The American Spectator

Real Immigration Reform Requires Free Markets

Ross Kaminsky — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:15:00 -0400

Only in the United States Congress could a legislative provision entitled “Market-Based H-1B Visa Limits” actually mean that “the number of visas calculated under subparagraph (A) for any fiscal year shall not be less than 110,000 or more than 180,000.”

If you read even a few pages of the so-called Gang of Eight immigration bill trudging its way through Congress—a bill that contains many provisions as horrendous as that one—you can’t help but think of Otto von Bismarck’s famous sausage-making analogy and wonder “who the hell wrote this mess?” The answer, sadly but not surprisingly, is special interests, namely the Chamber of Commerce and big labor unions. Speaking on background for this article, an aide to a Senate Judiciary Committee member put it plainly: “Neither the Chamber nor the AFL-CIO is interested in a free market. The Chamber is interested in delivering for their big business cronies and labor is interested in protectionism. So they work out a secret deal together, and that’s how our legislation gets made.” It is a frightening shotgun marriage that embodies the old tale of two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. And guess who’s the lamb, my fellow citizen.

Much of the debate about the bill centers on legitimate questions of cost and border security along with illegitimate concerns such as unions’ desire to allow increased immigration only to the extent that they can capture more dues-paying members.

Some opponents of the current legislation yell “secure the border first!” (a not inappropriate suggestion that bill drafters claim to be working into the text) while some supporters, through crocodile tears, bemoan cruel racism in the dark hearts of those who have the temerity to think that borders matter at all. In a time of trillion-dollar deficits, hearken back to Milton Friedman’s warning that “It’s just obvious that you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”

And while cost and national security are indeed of critical importance, there is an even bigger and so far not well-answered question: Does the proposed bill actually improve our immigration policy? More specifically, does it abide by a set of fundamental economic principles that history has proven are necessary for the success of any piece of public policy that impacts the economy—which, its other implications aside, immigration certainly does?

In short, does the plan move us substantially toward a free-market solution?

Small “breakthroughs” notwithstanding, quotas, price fixing, price controls and other forms of central planning have tended, with the obvious and disastrous exception of President Nixon’s wage and price controls, to be the province of Democrats. Republicans on the other hand at least claim to support free markets. They decry the expanding bureaucratic state that gives us, just as one example, the ultimate price control: Obamacare’s IPAB, famously termed a “death panel” by Sarah Palin.

And yet the proposed “bipartisan” Gang of Eight legislation includes the creation of a Soviet-sounding “Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Research” that will spend millions of dollars each year “to determine the annual change to the numerical limitation for nonimmigrant aliens…to supplement the recruitment methods employers may use to attract such nonimmigrant aliens…to designate shortage occupations in zone 1 occupations, zone 2 occupations, and zone 3 occupations” and to generally micromanage what should be a contract freely made between any willing employer and willing employee.

Does anyone else feel like the Obamcare model of government control is being adapted, with little improvement, to immigration policy?

The legislation would be anti-capitalist enough if its quotas were sufficiently high to allow most of the likely demand for foreign labor by American employers. But this is a bill that limits visas for construction workers to 15,000 per year and those for “qualified immigrants seeking to enter the United States for the purpose of creating new businesses” to 10,000 per year. These are just two of the measure’s various “not to exceed” limitations, which fly in the face of economic liberty and historical commonsense.

To wit, when the demand for unskilled or semi-skilled workers exceeds government quotas, the laborers find a way to come here illegally. And when government prevents investors and high-skilled workers—who are presumably less likely to violate the law because they have more to lose—from putting their capital and talent to work here, they will simply create jobs elsewhere, and Americans will find a way to “offshore” at least some of the work they need done.

Quotas proposed by the Gang of Eight bill represent small fractions of the actual demand for labor across the American economy. If a key goal of immigration reform is to decrease the number of attempts by would-be workers to cross our borders illegally and instead to give a legal path to work here (separate from any question of a path to citizenship), this bill simply cannot succeed.

This is not just an economic issue; it is also a national security issue. The more demand there is for illegal passage across our border, the more illegal passageways will be created, leaving a border both more porous and more crowded. Thus, quotas so low as to be meaningless make it easier to for a terrorist to cross into the United States among the throngs who, under any rational policy, would be processed through an employment office rather than occasionally intercepted scurrying through a tunnel or over a wall.

With labor costs rising in large Asian nations that had previously supplied less expensive higher-skill workers, offshoring will become marginally less attractive. But that doesn’t mean the result will simply be more jobs for Americans in America. After all, the existence of higher-paid workers in other nations means more and richer customers in other nations. So the result is increasingly likely to include an American brain-drain, as our mindless, non-economic limitations on immigration into the U.S. cause rational, profitable emigration out of the U.S.

To be sure, both low-skill and high-skill immigrants who come to the United States can negatively impact the wages of individual Americans competing for the same jobs. Foes of immigration expansion trumpet these cases loudly. Despite a questionable Heritage Foundation report, however, the majority of studies on the impact of immigration on Americans who have above a high-school education show a distinctly positive effect for the nation as a whole. (See here, here, and here among many other examples.)

To use an economic term, increased immigration may not be a Pareto-optimal improvement, but it is an improvement nonetheless: The nation gains economically, but that does not mean there are no losers in the process.

And thus we get to the fundamental problem in the immigration debate—and in almost every other public policy debate in a nation whose central government does far too much for far too many: concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.

