"English" via sadeq in Google Reader

So Glad He Owns All Media

2009-11-10T17:32:24Z

Murdoch says Glenn Beck "was right" to call Obama a racist.

Incommunicado

2009-11-10T17:09:48Z

Newsroom sources at the Washington Times say they don't expect Executive Editor John Solomon to return. He hasn't come in to the office since the staff shake up over the weekend. And there are some suggestions that problems with the paper's growth and revenue figures may also be figuring into the on-going controversy.

Hasan Investigated, Cleared

2009-11-10T17:10:50Z

Well, that's a bit of an oopsie:

The FBI and the military investigated contacts between an Army psychiatrist accused of last week's deadly shooting rampage at Fort Hood and a Yemen-based militant over the past year but concluded he didn't pose a terrorist threat, senior law enforcement and military officials said Monday.

The members of two Joint Terrorism Task Forces, including one in the nation's capital, went so far as to contact Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's superiors and review his academic and military records for evidence of suspicious activity late last year and early this year, according to three senior U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials.

But the investigators from the multi-agency teams concluded that Hasan's activities weren't suspicious enough to warrant a more formal investigation, even though the militant imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, had ties to al-Qaida and was the author of a popular Web site espousing jihadist activity, according to the officials.

Beltway sniper faces execution tonight

2009-11-10T17:31:28Z

John Muhammad, the Beltway sniper, will be executed tonight in Virginia:

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine has cleared the way for the execution of sniper John Allen Muhammad.

Kaine denied Muhammad's clemency request Tuesday. Muhammad is scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday night at a Virginia prison for killing Dean Harold Meyers at a gas station during a three-week spree that left 10 people dead in 2002 across Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, were also suspected of fatal shootings in other states including Louisiana, Alabama and Arizona. Malvo is serving a life sentence.

Muhammad's attorney, Jonathan Sheldon, says Virginia will be executing a severely mentally ill man.Of course he is mentally ill, he preyed on innocent people. While I have mixed feelings about the death penalty these days, this son-of-a-bitch deserves his fate.

Isakson: House health care bill DOA in the Senate

2009-11-10T17:22:34Z

Sen. Johnny Isakson confirms what we read yesterday, that the House health care bill is dead-on-arrival in the Senate and he believes debate on the bill will continue into next year:

U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-east Cobb) thinks the health care bill that passed the House on Saturday has almost no chance in the Senate because Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) has vowed to join a majority Republican filibuster against the measure.

"Unlike the House, we operate under unanimous consent," he said to members of Cobb's Madison Forum political group Monday. "So the bill will have a difficult time when it comes to the Senate. I expect there will be six to eight weeks of debate, taking it past Christmas and after the new year begins. I think over time, people will find out more about the bill than they did when it went before the House, when they printed it just before they voted, and I don't even think they printed the whole thing. And with Lieberman joining our filibuster, that brings it to 41 votes, which would make it impossible to pass." Isakson said he believes health care should be reformed, but should be approached step-by-step and not widespread, as the House bill suggests.While I think it's great that he opposes this bill, Isakson voted for Medicare Part D, a $9 trillion expansion of an already existing entitlement, when he was in the House, so I wouldn't count on him when he is voting on health care legislation.

MoveOn.org targets Marshall

2009-11-10T17:15:09Z

MoveOn.org is targeting Rep. Jim Marshall (D-GA) for voting for the Stupak Amendment and against the health care bill.

Hey, if you guys want to primary Marshall. Fine by me, but that seat will go to a Republican if a "progressive" is the Democratic Party's nominee.

And, no the situation is a bit different from NY-23.

Anita Dunn, We Hardly Knew Ye: Maoist Flack Takes Great Leap Forward At Rolling Donut

2009-11-10T17:28:00Z

Jake Tapper reports that Anita Dunn, tongue-chewing White House communications director, acolyte of Mao Zidong and Mother Theresa, and a frequent surprise guest in the Hit & Run comment threads, has been ousted by counterrevolutionary enemies of the people.

Tapper, a running dog of the American Imperialist Broadcasting Company, says that Dunn was not made a non-person by capitalist stooges, but rather is leaving voluntarily:

Dunn’s departure was expected; she came on board temporarily earlier this year when communications director Ellen Moran left for a more family-friendly position at the Department of Commerce. Dunn, who advised then-Sen. Obama during the campaign, always said she was here temporarily because she wants to spend more time with her teenage son.

