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Well, It Sure Seems Like Keynes Was Right

2011-12-17T16:12:00.001-08:00

Henry Blodget | Dec. 17, 2011, 10:20 AM | 10,987 | 223

After the experience of the past five years, it certainly seems like John Maynard Keynes was right, doesn't it?

It seems hard to conclude anything else.

I'm not an economist, and I'm not born of a particular economic school that I've bet my life's work on, so I have observed the global economic events of the past five years with a fairly open mind.

I've listened to Keynesians like Paul Krugman argue that the way to fix the mess is to open the government spending spigot and invest like crazy.

And I've listened to Austerians like Niall Ferguson argue that the way to fix the mess is to cut spending radically, balance government budgets, and unleash the private sector.

And I've also looked back at history--namely, Reinhart and Rogoff's analysis of prior financial crises, the Great Depression, Japan, Germany after Weimar, and so forth.

And I have to say, the conclusion I keep coming back to is that Keynes was right.

In the aftermath of a massive debt binge like the one we went on from 1980-2007, when the private sector collapses and then retreats to lick its wounds and deleverage, the best way to help the economy work its way out of its hole is for the government to spend like crazy.

Or, rather, if not the "best way," at least the least-worst way.

Because, obviously, piling up even bigger mountains of debt is not a happy side-effect of such spending.

But let's face it: Austerity doesn't work.

At least, austerity doesn't work to quickly fix the problem.

The reason austerity doesn't work to quickly fix the problem is that, when the economy is already struggling, and you cut government spending, you also further damage the economy. And when you further damage the economy, you further reduce tax revenue, which has already been clobbered by the stumbling economy. And when you further reduce tax revenue, you increase the deficit and create the need for more austerity. And that even further clobbers the economy and tax revenue. And so on.

Image: Robert Johnson

Homeless tent city in Lakewood, New Jersey. Click for the photo essay >

Basically, austerity puts you into a death spiral in which you keep trying to cut your way to prosperity, but all you end up doing is digging a bigger hole. And in the meantime, tens of millions of people are out of work, the economy is retrenching, and everything is generally miserable.

And how about the alternative?

Well, die-hard anti-Keynesians will tell you that the alternative is what we're experiencing now. Obama did the big Keynesian stimulus thing a couple of years ago, and the economy is still lousy and the unemployment rate is still too high. And we have an absolutely massive debt pile that we need to work off.

Ergo, Keynesianism doesn't work.

But isn't that an unfair conclusion?

Most of the debt mountain we've piled up is the result of what we did before the crisis, not after it. In the years leading up to 2007, our absurdly undisciplined leaders took a nice big budget surplus and then squandered it. And they created absurdly loose lending standards and encouraged the whole country to lever up and buy stuff we couldn't afford. And they never said "no" to anything except tax increases, no matter what, and denied all the structural problems that were building up for decades.

And by 2007, they had put us in one hell of a hole.

And, given that, it seems reasonable to think that, as Krugman has long argued, one of the problems with the economy now is that the original stimulus just wasn't big enough.

Image: AP

The sign is correct. Click for details >

And it also seems reasonable to conclude that, given the mess we got ourselves into, there is just no quick fix, regardless of what anyone does.

And that, in fact, is my real conclusion about our current situation--that, no matter what anyone does, we're going to be licking our wounds for years.

But I will also add this in defense of Keynesianism...

The Austerians love to point at the 1930s as "proof" that Keynes was wrong. Look at the huge "New Deal," they say. Look at all those expensive public works projects. Look at all the spending the government did to try to get us out of the Great Depression, and it never really worked. What got us out of the Depression, the Austerians smugly observe, was World War 2.

But what was World War 2 if not an absolutely gigantic Keynesian stimulus?

Seriously.

The Federal deficit in World War 2 was massive--much bigger than any time during the Great Depression. And we built up a huge Federal debt load. And... we set the stage for two decades of amazing prosperity, in which we worked off those debts.

Our current debt and deficit situation scares the bejeezus out of me. We absolutely have to get our long-term budget problems under control, and doing so will involve both cutting spending and raising taxes. If we don't do that, we really will collapse, as Niall Ferguson et al have long been arguing.

Image: ASurroca on Flickr

Companies like Starbucks could help stimulate the economy, too--by giving their low-wage employees a raise >

But getting the budget under control by radically chopping spending or increasing taxes this minute, as many Austerians want to do, won't help. In fact, it will likely make the problems vastly worse, because it will put that many more people out of work and reduce tax revenue that much further (just take a look at Europe).

Meanwhile, given that we've already racked up $15 trillion of debt, I certainly wouldn't be opposed to our spending another couple of trillion upgrading our piss-poor infrastructure. Incurring debt to build things that help all Americans, from unemployed folks to business leaders to children, is a tradeoff I'm willing to make. Especially if the jobs created by this "stimulus" spending help alleviate our massive unemployment and inequality problems.

And, by the way, I don't think this "stimulus" necessarily needs to come from just the government. Our corporations are as profitable now as they have ever been. So I'd like to see a lot of them voluntarily decide to invest more and pay their low-wage employees more and hire more employees. They can afford it, and "cash flow" isn't the sole objective or reward of running a business.

Anyway, based on the experience of the last five years, it seems to me that Keynes was right.

I still have an open mind, though, if any Austerians out there want to have another go.

NOW READ: Here's What's Wrong With The Economy (And How To Fix It)

Here Are Occupy Wall Street's Plans For A National Convention That Could Change The Face Of America

2011-10-15T15:19:00.000-07:00

Linette Lopez | Oct. 14, 2011, 1:40 PM |15,924 | 194

Image: Daniel Goodman / Business Insider

It's in the works. A massive Occupy Wall Street gathering with delegates from all over the country. And if these plans are carried out, Occupy Wall Street will be a major force to be reckoned with on Election Day 2012.

The date? July 4, 2012.

Put aside questions of whether or not the movement will survive that long. Imagine that they do, because they have no doubt.

If only our economy had that kind of confidence.

Discussions on how to proceed will begin tomorrow at a massive General Assembly at 7 PM. Here's how they describe what they're about to do:

....the election of delegates and holding of a national general assembly or convention on July 4, 2012 must be organized. No calls for violence. No calls for the violent overthrow of the government.

...Once organized and the delegates have been elected by direct ballot in all 435 districts. They must demand that our elected leaders take action. If they do not take action within one year of the demand, we will demand their mass resignations and that new elections be held so we can take back our democracy from the corporations and those who BUY power and influence with MONEY. Yes this includes unions and lobbyists.

The Citizens United case must be reversed...

More concrete, long-term measures can also be found on their website in a document called The Steps to Non-Violent Revolution and the Convening of a National General Assembly. There are ten of them, and the most amazing thing about them, is that they outline a democratic plan to decide on a platform of reforms supported by occupations across the entire country leading right up to the 2012 election.

Perhaps Occupy Wall Street only thought of doing this now, but I sincerely doubt it.

Basically, if this is carried out, Occupy Wall Street could shift the course of American politics at its highest levels.

Here are the steps:

1. The Occupy Wall Street movement, through the local general assembly, should elect an executive committee comprised of 11 people or some other odd number of people that is manageable for meetings. Ideally this committee should represent each city in the U.S. that is being occupied.

2. The executive committee will then attend to local issues such as obtaining permits, paying for public sanitation and dealing with the media. More important, the executive committee shall plan and organize the election of the 870 delegates to a National General Assembly between now and July 4, 2012.

3. As stated in the 99% declaration, each of the 435 congressional districts will form an election committee to prepare ballots and invite citizens in those districts to run as delegates to a National General Assembly in Philadelphia beginning on July 4, 2012 and convening until October 2012.

4. Each of the 435 congressional districts will elect one man and one woman to attend the National General Assembly. The vote will be by direct democratic ballot regardless of voter registration status as long as the voter has reached the age of 18 and is a US citizen. This is not a sexist provision. Women are dramatically under-represented in politics even though they comprise more than 50% of the U.S. population.

5. The executive committee will act as a central point to solve problems, raise money to pay for the expenses of the election of the National General Assembly and make sure all 870 delegates are elected prior to the meeting on July 4th.

6. The executive committee would also arrange a venue in Philadelphia to accommodate the delegates attending the National General Assembly where the declaration of values, petition of grievances and platform would be proposed, debated, voted on and approved. The delegates would also elect a chair from their own ranks to run the meetings of the congress and break any tie votes. We will also need the expertise of a gifted parliamentarian to keep the meetings moving smoothly and efficiently.

7. The final declaration, platform and petition of grievances, after being voted upon by the 870 delegates to the National General Assembly would be formally presented by the 870 delegates to all three branches of government and all candidates running for federal public office in November 2012. Thus, the delegates would meet from July 4, 2012 to sometime in early to late October 2012.

8. The delegates to the National General Assembly would then vote on a time period, presently suggested as one year, to give the newly elected government in November an opportunity to redress the petition of grievances. This is our right as a People under the First Amendment.

9. If the government fails to redress the petition of grievances and drastically change the path this country is on, the delegates will demand the resignation and recall of all members of congress, the president and even the Supreme Court and call for new elections by, of and for the PEOPLE with 99 days of the resignation demand.

10. There will NEVER be any call for violence by the delegates even if the government refuses to redress the grievances and new elections are called for by the delegates. Nor will any delegate agree to take any money, job promise, or gifts from corporations, unions or any other private source. Any money donated or raised by the executive committee may only be used for publicizing the vote, the National General Assembly, and for travel expenses and accommodation at the National General Assembly ONLY. All books and records will be published openly online so that everyone may see how much money is raised and how the money is spent each month. There will be no money allowed to "purchase" delegate votes as we have in the current government. No corporate "sponsorship".

Very ambitious, we'll see how it goes.

Early criticism of Obama: Obama Stimulus Op-Ed in Washington Post Was Partisan and Not Presidential

2011-09-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

In the White House Office of Media Relations—where I once worked—staffers like me used to line up third-party advocates to support Administration policies. "Surrogates," they're called, such as Congressmen, Governors and the like and they are persuaded to to sign op-eds pieces in local newspapers. Longer magazine profiles and think pieces by the president can serve a strategic purpose, but short hits in newspapers on specific bills are "not Presidential." Leave the street-fighting over legislation to the surrogates, it goes, and keep the president above it all. But in a world of Twitters, YouTube and Blackberries, that has all changed.

President Obama signed an op-ed this morning in the Washington Post, and it's a quick hit that would have been better left unwritten. In it, he overpromises results from a bill that hasn't been finalized and is still having amendments added in the Senate as I write this. But he says the stimulus bill will be "swift, bold and wise enough for us to climb out of this crisis." How does he know that? Maybe it will, but none of us really knows yet what is going to happen.

The president promises more than a fix for housing, jobs and banks—he guarantees massive government involvement in many sectors of our economy—from energy to healthcare to schools to access to the internet. He goes on to promise "unprecedented transparency and accountability, so Americans know where their tax dollars are going and how they are being spent." That's a big deal if he can deliver it. We've been waiting for that for years.

The president would have been wise to invite the loyal opposition to join him in supporting the bill, or at least to acknowledge that reasonable minds can disagree on the road to compromise. But instead, he rejects criticism of the stimulus plan and reminds readers that his side won. He seems to blame Republicans for everything causing our country to fall apart:

I reject these theories [criticizing the stimulus], and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change. They know that we have tried it those ways for too long. And because we have, our health-care costs still rise faster than inflation. Our dependence on foreign oil still threatens our economy and our security. Our children still study in schools that put them at a disadvantage. We've seen the tragic consequences when our bridges crumble and our levees fail.

Anyone opposing the current stimulus package is engaging in "old ideological battles," "narrow partisanship," "bad habits," and "the same old partisan gridlock that stands in the way of action," he writes. I guess that includes not only the House Republicans, but economic experts Martin Feldstein and Alice Rivlin, the other 250 economists who have publicly stated their reservations.

Most of Washington is engaged in a battle of ideas, for the first time in a long time, about the meaning of capitalism and free markets and government intervention. The future of our economy is at stake, and the president would have been better off not engaging in overblown rhetoric and name-calling on the op-ed page. He came across as partisan and strident about the future, instead of inclusive and thoughtful. Someone else should have signed that op-ed.

Persecution of the Right and the Washington Post Op-Ed page ...

www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/.../washington_postCached - Similar

Jun 19, 2009 – Neocon Charles Krauthammer: attacking Obama for indifference to Freedom in Iran ... The Purpose of The Washington Post Op-Ed Page and The ... and "A Tragic Legacy" (June, 2007), which examines the Bush legacy. ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/04/AR2009020403174.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
Obama's Feb 5, '09 op-ed - his first partisan attack.

Health Care: Americans Want Change While Keeping Status Quo

Washington Post op-ed

By Michael Kinsley

Friday, August 28, 2009

The reason Americans have turned against health-care reform, after electing President Obama in part for promising it, is simple: Despite protestations to the contrary, Americans don't like change. You wouldn't know it, of course, if you listen to politicians in high-pander mode, or to talk radio hosts of the right or TV pundits of the left. Or, for that matter, if you listened to the president of the United States. You would think that while we might disagree about what kind of change we want, Americans are in total agreement that the current situation is intolerable in all areas and that change -- big, immediate change -- is essential. Americans do agree about this -- in the abstract. But as soon as it seems that change might actually happen -- as soon as we leave the abstract for the particular -- we panic. We suddenly develop nostalgia for the comforts of the status quo. Sure, we want change -- as long as everything can stay just as it is.

Yes, of course, the opposition party has gotten away with some grotesque misrepresentations. But that will always be true as you move from the abstract to the particular. There will always be a Betsy McCaughey sharpening her pencils and cackling as she underlines promising sub-clauses. And she will always find something. Obama thought he could avoid this by not supplying the document. He thought -- hell, we all thought -- that Hillary Clinton's big mistake in the 1990s was too much detail. Obama said he would leave all that up to Congress. But at some point, you've got to show your hand. All Obama seems to have achieved in the end was a shift in timing -- and not an advantageous one. Instead of being in trouble almost from the beginning, his reform remained popular until it was time for Congress to vote.

The similarities to the last time we tried health-care reform are striking. Bill Clinton had campaigned on a call for change in general and health-care reform in particular. Rising costs and increasing numbers of uninsured made the system seem intolerable. There were deep disagreements about what change was needed, but whether change was needed appeared beyond dispute. Afraid of being tagged the party that prevented change, Republicans were about to give up and compromise. Then GOP apparatchik extraordinaire Bill Kristol blew the whistle. He said, better to be thought of as against all change than to be tarred as in favor of any particular change. It seemed like a lunatic idea at first, but Kristol turned out to be right -- politically. He was wrong about the actual substance of the issue. As a result, in the 14 years since, millions more are uninsured, and here we are trying reform again. I'd like to think that if it goes down this time -- when even the insurance companies are on board, promising to eliminate their odious policies about preexisting conditions -- Republicans will pay for having killed it, if indeed they do kill it. But they didn't pay the last time.

All this is similar to those polls about attitudes toward Congress that show that most people find Congress absolutely loathsome, yet are extremely fond of their own representative. Once again it's the difference between the abstract and the particular. Congress in the abstract is greedy, stupid and corrupt. It will do anything to get reelected. Your own representative, though, is Congress in the particular. And he or she is not so bad, even though he or she actually does get reelected.

Why does this happen? Some people (including me) say the voters are immature. Politicians (and those talk radio fellows again) are always telling them that they are wise and those folks in Washington are fools. Pollsters seek and validate their opinions on subjects they haven't bothered to learn anything about. Politicians drown them in benefits with no thought of how the bills will be paid. No wonder that citizens turn out like spoiled children. But "immature" is a label, not an explanation. It's just a guess, but my own suspicion is that the raucous town hall meetings that blindsided pols and press alike reflect the voters' true feelings -- misinformed, perhaps, but sincere -- and their previous passionate demands for what they now passionately oppose -- in a word, "change" -- were empty ritual. Discontent verging on anger is almost the price of admission to our political culture these days. You're nobody if you're not furious at Congress and/or the media and/or your health care and/or the president. To believe in your country's institutions is virtually unpatriotic.

This is only as long as your discontent can remain abstract, of course. When you are asked to approve of even moderate but genuine change, the status quo starts to look pretty good.

kinsleym@washpost.com

Tax cut data and statements

2011-09-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

Did the Bush tax cuts reduce revenue? Of course.

The Heritage Foundation's Brian Riedl accuses me of committing economic malpractice and cherry-picking data on a column that argued against permanently extending the Bush tax cuts. Okay, I’ll engage on that.

First, he says I picked “highly misleading” years to look at tax revenue as a percentage of GDP. (The context was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s assertion that "there's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.") The first year I chose was 2000, and the reason was simple: it was the year before the tax cuts were enacted.

Riedl is correct that this was a post-World War II high. But since I was responding to McConnell’s assertion about the impact of the Bush tax cuts, that seemed the sensible place to start. And I ended with 2008 precisely to avoid the suggestion of cherry-picking. As I noted, the real recession-induced plunge has come in the last two years, with revenue falling below 15 percent of GDP.

Riedl notes that tax revenue has historically averaged 18 percent of GDP. Yes -- and in only three of the ten years the tax cuts have been in place has revenue exceeded that share. The average from 2000 to 2007 -- I’m being sporting here by lopping off the last two years, and including the year 2000 high point -- was 17.6 percent. By contrast, the average during the 1990's was 18.5 percent. Brian, who’s cherry-picking now?

Indeed, Riedl acknowledges, “Yes, the 2001/2003 tax cuts played some role in keeping revenues below their historical average for most of the 2000s, but the country was also recovering from a recession at that time, too.” This makes my point: that McConnell is wrong in contending “there’s no evidence whatsoever” that the tax cuts diminished revenue.

“To blame that entire revenue drop on the 2001/2003 tax cuts completely ignores the bursting of the stock market bubble as well as the recession,” Riedl says. But, of course, I did not blame the entire revenue drop on the tax cuts. I was simply responding to McConnell’s mischaracterization.

Some readers have pointed out, entirely accurately, that the gross amount of tax revenue rose in the aftermath of the tax cuts, although there was some decline through 2004. The government took in $2 trillion in 2000; $2.6 trillion in 2007. (I’m using Riedl’s preferred high-point year here.) This increase barely keeps up with inflation.

More important, to get back to McConnell’s assertion about the absence of evidence that the tax cuts “actually diminished revenue,” the point is: compared to what? The only logical benchmark is whether the tax cuts diminished revenue compared to what they would have been in the absence of any change, and here the answer is indisputable: the tax cuts did their intended job of returning money to taxpayers. The government took in less than it would have otherwise.

How do I know? Brian Riedl said so. Riedl found that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were responsible for “just 14 percent of the swing from the projected cumulative $5.6 trillion surplus for 2002-2011 to an actual $6.1 trillion deficit.”

How much is just 14 percent? Riedl did the math so I don’t have to: $1.7 trillion. Throw in other tax costs -- primarily the annual patching of the Alternative Minimum Tax, made more expensive by the existence of the Bush tax cuts -- and you get another $400 billion. Throw in the extra interest payments caused by the increased debt -- a cost Riedl conveniently omitted -- and you have $377 billion more.

Readers have also suggested that looking at the ratio of revenues to GDP is misguided because the entire theory of the tax cuts is that they would spur economic growth -- “the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy,” in McConnell’s phrase. That would be a fair argument -- if in fact the economy had grown at a better-than-expected rate. But it didn’t. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has shown, “the 2001-2007 economic expansion was among the weakest since World War II with regard to overall economic growth.” Even singling out the boomiest years -- 2003-2007 -- growth in GDP was below average.

