:: November 2008::
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The Krugman Recipe
[wsj] Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been on the attack lately in regard to the New Deal. His new book "The Return of Depression Economics," emphasizes the importance of New Deal-style spending. He has said the trouble with the New Deal was that it didn't spend enough.
He's also arguing that some writers and economists have been misrepresenting the 1930s to make the effect of FDR's overall policy look worse than it was. I'm interested in part because Mr. Krugman has mentioned me by name. He recently said that I am the one "whose misleading statistics have been widely disseminated on the right."
Mr. Krugman is a new Nobel Laureate, teaches at Princeton University and writes a column for a nationally prominent newspaper. So what he says is believed to be objective by many people, even when it isn't. But the larger reason we should care about the 1930s employment record is that the cure Roosevelt offered, the New Deal, is on everyone else's mind as well. In a recent "60 Minutes" interview, President-elect Barack Obama said, "keep in mind that 1932, 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%, inching up to 30%."
The New Deal is Mr. Obama's context for the giant infrastructure plan his new team is developing. If he proposes FDR-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn't. [...]
What kept the picture so dark so long? Deflation for one, but also the notion that government could engineer economic recovery by favoring the public sector at the expense of the private sector.
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Google: All The Information They Decide You Can Have
[nyt] [...] Today the Web might seem like a free-speech panacea: it has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, to blogs and social-networking sites and the like, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.
The most powerful and protean of these Internet gatekeepers is, of course, Google. With control of 63 percent of the world’s Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, Google has enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. As an acknowledgment of its power, Google has given Nicole Wong a central role in the company’s decision-making process about what controversial user-generated content goes down or stays up on YouTube and other applications owned by Google, including Blogger, the blog site; Picasa, the photo-sharing site; and Orkut, the social networking site. Wong and her colleagues also oversee Google’s search engine: they decide what controversial material does and doesn’t appear on the local search engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well as on Google.com. As a result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet. [...]
“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and a former scholar in residence at Google, told me recently. “One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.” Google’s claim on our trust is a fragile thing. After all, it’s hard to be a company whose mission is to give people all the information they want and to insist at the same time on deciding what information they get.
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Comments From The Internet
guystone wrote: [cbc] For anyone questioning the Conservative's economic plans and why they didn't say there was a problem during the election:
#1. They said there was a worldwide economic problem during the election that was sure to affect us. They said our economic fundamentals were strong and for the record they are still reasonably strong.
#2 Harper and Flaherty had said that they had already increased spending on equalization payments (health care / education), provided tax cuts (personal and for business). This is something they had been doing all along. (For the record the NDP (not the Liberals) were attacking the Conservatives all along for doing just that and are now attacking them for not doing enough of it)
#3 Canada is weathering the storm better than any industrialized country in the world. We are still + 800,000 jobs since Harper took office. We still are hovering above a recession and have a budget surplus. Our G8 counterparts, our G30 counterparts, OECD, IMF, and World Bank are all looking at Canada as we type wondering why we are doing so well compared to all the other countries
#4 as per #3 The only group in the entire world that think Canada is doing poorly and are reacting poorly is the Canadian opposition parties (the truth is they don't really believe what they are saying themselves). The rest of the world thinks that Harper and the Conservatives are economic geniuses
#5 Because the opposition parties in Canada are continuouly trying to convince Canadians that our economy is self-destructing it is truly hurting our economy. Its our confidence that is the main problem - not our economic position. The opposition parties want to get into power at all costs to the Canadian people
#6 I obviously don't believe our positive economic position is due to Harper / Conservatives alone. Paul Martin did a great job and our banking, investment, and our insurance "rules and regulations" have always been strict and smart. We are also a reasonably capitalist society with a low population density, great democracy (other than the chaos going on now), good human rights record, great place to live (immigration helps), high amount of commodities per capita, with a good educational system. (health care no comment...)
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Punk Memories : Auction
[nyt] CBGB’s sticker-encrusted urinal is already museum-worthy, and on Monday more detritus from the era of the Ramones and the Clash hurtled its way into high culture, when Christie’s hosted its first auction devoted to punk memorabilia. [slideshow]
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Best Wishes For Thanksgiving : Wherever You Might Be
[wsj] When was the first Thanksgiving? Most of us think of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621. But if the question is about the first national Thanksgiving holiday, the answer is that the tradition began at a lesser-known moment in 1777 in York, Pa.
In July 1776, the American colonists declared independence from Britain. The months that followed were so bleak that there was not much to give thanks for. The Journals of the Continental Congress record no Thanksgiving in that year, only two days of "solemn fasting" and prayer.
For much of 1777, the situation was not much better. British troops controlled New York City. The Americans lost the strategic stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, to the British in July. In Delaware, on Sept. 11, troops led by Gen. George Washington lost the Battle of Brandywine, in which 200 Americans were killed, 500 wounded and 400 captured. In Pennsylvania, early in the morning of Sept. 21, another 300 American soldiers were killed or wounded and 100 captured in a British surprise attack that became known as the Paoli Massacre.
Philadelphia, America's largest city, fell on Sept. 26. Congress, which had been meeting there, fled briefly to Lancaster, Pa., and then to York, a hundred miles west of Philadelphia. One delegate to Congress, John Adams of Massachusetts, wrote in his diary, "The prospect is chilling, on every Side: Gloomy, dark, melancholy, and dispiriting."
[nro] : Tuesday night of last week, I got a call from Richard, a good friend of mine. I just wasn’t in the mood to take it, you know? You’ve been there. Anyway, he didn’t leave a message.
The next day got away from me, but the day after that I called his cell on the way to work just to catch up. His wife answered the phone. And then I found out that Richard had died in his sleep the day before. Just like that. Gone. He left a wife, a five-year-old daughter, and a son who’s not yet one.
So this is my Thanksgiving message. It’s not dreary or sad at all — on the contrary.
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Politically-incorrect Reasons to Be Optimistic on Thanksgiving Day: VDH
[pjm] : 1. Tempered not melted. The question is not whether America is in decline, but whether it is in decline at a more rapid pace than true of Europe, Russia, or Asia.
[...] Once again, I note from mail and the postings that critics on the hard Left continue to lack humor; when they should be ecstatic with the triumph of Obama and the new majority in the Congress, they seem instead curiously consumed by their petty anger and bitterness. And now even the ritual totem George Bush is gone at which to chant and revile. No matter; this is a wonderful country and we are so lucky to be alive in the here and now in the United States. So Lighten up this Thanksgiving–Carpe diem!
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caution on global warming
[politico] [...] The National Academy of Sciences and most major scientific bodies agree that global warming is caused by man-made carbon emissions. But a small, growing number of scientists, including D’Aleo, are questioning how quickly the warming is happening and whether humans are actually the leading cause.
Armed with statistics from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center, D’Aleo reported in the 2009 Old Farmer’s Almanac that the U.S. annual mean temperature has fluctuated for decades and has only risen 0.21 degrees since 1930 — which he says is caused by fluctuating solar activity levels and ocean temperatures, not carbon emissions.
Data from the same source shows that during five of the past seven decades, including this one, average U.S. temperatures have gone down. And the almanac predicted that the next year will see a period of cooling.
“We’re worried that people are too focused on carbon dioxide as the culprit,” D’Aleo said. “Recent warming has stopped since 1998, and we want to stop draconian measures that will hurt already spiraling downward economics. We’re environmentalists and conservationists at heart, but we don’t think that carbon is responsible for hurricanes.”
D’Aleo’s organization, the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, is collaborating on the campaign with the Cooler Heads Coalition, a subgroup of the National Consumer Coalition with members including Americans for Tax Reform, the National Center for Policy Analysis and Citizens for a Sound Economy.
More than 31,000 scientists across the world have signed the Global Warming Petition Project, a declaration started by a group of American scientists that states man’s impact on climate change can’t be reasonably proven.
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The Grey Cup
In 1909, Earl Grey, the Governor-General of Canada, donated a trophy for the Rugby Football Championship of Canada. The trophy, which subsequently became known as the Grey Cup, was originally open to competition only for teams that were registered with the Canada Rugby Union. Since 1954 only the teams of the CFL have challenged for the Grey Cup. Please note - a two game, total-points series took place in 1940, while the 1962 game was played over two days due to fog.
[link]
The Game
The 96th annual Grey Cup game between the Montreal Alouettes and the Calgary Stampeders kicks off at 6pm EST and can be seen live on TSN.
