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In Real Clear Politics, Tom Bevan blogs about Obama coming clean about some of the dirt in Obamacare.
There’s been a remarkable amount of coverage of President Obama’s appearance at the House Republican retreat today, but I haven’t seen anyone focus on the President’s rather stunning admission about the Democrats’ health care legislation (Video):
“The last thing I will say, though — let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.” [emphasis added]
…This was one of the core debates on health care throughout last year: Would President Obama and the Democrats’ legislation allow government to come between citizens and their choice of doctors and insurers? Obama promised it wouldn’t. Republicans said it would, and this was one of the aspects of the legislation that led them to characterize it as a government takeover of health care – the same characterization that Obama chastised the GOP for today.
So it’s a bit of shock to find out now – from the President himself, no less – that one or both of the bills that passed Congress late last year (the House passed its version in late November, the Senate on Christmas Eve Day) contained language that would have violated this pledge.
Daniel Foster, in the Corner, posts on how close we were to having Obamacare.
This is how close we were to the “precipice” the president once spoke about:
Sen. Tom Harkin, the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, said negotiators from the White House, Senate and House reached a final deal on healthcare reform days before Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts.
Labor leaders had announced an agreement with White House and congressional representatives over an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans on the Thursday before the special election. . . .
Harkin (D-Iowa), who attended healthcare talks at the White House, said negotiators were on the cusp of bringing a bill back for final votes in the Senate and House.
Harkin said “we had an agreement, with the House, the White House and the Senate. We sent it to [the Congressional Budget Office] to get scored and then Tuesday happened and we didn’t get it back.” He said negotiators had an agreement in hand on Friday, Jan. 15. …
John Steele Gordon comments in Contentions about a post from Jennifer Rubin.
Jennifer referred this morning to the columns of Gail Collins and Charles Blow in the New York Times, in which they complain that the problems the Obama administration face are due to: 1) the wretched selfishness of Americans in general and Republicans in particular; and 2) the intellectual inadequacy of Americans in general and Republicans in particular. If the American people were only of a higher quality morally and intellectually, everything would be just fine, and President Obama would be sailing majestically toward an overwhelming re-election.
This sort of thinking reminds me of a dictum coined by Oscar Hammerstein I, the great theatrical impresario of the turn of the 20th century (and grandfather of the eponymous lyricist). After a play he had produced flopped badly, a friend commiserated with him and blamed it on the Broadway audience. Hammerstein looked at him and said, “When the audience doesn’t like the play, there is something wrong with the play, not the audience.”
Good advice, not likely to be taken.
In Euro Pacific Capital, John Browne recommends caution in assessing the stock market and the economy.
As a former army parachutist with a bad head for heights, I recall standing in the doorway of an aircraft while my jumping instructor shouted: “Don’t look down!” He understood that my unease with parachuting combined with the sight of thousands of feet of open air could be enough to elicit panic. Many investors in today’s American stock and bond markets appear to be getting the same advice. While in my predicament, I had a parachute and a rudimentary understanding of how to use it, I fear that American investors have nothing to break their fall.
Looking down from the lofty nominal heights of today’s American stock and bond markets, there is cause for real concern.
First, the Dow has risen 62% over the past ten months.[i] Despite the fact that a market collapse appears to have been averted – for a time, at least – this normally would be considered an unhealthy speed. This rapid rise may be the result of government and media cheerleading, which have been based in part on government statistics whose accuracy gives additional cause for concern. In short, the stock markets appear to be heavily overbought.
Second, the somewhat surprisingly solid earnings posted by American companies over the past year have been achieved largely by savage labor cuts, inventory depletion, margin reductions and reduced research and advertising expenses.[ii] It is doubtful that such cuts can be continued over the longer term. At the same time, the top-line revenues of many companies have been in decline, threatening future earnings. These are not the types of metrics that would normally inspire long term confidence. …
In the National Review, Jay Nordlinger reviews the break-up of the global warming conspiracy.
…In truth, the science was not quite settled. The hockey stick had been called into grave question by those two inconvenient Canadians. When McIntyre first saw the graph, his curiosity was piqued. He had spent his career in mineral exploration, and had witnessed his share of spectacular claims. Dot-com rackets would forecast big profits, using hockey sticks. Most of the time, the forecasts proved bogus. It was necessary to examine the raw data behind a hockey stick. McIntyre had never even heard of the IPCC — how many of us had? — but he was determined to look into its stick. And he was astonished to discover something: No one had challenged that stick, had put it to the test. Was the world to accept the IPCC’s claims about global warming, and alter its economies accordingly, without due diligence? …
…In 2003, he linked up with Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, west of Toronto. McKitrick had co-authored a book called “Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming.” Together, the two M’s formed a kind of Team B, doing a rigorous check or audit of the “A” team’s work. McKitrick points out that this is perfectly normal, even mandatory, in business — in the engineering fields, for example. You don’t attempt to put a new plane in the air, or a new space shuttle, without a serious Team B — or C or D — effort. Shouldn’t the U.N.’s climate panel have the soundest information possible, before spooking the world with a hockey stick? Shouldn’t the world’s governments be on the soundest footing possible before spending billions and upsetting their arrangements?…
…But the e-mails were eye-opening to journalists, he says, some of whom were “shocked.” “They’ve been reporting the standard global-warming line for years, and I’ve learned in conversations with them that they had no idea that this group of scientists acted this way.” Hence, the “loss of innocence.” McKitrick says that Climategate “pried the lid off the process behind the IPCC reports and what goes on in journals, and forced people to realize that this is not a pure, rarefied search for truth” but “a very partisan and distorted process.” Reporters, he says, are more respectful to him now. Before, it was basically, “Why don’t you believe what all the world’s scientists are saying?” Now they are humbler, asking more intelligent questions. …
Roger Simon posts on Scientific American getting to eat crow. Cold.
