Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, January 21, 2015


Rollin' down the riv-er...


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10 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/holman-jenkins-climate-reportings-hot-mess-1421802468

News reporting of the latest climate alarm was not uniformly bad. Among hundreds of publications in the Factiva database, exactly one — the Mail on Sunday, one of those derided London tabloids — injected the phrase “statistically significant” into consideration of whether 2014 was in any meaningful sense the “hottest year on record.”

A non-journalistic source and not exactly an outfit of climate-change deniers, Berkeley Earth, also noted that, when it comes to 2014 and the other “hottest year” candidates, 2005 and 2010, the observed temperature difference was smaller than the margin of error by a factor of five, adding: “Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year.”

To its credit, the Washington Post alluded to the possibly more important fact that “rising temperatures have not kept pace with computer simulations that predicted even faster warming.”

The New York Times contributed nothing to reader enlightenment as usual, and the Associated Press committed a howler by claiming that “nine of the 10 hottest years in NOAA global records have occurred since 2000. The odds of this happening at random are about 650 million to 1, according to University of South Carolina statistician John Grego. ”

This might be true if Earth’s climate were dice, where rolling a six has no effect on the odds of the next roll being a six. But climate is a continuous process of incremental change. A unified theory of media idiocy on climate is beyond the scope of this column, but even someone with the apparently parched intellect of an AP editor should be able to look at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration charts and notice that cool years are grouped with cool years, warm years with warm years, and in-between years with in-between years.

Either NOAA’s entire temperature history is a statistical anomaly of incomprehensible, galactic proportions — or AP has peddled itself a faulty assumption.

(And sure enough, Mr. Grego tells me AP specifically instructed him to assume “all years had the same probability of being ‘selected’ as one of the 10 hottest years on record.” This is akin to assuming that, because you weighed 195 pounds at some point in your life, there should be an equal chance of you weighing 195 pounds at any point in your life, even when you were a baby.)

The real mystery, though, would be if the warmest years did not bunch up in the post-1998 period, given the sharp warming observed from the late 1970s to the late 1990s.

When climate reporters robotically insist, as they did again this week, that the 2000s represent the hottest period in the rather skimpy, 134-year historical record, they are merely reiterating that the pre-1998 warming happened. No clear trend up or down has been apparent since then.

* ONE... MORE... TIME...

When climate reporters robotically insist, as they did again this week, that the 2000s represent the hottest period in the rather skimpy, 134-year historical record, they are merely reiterating that the pre-1998 warming happened. No clear trend up or down has been apparent since then.

* AND THEN THERE'S THIS:

The bigger problem, of course, is that evidence of warming is not evidence of what causes warming.

January 21, 2015 at 4:06 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2015/01/21/one_year_after_the_aca_healthcare_that_is_less_affordable_and_accessible.html

Last month the White House proudly announced that after completing the first year of Affordable Care Act (ACA) implementation the number of uninsured Americans is at historic lows - 11.3% in the second quarter of 2014, down from 14.4% the year before.

Over 10 million people enrolled for health insurance through Medicaid or an insurance exchange. But signing up for insurance does not equal access. Healthcare has to be available and affordable. The ACA did not achieve these goals in 2014 - and 2015 will be worse.

Medicaid recipients have always had trouble finding care primarily because Medicaid pays physicians a fraction of private and Medicare rates. To remedy this the ACA included a federally funded two-year increase in Medicaid fees for primary care physicians up to Medicare levels. $5.6 billion was spent through June 2014. But the Urban Institute reports that it is unclear whether the increase in Medicaid primary care payment had an effect on the number of physicians accepting Medicaid patients, or on the number of Medicaid patients that physicians are willing to see. And increasing the fees of primary care physicians does not improve access to specialists - the Commonwealth Fund found that low Medicaid payment is the main barrier to specialty care. Most importantly, the primary care fee increase expired on December 31, 2014. The Urban Institute estimates this will lead to an average 42.8% reduction in fees for primary care services. Since most states will not continue fee increases without federal funds, any increased access for Medicaid patients will not last.