Riedl says that in arguing against a permanent extension of the tax cuts, I am putting blame in the wrong place. “As a deficit hawk, Marcus should focus on the actual source of rising long-term deficits -- rising entitlement spending -- rather than blame the tax cuts for a spending problem,” he concludes. Well, my column was about the Republican insistence that taxes cannot be allowed to go in any direction but down; I’ve spent plenty of ink lamenting the entitlement problem.

But even this year, with the economy struggling, the tax cuts account for one-fourth of the deficit, according to estimates by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. By 2019, when the economy will presumably have improved, the tax cuts will account for almost three-fifths of the projected deficit.

Meanwhile, Riedl makes the role of tax cuts in future deficits look smaller by assuming -- contrary to the standard practice of the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget -- that spending will grow with GDP rather than with inflation. If you build more spending into your assumptions, you’re going to find that spending is a bigger share of the problem.

Brian, have a cherry. They’re in season.

What Obama has done with the hand dealt him.

2011-09-08T10:28:00.001-07:00

By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN

When it comes to the economy, presidents, like quarterbacks, often get more credit or blame than they deserve. They inherit problems and policies that affect the economy well into their presidencies and beyond. Reagan inherited Carter's stagflation, George H.W. Bush twin financial crises (savings & loan and Third World debt), and their fixes certainly benefitted the Clinton economy.

President Obama inherited a deep recession and financial crisis resulting from problems that had been building for years. Those responsible include borrowers and lenders on Wall Street and Main Street, the Federal Reserve, regulatory agencies, ratings agencies, presidents and Congress.

Obama, Tiger, Golf and Politics

2011-08-24T09:33:00.000-07:00

By Tom Freidman, NYT, August 23,2011

Despite the carping by critics, I’m glad the president went on vacation because one of the most useful things he could do right now is play golf — a lot of golf — but not that friendly foursome thing with his aides that he usually does. No, real golf: Match play, head to head, with real money on the line. Match-play golf is a great teacher. As any good golfer will tell you, the first rule of match play is this: Never play not to lose. Do not wait and hope for your opponent to make a mistake. Always play the course, always play to win and always assume your opponent will do well — will make that long putt — so you have to do better.

For months now, Obama has been playing not to lose, keeping his own plans for a “Grand Bargain” on debt, deficits, taxes, jobs and investment vague, while waiting for the Republicans to say crazier and crazier stuff — like promising the return of $2-a-gallon gasoline, or insisting that climate change was made up by scientists to get research grants (but politicians taking millions from oil companies can be trusted to tell us the truth on this issue), or that Texas has a right to secede. But while the G.O.P. candidates have been obliging the president with their nuttiness, it has not helped Obama’s poll ratings.

Many Americans can see that most of these G.O.P. candidates are closer to professional wrestlers than politicians — with their fake body slams and anti-Obama bluster. All they are missing are the Tarzan outfits. This is the silly season. But I would not assume that Republicans won’t come up with more serious candidates when it counts, or that some of these candidates won’t move to the center. I would definitely assume that they’ll do better.

That’s why the last few months have been so worrying to Obama supporters. Obama surprised everyone by broaching the idea during the debt negotiations of a “Grand Bargain” — roughly $3 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade and $1 trillion in tax increases — as a signal to the markets that we’re getting our fiscal house in order. It was absolutely the right idea — as long as it is coupled with investments in infrastructure, education and research — but House Speaker John Boehner could not deliver his Tea Party-led G.O.P. caucus.

Yet rather than flesh out his Grand Bargain in detail and take it on the road — and let every American everywhere understand and hear every day that he had a plan but the Republicans wouldn’t rise to it — Obama dropped it. Did he ever try to explain the specifics of his Grand Bargain and why it was the only way to go? No.

This left his allies wondering whether he was committed to it — and really did have his own party on board for it. And it left his opponents thrilled and setting the agenda themselves. It is why Obama’s recent bus tour fell flat. People don’t want to cheer just the man anymore. They want to cheer the man and his plan — a real plan, not just generalities and tactics to get him re-elected with 50.0001 percent and no real mandate to do what’s needed to fix the country now.

Without his own Grand Bargain on the table — imprinted on the mind of every American — Obama has been left playing defense, playing to get the least-bad deal, or playing not to lose. That’s what’s producing all the “What happened to Obama?” talk and its silly variants. (He’s a loser; he’s not very bright; he’s Jimmy Carter.)

It’s all nonsense. Obama is smart, decent and tough, with exactly the right instincts about where the country needs to go. He has accomplished a lot more than he’s gotten credit for — with an opposition dedicated to making him fail. But lately he is seriously off his game. He’s not Jimmy Carter. He’s Tiger Woods — a natural who’s lost his swing. He has so many different swing thoughts in his head, so many people whispering in his ear about what the polls say and how he needs to position himself to get re-elected, that he has lost all his natural instincts for the game. He needs to get back to basics.

It’s crazy what’s happening in America today: We’re having an economic crisis and the politicians are having an election — and there is almost no overlap between the two. The president needs to bring them together. But that can only happen if he stops playing not to lose and goes for broke himself. Our problems are not insoluble. We need a Grand Bargain — where each side gives something on spending, taxes and new investments — and we’re on our way out of this.

Run on that, Mr. President: At best you’ll generate enough public pressure (now totally missing) to shame sane Republicans into joining you, and we’ll get a deal, and at worst you can run in 2012 on a platform, which, if you win, will actually give you a mandate for the change the country needs.

Meanwhile, Mr. President, on a rainy day, rent the movie “Tin Cup.” There is a great scene where Dr. Molly Griswold is trying to help Roy “Tin Cup” McAvoy, the golf pro, rediscover his swing — and himself. She finally tells him: “Roy ... don’t try to be cool or smooth or whatever; just be honest and take a risk. And you know what, whatever happens, if you act from the heart, you can’t make a mistake.”

FCC finally kills off fairness doctrine

2011-08-23T09:15:00.000-07:00

By BROOKS BOLIEK | 8/22/11 3:22 PM EDT

The FCC gave the coup de grace to the fairness doctrine Monday as the commission axed more than 80 media industry rules.

Earlier this summer FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski agreed to erase the post WWII-era rule, but the action Monday puts the last nail into the coffin for the regulation that sought to ensure discussion over the airwaves of controversial issues did not exclude any particular point of view. A broadcaster that violated the rule risked losing its license.

While the commission voted in 1987 to do away with the rule — a legacy to a time when broadcasting was a much more dominant voice than it is today — the language implementing it was never removed. The move Monday, once published in the federal register, effectively erases the rule.

Monday’s move is part of the commission’s response to a White House executive order directing a “government-wide review of regulations already on the books” designed to eliminate unnecessary regulations.

Also consigned to the regulatory dustbin are the “broadcast flag” digital copy protection rule that was struck down by the courts and the cable programming service tier rate. Altogether, the agency tossed 83 rules and regs.

Genachowski said in a statement that the move was aimed at promoting “a healthy climate for private investment and job creation.” Both the Obama administration and the FCC have come under criticism by business groups over laws and regulations such as health care reform and net neutrality rules.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 3:11 p.m. on August 22, 2011.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61851.html#ixzz1VrxcwUZn

______________________________

Read, also, this article:

By KEACH HAGEY | 1/16/11 4:23 PM EDT

When some liberals called for reining in harsh political rhetoric after the Arizona shootings, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) took it one step further. He called for bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, in what was widely considered an attempt to clamp down on talk radio.

A week later, those calls have abated, and no one is seriously pursuing the idea of returning to the long-defunct policy, which required media on the public airwaves to present both sides of controversial political issues. Not Clyburn, not another Democrat who echoed his call for regulatory remedies, Rep. Louise Slaughter (N.Y.), and not the Federal Communications Commission, whose chairman opposes reinstating the policy.

But you wouldn’t know it from listening to conservative talk radio.

Conservative talkers like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are rallying their listeners with a very old — and very successful — battle cry, accusing the left of trying to curb their free speech.

“So believe me, I wouldn’t be surprised, folks, if somebody in the Obama regime or some FCC bureaucrat or some Democrat congressperson has already written up legislation to stifle and eliminate conservative speech, and that legislation is sitting in a desk drawer someplace just waiting for the right event to clamp down because that’s what all this is,” Limbaugh said Monday, in his first show since the shooting. “And every time an event like this happens, they get into a trial run in hopes that this is the one that they can succeed in shutting us all down.”

This theme remained a constant on talk radio, conservative blogs and Fox News throughout the week, as conservative commentators accused liberals of exploiting the tragedy to score political points without any evidence linking the shooter to conservative media. But beyond the political tit-for-tat was a media regulation debate that gave conservative talk radio a chance to talk about one of its favorite topics: itself.

“This is ultimately very good for talk radio,” said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, said of the Fairness Doctrine controversy. “Why? Because talk radio is really just a form of entertainment…It thrives on attention.”

Still, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the Fairness Doctrine to conservative commentators — its demise in 1987, through an executive order signed by President Ronald Reagan, is credited with the creation of modern-day talk-radio, because broadcasters no longer had to offer competing views on the same broadcasts. (The Fairness Doctrine sometimes gets confused with equal-time provisions that still apply to modern broadcasting, but equal-time rules only apply to political candidates, while the Fairness Doctrine applied to controversial issues.)

And the conservative commentators could be excused for having a powerful feeling of deja vu. After the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995, President Bill Clinton spoke to a group of students in Minneapolis, saying, “We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today” whose sole goal “seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression, by their very words, that violence is acceptable.”

No one had any doubt who he was talking about, since Rush Limbaugh was by far the highest rated talk radio figure of the time. The president scored political points, but there was no regulatory effort at the time to back up his words.

When President Barack Obama was elected, conservative talkers picked up the theme again — warning their listeners that with Democrats in Congress and a Democrat in the White House, a new liberal push for the Fairness Doctrine to silence their voices could not be far behind. Obama does not support the return of the Fairness Doctrine, his spokesman told Fox News last year.

Headlines for future use / debt issues/

2011-08-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

New home sales on pace for worst year in history... NATIONAL DEBT RISES BY $3 MILLION EACH MINUTE... Obama sets record: $4,247,000,000,000 debt in just 945 days... YORK: Spending, not entitlements, created huge deficit... $500,000 federal stimulus grant created 1.72 jobs...

GOP winning the larger argument over government

2011-08-03T02:17:00.000-07:00

Posted at 01:37 PM ET, 08/02/2011

By Greg Sargent

In recent days, the debt ceiling deal — which just passed the Senate and is about to be signed by the President — has sparked a fair amount of handwringing among liberals who worry that the fight shows the left has lost the larger argument over the proper role and scope of government in our society. Jared Bernstein and Kevin Drum have both argued that until liberals can make headway in that argument, the playing field in such fights will be dramatically tilted against them.

It’s hard not to agree with these folks when you look at findings like this one from the internals of the new CNN poll:

As you may know, the agreement would cut about one trillion dollars in government spending over the next ten years with provisions to make additional spending cuts in the future. Regardless of how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of the cuts in government spending included in the debt ceiling agreement?

Approve 65

Disapprove 30

Sixty five percent approve of deal’s spending cuts. But it gets worse. Of the 30 percent who disapprove, 13 percent think the cuts haven’t gotten far enough, and only 15 percent think the cuts go too far. One sixth of Americans agree with the liberal argument about the deal.

Yes, the poll also found that 60 percent disapprove of the deal’s lack of high-end tax hikes. Yes, approval of the GOP is lower than that of Obama or Dems. Such findings have led many, myself included, to conclude that Dems were winning the P.R war in this fight in particular.

But the public disapproves of everyone’s handling of this mess. And while the public wanted the rich to kick in more, the poll finds that a plurality (49-42) believes the deal will help the economy, meaning a plurality believes the Republican argument that spending cuts are good economic policy.

You might argue that the public doesn’t really care about deficits; only jobs will dictate the 2012 election. You might also hold out hope that ultimately the public will prefer a Dem balance between spending cuts and public investment, rather than the extreme GOP vision. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the public is reflexively disposed to agree with the GOP’s economic worldview, and is all-too-willing to blame government for our economic doldrums.

“We will only find success when a majority of Americans agrees with us that government is something worth fighting for,” wrote Jared Bernstein. When looking at the above numbers, it’s hard not to agree. And it’s easy to understand why the White House ultimately decided — right or wrong — that it had to fight this battle almost entirely on the GOP’s turf. Liberals who still hope to shift the playing field have tons of work to do.

By Greg Sargent | 01:37 PM ET, 08/02/2011

The Obama Downgrade, Alphabetically

2011-08-03T02:12:00.000-07:00

Snapshots from President Obama's efforts to improve America's standing in the world, 923 days into his administration:

A is for the Arab world, and our standing in it: This year, Zogby International found that 5% of Egyptians had a favorable view of the U.S. In 2008, when George W. Bush was president, it was 9%.

B is for the federal budget deficit, which is estimated to come in at around 11% of GDP in 2011, up from about 3% in 2008.

C is for China's military budget. For 2012, Beijing plans to increase spending on defense by 12.7%. The Obama administration, by contrast, proposed Pentagon cuts in April averaging out to $40 billion per year over the next decade, and Congress may soon cut a lot more.

D is for—what else—the federal debt, which grew to $14.3 trillion this month from $10.7 trillion at the end of 2008. D is also for the dollar, which has lost almost half its value against gold since Aug. 2008.

E is for energy. The average retail price of a gallon of gas hovered near the $1.80 mark when Mr. Obama was inaugurated. It has since more than doubled. E is also for ethanol, the non-wonder fuel the U.S. continues to subsidize to the tune of $5 billion a year.

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F is for free trade. Bill Clinton signed Nafta in 1994, which facilitates $1.6 trillion in the trade of goods and services between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. George W. Bush midwifed more than a dozen FTAs, from Australia to Singapore to Morocco to Bahrain. Number of FTA's signed by the current president: zero.

G is for Guantanamo, which remains open, and for Gadhafi, who remains in power, and for Greece, which offers a vision of America's future if we don't reform our entitlement state.

H is for Hillary Clinton, who—I can't believe I'm writing this—would have made a better president than Mr. Obama.

I is for Israel, a Middle Eastern country the president claims to support even as he routinely disses its prime minister, seeks to shrink its borders and—why not?—divide its capital.

J is for jobs. In November 2008, president-elect Obama promised he would create 2.5 million jobs by 2011. By October 2010 the economy had shed 3.3 million jobs.

K is for Karzai, Hamid, Afghanistan's feckless leader. Still, the Obama administration probably did itself no favors by publicly dumping on the man, leading him to seek new best friends in Tehran.

L is for Laden, Osama bin. The president's greatest triumph, which will forever put him one notch—if only one notch—above Jimmy Carter.

M is for Mexico, a country that manages 5.4% unemployment and 4.2% annual growth even as it fights a war against the drug cartels.

N is for NATO, once a pillar of Western security, which Mr. Obama is in the process of destroying through his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and his refusal to give NATO the push it needs to win in Libya.

O is for ObamaCare, which goes far to explain B, D, J as well as the Greek part of G.

P is for Pyongyang, whose ruler the administration is once again attempting to engage in the six-party talks. This is after the Kim regime welcomed Mr. Obama's plea for a nuclear-free world by testing a nuclear bomb, torpedoing a South Korean ship, shelling a South Korean village, and unveiling a state-of-the-art uranium enrichment facility.

Q is for QE2, the most disastrous experiment in monetary policy since Fed Chairman William Miller's low-interest rate policy crashed the dollar in 1978.

R is for the reset with Russia, the principal result of which is an arms-control treaty that brings us to parity in strategic nuclear weapons, leaves us behind in the tactical category, and ill-equips us for the challenge of a proliferating world.

S is for shovel-ready. Enough said.

T is for taxes, which Mr. Obama would like to see raised for "millionaires and billionaires"—curiously defined as people making $200K and up.

U is for Iran's uranium enrichment. When Mr. Obama came to office promising to extend his hand to the mullahs, Iran had enriched 1,000 kilos of uranium. Today they have produced more than 4,000 kilos.

V is for Venezuela, a country whose extensive subterranean links to Iran the administration has consistently downplayed.

W is for the Dubya, whose presidency now looks like a model of spending restraint.

X is for Liu Xiaobo, an example of what a deserving winner of the Nobel Peace Prize looks like. X is also for Xanax, likely to be remembered as the drug of choice of the Obama years.

Y is for Yes, We Can! Unfortunately, it's also for Yemen.

Z is for zero, which is the likelihood that one of the current GOP hopefuls will defeat Mr. Obama in 2012.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903341404576481870724644008.html

Editor of US News and World Report expresses disappoint with ObamaCare

2011-05-25T09:42:00.000-07:00

Obama skirts rule of law to reward pals and punish foes.

By: Michael Barone 05/24/11 8:05 PM
Senior Political Analyst Follow Him @MichaelBarone

If Obamacare is so great, why do so many people want to get out from under it?-J. Scott Applewhite/AP File

Question: What do the following have in common? Eckert Cold Storage Co., Kerly Homes of Yuma, Classic Party Rentals, West Coast Turf Inc., Ellenbecker Investment Group Inc., Only in San Francisco, Hotel Nikko, International Pacific Halibut Commission, City of Puyallup, Local 485 Health and Welfare Fund, Chicago Plastering Institute Health & Welfare Fund, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, Teamsters Local 522 Fund Welfare Fund Roofers Division, StayWell Saipan Basic Plan, CIGNA, Caribbean Workers' Voluntary Employees' Beneficiary Health and Welfare Plan.

Answer: They are all among the 1,372 businesses, state and local governments, labor unions and insurers, covering 3,095,593 individuals or families, that have been granted a waiver from Obamacare by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.

All of which raises another question: If Obamacare is so great, why do so many people want to get out from under it?

More specifically, why are more than half of those 3,095,593 in plans run by labor unions, which were among Obamacare's biggest political supporters? Union members are only 12 percent of all employees but have gotten 50.3 percent of Obamacare waivers.

Just in April, Sebelius granted 38 waivers to restaurants, nightclubs, spas and hotels in former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco congressional district. Pelosi's office said she had nothing to do with it.

On its website HHS pledges that the waiver process will be transparent. But it doesn't list those whose requests for waivers have been denied.

It does say that requests are "reviewed on a case by case basis by Department officials who look at a series of factors including" -- and then lists two factors. And it refers you to another website that says that "several factors . . . may be considered" -- and then lists six factors.

What other factors may be considered? Political contributions or connections? (Unions contributed $400 million to Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle.) The websites don't say.

In his new book "The Origins of Political Order," Francis Fukuyama identifies the chief building blocks of liberal democracy as a strong central state, a society strong enough to hold the state accountable and -- equally crucial -- the rule of law.

One basic principle of the rule of law is that laws apply to everybody. If the sign says "No Parking," you're not supposed to park there even if you're a pal of the alderman.

Another principle of the rule of law is that government can't make up new rules to help its cronies and hurt its adversaries except through due process, such as getting a legislature to pass a new law.

The Obamacare waiver process appears to violate that first rule. Two other recent Obama administration actions appear to violate the second.

One example is the National Labor Relations Board general counsel's action to prevent Boeing from building a $2 billion assembly plant for the 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina, which has a right-to-work law barring compulsory union membership. The NLRB says Boeing has to assemble the planes in non-right-to-work Washington state.

