Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Climate fraud

Climate Crisis Yet Another Flagrant Con
By PAUL DRIESSEN Posted Tuesday, June 30, 2009 4:20 PM PT

A 1,500-page bill to tax, regulate and penalize all U.S. hydrocarbon energy use to "save the planet" from climate Armageddon has passed the House 219-212 despite the fact that not one member read it. The Senate promises an August vote.

But average global temperatures peaked in 1998 and since have fallen slightly, even as carbon dioxide levels continued climbing. Thousands of scientists say CO2 has little effect on planetary temperatures, and there is no climate crisis. The legislation would cost millions of jobs and trillions of dollars, for a hypothetical 0.1 degree F reduction in global temperatures.

The administration responded to these inconvenient truths by issuing another "report" by government scientists carefully selected to include only climate crisis believers.

It then hired an activist media firm that specializes in environmental campaigns, to hype meaningless computer-generated Hollywood disaster scenarios:
Catastrophic sea levels, floods in lower Manhattan, California beaches permanently submerged. Ferocious hurricanes. Droughts. Food shortages, epidemic diseases, a quadrupling of heat-wave deaths. Aged sewer systems convulsing from massive storm runoff. Polar bears disappearing from the Arctic. It may be the most flagrant attempted con job in U.S. history.

If successful,Congress, activists, courts and bureaucrats will gain control over almost every aspect of American life. Government will confiscate hard-earned dollars, convert them to payoffs for activists and companies that get on the climate-crisis bandwagon, consign uncooperative companies to oblivion, impose eco-tariffs on imports, restrict access to energy, and inflict soaring costs on families, industry and transportation.

The sham "report" conflates and confuses human activities and emissions with powerful natural forces that have caused major and minor climate changes and weather anomalies since the dawn of time.

It relies on conjecture, conformist thinking and conspicuous elimination of contrary, skeptical, realist scientists and studies that do not support climate cataclysm conjecture.

The authors "largely ignored" critical comments to earlier drafts and made the final version "even more alarmist," says Joseph D'Aleo, first director of meteorology at the Weather Channel and ex-chairman of the American Meteorological Society's Weather Analysis and Forecasting Committee.

The report "misrepresents my own work," says University of Colorado environmental studies professor Roger Pielke, Jr. It makes claims that aren't supported by citations provided, relies on analyses that were never peer reviewed, ignores peer-reviewed studies that reach opposite conclusions from those proclaimed by the report, and cites papers that don't support conclusions.

The report also relies heavily on surface temperature data from monitoring stations located next to parking lots and air conditioning exhaust ports — falsely skewing temperature records upward. It relies on long chains of assumptions and speculation, but provides little supporting evidence.

An even more egregious miscarriage of science is its reliance on worst-case scenarios conjured up by computer models. These climate models have never been validated by actual observations, notes Professor Robert Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at Australia's James Cook University.

Australia's own climate modeling agency stresses climate change scenarios are based on computer models that "involve simplifications of (real world) processes that are not fully understood. Accordingly, no responsibility will be accepted . . . for the accuracy of forecasts inferred" from its reports.

"Modeling results are interesting — but worthless for setting public policy," Carter says. But that's exactly how they're used.

Sure, it's conceivable that Antarctica could melt, causing sea levels to rise 20 feet, as Al Gore and the government con-artists suggest. Greenhouse gases would merely have to increase average annual Antarctic temperatures from —50 F today to +40 F for a few centuries to melt 200,000 cubic miles of South Pole icecaps. That may be as likely as having the planet overrun by T-rexes cloned from DNA in fossilized mosquitoes. But it's conceivable. And in the realm of global warming politics, that's all that matters.

As one activist group put it: "The task . . . is not to persuade by rational argument." It is "to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement. The 'facts' need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken." The strategy is to treat "climate-friendly activity as a brand that can be sold. This is the route to mass behavior change."

If the congressional, administration and activist conspirators behind this deceit were in the private sector — peddling bogus drugs, rather than bogus science — they'd be convicted of fraud. Instead, they'll probably get bonus checks. It's time to tell Congress: No more con jobs and tax hikes.

Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality.

socialized health care

Canada's Single-Prayer Health Care
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Tuesday, June 30, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Health Reform: A critically ill premature baby is moved to a U.S hospital to get the treatment she couldn't get in the system we're told we should emulate. Cost-effective care? In Canada, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for.

IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure

Ava Isabella Stinson was born last Thursday at St. Joseph's hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. Weighing only two pounds, she was born 13 weeks premature and needed some very special care. Unfortunately, there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joseph's — or anywhere else in the entire province of Ontario, it seems.

Canada's perfectly planned and cost-effective system had no room at the inn for Ava, who of necessity had to be sent across the border to a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital to suffer under our chaotic and costly system. She had no time to be put on a Canadian waiting list. She got the care she needed at an American hospital under a system President Obama has labeled "unsustainable."

Jim Hoft over at Gateway Pundit reports Ava's case is not unusual. He reports that Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit is closed to new admissions half the time. Special-needs infants are sent elsewhere and usually to the U.S.

In 2007, a Canadian woman gave birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets — Autumn, Brooke, Calissa and Dahlia Jepps. They were born in the United States to Canadian parents because there was again no space available at any Canadian neonatal care unit. All they had was a wing and a prayer.

The Jepps, a nurse and a respiratory technician flew from Calgary, a city of a million people, 325 miles to Benefit Hospital in Great Falls, Mont., a city of 56,000. The girls are doing fine, thanks to our system where care still trumps cost and where being without insurance does not mean being without care.

Infant mortality rates are often cited as a reason socialized medicine and a single-payer system is supposed to be better than what we have here. But according to Dr. Linda Halderman, a policy adviser in the California State Senate, these comparisons are bogus.

As she points out, in the U.S., low birth-weight babies are still babies. In Canada, Germany and Austria, a premature baby weighing less than 500 grams is not considered a living child and is not counted in such statistics. They're considered "unsalvageable" and therefore never alive.

Norway boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world — until you factor in weight at birth, and then its rate is no better than in the U.S.

In other countries babies that survive less than 24 hours are also excluded and are classified as "stillborn." In the U.S. any infant that shows any sign of life for any length of time is considered a live birth.

A child born in Hong Kong or Japan that lives less than a day is reported as a "miscarriage" and not counted. In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby is not counted as a baby if it is less than 30 centimeters in length.

In 2007, there were at least 40 mothers and their babies who were airlifted from British Columbia alone to the U.S. because Canadian hospitals didn't have room. It's worth noting that since 2000, 42 of the world's 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g (0.9 pounds) were born in the U.S.

It must be embarrassing to Canada that a G-7 economy and a country of 30 million people can't offer the same level of health care as a town of just over 50,000 in rural Montana. Where will Canada send its preemies and other critical patients when we adopt their health care system?

As we have noted, in Canada roughly 900,000 patients of all ages are waiting for beds, according to the Fraser Institute. There are more than four times as many magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) units per capita in the U.S. as in Canada. We have twice as many CT scanners per capita.
Expensive? Wasteful. Just ask the Jepps or the parents of Ava Isabella Stinson.

Obama and ideology

Obama: Ideologue-in-chief
by Caroline Glick

For a brief moment it seemed that US President Barack Obama was moved by the recent events in Iran. On Friday, he issued his harshest statement yet on the mullocracy's barbaric clampdown against its brave citizens who dared to demand freedom in the aftermath of June 12's stolen presidential elections.

Speaking of the protesters Obama said, "Their bravery in the face of brutality is a testament to their enduring pursuit of justice. The violence perpetrated against them is outrageous. In spite of the government's efforts to keep the world from bearing witness to that violence, we see it and we condemn it."

While some noted the oddity of Obama's attribution of the protesters' struggle to the "pursuit of justice," rather than the pursuit of freedom - which is what they are actually fighting for - most Iran watchers in Washington and beyond were satisfied with his statement.

Alas, it was a false alarm. On Sunday Obama dispatched his surrogates - presidential adviser David Axelrod and UN Ambassador Susan Rice - to the morning talk shows to make clear that he has not allowed mere events to influence his policies.

After paying lip service to the Iranian dissidents, Rice and Axelrod quickly cut to the chase. The Obama administration does not care about the Iranian people or their struggle with the theocratic totalitarians who repress them. Whether Iran is an Islamic revolutionary state dedicated to the overthrow of the world order or a liberal democracy dedicated to strengthening it, is none of the administration's business.

Obama's emissaries wouldn't even admit that after stealing the election and killing hundreds of its own citizens, the regime is illegitimate. As Rice put it, "Legitimacy obviously is in the eyes of the people. And obviously the government's legitimacy has been called into question by the protests in the streets. But that's not the critical issue in terms of our dealings with Iran."