Access problems are not confined to the fee for service Medicaid plans studied by the Urban Institute. The HSS Inspector General studied the Medicaid managed care plans that cover nearly three-quarters of Medicaid enrollees and found that over half of the plans' putative providers were no longer in practice, not accepting new plan patients or not participating in Medicaid.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

Among providers offering appointments, over a quarter had wait times of more than one month, and 10% had wait times longer than two months. Expiration of the ACA fee bump will exacerbate these problems.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

Patients who obtained private exchange insurance have also had access problems. The main way exchanges control costs is to limit the number of doctors and hospitals patients can visit. According to McKinsey & Company, 70% of the plans available on the exchanges have narrow or ultra-narrow networks of available local hospitals and well-known academic and specialty centers have been purposely excluded. Most exchanges have few if any plans covering out of network providers. Many exchange enrollees are unable to see the physicians who have treated them for years, use facilities providing the most appropriate treatment, or access care close to home.

* SOME "CARE," HUH? BUT, HEY... THEY HAVE AN INSURANCE CARD!

* TO BE CONTINUED...

January 21, 2015 at 4:20 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

A New York Times/CBS national poll indicates that the ACA has made care less affordable and less accessible.

* OOPS!

"Nearly half of respondents described the affordability of basic medical care as a hardship for them and their family, up 10 points from a year ago." More than half said out of pocket expenses had gone up and a third said expenses had "gone up a lot." A quarter reported care has become so expensive that they are less likely to see a doctor than in the past.

The cost and access issues may explode this spring when King v. Burwell, challenging the provision of ACA subsidies to buy insurance on both the federal and state exchanges, is decided. Only 14 states have established insurance exchanges; 5.4 million citizens of the remaining states obtain insurance through the federal exchange and most receive subsidies. If the Supreme Court finds that the law only allows subsidies on state exchanges, federal exchange enrollees will lose their subsidies and likely their insurance and healthcare access.

By prescribing a generous "essential health benefits" package that many patients neither want nor need, the ACA has increased families' premiums and out of pocket costs and forced them into narrow provider networks. By expanding Medicaid enrollment without measures to increase willing providers, the ACA has only done half the work of improving access. Until ACA requirements are relaxed so that patients have a genuine choice of different benefit packages and affordable plans and the problem of inadequate Medicaid fees is addressed, decreasing the number of uninsured will be a hollow achievement.

* AND AT THAT POINT... (*SIGH*)... WE'RE STILL LEFT WITH SUBSIDIES THE AMERICAN PEOPLE CAN'T AFFORD TO PAY FOR ABSENT DEFICIT SPENDING AND DEBT PILED UPON DEBT!

January 21, 2015 at 4:20 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon0120hm.html

Who knew that the return of William J. Bratton to serve as New York police commissioner, a position he held from 1994 to 1996, would signal a return of some of the hoariest anti-police conceits from that era as well?

In a column blasting Broken Windows policing (which targets public-order offenses like graffiti and turnstile jumping), New York Times reporter Ginia Bellafante dusts off one of the Times’s favorite questions from the 1990s:

“Why doesn’t New York police itself like San Diego does?”

San Diego lowered its violent crime rate from 1991 to 1998, and again from 2002 to 2012, by more than New York did, Bellafante says, without allegedly employing what she calls “broken-windows tactics.”

* NOT SO FAST (AND LOOSE) THERE, GINIA...!

San Diego and New York’s demographics and crime profiles are worlds apart.

San Diego doesn’t have a large entrenched underclass, nor did it ever have a serious violent-crime problem.

Its murder rate in 1993, a year before Bratton took over the NYPD, was two-fifths that of New York. (New York had 1,946 murders in 1993; San Diego had 133.) Gang members did not — and do not — regularly gun each other down in San Diego as they still do in New York’s public housing projects.