"I don't agree," says William Gould IV, NLRB chairman during the Clinton years. "The Boeing case is unprecedented."

The other example is the Internal Revenue Service's attempt to levy a gift tax on donors to certain 501(c)(4) organizations that just happen to have spent money to elect Republicans.

A gift tax is normally assessed on transfers to children and other heirs that are designed to avoid estate taxes. It has been applied to political donations "rarely, if ever," according to New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom.

"The timing of the agency's moves, as the 2012 election cycle gets under way," continues Strom, "is prompting some tax law and campaign finance experts to question whether the IRS could be sending a signal in an effort to curtail big donations."

In a Univision radio interview during the 2010 election cycle, Barack Obama urged Latinos not "to sit out the election instead of saying, 'We're going to punish our enemies and we're going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.' "

Punishing enemies and rewarding friends -- politics Chicago style -- seems to be the unifying principle that helps explain the Obamacare waivers, the NLRB action against Boeing and the IRS' gift-tax assault on 501(c)(4) donors.

They look like examples of crony capitalism, bailout favoritism and gangster government.

One thing they don't look like is the rule of law.

Michael Barone, The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.

On stimulus jobs reporting, a big 'Oops'

2011-02-14T07:29:00.000-08:00

Error in Recovery Act accounting raises doubts about government's ability to precisely track the flow of funds and jobs.

By David Goldman, CNNMoney.com staff writer

Last Updated: October 16, 2009: 4:53 PM ET

Federal guidelines don't allow UT-Battelle to report the 150 construction jobs funded by stimulus contracts.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Gaffes in federal reports this week about stimulus have called into question the government's ability to accurately track how many jobs are being created by the massive $787 billion Recovery Act.

The data in Thursday's reports were filled with mistakes, including an error that made it look like a French vaccine maker received the largest stimulus contract, $1.4 billion, when in fact it has gotten an award one-100th the size.

Government research organization OMB Watch said its assessment of the reports revealed many inconsistencies in the job data.

"The data is rife with mistakes," said Craig Jennings, senior federal fiscal policy analyst at OMB Watch. "When you put out data that hasn't yet been checked, it undermines transparency, because you are putting out wrong information."

According to the Recovery Board, a non-profit, government-funded organization that operates stimulus data tracker recovery.gov, the government expected mistakes and is reviewing reports of them.

Uncovering how many jobs stimulus created is critical to the debate about the Recovery Act's value. Critics argue that the mammoth funding simply represents more government spending and is not effectively being used to create jobs. But proponents say stimulus is a crucial shot in the arm for the economy, and that the labor market would have fallen further without it.

"Understanding how many jobs are created will answer the very fair and important question, 'What return on our investment are we getting?' " said Christopher Mihm, the Government Accountability Office's managing director of strategic issues.

But the enormity of the stimulus bill leaves some experts saying it will be impossible to accurately portray the data. The sheer size of the reporting is dumbfounding: Tens of thousands of recipients will file reports after receiving stimulus funds from one of 28 government umbrella agencies, or from one of countless agencies from the 50 states.

Making it even more difficult to discover the true jobs number is a decision to put the responsibility of correcting mistakes on the stimulus recipients' shoulders. For transparency's sake, government agencies can point out errors but are powerless to change them. All of the data are under government review, and a report on the errors the agencies find will be available at the end of the month.

"It's important that those errors get caught before they get published, and right now they're still under review," said Jennings. "It's possible that some will be caught by the review, but it will take an incredible amount of man power just to sift through the data."

Recipients of stimulus funds were required to report how many jobs they saved or created and how much money they have received from government agencies by Oct. 10. The first sliver of that information was posted on recovery.gov on Thursday, with much more data to come on Oct. 30.

The contract awards posted Thursday represented less than 7% of the total stimulus funds doled out so far. By far the largest part of stimulus is in grants to states, which account for 83% of stimulus funding. Federal agencies and recipients are spending nearly three weeks reviewing these state reports to improve their accuracy before publishing them.

Loans to recipients make up the other 10%. Both grants and loans will be posted on recovery.gov at the end of the month.

There were 5,232 federal contracts reported Thursday, but 41,944 grants and loans will be reported on Oct. 30. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California recently said that his state alone submitted 5,747 reports from agencies and others who received funds from the state.

Mistake-prone reporting

A mistake in the very first contract listed on the site prompted doubts about the reliability of the reports.

Recovery.gov erroneously reported Thursday that French vaccine maker Sanofi Pasteur had received $1.4 billion in stimulus funds from the Department of Health and Human Services. The company topped the site's list titled "Largest federal contracts in U.S."

When CNNMoney.com first asked about the contract on Thursday, a spokeswoman from Sanofi Pasteur suspected the $1.4 billion figure was a mistake. HHS spokeswoman Vicki Rivas-Vazquez said the number on recovery.gov was erroneous and the actual amount was $10.4 million.

Sanofi Pasteur said Friday that $10.4 million is the correct figure.

"We anticipated errors in the reporting and so informed many reporters beforehand," said Edward Pound, spokesman for the Recovery Board. "This is the first time this kind of reporting is being done. These reports are being reviewed by federal agencies and recipients to catch any errors or problems."

The Recovery Board has the tall task of compiling all of the data, and is spending $18 million revamping its Web site to manage all of the information.

OMB Watch said its review yielded "really weird job numbers," including many discrepancies within the reports themselves. For instance, Jennings said OMB Watch found that many companies said in a narrative portion of their reports that it was able to retain several employees because of stimulus funds, but the "jobs created" column read "zero."

The Recovery Board aggregates its jobs data from the "jobs created" column to display the total number of jobs saved or created. Jennings speculated that recipients might have been confused about the scope of the term "created."

"I would not stake any sort of claims on those job numbers," said Jennings. "We don't know what's going on there."

Even the job figures that are input correctly do not always reflect the true number of positions created by stimulus funds.

For instance, UT-Battelle received a $338.7 million contract, listed as the fourth largest on the recovery.gov site. So far, the company, which manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee for the Department of Energy, has spent $13 million and created 41 jobs, mostly related to the oversight of subcontractors.

But the funding is actually creating many more jobs, said Thom Mason, UT-Battelle's CEO. Among the firm's first stimulus projects is the building of a chemistry and new materials research lab, which will employ 150 construction workers. None of these positions will appear on UT-Battelle's reports to the federal government.

"It's important that everyone reports on a consistent basis," said Mason, who expects to hire up to 4,000 subcontractors with stimulus funds. "The difficulty is that it gives you a number that's not really a realistic reflection of how many jobs are created."

--CNNMoney.com senior writer Tami Luhby contributed to this report.

First Published: October 16, 2009: 3:51 PM ET

Dems object to GOP gov't transparency probe

2011-02-02T23:10:00.000-08:00

By TED BRIDIS

updated 2/2/2011 4:09:04 PM ET

Congressmen say Rep. Issa's inquiry will burden federal agencies

WASHINGTON — Some Democrats in Congress objected Wednesday to early steps taken by the new Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to conduct a broad inquiry into President Barack Obama's promises to improve government transparency.

Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, Gerald Connolly of Virginia and Peter Welch of Vermont complained in a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., that his investigation will burden federal agencies responsible for producing government records under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requested by citizens, journalists, companies and others. Cummings is the senior Democrat on the House oversight committee.

Issa last week demanded details of every such request during the last five years, plus copies of all letters or e-mails between government workers and people with pending requests. He said the effort would make sure that "all federal agencies respond in a timely, substantive and non-discriminatory manner" to requests for records under the information law.

The five-year window would cover part of the Bush administration and the first years of Obama's presidency.

In their letter to Issa on Wednesday, the Democrats said the investigation would require government offices to turn over perhaps hundreds of thousands of documents. "Without a defined focus, your inquiry will place a significant burden on FOIA offices and divert limited staff from processing requests from the public," they wrote.

Issa's investigation into government transparency under Obama is among the earliest by Republicans since they won control of the House, and targets one of the first pledges Obama made after he moved into the White House.

The investigation was at least partly prompted by reports last year from The Associated Press that the Homeland Security Department had sidetracked hundreds of requests for federal records to top political advisers, who wanted information about those requesting the materials

In some cases the release of documents considered politically sensitive was delayed, according to more than 1,000 pages of e-mails obtained by the AP.

The Democrats said they were uncomfortable with Issa's request for names of all people who sought federal records, dates of their requests, descriptions of what they asked to receive and whether they ever received anything. They said Issa should modify his request to not include names.

"It is unclear why the committee needs the identities of specific FOIA requesters," they wrote.

Names of people who ask the government for records and details about what they sought under the Freedom of Information Act are generally available publicly, and many are published by federal agencies online.

Egypt's conflicting views of democracy and religion

2011-02-02T21:29:00.000-08:00

By: Byron York 01/31/11 8:05 PM
Chief Political Correspondent

People chant anti-government slogans during a protest in the capital's central Tahrir, or Liberation, Square, Cairo, Egypt, Monday Jan. 31, 2011. A coalition of opposition groups called for a million people to take to Cairo's streets Tuesday to ratchet up pressure for President Hosni Mubarak to leave.-Amr Nabil/AP

Last year the Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project conducted a survey of opinion in several Muslim countries. The subject was the proper role of Islam in politics and society. One of the countries surveyed was Egypt, and among other discoveries, the Pew researchers found that 84 percent of Egyptians favor the death penalty for people who leave the Muslim religion.

In another survey, Pew found that 90 percent of Egyptians say they believe in freedom of religion. Pew also found that a majority of Egyptians think democracy, with protections of free speech and assembly, is "preferable to any other kind of government."

How can those attitudes fit together in a democratic post-Mubarak Egypt? It's no wonder so many people can't figure out what is next.

The Pew survey found wide streams of opinion in Egypt that seem at the very least inhospitable to democracy. When asked which side they would take in a struggle between "groups who want to modernize the country [and] Islamic fundamentalists," 59 percent of Egyptians picked the fundamentalists, while 27 percent picked the modernizers. In a country in which the army will likely play a deciding role in selecting the next political leadership, just 32 percent believe in civilian control of the military. And a majority, 54 percent, support making segregation of men and women in the workplace the law throughout Egypt.

There's more. When asked whether suicide bombing can ever be justified, 54 percent said yes (although most believe such occasions are "rare.") Eighty-two percent supported stoning for those who commit adultery.

And yet at the same time, says Richard Wike, associate director of Pew's Global Attitudes Project, "We found support for some specific features of democracy -- free media, civil liberties, an independent judiciary." Indeed, 80 percent of Egyptians place a high value on free speech, 88 percent on an impartial judiciary and 75 percent on "media free from government censorship."

What accounts for the coexistence of attitudes that to the American mind cannot coexist? "I'm not entirely certain what explains it," Wike says.

Analysts with a hopeful view of events in Egypt see a society that, if Hosni Mubarak departs the scene, will lean toward modernity. "There has always been a modernist current in Egypt, and it has always battled against the religious alternative," says Fouad Ajami, director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University. "The deciding vote in that fight between the modernists and the religious types was always cast by the state, and if I look at the next phase in Egypt, my feeling is that the army, which is an extension and expression of the middle class, will check the Muslim Brotherhood."

Still, even Ajami can't predict how that will work out. When asked what freedom of religion would mean in practice in a new Egypt, he replies, "The honest answer is, as they say in Arabic, only God knows what is next."

Whatever comes next, it will likely have an anti-American flavor. The Pew 2010 report found that 82 percent of Egyptians hold an unfavorable view of the United States. That's higher than in Pakistan, higher than in Jordan, higher than 18 other nations Pew surveyed. And it is higher than the 72 percent of Egyptians who have an unfavorable view of al Qaeda.

Egyptian opinion of the United States improved briefly in 2009, when Barack Obama became president, but it fell significantly in 2010. Muslim opinion of Obama, who made outreach to Muslims a top priority and traveled to Cairo in June 2009 to address the Islamic world, has also dropped.

On the other hand, as the al Qaeda statistic shows, Egyptians aren't siding with terrorist groups, either. They don't like Osama bin Laden. Seventy percent say they are at least somewhat concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism around the world. They don't like Hezbollah and are divided on Hamas.

Put it all together, and it's a confusing picture for the nonexpert and, truth be told, for the expert, too. We might be about to see a grand democratic experiment in a country in which large numbers of people hold at least some views that westerners find utterly inconsistent with democracy. Such experiments have been rough rides in the past. As they say in Arabic -- and in English, too -- only God knows what is next.

Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.

Obama by the numbers - 1/31/2011

2011-02-01T05:54:00.000-08:00

Jan 31, 2011: Numbers can tell a story. Looking back on Barack Obama's second State of the Union message, and looking forward to the congressional session and the 2012 elections, they tell a story that should leave Democrats uneasy.

Start off with the audience in the House chamber. Not all members of Congress attended; Obama briefly and Paul Ryan at greater length in his otherwise brief rebuttal both appropriately noted the absence of Gabrielle Giffords.

But the contrast between the audience at Obama's first State of the Union last year and the audience this year is remarkable. Then there were 316 Democrats and 218 Republicans in Congress. This year there are 289 Republicans and 246 Democrats. No president has seen such a large change in the partisan composition of his State of the Union audience since Harry Truman.

That obviously will have legislative consequences. Obama told Republicans to give up on all but the most minor changes to Obamacare. They're not going to follow this advice.

As for spending, Obama reiterated his call for a limited freeze on domestic discretionary spending and cuts in defense. Again, as Ryan made clear, this Congress has different ideas.

The political incentive for Obama is to sound consensual, not confrontational. The current uptick in his job approval, putting him just over 50 percent, began when he agreed with Republicans to continue current income tax rates rather than raise taxes on high earners.

But on Tuesday night, he continued to call for higher taxes on the greedy rich in a time of sluggish economic recovery. Not as consensual as one might expect.

House Democrats, almost all elected from safe districts, won't mind that. But they're not going to have much to say about legislative outcomes. House Republicans will take it as a poke in the eye and perhaps as an attempt to renege on a deal. Not helpful in reaching other agreements.

In the Senate, where Democrats have a 53-47 majority, but not iron control, the situation is different. In the 2012 cycle, 23 Democrats come up for re-election and only 10 Republicans. You can get a good idea of their political incentives by looking at the 2010 popular vote for the House in their states. Since the mid-1990s, when partisan percentages in presidential and House elections converged, the popular vote for the House has been a pretty good gauge of partisan balance.

Of the 10 Republican senators up for re-election, only two represent states where Democrats won the House vote -- Olympia Snowe of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts. They're both well ahead in local polls.

For the 23 Democrats up for re-election, the picture is different. Eight represent states where the House vote was 53 percent to 65 percent Democratic and where Barack Obama got more than 60 percent in 2008. Count them all as safe.

But 12 represent states where Republicans got a majority of the House vote in 2010. These include big states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Virginia, and states like Montana and Nebraska, where Republican House candidates topped 60 percent. Missouri, New Jersey, North Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin round out the list.

In another three states -- New Mexico, Washington, Minnesota -- Republicans won between 46 percent and 48 percent of the House popular vote. These were solid Obama states in 2008. They don't look like solid Democratic states now.

The point is that Democratic senators from all or most of these 15 states have a political incentive to reach agreements with Republicans that go a lot further than Obama did at the State of the Union.

Finally, what about the portents for the 2012 presidential race? Well, start off with the fact that Democrats won the House popular vote in only two of the 17 states that do not have Senate elections next cycle. The other 15 went Republican.

Overall, Democrats carried the popular vote for the House in 15 states with 182 electoral votes in 2012; add three more for the District of Columbia. Democrats were within 5 percent of Republicans in House elections in five more states with 52 electoral votes.

That gets Democrats up to 237 electoral votes, 33 votes shy of the 270-vote majority and 128 short of the 365 electoral votes Obama won in 2008.

Opinion can change, as it did in 2009 and 2010. But these are not favorable numbers for Obama or his party.

Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

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Marco Rubio's campaign points

2010-11-01T22:41:00.000-07:00

America’s proud legacy of limited government, free enterprise and personal responsibility is under assault in Washington in the form of Obamacare, the so-called stimulus and cap and trade. Washington is broken, and there’s a fundamental question voters must ask themselves this election year: Who do you trust to fix it?

With the right leaders, the right agenda and the right movement of people and ideas, we can reverse this trend. America can remain exceptional, but it’s going to require bold and decisive action in the very near future. It’s going to require leaders who are willing to not only stand up to the Obama agenda, but offer clear alternatives as well.

Saying no to bad ideas is very important in the Obama Era, but so is laying out an alternative conservative vision. We did just that in Florida. As I prepared to become Speaker of the House, we created a book called 100 Ideas for Florida’s Future. It was a book of ideas and proposals collected over many months from all across the state. Many of them came from political leaders, academics and researchers. But some of the best ideas came from everyday working Floridians who simply wanted to promote limited government, maintain our freedom and keep Florida great. We took the 100 best ideas on issues like tax reform, education and insurance reform and put them in a book which became the foundation of my agenda as speaker.

Sharing our vision didn’t cost us politically. It enhanced us. We didn’t lose by taking risks, but we surely gained by showing the people of Florida that politics can be about more than just personal ambition and winning elections. We need more of that thinking in Washington.

For too long, politicians of all stripes have made false promises to different groups of Americans, often paid for by other groups of Americans, and always paid for by the next generation. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, pensions and other government programs are on unsustainable growth paths that will bankrupt the country and fundamentally alter the relationship of citizens to their government in ways that are not in sync with our founding principles.

Many countries have chosen to have the government run the economy. They chose to allow government to decide which companies survive and fail. They chose to allow government to determine which industries are rewarded. The problem is that when government controls the economy, those who can influence government keep winning, and everybody else stays the same. In those countries, the employee never becomes the employer, the small business can never compete with a big business, and no matter how hard your parents work or how many sacrifices they make, if you weren’t born into the right family in those countries, there’s only so far you can go.

So what do we do to avoid their fate? Here are some commonsense ideas that will help reverse the trend we are on and put us back on the right track:

First, we should freeze non-defense and non-veteran discretionary spending at pre-Obama levels. Though it’s a relatively small part of the budget, non-defense and non-veteran discretionary spending has ballooned in recent years and must be brought under control. We should cancel the unspent stimulus funds, repeal a TARP program that has evolved into a revolving bailout and slush fund, and sunset discretionary spending programs every 10 years after the Census. This will force our political leaders to evaluate the success and cost effectiveness of each and every government program on a regular basis. Lastly, we must also rein in the size and compensation of federal government workers. We need a freeze on civilian employment and adjust their pay and benefits, which are now some 70% higher than their private sector counterparts.

This freeze has to be enforced by a 21st century version of a Gramm-Rudman-type sequester. Again, politicians in both parties have demonstrated their unwillingness to control spending. If they keep refusing, we need a mechanism to do it for them. Additional safeguards, like a Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment with a supermajority to raise taxes, and a line-item veto would be valuable long-term. However, given the current Congress’ penchant for massive spending, taxpayers shouldn’t hold our breath in the short term.

The second needed step is to reform our entitlement programs and prevent their impending bankruptcy. Here’s a simple fact: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are going broke. They are like sticks of fiscal dynamite whose wicks are getting shorter by the day. We have to tell the truth and admit what’s obvious: for today’s seniors and those over 55, we won’t make changes. But for those like me who are under 40, the programs will need to change.

