JustOneMinute

Food Fight! Sarah Or Michelle?

Sarah Palin throws down against Michelle Obama:

Sarah Palin mocks Michelle Obama's anti-obesity campaign on reality show with jab about dessert

She's all for cutting flabby government, but Sarah Palin wants Michelle Obama to butt out of keeping kids from getting fat.

The moose-munching Tea Party darling is picking a fight with the First Lady - over dessert.

"Where are the s'mores ingredients?" the sharp-elbowed hockey mom growled in Sunday's episode of her outdoorsy TLC show "Sarah Palin's Alaska."

"This is in honor of Michelle Obama, who said the other day we should not have dessert," Palin said mockingly as she rummaged through her kitchen cupboards for graham crackers, marshmallows and chocolate.

Hmm.  I would have said it will be a cold day before I side with Michelle over Sarah, but having checked the thermometer...

I don't mind a little role-modeling from the First Family; nor do I mind a government effort to inform.  I would also note that, Ms. Palin's commitment to individual choice and responsibility notwithstanding, our national obesity and overweight statistics suggest that some aspect of the consumer decision making process has gone awry.

Until the government uses its expansive powers under the Commerce Clause to end my inactivity in the broccolli market I am going to side with Michelle on this one.  I have doubts about whether she will have much impact, but at least Ms. Obama is pushing in the right direction.

In any case, the real scuffle here is between Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, famous former fatty.  [And I see Mike has joined in on Michelle's side!]

BONUS MOCKERY:  OK, she is First Lady, not a Presidential candidate.  Still, since role modeling is the topic, here we go, from a chat last February between Mike Huckabee and Michelle Obama:

MIKE HUCKABEE, FOX NEWS HOST: The obvious question I have to ask you: do you ever watch Fox News?

FIRST LADY MICHELLE OBAMA: I — you know what? I don't watch news that much.

HUCKABEE: But you will watch it this weekend?

M. OBAMA: I will, I will. I will absolutely watch it. You've got it.

HUCKABEE: All right.

M. OBAMA: I try to stay away from, you know, news because I want to formulate my opinions based on experiences that I have. So, you know I'll read clips, you know. I get headlines, but I tend — and I try to keep home kind of a news-free zone.

OK, I can see not wanting to be pestered by her kids wondering what that mean man meant about daddy and approval ratings and "in the tank", but still.

STILL MORE:  Ben Smith catches Sarah Palin in a nanny outfit, which could be OK...

Not All Global Warming Skeptics Are Crackpots?!?

The NY Times has a long feature appraising the science, economics, and politics of carbon dioxide and climate change.  The most surprising bit is this:

Climate-change contrarians do not accept these numbers.

The Internet has given rise to a vocal cadre of challengers who question every aspect of the science — even the physics, worked out in the 19th century, that shows that carbon dioxide traps heat. That is a point so elementary and well-established that demonstrations of it are routinely carried out by high school students.

However, the contrarians who have most influenced Congress are a handful of men trained in atmospheric physics. They generally accept the rising carbon dioxide numbers, they recognize that the increase is caused by human activity, and they acknowledge that the earth is warming in response.

But they doubt that it will warm nearly as much as mainstream scientists say, arguing that the increase is likely to be less than two degrees Fahrenheit, a change they characterize as manageable.

Among the most prominent of these contrarians is Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who contends that as the earth initially warms, cloud patterns will shift in a way that should help to limit the heat buildup. Most climate scientists contend that little evidence supports this view, but Dr. Lindzen is regularly consulted on Capitol Hill.

“I am quite willing to state,” Dr. Lindzen said in a speech this year, “that unprecedented climate catastrophes are not on the horizon, though in several thousand years we may return to an ice age.”

That is a more thoughtful discussion than I ever would have expected.  They also include unexpected balancers such as this:

But these modest efforts [to reduce energy consumption] are being swamped by rising energy use in developing countries like China, India and Brazil. In those lands, economic growth is not simply desirable — it is a moral imperative, to lift more than a third of the human race out of poverty. A recent scientific paper referred to China’s surge as “the biggest transformation of human well-being the earth has ever seen.”

Growth is good!

The Education Of Eric Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder has a long interview with ABC News in which he reveals his recent rendevous with reality (my emphasis):

What was uppermost on his mind, however, is the alarming rise in the number of Americans who are more than willing to attack and kill their fellow citizens.

"It is one of the things that keeps me up at night," Holder said. "You didn't worry about this even two years ago -- about individuals, about Americans, to the extent that we now do. And -- that is of -- of great concern."

"The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens -- raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born," he said.

In the last 24 months, Holder said, 126 people have been indicted on terrorist-related charges, Fifty of those people are American citizens.

"I think that what is most alarming to me is the totality of what we see, the attorney general said. "Whether it is an attempt to bomb the New York City subway system, an attempt to bring down an airplane over Detroit, an attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square ... I think that gives us a sense of the breadth of the challenges that we face, and the kinds of things that our enemy is trying to do."