Yet... despite San Diego’s much lower violent crime rate, in 1999, the allegedly pacific San Diego police department fatally shot civilians at 15 times the rate of the NYPD.)

What about that gap from 1998 to 2002 in Bellafante’s New York/San Diego comparison?

Bellafante, drawing on a report from the John Jay College Center on Race, Crime, and Justice, has chosen her dates carefully. San Diego’s 1990s crime drop came to a screeching halt by the end of the decade, while the New York Police Department continued to bring crime down year after year — the only city in the country to do so. By 2002, when San Diego’s crime rate started dropping again, New York had already saved hundreds more lives.

* WHAT A SCUMBAG, HUH? REMEMBER THAT NAME, FOLKS - GINA BELLAFANTE.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

January 21, 2015 at 5:08 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

For decades, the main complaint about urban police departments was that they ignored crime in minority neighborhoods. Over the years, I have heard the following requests and many more like them in police community meetings in inner-city New York: “There are youths congregating on my stoop, can’t you arrest them for loitering?” (from an elderly black woman in Central Harlem); “I smell marijuana in my hallways” (from a young Hispanic man in the South Bronx); “people hang out outside the club across from our building smoking weed” (from a young black woman in the Bronx’s Mott Haven section); “there are people barbecuing on the meridian strip of Broadway, isn’t that illegal?” (from a black woman on upper Broadway).

An elderly cancer amputee in the Mount Hope section of the South Bronx will only go to her lobby to pick up her mail when she sees police around; otherwise, she is terrified of the youth trespassing in her lobby.

Today, the NYPD focuses intensely on the most crime-ridden areas of the city, determined to free their residents from fear. And the main source of fear in these neighborhoods is public disorder, which signals that informal social controls have broken down, paving the way for more violent forms of lawlessness.

Not every misdemeanor offense requires an arrest; sometimes a warning will suffice. But until the opponents of Broken Windows policing can persuade the law-abiding poor that public order doesn’t matter...

(*SMIRKING SNICKER*)

...NYPD commanders will rightly respond to their fervent desire for safe, orderly public spaces.

(*THUMBS UP*)

Bellafante summarizes a recent City Journal article by Bratton and Manhattan Institute fellow George Kelling as “arguing essentially that minorities love ‘broken windows’ [and] that critics who don’t see this ‘have never been to a police/community meeting in a poorer, mostly minority neighborhood.’”

There may or may not be a note of sarcasm in Bellafante’s summary; in any case, Bratton and Kelling’s point that public-order offenses are the main target of community complaints in poor, minority neighborhoods is simply undeniable.

Broken Windows critics have never answered the question: What are the police supposed to do when they hear such complaints?

Should they ignore these heartfelt requests for public order because broken windows policing allegedly “stigmatizes,” in Bellafante’s words, “black and Hispanic men who end up . . . burdened with fines and arrest records?"

Should the police tell that elderly woman in Central Harlem, now the proud owner of her newly converted co-op, to "deal with" the teens on her stoop herself?

Should tenants concerned by the smell of weed in their hallways just learn to live with it?

* I FOR ONE WILL GLADLY TAKE BRATTON'S NYC OVER BELLAFANTE'S "THUNDERDOME" ANY DAY OF THE YEAR!

January 21, 2015 at 5:08 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/396798/abolition-private-life-kevin-d-williamson

One of the remarkable aspects of the recent spate of infantile Left-wing protests that caught Jim Geraghty’s attention is that they are directed at private life and private spaces rather than at public institutions and public affairs.

One expects protests at city hall; in New York, we even endured the unseemly spectacle of one of those shut-down-traffic protests conducted by the city council itself, as though its members did not do enough to inconvenience the residents of that city.