No, whether an America-hating regime is legitimate or not is completely insignificant to the White House. All the Obama administration wants to do is go back to its plan to appease the mullahs into reaching an agreement about their nuclear aspirations. And for some yet-to-be-explained reason, Obama and his associates believe they can make this regime -- which as recently as Friday called for the mass murder of its own citizens, and as recently as Saturday blamed the US for the Iranian people's decision to rise up against the mullahs -- reach such an agreement.

IN STAKING out a seemingly hard-nosed, unsentimental position on Iran, Obama and his advisers would have us believe that unlike their predecessors, they are foreign policy "realists."

Unlike Jimmy Carter, who supported the America-hating mullahs against the America-supporting shah 30 years ago in the name of his moralistic post-Vietnam War aversion to American exceptionalism, Obama supports the America-hating mullahs against the America-supporting freedom protesters because all he cares about are "real" American interests.

So too, unlike George W. Bush, who openly supported Iran's pro-American democratic dissidents against the mullahs due to his belief that the advance of freedom in Iran and throughout the world promoted US national interests, Obama supports the anti-American mullahs who butcher these dissidents in the streets and abduct and imprison them by the thousands due to his "hard-nosed" belief that doing so will pave the way for a meeting of the minds with their oppressors.

Yet Obama's policy is anything but realistic. By refusing to support the dissidents, he is not demonstrating that he is a realist. He is showing that he is immune to reality. He is so committed to appeasing the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei that he is incapable of responding to actual events, or even of taking them into account for anything other than fleeting media appearances meant to neutralize his critics.

Rice and Axelrod demonstrated the administration's determination to eschew reality when they proclaimed that Ahmadinejad's "reelection" is immaterial. As they see it, appeasement isn't dead since it is Khamenei - whom they deferentially refer to as "the supreme leader" - who sets Iran's foreign policy.

While Khamenei is inarguably the decision maker on foreign policy, his behavior since June 12 has shown that he is no moderate. Indeed, as his post-election Friday "sermon" 10 days ago demonstrated, he is a paranoid, delusional America-bashing tyrant. In that speech he called Americans "morons" and accused them of being the worst human-rights violators in the world, in part because of the Clinton administration's raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas in 1993.

Perhaps what is most significant about Obama's decision to side with anti-American tyrants against pro-American democrats in Iran is that it is utterly consistent with his policies throughout the world. From Latin America to Asia to the Middle East and beyond, after six months of the Obama administration it is clear that in its pursuit of good ties with America's adversaries at the expense of America's allies, it will not allow actual events to influence its "hard-nosed" judgments.

TAKE THE ADMINISTRATION'S response to the Honduran military coup on Sunday. While the term "military coup" has a lousy ring to it, the Honduran military ejected president Manuel Zelaya from office after he ignored a Supreme Court ruling backed by the Honduran Congress which barred him from holding a referendum this week that would have empowered him to endanger democracy.

Taking a page out of his mentor Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez's playbook, Zelaya acted in contempt of his country's democratic institutions to move forward with his plan to empower himself to serve another term in office. To push forward with his illegal goal, Zelaya fired the army's chief of staff. And so, in an apparent bid to prevent Honduras from going the way of Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua and becoming yet another anti-American Venezuelan satellite, the military - backed by Congress and the Supreme Court - ejected Zelaya from office.

And how did Obama respond? By seemingly siding with Zelaya against the democratic forces in Honduras who are fighting him. Obama said in a written statement: "I am deeply concerned by reports coming out of Honduras regarding the detention and expulsion of president Mel Zelaya."

His apparent decision to side with an anti-American would-be dictator is unfortunately par for the course. As South and Central America come increasingly under the control of far-left America-hating dictators, as in Iran, Obama and his team have abandoned democratic dissidents in the hope of currying favor with anti-American thugs. As Mary Anastasia O'Grady has documented in The Wall Street Journal, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have refused to say a word about democracy promotion in Latin America.

Rather than speak of liberties and freedoms, Clinton and Obama have waxed poetic about social justice and diminishing the gaps between rich and poor. In a recent interview with the El Salvadoran media, Clinton said, "Some might say President Obama is left-of-center. And of course that means we are going to work well with countries that share our commitment to improving and enhancing the human potential."

But not, apparently, enhancing human freedoms.

FROM IRAN to Venezuela to Cuba, from Myanmar to North Korea to China, from Sudan to Afghanistan to Iraq to Russia to Syria to Saudi Arabia, the Obama administration has systematically taken human rights and democracy promotion off America's agenda. In their place, it has advocated "improving America's image," multilateralism and a moral relativism that either sees no distinction between dictators and their victims or deems the distinctions immaterial to the advancement of US interests.

While Obama's supporters champion his "realist" policies as a welcome departure from the "cowboy diplomacy" of the Bush years, the fact of the matter is that in country after country, Obama's supposedly pragmatic and nonideological policy has either already failed - as it has in North Korea - or is in the process of failing. The only place where Obama may soon be able to point to a success is in his policy of coercing Israel to adopt his anti-Semitic demand to bar Jews from building homes in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. According to media reports, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has authorized Defense Minister Ehud Barak to offer to freeze all settlement construction for three months during his visit to Washington this week.

Of course, in the event that Obama has achieved his immediate goal of forcing Netanyahu to his knees, its accomplishment will hinder rather than advance his wider goal of achieving peace between Israel and its neighbors. Watching Obama strong-arm the US's closest ally in the region, the Palestinians and the neighboring Arab states have become convinced that there is no reason to make peace with the Jews. After all, Obama is demonstrating that he will deliver Israel without their having to so much as wink in the direction of peaceful coexistence.

So if Obama's foreign policy has already failed or is in the process of failing throughout the world, why is he refusing to reassess it?

Why, with blood running through the streets of Iran, is he still interested in appeasing the mullahs? Why, with Venezuela threatening to invade Honduras for Zelaya, is he siding with Zelaya against Honduran democrats? Why, with the Palestinians refusing to accept the Jewish people's right to self-determination, is he seeking to expel some 500,000 Jews from their homes in the interest of appeasing the Palestinians? Why, with North Korea threatening to attack the US with ballistic missiles, is he refusing to order the USS John McCain to interdict the suspected North Korean missile ship it has been trailing for the past two weeks? Why, when the Sudanese government continues to sponsor the murder of Darfuris, is the administration claiming that the genocide in Darfur has ended?

The only reasonable answer to all of these questions is that far from being nonideological, Obama's foreign policy is the most ideologically driven since Carter's tenure in office. If when Obama came into office there was a question about whether he was a foreign policy pragmatist or an ideologue, his behavior in his first six months in office has dispelled all doubt. Obama is moved by a radical, anti-American ideology that motivates him to dismiss the importance of democracy and side with anti-American dictators against US allies.

For his efforts, although he is causing the US to fail to secure its aims as he himself has defined them in arena after arena, he is successfully securing the support of the most radical, extreme leftist factions in American politics.

Like Carter before him, Obama may succeed for a time in evading public scrutiny for his foreign-policy failures because the public will be too concerned with his domestic failures to notice them. But in the end, his slavish devotion to his radical ideological agenda will ensure that his failures reach a critical mass.

And then they will sink him.

Honduran coup

Did Someone Say Coup?
by Mona Charen

The news that Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was removed from his post and spirited out of the country by the Honduran military has elicited official condemnations from the governments of France, Ecuador, Chile, Spain, and Argentina; as well as protests from the Organization of American States and the United Nations. The U.S. State Department called the events an "attempted coup," and demanded that Mr. Zelaya be returned to power in order to facilitate the "restoration of democratic order."

Hold on. There was an attempted coup in Honduras, but it was Zelaya who initiated it, not his opponents. As the invaluable Mary Anastasia O'Grady reported in the Wall Street Journal, Zelaya, a Hugo Chavez acolyte, was attempting to ape his mentor by rewriting Honduras' constitution. Under Honduran law, however, the president cannot call a referendum on the constitution on his own authority. O'Grady explains: "While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite ... A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress. But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chavez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do." The attorney general of Honduras, as well as the nation's Supreme Court, had declared the referendum illegal. Zelaya attempted an end run. O'Grady writes: "Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order."

Zelaya had a good teacher. Hugo Chavez has been patiently and persistently undermining the democratic character of Venezuela for 11 years -- a slow-motion coup. Just a day before Zelaya's confrontation with the army and the courts came to a head, thousands of Venezuelans once more took to the streets of Caracas, this time to protest the threatened closure of Globovision, the only remaining television channel in the country critical of President for Life Chavez. Two years ago, RCTV (Radio Caracas Television), then the nation's leading station, lost its license because it declined to provide fawning coverage of Chavez (one is tempted to call him "the Dear One" as they do in North Korea).

"The media terrorism in Venezuela is a permanent practice by a big part of the private media," Andres Izarra, a government spokesman, explained to the Washington Post. "Messages of hate," Izarra asserted, "some inserted subliminally," had been detected by the government even in entertainment shows. Chavez has hardly been subtle about his goals. In a statement that could have come from Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin, he declared, "I am going to go after those resisting the revolution and eliminate them one by one." His targets have included priests, independent journalists, businessmen, opposition politicians, and Venezuela's tiny Jewish community.