We still keep a mild eye on the goings about in the Canadian Football League, having brought it into the Internal Wagering Machine last season. The Offices of Vegas are going Calgary over Montreal 2-1, with TQM in the pea soup.
** Calgary wins it : 22-14
- The Offices of Vegas will tally the internal wagering of another year of that wacky Canadian football league eventually.
We've projected and barring any recount : TQM wins the VIW season :
Final VIW CFL 08 Result : tqm-45 / tgp-40 / vgs-34
The home Office, yea, we took a beat down. No one seems to remember who won it around the Offices last year - they each say they did. I'll look around sometime.
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CFL fan laments loss of Grey Cup on free TV; TSN calls it 'wave of the future’
[canoe] : for some Canadians, the tradition may be lost this year because they can't watch the Montreal Alouettes take on the Calgary Stampeders at all. No Signal!
After more than 50 seasons on conventional television, the Grey Cup will be shown on TSN, an all-sports channel available only on cable or satellite. This has sparked the ire of Grey Cup fans like Mike Donaldson.
"There's something wrong with that," says Donaldson. Donaldson lives in rural Alberta, near Elk Island National Park. Cable isn't an option. [...]
TSN and French-language affiliate RDS had the broadcast rights to the CFL's entire schedule this year - 72 regular-season games, four division playoff games and the Grey Cup. In the past, TSN had split games with CBC, which would air the final.
TSN is available in nine million homes and president Phil King says "virtually 99 per cent of Canada" could get the channel either via cable or satellite. [...]
"I think that's really because ... every single CFL game this year is on TSN, as will be for the next five years, so any CFL fan that perhaps couldn't have TSN at the beginning of the season has probably gone out and gotten it by now," King said in an interview from Montreal.
"You can get a TSN signal if you want to. It is out there."
TSN has planned what it boasts is the most extensive Grey Cup coverage in the history of the CFL, including 11 hours of pre-game coverage Saturday and Sunday. Canadians can also access the full Grey Cup game online. Each quarter will be posted after it's completion.
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The Warmer, the Merrier
[link] Earth warmed a little during the last century as part of the natural climate cycles that have always been happening and always will. The principal agent by far – to the tune of 95% of the total in maintaining an atmosphere that keeps the Earth from freezing at this distance from the Sun – is water vapour, which doesn't even figure in the computer models that the current hysteria is based on, because you can't control it, tax it, or blame it on your favorite villains. At 0.03% of the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide is a minor player, and the proportion of it due to human activities, minuscule – 2% of the 0.03%, which is six millionths of the 5% warming which was due to CO2 to begin with. Put another way, the human contribution works out at three cents in a hundred thousand dollars.
Carbon dioxide did increase over the latter half of the twentieth century, but the assertion that it was all or mainly a result of burning hydrocarbon fuels has no solid foundation. Warming for any reason will release carbon from vast natural reservoirs. Reconstructions of past conditions show CO2 levels up to 20 times higher than at present, before there were any humans at all, and data from such sources as ice cores, lake sediments, and tree rings indicate that in the swings over the ages, the warming occurred first, making CO2 levels a longer-term effect rather than the driver. Mean temperatures actually fell from the late 1940s through to the 1970s and again from around 1998 to the present, while CO2 continued rising steadily, very likely as a consequence of the 300-year recovery from the "mini ice age" of the 17th century.
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Let Detroit Go Bankrupt
By MITT ROMNEY
Published: November 18, 2008
[nyt] IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.
Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
I love cars, American cars. I was born in Detroit, the son of an auto chief executive. In 1954, my dad, George Romney, was tapped to run American Motors when its president suddenly died. The company itself was on life support — banks were threatening to deal it a death blow. The stock collapsed. I watched Dad work to turn the company around — and years later at business school, they were still talking about it. From the lessons of that turnaround, and from my own experiences, I have several prescriptions for Detroit’s automakers.
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Rivals : Reflect
[latimes] : People love Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on the Lincoln presidency, "Team of Rivals." More important, for this moment in American history, Barack Obama loves it. The book is certainly fun to read, but its claim that Abraham Lincoln revealed his "political genius" through the management of his wartime Cabinet deserves a harder look, especially now that it seems to be offering a template for the new administration.
"Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his Cabinet," is the way Obama has summarized Goodwin's thesis, adding, "Whatever personal feelings there were, the issue was how can we get this country through this time of crisis."
That's true enough, but the problem is, it didn't work that well for Lincoln. There were painful trade-offs with the "team of rivals" approach that are never fully addressed in the book, or by others that offer happy-sounding descriptions of the Lincoln presidency.
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Al Franken Campaign Challenged Ballot
One challenge headed to the state so far in Plymouth : [stm] : The bubble beside Norm Coleman’s name appeared to have both an X and a squiggle in it, but the Al Franken campaign wants the state Canvassing Board to rule on whether it should count. That’s the only challenge in the special envelope in Plymouth so far, according to Sandy Engdahl, the city clerk and the official running the city recount.
Come on. Seriously? It's bad enough that grade A tool Franken is even in such a position to begin with, but when people in commentary there actually suggest that this vote is questionable, well it kind of explains itself I suppose. Chime the old adage you get who you deserve. Sheeziz.
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Murdoch on The State of The Media
Rupert Murdoch is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest diversified media companies. News Corporation’s operations include the production of major motion pictures and television programs, cable, satellite and broadcast television, newspaper, magazine and book publishing, and internet and mobile news, information and entertainment services, spanning the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and Latin America.
[cnet] [...] "My summary of the way some of the established media has responded to the internet is this: it's not newspapers that might become obsolete. It's some of the editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper's most precious asset: the bond with its readers," said Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp. He made his remarks as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Australian Broadcast Corporation. [...]
"The complacency stems from having enjoyed a monopoly--and now finding they have to compete for an audience they once took for granted. The condescension that many show their readers is an even bigger problem. It takes no special genius to point out that if you are contemptuous of your customers, you are going to have a hard time getting them to buy your product. Newspapers are no exception." [...]
"It used to be that a handful of editors could decide what was news-and what was not. They acted as sort of demigods. If they ran a story, it became news. If they ignored an event, it never happened. Today editors are losing this power. The Internet, for example, provides access to thousands of new sources that cover things an editor might ignore. And if you aren't satisfied with that, you can start up your own blog and cover and comment on the news yourself. Journalists like to think of themselves as watchdogs, but they haven't always responded well when the public calls them to account."
To make his point, Murdoch criticized the media reaction after bloggers debunked a "60 Minutes" report by former CBS anchor, Dan Rather, that President Bush had evaded service during his days in the National Guard.
"Far from celebrating this citizen journalism, the establishment media reacted defensively. During an appearance on Fox News, a CBS executive attacked the bloggers in a statement that will go down in the annals of arrogance. '60 Minutes,' he said, was a professional organization with 'multiple layers of checks and balances.' By contrast, he dismissed the blogger as 'a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.' But eventually it was the guys sitting in their pajamas who forced Mr. Rather and his producer to resign.
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Transitional
[tws] : You may have noticed that some presidential Transitions are more equal than others.
Here is my theory: When a Democrat is succeeded by a Republican in the White House, it is seen as a civic regression, the triumph of dirty politics over clean statesmanship (see Willie Horton, the October Surprise, Lee Atwater, etc.). But when a Democrat replaces a Republican, it's a national rebirth, a celebration of renewal and the natural order of things.
An expatriate Briton, now deceased, liked to tell the story of dining one evening in early 1969, on the eve of Richard Nixon's first inaugural, at the Rive Gauche, a fashionable Georgetown restaurant favored by Jackie Kennedy and friends, long since gone. As their meal progressed, he and his companion observed that the place was swiftly filling up with people they didn't know, or even recognize, total strangers. And then it hit them: The Republicans had arrived!
Of course, this mixture of alarm and condescension--Tip O'Neill to Ronald Reagan: "You're in the big leagues now" (1981)--is very different from the tone currently surrounding Barack Obama, or the arrival of Bill Clinton--"Bill and Al's Excellent Adventure," the Washington Post (1992)--a decade-and-a-half ago. Certainly as far as the media are concerned, a Democrat-to-Republican Transition is an ominous thing, as the black clouds and killer insects descend on the nation's capital; a Republican-to-Democrat Transition, by contrast, is a tribute to life, an Ode to Joy on the Mighty Wurlitzer of political Washington.