Holder says many of these converts to al Qaeda have something in common: a link to radical cleric Anwar Al Awlaki, an American citizen himself.

No, two years ago the only thing we knew about Reid, Padilla, the Lackawanna Six et al was that Bush was shreddding the Constitution and Gitmo needed to be closed.  Two years ago the DHS was fretting about right-wing haters.

Oh, well - I don't know why Holder wants to credit Obama and say that Muslims only became radicalized in the last two years, but there it is.

THEY'RE ON IT 22/7!  Janet Napolitano: We’re working “364 days a year” to fight terror.  Have a Merry Christmas!  (And be doubly nervous in 2012.)

Now All Racists Are Violent?

Oh, brother - Matt Yglesias takes it upon himself to teach a bit of Mississipi history to Gov. Haley Barbour, whose family has been in Mississipi for a mere five generations.

In a Weekly Standard profile Gov. Barbour credited the local Citizens Council with keeping things cool when the Yazoo City schools were finally desegregated in 1970:

Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

Matt documents that the Citizens Councils were white supremacists, asserts that Barbour is "dangerously igorant" of his own state's history, and closes with following logical and rhetorical leap:

Haley Barbour gives these people credit for keeping things calm!

Hmm - are all racists violent?  I am not up to speed with what they are teaching at Harvard these days about the Deep South.

Let's turn to a much younger David Halberstam writing in 1956 for Commentary:

The Council movement has been compared frequently to two earlier organizations that originated in the South, the Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction times, and the new Klan that appeared on the scene after World War I. And indeed there are, at least for the moment, certain parallels between the Klans—especially the original one—and the Council movement. The differences are nonetheless crucial. The Councils have an almost self-conscious desire for respectability. They struggle to achieve a constitutionally illegal purpose by “all legal means.” They shun both the Klans’ reputation for violence, and their haberdashery; their members are respectable citizens of the community, the quintessence of the civic luncheon club. At their meetings there is emphasis on speakers from the ministry and the universities.

The original Klan grew out of the turbulence of the post-Civil War South. Southern whites, then politically powerless, donned hood and regalia to move against the “carpetbag” Negro Union and Loyal Leagues. The membership of the Klan included the backbone of the local community: former Confederate officers, lawyers, and bankers, and it relied primarily on threats—of a “whupping,” a midnight scare session, or a tar-and-feathering—to impose its own notion of peace and order on the semi-anarchy of Reconstruction. But by 1871 the conditions in the South that gave rise to the Klan had largely disappeared and it was disbanded.

...

The second Klan battened on postwar frustration and distrust of foreigners. First and foremost, it was fanatically anti-Catholic, though it was also anti-Negro and anti-Semitic. It set itself up as a guardian of local morality as well as patriotism, and would don the white hood and go after a man who wasn’t supporting his family properly, or who had been drinking too much. Violence was frequent, tar-and-featherings abounded, and there were even lynchings. The movement finally collapsed because of its over-extended membership, its lack of real purpose, and its inability to withstand strong criticism of it from both North and South.

The White Citizens Council movement today has had to throw off the Klan’s stigma and repudiate its legacy. Partly this is so because of the WCC’s feeling that not even desegregation justifies violence. But more important is the fact that the economy of the South is fast industrializing: every little town has its industrial development group seeking outside (usually Northern) support, and this is the single most telling factor in the community’s attitude toward the future.

Show them the money.

Or let's cut to "The Citizens' Council" by Neil McMillen, describing the same period:

Economic pressure but not violence in 1955.  And by 1970 I guess the Council was ready to move on.

I don't think Barbour claimed the Councils were led by integrationist progressives on the right side of history; I think he claimed they helped keep the peace.  Two sources say they did, against which we have to weigh Matt's shock and awe.

THE NIGHT THEY DROVE OLD DIXIE DOWN:  I am sure I am not smart enough to grasp the current liberal vision - do they read "To Kill A Mockingbird" and come away with the notion that Atticus Finch represented the mainstream white view in the South?  Do they suppose that a regressive and racist minority of whites suppressed both blacks and the white majority?

My guess is that the Citizens' Councils provided a non-violent means of expression (and repression) for the majority white view.  ItIs unfortunate they were on the wrong side of history, but they were preferable to the violent alternative.  The Other McCain has lots, including this:

I have on my shelves a 1960 book by William D. Workman Jr. entitled The Case for the South. Workman makes clear that it was foolish to speak of “moderates” in the Deep South of that era if, by “moderate,” you meant white people who were in favor of integration. The overwhelming majority of white Southerners were in favor of maintaining the status quo of Jim Crow, which was all they’d ever known.

When it became obvious that the federal government intended to impose desegregation at all hazards, one might say that those leaders who counseled peaceful cooperation for the good of the community were “moderates,” but this doesn’t mean they were actually in favor of desegregation. Neither does it mean that officials like Jimmy Carter — who campaigned and governed as a segregationists so long as that was the means to political success — were any more “racist” than anyone else.