The third thing we must do to avoid a diminished future is grow our economy and create jobs. We should start by extending the pro-growth Bush tax cuts rather than allowing them to expire as President Obama and Congressional Democrats have proposed.

While this is an important short term fix, it isn’t a long term solution. Our tax code is fundamentally flawed. Too many years of special interest lobbying and class warfare politics have cemented it as anti-family, anti-jobs, and anti-competitive. We must make it simpler, fairer and less complex.

We should start by ending double taxation. Every dollar that is legitimately subject to tax should be taxed. But we should stop giving Washington two or even three bites at the apple. That means no more job-destroying double taxation of capital gains, dividends or death.

Also, if big government Europeans think a 25% average corporate tax rate is high enough, then we should tear down our 35% rate so it’s no higher than the European average.

Unfortunately, the fourth thing we must do to avoid a diminished future is a reaction to President Obama’s agenda. We must repeal the big government monstrosity that is his health care law and replace it with something better. One firm alone, Caterpillar, has said it will cost them $100 million dollars. Think about that in terms of lost jobs, lost wages and broken dreams across an entire economy. This law is bad health policy and even worse economic policy.

Fortunately, this damage to America’s long-term future is not irreversible. However, with each day that passes and each tough decision that is deferred, our economic and fiscal challenges only mount.

As Americans, we have reached a point in our history when we must decide if we are to continue on the free market, limited government path that has made us exceptional, or if we are prepared to follow the rest of the world down the road of government dependency. It is a clear choice between two very different futures, and I believe the American people are prepared to make the tough, but necessary, choices to ensure future generations enjoy unrivaled levels of freedom, security and prosperity.

The Marxist Lefties fall for the Palin bait and make fools of themselves over "1773"

2010-10-23T21:40:00.000-07:00

When Palin first shouted out, "Let's not party like its 1773 until after the election," (or words to that effect), we found 10 headlines and more than 30 Marxist blog (Huffington Post, ThinkProgress, Salon, and on and on) making fun of Palin for getting the date wrong. It was 1776, you fool !!! or words to that effect.

What is funny is that these headlines were post for two days before someone finally realized that the Boston TEA Party happened in the year 1773.

And with that, Palin pulls the plug on the Left proving that they know next to nothing out our (the United States of America) history or its foundi

WMDs found

2010-10-23T17:27:00.000-07:00

WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq – With Surprising Results

By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But for years afterward, WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

In August 2004, for instance, American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic “blister agent” used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and “reported two positive results for blister.” The chemical was then “triple-sealed and transported to a secure site” outside their base.

Three months later, in northern Iraq, U.S. scouts went to look in on a “chemical weapons” complex. “One of the bunkers has been tampered with,” they write. “The integrity of the seal [around the complex] appears intact, but it seems someone is interesting in trying to get into the bunkers.”

Meanwhile, the second battle of Fallujah was raging in Anbar province. In the southeastern corner of the city, American forces came across a “house with a chemical lab … substances found are similar to ones (in lesser quantities located a previous chemical lab.” The following day, there’s a call in another part of the city for explosive experts to dispose of a “chemical cache.”

Nearly three years later, American troops were still finding WMD in the region. An armored Buffalo vehicle unearthed a cache of artillery shells “that was covered by sacks and leaves under an Iraqi Community Watch checkpoint. “The 155mm rounds are filled with an unknown liquid, and several of which are leaking a black tar-like substance.” Initial tests were inconclusive. But later, “the rounds tested positive for mustard.”

In WikiLeaks’ massive trove of nearly 392,000 Iraq war logs, there are hundreds of references to chemical and biological weapons. Most of those are intelligence reports or initial suspicions of WMD that don’t pan out. In July 2004, for example, U.S. forces come across a Baghdad building with gas masks, gas filters, and containers with “unknown contents” inside. Later investigation revealed those contents to be vitamins.

But even late in the war, WMDs were still being unearthed. In the summer of 2008, according to one WikiLeaked report, American troops found at least 10 rounds that tested positive for chemical agents. “These rounds were most likely left over from the [Saddam]-era regime. Based on location, these rounds may be an AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] cache. However, the rounds were all total disrepair and did not appear to have been moved for a long time.”

A small group — mostly of the political right — has long maintained that there was more evidence of a major and modern WMD program than the American people were lead to believe. A few Congressmen and Senators gravitated to the idea, but it was largely dismissed as conspiratorial hooey.

The WMD diehards will likely find some comfort in these newly-WikiLeaked documents. Skeptics will note that these relatively small WMD stockpiles were hardly the kind of grave danger that the Bush administration presented in the run-up to the war.

But the more salient issue may be how insurgents and Islamic extremists (possibly with the help of Iran) attempted to use these lethal and exotic arms. As Spencer noted earlier, a January 2006 war log claims that “neuroparalytic” chemical weapons were smuggled in from Iran.

That same month, then “chemical weapons specialists” were apprehended in Balad. These “foreigners” were there specifically “to support the chemical weapons operations.” The following month, an intelligence report refers to a “chemical weapons expert” that “provided assistance with the gas weapons.” What happened to that specialist, the WikiLeaked document doesn’t say.

Photo: Air War College

citizen United didn't change discloure law at all.

2010-10-20T16:21:00.000-07:00

Chris Good - Chris Good is a staff editor at TheAtlantic.com, where he writes for the Politics channel. He has previously reported and blogged for The Hill newspaper.

Don't Blame Citizens United

Oct 20 2010, 6:15 PM E

Since the Supreme Court issued its Citizens United ruling in January, Democrats have consistently blamed it for allowing secretive, shady, special-interest money to flow unabated into the U.S. political system, corrupting elections at an unprecedented pace.

"This decision...gave the special interests the power to spend without limit - and without public disclosure - to run ads in order to influence elections," President Obama said during a weekly radio address in September.

This is not quite correct. Special interests can do all of those things, but not because of the Supreme Court's January ruling.

To understand how and why, let's take a pleasant stroll through the dark and complicated webs of campaign finance law.

Much of the "shadowy" spending Democrats have cited comes from groups that file under section 5014(c)4 of the U.S. tax code. Commonly known as 501(c)4's in the political world, they're tax-exempt nonprofits that engage in issue advocacy and don't typically disclose their donors. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded conservative organization that's a favorite for Democrats to demonize, has a 501(c)4 arm, for instance. The Karl-Rove-co-founded American Crossroads also includes a 501(c)4 operation.

Citizens United didn't actually change anything about what these groups can do. They could spend unlimited amounts during election season without disclosing their donors before this past January.

What Citizens United did change was where their money can come from.

The Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations and unions can spend directly on elections. Previously, they were prohibited, and these "shadowy" nonprofits weren't allowed to take corporate money, otherwise they'd have to disclose their donors to the Federal Election Commission. Now, after Citizens United, 501(c)4 groups can take as much corporate and union money as they want, still without disclosing.

But while Democrats have insinuated that Citizens United is preventing these groups from having to disclose their donors, that simply isn't the case. 501(c)4 groups never had to disclose their donors.

"Citizens United did not change the disclosure laws at all. It endorsed the disclosure laws on the books, and the weaknesses that are being blown into huge proportions in this election were on the books before this election," said Tara Malloy, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center. The Federal Election Commission, meanwhile, has weakened those laws through its interpretations, Malloy said.

In fact, the Supreme Court actually came down in favor of disclosure in one key regard.

There has been a hanging question in campaign finance law for some time over just what constitutes a political communication. For hypothetical instance, an ad is aired in California two weeks before Election Day. In it, a narrator advises viewers, "Sen. Barbara Boxer is so mean to poor children it's shocking. Call Sen. Barbara Boxer and tell her to stop saying mean things to poor children and taking their money to buy extra hot tubs for her diamond-encrusted hover-yacht." Does that count as an "electioneering communication"?

According to some past interpretations of the law, it doesn't, because the ad doesn't expressly advocate for Boxer's election or defeat. The narrator just wants you to call Sen. Boxer and ask her not to be so horrible--he's not telling you to vote against her.

But in Citizens United, the Supreme Court cited and reinforced a more liberal interpretation: that mentioning a candidate by name close enough to Election Day, even without expressly telling viewers how to vote, can count as an electioneering communication and thus require disclosure.

Unsurprisingly, it gets even more complicated.

A group has to tell the FEC that it's airing the ads and how much it's spending, but it still doesn't have to disclose its donors. In order to keep the donors secret, the group simply has to file with the IRS as a tax-exempt nonprofit, claiming that its main function is not politics, instead of openly forming as a political committee.

The potential for gaming the system seems readily apparent, given that enforcement rests on two unconnected agencies, the IRS and the FEC.

It could very well be the case that some 501(c)4 groups are airing such ads and that politics is indeed their main business, and that they should instead claim themselves as political committees, disclosing donors to the FEC and filing with the IRS, for instance, under section 527. Watchdogs and Democratic senators have called on the IRS to investigate whether American Crossroads (part of which files as a 527 and does disclose to the FEC) mainly conducts political business and should forfeit its tax exempt status and instead begin disclosing its donors. But such a challenge seems like it will get sorted out after the midterms, if it gets sorted out at all.

How we got here is a different story. Groups can spend unlimited amounts of money without disclosing donors because of a series of court cases and FEC regulatory decisions that have weakened campaign finance laws, despite Congress's attempt to crack down on campaign finance by passing the McCain/Feingold law in 2002.

"In a sense what you had in early 2010 was a coming together of Citizens United," plus another federal court case and an FEC decision, "plus a climate where corporations feel that they have a lot at stake," said Prof. Richard Briffault, a campaign finance law expert at Columbia University.

None of this is to downplay the effect of Citizens United, or to say that the present state of things is particularly good or bad.

That corporations and unions can directly pour money into 501(c)4 groups is a significant development, to be sure. And it's unclear to what extent this is happening, since no one knows exactly where these groups are getting their money--as Obama and Democrats have repeatedly pointed out.

But Citizens United didn't open the floodgates, on its own, in the way Democrats have insinuated. Before that ruling, CEOs and other, sundry rich guys were able to get involved in elections quite easily through 501(c)4 organizations. Corporations formed their own political groups which, while they could only take in $5,000 per donor under federal law, had no trouble getting donations from high-level company employees.

Briffault and Malloy agree that Citizens United signaled a trend of deregulation that made special interests, big-time donors, and corporations more comfortable with the idea of getting involved in elections, usually through tax-exempt nonprofit groups.

To say, however, that Citizens United is responsible for the deluge of "shadowy" spending we're seeing in 2010 is not exactly true. How we arrived here is much more complicated than that.

troops negative on Obama

2010-10-20T14:02:00.000-07:00

Troops chafe at restrictive rules of engagement, talks with Taliban

By: Sara A. Carter
National Security Correspondent
October 19, 2010

A U.S. Army Chinook helicopter from the 101st Airborne Division transports U.S. infantrymen from one position to another in Zhari District, southern Afghanistan. Going increasingly on the offensive in this district near Kandahar City, American commanders are hoping to clear Taliban-held areas and fighting positions in the weeks and months ahead, before President Barack Obama makes a critical assessment in December of the effectiveness of the 30,000-man surge. (AP file photo)

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- To the U.S. Army soldiers and Marines serving here, some things seem so obviously true that they are beyond debate. Among those perceived truths: Tthe restrictive rules of engagement that they have to fight under have made serving in combat far more dangerous for them, while allowing the Taliban to return to a position of strength.

"If they use rockets to hit the [forward operating base] we can't shoot back because they were within 500 meters of the village. If they shoot at us and drop their weapon in the process we can't shoot back," said Spc. Charles Brooks, 26, a U.S. Army medic with 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, in Zabul province.

Word had come down the morning Brooks spoke to this reporter that watch towers surrounding the base were going to be dismantled because Afghan village elders, some sympathetic to the Taliban, complained they were invading their village privacy. "We have to take down our towers because it offends them and now the Taliban can set up mortars and we can't see them," Brooks added, with disgust.

In June, Gen. David Petraeus, who took command here after the self-inflicted demise of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, told Congress that he was weighing a major change with rules for engaging enemy fighters in Afghanistan. That has not yet happened, troops say. Soldiers and Marines continue to be held back by what they believe to be strict rules imposed by the government of President Hamid Karzai designed with one objective: limit Afghan civilian casualties.

"I don't think the military leaders, president or anybody really cares about what we're going through," said Spc. Matthew "Silver" Fuhrken, 25, from Watertown, N.Y. "I'm sick of people trying to cover up what's really going on over here. They won't let us do our job. I don't care if they try to kick me out for what I'm saying -- war is war and this is no war. I don't know what this is."

To the soldiers and Marines risking their lives in Afghanistan, restrictions on their ability to aggressively attack the Taliban have led to another enormous frustration stalking morale: the fear that the Karzai government, with the prodding of the administration of President Obama, will negotiate a peace with the Taliban that wastes all the sacrifices by the U.S. here. Those fears intensified when news reached the enlisted ranks that the Karzai government, with the backing of senior Obama officials, was entering a new round of negotiations with the Taliban.

"If we walk away, cut a deal with the Taliban, desert the people who needed us most, then this war was pointless," said Pvt. Jeffrey Ward, with 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, who is stationed at Forward Operating Base Bullard in southern Afghanistan.

"Everyone dies for their own reasons but it's sad to think that our friends, the troops, have given their lives for something we're not going to see through."

Other soldiers agreed. They said they feared few officials in the Pentagon understand the reality on the ground.

From the front lines, the U.S. backing of the Karzai government, widely seen as riddled with corruption by the Afghans living in local villages, has given the Taliban a position of power in villages while undercutting U.S. moral authority.

Corrupt government officials have made "it impossible for us to trust anyone," said elder Sha Barar, from the village of Sha Joy. The people of that village and many others profess fear of the Taliban, and recount tales of brutality and wanton killings by the Taliban and their sympathizers. But they don't see the Karzai government as a positive force in their lives.

Karzai said that talks need to continue with the Taliban "at a fixed address and with a more open agenda to tell us how to bring peace to Afghanistan and Pakistan."

But U.S. troops and Marines interviewed during the past month in Afghanistan question what negotiations would really mean, to both them and the Afghan people. And they almost universally believe that negotiating would be a mistake before achieving decisive gains they believe are attainable once oppressive rules of engagement are relaxed.

"What does it mean if we give in to the Taliban? They are the enemy," Brooks said. "This place is going to be a safe haven for terrorists again. The government doesn't care about the sacrifices already made. As far as the mission goes, I want to see these kids go to school and have a future but not at the expense of my friends -- not anymore."

Sara A. Carter is The Washington Examiner's national security correspondent. She can be reached at scarter@washingtonexaminer.com.

Clinton and the GOP and the roll they played in the crisis of 2008 -2011

2010-10-18T18:45:00.000-07:00

Clinton Pressure to Promote Affordable Housing Led to Mortgage Meltdown

by Hans Bader
September 16, 2008 @ 10:50 am

The current mortgage crisis came about in large part because of Clinton-era government pressure on lenders to make risky loans in order to “make homeownership more affordable for lower-income Americans and those with a poor credit history,” the DC Examiner notes today. “Those steps encouraged riskier mortgage lending by minimizing the role of credit histories in lending decisions, loosening required debt-to-equity ratios to allow borrowers to make small or even no down payments at all, and encouraging lenders the use of floating or adjustable interest-rate mortgages, including those with low ‘teasers.’”

The liberal Village Voice previously chronicled how Clinton Administration housing secretary Andrew Cuomo helped spawn the mortgage crisis through his pressure on lenders to promote affordable housing and diversity. “Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments.

He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded â€˜kickbacks’ to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.” (See Wayne Barrett, “Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie: How the Youngest Housing and Urban Development Secretary in History Gave Birth to the Mortgage Crisis,” Village Voice, August 5, 2008).

Investors Business Daily had an editorial yesterday about how another federal “law designed to encourage minority homeownership” also contributed to the mortgage crisis by pressuring lenders to make risky loans.

The Bush Administration also deserves criticism: although some Bush Administration officials “meekly advocated reforms” of the risky practices engaged in by the government-backed mortgage giants (the “Government-Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, which received $10 billion annually in taxpayer subsidies even before their current bailout), Fannie’s well-paid lobbyists easily defeated those reform proposals by paying off liberal lawmakers and bullying critics. And the Administration did nothing to end federal obsessions with “affordable housing” and “diversity” that encouraged lenders to make risky loans to borrowers with little savings.

Why Liberals Don't Get the Tea Party Movement - WSJ Editorial

2010-10-16T15:28:00.000-07:00

Our universities haven't taught much political history for decades. No wonder so many progressives have disdain for the principles that animated the Federalist debates.

By PETER BERKOWITZ

Highly educated people say the darndest things, these days particularly about the tea party movement. Vast numbers of other highly educated people read and hear these dubious pronouncements, smile knowingly, and nod their heads in agreement. University educations and advanced degrees notwithstanding, they lack a basic understanding of the contours of American constitutional government.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman got the ball rolling in April 2009, just ahead of the first major tea party rallies on April 15, by falsely asserting that "the tea parties don't represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They're AstroTurf (fake grass-roots) events."

Having learned next to nothing in the intervening 16 months about one of the most spectacular grass-roots political movements in American history, fellow Times columnist Frank Rich denied in August of this year that the tea party movement is "spontaneous and leaderless," insisting instead that it is the instrument of billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch.

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne criticized the tea party as unrepresentative in two ways. It "constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers," he asserted last month. This was a step back from his rash prediction five months before that since it "represents a relatively small minority of Americans on the right end of politics," the tea party movement "will not determine the outcome of the 2010 elections."

In February, Mr. Dionne argued that the tea party was also unrepresentative because it reflected a political principle that lost out at America's founding and deserves to be permanently retired: "Anti-statism, a profound mistrust of power in Washington goes all the way back to the Anti-Federalists who opposed the Constitution itself because they saw it concentrating too much authority in the central government."

Mr. Dionne follows in the footsteps of progressive historian Richard Hofstadter, whose influential 1964 book "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" argued that Barry Goldwater and his supporters displayed a "style of mind" characterized by "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy." Similarly, the "suspicion of government" that the tea party movement shares with the Anti-Federalists, Mr. Dionne maintained, "is not amenable to 'facts'" because "opposing government is a matter of principle."

To be sure, the tea party sports its share of clowns, kooks and creeps. And some of its favored candidates and loudest voices have made embarrassing statements and embraced reckless policies. This, however, does not distinguish the tea party movement from the competition.

Born in response to President Obama's self-declared desire to fundamentally change America, the tea party movement has made its central goals abundantly clear. Activists and the sizeable swath of voters who sympathize with them want to reduce the massively ballooning national debt, cut runaway federal spending, keep taxes in check, reinvigorate the economy, and block the expansion of the state into citizens' lives.

In other words, the tea party movement is inspired above all by a commitment to limited government. And that does distinguish it from the competition.

But far from reflecting a recurring pathology in our politics or the losing side in the debate over the Constitution, the devotion to limited government lies at the heart of the American experiment in liberal democracy. The Federalists who won ratification of the Constitution—most notably Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay—shared with their Anti-Federalist opponents the view that centralized power presented a formidable and abiding threat to the individual liberty that it was government's primary task to secure. They differed over how to deal with the threat.

The Anti-Federalists—including Patrick Henry, Samuel Bryan and Robert Yates—adopted the traditional view that liberty depended on state power exercised in close proximity to the people. The Federalists replied in Federalist 9 that the "science of politics," which had "received great improvement," showed that in an extended and properly structured republic liberty could be achieved and with greater security and stability.