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John R. Thomson recently spent two weeks in Caracas, Venezuela, assessing economic and political conditions prior to next Sunday's elections.
[wt] : The drive to Caracas from Maiquetia Airport is dangerous at night and unsightly by day. Thugs - often dressed as police - stop vehicles, rob passengers and steal their cars. Surrounding hills hold a seemingly impossible number of squalid ranchos - shack-filled ghettos - home to a million or more desperately poor Venezuelan peasants, who have become President Hugo Chavez's core support.
Caracas can seem hardly changed from 10 years ago. There are 5 times more vehicles on the same streets, now hellishly potholed. But standing on one of the middle-upper class hills in Chuao district overlooking the city, the capital looks like the energetic, exciting city of yore. It isn't.
Caracas is on a seemingly unstoppable downward slide. The invading poor have endangered the city of 6 million as never before. The wealthy (those not seeking refuge in southern Florida, Colombia or Spain) lead a semi-surrealistic existence reflecting a sense of smiling through the ever-increasing gloom, plus a devout dream that somehow, someday Venezuela will be rid of Mr. Chavez, socialism and insecurity.
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Remedying the Bias Perception
D.Howell | OMBUDSMAN | The Post
[wapo] Thousands of conservatives and even some moderates have complained during my more than three-year term that The Post is too liberal; many have stopped subscribing, including more than 900 in the past four weeks.
It pains me to see lost subscribers and revenue, especially when newspapers are shrinking. Conservative complaints can be wrong: The mainstream media were not to blame for John McCain's loss; Barack Obama's more effective campaign and the financial crisis were.
But some of the conservatives' complaints about a liberal tilt are valid. Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I'll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don't even want to be quoted by name in a memo. [...]
Bob Steele, ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute, which trains journalists, thinks editors should be doing "ongoing content evaluation of candidates and issues to provide scrutiny on photos, stories, placement of stories and what are the weaknesses and strengths of the candidates." He also recommends "prosecutorial editing" as one way to "minimize the ideological bias and beliefs that all journalists have. It would greatly reduce the news content being skewed by beliefs."
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Hottest October Ever! Hold On, Oops. Nevermind
[uktelegraph] : A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running. [...]
A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.
If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)
Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question.
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Ex-Lobbyists Have Key Obama Roles
[wapo] Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to change Washington, vowing to upend the K Street lobbying culture he encountered when he joined the U.S. Senate.
But more than a dozen members of President-elect Obama's fast-growing transition team have worked as federally registered lobbyists within the past four years. They include former lobbyists for the nation's trial lawyers association, mortgage giant Fannie Mae, drug companies such as Amgen, high-tech firms such as Microsoft, labor unions and the liberal advocacy group Center for American Progress.
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UK : Tax Cuts? Cut Spending
[spectator] It was in the 1996 Budget that the Conservatives made a mistake they have yet to recover from, they began to say “investment” rather than “spending”. With that rhetorical shift they accepted Brown’s logic that the more money spent by the state, the better. Now that Brown’s spendthrift, debt-concealing policies have led Britain into recession it is the perfect time for the Tories to think again – and start saying what they would cut.
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Roger 'The Giggler' Moore Solidifies Title as Worst Bond
Thanks for solidifying the eternal 'best/worst/favorite' Bond question for the Vegas staff. We've been again casually revisiting the history of the films of late, in chronological order and honestly, we kind of dreaded coming up to your tenure holding the mantle. This tidbit won't help. [cbc]
The 81-year-old actor recalled being appalled at the violence in A View to a Kill, the 1985 movie which was the last of the seven in which he played Bond.
"That wasn't Bond," he said.
In his book, Moore writes of his distaste for guns, ever since he was shot in the leg by a friend with a BB gun as a teenager.
'My Bond was a lover and a giggler'
While making The Man With the Golden Gun, director Guy Hamilton wanted Bond to be tougher and had him threaten to break Maud Adams' character's arm to get information, he writes. "That sort of characterization didn't sit well with me, but Guy was keen to make my Bond a little more ruthless.
"I suggested my Bond would have charmed the information out of her by bedding her first. My Bond was a lover and a giggler, but I went along with Guy," the British actor wrote.
You know, we never quite got Dalton completely in the role, but something tells us that when we finish his segments and yours (which we're about to embark on), we'll be siding with Dalton. Needless to say, Lazenby kicked your ass.
Uh, yea...OK, Rog. Somehow we always knew that you probably thought that a bit of slapstick or maybe some crooning would not be out of line for Bond.
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Obama and the Founders' Intent
[newsweek] In a Presidential contest replete with novelties, none was more significant than this: A candidate’s campaign—for his party’s nomination, then for the presidency—was itself virtually the entire validation of his candidacy. Voters have endorsed Barack Obama’s audacious—but not, they have said, presumptuous—proposition, which was: The skill, tenacity, strategic vision and tactical nimbleness of my campaign is proof that I am presidential timber.
Because imitation is the sincerest form of politics, the 2008 campaign will not be the last in which such a proposition is asserted. Obama’s achievement represents the final repudiation of the Founders’ intentions regarding the selection, and hence the role, of presidents. So Americans should understand the long evolution of the selection process.
It is strange but true: Presidential politics, although of paramount importance, is a game without settled rules. More than two centuries after ratification of the Constitution, there is no stable system for selecting presidential candidates.
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It is the soldier.
It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.
It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves under the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.
-Charles M. Province
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Internet Black Boxes to Record Every Email and Website Visit
[telegraph] : Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database.
The vision was outlined at a meeting between officials from the Home Office and Internet Service Providers earlier this week.
It is further evidence of the Government's desire to have the capability to vet every telephone call, email and internet visit made in the UK, which has already provoked an outcry.
Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, has described it as a "step too far".
The proposal is expected to be put out to consultation as part of the new Communications Data Bill early next year.
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Cartoon from a November 1874 Harper’s Weekly issue which solidified use of the elephant icon to represent the GOP. It, as well as the donkey used by the Democrats, were created by political cartoonist Thomas Nash.
The elephant has been a symbol of strength since Roman times. Its first use by the Republican Party is believed to date from a printer’s cut (pre-made pictures kept ready to use as illustrations when needed) of an elephant used by an Illinois newspaper during Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 presidential campaign. Thomas Nast was a staunch Republican, and he deliberately chose the elephant as a symbol for his own Party because of the animal’s great size, intelligence, strength, and dignity. It first appeared in his November 7, 1874 cartoon, “The Third Term Panic,” which was a comment on fears that Grant would run for a third term as President that led some Republicans to vote with the Democrats. Nast continued using the elephant thereafter, and gradually it became the Republican icon as it was adopted by other cartoonists.
[nastportfolio]
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Palin and the GOP
[wsj] : Love Sarah Palin or hate her -- and there seems to be little in between -- the Alaska Governor has become a national political figure. She could have a big political future, assuming she and the many Republicans now trashing her learn something from their recent misadventures.
Last August we advised John McCain not to select a relative unknown like Mrs. Palin, in part because we remember the way Dan Quayle was treated. The media haze GOP candidates in a way they never do Democrats. (See Joe Biden, unreported gaffes of.) Any national-campaign novice was bound to be chewed up. Mr. McCain nonetheless decided to take one of his celebrated leaps off the high bar. (Our track record this campaign was perfect: If we proposed it, Mr. McCain did the opposite.)
In the event, Mrs. Palin's contribution to the McCain ticket was mixed. Her bravura convention speech defied the early media mockery and made her an instant hero among rank-and-file Republicans. Her reform credentials and social conservatism inspired a GOP base that was angry with its wayward party and wary of Mr. McCain. The exit polls show that conservative turnout was strong, and Mrs. Palin deserves some credit for that.
Yet Mrs. Palin was clearly thrust into the spotlight before she was prepared for the rigors of a national campaign. The McCain camp also did her no favors, initially keeping her under a quarantine that raised the stakes for any media interview she did do. When it finally handed her over to Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, Mrs. Palin was set up to fail with ground rules that let CBS dribble out her uncertain answers night after night. [...]
