Interesting stories today:

Now that the federal government owns 61 percent of General Motors the automaker plans to introduce a ‘public option’ vehicle as part of a sweeping plan to provide new cars for some 46 million Americans who lack proper transportation.

So real you'd think it's real. And yet that's the direction of the new health plan...

Here's a short paragraph out of a good article. Read the whole thing.

During the auto bailout hearings a majority of voters called, e-mailed, wrote, and expressed concern about this auto bailout, and then were ignored by the Congress that gave out bailout money anyway. The same thing happened during the stimulus/recovery/spending package that was passed. A majority of American’s voiced concern, but Congress passed this bill with over 8000 pork attachments. During the debate on these issues we were told that GM and Chrysler were to big to let them go bankrupt, we gave them “billions” and they went bankrupt anyway. We were told that a stimulus/recovery/spending package had to be passed immediately to control unemployment and stimulate the economy, it hasn’t happened.

Keep in mind this guy is an independent. Not a partisan.

I see that the FTC has decided that you, my reader, are an uninformed moron who can't possibly decide between things without even more information.

So here's the more information: when I link to Amazon products, I'm typically linking to my affiliate page, and getting a cut if you think it's worth buying. If you don't think it's worth buying, or think my recommendations are trash, I don't get a cut. If you'd like to find out what I'm talking about without paying the cut to me, thereby increasing Amazon's profit, go directly to their website without using my link, and find it yourself. Same information either way. It's up to you.

For those of us who are aware that massive disclosures do not produce better decisions (and who are pleased about the (PDF)Nobel Prize awarded to the one who proved it true), this is an example of a waste of time on many, many levels: but your government, the one that needs to spend hundreds of billions next year because employment is cratering now, wanted you to know.

From a letter by a cancer specialist:

Every analysis of oncology suggests that we have a 10-30% deficit of trained physicians staring us in the face by 2020. Every academic analysis suggests one or another program, and bemoans the difficulty in attracting qualified medical students and residents to oncology. It's quite simple, really: very hard work, and declining income. Private practice physicians have seen a fall of approximately 30% since 2004. Worsening economics are right around the corner. Given the extraordinary expense of chemotherapy and supportive therapies, combined with reimbursements that just exceed a wash, it will become impossible to deliver outpatient care in more than half the venues in the United States quite soon. And then, simply put, the senior physicians will quit....

I could go on, but this note is far too long already. Specialists, and underpaid generalists will hang it up years ahead of their planned exit from medicine in just about any system that the Obama administration is likely to devise. They'll scarcely need to ration care: there just won't be anyone around to deliver it. Government will kill the golden goose, and then blame it upon everyone and anyone else. As usual.

Name me happy workers whose wages have fallen 30% in the past five years. Actually, name me anyone else whose wages have fallen 30% and who still thinks they're going to not take early retirement where they can. And we are about to have the largest cohort enter the senior citizen ranks just in time for the system to fail them.

There are two fixes now, widely discussed everywhere but in the media:

1. Allow health insurance companies registered in any state to sell their policies in every state.

2. Require all insurers to offer plans to everyone as a condition of offering it to anyone.

A brilliant point about the financial crisis and regulation:

I'm sure everyone has seen various op-eds, blog posts, and so forth proclaiming that the financial crisis shows that capitalism can't be left "unregulated", and that the end of "free market ideology" is nigh.

It seems obvious to me, though, that critics are comparing markets (which were far from unregulated) to a hypothetical, rational, efficient, regulatory system, which is a classic nirvana fallacy.

I won't dispute that many market actors--banks, bond rating agencies, mortgage companies, etc.--hardly acquitted themselves well during the housing bubble and resulting financial crash. But exactly which government actors acquitted themselves well? The public-private Fannie and Freddie Frankensteins, which helped inflate the bubble and whose bailouts will cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars? The Treasury Department, which failed to do anything proactive to prevent the crisis, and ultimate whose reaction to it under Paulsen ranged from subdued panic to hyperactive panic? The Federal Reserve, whose monetary policies were probably the biggest villain in the whole fiasco, and whose chairman famously argued, absurdly, that housing prices nationwide could not go down because they never had before (and even more absurdly based his policies on such nonsense)? Congress, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to make ever more risky loans, berated (and regulated) financial companies for not generously lending to subprime borrowers, and not only prevented the Bush Administration from reforming Fannie and Freddie but gave them even more lending authority just as the crisis was emerging? And which then passed a "stimulus" bill full of longstanding Democratic priorities but rather short on actual stimulus? State and local governments, which spent lavishly when bubble-related tax revenues were way up, and almost none of which prudently planned for the bubble's bursting? And which bought into the "everyone should own a house mentality" to the extent that they were disinclined to use their existing regulatory powers to rein in crazy mortgage practices (like 0 down, option arms to insolvent borrowers) and indeed barely prosecuted rampant bubble-time mortgage fraud?