[Dunn replacement Dan] Pfeiffer, a Georgetown alumnus from Delaware, originally worked for the presidential campaign of Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind, but became the Obama campaign communications director after Bayh dropped out. He has worked for former Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-SD, and Sen. Tim Johnson, D-SD, and is married to Sarah Feinberg, senior advisor to chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and a special assistant to the president.

New Yorker's John Cassidy on the Real Reason for the Health Care Bill

2009-11-10T16:29:00Z

Oo, what a giveaway!, as pointed out in this Wall Street Journal editorial:

Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. "The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment," he writes. "Let's not pretend that it isn't a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won't. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind."

Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of "making the United States a more equitable country" and furthering the Democrats' "political calculus." In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run....

As Mr. Cassidy concludes, "Putting on my amateur historian's cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted."

Cassidy's full piece for The New Yorker which the Journal is quoting, which has many more details on the fantasy of "cost-savings" in the health care bill as it stands.

Hat tip on the link: Dan Gifford.

Saturday

2009-11-10T17:29:38Z

The Gallup poll has discovered (HT: Catherine Rampell) that Saturday is the day of the week that consumers spend the most money. In a brilliant policy innovation, President Obama has decreed that from now on, every day of the week will be called Saturday. The ap reports:

“This will not cost the American people a dime,” the President said at a press conference announcing the change. “There are no budgetary costs. The stimulus effects will he huge. Not only will Americans spend more than they did before, but there will be a new demand for calendars. The surge in calendar production will increase employment in the publishing and printing industry. This is a win-win for the American people.”

He also outlined some important psychological benefits:

“No more Monday morning quarterbacking. Every day is a weekend. And no more Sunday night blues for people dreading Monday morning.”

The President also announced that Thanksgiving would be celebrated on the 25th Saturday in November.

The Search for Answers in Fort Hood

2009-11-10T16:51:16Z

The country is unpacking the recent shooting at Fort Hood and analyzing the perpetrator intensely. Along with natural shock and curiosity, a principle reason for doing so is to discover what can prevent incidents like this in the future.

When faced with any risk, including rampaging gunmen, there are four options:

Prevention—the alteration of the target or its circumstances to diminish the risk of the bad thing happening.
Interdiction—any confrontation with, or influence exerted on, an attacker to eliminate or limit its movement toward causing harm.
Mitigation—preparation so that, in the event of the bad thing happening, its consequences are reduced.
Acceptance—a rational alternative often chosen when the threat has low probability, low consequence, or both.

(There is much more to risk management, of course. This handy simplification is taken from the DHS Privacy Committee’s “framework” document.)

Taking the facts as they appear now, what lessons can we take from Fort Hood that will help protect military forces and facilities, and the country in general? Let’s go through some of them option-by-option:

Prevention: What circumstances at Fort Hood and elsewhere could be altered to prevent this ever happening again? An obvious one is gun control—if there were no guns, there could be no shooting. But this prescription is complicated by the intrusions on individual rights required to implement it. Depriving citizens of arms directly violates the Second Amendment, and effectively enforcing a gun control regime would almost certainly violate the Fourth.

Removing guns from specific locations might be more palatable and achievable, but gun rampages do not restrict themselves to restricted areas, and widespread possession of guns by law-abiding citizens is an important form of interdiction. Indeed, appropriate gun violence was the interdiction that ultimately stopped further bloodshed.

Interdiction: What steps can be taken against attackers to limit their progress toward causing harm? This is a confounding option because learning what this attack looked like as an embryo won’t tell us what the next one will look like.

Thousands of people are like Nidal Hasan in one respect or another, but they will never commit any attack. There are thousands of people with turmoil or mental illness similar to his, for example. There are thousands of military servicemembers with doubts about U.S. policies. There are thousands of Muslims in the military (whose contributions are highly valuable). There are thousands of people who have investigated or sought contact with Al Qaeda.

If the conclusion from Fort Hood were that all people who share certain traits should be investigated/interdicted, this would violate fundamental rights and values while it wasted investigators’ time: Who is troubled enough in their minds, doubtful enough of U.S. foreign policy, etc. Whose contacts with Al Qaeda or jihadi Web sites indicate a desire to perpetrate bad acts and not curiosity or enmity?

Sending investigators into this quagmire would only work as a salve until some future rampage arose from another unique set of circumstances. We would be no safer for having investigated all who were “like” Nidal Hasan in the ways we decide are material.

