Minimum Wage Primer

Minimum Wage Primer

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=23914

With recent calls for increasing the minimum wage, Americans need to understand how it impacts labor markets and whether it works as an antipoverty tool, says Ben Gitis, a policy analyst at the American Action Forum.

• The federal minimum wage was first introduced in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
• The Labor Department had found that nearly 25 percent of children were working 60 hours a week for a median weekly wage of $4 ($1.14 per hour, in today's dollars).

Today, proponents of increasing the minimum wage cite its effectiveness as an antipoverty tool. However:

• Very few people earn the minimum wage. In fact, minimum wage workers account for only 1.9 percent of all wage and salary workers.
• In 2011, 78.7 percent of minimum wage earners were not in poverty.

Moreover, increasing the minimum wage could actually increase the income gap, rather than decrease it, as proponents claim. This is because there is a disproportionate number of people earning the minimum wage who are teenagers in families with incomes well above the national average.

• In 2011, 36.6 percent of people working hourly minimum wage (or below) jobs were teenagers living at home, whose families had average incomes of $103,964.30.
• Increasing the minimum wage could limit earnings for the jobless while increasing earnings for others.

The minimum wage assists very few people who actually are in need. Increasing it would not alleviate poverty, but would actually increase poverty and give higher wages to families who need it least.
Source: Ben Gitis, "Primer: Minimum Wage and Combating Poverty," American Action Forum, December 3, 2013.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent - Reason.com

Link: http://reason.com/archives/2013/12/17/guilty-until-proven-innocent

Last February, one year after the encounter, the other shoe dropped: Yu was informed that Walker had filed charges of "nonconsensual sexual contact" against him through the college disciplinary system. Two and a half weeks later, a hearing was held before a panel of three faculty members. Yu was not allowed an attorney; his request to call his roommate and Walker's roommate as witnesses was denied after the campus "gender equity compliance investigator" said that the roommates had emailed him but had "nothing useful" to offer. While the records from the hearing are sealed, Yu claims his attempts to cross-examine his accuser were repeatedly stymied. Many of his questions (including ones about Walker's friendly messages, which she had earlier told the investigator she sent out of "fear") were barred as "irrelevant"; he says that when he was allowed to question Walker, she would start crying and give evasive or nonresponsive answers. Yu was found guilty and summarily expelled from Vassar.

The federal war on campus rape is unfolding amid a revival of what Katie Roiphe, in her landmark 1994 book The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus, dubbed "rape-crisis feminism"-a loosely defined ideology that views sexual violence as the cornerstone of male oppression of women, expands the definition of rape to include a wide range of sexual acts involving no physical force or threat, and elevates the truth of women's claims of sexual victimization to nearly untouchable status. This brand of feminism seemed in retreat a few years ago, particularly after a hoax at Duke University drew attention to the danger of presuming guilt. (In 2007, the alleged rape of a stripper by three Duke lacrosse players sparked local and national outrage-until the case was dismissed and the young men declared innocent.) Yet in 2013, the concept made a strong comeback with a sexual assault case that gained national visibility in January and went to trial in March. This one was in Steubenville, Ohio.

 

The Tweetable Guide To Media Myths And Left-wing Violence

Link: http://minx.cc/?post=345725

On Twitter, I reviewed the media's history of convenient speculation and outright lies when it comes to the perpetrators of violence. 

Time after time, blame conservatives and "The Right".
Time after time, be wrong.
Such consistency is a rare gift.

