Christine Todd Whitman proclaims herself queen of GOP, scolds bloggers

Christine gives us what for

Christine Todd Whitman chews us out today:

As was to be expected, the blogosphere is full of people saying that Arlen Specter was always a Democrat and now he’s simply proved it.

In reality, until Tuesday, Arlen Specter caucused with the Republicans, and he voted with his party 70 percent of the time in the 110th Congress. It is a sure bet that his voting record will now change. I fail to see the satisfaction in that.

In fairness, the blogosphere’s been saying that Arlen Specter is a Dem for years and years. And note that she doesn’t tell us how many times Specter voted with the Dems in the 110th Congress. I decided to add it up myself, but since many Congressional votes are trivial BS, I used the Washington Post’s list of key votes from the 109th Congress to the present (plus, it was a much shorter list). The result?

What is it about “last resort” that Obama doesn’t get?

The POTUS imagines a world where magical, completely benign interrogation techniques exist:

We could have gotten information in ways that are consistent with our values, with who we are.

Not really, said a CIA guy who was not part of the interrogation team, but was the leader of the team that originally brought Abu Zubaydah in:

Kiriakou said the feeling in the months after the 9/11 attacks was that interrogators did not have the time to delve into the agency’s bag of other interrogation tricks.

“Those tricks of the trade require a great deal of time — much of the time — and we didn’t have that luxury. We were afraid that there was another major attack coming,” he said.

And was useful information obtained quickly enough to make a difference?

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail

The President plays to his strengths:

Worry about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of the Taliban? Naw.

Worry about social services in Pakistan? Oh yass.

“I am more concerned that the civilian government right now is very fragile and don’t seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services,” like health care and the rule of law, Mr. Obama said. “As a consequence,” he added, “it’s very difficult for them to gain the support and loyalty of their people.”

Beyond trivializing the reasons that the country is so unstable, I guess I’d really, really appreciate it if the POTUS would place American security and stability ahead of Pakistan’s social services. I’m pretty sure he read the job description before he applied, didn’t he?

Michelle’s garden: maternal or manipulative?

Thinking back on Michelle Obama’s first 100 days has set Nia-Malika Henderson of Politico to ovulating:

In the East Wing, the talk sometimes turns to Michelle Obama’s legacy.

Nearly 100 days in, Obama’s aides look 100 years out and see a signature achievement they believe will last — the kitchen garden at the White House.

It might not seem like much, a small patch of earth to grow some vegetables. But aides say Obama wanted the garden because it signifies more — from the importance of healthful eating, to getting schoolkids outdoors to help, to making the White House seem more accessible. Those are some of the themes — practical, sensible, maternal even — that Obama has embraced in her new role.

But was this really a sign of “practical, sensible, maternal” themes, or just a photo-op?

Somehow, I’m not very comforted

I missed this from a few days ago:

President Hu Jintao sought Thursday to reassure other nations about China’s rising military strength before presiding over a naval display highlighting Beijing’s ambitions of becoming a major sea power. …he said China would never threaten other nations or seek regional dominance.

Since they are already threatening Taiwan and seeking dominance in Asia, I think we can safely ignore his statements.

And oh, BTW, what sort of “major sea power” are we talking about?

It…included the first known public display of two Chinese nuclear-powered submarines.

Perfect for home defense.

Alley-cattin’ around

I put up a post over at IB. Michael claimed that he wouldn’t mind adding some serious content to the blog.

We shall see. Oh yes. We shall see.

[Gotta work on my Gollum imitation]

Waiting to exhale? That’s not going to satisfy the EPA for long.

Now that the EPA is going to start regulating our exhaled CO2 (a little hyperbole, at least so far), you’d think the emerging environmental police state would be resting on its laurels. Not so, not so. Look what’s coming on the horizon:

With Americans looking to reduce their “carbon footprints,” food seems an obvious place to start.

Choosing a diet with a smaller carbon footprint means choosing foods that are processed in ways that emit less carbon dioxide — a heat-trapping “greenhouse” gas — into the atmosphere.

Of course it’s just a “suggestion” now, but how long before the twin pressures of health care and global warming start putting ideas in legislators’ heads?

Now close your eyes and guess which food is first on the hit list (I’m sure you’ll get this):

“A family of four that gives up eating beef one day a week has basically traded in their pickup for a Prius,”

You ever feel like all the walls are closing in on you?