Imagine this situation: A defense manufacturer wants a government contract for a $300 million satellite for a mission that might be useful but is certainly not critical. That contract would earn the company $30 million in profit while costing every American a single dollar. It’s true that many Americans pay no taxes, so the actual distribution of $300 million cost will be steeply skewed. Nevertheless, how many Americans will spend time or money lobbying Congress to forego the satellite? Versus how many millions of dollars will the company spend lobbying in favor the contract?

Similarly, if the American economy would stand to gain tens of millions, or tens of billions of dollars from immigration reform, increasing jobs and opportunity across the nation, but thousands of individual workers would suffer declines in their incomes, which will be the louder, more aggressive voice?

The reality is that our immigration system is broken, that most politicians realize at least this much, and that Republicans feel the need to pass something in a desperate attempt to gain support among a rapidly growing Hispanic electorate (though it is unproven that a bill like the Gang of Eight’s would accomplish that goal).

Something must be done. But for those who believe that Republicans may just be adding to their long, dreary record of “compromise first, principles perhaps later,” one must wonder whether this legislation—proposed as much because it will make people think something good has been done as because of what it will actually do—is the right answer.

In the spirit of suggesting a solution rather than just complaining about a problem, a particular reform plan comes to mind: the Red Card Solution. It focuses on creating a guest-worker program, a move that, despite being opposed by the most aggressively anti-immigrant forces as well as by big labor, is the lynchpin to successfully restructuring our dysfunctional immigration system.

A key assumption of the Red Card Solution, as stated in a white paper (should it be a red paper?), is that “the vast majority of illegal workers in the U.S. are not here seeking citizenship, or even permanent resident status…The debates about ‘illegal immigration,’ and solutions proposing a ‘path to citizenship’ fuel deep-seated concerns about amnesty—and even voting rights—for people whose only qualification is a blatant defiance of the law. However, since this is not the objective of most illegal aliens, a program to provide legal non-citizen work permits for these people does not require a significant change in immigration laws.”

This assumption is difficult to prove. One recent, but small, survey suggested that nearly 90 percent of illegal immigrant Hispanics would apply for citizenship if they could. That said, it stands to reason that what most illegal aliens want is the ability to provide labor and earn a living without fear of jail and deportation. They would still want that if a path to citizenship were unavailable or very burdensome or expensive. We should move in that direction for our sake, not for theirs.

America does not have a moral responsibility to open its borders simply because others want to come here, and particularly not when immigrants might impose costs on taxpayers. However, we have a moral responsibility to Americans to implement an immigration system that serves our nation and not just special interests.

The only possible reforms that can meet this test are those based on free-market supply and demand forces and that leave as little decision-making as possible in the hands of bureaucrats, Congressmen, and rent-seeking lobbyists. The Red Card Solution aces the test, and for that reason alone is today the best immigration reform plan I am aware of.

It is hard to say whether the Gang of Eight bill is better than nothing. If this is the case, it is so primarily in a political sense rather than a policy sense. But when you have legislation drafted by K-Street bagmen and supported more for its compromise than its adherence to any economically sensible principles, Americans shouldn’t be surprised when they end up disappointed.

Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (Creative Commons 2.0).

Enough With the Bipartisanship

Matt Purple — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:11:00 -0400

In 1987, on the evening of her third general election victory as leader of the Conservative Party, the late and great Margaret Thatcher gave a speech before her constituents in the district of Finchley. It was mostly boilerplate stuff—thanking the voters, praising the poll watchers. But there was also something distinctly un-American going on: the address was constantly being interrupted by hecklers. Every time jeers broke out, Thatcher would smile, durable and unflappable, until quiet was restored.

This is how politics works in Britain, where it’s expected that the nation’s leader can handle an occasional boo or insult. The most familiar illustration of this is Prime Minister’s Questions, where the prime minister engages in a rapid-fire debate with the leader of the opposition while backbenchers hoot and holler. And this is tame compared to many other countries. In 2008, the South Korean parliament had 47 cases of “parliamentary disorder” a polite term for “brawl.”

But here in America, politics is a far more sterile affair. It’s expected that constituents will respect lawmakers, and it’s expected that lawmakers will work with other lawmakers to pass legislation. “Bipartisanship” and “reaching across the aisle” are hallowed terms. Ideologies are held suspect, disagreements are muted, and anger is considered bad form.

When Rep. Joe Wilson shouted, “You lie!” during a presidential speech in 2009, Washington’s elite spent weeks in high dudgeon. It was a uniquely American crisis. As one perplexed British commentator noted, “insulting Gordon Brown is practically an obligation.”

It was this regime of courtesies that produced the immigration bill that cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. After the presidential election, with Republicans reeling from low Hispanic support, the media was giddy with anticipation over a compromise on immigration. It mattered little that an immigration bill wasn’t needed, or that Latino voters don’t consider immigration a high priority. Bipartisanship was in the air.

So the usual motions began. The Senate formed a Gang of Eight (only in Congress are compromising cliques called “gangs”), while everyone speculated in hushed tones whether Sen. Marco Rubio, considered on-the-fence on immigration, would join the effort. A bill was hammered out. Amendments were added and subtracted, including one that would have protected same-sex couples under the immigration system. It was withdrawn, naturally, because lawmakers were worried “the coalition would fall apart,” according to Sen. Lindsey Graham.

These are nearly the same circumstances that led to the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, Congress’s failed attempt to control illegal immigration in 1986. The bill was a collaborative effort between Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and Democratic Rep. Romano Mazzoli. It was widely hailed as a bipartisan effort; consensus fetishist David Broder praised Simpson-Mazzoli as a “compromise among strong economic and political interests.” The law passed a Democrat House, a Republican Senate, and was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.

