What Got Lost

Regular readers will note that I had a bit of a software foul-up while trying to upgrade. The site was dead for a while, in fact. Hopefully, everything is back, more or less, now. I did try to save comments and such that were posted before the crash - I'll try to get those back up if I can. If comments were lost and I did not manage to save them, I apologize. Hopefully, everything else is up and running.

Please let me know if anything is not working for you either by comment or by email.

When The SCHIP Hits The Fan

According to The Crypt, the Democrats are rolling out a new poster child for the SCHIP expansion they are pushing. The thing is, if they had brought this family out first, I rather doubt anyone would have blogged about them.

This week, Democrats have brought forth the Wilkerson family, whose two-year old daughter Bethany is covered by SCHIP and had life-saving heart surgery when she was an infant. On Monday the Wilkerson family held a conference call, sponsored by USAction, a liberal grassroots advocacy group lobbying in favor of the $35 billion SCHIP expansion.

For the record, the Bo and Dara Wilkerson say they make $34,000 in combined income from restaurant jobs in St. Petersburg, Fla. They rent their house and the couple owns one car, which Bo calls "a junker." Malkin and other bloggers have revealed over the past week that the Frost family owned two properties, as well as a couple cars, and had a $45,000 income. The accusation against Democrats, and by extension the Frost family, is that they are too middle class to be granted any subsidized health insurance for their children.

The Wilkersons said they are fully aware of the possibility that their finances and personal lives may be investigated by opponents of the SCHIP bill.

Nonsense. They are exactly the people that SCHIP was meant to cover in the first place. There is not one conservative that I am aware of who would raise any questions about this family or their circumstances. These are the "working poor" the program targeted - correctly. The ruckus was over another family that by any reasonable standard is not poor. The Democrats either foolishly put that family out as their "human face" or did so intentionally to cause the ruckus. Either way, the Frost family was ill used by the Democrats.

But they are lumping the middle class in with the real working poor and blurring the debate. They are conflating two very, very different groups and are at risk of losing substantial ground with both of those groups with this ploy. Those who really are among the working poor can rightfully point to the expansion into the middle class of benefits as making it less likely a hand will be there for them when they need it. The middle class will resent being called poor after working to get to where they are.

The real debate that the Democrats deflected criticism from here with their stupid or cynical actions is whether SCHIP should be expanded to the middle class - which I and a lot of others see as pushing socialized medicine in - and how is this massive expansion really going to be paid for. The disingenuous taxation scheme the Democrats are pushing unfairly targets those least able to pay those taxes. They know that the demographics of smokers are such that a large percentage are lower income and less educated. The Democrats know that and are smugly elitist about it. "Well," they sniff, "They shouldn't be smoking at all." So if the revenue falls - and it will - who pays for all this?

Answer: The rest of us. SCHIP expansion won't be as popular then, but by then it will be too late.

UPDATE: Others: Rick Moran: "I note that this time around, the Democrats were careful to push a family forward whose choices regarding health insurance couldn’t be questioned. In that respect, if they’re waiting for conservatives to attack the Wilkerson’s, they are going to be sorely disappointed."

Bruce Kesler: "I’d also phoned Medi-Cal (California’s Medicaid), targeting the truly poor, and found it does have a, perhaps overstrict, asset test: no more than $3000 of personal assets (including car and cash accounts). Wouldn’t the extra SCHIP funding be better spent on the truly needy. Or, do the Dems already discount that reliable voter bloc in their quest for middle-class voters who also want to be on the dole?"

Callimachus: "But there is a vast difference in the minds of middle-class Americans. You start telling them they're in the same situation as the poor, and you're going to lose them real fast. Which is how the Democrats tend to do it."

McQ: "So other than emotional appeal and an attempt to pretend the Wilkersons are the sort of family the fight is about when it is not, why are we seeing the Wilkersons at all?"

Jeff Goldstein: "The entire dustup over SCHIP has never been about the Frost family — except insofar as cynical Dems were willing to use an injured child already covered by the program as an emotional beard to demand an increase that would cover those making close to twice as much as the boy’s family."

Wide Open: "The central market-driven core of the health system is under incremental attack. and we need to defend it with ideas and answers, not by questioning the hard-luck cases."

