JustOneMinute

The Petering Out of PPIP

Noam Scheiber reports that the Treasury PPIP is dead, or at least comatose and fading fast.  I want to pry this out for a special look:

For what it's worth, I've actually talked to several Treasury people about this on background in recent weeks. And while they all tell me the legacy securities part of the PPIP is moving forward in some form, they generally say they'd be pretty happy if it turned out the PPIP were unnecessary. In fact, it ties in with Treasury's view that the Geithner plan was misunderstood in some quarters from the beginning. The point was not, as one Treasury official recently told me, to solve the financial crisis by providing liquidity and magically reviving the prices of toxic assets. (Though Treasury certainly wouldn't have minded if that happened.) The point was largely to make it easier for banks to raise capital by removing the toxic assets from their balance sheet--the thinking being that the bad assets create uncertainty and generally frighten potential investors. So with the banks raising capital relatively easy, one can understand why Treasury isn't disappointed to see the PPIP peter out.

Widely misunderstood?  Whomever do they have in mind?  I penned several posts back in the early days of TARP explaining how the purchase of banks assets *at a fair value* could help recapitalize the banks by (a) improving their asset to capital ratio, and (b) reducing their volatility and making them more appealing to lenders and equity investors frightened by the prospect of bankruptcy.  I would say that lefties intent on promoting the nationalization of Citicorp and BofA were also intent on misrepresenting TARP and the ensuing PPIP.

That said, it should be easy enough to dig up the Congressional testimony and press briefings pitching TARP and PPIP.  I suspect we will see talk of the promotion of price transparency and maybe less on reducing volatility and attracting private investment than the current Treasury backgrounders would prefer.

What If Reports Of Michael Jackson's Death Had Been Greatly Exaggerated?

Unable to move on after being scooped on their home field, the LA Times blog offers this, presumably to the tune of "Bleat It":

How would we have reacted if TMZ had been wrong about Michael Jackson's death?

Wow, first time for everything.  Let me take a stab - I suppose a lot of people would have tried to re-upload "Thriller".  Can that be done at I-Tunes?

The LA Times soldiers on:

Has technology’s ability to deliver information at such a rapid pace corrupted us? It’s one thing to marvel at how social media sites have helped spread Iranian news we might not have attained due to censorship -- and with such timeliness; it’s quite another to have become a culture that prizes speed over confirmed facts. Have our standards for accountability dissolved?

Hmm, we are talking about celebrity-watching here.  I don't know what the rules are, if any, but my guess is that speed is prized over accuracy (Let me check that with my high school and college girls...). 

The descent into fantasy continues:

“I’m not sure it’s technology that’s breaking down the barriers of accountability,” says Jeffrey Seglin, author of The Right Thing, a weekly ethics column published by the New York Times Syndicate. “The National Enquirer broke facts about the O.J. case before other media outlets did. Matt Drudge reported information on the Monica Lewinsky affair that Newsweek had been sitting on."

OK, I'll accept the point that gossip and rumor were not invented after Facebook and Twitter.  But let's stay with that theme:

“A curious thing is at play here,” Seglin continues. “Few people expect TMZ or Drudge or the National Enquirer to get things right or to report on issues of substance. When they do, at least so far, it’s a bit of an anomaly. So the consequences for getting it wrong among such sites do not seem terribly high.

A curious thing is that neither the LA Times nor Mr. Seglin want to mention the John Edwards debacle, broken by the unexpectedly accurate National Enquirer after the national media turned a blind eye to the possible implosion of a major Democratic candidate.  What if the Enquirer had been wrong about that?  But they weren't!  More grist for the LA Times mill...

Last laugher from Mr. Seglin on accuracy and accountability:

That said, Fox News didn’t take as big a hit as it might have after it was revealed that the reports it filed on Sarah Palin not knowing Africa was a continent were based on a hoax.”

Hmm, it's almost as if Democrats and Republicans are treated differently by Big Media.  Did Seglin seriously expect the NY Times editors or columnists to ride to the defense of Sarah Palin?  Or maybe he thought NBC News would shoulder that burden.

THE REALLY LAST LAUGHER: 

Would TMZ take the same approach to a political figure, which in turn could pose a threat to national security? Let’s hope we never find out.

I am hoping never to find out what they heck they have in mind with that.  But let me offer this promise - if TMZ reports that Obama is dead, or even Joe Biden, I promise to double-check before texting 300 people and posting here.

Traitors All!

Paul Krugman celebrates his Nobel Prize in Polemics by declaring that all those who disagree with him on global warming are traitors to the planet.  No, I am not sure what that means either, but it certainly sets a high rhetorical bar - presumably those who disagree with him on health care reform are traitors to humanity, but what about those who disagree with him on the wisdom of nationalizing Citicorp?  Are we merely traitors to our debit cards, or does Krugman contemplate a more dramatic charge?

Well.  Let me not come between you and some lunatic ravings:

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.

Deadly heat waves that only occur once in a generation will soon become annual events.  Hmm.  My guess is that one major reason a rare, unusual heat wave is so deadly is because - stay with me on this - it is rare and unusual.  The good people of the great city of Phoenix have a word for the sort of weather that would be a record breaking heat wave in New York City; that word is "normal".  Yet my summer reading does not include headlines of people dropping in the streets of Phoenix like pop flies over the NY Mets infield.   Or turn it around - why, one might wonder, does Washington DC struggle during a snow storm that Buffalo would handle with panache?  Familiarity may not breed contempt but it inspires preparation.

But let's cut to the Health section of the USGCRP report in question (press release) for some more merriment.  About those heat waves? 

Heat is already the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States. More than 3,400 deaths between 1999 and 2003 were reported as resulting from exposure to excessive heat.

That is about 850 deaths per year.  Each untimely death is tragic and Krugman is surely vexed that this number might rise.  But by way of comparison, a 2002 study estimated that higher CAFE standards would put Americans in smaller cars and result in an additional 2,000 deaths per year; Krugman, as a party-line progressive, surely supports higher CAFE standards.  I denounce Krugman as a traitor to the national highway system!  Not to mention as a traitor to the safety of my wife and kids.

And let's press on with the USGCRP "science":

Projections for Chicago suggest that the average number of deaths due to heat waves would more than double by 2050 under a lower emissions scenario91 and quadruple under a high emissions scenario 91 (see figure page 90). 283

The number of deaths will double or quadruple?  Geez, that is pretty grim.  Of course, as the report notes, the United States population is getting larger, older, fatter, and more diabetic, so all sorts of death rates are rising.  Just for starters, since the population is getting older, what is the heat wave related death rate per hundred thousand for folks aged 65 to 85?  The USGCRP may know, but they aren't telling - all they deliver is an aggregate deaths per 6 million (but they do tell us that the proportion of the US population over 65 will rise from 12 percent to 21 percent by 2050).

My goodness - if this had been delivered under George Bush earnest libs would have hollered that this slippery presentation represented the worst sort of phony, politicized science .  Fortunately, it came out under Obama and tells the story Krugman wants told, so he is delighted to cite it.

Back to Special K:

In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

Jiminy, Krugman sounds like he just learned he won't be able to chill his white wine.  Relax, prof, there will be ice in the future.  Annual heat weaves are a clear and present danger unless we can invent air conditioners and remind people to flip them on.

I DEPLORE THIS FALSE EQUIVALENCE:  Andrew Sullivan misses the distinction between traitors to the planet and traitors to their party.

BUT SERIOUSLY:  We will let Krugman bash Al Gore while we boost Bjorn Lomborg, the Skeptical Environmentalist, in this old piece.  Key point:

And just to state the ought-to-be-obvious - Lomborg has parted company (as have I) with the folks who argue that humans have not contributed to global warming.  His position is that, to whatever extent we have, global warming is just one of many problems and that making it a top priority would be a major mis-allocation of resources.

As an economist, this notion of a cost-benefit analysis ought to be familiar to Krugman.  Ought to be.

Merry Mariano

Mighty Mo picks up his 500th save and his first RBI in a 4-2 victory over the beleaguered Mets.

From the always self-effacing Mariano:

Rivera smiled and said his first run batted in meant more to him than the save.

“But don’t get me wrong, this is definitely special, being the second guy who does that in the history of baseball; it’s kind of special,” Rivera said. “But I’m a team player. My team fought hard today to give me that opportunity to be there. I tried to do my job. Really, all the 500 saves belong to my teammates.”

And the Captain:

“We’ve played together for 17 years,” Jeter said. “He’s the definition of consistency. You can line up all the players who ever played the game. Mo’s been as consistent as anyone. He does it in the regular season; he does it in the postseason; he does it in spring training; he did it in the minor leagues. He’s pretty much been successful everywhere he’s been.”

Sporting News describes the RBI:

Rivera's RBI came after Mets closer Francisco Rodriguez intentionally walked Derek Jeter to load the bases with two outs in the top of the ninth. K-Rod fell behind Rivera 2-0 before squaring the count. Rivera then fouled off a 2-2 fastball before walking on a 3-2 pitch to drive in an insurance run heading to the ninth.

"I just wanted to try to do something,'' Rivera said of the at-bat. "I guess K-Rod came against me too fine. The pitches he threw were close.''

That is not the half of it.  Mariano had come in to get the last out in the bottom of the eighth inning.  The Mets brought in their stud closer, K-Rod, to keep the game close in the top of the ninth.  As circumstances evolved (Yet another missed pop fly, a walk, and two outs), Derek Jeter came to the plate with men on first and second and Mariano ostensibly on deck. 

No team in their right mind would pitch to Jeter when a guy with two regular season at-bats in his career is waiting in the on-deck circle, would they?  They might!  Although it was unimaginable that the Yankees would lift Rivera and let someone else finish the ninth, the Yankees put a batting helmet on Cervelli, a possible pinch-hitter, and had him wave a bat around while Mariano stayed seated. 

K-Rod actually threw Jeter a strike, which left the ESPN announcers aghast.  Jeter looked towards the Yankee dugout and started laughing - he either saw Cervelli or heard the Yankees playing the theme music from "The Pink Panther" - and the Mets came to their senses and gave Jeter an intentional pass, with unfortunate results.

AT LEAST A DECADE TOO LATE, BUT STILL:  Forget "Enter Sandman" - Mariano's entrance song should have been the theme from "A Fistful of Dollars".

Waiting For Ricci

The Supreme Court should release its decision in the New Haven firefighters case today.

[UPDATE:  Sotomayor is overturned 5-4, which preserves her cred as a reliable liberal:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.

The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide, potentially limiting the circumstances in which employers can be held liable for decisions when there is no evidence of intentional discrimination against minorities.

"Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion for the court. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

This won't be that awkward for Sotomayor - she is a liberal judge with, at least on this case, mainstream liberal views.  But it will be helpful to give the Senate Democrats an opportunity to defend her position.

EVEN THE LOSERS:  Jonathan Adler of the Volokh Conspiracy studies Footnote 10 of the dissent and infers a rebuke to Sotomayor:

First, Justice Ginsburg's dissent contains an interesting footnote -- Footnote 10 -- suggesting that she and the other dissenters were prepared to vacate and remand the case as recommended by the Obama Administration's amicus brief.

10. The lower courts focused on respondents’ “intent” rather than onwhether respondents in fact had good cause to act. See 554 F. Supp. 2d 142, 157 (Conn. 2006). Ordinarily, a remand for fresh consideration would be in order. But the Court has seen fit to preclude further proceedings. I therefore explain why, if final adjudication by this Court is indeed appropriate, New Haven should be the prevailing party.