To which I would add:  It is politically convenient for high-minded Dems to pretend they lost the South on the issue of race.  However, the South is also tougher on defense, stronger on guns, weaker on unions, and more religious than the country as a whole. High-minded Dems would prefer not to talk about their limited appeal as the party that lost both Vietnam and God.

I'VE FORGOTTEN MY MILTON... Wasn't Lucifer cast down after trying to organize the cherubim and seraphim?  Or was he trying to ban handgun sales?  It gets hazy at Christmastime...

A SAFE BET, BUT: Ben Smith suspects that the media will ask Barbour about a tasteless quip he made in 1982.  And I bet they will! Of course, these are the same media heroes who uncritically recycled every evasion and misstatement made by the Obama campaign about the Ayers/Obama relationship, but still.

A DAY LATER:  Barbour delivers the obvious defense - his original statement was accurate and responsive but incomplete.

Jim Geraghty is cogent and sensible.

Holiday Week Open Thread

The traditional "I'm sure glad I am only a fair-weather Giants fan ('cause baby, it's cold outside)" open thread.

And a bonus thought of interest mainly to my cardiologist - the NY Jets had an excellent chance to lose their game on the final play with no time on the clock, a weird confluence which would have turned sports talk radio in New York city into one huge exercise in suicide prevention.

But we live!

DADT Ends

The Senate repeals Don't Ask, Don't Tell.  John McCain is fuming but Barry Goldwater would have applauded:

At 85, after a life in politics spanning five decades (he retired from the Senate in 1987), Mr. Conservative [aka barry Goldwater] has found himself an unlikely new career: as a gay rights activist. While that's not his sole pursuit – he returned to Capitol Hill yesterday to testify in favor of scenic overflights of the Grand Canyon – in recent years he's championed homosexuals serving in the military and has worked locally to stop businesses in Phoenix from hiring on the basis of sexual orientation. This month he signed on as honorary co-chairman of a drive to pass a federal law preventing job discrimination against homosexuals. The effort, dubbed Americans Against Discrimination, is being spearheaded by the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the influential gay lobbying organization.

"The big thing is to make this country, along with every other country in the world with a few exceptions, quit discriminating against people just because they're gay," Goldwater asserts. "You don't have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that's what brings me into it."

Do keep in mind, Goldwater was a libertarian at heart, which put him in an odd place in the Republican Party:

Gay rights aside, Goldwater is doing lots more to drive would-be disciples nuts. In 1992 he backed a Democrat for Congress over a Christian conservative Republican (his candidate, Karan English, won), and has been applying the full force of his cantankerous personality to frequent denunciations of the religious right and occasional defenses of Bill Clinton – calling a press conference recently to urge Republican critics of Whitewater to "get off his back and let him be president."

And back to gay rights:

So how did this super-patriot, former fighter pilot and retired Air Force general get involved in gay rights?

"The first time this came up was with the question, should there be gays in the military?" Goldwater says. "Having spent 37 years of my life in the military as a reservist, and never having met a gay in all of that time, and never having even talked about it in all those years, I just thought, why the hell shouldn't they serve? They're American citizens. As long as they're not doing things that are harmful to anyone else. ... So I came out for it."

He says he's mystified by the origins of homosexuality. "You try to find out where it started, even going back to old Egyptology – and you knew damn well the Egyptians had to have those people – but you can't find any writings," he says. "I have one grandson who's gay. And my brother {Bob Goldwater} has a granddaughter who is gay. We're sort of at a loss to know what the hell it's all about."

Goldwater says that having openly gay relatives doesn't influence his beliefs, which are animated by libertarian principles that government should stay out of people's private lives.

If Goldwater (and AllahPundit!) are with me, who will stand against me?

AND DO KEEP IN MIND:  As AllahP notes, far better that this die in the Congress than in the courts:

I support the move, but if you don’t, look at it this way: As Gates has often said, if it didn’t happen here it probably would have happened in the courts. Civilian control of the military is one thing, judicial control is something else, so the fact that repeal now wears a democratic halo will hopefully make it more tolerable to skeptics inside the branches.

 

 

The DREAM Dies

The Senate kills the DREAM Act.

Under Development - My OEP On Fannie Mae And The Financial Collapse

So what is my Official Editorial Position on the role played by Fannie Mae in fueling the housing bubble and the resulting financial collapse?  Good question - I really ought to have one, and I am having a hard time swallowing the straight Republican line put out by the Republicans on the panel investigating this.

I am confident that the largest players in the US mortgage market played a role in distorting that market.  However, the numbers don't tell that story very convincingly - the conservator's report on Fannie and Freddie from 2010 showed them losing market share during the housing boom. Left unmentioned by even astute observers - Fannie Mae was hamstrung by an accounting scandal and was battling the Bush Administration.  However, per CNN the market had passed them by:

Another question that has been lost in the political wrangling is whether Fannie's business has changed permanently for the worse. Over the past 18 months the growth in Fannie Mae's portfolio has slowed sharply because of competition from banks and hedge funds, which are financing their mortgage purchases with cheap, short-term debt (a technique known as the carry trade). Back in 2002 the spread between the yield of Fannie's mortgage portfolio and its long-term liabilities was 63 basis points. In the second quarter of 2004 it had fallen to two basis points. To keep profits up, it looks like Fannie, which has disparaged the carry trade as too risky, may now be using the strategy itself, which would make it more vulnerable to rising interest rates. 