Globovision stands accused by the government of "media terrorism" because a commentator suggested that Chavez might end his days the way Benito Mussolini did. Two weeks ago, CBS reports, police raided the home of Globovision's president, Guillermo Zuloaga, and ordered the station to pay $2.3 million for giving free airtime to anti-government groups during a 2002 oil strike. The government was further enraged when Globovision provided coverage of an earthquake before the official media arrived on scene, and particularly that Globovision was critical of the government's handling of relief. Chavez accused the station of spreading terror and needlessly alarming the nation.

If Globovision is silenced, there will be no free television at all in Venezuela. Thousands of Venezuelans marched to protest the dying of the light, yet foreign ministries around the world were silent. Neither Secretary of State Clinton nor President Obama has breathed a word of condemnation of Chavez's slow strangling of freedom in Venezuela, nor his export of Chavismo to Nicaragua, Bolivia, or Honduras. But without a moment's reflection, the secretary of state and the president offered crucial diplomatic support to Chavez disciple Manuel Zelaya.

When Barack Obama was asked about the book Chavez handed him last April, "Open Veins of Latin America," the president said he hadn't read it. Now I'm not so sure.

global warming censures

The Censorious Left's Global Warming Denier Deniers
by David Limbaugh

There is so much misinformation on the subject of global warming and so little consensus -- as to what environmental changes are occurring, whether human behavior is contributing to them, whether they are causing significant environmental damage, and whether the proposed cap and trade legislation would do anything to alleviate any of this -- it is no wonder our freedom-hating majority in the House insisted on cramming it through before they could even read, much less digest, what it contained.

It would be bad enough if they passed innocuous legislation to address an alleged problem (man-caused global warming) without first verifying there is a problem and then analyzing and assessing the extent of it, but it's outrageous that they would pass a measure that could have crippling effects on our economy and American taxpayers.

Who do these people think they are -- that they can claim a mandate to do anything they want to, that they can grab as much power as they want, that they can transform our government overnight into an enemy of the people, with no fear of accountability?

Oh, I know; the government has already behaved like the people's enemy all too often, but never on the scale we're witnessing today -- from a party that had the audacity to accuse President George W. Bush of abusing his authority.

Just where is the journalistic skepticism in today's dominant media culture or the professed open-mindedness of Democrats?

What is their response when people have the temerity to challenge their assertions on catastrophic global warming? It is ridicule and abuse. Not only are the doubters flat-earth Neanderthals; they are darn near treasonous, according to the dogmatic left.

You don't believe me? In a piece about the cap and trade bill, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, "As I watched the (global warming) deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason -- treason against the planet."

Don't get me wrong. It's not really newsworthy when leftists incline toward criminalizing their political opponents. Both Krugman and his colleague Frank Rich wrote columns last month essentially blaming President Barack Obama's critics for the murders of abortion doctor George Tiller and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum security guard.

But I digress. While President Obama says that global warming "science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear" and Krugman says the "warming deniers" have "contempt for hard science," the record reveals a different story. If anyone has contempt for hard science, it is the Krugman leftists, who, either because of their political agenda or ideological predispositions, refuse to acknowledge -- let alone consider -- opposing opinions, even when they come from "hard scientists."

One way they deal with the very real fact that there is significant opposition to their dogmatic conclusions is to personally attack their opponents, usually saying evil corporations with vested interests in destroying the planet have bought them off. Just as often, they simply out-yell, ridicule, ignore or attempt to silence them.

Remember when MIT's Richard Lindzen acknowledged that many scientists refuse to publicize their dissent to make "their lives easier"?

I would like to know how Krugman and Obama would explain away the fact that more than 31,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have signed a petition urging the United States government to reject the global warming agreement known as Kyoto -- "and any other similar proposals" -- because the "the proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind." Another 100 scientists have endorsed a newspaper ad by the Cato Institute challenging the president's "facts" on global warming.

But these authoritarian leftists don't just scoff at the hard science contradicting their conclusions about global warming and the extent to which man is contributing to it. In their close-minded arrogance, they completely eschew any scientific inquiry into whether cap and trade legislation would have any appreciable impact on the alleged problems.

But if they are so sure of their scientific position, why are we reading reports -- from the CBS Political Hotsheet, no less -- that "the Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages"?

That's right; the Hotsheet reports that "less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty 'decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.'"

What say you, President Obama?

If you and your comrades are so sure of your science, why -- other than, perhaps, your mission to destroy capitalism -- are you silencing and/or ignoring dissenting science?

Massachusetts health care

The State of Massachusetts-Dropkick Murphys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzF0hHb7xMc

Massachusetts Health Care: A Model Not to Copy
by Phyllis Schlafly

The Obama-Kennedy health plan is modeled after the Massachusetts plan, which, when adopted, many applauded as innovative and destined for success. In fact, the Massachusetts plan has been a massive failure and is a model for what not to do.

It has increased costs. It has wasted taxpayer dollars. It has limited patients' choice. It has hurt small business. It has failed to achieve its goal of universal coverage. Most objectionable, it has created shortages and waiting lists.

Promoters predicted that the Massachusetts plan would lower health-care costs, but -- so far -- costs are moving in the opposite direction. State government spending on health-care programs in Massachusetts has increased by 42 percent since the plan was adopted in 2006 and currently is 33 percent above the national average.

Advocates promised that the Massachusetts plan would make health insurance more affordable, but according to a Cato study, insurance premiums have been increasing at nearly double the national average: 7.4 percent in 2007, 8 percent to 12 percent in 2008, and an expected 9 percent increase this year. Health insurance in Massachusetts costs an average of $16,897 for a family of four, compared to a national average of $12,700.

The Massachusetts plan incorporates a system of middle-class subsidies called Commonwealth Care to help pay for insurance for families with incomes up to 300 percent of poverty level ($66,150 for a family of four) and also expanded eligibility for Medicaid.

The Massachusetts Connector, a new bureaucracy that was supposed to increase patient choice, has become an overbearing regulatory arm of government that has decreased competition by prescribing benefits insurance must offer. The Connector is evidently unpopular with patients, since only 18,000 people have used the Connector to buy insurance during the past three years.
The Connector has imposed regulations that add to the cost of insurance and limit consumer choice, such as requiring prescription-drug coverage and preventive-care services, restricting high-deductible policies and putting limits on annual or per-sickness policies. Complying with the Connector's rules means changing from your current insurance that you like.

The costs to the taxpayers are rising, too, and one tax increase has not satisfied the appetite of the hungry plan. The prospect of huge deficits has elicited discussion of cuts in reimbursements to providers and the imposition of a "global budget," which is a euphemism for rationing.

Even though Massachusetts has more doctors per capita than any other state, the Boston Globe reports that waiting periods to see physicians have grown. The average wait is now 63 days to see a family doctor, 50 days to see a specialist and the second trimester of pregnancy to see an obstetrician-gynecologist.

If you want to see the busiest, most popular physicians, the wait can be up to a year. The longer waits are the result of thousands of newly insured residents coming into the health-care system.
Massachusetts has reduced the number of uninsured, but there are no reliable figures on how many are still uninsured since some statistics are based on telephone surveys that don't reach significant groups of people who lack landline telephones (such as young people and illegal aliens). Cato estimates that 200,000 are still uninsured.

If the number of uninsured had been measurably reduced, that should be reflected in the use of hospitals' emergency care facilities for uncompensated care. But hospitals don't confirm this effect.

Small business is hurting, too. The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council ranks Massachusetts last of all the 50 states for business-friendly health-care policies.

A June 21 front-page article in The New York Times reported that one cancer unit in a Philadelphia Veterans Administration hospital bungled 92 of 116 prostate cancer treatments over six years (requiring these patients to undergo a second operation) before the errors were discovered.
The real problem is that the government cannot run health care safely (or cheaper).

Canada is another model of what not to do. It's fortunate that Canada is so close to the United States because Canadians rely on American medicine for serious surgery.

De facto rationing in Canada is practiced by waiting lists rather than by using its realistic name. The Globe and Mail in Toronto reports that the physician shortage is so acute that some towns hold lotteries to win a ticket granting access to the local doctor and that Ontario sent 160 patients to New York and Michigan for emergency neurosurgery between 2006 and 2008.

Although President Obama told the American Medical Association that single-payer (government-controlled) health care works "pretty well" in some other countries, no government has ever been able to run a health-care system as well as private enterprise. Less regulation of health care, not more government control, is the way to healthier Americans and lower costs.

College

More Money, Less Knowledge
by Ed Feulner

This year, the economy promises to make Independence Day less explosive than usual.

