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

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Another Semi-Defense of, Ahem, Tim Geithner

Another Semi-Defense of, Ahem, Tim Geithner. By Noam Scheiber
The New Republic,

It is, to massively understate the point, not exactly popular to defend Tim Geithner these days. And I certainly have concerns about what he's up to, and the direction the financial rescue is headed. But I think it's worth making at least one broad point on the guy's behalf. (God knows he could use it. When was the last time SNL not only parodied a Treasury secretary, but did it in a sketch that was funny?)

At the risk of sounding trite, I'd just say it's pretty easy for me and other commentators to insist that some form of nationalization is the only possible solution to the bank crisis. I happen to honestly think it is, as do many others. But it costs us nothing to say. We wouldn't have to deal with the logistical, political, and managerial nightmare of pulling it off, during which time thousands upon thousands of things could go wrong. And if some subset of those things did go wrong, we wouldn't be in charge of wading through the wreckage. If you were, your calculus would almost certainly be different from the guy who tosses off a few sentences and hits "publish" on his blog--sometimes before taking a shower in the morning. (That would be, uh, me.)

I couldn't help thinking this when I read Alan Blinder's column in Saturday's Times. Blinder ticked off some of the potential hitches with nationalization, including these:

First and foremost, the Swedish government had to deal with only a handful of banks; we have more than 8,300. Numbers matter, because deciding where to draw the nationalization line isn’t easy. Presumably, no one wants to nationalize all the banks, thousands of which are healthy. But where do you stop, once you start?

Suppose we nationalized four banks. Bank Five would then find itself at a severe disadvantage in competing for funds with the government-backed quartet. Forced to pay higher interest rates to attract depositors and other creditors, its profitability would suffer. Soon, Bank Five might start looking like a candidate for nationalization, too — followed by Banks Six, Seven and so on. ...

As stock traders began to contemplate the nationalization of Banks Five, Six and Seven, their share prices would tank, and short-sellers might consign the companies to an early grave.

Now, I have some ideas about why these fears are overblown, and how you could defuse them. (Transparency on the bank's balance sheets would be a good place to start, so people knew which banks were bona fide nationalization candidates.) But, if you're the guy who has to make the call--and deal with the s**tstorm that erupts if those fears turn out to be right, are you really going to take the word of a handful of bloggers and columnists? Even the top academic economists in the world? Paul Krugman has some great points in response to Blinder. But, if I'm Geithner, and I'm staring at such enormous downside risks, even an outsider as sharp as Krugman isn't going to set my mind at ease.

Don't get me wrong. At some point Geithner's going to have to do something truly comprehensive. And if he doesn't, or that something fails, he will rightly be blamed. And the longer he puts it off, the more likely failure becomes (all things being equal).

Also, as I've said before, I'm really glad people like Krugman are out there keeping the administration honest in the meantime.

I'd only caution against assuming the people at Treasury must be idiots if they can't see what looks obvious to you and me. It's just not so simple.

--Noam Scheiber

Thursday, March 5, 2009

On Ledbetter and the media

Distorting the News, to Obama’s Advantage, by Hans Bader
Open Market/CEI, March 04, 2009 @ 3:29 pm

Distorted press coverage of a Supreme Court decision gave a big boost to the Obama campaign, which made the decision a major campaign issue by bashing and distorting it. The New York Times has since refused to correct its erroneous coverage of that decision, refusing to even read relevant portions of the very decision on which it reported, and court documents in the case, which plainly contradict its coverage. The Obama Administration and Obama campaign also made easily verifiable false claims about the decision, about which the press seems to have no interest. As a journalism professor, and legal commentator Stuart Taylor, have noted, press coverage of the decision “stank“, and was simply “lousy.”

In Ledbetter v. Goodyear (2007), the Supreme Court held that a woman who had waited five years after learning of pay disparities to file an EEOC complaint, and decades after her pay was allegedly set lower than her male peers, could not later sue for discrimination under a civil-rights law known as Title VII, since that law has a 180-deadline. In its ruling, the Court held that plaintiffs generally must sue within 180 days after a discriminatory pay level is set, and that it is not enough that the plaintiff sued within 180 days after a subsequent paycheck or pension benefit affected by the discrimination, which could be many, many years later.

