Come sunday the US will have the highest corporate tax rate in the world.

Economists tell us that how much wealth each of us produces is a function of the amount of capital and the level of technology that we have at our disposal.  The more capital and the more advanced the technology, the more we produce and therefore the more we can consume.  By keeping the US cost of capital the highest in the world, we directly reduce the amount of capital per worker.  And because much technological innovation is driven by capex, we also reduce the amount of technology.  A negative two-fer.

Just one more epic fail by our fearless Federal state.  They hate us, don't they?  More Here.

I want!

Sh-sh-shake it, baby!

Barack Obama - Fanning the flames of hate

JOHN HINDERAKER: “President Obama has fanned the flames of hatred in the Trayvon Martin case, and has not said a single critical word about the outrageous actions of the New Black Panthers, who offered a $10,000 bounty on George Zimmerman–the same New Black Panthers on whose behalf Eric Holder quashed a federal criminal prosecution; or of Spike Lee, who tweeted a wrong address for Zimmerman, presumably to facilitate harassment or even murder; or of the many liberals who have posted on the @killzimmerman Twitter feed; or of the many other Democrats and liberals who have indulged in an orgy of hate with respect to Mr. Zimmerman. President Obama’s interest in the victims of violence is selective: he cares if they look like the hypothetical son he doesn’t have.”

In other words, he’s a racist hatemonger. Just to be clear. So much for hope and change.



Hope is what he promised. Hate is what he’s delivering.

Borrowing money for Kindergarten

A fool and her money will soon be parted.  It's a pathetic testament to status anxiety in our society.  Formal education is increasingly crap.

NOW, A LOWER EDUCATION BUBBLE: People Are Taking Out Student Loans to Pay for Kindergarten. “Families are taking out tens of thousands of dollars worth of loans in order to pay for private kindergarten for their whelps. That is some f*cked up sh*t.”

You are witnessing the beginning of the death throes of the modern university

It's about damned time these looters paid for their corruption.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: No Financial Aid, No Problem. For-Profit University Sets $199-a-Month Tuition for Online Courses.

Students are flocking to Western Governors University, driving growth of 30 to 40 percent each year. You might expect that competitors would be clamoring to copy the nonprofit online institution’s model, which focuses on whether students can show “competencies” rather than on counting how much time they’ve spent in class.
So why haven’t they?
Two reasons, says the education entrepreneur Gene Wade. One, financial-aid regulatory problems that arise with self-paced models that aren’t based on seat time. And two, opposition to how Western Governors changes the role of professor, chopping it into “course mentors” who help students master material, and graders who evaluate homework but do no teaching.

Read the whole thing.

Mark your 'Timmies'

Tim Geithner signs all new currency.  He's also the tax cheat who runs the IRS.  Let's recognize his wonderful dual role, shall we?

So this is all going to collapse then?

If the mandate is 'constitutional' but is not enforceable under Federal law, then no one in their right mind will purchase health insurance unless they expect their health costs are to be be higher than the premiums.  Thus the entire system will undergo almost immediate existential system failure.  The Obama administration's policies on healthcare are contradictory and irrational.  Unless you remember that their only purpose is to cement the left in power.  It's almost as if they don't care about policy outcomes at all....

CONSISTENCY: The Solicitor General argues that failure to comply with the requirement to buy health insurance does not equal a violation of federal law.

Is this cool or what?

Bionic Hands.  Definitely worth a gander.

Our insanely expensive healthcare system

And experts agree:  Obamacare will make it much worse.  It's all so progressive.

Quote 'o the Day

Regarding energy policy..... 

"I prefer the "old" approach to emerging technology: We adopt new technology when it is better and cheaper than the old technology, notwhen it is worse and more expensive, forced to convert over by a government demanding we pay more for less -- so we can reap all these speculative benefits in a hypothetical future."

~ Ace of Spades HQ 

Hattip Carpe Diem

NPR: Our Foxconn-Apple megastory was BS

I guess this was just too good to check.  It's funny how that happens with corporations and conservative groups at the National Public Radio.  Ever see them expose a leftist ally?  Beuller?  Beueller?

Pathetic.  Break it up, break it all up.

When is voter fraud not voter fraud?

When liberals do it.  It's 'Revolutionary Morality'.  Here's a memoir from 2004.  Hat tip NRO.

Today, when I voted in Tennessee, I laughed as I remembered voting for George W. Bush in 2004.

I had taken my two kids to the lobby of the Benjamin Franklin House in Philadelphia. We had lived on the 17th floor of the building since moving there a year or so before, and I remember appreciating the convenience of just taking the elevator down and casting my vote.

How wrong I was.

I approached the table, which had the people sitting with giant books of names. One of them asked me for my name and my phone number. It seemed a little off. I’d never voted in Pennsylvania before, but I wasn’t ready to hand over my phone number to some random poll monitor.

“Why do you need my phone number?” I asked.

The guy looked at his list skeptically, as if he was not going to let me vote.

“Well, I’m checking off who voted and I need to know whether I should call you later to make sure you made it to the polls.”

Alarm bells started going off in my head. Why would he need my number to not call me. And why would an election official be calling voters anyway?

“So, I’m voting right now,” I said, incredulously. “I’m here. You don’t need my number, not to call me, to make sure I did what I’m trying to do right now.”

Okay, so I was upset and wasn’t able to be clear in my protest.

“Listen,” he said. “I just want to make sure our people get out to vote.”

“Your people?”

He could tell by my Tennessee accent that I was probably not “his people.” Someone in the line behind me yelled out, “Why don’t you go back south and vote? I’m on my lunch break!”

“What do you mean, ‘your people?’” I asked.

Philadelphia is notorious for voter intimidation, voter fraud, and other crazy voting mishaps. For example, in 2008, a University of Pennsylvania student filmed two black panthers standing outside a polling place carrying clubs, intimidating Republican poll watchers from entering their polling place. (FoxNews later went to check out the scene.) On that day in 2006, news reports had emerged that some voting machines already had thousands of votes registered on them, even though the polls hadn’t opened yet.