This would suggest that even the Court's dissenters believed that the Second Circuit did not properly address the issues raised by the New Haven firefighters, even if they would adopt a standard that would make it difficult for the firefighters to prevail.

The Workplace Law Profs summarize the case; Glenn Reynolds has lots.]

RESUMING:

The non-PC Steve Sailer has fun with Emily Bazelon of Slate, who looks with disfavor on family ties and acquired expertise in mundane matters such as saving people's lives but presumably has a different view for important matters such as law school admissions.  A snippet of his Big Finish:

I looked up "Emily Bazelon" on Wikipedia (accessed 16.59 ET, June 28 2009) and discovered that while she’s very bright, she’s not exactly the most self-aware person. When read in light of her biography, her Slate article about privileged white firemen becomes an amusing epitome of unthinking Gown v. Town prejudice.

Wikipedia tells us: [Bazelon] graduated from Yale College in 1993 and from Yale Law School in 2000."

Skip a bit and:

Moreover, this legal writer’s concern about the advantages Frank Ricci garnered by being related to firemen seems a little ironic in light of this Wikipedia line:
 

"She is the granddaughter of Judge David L. Bazelon and cousin of feminist Betty Friedan."

Actually, as her 2005 Slate article Shopping with Betty suggests, she’s more like the second cousin twice removed of the proto-feminist (and crypto-communist) authoress of the bestselling Feminine Mystique. Still, the two were fairly close despite their age difference.

More strikingly, the legal journalist’s grandfather David Bazelon was the most powerful judge in America not on the Supreme Court when he served from 1962-1978 as Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Indeed, considering his close relationship with the Svengali of the Warren Court, William J. Brennan, quite possibly Bazelon was more powerful than several Supreme Court Justices.

Mr. Sailer overlooks that she is also a woman.  Well, then.

Authorship Of Obama's "Dreams" - Maybe It Was The Guy Who Forged His Birth Certificate

Is this really as good as it gets?  Jack is back with more "evidence" that Bill Ayers was involved in authoring Obama's "Dreams From My Father".

Jonah Goldberg is utterly unimpressed by the lead tidbit which is that both Ayers and Obama misquoted the well-known description of Chicago as "hog butcher to the world".

As for them both getting the quote wrong, so what?  I would bet that most, or at least a great many, people get that quote wrong in the same way. If you search Google Books, you'll find 605 books or excerpts using the "to" and 655 using "for." If you search Nexis you'll find 536 instances of "to" and only 382 of "for."

I scored it as roughly 5,000 Google hits for the wrong quote and 8,000 for the correct one.  Not exactly decisive.

Mr. Goldberg was kind enough to gloss over the next bit of "evidence", which is either presented opaquely or is some of the worst forensic work I have seen:

I read through all 759 matches and culled out those that I would consider B-Level or above.  There were 180 of these.  As a control, I tested them against my own 2006 book Sucker Punch, like Dreams and Fugitive Days a memoir that deals extensively with race.  In that I am closer to Ayers in age, race, education, family and cultural background than Obama is, our styles should have had more chance of matching.  They don't.  Of the 180 examples, I matched, strictly speaking, on six.  Even by the most generous standard, we matched on only sixteen.

So let me see if I understand.  A careful reader identified 180 matches between Ayers' work and Obama's that Mr. Cashill considered to be "B-level or above".  Mr. Cashill only matched at most sixteen of those phrases or features in his own writing, thereby proving... what?

What is the baseline?  For the exercise to be meaningful, a careful reader would need to go through Mr. Cashill's work and compare it directly to Ayers.  If that were done, they might well find 164 other Cashill-Ayers matches which, combined with the 16 in hand, resulted in a total of 180 matches in all.  And since Obama would not be a match on these 164 new entries, I guess we would conclude that Ayers was the author of Cashill's work.

Or maybe a careful reader would undertake a third comparison and discover Cashill and Obama match on 164 unique new points, thereby proving that Mr. Cashill was the author of "Dreams" and could save us a lot of time by simply admitting it.

That said, perhaps a careful, objective reader would establish that the Cashill-Ayers matches only total 30, which might lead us to wonder whether the Obama-Ayers match rate is unusually high.  But right now, we have no baseline at all and no reason to think that Obama, Ayers and Cashill all ought to match on the same phrases.

The third bit of evidence also falls flat:

Rather astonishingly, as Mr. West points out, at least six of the characters in Dreams have the same names as characters in Ayers' books: Malik, Freddy, Tim, Coretta, Marcus, and "the old man."

"The old man" - geez, I never thought I would see that in a book, ha, get it, "See", Old Man", Sea....  But semi-seriously, folks - six names match out of how many?  Surely it makes a difference whether the two authors only have six named characters, or each presents a cast encompassing the Chicago phone book.

OK, I can't stop - the next bit of evidence is this:

In one instance, Obama reflects on his own first days as a ten year-old at his Hawaiian prep school, a transition complicated by the presence of "Coretta," the only other black student in the class.

When the other students accuse Obama of having a girlfriend, Obama shoves Coretta and insists that she leave him alone.  Although "his act of betrayal" buys him a reprieve from the other students, Obama understands that he "had been tested and found wanting."

Ayers relates a parallel story in Parent.  He tells of a useful reading assignment from the 1992 book, The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, by black author Reginald McKnight.  The passage in question deals with the travails of Clint, the first black student in a newly integrated school, who repudiates Marvin, the only other black boy in the school.  Upon reflection, Clint thinks, "I was ashamed.  Ashamed for not defending Marvin and ashamed that Marvin even existed."

Wow - the theme of guilt following a self-serving betrayal never shows up anywhere in literature.  Maybe Ayers wrote the New Testament story of Judas, too.  This is real breakthrough stuff.

 I can quit anytime.

Forcing Prices Down Does Not Normally Increase Supply

Tyler Cowen ponders a puzzle of health care reform:

Imagine a benevolent single buyer of health care services.  Forget about whether or not it could be a government; let's just focus on the logic of the model.  I can think of a few scenarios:

1. The buyer bargains down price and suppliers in turn lower quantity.

2. The buyer bargains down price and the monopolizing suppliers respond by expanding quantity.  The monopsonist moves us to a more competitive solution.  Note that under this option the direct institution of more competition could have the same effects.

If #2 is true, you might expect supply restrictions to be an important issue.  That is, the people who favor monopsony should also favor greater competitiveness on the supply side.  Yet this does not seem like a current priority.  I hardly ever see talk of deregulating medical licensing, allowing paramedics and nurses to perform more basic medical functions, or abolishing other entry restrictions.  I do recall that an earlier version of Obama's plan, struck down by Congress, would have created a nationwide insurance market.  There was no big fight, either in the administration or in the blogosphere.

Those who favor monopsony might have another model in mind.  In this model there are many medical suppliers but each supplier still has a fair degree of ex post monopoly power.  Search costs, non-transparency, lock-in, and consumer irrationality can generate this kind of result.  And in these models allowing for more entry needn't much help the basic problem.

Under #2, which other policies will help set this market right?  What are the possible policy substitutes for monopsony?

I suspect that one of the more important articles on health care was delivered in the New Yorker a few weeks back:

The Cost Conundrum
What a Texas town can teach us about health care.

Atul Gawande   
June 1, 2009

Here is the NPR summary:

It seems nearly impossible to read about or listen to a discussion about health-care reform for any length of time these days without someone mentioning the New Yorker article by Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and writer who examines the reasons why the small Texas city of McAllen has some of the highest health-care costs in the country and significantly more than El Paso, Tex., a city in the same region with very similar demographics.

The answer, Gawande found, was that the doctors in McAllen were over ordering all kinds of medical tests and treatments.

The New Yorker piece apparently became required reading in the White House and was cited by Budget Director Peter Orszag when responding to Virgina Postrel.  Here is the Budget Director's take-away:

But, today, the American health care system doesn’t always reward the best medical innovations – and one need look no further than McAllen, Texas to see that this is so. 

 

Despite having a demographic profile similar to El Paso, Texas, and despite having had similar Medicare expenditures as El Paso as recently as 1992, McAllen’s spending grew about five times faster in the years since than in either El Paso or the United States as a whole.  In return, McAllen got more medicine (more tests, more surgeries, more time in waiting rooms), but it didn’t get better health – McAllen scores lower than El Paso (and the U.S. average) in measures of health care quality.  McAllen "innovated," and certain doctors and hospitals were financially rewarded, but I think we can all agree that this isn’t the kind of innovation we desire.

This is the sort of market behavior that a powerful, centralized system might avoid.  However, the Health Care Value blog makes this point about controlling costs:

First, as we know in every aspect of our lives, human beings respond to economic incentives. In the past decade, no other profession in America has suffered a decline in inflation-adjusted income like physicians. It is curious that we trust physicians to be smart enough to heal us but assume that they will not attempt to stymie consistent actual and threatened reductions in their income.

Well, there is that.

At a deeper level, the Gawande/New Yorker comparison of McAllen with El Paso and Grand Junction, Colrado may founder on patient demographics and prior access to health care.  The Health Care blog runs numbers for the Medicare populations in the three areas and makes these points:

According to Gawande, McAllen Texas has a physician culture that promotes high cost, low quality care. By comparison El Paso is portrayed as having a similar patient population to McAllen with lower costs of care.   Grand Junction, Colorado, however, the antithesis of McAllen according to the article, is credited with having a physician culture that promotes low costs and high quality.  Ultimately Gawande warns that by failing to change the physician culture nationally, “McAllen won’t be an outlier.  It will be our future.”  But is McAllen really an outlier, a harbinger of physician income-enhancing practices run amok?  

A fair comparison between McAllen and Grand Junction would include a more precise analytic methodology than could be offered in Dr. Gawande’s article.  Such an analysis is important: the correct diagnosis of the health care cost crisis is an essential step in selecting an effective prescription.  If McAllen is not an outlier and Grand Junction is not a paragon, then the solution is not to simply tamp down variation by exporting Grand Junction values to McAllen.  If the physician practices reported by Dr. Gawande in McAllen lead to explainable patterns of costs according to current norms, then those practices are part of a national phenomenon right now, not in a nightmare future.   

An analysis of the Medicare population in the three counties can place Dr. Gawande’s observations in a more complete context.  Medicare beneficiaries enjoy a standardized benefit package, and detailed data are available on the services they receive.  We can use cost data for Medicare enrollees in the three counties to test Dr. Gawande’s assertions regarding McAllen’s and Grand Junction’s comparative health care costs.
 

And eventually we come to charts indicating that the Medicare patients in McAllen seem to have a lot more medical problems than their counterparts in El Paso and Grand Junction.  However:

Many of the disease rates for the McAllen population are more than double those for Grand Junction.  If the Medicare population in McAllen is truly that much sicker wouldn’t we expect the payments to be greater?  A comparison of expenditures for Medicare enrollees without a diagnosis of diabetes or heart disease in the last year shows that costs for these standard populations are statistically very close (Exhibit 5). 

Exhibit 5: Medicare Monthly Payments per Patient without a Diagnosis in the Year for Diabetes or Heart Disease, 2006

Row Labels	Medicare Enrollees	Monthly Per Person Payments
McAllen, Texas	28,680	$3,147
El Paso, Texas	47,960	$2,564
Grand Junction, Colorado	11,160	$3,307

 

By eliminating diabetes, ischemic heart disease or heart failure from the population payment measures the Grand Junction advantage is completely removed.  Grand Junction is just as costly as McAllen for populations without one of these conditions. 