Gary Gorton of Yale has the must-read on how that repo trade worked out [another version here].

And the Republican arguments can become hazy here.  For examples, buyers may have proceeded with confidence in 2005, firm in the belief that Fannie would be back to bail them out in 2006. Even more importantly, not every bubble ends in a financial panic - for example, the tech collapse of 2000/2001 did not threaten to take down the banking system.  So even if Fannie helped inflate the housing bubble, should they be blamed for the panic?

Well.  This is a weekend for Christmas shopping.  Joe Nocera of the Times tackles the Republican report and vexes me with this:

The Republican document issued earlier this week did little more than regurgitate this theory of the case. “Subsidizing mortgages through the G.S.E.’s was a particularly expedient way to increase the homeownership rate,” they write at one point. At the same time, they tread lightly over the culpability of other nongovernmental culprits like the credit ratings agencies and Wall Street itself.

The only problem with Mr. Wallison’s theory is that it’s not, as they say, reality-based. Anyone who has looked at the role of Fannie and Freddie will discover they spent most of the housing bubble avoiding subprime loans, because those loans didn’t meet their underwriting standards. (Indeed, for most of their existence, Fannie and Freddie didn’t so much meet their affordable housing goals as gamed them.)

Well, Fannie and Freddie couldn't underwrite subprime loans, so they bught them for their own investment accounts from others, and scored that as providing affordable housing.  The WaPo has a chart from HUD (I think...) showing Fannie and Freddie buying 49% of the securities backed by subprime mortgages in 2003, 44% in 2004, 33% in 200, and 20% in 2006.  (In 2006 the dollar amount was $90 billion).  Even with declining market share, they were huge players.

On the other hand, the conservator reports don't show them with huge losses from their investment activity, despite holding a $700 billion portfolio of mortgages (all qualities, presumably).  I presume I am missing something.

LOVE THESE TYPOS: An earlier version (and possibly this one, too) had discussion of the baking system and the hosing bubble.  And I got no help from Spellchek, that uncertain ally.

IN BRIEF:  My current leaning is that Fannie and Freddie contributed to the general moral hazard promoted by the Fed - a never heard of 'em hedge fund (Long Term Capital) was too big to fail back in 1998, Bear Stearns was too big to fail in early 2008, and surely the housing market was too big to fail and would be propped up by Fannie, Freddie and the Fed.  Also important were the Basel capital requirements which gave banks around the world a special break on mortgage backed securities.

Easy money leaving investors scratching for yield, a regulatory structure encouraging banks to hold housing securities, huge government sponsored entities promising to buy anything in sight to keep the housing market humming - what could go wrong?

Yet Another Study Showing How Dumb I Am

The NY Times summarizes yet another study showing how dumb I am, being in the Fox News demographic; Aaron Worthing at Patterico's Blog responds.

The study's authors admit that "truth" can be slippery, but they lose their humility at the starting gate - their first "truth" is that “most economists who have studied it estimate” that the stimulus bill "saved or created several million jobs".  

The first speed bump is that a mere 8% of their survey respondents actually endorses this wisdom.  Talk about the Great Unwashed!  But their evidence also merits a laugh track:

“[The] CBO concluded that for the third quarter of 2010, ARRA had “increased the number of full time-equivalent jobs by 2.0 to 5.2 million compared to what those amounts would have been otherwise.”

Hmm, so now the CBO represents "most economists"?  Who knew?!?  And how impressed should we be that the government gave itself a passing grade?  Surely they can do better than that.

Actualy, they don't, and stop calling them Shirley; here is their other bit of support: 

“Since 2003, the Wall Street Journal has maintained a panel of 55-60 economists which it questions regularly, in an effort to move beyond anecdotal reporting of expert opinion… In March 2010 the panel was asked more broadly about the effect of the ARRA on growth. Seventy-five percent said it was a net positive.”

Please.  The authors provide a link to the WSJ article in question, and it is hardly bereft of clues as to their direction:

Economists Credit Fed For Alleviating Crisis

Economists say stimulus helped but point to central bank's key role

And skipping a bit:

Thirty-eight of the 54 surveyed economists, not all of whom answered every question, said the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act boosted growth and mitigated job losses, while six said the legislation had a net negative effect.

On average, economists estimated that the stimulus added one percentage point to growth in 2009; they forecast gross domestic product would expand 3% this year, compared with 2.2% in the absence of stimulus. They estimated that the February unemployment rate, reported at 9.7% last week, would have been 10.4% without the stimulus.

That is a reduction in unemployment of 0.7% on a workforce of roughly 150 million, or about 1 million jobs, which falls short of "several million".  The positive thinkers will want to credit some additional employment to the extra 0.8% of GDP growth forecast for 2010; a reasonable estimate seems to be another 0.4% reduction in unemployment, or 600,000 jobs.