As for Mrs. Palin's Republican critics, they might consider if they can afford to write off a young leader with such natural political talent. We don't see a large constellation of other GOP stars on the horizon. Mr. McCain was right to understand that his party needs a new generation of leaders who haven't grown comfortable with the perks of Washington. Especially as Democrats once again grow the Beltway, the next GOP leaders will need to make a better case for entrepreneurship and limited government. Mrs. Palin deserves a chance to see if she has the skill and work ethic to become that kind of leader.
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Jobless Rate : 14-year high of 6.5
[yahoo] : The nation's unemployment rate bolted to a 14-year high of 6.5 percent in October as another 240,000 jobs were cut, the government said Friday. It was stark proof the economy is almost certainly in a recession.
The new snapshot, released by the Labor Department, shows the crucial jobs market deteriorating at an alarmingly rapid pace.
The jobless rate zoomed to 6.5 percent in October from 6.1 percent in September, matching the unemployment rate in March 1994. Employers have cut jobs each month this year.
Unemployment has now surpassed the high seen after the last recession in 2001. The jobless rate peaked at 6.3 percent in June 2003.
Employers got rid of 240,000 jobs in October, marking the 10th straight month of payroll reductions.
Job losses in August and September turned out to be much deeper. Employers cut 127,000 positions in August, compared with 73,000 previously reported. A whopping 284,000 jobs were axed last month, compared with the 159,000 jobs first reported.
So far this year, a staggering 1.2 million jobs have disappeared.
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U.S. Stocks Post Biggest Post-Election Drop on Economic Concern
[bloomberg] The stock market posted its biggest plunge following a presidential election as reports on jobs and service industries stoked concern the economy will worsen even as President-elect Barack Obama tries to stimulate growth. [...]
The market's decline came a day after the biggest presidential Election Day gain since the New York Stock Exchange first opened for trading on a voting day in 1984.
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Triumph Of The Creative Class
[forbes] : Today the traditional business leadership, like their Republican allies, present a spectacle of utter disarray. The commercial banks have been effectively nationalized. Many traditional manufacturers, notably automakers, also yearn to suck on the federal teat. Reduced to supplicants, these companies have surrendered their standing as independent players. At the same time, the traditional energy companies, long the whipping boys of Congressional Democrats, will be fully occupied trying to survive the onslaught of anti-carbon regulations now all but inevitable.
In contrast, the creative class comes to power with the wind at its back. Its ascendancy was first predicted by Daniel Bell in his 1973 classic The Coming of Post-Industrial Society as a natural product of the rise of science-based industry. Shortly afterward California's Jerry Brown became the first politician to recognize this shift, embracing Silicon Valley and Hollywood as a counterweight to the industrial, aerospace and agribusiness establishment that had supported both his father, former governor Pat Brown, and Ronald Reagan.
In the ensuing decades, the creative class establishment rallied to different political causes and candidates, including Gary Hart's 1984 presidential campaign and the causes of other so-called "Atari Democrats." Yet it is only this year that its members have, like the Skynet computer system in the Terminator series, reached a level of consciousness about their potential true power.
What will this ascendancy mean in economic terms? Since the creative class deals largely with images, ideas and transactions, it's not likely to focus much on reviving the tangible parts of the economy: manufacturing, logistics, traditional energy and agribusiness.
On the other hand, the creatives are unlikely to be protectionist since they represent companies whose growth markets, and often suppliers, are located overseas. Heavily counted among the world's richest people, they are also likely to support some Bushite policies--like low interest rates and financial bailouts--that prop up their stock prices and drive money to Wall Street. [...]
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Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace
[wsj] This is the price Mr. Bush is paying for trying to work with both Democrats and Republicans. During his 2004 victory speech, the president reached out to voters who supported his opponent, John Kerry, and said, "Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust."
Those bipartisan efforts have been met with crushing resistance from both political parties. [...]
Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman's presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years -- and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.
Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.
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Madeleine Albright: A letter to the next president
[telegraph] : Congratulations on your success. You have won an impressive victory – but with that victory comes the responsibility to guide a troubled America in a world riven by conflict, confusion and hate. Upon taking office, you will face the daunting task of restoring America’s credibility as an effective and exemplary world leader.
John Bolton: Letter to the next president
[telegraph] Congratulations, Mr President-elect, on your victory. After the longest presidential campaign in our history, you now have 77 days to prepare to govern. While foreigners might see eleven weeks as an eternity, you know only too well that it is precious little time to select your top advisers and then subject them to our cumbersome FBI and ethics screening of their backgrounds, their finances, their potential conflicts of interest, and whatever skeletons are hanging in their closets.
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Congratulations : President-Elect Obama
May wisdom guide you on your new path and we wish you the best of luck. Let's see where it leads and what fruit it bears.
We've got the Change, and now we're fully on board with the Hope concept.
Enjoy the honeymoon.
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[NYT] : OBAMA President-Elect Calls Outcome a ‘Defining Moment’
[LATimes] : OBAMA WINS 'That is the true genius of America —
that America can change'
[uktimes] : 'Change has come' - Obama wins in landslide
[nationalpost] : A major divide has been crossed; U.S. elects Barack Obama
[sydneymorningherals] : A new America
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Finally. The longest and most expensive US Presidential campaign season comes to a close. Even for political junkies like us, it is a welcomed end. Get on with it. Out with the old and in with the new. That's what it will be no matter who wins, regardless of the 'more of the same' nonsense. Or the 'change' mantra. By most accounts, tomorrow the 'O' will be relaxing and counting down the days until he can change America and the world. That'll be something we'll be watching for, to be sure. Show me the money!
TCB
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Obama's '$4 Billion for Exxon' Myth
Why haven't the 'fact-checkers' done a better job?
[wsj] [...] In the last debate, Sen. Obama said, "We both want to cut taxes, the difference is who we want to cut taxes for. . . . The centerpiece of [McCain's] economic proposal is to provide $200 billion in additional tax breaks to some of the wealthiest corporations in America. Exxon Mobil, and other oil companies, for example, would get an additional $4 billion in tax breaks."
That $200 billion figure is false. Yet FactCheck.org and most reporters never bothered to ask Mr. Obama where he came up with it. FactCheck.org did discover that Mr. Obama's claim about "$4 billion in tax breaks for energy companies" came from a two-page memo from the Center for American Progress Action Fund -- a political lobby headed by John Podesta, former chief of staff to Bill Clinton, with tax issues handled by two lawyers, Robert Gordon and James Kvaal, former policy directors for the John Kerry and John Edwards campaigns. Those lawyers confused average tax rates (after credits and deductions) with the 35% statutory rate on the next dollar of earnings, so that cutting the latter rate from 35% to 25% would supposedly cut big oil's $13.4 billion tax bill by 28.5%, or $3.8 billion. That is not economics; it is not even competent bookkeeping.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, by contrast, correctly notes that, "Senator McCain has called for the repeal and reform of a number of tax preferences for oil companies," which would raise the oil companies' taxes by $5 billion in 2013. [...]
Phasing in tax-rate reductions -- as in 1981 and 2001 -- has become a bad habit among Republicans. The trouble is that knowing tax rates will be lower in the future provides incentives to delay earning and reporting income until after they fall. In the American Economic Review, December 2006, University of Michigan economists Christopher House and Matthew Shapiro found "the phased-in tax cuts called for in the 2001 tax bill worked to depress employment as firms and workers waited for the lower tax rates to materialize."
In the U.S today, the combined federal and state tax on corporate profits averages 40%, which is increasingly out of line with the rest of the world. The average corporate tax rate dropped to 25.9% in 2008 from 37.7% in 1996 among 97 countries surveyed by KPMG, and to 23.2% from 38% in the European Union. Corporate tax revenues typically increased as a share of GDP after tax rates were reduced. Countries with corporate tax rates from 12.5% to 25%, such as Ireland, Switzerland, Austria and Denmark, routinely collect more corporate tax revenue as a share of GDP than the anemic 2.1% figure the Congressional Budget Office projects for the U.S.
In a new Tax & Budget Bulletin at Cato.org, Jack Mintz of the University of Calgary estimates that a federal-state corporate tax rate higher than 28% loses money for the government. Kimberly Clausing of Reed College estimated revenues would be maximized with a 33% federal and state tax. Kevin Hassett and Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute found "the revenue maximizing point has dropped over time, and is about 26%." In all of these studies, cutting the federal tax to 28%-30% sooner rather than later is very likely to raise revenue.