I guess that leaves plenty of other ailments for which people might be treated.  On the other hand, my reservation about this chart is that it is much harder to overtreat a healthy person.

So, is McAllen an example of a flawed market culture in which doctors overuse and overbill the system in order to prop up their own incomes, or are its higher expenses due to a poorer and sicker population?  I hope Peter Orszag gets the right answer.

Alternative Energy: Geothermal Is So Hot You'll Feel The Earth Move

We are talking about hot rocks, the geothermal energy source that powers Old Faithful, not staid ground source heat pumps.

The Times recently had a story noting that hot rocks could power the world.  Step one is to drill deep for hot rocks; this technology has been pioneered by the oil and gas people.

Step two is to put water down the hole; step three is to capture the resulting steam to power a turbine and generate electricity.  As an MIT report explained, none of this requires any dramatic technological breakthroughs, a geothermal plant can provide steady, reliable baseload power with inconsequential carbon emissions, and the available energy stored as heat beneath the earth's crust is vast.  The US currently gets more electricity from geothermal than from wind and solar combined, and, per an estimate reported in the Times, could get 15% of our electricity from geothermal by 2030.

There is just one tiny problem - did we mention the earthquakes?

BASEL, Switzerland — Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was a hero in this city of medieval cathedrals and intense environmental passion three years ago, all because he had drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane.

He was prospecting for a vast source of clean, renewable energy that seemed straight out of a Jules Verne novel: the heat simmering within the earth’s bedrock.

All seemed to be going well — until Dec. 8, 2006, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.

Hastily shut down, Mr. Häring’s project was soon forgotten by nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area two hours’ drive north of San Francisco.

Residents of the region, which straddles Lake and Sonoma Counties, have already been protesting swarms of smaller earthquakes set off by a less geologically invasive set of energy projects there. AltaRock officials said that they chose the spot in part because the history of mostly small quakes reassured them that the risks were limited.

Hmm, California being tossed into the ocean - that is right out of Superman.  As an old fan of Dr. J and his Sixers I could have done with a bit less of LA, but this seems like overkill.

Let's put this in the "Thank Heaven for Undersecretaries" file:

Steven E. Koonin, the under secretary for science at the Energy Department, said the earthquake issue was new to him, but added, “We’re committed to doing things in a factual and rigorous way, and if there is a problem, we will attend to it.”

The earthquake issue was new to him?  Dr. Koonin, an Obama appointment, has a brilliant resume, but he ought to get a subscription to the Wikipedia, which tells us this about the environmental impact of geothermal power in the third paragraph:

Environmental Impact

...

Construction of the power plants can adversely affect land stability in the surrounding region. Subsidence has occurred in the Wairakei field in New Zealand^[7] and in Staufen im Breisgau, Germany.^[8] Enhanced geothermal systems can trigger earthquakes as part of the hydraulic fracturing process. The project in Basel, Switzerland was suspended because more than 10,000 seismic event measuring up to 3.4 on the Richter Scale occurred over the first 6 days of water injection.^[9]

And a bit more from Basel:

To stimulate the reservoir for a proposed "hot dry rock" geothermal project in the city of Basel, approximately 11500 m3 of water were injected between December 2nd and 8th, 2006, at high pressures into a 5 km deep well. A six-sensor borehole array, installed at depths between 300 and 2700 meters around the well to monitor the induced seismicity, recorded more than 10500 events during the injection phase. Events with magnitudes as low as ML 0.7 were also recorded by regional networks in Switzerland, Germany and France, as well as by up to 30 strong-motion stations installed in the epicentral area. Due to excessive seismic activity, that included an ML 2.7 event, injection had already been stopped when a few hours later an ML 3.4 event jolted the city of Basel.

I don't have the impression that the people who studied the Basel situation are still puzzling over the gross cause and effect, although the Times tells us that others seem to be:

Like the effort in Basel, the new project will tap geothermal energy by fracturing hard rock more than two miles deep to extract its heat. AltaRock, founded by Susan Petty, a veteran geothermal researcher, has secured more than $36 million from the Energy Department, several large venture-capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Google. AltaRock maintains that it will steer clear of large faults and that it can operate safely.

But in a report on seismic impact that AltaRock was required to file, the company failed to mention that the Basel program was shut down because of the earthquake it caused. AltaRock claimed it was uncertain that the project had caused the quake, even though Swiss government seismologists and officials on the Basel project agreed that it did. Nor did AltaRock mention the thousands of smaller earthquakes induced by the Basel project that continued for months after it shut down.

Troubling - this seems like the sort of behavior that could give a great idea a bad reputation.  And with funding from the 'Don't be evil" crowd from Google, no less.

MORE:  The AltaRock people explain that their site is geologically quite different from Basel:

• We took extraordinary care in choosing our site at the Geysers to avoid siting on a major fault. The Basel Project drilled into a significant fault. Read More
  Basel sits on top of a large (200 kilometer long) "locked" fault that previously ruptured and heavily damaged the city in the 14th century. Over the course of a year, we reviewed nine different sites in North America. We carefully chose our site to avoid Basel's problems. There has been geothermal energy production at the Geysers since 1965. AltaRock's project is located in a seismically active area adjacent to smaller faults (the closest faults are 3 & 11 kilometers long) which are not "locked" due the constant stress relief resulting from small seismic movements.
  

• Smaller faults mean smaller events, and the faults in the Geysers area are significantly smaller than at Basel. Read More
  The Geysers is a seismically active area with many smaller faults unconnected to larger and longer faults located elsewhere in CA. Smaller faults produce smaller magnitude events. Basel's geology is very different. In the over 40 years of geothermal energy production at the Geysers, induced seismicity events have been extensively studied and very modest and are expected to be no different with AltaRock's project, which will involve two geothermal wells in an existing field of more than 350 wells.

House Passes Waxman-Markey

Nancy and friends play "Perils of Pauline" but squeak their bill through with no momentum at all:

WASHINGTON — The House passed legislation on Friday intended to address global warming and transform the way the nation produces and uses energy.

The vote was the first time either house of Congress had approved a bill meant to curb the heat-trapping gases scientists have linked to climate change. The legislation, which passed despite deep divisions among Democrats, could lead to profound changes in many sectors of the economy, including electric power generation, agriculture, manufacturing and construction.The bill’s passage, by 219 to 212, with 44 Democrats voting against it, also established a marker for the United States when international negotiations on a new climate change treaty begin later this year.

Now that theyhave passed it we (and they) have time to read it.  Passing a bill prior to the upcoming Copenhagen negotiations in December is important to the Administration strategy.  This is from William Antholis of Brookings, in a June speech:

One key nuance should not be ignored. Rather than try to get 67 votes [to ratify a climate treaty in the Senate] after a negotiation to ratify an agreement, the hope of supporters of Waxman-Markey is to simply pass a domestic law first, and base the international negotiations on that law. In the best of all worlds, that would happen before the Copenhagen agreement, as a way of sending a signal to the world that the U.S. has actually adopted a climate change law. There is a strong preference to have all of this happen before Copenhagen so that the U.S. does not pass a law because the international community has told it to pass. That is particularly true in the Senate, which guards U.S. sovereignty with all the religious fervor that was associated with that word when the Thirty Year’s War gripped this continent six hundred years ago.

While we are Brookings, let's recycle Gregg Easterbrook from 2006, when he made the case for action on global warming and declared the case to be closed.

And to be fair and balanced let's toss in Dr. William Happer, a Princeton physicist and global warming skeptic.

Poppies...

The War On Drugs takes a new direction in the War On Terror battlefield of Afghanistan:

ROME — The Obama administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan told allies on Saturday that the United States was shifting its drug policy in Afghanistan away from eradicating opium poppy fields and toward interdicting drug supplies and cultivating alternative crops.

“The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure,” the envoy, Richard C. Holbrooke, told reporters on the margins of the Group of 8 conference in the northern Italian city of Trieste, Reuters reported. “They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work and they alienated people and drove people into the arms of the Taliban.”

Mr. Holbrooke said the United States would begin phasing out eradication efforts, which generally have involved spraying or plowing under poppy fields, often under fire from Taliban militants or angry farmers. Instead, he said, more emphasis would be placed on helping Afghan farmers make a living through other crops and on seizing both drugs coming out of the country and growing and processing supplies coming in.

And let's thank heaven for experts:

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on counternarcotics, called the administration’s shift away from eradication and toward stimulating the rural economy “courageous” and “absolutely right.”

But she added that it was imperative for the United States “to set the right expectations,” and make it clear that it was unlikely that the new policy “will result in a substantial reduction of cultivation or on the dependence on the illegal economy.”

It's courageous, it's the right thing to do, but it won't work. Great.  And the next Administration can find yet another rope up which they will pee. 

Lots of background on opium production here. 

Chemicals used to isolate morphine from opium include ammonium chloride, calcium carbonate (limestone), and calcium hydroxide (slaked lime). The precursor chemical normally used in the conversion of morphine to heroin is acetic anhydride. Chemical reagents used in the conversion process include sodium carbonate and activated charcoal. Chemical solvents needed are chloroform, ethyl alcohol (ethanol), ethyl ether and acetone. Other chemicals may be substituted for these preferred chemicals, but most or all of these preferred chemicals are readily available through smugglers and suppliers.

Necessary laboratory equipment includes measuring cups, funnels, filter paper, litmus paper and a stainless steel pot. Only the most sophisticated heroin labs use glass flasks, propane gas ovens, Bunsen burners, vacuum pumps, autoclaves, electric blenders, venting hoods, centrifuges, reflux condensers, electric drying ovens and elaborate exhaust systems. Portable, gasoline-powered generators are often used at clandestine heroin conversion laboratories used to power various electrical devices.

My guess is that the chemicals involved are quite common, but I want to check that.

Fit In Sixty Seconds

The NY Times "Well" blog has an eye-catching post with a deliberately misleading title: Can You Get Fit in Six Minutes a Week?

The six minutes is a notable under-estimate - the post summarizes an interesting study comparing long, slow endurance training to short, explosive interval training:

The potency of interval training is nothing new. Many athletes have been straining through interval sessions once or twice a week along with their regular workout for years. But what researchers have been looking at recently is whether humans, like that second group of rats, can increase endurance with only a few minutes of strenuous exercise, instead of hours? Could it be that most of us are spending more time than we need to trying to get fit?

The answer is "maybe":

“There was a time when the scientific literature suggested that the only way to achieve endurance was through endurance-type activities,” such as long runs or bike rides or, perhaps, six-hour swims, says Martin Gibala, PhD, chairman of the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. But ongoing research from Gibala’s lab is turning that idea on its head. In one of the group’s recent studies, Gibala and his colleagues had a group of college students, who were healthy but not athletes, ride a stationary bike at a sustainable pace for between 90 and 120 minutes. Another set of students grunted through a series of short, strenuous intervals: 20 to 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the students pedaled hard again for another 20 to 30 seconds, repeating the cycle four to six times (depending on how much each person could stand), “for a total of two to three minutes of very intense exercise per training session,” Gibala says.