This improved science of politics was based not on abstract theory or complex calculations but on what is referred to in Federalist 51 as "inventions of prudence" grounded in the reading of classic and modern authors, broad experience of self-government in the colonies, and acute observations about the imperfections and finer points of human nature. It taught that constitutionally enumerated powers; a separation, balance, and blending of these powers among branches of the federal government; and a distribution of powers between the federal and state governments would operate to leave substantial authority to the states while both preventing abuses by the federal government and providing it with the energy needed to defend liberty.

Whether members have read much or little of The Federalist, the tea party movement's focus on keeping government within bounds and answerable to the people reflects the devotion to limited government embodied in the Constitution. One reason this is poorly understood among our best educated citizens is that American politics is poorly taught at the universities that credentialed them. Indeed, even as the tea party calls for the return to constitutional basics, our universities neglect The Federalist and its classic exposition of constitutional principles.

For the better part of two generations, the best political science departments have concentrated on equipping students with skills for performing empirical research and teaching mathematical models that purport to describe political affairs. Meanwhile, leading history departments have emphasized social history and issues of race, class and gender at the expense of constitutional history, diplomatic history and military history.

Neither professors of political science nor of history have made a priority of instructing students in the founding principles of American constitutional government. Nor have they taught about the contest between the progressive vision and the conservative vision that has characterized American politics since Woodrow Wilson (then a political scientist at Princeton) helped launch the progressive movement in the late 19th century by arguing that the Constitution had become obsolete and hindered democratic reform.

Then there are the proliferating classes in practical ethics and moral reasoning. These expose students to hypothetical conundrums involving individuals in surreal circumstances suddenly facing life and death decisions, or present contentious public policy questions and explore the range of respectable progressive opinions for resolving them. Such exercises may sharpen students' ability to argue. They do little to teach about self-government.

They certainly do not teach about the virtues, or qualities of mind and character, that enable citizens to shoulder their political responsibilities and prosper amidst the opportunities and uncertainties that freedom brings. Nor do they teach the beliefs, practices and associations that foster such virtues and those that endanger them.

Those who doubt that the failings of higher education in America have political consequences need only reflect on the quality of progressive commentary on the tea party movement. Our universities have produced two generations of highly educated people who seem unable to recognize the spirited defense of fundamental American principles, even when it takes place for more than a year and a half right in front of their noses.

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

NY Times Editorial on the Chamber and Obama's charges of foreign money.

2010-10-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

Topic of Foreign Money in U.S. Races Hits Hustings

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: October 8, 2010

WASHINGTON — Ever since he raised the issue in his State of the Union speech nearly nine months ago — prompting head-shaking by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. of the Supreme Court — President Obama has been warning about the danger of foreign money creeping into elections as a result of the court’s landmark campaign finance ruling.

In two campaign stops Thursday, Mr. Obama invoked what he portrayed as a specific new example, citing a blog posting from a liberal advocacy group as he teed off on a longtime adversary, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, over its political spending.

“Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations,” Mr. Obama said. “So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections.”

But a closer examination shows that there is little evidence that what the chamber does in collecting overseas dues is improper or even unusual, according to both liberal and conservative election-law lawyers and campaign finance documents.

In fact, the controversy over the Chamber of Commerce financing may say more about the Washington spin cycle — where an Internet blog posting can be quickly picked up by like-minded groups and become political fodder for the president himself — than it does about the vagaries of campaign finance.

Organizations from both ends of the political spectrum, from liberal ones like the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the Sierra Club to conservative groups like the National Rifle Association, have international affiliations and get money from foreign entities while at the same time pushing political causes in the United States.

In addition, more than 160 political action committees active in campaigning have been set up by corporations that are based overseas, including military contractors like B.A.E. Systems and pharmaceutical giants like GlaxoSmithKline, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research service.

Such groups, which collectively have spent hundreds of millions dollars on political causes to advance their agenda, are required by law to ensure that any foreign money they receive is isolated and not used to finance political activities, which would violate a longstanding federal ban. The Chamber of Commerce says it has a vigorous process for ensuring that does not happen, and no evidence has emerged to suggest that is untrue.

Richard L. Hasen, an election-law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said there were legitimate questions about whether foreign money could be making its way into campaigns, particularly because many groups are not required to disclose their donors. But he added, “I’ve seen no proof of the chamber funneling a penny of foreign money into U.S. elections.”

The specter of foreign money entering American campaigns has been a potent political issue over the years. President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign gave rise to evidence of illegal contributions from overseas.

Mr. Obama himself faced accusations by conservative opponents in his 2008 campaign that his large online fund-raising efforts may have generated contributions from foreign nationals barred from contributing. No allegations were substantiated.

“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” said Bruce Josten, chief lobbyist for the chamber, as he recalled the 2008 allegations.

He accused Mr. Obama of using “smear tactics” in bringing up the issue at two separate campaign stops this week in order to deflect attention from his own record as the midterm elections approach. “This is a White House that seems to like to pick an enemy and use it as a foil to advance an agenda,” he said.

Mr. Josten said the Chamber of Commerce had 115 foreign member affiliates in 108 countries, who pay a total of less than $100,000 in membership dues that go into its general fund.

The group’s total budget is more than $200 million, and Mr. Josten said the group had safeguards to segregate the small fraction generated overseas from other accounts to comply with federal law and avoid bleeding into political spending.

The group has already spent more than $25 million on an aggressive political ad campaign in attacking policies it considers anti-business and the candidates, overwhelmingly Democrats, who have supported those policies. The chamber expects to spend at least $50 million by the November elections.

“We don’t raise money from foreign corporation for our public affairs activities,” Mr. Josten said. “I am absolutely certain we are in full compliance with all federal campaign laws.”

The issue of the chamber’s funding first gained notice this week when ThinkProgress, a blog affiliated with the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal advocacy group, posted a lengthy piece with the headline “Exclusive: Foreign-Funded ‘U.S.’ Chamber of Commerce Running Partisan Attack Ads.”

The piece detailed the chamber’s overseas memberships, but it provided no evidence that the money generated overseas had been used in United States campaigns. Still, liberal groups like MoveOn.org pounced on the allegations, resulting in protests at the chamber’s offices, a demand for a federal investigation by Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, and ultimately the remarks by Mr. Obama himself.

White House officials acknowledged Friday that they had no specific evidence to indicate that the chamber had used money from foreign entities to finance political attack ads.

“The president was not suggesting any illegality,” Bob Bauer, the White House counsel, said. Instead, he said Mr. Obama’s reference to the chamber was meant to draw attention to the inadequacies of campaign disclosure laws in allowing groups to spend large amounts of money on politics without disclosing their donors.

White House officials called on the chamber to go beyond current disclosure laws and establish that no foreign money has been used in its political campaigns. “They can put this to rest,” said Joshua Earnest, a White House spokesman. “They have the keys to the file cabinet.”

But a number of Republicans said Friday that they thought Mr. Obama’s attack was unfair.

“It’s really just unfortunate and irresponsible rhetoric from the White House,” said Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a Republican campaign finance lawyer. “These charges are just not real.”

A History of Network Neutrality

2010-10-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

Broadband's Impact, FCC, Net Neutrality October 11th, 2010

Rahul Gaitonde, Deputy Editor, BroadbandBreakfast.com

WASHINGTON, October 11, 2010 – The issue of network neutrality is one that has become an increasing problem around the globe. In the United States, the problem became more of an issue with the rise of cable and DSL service.

With the decreasing level of competition among internet service providers and the increasing number of violations of network neutrality, the issue has garnered increasing importance. While Congress has attempted to protect consumers, it has failed. Private industry firms has already begun to adopt rules that they claim will protect consumers but avoid critical issues. The Federal Communications Commission has supported the issue but has yet to formally codify any protections.

In order to understand the importance of network neutrality one must first understand its principles. While there are many variants of the definition, they all agree on some basic points: users should be able to connect to any device they wish. They should be able to run any legal application they want to. They should not have their service degraded based upon usage.

Columbia University Professor Tim Wu, who wrote about the subject in 2003, has said, “Network neutrality is best defined as a network design principle. The idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally.” For consumers, this means that they are able to use their internet connection for any purpose they see fit.

There have been two major violations of these principles. In 2004, Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-IP (voice over internet protocol, or VoIP) service Vonage over its DSL connections. In 2007, Comcast was accused of slowing down the cable connections of customers who used BitTorrent, a file-sharing application.

The Madison River violation was resolved when the FCC intervened, and Madison River agreed to pay a fine and stop blocking access. The FCC consent decree states :“On February 11, 2005, the bureau issued a Letter of Inquiry (LOI) to Madison River, initiating an investigation. Specifically, the bureau inquired about allegations that Madison River was blocking ports used for VoIP applications, thereby affecting customers’ ability to use VoIP through one or more VoIP service providers.” In order to avoid future costs associated with litigation Madison River settled and paid the fine.

The Comcast case went to the courts when the ISP claimed that the FCC did not have the authority to stop them from blocking BitTorrent. In April 2010, the Comcast case went before the D.C. Circuit Court which held that the FCC exceeded its authority in pursuing Comcast.

Shortly after this ruling, the FCC issued a notice of inquiry in May that proposed changing the classification of broadband from a Title I service to a more heavily-regulated Title II service, but it also included a new proposal which the FCC chairman called the Third Way. This Third Way was a hybrid of Title I and Title II regulations. The Third Way gained a support from a wide range of stakeholders including some ISPs and consumer protection advocates. Democratic Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Tom Udall of New Mexico all sent letters in support.

In June, a group of ISPs and technology companies announced the creation of the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG or TAG) which would help advise and mitigate the problems of network neutrality. The organization had a wide membership including AT&T, Cisco Systems, Comcast, DISH Network, EchoStar, Google, Intel, Level 3 Communications, Microsoft, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. While many saw this as a positive step, the organization has yet to propose any solutions.

While the notice of inquiry was receiving responses, news that the FCC began to hold closed-door meetings with major stakeholders on the issue of network neutrality created an uproar. Many consumer protection advocates opposed these secret meetings, and they were stopped.

In August, Google and Verizon announced a joint policy statement in which they outlined their own network neutrality principles. Their statement said in part: “Users should choose what content, applications, or devices they use, since openness has been central to the explosive innovation that has made the internet a transformative medium.” They however specifically left out wireless since they said it was too new of a market to require consumer protection. Their omission sparked an outcry from consumers groups and others who said consumers’ increasing use of wireless devices showed that wireless is the wave of the future and should be watched closely to better benefit consumers.

During this period, many called upon Congress to act, claiming that the FCC did not have the necessary authority to reclassify broadband even if it wanted to. The commissioner supported this and stated numerous times that he was willing to work with Congress to find a suitable solution. Rep. Henry Waxman, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, proposed legislation that would codify many of the FCC’s principles and also included language which would require ISPs to disclose accurate speed and pricing information. The Waxman bill also included wireless along with wireline which was further than the FCC’s original plans. Waxman was unable to get the bill passed through his committee due to Republican opposition.

The future of network neutrality remains unclear. However, whatever direction it takes in the policy, business or consumer arenas will affect the growth of the internet for years to come.

Christian compassion requires the truth about harms of homosexuality

2010-10-12T21:41:00.000-07:00

By Tony Perkins

The media has recently been filled with reports of several recent suicides by teenagers who are reported to have been victims of "anti-gay" bullying. Some homosexual activist groups lay blame at the feet of conservative Christians who teach that homosexual conduct is wrong, as well as pro-family groups such as Family Research Council which oppose elements of the homosexual political agenda, such as same-sex "marriage."

The Christians and pro-family leaders I know are unanimous in believing that no person, especially a child, should be subjected to verbal or physical harassment or violence--whether because of their sexuality, their religious beliefs, or for any other reason. Such bullying violates the Christian's obligation to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and receives no support from the pro-family political movement.

Where bullying has occurred, the blame should be placed on the bullies themselves--not on organizations within society who clearly oppose bullying. I suspect that few, if any, such bullies are people who regularly attend church, and I would not be surprised if most of the "bullies" did not have the positive benefit of both an active mom and dad in their lives. Religious faith and a return to traditional family values are more likely to be a solution to the problem of bullying than a cause.

However, homosexual activist groups like GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) are exploiting these tragedies to push their agenda of demanding not only tolerance of homosexual individuals, but active affirmation of homosexual conduct and their efforts to redefine the family.

There is an abundance of evidence that homosexuals experience higher rates of mental health problems in general, including depression. However, there is no empirical evidence to link this with society's general disapproval of homosexual conduct. In fact, evidence from the Netherlands would seem to suggest the opposite, because even in that most "gay-friendly" country on earth, research has shown homosexuals to have much higher mental health problems.

Within the homosexual population, such mental health problems are higher among those who "come out of the closet" at an earlier age. Yet GLSEN's approach is to encourage teens to "come out" when younger and younger--thus likely exacerbating the very problem they claim they want to solve.

Some homosexuals may recognize intuitively that their same-sex attractions are abnormal--yet they have been told by the homosexual movement, and their allies in the media and the educational establishment, that they are "born gay" and can never change. This--and not society's disapproval--may create a sense of despair that can lead to suicide.

The most important thing that Christians can offer to homosexuals is hope--hope that their sins, just like the sins of anyone else, can be forgiven and their lives transformed by the power of Jesus Christ. Jesus' command to love our neighbor clearly embraces the homosexual as well. But love does not require affirming every behavior in which an individual engages. For a parent to encourage a child to indulge their every desire would not be love, but its very opposite. The same is true of self-destructive behaviors in which adults may engage--whether it is the excessive use of alcohol, drugs, reckless driving, or heterosexual activity outside of marriage.

Since homosexual conduct is associated with higher rates of sexual promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, mental illness, substance abuse, and domestic violence, it too qualifies as a behavior that is harmful to the people who engage in it and to society at large. It is not loving to encourage someone to indulge in such activities, no matter how much sensual pleasure they may derive from them. It is more loving to help them overcome them. This is why, in the public policy arena, we will continue to oppose any policy or action that would celebrate or affirm homosexual conduct.

The model for a Christian response to homosexuals may be the story of the woman caught in adultery. When the crowd responded with violence, by gathering to stone her, Jesus said, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." Knowing that they were all sinners, the crowd melted away. But Jesus' words to the woman he saved were crucial. He did not say, "Go, for you have not sinned." Instead, he said, "Go and sin no more."

There is no contradiction between Christian compassion and a call for holy living. But the life which is holy (from a spiritual perspective) or even healthy (from a secular perspective) requires abstinence from homosexual conduct. We would do no one a favor if we ceased to proclaim that truth.

Tony Perkins is President of the Family Research Council.

from recovery.gov

2010-10-09T15:00:00.000-07:00

Text View of Map Data
Source: As Reported by Recipients

Zip

Recovery Funded Jobs Reported by Recipients

April 1 - June 30, 2010

750,045

Job calculations are based on the number of hours worked in a quarter and funded under the Recovery Act.

Find Recovery Jobs

Job Search

Contracts

Link to:

FedBizOpps.Gov

Grants

Link to:

Grants.Gov

Loans

Link to:

GovLoans.Gov

SBA.Gov

Overview of Funding

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 distributes the $787 billion as follows:

Source for Distributing and Reporting: US Treasury, Federal Agency Financial and Activity Reports
As of 9/30/2010
Text View of Overview of Funding

Pentagon Plan: Buying Books to Keep Secrets

2010-09-10T11:29:00.000-07:00

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: September 9, 2010

- Permalink

WASHINGTON — Defense Department officials are negotiating to buy and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of an Afghan war memoir they say contains intelligence secrets, according to two people familiar with the dispute.

Enlarge This Image

Jamie Rose for The New York Times

Anthony A. Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, wrote “Operation Dark Heart.”

Enlarge This Image

Cover of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer.

The publication of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony A. Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, has divided military security reviewers and highlighted the uncertainty about what information poses a genuine threat to security.

Disputes between the government and former intelligence officials over whether their books reveal too much have become commonplace. But veterans of the publishing industry and intelligence agencies could not recall another case in which an agency sought to dispose of a book that had already been printed.

Army reviewers suggested various changes and redactions and signed off on the edited book in January, saying they had “no objection on legal or operational security grounds,” and the publisher, St. Martin’s Press, planned for an Aug. 31 release.

But when the Defense Intelligence Agency saw the manuscript in July and showed it to other spy agencies, reviewers identified more than 200 passages suspected of containing classified information, setting off a scramble by Pentagon officials to stop the book’s distribution.

Release of the book “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to national security,” Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess Jr., the D.I.A. director, wrote in an Aug. 6 memorandum. He said reviewers at the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and United States Special Operations Command had all found classified information in the manuscript.

The disputed material includes the names of American intelligence officers who served with Colonel Shaffer and his accounts of clandestine operations, including N.S.A. eavesdropping operations, according to two people briefed on the Pentagon’s objections. They asked not to be named because the negotiations are supposed to be confidential.

By the time the D.I.A. objected, however, several dozen copies of the unexpurgated 299-page book had already been sent out to potential reviewers, and some copies found their way to online booksellers. The New York Times was able to buy a copy online late last week.

The dispute arises as the Obama administration is cracking down on disclosures of classified information to the news media, pursuing three such prosecutions to date, the first since 1985. Separately, the military has charged an Army private with giving tens of thousands of classified documents to the organization WikiLeaks.

Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the case showed that judgments on what is classified “are often arbitrary and highly subjective.” But in this case, he said, it is possible that D.I.A. reviewers were more knowledgeable than their Army counterparts about damage that disclosures might do.

Mr. Aftergood, who generally advocates open government but has been sharply critical of WikiLeaks, said the government’s move to stop distribution of the book would draw greater attention to the copies already in circulation.

“It’s an awkward set of circumstances,” he said. “The government is going to make this book famous.”

Colonel Shaffer, his lawyer, Mark S. Zaid, and lawyers for the publisher are near an agreement with the Pentagon over what will be taken out of a new edition to be published Sept. 24, with the allegedly classified passages blacked out. But the two sides are still discussing whether the Pentagon will buy the first printing, currently in the publisher’s Virginia warehouse, and at what price.

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Bob Mehal, said the book had not received a proper “information security review” initially and that officials were working “closely and cooperatively” with the publisher and author to resolve the problem.

In a brief telephone interview this week before Army superiors asked him not to comment further, Colonel Shaffer said he did not think it contained damaging disclosures. “I worked very closely with the Army to make sure there was nothing that would harm national security,” he said.

“Operation Dark Heart” is a breezily written, first-person account of Colonel Shaffer’s five months in Afghanistan in 2003, when he was a civilian D.I.A. officer based at Bagram Air Base near Kabul.

He worked undercover, using the pseudonym “Christopher Stryker,” and was awarded a Bronze Star for his work. Col. Jose R. Olivero of the Army, who recommended Colonel Shaffer for the honor, wrote that he had shown “skill, leadership, tireless efforts and unfailing dedication.”

But after 2003, Colonel Shaffer was involved in a dispute over his claim that an intelligence program he worked for, code named Able Danger, had identified Mohammed Atta as a terrorist threat before he became the lead hijacker in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. An investigation by the Defense Department’s inspector general later concluded that the claim was inaccurate.

In 2004, after Colonel Shaffer returned from another brief assignment in Afghanistan, D.I.A. officials charged him with violating several agency rules, including claiming excessive expenses for a trip to Fort Dix, N.J. Despite the D.I.A. accusations, which resulted in the revocation of his security clearance, the Army promoted him to lieutenant colonel from major in 2005. He was effectively fired in 2006 by D.I.A., which said he could not stay on without a clearance, and now works at a Washington research group, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies.