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The Krugman Recipe
[wsj] Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been on the attack lately in regard to the New Deal. His new book "The Return of Depression Economics," emphasizes the importance of New Deal-style spending. He has said the trouble with the New Deal was that it didn't spend enough.
He's also arguing that some writers and economists have been misrepresenting the 1930s to make the effect of FDR's overall policy look worse than it was. I'm interested in part because Mr. Krugman has mentioned me by name. He recently said that I am the one "whose misleading statistics have been widely disseminated on the right."
Mr. Krugman is a new Nobel Laureate, teaches at Princeton University and writes a column for a nationally prominent newspaper. So what he says is believed to be objective by many people, even when it isn't. But the larger reason we should care about the 1930s employment record is that the cure Roosevelt offered, the New Deal, is on everyone else's mind as well. In a recent "60 Minutes" interview, President-elect Barack Obama said, "keep in mind that 1932, 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%, inching up to 30%."
The New Deal is Mr. Obama's context for the giant infrastructure plan his new team is developing. If he proposes FDR-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn't. [...]
What kept the picture so dark so long? Deflation for one, but also the notion that government could engineer economic recovery by favoring the public sector at the expense of the private sector.
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Google: All The Information They Decide You Can Have
[nyt] [...] Today the Web might seem like a free-speech panacea: it has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, to blogs and social-networking sites and the like, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.
The most powerful and protean of these Internet gatekeepers is, of course, Google. With control of 63 percent of the world’s Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, Google has enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. As an acknowledgment of its power, Google has given Nicole Wong a central role in the company’s decision-making process about what controversial user-generated content goes down or stays up on YouTube and other applications owned by Google, including Blogger, the blog site; Picasa, the photo-sharing site; and Orkut, the social networking site. Wong and her colleagues also oversee Google’s search engine: they decide what controversial material does and doesn’t appear on the local search engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well as on Google.com. As a result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet. [...]
“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and a former scholar in residence at Google, told me recently. “One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.” Google’s claim on our trust is a fragile thing. After all, it’s hard to be a company whose mission is to give people all the information they want and to insist at the same time on deciding what information they get.
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Comments From The Internetguystone wrote: [cbc] For anyone questioning the Conservative's economic plans and why they didn't say there was a problem during the election:
#1. They said there was a worldwide economic problem during the election that was sure to affect us. They said our economic fundamentals were strong and for the record they are still reasonably strong.
#2 Harper and Flaherty had said that they had already increased spending on equalization payments (health care / education), provided tax cuts (personal and for business). This is something they had been doing all along. (For the record the NDP (not the Liberals) were attacking the Conservatives all along for doing just that and are now attacking them for not doing enough of it)
#3 Canada is weathering the storm better than any industrialized country in the world. We are still + 800,000 jobs since Harper took office. We still are hovering above a recession and have a budget surplus. Our G8 counterparts, our G30 counterparts, OECD, IMF, and World Bank are all looking at Canada as we type wondering why we are doing so well compared to all the other countries
#4 as per #3 The only group in the entire world that think Canada is doing poorly and are reacting poorly is the Canadian opposition parties (the truth is they don't really believe what they are saying themselves). The rest of the world thinks that Harper and the Conservatives are economic geniuses
#5 Because the opposition parties in Canada are continuouly trying to convince Canadians that our economy is self-destructing it is truly hurting our economy. Its our confidence that is the main problem - not our economic position. The opposition parties want to get into power at all costs to the Canadian people
#6 I obviously don't believe our positive economic position is due to Harper / Conservatives alone. Paul Martin did a great job and our banking, investment, and our insurance "rules and regulations" have always been strict and smart. We are also a reasonably capitalist society with a low population density, great democracy (other than the chaos going on now), good human rights record, great place to live (immigration helps), high amount of commodities per capita, with a good educational system. (health care no comment...)
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Punk Memories : Auction
[nyt] CBGB’s sticker-encrusted urinal is already museum-worthy, and on Monday more detritus from the era of the Ramones and the Clash hurtled its way into high culture, when Christie’s hosted its first auction devoted to punk memorabilia. [slideshow]::::
Best Wishes For Thanksgiving : Wherever You Might Be
[wsj] When was the first Thanksgiving? Most of us think of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621. But if the question is about the first national Thanksgiving holiday, the answer is that the tradition began at a lesser-known moment in 1777 in York, Pa.
In July 1776, the American colonists declared independence from Britain. The months that followed were so bleak that there was not much to give thanks for. The Journals of the Continental Congress record no Thanksgiving in that year, only two days of "solemn fasting" and prayer.
For much of 1777, the situation was not much better. British troops controlled New York City. The Americans lost the strategic stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, to the British in July. In Delaware, on Sept. 11, troops led by Gen. George Washington lost the Battle of Brandywine, in which 200 Americans were killed, 500 wounded and 400 captured. In Pennsylvania, early in the morning of Sept. 21, another 300 American soldiers were killed or wounded and 100 captured in a British surprise attack that became known as the Paoli Massacre.
Philadelphia, America's largest city, fell on Sept. 26. Congress, which had been meeting there, fled briefly to Lancaster, Pa., and then to York, a hundred miles west of Philadelphia. One delegate to Congress, John Adams of Massachusetts, wrote in his diary, "The prospect is chilling, on every Side: Gloomy, dark, melancholy, and dispiriting."
[nro] : Tuesday night of last week, I got a call from Richard, a good friend of mine. I just wasn’t in the mood to take it, you know? You’ve been there. Anyway, he didn’t leave a message.
The next day got away from me, but the day after that I called his cell on the way to work just to catch up. His wife answered the phone. And then I found out that Richard had died in his sleep the day before. Just like that. Gone. He left a wife, a five-year-old daughter, and a son who’s not yet one.
So this is my Thanksgiving message. It’s not dreary or sad at all — on the contrary.
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Politically-incorrect Reasons to Be Optimistic on Thanksgiving Day: VDH
[pjm] : 1. Tempered not melted. The question is not whether America is in decline, but whether it is in decline at a more rapid pace than true of Europe, Russia, or Asia.
[...] Once again, I note from mail and the postings that critics on the hard Left continue to lack humor; when they should be ecstatic with the triumph of Obama and the new majority in the Congress, they seem instead curiously consumed by their petty anger and bitterness. And now even the ritual totem George Bush is gone at which to chant and revile. No matter; this is a wonderful country and we are so lucky to be alive in the here and now in the United States. So Lighten up this Thanksgiving–Carpe diem!
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High Street legend Woolworths has buckled under its debt and is set to go into administration, BBC business editor Robert Peston has learned.
The move will put tens of thousands of jobs at its 815 stores under threat.
The board of Woolies - one of the UK's oldest store groups - is meeting to take the formal decision.
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caution on global warming
[politico] [...] The National Academy of Sciences and most major scientific bodies agree that global warming is caused by man-made carbon emissions. But a small, growing number of scientists, including D’Aleo, are questioning how quickly the warming is happening and whether humans are actually the leading cause.
Armed with statistics from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center, D’Aleo reported in the 2009 Old Farmer’s Almanac that the U.S. annual mean temperature has fluctuated for decades and has only risen 0.21 degrees since 1930 — which he says is caused by fluctuating solar activity levels and ocean temperatures, not carbon emissions.
Data from the same source shows that during five of the past seven decades, including this one, average U.S. temperatures have gone down. And the almanac predicted that the next year will see a period of cooling.
“We’re worried that people are too focused on carbon dioxide as the culprit,” D’Aleo said. “Recent warming has stopped since 1998, and we want to stop draconian measures that will hurt already spiraling downward economics. We’re environmentalists and conservationists at heart, but we don’t think that carbon is responsible for hurricanes.”
D’Aleo’s organization, the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, is collaborating on the campaign with the Cooler Heads Coalition, a subgroup of the National Consumer Coalition with members including Americans for Tax Reform, the National Center for Policy Analysis and Citizens for a Sound Economy.
More than 31,000 scientists across the world have signed the Global Warming Petition Project, a declaration started by a group of American scientists that states man’s impact on climate change can’t be reasonably proven.
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The Grey Cup
In 1909, Earl Grey, the Governor-General of Canada, donated a trophy for the Rugby Football Championship of Canada. The trophy, which subsequently became known as the Grey Cup, was originally open to competition only for teams that were registered with the Canada Rugby Union. Since 1954 only the teams of the CFL have challenged for the Grey Cup. Please note - a two game, total-points series took place in 1940, while the 1962 game was played over two days due to fog.[link]
The GameThe 96th annual Grey Cup game between the Montreal Alouettes and the Calgary Stampeders kicks off at 6pm EST and can be seen live on TSN.