Twenty years later, Simpson-Mazzoli was widely regarded as a failure that had granted amnesty to illegal immigrants while doing nothing to control the border. Sen. Chuck Grassley, no panting partisan, admitted in 2007 that he’d been wrong to vote for the act. “I found out…if you reward illegality, you get more of it,” he said. Ditto Sen. Byron Dorgan: “I heard all the promises of the Simpson-Mazzoli Act. None of them were true, and three million people got amnesty.”

Immigration isn’t the only issue where niceties are mandated. In 2001, newly elected president George W. Bush decided he wanted to work with Democrats in Congress to do something about education. So backs were slapped and hands were shaken. Sen. Ted Kennedy was invited to the White House for a movie screening. The resulting No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was co-sponsored by Kennedy, and amounted to little more than a consolidation of federal education power. The one initiative that might have ameliorated the plight of inner-city students—school vouchers—was stripped out during negotiations.

Bush signed NCLB into law and everyone patted themselves on the backs. Today it’s regarded as one of the great policy flops of our time. Per the Washington Post: “A review of a decade of evidence demonstrates that NCLB has failed badly both in terms of its own goals and more broadly. It has neither significantly increased academic performance nor significantly reduced achievement gaps, even as measured by standardized exams.”

Yet the bipartisan machine grinds on. The criticism most commonly leveled at Republicans over Obamacare is that they refused to find common ground with Democrats. Sen. Ted Cruz is called a monster for showing a scintilla of condescension when addressing Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The Tea Party is attacked for being inflexible.

It’s all based on the flawed premise that bipartisan is better. Imagine a line with two poles at the end, one labeled “liberal” and the other labeled “conservative.” Simply because a law occupies a median point on the line doesn’t mean that it’s somehow more virtuous—or even remotely effective.

It’s also misleading to measure conservative and liberal principles on this sort of linear scale. Liberals believe that the federal government should tinker with society to make people’s lives better. Conservatives generally don’t think Congress has any business solving such problems. It’s difficult to argue that a federal law draws from both liberal and conservative principles when conservatives oppose federal intervention in the first place.

“Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus,” Christopher Hitchens once said. Today that false security rules Washington. Rather than succumb to it, Republicans should stand pat and swing away. It’s better for government to disagree and do nothing than to come together and pass anything.

So bring on the heckles and let the guffaws sound from the dispatch boxes. Our liberties are safest when politicians are beating each other with olive branches, not when they’re extending them.

Photos: UPI.

The United States of El Norte

Larry Thornberry — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:10:00 -0400

Rookie Florida Senator Marco Rubio continues to work tirelessly to get the United States to annex Mexico, though an exhaustive (and exhausting) search of his 2010 election campaign reveals no promises to do, nor even a mention that he might consider doing such an outlandish thing. Au the contraire, the pre-election Rubio said all the right things about line-cutters and lawbreakers. That’s one of the reasons he’s a senator today.

There are only two sure consequences of the current 800-page immigration hairball before Congress. The first is that a minimum of 11 million citizens of other countries, more Mexicans than anyone else, will become permanent, undeportable residents of the U.S., and can immediately begin working to get all their relations here. Second, the bill, if we are foolish enough to pass it, would create a powerful incentive for millions more south of the border to come here once word gets around that if you can sneak into El Norte now, you’re here to stay.

None of the other stuff will happen – the sweeteners that open-borders advocates are buffaloing the marks with: border security, back taxes, fines, no welfare, English proficiency. These things won’t happen because we lack both the bureaucratic infrastructure and the political will to do them.

One party doesn’t want to do these things, or anything else that would staunch the flow of undocumented Democrats into El Norte and thereby into American voting booths. A disturbingly high fraction of the other party will not oppose this invasion and capitulation of sovereignty because they are terrified of being called anti-Hispanic. Of course, insisting on sovereignty, enforceable borders, and standards for citizenship is not anti-anyone. But that’s not the way it will be played by the media, Democrats, and various Hispanic indignation groups.

The Democrats whooping up “comprehensive reform” know this. So do the Republicans in the so-called gang of eight (one of whom is appropriately enough named Flake). Worst of all, so does Marco Rubio. We’ve all seen Marco on television. He’s a very intelligent, articulate guy with much wider knowledge and analytical powers than 90+ percent of politicians. He’s a sound conservative on so many other issues. But on this one he’s badly wrong, and clearly not dumb enough to believe the things he’s saying. The melancholy but unavoidable conclusion is that Rubio is being dishonest on this issue. The puzzler is why. Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer are doubtless covered with bruises from pinching themselves daily, unable to believe they have such a high-octane, conservative champion flogging their transparent, leftist hustle.

The foolish things Rubio has recently said about immigration are almost endless, but some of the most knee-slappingly absurd are:

“We have to do something, because what we have now is amnesty.”

No, Marco. What we have now is not amnesty. What we have now is a refusal of the current administration to enforce existing immigration laws (as previous administrations have refused to enforce them) and a willingness to sue anyone who tries to do anything about border crashers. There is no urgency to pass new laws that Obama and Associates will ignore, or turn to their advantage.

“We can’t round up and deport 11 million people here illegally.”

So who said we could? I’ve never heard anyone advocate for a deadline on saying adios to 11 million citizens of other countries here illegally. But if we had the will to do so, we could deport a large percentage of these gate-crashers, and at less expense than all the finding, fining, taxing, penalizing, English testing et al. the current bill’s supporters say they want to do. And why should the threat of being deported be removed from people here illegally while others wait to become Americans the right way?