Two intense minutes three times a week results in the six minutes in the headline.  But allowing for a warm-up and cool down, as well as four minutes between intervals, suggests a time commitment of about 30 minutes three times a week.  That is well less than the 90 to 120 minutes per session expended by the conventional exercise riders, but still.

On to the results:

Each of the two groups exercised three times a week. After two weeks, both groups showed almost identical increases in their endurance (as measured in a stationary bicycle time trial), even though the one group had exercised for six to nine minutes per week, and the other about five hours. Additionally, molecular changes that signal increased fitness were evident equally in both groups. “The number and size of the mitochondria within the muscles” of the students had increased significantly, Gibala says, a change that, before this work, had been associated almost exclusively with prolonged endurance training. Since mitochondria enable muscle cells to use oxygen to create energy, “changes in the volume of the mitochondria can have a big impact on endurance performance.” In other words, six minutes or so a week of hard exercise (plus the time spent warming up, cooling down, and resting between the bouts of intense work) had proven to be as good as multiple hours of working out for achieving fitness.

Very interesting, but...

1.  Is two weeks a useful measure of an exercise "program"?  Would this result hold up for a forty or fifty-something who has been exercising regularly since high school?

2.  It's not the destination, its the journey.  As the article goes on to note, the interval training is quite painful.  Now, some people actually enjoy wind sprints, suicides, and gassers (My hand is raised!) but my guess is that anyone who will engage in that sort of self-inflicted torment probably likes the whole exercising experience and is not focused on saving time on a regular basis.  Let's put it this way - there is probably a study showing that film buffs could save a lot of time by skipping directly to the plot summaries available at IMDB, but I bet they don't.

3.  What about revealed preference?  Plenty of prefessional athletes have tried all sorts of things to improve their fitness.  My guess is that if an exclusive emphasis on interval training produced better results Jerry Rice, Michael Jordan or Karl Malone would have figured it out.  Or Olympic coaches, or the Navy SEALS.

Jerry Rice opted for a mix:

Rice’s six-day-a-week workout is divided into two parts: two hours of cardiovascular work in the morning and three hours of strength training each afternoon. Early in the off-season, the a.m. segment consists of a five-mile trail run near San Carlos on a torturous course called, simply, The Hill. But since five vertical miles can hardly be considered a workout, he pauses on the steepest section to do a series of ten 40-meter uphill sprints. As the season approaches, however, Rice knows it’s time to start conserving energy - so he forgoes The Hill and instead merely does a couple of sprints: six 100-yarders, six 80s, six 60s, six 40s, six 20s, and 16 tens, with no rest between sprints and just two and a half minutes between sets.

For the p.m. sessions he alternates between upper-body and lower-body days. But no matter which half of his body he’s working on, the volume is always the same: three sets of ten reps of 21 different exercises. Yes, your calculator’s right: That’s 630 repetitions a day.

Rice described something similar here:

A typical workout for me started around 7:00 a.m. I’m at the track. I may do about eight 200s without stopping. You do the 200s running first and then jog until you reach back to the starting line where you start running again. Then I do ten 100s, eight 60s and six 40s. After that, I then go down to the football field. That’s where I do my route running and cone drills. It’s all about getting your feet up and down so you know where you are on the football field and being able to explode. Football is about stop and go.

Let's check in with the Mailman:

If any athlete embodies the value of strength and conditioning, it's Malone, who concedes that his highly disciplined fitness regimen could be viewed as obsessive.

During the off-season, he works out from 7 a.m. to noon each day, stretching, lifting weights and mixing in some cardio work.

His well-honed physique is built upon rotating heavy and light weights and concentrating on just two or three major muscle groups per day. For example, chest, shoulder and back one day; calves, thighs and stomach the next.

He typically wraps up a workout with 40 minutes on a treadmill, another 40 minutes on an elliptical trainer and 30 minutes on a stationary bike. Sometimes, he'll follow this program for three weeks without taking a single day of rest. (Of course, no personal trainer would recommend working out every day for three weeks without breaks.) And by the way, he never even picks up a basketball during the off season.

OK, having read that I am going to take two Advil and rest for a spell.

SPRINTING WITH THE STEELERS:

This looks like it's all speed work for the speed guys on the Steelers:

“The Steelers have a really good strength coach (Garrett Giemont). Some of the guys that come down, they’re still doing the strength program and they’re not trying to get out of anything. They still contact him. They follow his plan really well. It’s just the camaraderie of the group all in Florida.”

Most drills are relatively short and concentrate on developing speed, power, agility, reaction time and quickness. Holmes and other receivers are requried to run 10 consecutive pass patterns as a way of developing the stamina required to play in a game.

“He’s doing 10 routes in less than one minute, 45 seconds, and then he has two minutes rest,” Shaw said. “And then we’re going to work our way to five sets so that he’ll be able to run 50 routes, which he may not do in a whole game.

“One day we’re doing speed work, the next day we’re doing cutting with metabolics. We’re training to be (position) specific so you can go back and last the whole season. It’s stuff to get their bodies to recover.”

Hmm, where am I headed here?  I doubt Usain Bolt is logging five and ten mile training runs, but I am also pretty sure that top distance runners are not totally ignoring the long mileage runs.

Celebrating Seven Glorious Years

Mickey Kaus has been doing this blogging thing for ten years.  Yike! [That's all you have to say about the world's greatest living West Coast blogger? -- ed.  I wouldn't change a word.]

Meanwhile, Back In Waziristan (Ongoing...)

The Pakistani military continues their push in Waziristan.  From, Reuters:

WANA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani warplanes killed at least a dozen Taliban fighters on Saturday, in a strike on their stronghold near the Afghan border, while police in the southern city of Karachi shot dead five militants.

U.S. officials have issued a steady stream of praise for Pakistan since the government first took the decision to go on the offensive against the militants over two months ago.

Operations in Swat and Buner, two valleys north of the capital of Islamabad, are in their final stages and the focus has switched to the stronghold of Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan, a remote tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

The air raid on Saturday on Mehsud's mountainous redoubt was the latest in a series over recent weeks, and the government has already given orders for the military to mount an all-out assault.

The army is still assembling its forces in South Waziristan, and some diplomats expect some of the troops fighting in Swat to be moved there soon.

Recently, a US drone strike reportedly killed 60 people at a funeral for a Taliban leader.  The target, Baitullah Mehsud, was narrowly missed.

An Unusual 5-4 Split On The Supremes

Scalia and Thomas took a hard originalist line on a defendant right to confront his accusers; in alliance with three bleeding hearts (Souter, Stevens, and Ginsburg) to reach a decision that will vex prosecutors and strain state and municipal budgets:

WASHINGTON — Crime laboratory reports may not be used against criminal defendants at trial unless the analysts responsible for creating them give testimony and subject themselves to cross-examination, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a 5-to-4 decision.

The ruling was an extension of a 2004 decision that breathed new life into the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause, which gives a criminal defendant the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”

Four dissenting justices said that scientific evidence should be treated differently than, say, statements from witnesses to a crime. They warned that the decision would subject the nation’s criminal justice system to “a crushing burden” and that it means “guilty defendants will go free, on the most technical grounds.”

The two sides differed sharply about the practical consequences of requiring testimony from crime laboratory analysts. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the four dissenters, said Philadelphia’s 18 drug analysts will now each be required to testify in more than 69 trials next year, and Cleveland’s six drug analysts in 117 trials each.

Noting that 500 employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation laboratory in Quantico, Va., conduct more than a million scientific tests each year, Justice Kennedy wrote, “The court’s decision means that before any of those million tests reaches a jury, at least one of the laboratory’s analysts must board a plane, find his or her way to an unfamiliar courthouse and sit there waiting to read aloud notes made months ago.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, scoffed at those “back-of-the-envelope calculations.”

In any event, he added, the court is not entitled to ignore even an unwise constitutional command for reasons of convenience.

“The confrontation clause may make the prosecution of criminals more burdensome, but that is equally true of the right to trial by jury and the privilege against self-incrimination,” Justice Scalia wrote.

“The sky will not fall after today’s decision,” he added.

But that is not how prosecutors saw it. “It’s a train wreck,” Scott Burns, the executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, said of the decision.

Waxman-Markey - Some AEI Soundbites

As an alternative to a tedious tome on Waxman-Markey the American Enterprise Institute offers colorful quotes from their experts.  Some snippets:

Steven F. Hayward writes on a wide range of public policy issues. He is the coauthor of the annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators; the producer and host of An Inconvenient Truth . . . or Convenient Fiction?, a rebuttal to Al Gore's documentary; and the author of many books on environmental topics. He contributes to AEI's Energy and Environment Outlook series.

Hayward quote: "Waxman-Markey is a bundle of contradictions. It seeks to make carbon more expensive, but does not want any consumer to pay higher energy prices--at least for the first decade of its operation. It seeks a first in economic history--it wants to have rationing without scarcity or price inflation.

...The "cap and trade" system at the heart of the bill is riddled with so many loopholes that it should be considered more of a 'hairnet and giveaway.'"

Pencil him in as "Undecided".

Samuel Thernstrom has studied and written about environmental issues for twenty years, with a particular emphasis on global climate change. He served on the White House Council on Environmental Quality prior to joining AEI in 2003. As codirector of the AEI Geoengineering Project, Mr. Thernstrom studies the policy implications of geoengineering--a new way to deal with global warming by blocking a small fraction of the sunlight that would otherwise warm the Earth's surface. His recent op-ed in the Washington Post discusses the possibility of engineering a cooler planet: http://www.aei.org/article/100625.

Thernstrom quote: ...While proponents can cite the importance of establishing the first federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions, honest environmentalists are profoundly disappointed in the bill's fundamental flaws. This bill builds upon the Kyoto Protocol's record of failure, rather than learning valuable lessons from those mistakes.  I agree with NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who said recently 'I hope cap and trade doesn’t pass, because we need a much more effective approach.'"

Hmm - can we call that "Undecided, but doesn't realize it yet"?  C'mon, Nancy has until the Fourth of July to bash this through the House.

ANY DAY NOW:  The Brookings Institute sneak-previewed their upcoming report on the economic impact of climate change back on June 8 but it was not a specic look at Waxman-Markey.

Pages 17 and 18 show their estimate of the impact on GDP of different reduction strategies out to 2050.  Folks who focus on the direct comparison of GDP (p. 17) will argue that their is virtually no impact.  On the other hand, page 18 indicates that GDP is reduced by 1% to 2.5% per year.  On a $14 trillion economy, that is a cost of $140 to $350 billion per year, an amount which ought to be able to hold people's attention.

How Green Were My Lost Jobs?

Betsy Newmark opines on George Will and Spain's experience with green jobs.

Here is a Bloomberg story from March:

March 27 (Bloomberg) -- Subsidizing renewable energy in the U.S. may destroy two jobs for every one created if Spain’s experience with windmills and solar farms is any guide.

For every new position that depends on energy price supports, at least 2.2 jobs in other industries will disappear, according to a study from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2010 budget proposal contains about $20 billion in tax incentives for clean-energy programs. In Spain, where wind turbines provided 11 percent of power demand last year, generators earn rates as much as 11 times more for renewable energy compared with burning fossil fuels.

The premiums paid for solar, biomass, wave and wind power - - which are charged to consumers in their bills -- translated into a $774,000 cost for each Spanish “green job” created since 2000, said Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at the university and author of the report.

“The loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to higher energy prices,” he said in an interview.

Yike.  Forcing up energy costs doesn't create jobs?  Who knew?