“In yet the latest reminder of the economic crisis,” The Washington Post reported recently, “more than 40 communities across the country have already cancelled their Fourth of July fireworks.”

Families are cutting back too, of course. The savings rate has risen to its highest level in 15 years and consumer spending is down as people focus on making ends meet.
At least one industry, though, is bucking the cost-saving trend: higher education.

In recent decades, the cost of college has increased roughly 8 percent every year -- about twice the general rate of inflation. For the just-completed academic year, tuition jumped 6.4 percent.

The College Board, which tracks such information, expects a similar increase next year.

During this patriotic holiday, parents and students alike should start asking whether they’re getting their money’s worth from colleges. Because, when it comes to understanding basic concepts about American history, evidence indicates they aren’t.

Consider a series of surveys by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. In 2006 and 2007, ISI gave 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges a test to determine their knowledge of American heritage. In both years, freshmen and seniors alike failed, earning scores in the low 50s.

Last year ISI extended its effort, surveying a random sample of 2,500 adults. Those results, too, were sobering. Americans with a bachelor’s degree averaged only 57 percent, just 13 percentage points higher than the average score among high-school graduates and a failing score in its own right.

What haven’t American colleges taught well?

“Only 24 percent of college graduates know the First Amendment prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States,” ISI found, to cite one example. And: “Only 54 percent can correctly identify a basic description of the free enterprise system.”

Today’s college graduate is “highly unlikely” to “have a solid command of the founding and Civil War eras, core constitutional principles, and market economics,” the report concludes. “After all the time, effort and money spent on college, students emerge no better off in understanding the fundamental features of American self-government.”

Thomas Toch, co-director of the non-profit think tank Education Sector, agrees. In the July issue of The Atlantic he writes, “We need to shed more light on how well colleges are educating their students -- to help prospective students make better decisions and to exert pressure on the whole system to provide better value for money.”

That doesn’t mean we need more federal spending on education. In fact, we ought to have less. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has already agreed to throw money at colleges.

In July the maximum amount for Pell Grants will jump to $5,350, up $500 per year. Obama’s 2010 budget declares it wants to “ensure the Pell Grant continues to grow steadily by making it an entitlement.” And the administration plans to provide $200 billion in scholarships and credits over the next decade.

But the more aid government provides, the higher colleges raise their tuitions. As a recent White House staff report on higher education notes, “schools with the steepest increases in tuition receive the most loan assistance from the federal government, clearly incentivizing higher tuition.”

Instead, parents and elected officials should use their financial leverage to break the downward spiral in higher education. They should demand that colleges teach basic American history, political science and economics. Schools should be graded so those that don’t -- or won’t -- teach these subjects can be punished by losing customers (students).

That’s a lesson in free-market economics that colleges need to learn -- one that can help more Americans understand part of what we celebrate on the Fourth of July.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Health care

Rushing Ahead In Health Care Wonderland
By THOMAS SOWELL Posted Monday, June 29, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Most political and media discussions of medical care have an air of unreality reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. There is an abundance of catch-phrases but remarkably few coherent arguments.

Let's start at square one. Why is there alarm about American medical care? The most usual reason given is because its cost is high and rising.

That is certainly true. We were not spending nearly as much on high-tech medical procedures in the past because there were not nearly as many of them. And we weren't spending anything at all on some of the new pharmaceutical drugs because they didn't exist.

This general pattern is not peculiar to medical care. Cars didn't cost nearly as much in the past, when they didn't have air conditioning, power steering and high-tech safety features. Homes were cheaper when they were smaller, had fewer bathrooms and lacked such conveniences as built-in microwave ovens.

Benefit Fairy

We would like to have all these things without the rising costs that come with them. But only with medical care is such wishful thinking taken seriously, with government regarded as a sort of fairy godmother who will give us the benefits without the costs.

A cynic is said to be someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If so, then it is political cynicism to point to other countries that spend less on medical care, including some countries where there is "universal health care" provided "free" by their governments.

Cheaper For A Reason

Just as medical care, houses and cars were all cheaper when they lacked things that they have today, so medical care in other countries is cheaper when they lack many things that are more readily available in the United States.

There are more than four times as many magnetic resonance imaging units (MRIs) per capita in the United States as in Britain or Canada, where there are government-run medical systems.

There are more than twice as many CT scanners per capita in the United States as in Canada and more than four times as many per capita as in Britain.

Is it surprising that such things cost money?

The cost of developing a new pharmaceutical drug is now about a billion dollars. Neither political rhetoric nor government bureaucracies will make those costs go away.

We can, of course, refuse to pay these and other medical costs, just as we can refuse to buy air-conditioned homes with built-in microwave ovens. But that just means we pay attention only to prices and not to the value of what we get for those prices.

We can even refuse to pay for so many doctors. But that just means that we will have to wait longer to see a doctor — as people do in countries with government-run medical systems.

In Canada, 27% of the people who have surgery wait four months or more. In Britain, 38% wait that long. But only 5% of Americans wait that long for surgery.

Surgery may well cost less in countries with government-run medical systems — if you count only the money cost, and not the time the patients have to endure the ailments that require surgery, or the fact that some conditions become worse, or even fatal, while patients wait.

A recent report from the Fraser Institute in Canada shows that patients there wait an average of 10 weeks to get an MRI, just to find out what is wrong with them. A lot of bad things can happen in 10 weeks, ranging from suffering to death.

Stop, Think

Politicians may talk about "bringing down the cost of medical care," but they seldom even attempt to bring down the costs. What they bring down is the price — which is to say, they refuse to pay the costs.

Anybody can refuse to pay any cost. But don't be surprised if you get less when you pay less. None of this is rocket science. But it does require us to stop and think before jumping on a bandwagon.

The great haste with which the latest government expansion into medical care is being rushed through Congress suggests that the politicians don't want us to stop and think. That makes sense, from their point of view, but not from ours.

Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc

Sotamayor

A Supreme Case Against Sotomayor
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Monday, June 29, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Judiciary: The Supreme Court's overturning of high-court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's ruling in the New Haven firefighter case exposes what lies at the core of her misguided philosophy: stark racial favoritism.

Thanks to the court's ruling Monday in Ricci v. DeStefano, all the YouTube video clips from Judge Sotomayor's old speeches and conferences take on a clearer meaning now.

Her claims that she was cheated when she took the racially skewed SATs, her contention that a Latina judge is morally superior to a white male judge, her mock sotto-voce declaration that appellate courts make policy — they have all been distilled and disposed of in one shot by the high court majority.

The court ruled 5-4 that the city of New Haven was guilty of reverse discrimination. Fearing lawsuits, New Haven had thrown out the results of fire department exams it conducted after only two Hispanics and no blacks from its firefighter ranks scored high enough to warrant promotions. It got sued anyway, as 18 firefighters claimed they were victims of reverse discrimination.

A three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, including Judge Sotomayor, sided with the city. One of Sotomayor's fellow 2nd District judges — Clinton appointee Jose Cabranes — charged that the panel's Lilliputian opinion contained no "clear statement of either the claims raised by the plaintiffs or the issues on appeal," plus "no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at the core of this case."

As Justice Kennedy's opinion noted, "there is no evidence — let alone the required strong basis in evidence — that the tests were flawed because they were not job-related or because other equally valid and less discriminatory tests were available to the City." He concluded that New Haven had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which forbids employer discrimination.

But what need is there for pesky things like evidence when a judge has "empathy" — the quality that President Obama said was so important in a Supreme Court justice? A justice can sit back and declare that in her view the members of a downtrodden minority group are more worthy of favors than those in the majority — appellate court policymaking at its purest (more properly known as judicial imperialism).

And wasn't that exactly the approach of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who took the extraordinary step of reading her dissent from the bench on Monday?

"By order of this Court," she complained, "New Haven, a city in which African-Americans and Hispanics account for nearly 60% of the population, must today be served — as it was in the days of undisguised discrimination — by a fire department in which members of racial and ethnic minorities are rarely seen in command positions."

In other words, qualifications and excellence are secondary at best — just get your city services to reflect the racial makeup of the population, or else. Race is the paramount consideration, now and forever.

As Justice Samuel Alito noted, the whole process was knee-deep in corrupt, racially motivated influence.

"Almost as soon as the city disclosed the racial makeup of the list of firefighters who scored the highest on the exam," Alito points out, "the city administration was lobbied by an influential community leader to scrap the test results, and the city administration decided on that course of action before making any real assessment of the possibility of a disparate-impact violation."

That "leader" was the Rev. Boise Kimber, a personal ally of seven-term New Haven Mayor John DeStefano who, as Alito noted, once took to the television airwaves and "threatened a race riot during the murder trial of the black man arrested for killing white Yalie Christian Prince. He continues to call whites racist if they question his actions."

In 2002, Mayor DeStefano made Kimber chairman of the city's Board of Fire Commissioners, in spite of his lack of fire department or municipal management experience.