Color me dumb but I doubt that a majority of economists believe that 1.6 million equals "several million".  If the study authors are aware of more compelling evidence that "several million" jobs were created by the stimulus, they really should have used this opportunity to present it.  The WSJ link they provide only gets them into field goal range.

The study continues with further illustrations of my stupidity (I am wrong to disbelieve the CBO machinations which tell me ObamaCare will reduce the deficit), but time does not permit a full cataloging of my ignorance.

CHUGGING ALONG:  Their second issue on which the public is woefully ignorant is ObamaCare: apparently a mere 13% of survey respondents embrace the CBO and believe that a huge, complicated new entitlement program will defy history and come in under the politically gamed budget.  Go figure.

Issue three is the status of the recovery.  44% correctly believe the economy is starting to recover; 55% are so foolish as to think that things are getting worse, little appreciating that "The US Bureau of Economic Analysis concluded in September 2010 that the recession had ended in June 2009".

Well, put me in the 44%, and the stock market is on my side.  On the other hand, over at the BLS I learn that total employment reached 140 million in June 2009; it then dipped to 138 million by December 2009 and is now at 139 million.  The unemployment rate was 9.5% in June 2009, reached 10.0% that December, and is now 9.8%.  And as of September 2010 (prior to the new tax bill and stimulus) 22% of the WSJ economists surveyed were forecasting a double dip recession.  Put it together and I wouldn't pound the table saying the skeptics were wrong.

Issue four:

The National Academy of  Sciences has concluded unambiguously that climate change is occurring.  However, a substantial 45% of voters thought that most scientists think climate change is not occurring (12%) or scientists are evenly divided (33%).  Fiftyfour percent recognized that most scientists think that climate change is occurring.

Not only do I want to go with the crowd on this one, but I am not sure how one might defend either minority view as to what "most scientists" believe.  But I bet I'll find out!

Issue five:

Large numbers of voters had misinformation about which President initiated the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).  Asked which President had started the program, 40% believed incorrectly that TARP was started under President Obama, not under President George W. Bush.  Fifty-five percent were correct that the program began under Bush.  

Facts are stubborn things.  However, the authors get Orwellian here:

TARP was passed in Congress with considerable bipartisan support.  Majorities of Democrats in both houses favored it.  Republicans were divided overall: a large majority of Republicans favored it in the Senate, and while House Republicans leaned negative, this was by a narrow margin.  A majority of voters were correct about Democratic support  for TARP, but views were mixed on how the Republicans voted.   

How soon they forget - TARP was shot down on its first pass through the House.  From the Sept 30 2008 WaPo:

A bipartisan rebellion in the House killed a $700 billion rescue plan for the nation's financial system yesterday, sending global stock prices plunging, prompting fierce recriminations on the presidential campaign trail and dealing President Bush his worst legislative defeat.

...On the 228 to 205 congressional vote, 140 Democrats voted yes and 95 voted no; 133 Republicans opposed the measure, while 65 approved.

That relates to this attempt to test people's memories:

Respondents were asked: “When Congress voted on the bailout for banks and financial institutions in 2008, please select how you think the Democrats and Republicans voted: [each] mostly favored it, mostly opposed it, or were divided.”   Sixty percent of voters were aware that Democrats had mostly favored TARP (opposed it, 9%; were divided, 26%).  Regarding Republican congressional support, 31% thought correctly that Republicans were divided; 31% thought they mostly favored it; and 33% thought they mostly opposed it.

Divided does look like the most descriptive answer.

Issue Six:

Respondents were asked: “Is it your impression that the bailout program for Chrysler and General Motors occurred under President George W. Bush, President Barack Obama, or both presidents?”  Fifty-three percent believed the GM-Chrysler bailout occurred under President Obama only.  Another 16% thought it occurred under President Bush only.   Just 28% were correct that the GMChrysler bailout occurred under both presidents. 

GM and Chrysler got $17 billion at Christmastime from Bush and $63 billion under Obama, who orchestrated the union bailout and got all the headlines.

Issue Seven was a Dem attack:

In October an article on the website ThinkProgress.org launched the claim that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was using large amounts of money raised from foreign sources to support Republican candidates.  Most voters—60%--were aware that this charge about the Chamber of Commerce was not proven to be true.  However, a substantial 31% did believe the claim that “the US Chamber of Commerce was spending large amounts of money it had raised from foreign sources to support Republican candidates and attack Democratic candidates” was proven to be true.  

Issue eight was on the original stimulus:

Although the stimulus legislation included about $288 billion in tax cuts, this was not the understanding of a majority of voters.  Instead, a modest majority of 54% of voters believed there were no tax cuts in the stimulus legislation, while 43% knew it did include tax cuts. 

The study links to a Politfact article explaining that $70 billion of that $288 billion came from the AMT fix, so it was a "cut" only in the sense that the AMT fix which had always been adopted before was adopted yet again (but might not have been!).  These authors would give a better impression if they showed evidence of reading their own sources.