New Szostak protocell is closest approximation to origin of life and Darwinian evolution so far - The Panda's Thumb

Link: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2013/12/new-szostak-pro.html

This is the first time that nonenzymatic RNA copying succeeded inside a fatty acid vesicle. The big obstacle has always been that magnesium ion Mg2+ was necessary for RNA copying, but two negative side-effects of high Mg2+ levels frustrated success. Firstly, high Mg2+ levels break down the simple, fatty acid membranes that probably surrounded the first living cells. Secondly, Mg2+ catalyses degradation of single-stranded RNA. After a long trial-and-error process, Szostak et al. discovered that citrate removes these two side-effects. Citrate efficiently protects fatty acid membranes from the disruptive effects of high Mg2+ ion concentrations, while both allowing RNA copying and protecting single-stranded RNA from Mg2+-catalyzed degradation.

and

A working version of a complete protocell has not yet been achieved in a laboratory setting. Other problems need to be solved, such as the fact that citrate is not a plausible prebiotic component: it needs to be replaced by an alternative component. Finally, at a certain level of complexity, a third main component of the cell would be helpful: chemical energy (metabolism). Nevertheless, conceptually and practically, the Szostak protocell is the closest approximation so far to the origin of life forms which have the potential to evolve.

From the comments:

Do follow the link under the picture (above). There are some really cool animations there.
For those of use who don't stare through a microscope each day, it's hard to remember that these are not "static" structures, like our skin or bones or organs, or like static pictures on a page. These are instead fairly loosely (or at least dynamically) held individual molecules, that are always in random thermally generated Brownian motion. Once you see the parts of the assemblage all wiggling about, it becomes much more plausible to imagine them interacting in some fashion.
When all we see are static pictures or drawings, explaining how this large molecule fits like a key into this other large molecule, it becomes reasonable to ask, "Well, how did the cell know to grab molecule "A" and stick it to molecule "B"?". With only the static drawings, it looks like a well defined key in an unchanging lock. Even simple animations often just show the static "key" molecule approaching the static "lock" molecule, in a well controlled manner, turning the lock, and then moving on. Even animations of the assembly or copying of DNA or RNA typically show precise, "intentional" motions of the molecules in question.
But, looking at animations like these, it becomes more clear that we're talking about relatively flexible structures all wiggling about, all bumping into each other, in relatively rapid and random ways, and that, occasionally, two of those flexible structures will stick together in certain ways. Given the nature of those structures, two molecules are more likely to stick together in one way than in another.
Looked at another way, we (the lay public) tend to imagine these molecular parts acting as we see desecrate objects acting around us in our daily lives. We don't have the personal experience of parts (molecules) where the environment (water) is on the same scale as we are, and where the interactive forces between molecules bumping into each other is on the same order of energy as the forces holding the parts together.
It's like the difference between walking from one exhibit to another in a relatively sparsely populated museum, and trying to move from one side of a densely populated train platform to another, where you are literally check to jowl with all the other people all constantly bumping into each other.
Detailed, dynamic animations like these are wonderful teaching tools to better show what is really going on.

PJ Media � From Sandy Hook to Malpractice?

Link: http://pjmedia.com/blog/from-sandy-hook-to-malpractice/?singlepage=true

SHOOTER AT ARAPAHOE HIGH DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE: Arapahoe High gunman held strong political beli… [feedly]

SHOOTER AT ARAPAHOE HIGH DOESN'T FIT THE NARRATIVE:  Arapahoe High gunman held strong political beliefs.

Just not the ones you might expect.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/180916/

In one Facebook post, Pierson attacks the philosophies of economist Adam Smith, who through his invisible-hand theory pushed the notion that the free market was self-regulating. In another post, he describes himself as 'Keynesian.' . . . Pierson also appears to mock Republicans on another Facebook post, writing 'you republicans are so cute' and posting an image that reads: 'The Republican Party: Health Care: Let 'em Die, Climate Change: Let 'em Die, Gun Violence: Let 'em Die, Women's Rights: Let 'em Die, More War: Let 'em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?'

Are We About To Face A Severe Doctor Shortage?

Are We About To Face A Severe Doctor Shortage?

Two features of ObamaCare will substantially increase the demand, while (surprisingly) nothing in the law increases supply. And when people take steps to increase their access in response to growing waiting times, the success of some will increase the rationing problems for everyone else.

