in this deficit environment, the situation finally reversed in April 2008. From that point on, world oil output had finally caught up with and overtaken demand. A few months later, the price of oil crashed back down. The presence of large investors definitely influenced the movement of prices, but ultimately the explanation based on supply and demand is accurate.

Even the sudden collapse of oil prices may be partially or completely attributable to “real” forces in the economy. The economic outlook changed considerably in the late summer of 2008, meaning that oil consumption will not grow nearly as quickly over the next few years as forecasters previously believed. The dollar has also strengthened tremendously because of the “flight to safety” by investors around the world. The rising dollar translates into lower oil prices, quoted in U.S. dollars.


Conclusion

Institutional investors rushed into the commodities futures markets as oil prices steadily rose from the fall of 2007 through the summer of 2008. This correlation led many analysts to conclude that the hedge funds were causing the prices to rise. But a more careful analysis shows that the situation was more nuanced, with price rises (fueled by legitimate, fundamental supply and demand) leading rational investors to diversify their holdings by gaining exposure to the energy sector.

In any event, it is wrong to assume that giving government bureaucrats more power will somehow make financial markets more transparent or efficient. Masters and the folks at 60 Minutes should read up on how the SEC ignored letters about Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme that a suspicious analyst in the private sector began sending them back in 1999. In the private sector, speculators who make bad forecasts lose money, big time. In contrast, the SEC will probably see its budget increased even though it ignored a reputed $50 billion swindle for 9 years.

Many investors overshot the rise in oil prices, and the market punished them accordingly. But record oil prices really were driven by the fundamentals of supply and demand. Futures markets, and large institutional investors who use them, provide a valuable service to consumers by actually reducing volatility in the long run. It’s too bad that 60 Minutes seems to have overshot in their finger-pointing, but there won’t be any market correction for them.