Issue nine is a bit frightening:

Although President Obama has more than doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan, four in ten voters had a different perception.   

Respondents were asked, “What is your impression of what the Obama administration has done in regard to the number of US troops in Afghanistan—increased them, decreased them, or kept them the same?”  Forty-three percent mistakenly believed that the Obama administration had either kept troop levels the same (20%) or actually decreased them (23%).   A 55% majority was aware that the Obama administration increased the number of US troops in Afghanistan. 

The silver lining for Obama - with this kind of pubic awareness he won't have trouble with an anti-war movement.

Issue ten is meant to tweak the birthers, rally the faithful, and raise my blood pressure:

As you may know, some people have suggested that President Obama was not born in the United States.  Do you think that Obama was not born in the US, Obama was born in the US, or it is not clear whether Obama was born in the US or not?”

They accept the Hawaii summary certificate as conclusive.

For my money, it is clear that:

The state of Hawaii has a more extensive file documenting the circumstances of Obama's birth;

That file contains documentation sufficient to prompt the state to deliver a birth certificate, so presumably they are satisifed he was born in Hawaii;

State privacy laws prohibit the state from sharing that file with the public, but they would release it to Obama or any relative/trustee with a legitimate interest in his history;

Obama has not requested and released his file, a process I estimate would take a day (I assume the President would be accorded special treatment).

So, why is the most transparent administration in history so opaque on this minor point?  My official editorial position is that "Obama" is the most tightly controlled brand since Mickey Mouse (and is becoming synonomous with just that), so he is just saving this material (and his law firm billing records, and his college transcripts, and everything else) for his eight-figure book deal.

My back-up guess is that the file includes something embarassing, such as a legal name change from "Barry" to "Barack" while a teenager.  The omission of that detail (if true) from "Dreams From My Father" might trigger some clucking.

And the long-shot back up to the back up is that the "proof" being accepted by the state of Hawaii is simply affidavits from his mother and maternal grandparents asserting he was born in Hawaii.  The obvious motivation would have been to document Barack (Barry?) as an American so that if the shotgun marriage didn't last a custody fight would play out in American courts.

Of course, in that long-shot scenario, those affidavits might be accurate, and the affiants have all passed away.  But I suspect such a revelation would prompt even the authors of this study to question the clarity and foundation of their faith in the circumstances of Obama's birth.  

Daredevil

Fascinating news from neurology - the woman without fear:

Spiders, snakes? Brain-damaged woman knows no fear

NEW YORK – Meet SM, a 44-year-old woman who literally knows no fear.

She's not afraid to handle snakes. She's not afraid of the "The Blair Witch Project," "The Shining," or "Arachnophobia." When she visited a haunted house, it was a monster who was afraid of her.

SM isn't some cold-blooded psychopath or a hero with a tight rein on her emotions. She's an ordinary mother of three with a specific psychological impairment, the result of a very rare genetic disease that damaged a brain structure called the amygdala (uh-MIG'-duh-luh).

Her case shows that the amygdala plays a key role in making people feel afraid in threatening situations, researchers say.

Her life history also shows that living without fear can be dangerous, they said.

Well, sort of - here we go:

She apparently hasn't felt fear as an adult, not even 15 years ago in an incident described by the researchers. A man jumped up from a park bench, pressed a knife to her throat and hissed, "I'm going to cut you."

SM, who heard a church choir practicing in the distance, looked coolly at him and replied, "If you're going to kill me, you're going to have to go through my God's angels first."

The man suddenly let her go. She didn't run home. She walked.

"Her lack of fear may have freaked the guy out," Feinstein said.

But it also got her into that situation in the first place, he noted. SM had willingly approached the man when he asked her to, even though it was late at night and she was alone, and even though she thought he looked "drugged out."

SM has also walked into other dangerous situations because of her lack of fear, and all in all, it's remarkable she's still alive, Feinstein said.

I am hazy as to just what they mean by "fear", as contrasted with judgment and experience.  For example, I don't quake in terror at the prospect of crossing a busy street - it is obviously dangerous, but my years of experience in simultaneously walking and chewing gum have equipped me to deal with it.  Similarly, when I was a young man linving in the Greatest City in the World, I knew certain areas and certain behaviors were high-risk; I didn't tremble in terror at the thought of entering Central Park at midnight, but I rarely entered it, either.

I would think that anyone with an intellectual (as opposed to visceral) appreciation of the downside in approaching a drugged-out strager and having one's throat slashed would modify their behavior appropriately, fear or not.  But I'm afraid I am not an expert on this.

I do like this study:

In another experiment, published in 1995, she was blasted with a loud horn every time she saw a blue-colored square appear on a screen. Despite the repeated blasting horn, she never developed the fear an ordinary person would feel when seeing the blue square.

Well - if the horn bothered her, one might expect she pretty quickly developed an "Oh, bother, here we go again" response, which would relate to her ability to detect patterns and evaluate potential hazards and annoyances (such as loud horns or knife-wielding druggies).  But I would guess that "Oh, brother" does not need to show up as fear.