At this point we have no idea how many people will become newly insured under ObamaCare. For the first year out, the number of people with insurance may actually go down! But the administration's goal is to insure an additional 30 million people and eventually a lot of those people will acquire health plans. When they do, the economic studies predict that they will try to double their use of the health care system.

Adding to this increased demand will be new mandated benefits. The administration never seems to tire of reminding seniors that they are entitled to a free annual checkup. Then there are new benefits for women, including free contraceptives. And all of us will be entitled to a long list of preventive services — with no deductible or copayment.

But the health care system can't possibly deliver on all these promises. The original ObamaCare bill actually had a line item for increased doctor training. But this provision was zeroed out before passage, probably to keep down the cost of health reform. The result will be increased rationing by waiting.

Take preventive care. The health reform law says that health insurance must cover the tests and procedures recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. What would that involve? In the American Journal of Public Health, scholars at Duke University calculated that arranging for and counseling patients about all those screenings would require 1,773 hours of the average primary care physician's time each year, or 7.4 hours per working day.

And all of this time is time spent searching for problems and talking about the search. If the screenings turn up a real problem, there will have to be more testing and more counseling. Bottom line: To meet the promise of free preventive care nationwide, every family doctor in America would have to work full-time delivering it, leaving no time for all the other things they need to do.

When demand exceeds supply in a normal market, the price rises until it reaches a market-clearing level. But in this country, as in other developed nations, Americans do not primarily pay for care with their own money. They pay with time.

How long does it take you on the phone to make an appointment to see a doctor? How many days do you have to wait before she can see you? How long does it take to get to the doctor's office? Once there, how long do you have to wait before being seen? These are all non-price barriers to care, and there is substantial evidence that they are more important in deterring care than the fee the doctor charges, even for low-income patients.

For example, the average wait to see a new family doctor in this country is just under three weeks. But in Boston, with ObamaCare-type reform, the wait is about two months.

When people cannot find a primary care physician who will see them in a reasonable length of time, all too often they go to hospital emergency rooms. Yet one study found up to 20% of the patients who enter an emergency room leave without ever seeing a doctor, because they get tired of waiting. Be prepared for that situation to get worse.

The heartlessness of Thanksgiving dinner?

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/americas-excuse-book-take-your-choice-victim-or-heartless-hypocrite

A thoroughly enraged reader took exception to my Thanksgiving entry, claiming that the meal portrayed was inaccessible to most Americans. Here's the meal that caused the apoplectic reader to label me heartless because "most Americans" couldn't possibly have this home-made meal:

The courses (all home-made) included the traditional favories:
--turkey
--stuffing
--mashed potatoes
--gravy
--sweet potatoes with sliced apples
--three kinds of home-made cranberry sauce (one with apples, one with orange)
And an international potluck:
-- mussels with spinach leaves and dipping sauce
--somosas with mint/cilantro sauce
--Hawaii style potato salad
--nimono (a holiday Japanese stew, also called nishime)
--Crackling pork belly with lemon grass and garlic

I decided to fact-test the enraged reader's claim of general inaccessibility of a home-cooked potluck dinner. First, how many meals did this dinner provide, including the soup that was made with the turkey carcass? This potluck dinner served a crowd on Thanksgiving, 6 more friends the following day, neighbors whom we delivered food to, and multiple meals of leftovers for the three of us. It has already made 40 adult servings of a bountiful multi-course meal, and counting the many meals remaining in leftovers and the soup, the total adult servings will be more like 50.

Our cost of ingredients for the traditional meal was less than $80, or roughly $2 per serving. The cost of all the potluck dishes brought by others was less than $30. The sparkling wine, ginger ale and red wines (all bought on sale) was about $20.
Total cost of the meal: $130, or $3.25 per serving, less than a "value meal" at a fast food outlet. If we add in meals made from leftovers (the turkey soup, etc.), the cost per serving drops to less than $3.
Are the "poor" really too poor to buy fresh ingredients that add up to $3 per serving? Let's start with the fact that according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49% of Americans Get Gov't Benefits; 82 million in Households on Medicaid. That means roughly 156 million Americans out of 317 million total population are receiving cash benefits (i.e. direct transfers) from the Federal government. Approximately 57 million receive Social Security retirement or disability benefits.