Even before the Able Danger imbroglio, Colonel Shaffer admits in his book, he was seen by some at D.I.A. as a risk-taking troublemaker. He describes participating in a midday raid on a telephone facility in Kabul to download the names and numbers of all the cellphone users in the country and proposing an intelligence operation to cross into Pakistan and spy on a Taliban headquarters.

In much of the book, he portrays himself as a brash officer who sometimes ran into resistance from timid superiors.

“A lot of folks at D.I.A. felt that Tony Shaffer thought he could do whatever the hell he wanted,” Mr. Shaffer writes about himself. “They never understood that I was doing things that were so secret that only a few knew about them.”

The book includes some details that typically might be excised during a required security review, including the names of C.I.A. and N.S.A. officers in Afghanistan, casual references to “N.S.A.’s voice surveillance system,” and American spying forays into Pakistan.

David Wise, author of many books on intelligence, said the episode recalled the C.I.A.’s response to the planned publication of his 1964 book on the agency, “The Invisible Government.” John A. McCone, then the agency’s director, met with him and his co-author, Thomas B. Ross, to ask for changes, but they were not government employees and refused the request.

The agency studied the possibility of buying the first printing, Mr. Wise said, but the publisher of Random House, Bennett Cerf, told the agency he would be glad to sell all the copies to the agency — and then print more.

“Their clumsy efforts to suppress the book only made it a bestseller,” Mr. Wise said.

Icecap melt-down estimates revised lower.

2010-09-08T09:53:00.000-07:00

Climate: New study slashes estimate of icecap loss

PARIS (AFP) - – Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists.

In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually.

Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise in sea levels, a pace that compares dramatically with 1.8mm (0.07 inches) annually in the early 1960s.

But, according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, the ice estimates fail to correct for a phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment.

This is the term for the rebounding of Earth's crust following the last Ice Age.

Glaciers that were kilometers (miles) thick smothered Antarctica and most of the northern hemisphere for tens of thousands of years, compressing the elastic crust beneath it with their titanic weight.

When the glaciers started to retreat around 20,000 years ago, the crust started to rebound, and is still doing so.

This movement, though, is not just a single vertical motion, lead researcher Bert Vermeersen of Delft Technical University, in the Netherlands, said in phone interview with AFP.

"A good analogy is that it's like a mattress after someone has been sleeping on it all night," he said.

The weight of the sleeper creates a hollow as the material compress downwards and outwards. When the person gets up, the mattress starts to recover. This movement, seen in close-up, is both upwards and downwards and also sideways, too, as the decompressed material expands outwards and pulls on adjacent stuffing.

Often ignored or considered a minor factor in previous research, post-glacial rebound turns out to be important, says the paper.

It looks at tiny changes in Earth's gravitational field provided by two satellites since 2002, from GPS measurements on land, and from figures for sea floor pressure.

These revealed, among other things, that southern Greenland is in fact subsiding, as the crust beneath it is pulled by the post-glacial rebound from northern America.

With glacial isostatic adjustment modelled in, the loss from Greenland is put at 104 gigatonnes, plus or minus 23 gigatonnes, and 64 gigatonnes from West Antarctica, plus or minus 32 gigatonnes.

These variations show a large degree of uncertainty, but Vermeersen believes that even so a clearer picture is emerging on icesheet loss.

"The corrections for deformations of the Earth's crust have a considerable effect on the amount of ice that is estimated to be melting each year," said Vermeersen, whose team worked with NASA's Jet Propulsation Laboratory and the Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

"We have concluded that the Greenland and West Antarctica ice caps are melting at approximately half the speed originally predicted."

If the figures for overall sea level rise are accurate, icesheet loss would be contribute about 30 percent, rather than roughly half, to the total, said Vermeersen. The rest would come mainly from thermal expansion, meaning that as the sea warms it rises.

The debate is important because of fears that Earth's biggest reservoirs of ice, capable of driving up ocean levels by many metres (feet) if lost, are melting much faster than global-warming scenarios had predicted.

In 2007, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted oceans would rise by 18-59 centimeters (7.2 and 23.6 inches) by 2100, a figure that at its upper range means vulnerable coastal cities would become swamped within a few generations.

The increase would depend on warming estimated at between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius (1.98-11.52 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, the IPCC said. It stressed, though, the uncertainties about icesheet loss.

Why Obama does not fear the polls and re-election. Think OFA.

2010-05-07T19:21:00.000-07:00

The Party of Obama

What are the president’s
grass roots good for?

By Charles Homans

n David Plouffe’s campaign memoir, The Audacity to Win, Barack Obama’s victory happens the way explosions happen in the more lyrical action movies: there is a moment of silent suspended animation, and then the roar. Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, meets the new president in his suite at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago, just as Obama gets off the phone with President Bush, who has called to congratulate him. “I suddenly noticed how quiet the room seemed,” Plouffe writes. “An outside observer might not have immediately known if we had won or lost the election.” As Obama and his entourage pile into the motorcade to greet the crowds in Grant Park, Plouffe is still checking the western states’ returns on his BlackBerry. It doesn’t quite seem to have happened.

The principal architects of Obama’s win were Plouffe and campaign adviser David Axelrod, and if Axelrod’s handiwork—the shaping of the candidate and his message—was visible at the time, it took somewhat longer for outsiders to grasp the full scope of Plouffe’s accomplishment, the technical workings of the campaign itself. Plouffe was press shy throughout the campaign, and came across in the few interviews he did give as almost studiously bland, like a particularly talented manager of a suburban Best Buy franchise. (He’s even from Delaware.) But Plouffe’s low-key act wasn’t entirely incidental; the structure he built benefited from appearing not to have an architect.

The Obama campaign, Plouffe insists in nearly every chapter of his book, was built by, and for, the people. And to a real degree, it was. By November 4, Obama for America had 2 million active volunteers and nearly 4 million small donors, more than any previous Democratic campaign. With my.barackobama.com, the campaign’s online hub, organizers could make more effective use of its grass roots than any candidate ever had. Local volunteers could organize and plan events without anyone in Chicago lifting a finger. By Election Day, the campaign’s e-mail list of self-selected Obama supporters numbered 13 million addresses. With the click of a mouse, Plouffe could reach a group of true believers the size of the population of Illinois.

That list—by the time Obama took office in January, what was going to happen to it was the million-dollar question. It was a tool that no previous president had had—except that, legally, the White House couldn’t have it. So after some deliberation, Obama and his organizers decided to move the whole shop into the Democratic National Committee, renaming it Organizing for America and tweaking its mission: the organization that helped Obama win as a candidate would now be tasked with helping him succeed as a president. The speculation commenced immediately. In a profile of Plouffe—the man who “Changed Politics Forever”—in Esquire, Lisa Taddeo wrote, “If Obama has a policy initiative he wants to push, or a message he needs to disseminate, or a gaffe he wants to bat down, he will call David Plouffe and Plouffe will unleash the many-million-mouthed dog, just as he did all across America for these past two years.”

That was the idea, anyway. But then Plouffe, whose daughter was born two days after the election, went into private consulting. The rest of the campaign’s inner circle mostly moved into administration jobs, leaving OFA in the hands of their thirtysomething protégés. And the organization that was supposed to change everything has—well, not changed much at all.

It isn’t that OFA hasn’t done anything—it’s that it’s hard to say whether what it’s done has actually mattered. When Congress debated the stimulus package, OFA asked its members to host house parties and collect stories—ultimately some 31,000 of them—about how the economic crisis was affecting them. The bill passed, but you would’ve had to squint awfully hard to see OFA’s fingerprints on the final product. As the climate and health care bills advanced through the House, OFA sent out informational e-mails to its members and ran a television commercial urging viewers to call their congressmen and ask them to support health care reform—until the congressmen (who weren’t named in the ads) complained to the White House. OFA obliged, and the next round of ads praised lawmakers who were doing the right thing; “Even if they aren’t 100 percent on board, we’re asking our folks to thank our members,” OFA Executive Director Mitch Stewart told the New York Times. In August, as conservative tea partiers descended on lawmakers’ town halls, OFA belatedly mobilized members to provide moral support at Democrats’ events, but shied away from Republicans’.

As summer faded into fall, OFA began to receive harsh reviews from progressives, who argued that an organization that could have redefined liberal activism for a new generation had instead been squandered on what was essentially a prolonged PR mission. In an August 30 Washington Post op-ed titled “We Have the Hope. Now Where’s the Audacity?” veteran organizers Peter Dreier and Marshall Ganz contended that OFA had “failed to keep up” with Obama’s legislative agenda, and chastised the group for spending time on community service projects rather than bare-knuckle pursuit of policy victories. That criticism, in particular, must have stung; Ganz, a onetime acolyte of César Chávez and a legendary theorist of community organizing, had mentored members of OFA’s brain trust, and conducted training workshops for Obama’s volunteers during the campaign.

Finally, on October 20, OFA made its first big move: a national “day of action” on health care reform, on which the organization’s members made—or pledged to make; the numbers OFA has released don’t distinguish—more than 315,000 calls to members of Congress, asking lawmakers to pass Obama’s health care plan. But once again, the callers’ pitch was short on specifics—you had to dig deep on OFA’s Web site to find any mention of the public health insurance option that liberals (and, according to CBS News polling, most Americans) wanted to see included in the bill. And the volume of calls, while impressive, fell short of overwhelming; with less than 3 million members, MoveOn was able to make that many calls to voters on a single afternoon in early 2004.

As the health care debate continued through November, MoveOn ran hard-hitting ad campaigns for the public option in Arkansas and Maine, the homes, respectively, of Blue Dog Democratic and moderate Republican lawmakers who would determine the fate of the bill in the Senate. OFA, meanwhile, sent out an e-mail plea to its members asking them for help raising $500,000 to counteract the “misinformation” Sarah Palin was spreading about Obama’s health care plan on her book tour. Whatever OFA did with such donations, it had no noticeable impact on public perception of the president’s handling of health care, which barely budged (downward) in the polls in the weeks after OFA kicked into high gear.

Could OFA have done a better job of helping pass these bills? Maybe, but it’s hard to see how. On health care, for instance, the thing that OFA could theoretically do—drum up public support for the general idea of health care reform—didn’t really need doing; reform of one sort or another remained consistently popular throughout last year’s debate. What mattered was which bill—there were five of them up for debate in the Senate—and the White House, whose agenda rests almost entirely in the hands of a few moderate Senate Democrats, was naturally not interested in riling any of the authors. Rather than enlisting OFA to push for a specific piece of legislation, Obama used his speech to the organization’s volunteers on October 20 to try to convince them that any of the bills would constitute a victory.

In short, the problem isn’t that OFA is screwing up—it’s that the Obama White House has been using Plouffe’s invention for the wrong task. An organization of this nature is a marginal-at-best tool for advancing specific legislation. But with the right cues from its patron in the White House, OFA could be a powerful tool for expanding and remaking the Democratic Party—a mission that would, in the end, do far more to further Obama’s agenda than a few hundred thousand phone calls.

n the days after the election, Obama’s campaign operatives met in Chicago to mull the question of what to do with the machine they had spent the last two years assembling. There were essentially two options. One, espoused by Steve Hildebrand, Plouffe’s deputy, was to turn it into a stand-alone liberal pressure group: an organization that would, like a supercharged MoveOn, take the raucous activist spirit that had animated the field troops of the Obama campaign and funnel it into a powerful policy movement. “I thought it would be important to really explore the idea,” Marshall Ganz, who wasn’t involved in the discussions but had stayed close with some of Obama’s organizers, told me recently. “There was an opportunity to make something that would transcend all the issue groups and be an advocacy organization for a more progressive agenda.” The most sweeping changes in the domestic policy landscape, he pointed out, had all resulted from the combined efforts of powerful outside pressure groups and sympathetic leaders on the inside. FDR had had the populist armies of Huey P. Long, Lyndon Johnson had the civil rights movement, even the Republican revolution had Grover Norquist and Jerry Falwell.

The problem with this idea was that Obama’s supporters, whatever their ideological affinities, were mostly united by their affection for the president and their desire to win a pivotal election. As a candidate, Obama was hardly a liberal firebrand—his vision of government had been moderately left of center and mildly technocratic, more JFK than FDR. And in any case, transplanting the heart of a movement is a tricky thing—the civil rights movement didn’t evolve out of Johnson-Humphrey ’64, after all, and even Martin Luther King Jr. stumbled when he tried to extend his activist franchise to include poverty and housing rights.

David Plouffe had something else in mind: integrating OFA into the Democratic National Committee. This idea had its own outside champion in Howard Dean, who weighed in during the proceedings. As chairman of the DNC, Dean had pursued a “fifty-state strategy”: eschewing the traditional Democratic practice of pouring money and people into competitive states and ignoring everyone else, Dean allocated a smattering of resources to parties in every single state, even deeply red ones where Democrats were about as popular as the Inner Mongolian People’s Party. It was controversial among Democrats—Dean and Rahm Emanuel had once nearly come to blows over it—but the Obama campaign’s similar approach in 2008 had vindicated Dean’s vision. Now Dean saw the opportunity to use OFA to double down on the bet he had made, beefing up state Democratic outposts with Obama’s grassroots supporters. “This is kind of a fusion of the old way of doing things, which is the president putting his stamp on the party,” Dean told me, “and the fifty-state strategy, which is the new way of doing things.”

But there was a problem with that, too: a lot of OFA’s members didn’t necessarily think of themselves as Democrats. This had been an issue during the campaign, when Obama’s advisers were weighing the pros and cons of taking public financing during the general election. For legal reasons, Plouffe realized, such a move would mean asking Obama’s army of volunteers and small donors, many of them independents and some Republicans, to work for and contribute to the DNC—something he wasn’t sure they would do. “If these people were forced to volunteer through the Democratic Party, no matter how clearly the mission was stated, we feared we could lose up to 20 percent of our volunteers,” Plouffe writes in The Audacity to Win.

In the end, Obama and OFA’s organizers split the difference. They took Dean’s advice, rebranding OFA as a “project of the DNC.” But, wary of spooking Obama’s non-Democratic voters, OFA has since self-consciously maintained the rhetoric of an independent grassroots organization. Unable to embrace either specific policy goals, the way an independent organization like MoveOn can, or overt party-building objectives, OFA instead sticks with ferocious consistency to a succinct and basically meaningless mission: “to support the president’s agenda.” This charter gives OFA a set of endlessly moveable goalposts, and lends an odd meta quality to the group’s activism: it measures success less in actual legislative accomplishments than in the simple fact of its continued existence.

But this vagueness has an end date: this year’s congressional elections, when Democrats, facing reelection battles in what will inevitably be a tough race for the party, will ask the most promising electoral operation in the Democratic orbit for help. When I called an in-state staffer for a Democratic congressman facing reelection in a conservative district this year, he spoke—on the condition of anonymity—with a wary respect for OFA’s work so far. But, he told me, “when I ask their state director what they’re doing, he says they’re ‘supporting the president’s agenda.’ I ask what the hell that actually means, and he can’t tell me. I asked how they were going to play in 2010, and he had no response. And that has me worried, because you have these activists—we need their help. We need them to make phone calls for us.”

e had good reason to be nervous: while the size of the grassroots operation that propelled Obama into office in 2008 was unprecedented, its in-it-but-not-of-it relationship with the Democratic Party wasn’t. As Northwestern University political scientist Daniel J. Galvin argues in his fine new book Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush, for the past half century Democratic presidents have taken a similar attitude toward the DNC, using it to advance their presidential agenda rather than building for the future. This was partly because for years, the future looked to be shaping up okay without their help. Since FDR, Democrats and Republicans alike had assumed that Democratic hegemony was the natural state of affairs in American politics—which, for a time, was true. When elections rolled around, Democratic presidential candidates could outsource the nuts and bolts of grassroots campaigning to urban political machines, labor unions, and civic associations; campaign structures like the DNC were mostly a technical necessity. Democrats had also inherited the early-twentieth-century Progressive movement’s squeamishness about political parties, which the Progressives had viewed as inherently corrupt and inferior to the strong leadership of a president.

As a result, Galvin writes, Democratic presidents tended to hoard the resources and popular support they received during their campaigns, sequestering what grass roots they had in quasi-independent organizations while using the party’s own war chest and staff to push their agendas. John F. Kennedy had his own “project” at the DNC, called Operation Support, with the OFA-like aim of using the president’s celebrity appeal to prod along his legislative priorities, enlisting volunteers to write letters to the editor of their local newspapers, talk to their neighbors about Kennedy’s policies, and browbeat recalcitrant members of what was at the time a still-heterodox Democratic coalition in Congress. Jimmy Carter maintained the Carter Network, an independent organization fueled by the zeal of 150,000 of his grassroots supporters. In 1993, Bill Clinton used the DNC as a staging ground for his National Health Care Campaign, which tasked veterans of his 1992 presidential campaign with using the DNC’s human and infrastructural resources—along with $3 million of the organization’s money—to build grassroots support for health care reform.

As far as agenda advancement went, these efforts ranged from benign to worthless. Worse, they sucked resources and attention away from what the Democratic campaign committees should have been doing: planning for the next election. (Both Carter’s and Clinton’s first DNC chairs saw this, and quit in frustration early in their respective tenures.) The deficit first became apparent in 1980, when the increasingly venal and discredited Democratic caucus’s hold on Congress began to loosen and Democrats found that the institutions the party had counted on for electoral support, the unions and urban political machines, had mostly withered away. After pillaging the party in his first term and suffering the consequences in the 1994 midterms, Clinton tried to rebuild it in his second. But a few years of feverish fund-raising were hardly enough to reverse decades of decline, and both Al Gore and John Kerry went into their respective elections outmatched by the well-oiled Republican campaign machine.

y then, the Republicans had spent half a century pursuing a wholly opposite strategy, with much better results. Like the Democrats, they had long presumed the GOP to be the minority party—and they hoped to change that. To that end, they had consistently reinvested the momentum of their campaigns into the Republican Party itself.

The process began with Dwight D. Eisenhower, who took office in 1953 under what were, in many ways, Obama-like circumstances. Harry Truman was shuffling out of office in a funk of unpopularity. Ike had beaten Adlai Stevenson decisively the previous November, with 83 percent of the electoral vote and the strongest Republican showing in the South in years. His party controlled both the House and the Senate. These were wafer-thin majorities, however, and there was little reason to believe they would last. The GOP itself was near broke and balkanized, with liberals and moderates fending off a burgeoning conservative insurgency energized by Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade, then in its third year.

Eisenhower, who counted himself among the moderates, was not a particularly Republican Republican. His campaign had been viewed as a largely nonpartisan one; he was a general and a national hero, a man who Walter Lippmann, writing in the Washington Post, believed “in the style of George Washington was above party and above faction.” His youthful supporters had organized for him largely through Citizens for Eisenhower, his own grassroots organization that stood outside the GOP. In his first year he often fought congressional Republicans over legislation, and appealed to their Democratic rivals for the stray votes he needed.