Perhaps the most absurd things Rubio has had to say about the current legislation are various flute solos on how much all the new blood this “reform” would lead to would help invigorate the American economy. If we adopt this anti-sovereignty legislation, doubtless new Americans will include small numbers of physicians, engineers, scientists, skilled artisans, and entrepreneurs who will contribute to our economy. But these will be swallowed up by an army of unemployed and unemployable pool cleaners and leaf-blower operators, illiterate or semi-literate in two languages, who will cost far more in public services than they will pay in taxes. Anyone seeking to establish how these folks, regardless of how much sympathy we may have for their plight, could invigorate the economy of a dead-broke welfare state already groaning with unemployed and with hardly any available billets for unskilled workers, has one hell of a hill to climb.

But just because an assertion is absurd on its face is no reason it won’t attract defenders if the price or the politics are right. In recent weeks Rubio’s office has been firing off press releases daily trumpeting the comprehensive wonderfulness of immigration reform. One of Thursday’s shouted: “Conservative Economists Back Immigration Reform.”

The conservative economists in this case were being spoken for by something called the American Action Forum. AAF’s president is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and advisor to Sen. John McCain, one of the authors and chief boosters of the “We Don’t Need No Stinking Borders Act of 2007,” which Americans rightly shouted down.

“It [the current legislation] is an opportunity to improve the long-term prospects for economic growth, enhance the skills of the U.S. labor force, and augment the flexibility of the nation’s labor market,” Holtz-Eakin said in a letter signed by 111 economists.

No, it’s not you. I can’t connect those dots either.

Certainly Social Security could do with more contributors. How else are Baby Boomers to pay their greens fees? And America’s birth rate may be below the level required to furnish sufficient taxpayers for future decades. But ushering a fraction of the third world into America will make these problems worse, not better.

The preposterous assertions of Holtz-Eakin and his house economists put me in mind of P.J. O’Rourke’s insightful explanation of the difference between micro- and macro-economics, which I paraphrase here from memory: “Micro-economics are things economists are specifically wrong about, while macro-economics are things economists are wrong about in a general sort of way.”

Speaking of way, Rubio has certainly lost his in this matter. And has almost certainly lost all prospects of ever claiming possession of the key to the Oval Office washroom.

Photo: UPI.

Vodka = Vodka = Vodka

Daniel J. Flynn — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:08:00 -0400

New Jersey alcohol enforcement officials raided bars up and down the Garden State Wednesday on suspicion that mixologists were pouring generic rail-drinks from high-end liquor bottles. Earlier samples of 150 liquors ordered by name yielded a 20 percent fraud rate. Operation Swill busted 29 establishments, including a Ruby Tuesday’s, an Applebee’s, and 13 TGI Friday’s.

If ever a class of people needs the state’s protection, drunks do. More so than children or geriatrics, inebriates just can’t help themselves. Preyed upon by highwaymen and fat girls, as well as their own unquenchable thirst, alcoholics can’t be expected to discern Old Crow from Maker’s Mark. Yet, they do. The miraculous power of God Booze infuses its worshippers with a sixth sense, enabling them to detect Ron Rico from Ron Bacardi. In fact, customer complaints served as a catalyst for New Jersey’s raids. Though they may not be able to recite the alphabet or balance on command, drunks know drinks.

The barfly understands when the barkeep cheats him. He doesn’t always grasp when he cheats himself. This is especially true when it comes to America’s most popular spirit, vodka, which accounts for about a third of all liquor purchased. Once an obscure sometime-substitute for gin, vodka consumption in the U.S. now outpaces gin, rum, and tequila combined. Unlike its colored cousins bourbon and tequila, the clear 80-proof elixir mixes well with others, a secret to the popularity of potions as well as people. Over the last decade, vodka sales have almost doubled. Fueling the boom have been expensive vodkas in flashy bottles sold in flashier advertisements by the likes of Chelsea Handler and Puff Daddy.

High end vodka isn’t about the distillation process. It’s about marketing. Drinkers don’t buy good vodka. They buy status. Whereas walking sticks and monocles may have signified “conspicuous consumption” in Thorstein Veblen’s day, overpaying for pretentious vodka does today.

There is less for the drinker to be discriminating when it comes to vodka. Strangely, this is the liquor in which brand name matters most. When vodka-lovers sampled offerings from ABC’s 20/20 a few years back, the group overwhelmingly rejected Grey Goose, a posh premium with a distinctive frosted-glass bottle. The New York Times similarly blind taste-tested 21 vodkas. Grey Goose and Ketel One failed to finish in the top 10. The winner? Smirnoff. The lowest priced vodka placed highest.

Oft described as “colorless, odorless, and tasteless,” vodka doesn’t vary the way other hard liquors do. Syrupy cheap rum goes down sweet. It doesn’t come up sweet. Bad tequila tastes as though Jose Cuervo and all of his cousins have just bathed in the back of your throat. But vodka has to be really, really bad for a drinker to notice. Vodka is vodka is vodka.

So, if the Jersey bartenders substituted Sobieski for Belvedere, whose ornate empty bottles compare in price to its fellow Polish competitor’s full ones, who, really, has been harmed? The customer maintains the illusion of social superiority all the while drinking equal if not better vodka. The barkeep enjoys higher profits and a good laugh. And nobody was the wiser for it—until New Jersey unleashed a meddling device known as the “True Spirit Authenticator.”