We still keep a mild eye on the goings about in the Canadian Football League, having brought it into the Internal Wagering Machine last season. The Offices of Vegas are going Calgary over Montreal 2-1, with TQM in the pea soup.
** Calgary wins it : 22-14
- The Offices of Vegas will tally the internal wagering of another year of that wacky Canadian football league eventually.
We've projected and barring any recount : TQM wins the VIW season :
Final VIW CFL 08 Result : tqm-45 / tgp-40 / vgs-34
The home Office, yea, we took a beat down. No one seems to remember who won it around the Offices last year - they each say they did. I'll look around sometime.
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CFL fan laments loss of Grey Cup on free TV; TSN calls it 'wave of the future’
[canoe] : for some Canadians, the tradition may be lost this year because they can't watch the Montreal Alouettes take on the Calgary Stampeders at all. No Signal!
After more than 50 seasons on conventional television, the Grey Cup will be shown on TSN, an all-sports channel available only on cable or satellite. This has sparked the ire of Grey Cup fans like Mike Donaldson.
"There's something wrong with that," says Donaldson. Donaldson lives in rural Alberta, near Elk Island National Park. Cable isn't an option. [...]
TSN and French-language affiliate RDS had the broadcast rights to the CFL's entire schedule this year - 72 regular-season games, four division playoff games and the Grey Cup. In the past, TSN had split games with CBC, which would air the final.
TSN is available in nine million homes and president Phil King says "virtually 99 per cent of Canada" could get the channel either via cable or satellite. [...]
"I think that's really because ... every single CFL game this year is on TSN, as will be for the next five years, so any CFL fan that perhaps couldn't have TSN at the beginning of the season has probably gone out and gotten it by now," King said in an interview from Montreal.
"You can get a TSN signal if you want to. It is out there."
TSN has planned what it boasts is the most extensive Grey Cup coverage in the history of the CFL, including 11 hours of pre-game coverage Saturday and Sunday. Canadians can also access the full Grey Cup game online. Each quarter will be posted after it's completion.
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The Warmer, the Merrier
[link] Earth warmed a little during the last century as part of the natural climate cycles that have always been happening and always will. The principal agent by far – to the tune of 95% of the total in maintaining an atmosphere that keeps the Earth from freezing at this distance from the Sun – is water vapour, which doesn't even figure in the computer models that the current hysteria is based on, because you can't control it, tax it, or blame it on your favorite villains. At 0.03% of the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide is a minor player, and the proportion of it due to human activities, minuscule – 2% of the 0.03%, which is six millionths of the 5% warming which was due to CO2 to begin with. Put another way, the human contribution works out at three cents in a hundred thousand dollars.
Carbon dioxide did increase over the latter half of the twentieth century, but the assertion that it was all or mainly a result of burning hydrocarbon fuels has no solid foundation. Warming for any reason will release carbon from vast natural reservoirs. Reconstructions of past conditions show CO2 levels up to 20 times higher than at present, before there were any humans at all, and data from such sources as ice cores, lake sediments, and tree rings indicate that in the swings over the ages, the warming occurred first, making CO2 levels a longer-term effect rather than the driver. Mean temperatures actually fell from the late 1940s through to the 1970s and again from around 1998 to the present, while CO2 continued rising steadily, very likely as a consequence of the 300-year recovery from the "mini ice age" of the 17th century.
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Let Detroit Go Bankrupt
By MITT ROMNEY
Published: November 18, 2008
[nyt] IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.
Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
I love cars, American cars. I was born in Detroit, the son of an auto chief executive. In 1954, my dad, George Romney, was tapped to run American Motors when its president suddenly died. The company itself was on life support — banks were threatening to deal it a death blow. The stock collapsed. I watched Dad work to turn the company around — and years later at business school, they were still talking about it. From the lessons of that turnaround, and from my own experiences, I have several prescriptions for Detroit’s automakers.
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Rivals : Reflect
[latimes] : People love Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on the Lincoln presidency, "Team of Rivals." More important, for this moment in American history, Barack Obama loves it. The book is certainly fun to read, but its claim that Abraham Lincoln revealed his "political genius" through the management of his wartime Cabinet deserves a harder look, especially now that it seems to be offering a template for the new administration.
"Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his Cabinet," is the way Obama has summarized Goodwin's thesis, adding, "Whatever personal feelings there were, the issue was how can we get this country through this time of crisis."
That's true enough, but the problem is, it didn't work that well for Lincoln. There were painful trade-offs with the "team of rivals" approach that are never fully addressed in the book, or by others that offer happy-sounding descriptions of the Lincoln presidency.
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Al Franken Campaign Challenged Ballot
One challenge headed to the state so far in Plymouth : [stm] : The bubble beside Norm Coleman’s name appeared to have both an X and a squiggle in it, but the Al Franken campaign wants the state Canvassing Board to rule on whether it should count. That’s the only challenge in the special envelope in Plymouth so far, according to Sandy Engdahl, the city clerk and the official running the city recount.
Come on. Seriously? It's bad enough that grade A tool Franken is even in such a position to begin with, but when people in commentary there actually suggest that this vote is questionable, well it kind of explains itself I suppose. Chime the old adage you get who you deserve. Sheeziz.::::
Murdoch on The State of The Media
Rupert Murdoch is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest diversified media companies. News Corporation’s operations include the production of major motion pictures and television programs, cable, satellite and broadcast television, newspaper, magazine and book publishing, and internet and mobile news, information and entertainment services, spanning the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and Latin America.
[cnet] [...] "My summary of the way some of the established media has responded to the internet is this: it's not newspapers that might become obsolete. It's some of the editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper's most precious asset: the bond with its readers," said Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp. He made his remarks as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Australian Broadcast Corporation. [...]
"The complacency stems from having enjoyed a monopoly--and now finding they have to compete for an audience they once took for granted. The condescension that many show their readers is an even bigger problem. It takes no special genius to point out that if you are contemptuous of your customers, you are going to have a hard time getting them to buy your product. Newspapers are no exception." [...]
"It used to be that a handful of editors could decide what was news-and what was not. They acted as sort of demigods. If they ran a story, it became news. If they ignored an event, it never happened. Today editors are losing this power. The Internet, for example, provides access to thousands of new sources that cover things an editor might ignore. And if you aren't satisfied with that, you can start up your own blog and cover and comment on the news yourself. Journalists like to think of themselves as watchdogs, but they haven't always responded well when the public calls them to account."
To make his point, Murdoch criticized the media reaction after bloggers debunked a "60 Minutes" report by former CBS anchor, Dan Rather, that President Bush had evaded service during his days in the National Guard.
"Far from celebrating this citizen journalism, the establishment media reacted defensively. During an appearance on Fox News, a CBS executive attacked the bloggers in a statement that will go down in the annals of arrogance. '60 Minutes,' he said, was a professional organization with 'multiple layers of checks and balances.' By contrast, he dismissed the blogger as 'a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.' But eventually it was the guys sitting in their pajamas who forced Mr. Rather and his producer to resign.
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Transitional
[tws] : You may have noticed that some presidential Transitions are more equal than others.
Here is my theory: When a Democrat is succeeded by a Republican in the White House, it is seen as a civic regression, the triumph of dirty politics over clean statesmanship (see Willie Horton, the October Surprise, Lee Atwater, etc.). But when a Democrat replaces a Republican, it's a national rebirth, a celebration of renewal and the natural order of things.
An expatriate Briton, now deceased, liked to tell the story of dining one evening in early 1969, on the eve of Richard Nixon's first inaugural, at the Rive Gauche, a fashionable Georgetown restaurant favored by Jackie Kennedy and friends, long since gone. As their meal progressed, he and his companion observed that the place was swiftly filling up with people they didn't know, or even recognize, total strangers. And then it hit them: The Republicans had arrived!
Of course, this mixture of alarm and condescension--Tip O'Neill to Ronald Reagan: "You're in the big leagues now" (1981)--is very different from the tone currently surrounding Barack Obama, or the arrival of Bill Clinton--"Bill and Al's Excellent Adventure," the Washington Post (1992)--a decade-and-a-half ago. Certainly as far as the media are concerned, a Democrat-to-Republican Transition is an ominous thing, as the black clouds and killer insects descend on the nation's capital; a Republican-to-Democrat Transition, by contrast, is a tribute to life, an Ode to Joy on the Mighty Wurlitzer of political Washington.