The study is here.

And while on the topic of forcing up energy costs, QandO notes that Waxman-Markey lays the foundation for a trade war.  This is from the Times story to which he links:

A House committee working on sweeping energy legislation seems determined to make sure that the United States will tax China and other carbon polluters, potentially disrupting an already-sensitive climate change debate in Congress.

The Ways and Means Committee's proposed bill language (pdf) would virtually require that the president impose an import tariff on any country that fails to clamp down on greenhouse gas emissions.

Directed primarily at China, the United States' biggest manufacturing competitor, the provisions aim to protect cement, steel and other energy-intensive industries that expect to face higher costs under a federal emissions cap. But associations that represent importers and multinational corporations are raising red flags, warning that the language could lead to trade wars, hurt the United States' ability to export low-carbon technology and harm consumers.

More good news.

Shake Your Booty For Ibuprofen - NOT

The Supremes smack the Arizona school officials who asked a 13 year old girl to shake it down so they could check her for prescription ibuprofen (Advil, to you non-druggies...).  The decision was 8-1 with a dissent from Clarence Thomas:

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a school's strip search of an Arizona teenage girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen was illegal.

In an 8-1 ruling, the justices said school officials violated the law with their search of Savana Redding in the rural eastern Arizona town of Safford.

Redding, who now attends college, was 13 when officials at Safford Middle School ordered her to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear because they were looking for pills — the equivalent of two Advils. The district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs and the school was acting on a tip from another student.

However, good news for taxpayers:

The court also ruled the officials cannot be held liable in a lawsuit for the search. Different judges around the nation have come to different conclusions about immunity for school officials in strip searches, which leads the Supreme Court to "counsel doubt that we were sufficiently clear in the prior statement of law," Souter said.

"We think these differences of opinion from our own are substantial enough to require immunity for the school officials in this case," Souter said.

The justices also said the lower courts would have to determine whether the Safford United School District No. 1 could be held liable.

Our previous thoughts anticipated the "8", so take that, LA Times!.  That said, Thomas is heading off in an interesting direction here.

MORE:  Ann Althouse has lots.

Moving Heaven And Earth

From Real Clear Politics we learn that the legislators Down Under are on the brink of rejecting Australia's version of cap and trade legislation on CO2:

An April 29 article in The Australian described the general trend—and its leading cause.

There is rising recognition that introduction of a carbon tax under the guise of "cap and trade" will be personally costly, economically disruptive to society and tend to shift classes of jobs offshore. Moreover, despite rising carbon dioxide concentrations, global warming seems to have taken a holiday….

With public perceptions changing so dramatically and quickly it is little wonder Ian Plimer's latest book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, has been received with such enthusiasm and is into its third print run in as many weeks. [It's now up to the fifth printing.]

The public is receptive to an exposé of the many mythologies and false claims associated with anthropogenic global warming and are welcoming an authoritative description of planet Earth and its ever-changing climate in readable language.

Hmm - the Plimer book is not treated very kindly here or here.

Back to RCP:

And that's what makes Plimer so influential—not just his credibility as a scientist, but the righteous certainty with which he dismisses man-made global warming as an unscientific dogma. He writes: "The Emissions Trading Scheme legislation poises Australia to make the biggest economic decision in its history"—Australia generates 80% of its electricity from coal, which would essentially be outlawed—"yet there has been no scientific due diligence. There has never been a climate change debate in Australia. Only dogma."

Apparently the US edition of Plimer's book goes on sale July 1, but Amazon has it now.

Let's see if we can get a cool graphic:

[We can't - here is the boring Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science text link; the cool graphic is on the upper left sidebar if it ever loads.]

This will be on every beach this summer, if the weather ever warms up.

NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T:  The cool graphic is showing up nicely with the.typepad Preview function but not when I look at the actual post.  Baffling to me, not helpful to you...

A Thousand Points Of Darkness

Michelle Obama takes yet another opportunity to remind the world that the sun rose for the first time on Jan 20, 2009:

Hordes of cheering children, parents, teachers and volunteers welcomed first lady Michelle Obama to a playground-in-progress in San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood Monday, where the president's wife joined California first lady Maria Shriver in building a play structure and saluting community volunteers.

..."This new Obama administration doesn't view service as something separate from our national priorities. ... We have an administration that understands that service is the key to achieving our national priorities," she said. "For far too long, we've viewed service in our communities as largely separate from our policies in government."

Uh huh - because no other national leader has ever given even a nod towards the benefits of community service.  Just off hand, there is John Kennedy's Peace Corps, Jimmy Carter with his Habitat for Humanity, John Edwards with various self-promoting schemes he dropped after his Presidential hopes collapsed, Bush 41's "Thousand Pints of Light (Beer)", Clinton's Americorps, and the Bush 43 USA Freedom Corps.

Of course, if Michelle is thinking about a full Federal takeover of the volunteer movement, well, her husband is advancing that agenda.

And do recall - the other half of the First Couple had an impossible time imagining military volunteers as participating in national service when he addressed a group of Wesleyan grads in 2008 around Memorial Day.  However, by the Fourth of July his handlers had taken the speech through re-write and the cavalry arrived.  Honesty - rarely the best policy!

"They Planted A Gay Whore"?

Like so many of our friends on the left, Marcy Wheeler has more fun imagining and recycling conspiracy theories than verifying them.  Hence her provocative headline denouncing the AP coverage of the Nico Pitney / Huffington Post media flap about the White House planting a question about Iran at Obama's press conference.

The reference, of course, is to the infamous James Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon.  Meanwhile, back in reality there was never any evidence that "They", presumably the sinister Karl Rove White House, had any association with Talon News or that Guckert was "planted" at a Presidential press conference.  In fact, Guckert showed up at the regular White House press briefing each day and on two occasions Bush swept the available reporters into impromptu press conferences.  Talon News seems to have been the creation of a Texas hustler who saw a niche for a right-wing news service and was happy to intimate that he had White House connections (FWIW, I have Nigerian uncles, apparently, based on my emails).  That is utterly unlike the Nico Pitney situation, where the invaluable Mr. Pitney was told the night before to be there and be square with a question from Iran.

Whatever - fantasy trumps fiction yet again.  As to the Pitney situation, I think it was a clever attempt to engage the Iranian dissidents directly, whch of course flies in the face of Obama's previously stated desire to keep his distance and emphasize the home-grown nature of the Iranian revolt.

What I would keep an eye on is the breakdown in the media-Obama love-fest.  What is the Beltway wisdom?   Hell hath no fury like a media scorned.  One can imagine the press in the role of the embittered ex-girlfriend finally realizing that they will never get Obama back.  Presumably Obama (or the White House switchboard) can deal with the 3 AM phone calls.  However, the press may be picking up on the meme that Obama is soulless (he processes your pain but does not actually feel it).  Jake Tapper offered the allusion to the emotion-less Mr. Spock of Star Trek; other examples elude me, darn it, but the day is young!  [See MORE ON LESS EMOTION, below.]

And of course on policy the stalwarts in our liberal media are disappointed by Obama's Bush-lite positions on Gitmo, torture, and gays in the military or the chapel.

I wonder how the thin-skinned Obama would hold up to a hostile media. We may find out one day soon.

MORE ON LESS EMOTION:  In the course of defending the sort of date night she wishes she experienced more often Ms. Dowd wrote:

Some White House officials fretted that the Obamas’ Marine One and Gulfstream magic-carpet ride to dinner in Greenwich Village and a play on Broadway was too showy. Others thought it helped show a softer side of the often dispassionate Obama.

Obama To Mullahs - I'll Cut Off Your Weenies

Obama firms up his response to the crackdown in Iran.

Sanford And Sins

Gov. Mark Sanford (R, SC) explains his five day walkabout to the tune of "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina".

In a stunning confession, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford admitted Wednesday to having an affair and covering up a secret trip to visit his mistress in Argentina. 

Sanford made the admission at a press conference meant to clear up his mysterious week-long absence. It was the latest, and most shocking, installment in the evolving story surrounding Sanford's disappearance. 

His staff initially told reporters he left town Thursday to go hiking on the Appalachian Trail, but the governor returned Wednesday morning on a flight from Argentina. 

Sanford on Wednesday afternoon admitted he was visiting his mistress in the South American country.

All Aboard, Except Those Who Aren't

The Waxman-Markey bill regulating carbon emissions is really tough on China and India:

The Administrator, in consultation with the Department of State and the United States Trade Representative, shall annually prepare and certify a report to the Congress regarding whether China and India have adopted greenhouse gas emissions standards at least as strict as those standards required under this Act. If the Administrator determines that China and India have not adopted greenhouse gas emissions standards at least as stringent as those set forth in this Act, the Administrator shall notify each Member of Congress of his determination, and shall release his determination to the media.

So if China and India become the world refuge for high-emissions industries, well, Congress will be notified promptly, as will the watchdog media.  Good to know.

Jim Manzi at NRO says that Waxman-Markey could not survive a cost-benefit analysis and notes some problems with the EPA analysis.

The Heritage Foundation is also skeptical of the bill.

The CBO painted a rosy picture but the Heritage Foundation articulated a problem with their analysis that has been nagging at me for days:

Most problematic is their complete omission of economic damage from restricting energy use. Footnote three on page four reads, “The resource cost does not indicate the potential decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap. The reduction in GDP would also include indirect general equilibrium effects, such as changes in the labor supply resulting from reductions in real wages and potential reductions in the productivity of capital and labor.” That’s a pretty big chunk of change to ignore. In The Heritage Foundation’s analysis of the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation, the GDP hit in 2020 was $161 billion (2009 dollars). For a family of four, that is $1,870 that they ignore.

What CBO does is focus on the revenue raised (and re-distributed) by the sale of emissions allowances.  Since they take at face value the claim that most of the revenue will be returned to the harried consumer, they claim the cost of the bill is low.

The Heritage point has been vexing me for several days but I have not had time to pin it down.  To illustrate the problem, suppose the Congress announced that in order to relieve traffic congestion, cut pollution, save gasoline, and improve traffic safety they were going to (a) lower the national speed limit to 40 MPH, and (b) impose a revenue-neutral gasoline tax of $10 per gallon, all of which would be used to fund a reduction in the payroll tax.

One might argue (as CBO did with Waxman-Markey) that since the new tax is revenue-neutral, the impact on the economy is tiny (other effects will be ignored).

Or one might argue, as per Heritage, that the huge dislocations caused by commuters switching jobs, relocating their homes, and so on might represent a huge cost to the economy in terms of lost output and reduced societal welfare, even if the net tax revenue to the government was tiny.

Who is right?  Presumably, that depends on how much change Waxman-Markey imposes on the economy.

Wednesday In Iran

Per the BBC, protestors are ignoring the prayers of the ayatollah to stop.

I Will Do Anything To Bash Krugman (But I Won't Do That)

C'mon - calling for lower interest rates to stimulate the housing market and mitigate the recession of 2000/2001 is hardly the same as imploring Fannie, Freddie and the Fed to rip up all all known lending standards and take the global financial system to the abyss.  Thumping Krugman for calling for a crazed housing bubble is a bash too far.

In 2001 Krugman had the very broad-based view that lower interest rates could keep the consumer moving forward until business investment picked up the baton.  This view of the economy is described in the 2005 Times:

But a wide variety of indicators now suggest that the economy is in a sweet spot: business investment is soaring; inflation appears more moderate than a few months ago; employment is climbing, even if real wages are not.

