Some Greatest Generation

This really upsets me. By a large margin, those over 65 dislike national health care. they've got theirs so screw everybody else.

The Despicable is Working

The retirement of Congressman David Obey, and his reasons for it, discourage me tremendously. The nihilistic, obstructionist strategy and behavior of the Republicans this term is working. The "throw the bums out" temper of the electorate favors the minority party. The more destructively the Republicans behave, the better for them at the polls it seems, at least so far. I hold out hope that as the elections come closer and as the voters pay more attention to what is going on, light will shine on what has been happening and why the government is so gridlocked. Needless to say, I am not holding my breath.

So Much for Libertarianism

This is a great take-down of a bankrupt set of beliefs. It all boils down to "I'm keeping more than I need or can use and screw you." This is just the start of a devastating litany:

Ah, the 1880s. I can hear people getting wistful from here.

A golden age in which people kept all that they earned. Of course, what they earned in the absence of those debilitating minimum wage laws could be nothing more than worthless tokens from the company store. What they earned from twelve hours of work seven days a week could be actually be a bigger debt to the company that sent you into a mine or factory and made you pay for the wear on your tools, the water you drank, the fuel for your lamp, even the blasting powder you used.

Another Way to Argue for Global Climate Change

When you look at it this way, it makes the deniers look even sillier. It is worth relisting here:

The following groups say the danger of human-caused climate change is a ... FACT:

U.S. Agency for International Development
United States Department of Agriculture
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
National Institute of Standards and Technology
United States Department of Defense
United States Department of Energy
National Institutes of Health
United States Department of State
United States Department of Transportation
U.S. Geological Survey
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
National Center for Atmospheric Research
National Aeronautics & Space Administration
National Science Foundation
Smithsonian Institution
International Arctic Science Committee
Arctic Council
African Academy of Sciences
Australian Academy of Sciences
Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts
Academia Brasileira de Ciéncias
Cameroon Academy of Sciences
Royal Society of Canada
Caribbean Academy of Sciences
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Académie des Sciences, France
Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences
Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina of Germany
Indonesian Academy of Sciences
Royal Irish Academy
Accademia nazionale delle scienze of Italy
Indian National Science Academy
Science Council of Japan
Kenya National Academy of Sciences
Madagascar’s National Academy of Arts, Letters and Sciences
Academy of Sciences Malaysia
Academia Mexicana de Ciencias
Nigerian Academy of Sciences
Royal Society of New Zealand
Polish Academy of Sciences
Russian Academy of Sciences
l’Académie des Sciences et Techniques du Sénégal
Academy of Science of South Africa
Sudan Academy of Sciences
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Tanzania Academy of Sciences
Turkish Academy of Sciences
Uganda National Academy of Sciences
The Royal Society of the United Kingdom
National Academy of Sciences, United States
Zambia Academy of Sciences
Zimbabwe Academy of Science
American Academy of Pediatrics
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians
American Astronomical Society
American Chemical Society
American College of Preventive Medicine
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Physics
American Medical Association
American Meteorological Society
American Physical Society
American Public Health Association
American Quaternary Association
American Institute of Biological Sciences
American Society of Agronomy
American Society for Microbiology
American Society of Plant Biologists
American Statistical Association
Association of Ecosystem Research Centers
Botanical Society of America
Crop Science Society of America
Ecological Society of America
Federation of American Scientists
Geological Society of America
National Association of Geoscience Teachers
Natural Science Collections Alliance
Organization of Biological Field Stations
Society of American Foresters
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Society of Systematic Biologists
Soil Science Society of America
Australian Coral Reef Society
Australian Medical Association
Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Engineers Australia
Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies
Geological Society of Australia
British Antarctic Survey
Institute of Biology, UK
Royal Meteorological Society, UK
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
European Federation of Geologists
European Geosciences Union
European Physical Society
European Science Foundation
International Association for Great Lakes Research
International Union for Quaternary Research
International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
World Federation of Public Health Associations
World Health Organization
World Meteorological Organization

