Monday, February 15, 2010

Barker's Newsbites: Monday, February 15, 2010


Today's abbreviated offerings...
Posted by at

10 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2U4NjMxOWNjOTRiZTE3YWFiZDRhMjZhMTBkNDEyNDk=

Something that bodes ill for the future has just occured on the University of California's campus at Irvine.

A group of Muslim students, several dozen in number, disrupted a talk by Michael Oren, the historian who is also the present Israeli ambassador in Washington.

They had prepared and coordinated tactics for the occasion. The hall was quite large, and they had packed it. Interrupting Ambassador Oren, one of them would rise to shout an insult, whereupon the guards would lead him out of the hall, and another would stand up to shout - and so on and on until sustained discourse was impossible.

Appeals from the university authorities and Ambassador Oren had no effect at all. After a number of individual ejections, those who were still in their seats got up to leave together. The shrill shrieks of the female students injected a note of hysteria into the commotion.

Such contempt for free speech in a university is intolerable.

February 15, 2010 at 6:46 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=auKBO.MWmHLE

Restrictions on oil and gas drilling will cost the U.S. economy $2.36 trillion through 2029, according to a study requested by state utility regulators and paid for in part by industry-sponsored groups.

Drilling restrictions in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off the U.S. coastline are blocking access to about nine years’ worth of U.S. oil and gas consumption, according to the report.

Former President George W. Bush and Congress ended bans in 2008 on drilling along the U.S. coastline. The Interior Department hasn’t acted to open the newly available areas, including offshore Alaska and on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Congress has kept the Arctic refuge off limits.

“Required actions to access the energy resources thought to exist there have not been taken,” O’Neal Hamilton, a former chairman of South Carolina’s Public Service Commission, said of the areas where leasing hasn’t proceeded. “Our research allows policy makers to know the extent of the resource base and the effects that maintaining the restrictions would have on the country.”

The report, issued today, said opening the areas would free up 43 billion barrels of oil and 286 trillion cubic feet of gas.

Annual average natural-gas prices will increase by 17 percent by 2030 and electricity prices will rise by 5 percent if U.S. policy makers don’t open access to off-limit areas, the report forecast.

*** REPEAT: ANNUAL AVERAGE NATURAL-GAS PRICES WILL INCREASE BY 17%... ELECTRICITY PRICES WILL RISE BY 5% IF U.S. POLICY MAKERS (RIGHT NOW THAT'S PRESIDENT OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS DON'T OPEN ACCESS...!!!

That would cut the gross domestic product by $2.36 trillion cumulatively through 2029, or 0.52 percent annually on average, according to the report.

* THAT'S TRILLION - TRILLION WITH A "T" - TWO POINT THREE SIX TRILLION DOLLARS...!!!

February 15, 2010 at 6:46 PM
William R. Barker said...

A Posting In Two Parts...

http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=OGQ0ZmU0MjhlMjAwNThjM2IxMWVjNzE0MzJiN2U2Yzk=

The public sector employs about one-sixth of the U.S. work force. Average federal pay is distinctly higher than private-sector pay. After adjusting for part-time work and the cash value of payment in kind, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reports a wage and salary premium in 2008 of...58% for civilian government. It wasn’t always that way. [N]early half the civilian premium were created between 2000 and 2005.

For reasons of efficiency and fairness, the extra pay might have been coupled with reducing the job security and trimming the benefits that federal employees traditionally enjoy. It was not. On the contrary, the federal benefit edge has widened. It is not easy to measure how much, for the government refuses to publish direct comparisons. However, a few months ago, Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute deduced from BEA statistics that from 2000 to 2008, benefits grew a whopping $16,000 per full-time federal civilian employee, versus $3,000 per private employee. Federal benefits are now more than four times private benefits.

In 2008, federal employees were relatively well insulated from the financial crisis. Their benefits were guaranteed, they bore little risk of layoff, and the thriving business of government buoyed housing valuations for D.C.-area residents. A sense of shared national burden would have called for public-sector restraint in 2009. Instead, as millions of private workers lost their jobs and real incomes declined, civilian federal salaries were boosted 3.9 percent. Not surprisingly, resignation rates for federal employees have sunk to less than a third of private-sector averages.