I was completely undone, and the people in the line were sick of me holding up the process. “Who are you?” I demanded.

“Well,” he eventually admitted, “I’m with MoveOne.org. And I just want to make sure the ballots are cast for the right person.”

In his opinion, the right person was John Kerry.

“Why are you here? Why are you behind this table? This table is for poll watchers. You aren’t supposed to be collecting data for MoveOn.org!” I couldn’t help it, but my voice rose to a near yell. “You’re posing as a poll watcher!” I said.

By this time, everyone was pretty much over me. I got out my cell phone and called the police. The MoveOn guy, well, moved on. Of course, the election officials were aware that the activist was harassing voters beyond the barrier and collecting their information right there on the spot.

When the officers came, they took my report but looked as if they’d rather be doing anything else. Reluctantly, they filled out a form, I cast my vote, and I went up to my apartment and hid for the rest of the day.

When David came home from work, he walked through the lobby and decided to vote before he went up for dinner.

“David French,” he told them as they looked at their sheets and found his name and address.

“Oh, yes,” the election official said, “We met your lovely wife.”

President Obama: World's leader in campaign fundraising

He puts those nasty Republicans to shame.  And he does it while holding down the hardest job in the world and playing more golf and taking more vacation days than any other modern President.  All while managing the government's response to the worst economic slump since the Great Depression.  Whatta Guy!  Hattip NRO.

The New York Times acknowledges what many of Obama’s critics have been pointing out for months:

A seat at a state dinner is a relatively painless way for presidents to thank supporters and a time-honored perk of donordom. But Mr. Obama has a particular large group of friends to thank: He has beenholding fund-raising events at a far more rapid pace than his predecessors, hoping to build a cash advantage that will carry him to re-election this fall.

I’ve said that his furious schedule of fundraisers is driven less by a need for campaign cash than by his ego’s need for constant praise and adoration.

Notice this detail as well:

Mr. Obama also invited Hamilton E. James, Jr., the billionaire second-in-command at private equity company Blackstone, who Obama allies have been avidly courting as a potential fund-raiser and donor.

Mary Jo Kopechne was not available for comment

James Taranto on the topic of "revolutionary truth" and double standards:

She Sleeps With the Fishes 

Yesterday we noted that Stanley Fish had justified liberal double standards--trying to destroy Rush Limbaugh for his "misogynistic remarks," while tolerating worse from Bill Maher--on the ground that liberals are "good guys" and conservatives are "bad guys." This prompted reader July Linett to write us with an interesting thought experiment:

Although you point out some of the problems with his argument, I think there is more to it. For example, there are two men with guns. Both kill an innocent child accidentally. One of the men is an anti-Semite known for torturing animals. The other is a guy we like. Is it fair then to give the guy we like a pass and instead only put the anti-Semite in jail for the crime of shooting the kid?
Admittedly, calling someone names is a far cry from the above, but as I read Fish, that's just about what he's saying.
To put the question more broadly, what if the left applied lower standards to its friends not just when it came to the etiquette of political debate but to all forms of wrongful behavior?

There was someone with whom we wanted to discuss this matter, but Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

CBO: Obamacare 10 year cost double what was promised when passed

Of course it took epic levels of accounting fraud in the bill to get it passed.  I predict that like Medicare, the cost of Obamacare will continue to grow far beyond the (slightly more honest) projections made by the CBO.  At least until the great inflation comes and the currency collapses.  But by then BHO will have moved on to be an 'elder' statesman worth hundreds of millions of dollars, no make that hundreds of millions of Swiss Francs or Singaporean Dollars.

He'll be our Jose Lopez Portillo.  Hope and change indeed.

Details here.

Fonda, Steinham on CNN: Govt should force Limbaugh off the air

The left is abandoning what Stan Fish calls 'liberal formalism' for raw power politics.  Whether something is moral or not depends upon whose side you're on.  Revolutionary morality is now on display at mainstream outlets like CNN.  Check it out here.  There was a time when CNN wouldn't have touched this with a ten foot pole.  No more.

Appeals to racial solidarity are racist. And wrong.

I went to college with Lovie Smith - he and his friends used to come to our parties.  He's a nice guy and not a radical in any way.  But this campaign ad that he recorded for President Obama that calls for all blacks to support BHO because he's black is wrong.  Appeals to racial solidarity have no place in our politics.   They balkanize and encourage hatred and groupthink.  Please retract this, Lovie.

If you want the NYT to treat you with respect, it's best to make sure that you're willing to kill them

All religions are equal, but the ones that kill people are more equal than the others. Hattip NRO

Pamela Geller was struck by that ad The New York Times ran the other day, “It’s Time To Quit The Catholic Church“, an “open letter to ‘liberal’ and ‘nominal’ Catholics”. So she sent in her own ad, “It’s Time To Quit Islam“, an “open letter to ‘moderate’ Muslims”. Analogous artwork, same pitch, only difference being the intended target. TheTimes’ Senior Vice-President for Corporate Hogwash called to tell Miss Geller that – surprise! surprise! – they were way less eager to rush this one into print:

Bob Christie, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications for the New York Times, just called me to advise me that they would be accepting my ad, but considering the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, now would not be a good time, as they did not want to enflame an already hot situation. They will be reconsidering it for publication in “a few months.”

So I said to Mr. Christie, “Isn’t this the very point of the ad? If you feared the Catholics were going to attack the New York Times building, would you have run that ad?”

Thus the courage of the secular left: If you’re going to be “provocative”, it’s best to do it with people who can’t be provoked. Pamela is right. If you want to be treated with respect by The New York Times and the rest of the multiculti establishment, make it clear you’re willing to kill them. That’s an interesting message to send.

IRS Power Grab

The Obama administration is fundamentally unable to control its power lust.  Here's another 350,000 people who will see their costs go up or lose their livelihood to the big boys.  The capital strike continues to gain momentum.  Hattip Instapundit.

HOPE AND CHANGE: IRS to Mom and Pop: Drop Dead.