Right Voices: "Before the bill was vetoed, it was set up for failure. Smoking is not on the rise. As a smoker,I say great! I wish I was a non-smoker. Even with the increased tax, you still fall millions short of coming close to funding the program."

Hot Air: "Can’t the Democrats find anyone who doesn’t qualify for SCHIP? And if they can’t, what does that say about the program or the scale of the proposed expansions of it?"

No Diversity At All

Mark Moyar writes about his effort to obtain a professorship at the University of Iowa history department. This appears to be a case very much like what George Will wrote about yesterday in the social work field. While the University of Iowa may utilize hiring diversity in terms of racial makeup - one assumes they do - they practice a lockstep uniformity in thought. There are 27 professors who are members of the Democratic party.

There are no Republicans.

27-0 at the University of Iowa 

It’s not the score of a Hawkeye football game. It’s the number of Democrats versus the number of Republicans in the University of Iowa history department, and it has Iowans in an uproar. So, too, do charges published by Mark Bauerlein that left-wing bias has influenced the department’s hiring process. In response to the revelations, department chair Colin Gordon announced that the department had committed no wrongdoing, and neither he nor the university has expressed any concern about the total absence of intellectual diversity. Rarely have the hypocrisy and mendacity of academia been so thoroughly exposed as in the history department’s damage-control campaign.

Professor Gordon contended that the history department cannot discriminate against Republican or conservative job applicants because it does not know the political ideology of applicants. But the University’s own hiring manual states that search committees must “assess ways the applicants will bring rich experiences, diverse backgrounds, and ideology to the university community.” So they are obligated to understand applicants’ ideology, and to make sure not to overlook people with differing ideologies.

Determining a historian’s ideological inclinations is actually very easy in most cases. When I applied to the University of Iowa history department for a professorship in the United States and world affairs, my résumé listed membership in the National Organization of Scholars, which is an organization that everyone in academia knows to be ideologically to the right of the average academic organization. A quick search on Google or Amazon, moreover, reveals that my two books on the Vietnam War have widely been characterized as conservative.

Read it all, the university comes off as tapdancing around a real issue and staunchly defending their ideological uniformity. So much for academic freedom and cultural diversity. American colleges are increasingly diverse in race and gender but are frighteningly uniform in their embedded group-think. That rigid control, increasingly authoritarian and intolerant is the road to a police state.

Here's the article by Mark Bauerlein from the Des Moines Register. (I have no idea why Moyar failed to link it. Thank heavens for search engines.)

But last May the question did arise, and in response an officer in Iowa's Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity named Jan Waterhouse clarified its meaning: "Associational preference within the University policy has been interpreted to include political affiliation."

So why, then, does the history department in the university have 27 registered Democrats and 0 registered Republicans? The most obvious political affiliation, party membership, falls completely on one side. Despite the sizable Republican population of Iowa, not a single representative has made it into the history faculty ranks.

Think of what would happen if other diversities suffered the same disparate outcome. A department of all men would spark an outcry, and rightly so. But nobody seems to worry about the political skew. Waterhouse's statement appears in a response to a complaint of discrimination on "associational preference" grounds filed by a candidate for a history post.

The real problem, as Bauerlein points out is this:

In hard-science fields, the issue isn't important, but in value-heavy areas of the humanities and history, political diversity is crucial. Students should hear the full range of opinion on open and controversial issues. Furthermore, employees and job candidates need to feel that their politics will not affect their status. That is why the non-discrimination statement includes "associational preference" in its list, and why "associational preference" covers political affiliation.

Humanities and history can be heavily impacted by who is teaching and how facts are interpreted. The lockstep uniformity of the University of Iowa history department practically guarantees that there will be a uniformly rigid interpretation of history in a particular direction. That is no longer instruction. It is indoctrination.

A Job I Would Not Want

Reporter Jill Leovy of the Los Angeles Times has been covering every single murder in Los Angeles county as part of a project to document every victim for one year. Tough assignment, right? You have no idea:

She has covered more than 700 so far.

Jill Leovy's war isn't thousands of miles away. In fact, without traffic, she can drive from her office to the front lines in about ten minutes.