...

Hints of a handoff from consumer-led growth to business-led growth are apparent at Siemens Energy and Automation of Alpharetta, Ga.

At the company, a unit of Siemens of Germany, electrical equipment sales to industrial customers plunged by a third after 2001. Sales of equipment to the residential housing market picked up part of the slack, as the Federal Reserve's low interest rates prompted a home-building boom that continued through last year.

But Harry Volande, chief financial officer at Siemens Energy and Automation, said industrial sales of electrical equipment and automation systems would expand by double digits, even as sales to the residential housing market flatten with the cooling of the housing market and a tapering off of construction activity.

Ex post, the Fed clearly let the housing market expansion go on for too long.  One might argue that Greenspan's entire economic strategy, which amounted to believing that a recession tomorrow is better than a recession today, was flawed, since the result was to lead us from one bubble to the next.  But the management of the economic cycle is a pretty mainstream goal, which Krugman held and still holds.

In any case, by 2005/2006 it was clear to Krugman that something needed to be done, maybe - I still love his classic prognostication from May 2006:

As I summarized it awhile back, we became a nation in which people make a living by selling one another houses, and they pay for the houses with money borrowed from China.

Now that game seems to be coming to an end. We're going to have to find other ways to make a living — in particular, we're going to have to start selling goods and services, not just I.O.U.'s, to the rest of the world, and/or replace imports with domestic production. And adjusting to that new way of making a living will take time.

Will we have that time? Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, contends that what's happening in the housing market is "a very orderly and moderate kind of cooling." Maybe he's right. But if he isn't, the stock market drop of the last two days will be remembered as the start of a serious economic slowdown.

Maybe the housing bubble will end badly, unless it doesn't!  A more clarion call has not been sounded.

Ahh, well - has it been four years since this compilation of Krugman-bashes?  We've all passed a lot of water since then.

Iran - Whodunnit?

Captain Ed mocks the notion circulating in the White House that Obama's Cairo speech triggered the Iranian uprising.

On the other hand, Matt Yglesias implicitly acknowledges a reason for Team Obama to try and claim credit or maybe even show some support for the opposition [which he is now doing!]: Obama's dream of negotiating with Iran's leaders is going to be deferred:

The hope behind an engagement strategy was that the Supreme Leader might be inclined to side with the more pragmatic actors inside the system—guys like former president Rafsanjani and former prime minister Mousavi. With those people, and most of the Iranian elites of their ilk, now in open opposition to the regime, any crackdown would almost by definition entail the sidelining of the people who might be interested in a deal. Iran would essentially be in the hands of the most hardline figures, people who just don’t seem interested in improving relations with other countries.

Under the circumstances, the whole subject of American engagement may well wind up being moot.

Moot?  Let's not overlook the incredibly powerful Cairo speech, which included this passage in Obama's section on democracy:

America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments – provided they govern with respect for all their people.

Hard to see how Obama could square "welcoming" the mullahs with "respect for their people", although the 4th of July hotdog diplomacy is still on.

UPDATE:  Apparently Team Obama has opted for a tougher line.  Well, he had nothing to lose on the "engage with the mullahs" strategy anyway.

Let's cut to the Obama press office for a transcript and reaction:

A Brief Wrap | 1:33 p.m. | Helene Cooper: Well, Sheryl, he really ramped it up on Iran. We heard the president use the word “condemn” for the first time since the Iranian elections to describe the government’s actions. It will be interesting to see what comes next from Tehran in response.

Sheryl Stolberg: Yes, I was struck especially by his last answer to Suzanne Malveaux about the “heartbreaking” video. He showed more passion than earlier in the press conference. And speaking of passion, I was also struck by the way Mr. Obama seemed irritated with reporters at various times during this news conference. The cigarette question seemed to really get under his skin. He rarely loses his cool, but there were more flashes of anger here than in the past.

Meanwhile, Back In Waziristan

The Pakistani Army claims to be succeeding in the Swat Valley and is poised to commence major operation in South Waziristan.

If The Rain And Clouds Aren't Depressing You...

If you've managed to keep a smile on your face despite the unrelentingly grim weather, you may have the temperament to weather Ross Douthat's latest column on our broken political system.  A snippet:

Voters demand low taxes and generous services, and neither party has found a way to say no and stay politically viable while saying it.

Eventually, it’s assumed, either a liberal or a conservative majority will find a way to square this circle. But you just have to look west to California — polarized, and essentially bankrupt and ungovernable — to see that there are darker possibilities.

In recent years, liberalism has profited from the impasse. Liberals torpedoed the Bush administration’s attempt to trim Social Security benefits. They demagogued John McCain in 2008, when he proposed a market-based health care plan and hinted at means-testing Medicare.

But now it’s their turn to actually run the country. And just as Bush-era conservatives couldn’t really make tax cuts pay for themselves, Obama-era Democrats aren’t really going to be able to finance universal health care without substantial middle-class tax increases, or substantial spending cuts.

It's always darkest just before it goes pitch-black.

MORE:  CATO on likely tax hikes for Obamacare.

"Shovel-Ready" Stimulus Didn't Actually Involve Shovels

Looks like there was plenty of shoveling on the stimulus bill, but not the kind we had in mind:

No Country for Burly Men
How feminist groups skewed the Obama stimulus plan towards women's jobs.
by Christina Hoff Sommers

A "man-cession." That's what some economists are starting to call it. Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a "downturn" for women but a "catastrophe" for men.

Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women's groups has made it all but impossible. Consider what just happened with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Well, we had the famous Angry White Male backlash in 1994. The seeds are being sown...

To Be Slim In Japan

Hmm - slim Japanese don't have as good a longevity outlook as their heftier counterparts.  Boy, that'll keep me scratching my head all night - what's up with the fish and rice diet, anyway?

FWIW, a NY Times article reported a similar result back in 2005, based on Americans.

Iran Watch

Here is some BBC coverage:

Iran TV reports ten dead

Obama doing a superbly nuanced job

Polling irregularities

What He Said, What He Meant

Jim Lindgren on Obama's health care "promises" - more change we hope you didn't believe in.

Emotion Trumps Research Every Time

The NY Times editors are so vexed by what they see as the latest blatant injustice from the Roberts Court that they can't be bothered to read the court's opinion or their own coverage of the case (Matt Yglesias keeps them company).  Let's cut to the NY Times editors:

In an appalling 5-to-4 ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority tossed aside compelling due process claims, the demands of justice and a considered decision by a lower federal appeals court to deny the right of prisoners to obtain post-conviction DNA testing that might prove their innocence.

The inmate at the center of the case, William G. Osborne, is in prison in Alaska after a 1994 rape conviction based in part on a DNA test of semen from a condom recovered at the scene.

Clang!  The inmate is in prison, all right, but for a conviction in a different crime following his release on parole in 2007 for this rape.  From the Times news report:

There was other significant evidence of Mr. Osborne’s guilt, and he confessed to the Alaska Board of Parole, which released him after 14 years. He later said he had lied to the parole board in the hope of quicker release. Mr. Osborne has since been convicted of a home invasion. [More at  CS Monitor and Scripps.]

Back to the Times editors for more bleating:

The state used an old method, known as DQ-alpha testing, that could not identify, with great specificity, the person to whom the DNA belonged. The high court sided with Alaska in its refusal to grant Mr. Osborne access to the physical evidence, the semen. His intent was to obtain a more advanced DNA test that was not available at the time of his trial and that prosecutors agreed could almost definitively prove his guilt or innocence.

Well, his intent was to roll the bones, figuring he had nothing to lose except the expense of the test.  Osborne had already passed on a more detailed test at the time of his trial, as the Times explains:

Rudimentary DNA testing on the condom in preparation for trial excluded two other suspects and included Mr. Osborne among those who might have committed the crime. The kind of testing used at the time, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “generally cannot narrow the perpetrator down to less than 5 percent of the population.”

Mr. Osborne’s trial lawyer decided not to pursue a second kind of DNA testing that was more discriminating. The lawyer said she feared that the results might further incriminate her client.

The defense strategy is presented in more detail in the opinion:

Osborne then sought postconviction relief in Alaska state court. He claimed that he had asked his attorney, Sidney Billingslea, to seek more discriminating restriction-fragment-length-polymorphism (RFLP) DNA testing [Wiki] during trial, and argued that she was constitutionally ineffective for not doing so.¹  Osborne I, 110 P. 3d, at 990. Because she believed Osborne was guilty, " 'insisting on a more advanced ... DNA test would have served to prove that Osborne committed the alleged crimes.' " Ibid. The Alaska Court of Appeals concluded that Billingslea's decision had been strategic and rejected Osborne's claim. Id., at 991-992. 
 

Billingslea testified that after investigation, she had concluded that further testing would do more harm than good. She planned to mount a defense of mistaken identity, and thought that the imprecision of the DQ Alpha test gave her " 'very good numbers in a mistaken identity, cross-racial identification case, where the victim was in the dark and had bad eyesight.' "

It seems that sample size was not a problem, so the RFLP test available in 1993 would have been definitive.

As a matter of public policy, there is a legitimate question of how best to chivvy the states along as they legislate access to what amounts to new evidence made available by advances in technology.  However, as the WaPo explains, this was an awkward case on which prisoner's rights advocates chose to hang their hats, since the prisoner is almost surely guilty:

Prosecutors had told the court that Osborne was not a good cause for those worried about the wrongly convicted. He was identified as the woman's attacker not just by her but by an accomplice. At trial, one test of the semen found at the crime scene said it could have come from Osborne but also from about 15 percent of the population of African American men.

More of the case details are available in the opinion:

 This lawsuit arose out of a violent crime committed 16 years ago, which has resulted in a long string of litigation in the state and federal courts. On the evening of March 22, 1993, two men driving through Anchorage, Alaska, solicited sex from a female prostitute, K. G. She agreed to perform fellatio on both men for $100 and got in their car. The three spent some time looking for a place to stop and ended up in a deserted area near Earthquake Park. When K. G. demanded payment in advance, the two men pulled out a gun and forced her to perform fellatio on the driver while the passenger penetrated her vaginally, using a blue condom she had brought. The passenger then ordered K. G. out of the car and told her to lie face-down in the snow. Fearing for her life, she refused, and the two men choked her and beat her with the gun. When K. G. tried to flee, the passenger beat her with a wooden axe handle and shot her in the head while she lay on the ground. They kicked some snow on top of her and left her for dead. 521 F. 3d 1118, 1122 (CA9 2008) (case below); Osborne v. State, 163 P. 3d 973, 975-976 (Alaska App. 2007) (Osborne II); App. 27, 42-44.

     K. G. did not die; the bullet had only grazed her head. Once the two men left, she found her way back to the road, and flagged down a passing car to take her home. Ultimately, she received medical care and spoke to the police. At the scene of the crime, the police recovered a spent shell casing, the axe handle, some of K. G.'s clothing stained with blood, and the blue condom. Jackson v. State, No. A-5276 etc. (Alaska App., Feb. 7, 1996), App. to Pet. for Cert. 117a.