In other words, our problem is not no regulation (free markets) versus government control: our problem is a bunch of greedy SOBs on whom we sic other greedy SOBs with the thought that "it takes a thief to catch a thief".

I'll bet you think that's impossible, right? Bank of America is a large bank, and the government wouldn't simply threaten them with being fired to get them to lose shareholders' money?

Not according to the Attorney General of New York: they were supposed to lose money on the Merrill Lynch buyout or be fired.

What was missing, of course, was a good reason why the pension funds that hold BofA stock should have to take the hit: they have older people to look after, who need the money they were promised.

Governmental compassion on display. We're in the best of hands.

Seen the promises out there for "new, green jobs"? Wondered what you were being promised?

Well, let's start by saying what it isn't (paper on SSRN, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:

A rapidly growing literature promises that a massive program of government mandates, subsidies, and forced technological interventions will reward the nation with an economy brimming with green jobs. Not only will these jobs improve the environment, but they will be high paying, interesting, and provide collective rights. This literature is built on mythologies about economics, forecasting, and technology.

Myth: Everyone understands what a green job is.

Reality: No standard definition of a green job exists.

Myth: Creating green jobs will boost productive employment.

Reality: Green jobs estimates include huge numbers of clerical, bureaucratic, and administrative positions that do not produce goods and services for consumption.

Myth: Green jobs forecasts are reliable.

Reality: The green jobs studies made estimates using poor economic models based on dubious assumptions.

Myth: Green jobs promote employment growth.

Reality: By promoting more jobs instead of more productivity, the green jobs described in the literature encourage low-paying jobs in less desirable conditions. Economic growth cannot be ordered by Congress or by the United Nations. Government interference - such as restricting successful technologies in favor of speculative technologies favored by special interests - will generate stagnation.

Myth: The world economy can be remade by reducing trade and relying on local production and reduced consumption without dramatically decreasing our standard of living.

Reality: History shows that nations cannot produce everything their citizens need or desire. People and firms have talents that allow specialization that make goods and services ever more efficient and lower-cost, thereby enriching society.

Myth: Government mandates are a substitute for free markets.

Reality: Companies react more swiftly and efficiently to the demands of their customers and markets, than to cumbersome government mandates.

Myth: Imposing technological progress by regulation is desirable.

Reality: Some technologies preferred by the green jobs studies are not capable of efficiently reaching the scale necessary to meet today's demands and could be counterproductive to environmental quality.

Let's spend a moment on those notes about employment: will more people have jobs as a result of these policies? Start with a report from a country that has actually tried the policy: Spain. What do we learn about employment under green jobs?

Optimistically treating European Commission partially funded data, we find
that for every renewable energy job that the State manages to finance, Spain’s
experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence,
by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs
on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created, to which we have to add
those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would
have created.

In other words, if we look at everything in the best light possible, we expect that those green jobs should RAISE unemployment, not decrease it. Do you think that is a good public policy? Do you think perhaps your congresscritter might be open to listening to you? Your family and friends? Take a moment and speak to one of these choices. It's your country.

If the President WANTS to seriously anger me, making veterans pay for the medical treatment their wounds need will do nicely.

Not taking care of veterans is called irresponsibility. You broke it, you clean it up -- yes, what you were told as a child that evidently didn't sink in. It's called bad faith, too: they reasonably expect that's the purpose of the Veteran's Administration. And it is.

I think I'm beginning to get the point of the tea parties being held across the country.

Look at the headline again.

Now laugh.

Now read why you might want to blame Bush and get rid of the thing, from the week's news. Having created a deficit mostly from a stimulus bill, and then said the deficit is a problem, it requires more....

Now say, "Darn it all!"

Hat tip to Instapundit.

That's the quick summary of this speech by Havel, which was not politely received by the European Parliament (a body which doesn't care if it insults heads of state is an interesting choice to speak at, but I applaud Havel's courage).

Interesting quote:


The present decision making system of the European Union is different from a classic parliamentary democracy, tested and proven by history. In a normal parliamentary system, part of the MPs support the government and part support the opposition. In the European parliament, this arrangement has been missing. Here, only one single alternative is being promoted and those who dare thinking about a different option are labelled as enemies of the European integration. Not so long ago, in our part of Europe we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition. It was through this experience that we learned the bitter lesson that with no opposition, there is no freedom. That is why political alternatives must exist.

And not only that. The relationship between a citizen of one or another member state and a representative of the Union is not a standard relationship between a voter and a politician, representing him or her. There is also a great distance (not only in a geographical sense) between citizens and Union representatives, which is much greater than it is the case inside the member countries. This distance is often described as the democratic deficit, the loss of democratic accountability, the decision making of the unelected – but selected – ones, as bureaucratisation of decision making etc. The proposals to change the current state of affairs – included in the rejected European Constitution or in the not much different Lisbon Treaty – would make this defect even worse.