The misnamed “Operation Swill” didn’t discover shady barkeeps substituting an inferior for a superior product, at least when it came to vodka. The discovery of a liquor bottle containing rubbing alcohol is quite another matter.

The illegal fraud of drink pourers serving cheap booze when customers paid for expensive stuff deserves the stiff punishment that inevitably follows public exposure. The legal fraud of drink makers selling ordinary vodka as though it were the nectar of the gods deserves the stiff punishment of exposure, too.

Photo: Simon Laird (Creative Commons 2.0).

Laying Down My Pen

Quin Hillyer — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:07:00 -0400

Tornado Chasers

Claire Healey — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:07:00 -0400

Republicans’ capacity for destruction seems to rank up there with Mother Nature’s in the eyes of some Senate liberals. And rarely has that been more evident than after Monday’s terrible events in Oklahoma.

In the aftermath of the tornado that devastated the Oklahoma City region, some Democrats decided to criticize conservatives for indirectly causing the tragedy by refusing to aid efforts to reduce global warming. Though climate change has not held the spotlight in the last few years, politicians on the left have seized on the Oklahoma tragedy as an opportunity to bring more attention to the subject.

Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse led things off with a tirade on the Senate floor.

“So, you may have a question for me,” Whitehouse said, addressing Republicans. “Why do you care? Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves? I’ll tell you why. We’re stuck in this together.”

He went on to bash Republicans for failing to recognize the dangers of ignoring climate change: “You drag America with you to your fate. I will keep reaching out and calling out, ever hopeful that you will wake up before it is too late.”

Whitehouse has since issued a statement apologizing for any insensitivity his speech may have reflected toward the Oklahoma victims. However, he made no effort to retract his statement that conservatives were an indirect cause of extreme weather.

California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer also jumped at the chance to blame Republicans. “This is climate change,” she said, according to the Daily Caller. “We were warned about extreme weather: not just hot weather, but extreme weather.”

For Boxer, it was the perfect opportunity to push her carbon tax bill, also sponsored by noted Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders. The bill would put a fee on carbon emissions to subsidize other energy sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass. “Carbon could cost us the planet,” Boxer said. “The least we could do is put a little charge on it so people move to clean energy.”

But is warming really a cause of tornadoes? Is there any substance behind Democrats’ hot air? Let’s take a look at the science behind the formation of tornadoes, since Whitehouse and Boxer evidently haven’t.

According to the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), heat plays a small-to-nonexistent part in the formation of tornadoes. Highly destructive tornadoes form from mesocyclones, which are rotating thunderstorms with firm radar circulations. Temperature differences across the downdraft air on the mesocyclone sometimes correlate with the formation of twisters, but studies show that temperature variation often plays no role in their creation.

A prime example of this is the tornado outbreak of May 3-4, 1999. The tornado count over the two-day span rose to 70 and claimed over 40 lives. The NSSL states that “very little temperature variation was observed near some of the most destructive tornadoes in history” during that time.

So it seems unlikely that heat had anything to do with Monday’s terrible storms. Right now the temperature of the lower troposphere over the U.S. is below average. Also below average is the number of tornadoes that have hit the U.S. in the past year and a half. According to The Examiner, Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, notes that “the 12-month period from May 2012 to April 2013 was remarkable for the absence of tornado activity and tornado impacts in the United States.”

Not that politicians like Whitehouse and Boxer care about the facts. It says something that they’re willing to politicize a natural disaster in order to gain political traction. Such statements draw to mind Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and global warming advocate, who perfectly demonstrates liberals’ thought processes in promoting their agendas, no matter what the cost.

“Probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat,” Schelling said in a 2009 interview with The Atlantic. “I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening—you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth—that would get people concerned about climate change.”

The death toll is currently at 24 people in Oklahoma. I wonder: Would Schelling deem this tragedy a large enough “horrid thing” to promote his cause?

Whitehouse, Boxer, and other global warming advocates need to focus more on efforts to help the devastated areas instead of seizing the tragedy to push new bills. Here’s hoping this is the last we’ll see of their ludicrous statements on natural disasters.

We Will Remember

Roger Kaplan — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:07:00 -0400

Why should we remember places with strange names, inhabited by tribes whose languages and religions and customs are unfamiliar, most of whom hate us? Why should we remember valleys called the Gowardesh or the Khien Phuong, towns and hamlets with names we can scarcely pronounce, Karabilah, Chonghyon, Cam Lo, Sokkogae, Hangnyong? Even when the words are more recognizable or carry ancient connections to better known locales, they seem exotic: Bois-de-Consenvoye, Chatel-Chehery, Rouge Bouquet, Chemin des Dames.

We remember. These names are carved into the American soul, as are ones we know almost as nearby neighborhoods—Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, Antietam—names to inspire awe and terror and pride and admiration and astonishment all at once, mixed into a feeling that defies rational explanation.

Perhaps this is because what happened at these places, on these hallowed grounds, touches within us the deepest reflexes of reverence and piety—yes, for if there are no atheists in the foxholes, neither are there any on the grounds where men fought and fell so that we could live.

You could say that we live in a free country, and that is so, of course. At these places, on these grounds and so many more, men fought for the freedoms on which our nation stands, thrives, endures. But while it is well to think there is some long-range and overarching purpose to the wars Americans have waged over more than two centuries, and that this purpose is a decent and even a noble one, a tin sound inevitably accompanies the formal words that mark the deeds entrusted to our remembrance. It is not the fault of the language: conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity, and upheld the highest traditions, and inspiring valor, selfless devotion. The words used in citations for military valor are not hollow if we remember the persons and actions to which they refer.