     Six days later, two military police officers at Fort Richardson pulled over Dexter Jackson for flashing his headlights at another vehicle. In his car they discovered a gun (which matched the shell casing), as well as several items K. G. had been carrying the night of the attack. Id., at 116a, 118a-119a. The car also matched the description K. G. had given to the police. Jackson admitted that he had been the driver during the rape and assault, and told the police that William Osborne had been his passenger. 521 F. 3d, at 1122-1123; 423 F. 3d 1050, 1051-1052 (CA9 2005); Osborne v. State, 110 P. 3d 986, 990 (Alaska App. 2005) (Osborne I). Other evidence also implicated Osborne. K. G. picked out his photograph (with some uncertainty) and at trial she identified Osborne as her attacker. Other witnesses testified that shortly before the crime, Osborne had called Jackson from an arcade, and then driven off with him. An axe handle similar to the one at the scene of the crime was found in Osborne's room on the military base where he lived.

Hence the defense attorney's desire to steer away from a more conclusive DNA test and aim for a "mistaken identity, cross-racial identification case", which in this scenario would have amounted to, all black guys look alike to white folks.

Let's leave the last laugh for Matt Y:

Conservative Justices’ Strange Enthusiasm for the Punishment of the Innocent

Here’s a beaut of a decision from the increasingly brutal and inhumane conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Not content with gutting anti-discrimination legislation, a 5-4 majority has decided that if people are wrongfully convicted they should be punished anyway because, hey, tough on crime!

...The predominant thinking of Alaska in this case seems to be that the punishment of the innocent works as a close substitute for the punishment of the guilty, so that given the heinous nature of the crime the state has a strong interest in convicting someone or other of it irrespective of the facts. This is exactly the sort of madness and injustice we rely on the judicial system to rescue us from. But not the new Roberts Court!

I am confident that the 5 justices in the majority are comfortable that the guilty have been punished.

MORE:  The SCOTUS Blog has analysis:

Amid competing essays on the courts’ role in declaring constitutional meaning, a Supreme Court majority has handed off — as essentially a question for the political branches of government — the issue of when a convicted individual can get access to genetic evidence to try to prove innocence of the crime.

...

Access to evidence for DNA testing, however, is not guaranteed by anything in the Constitution, the Court majority concluded – at least when the individual has had a fair trial, and is seeking the evidence after the fact, to try to undo a conviction.

...

The majority opinion in District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne (08-6) should not be misunderstood: it does not rule out entirely any access, in a criminal case, to genetic evidence for DNA testing.  What it does do is narrow any legal foundation for such access, primarily by leaving it up to 50 state legislatures and Congress to craft rules to control access.

That Would be A Heck Of A Father's Day Gift

Oh, I want CREW to give us the FBI notes of the Cheney interview in the Plame case.  Fingers crossed!

OK, I understand the precedential argument:

Justice Department lawyers told the judge that future presidents and vice presidents may not cooperate with criminal investigations if they know what they say could become available to their political opponents and late-night comics who would ridicule them.

"If we become a fact-finder for political enemies, they aren't going to cooperate," Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Smith said during a 90-minute hearing. "I don't want a future vice president to say, `I'm not going to cooperate with you because I don't want to be fodder for 'The Daily Show.'"

Well, at least Jon Stewart is the bogeyman, not Rush or Bill.  But I don't think that, following the Plame debacle, we will see a special counsel gain the cooperation of the White House anytime soon anyway.  People will lawyer up or resign rather than risk a perjury charge.

Saturday Morning Open Thread

Away we go, rain or shine rain.

Just Words For Obama On Iran

While Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton continue their search for Obama's backbone, let me repeat my suggestion for some White House rhetoric in support of the demonstrators in Iran:

America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments – provided they govern with respect for all their people.

Too inflammatory?  Well, he said it two weeks ago in Cairo, back when talk was cheap.

Back in Tehran, Ayatollah Khamenei says, "Enough".

Can Obama really hope to "welcome" Iran's leaders following a brutal crackdown?  I am worried about another Tiananmen; Obama, of course, is worried about another Kent State.

MORE:  Paul Wolfowitz, not necessarily the go-to guy on creating democracies, thinks Obama could do more:

It would be a cruel irony if, in an effort to avoid imposing democracy, the United States were to tip the scale toward dictators who impose their will on people struggling for freedom. And if we appear so desperate for negotiations that we will abandon those who support our principles, we weaken our own negotiating hand.

That does not mean that we need to pick sides in an Iranian election or claim to know its result. Obama could send a powerful message simply by placing his enormous personal prestige behind the peaceful conduct of the demonstrators and their demand for reform -- exactly the kind of peaceful, democratic change that he praised in his speech in Cairo.

Like the rest of the world, President Obama must have been surprised by the magnitude of the protests in Iran. Iranians are protesting not just election fraud but also the growing abuses of the Iranian people by a dictatorial regime. Now is not the time for the president to dig in to a neutral posture. It is time to change course.

Jon Chait of TNR would be even more delighted if Wolfowitz specifically, and conservatives generally, would at least address the notion that the Great Satan has a very limited role to play here and will not help the demonstrators by being linked to them, or by being perceived as meddling in Iranian affairs (again!).   Dan McLaughlin obliges:

But what if President Obama did it [lent rhetorical support to the demonstrators]? If Cairo was about anything, if it was worth anything, if the Obama Brand could ride to the aid of the interests of the United States in a situation where a more explicitly pro-American president could not, Obama should be willing and able to put that brand to work in a situation where the obvious objective truth is that he was acting to favor the interests of an Islamic population. He should be able to draw on his personal favorability in a crisis when something real is at stake.

Well, maybe the Muslim world needs more than one speech to fall fully in love with him - it took America a few months, if I recal the primary season.

In any case, David "I Didn't Drink The Kool Aid But I Can Describe Its Bouquet" Brooks assures us that Obama is all good on this:

Many of us have been dissatisfied with the legalistic calibrations of the Obama administration’s response to Iran, which have been disproportionate to the sweeping events there. We’ve been rooting for the politicians in the administration, like Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who have been working for a more sincere and heartfelt response.

But the comments of the first few days are not that important. What’s important is that the Obama administration understands the scope of what is happening. And on the big issue, my understanding is that the administration has it exactly right.

Exactly?  At this point Obama seems to be committed to pursuing negotiations and a summit (without pre-conditions, but with preparations) with Iranian leaders likely to be widely viewed as repressive and illegitimate.  I am not sure that is exactly the best course.

Such Drama, And So Early...

The NY Times poll results leave us wondering whether Neo can defeat Agent Smith.  It begins with believing!  (And sometimes ends there...)

The Jeffersons

The Blog of Legal Times covers the ongoing trial of Rep. Jefferson.

Dazed And Confused

The firing of IG Walpin rests on a slim reed.  And now two other IGs are in the news.

Too Much For A Superpower

Our Secretary of State answers the question - as a superpower, can the United States walk and chew gum at the same time?

Looking down the road, we have to wonder whether this injury to her right arm will impair her throwing motion.

Our Man In Tehran

Robert Fisk of The Independent continues to prowl the streets of Tehran.  He is skeptical of the letter purporting to reveal the unofficial official results of the election:

They were handing out the photocopies by the thousand under the plane trees in the centre of the boulevard, single sheets of paper grabbed by the opposition supporters who are now wearing black for the 15 Iranians who have been killed in Tehran – who knows how many more in the rest of the country? – since the election results gave Mahmoud Ahmadinejad more than 24 million votes and a return to the presidency. But for the tens of thousands marking their fifth day of protests yesterday – and for their election campaign hero, Mirhossein Mousavi, who officially picked up just 13 million votes – those photocopies were irradiated.

For the photocopy appeared to be a genuine but confidential letter from the Iranian minister of interior, Sadeq Mahsuli, to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, written on Saturday 13 June, the day after the elections, and giving both Mr Mousavi and his ally, Mehdi Karroubi, big majorities in the final results. In a highly sophisticated society like Iran, forgery is as efficient as anywhere in the West and there are reasons for both distrusting and believing this document. But it divides the final vote between Mr Mousavi and Mr Karroubi in such a way that it would have forced a second run-off vote – scarcely something Mousavi's camp would have wanted.

Headed "For the Attention of the Supreme Leader" it notes "your concerns for the 10th presidential elections" and "and your orders for Mr Ahmadinejad to be elected president", and continues "for your information only, I am telling you the actual results". Mr Mousavi has 19,075,623, Mr Karroubi 13,387,104, and Mr Ahmadinejad a mere 5,698,417.

Could this letter be a fake? Even if Mr Mousavi won so many votes, could the colourless Mr Karroubi have followed only six million votes behind him? And however incredible Mr Ahmadinejad's officially declared 63 per cent of the vote may have been, could he really – as a man who has immense support among the poor of Iran – have picked up only five-and-a-half million votes? And would a letter of such immense importance be signed only "on behalf of the minister"?

The BBC also has background.

I Suggest Some Bold Words For Obama On Iran

The WaPo explains why Obama is tip-toeing around the Iranian demonstrations:

U.S. Struggling for Right Response to Iran
Obama Seeks Way to Acknowledge Protesters Without Alienating Ayatollah

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 18, 2009

The political unrest in Iran presents the Obama administration with a dilemma: keep quiet to pursue a nuclear deal with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme leader, or heed calls to respond more supportively to the protesters there -- and risk alienating the Shiite cleric.

...

The administration's stance is practical -- the real power in Iran rests with Khamenei, not with whoever is president -- but pressure for a shift in policy will mount if the protests continue to grow and begin to threaten the government's hold on power. Obama already has been criticized -- notably by his Republican presidential rival, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) -- as abandoning "fundamental principles" of support for human rights.

If the cat has his silver tongue, perhaps Obama could make this statement:

Let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.

That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.

There is no straight line to realize this promise. But this much is clear: governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure. Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments – provided they govern with respect for all their people.

A bit too pointed, perhaps?  If the United States welcomes all elected, peaceful government, what is our stance towards repressive regimes who maintain their power by way of rigged elections?

But maybe Obama will be brave enough to say something like this in response to the situation in Iran - after al, he said it to 'Hosannas' a mere two weeks ago in Cairo.

MORE:  The Daily Telegraph has lots.

On The Lighter Side

Betsy Newmark has fun with the opening of Congressman William "Frozen Funds" Jefferson.

Fisking The Iranian Election

Fascinating stuff from THE Robert Fisk, who is walking the streets of Teheran with impunity and urging other Western reporters to do the same:

No-one's told me not to drive around so I go and see wounded people and go and watch these confrontations and no-one seems to bother me.

I rather think an awful lot of journalists take it too seriously. If you get in a car and go out and see things, no-one's going to stop you, frankly.

Let's go to the buried lead:

My suspicion is that [Ahmadinejad] might have actually won the election but more like 52 or 53 per cent. It's possible that Mousavi got closer to 38 per cent.

But I think the Islamic republic's regime here wanted to humiliate the opponent and so fiddle the figures, even if Ahmadinejad had won.

The problem with that is they're now going to claim they're going to need a recount. If the recount is to actually give Mousavi the presidency, someone is going to have to pay the price for such an extraordinary fraud of claiming Ahmadinejad won 30, 40, 50 per cent more than he should have done.

And what about the military?

I've just been witnessing a confrontation, in dusk and into the night, between about 15,000 supporters of Ahmadinejad - supposedly the president of Iran - who are desperate to down the supporters of Mr Mousavi, who thinks he should be the president of Iran.

There were about 10,000 Mousavi men and women on the streets, with approximately 500 Iranian special forces, trying to keep them apart.

