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David Warren takes a philosophical look at our judgments of events, and how they can change.
…The victory of Scott Brown, in the Massachusetts byelection, has brought the Left agenda — Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid in White House and Congress — to an abrupt halt. And it has done so before that much damage could be done.
In the bluest of all American blue states — the one which already had a taste of progressive “Obamacare” at state level — people realized they’d made a horrible mistake. A vote swing of more than 30 per cent changed the complexion of a Senate seat that had belonged to the Kennedy family since 1952.
Debt is not the answer to economic problems, there or here; more bureaucracy is not the answer; nor is the further empowerment of public sector unions to hold taxpayers to ransom.
And as to terrorism and foreign threats, Mr. Brown was able to play, before the most politically correct constituency in the U.S., variations on the theme: “American taxpayer dollars should go to buying weapons to kill terrorists, not pay for lawyers to defend them.” …
Thomas Sowell celebrates Scott Brown.
Some of the most melancholy letters and e-mails that are sent to me are from people who lament that there is nothing they can do about the bad policies that they see ruining this country. They don’t have any media outlet for their opinions and the letters they send to their Congressmen are either ignored or are answered by form letters with weasel words. They feel powerless.
Sometimes I remind them that the whole political establishment — both Democrats and Republicans, as well as the mainstream media — were behind amnesty for illegal immigrants, until the public opinion polls showed that the voters were not buying it. If politicians can’t do anything else right, they can count votes.
It was the same story with the government’s health care takeover legislation. The Democrats have such huge majorities in both houses of Congress that they could literally lock the Republicans out of the room where they were deciding what to do, set arbitrary deadlines for votes, and cut off debate in the Senate. The mainstream media was on board with this bill too. To hear the talking heads on TV, you would think it was a done deal.
Then Scott Brown got elected to the “Kennedy seat” in the Senate, showing that that seat was not the inheritance of any dynasty to pass on. Moreover, it showed that the voters were already fed up with the Obama administration, even in liberal Massachusetts, as well as in Virginia and New Jersey. The backtracking on health care began immediately. Politicians can count votes. Once again, the public was not helpless. …
Mary Katherine Ham blogs in the Weekly Standard about Medicare-related issues.
…But Barack Obama needed senior support on Obamacare, so back in October, he sent out a senior stimulus— $250 per Social Security recipient coming to a total of $13 billion. He didn’t get their support (as we now know), but the checks went out, supported by some Republicans and criticized by deficit hawks and many conservatives.
Today, when answering an Ohio woman’s question, Obama edged indelicately close to the political truth about programs for seniors: “We never forget seniors because they vote at very high levels,” he said to light laughter before realizing the response was a bit crass. He then hastened to add that we appreciate seniors because they “changed our diapers.” It was a cynical moment for the hope-and-change merchant.
The admission is a political truth we all know, and the reason Republicans have (unwisely, I think) painted themselves into a fiscal corner by bashing the idea of Medicare cuts in the fight against Obamacare. What’s telling is how clumsy the president has become in his rhetoric. As the constant pitch for flailing health-care becomes more and more tired, the Great Orator does himself less and less good with each outing.
It’s always interesting to see the MSM eat crow. Mort Zuckerman has another commentary on the deflation of Obama’s popularity. Since the health care monstrosity was such a near miss, we are right to wonder where Zuckerman was when we really needed him.
…Taxpayers have thus come to see politics as usual masquerading as economic recovery. Indeed, both the stimulus and healthcare plans were voted on so quickly that the lawmakers had no time to read the bills. In both cases, the White House created the impression it was interested in passing anything, no matter how ineffectual. This was epitomized by Obama’s chief of staff essentially asserting that a healthcare bill would be passed even if all it consisted of was two Band-Aids and an aspirin.
Most critically, Obama misjudged the locus of the country’s anxiety: the economy. Instead of concentrating on jobs, jobs, jobs, he made the decision to “boil the ocean” and go for everything, from comprehensive health reform to global warming to a world without nuclear weapons … and the beat goes on.
This was more than the Congress could absorb and more than the country could understand. Obama, the theoretician in a hurry, made no allowance for the normal resistance to dramatic change and the public’s distaste for big government, big spending, and big deficits. He didn’t seem to realize that Americans understand in the most personal terms that excessive debt has real consequences, given how many have mortgages that exceed the value of a home and credit lines that are too much to carry. Yet this was what the president seemed to be getting us into. Over 60 percent of the country believes that government spending is excessive; Obama’s lowest approval ratings come from his mishandling of the present and future deficits. …
The Economist reviews the undoing of The One, and suggests a course correction.
…One thing, though, is clear. The brief era in which the Democrats felt they could push through anything they wanted, courtesy of their thumping majorities in the House and the Senate and their occupancy of the White House, is over. Once Scott Brown is seated in the Senate, Mr Obama will lose his supermajority there, so a determined opposition (which this one certainly seems to be) will be able to block anything it wants to. Making deals with the Republicans once again becomes a necessity, not a luxury. That should not be a disaster; most presidents have to govern with far fewer than 60 Senate votes.
It is not obvious, though, that the Olympian Mr Obama knows how to do this, despite all his fine words along the campaign trail about “a new politics”. What he now has to understand is that he is in a weak position: he needs the Republicans more than they need him. To get what he wants, he will have to learn to give them much more of what they want. For instance, he could now offer the Republicans tort reform and genuine cost-control to bring them on board for a slimmed-down health bill: that might be an offer they could not refuse. Likewise, any hope of getting a climate-change bill through Congress will probably have to involve more nuclear power.