Since there is no European demos – and no European nation – this defect cannot be solved by strengthening the role of the European parliament either. This would, on the contrary, make the problem worse and lead to an even greater alienation between the citizens of the European countries and Union institutions. The solution will be neither to add fuel to the “melting pot” of the present type of European integration, nor to suppress the role of member states in the name of a new multicultural and multinational European civil society. These are attempts that have failed every time in the past, because they did not reflect the spontaneous historical development.

I fear that the attempts to speed up and deepen integration and to move decisions about the lives of the citizens of the member countries up to the European level can have effects that will endanger all the positive things achieved in Europe in the last half a century. Let us not underestimate the fears of the citizens of many member countries, who are afraid, that their problems are again decided elsewhere and without them, and that their ability to influence these decisions is very limited. So far, the European Union has been successful, partly thanks to the fact that the vote of each member country had the same weight and thus could not be ignored. Let us not allow a situation where the citizens of member countries would live their lives with a resigned feeling that the EU project is not their own; that it is developing differently than they would wish, that they are only forced to accept it. We would very easily and very soon slip back to the times that we hoped belonged to history.


Read the whole thing. Rather important to the project of Europe.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, a post noting that a bunch of lefty law professors had written a paper against Cass Sunstein, whom Obama wishes to add as his regulatory czar. He notes with some amusement that they advocate "the precautionary principle" and "It is difficult to think of a single public health or environmental threat that with the benefit of additional research has not proven even more dangerous over time."

This sort of statement, besides tickling the funnybone, is subject to rebuttal, and he responds:

Now that's a fun game! Let's see, off the top of my head, here are some things that turned out to be a lot less threatening than many, including at least some "experts," thought:

Mercury in vaccines; Bendectin; Silicone breast implants (and medical grade silicone in general); PCBs; Asbestos in buildings; Flouride in water; Birth control pills; Occasional marijuana use; High fat diets; Exposure to low level nuclear radiation; New carpet fumes; "Toxic waste dumps"/Superfund sites; Moderate overweightedness; Moderate alcohol consumption; Spermicides; Metal fillings (for teeth); Cancer from physical trauma; Masturbation; Predictions in the 1970s of worldwide food shortages; "Overpopulation"; Global Warming (the predictions of the level of man-made warming have decreased dramatically, even among strong advocates of the theory); Miscarriage from video display monitors; Cancer from electromagnetic field radiation; Radon; Dioxin; Pesticides commonly used on fruits and vegetables causing cancer to "eaters";

Feel free to add more, below.

The comments duly take him up on that, and serve as a quick reminder of all the ridiculous scares (did someone say "Alar"?) that the "experts" have foisted on a gullible public. The longer your experience and the better your memory, the less impressed you tend to be by "expert" claims of impending catastrophe: you realize the odds are that they've just bollixed up their work again.

The Guardian, a newspaper with many accidentally funny articles, has done it again: "No inaugural address has so thoroughly rejected the political philosophy and legislative record of the previous administration.".

Really.

Just so you catch up, let's take a quick glance at reactions from people who know something about Bush and the speech, and compare them.

You can stop laughing now. Don't tell the Guardian, they don't know they're read for laughs.

California has decided that they want a legislature that represents the state, rather than the current legislature, and duly voted in Proposition 11 (PDF, Prop 11 starts on page 58, if the page link above doesn't work). The short version is here.

While I recognize that the professional politicians will challenge it immediately (I'm sure they can make an argument that because their arguments against it in the ballot pamphlet were incoherent that the people were not properly informed before voting), I'm sure, as well, that the resulting map will be challenged on the grounds that the "historic representation of name-of-district-here" has changed, and I think I'm going to enjoy noting who makes that challenge.

Obmama plans on spending more. Which is, to give him credit, hard to do, the kind of achievement a sometime legislator and professional schnorrer can be proud of.

Somehow, I'm not sure that "let's bail out everybody, paid for by taxes on the country" is that much different from those cryptic instructions: "Lift yourself up by your own bootstraps." If I'm going to have my job taken over so that I'm a government employee and have the salary garnished to pay to hire me, I'm not sure that I've gotten anywhere.

Per the inspiring post from Iowahawk, I am Joe. Ad likely to stay that way, appalled that being around a candidate and asking a question is treated like something worth investigating from the same media that can't bother to investigate a presidential candidate.

I'd post a picture here, but that would take bandwidth. Check out the link, above.

The Senate stepped up after the House had bobbled the vote on the rescue bill and passed something better than Congress had voted on. Think Resolution Trust Corporation, then add in clearing out some of the deadwood preventing recovery in the tax code. Not bad.