The following groups say the danger of human-caused climate change is a ... FRAUD:

American Petroleum Institute
US Chamber of Commerce
National Association of Manufacturers
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Industrial Minerals Association
National Cattlemen’s Beef Association
Great Northern Project Development
Rosebud Mining
Massey Energy
Alpha Natural Resources
Southeastern Legal Foundation
Georgia Agribusiness Council
Georgia Motor Trucking Association
Corn Refiners Association
National Association of Home Builders
National Oilseed Processors Association
National Petrochemical and Refiners Association
Western States Petroleum Association

^{["FACT" organizations come from "Is There a Scientific Consensus on Global Warming?" at SkepticalScience.com. "FRAUD" organizations are petitioners v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act.]}
Something liberals, especially non-scientists among us, often ask for is a place to visit to learn how to respond succinctly to the ever-changing claims of the climate-change deniers, particularly when those deniers are neighbors or somebody encountered at a party. One good spot is Skeptical Science.

It's not Obama's Deficit

Nothing like some facts and a chart to blast away all the BS arguments that pin the exploding budget deficit on Obama and the Democrats.

The events and policies that have pushed deficits to these high levels in the near term, however, were largely outside the new Administration’s control. If not for the tax cuts enacted during the presidency of George W. Bush that Congress did not pay for, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were initiated during that period, and the effects of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression (including the cost of steps necessary to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.
While President Obama inherited a dismal fiscal legacy, that does not diminish his responsibility to propose policies to address our fiscal imbalance and put the weight of his office behind them. Although policymakers should not tighten fiscal policy in the near term while the economy remains fragile, they and the nation at large must come to grips with the nation’s long-term deficit problem. But we should not mistake the causes of our predicament.

 

Bad Idea: Selling Health Insurance across State Lines

Ezra Klein explains very patiently the consequences of  the Republican idea to bring down health-care costs by letting families and businesses buy health insurance across state lines. What a rip it would be. Can't the Repubs ever have a genuinely positive idea that would benefit all or most citizens?

Insurance is currently regulated by states. California, for instance, says all insurers have to cover treatments for lead poisoning, while other states let insurers decide whether to cover lead poisoning, and leaves lead poisoning coverage -- or its absence -- as a surprise for customers who find that they have lead poisoning. Here's a list (pdf) of which states mandate which treatments.
The result of this is that an Alabama plan can't be sold in, say, Oregon, because the Alabama plan doesn't conform to Oregon's regulations. A lot of liberals want that to change: It makes more sense, they say, for insurance to be regulated by the federal government. That way the product is standard across all the states.
Conservatives want the opposite: They want insurers to be able to cluster in one state, follow that state's regulations and sell the product to everyone in the country. In practice, that means we will have a single national insurance standard. But that standard will be decided by South Dakota. Or, if South Dakota doesn't give the insurers the freedom they want, it'll be decided by Wyoming. Or whoever.
This is exactly what happened in the credit card industry, which is regulated in accordance with conservative wishes. In 1980, Bill Janklow, the governor of South Dakota, made a deal with Citibank: If Citibank would move its credit card business to South Dakota, the governor would literally let Citibank write South Dakota's credit card regulations.

Climate Change Links

A commenter to a Bad Science posting pulled together these overpowering links on climate change. Good to have them all in one spot:

1. NASA http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/global_wa ... dbook.html http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Featur ... mingQandA/ http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif (The graph)
2. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climatic Data Center http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html
3. World Meteorological Organization (WMO) http://www.wmo.ch/pages/about/wmo50/e/w ... ing_e.html
4. American Meteorological Society http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2007climatechange.html
5. National Center for Atmospheric Research “How do we know Earth is warming now?” http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/research/climate/now.php
6. Earth System Research Laboratory - Global Monitoring Division “Climate Forcing” http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/about/climate.html
7. University Corporation for Atmospheric Research http://www.ucar.edu/research/climate/warming.jsp
8. Jet Propulsion Laboratory - California Institute of Technology “Global Climate Change” “How do we know?” http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/evidence/
9. American Geophysical Union (world's largest scientific society of Earth and space scientists) “Human Impacts on Climate” http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/policy/clima ... ition.html
10. American Association for the Advancement of Science “The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now” http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/cli ... tement.pdf http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/
11. The United States Energy Information Administration “Greenhouse Gases, Climate Change, and Energy” http://www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochu ... apter1.htm
12. Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Report: Human activity fuels global warming” http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/climate.html
13. California Institute of Technology “How We Know Global Warming is Real” “The science behind human-induced climate change” http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~tapio/paper ... c_2008.pdf
14. Atmospheric Sciences - University of Illinois - Champaign “Evidence continues to mount that human activities are altering the Earth’s climate on a global scale.” http://www.atmos.uiuc.edu/research/01climate.html
15. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution “Global Warming” http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12457
16. The UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre “Climate change - the big picture” http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/p ... index.html http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/guide/
17. The UK’s Royal Society “Climate change controversies: a simple guide” http://royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=6229
18. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Based in Switzerland) “Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report” http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-repor ... yr_spm.pdf
19. Japan Meteorological Agency “Global Warming Projection Vol.7” http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/produc ... dex-e.html
20. The Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society “Our climate has changed substantially.” “Global climate change and global warming are real and observable.” http://www.amos.org.au/publications/cid ... blications
21. Royal Society of New Zealand “The globe is warming because of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.” http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/Site/new ... m0708.aspx
22. National Geographic Magazine http://environment.nationalgeographic.c ... l-warming/
23. Scientific American Magazine http://www.sciam.com/topic.cfm?id=globa ... ate-change

So Much for Reaganites and Small Government

This chart says so much. The Republicans are simply full of crap when they talk balanced budgets. Manifestly, their fiscal recklessness has been obviously the case for their last 20 years in power (Reagan-Bush-Bush).

Data on Income Inequality from the IRS

The story is the same no matter who tells it. The rich have been making out like bandits over the last 30 years.

Following recent analyses confirming that income inequality in the United States has reached record levels, noted tax journalist David Cay Johnston summed up the new data, "The incomes of the top 400 American households soared to a new record high in dollars and as a share of all income in 2007, while the income tax rates they paid fell to a record low. The numbers tell the tale of the widening chasm between the rich and everyone else:

In 2007 the top 400 taxpayers had an average income of $344.8 million, up 31 percent from their average $263.3 million income in 2006, according to figures in a report that the IRS posted to its Web site without announcement that were discovered February 16...

Adjusted for inflation to 2009 dollars, the top 400 enjoyed a 27 percent increase in their income, or nine times the rate of increase for the bottom 90 percent...Since 1992, the bottom 90 percent of Americans have seen their incomes rise by 13 percent in 2009 dollars, compared with an increase of 399 percent for the top 400.

Unsurprisingly, the public disclosure of the top 400 report first introduced by the Clinton administration was halted by President Bush (only to be reinstituted by the Obama White House last year). Unsurprising that is, because the sheer size of the massive windfall for America's rich due to the Bush tax cuts would make a Warren Buffet blush.

Us vs. Them and Human Rights

This is one of Greenwald's better columns because he takes a perfectly framed situation -- the Baptists arrested in Haiti for kidnapping vs. those the US picks up as terrorism suspects -- to nail the blazingly obvious point that wingers are simply bigots, pure and simple.