Apparently, none of this matters to judicial activists like Judge Sotomayor or Justice Ginsburg and the three other unreconstructed liberals on the high court.

What does matter is treating people as members of ethnic groups rather than individuals — a vice that has caused untold suffering throughout American history, and which we should long since have transcended.

Banana Democrats

Banana Democrats
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Monday, June 29, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Americas: During his campaign, President Obama made a big deal of criticizing leaders who are elected democratically but don't govern democratically. He's had a chance to show that it mattered in Honduras. He didn't.

That's the sorry story as Honduras' now ex-president, Mel Zelaya, last Thursday defied a Supreme Court ruling and tried to hold a "survey" to rewrite the constitution for his permanent re-election. It's the same blueprint for a rigged political system that's made former democracies like Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador into shells of free countries.

Zelaya's operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the "citizen's power" survey through threats — warning those who didn't sign that they'd be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway.

As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a "yanqui coup."

President Obama on Monday called the action "not legal," and claimed that Zelaya is still the legitimate president.

There was a coup all right, but it wasn't committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).

Yet the U.S. administration stood with Chavez and Castro, calling Zelaya's lawful removal "a coup." Obama called the action a "terrible precedent," and said Zelaya remains president.

In doing this, the U.S. condemned democrats who stood up to save their democracy, a move that should have been hailed as a historic turning of the tide against the false democracies of the region.

The U.S. response has been disgraceful. "We recognize Zelaya as the duly elected and constitutional president of Honduras. We see no other," a State Department official told reporters.

Worse, the U.S. now contemplates sanctions on the tiny drug-plagued, dirt-poor country of 7 million, threatening to halt its $200 million in U.S. aid, immigration accords and a free-trade treaty if it doesn't put the criminal Zelaya back into office.

Not even Nicaragua, a country the State Department said committed a truly fraudulent election, got that. Nor has murderous Iran gotten such punishment, even as it slaughters Iranian democrats in the streets. But tiny Honduras must be made to pay.

We understand why the White House is so quick to call this a "coup" and to jump to the side of Hugo Chavez. The Venezuelan despot has made political hay against the U.S. over its premature recognition of the Venezuelan coup leaders who tried to overthrow Chavez in 2002. Obama wants to avoid that this time.

The White House also wants to mollify the morally corrupted Organization of American States, which, by admitting Cuba, is no longer an organization of democracies and now, through its radical membership, tries to dictate how other countries run themselves.

Such a response says that democracy effectively ends with elections. It says rule of law is irrelevant and that rulers have rights, not responsibilities. But if leaders can't be held accountable, they should be removed, as happened in Honduras.

If the U.S. does hit Honduras with sanctions, it will earn ill will in the country lasting for years. It will further erode U.S. moral authority and cost us influence in the region — becoming an embarrassing footnote in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations.

Is that what the U.S. wants? It's time for a more sophisticated definition of democracy — one that includes the rule of law and the will of the people.

Friday, June 26, 2009

EPA hides climate study

Carbongate
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Friday, June 26, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill?
Read More: Global Warming
This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest tax increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporters' arguments.
On Friday, the day of the vote, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said it was releasing "an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency."
In the release, the institute's Richard Morrison said "internal EPA e-mail messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the administration's agenda of regulating carbon dioxide."
Reading the report, available on the CEI Web site, we find this "endangerment analysis" contains such interesting items as: "Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."
What the report says is that the EPA, by adopting the United Nations' 2007 "Fourth Assessment" report, is relying on outdated research by its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The research, it says, is "at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field" and ignores the latest scientific findings.
Besides noting the decline in temperatures as CO2 levels have increased, the draft report says the "consensus" on storm frequency and intensity is now "much more neutral."
Then there's one of Al Gore's grim fairy tales — the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and glaciers the size of Tennessee roaming the North Atlantic. "The idea that warming temperatures will cause Greenland to rapidly shed its ice has been greatly diminished by new results indicating little evidence for operations of such processes," the report says.
Little evidence? Outdated U.N. research? No reason to rush? This is not what the Obama administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were telling us when they were rushing to force a Friday vote on Waxman-Markey. We were given the impression that unless we passed this cap-and-tax fiasco, polar bears would be extinct by the Fourth of July.
We have noted frequently the significance of solar activity on earth's climate and history. This EPA draft report not only confirms our reporting but the brazen incompetence of those "experts" that have been prophesying planetary apocalypse.
"A new 2009 paper by Scafetta and West," the report says, "suggests that the IPCC used faulty solar data in dismissing the direct effect of solar variability on global temperatures. Their report suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in Earth's global temperatures."
The report was the product of Alan Carlin, senior operations research analyst at the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE). He's been with the EPA for 38 years but now has been taken off all climate-related work. He is convinced that actual climate observations do not match climate change theories and that only the politics, not the science, has been settled.
Thomas Fuller, environmental policy blogger with the San Francisco Examiner, wrote Thursday in a story developed in conjunction with Anthony Watts' Web site wattsupwiththat.com: "A source inside the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed many of the claims made by analyst Alan Carlin, the economist/physicist who yesterday went public with accusations that science was being ignored in evaluating the danger of CO2."
All this is particularly interesting because of the charges by Al Gore, NASA's James Hansen and others that the Bush administration and energy companies actively suppressed the truth about climate change.
One of the e-mails unearthed by CEI was dated March 12, from Al McGartland, office director at NCEE, forbidding Carlin from speaking to anyone outside NCEE on endangerment issues such as those in his suppressed report.
Carlin replied on March 16, requesting that his study be forwarded to EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, which directs EPA's climate change program. Carlin points out the peer-reviewed references in his study and points out that the new studies "explain much of the observational data that have been collected which cannot be explained by the IPCC models."
For saying the climate change emperors had no clothes, Carlin was told March 17: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."
In other words, the administration and Congress had their collective minds made up and didn't want to be confused with the facts. They certainly didn't want any inconvenient truths coming out of their own Environmental Protection Agency, the one that wants to regulate everything from your lawn mower to bovine emissions and which says the product of your respiration and ours, carbon dioxide, is a dangerous pollutant and not the basis for all life on earth.
The problem the warm-mongers have is they now are in a position of telling the American people, who are you going to believe — us or your own lying eyes? Forget the snow in Malibu, the record cold winters. Forget that temperatures have dropped for a decade.
In April, President Obama declared that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over." Apparently not, for as he spoke those very words his administration was suppressing science to advance a very pernicious ideology.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=330911757213432

check out the chart at the bottom of that links page.

EPAs suppression of facts

EPA's Game of Global Warming Hide-and-Seek
by Michelle Malkin

The Obama administration doesn't want to hear inconvenient truths about global warming. And they don't want you to hear them, either. As Democrats rush on Friday to pass a $4 trillion, thousand-page "cap and trade" bill that no one has read, environmental bureaucrats are stifling voices that threaten their political agenda.

The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington (where I served as a journalism fellow in 1995) obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama's willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of "consensus."

In March, Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, asked agency officials to distribute his analysis on the health effects of greenhouse gases. EPA has proposed a public health "endangerment finding" covering CO2 and five other gases that would trigger costly, extensive new regulations of motor vehicles. The open comment period on the ruling ended this week. But Carlin's study didn't fit the blame-human-activity narrative, so it didn't make the cut.

On March 12, Carlin's director, Al McGartland, forbade him from having "any direct communication" with anyone outside his office about his study. "There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc."

On March 16, Carlin urged his superiors to forward his work to EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, which runs the agency's climate change program. A day later, McGartland dismissed Carlin and showed his true, politicized colors:
"The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. … I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."

Contrary comments, in other words, would interfere with the "process" of ramming the EPA's endangerment finding through. Truth in science took a back seat to protecting eco-bureaucrats from "a very negative impact."

In another follow-up e-mail, McGartland warned Carlin to drop the subject altogether: "With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don't want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research, etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate."

But, of course, the e-mails show that EPA had already predetermined what it was going to do -- "move forward on endangerment." Which underscores the fact that the open public comment period was all for show. In her message to the public about the radical greenhouse gas rules, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson requested "comment on the data on which the proposed findings are based, the methodology used in obtaining and analyzing the data, and the major legal interpretations and policy considerations underlying the proposed findings."

Jackson, meet Carlin.

The EPA now justifies the suppression of the study because economist Carlin (a 35-year veteran of the agency who also holds a B.S. in physics) "is an individual who is not a scientist."

Neither is Al Gore. Nor is energy czar Carol Browner. Nor is cap-and-trade shepherd Nancy Pelosi. Carlin's analysis incorporated peer-reviewed studies and, as he informed his colleagues, "significant new research" related to the proposed endangerment finding.

According to those who have seen his study, it spotlights EPA's reliance on out-of-date research, uncritical recycling of United Nations data and omission of new developments, including a continued decline in global temperatures and a new consensus that future hurricane behavior won't be different than in the past.