Doing your taxes sucks. Paying someone else to do your taxes sucks, too. But you know what sucks most of all? Having the person who does your taxes go out of business (or dramatically raise prices) thanks to an IRS power grab.
Last year, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) got into the business of licensing tax preparers. The IRS wasn’t granted the authority to do this by Congress, they just decided to go for it. At a time when unemployment is still awfully high, 350,000 people–many of whom are self-employers or own small businesses–will be hit by rules that axe their jobs or make it more difficult and expensive to keep their calculators clacking.

Wars against arithmetic don't end well

And we are seeing an entire political class charging into the machine guns.  Hattip Instapundit.

SPEAKING OF THE PUBLIC PENSION CRISIS: NY Suicide Caucus Votes Down Cuomo Pension Reform.

If you needed more proof that arithmetic-deficient politicians and dysfunctional government are largely to blame for the disastrous state of New York’s finances, Albany Democrats have just supplied it. 

New York’s Assembly Democrats have voted down Governor Cuomo’s pension reform plan, hammering yet another nail into the state’s financial coffin. The Assembly refused Cuomo’s suggestion to raise the retirement age from 62 to 65 even though the governor stressed that his plan would save hundreds of billions of dollars in costs toward a pension plan expected to consume 35 percent of the government’s budget by 2015. In 2001, it was 3 percent.

Revolutionary Morality

Professor Stanley Fish explains the modern left's approach to truth in the New York Times.  It is surprising that such a prestigious academic would be allowed to openly say so in the pages of its chief establishment practitioner.  Either they are getting sloppy or they no longer believe they have anything to fear from our attenuated democracy.  Fascists of both the left and the right usually stick to 'liberal formalism' until they believe that their power is unassailable.  Then the long knives come out.  The Sovs called it 'revolutionary' morality.

In an essay for the New York Times website, literary theorist Stanley Fish offers a justification for the left's denunciations of Rush Limbaugh for "misogyny" and its tolerance of the same from the likes of Bill Maher and Ed Schultz.

The charge of hypocrisy, he notes, is based in "the political philosophy of enlightenment liberalism," which emphasizes procedural fairness à la the Golden Rule. He urges liberals to take an alternative approach:

If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal--that is, non-formal--perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?
There is no answer to that question once you step outside of the liberal calculus in which all persons, no matter what their moral status as you see it, are weighed in an equal balance. Rather than relaxing or soft-pedaling your convictions about what is right and wrong, stay with them, and treat people you see as morally different differently. Condemn Limbaugh and say that Schultz and Maher may have gone a bit too far but that they're basically O.K. If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. "Fair" is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment.

The EPA's butcher's bill

And once again, President Obama's career is on the bill of fare...

INSIDE THE BELTWAY: Drivers fume as local gas prices break the $4 barrier. “Gas prices are soaring past $4 in the District, and they’re not expected to drop anytime soon, leaving Washingtonians to think about changing their driving habits and maybe their votes. . . . AAA Mid-Atlantic’s John Townsend said local prices are even higher because five Northeast U.S. refineries shut down in the last two years.” I wonder what could have caused that?

Mitt Romney: "A safe pair of hands"

Alternatively, Mitt Romney:  He's not nuts!

Mitt Romney:  He's not a community organizer!

Another reason to not trust the police

Don't think your jurisdiction is any better than Virginia.  The law isn't on your side, they're on their side.

Another Reason To Be Against The Death Penalty
The wrongful conviction rate in Virginia alone is just appalling. Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate that of 214 DNA samples of incarcerated people obtained between 1973 and 1988 that could still yield accurate results, a whopping 70-plus people (perhaps even 79 of those people) were excluded as perpetrators of a crime:

Whatever the percentage of error on the part of Virginia's criminal justice system, one thing is certain: Only a handful of the falsely convicted have received the exonerations they deserve. Since DNA retesting began in Virginia, two people have been formally exonerated and another, who is dead, was cleared of a rape he didn't commit. When Barbour's paperwork is processed, he will be only the fourth person to be exonerated, despite the fact that the state is aware of scores of others who may be innocent. Even now Barbour remains skeptical. "They can do anything now to trick it up like they did 34 years ago," he says. "I'm not going to be excited 'til it all comes out. I'm innocent. I'm here. But I don't trust the justice system. Period."After all, Virginia authorities never did successfully contact Barbour to acknowledge his innocence. It was Jonathan Sheldon, a private-practice attorney in Fairfax, Va. who took it upon himself to contact Barbour and many of the other 70-some men who have been convicted of crimes, excluded by DNA testing, and never advised of that fact. As of today, the state has given him only 32 names and Sheldon says he has already located most of them. Some are dead. Some are dying. Some suffer from mental illnesses that make it impossible for them to even understand why he is calling. As the Richmond-Times Dispatch's Frank Green, who first reported on Barbour's exclusion by DNA testing, wrote last month: "The Virginia Department of Forensic Science has issued reports that exclude at least 76 felons as the source of biological evidence in their cases." Yet as of last month, 29 of those felons had not been notified that the new DNA reports existed.

Barbour, whose story leads the piece, lost five years of his life in jail and is stricken with cancer:

Jonathan Sheldon, a lawyer familiar with his case says, "People think, 'Oh, he only got five years.' But in that five years he lost his six-month-old marriage, and scarred his relationship with his daughter. That five years broke him."The Commonwealth of Virginia learned that Bennett Barbour was innocent nearly two years ago, when DNA testing cleared him of the crime. Virginia authorities, however, never informed Barbour of his innocence. (State officials claim to have mailed a letter with the test results to Barbour's last four known addresses, but none of those letters ever reached him.) Barbour learned of the DNA tests that proved his innocence only last month, on Feb. 5, when he received a phone call from Sheldon. "I was with my nephew playing cards, and Mr. Sheldon called my mother's house looking for me," says Barbour. "He said the authorities stopped looking for me because they couldn't find me. But Sheldon found me in two days using the Internet."
Actually, that's not true. It only took Sheldon a few hours.

No honor among traitors - Specter says Dems double crossed him after he double crossed the GOP

No fair!  No Double-Double Crossees!