The disaster that is Obamacare (ongoing)

The disaster that is Obamacare (ongoing)

• It's Dec. 3 and the Obamacare web site is still broken for many people. CNN found that users still get error screens mid-stream. Others have found try-again-later messages. Worst of all, even if you do get through enrollment, you may still not actually be enrolled with any insurer.
• Cost of that broken web site? Estimated at $1 billion and counting. (Similar-size projects done by private companies *for their own core business* cost maybe $50 million.)
• Even Obama-loving, Democrat business owners are sour on Obamacare…after having taken away their employees' coverage, on the grounds that Obamacare with its new plan mandates is just too costly for them as employers, but somehow not too costly for their employees.
• Even President Obama's former press secretary, Robert Gibbs, thinks the Obama administration needs to become more honest. (Ouch!) Sadly, Sebelius didn't get the memo.
• Things look so bad for Democrats politically that even Obama's rubber-stamp, Sen. Al Franken, may be in trouble in 2014.
• Government-run health care doesn't work in the UK either, where more than 1000 NHS patients have died of simple dehydration since 2003. (Hmm…an unofficial way they get rid of pesky, money-draining patients?)

No, Melissa Harris-Perry, “Obamacare” was not conceived by rich white men

http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/12/no-melissa-harris-perry-obamacare-was-not-conceived-by-rich-white-men/

Jeanne Schulte Scott argued for the trade journal Healthcare Financial Management in March 2007 that then-President Bush had "put all his eggs into his 'privatization' basket" in his 2007 State of the Union address; nevertheless, he made health care the "issue du jour" for the 2008 presidential race. "Health care is hot!" she wrote, and then made a prediction that seems so quaint given all that's passed in the last four-and-a-half years:

The many would-be candidates for president in 2008 are falling over themselves offering their own proposals. We will soon see a "Giuliani-care" and "Obama-care" to go along with "McCain-care," "Edwards-care," and a totally revamped and remodeled "Hillary-care" from the 1990s.

The term took off from there, The Atlantic continued:

Headline writers squeezed for space gave the term momentum since "Obamacare" is so much shorter than "Obama's health care overhaul" or "Obama's health care bill." On May 30, 2007, The Hotline headlined a roundup of news about then-candidate Obama announcing his health care proposal "Obama: Here's Obamacare." A few days later, Jason Horowitz's story for the June 6 New York Observer (which also post dates its issues) was titled, "Stat! Clinton Readies Scalpel for Obamacare." Neither contains the term in the body of the story, so it was likely the work of an editor.

Timothy Noah wrote a series for Slate about "the health care primary," beginning June 19 with "Obamacare: Better Than It Looks." Stories on "Edwardscare: A Trojan Horse," "Hillarycare II: New and Improved," and "McCaincare: Provocative but Vague" followed.

Mitt Romney began using the term later in 2007, as a contrast to "Romneycare," clearly focused on policy differences, not race,  'Obamacare': The word that defined the health care debate:

It first appeared on the campaign trail in May of that year, when Romney distinguished his effort on health reforms as governor of Massachusetts.

"In my state, I worked on health care for some time. We had half a million people without insurance, and I said, 'How can we get those people insured without raising taxes and without having government take over heath care,'" he said in Des Moines, Iowa, advocating for states to find free market solutions.

"And let me tell you, if we don't do it, the Democrats will. If the Democrats do it, it will be socialized medicine; it'll be government-managed care. It'll be what's known as Hillarycare or Barack Obamacare, or whatever you want to call it."

On the campaign trail since, he has defended himself from charges of similarities between "Romneycare" and "Obamacare" — including a critique from a rival presidential candidate that the two amount to "Obamneycare."