(*SNORT*)

Protests in front of the police station or the (hideously fascist-looking) Federal Reserve building are part of the normal course of affairs in a democratic republic with free speech and a strong tradition of lively discourse. But the profoundly stupid “black brunch” protests, during which racial-grievance entrepreneurs disrupted meals at places that seemed to them offensively Caucasian (“white spaces”) are a different species of undertaking.

(And a poorly informed one, at that: In New York City, protesters invaded the Pershing Square Café across the street from Grand Central Terminal, which is one of the more diverse spots in heavily segregated Manhattan, catering as it does to commuting 53-year-old lawyers from Fairfield County, who check any number of different demographic boxes.)

The message these protests send is that there is no private space — and, therefore, no private life — so far as this particular rabble is concerned. It’s the familiar Trotsky conundrum: You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

That the people at brunch have no real direct connection to the events motivating the protesters is beside the point. They were targeted on racial grounds: These were detestable “white spaces,” and the people there were to be punished for being white — even if they were not, in fact, white, their presence in “white spaces” makes them guilty by association.

(That the protesters were themselves largely white goes without saying: Protests of this sort are a prestige performance for stupid white college kids, mainly. If you want to see a genuinely “white space,” a protest is your best bet.)

While it is the case that the phrase “religious extremism” is of limited use (because it matters a great deal which religion is under discussion), the politics of religious extremist movements ranging from al-Qaeda to the sundry Ayn Rand cults have in common that apostates are always punished with far greater severity than are mere infidels.

* TELL ME ABOUT IT; I WASN'T RECENTLY BANISHED FROM A RAND PAUL FAN FB PAGE!

(*SNORT*)

* TO BE CONTINUED...

January 21, 2015 at 6:02 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

It is one thing never to have seen the light, but to have seen it and rejected it is unforgivable. (One of the great debates among sharia scholars from the earliest days of Islam to the present is: How many days should an apostate be imprisoned before he is put to death? There’s less debate about putting them to death.)

(*SNORTING CHUCKLE*)

That dynamic makes it inevitable that well-meaning progressives are frequently on the receiving end of outrage from their more puritanical co-religionists, and that’s historically been a pretty good business for the Left.

Jesse Jackson, surely one of the wealthiest Baptist preachers without a congregation, has had a very successful career at running a protection racket; and he’s smarter than the “black brunch” gang.

Jackson isn’t in New York complaining that Manhattan brunch spots are too white; he’s in Silicon Valley complaining that the C-suites and boardrooms of gazillion-dollar tech companies are too white. You don’t get paid leaning on brunchers; you get paid leaning on Google...

Sensible people would tell these pathetic bullies to mind their own business, but minding your business — and Google’s business — is literally Jesse Jackson’s business. (Literally, Mr. Vice President.) It’s what he does and how he eats. And it’s the Left’s best growth industry: Build nothing, create nothing, nurture nothing, and then shut down I-93 until you get your way, whether that means money in pocket, which is what the Castro protesters and Jesse Jackson are after, or whether that simply means luxuriating in the addictive pleasure of moral preening, which is what idiot white college kids in New York are after. The latter requires an audience, thus the Occupy a Denver Omelet movement.

What’s hilarious is that the protesters themselves are getting a lesson in why private life matters. When an enterprising WBZ-TV reporter, Ken MacLeod, started tracking down the Boston protesters who shut down the freeway and found them at their homes — often their parents’ homes, mansions in Brookline — he was accused of “harassment,” told “I need you to leave our property immediately,” etc. Which is to say, the protesters, having inserted themselves into public affairs, wished to enjoy the courtesy that they refused to extend to those who hadn’t inserted themselves into public affairs.