The only thing worse than someone completely indifferent to human rights abuses when committed by their own government is someone whose concern for such matters is dictated by the religion or other demographic attributes of those whose basic rights are being denied.  That's the same mentality that leads our media to treat American journalists held by Evil Foreign Governments for a few weeks under dubious circumstances as screeching headline-making news, while ignoring almost completely those foreign (Muslim) journalists held by the U.S. Government for years without charges.  How many Americans know and are outraged about Iran's detention of Roxana Saberi, all while being completely ignorant of the numerous Muslim journalists held for years by the U.S., including a Reuters photojournalist, Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed, finally released last week after being held by the U.S. military for 17 months with no charges and even after an Iraqi court ordered him released?  It's the same mentality that allows the U.S. Government, with a straight face, to issue reports condemning as "torture" the very techniques we used, to protest indefinite detention, extra-judicial killings and lawless eavesdropping when engaged in by other countries, and to demand that other countries prosecute their war criminals and torturers in the name of "the rule of law" (while our own are feted on TV shows and given regular newspaper columns to glorify the torture and other war crimes they implemented).

Batocchio's The Persistance of Ideology

I came across this old post from Batocchio, the Vagabond Scholar,  and think it hits many nails on the head. I have such a hard time understanding conservatives. Just what is it that they are thinking? How can they be so blatantly wrong, and unapologetic, about so many things for so long? The post explains a lot -- and has great links to back up the arguments. It is blogging at its best.

This is the introduction to his analysis of three areas of policy -- economics, foreign policy, and human rights:

If conservatism at its best involves sticking with policies that have proved effective, at its worst it entails sticking with policies that have proved unsuccessful or even disastrous. It's not as if some pure, beneficent strain of conservatism is common, though, to the degree it exists at all. Movement conservatism has long consisted of policies that benefit a select few at the expense of the nation as a whole. In many cases, conservatives are still obstinately pushing ideologies and policies that have yielded horrible results – sometimes even for themselves. Admitting error is rare among this ideological crowd, taking blame is rarer still, and actually changing approaches is seen as anathema.

A Top Ten Worst List

Read-em and weep: Juan Cole's Top Ten Worst things about the Bush Decade. His intro:

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth (surely a quarter of the privately held wealth is enough for the one percent?) It isn't about which party is in power; parties can always be bought. It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society. Egalitarianism is unworkable, but over-concentration of wealth is also impractical. The latter produced a lot of our problems in the past decade, and as long as such massive inequality persists, our politics will be lopsided.

Defense Expenditures and the War on Terror

We dwarf the defense expenditures of all other countries by far. Can this be justified on the basis of defending ourselves against a bunch of third rate middle eastern countries? This means the terrorists are winning by ruining our country as we turn it over to the proverbial military-industrial complex.

Why There Can't Be "Bipartisanship"

In an excellent, but so far unrecognized by our crack media, observation James Fallows cites the point that: "Bipartisanship consists of getting ENOUGH members of the minority party to join the (incomplete) majority in voting for major legislation.  It can't happen if the minority party members vote as a block against major legislation."

Even Sullivan Can See What's Happening Clearly

Every now and then, Andrew Sullivan nails the situation eloquently and clearly. I believe this is exactly right and why none of us should buy that shiny-object crap about "the past doesn't matter":

Clive Crook writes:

What does it matter who caused the problem? Obama's job is to solve it.

This with respect to the crippling fiscal legacy bequeathed by the Bush administration and the appalling recession that subsequently wiped out revenues. Yes, he actually wrote the words:
What does it matter who caused the problem?
Let me try to explain: it matters who caused the problem and why because if we do not understand the causes we cannot fix the problem and it matters because any adult judgment of a politician's first year that does not take into account the inheritance he was bequeathed is impossible.
It matters because the most important fact in American politics is the worst presidency in modern times that preceded Obama.

Two failed, unwinnable wars that continue to destroy lives and cripple our finances, a massive splurge in entitlement and discretionary spending, a huge increase in defense spending and massive tax cuts: this we now have to forget? This context should be removed from the picture?
It matters too because the very people who gave us this mess are now adamantly refusing to do anything to get us out of it, and pledge to return to exactly the same policies that got us there in the first place: more tax cuts, more war, more entitlement spending, more debt, no health insurance reform, no action on climate change. Clive acts as if there were some viable alternative out there. There isn't.
I'm not saying that Obama should not be held responsible for actions he has taken; I am saying he should not be held responsible for actions he did not take and an appalling inheritance he was forced to grapple with. Removing that context, as the GOP has largely done, and Crook now endorses, is to rig the entire debate so that Obama cannot win. It is a function of the kind of punditry that is, in fact, far more of a problem for the country than anything Obama has done - because it bases political judgment on unreality, and distorts the body politic's capacity for reasoned argument. It treats all of this as a game.