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John R. Thomson recently spent two weeks in Caracas, Venezuela, assessing economic and political conditions prior to next Sunday's elections.
[wt] : The drive to Caracas from Maiquetia Airport is dangerous at night and unsightly by day. Thugs - often dressed as police - stop vehicles, rob passengers and steal their cars. Surrounding hills hold a seemingly impossible number of squalid ranchos - shack-filled ghettos - home to a million or more desperately poor Venezuelan peasants, who have become President Hugo Chavez's core support.
Caracas can seem hardly changed from 10 years ago. There are 5 times more vehicles on the same streets, now hellishly potholed. But standing on one of the middle-upper class hills in Chuao district overlooking the city, the capital looks like the energetic, exciting city of yore. It isn't.
Caracas is on a seemingly unstoppable downward slide. The invading poor have endangered the city of 6 million as never before. The wealthy (those not seeking refuge in southern Florida, Colombia or Spain) lead a semi-surrealistic existence reflecting a sense of smiling through the ever-increasing gloom, plus a devout dream that somehow, someday Venezuela will be rid of Mr. Chavez, socialism and insecurity.
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Remedying the Bias Perception
D.Howell | OMBUDSMAN | The Post
[wapo] Thousands of conservatives and even some moderates have complained during my more than three-year term that The Post is too liberal; many have stopped subscribing, including more than 900 in the past four weeks.
It pains me to see lost subscribers and revenue, especially when newspapers are shrinking. Conservative complaints can be wrong: The mainstream media were not to blame for John McCain's loss; Barack Obama's more effective campaign and the financial crisis were.
But some of the conservatives' complaints about a liberal tilt are valid. Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I'll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don't even want to be quoted by name in a memo. [...]
Bob Steele, ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute, which trains journalists, thinks editors should be doing "ongoing content evaluation of candidates and issues to provide scrutiny on photos, stories, placement of stories and what are the weaknesses and strengths of the candidates." He also recommends "prosecutorial editing" as one way to "minimize the ideological bias and beliefs that all journalists have. It would greatly reduce the news content being skewed by beliefs."
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Hottest October Ever! Hold On, Oops. Nevermind
[uktelegraph] : A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running. [...]
A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.
If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)
Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question.
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Ex-Lobbyists Have Key Obama Roles
[wapo] Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to change Washington, vowing to upend the K Street lobbying culture he encountered when he joined the U.S. Senate.
But more than a dozen members of President-elect Obama's fast-growing transition team have worked as federally registered lobbyists within the past four years. They include former lobbyists for the nation's trial lawyers association, mortgage giant Fannie Mae, drug companies such as Amgen, high-tech firms such as Microsoft, labor unions and the liberal advocacy group Center for American Progress.
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UK : Tax Cuts? Cut Spending
[spectator] It was in the 1996 Budget that the Conservatives made a mistake they have yet to recover from, they began to say “investment” rather than “spending”. With that rhetorical shift they accepted Brown’s logic that the more money spent by the state, the better. Now that Brown’s spendthrift, debt-concealing policies have led Britain into recession it is the perfect time for the Tories to think again – and start saying what they would cut.
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Roger 'The Giggler' Moore Solidifies Title as Worst Bond
Thanks for solidifying the eternal 'best/worst/favorite' Bond question for the Vegas staff. We've been again casually revisiting the history of the films of late, in chronological order and honestly, we kind of dreaded coming up to your tenure holding the mantle. This tidbit won't help. [cbc] The 81-year-old actor recalled being appalled at the violence in A View to a Kill, the 1985 movie which was the last of the seven in which he played Bond."That wasn't Bond," he said.
In his book, Moore writes of his distaste for guns, ever since he was shot in the leg by a friend with a BB gun as a teenager.
'My Bond was a lover and a giggler'
While making The Man With the Golden Gun, director Guy Hamilton wanted Bond to be tougher and had him threaten to break Maud Adams' character's arm to get information, he writes. "That sort of characterization didn't sit well with me, but Guy was keen to make my Bond a little more ruthless.
"I suggested my Bond would have charmed the information out of her by bedding her first. My Bond was a lover and a giggler, but I went along with Guy," the British actor wrote.
You know, we never quite got Dalton completely in the role, but something tells us that when we finish his segments and yours (which we're about to embark on), we'll be siding with Dalton. Needless to say, Lazenby kicked your ass.
Uh, yea...OK, Rog. Somehow we always knew that you probably thought that a bit of slapstick or maybe some crooning would not be out of line for Bond.
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Obama and the Founders' Intent
[newsweek] In a Presidential contest replete with novelties, none was more significant than this: A candidate’s campaign—for his party’s nomination, then for the presidency—was itself virtually the entire validation of his candidacy. Voters have endorsed Barack Obama’s audacious—but not, they have said, presumptuous—proposition, which was: The skill, tenacity, strategic vision and tactical nimbleness of my campaign is proof that I am presidential timber.
Because imitation is the sincerest form of politics, the 2008 campaign will not be the last in which such a proposition is asserted. Obama’s achievement represents the final repudiation of the Founders’ intentions regarding the selection, and hence the role, of presidents. So Americans should understand the long evolution of the selection process.
It is strange but true: Presidential politics, although of paramount importance, is a game without settled rules. More than two centuries after ratification of the Constitution, there is no stable system for selecting presidential candidates.
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It is the soldier.It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.
It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves under the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.
-Charles M. Province
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Internet Black Boxes to Record Every Email and Website Visit
[telegraph] : Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database.
The vision was outlined at a meeting between officials from the Home Office and Internet Service Providers earlier this week.
It is further evidence of the Government's desire to have the capability to vet every telephone call, email and internet visit made in the UK, which has already provoked an outcry.
Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, has described it as a "step too far".
The proposal is expected to be put out to consultation as part of the new Communications Data Bill early next year.
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Cartoon from a November 1874 Harper’s Weekly issue which solidified use of the elephant icon to represent the GOP. It, as well as the donkey used by the Democrats, were created by political cartoonist Thomas Nash.
The elephant has been a symbol of strength since Roman times. Its first use by the Republican Party is believed to date from a printer’s cut (pre-made pictures kept ready to use as illustrations when needed) of an elephant used by an Illinois newspaper during Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 presidential campaign. Thomas Nast was a staunch Republican, and he deliberately chose the elephant as a symbol for his own Party because of the animal’s great size, intelligence, strength, and dignity. It first appeared in his November 7, 1874 cartoon, “The Third Term Panic,” which was a comment on fears that Grant would run for a third term as President that led some Republicans to vote with the Democrats. Nast continued using the elephant thereafter, and gradually it became the Republican icon as it was adopted by other cartoonists. [nastportfolio]
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Palin and the GOP
[wsj] : Love Sarah Palin or hate her -- and there seems to be little in between -- the Alaska Governor has become a national political figure. She could have a big political future, assuming she and the many Republicans now trashing her learn something from their recent misadventures.
Last August we advised John McCain not to select a relative unknown like Mrs. Palin, in part because we remember the way Dan Quayle was treated. The media haze GOP candidates in a way they never do Democrats. (See Joe Biden, unreported gaffes of.) Any national-campaign novice was bound to be chewed up. Mr. McCain nonetheless decided to take one of his celebrated leaps off the high bar. (Our track record this campaign was perfect: If we proposed it, Mr. McCain did the opposite.)
In the event, Mrs. Palin's contribution to the McCain ticket was mixed. Her bravura convention speech defied the early media mockery and made her an instant hero among rank-and-file Republicans. Her reform credentials and social conservatism inspired a GOP base that was angry with its wayward party and wary of Mr. McCain. The exit polls show that conservative turnout was strong, and Mrs. Palin deserves some credit for that.
Yet Mrs. Palin was clearly thrust into the spotlight before she was prepared for the rigors of a national campaign. The McCain camp also did her no favors, initially keeping her under a quarantine that raised the stakes for any media interview she did do. When it finally handed her over to Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, Mrs. Palin was set up to fail with ground rules that let CBS dribble out her uncertain answers night after night. [...]