But the message from his superiors was clear: La-la-la, we can't hear you.

In April, President Obama declared that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over."

Another day, another broken promise. Will Carlin meet the same fate as inspectors general who have been fired or "retired" by the Obama administration for blowing the whistle and defying political orthodoxy? Or will he, too, be yet another casualty of the Hope and Change steamroller? The bodies are piling up.

the cap and trade bill

Throw the Bums Out
by David Limbaugh

Here they go again -- our faithful representatives in Washington, that is. They're about to pass, without reading its 1,200-plus pages, an incredibly expensive and destructive cap and trade bill, which has little prayer of accomplishing what it sets out to accomplish but satisfies their urgent need to pay homage to their liberal ideology and secular humanist worldview.

Do you remember when Barack Obama was forced to give an answer to justify his advocacy of a capital gains tax increase in view of such taxes' history of actually decreasing revenues? The revenue reductions are worth it because it's a matter of "fairness," he said. Spread the misery. Likewise, with cap and trade, Obama and his congressional cohorts will wreak untold destruction on the economy and get little benefit in return.

I'm not exaggerating here. Doesn't it make sense that before enacting legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the purpose of reducing man-made global warming, Congress would investigate whether significant man-made global warming is occurring (as opposed to watching Al Gore's propaganda film and simply declaring, by fiat, that scientists have reached a consensus on the issue when they clearly have not)?

And if, after a thorough and balanced inquiry, they determine that it is occurring, shouldn't they next examine whether their proposed legislative remedy is likely to significantly ameliorate the problem?

But they not only have not conducted a bona fide examination of the man-made warming issue but also have not attempted to examine, in any remotely scientific way, how much their proposed bill would reduce global warming (assuming it exists to the extent they contend) or whether any such reductions would make any difference at all to humanity's short- or long-term health or happiness or anything else.

All of this would be outrageous enough if there were no economic costs associated with their proposal. But in fact, the costs would be astronomical and way beyond the calculations they are presenting -- fraudulently -- to the American people to stunt the opposition they'd encounter if the truth were revealed.

The truth is that there is no crisis, and all the hysteria they're generating is solely for the purpose of ramrodding this odious bill through Congress before the public realizes it has, once again, been duped and betrayed.

The Heritage Foundation's senior policy analyst for energy and environment, Ben Lieberman, has produced a stellar paper on these questions -- reproduced from his remarks at The Heartland Institute's Third International Conference on Climate Change on June 2.
Let me share a few of the highlights and encourage you to read the rest of his report -- and others like it -- online.

Based on available evidence and analysis, Lieberman concludes "that both the seriousness and imminence of anthropogenic global warming has been overstated." But even if we assume the problem is as bad as the hysterics claim, the proposed bill "would have a trivial impact on future concentrations of greenhouse gases. … (It) would reduce the earth's future temperature by 0.1 to 0.2 degree C by 2100, an amount too small to even notice." The bill would bind only the U.S., not other nations, many of which, like China, are "polluting" at a record pace. Also note that many European nations that have already imposed similar emissions restrictions have seen their emissions rise.

But what would the costs be for this quixotic legislative paean to earth goddess Gaia? Contrary to the flawed analyses being advanced by the bill's proponents, Heritage estimates that the direct costs would be an average of $829 per year for a household of four, totaling $20,000 between 2012 and 2035. But when considering the total cost as reflected in the cost of allocations and offsets, the average cost to that family unit would be $2,979 annually from 2012 to 2035. Adding insult and hypocrisy to injury, the bill would hurt the poor the worst because they would bear a disproportionate burden of the higher energy costs the bill would trigger.

Now here's the kicker. The bill is also projected to harm the manufacturing sector and cause estimated "net" job losses, averaging about 1.15 million between 2012 and 2030. The overall gross domestic product losses would average $393 billion per year from 2012 to 2035, and the cumulative loss in gross domestic product would be $9.4 trillion by 2035. The national debt for a family of four would increase by $115,000 by 2035.

Enough already. Throw the bums out.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Obama and Iran

Obama to Iran: Let Them Eat Ice Cream
by Ann Coulter

On Iran, President Obama is worse than Hamlet. He's Colin Powell, waiting to see who wins before picking a side.

Last week, massive protests roiled Iran in response to an apparently fraudulent presidential election, in which nutcase Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner within two hours of the polls closing. (ACORN must be involved.)

Obama responded by boldly declaring that the difference between the loon Ahmadinejad and his reformist challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, "may not be as great as advertised."

Maybe the thousands of dissenters risking their lives protesting on the streets of Tehran are doing so because they liked Mousavi's answer to the "boxers or briefs" question better than Ahmadinejad's.

Then, in a manly rebuke to the cheating mullahs, Obama said: "You've seen in Iran some initial reaction from the supreme leader" -- peace be upon him -- "that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election."

Did FDR give speeches referring to Adolf Hilter as "Herr Fuhrer"? What's with Obama?

Even the French condemned the Iranian government's "brutal" reaction to the protesters -- and the French have tanks with one speed in forward and five speeds in reverse.

You might be a scaredy-cat if ... the president of France is talking tougher than you are.

More than a week ago, French president Nicolas Sarkozy said: "The ruling power claims to have won the elections ... if that were true, we must ask why they find it necessary to imprison their opponents and repress them with such violence."

But liberals rushed to assure us that Obama's weak-kneed response to the Iranian uprising and the consequent brutal crackdown was a brilliant foreign policy move. (They also proclaimed his admission that he still smokes "lion-hearted" and "statesmanlike.")

As our own Supreme Leader B. Hussein Obama (peace be upon him) explained, "It's not productive given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling."

You see, if the president of the United States condemned election fraud in Iran, much less put in a kind word for the presidential candidate who is not crazy, it would somehow crush the spirit of the protesters when they discovered, to their horror, that the Great Satan was on their side. (It also wouldn't do much for Al Franken in Minnesota.)

Liberals hate America, so they assume everyone else does, too.

So when a beautiful Iranian woman, Neda Agha Soltan, was shot dead in the streets of Iran during a protest on Saturday and a video of her death ricocheted around the World Wide Web, Obama valiantly responded by ... going out for an ice cream cone. (Masterful!)

Commenting on a woman's cold-blooded murder in the streets of Tehran, like the murder of babies, is evidently above Obama's "pay grade."

If it were true that a U.S. president should stay neutral between freedom-loving Iranian students and their oppressors, then why is Obama speaking in support of the protesters now? Are liberals no longer worried about the parade of horribles they claimed would ensue if the U.S. president condemned the mullahs?

Obama's tough talk this week proves that his gentle words last week about Ahmadinejad and Iran's "supreme leader" (peace be upon him) constituted, at best, spinelessness and, at worst, an endorsement of the fraud.

Moreover, if the better part of valor is for America to stand neutral between freedom and Islamic oppression, why are liberals trying to credit Obama's ridiculous Cairo speech for emboldening the Iranian protesters?

The only reason that bald contradiction doesn't smack you in the face is that it is utterly preposterous that Obama's Cairo speech accomplished anything -- anything worthwhile, that is. Not even the people who say that believe it.

The only reaction to Obama's Cairo speech in the Middle East is that the mullahs probably sighed in relief upon discovering that the U.S. president is a coward and an imbecile.

Two weeks ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was exulting over the "free and fair" national election in Lebanon, in which the voters threw out Hezbollah and voted in the "U.S.-supported coalition." (Apparently support from America is not deemed the vote-killer in Lebanon that it allegedly is in Iran.)

To justify his Times-expensed airfare to Beirut, Friedman added some local color, noting that "more than one Lebanese whispered to me: Without George Bush standing up to the Syrians in 2005 ... this free election would not have happened."

That's what Lebanese voters said.

But Friedman also placed a phone call to a guy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- which he didn't have to go to Lebanon for -- to get a quote supporting the ludicrous proposition that Obama's Cairo speech was responsible for the favorable election results in Lebanon.

"And then here came this man (Obama)," Mr. Carnegie Fund said, "who came to them with respect, speaking these deep values about their identity and dignity and economic progress and education, and this person indicated that this little prison that people are living in here was not the whole world. That change was possible."

I think the fact that their Muslim brethren are now living in freedom in a democratic Iraq might have made the point that "change was possible" and "this little prison" is "not the whole world" somewhat more forcefully than a speech apologizing for Westerners who dislike the hijab.

Obama -- and America -- are still living off President Bush's successes in the war on terrorism. For the country's sake, may those successes outlast Obama's attempt to dismantle them.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Myths and lies about health care

Myths, Lies and Stupidity About Health Care
by Ben Shapiro

President Barack Obama's health care plan, we are told, will spend $1 trillion over the next 10 years. But since trillion is the new billion, Americans aren't supposed to worry about that.

Obama's health care plan will cause employers to stop providing private health insurance for millions of employees and instead shift employees to public care. But Obama says that government is the best arbiter of your health, so Americans aren't supposed to worry about that.