But Eisenhower had few illusions about the limits of this nonpartisanship. At the end of the day, he knew, American government was a two-party system, and he was in one of them. If he poured his own star power and resources into rebuilding the GOP, Eisenhower reasoned, he could remake it as an extension of himself, and one that could continue promoting his legislative aims beyond the end of his own presidency. He urged his grassroots supporters—the Citizens for Eisenhower groups that had powered his ’52 campaign—to become card-carrying Republicans. “I pointed out that if we focused the whole effort on me as an individual then it would follow that in the event of my disability or death, the whole effort would collapse,” he wrote in his diary after one conversation with a Citizens leader. “This, I pointed out, was absurd. The idea is far bigger than any one individual.”

Eisenhower wasn’t able to keep the Republican Party moderate, but he did lay the foundation for its eventual dominance. His successors continued his work. Nixon, while not exactly the greatest poster boy for the Republican brand by the end of his presidency, directed efforts to strengthen local parties and build on regional victories. Gerald Ford, acutely aware of the GOP’s post-Nixon vulnerability, fund-raised obsessively for the party, but as an appointed president he had no base of campaign supporters to rally to the cause. He succeeded, however, in building a powerful operation to bequeath to a president who did: Ronald Reagan.

Reagan ran the most grassroots-driven Republican campaign since Eisenhower’s, and once in office he set about using it to expand the party’s infrastructure. He filled the RNC’s finance chair with Richard DeVos, the billionaire cofounder of the Amway Corporation, who brought with him the business model that had made his fortune, and worked to convert the party faithful’s social networks into fund-raising tools for the GOP. Republicans were now urged to bring their friends and family into the party ranks.

Reagan’s 1984 reelection marked the greatest expansion in the Republican electorate to date, snagging 64 percent of young and first-time voters. But there was one problem: like the voters who would elect Barack Obama twenty-four years later, Reagan’s constituency contained many voters who weren’t yet members of his party. There were unaffiliated young people, independents, evangelicals who had been skittish about electoral politics, and conservative Democrats who saw the mainstream of their party shifting away from them.

In Reagan’s view, this was the mother of all opportunities. If he could bring supporters into the Republican fold, he realized, he could do what Eisenhower had aspired to do: rebrand the Republican Party as a vehicle for his own ideology for a generation to come. Reagan threw himself into the project in his second term, urging his unaffiliated voters to think of the Republican Party as their party, and to participate in the electoral process at every level as Republicans. At a 1985 White House reception for ex-Democratic politicians who had switched parties, he spoke of his own 1961 party conversion, and commended his guests for undertaking “an act of courage and an act of conscience … You’re not isolated cases,” he told them. “You’re part of a great national change, a national movement that is sweeping the electorate.”

Reagan’s effort succeeded spectacularly. During his second term, the Republicans forged what would be a three-decades-and-counting alliance with evangelicals, broke the Democrats’ hold on local offices in the South, and created a class of suburban Republican voters that would carry the Republican class of 1994 and George W. Bush to their later victories. For the first time since FDR, Republicans began to think of themselves not as a permanent minority but as an emerging majority. But the greatest victory was Reagan’s own—by bringing his own constituents into the party, he was able to realize Eisenhower’s dream of an electoral machine that perpetuated his agenda after the end of his own career.

alvin’s account of all this is disciplined and scholarly, with accordingly focused conclusions. Still, the lessons are hard to miss. One is that trying to push an agenda from the White House, using the organs of the party, is usually a mug’s game. Sweeping legislative accomplishments like the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act were the result of an ambitious president, a disciplined Congress, and outside movements pushing for concrete policy goals; if the second and third components aren’t in place, there’s not much the president can do to gin them up, regardless of the size of his base. What he can do, and do effectively, is play the long ball: a popular president is the best branding device a political party can hope for, and a political party is the best means the president has for extending the brand.

Barack Obama is the first Democratic president of the modern era to take office with a Republican’s sense of vulnerability, the knowledge that his party’s hold on power, however robust it may seem, may prove tenuous. And the novel design of the Obama campaign—its largely self-sustaining, volunteer- and small-donor-driven structure—provides him with a rare opportunity as president. Unlike previous cash-strapped Democrats, who arrived in the Oval Office with onerous campaign debts and had to make hard choices about how to spend what money they had, Obama can afford to invest in both his own projects and the party’s. Obama won the 2008 election with an unheard-of $18 million left over—money that, according to a Politico analysis of Federal Elections Commission filings, has allowed the DNC to not only add scores of OFA staffers to its payroll but also bring the DNC war chest to within $7 million of the historically better-funded RNC’s. OFA now has paid staffers in all but one state (Oklahoma), most of them embedded with local Democratic parties and well networked with local ex-Obama campaign volunteers. All but one of the half-dozen state-party chairs I talked to spoke of this apparatus in hopeful terms.

But so far, Obama has failed to do what Reagan and Eisenhower did: he has asked his supporters to rally around Democratic causes, but he has balked at asking them to become Democrats. He has asked his loyal enthusiasts to take ownership of a presidency, but not of a party. The distinction matters—you can support a presidency, but you can’t really participate in it. OFA has called on its members to contribute money, make phone calls on a handful of issues, even knock on doors for Democratic candidates running in off-year elections in November (desultory get-out-the-vote efforts which, unsurprisingly, turned out only dribs and drabs of Obama’s electorate for John Corzine and Creigh Deeds in their failed gubernatorial campaigns in New Jersey and Virginia). But it hasn’t asked them to, for instance, work on behalf of primary candidates who reflect their values, shape local party platforms, or run for office themselves. It’s why, for all of its fervent activity, OFA looks less like a movement than a cheering section.

Bringing his supporters into the party would run counter to the image Obama projected during and after the campaign, that of a man who wants to transcend the old political categories, an inclination that seems deeply rooted in his political nature. And an invitation to join the party is also necessarily an invitation to shake it up—the same Democrats seeking to enlist OFA’s volunteer army this year could find themselves facing its members in a primary battle first. But these are necessary risks for Obama and his partisans to take. Success in politics is incremental, and a party, as Eisenhower observed, is a vastly more durable thing than a presidency—it can carry out a mission above the churn of individual flesh that moves under its banner. Belief in it is what made Reaganism not just a fad but a political paradigm, one that filled the vacuum left behind by a receding Democratic establishment. In the wake of the Republican collapses of 2006 and 2008, Obama has a similar opportunity.

If the idea of turning Obama’s dewy-eyed idealists into nut-cutting party politicos seems cynical, it shouldn’t. Reagan’s bid to pull his voters into the Republican Party was simply a pragmatic acknowledgment of how the system worked, and a bid to prove that it could work. Obama, a man whose move into politics stemmed from an early dissatisfaction with the limits of working outside the system, surely understands this as well as anyone. What remains to be seen is whether he can explain it to his most loyal followers.

A Renewable Electricity Standard: What It Will Really Cost Americans - from Heritage

2010-05-06T11:10:00.000-07:00

Published on May 5, 2010 by David Kreutzer, Ph.D. , Karen Campbell, Ph.D. , William Beach , Ben Lieberman and Nicolas Loris

Abstract: Renewable energy—harnessing the power of the wind and the sun—sounds wonderful until confronted with the facts. While wind and sun are indeed free, turning their energy into consumer-accessible electricity is not. Nor is it easy. Wind power must be used at the moment the wind is blowing— which it generally does not do during blazing-hot summer days, the peak of electricity use. Both solar and wind power require costly installations and transmission mechanisms. Instead of saving money for Americans, renewable energy sources are much more likely to spike their utility bills. Nevertheless, Congress is considering a mandate for a nationwide renewable electricity standard (RES). Heritage Foundation energy policy experts explain why an imposed national RES would be bad for families, bad for business, and bad for the economy.

Congress is once again considering major energy legislation, focused largely on promotion of energy sources that produce few or no greenhouse gases. This current concentration on promoting so-called renewable energy sources assumes that congressional action now will lead to such significant growth in renewable energy sources that the use of carbon-based energy will subside, thus reducing the expansion of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other global warming gases.

Congress’s effort to expand renewable energy sources starts from a relatively meager production base. Nearly half of America’s electricity is generated from coal, with natural gas and nuclear energy adding about 20 percent each.[1] Most of the rest is provided by renewable sources, primarily hydroelectric energy at 6 percent. Non-hydro renewables like wind and solar energy and biomass total only 3 percent.

For many years, federal energy and environmental policy has nudged production of some electricity sources over others, either through “sticks,” such as costly air quality regulations targeting coal, or through “carrots” like tax credits and subsidies for wind. Proposed global warming legislation would alter the electricity mix to an unprecedented degree by putting a price on emissions of greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion. Coal is the most carbon-intensive energy source, and any stringent cap-and-trade provisions would significantly curtail its use in favor of other sources in the decades ahead. Such legislative measures, however, are very costly,[2] and the prospects for passage in 2010 are uncertain.

Congress is also considering achieving similar but less ambitious goals via a renewable electricity standard (RES). Twenty-nine states have versions of an RES, but Washington is considering a nationwide standard. Under this mandate, a growing percentage of electricity would have to be produced by approved renewable energy sources. Much of the RES would be met with increased energy generation from wind turbines.

It stands to reason that an RES would raise electricity prices. After all, if electricity created by wind and other renewables were cost competitive, consumers would use more of it without a federal law to force consumption. Recent experience with the mandate for renewable fuels like corn ethanol also suggests significant cost increases as well as technical shortcomings.[3]

While proponents argue that wind is free, harnessing it into useful electricity certainly is not. However, the question of how much an RES will affect electric bills does not have a straightforward answer.

Perhaps easiest to calculate is the direct cost of purchasing, installing, and operating the increasing number of wind turbines needed to meet the RES. A bit murkier are questions about the costs of the necessary additional transmission lines to deliver the electricity from where it is generated— the most desirable sites for wind are often remote mountain ridges or sparsely populated plains—to the cities where it is needed.[4] The economics of an RES is further complicated by the legal and administrative objections to establishing appropriate sites for wind farms and transmission lines, which already are quite common and would only grow with an RES.[5]

It is particularly difficult to take into account the substantial costs created by the intermittent and unreliable nature of wind. Simply put, the wind does not always blow, and it is difficult to predict and impossible to control. Given the need for electricity 24 hours a day seven days a week and the reality that times of peak demand—hot summer days—are precisely when the wind is usually still, a mandate for increased wind-generated energy is also a mandate for increased non-wind backup systems for balancing wind fluctuations.[6] In effect, increased wind power cannot simply be added to the existing grid without transforming the grid in ways that introduce both significant costs and operational inefficiencies.

These shortcomings will not be overcome through increases in scale. Connecting a large number of widely dispersed wind farms to the grid will not smooth the overall supply enough to make balancing unnecessary. Though variability can be reduced, a recent analysis states, “These results do not indicate that wind power can provide substantial baseload power simply through interconnecting wind plants.”[7]

There are federal studies of the costs of an RES that conclude that it would add no more than a few percent to electric rates,[8] but these studies do not take the full cost of wind and other renewables into account. This Center for Data Analysis (CDA) Report provides such a comprehensive economic analysis.

CDA analysis projects that an RES as outlined below would:

Raise electricity prices by 36 percent for households and 60 percent for industry;
Cut national income (GDP) by $5.2 trillion between 2012 and 2035;
Cut national income by $2,400 per year for a family of four;
Reduce employment by more than 1,000,000 jobs; and
Add more than $10,000 to a family of four’s share of the national debt by 2035.

Comparing the Costs of Wind and Coal

The flow of wind is erratic and uncertain, which means that so is the power generated from wind. This unreliable nature is especially problematic when wind is used to generate utility-scale electricity for the power grid.

Keeping line quality, primarily voltage and frequency, within the necessarily close tolerances requires constant monitoring of demand and the constant monitoring and adjustment of supply.[9] Even under the best of circumstances, these adjustments require a certain fraction of power to be delivered from generators that can be ramped up and down rapidly. For the most part, this easily ramped electricity comes from natural-gas fired turbines that are relatively expensive to operate compared to a baseload source such as coal, nuclear, or natural-gas combined-cycle power plants.

Though coal, nuclear, and gas combined-cycle power plants are much more sluggish in response to changing demand, their dependability is very high. Indeed, their output can be matched to sizeable, expected changes in demand when given sufficient lead time. Wind energy plants do not have this ability by themselves, so direct comparisons of wind costs per kilowatt hour to coal or gas costs are misleading.

Further, location choices for fossil and nuclear-fueled power plants have much greater latitude than those for wind turbines, which, like hydropower plants, must be located where the natural resource is best suited—not necessarily close to where the power is used. This feature adds additional transmission costs to wind energy.

With nuclear power not considered to be renewable, the least-cost renewable source for electricity is onshore wind. In an early-release version of its “Annual Energy Outlook 2010,” the Energy Information Administration (EIA) lists the levelized costs of various sources of electricity projected for 2016 (in 2008 dollars).[10]

The EIA levelized costs per megawatt hour are $78.10 for conventional coal power,[11] $149.30 for onshore wind power, $191.10 for offshore wind power, $396.10 for photo-voltaic solar power, $256.60 for thermal solar power, and $139.50 for power generated by natural-gas conventional turbines.

Even though the $149.30 for the cheapest renewable power is already well above the cost of conventional power sources, it does not include any adjustment for reliability or additional transmission costs.

Wind cannot be turned on and off to match changes in demand. There are no feasible energy storage options for most wind farms. So, unlike power from conventional sources, wind power must be used when the wind is actually blowing.

Geography puts wind at another disadvantage. To keep the cost of wind power as low as possible, it is necessary to locate the wind farms in areas with the strongest and steadiest winds. As is the case with solar power, many of the best areas for wind power are located far from the major population centers. This requires construction of new, high-capacity transmission lines. A review of transmission costs suggests a median cost of $15 per megawatt hour.[12]

The dependability problem is more complicated. Power-grid management requires constant and instantaneous balancing of supply and demand. Sophisticated analysis and long experience guide grid operators as they schedule the various sources of generation. Nevertheless, there will still be unanticipated changes in both supply and demand; further, there can be variations in demand that cannot easily be matched by the most efficient conventional sources (coal, nuclear power, and integrated combined-cycle gas) even if they are anticipated. The most common energy source for balancing these very short-run changes is natural gas turbines, which are less efficient than coal, nuclear power, or natural gas combined cycle.

Wind, like solar energy, is not a dispatchable power source; that is, it cannot be turned on at will. As a result, increasing dependence on wind adds variability and uncertainty to the power grid that must be offset by quick-ramping power sources like natural gas turbines to maintain a relatively constant flow of electricity.

This increased reliance on natural gas turbines comes from two sides of the balancing equation. When there is an unanticipated decline in wind generation, or when the decline is anticipated but is for too short a period to balance with coal, natural gas turbines fill the gap. On the other hand, when wind generation is low compared to capacity, there is need for power sources that can be quickly ramped down. In this case, there would be additional need for natural gas generation so that unanticipated increases in wind power can be accommodated by rapidly cutting power from the natural gas turbines.

Gas turbines are not a renewable energy source, so swapping a megawatt hour of wind power for a megawatt hour of coal power also requires swapping power from natural gas turbines for additional coal. Since coal power is cheaper than power generated by natural gas turbines, the difference must be added to the cost differential between wind and coal.

There is little research directly addressing the question of how much additional gas-turbine power will be needed. The theoretical limits are zero (all fluctuations are perfectly anticipated and balanced with the cheapest coal power) and the inverse of the capacity factor, which would imply three megawatt hours of additional gas-turbine power for every megawatt hour of wind power.[13] In theory, this could add as much as $179 per megawatt hour to the cost of wind power.

A study done for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicates that the spinning reserves must be increased about 0.2 megawatt capacity for each megawatt of wind power.[14] “Spinning reserves” describes the power plants that must be warmed up and synchronized with the grid so that they can be brought online more quickly. They use fuel, but not as much as when they are called upon to supply power to the grid.

This measure is somewhat different from the necessary increase in actual gas-turbine electricity production, but it is very much related to the uncertainty and variability problem. Though 0.2 megawatt per hour may be a significant underestimate for the amount of additional gas-turbine power, it is the factor employed for this analysis. That is, for every megawatt hour of wind that is substituted for coal power, an additional 0.2 megawatt hour of gas-turbine power must be substituted for coal as well. Using this ratio adds $12 per megawatt hour instead of the theoretical maximum of $179 per megawatt hour to the cost of wind power.

After making these adjustments for transmission costs and additional gas-turbine generation, the cost of an additional megawatt of onshore wind power is $177 per hour. This is 126 percent above the cost of a megawatt of coal power per hour.

Put another way, the electric bill for a typical family of four would be $189 per month if it was powered entirely by coal, but it would rise to $340 per month if it was supplied entirely by onshore wind power.[15]

Since onshore wind is the least expensive of the renewable electricity sources (ruling out conventional hydro and nuclear power), any plan that uses the more expensive renewable sources—such as offshore wind ($218 per megawatt hour); thermal solar power ($284 per megawatt hour); or photovoltaic solar power ($423 per megawatt hour)— would have even greater costs. As the mandated renewable-fraction of electric power rises, so does the average cost of electricity.

Chart 1 shows the hypothetical family-of-four electric bill for different sources of electric power. Though former Vice President Al Gore has suggested moving the country entirely to renewable electricity generation in 10 years, few if any legislative proposals seek complete dependence on renewables. Nevertheless, Chart 1 illustrates the large cost differences between the cheaper conventional energy sources and various renewable energy sources.

With a standard that requires only a fraction of electricity to be generated by renewable sources, the adverse impact on electric bills will be diluted as the higher cost of renewable electricity is averaged with the lower-cost conventional power. However, as the relative amount of wind power grows, the impact on electricity prices grows as well.

A Renewable Standard

Renewable energy standards typically stipulate a timeline of minimum levels of electricity that must be met by approved renewable sources. Usually, these minimum levels are expressed as a fraction of total electricity generation for each year.

For the purposes of this study, the RES starts at 3 percent for 2012 and rises by 1.5 percent per year. This profile mandates a minimum of 15 percent renewable electricity by 2020, a minimum of 22.5 percent by 2025, and a minimum of 37.5 percent by 2035, which is the end year for this analysis.

CDA analysts assume that the higher costs of the renewable power are averaged in with the lower costs of conventionally generated power so that within each of the sectors (industrial, commercial, and residential), all customers pay the same price per kilowatt hour. Further, for the purposes of this analysis, prices do not vary from one part of the country to another. In reality, an RES will have differential impacts from one market to another. In general, smoothing adverse impacts in economic analysis reduces overall costs. So although the analysis may blur the pattern of economic distress, it is unlikely to have overestimated it.

Economic Responses

When the cost of any commodity rises, actors in the economy respond in uncounted ways to offset the impact. Though specific responses cannot be predicted, general patterns and magnitudes can be estimated from past responses to price changes.

Electricity prices have risen and fallen over the decades, and businesses and households have adjusted. The adjustments can be as routine as parents reminding their children to turn off the lights or as entrepreneurial as an engineer setting up a firm to develop new technology. When electricity prices rise, heat-pump salespeople are more likely to emphasize the advantages of their more efficient (and more expensive) models; producers of electronic controls will see a greater market for programmable thermostats; people will turn down the thermostat and be more inclined to buy Energy Star-rated appliances.[16] These impacts and more are reflected in the complex system of equations that have been estimated for the macroeconomic model and are reflected in the coefficients of the smaller energy model employed to estimate initial electricity price effects.[17]

Even when averaging the cost of the mandated renewable electricity with the cheaper conventionally sourced electricity, the price rises are noticeable. For residential consumers, the price increases start small (because the renewable mandate starts at only 3 percent), but by 2035, the price rises 36 percent above the baseline price. Forced to pay higher prices, households cut electricity use by 19 percent. Even after these consumption cutbacks, a family of four will see its annual electric bill rise by over $300.