Couldn't happen to nicer guy...

Remember Senator Arlen Specter, the long-time Republican and somewhat shorter-time Democrat? He has a new book out complaining that, after he stiffed his Republican colleagues, his new Democrat colleagues stiffed him:

Former Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.) writes in a new book that President Obama ditched him in the 2010 election after he helped Obama win the biggest legislative victory of his term by passing healthcare reform.
Specter also claims that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) did not uphold his promise to grant him seniority accrued over 28 years of service in the Senate as a Republican…
Specter writes that Obama turned down a request to campaign with him in the final days of the primary, because the president’s advisers feared he would look weak if he intervened and Specter lost…
Specter was also disappointed that Biden, who was only a few blocks away at Penn University, did not attend a pre-primary day rally at the Phillies’s Citizens Bank Park — a missed opportunity Specter attributes to a failed staff-to-staff request.

“A failed staff-to-staff request”? Specter could have called Biden directly on a non-staff-to-non-staff telephone, but that would have been totally improper considering Specter’s former seniority to Biden on the powerful senate Telephone, Telegram and Facsimile Machine Inter-Senatorial Communications Etiquette Committee. It gets worse:

Specter believes Reid acted with “duplicity” while managing the party switch. Specter said Reid promised him that he would be recognized on the seniority list as a Democrat elected in 1980, but failed to deliver on it…
Instead, Reid stripped Specter of all his seniority by passing a short resolution by unanimous consent in a nearly-empty chamber, burying him at the bottom of the Democrats’ seniority list.
Specter found out about it after his press secretary emailed him a press account of the switch. Specter was floored that Reid had “violated a fundamental Senate practice to give personal notice to a senator directly affected by the substance of a unanimous consent agreement.”

Outrageous! Specter had his press secretary take it up with the powerful Senate subcommittee on subcommittees chaired by Harry Reid’s press secretary’s communications adviser’s media strategist’s marketing consultant’s publicity relations director’s intern. But the humiliations continued:

He says Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), now the chairman of the Labor, Health and Human Services subcommittee, declined a request to let Specter take over as chairman at least until the election.
Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) refused to let him move past them in seniority on the Judiciary Committee.

Reid also reneged on a commitment to re-name the influential Energy, Education, Indian Casino Gambling and Northern Mariana Islands Committee the His Excellency Senator Arlen Z. Specter Energy, Education, Indian Casino Gambling and Northern Mariana Islands Committee.
If you buy only one book this year about a man passed over for the chairmanship of the Senate Labor, Health and Human Services subcommittee, make it this one. Unless Tom Harkin has one in the works.

Can you say inflation?

I knew you could.  Hattip Carpe Diem

The Police: They're not on your side, they're on their side...

Way to many cops, way to many crimes.  Hattip, Advice Goddess

The NYPD Tapes
Fantastic piece on the Voice's investigation about cops jiggering crime stats by refusing to make crime reports, or calling serious crimes minor ones, then going after the whistleblower who made their doings public. Graham Rayman writes in the Village Voice:

For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the "stats" that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports. 

Arresting bystanders made it look like the department was efficient, while artificially reducing the amount of serious crime made the commander look good.
In October 2009, Schoolcraft met with NYPD investigators for three hours and detailed more than a dozen cases of crime reports being manipulated in the district. Three weeks after that meeting--which was supposed to have been kept secret from Schoolcraft's superiors--his precinct commander and a deputy chief ordered Schoolcraft to be dragged from his apartment and forced into the Jamaica Hospital psychiatric ward for six days. 

...Investigators went beyond Schoolcraft's specific claims and found many other instances in the 81st Precinct where crime reports were missing, had been misclassified, altered, rejected, or not even entered into the computer system that tracks crime reports. 

These weren't minor incidents. The victims included a Chinese-food delivery man robbed and beaten bloody, a man robbed at gunpoint, a cab driver robbed at gunpoint, a woman assaulted and beaten black and blue, a woman beaten by her spouse, and a woman burgled by men who forced their way into her apartment. 

...•In a 2009 incident, an elderly man said he was a burglary victim. When he showed up at the precinct to file a report, a sergeant told him to go to another precinct to file. Again, this is a violation of the NYPD's own policy. It was only after a newspaper article appeared months later that a report was taken 

•A 60-year-old retired traffic agent made repeated visits to the precinct to get a complaint number for her stolen vehicle from May through June 2009. The investigation showed the report was never entered into the NYPD computer system, preventing it from being counted in the crime statistics. Investigators concluded nothing would have been done if the woman hadn't been a former traffic agent and pressed the issue.

Health Insurance does not equal Health Care

Particularly when you shift people from private insurance to public insurance. This, of course is obvious to anyone who lives in the UK or Canada.  But Obamacare is premised on making this obvious mistake.  And our totally unbiased press reports expansion of government health insurance as an expansion of health care.  Which is a lie.

Roy For McArdle: "Health INSURANCE Is Not The Same As Health CARE"
Avik S. A. Roy, blogging at TheAtlantic.com's space that was Megan McArdle's, writes:

Chapin White of the Center for Studying Health System Change has published an important new paper in Health Services Research, a journal of health economics, which suggests that a critical part of the Affordable Care Act--its expansion of Medicaid coverage to 16 million more Americans--may actually reduce those individuals' access to health care.White's report comes on the heels of numerous studies that show that patients on Medicaid, our national government-run health-care program for the poor, do far worse on health outcomes than do those on private insurance, and in some cases, worse than those with no insurance at all. (For an extremely deep dive into these studies, see my three-part series on the topic.) 

1) Medicaid underpays doctors for their expenses
Why does this occur? The main reason is that Medicaid underpays doctors and hospitals to care for Medicaid beneficiaries. Medicaid's reimbursement rates are around half of those paid by private insurers. In many cases, Medicaid pays doctors less than it costs to care for Medicaid patients, meaning that doctors face the choice of caring for the poor, and going broke, or shutting their doors to Medicaid patients. One survey found that internists were 8.5 times as likely to accept no Medicaid patients at all, relative to those with private insurance. Another found that two-thirds of kids on Medicaid were denied a doctor's appointment for a serious condition, relatively to only 11 percent for the privately-insured. 