Mitigation: I have seen no indication that the facilities and staff of Fort Hood were ill-equipped to deal with the results of this violence. There may be marginal ways they could improve—there always are—but medical services can’t be available everywhere always. There is little prescription for change here.

Acceptance: With the confounding difficulty of prevention and interdiction before us, this option rises a little bit in currency. Television news and commentary may make it feel differently to many people, but there is a very low probability of shootings like this happening. The costs of preventing and interdicting such violence is very high. This is a candidate for “acceptance.”

Acceptance is the least “acceptable” option, of course. Nobody thinks it is ‘ok’ for this kind of thing to happen. But like so many tragedies—indeed, part and parcel of tragedy—it is the loss of innocent life for no good reason.

Fort Hood presents the country with a choice: Invest extraordinary efforts in measures that cost a great deal, that invade prized rights, and that don’t work? Or show our sorrow to the families and community of Fort Hood and make peace with the grief and tragedy of this incident.

Obamacare Will Be a Budget Buster

2009-11-10T16:46:17Z

Does anyone think that a huge new entitlement program will lead to lower budget deficits? Sounds implausible, yet proponents of government-run healthcare claim this is the case according to the official estimates from the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation.

To use a technical phrase, this is hogwash. This new 6-1/2 minute video, narrated by yours truly, gives 12 reasons why Obamacare will lead to higher deficits – including real-world evidence showing how Medicare and Medicaid are much more costly than originally projected.

By the way, this video doesn’t even touch on the mandate issue, which Michael Cannon explains is not being counted in order to make the cost of government-run healthcare less shocking.

Obama’s (In)Decision on Afghanistan

2009-11-10T15:57:18Z

According to CBS News, President Barack Obama will send most, if not all, of the 40,000 additional troops that General Stanley McChrystal requested and reportedly plans to keep those troops in Afghanistan for the long-term.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

If the CBS report turns out to be true—the White House has backed away, and other news outlets are leaving the story alone for the moment—the president’s decision is disappointing, but expected. Last month, the administration ruled out the notion of a near-term U.S. exit from Afghanistan, arguing that the Taliban and al Qaeda would perceive an early pullout as a victory over the United States. But if avoiding a perception of weakness is the rationale that the administration is operating under then we have already lost by allowing our enemies to dictate the terms of the war.

Gen. McChrystal’s ambitious strategy hopes to integrate U.S. troops into the Afghan population. These additional troops might reduce violence in the short- to medium-term. But this strategy rests on the presumption that Afghans in heavily contested areas want the protection of foreign troops. The reality might be very different; western forces might instead be perceived as a magnet for violence.

McChrystal’s strategy also presumes that an additional 40,000 troops will be enough. But proponents of an ambitious counterinsurgency strategy need to come clean on the total bill that would be required. For a country the size of Afghanistan, with roughly 31 million people, the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine advises between 620,000 to 775,000 counterinsurgents—whether native or foreign. Furthermore, typical counterinsurgency missions require such concentrations of forces for a decade or more. Given these realities, we could soon hear cries of “surge,” “if only,” and “not enough.”

Even if the United States and its allies committed themselves to decades of armed nation building, success against al Qaeda would hardly be guaranteed. After all, in the unlikely event that we forged a stable Afghanistan, al Qaeda would simply reposition its presence into other regions of the world.

It is well past time for the United States to adapt means to ends. The choice for President Obama is not between counterterrorism or counterinsurgency; but between counterterrorism and counterterrorism combined with counterinsurgency. Protecting the United States from terrorism does not require U.S. troops to police Afghan villages. Where terrorists do appear, we hardly need to tinker with their communal identities. We can target our enemies with allies on the ground or, if that fails, by relying on timely intelligence for use in targeted airstrikes or small-unit raids.

President Obama’s decision on Afghanistan could define his presidency. If an escalating military strategy leads only to thousands of more deaths, and at a cost of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, then that is a bitter legacy indeed.

Tuesday Links

2009-11-10T15:56:08Z

In the Obama era, the “slippery slope” has gone vertical: “Instead of ‘eventually,’ the feared extensions of government power come immediately.”

The House health care bill: “One of the most expensive pieces of legislation in history.”

How quickly we forget: “In spite of its monumental failure to bring social peace and material abundance, socialism is enjoying something of a renaissance.“

Good question: Why would Congress compel young adults to buy health insurance they don’t need?

