MEGAN MCARDLE: HEALTH “REFORM” IS DEAD. Like Megan, I think they’ll eventually pass something that they’ll call health care reform, but it won’t be much.
Archive for 2009
December 15, 2009
MICKEY KAUS: “Only 33% of *U.S. born* (second-generation) Latino immigrant kids identify themselves first by the term ‘American.’ Most prefer either their country of origin (41%) or the term ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic.’ This is supposed to prove Lou Dobbs wrong?”
In previous waves of immigration, we got assimilation because teachers, politicians, media, etc. believed in it, and thought America as it was an indisputably good thing, and thus acted accordingly. This time, they feel differently, and act differently, and so we get different results.
CLIMATEGATE: IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES, Clive Crook writes: “It is not enough for climate scientists and environment ministers to go to Copenhagen and tell each other how right they are. They also need to convince the public. National politics – the democratic process – is awfully inconvenient sometimes, but cannot be waved away. . . . Aiming to smear the doubters and shut them up is just bad science, and from a public-relations point of view is wholly counter-productive. . . . For the sake of their own credibility, scientists should maintain a cautious distance from politics, and those who take up politics should not expect the deference to disinterested scholars they would otherwise deserve.”
ANNE APPLEBAUM: The Apocalypse Is Not Upon Us: The climate change movement gets nowhere by claiming it is. “The assumption behind this calculation is profoundly negative: Human beings are nothing more than machines for the production of carbon dioxide. And if we take that assumption seriously, a whole lot of other things look different, too. Certainly weapons of mass destruction must be reconsidered, along with the flu virus: By reducing the population, they might also reduce emissions as well. Perhaps they should be encouraged?” Don’t give ’em ideas.
RON BAILEY reports from Copenhagen. “I spent the day waiting with thousands of others in subfreezing cold to try to get into the proper building to obtain our credentials for the official United Nations Climate Change Conference. I clocked about 5 hours in line while my housemate, in town representing a Colorado NGO, waited 10.5 hours and was also turned away. The conference chaos makes one wonder how anyone expects the U.N. to run the world’s climate if it can’t manage a queue?”
LONDON TIMES: Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don’t add up.
There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.
The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.
Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.
In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore. . . . Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
Busted. It won’t be the last time.
UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!
CLIMATEGATE: Jim Lindgren: Michael Mann Should Not Be Investigated By Penn State. “But if I were Professor Mann’s dean at Penn State, I would try to determine whether he has fully shared his data, metadata, and computer code. . . . If Mann is still withholding the data and code necessary for replication, I’d ask him to replicate his most important or most controversial recent work (certainly not everything) and to release the data and code so that others might do so. If Mann couldn’t replicate his own work, I would ask him to announce that fact to the scientific community, so that serious scientists would know whether his work is replicable.” Plus, lessons from the Bellesiles scandal.
PROFESSOR KENNETH ANDERSON ON Just War Theory and Obama’s Nobel Prize speech.
GOING AFTER THE “FAT CATS” IN PUBLIC, staging a “lovefest” in private. “Maybe Obama’s softened tone was recognition of Wall Street’s election help. Campaign-finance filings show that firms like Goldman — now getting ready to dish out $20 billion in bonuses after nearly imploding last year — favored Obama over John McCain by a fairly wide margin. Nearly all the major Wall Street CEOs — including Dimon, Blankfein and Mack — have told people that they voted for Obama.”
UPDATE: U.S. News: What Obama Tells His Banker Pals.
MEGAN MCARDLE: What is Claire McCaskill Saying, Exactly?
I think she’s nervous about all the protests back home.
UPDATE: Why The Rush? Because the more people know, the more they’re against it.
STORE OPERATOR just joking about jihad.
MARK HEMINGWAY: Is The Senate Healthcare Bill Imploding?
JAMES TARANTO: “Whose job was it to make ObamaCare popular? The politicians who backed ObamaCare, of course. If 61% of Americans oppose the Senate bill, it is because the senators who support it have failed to make their case. It’s hard to see how someone who thinks they had a good case to make can excuse this failure, much less present it as an achievement of near-courage.”
December 14, 2009
MARKDOWNS ON cellphones, smartphones, and service.
CYBERSECURITY CZAR POSITION a waste of time? “It’s a position that’s going to report up to the economic council and the security council. It won’t have any statutory authority. . . . It’s not a winning position. I’m not at all surprised by the fact that it’s empty. That position is a blame-taking position.”
GOVERNMENT: D.C. hands out $15M in bonuses despite recession, budget gaps. “The bonuses were ladled out even as the city was facing nine-figure budget shortfalls and officials — including Rhee — were firing employees by the busload, claiming they could no longer afford them.” It’s only a scandal if business does it.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST at the IPCC? “Seek and ye will find. Our friendly part-time chairman of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, is quite a remarkable man. As well as his onerous post with the UN’s IPCC, it seems he has a considerable number of other interests. . . . Intriguingly, for such an upstanding public servant though, he is also a strategic advisor to the private equity investment firm Pegasus Capital Advisors LP, which he became in February of this year. However, this is by no means Dr Pachauri’s only foray into the world of finance. In December 2007, be became a member of the Senior Advisory Board of Siderian ventures based in San Francisco. This is a venture capital business owned by the Dutch multinational business incubator and operator in sustainable technology, Tendris Holding, itself part-owned by electronics giant Philips. It acquired a minority interest in January 2009 in order to ‘explore new business opportunities in the area of sustainability.’ As a member of the Senior Advisory Board of Siderian, Dr Pachauri is expected to provide the Fund and its portfolio companies ‘with access, standing and industry exposure at the highest level.'”
Access at the highest level, indeed.
“INSURANCE COMPANIES WIN:” Kos wants to kill the healthcare bill.
ON PJTV, it’s Stephen Green’s Hair Of The Dog.
A TEA PARTY down under? “In a way — it’s like watching the Tea Party movement swallow the GOP from the inside, and the polls are going up rather than down as a result. If this is a collapse, then parties should collapse more often.”
OBAMA WANTS BANKS TO LOAN MORE MONEY TO SMALL BUSINESS. I’d be willing to bet, though, that part of the problem is that small business isn’t keen to borrow or expand right now — in large part for fear of what Obama’s tax-and-health-care-and-carbon-tax policies will do to their future prospects.
ACTIVISTS TO PROTEST OBAMACARE outside Claire McCaskill’s office tomorrow.