There’s a difference between humility and humiliation…

…that our globe-trotting President doesn’t seem to appreciate. USA Today has a nice summary of the United States’ recent embarrassments. I think this line summarizes the situation nicely:

London’s Daily Telegraph said Obama “went further than any U.S. president in history in criticizing his own country’s action while standing on foreign soil.”

“Further than any U.S. president in history?” I’d say “further than any country’s leader on foreign soil.” Maybe Britain has come close, but can you imagine France, China, Russia, etc., ever being that self-critical?

The article closes with:

“You’ve changed America’s relationship with the world,” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told Obama during an April 1 news conference in London.

That’s undeniably true. But then, before this year, we didn’t particularly want to be the world’s chump.

Can we really save $700 billion in health care costs?

Larry Summers repeats the $700 billion stat:

Appearing on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Lawrence H. Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, stated, “Whether it’s tonsillectomies or hysterectomies … procedures are done three times as frequently [in some parts of the country than others] and there’s no benefit in terms of the health of the population. And by doing the right kind of cost-effectiveness, by making the right kinds of investments and protection, some experts … estimate that we could take as much as $700 billion a year out of our health care system.”

So you’re probably wondering where that $700 billion number came from. Well, it kind of came from Peter Orszag’s prepared statement to the Senate:

Robert Gibbs proclaims his inadequacy

Trying to defend the significance of the insignificant $100 million in budget cuts, he tells us:

“I’m being completely sincere that only in Washington, D.C. is $100 million not a lot of money,” Gibbs said. “It is where I’m from. It is where I grew up. And I think it is for hundreds of millions of Americans.”

Well, gosh, Robert, then maybe this job is just too big for you, because if $100 million is impressive, then $1,000,000 million (a trillion dollars) must completely blow you away.

And I hope that this adminstration wasn’t selected based on its familiarity with household budgeting, though that’s what Gibbs seems to imply. You know, Robert, $100,000 is still a lot of money to millions of Americans. Why don’t you run a special budget exercise to shave $100,000 out of the budget?

Hmmm. Actually it would be kinda nice if the administration was a little more intimidated by these sorts of sums. Instead they’re playing with trillions of dollars without any sign of a perspective on what it all means. As others have pointed out, if they cut $100 million per day out of the budget, they would just keep up with the interest on the stimulus package.

Fiscal responsibility starts before you spend the money. Had Obama/Reid/Pelosi cut the stimulus package by 0.01%, they could have saved the $100 million from the outset. If they had cut it by 1%, we would have saved $8.2 billion.

Instead we have a fire drill conducted solely for political show.

At least we’re in the top 10

A guy at work asked me how Denver International Airport ranked in terms of traffic. I looked it up, and here are the results (based on 2008 stats):

1. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport – 90,039,280

2. O’Hare International Airport (Chicago) – 69,353,654

3. Heathrow Airport (London) – 67,056,228

4. Haneda Airport (Tokyo) – 65,810,672

5. Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport – 60,851,998

6. Los Angeles International Airport – 59,542,151

7. Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport – 57,069,331

8. Beijing Capital International Airport – 55,662,256*

9. Frankfurt Airport – 53,467,450

10. Denver International Airport – 51,435,575

I had no idea that Atlanta’s airport was so much busier than any other airport in the world. It’s almost twice as busy as DIA. Ah well, maybe we can catch Frankfurt next year.

Handshake? What handshake?

From doubleplusundead:

Carol E. Lee of Politico quotes a White House official who says that Obama’s smiling handshake with Hugo didn’t really mean anything:

Said Deputy White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest of the handshake: “It was good manners, and it was friendly. But it doesn’t signify a significant change or a dramatic change in the relationship between our two countries.”

That may be true, but if it gave people the impression that it was significant, then surely this suggests that Obama exercised poor diplomacy by sending the wrong signals.

So did people think it was significant? Here are some headlines:

• Obama, Chavez shake hands at summit-Venezuela govt (Reuters UK)
• Photos of Obama, Chavez Prompt Questions Over Change in Diplomatic Relations (Fox News)
• Chavez to Obama: ‘I want to be your friend’: Venezuelan leader shakes president’s hand, hints at closer ties with U.S. (MSNBC/AP)
• Obama, Chavez shake hands at Americas Summit (Yahoo/AP)
• Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez shake hands: US President Barack Obama has taken the first step towards ushering in an era of new relations with another long-time foe of Washington by shaking hands with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. (Telegraph UK)
• Obama and US critic Chavez shake hands at summit (France 24/AFP)
• President Obama in historic handshake with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (Times Online)
• Obama, Chavez shake hands in Trinidad (China National News)

All over the world, all of the major news agencies and many of the world’s newspapers took that handshake as an event of major signficance. Surely President Obama would agree that it’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it. If he can’t conduct world affairs without sending these sorts of mixed signals, then he should stay home before our foreign policy becomes even more snarled and contradictory than it is.