The court specifically left open, however, the possibility that a plaintiff could sue more than 180 days after the discriminatory pay decision if the plaintiff did not discover that the decision was discriminatory until much later. In footnote 10 of its decision, it wrote, “We have previously declined to address whether Title VII suits are amenable to a discovery rule. . .Because Ledbetter does not argue that such a rule would change the outcome in her case, we have no occasion to address this issue.”

Despite that fact, however, New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse falsely reported that the 180-day deadline “applies, according to the decision, even if the effects of the initial discriminatory act were not immediately apparent to the worker.” See Linda Greenhouse, “Justices Ruling Limits Suits on Pay Disparities,” New York Times, May 30, 2007.

Although the plaintiff, Lilly Ledbetter, had admitted in her deposition that she had been informed by 1992 of the pay disparity she later sued over, and had cited it herself to her boss by 1995, Greenhouse also falsely claimed that the Supreme Court rejected Ledbetter’s claim because “she learned of her fate” at the end of her career, “too late, according to the Supreme Court’s majority.”

Despite the fact that the Supreme Court had explicitly left open the possibility that Ledbetter could have sued if she hadn’t known about the discrimination against her, other New York Times reporters, relying on Greenhouse, stated just the contrary. For example, Adam Liptak stated that “Ms. Ledbetter lost her case because she had discovered the disparity between her pay and that of her male colleagues too late.” See Liptak, “Justices Hear Bias Case on Maternity, Pensions, and Timing,” New York Times, Dec. 11, 2008, at pg. B7. And Sheryl Gay Stolberg similarly stated that Ledbetter discovered only “when she was nearing retirement that her male colleagues were earning much more than she was.” See Stolberg, “Obama Signs Equal-Pay Legislation,” New York Times, January 29, 2009.

Other papers, such as the Los Angeles Times, made more extreme, and obviously false, claims about the decision. The Los Angeles Times falsely claimed that under the Ledbetter ruling, “any employer that could hide discrimination for six months could get away with it.” And the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette erroneously stated that Lilly Ledbetter was not allowed to sue more than 180 days after her first unequal paycheck even though “she did not know she was being discriminated against until near the end of her career when she sued.” And the Washington Post incorrectly claimed that the decision “limited Ledbetter’s ability to sue after she discovered that Goodyear had been paying higher salaries to her male counterparts for nearly 20 years.” See Editorial, “The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act Is Back,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 10, 2009; Editorial, “Lilly’s Cause: Obama Can Correct An Injustice of the Bush Years,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jan. 12, 2009; Richard Leiby, “A Signature with the First Lady’s Hand on It,” Washington Post, Jan. 30, 2009, at C1.

But as even the liberal employment lawyer David Copus, who brought landmark pay discrimination lawsuits for the EEOC, has noted, Ledbetter suspected for years that she was discriminated against, and the Supreme Court left intact employees’ ability to sue when employer deception leaves employees unaware of discrimination against them. See Davis A. Copus, “Pay Discrimination Claims After Ledbetter,” Defense Counsel Journal, Volume 75, page 300 (Oct. 1, 2008).

As Copus notes, “Ledbetter admitted at her deposition that ‘different people that [she] worked for along the way had always told [her] that [her] pay was extremely low.’ She recalled that her manager told her in 1992 that her pay was lower than that of other Area Managers, and that by 1994 or 1995, she had learned the amount of the difference. In 1995, Ledbetter told her supervisor that she ‘needed to earn an increase in pay’ because she ‘wanted to get in line with where [her] peers were, because . . . at that time [she] knew definitely that they were all making a thousand [dollars] at least more per month.’” Yet she waited to sue until shortly before she retired, and after the supervisor she accused of discrimination died!