Obama's health care plan, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will add only 16 million of the 46 million uninsured to the rolls of the insured. But Obama says that's an improvement, so Americans aren't supposed to worry about that.

Here's something we should worry about: Who are the current uninsured for whom all of us are supposed to sacrifice our current health care plans? And should the other 300 million of us turn to government care just to help those 46 million?

Here's a quick profile of those who are uninsured. Ten million of the uninsured are illegal immigrants -- which, by the way, doesn't mean they don't get health care.

Walk into virtually any emergency room in California and illegal immigrants are the bulk of the population. Education costs and health care costs for illegal immigrants compose between 16.4 percent and 20.5 percent of California's budget deficit.

Liberal commentators are already urging that Obama's nationalized health care plan cover illegal immigrants.

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post suggests that a failure to include illegal immigrants in the new health care redesign would create unemployment among U.S. citizens; businesses would not be forced to pick up the health care tabs for illegal immigrants and would therefore hire them at greater rates. This is undoubtedly true.

But the solution is to prosecute businesses that hire illegal immigrants -- or, better yet, not to require employers to cover employees. Only liberals would use employer malfeasance as an excuse to sacrifice workers' current insurance plans.

Another 9 million "uninsured" have household incomes of above $75,000. That's 3.4 times the federal poverty standard for a family of four. For a married couple, that's 6.9 times the federal poverty standard. Some of these people – 30 percent -- are just temporarily without health insurance for six months or less. Others voluntarily avoid health insurance, even if they can afford it. And that's a perfectly reasonable position -- many people worry less about paying for the occasional visit to the doctor than about paying the monthly premiums.

In essence, the Obama plan would force insurance on these people and force public insurance on the rest of us.

And then there are "12 million uninsured Americans … eligible for Medicaid and the State Children's Health insurance program -- but they haven't signed up," according to Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute and author of The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care.

Again, voluntary behavior is voluntary. It's not an excuse for government involvement.

So, to sum up, of those 46 million "uninsured," a solid 31 million are uninsured in ways that require no fix from the federal government.

That leaves 15 million uninsured unaccounted for.

A nationalized health care plan of the sort Obama proposes therefore shifts health care for literally 95 percent of the population on behalf of 5 percent of the American population -- 5 percent who, like illegal immigrants, receive emergency care under federal law.

The media and Obama have portrayed the American health system as a system in crisis. They point to skyrocketing premiums -- the cost of a family policy is now $1,000 per month for employers.

Obama says, "One out of every five dollars we earn will be spent on health care in a decade." Premiums for family coverage have risen 78 percent since 2001. And the government programs Medicare and Medicaid will comprise a huge chunk of the federal budget in ten years, more than any other government expenditure.

Why these exponentially higher costs? Because of increased government involvement in the health care system.

State regulations have decreased market flexibility by requiring that insurers cover unhealthy individuals at lower-cost and requiring that insurers cover certain hospitals and doctors. The federal and state governments have required that health care providers care for individuals without reimbursement – which means escalating costs for those who do pay. And both federal and state health care subsidization programs have encouraged health care providers and insurance to raise costs.

The answer is more of a free market, not less of one. The answer is competition between insurers, not government monopoly. The answer is a private system, not a public one.

Sen. Reid and illegal immigrants

Harry Reid's Assault on American Workers
by Terry Jeffrey

Assume there are 100 people in your community who do the work you do and 100 jobs for that type of work that local employers want to fill. You are in a pretty good position: You can stay employed.

Now assume there are only 95 people in your community who do the work you do and 105 jobs that local employers want to fill. You are in an even better position: You can stay employed and demand a higher wage because the demand for the work you do exceeds the supply of able workers.

You are, in fact, like all workers in a free society, a small business owner. You are an enterprise of one. You have something of value to sell, which is your labor, and you have a right to hold out for the highest price you can get from willing buyers. Harvard Law School graduates have this right, and landscape laborers have this right.

It is at the heart of free enterprise, a core element of our American way of life.

Now suppose the government decides to stop enforcing the nation's borders and immigration laws, allowing 25 people from a foreign country who do the same kind of work you do to illegally enter the United States, settle in your community, and begin competing with you and your neighbors for the jobs you hold.

With additional illegal aliens pouring across the border daily, there are already 120 people seeking the 105 jobs of your type in your town.

A few of your lifelong friends are laid off. Your own job is threatened. Your employer slashes wages, and you accept the pay cut because the supply of workers now exceeds the demand.
You begin wondering when you'll see a pink slip in your pay envelope.

The illegal-alien families, which pay less in taxes than the formerly higher-paid American workers, put their children in public schools, secure health care at public hospitals and place a net financial burden on their neighbors. Taxes go up; the quality of services goes down.

This is before the recession.

First, economic growth slows. Then, it stops. Then, it drops off a cliff. Month after month, hundreds of thousands of additional workers are thrown from their jobs as the economy tumbles down a mountainside.

What policy changes do congressional leaders recommend as employment plummets?

In Washington, D.C., today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is plotting an attack on the surviving jobs of American workers.

"I'm going to do comprehensive immigration reform," Reid told reporters last week. "I'm not going to do it piecemeal. That's an excuse for everybody to do too little.

"We're going to do it all at once, and we're going to have comprehensive immigration reform that will include taking care of our borders, a decent guest-worker program, bringing the 11 million people out of the shadows, doing something that's so important with the employer sanctions bill that really is a catch-22 for everyone and a number of other things," said Reid. "We're going to do it all in one piece of legislation, not give people an excuse that they voted for one thing and think that they're through with it."

What Reid means by "bringing 11 million people out of the shadows" is making illegal immigrants legal -- thus rewarding illegal behavior and encouraging further illegal immigration.

What he means by a "decent guest-worker program" is giving employers the power to import foreign workers into the United States and keep those workers laboring here in a status that is inferior to a free American citizen or permanent legal resident.

These imported "guest workers" would not have the right to sell, or withhold, their labor at any time, place and price they choose -- like real Americans do. Such workers would be subject to federal laws and regulations meant to hold them captive to the employers who imported them.

Such workers would be half-slave, half-free -- and part of a country dividing against itself.

What Harry Reid is proposing is an assault on American workers and the principle of free labor. It is as contrary to the American way of life as the federal government owning General Motors.

Obamacare funding

Who's Funding the Obamacare Campaign?
by Michelle Malkin


If you believe the White House, there are 30 million Americans who support a government health care takeover. But if you look at the funding behind the Obamacare campaign, it's the same few leftist billionaires, union bosses and partisan community organizers pushing the socialized medicine agenda. Let's connect the dots.

On Thursday, a national "grassroots" coalition called Health Care for America Now (HCAN) will march on Capitol Hill to demand universal health care. The ground troops won't have to march very far. HCAN, you see, is no heartland network. It is headquartered at 1825 K Street in Washington, D.C. -- smack dab in the middle of Beltway lobby land.

In fact, 1825 K Street is Ground Zero for a plethora of "progressive" groups subsidized by anti-war, anti-Republican, Big Nanny special interests. Around Washington, the office complex is known as "The Other K Street." The Washington Post noted in 2007 that "its most prominent tenants form an abbreviated who's who of well-funded allies of the Democratic Party. … Big money from unions such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, as well as the Internet-fueled MoveOn, has provided groups like those at 1825 K Street the wherewithal to mount huge campaigns."

MoveOn, of course, is the recreational political vehicle of radical liberal sugar daddy George Soros. The magnate's financial fingerprints are all over the HCAN coalition, which includes MoveOn, the action fund of the Center for American Progress (a Soros think tank) and the Campaign for America's Future (a pro-welfare state lobbying outfit).

HCAN has a $40 million budget, with $10 million pitched in by The Atlantic Philanthropies -- a Bermuda-based organization fronted by Soros acolyte Gara LaMarche. Also in the money mix: notorious Democratic donors Herb and Marion Sandler, the left-wing moguls who made billions selling subprime mortgages and helped Soros fund his vast network of left-wing activist satellites.

By their side is billionaire Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance, whose "Progressive Future" youth group has dispatched clueless volunteers armed with clipboards and literature bashing Rush Limbaugh and Fox News to scare up support for Obamacare.

And two more left-wing heavyweights joining the HCAN parade: the corruption-plagued SEIU (which has battled numerous embezzlement scandals among its chapters across the country while crusading for consumer and patients' rights) and Obama's old chums at fraud-riddled ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

ACORN and HCAN are linked by left-wing philanthropist Drummond Pike, who heads the nonprofit Tides Foundation/Tides Center. As the tax disclaimer for HCAN discloses, "HCAN is related to Health Care for America Education Fund, a project of The Tides Center, a section 501(c)(3) public charity." For decades, the Tides Center and its parent organization, the Tides Foundation, have seeded some of the country's most radical activist groups of the left, including the communist-friendly United for Peace and Justice, the jihadist-friendly National Lawyers Guild and the grievance-mongering Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Pike is the same philanthropist who assisted ACORN founder Wade Rathke after his brother, Dale, was caught embezzling nearly $1 million from the group. Wade Rathke sits on the Tides Foundation board of directors. In a conspiracy to cover up Dale Rathke's massive theft of funds, Pike volunteered to buy a promissory note worth $800,000 to cover the debt. These are the populist do-gooders supposedly looking out for you and your health.