According to the BLS, state and local governments in September 2009 paid $39.83 in salary and benefits per hour worked. That is 45% higher than what private employers paid. The salary component was one-third higher. The benefit component was two-thirds higher.

While state and local employees’ salary advantage has been stable for at least a decade, their benefit advantage has widened considerably. In inflation-adjusted terms, private benefits per working hour have risen by nearly a dollar since 2000. The corresponding state and local employee benefits have risen by nearly three dollars.

Compounding the disparity, public-sector employees typically receive benefits that are far more secure than those that private-sector employees receive. According to a recent study from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, almost 80% of state and local workers age 25–64 have pensions from their employers, and 80% of these pensions provide strictly defined benefits (i.e., they impose no risk from shortfalls in investment proceeds). In contrast, only 45% of private employees of the same age have pensions from their employers, and only 40% of these pensions provide strictly defined benefits.

Moreover, public-sector benefits tend to kick in at lower ages, with better cost-of-living adjustments and fewer deductibles for health care than private-sector benefits. Only older, heavily unionized private firms offer comparable perks - to their regret. They have been sinking for years under the load and need another $150 billion–plus from the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to meet their commitments. They have become international symbols of how not to regain an edge. Yet our civil service is emulating them.

Full-time federal employees with three years of service or more can take off 43 weekdays a year with full pay: 10 holidays, 20 days vacation, and 13 sick days. Employees with 15 years of service get an additional six days of vacation a year. A program called “time off as an incentive” grants extra paid leave “to recognize excellent employee performance.” And those with two to three decades of service qualify for retirement at ages 50 to 60 with full or nearly full benefits.

* To be continued...

February 15, 2010 at 6:47 PM
William R. Barker said...

* Continuing...

(Part 2)

Some state and local programs reward not working even more. Since 1999, California has allowed state employees to retire at age 50 with as little as five years of service. Each year, pensioners receive a certain percentage of their final salaries for each year they worked. Most employees hired in their twenties can retire by age 55 or earlier with 50 percent or more of their highest salary locked in for life, with full inflation adjustment. The state also pays 100 percent of health-care costs for retirees with at least 20 years of service. Such pledges are anachronistic. They date from an era in which 25 years of hard manual labor broke workers’ health, medical technology was limited, benefits were low, average lifespans were under 65, and the worker-to-retiree ratio was extremely high. They are totally unsuited to the 21st century, in which people can work productively for 40 years or more, expensive medical technology is beating back infirmity, benefits are extensive, and the worker-to-retiree ratio is dropping below two to one.

While wrapped as public-spiritedness, such benefits are actually assaults on future generations. When education bills get padded with extra retirement benefits for teachers, they guarantee that a larger share of future education budgets will be siphoned off to people who no longer teach. That can’t possibly help the next generation to learn. Nor can it help the next generation of teachers, who will have to settle for lower pay and worse benefits to keep their states afloat.

Some of our biggest states and localities are already insolvent. California is so far under water that serious budget-balancing has given way to creative gimmicks for borrowing against the future. New York is racing to beat it to the bottom.

The problem is less the nominal deficit than the gaping holes off the balance sheet. If state pension funds were held to traditional accounting standards for banks, never mind the tighter new standards, most of them would have negative capital. They owe clearly defined benefits, with no right to scale them back, yet don’t hold nearly enough assets to guarantee debt servicing out of ordinary dividends. So they invest heavily in risky equities, hope for high returns, and get hammered in downturns.

It’s a bit like buying a home beyond one’s means and counting on appreciation to service the mortgage. Lenders are rightly castigated for having exacerbated this practice through low standards and deceptive packaging, the so-called liar loans. But liar loans still abound in the public sector, under the guise of “Pension Obligation Bonds.” Strapped governments borrow at U.S. Treasury rates plus a premium, pledge to make even more by reinvesting in equities, and treat the wished-for profits as hard assets on their balance sheets. Presto, the budget looks balanced again. And if the equities get nailed, well, distract the public with a new accounting trick.

