Keith Hennesey, who served as a White House economic advisor to President George W. Bush for more than six years and was the director of the National Economic Council in 2008, asks a question the White House press corps failed to ask the president: How much more money will the taxpayers be kindly asked to dig out to fund GM and Chrysler for the next 60 days?
The press could have reported yesterday’s story as, “President Obama today committed to put another $X billion of taxpayer funds at risk to save the auto industry, as he extended the loans provided by President Bush in December. He gave Chrysler a hard deadline, and promised taxpayers that they would spend no more than $Y billion to help Chrysler avoid bankruptcy. He made no similar commitment to taxpayers on General Motors, promising only that they would pay for at least enough to ‘provide [General Motors] with working capital for 60 days. These new commitments of taxpayer funds will come from the shrinking remainder of the $700 B of TARP funds appropriated by the Congress last September, leaving less to address the President’s goals in stabilizing the financial system.” I have seen no reporting like this, and I cannot see any evidence of the White House press corps asking what X and Y are.
WASHINGTON– The Senate has endorsed using revenues from controversial cap-and-trade auctions of permits for emitting greenhouse gases to help consumers pay higher gasoline and electricity prices.
On one hand they’re going to pass what amounts to a passive new tax on energy production by forcing energy producers (coal plants, natural gas plants, etc.) to purchase carbon credits from the government. This will both depress the supply of energy as some producers are forced out of the market and drive up the price of energy as the expense of the taxes and the decreased supply hits the market.
On the other hand, they’re going to subsidize energy consumption by buying it down with government entitlements. This will drive up demand for energy as people consume more than they would have anyway thanks to the subsidies, which in turn will drive up the price of energy even as the aforementioned carbon credit tax depresses supply.
The result? A perfect storm of unnecessary stupidity that is going to take a heavy, heavy toll on what you pay for energy. And not just you, but the people you work for too. Meaning layoffs. Cutbacks. Downsizing. Budget cuts.
Hope ‘n change!
Asking whether this is a bug or a feature is rhetorical at this point.
A good article about the much-overblown incident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant and how America’s nuclear power industry has changed since. Some highlights:
Three Mile Island was an industrial accident. It ruined the reactor, caused a billion dollars worth of damage and nearly bankrupted the utility. What made it unusual for an industrial accident is that no one was hurt. The radioactive release — caused when the seals on a steam overflow tank failed — was minuscule. Exhaustive studies of the area have never found any health effects on the surrounding population. What Three Mile Island proved is that the worst-case scenario for a nuclear accident was far less than anyone realize.
America’s fleet of 104 nuclear reactors now runs at a level of safety and efficiency unprecedented in any industry. Reactors now run for nearly two years without interruption. The record — 688 straight days — is held by Unit 1, Three Mile Island, the one that didn’t melt down.
Despite being the object of scorn for three decades, nuclear energy delivers enormous benefits to the American public. With only 9 percent of the nation’s generating capacity, it produces 20 percent of our electricity. Natural gas, on the other hand — the favorite of environmentalists — makes up 39 percent of our capacity but delivers only 20 percent of our electricity because the fuel is so expensive.
The nation’s disdain for the nuclear industry and lack of will in constructing new reactors has put us in a precarious position. Our entire energy future may be riding on the fate of a few 40-year-old [not-as-safe] reactors. Somebody had better pay attention to this before we have another nuclear accident and the enormous promise of nuclear energy in this country ends for good.
The company that owns the Chicago Sun-Times and 58 other newspapers and online sites said Tuesday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The Sun-Times Media Group, Inc. said it would continue to operate its newspapers and Web sites as usual while it improves its cost structure and stabilizes operations.
Tuesday’s announcement comes amid a raft of newspaper closings and cuts that has seen the end of The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado; The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and The Christian Science Monitor.
The chain that owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune is in bankruptcy and other papers are on the brink. And two industry giants, The Washington Post and The New York Times, announced last week they are cutting costs and staff amid tumbling revenue and continued economic decline.
The Sun-Times said similar cost-cutting measures failed to turn around the company’s fortunes.
[T]he company would explore the potential sale of assets or new investment in the company to help it remain viable.
At least 120 newspapers in the United States have shut down since January 2008, according to Paper Cuts, a Web site tracking the newspaper industry. More than 21,000 jobs at 67 newspapers have vaporized in that time, according to the site.
Newspapers have struggled to meet challenges posed by changing reader habits, a shifting advertising market, an anemic economy, and the newspaper industry’s own early strategic errors.