It's being fought mostly in the tough, minority neighborhoods of Los Angeles County, where three people are killed each day on average — more than a thousand a year.

Leovy is the creator of The Homicide Report, a blogging project by the Los Angeles Times in which she is attempting to record every homicide in Los Angeles County over the course of a year. She has covered over 700 to date.

Because it is often the only public acknowledgement of the event, the blog has become a memorial for murder victims, with family members and friends posting responses adjacent to many of the entries, providing updates on children or expressing the pain of being left alone.

Most of the reports are just a sentence or two long, but they are filled with heartbreak, like the death of Michael Presley, 19, buried in the same grave as his father, who was also murdered years earlier.

Or the story of twin brothers Noel and Joel Velazco, both shot to death only a few feet from each other, but six years apart.

Her reporting can be found at The Homicide Report. The report caught my eye, but there is a statistic in it that should come as a real shock to everyone - except, I suppose, to folks like Leovy who are paying attention.

The national homicide rate is roughly six deaths per 100,000 people. For adult Latino males in Los Angeles County it's 52 deaths per 100,000. For adult black males it's an eye opening 176 deaths per 100,000. The highest incidence of murder is in the poor neighborhoods southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

That is appalling.

Television Can Kill

The things they never tell you when you're growing up. We would just like to point out that television can kill or cause serious injury to life or property. Particularly when the television set is heaved out a second-story window.

ANNECY, France (AFP) - A French rugby fan was so distraught at his team's World Cup semi-final exit that he threw his television out of the window of his flat onto a car parked two floors below.

Police here said the man, who had been drinking as he watched Les Bleus slip to a 14-9 defeat to England on Saturday, also threw his video recorder and furniture from his second floor apartment.

We have quietly pointed out that rugby players are, on average, completely insane. This extends to their fans as well. The frustrated fan will have to pay for the damage to be repaired - and get a new television. But it isn't only falling television sets that are a danger, folks. It can be television cameras as well:

SEATTLE - Talk about bad omens. An overhead NBC television camera mounted on wires collapsed onto the turf during a timeout early in Sunday night's game between the New Orleans Saints and Seattle Seahawks, almost hitting two Seattle players and causing a 10-minute delay.

The Saints had just called timeout with 11:24 remaining in the first quarter when the camera slumped and then fell a few yards from quarterback Matt Hasselbeck and the rest of the huddling Seahawks. After the camera was righted somewhat off the ground, it fell again — and nearly hit Bobby Engram as the receiver was walking to the sideline.

Game officials then cleared both teams from the middle of the field while the network got the camera back up to normal height. As the camera moved up and down the field for testing, Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren looked up at its every move with his mouth agape. When the camera moved to the sideline, Seattle's players all cleared out from beneath it.

Are we certain that Keith Olberman was not at the controls of the camera? After all, it tried to hit Hasselbeck, who isn't too popular with some folks on the left.

Undular Bores

This is pretty wild. Visible gravity waves.

On a recent crisp autumn afternoon in Iowa, video cameras captured an unusual and visually dramatic result of two air masses colliding. Clouds split into a series of stripes and swept across the sky.

These so-called undular bores are created by atmospheric conditions that destabilize the air in a particular way. In the case of Des Moines, Iowa, they formed on Oct. 3 when a group of thunderstorms approached the city.

"At the time, a layer of cold, stable air was sitting on top of Des Moines," said atmospheric scientist Time Coleman of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Alabama. "The approaching storms disturbed the air, creating a ripple akin to what we see when we toss a stone into a pond."

A time-lapse video of the event shows just how strange it looked.

Undular bores are a type of gravity wave, one in which gravity is the force that pulls the wave down. Coleman likens the cloud waves to those created when a boat moves across the water.

"When a boat goes tearing across a lake, water in front of the boat is pushed upward," he explained. "Gravity pulls the water back down again and this sets up a wave."

For some reason the linked video at LiveScience will not play. But YouTube comes to the rescue:

Keep The Home Fires Burning

The old cliché "keep the home fires burning" probably originated in the need to tend home cooking fires so they would last all day. It has come to mean other things through the years, mostly about the need to take care of some things at home to keep a marriage or a relationship sound. But the home fire shouldn't be an effigy of yourself being set alight. Yet that's just about what Harry Reid has managed in his short tenure as Senate Majority Leader.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's appeal among Nevadans has plunged dramatically in a new Review-Journal poll, which finds him viewed unfavorably by most likely voters in his home state.