Pity Scientific American. Little did the magazine’s editors know when putting together their February issue that their boneheaded article Negating “Climategate”: Copenhagen Talks and Climate Science Survive Stolen E-Mail Controversy now reads as if it were written by David Biello somewhere around 1993. Oh, well, back when this nonsense was written (December?) some people still believed the Himalayan glaciers were about to disappear, not to mention the Amazonian rainforests. Nor did we know that not just the East Anglia CRU, but also our own NASA had been playing fast and loose with AGW temperature facts, for some reason needing a FOIA to cough up data that should be public record in such a scientific endeavor. The poor editors of SA are taking a drubbing in the comments, which they richly deserve.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, Bin Laden is apparently jumping on the “global warming bandwagon.” I think we should give him an Oscar!
Mark Steyn points out the foreign press is reporting all the new global warming embarrassments. Our press – not so much.
You have to assume that America’s dying monodailies are now actively auditioning for state ownership. How else to explain the silence of the massed ranks of salaried “environmental correspondents” on the daily revelations emerging from the fast disintegrating “scientific consensus” on “climate change”? You get livelier coverage from the Chinese press.
But in competitive newspaper markets they still know a story when they see one. Surely the most worrying sign for the thuggish enforcers of “settled science” is that even the eco-lefties at The Guardian and The Independent, two of the most gung-ho warm-mongers on the planet, are beginning to entertain doubts. …
In Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler reports on more trouble for the IPCC. Apparently they also cited a fifth-grader’s science report as proof of their global warming scams. Not really, but awfully close.
…It has also become clear that the IPCC report systematically misrepresents the peer-reviewed literature on the effect of climate change hurricanes and natural disasters. Specifically, the report falsely claims there is evidence that human-induced climate change is producing an increase in extreme weather events and associated losses and includes a graph that is not based upon published, peer-reviewed work. Yet the studies upon which the IPCC purports to base its claim — including one that was not peer-reviewed and should not have been cited at all — say no such thing. Worse, when the IPCC’s erroneous claims were challenged during the review process, an IPCC author fabricated a response to defend the erroneous claim. In response, the IPCC now claims it “carefully followed” its official procedures. Yet as Roger Pielke Jr., one of the researchers whose work is misrepresented in the report, responds, this claim is simply false as the IPCC “relied on an unpublished, non-peer reviewed source to produce its top line conclusions in this section,” ignored the complaints of reviewers, and fabricated a defense of the claim. Indeed, when the then-unpublished, un-peer-reviewed paper upon which the IPCC purported to rely was eventually published, it rejected the climate-disaster loss link asserted by the IPCC.
But wait, there’s more.It turns out that other claims in the IPCC’s WGII report were also based upon non-scientific sources, including magazine articles and reports by advocacy groups. For instance, the IPCC’s claim that climate change could endanger up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rain forest is based upon a report issued by an environmental advocacy organization, not a peer-reviewed scientific study, and the advocacy report misrepresented peer-reviewed studies to reach its conclusion. It also appears other IPCC claims about glaciers in the Andes and Alps were based upon a magazine article and student’s dissertation. …
And we have NRO Shorts. Here are three:
Reporters largely ignored it, but the Department of Health and Human Services released a study showing that Head Start’s positive effects peter out by the end of first grade. The study included 44 tests, of which 42 found no statistically significant and lasting improvement. Some positive results are to be expected when you run that many tests, and a footnote points out that the two apparently lasting results disappear after correcting for that tendency. Andrew Coulson and Adam Schaeffer of the Cato Institute point out that school choice, on the other hand, appears to have lasting positive results. Naturally, the Democrats have expanded funding for Head Start while ending school choice in D.C.
In a region traditionally known for producing loud, blustery autocrats who champion failed economic policies (Castro, Ortega, Chávez), Chile is a quietly remarkable success story. On January 11, it signed an accession agreement to become the first South American member of the OECD. Less than a week later, Chilean voters elected a conservative government for the first time since General Pinochet stepped down 20 years ago. The victory of presidential candidate Sebastián Piñera, a billionaire airline mogul, ends two decades of rule by the center-left Concertación coalition, whose multiple governments largely maintained the free-market economic reforms that were adopted under Pinochet. In recent years, Chilean officials moved away from pro-growth policies and toward greater social spending, but they also saved much of their copper windfall during the commodity boom, ensuring that they were in a strong fiscal position when the global financial crisis erupted. Piñera will inherit a well-run economy — one that has the potential to grow much faster. His election, like that of Ricardo Martinelli in Panama last May, affirms that not all Latin American countries are moving left.
Miep Gies used to say she was just an ordinary housewife. Austrian by birth, and Catholic, she married a Dutchman named Jan Gies and lived in Amsterdam. In the war, Miep and Jan helped hide Otto Frank and his family in a secret room, daily risking their own lives to do so. For Miep, Otto Frank’s young daughter Anne was a girl “full of the joy of just being alive,” and she remembered seeing Anne writing her diary with a look of utter intensity in her face. When the Gestapo rounded up the Franks, Miep kept Anne’s diary safe. She also respected Anne’s privacy. If she’d read those pages, she would have found references to herself and Jan, and might well have destroyed the lot for fear that the Gestapo in another search would incriminate them. After the war Otto Frank returned, and he was with Miep when he heard that his wife and daughters were dead. Miep took out the diary, saying, “Here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you.” More than that, it is a legacy to us all. The Diary of Anne Frank has been published in millions of copies in dozens of languages. Miep had her part in rescuing a human document that touches the heart like no other. This admirable lady lived to be 100. The world could do with a lot more ordinariness like hers. R.I.P.