Believe it or not, physicians even do better caring for the uninsured than they do caring for Medicaid patients. Two MIT economists, Jonathan Gruber and David Rodriguez, have found that three-quarters of physicians receive lower fees for serving Medicaid patients than they do for the uninsured, because many people without health insurance are still able to pay out-of-pocket for routine health expenses. (Gruber was the intellectual father of Obamacare, and remains an outspoken advocate of the law.)

And #2 and #3:

2) Overall, Medicaid expansions do not lead to more doctor visits3) Obamacare's Medicaid expansion could worsen physician access

The Government Can

Must see internet:

The bluer your state is the broker it is

New York, circling the drain?  Even the Grey Lady can't avoid the obvious facts, although they tiptoe around the chilling implications.

From sea to shining sea blue governance means corruption and bankruptcy.  What a surprise.

Wally Mead has some thoughts here.

Perhaps the last, decadent phase of social democracy is autarky

Or Sarkoautarky.  There is an enormous need to blame anyone but the real culprits in the looting of rich nations.  And I suspect that many of them will go through an Argentina phase of demagoguery, confiscation and violence before they become poor enough to wake up.

Some people call it muddling through and that is true:  through a man made catastrophe.  Hattip Marginal Revolution.

Sarkozy struck a strident new tone in a Sunday rally.

He threatened to pull France out of the Schengen open borders agreement and demanded the European Union adopt measures to fight cheap imports, warning that France might otherwise pass a unilateral “Buy French” law.

“I want a Europe that protects its citizens. I no longer want this savage competition,” he declared to a cheering crowd. “I have lost none of my will to act, my will to make things change, my belief in the genius of France.”

A lot of social science research findings are crap

And here's a good example why.  Hat tip Marginal Revolution.

Rasmussen Survey: Get government off of our back

Fear the Feds.  According to this Rasmussen survey almost no one believes that our great and glorious Federal Megastate can do good.  It's all about minimizing harm.  Which is why we need to break it up, break it all up.

Fifty-two percent (52%) fear the federal government will try to do too much to help the economy.  Thirty-six percent (36%) fear it will do too little. However, earlier polling found that even those who want the government to do more are primarily thinking of cutting deficits, cutting spending and cutting taxes. 

Why do politicians screw with the clocks? Because they can.

Exercise of power becomes it's own excuse.  Politicians who are not seen as 'doing something' run the risk of losing voter (and more crucially, 'muckraking, crusading' journalist support).  Therefore they do things.  Many, many things.  Daylight savings time is just one of the more obvious pointless manipulations.  It's time to break it up, break it all up.

John Miller explains.

But the very worst thing about DST is that it’s bad for your health. According to Stanley Coren, a sleep expert at the University of British Columbia, the number of traffic accidents and fatal industrial mishaps increase on the Monday after we spring forward. (Check out one of his studies here.) The reason, presumably, is because losing even a single hour of sleep over the weekend makes a lot of people a bit drowsier on what we might usefully call Black Monday. Unfortunately, there’s no compensating effect of a super-safe Monday as we go off DST and “fall back” in the autumn.

Mandate it all.

Because our Supreme Leaders know what is good for us.  What would we do without them?  The WSJ has a helpful list of other mandates that are 'good for us'.

Coffee. Studies show that coffee can ward off depression, Alzheimer's disease, type 2 diabetes and sleepiness—which makes it one of the most powerful preventive treatments. Workers who drink java are also more productive and pleasant. While many offices have coffee makers, some employers—most notably those affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—continue to deny workers this essential benefit. All employers should have to provide workers with freshly brewed coffee. Oh, and workers must also be able to choose the kind of coffee regardless of the price.

Republicans might argue that requiring Mormon charities to serve coffee is a violation of "religious liberty" since the Mormon church's doctrine proscribes coffee, but this argument is a red herring. Leading medical experts recommend drinking coffee. Moreover, 99% of adults have drunk coffee at one point in their lives (including most Mormons).

Notice anything different?

Hope!  Change!

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others...."

Orwell's famous line from Animal Farm applies to our so called 'Green' wind industry.  W was as big a hypocrite on this as BHO is, BTW.

As Robert Bryce writes in today's WSJ:
  
"For years, the wind energy industry has had a license to kill golden eagles and lots of other migratory birds. It's not an official license, mind you. But as the bird carcasses pile up—two more dead golden eagles were recently found at the Pine Tree wind project in Southern California's Kern County, bringing the number of eagle carcasses at that site to eight—the wind industry's unofficial license to kill wildlife is finally getting some serious scrutiny. 

Some 77 organizations—led by the American Bird Conservancy, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Endangered Species Coalition and numerous chapters of the Audubon Society—are petitioning the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to toughen the rules for the siting, permitting and operation of large-scale wind projects. 

It's about time. Over the past two decades, the federal government has prosecuted hundreds of cases against oil and gas producers and electricity producers for violating some of America's oldest wildlife-protection laws: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Eagle Protection Act. But the Obama administration—like the Bush administration before it—has never prosecuted the wind industry despite myriad examples of widespread, unpermitted bird kills by turbines."

Read more here. 

Frightening picture of an elegant dystopia

Very well done. And fairly plausible.

Modern Feminism promotes the interests of affluent women. Period.

JAMES TARANTO: What used to be a normal family life is now available only to the affluent.

Eventually, however, her career “succumbed,” as Reuters oddly puts it. In truth, this is no tragedy but a hypergamous happy ending. Mancini left the labor force because her husband was doing so well that he could afford to support the whole family: “She quit in 2005 when her six-digit income was overtaken by his seven-digit one.”
For Mancini, it was a liberation. She tells the wire service: “At that point, it was clear that my wage had become family pocket money. There was a real opportunity to do other things that did not require being chained to a desk.” 

An increasing number of affluent women with affluent husbands are casting off the chains of professional work, according to a forthcoming Federal Reserve study that Reuters apparently obtained in advance . . . 