Yeah, strategic errors like a decision to be a press wing of one of the political parties instead of reporting the news. I wonder if there isn’t some kind of connection between this “strategic error” and those ”changing reader habits”.
At least they are dying happy newspapers, knowing they did everything they possibly could to get their guy elected one last time, and that their last desperate effort – even if it cost them the trust of their few remaining readers – was such a huge success. Rest in peace, pillars of democracy – your ultimate sacrifice was not in vain.
Within the month of one another, Oregon’s state-sponsored health care plan has issued letters denying payment for cancer treatments for two different patients. However, in the same devastating letters,thestate reiterated that it would pay for drugs to commit suicide.
Oregon is the only state that both allows assisted suicide and openly rations health care. Pro-lifers, and others, have long warned of the deadly consequences that flow from the motivation to reduce costs.
Cancer drugs can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000 a month. Lethal medication, on the other hand, costs less that $100.
As a general rule, the state-run Oregon insurance plan only covers drugs that meet the “five-year, 5 percent rule” meaning, a 5% survival rate after five years. If a patient did not meet this exclusive and outdated criterion, all that he would be entitled to would be medication for palliative care and to a reminder of the option of assisted suicide.
The government deciding who lives and who dies: not just in Britain anymore. But even Britain’s government leviathan doesn’t yet nudge people to do the right thing and kill themselves so the NHS can save some money.
Or, rather, they deserved Churchill (you may remember him – the fired plagiarist professor who believes 9/11 victims needed killin’):
Ward Churchill’s civil suit to be reinstated to his teaching post is apparently in court. Churchill is arguing that the nominal reasons for his termination (mostly shoddy academic work) were not alone enough to have normally justified his termination, and that he was in fact fired for his remarks about 9/11. This is an important distinction, because tenured professors can generally not be fired for exercise of first amendment rights, no matter how wacky their statements.
In a post that spawned a number of angry emails, I actually said I thought Churchill was fired improperly. There is plenty of evidence that the Native American studies department at Colorado, and gender/racial studies departments in general, have never enforced any sort of academic rigor, and it is hypocritical to suddenly discover such rigor for this case. Churchill has been rewarded and promoted historically for much of the same work he is nominally getting fired for now. Further, examples are legion of heads of various elite university racial and gender studies departments who exercise the same or less academic rigor as Churchill but whom no one is criticizing. As I mention in my earlier post, Cal State Long Beach hired a paranoid schizophrenic who had served prison time for beating and torturing two women as the head of their Black Studies department.
Frankly, Colorado is getting exactly what they hired. They weren’t looking for a research mastermind. They were looking for a politically correct hire to fill a void and create a department that made them look nice and progressive on paper. And that is exactly what they got.
Those racial and gender studies departments sure aren’t created because anything that can be called work with a straight face is expected from them.
A letter to CNN news host Rick Sanchez from Donald J. Boudreaux, chairman of the department of economics at George Mason University:
Dear Mr. Sanchez:
Re your interview today with economics students at Georgia State University: when a young man said that he is skeptical of government regulation and that he values individual liberty, you derisively accused him of believing that the economy would work well “without any rules.”
The smug assurance of your accusation reveals your gross misunderstanding of the case for free markets. That case is not that rules are unnecessary. Rather, it’s that rules written by politicians and enforced by bureaucrats generally work much less well than do rules that emerge decentrally – rules that evolve from the voluntary interactions and successes and mistakes of individuals each pursuing his or her own goals without being herded by a central authority – rules that are enforced by competition and by the exercise of personal responsibility and that, when sufficiently important, become formalized in case law declared by courts.
The distinction between what you think of as rules and the kinds of rules that permeate successful market economies is perhaps subtle. But it’s also real and important. You should try to grasp it.
Is a volcano in the U.S. going to blow? Yes. The only question is when. Some geologists are worried that it might be sooner rather than later, given the ominous rumblings recently detected in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Filled with geysers, fumaroles, and other geological hot spots, much of Yellowstone sits atop a giant caldera—which is a collapsed volcano. Volcanoes are openings in the Earth’s crust through which molten rock, ash, and gas periodically escape. Frequently, magma—molten rock—moves beneath the surface, prior to spewing out, and such movement registers as seismic tremors. In 2008 and early this year, geologists recorded an unusually high number of tremors in Yellowstone: 813 in 11 days, the second most intense cluster since recordkeeping began, in 1973. Such heightened activity might signal that an eruption is brewing.
When might that happen?