It was interesting that the special forces - who normally take the side of Ahmadinejad's Basij militia - were there with clubs and sticks in their camouflage trousers and their purity white shirts and on this occasion the Iranian military kept them away from Mousavi's men and women.

In fact at one point, Mousavi's supporters were shouting 'thank you, thank you' to the soldiers.

One woman went up to the special forces men, who normally are very brutal with Mr Mousavi's supporters, and said 'can you protect us from the Basij?' He said 'with God's help'.

It was quite extraordinary because it looked as if the military authorities in Tehran have either taken a decision not to go on supporting the very brutal militia - which is always associated with the presidency here - or individual soldiers have made up their own mind that they're tired of being associated with the kind of brutality that left seven dead yesterday - buried, by the way secretly by the police - and indeed the seven or eight students who were killed on the university campus 24 hours earlier.

It is only one incident, of course, but it does fly against this guest piece in the Times which argued that Ahmadinejad, a former officer in the Revolutionary Guard had remade the Iranian government as a military dictatorship:

Disenchantment with clerical rule has been growing for years. To the urban youths who make up Iran’s most active political class, the mullahs represent the crude rigidity of Islamic law. To the rural poor, they epitomize the corruption that has meant unbuilt schools, unpaved roads and unfulfilled promises of development.

This hostility overflowed during the 2005 presidential race, with the defeat of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a cleric widely considered corrupt, by Mr. Ahmadinejad, a former officer in the Revolutionary Guards.

In Mr. Ahmadinejad, the public saw a man who repudiated the profligacy of the clerical class, a man who was ascetic, humble and devout. And he capitalized on that image to consolidate power and to promote his brothers in arms. Fourteen of the 21 cabinet ministers he has appointed are former members of the guards or its associated paramilitary, the Basij. Several, including Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, are veterans of notorious units thought to have supported terrorist operations in the 1980s.

Well, I have no doubt Fisk saw what he saw.

This is more cold water on the notion that reform may be taking hold in Iran:

[The protest] is absolutely not against the Islamic republic or the Islamic revolution.

It's clearly an Islamic protest against specifically the personality, the manner, the language of Ahmadinejad. They absolutely despise him but they do not hate or dislike the Islamic republic that they live in.

That ties in to the point that Mousavi was also hand-picked by the mullahs before he was allowed to stand for election.

MORE:  Soccer Players Have Balls. 

Homme Bites Chien

Expect the unexpected with Iran coverage - from the Wall Street Journal:

The President yesterday denounced the "extent of the fraud" and the "shocking" and "brutal" response of the Iranian regime to public demonstrations in Tehran these past four days.

"These elections are an atrocity," he said. "If [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad had made such progress since the last elections, if he won two-thirds of the vote, why such violence?" The statement named the regime as the cause of the outrage in Iran and, without meddling or picking favorites, stood up for Iranian democracy.

Dramatic pause while we search our memories - no, we didn't miss Obama's bold pronouncements on Iran:

The President who spoke those words was France's Nicolas Sarkozy.

The French are hardly known for their idealistic foreign policy and moral fortitude. Then again many global roles are reversing in the era of Obama. The American President didn't have anything to say the first two days after polls closed in Iran on Friday and an improbable landslide victory for Mr. Ahmadinejad sparked the protests. "I have deep concerns about the election," he said yesterday at the White House, when he finally did find his voice. "When I see violence directed at peaceful protestors, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me and it's of concern to the American people."

Spoken like a good lawyer. Mr. Obama didn't call the vote fraudulent, though he did allow that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election." This is a generous interpretation of the Supreme Leader's effort to defuse public rage by mooting a possible recount of select precincts. "How that plays out," Mr. Obama said, "is ultimately for the Iranian people to decide." Sort of like the 2000 Florida recount, no doubt.

Whoa - is this MY Wall Street Journal praising the French and mocking Florida 2000?  How far has the Iranian revolution reached?

GEORGIA ON MY MIND:  Back when McCain and Obama were mere candidates, Obama was initially cautious in response to the Russian incursion into Georgia, but eventually got behind the bellicose John McCain.

John, We Hardly Knew Ye

Sen. John Ensign (R, Nev.) responds to an alleged blackmail threat by admitting to an extra-marital affair, which may hurt his 2012 Presidential prospects.  Michelle Malkin has heard enough from him.

Iran Watch

Per McLatchy, Iran's senior cleric has called the election a sham:

"No one in their right mind can believe" the official results from Friday's contest, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri said of the landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime of handling Mousavi's charges of fraud and the massive protests of his backers "in the worst way possible."

"A government not respecting people's vote has no religious or political legitimacy," he declared in comments on his official Web site. "I ask the police and army personals (personnel) not to 'sell their religion,' and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before God."

The rulers of Iran are in their right minds?  Who knew?

Hot Air has more on Montazeri's background.  We are sending this one out to the Ayatollahs.

Finally, Will Collier tells us what he really thinks:

Rather than offering any crumbs of support to the Iranians who are literally putting their lives on the line for their own freedom, Barack Obama could only manage "deep concerns." In Obamaland, it's not as important to offer even moral support to people trying to shake off the yoke of a barbaric dictatorship as it is to not appear to be "meddling."

This all sounds quite familiar, and everyone over 30 has seen it before. Did somebody replace the "community activist" with a self-righteous peanut farmer while we weren't looking?

...I've met a lot of Eastern Europeans who have pictures of Ronald Reagan on their mantles. They never forgot the way he stood up for them, in public, against the commissars. Iran's population is going to run off the mullahs one of these years, hopefully this year. When that happens, what do you want them to remember, that we were supporting them, or worrying about what their oppressors would think about it?

Ahh, well.  Robert Kagan explains Obama's realism:

For, in fact, Obama never meant to spark political upheaval in Iran, much less encourage the Iranian people to take to the streets. That they are doing so is not good news for the president but, rather, an unwelcome complication in his strategy of engaging and seeking rapprochement with the Iranian government on nuclear issues.

One of the great innovations in the Obama administration's approach to Iran, after all, was supposed to be its deliberate embrace of the Tehran rulers' legitimacy. In his opening diplomatic gambit, his statement to Iran on the Persian new year in March, Obama went out of his way to speak directly to Iran's rulers, a notable departure from George W. Bush's habit of speaking to the Iranian people over their leaders' heads. As former Clinton official Martin Indyk put it at the time, the wording was carefully designed "to demonstrate acceptance of the government of Iran."

This approach had always been a key element of a "grand bargain" with Iran. The United States had to provide some guarantee to the regime that it would no longer support opposition forces or in any way seek its removal. The idea was that the United States could hardly expect the Iranian regime to negotiate on core issues of national security, such as its nuclear program, so long as Washington gave any encouragement to the government's opponents. Obama had to make a choice, and he made it. This was widely applauded as a "realist" departure from the Bush administration's quixotic and counterproductive idealism.

So Obama has been, to use the soccer metaphor, wrong-footed.  Hmm, to a basketball player that would be something like picking up the dribble too soon.  [Mark Coffey has more.]

THE WORLD HAS CHANGED FOREVER:  You are not ready for what comes next:

The President yesterday denounced the "extent of the fraud" and the "shocking" and "brutal" response of the Iranian regime to public demonstrations in Tehran these past four days.

"These elections are an atrocity," he said. "If [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad had made such progress since the last elections, if he won two-thirds of the vote, why such violence?" The statement named the regime as the cause of the outrage in Iran and, without meddling or picking favorites, stood up for Iranian democracy.

That is from the Wall Street Journal.  Continuing:

The President who spoke those words was France's Nicolas Sarkozy.

The French are hardly known for their idealistic foreign policy and moral fortitude. Then again many global roles are reversing in the era of Obama. The American President didn't have anything to say the first two days after polls closed in Iran on Friday and an improbable landslide victory for Mr. Ahmadinejad sparked the protests. "I have deep concerns about the election," he said yesterday at the White House, when he finally did find his voice. "When I see violence directed at peaceful protestors, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me and it's of concern to the American people."

Spoken like a good lawyer.

The WSJ is lauding France for diplomatic courage.  Fire me.

We Managed To Avoid The Nuclear Option

Sarah Palin accepts David Letterman's current groveling, but her statement provides new fodder for the late night crew (my emphasis):

In a statement to FOXNews.com early Tuesday, the Alaska governor said, "Of course it's accepted on behalf of young women, like my daughters, who hope men who 'joke' about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve."

"Letterman certainly has the right to 'joke' about whatever he wants to, and thankfully we have the right to express our reaction," Palin said. "This is all thanks to our U.S. Military women and men putting their lives on the line for us to secure America's Right to Free Speech - in this case, may that right be used to promote equality and respect."

Only the brave men and women of the US military stood between us and a full Letterman takeover?  A grateful nation gives thanks, but where were they when Joe Buck unleashed Artie Lange?

Pakistan Preps For An Offensive Into Waziristan

The Times covers Pakistani preparations for a push into Waziristan.  This is not the first such ballyhooed effort, but circumstances have changed.

Some Health Care, With Buried Bad News

The Times frontpages cost concerns about Obama's push for health care reform:

An analysis released Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office raised the hurdles for draft legislation in the Senate just as its Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee planned to begin voting on Wednesday. The office concluded that a plan by the committee’s Democratic leaders, Senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, would reduce the number of uninsured only by a net 16 million people. Even if the bill became law, the budget office said, 36 million people would remain uninsured in 2017.

That finding came as a surprise. Robert D. Reischauer, an economist who headed the budget office when Congress tackled the health care issue in the Clinton administration, said that if so many people remained uninsured, it might not be feasible to cut special federal payments to hospitals that serve many low-income people.

Mr. Obama said Saturday that the government could save $106 billion over 10 years by cutting such hospital payments as more people gained coverage.

William Galston was cogent on the cost question, writing in The New Republic recently:

What I found suggests that little happened, during either the campaign or the first four months of the Obama administration, to educate the people about the real choices their elected representatives now face. As the discussion of legislative options becomes more precise, the people will be in for some rude surprises--and advocates of fundamental reform will have a harder time making their case than they now believe.

David Brooks offers a canny preview of the upcoming political theatre.  A snippet about where we are in Obama's process now:

In stage two, you pass everything over to Congress. You’ll need these windbags at the end, so you might as well get them busy at the beginning. This will produce a whirl of White Papers, a flurry of committee activity, a set of legislative rivalries as every chairman in the stable seeks to be the lead horse in the romp to legislative glory. All you have to do is raise a portentous eyebrow from time to time, signaling grand approval of the various proposals as they blow by.

This brings us to the current stage: The Long Tease. Every player in this game has a favorite idea, and you are open to all of them. The liberals want a public plan, and you’re for it. The budget guys are for slashing Medicare reimbursements, and you’re for that. The doctors want relief from lawsuits, and you’re open to it. The Republicans want you to cap the tax exemption on employee health benefits. You campaigned against that, but you’re still privately for it.

You ran on a platform of hope and, boy, are you delivering. Every special interest in Washington lives in hope that they will get their pet idea incorporated into the final bill.

Finally, the bad news:

Alcohol’s Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It

...No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death — only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy. “The moderate drinkers tend to do everything right — they exercise, they don’t smoke, they eat right and they drink moderately,” said Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a retired sociologist from the University of California, San Francisco, who has criticized the research. “It’s very hard to disentangle all of that, and that’s a real problem.”

Oddly, a similar problem confounds the folks who insist that exercise promotes good health.