 

The Health Care Mandate - Waiting For The Shoe To Drop In Florida

The Times braces its readership for the next blow to ObamaCare and the controversial mandate:

Judge Hints He May Rule Against Health Law
By KEVIN SACK

PENSACOLA, Fla. — A federal judge asserted on Thursday that it would be “a giant leap” for the Supreme Court to accept the Obama administration’s defense of a central provision of the new health care law, suggesting he may become the second judge to strike it down as unconstitutional.

In a three-hour hearing, the judge, Roger Vinson of Federal District Court, said the law’s requirement that most Americans obtain insurance, a provision that takes effect in 2014, would constitute “a giant expansion” of the court’s traditional application of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

“People have always exercised the freedom to choose whether to buy or not buy a commercial product,” the judge said, noting that he had been uninsured and paid out of pocket when his first son was born.

They duly note that Judge Vinson is a Reagan appointee.

I do like this compelling government argument:

Ian H. Gershengorn, a deputy assistant attorney general who is defending the law, told Judge Vinson that the health care market was unique because getting sick was both unpredictable and potentially bankrupting. The economic consequences of not having insurance — including cost-shifting to others — justify its regulation by Congress, he said.

Uh huh.  Which is why we have a Federal mandate obliging the purchase of fire insurance, since losing one's home can be financially devastating and result in cost-shifting.  Oh, wait - you mean we don't?  Whatever.  Maybe I misunderstood the word "unique". 

But let's soldier on - having a heart atack can be unpredictable, financially devastating (not to mention fatal), and can result in cost shifting.  Hence the Federal mandate for eating vegetabes and exercising regularly.  Similarly, getting AIDS by way of unprotected sex can be unpredictable and devastating, which explains the Federal mandate for condoms.  OK, I can quit anytime...

Well.  Since lightning already struck in Virginia, thereby shifting the range of the comprehensible and respectable, I will be surprised if this judge does not stike down the mandate.  Here is what seems to be up for grabs:

Judge Vinson, a senior judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan, has seemed somewhat more receptive than Judge Hudson to the states’ argument that the entire health care law should fall if the insurance mandate is unconstitutional. He said the act was analogous to a watch with interlocking and interdependent wheels.

“It’s also been compared to a Rube Goldberg invention,” he remarked.

Judge Vinson said he would rule “as quickly as possible.”

In kinda sorta doesn't matter what this judge decides, since eventually the Supreme Court will take this up.  However, the wider the boundaries drawn by the various appeals court the greater the maneuvering room for the Supremes.

Kids These Days

Kids these days - here are stories about two Philly-area college footballers players who have saved lives on the side and a coach who deserves some credit.

First at wide receiver and in the outfield, Matt Szczur:

Villanova’s Matt Szczur has had so much to do this year — play football and baseball, provide bone marrow to a toddler with juvenile leukemia, keep up with his schoolwork — that he sometimes wishes he had a duplicate Matt Szczur to give him a hand.

Szczur, a wide receiver, likes to do it all, but he will have to make a hard choice after he plays in the Senior Bowl next month. Szczur is also a baseball player who was drafted in the fifth round last year by the Chicago Cubs. If he commits to play only baseball by Feb. 10, in time for spring training, he will receive a $500,000 bonus. That means he would miss the N.F.L.’s scouting combine, which begins Feb. 23.

“I’d rather see him play baseball,” his father, Marc, said this week, “but I just want him to be happy.”

Let's cut to the kid:

Szczur, a senior from Erma, N.J., gained attention late in the 2009 season after the National Marrow Donor Program determined that his bone marrow was a match for a 13-month-old girl with juvenile leukemia.

Wildcats players have been tested since 1992 at the urging of Coach Andy Talley.

For years Coach Talley has been talking up bone marrow donation to anyone who will listen; he is not credited, but I suspect he had an influence on this next story:

Last week, Warren Sallach, a road maintenance worker from Brenham, Tex., called Matt Hoffman, a senior defensive end at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J. They had never met, and Sallach froze when Hoffman answered.

“You don’t know what to say the first time you talk to somebody that saved your life,” Sallach said. “Just a thank you is nowhere near enough.”

In November 2009, Sallach received a blood stem cell transplant to treat non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in San Antonio. He has since learned that the anonymous donor was Hoffman, who gave up the final football game of his junior season to undergo the donation procedure in Philadelphia.

To protect the confidentiality of recipients and donors, the National Marrow Donor Program requires them to remain anonymous to one another for at least a year after a transplant. They can make contact only if both parties consent.

Last week, Sallach, 59, and Hoffman, 21, spoke by phone for an hour, and on Thursday, they will meet for the first time in Salem, Va., at the presentation of the Gagliardi Trophy, Division III’s equivalent to the Heisman. Hoffman is one of the four finalists.

The two families are anticipating hugs and tears and smiles.

“Even though we didn’t know each other, it’s an intimate situation to donate your cells to someone who needs them,” Hoffman said. “It’s going to be special to meet him and his family.”