Absolute Proof the Military-Industrial Complex Rules

Matt Yglesias spotted the following chart and draws the obvious conclusion. Combat aircraft? We are nuts...all of us for either asking for it or for going along with it. More proof that the fear card always works. You can't even go after this stuff without being called soft on security. Per Attackerman:

I got this chart from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment’s Todd Harrison’s brand-new paper on the imminent Fiscal 2011 defense budget. (Conveniently released today!) As you can see, all this chart details is spending on aircraft. In last year’s budget, that spending represented 5 percent of the budget, or between $38.6 billion and $40.1 billion, depending on whether you want to include funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in your calculation or not.
You see that bright green line? The one at the top? The one that’s way higher than all its colorful competitors? That represents procurement funding for combat aircraft.
Has it sunk in yet?
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say we don’t use combat aircraft in the wars we’re fighting. You have to come up with a baroque set of Michael Bey-esque geopolitical calculations by which we would use combat aircraft in any conceivable war. The U.S.’s area of combat-aircraft dominance is called Planet Earth. No Air Force is going to challenge ours. No actual U.S. adversary has an air force, and the list of real-potential U.S. adversaries that do starts with Iran and ends with North Korea, neither of which are remotely stupid enough to test us in the air. The most likely scenario for using combat aircraft in a U.S. war is an alien invasion.
What is relevant to the wars we fight are (a) remotely-piloted aircraft like drones, (b) surveillance aircraft like drones, (c) helicopters, and (d) especially airlift, to get our ground troops from Point A to Point B. And as you can see from the chart, we don’t spend nearly on that stuff what we spend on combat aircraft.
But by all means, freeze spending on school lunch programs and Head Start and shit like that.

Yikes! Watch What You Eat

This could be very important. It's not some chain email -- it's the Scientific American, no less, saying so. The plastics and POPs all around us are getting into our bodies and even causing low level disease, such as obesity. Use only glass and metal containers and cooking gear whenever possible. Also, avoid farm-raised seafood. This will change how I cook and eat. It may also explain why cancer is so much more common now than it was 50 years ago.

Researchers have for the first time found a connection between exposure to certain chemicals and insulin resistance, according to a study published in the online edition of Environmental Health Perspectives.
A group of European scientists examined whether exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POPs) contributed to insulin resistance, which has been increasing around the world. More than 25 percent of U.S. adults suffer from metabolic conditions stemming from insulin resistance that include fatigue, obesity and difficulty regulating blood levels of fat and sugar.
Researchers fed rats a high-fat diet of either crude or refined fish oil from farmed Atlantic salmon over 28 days. The crude fish oil contained average levels of POPs that people are exposed to through fish consumption, while the refined oil contained none. Both had equal fat levels.
They found that rats exposed to the crude fish oil developed belly fat and could not regulate fat properly. They had higher levels of cholesterol and several fatty acids in their livers. Those exposed to the refined fish oil experienced none of those symptoms.
Researchers said the findings provide "compelling evidence" of a causal relationship between POP exposure common in the food chain and insulin resistance, and highlight the need to understand the interactions of POPs and fat-containing foods such as fish, dairy products and meat.
How to deal with POPs is particularly challenging because they persist in the environment for long periods and can build up in animals' tissues.
The 2001 Stockholm Convention, which the United States has ratified but not signed, lists and bans numerous POPs from manufacture and use. The researchers say their evidence reinforces the need to have international agreements aimed at limiting the release of POPs into the environment in an effort to protect public health.