It could happen next week—or possibly 50,000 years from now. If that sounds vague, such is the nature of geologic time. Yellowstone’s last major eruption was about 640,000 years ago. It’s due for another one—overdue, in fact—because scientists have determined that the Yellowstone volcano has erupted on a cycle that’s roughly 600,000 years long. Eventually, all that magma building up below the surface is going to need a place to go. The same is true of other monster volcanoes around the globe. “Although very rare, these events are inevitable,” says University of Bristol geologist Stephen Sparks, “and at some point in the future humans will be faced with dealing with and surviving a super eruption.”
What would a Yellowstone eruption be like?
It would be a cataclysm affecting everyone in the entire U.S., and in fact, the entire world. Scientists say the eruption 640,000 years ago blew a hole in the Earth’s crust as big as Connecticut, buried areas as far as 100 miles away in molten lava, and threw up ash that came down as far away as Iowa and Louisiana. Such an event today—even with warning—could be a horror of unimaginable proportions. There would be hundreds of thousands of immediate casualties, and so much ash and dust would be thrown into the atmosphere that it would blot out much of the sun, plunging Earth into a darkened, continuous winter lasting years. Crops would die, and global starvation—and warfare over remaining food stockpiles—might follow. Some experts even say an eruption could be a “species-ending event”—that species being humans.
Buying a car is like one of those Indiana Jones adventures: you can end up with a heart attack, or a ten-year wait. For a long time it was only possible to get a car as a part of the distribution based on merit. An outstanding worker, with thousands of volunteer hours or a mission as a soldier to Angola or Ethiopia, might consider himself lucky if he was allowed to acquire a Moskovich or a Lada. Professionals of the highest rank would compete in the universities and study centers for the small allocations of automobiles. Meanwhile, government officials could aspire to more modern models, which would be repaired in the State’s own workshops.
When the pipe that carried the subsidy from the Kremlin to here collapsed, the distribution of appliances and cars based on merit ended. It began to work in another way, with money as the medium of exchange to get a vehicle. However, a selective filter was maintained to get the right to buy one of the newcomers, such as a Citroen, Peugeot or Mitsubishi. The old cars acquired before 1959 can be sold, but transferring ownership of the cars obtained for labor or ideological qualities is prohibited. The regulations ended up stipulating that what was acquired in those years of “Real Socialism” is only half owned, non-transferable and easily confiscated.
To this day, although some shops display modern all-terrain air-conditioned minibuses, no Cuban can order and buy a car simply by having the money; they must have a letter of authorization in advance, which takes years of paperwork. The process includes an exhaustive investigation into the origins of the funds, along with verification of the ideological purity of the buyer. For almost a decade, the signature on this safe-conduct was that of Carlos Lage, vice president of the Council of Ministers, who was thrown out of office a few weeks ago. So, in the midst of the astonishment caused by his removal people are asking, “Now who’s going to sign the letters to get a car?”
Of course a commie regime will be suspicious of anyone who has enough money to buy a car. And I can only imagine what it takes to buy a motor boat on the Freedom Island.
The author, Yoani Sanchez, blogs from Cuba, and since blogging in Cuba is much like car-buying in Cuba, she has to publish her posts by e-mailing them to friends outside the country, who then put them online.
“Until same-sex marriage is legal everywhere and same-sex couples are allowed the rights as every heterosexual couple worldwide, we simply do not think it’s fair or just for a female bride-to-be to celebrate her upcoming nuptials here at Cocktail.”
A central Colombian farm worker has been accused of raping his daughter for decades and fathering eight children with her.
The daughter, 35-year-old Alba Nidia, told CNN that her biological father has sexually abused her since she was about 5, shortly after her mother’s death, resulting in 14 pregnancies. Eight children — five girls and three boys — survived.
Actually, Britain has two - don’t forget the Muslims.
In the 1990s, during the “Lost Decade” that followed the bursting of a real estate bubble, Japan’s government spent more than $2 trillion on public works. In so doing, it dug itself the deepest public-debt hole in the history of the developed world, totaling more than 175 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
All the spending has made Japan’s infrastructure the envy of the world. It has a public transportation system that is unrivaled for convenience and ubiquity. Its fiber-optic broadband infrastructure enables the world’s fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else.
But many critics say the government has gone too far, outfitting itself with more dams, bridges, highways, museums and airports than it will ever use. Japan has the oldest population in the world and the lowest proportion of children.