As legal commentator Stuart Taylor observed in the National Journal, “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.” See Stuart Taylor, “Does the Ledbetter Law Benefit Workers, or Lawyers? Democrats and the Media Have Distorted the Facts Underlying the New Equal Pay Law,” National Journal, Jan. 31, 2009.

Given Ledbetter’s tardiness and longstanding knowledge that she might have been discriminated against, her lawyer didn’t even claim that she could take advantage of the Supreme Court’s exceptions to the deadlines for workers whose employers conceal evidence of discrimination, leaving them unaware of discrimination, such as “equitable tolling” and “estoppel.” See Zipes v. Trans World Airlines, 455 U.S. 385, 393 (1982) (”filing a timely charge of discrimination with the EEOC is . . . a requirement that, like a statute of limitations, is subject to waiver, estoppel, and equitable tolling”).

When I, a lawyer with expertise in discrimination claims, sent an email to the New York Times noting its inaccurate reporting, and citing its conflict with Ledbetter’s deposition, and the writings by legal commentators like David Copus and Stuart Taylor, I received an email in response from senior editor Greg Brock, claiming that the New York Times’ reporting couldn’t possibly be wrong. Why? Because so many other newspapers had made the same claims the New York Times did, and because its reporting was consistent with the self-serving claims that the plaintiff Ledbetter later made (with no evidence whatsoever) — never mind that those claims were inconsistent with plaintiff Ledbetter’s own admissions in her deposition, and inconsistent with what the Supreme Court said in its decision! Apparently, the pervasiveness of a media error makes it unquestionable.

In his January 30 email, Mr. Brock wrote:

“I do not know where Mr. Taylor came by his information. But if you do your research, you will see that dozens of news organizations have consistently reported the following background on the Ledbetter case:

Lilly Ledbetter worked for Goodyear for 19 years before accepting an early retirement offer in 1998. Shortly before she left Goodyear, Ledbetter received an anonymous memo revealing that the other shift supervisors with the same title and the job responsibilities she had, were paid between 14-30% more than she was earning. The decision to pay Ledbetter less than her male co-worker had been made years earlier by a supervisor who did not believe women belonged at Goodyear, and certainly not working as supervisors. Until Ledbetter got this memo, she did not know she had been shortchanged all those years. Ledbetter sued, and in the course of the lawsuit, Goodyear’s records confirmed the anonymous tip — the sole woman supervisor was paid far less than the men in the same positions.

The following statement was also presented by Ms. Ledbetter in testimony before Congress, when she explained:

‘I only started to get some hard evidence of what men were making when someone anonymously left a piece of paper in my mailbox at work, showing what I got paid and what three other male managers were getting paid. I thought about just moving on, but in the end, I could not let Goodyear get away with their discrimination. So I filed another complaint with the EEOC in 1998. After I filed my EEOC complaint and then filed a lawsuit, I was finally able to get the whole picture on my pay compared to the men’s. It turned out that I ended up getting paid what I did because of the accumulated effect of pay raise decisions over the years.’
She retired in 1998. So this shows that she did indeed learn the story not long before her retirement.”


This is not the only error made by the Times. As the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto has pointed out, the Times falsely suggested, contrary to all evidence, that the Ledbetter decision was the result of a supposedly pro-plaintiff female justice — Sandra Day O’Connor — being replaced by a supposedly pro-defendant male justice — Samuel Alito. Linda Greenhouse, the Times’ Supreme Court reporter, claimed that the 5-to-4 decision “showed the impact of Justice Alito’s presence on the court. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, whom he succeeded, would almost certainly have voted the other way, bringing the opposite outcome.”

In reality, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was at least as tough in enforcing deadlines for suing against discrimination plaintiffs as the male justice who replaced her, Samuel Alito. She had dissented against the Supreme Court’s earlier generous interpretation of the statutory deadline for sexual and racial harassment plaintiffs in the case of National Railroad Passenger Corporation v. Morgan, 536 U.S. 101 (2002), arguing that the deadline as interpreted by Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion was too generous to plaintiffs.