Greenwalds's Analysis of What's Wrong with the Press

Glen strikes again and his points, and evidence, are all to the mark. There is no doubt the press has failed in the last decade. This describes why and how, especially when coupled with the fact that big corporations run the news operations and those working in those operations want to please their bosses by playing the access game this way.

Aside from falsity -- and the fact that they become irreversibly lodged in our political culture as fact -- what do all of these deceitful reports have in common?  They're all the by-product of granting anonymity to people and then repeating what they claim as fact, with the falsehood-disseminators protected by "journalists" from any and all accountability for their falsehoods.  It's exactly the same process that caused our leading media outlets to tell Americans about Iraq's massive WMD program and Al Qaeda connections; Jessica Lynch's heroic firefight with inhumane Iraqi devils and her "rescue" by our Marines; Pat Tillman's death at the hands of Al Qaeda monsters; and government tests that "confirmed" the presence of bentonite in the anthrax used to attack the U.S., which meant it was likely that Saddam was behind the attacks.
Unjustified anonymity -- especially when mindlessly repeating what shielded government sources claim in secret -- is the single greatest enabler of false and deceitful "reporting."  Despite (or, really, because of) its unparalelled record of producing lies, it will never stop, because agreeing to it is how "journalists" end up being selected as favored message-carrying servants for the powerful.  This falsehood-producing method isn't ancillary to American journalism but central to it; the book which is occupying the attention of America's political and media class is based exclusively on unattributed, shielded sources, and that seems to bother none of them.

Becoming an Aristocracy

The data doesn't look good for Americans as far as having the economic success of each generation be independent of their parents. I was surprised at how much worse on this the US is than most other developed countries. I expect this will get even worse as the expense of a college education continues to rise faster than than national income.

Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, has a paper which says that “Using administrative data containing the earnings histories of parents and children,the IGE is estimated to be around 0.6. This suggests that the United States is substantially less mobile than previous research indicated.” And, “estimates of intergenerational mobility are significantly lower for families with little or no wealth.”

He also points to CAP’s research on the subject:

By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

And you don’t need to take my word for it either, the Economist—an outfit with right-wing views on economic matters, but that’s also international in its outlook and thus not blinded by the solipsism of the American right—has covered this in detail.
This one stat isn’t the be-all and end-all of mobility. One nice thing about the United States and social mobility is that compared to most European countries (but not Canada or Australia, or for that matter Sweden in Europe) it’s easier for foreigners to move here and make their way. Still, the facts are the facts. The ex ante level of inequality in the United States makes social mobility hard, and we’re not doing anything like the kinds of investments in child nutrition, early education, etc. that could make up for it ex post.

Taxes and Growth

Another conservative belief proven wrong with the facts. Are they ever right? I would hope so, but with this era's conservatives, it never seems to happen.

For the record, however, the most-taxed countries on Earth (i.e., the countries where revenue is the highest percent of GDP) are in order:

1. Denmark
2. Sweden
3. Belgium
4. France
5. Norway

In terms of per capita GDP these are, respectively, the 4th, 9th, 14th, 15th, and 3rd richest countries on earth while the United States is 17th. Of course in part that’s an exchange rate phenomenon and if you use PPP adjustments rather than market exchange rates, the U.S. looks better. On the other hand, if you peer into the future it seems to me that exchange rate comparisons are likely to make us look even worse in years to come. The high-tax five also do very well on things like the U.N. Human Development index.

MoDo Fails Badly

Nice evisceration of a particularly awful MoDo column. Note my comment (20. from Down Goes Pecksniff):

When I saw MoDo this morning, I fumed. She is occasionally clever, and certainly better than the neo-con crowd over at WaPo, but this was pathetic.
Matt has nailed what gnawed at me — that, according to her, Obama should treat the electorate as children. None of that wimpy, analytical, fact-finding stuff for her. AUTHORITY is what’s needed from our leaders. We had that for eight years and look where it got us. She has gone to the dark side, or maybe just the dumb side, and I’m done.