For women with lower levels of education, the picture is markedly different, as Charles Murray shows in “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” One-income households have become common at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum as well–but because women are less likely to be married at all, while men are less likely to be in the labor force. 

Marriage and male responsibility for families were once the norm at all levels of American society. Feminism was supposed to liberate women from dependency on men. Instead it has helped to create a two-tiered culture in which the norm is for women to be “chained to a desk,” but those who hit the jackpot in the mating game can realistically aspire to escape that status. Nice going, ladies. Happy International Women’s Day.

Contraception mandate infringes liberty period. Not just religious liberty.

This guy makes sense, from NRO.  The key is to demand liberty full stop.  Religious liberty, sexual liberty, economic liberty, social liberty.  Individuals are best equipped to make individual choices.

Republicans, as is typical, are making a huge tactical blunder with their focus on religious liberty. This is about liberty, period, not just religious liberty. All the religion talk simply plays into liberal attempts to smear conservatives as religious zealots. If Republicans were smart, which they clearly are not, they would emphasize 2 simple points:
1) There is no lack of access to contraception or attempt to restrict it. Any American can walk into any drug store in any State and buy whatever contraception they want. If they are poor, they can use Medicaid, various State programs, or Planned Parenthood. This Obama decree does not do anything to increase accessibility.
2) Contraception is a personal matter and should not be in the government domain. Liberals, more than anyone else, should be careful what they wish for on this. If they insist that contraception is a government issue, they forfeit the right to invoke privacy rights about it. Americans should do whatever they want with regard to contraception, whether their religion plays a role in the decision or not, and the government should not force any company to offer it or any person to pay for it.
This is a simple, winning message, and we don’t need to rely on relgion to make it stand.

Chicken vs. Pig breakfast logic

Why are airplane pilots so much more focused on avoiding error than doctors? Because doctors don’t go down with their patients.

Jim Manzi on analysis as rhetoric

Obama Fundraisers: Raise half a mil, get a job

It's the Chicago way.  Hope and change indeed.

WASHINGTON POST: The Influence Industry: Obama gives administration jobs to some big fundraisers.“More than half of Obama’s 47 biggest fundraisers, those who collected at least $500,000 for his campaign, have been given administration jobs. Nine more have been appointed to presidential boards and committees.”

BHO is terrified of his base

MICKEY KAUS: Is Obama Scared Of Occupy? “Is Obama worried that front-page Occupy-style protests might be starting to hurt his reelection campaign? That’s one obvious explanation for the sudden shift of the G-8 summit to Camp David from Chicago.”

At least if you have car debt, you have a car....

...quite a bit of the 'college' debt is held without a degree.  Not that most degrees are worth the paper they're printed on.  And note that most is owed by the young.  Liberal, academic baby boomers have raped their kids and called it righteousness.   Hattip Phi Beta Cons

The total outstanding student-loan balance in the U.S. being greater than total outstanding credit-card debt — old news. But total outstanding student loans are now also greater than total outstanding auto loans ($870 billion vs. $730 billion). To make this matter even more rosy, $580 billion of student-loan debt is owed by people younger than 40 years old.

Incentives matter

Run, baby run.

The wrong people are puzzled in this cartoon

GM isn't puzzled, they got subsidized and bailed out to do this.  This was rational PR for them.  It's the usual suspects that are confused.  Once again Federal subsidies disappear down a rat hole, padding executive salaries and shielding union bosses from market forces.  It's a classic Chicago Liberal scam.

And the Shale Gale is contributing to the generation of huge numbers of "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs"

Again, how can this be?  I thought jobs came from Obama?  This all must be due to the stimulus.  Right?

From the Harvard Business Review blog, "New Math Will Drive a U.S. Manufacturing Comeback" by Harold Sirkin and Michael Zinser of the Boston Consulting Group:

"Making the United States an even more attractive location for factories and investments is critical for the health of our nation. More domestic factories would help create more balanced trade flows and a more stable global economy. But company decisions on what and where to place production facilities, while influenced by many factors, ultimately depend on the math.

Thankfully, the math these days is starting to work in America's favor again. 

Assuming the trend continues, as we expect it to, the economic impact could be substantial, resulting in as many as 2 million, and possibly up to 3 million, U.S. jobs between now and the end of the decade. An estimated 600,000 to 1 million of these jobs would be directly in manufacturing, with the remainder in construction, orders for new equipment, supporting services, transportation and retail sales. This could increase U.S. gross domestic product by $100 billion, lower the non-oil U.S. trade deficit by 20% to 35%, and reduce unemployment by 1 to 1.5 percentage points."

Energy independence in 8 years?

And nary a government program in sight.  How can this be?  Everyone knows that good things only come from resolute state action and subsidy.  Don't they?  Well, don't they?

From NPR (!).  Hattip Carpe Diem.

From a segment on NPR today, "Is U.S. Energy Independence Finally Within Reach?"

"Energy self-sufficiency is now in sight," says energy economist Phil Verleger. He believes that within a decade, the U.S. will no longer need to import crude oil and will be a natural gas exporter. Verleger says all of the previous presidents fighting for energy independence would be quite surprised by how this came about: It's not the result of government policy or drilling by big oil. "This is really the classic success of American entrepreneurs," he says. "These were people who saw this coming, managed to assemble the capital and go ahead."

Small energy companies using such controversial techniques as hydraulic fracturing, along with horizontal drilling, are unlocking vast oil and natural gas deposits trapped in shale in places like Pennsylvania, North Dakota and Texas. North Dakota, for instance, now produces a half-million barrels a day of crude oil, and production is rising.

 "This shale gale, I describe it as the energy equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down. This is a big deal," says Robin West, chairman and CEO of PFC Energy, who has been in the energy consulting business for decades. "We estimate that by 2020, the U.S. overall will be the largest hydrocarbon producer in the world; bigger than Russia or Saudi Arabia," he says."

Because producing budgets is actually something governments are supposed to do

And that ain't BHO's thing, baby.  Much easier to promise to do things that can't be measured easily.  Saul Alinsky, call your service.