By contrast, on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, then-judge Alito, prior to his elevation to the Supreme Court, had argued for a more generous interpretation of the deadline for suing under another discrimination law, 42 USC 1981, arguing it should be expanded to four years (see Zubi v. AT&T, 219 F.3d 220 (3d Cir. 2001)) — a position that conflicted with some federal court rulings, but was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court in Jones v. R.R. Donnelley & Sons, 541 U.S. 369 (2004).

In signing his first bill into law — a bill to override the Supreme Court’s Ledbetter decision — Obama didn’t let facts get in the way of a good story, or milking a political wedge issue. He falsely claimed that Lilly Ledbetter, whose pay discrimination claim was dismissed by the Supreme Court as untimely, worked at Goodyear “for nearly two decades before discovering that for years, she was paid less than her male colleagues for doing the very same work.” Actually, Ledbetter knew by 1992, if not earlier, that she was being paid less than the male employees she claimed should have been paid the same as her. Small wonder that the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear dismissed her claim as untimely.

Similarly, the White House falsely claimed that “The Court ruled that employees subject to pay discrimination like Lilly Ledbetter must file a claim within 180 days of the employer’s original decision to pay them less . . . even if the employee did not discover the discriminatory reduction in pay until much later (check out Justice Alito’s arguments in the Court’s opinion).”

This is misleading, and perhaps knowingly so, since the White House linked to the very court decision it distorts. First, the Court never said there was a rigid deadline that bars claims by employees who “did not discover” discrimination “until much later.” Ledbetter never argued that the deadline should be suspended based on her employer concealing discrimination against her, because she in fact knew for years about the pay disparity she later sued over. If she truly had been in the dark about the alleged discrimination, she could have sought to take advantage of exceptions to the deadline that suspend it, like waiver, estoppel, and equitable tolling, under the Supreme Court’s decision in Zipes v. Trans World Airlines, 451 U.S. 385, 398 (1982). But she never made that argument, because, as she testified in her deposition, she had been told many years earlier that she was being paid less than the men she later claimed ought to have been paid the same as her.

Nor did she argue that the outcome of her case would have been changed if the Supreme Court recognized an even broader extension to the deadline for employees who are unaware of the discrimination against them, the so-called discovery rule. As the Supreme Court specifically noted in footnote 10 of its opinion, “we have previously declined to address whether Title VII suits are amenable to a discovery rule. . . .Because Ledbetter does not argue that such a rule would change the outcome in her case, we have no occasion to address this issue.” In short, since Ledbetter had long known of the facts underlying her discrimination claim, relaxing the deadline for employees who “did not discover” the discrimination until much later would have done her no good.

But in the 2008 election campaign, Obama and state democratic parties falsely claimed that the Supreme Court had created a rigid 180-day deadline for bringing discrimination claims, regardless of whether the employer conceals evidence of discrimination. The 2008 campaign featured TV ads from Obama, and mass mailings by state Democratic Parties, falsely claiming that McCain backed wage discrimination against women, simply because he did not support a bill to override the Supreme Court’s Ledbetter decision. Amazingly, the McCain campaign did almost nothing to counter those attacks.

Press coverage suggesting that the Ledbetter decision created a rigid 180-day deadline for pay discrimination claims was also faulty because it ignored the fact that the 180-day deadline only applies to plaintiffs who choose to sue only under the law with the shortest deadline, Title VII. Pay discrimination claims can also be brought under the Equal Pay Act, which has a longer three-year deadline for most claims, and more generous accrual rules as well. And race discrimination claims can be brought under 42 USC 1981, which has a long four-year deadline.

The Supreme Court specifically noted that the plaintiff could have sued instead under the Equal Pay Act, observing that plaintiff “having abandoned her claim under the Equal Pay Act, asks us to deviate from our prior decisions in order to permit her to assert her claim under Title VII.” Plaintiff Ledbetter’s lawyer admitted to the court that he had goofed by failing to press her claim under that law.

In short, it wasn’t the Supreme Court that prevented Ledbetter from suing: it was her own incompetent lawyer, and her own tardiness in suing after she learned of the pay disparities she claimed were discriminatory.

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.