Recently, the GAO estimated that unfunded retirement benefits for state and local employees exceed $530 billion. Top dishonors go to New York State, whose government, largest city, and largest counties underfund pensions by at least $119 billion. Authorities in California underfund by at least $91 billion. New Jersey underfunds by at least $51 billion. Together these three account for nearly half of all underfunding. Illinois is almost surely fourth, but Cook County refused to report its liabilities. Special mentions go to Detroit and Boston, which despite their moderate size have racked up unfunded liabilities of roughly $6 billion apiece.

Hardly any of the most insolvent state and local authorities can haul themselves back to solvency on their own. Few are even trying. They are simply rolling over their debt as long as they can, and counting on the federal government to bail them out when they can’t.

February 15, 2010 at 6:47 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/12/barack-obama/obama-claims-bush-administration-got-190-terrorism/

As the debate rages over whether Guantanamo detainees ought to be tried in federal court, a lot of numbers are flying around that may appear confusing or conflicting.

Consider these citations:

"We know that we can prosecute terrorists in our federal courts safely and securely because we have been doing so for years. There are more than 300 convicted international and domestic terrorists currently in Bureau of Prisons custody including those responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the attacks on embassies in Africa." -- Attorney General Eric Holder before a Senate Judiciary Committee on Nov. 18, 2009.

And then this from President Barack Obama in a Feb. 7, 2010, pre-Super Bowl interview with Katie Couric, who asked if he had ruled out trying confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in New York City -- "I have not ruled it out, but I think it's important for us to take into account the practical, logistical issues involved," Obama said. "I mean, if you've got a city that is saying no, and a police department that's saying no, and a mayor that's saying no, that makes it difficult. But I think that the most important thing for the public to understand is we're not handling any of these cases any different than the Bush administration handled them all through 9/11. "They prosecuted the 190 folks in these Article III (federal) courts," Obama said. "Got convictions. And those folks are in maximum security prisons right now."

For the purposes of this fact-check, we are specifically looking at Obama's statement. That figure of 190 jihadist terrorism convictions has been vociferously challenged as overinflated — particularly when compared to Guantanamo detainees — by Dana M. Perino, a former press secretary to President George W. Bush, and Bill Burck, a former federal prosecutor and deputy counsel to President Bush. It has also been picked apart in a series of stories from Andrew McCarthy of National Review.

New York University's Center on Law and Security has been tracking such cases for years and throws a wide net. In its "Terrorist Trial Report Card: September 11, 2001-September 11, 2009," it finds that the Department of Justice has indicted 828 defendants on terrorism-related charges. Of the 593 that have been resolved, 523 were convicted on some charge either at trial or by plea. Terrorism-related can be a broad definition, though, and can include immigration violations, giving false statements and other relatively minor charges. And so the report breaks out cases in which defendants are charged under core terrorism or national security statutes. Those are bona fide, serious charges. Now you're talking about 174 people convicted under those statutes; plus another 24 charged with those statutes, but convicted on lesser crimes. That also gets to the president's figure.

But it's misleading for Obama to cite that 190 number as if the cases are equivalent to those faced by Guantanamo detainees, said Greenberg, editor of the report. For one, most of those cases do not involve people affiliated with a radical Islamist organization, but rather with such groups as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a group of Marxist guerrillas. There are probably less than a dozen cases against people in the Islamic jihadist framework who have been convicted in federal court of serious terrorism-related crimes comparable to many of the Guantanamo detainees, Greenberg said.

We [PoliFact.com] agree with Greenberg that only a fraction of those 190 cases cited by Obama could rightly be equated to the Guantanamo detainees. And while even that much smaller number might provide a powerful argument for Obama, that's not the number he used. And so we rate his statement Barely True.

February 15, 2010 at 6:48 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

* OR PERHAPS DESTROYED. (*SHRUG*)

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

(*SHRUG*)

* SOMEHOW "OOPS" JUST DOESN'T SEEM TO COVER IT.