As for Mrs. Palin's Republican critics, they might consider if they can afford to write off a young leader with such natural political talent. We don't see a large constellation of other GOP stars on the horizon. Mr. McCain was right to understand that his party needs a new generation of leaders who haven't grown comfortable with the perks of Washington. Especially as Democrats once again grow the Beltway, the next GOP leaders will need to make a better case for entrepreneurship and limited government. Mrs. Palin deserves a chance to see if she has the skill and work ethic to become that kind of leader.
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Jobless Rate : 14-year high of 6.5
[yahoo] : The nation's unemployment rate bolted to a 14-year high of 6.5 percent in October as another 240,000 jobs were cut, the government said Friday. It was stark proof the economy is almost certainly in a recession.
The new snapshot, released by the Labor Department, shows the crucial jobs market deteriorating at an alarmingly rapid pace.
The jobless rate zoomed to 6.5 percent in October from 6.1 percent in September, matching the unemployment rate in March 1994. Employers have cut jobs each month this year.
Unemployment has now surpassed the high seen after the last recession in 2001. The jobless rate peaked at 6.3 percent in June 2003.
Employers got rid of 240,000 jobs in October, marking the 10th straight month of payroll reductions.
Job losses in August and September turned out to be much deeper. Employers cut 127,000 positions in August, compared with 73,000 previously reported. A whopping 284,000 jobs were axed last month, compared with the 159,000 jobs first reported.
So far this year, a staggering 1.2 million jobs have disappeared.
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U.S. Stocks Post Biggest Post-Election Drop on Economic Concern
[bloomberg] The stock market posted its biggest plunge following a presidential election as reports on jobs and service industries stoked concern the economy will worsen even as President-elect Barack Obama tries to stimulate growth. [...]
The market's decline came a day after the biggest presidential Election Day gain since the New York Stock Exchange first opened for trading on a voting day in 1984.
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Triumph Of The Creative Class
[forbes] : Today the traditional business leadership, like their Republican allies, present a spectacle of utter disarray. The commercial banks have been effectively nationalized. Many traditional manufacturers, notably automakers, also yearn to suck on the federal teat. Reduced to supplicants, these companies have surrendered their standing as independent players. At the same time, the traditional energy companies, long the whipping boys of Congressional Democrats, will be fully occupied trying to survive the onslaught of anti-carbon regulations now all but inevitable.
In contrast, the creative class comes to power with the wind at its back. Its ascendancy was first predicted by Daniel Bell in his 1973 classic The Coming of Post-Industrial Society as a natural product of the rise of science-based industry. Shortly afterward California's Jerry Brown became the first politician to recognize this shift, embracing Silicon Valley and Hollywood as a counterweight to the industrial, aerospace and agribusiness establishment that had supported both his father, former governor Pat Brown, and Ronald Reagan.
In the ensuing decades, the creative class establishment rallied to different political causes and candidates, including Gary Hart's 1984 presidential campaign and the causes of other so-called "Atari Democrats." Yet it is only this year that its members have, like the Skynet computer system in the Terminator series, reached a level of consciousness about their potential true power.
What will this ascendancy mean in economic terms? Since the creative class deals largely with images, ideas and transactions, it's not likely to focus much on reviving the tangible parts of the economy: manufacturing, logistics, traditional energy and agribusiness.
On the other hand, the creatives are unlikely to be protectionist since they represent companies whose growth markets, and often suppliers, are located overseas. Heavily counted among the world's richest people, they are also likely to support some Bushite policies--like low interest rates and financial bailouts--that prop up their stock prices and drive money to Wall Street. [...]
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Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace
[wsj] This is the price Mr. Bush is paying for trying to work with both Democrats and Republicans. During his 2004 victory speech, the president reached out to voters who supported his opponent, John Kerry, and said, "Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust."
Those bipartisan efforts have been met with crushing resistance from both political parties. [...]
Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman's presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years -- and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.
Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.
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Madeleine Albright: A letter to the next president
[telegraph] : Congratulations on your success. You have won an impressive victory – but with that victory comes the responsibility to guide a troubled America in a world riven by conflict, confusion and hate. Upon taking office, you will face the daunting task of restoring America’s credibility as an effective and exemplary world leader.
John Bolton: Letter to the next president
[telegraph] Congratulations, Mr President-elect, on your victory. After the longest presidential campaign in our history, you now have 77 days to prepare to govern. While foreigners might see eleven weeks as an eternity, you know only too well that it is precious little time to select your top advisers and then subject them to our cumbersome FBI and ethics screening of their backgrounds, their finances, their potential conflicts of interest, and whatever skeletons are hanging in their closets.
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Congratulations : President-Elect Obama
May wisdom guide you on your new path and we wish you the best of luck. Let's see where it leads and what fruit it bears.We've got the Change, and now we're fully on board with the Hope concept.
Enjoy the honeymoon.
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[NYT] : OBAMA President-Elect Calls Outcome a ‘Defining Moment’
[LATimes] : OBAMA WINS 'That is the true genius of America —
that America can change'
[uktimes] : 'Change has come' - Obama wins in landslide
[nationalpost] : A major divide has been crossed; U.S. elects Barack Obama
[sydneymorningherals] : A new America
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Finally. The longest and most expensive US Presidential campaign season comes to a close. Even for political junkies like us, it is a welcomed end. Get on with it. Out with the old and in with the new. That's what it will be no matter who wins, regardless of the 'more of the same' nonsense. Or the 'change' mantra. By most accounts, tomorrow the 'O' will be relaxing and counting down the days until he can change America and the world. That'll be something we'll be watching for, to be sure. Show me the money!TCB
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Obama's '$4 Billion for Exxon' Myth
Why haven't the 'fact-checkers' done a better job?
[wsj] [...] In the last debate, Sen. Obama said, "We both want to cut taxes, the difference is who we want to cut taxes for. . . . The centerpiece of [McCain's] economic proposal is to provide $200 billion in additional tax breaks to some of the wealthiest corporations in America. Exxon Mobil, and other oil companies, for example, would get an additional $4 billion in tax breaks."
That $200 billion figure is false. Yet FactCheck.org and most reporters never bothered to ask Mr. Obama where he came up with it. FactCheck.org did discover that Mr. Obama's claim about "$4 billion in tax breaks for energy companies" came from a two-page memo from the Center for American Progress Action Fund -- a political lobby headed by John Podesta, former chief of staff to Bill Clinton, with tax issues handled by two lawyers, Robert Gordon and James Kvaal, former policy directors for the John Kerry and John Edwards campaigns. Those lawyers confused average tax rates (after credits and deductions) with the 35% statutory rate on the next dollar of earnings, so that cutting the latter rate from 35% to 25% would supposedly cut big oil's $13.4 billion tax bill by 28.5%, or $3.8 billion. That is not economics; it is not even competent bookkeeping.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, by contrast, correctly notes that, "Senator McCain has called for the repeal and reform of a number of tax preferences for oil companies," which would raise the oil companies' taxes by $5 billion in 2013. [...]
Phasing in tax-rate reductions -- as in 1981 and 2001 -- has become a bad habit among Republicans. The trouble is that knowing tax rates will be lower in the future provides incentives to delay earning and reporting income until after they fall. In the American Economic Review, December 2006, University of Michigan economists Christopher House and Matthew Shapiro found "the phased-in tax cuts called for in the 2001 tax bill worked to depress employment as firms and workers waited for the lower tax rates to materialize."
In the U.S today, the combined federal and state tax on corporate profits averages 40%, which is increasingly out of line with the rest of the world. The average corporate tax rate dropped to 25.9% in 2008 from 37.7% in 1996 among 97 countries surveyed by KPMG, and to 23.2% from 38% in the European Union. Corporate tax revenues typically increased as a share of GDP after tax rates were reduced. Countries with corporate tax rates from 12.5% to 25%, such as Ireland, Switzerland, Austria and Denmark, routinely collect more corporate tax revenue as a share of GDP than the anemic 2.1% figure the Congressional Budget Office projects for the U.S.
In a new Tax & Budget Bulletin at Cato.org, Jack Mintz of the University of Calgary estimates that a federal-state corporate tax rate higher than 28% loses money for the government. Kimberly Clausing of Reed College estimated revenues would be maximized with a 33% federal and state tax. Kevin Hassett and Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute found "the revenue maximizing point has dropped over time, and is about 26%." In all of these studies, cutting the federal tax to 28%-30% sooner rather than later is very likely to raise revenue.
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