We must remember men caught by surprise who threw themselves on grenades to absorb the force of explosions that would have killed their buddies. We must remember ambushed men who ran out of bullets and kept fighting with bayonets against hordes of savages so their brothers could retreat to defensive positions to regroup and fight again. We must remember young noncoms and ordinary infantrymen scarcely out of adolescence racing up muddy hills in the face of machine gun fire to save the lives of wounded comrades.

They call Memorial Day by a different name, Remembrance Day, in England. Men remember those who saved them more deeply than they remember the causes for which they fought. Yes, they know their fellow warriors upheld the highest honor, and they are right to tell us so. But we would have no freedom and no honor if we did not have men willing to fight and die together, regardless of whether others, in other places and at other times, would recall the sacrifice.

Yes, surely, we can say and do say and do well to tell our children on this day (Memorial Day, the last Monday in May by Act of Congress), that free men are more likely to fight and sacrifice their lives—for their comrades, for their families, for their country, for the ideas their country stands for—than slaves are likely to fight for their masters. We appreciate that American soldiers were stupefied when they found dead Korean and Vietnamese enemies chained to their heavy guns.

The freedom Americans grow up with and take for granted makes such qualities as adaptability, innovation, initiative normal when not second nature. The mental flow we grow up with tells us from the earliest age that we can and should think for ourselves—whether it is about grace or about when to go for a double play or about taking out a machine gun nest with a rifle.

We cannot so neatly explain why “think for yourself” is so often interpreted as “think of the other guys first.”

Corporal Mitchell Red Cloud, Jr., walking point, saw a Chicom force about to overwhelm his company; the place was Chonghyon, the day November 5, 1950. He stood in the clear, fired until he fell, long enough for his unit to retreat to a safer position. The Medal of Honor citation speaks of Cloud’s “dauntless courage” and “gallant self-sacrifice.” The teenager who had dropped out of high school in Wisconsin to join the Marines in 1942, who fought at Guadalcanal and Okinawa was offered a medical discharge, turned it down, fought on. After the war he married and fathered a daughter, but in ’48 he joined the Army, though they would not give him the sergeant’s stripes he had earned in the Marines. On that cold day in Korea he was a corporal.

At Chonghyon, he told his men to tie him to a tree (after eight bullet wounds he could no longer stand), fall back, and regroup. Firing his Browning until he succumbed to the onslaught, he saved his company, Company E, 19th of the 24th. We will remember.

At Chateau Thierry, eastern France, in July 1918, elements of the newly formed 42nd Infantry asked to halt the advance that had been designed to break the final German offensive. The Rainbow Division was winning, but at great cost. The request was reasonable. The 69th New York said it would consider it a compliment to be ordered forward. Douglas MacArthur’s comment was, “By God it takes the Irish when you want a hard thing done.” They did it as they had once done it on land much closer to home, when Robert E. Lee advised his lieutenants, “Do not engage the Irish.” The hard thing got done, and a few months later, a few days from the German surrender, they were still the point of the mighty American Expeditionary Force and still among the units taking the heaviest losses. Joyce Kilmer, a well-known poet, writer, and literary editor in civilian life and now a sergeant in the “Fightin’ Sixty-Ninth,” was among the last to fall. He had scribbled some lines six months earlier after a bombardment made a direct hit. They are read at the funeral for every member of the regiment. The first stanza names the place:

In a wood they call the Rouge Bouquet
There is a new-made grave to-day,
Built by never a spade nor pick
Yet covered with earth ten metres thick.

Another group of New Yorkers, the 369th New York, “Harlem’s Own,” had been lent to the French Fourth Army, both for strategic reasons and due to American racial segregation. They were clamoring to be sent to the front. They never lost ground nor a man by capture, served in action continuously longer than any other American regiment, and were collectively awarded the Croix de Guerre. No fewer than 171 men among them received that award individually as well. The first of these was Henry Lincoln Johnson, who, while on guard duty with Needham Roberts, fought off a German attack using a bolo knife and a club when ammo ran out. “These fighters from Hell,” the Germans said, “these men of bronze.” The name stuck, and the 369th yells “Hellfighters!” the way the 69th cries “Garryowen in glory!” when it goes into battle.

Most recently, the Hellfighters, who like the Fightin’ 69th have deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been on missions to Mali and Cameroon, places some of its men cannot locate on a map. Which you can say is to their credit, with no irony or insufferable condescension. Since the Civil War, which gave rise to Memorial Day, American fighting men have gone to more places than even the most learned geographer can catalogue. And in fact they have shown a tremendous capacity for taking a true interest, respectful and friendly, in the peoples and lands they have succored, often receiving in return resentment and envy and even murder. But in a soldier’s mental geography, the compass always points to the “thin red line o’ heroes when the drums begin to roll,” as Kipling put it after the 93rd Highlanders stopped a Russian cavalry charge at Balaclava, somewhere out there in the Crimea, on the way to Afghanistan.

This came to mind while at an event celebrating the Union League Club’s 150th anniversary. Formed as a pro-Union, pro-Lincoln group during the Civil War, the club played an active role in the formation and recruitment of the 69th New York during the Civil War and the 369th New York just before the outbreak of the Great War. Resplendent in their dress blues, the Guard men sat down to a military mess to express their appreciation. The club’s membership has included presidents, senators, and others of questionable ilk, but as an institution it has made up for this through active involvement in civic as well as military affairs, usually with good sense predominating over fevered reform-mindedness. Notable recent initiatives include support of the Wounded Warrior Project.