Reid is still slightly more well-liked than Gov. Jim Gibbons. Both the Democratic senator and the Republican governor are less favorably viewed than President Bush.

"Fortunately for Reid, he doesn't have to run for re-election for a while," said Brad Coker, managing partner of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc., the Washington, D.C.-based firm that conducted the poll. If they decide to run again, Reid's name won't be on the ballot until 2010, nor will Gibbons'.

The poll asked 625 likely voters from around the state whether they recognized a politician's name, and if so, if they had a favorable, unfavorable or neutral opinion of that person. The survey carries a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Reid's favorable rating was 32 percent, compared with 51 percent unfavorable and 15 percent neutral. Gibbons was viewed favorably by 30 percent, Bush by 34 percent.

The Review-Journal last asked Nevadans their opinion of Reid in early May. At that time, he was seen favorably by 46 percent and unfavorably by 42 percent.

It is a very good thing for Reid he is not running, isn't it? Those are brutal poll numbers for a politician.

Originality, Or Lack Thereof

Paul Krugman is completely unable to come up with a new term, so he just rewrites one invented by Charles Krauthammer and unveils the left's newest meme: Gore Derangement Syndrome. Then he busily projects the left's routine behavior.

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.

No, it isn't. I have documented many instances where the supposed cures for global warming are either useless, harmful or even fraudulent. I have linked repeatedly to discussions about and with people who have serious issues with anthropogenic global warming theories. I have also linked to measured responses to the hysteria Al Gore is promoting. Along the way, I have also made a lot of fun of Gore and his true believers.

This is just another attempt to demonize, marginalize and suppress anyone who disagrees with Al Gore - no matter why they disagree.

UN Springs Into Action, Issues Tut-Tut To Burma

The United Nations special envoy to Burma has issued a tut-tut to the military junta that rules Burma. There was no official finger wag, however. The junta responded with a Bronx cheer and went about the business of cracking more skulls.

BANGKOK (Reuters) - U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari told Myanmar on Monday to stop arresting dissidents and Thailand proposed a regional forum including China and India to nudge the reclusive military junta towards democratic reform.

However, as the region began a new diplomatic approach beyond the failed strategies of sanctions or "constructive engagement," the former Burma's ruling generals remained defiant, vowing to plough on with their own much-criticized "roadmap to democracy."

"We will go ahead. We will not deviate from our path," the official New Light of Myanmar said in a commentary on the seven-point masterplan, unveiled in 2003, to chart a course beyond the military rule of the last 45 years.

"Those who sincerely want to hold hands with us are welcome," the newspaper continued in uncompromising tone. "We will get rid of the barriers and obstacles on the way."

Gambari, in Bangkok at the start of a regional tour to drum up support for a coordinated diplomatic front, said actions spoke louder than words — and that the continued arrests and intimidation of activists were "extremely disturbing."

"These actions must stop at once," he told reporters.

What continues to amaze me is that people can watch the complete uselessness of the UN - over and over and over again - and still say we should be more involved with the UN. We watch them botch everything they touch with very, very few exceptions and yet should put our absolute trust in their pronouncements on the environment.

Is anyone really paying attention?

Putin To Visit Iran Despite Assassination Plot Rumor

Vladimir Putin will go ahead with his planned visit to Tehran despite reports in the Russian press that sources have warned about an "assassination plot" against him there. Oh, please. The tightly controlled Russian media lets it be known that Putin is somehow in danger, then Putin bravely goes forward with his plans? Gee, what stinks about that little scenario?

"Of course I am going to Iran," Putin told a news conference after talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "If you react to various threats and recommendations of the security services, then you should sit at home."

Kremlin officials had earlier said plans for Putin's visit were in doubt after a Russian news agency reported, quoting a single unnamed security source, that plotters were planning to assassinate Putin in Tehran.

Putin's visit to Iran, the first by a Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin went in 1943, has drawn intense interest because of Russia's role as a mediator in six-power talks designed to rein in Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The Kremlin leader said patience and negotiation were the best tools for dealing with Iran and said trying to intimidate Tehran was "hopeless."