“Our infrastructure is impeccable,” said Takayoshi Igarashi, a professor of politics at Hosei University and an expert on public works spending. “More public works would be surplus to real need. It would not stimulate anything but the construction industry.”
Still, Prime Minister Taro Aso and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) seem to favor another big round of spending on public works. Aso has said that these projects, including building roads, burying telephone wires and thinning forests, have been neglected and will produce much-needed jobs.
Of course the LDP wants a repeat of the stimulus - a lost decade for the country was a gold mine for the ruling party:
There is, however, much more than mere economics involved in Japan’s squabble over more public works.
The LDP, which has governed as a virtual one-party state for nearly half a century, owes much of its power and longevity to decades of generous government spending on infrastructure built outside Tokyo.
Money, jobs, roads and countless numbers of large concrete structures delighted rural voters, while encouraging construction companies to funnel political donations, some of them illegal, to ruling-party politicians, some of whom were convicted of corruption.
The LDP, over the years, designed a government bureaucracy that quietly awarded public works contracts to politically favored construction companies, according to Igarashi, the professor at Hosei University. He also said bureaucrats, when they retired from public service, made a habit of accepting lucrative jobs at construction firms that prospered from government contracts.
In 2001, a charismatic politician with a big-city power base, Junichiro Koizumi, took control of the ruling party. As prime minister until 2006, he cut spending on public works.
In the process, though, the ruling party’s popularity in rural areas declined.
The law requires a national election this year, and both the ruling party and the prime minister appear to be in deep trouble with voters. Nine out of 10 voters disapprove of Aso, according to recent opinion polls.
A massive increase in public works spending, however, could win hearts and minds in rural areas.
Just like in the U.S., it’s a stimulus for the (Liberal) Democratic Party.
A friend mentioned a couple of days ago that she wondered if Richardson’s death from “talk and die” syndrome would have been prevented had she fallen sick in the United States, and then today, this PR e-mail from a think tank that promotes health savings accounts arrived in my inbox:
NEWS REPORTS REVEAL NATASHA RICHARDSON’S DEATH MAY HAVE BEEN PREVENTED WITH U.S. HEALTHCARE
Lack of Equipment Under Government-Run System Delayed Lifesaving Measures
Washington, DC – News reports of the skiing accident, medical treatment and eventual death of actress Natasha Richardson last week shed new light on the limits of the Canadian health care. The timeline of the afternoon’s events indicate that the lack of medical equipment—a trauma helicopter and basic CT scanning equipment at the local hospital—delayed the treatment that may have saved her life.
Well, it’s certainly possible. But I’d hope the Natasha Richardson Proof—the Canadian health care system didn’t work perfectly for Richardson, ergo it sucks—doesn’t become some major PR tactic during a health care debate, because it’s a serious case of missing the forest for one tree.
Possible? Yes. Proven? No.
On another note, when someone is treated and then dies, can you really say that the health care system didn’t work perfectly for her? “I am calling from the hospital to say that our health care system didn’t work perfectly for your mother. Do you want an autopsy?”
A “friend” of Vice President Joseph Biden’s daughter, Ashley, is attempting to hawk a videotape that he claims shows her snorting cocaine at a house party this month in Delaware.
The video, which the shooter initially hoped to sell for $2 million before scaling back his price to $400,000, shows a 20-something woman with light skin and long brown hair taking a red straw from her mouth, bending over a desk, inserting the straw into her nostril and snorting lines of white powder.
The woman appears to resemble Ashley Biden, 27, a social worker for a Delaware child-welfare agency and a visible presence during her father’s campaign for the White House.
Biden has been an outspoken crusader against drugs, coining the term “drug czar” in 1982 while campaigning for a more forceful “war on drugs.”
Well, Biden knows what to do, then. Right? Or do all those drug laws he has sponsored say “For the little people only” in fine print at the bottom?
“In the past year more people have lost jobs . . . than in any other state. More homes have gone into foreclosure. More banks have failed . . . businesses are moving out at an alarming rate, most often citing excessive regulation and intolerable taxes. For top earners, California’s taxes are the highest in the U.S. And to what end? California’s credit rating is the lowest in the nation.”
In short, California is over-taxing, over-spending, over-regulating and over-suing its good citizens—and its unsustainable debt, soaring deficit, Democratic Party domination and dependency on big government—make it a model for the sequel to Barack Obama’s best-selling book “Dreams From My Father.”
Obama has struck a deal with Crown Publishing Group to write a book after his term ends. If he succeeds in making America resemble California, perhaps Obama will title it “Dreams From California.”