A couple blocks south of Union Station, it is a nice old club the way these nice old New York clubs are, with substantial collections in its library, comfortable rooms for visitors, elegant ballrooms and even a quite good kitchen. And at the bar the drinks are generous, which may partly explain the genial mood among the old and not so old soldiers who were there that evening, veterans and active duty. One active duty officer was Raymond Odierno, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, on hand to see old friends and take a stab at the cuts in the military budget that, he thinks, threaten our ability to hold the thin red line.

Surely, given the demands placed upon our defense establishment, cuts are risky business. In the final analysis, some students of the military say, it all depends on the soldier walking point, such as Robert Miller, who on January 25, 2008 was surprised by enemy fighters entrenched on higher ground in the Gowardesh Valley of Konar Province, Afghanistan. Like Mitchell Red Cloud some 55 years before, Miller, a Special Forces sergeant, charged the hostiles while warning the men behind him to fall back and take cover. Shot in the chest, he kept moving and firing to draw the enemy’s attention away from the U.S.-Afghan allied patrol.

Between the wars in which Mitchell Red Cloud and Robert Miller served to their last heartbeat was Jack Jacobs, also on hand at the Union League Club. In March 1968, Lt. Jacobs was serving as an advisor to a South Vietnamese Army battalion in the Mekong Delta. About to be surprised by “the largest, best armed, most cohesive Viet Cong unit in the region” (as he writes in his recent memoir), he and his NCO, a Texan named Ray Ramirez, sensed, but too late, the mortar attack that shattered their column. One eye closed, shrapnel to his face and head, Sgt. Ramirez and the South Vietnamese commanding officer critically injured, the young lieutenant bandaged Ramirez, dragged him to safety, and rushed back into the exposed field under the mortars and bullets to rescue the CO, all the while calling in air strikes.

And he kept going back to retrieve more wounded and disperse Vietcong squads trying to reach the perimeter behind which he had regrouped the badly damaged company for what became a successful stand until the rest of the battalion arrived to repulse the enemy, denying them what should have been a clear victory.

Why remember these old stories? Even if we tire of bemoaning the fact that Memorial Day has been turned into a weekend of shopping and fun, we should keep in mind the phrase Colonel (by the time he retired) Jacobs used for the title of his memoir, If Not Now, When? It is a quote from Rabbi Hillel, a sage who lived in the first century A.D. and to whom the authors of the Talmud often refer. It means pretty much what it says: It is better to do what we must when we can than to put it off on the theory that we will have future opportunities. Perhaps one may have other chances to do what one’s ethos demands—but why put it off? Jack Jacobs preferred to seek more chances, even after his acts of valor—those words again—in Kien Phuong on that day that would have much worse than it was had he not been who he was. He returned to combat by joining the Airborne, circumventing the Army policy that barred Medal of Honor winners from returning to war zones.

It is worth remembering this: the places where they stood, from Valley Forge to Manassas, from Fredericksburg to the Wilderness; “the uniforms that guard us”—Kipling again, and Kipling was fond of our country—grumbling and unflinching, laughing and sometimes bitching, but always getting it done, even when losing first and then returning; the ones we lost, always to remember, we always came back and never left anyone behind. They will never leave our memory, wherever they were—Midway, Anzio, Omaha Beach, the medivac choppers landing in the burning fields of the Ia Drang valley. It is worth remembering this.

We will remember.

Photo: UPI

The Chinese Waltz

George H. Wittman — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:07:00 -0400

Beijing’s leadership expertly follows a tricky path of maintaining close financial and commercial relations with Washington while simultaneously strutting about militarily. American businessmen and visiting politicians are wined and dined by well-connected Chinese counterparts in the luxurious restaurants and clubs that have proliferated in modern Chinese cities. Meanwhile military exercises on land, sea, and air against pretend U.S. aggressors are a constant feature of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The lavish entertainment in the commercial world acts to mask the sharp differences between the two countries in political military affairs.

At the same time the considerable commercial interests of family members of key political personalities reach all the way to the top. This fosters the illusion that profitable relations with well-connected personalities will not only be beneficial in financial terms to both sides but also serve as a positive step strategically. It is well known that the new president, Xi Jinping, has family members whose prosperity has risen alongside his political fortunes. This is par for the course: Wen Jiabao, the former premier, famously had “advantaged” his relatives to the point of ostentation. In communist China these days this is not corruption; it’s simply recognition of tradition. The problem is that similar “traditional” guanxi reaches down to the lesser levels and becomes what Xi Jinping reportedly was referring to in his first official speech of November 2012 as “the need to crack down on rampant corruption and bribe-taking.”

There is virtually no area of Chinese business and politics that has been untouched by public financial scandal. The situation has become so bad that fighting corruption has taken precedence over economic policy development. When former Vice-Premier Wang Qishan was named to the standing committee of the politburo he was specifically charged with heading the instrument that investigates party members suspected of corruption. Wang, who is well known to foreign bankers as one of the nation’s leading economic planners, is also known for his scrupulous incorruptibility.

Mr. Wang will have his hands full in a government where his new boss, the highly personable Xi Jinping, has been known for years as a conduit for deal-making in equipment acquisition for the People’s Liberation Army. Mr. Xi previously was the principal politburo liaison with the PLA command. His relationship with the PLA goes back many years to when he was a young man doing his military stint acting as the personal assistant to the man who was then defense minister, Geng Biao.

