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A Little More Mystic Nationalism
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The value of liberal rights and a liberal order are clear enough that free people do not need more than a dram of nationalist fortification to rise to liberty’s defense. Liberty is best loved when it is loved because it is good — because it makes possible a rightful order. Liberty is neglected when it is loved merely because it’s what we, the folks in these parts, happen to tell each other we love. An ongoing culture of liberty certainly makes us readier to grasp liberty’s real worth. But a culture in which the love of freedom is too easily confused with an admiration of martial virtue is a culture likely to find itself sooner or later at war with some imagined enemy and its own liberal values.
Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails
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The leaked documents (see our previous coverage) come from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in eastern England. In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: it claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report. That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it "relies on most heavily" when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.
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They show that some of the field's most prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of man-made global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data ("have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots"), cheered the deaths of skeptical journalists, and plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.
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Wayne Co. profits from police property seizures
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Vaughn, who has no criminal record, was required to pay for the return of her car, which was seized by police after they mistook Vaughn's co-worker for a prostitute. Even though prosecutors later dropped the case, Vaughn still had to pay.
Her story is not unusual. In Wayne County, law enforcement officials regularly seize vehicles without levying charges -- even in cases in which they later concede no law was broken. The agency provides perhaps the most prolific and egregious example of what critics contend is the wrongful use of laws allowing the seizure of private property.
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Officers from the Wayne County Sheriff's Morality Unit accused Odom of solicitation after they saw her make eye contact with passing motorists while waiting for Vaughn to pick her up from the bank. On the strength of that observation, officers ticketed Odom and seized Vaughn's 2002 Chrysler Sebring.
The Jobs Picture Crashes Into Debt Realities
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The chart below illustrates this point. Based on Congressional Budget Office data, it represents the interest the government paid on the federal debt as a percentage of GDP between 1962 and today and the projected debt service payments up until 2082. The projections are illustrated under the current CBO baseline and under the CBO alternative, more realistic, scenario. For comparison, the graph also shows CBO’s projections for the cost of Medicare and Social Security as a percentage of GDP. Notice that under either of CBO’s scenarios, the net interest payments, or the costs of the debt, rival the cost of two of our nation’s most expensive social programs.
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Add Sticky NoteStarting in 2012, the cost of the debt as a percentage of GDP will explode from a mere 1.8 percent of GDP to more than 30 percent of GDP in 2082.
- Something is going to give before this happens. - on 2009-12-04
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What does Obama's Afghan timeline mean? Depends who's asking
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The Obama administration is giving different explanations of its July 2011 deadline for the start of an Afghanistan troop withdrawal, assuring foreign officials that it applies only to the 30,000 to 35,000 additional U.S. troops that President Barack Obama is sending next year, but suggesting to Congress that it covers all U.S. forces.
With F.H.A. Help, Easy Loans in Expensive Areas
The federal government is continuing to guarantee risky loans, now in larger amounts than ever. I guess this is all part of the plan to reinflate the housing bubble.
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In its efforts to prop up a shattered housing market, the government is greatly extending its traditional support of real estate, including guaranteeing the mortgages of middle-class and even upper-class buyers against default.
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Some F.H.A. borrowers here say they have the cash for a full down payment but would rather invest it in the stock market or use it for remodeling. Others, like Mr. Rowland and his friends, simply do not have the money required by private lenders
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Heart Disease Death Rate Increased by 16% in First Year Following Indy Smoking Ban; By IOM Committee's Logic, Ban Caused Increase in Heart Attacks
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This reversed a trend of declining heart disease death rates prior to the smoking ban.
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If anti-smoking groups were correct that brief exposure to secondhand smoke is triggering heart attacks in many nonsmokers, there certainly should have been a decline in heart disease death rates within one year. At very least, one would not have observed a 16% increase in heart disease deaths.
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Stimulus is boon for D.C. area contractors: Federal departments are paying firms to help spend the money
Federal departments are paying firms to help spend the money
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Reports from stimulus recipients show that a sizable sum has gone to federal contractors in the Washington area who are helping implement the initiative -- in effect, they are being paid a hefty slice of the money to help spend the rest of it.
Against Nationalism
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I believe that nationalism is second only to communism as the greatest evil of modern politics.
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many non-mass murdering nationalist regimes still use nationalism as a justification for protectionism, discrimination against minority groups, suppression of dissent, and the like. Nor are these abuses simply the result of misinterpretations of nationalism by unscrupulous rulers. To the contrary, if you genuinely believe that we have special obligations to members of your ethnic or national group that sometimes trump universal principles, consistency requires that you be willing to sacrifice the rights of other groups to benefit your own, at least sometimes.