Why do they want Obamacare? An internal ACORN memo I obtained from August 2008 makes the motives clear: "Over our 38 years, health care organizing has never been a major focus either nationally or locally for ACORN," wrote ACORN Philadelphia regional director Craig Robbins. "But increasingly, ACORN offices around the country are doing work on health care." The goal: "Building ACORN Power."

The memo outlines the ACORN/HCAN partnership and their strategy of opposing any programs that rely on "unregulated private insurance" -- and then parlaying political victory on government-run health care "to move our ACORN agenda (or at least part of it) with key electeds that we might otherwise not be able to pull off."

The objective, in other words, is to piggyback and exploit Obamacare to improve and protect their political health. The "grassroots" movement is not about representing Main Street. It's about peddling influence and power at 1825 K Street.

Forced academic diversity in college

The Viciousness Of Academic Liberals
By WALTER E. WILLIAMS Posted Tuesday, June 23, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Ward Connerly, former University of California regent, has an article, "Study, Study, Study — A Bad Career Move" in the June 2, 2009, edition of Minding the Campus that should raise any decent American's level of disgust for what's routinely practiced at most of our universities.

Mr. Connerly tells of a conversation he had with a high-ranking UC administrator about a proposal that the administrator was developing to increase campus diversity.

Connerly asked the administrator why he considered it important to tinker with admissions instead of just letting the chips fall where they may. His response was that unless the university took steps to "guide" admissions decisions, the UC campuses would be dominated by Asians.
When Connerly asked, "What would be wrong with that?", the UC administrator told him that Asians are "too dull — they study, study, study." Then he said to Connerly, "If you ever say I said this, I will have to deny it."

Connerly did not reveal the administrator's name. It would not have done any good because it's part of a diversity vision shared by most college administrators.

With the enactment of California's Proposition 209 in 1996, outlawing racial discrimination in college admissions, Asian enrollment at UC campuses has skyrocketed. The UC Berkeley student body is 42% Asian students; UC Irvine 55%; UC Riverside 43%; and UCLA 38%. Asian student enrollment on all nine UC campuses is over 40%. That's in a state where the Asian population is about 13%.

When there are policies that emphasize and reward academic achievement, Asians excel. College officials and others who are proponents of "diversity" and equal representation find that outcome offensive.

To deal with the Asian "menace," the UC regents have proposed, starting in 2010, that no longer will the top 12.5% of students based on statewide performance be automatically admitted. Students won't have to take SAT subject matter tests. Grades and test scores will no longer weigh so heavily in admission decisions.

This is simply gross racial discrimination against those "dull" Asian students who "study, study, study" in favor of "interesting" black, white and Hispanic students who don't "study, study, study."

This is truly evil and would be readily condemned as such if applied to other areas lacking in diversity.

With blacks making up about 80% of professional basketball players, there is little or no diversity in professional basketball. Even at college-level basketball, it's not unusual to watch two teams playing and there not being a single white player on the court, much less a Chinese or Japanese player.

I can think of several rule changes that might increase racial diversity in professional and college basketball. How about eliminating slam dunks and disallowing three-point shots? Restrict dribbling? Lower the basket's height?

These and other rule changes would take away the "unfair" advantage that black players appear to have and create greater basketball diversity.

But wouldn't diversity so achieved be despicable? If you answer yes, why would it be any less so when it's used to fulfill somebody's vision of college diversity?

Ward Connerly ends his article saying, "There is one truth that is universally applicable in the era of 'diversity,' especially in American universities: an absolute unwillingness to accept the verdict of colorblind policies."

Hypocrisy is part and parcel of the liberal academic elite. But the American people, who fund universities as parents, donors or taxpayers, should not accept this evilness and there's a good way to stop it — cut off the funding to racially discriminating colleges and universities.

Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

news story- NYC teachers in rubber rooms....

By KAREN MATTHEWS, Associated Press Writer Karen Matthews, Associated Press Writer – Mon Jun 22, 5:20 pm ET
NEW YORK – Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that's what they want to do.
Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its "rubber rooms" — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.
The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.
"You just basically sit there for eight hours," said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. "I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.' `I've been sitting here for six months.' That sort of thing."
Ramos was an assistant principal in East Harlem when he was accused of lying at a hearing on whether to suspend a student. Ramos denied the allegation but quit before his case was resolved and took a job in California.
Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.
"It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract," spokeswoman Ann Forte said.
City officials said that they make teachers report to a rubber room instead of sending they home because the union contract requires that they be allowed to continue in their jobs in some fashion while their cases are being heard. The contract does not permit them to be given other work.
Ron Davis, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, said the union and the Department of Education reached an agreement last year to try to reduce the amount of time educators spend in reassignment centers, but progress has been slow.
"No one wants teachers who don't belong in the classroom. However, we cannot neglect the teachers' rights to due process," Davis said. The union represents more than 228,000 employees, including nearly 90,000 teachers.
Many teachers say they are being punished because they ran afoul of a vindictive boss or because they blew the whistle when somebody fudged test scores.
"The principal wants you out, you're gone," said Michael Thomas, a high school math teacher who has been in a reassignment center for 14 months after accusing an assistant principal of tinkering with test results.
City education officials deny teachers are unfairly targeted but say there has been an effort under Mayor Michael Bloomberg to get incompetents out of the classroom. "There's been a push to report anything that you see wrong," Forte said.
Some other school systems likewise pay teachers to do nothing.
The Los Angeles district, the nation's second-largest school system with 620,000 students, behind New York's 1.1 million, said it has 178 teachers and other staff members who are being "housed" while they wait for misconduct charges to be resolved.
Similarly, Mimi Shapiro, who is now retired, said she was assigned to sit in what Philadelphia calls a "cluster office." "They just sit you in a room in a hard chair," she said, "and you just sit."
Teacher advocates say New York's rubber rooms are more extensive than anything that exists elsewhere.
Teachers awaiting disciplinary hearings around the nation typically are sent home, with or without pay, Karen Horwitz, a former Chicago-area teacher who founded the National Association for the Prevention of Teacher Abuse. Some districts find non-classroom work — office duties, for example — for teachers accused of misconduct.
New York City's reassignment centers have existed since the late 1990s, Forte said. But the number of employees assigned to them has ballooned since Bloomberg won more control over the schools in 2002. Most of those sent to rubber rooms are teachers; others are assistant principals, social workers, psychologists and secretaries.
Once their hearings are over, they are either sent back to the classroom or fired. But because their cases are heard by 23 arbitrators who work only five days a month, stints of two or three years in a rubber room are common, and some teachers have been there for five or six.
The nickname refers to the padded cells of old insane asylums. Some teachers say that is fitting, since some of the inhabitants are unstable and don't belong in the classroom. They add that being in a rubber room itself is bad for your mental health.
"Most people in that room are depressed," said Jennifer Saunders, a high school teacher who was in a reassignment center from 2005 to 2008. Saunders said she was charged with petty infractions in an effort to get rid of her: "I was charged with having a student sit in my class with a hat on, singing."
The rubber rooms are monitored, some more strictly than others, teachers said.
"There was a bar across the street," Saunders said. "Teachers would sneak out and hang out there for hours."
Judith Cohen, an art teacher who has been in a rubber room near Madison Square Garden for three years, said she passes the time by painting watercolors of her fellow detainees.
"The day just seemed to crawl by until I started painting," Cohen said, adding that others read, play dominoes or sleep. Cohen said she was charged with using abusive language when a girl cut her with scissors.
Some sell real estate, earn graduate degrees or teach each other yoga and tai chi.
David Suker, who has been in a Brooklyn reassignment center for three months, said he has used the time to plan summer trips to Alaska, Cape Cod and Costa Rica. Suker said he was falsely accused of throwing a girl's test sign-up form in the garbage during an argument.
"It's sort of peaceful knowing that you're going to work to do nothing," he said.
Philip Nobile is a journalist who has written for New York Magazine and the Village Voice and is known for his scathing criticism of public figures. A teacher at Brooklyn's Cobble Hill School of American Studies, Nobile was assigned to a rubber room in 2007, "supposedly for pushing a boy while I was breaking up a fight." He contends the school system is retaliating against him for exposing wrongdoing.
He is spending his time working on his case and writing magazine articles and a novel.
"This is what happens to political prisoners throughout history," he said, alluding to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "They put us in prison and we write our `Letter From the Birmingham Jail.'"