As has been well known for a long time, the leadership, active and retired, of the PLA controls through board seats large portions of many corporate enterprises. In fact, a good number of these private enterprises are effectively owned by the PLA through share holdings of intermediaries. The contracts for defense operations are screened through this Byzantine proxy ownership, which is one of the means by which top ranking politburo personalities share in China’s economic successes.

The reality is that the PLA acts as a military outreach for China’s economic interests. Beijing is preoccupied with the gas and oil deposits located in the seas off its mainland far beyond any 200 mile international limit. The territorial disputes in which Beijing is involved include conflicts with Japan, Vietnam, Philippines, Borneo, Brunei, and, of course, Taiwan. The Chinese navy in particular (PLAN) is charged with maintaining a presence throughout areas subject to territorial disputes. In 2012 a Chinese naval vessel actually ran aground off what was termed “a spit of land” in the South China Sea claimed by both Manila and Beijing. This incident at the Scarborough Shoal caused much diplomatic shouting and hand-wringing, but nothing else. Similar incidents in the future may be more confrontational.

The Japanese navy frequently reports testing confrontations with Chinese warships in the Miyako Straits that provides passage through a chain of small Japanese islands. While most of these islands are used primarily as fishing ports, international oil companies and mining consortia for many years have had interest in the possibility of finding serious deposits of oil, gas, and other minerals either underwater or on the islands themselves. Leaders in Beijing are, one might expect, keeping their eyes on all such explorations.

Recent reports have emphasized the hyperactivity of China-based cyber intrusions. Here, too, is a confluence of the military and the civilian. While Beijing has an obvious interest in gaining access to U.S. and Western defense technology and intelligence information, it has increased its attention in cyber-interception in the various civilian product development fields. As the old expression goes, one hand washes the other. As early as 2009, Northrop Grumman reported on the interface of Chinese military and civilian cyber espionage activities. Since then it has become obvious that the PRC has, as Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, has put it, “reached a level of sophistication and are clearly supported by a level of resources that is…a massive and sustained effort by a government to blatantly steal commercial data and intellectual property.”

One can be sure that family and friends of the Standing Committee of the Politburo — among others — will get a piece of that action. Chinese communism has evolved a new form of private enterprise — for its commissars.

The Devils Koch

Marta H. Mossburg — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:01:00 -0400

If the Tribune Company were Biblical Egypt, the Koch brothers buying its papers would be the 11th plague. They are probably behind billions of red, bulgy-eyed cicadas poised to swarm the East Coast this year, too. Or so think many liberals.

So bad is the perception of the pair of billionaire industrialists known for their support of libertarian causes that the Pavlovian revulsion triggered by uttering their names makes the collective leftist disapproval of Ronald Reagan seem like an inaudible “boo.”

Take this typical response to them by “Hangover” actor Zach Galifianakis. Last year he told the New York Daily News, “I disagree with everything they do. They are creepy and there is no way around that. It’s not freedom what they are doing.”

Never mind that they have underwritten the Cato Institute, whose scholars support gay marriage and drug legalization, two causes of many on the left. (Full disclosure, my first job out of college was as an intern at Cato.) They have also given tens of millions to arts and medical institutions in addition to conservative political causes, including Americans for Prosperity, so hated by liberals. A doorman cited in a 2012 documentary claims David Koch is a bad tipper. Being stingy is mean. But no one needed that tidbit to hate him.

Charles and David Koch, who control privately owned Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries, have reached that special status where knowing anything about them is not necessary for condemnation. For those in a certain crowd mentioning “the Koch brothers” grants permission to listeners to suspend critical thought in the same way that saying “George Soros” triggers a mental meltdown for those on the right.

That is the take of Progressive Maryland, which in an email to supporters last Friday wrote, “We have a major problem brewing here in Maryland. Our only statewide daily newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, is in grave and immediate danger of being bought by a pair of wealthy members of the 1% club, the notorious Koch brothers.”

New Executive Director Kate Planco Waybright added, “There’s no other way to put it, the Koch brothers…would ruin The Baltimore Sun” and “further conservative corporate control of mainstream media, paralleling Rupert Murdoch’s ideological print and broadcast empire as showcased by Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and many more.”

The first LGBT director of the organization, according to her bio, urges supporters to email and call Tribune board members to voice their disapproval of a sale to them. Rupert Murdoch — Chairman and CEO of News Corp. — is interested in purchasing a part of Tribune, by the way, but for some reason he isn’t as scary to Progressive Maryland and other groups around the country, including the staff at the Los Angeles Times, another Tribune paper. Half of them reportedly indicated at a meeting in April they would quit if the Kochs bought it. Only a few said they would if Mr. Murdoch did, maybe because the Wall Street Journal has not fallen apart under his leadership. Not to be outdone, a Los Angeles City Councilman introduced a motion in April to remove pension money invested with the firms that own the Los Angeles Times unless it is sold to buyers who support “the highest terms of professional and objective journalism.”

Before all these people rush to condemn the Kochs, maybe they should wait to see what they do with Tribune — if they buy it. Making money will require them to earn the trust of the generally liberal communities in which Tribune operates. Besides, if they run the papers as ideological mills the company will become a very expensive vanity project read by people who already share their views. That will not help spread a free market ethos — one of their main goals — or their bank accounts.

Watching the scandals unfold in Washington should make Koch skeptics wonder, too, how more people who don’t hold government in such high regard might break more stories about government corruption. They may not be very likeable people. And they may be really dumb thinking they can make money off of newspapers. But they should be allowed to try just like other potential buyers.

Willing Executioners: Nov. 2005

James Rosen — Fri, 24 May 2013 05:59:00 -0400