"But to demonstrate patience and look for a way out is possible and should be done," Putin said. "If we have a chance to keep up these direct contacts, then we will do it, hoping for a positive, mutually advantageous result."

Merkel took a more hawkish line, saying that the United Nations must impose more sanctions on Iran if it does not comply with U.N. demands over its nuclear program.

INTELLIGENCE REPORTS

Russia's Interfax news agency had reported on Sunday evening that Putin had been warned by his special services of a possible assassination plot during his visit to Tehran this week.

"A reliable source in one of the Russian special services, has received information from several sources outside Russia, that during the president of Russia's visit to Tehran an assassination attempt is being plotted," Interfax said.

Russian media are mostly controlled by the government and it would be unthinkable for a major Moscow news organization to report an alleged plot against the president without prior official approval.

Pure propaganda, nothing more. All designed to make Putin look bold and brave to the Russian people. Its too bad the western media keeps playing along instead of calling him on it - not that it would change anything inside Russia, of course.

Io, Io, It’s Off To Work We Go

Ok, I couldn't resist the pun. NASA researchers think they have unlocked the secrets of Io's atmosphere. That Jovian moon is the most volcanically object in the solar system but scientists have long been puzzled by the sulfur dioxide atmosphere.

Io's volcanoes spew out sulfur dioxide, which is a gas that stinks of freshly lit matches and almost entirely makes up the moon's atmosphere. As Io rotates from daylight into darkness, chilling the yellowish rock down to -226 F (-143 C), the gas freezes into a solid, much like dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide gas).

"The atmosphere at that point collapses down so that all that is left supplying the atmosphere are the volcanoes," Retherford said.

Because Io's volcanic gas stays warm enough not to freeze and creates glowing auroras, scientists were able to find out how much the volcanoes supply Io's atmosphere by measuring the moon's nightside aurora.

About 1 to 3 percent of Io's dayside atmosphere, it turns out, is created by the volcanoes. The rest is generated from frozen sulfur dioxide turning directly into gas which, over eons, has accumulated on Io's surface.

NASA has a really nice gallery of images from Io here. Their Io page is here.

End Farm Subsidies

That is the opinion of Dean Kleckner, who headed the American Farm Bureau for 14 years. In his role with the biggest farm lobby he used to support the subsidies. He has had a major change of heart. As he points out, the US has lost yet another case in front of the World Trade Organization over farm subsidies. The rules of that organization now make it possible for Brazil to impose higher tariffs against American goods other than agricultural products. Mexico and Canada are gearing up to file their own complaints. It doesn't have to be this way.

I know all about subsidies. For years, I took them myself for my corn and soybean farm. I didn’t really enjoy it, but they were available and I rationalized my participation: Other industries received payments and tax breaks — why shouldn’t I? In addition, I spent 14 years as the head of the American Farm Bureau, the leading farmers’ lobby and a prime player in the creation of the subsidy system.

In the 1990s, however, a trip to New Zealand made me realize that eliminating subsidies was not just a free-market fantasy, but rather a policy that could work in an advanced industrial nation. New Zealanders had stopped subsidizing their farmers, cold turkey, in 1984. The transition was controversial and not without its rough spots, yet it succeeded. On that visit and several later ones, I never met a farmer who wanted to go back to subsidies.

Today, it’s obvious that we need to transform our public support for farmers. Many of our current subsidies inhibit trade because of their link to commodity prices. By promising to cover losses, the government insulates farmers from market signals that normally would encourage sensible, long-term decisions about what to grow and where to grow it. There’s something fundamentally perverse about a system that has farmers hoping for low prices at harvest time — it’s like praying for bad weather. But that’s precisely what happens, because those low prices mean bigger checks from Washington.

The Washington Post ran a series of articles that savaged the farm subsidies late last year. John Stossel has written about it. But those articles all focused on the payments themselves. Kleckner points out that the subsidies to farmers also end up damaging other sectors of the American economy when aggrieved countries impose punitive tariffs on other products. This is a classic lose-lose scenario all the way around. Prices are skyrocketing - why are American taxpayers being forced to hand money over to farmers?