MATT WELCH: The Symbolic Presidency: Obama says he can get you a job. So why can’t he produce a federal budget?

Damn Canucks

BLAME CANADA: For lower prices at the pump.

I'm proud to be a Sooner

Once again we are trend setters.

Obama loses Dem primary in 15 Oklahoma counties

(AP) – 9 hours ago  

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — President Barack Obama collected the most votes in the Oklahoma Democratic primary, but lost in 15 counties.

With 98 percent of precincts reporting Tuesday, Obama won 57 percent of the vote. Four other candidates combined for 43 percent of the vote, including anti-abortion activist and Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry who received 18 percent of the vote.

According to Democratic Party rules, Terry is eligible for a delegate since he won more than 15 percent of the statewide vote. Terry beat Obama in 12 counties, mostly in western Oklahoma. Terry acknowledges he can't win the presidency but says he hopes to cause Obama's defeat in the fall.

Oklahoma earned the nickname "reddest of the red" states after Obama's failed to win a single county in the 2008 presidential race.

The Propaganda of the...CO2 gas and noble cause corruption

Anarchists used to talk about the Propaganda of the Deed.  Recently the Hewlett foundation gave $581 million to promote global warming hysteria.  WWF and the Sierra club spend $1Billion annually on green propaganda.  The entire warming skeptics budget is probably smaller than Sierra's travel budget.  Matt Ridley has more:

By contrast, a storm of protest broke recently over the news that one small conservative think-tank called Heartland was proposing to spend just $200,000 in a year on influencing education against climate alarmism. A day later, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, with assets of $7.2 billion, gave a grant of $100 million to something called the ClimateWorks Foundation, a pro-wind power organisation, on top of $481 million it gave to the same recipient in 2008. The deep green Sierra Club recently admitted that it took $26 million from the gas industry to lobby against coal. But money is not the only reason that the entire political establishment came to believe in wind fairies. Psychologists have a term for the wishful thinking by which we accept any means if the end seems virtuous: ‘noble-cause corruption’. The phrase was first used by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir John Woodcock in 1992 to explain miscarriages of justice. ‘It is better that some innocent men remain in jail than the integrity of the English judicial system be impugned,’ said the late Lord Denning, referring to the Birmingham Six.

So how do you know what you know - Global Warming edition

According to a Harvard study, in 2009 US Power Plant Greenhouse gas emissions fell 9% from 2008, despite this being a recovery year from a sharp recession. In one year.  Why did this happen? Was it Wind? Solar? Electric cars? Nope. It was shale gas. The one energy technology that was not massively subsidized by Uncle Sugar was the one that delivered a massive green dividend. Imagine that, the energy technology opposed, indeed despised by most Greens delivered the green result.

I'll bet you didn't hear that on CNN, ABC, PBS, NBC, CBS, NYT, Wapo, did you? Of course you didn't. Not convenient, wouldn't be right, doesn't fit the narrative. Can't have the damned oil companies delivering a greener planet, can we?

So once again, all together now: how do you know what you know?

Greenwashing

Get Federal Money, Give Bosses Bonuses, Fail, Repeat.....

#GREENFAIL: ABC News: Green Firms Get Fed Cash, Give Execs Bonuses, Fail.

So GM's BS on the Volt caused Obama's BS and the the two BS's got cross mojinated, causing everyone's heads to explode.

Perhaps reality would have been a better option.

EDWARD NIEDERMEYER: Blind Spot: The Twilight Of The Volt. “Now that GM is undeniably signaling that the Volt is a Corvette-style halo car, with similar production and sales levels, my long-standing skepticism about the Volt’s chances seems to be validated. . . . The basic problem with the Volt isn’t that it’s a bad car that nobody could ever want; it is, in fact, quite an engineering achievement and a rather impressive drive. And if GM had said all along that it would serve as an “anti-Corvette,” selling in low volumes at a high price, nobody could now accuse it of failure. Instead, GM fueled totally unrealistic expectations for Volt, equating it with a symbol of its rebirth even before collapsing into bailout. The Obama administration simply took GM’s hype at face value, and saw it as a way to protect against the (flawed) environmentalist argument that GM deserved to die because of “SUV addiction” alone. And in the transition from corporate sales/image hype to corporatist political hype, the Volt’s expectations were driven to ever more unrealistic heights, from which they are now tumbling.”

But that would mean a lot more Christian Conservatives. And they're not diverse.

DIVERSITY: Princeton Prof Wants More Veterans on Campus.

The terrifying and obscene successor to lobotomies

Parents used to approve those for their children too.  Horrifying.  Evil.  You can't smoke marijuana but you can mutilate and inject hormones in your own child?  Here.

When children look to adults to give them guidance, adults often fall short of their charge; but few fall as short as Dr. Norman Spack of Children’s Hospital in Boston. According to a scattering of reports that have consistently struggled to gain attention when pitted against more important topics — the Oscars, for example — there has been a dramatic rise in the number of incidents in which children are given treatment that is designed to halt their development as males or females and, ultimately, completely change the sex of their birth. Spack is the procedure’s champion. He rejects the traditional notion that children who are confused about their gender are suffering from what psychiatrists term “gender-identity disorder” — which varies in severity from normal growing pains to fully-fledged disorders — and believes instead that they have innate differences in their brains that render them, literally, of the wrong sex.

Such “transgendered” children, argues Spack, need “correcting” before it is too late. And this is done, he explained in the Boston Globe in 2009, with “puberty-blocking drugs” that “work best at the beginning of the pubital process, typically age 10 to 12 for a girl and 12 to 14 for a boy.” The results are remarkable. One patient was a “girl from the UK,” who “was destined to be a 6-foot-4 male. With treatment, she’s going to end up 5-foot-10.” Spack’s ideas are growing in popularity. “If you open the doors, these are the kids who come,” he claims.

Osama not buried at sea?

So Obama lied and....Osama still died.  Here.