Because the cost of generation is a bigger fraction of the industrial electricity price than of the residential electricity prices, the RES causes a bigger percentage increase in industrial electricity prices than in residential electricity prices. The price increase is 5 percent in 2012 and rises to 60 percent in 2035. The higher prices force cutbacks in consumption that reach 23 percent below baseline in 2035. The net impact in 2035 is that industrial users will pay out 21 percent more dollars for 23 percent less electricity than if there were no RES.

Electric power is one of the most critical inputs to a modern economy. Thus, it is no surprise that forcing the cost of electricity to rise dampens economic activity. The cost increase for electricity can be viewed as a particularly damaging energy tax, because a renewable mandate, unlike the case of a normal tax, provides no revenue to at least partially offset the higher cost. By way of comparison, the highway use tax on gasoline raises the price of gasoline, but it also generates revenues for building and maintaining roads and bridges.[18] On the other hand, a renewable energy standard raises costs in the form of less efficient production, which provides no economic benefit.

As an analogy, suppose a farmer is able to produce 10,000 bushels of wheat per year with the aid of irrigation from a nearby river. If a regulation prohibiting irrigation cuts production to 9,000 bushels, then, to the farmer, this is the same as a 10 percent tax. However, with an actual tax, the government would have 1,000 bushels to distribute, while with the prohibition on irrigation, those bushels simply disappear—providing benefits to no one.

The Macroeconomic Impacts

Analysis of cap-and-trade bills that impose economy-wide reductions in CO2 emissions shows overall losses to the economy of $5 trillion to nearly $10 trillion between 2012 and 2035.[19] Though renewable energy standards apply only to the power sector (electricity generation), they provide less flexibility in meeting the goals than does cap-and-trade and can lead to losses of the same order of magnitude as the more comprehensive cap-and-trade regulations.

The broadest measure of a country’s economic activity is gross domestic product (GDP). As the mandated level of renewable energy rises over time, so does the cost of electricity and so do the losses imposed on the economy. Compared to the no-RES baseline, GDP drops by $50 billion in 2012. The annual losses increase to $197 billion by 2020, $300 billion in 2030, and more than $325 billion in 2035. Summing up the impacts for 2012 to 2035 yields a total loss of $5.2 trillion. All of these impacts are adjusted for inflation to 2010 dollars. On a family-of-four basis, this lost income averages over $2,400 per year.

When the economy is shocked by the higher electricity prices, employment declines. In the first year (2012), employment drops 330,000 jobs below the baseline level. The battle between market adjustments and ever-rising electricity prices leads to periods of growing job losses interspersed with periods of relative stability. However, by 2017, employment falls 1,000,000 jobs below the baseline and at times is more than 1.2 million jobs below the baseline. On average, there will be 1,000,000 fewer people working with the RES in effect than if there were no RES.

Falling incomes and rising unemployment squeeze government finances from two sides: Tax revenues fall, and expenditures on such things as unemployment insurance rise. These two responses cause federal deficits to grow even faster than they are already projected to grow. The RES will add over $10,000 to a family of four’s share of the national debt by 2035.

Conclusion

Mandating that an ever-increasing fraction of electrical power must be generated from renewable sources will raise the cost of electricity, force inconvenient and painful cuts in electricity use, and damage the economy. Households will see their electricity prices rise 36 percent by 2035, while industrial users will see their electricity prices rise 60 percent even after adjusting for inflation.

Since virtually every product and service depends on electricity to some extent, these price increases have pervasive impacts. Compared to projected levels without the RES, economic activity falls by $5.2 trillion, which is an inflation-adjusted average annual loss of $218 billion, or more than $2,400 per family of four each year.

Declining economic activity is bad for employment. Implementing the RES cuts jobs. Compared to baseline projections (that is, without the RES), employment averages 1,000,000 jobs below the baseline projection.

Though the source of wind and solar energy is free, power delivered from these sources is very expensive. For now at least, onshore wind is the cheapest renewable energy source that can be scaled in significant fashion. But scaling up wind power simply lays bare the costly nature of harnessing wind and magnifies the economic losses. A renewable electricity standard is not a path to the new economy, but an example of the stale old thinking that will hobble the already damaged economy with job-killing cost increases.

—David W. Kreutzer, Ph.D., is Research Fellow in Energy Economics and Climate Change in the Center for Data Analysis; Karen A. Campbell, Ph.D., is Policy Analyst in Macroeconomics in the Center for Data Analysis; William W. Beach is Director of the Center for Data Analysis; Ben Lieberman is Senior Policy Analyst in Energy and the Environment in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies; and Nicolas D. Loris is a Research Assistant in the Roe Institute at The Heritage Foundation.

Appendix

Methodology

As described in the section “Comparing the Costs of Wind and Coal,” CDA analysts calculated the increase in the cost of wind power per megawatt hour. This cost is then translated to that for 1 percent of base-year power production. This 1 percent cost is multiplied by the RES percent for each year, and an average price increase is calculated from that. The price increases are then passed on to the macroeconomic model.

Macroeconomic Simulation Overview

Heritage analysts used the IHS Global Insight long-term macroeconomic model of the U.S. economy to estimate the effects of the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733) on the overall economy.[20] The simulation was implemented by changing variables in the macroeconomic model according to the changes predicted by a microeconomic model of the energy sector maintained by the CDA (see above). In order to estimate the policy impact, two main pieces needed to be simulated: price effects and energy efficiency effects.

The energy model estimated the change in energy production prices and retail energy prices that would result from changing the production mix from renewable energy and traditional energy sources. These prices were matched with their corresponding variables in the macroeconomic model to estimate the effect that these price changes would have on the economy overall.

The energy model projects changes in fuel efficiency and changes in total highway fuel consumption. Corresponding macro-model variables were changed. The effect of these changes helps to mitigate some of the total increased consumer expenditure on fuel.

The macroeconomic model does not have specific variables corresponding to alternative renewable fuel sources as does the CDA energy model. The macroeconomic simulation takes into account the increase in domestic alternative fuel source supply by adjusting the variable amount of residual energy demand that affects the amount of imported energy.

TABLE (PDF)

2010-05-05T22:04:00.000-07:00

How Policies to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions Could Affect Employment

May 5th, 2010 by Douglas Elmendorf

Human activities around the world are producing increasingly larger quantities of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide resulting from the use of fossil fuels and from deforestation. Adopting policies aimed at reducing emissions of green house gases would shift the demand for goods and services away from fossil fuels and products that require substantial amounts of those fuels to make or to use and toward alternative forms of energy and products that require lesser amounts of fossil fuels. Employment patterns would shift to mirror those changes in demand. Changes in employment in specific industries would reflect the amounts of greenhouse gases they emit (through production and use of their output) and the difficulty of reducing their emissions of those gases.

In a brief released this afternoon, CBO has analyzed the research on the effects that policies to reduce green house gases would have on employment and concluded that total employment during the next few decades would be slightly lower than would be the case in the absence of such policies. In particular, job losses in the industries that shrink would lower employment more than job gains in other industries would increase employment, thereby raising the overall unemployment rate. Eventually, however, most workers who lost jobs would find new ones. In the absence of policies to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, changes to the climate also might affect employment; however, this brief does not address such changes because that effect would probably arise after the next few decades, and it has not been studied as carefully by researchers.

Various industries would be affected differently by policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions:

Coal mining would probably see the largest percentage decline in employment. Among fossil fuels—coal, petroleum, and natural gas—coal, when it is burned, produces more greenhouse gases per unit of energy than do the others. Moreover, coal is widely used to generate electricity, and electric utilities have some ability to substitute other sources of energy for coal. A mitigating factor for the coal mining industry could be the development of technologies to capture and store emissions of coal-fired power plants.
Employment in oil and gas extraction and natural gas utilities would also be expected to decline as those fuels became more expensive and the demand for them declined. In percentage terms, the decline would be smaller than that in coal mining, though. Because oil is widely traded on international markets, continued demand for it in other countries that did not implement emission-reduction policies would lessen some of the effects of the decline in domestic demand. Because the use of natural gas to generate electricity produces smaller quantities of greenhouse gases than does the use of coal, demand would probably shift from coal to natural gas in some instances, offsetting some or all of the reduction in demand for natural gas that would otherwise occur.
Mining (for materials other than coal), construction, and the industries that produce metals, nonmetallic mineral products (such as glass), chemicals, and transportation services—all of which use relatively large amounts of energy directly or indirectly—would probably also experience reductions in employment, although the percentage declines would be relatively small.
Over time, employment would increase in industries and sectors (such as services) whose products are less emission-intensive to produce and result in fewer emissions when used. Employment also would increase in industries that manufacture equipment for the production of energy using low-emission technologies such as nuclear, solar, and wind power.

This brief was prepared by Bruce Arnold of CBO’s Microeconomic Studies Division, with contributions from Molly Dahl of CBO’s Health and Human Resources Division.

New Unit to Question Key Terror Suspects

2010-05-05T06:56:00.000-07:00

Move Shifts Interrogation Oversight From the CIA to the White House

By Anne E. Kornblut

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 24, 2009

President Obama has approved the creation of an elite team of interrogators to question key terrorism suspects, part of a broader effort to revamp U.S. policy on detention and interrogation, senior administration officials said Sunday.

Obama signed off late last week on the unit, named the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG. Made up of experts from several intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the interrogation unit will be housed at the FBI but will be overseen by the National Security Council -- shifting the center of gravity away from the CIA and giving the White House direct oversight.

Seeking to signal a clean break from the Bush administration, Obama moved to overhaul interrogation and detention guidelines soon after taking office, including the creation of a task force on interrogation and transfer policies. The task force, whose findings will be made public Monday, recommended the new interrogation unit, along with other changes regarding the way prisoners are transferred overseas.

A separate task force on detainees, which will determine the fate of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and future regulations about the duration and location of detentions of suspected terrorists, has not concluded its work.

Under the new guidelines, interrogators must stay within the parameters of the Army Field Manual when questioning suspects. The task force concluded -- unanimously, officials said -- that "the Army Field Manual provides appropriate guidance on interrogation for military interrogators and that no additional or different guidance was necessary for other agencies," according to a three-page summary of the findings. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters freely.

Using the Army Field Manual means certain techniques in the gray zone between torture and legal questioning -- such as playing loud music or depriving prisoners of sleep -- will not be allowed. Which tactics are acceptable was an issue "looked at thoroughly," one senior official said. Obama had already banned certain severe measures that the Bush administration had permitted, such as waterboarding.

Still, the Obama task force advised that the group develop a "scientific research program for interrogation" to develop new techniques and study existing ones to see whether they work. In essence, the unit would determine a set of best practices on interrogation and share them with other agencies that question prisoners.

The administration is releasing the new guidelines on the day when what it sees as the worst practices of the Bush administration are being given another public airing. New details of prisoner treatment are expected to be included in a long-awaited CIA inspector general's report being unveiled Monday about the spy agency's interrogation program. The report could set off a fresh debate between members of the current administration and the previous one over whether such tactics are necessary to prod detainees into cooperation and, ultimately, keep the country safe.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is also considering whether to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate past interrogation abuses. Obama and White House officials have stated their desire to look ahead on national security; White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said last week that the administration is eager to keep "going forward" and that "a hefty litigation looking backward is not what we believe is in the country's best interest."

But a steady drip of stories about past practices has focused attention on the Bush administration. According to recent reports, the CIA hired the private contracting firm Blackwater USA as part of a program to kill top al-Qaeda operatives.

In addition to the new interrogation unit, the Obama task force recommended that the State Department play a more active role in transferring detainees between countries. When the United States is moving a prisoner to another country, it "may rely on assurances" from the foreign government that the detainee will not be tortured. But the State Department will now be involved in evaluating whether such assurances are sincere, the officials said, and the United States will also seek new ways of monitoring treatment of prisoners in foreign custody. Other recommendations involve prisoner transfers that are classified, the summary said.

Members of the new interrogation unit will have the authority to travel around the world to talk to suspects and will be trained to handle certain high-interest people, such as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Linguists and cultural and interrogation specialists will be assigned to the group and will have "some division of responsibility" regarding types of detainees, a senior administration official said. Most of the group's members will work there full time, although they will have part-time support from the FBI.

Interrogators will not necessarily read detainees their rights before questioning, instead making that decision on a case-by-case basis, officials said. That could affect whether some material can be used in a U.S. court of law. The main purpose of the new unit, however, is to glean intelligence, especially about potential terrorist attacks, the officials said.

"It is not going to, certainly, be automatic in any regard that they are going to be Mirandized," one official said, referring to the practice of reading defendants their rights. "Nor will it be automatic that they are not Mirandized."

The director of the HIG is expected to come from the FBI, and the deputy will be selected from one of the intelligence agencies, such as the CIA. Although past CIA techniques have come under fire in the debate over torture, the agency will continue to play "a very important role," one official said.

The CIA had recommended to the presidential task force that the agency, the FBI and the Defense Department establish a joint interrogation training center so that all agencies understand the rules under which they operate.

Staff writer Peter Finn contributed to this report.

2010-05-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

President Obama: GOP Opposition to Stimulus 'Helped to Create the Tea-Baggers'

May 04, 2010 9:07 AM

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Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations.

In Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” President Obama is quoted in an November 30, 2009, interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year ... That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

Tea Party activists loath the term “tea baggers,” which has emerged in liberal media outlets and elsewhere as a method of mocking the activists and their concerns.

On Saturday, the president delivered a commencement address at the University of Michigan where he said one way “to keep our democracy healthy is to maintain a basic level of civility in our public debate … But we can’t expect to solve our problems if all we do is tear each other down.”

The book also describes many of the president’s top advisers cautioning him against trying to tackle health care reform in the first year because it might be too much to take on at the same time as the recession.

“‘I begged the president not to do this,” White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says.

“They’ll give you a pass on this one,” Vice President Biden told the president.

-jpt

UPDATE: Some liberal bloggers, taking issue with this post, have noted that some Tea Partyers coined and originally embraced the term "tea-baggers." That seems true, and I didn't address the coinage of the term above. But it was fairly soon, by April 2009, when anchors on CNN and MSNBC were employing the term with mocking innuendo, as seen in the links above, and pretty quickly after that Tea Party activists began taking umbrage with it. It's now a common way for some on the left to mock Tea Partyers.

May 4, 2010 | Permalink | from ABC News

Federal Government Outpaces Private Sector in Job Creation - from Gallup

2010-05-04T11:18:00.001-07:00

May 3, 2010

Both see more hiring than firing; the opposite is true in state and local governments

by Frank Newport

PRINCETON, NJ -- Gallup's Job Creation Index for April reveals significantly more hiring within the federal government than in the private sector. Both show a substantially more positive picture than state and local governments, where firing far eclipses hiring.

Gallup's Job Creation Index is based on the percentage of American workers who say their employers are hiring minus the percentage who say their employers are letting workers go. The overall Index value for American workers in April tilts positive, with 27% of workers saying their places of employment are hiring, and 22% saying their employers are letting people go -- resulting in an overall +5 Job Creation Index.

These overall numbers, however, mask significantly different patterns across employment sectors. Based on these reports from workers, the federal government is a growth industry, while employment at state and local governments is shrinking.

By almost a 2-to-1 margin, federal employees say their employer is hiring rather than firing, giving the federal government a relatively robust +18 Job Creation Index for April. (Federal workers make up about 5% of the sample of workers Gallup interviewed in April.) This contrasts with Index values of -28 among state and -26 among local government workers (about 7% and 5% of Gallup's workforce sample, respectively). The Job Creation Index among private-sector and other non-government workers is +9.

Bottom Line

Gallup's Job Creation Index clearly indicates that state and local governments are in the midst of significant downsizing, no doubt reflecting budgetary issues resulting from recessionary pressures on the tax (and other) revenue that funds these governments.

Hiring at the federal level has apparently to date escaped these same fiscal pressures. Indeed, the federal government appears to be significantly outpacing the private sector in terms of the relative number of jobs created.

How long this pattern will continue is difficult to project. The federal budget deficit is likely to become a prominent element of political debate in the months and years ahead, thus opening up the possibility of increased employment pressures at the federal level. At the moment, however, the federal government is one of the brightest spots in the nation's hiring picture.

Survey Methods

Results are based on telephone interviews with 16,171 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted April 1-30, 2010, as part of Gallup Daily tracking. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point. Margins of sampling error for subgroups of the worker population will be proportionately larger.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones (for respondents with a landline telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell phone only).

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

71 MILLION vaccines still unused. HHH says we are still in a pandemic !!

2010-05-04T11:14:00.000-07:00

May 3 from Reuters

* HHS says states should continue to administer vaccine

Regulatory News

* Grassley says he is worried about wasting tax dollars

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON, May 3 (Reuters) - The United States still has 71 million doses of H1N1 swine flu vaccine that have not been used, but it is not yet time to throw them out, the federal government said on Monday.

States and other providers should hang on to the vaccine and continue to offer them to people until drug companies can start distributing seasonal vaccine for the coming influenza season in the autumn, said Health and Human Services Department spokesman Bill Hall.

Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance committee, released a letter on Monday that he sent to HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius asking her how much vaccine was left over and when it would expire.

H1N1 swine flu is still technically causing a pandemic and health officials say anyone who has not been vaccinated should still try, in case it causes a third wave of serious disease.

Health experts consider swine flu likely to join the mix of seasonal flu viruses and it will be included in the seasonal flu vaccine for 2010-2011, which will also contain two other flu strains.

When the the H1N1 virus started spreading in April, HHS and its agencies, along with commercial flu vaccine makers, rushed to formulate and make a vaccine.

Influenza vaccines are made using old and unwieldy methods that require incubating the virus in chicken eggs, and the process always takes months.

Vaccine started rolling out in October and the U.S. eventually ordered 229 million doses from its five licensed makers -- Novartis (NOVN.VX), AstraZeneca (AZN.N) unit MedImmune, Sanofi Aventis (SASY.PA), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK.L) and Australian vaccine maker CSL (CSL.AX).

Sebelius said last month that 162 million doses were produced and distributed, but only 90 million actually got into people's arms or noses.

VARYING SHELF LIFE

"Depending on the vaccine manufacturer, the shelf life of the H1N1 vaccines range from 18 weeks to 18 months, with some due to expire on June 30, 2010," Grassley wrote in his letter to Sebelius.

"I understand that it is not uncommon for some seasonal flu vaccines to be discarded each year, but the H1N1 vaccines were paid for with taxpayer dollars," he added, asking: "How many doses of vaccine are due to expire on June 30, 2010?"

Hall said the department would respond to Grassley.

"There are approximately 71 million doses, held by states, the distributor or the manufacturers, that remain unused, and have varying expiration dates, some as long as early 2011," Hall said by e-mail.

"We have asked states to hold on to any vaccine that has not expired, in case we continue to have regional upticks in disease, another wave, or another early start to the flu season. We are holding onto that vaccine (and advising states and vaccinators to hold onto theirs) until there is sufficient seasonal vaccine (which includes coverage for the 2009 H1N1 virus) to replace it."

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that H1N1 has killed at least 12,000 Americans and put more than 265,000 in hospital. People with chronic diseases such as asthma or diabetes, pregnant women and children were at highest risk.

Grassley also asked Sebelius whether HHS would try to increase distribution of seasonal flu vaccines.

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