My suggestion is that he stop trying to be popular with world leaders, and behave like American interests are foremost in his mind. It’ll require some acting, but then perhaps he could avoid embarrassments like humping the leg of the Saudi king.

[I also liked Nice Deb's take on it, as well as her compilation of links.]

Are we stimulated yet?

I wrote a post a couple of months ago which talked about the falsity of the “Obama’s plan will create 4 million jobs” claim. In that post I used the projections of Obama’s own economic team to make my point.

Today I decided to revisit those projections, taken from their January 10 report, and see how we’re doing. Obviously it’s still very early, but it’s possible even at this stage to ask:

1. Is anything good happening?, and
2. How competent are these economists at projecting even 3 months into the future?

So here’s the answer:

All I did was take the Obama team’s graph right out of their report, and add the maroon triangle to represent the unemployment as of the end of March (8.5% – though I’ll admit that it’s not clear to me where the quarters start and stop). And what do we see?

• Obama’s plan was supposed to keep unemployment from exceeding 8%. Fail.
• Obama’s plan was supposed to keep unemployment from matching the rate without the plan. Fail.
• Obama’s team provided us with a 5-year projection, but they’re completely off track after only 1 quarter. Epic Fail.

As you can see, we’re already 2/3 of the way to what was supposed to be the worst case: 9% unemployment.

It’s almost like the criticisms that the plan didn’t focus on near-term jobs creation were well-founded.

How good is Canada’s health care? Ask the people who carry private insurance.

Time to play catch-up on posting, and I’m going to kick it off with a little health care discussion. Ten days ago, Ezra Klein graced the LA Times with his claim that while stats show that the US health care system has shorter wait times that other systems, they overlook the people who can’t get health care at all!” To wit:

When that very same survey also looked at cost problems among residents of different countries, 24% of Americans reported that they did not get medical care because of cost. Twenty-six percent said they didn’t fill a prescription. And 22% said they didn’t get a test or treatment. Those latter numbers are probably artificially small: If you can’t afford to see a doctor, you never know that you can’t afford the treatment she would recommend. In Britain and Canada, only about 6% of respondents reported that costs had limited their access to care.

Now, I have to confess that I’m a little bit confused, because the preceding question in the poll says: “During the past 12 months, was there a time when you needed medical care, but did not get it?” Only 12% of the US respondents said “Yes,” and only 57% of those attributed the reason to cost. In a similar survey in the same year, only 20% said “Yes,” and only 35% blamed cost.

But the important point here is that he never mentions the most interesting statistic in the poll – the statistic that biases all the numbers so that none of his conclusions have merit. Here’s the question from the poll:

…are you currently covered by private health insurance that you or your family pay for or your or your family’s employer provides?

The percentages who answered “Yes.”

Australia	52%
Canada	61%
New Zealand	45%
United Kingdom	23%

So by the most important measure of confidence, people’s spending choices, we find that the public doesn’t really trust the vaunted Canadian and British “complete coverage” systems. They are actually willing to spend money on private coverage, in addition to the taxes they pay for the public health system. And that supplemental coverage may well have led to higher levels of satisfaction with the health care systems, so that the apparent contentment with government health plans is much higher than reality.

So now you can see our likely future. Rather than reducing our private insurance costs, we’ll just end up adding to them with higher tax obligations.

Looking forward to it.

Can’t….write….posts….

Busy as the proverbial rat these days. I’ve had a few ideas for posts, but couldn’t make any headway in the small amount of time I could devote to writing them up. So the blog, she is likely to be dormant for the next few weeks.

I suppose, given the number of times I’ve had to set blogging aside, that I should just give it up and post elsewhere. But I’m always afraid that my stuff is a little dry for places like Innocent Bystanders or even Nice Deb’s. Now that I think about it, it’s probably too dry for here, too.

Anyway, there’s plenty o’ graphing to be done, probably towards the end of this month. And thereafter my job arrangements may change such that I can squeeze blogging in more easily. So hopefully you’ll enjoy a steady supply of scatter plots and bar graphs for at least a few months.

Before the next crunch.