During the Civil Rights Movement — the real one, not the ersatz one led today by Jesse Jackson et al. — politics did genuinely intersect with brunch. On one side of the issue were people who argued that the social situation of African Americans at the time was so dire and so oppressive that invasive federal action was necessary. On the other side were well-intentioned conservatives such as Barry Goldwater and any number of writers for this magazine, who argued that if the reach of Washington were extended into every mom-and-pop diner in the country, it would constitute a step toward the abolition of private life, that the natural and inevitable extension of the principle at work would ensure that rather than being treated as private property, businesses reclassified as “public accommodations” would be treated more like public property, that the greasy snout of politics eventually would stick itself into every last precinct of what had been considered the sphere of privacy beyond the public sector.

As it turns out, both sides were right.

January 21, 2015 at 6:02 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/396696/when-courts-abdicate-evan-bernick

I very much appreciated Ed Whelan’s thoughtful, constructive essay, prompted by Senator Rand Paul’s remarks on judicial activism and judicial restraint.

Since Ed criticizes a recent essay I wrote in praise of those remarks, I would like to offer a response. I believe that Ed has mischaracterized the nature of the problem that Senator Paul and I have identified, and failed to come to terms with how reflexive judicial deference has not only perpetuated a growing disconnect between the written Constitution and the government we have but also destroyed countless American dreams.

Ed defines “judicial restraint” as “not striking down democratic enactments that have not been shown to violate the Constitution.” Thus defined, judicial restraint is simply respect for coordinate branches of government. But that is not the reflexive judicial deference that Senator Paul and I have criticized — the deference that is required in the vast majority of constitutional cases today, thanks to the so-called “rational-basis test.” Today, in all but a handful of cases involving rights arbitrarily designated as “fundamental,” restrictions imposed upon people’s constitutionally protected liberties are upheld “if there is any conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis for [them].”

The rational-basis test specifically invites courts to disregard credible evidence that the government is pursuing improper ends and to base their rulings on hypothetical explanations, however implausible.

Ed chides me for failing to explicitly embrace originalism. (For the record, I’m an originalist.) But even a universal commitment to originalism would not cure what ails our judiciary. It is impossible for judges to hold the government to the terms of a written Constitution if they do not judge. Under the rational-basis test, judges must uphold a law unless the plaintiff can perform a logically impossible feat: refuting an infinite set of negatives. This standard of review has no basis in constitutional text or the political philosophy that informs it — no surprise, given that it is the product of a Court, the Holmes Court, that largely signed on to the so-called Progressive agenda (as Ed rightly notes, this agenda was predicated upon the “abandonment of originalist principles”).

As James Madison noted in Federalist 10, “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.”

When judges do not judge (or, rather, when they merely go through the motions of judicial review while depriving it of any substance, as they routinely do in rational-basis cases), the political branches are left to be judges in their own cause, and unconstitutionality follows.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

January 21, 2015 at 7:26 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

The ugly consequences of reflexive deference can be seen in the infamous case of Buck v. Bell (1927). Carrie Buck, a teenager from Virginia, was committed to a state institution after becoming pregnant. The medical authorities sought to sterilize her on the grounds that she, together with her mother and her daughter, were “feebleminded.” Justice Holmes, writing for the Court, took the government’s factual assertions at face value and found that it was reasonable for the state, in the name of public welfare, to prevent the “manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” He thus reasoned that, so long as “every step . . . was taken in scrupulous compliance with the statute,” the Constitution had nothing to say about the compulsory-sterilization law. He concluded: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

(Of the approximately 36,000 Americans who had been forcibly sterilized by 1940, 30,000 of them were victims of the Court’s abdication in Buck v. Bell.)

The same principle that allowed the government to sterilize Carrie Buck for no good reason is at work in every case in which judges abdicate their responsibility to ensure that Americans can peacefully pursue their happiness free of arbitrary government interference. It is at work in every case in which judges rubber-stamp patently protectionist regulations, sign off on the bulldozing of neighborhoods for economic development, or rationalize their way into deciding that something referred to as a “penalty” some 18 times in the text of a statute is, in fact, a tax.