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How to Fix Health Care—Lasik surgery for the medical debate
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The alternative is to base reforms on what works in the other
five-sixths of the U.S. economy, where choice and competition
increase quality and drive down prices over time. -
"How to Fix Health Care" proposes three simple reforms that will
put us on a path to a health-care system that's better, more
affordable, and more accessible. And get this—these market-based
reforms can be implemented without creating new government
programs or raising taxes.
How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet"
Matthew Lasar points to the history of the telegraph business to argue in favor of government regulation.
Questions:
Was Western Union ever a monopoly? The article quotes some people who described it as a monopoly, but it also refers to competitors.
If Western Union became a monopoly, why? What prevented competitors from entering the market? The article says the U.S. government subsidized particular telegraph companies, which would have hampered competition. Did the U.S. government or other governments do other things to pick winners?
Did Western Union become a monopoly on telegraph service when the market for telegraphy was in decline? Telephone companies were in business by the time the article says Western Union's stock price dropped.
If Western Union was not ever a telegraph monopoly, did consumers respond to their abuses by switching to competitors? Over time, consumers clearly did choose competitors offering substitute services, since most of us don't communicate through telegraphy today.
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one wonders if there ever was an age when the hands-off school of regulation got exactly what it seems to want—a network environment largely untarnished by public oversight.
In fact, there was such a time.
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It was no secret why Western Union sided with Republicans. By the 1870s, the Party of Lincoln (Abe himself being a former railroad lawyer) had given away massive quantities of land for the construction of railroads and telegraphs: almost 130 million acres (about seven percent of the continental United States) was granted to eighty enterprises.
Report Cites Big Shortfall in Reserves at A.I.G.
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An independent analysis of whether the insurance industry has been setting aside enough money to pay its claims estimates that the American International Group has a shortfall of $11.9 billion in its property and casualty business.
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Other researchers have raised doubts about A.I.G.’s total worth since it was bailed out last year, and even the federal government has acknowledged that the company might have difficulty repaying all the money it owed taxpayers, currently about $120 billion.
CBO: Senate's Health Care Reform Bill Would Cause Individual-Market Insurance Premiums to Rise
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According to a report released by the Congressional Budget
Office this morning, the average price of insurance
premiums bought on the individual market—that is, premiums not
purchased through employers—would go up by 10 to 13 percent in
2016 if Congress passed health care reform legislation now in the
Senate. This tracks with
state-level reform efforts, which have almost always
coincided with spikes in individual insurance premiums.
Nevertheless, advocates of reform will—and indeed, already are—arguing that the report shows that the bill
will make health care both better and more affordable. How's
that? -
Basically, the argument is that, sure, insurance on the
individual market will be more expensive, but taxpayers will pick
up the tab for the increased costs. - 2 more annotations...
The Consumer Is Not the Customer: Both parties promise to preserve one of the central problems of the health care system
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Three-fifths of Americans, the share with employer-provided
health insurance, are in the same situation. Since someone else
buys insurance for them, using money they would otherwise receive
as wages, they are in no position to shop around and typically do
not know the true cost of their coverage. This disconnect between
payment and consumption is one of the central problems with the
health care system, contributing to insecurity, rapidly
escalating costs, and the general lack of choice and competition.
Yet both Democrats and Republicans insist on preserving it.
Health Care Reform in Massachusetts: Still a Bad Idea
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Health care reform advocates
have taken, in recent weeks, to noting that insurance premiums on
the individual market in Massachusetts—the state where a variant
on proposed national reforms is already in place—have fallen in
recent years. -
In 1996,
Massachusetts passed an earlier set of reforms—community rating
and guaranteed issue - 2 more annotations...
How Much Does A Decade of Health Care Reform Cost? It Depends on What You Mean By "First Decade."
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In other words, according to data provided by the CBO, starting
up the entire reform apparatus is going to cost more like $1.8
trillion over its first real decade of operation.
Skeptics doubt Mexican data on military abuses: Figures contradict U.S. numbers; complaints rise as drug war rages
Figures contradict U.S. numbers; complaints rise as drug war rages
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The Mexican military has come under scrutiny because of a surge in complaints against soldiers, including allegations of torture, beatings and illegal raids and arrests. The Mexican army is leading the fight against the powerful drug cartels as part of President Felipe Calderón's U.S.-backed strategy to put 45,000 troops into the streets and employ soldiers as police.
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Human rights monitors in Mexico and the United States describe the handful of convictions as proof that Mexico's military is incapable of prosecuting abuses among its officers and troops. The army pursues cases before secretive tribunals and refuses to release basic information, such as the names of the accused.
How Little We Know
Russell Roberts argues against giving more power to regulators for the purpose of reforming capitalism. Regulators were part of the problem, and there is no reason to believe they will be wiser in the future.
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