Bill Clinton grasped all this after the disaster of 1994, when the Republicans took back Congress; the result was a stream of good laws that outraged many leftish Democrats, from welfare reform to free-trade deals to deficit-reduction. Mr Clinton won an easy re-election and his presidency, despite his own best efforts to destroy it, was a pretty successful one. Mr Obama, who is now faced with the possibility of a similar electoral catastrophe, needs to copy the great triangulator.
Peter Schiff describes how government intervention has destroyed American Samoa’s economy and standard of living. People who abuse the power of the state never learn the law of unintended consequences.
…For generations, American Samoa offered strong advantages for tuna canners. The close proximity to vast Pacific tuna schools, the islands’ good port facilities, political association with the United States, and an abundance of relatively inexpensive labor (by American standards) enticed StarKist and Chicken of the Sea to locate their primary canning facilities in American Samoa. Although the workers were paid, in recent years, wages that were below the U.S. minimum, given the low taxes and living costs, these wages were enough to offer the average worker a standard of living that was superior to the denizens of other islands in that area of the Pacific.[ii]
But then, in 2007, Washington came to the “rescue.” As part of its efforts to provide a “living wage” for all Americans, Congress passed a law to step up the minimum wage to $7.25 per hour across all U.S. states and territories by 2009.[iii] Understanding that such a law would devastate American Samoa by raising canning costs past the point where the companies could maintain profitability, the non-voting Samoan member of the U.S. House of Representatives convinced Congress to allow an exemption for the islands. However, Republicans raised allegations that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in whose district both Chicken of the Sea and StarKist had corporate offices, had caved to pressure from big donors and was allowing the continued “exploitation” of Samoan workers. Facing a sticky political situation, the exemption was removed.
The Samoan representative desperately sought to fend off what he was sure would be an economic calamity. He asked the Department of Labor to issue a report examining the potential consequences of the law upon the islands’ economy. The report explained that “nearly 80 percent of workers covered by the FLSA earned under $7.25 per hour. By comparison, if the U.S. minimum wage were increased to the level of the 75th percentile of hourly-paid U.S. workers, it would be raised to $16.50 per hour.” Therefore, the study continued, “there is concern that [the tuna canneries] will be closed prior to the escalation of the minimum wage … and that production will be shifted to facilities outside the U.S.” Ultimately, the Department of Labor concluded that “closure of the tuna canneries will cause a total loss of 8,118 jobs – 45.6 percent of total employment.” (emphasis mine) [iv]…
Roger Simon blogs about the latest Climategate “science” scandal.
Sitting here in Barbara Jordan Terminal, waiting for my plane home and surfing the net, I came upon yet more Climategate/Glaciergate news from the the superb ongoing Telegraph coverage. Now they reveal the UN IPCC’s head climate honcho Rajendra Pachauri has hired the very scalawag who lied to us for years that the Himalayan glaciers were receding, the very “finding” from which Pachauri has suddenly been trying to distance himself. (Two weeks ago it was just the opposite. Don’t we all wish we had Pachauri’s bank account?)
So it goes. Anthropogenic Global Warming is rapidly morphing into the greatest scandal in the history of science since the belief in a flat earth – and people had a lot more excuses for that. Not that the Obama administration is even beginning to acknowledge it. Who knows what they say to each other behind the scenes? They have enough to worry about.
But speaking of climate scalawags, how about my Congressman Henry Waxman of Waxman-Markey fame? The reified liberalist lifer undoubtedly is incapable of understanding the science for himself – in fact he admitted as much in front of his committee, saying he “relied” on scientists for that – but it would be funny to watch if and finally they do make a public rollback on this nonsense. Fortunately for sclerotic Henry, this will probably be avoided, since virtually no one is making noises about the risible cap-and-trade legislation any more. And Al Gore appears to have conveniently vanished from the public eye, a John Edwards of climate. (Actually, I’m surprised Gore hasn’t turned up in Haiti to do “pro bono” work to resurrect his reputation.) …
Jeremy Page, in the Times, UK, reviews all the errors discovered in the IPCC report on Himalayan glaciers.
…The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.
…The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated” in the latest of a series of blows to the panel’s credibility.
…leading glaciologists pointed out at least five glaring errors in the relevant section.
It says the total area of Himalayan glaciers “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035”. There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.
A table below says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840m — a rate of 135.2m a year. The actual rate is only 23.5m a year.
The section says Himalayan glaciers are “receding faster than in any other part of the world” when many glaciologists say they are melting at about the same rate.
An entire paragraph is also attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from it, and the IPCC is not supposed to use such advocacy groups as sources. …
Walter Russell Meade, in The American Interest, gives more reason to pull the plug on UN funding.
The London Times continues to follow the glaciergate story–and it keeps getting worse.
The latest disclosure: Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s (formerly) prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (known as the IPCC), may have raised millions of dollars for his New Delhi institute on the basis of the totally bogus ‘glaciergate’ claim by the IPCC that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.
According the the London Times, Pachauri’s institute got money from the European Union and the US-based Carnegie Corporation to investigate a prediction that never had any scientific backing whatever, and one which all serious glacier scientists instantly recognized as impossible. The bogus claim was frequently repeated in the fundraising efforts — and reiterated as recently as January 15 when the IPCC was already under intense pressure to admit it had blundered.
This is now more than an example of eye-popping incompetence and gross neglect of elementary scientific standards by a body on whose authority the world is expected to make multi-trillion dollar decisions affecting every business and every person on the planet.
It is now, potentially, a criminal issue. If Pachauri knew the claim was bogus and allowed these grant applications to go forward, he could find himself facing criminal charges. …