February 15, 2010 at 6:48 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2010/02/15/why_washington_cant_reform_healthcare_97634.html

* The op-ed that the above posted link directs you to is so good that I'm just going to post a "teaser" here in the hopes that you'll follow the link and read the op-ed in its entirety.

BILL

** TEASER --

Imagine the world's smartest food expert with access to the best culinary research trying to decide what the right price is for a ham sandwich. Once the price is set, that's it - selling a ham sandwich for more or less is against the law. Oh, and homeless people get free ham sandwiches. Refuse to serve them and you lose your deli license.

(*GRIN*)

* Seriously... read the whole op-ed.

February 15, 2010 at 8:24 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://dailycaller.com/2010/02/15/former-cia-director-hayden-thiessens-courting-disaster-a-must-read/

[By Michael Hayden, retired U.S. Air Force four-star general and former director of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency]

Marc Thiessen begins his new book, “Courting Disaster,” with something of a disclaimer: For reasons of security and classification, he says, he should not have been able to write it. He’s right. He shouldn’t have been able to write it. But I’m glad he did.

I opposed the release of the Office of Legal Council memos on the CIA interrogation program last April. I opposed the release of additional memos and the report of the CIA inspector general on the interrogation program last August. But whatever their release did to reveal American secrets to our enemies, it did inject something into the public debate on this program that had been sorely missing - facts.

Thiessen has taken these documents...and created for the first time a public account of a program previously hidden from public view. Prior to this, some opponents of the program could create whatever image they wanted to create to support the argument of the moment. And those who were in government at the time were near powerless to correct the record. No longer.

Thiessen lays out the facts without much varnish. Here are the techniques, here’s what was learned, here’s why it was thought lawful.

February 15, 2010 at 8:24 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.

Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.

His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.

Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.

Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.

In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.

Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.

“The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.

February 15, 2010 at 8:57 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Under-Obama_-crony-capitalism-again-rules-the-day-84271222.html

Lobbyists, reports the Center for Responsive Politics, had a record 2009 in Barack Obama's Washington. Despite candidate Obama's promises to shun them, they raked in $3,470,000,000.

Last week, amid Washington's blizzards, Obama was asked about the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and the $9 million bonus for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

"I know both these guys; they are very savvy businessmen," he said. "I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth." So much for campaign-trail denunciations of "fat cat" bankers and bloated bonuses.

From what I know, Dimon and Blankfein are in fact first-rate CEOs, as able in their way as Henry J. Kaiser. Their banks soured on mortgage-backed securities before most of their competitors and started unloading them early or, in Goldman's case, getting them insured by AIG (and getting the government to pay 100 cents on the dollar for them, thanks to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then head of the New York Fed).

But the savviness that Obama handsomely acknowledged has been evident not only in their business judgment but in their politics. Goldman employee contributions to Democrats in 2008 ranked second only to those employed by the University of California. JPMorgan Chase's employees ranked No. 7. The stereotype of Wall Street being Republican is decades out of date.

Crony capitalism is now the order of the day in the United States. The government and the United Auto Workers own General Motors and Chrysler, which aren't likely to pay back their billions in TARP money any time soon, if ever. Meanwhile the government tells Americans to stop driving Toyotas.

The government was going to remake the health care sector, and so Billy Tauzin and other health care industry lobbyists were busy in the White House cutting deals to keep their clients above water. The government was going to remake the energy sector, and utility CEOs and lobbyists have been busy flaunting their green credentials.

As my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy Carney has been documenting, Big Business has been busy lobbying Big Government for "reforms" that serve big companies' interests. Wal-Mart backs a health care mandate, Philip Morris shapes tobacco regulation, General Electric is setting up a joint venture to trade carbon offsets (wasn't that Enron's line of work back in the day?).

The picture is not pretty. Government's pets or, in the president's words, "savvy businessmen," use government to get policies that will give them competitive advantages and stifle smaller competitors. Pleasing their masters in government is now absorbing the psychic energy of CEOs who used to concentrate on meeting consumers' needs in order to make profits.

February 15, 2010 at 8:57 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)