Now to see how serious the House is in response.

Got a link to John McCain's Skeleton Closet, and it struck me as silly in the same way this article did from the National Enquirer editor (though published in the Wall Street Journal). There is a certain "tone deafness" that affects each author.

Taking the second first, he says:

In this fractious environment, politics has made for more than strange bedfellows. Witness Mr. McCain greeting Levi Johnston and quickly becoming buddies with the 18-year-old hockey player who impregnated the daughter of his running mate.

Mr. McCain presumably did not have a copy in his pocket of the recently adopted platform of the Republican Party, which contained within its instructive gospel of morality and values: "We renew our call for replacing 'family planning' programs for teens with increased funding for abstinence education, which teaches abstinence until marriage as the responsible and expected standard of behavior. . . . We oppose school-based clinics that provide referrals, counseling, and related services for abortion and contraception."


Witness Mr. McCain acting well, Mr. Johnston acting like a grownup, and the platform of the Republican party calling for more responsibility for teens, not less -- and the editor evidently unable to understand the connection. That particular fight is one the Republicans would love to see fought, since they would win it handily, much to the confusion of the editor.

The Skeleton Closet tries to make a similar point:

Suddenly, in September 2007, he's campaigning in South Carolina, the heavily Baptist state where George W. Bush barely managed to stop McCain's presidential campaign 8 years ago. And guess what? McCain tells a reporter "By the way, I'm not Episcopalian. I'm Baptist."

When pressed, he said he's attended the North Phoenix Baptist Church in Arizona for more than 15 years, though he has never been baptized in that church. Now see, that's exactly the problem. Baptism is kind of a big thing in the Baptist Church. (That's how they got the name.) No baptism, not Baptist.

Talk about a pencil without a point. Why should I care?

Then there's the "Keating Five" assertion: McCain was one of them. Yep. He was. And, while not convicted of anything, he did decide that ethics and campaign reform were going to be his issues after that -- and he's been working on them since. How long ago was that, again?

"birthday regards" to Joe Bananas surely makes him corrupt and a Mafia member, right? Again, this is a pencil with no point, and needs no erasing from me.

Silliness. Really, folks.

There's been some bewailing of the fact that few debates in the blogosphere are civil, and Patterico has decided to do something about it. The link spells out the rules and history: the debate is here, and will be updated.

I'm mightily impressed. These are certainly better rules than most debaters get.

This is the key to the success of a man who mainly votes "present" and who does not work on major legislation: the appearance of experience without actually accomplishing anything.

Inspired by this brillant post in AJ Strata's journal.

For those who occasionally point out that China is determined to expand its influence, and hungry for influence far beyond its current state: China is not the threat you think it is.

Check out The Powerless Dragon for a short summary of why:

He offers a fine rehearsal of various problems China faces and/or is causing: it copies Western products rather than innovating; it then mass produces goods by paying exploitative wages; the quality of the goods is horrendous and often deadly; it lacks the natural resources to sustain the sort of growth it would require to become a developed nation; it pollutes at nearly suicidal levels, like Eastern Europe used to; it's running out of water as well as oil and metals and has built shoddy dams that imperil its own people; it has internal ethnic tensions, worker unrest, population imbalances that make a welfare system untenable; it exploits African and other workers abroad as it seeks to extract the raw materials it needs back home, making it the ugliest sort of imperialist power; the Communist Party has to ruthlessly repress free speech, the press, the Internet, religion, etc.; and so on and so forth.

And this list is from someone who believes in the Chinese military threat. I am not convinced: the USSR, too, was bellicose beyond its capacity, counting on its ability to cow others into acting well toward it.

Many remember the cover of TIME magazine and its "scare" stories about heterosexual AIDS. Some of my friends remember Michael Fumento and his determined fact checking that demonstrated that there was no danger of such an epidemic in the US. This week, the news is officially in: there is no such epidemic. There is an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases: any time "one in four" is a good statistical description, you have a serious problem.

And, for those following James Taranto, who enquires about apologies: just because the facts are against them, don't expect "experts" to change their tune. After all, the point of expertise is that no one questions you, and everybody believes you.

MoveOn doesn't have billionaire donors—it's just all of us, chipping in together.

Yeah, right.

Check out Wikipedia:

Soros gave $3 million to the Center for American Progress, committed $5 million to MoveOn,...

I know, old news. But if you're not going to be straight with us, don't bother with the emails.

Yesterday I read someone saying "McCain has been lying about Hamas endorsing Obama."

You guys should know better. McCain has a rep for saying what he believes, even if it's unpleasant to hear, or if he doesn't have the policy support he thinks he does. This, however, was a fact. Here's the interview. Listen for yourself.