The Rowan football team led an on-campus drive in the spring of 2009 to enroll students in the Be the Match registry for the donor program, and Hoffman was one of the 371 people who signed up.

After he was identified as a match for Sallach, Hoffman received shots for five consecutive days before the transplant to raise his blood stem cell count. The medication enlarged his spleen, which put him at risk of a rupture if he returned to football too quickly. So he sat out of Rowan’s final game.

“I knew that years from now I wouldn’t really care about maybe missing out on a couple of sacks,” Hoffman said.

And back in Texas:

Sallach had another round of chemotherapy before the transplant. He lost 50 pounds over the six months after the treatment and was tired and weak. But he slowly regained weight, the blood stem cells began to create new marrow, and the lymphoma went into remission once again.

Sallach, who said his most recent tests showed no sign of lymphoma, was well enough to go hunting recently with his 9-year-old son, Travis, who shot an 11-point buck. On New Year’s Day, Sallach and his wife, Becky, will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary.

“It’s the little things that you realize we wouldn’t have been able to experience had Matt not come along,” Becky Sallach said. “How do you put into words the sacrifice that he made to save a complete stranger’s life?”

ERRATA:  I want to see Matt Szczur and Auburn receiver Philip Lutzenkirchen in the same game just to listen to the announcers scuffle with the program notes.

Unhappy Is The Land That Needs A Hero

The NY Times tells us about a heroic Sunni policeman in Iraq:

In Seconds Before Blast, the Making of a Hero
By JACK HEALY

BALAD RUZ, Iraq — As the suicide bomber clutched the detonator to his explosive belt, preparing to spray fire and shrapnel into a religious procession here, an Iraqi police officer named Bilal Ali Muhammad faced a choice between his own life and something larger.

If he ran and took cover, Mr. Muhammad, 31, had a chance to save himself, to continue supporting his widowed mother, to help put his younger brother through college and to watch his three young daughters grow up.

Instead, the officer — a Sunni Muslim — threw himself onto the bomber, blunting the explosion’s impact on the Shiite worshipers.

“He gave his soul to the country,” said his mother, Alaahin Hassan, holding two of his daughters in her lap as dozens of black-veiled women filled her living room this week with ritualized wails of grief. “He believed in God. That made him great.”

In a country fractured by sect and ethnicity, from villages like this all the way to the government that is finally forming in Baghdad, Mr. Muhammad’s last act was a burst of heroism and humanity set against the viciousness that still stalks Iraq.

This was the situation:

On Monday afternoon, Mr. Muhammad was guarding the edge of an annual religious celebration of Ashura as Shiites waved green and black banners and beat drums to commemorate the killing of one of their sect’s foundational members in A.D. 680. The ceremonies have been ripe targets for Sunni insurgents, and Iraq’s leaders have deployed swarms of security forces this year to guard against attacks.

At 2:30 p.m., according to witnesses and police officials, Mr. Muhammad spotted a suspicious man approaching the crowd, his hand wedged into his pocket.

Mr. Muhammad, a police officer for five years, stopped the man and asked him, What do you have in your pocket? The man replied, It’s none of your business.

Pulling open the man’s jacket, Mr. Muhammad found an explosive belt strapped to his chest. Whether from instinct or training, or sheer lack of any other options, he acted in that instant.

Shouting warnings to the crowd, he wrapped his arms around the bomber. As both men tumbled to the dirt, the explosion ripped through their bodies and raked the street, scarring the white walls of a schoolyard.

A woman and her granddaughter sitting nearby were killed and a dozen others were wounded. But the police said the death toll would have been drastically higher had Mr. Muhammad not thrown himself onto the bomber.

“He’s a hero,” said Mr. Muhammad’s uncle, Hamza Hassan, who spent the day welcoming well-wishers to a funeral tent outside Mr. Muhammad’s family home here in this farming town near the Iranian border. “The only choice was to become a martyr.”

The man is a hero, but the government is on a bit of a tricky line - glorifying martyrdom risks glorifying, or at least legitimizing, the suicide bombers who also are prepared to die for their cause.

And a glimpse of the possible aftermath:

In nearby Baquba, inside a neat house by the trash-strewn banks of a languid stream, the family of Naseem Sabah Ismail is well acquainted with the accolades of heroics. In January 2008, Mr. Ismail, 23, threw himself onto an old man trying to set off a suicide vest at an Ashura procession. “He knew he was going to die,” said his father, Sabah Ismail. “He went to him anyway. He held onto him.”

The government provided a pension to the officer’s family and a few thousand dollars for burial in the Shiite cemetery in Najaf. But nearly three years later, the family said their sacrifice had largely been forgotten.

After his death, local officials made effusive speeches and private pledges vowing to promote Mr. Ismail to first lieutenant and build a statue in his honor. The statue was never built, and the promotion never came.

“The government only gave us promises,” said his mother, Sabriya Abed. “But it was all lies.”

 

Out With The Old, In With The Older

The omnibus spending bill dies, the dreaded Bush tax cuts live.

Not a bad starting point for the new Congress.