It is routine under the current practice of knee-jerk judicial deference epitomized by the nearly ubiquitous rational-basis test. It is nothing less than an abdication of the judiciary’s responsibility to act as a check on the political branches.

And...

* AND...

...it is incapable of securing “the blessings of liberty.”

* ALSO SEE:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/396480/rand-paul-wrong-judicial-restraint-right-edward-whelan

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/396416/rand-paul-right-judicial-restraint-wrong-evan-bernick

http://reason.com/blog/2015/01/14/rand-paul-rejects-judicial-restraint-say

January 21, 2015 at 7:27 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/house-immigration-plan-slammed-spends-10b-and-deports-no-illegals/article/2559020

Critics including Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions are slamming a House GOP border security plan set for debate Wednesday, claiming it will spend $10 billion on new equipment and border security tricks, but not send one single illegal home.

* SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING WE'D GET FROM THE BOEHNER RINO HOUSE.

The bill, however, is geared to handling the tight security of the actual border, not how illegal immigrants are handled once they cross in. Several related pieces of immigration reform legislation are expected to be addressed by the House.

* UH-HUH...

Sessions, the influential Center for Immigration Studies, and the head of the association of former Border Control agents all slammed the H.R. 399 being marked up in the House Homeland Security Committee today as unfocused on the No. 1 issue: U.S. sanctuary to illegals. “As long as sanctuary cities, welfare, education, and jobs and principally lack of enforcement and enabling by the federal government, are made available to the undocumented alien, we will not be able to secure the physical border,” said Zack Taylor, chairman of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers.

* AND THEN THERE'S THIS...

“Until lawmakers end the catch-and-release policies of the Obama administration,” said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, “any infrastructure improvements, new strategies, and better metrics are pointless.”

(*PURSED LIPS*)

Sessions, the key conservative immigration strategist in the Senate, added, “it does not end catch-and-release; it does not require mandatory detention and return; it does not include worksite enforcement; it does not close dangerous asylum and national security loopholes; it does not cut-off access to federal welfare; and it does not require completion of the border fence.

(*HEADACHE*)

Surprisingly, it delays and weakens the longstanding unfulfilled statutory requirement for a biometric entry-exit visa tracking system.”

(*SNORT*)

* SORRY... BUT NOTHING BOEHNER DOES "SURPRISES" ME.

The plan pushed by House Homeland Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul would devote billions to new technologies, added border agents, fencing, and surveillance strategies to the border. He said securing the border is his No. 1 goal. The bill, the first of several piecemeal proposals on immigration, is expected to win GOP and some Democratic support.

* TEN... BILLION... DOLLARS...???

Supporters said the issues raised by the critics are better handled by other panels with a more direct influence on the president's so-called "revolving door" policies. The border bill is meant to deal with building a safer and more secure dividing line between Mexico and the U.S.

* TEN... BILLION... DOLLARS...???

But critics claim that the first focus should be shutting down the Obama revolving door and let agents capture illegals and quickly deport them.

* BOTH ISSUES MUST BE ADDRESSED, BUT, WHAT'S THE GOOD OF "SECURITY" IF SUCCESSFULLY BYPASSING IT LEAVES ILLEGAL ALIENS IN THE CLEAR?

“It falls far short of what is needed to slow the flow of illegal immigration and prevent the entry of terrorists and criminals. It proposes to spend $10 billion of taxpayer money without ensuring that a single illegal alien will be sent home,” said Vaughan on her blog.

Other critics said while they welcome more border fencing, adding chain link has not been the answer, especially today when illegals can present themselves at border gates and be welcomed in.

(*HEADACHE GETTING WORSE*)

For example, said one, Congress in 2006 mandated 700 miles of double-layer fencing but only 36 miles were ever built and the McCaul bill seeks another 27 miles, totaling 63 of the previously mandated 700.

* FOR 10 BILLION DOLLARS...???

January 21, 2015 at 10:57 PM

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