Actual evidence on the Sudafed/Meth nexus

It turns out that all of the hysterical abuse of consumers over Sudafed has.....little or no impact.  Which isn't surprising since most Meth is now made in Mexican Mega Labs and smuggled across our unguarded border.  But the temptation  to oppress their neighbors is too great for our 'leaders' to pass up.  Indeed, the drive to dominate and oppress is written deeply into the sin nature of man.  Which means the only answer is to severely limit their power.  Hattip Reihan Salam.

Courtney Knapp kindly referred me to a new paper by the Cascade Policy Institute by Chris Stomberg and Arun Sharma that will be of great interest to those of you who use cold medicine from time to time. To curb the manufacture and, presumably, the consumption of methamphetamine, Oregon decided require that pharmacies put cold medicines that use pseudoephedrine behind the counter. The authors conclude that while this measure has inconvenienced cold sufferers, it has done little if anything to achieve its intended purpose.

Rampant, excess Patenting - Another consequence of the centralizing Federal State

It turns out that the Patent system is rigged in favor of the DC based patent lawyers.  Who woulda thunk it?  The more things are centered in the Imperial Capital, the more they are run for the courtiers who inhabit it.  The rest of us?  Well, we're just proles.

Hattip Rehan Salam:

Mike Masnick summarizes a new article by Jonathan Masur in the Yale Law Journal:

When the numbers came out showing that 2011 represented yet another record year for patents granted, it was such a non-surprise that I didn’t even bother mentioning it. The number of patents granted just keeps going up. And yes, there were two small dips during the past decade, but they corresponded with the rare situations in which the Supreme Court finally took an interest in some element of patent law and pushed back on the Federal Circuit (the appeals court that handles all patent issues) and the USPTO. We’ve discussed at length in the past, the problems of having a single appeals court that solely focuses on patent issues, because you lose the diversity of opinions (made worse at times when some of the judges on the panel have been former patent attorneys — or, most famously, when a judge at the court was the same former patent attorney who wrote the last major update to patent law…).
However, Steve sends over a fascinating Yale Law Journal review article by Jonathan Masur that notes this problem of the Federal Circuit can be explained structurally, in that the relationship between the PTO and the Federal Circuit combined with the fact that there’s no “adversarial” party contesting a patent grant, means that the patent system is effectively rigged to only expand, even if that goes against the best interests of society.

Fortunately, Tim Lee has offered a solution to the problems posed by the Federal Circuit:

In 1982, Congress became concerned that patent law was too complex for generalist judges. So it created a new court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and gave it exclusive jurisdiction to hear appeals in patent cases.
This had the unintended consequence of dramatically increasing the influence of the patent bar over patent law. Not only do Federal Circuit judges spend all their time hearing arguments from patent attorneys, but some of them are former patent attorneys themselves. In its first two decades, the Federal Circuit gradually shifted patent law in the pro-patent direction favored by most patent attorneys. Patents became easier to get and harder to invalidate. The courts allowed tougher punishments against infringers. And the Federal Circuit unilaterally eliminated traditional limits on patenting software and “business methods.”
The creation of the Federal Circuit had another unintended consequence, too. The Supreme Court relies on disagreements among appeals courts — known as “circuit splits” — to help it figure out which issues require its attention. And when the Supreme Court takes a case, the existence of multiple, conflicting precedents gives the justices more raw material from which to fashion their own decisions.
But when the Federal Circuit became the only court ruling on patent cases, there were no more circuit splits and no more competing legal precedents. That might be why the Supreme Court seems to have barely noticed that the Federal Circuit was dramatically reshaping patent law in the 1990s. The high court reviewed only about a dozen Federal Circuit decisions between 1982 and 2004, and the ones it did review tended to be on narrow, technical issues. The Supreme Court finally began to give the Federal Circuit’s handiwork some serious scrutiny when Chief Justice John Roberts took the bench. And the justices did not like what they saw. In the Chief Justice’s first three terms, the high court heard five different patent cases, and all of them resulted in unanimous or near-unanimous reversals of pro-patent decisions by the Federal Circuit.
But a lot of the damage had already been done. Hundreds of thousands of low-quality patents had been approved under the permissive rules the Federal Circuit had developed during the 1990s. Those patents may be technically invalid under recent Supreme Court decisions, but that’s of little help to a small company that can’t afford to litigate the question. So contra The Economist, a key element of any serious patent reform agenda should be to decentralize authority over patent appeals.

This seems like a sensible move — and potentially appealing to those who enjoy abolishing things. 

Obama's 1%

James Pethokoukis tells the tale:  the bottom 99% of us have had no recovery.  Nada, zip, nunca, zilch.  I am so glad that the President is on the job, fighting for us.  Imagine how rich we'd be if he had done nothing.....

Let the punishment vastly exceed the crime....

Our insane drug laws turn Gilbert and Sullivan on their heads.  St. Charles county here in Missouri has banned the sale of Sudafed over the counter.  The human drive to dominate and oppress others is alive and growing by leaps and bounds.  The latest lunatic madness from Kentucky:

KENTUCKY ESCALATES IN THE war against Sudafed.

Perhaps only when everyone is a felon will we relent....

Public Debts and Deficits: US is one of the worst

Look for the US, top right corner, just south of (bankrupt) Ireland and somewhat west of (bankrupt) Greece.  The only saving grace is that we owe money exclusively in our own currency.  That way we can screw all of the debt holders with a swingeing inflation.  The rub is that inflation doesn't do anything about the real problem:  unfunded future liabilities - which rise in lock step with inflation.  But in the interim, our alternative is going to the policy choice of Banana Republics and Presidents for Life everywhere.  All hail our Maximum Lider Senor Baracka Obamio!  Down with the Yanqui's!  Wait, that can't be right....

Private GDP soaring, public GDP shrinking

The result is stagnant growth.  The Obami handed out almost a trillion dollars in 'stimulus' mostly to states and localities so that they could put off the inevitable retrenchment.  The result, along with their provoking of a massive capital strike has ensured that they would enter this election season with a stagnant economy and half a dozen deep blue states teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.  Ironic, no?



Attaboy, Barry.