Podcast: The Cost of the Health Care Bill

Assorted links

2009-11-10T17:23:00Z

1. One calculation of implicit marginal tax rates on the poor.

2. The rise of Andrew Ross Sorkin at the NYT.

3. The problems of health care transition: "drop your bad risks ASAP" is another one.

4. Is there hope for Detroit?

5. "Salvaged [nuclear] bomb material now generates about 10 percent of electricity in the United States..." -- read more here.

6. Debunking of Senate vote chart.

7. UK list of best movies of the decade.

8. New Mark Thoma blog at CBS MoneyWatch.

MINIMUM WAGE AND OBESITY

2009-11-10T16:48:00Z

David O. Meltzer and Zhuo Chen explored the relationship between minimum wage rate in the U.S and body weight (link):

"Growing consumption of increasingly less expensive food, and especially “fast food”, has been cited as a potential cause of increasing rate of obesity in the United States over the past several decades. Because the real minimum wage in the United States has declined by as much as half over 1968-2007 and because minimum wage labor is a major contributor to the cost of food away from home we hypothesized that changes in the minimum wage would be associated with changes in bodyweight over this period. To examine this, we use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 1984-2006 to test whether variation in the real minimum wage was associated with changes in body mass index (BMI). We also examine whether this association varied by gender, education and income, and used quantile regression to test whether the association varied over the BMI distribution. We also estimate the fraction of the increase in BMI since 1970 attributable to minimum wage declines. We find that a $1 decrease in the real minimum wage was associated with a 0.06 increase in BMI. This relationship was significant across gender and income groups and largest among the highest percentiles of the BMI distribution. Real minimum wage decreases can explain 10% of the change in BMI since 1970. We conclude that the declining real minimum wage rates has contributed to the increasing rate of overweight and obesity in the United States. Studies to clarify the mechanism by which minimum wages may affect obesity might help determine appropriate policy responses."

Rok Spruk is a supply-side economist and a libertarian. He (currently) lives in Slovenia where he studies economics and business. His fields of research are economic growth, macroeconomics, international economy, global competitiveness, and tax reforms. His views, observations and ideas are posted on his blog.

OUTLOOK FOR THE NORWEGIAN ECONOMY

2009-11-10T16:06:00Z

Norges Bank has recently published Monetary Policy Report 3/2009 (link) and a comprehensive list of figures and charts including major macroeconomic trends in Norway and abroad (link). Time series on unit labor cost, output gap and other macroeconomic indicators are interesting to observe, especially because Norges Bank has been the first central bank in Europe to announce a targeted increase in interest rate to mitigate midterm inflationary outlook. Here (link) is a closer look at NIBOR and monthly interest rate dynamics in Norway (link).

I'm Genuinely Surprised

2009-11-10T16:09:49Z

Public Policy Polling just conducted a poll in which they tested how well Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) would do in a GOP primary against an unnamed right-wing/conservative challenger. In other words, how well she'd stand up against a stiff Hoffmanization. I'd figured Snowe was pretty much invulnerable in Maine, even though Republican primary electorates can lean pretty far right. But not so. PPP had the winger candidate crushing Snowe by a 59% to 31% margin.

Not surprisingly, Snowe's approval among in-state Dems is far higher than among Republicans.

They Didn't Treat Tip O'Neill Like This

2009-11-10T16:08:59Z

Laura Ingraham, on Fox News this morning: "Nancy Pelosi basically did everything except sell her own body to get this bill passed."

Maybe Just See a Shrink?

2009-11-10T15:47:22Z

Fox host says, if you're despondent, depressed about being shipped overseas, "you take out yourself." But you shouldn't take others with you.

Tu Quoque

2009-11-10T15:48:05Z

Did Obama bring criticism for the state of the job market upon himself? After all, he promised his stimulus package was going to create or save millions of jobs.

Eh, I'm underwhelmed. Bush made similar claims about the powers of his tax cuts. That's what presidents do: claim that they have magical powers over the economy. Then when things get better, they take credit, and when they don't, they claim things would have been even worse without them.

Perhaps they deserve to take a beating from the voters for the state of the labor market, which is sort of irrelevant, because whether or not they deserve it, they definitely will. But I'm as inclined to believe that presidents claim these magical powers because voters demand them, as that the causality runs the other way.

But op-ed columnists should not encourage these beliefs by writing columns demanding that the president exercise his magical powers. That energy would be better spent making fun of the president when he makes those sort of promises, and explaining that after all, the president is not the Labor God.