Evolutionary theory that a chimp mated with a pig is pure sausage meat

Evolutionary theory that a chimp mated with a pig is pure sausage meat

http://www.theguardian.com/science/occams-corner/2013/dec/04/theory-chimps-pigs-hybridisation

Obama: There Was No IRS Scandal – It Was Just Made Up By the Media (Video)

Obama: There Was No IRS Scandal – It Was Just Made Up By the Media (Video)

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/12/obama-there-was-no-irs-scandal-it-was-just-made-up-by-the-media-video/

The IRS Scandal involves:

• At least 292 conservative groups targeted
• At least 5 pro-Israel groups targeted
• Constitutional groups targeted
• Groups that criticized Obama administration were targeted
• At least two pro-life groups targeted
• A Texas voting-rights group was targeted
• Conservative activists and businesses were targeted.
• At least 88 IRS agents were involved in the targeting scandal
• At least one conservative Hispanic group was targeted
• IRS continued to target groups even after the scandal was exposed

Last night during his interview with Chris Matthews, Barack Obama denied there was a so-called IRS scandal and said it was just something sensationalized by the media.

Patterico's Pontifications: R.I.P. Nelson Mandela

Link: http://patterico.com/2013/12/06/r-i-p-nelson-mandela/

Our guide, like all guides on the island, had been one of the "political prisoners" on the island. Here he is, explaining about the 30-year sentence he had received as a "political prisoner":

You might have noticed some scare quotes around the description of this guy as a "political prisoner." Let me explain.

One of the tourists asked him what his purported offense was. The tourist prefaced his question with a statement saying that he understood that the guide, like many people on the island, had been a political prisoner. But, what was the offense that the government had claimed he had engaged in? It took a bit of polite insistence on the part of the questioner, but the answer that emerged was that the guide had received the sentence for firing rockets at a fuel depot. Our persistent questioner asked if he had actually done that — or had the charges been entirely made up? The tourist sounded a little confused, because the guide had described himself as a political prisoner, and this didn't sound like an accusation of WrongThink. The guide said he had done it, to fight against the racist and repressive government. He hastened to add that there had been no people at the fuel depot. It was just a strategic target.

As I walked out of the prison building, I asked my wife if she was enjoying the tour we were receiving from the terrorist. I was half-joking, but there is an aspect to history in which the winners get to write it, and the history of the struggle against apartheid is no exception.

There is an image of Mandela as the sort of South African version of Martin Luther King, Jr., but he was no such thing. He was the head of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress, which carried out violent acts in which innocent people died. Then again, much of the violence occurred while he was in prison. He also fought against a repressive and racist government and won.

If people want to hail Mandela as a hero, I won't waste energy arguing with them. That is debatable. I just ask that people not portray him as some icon of lifelong opposition to violence. That, he most certainly was not.

Water Policy: What about All Those Swimming Pools in Los Angeles?

Water Policy: What about All Those Swimming Pools in Los Angeles?
http://feedly.com/e/EZfT1b6K

http://scienceblogs.com/significantfigures/index.php/2013/12/03/water-policy-what-about-all-those-swimming-pools-in-los-angeles/

It turns out to be a drop in the bucket -- 2000 acre-feet per year, compared with 600,000 acre-feet per year.

Well, maybe several drops.

--
 via my feedly.com reader

“Darwin’s Dilemma”: Was the Cambrian Explosion Too Fast For Evolution? | NCSE

Link: http://ncse.com/blog/2013/10/darwin-s-dilemma-was-cambrian-explosion-too-fast-evolution-0015109

In the "sudden appearance" of organisms during the geologically brief Cambrian explosion, creationists imagine tangible evidence for the supernatural creation of animal "kinds." To their eyes, these rocks record the moment of creation when Yahweh declared: "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds." They point to Precambrian rocks with their lack of fossilized hard parts, then point to Cambrian layers with their copious fossils and say, "See! Right there: creation." The story is not so simple, of course; we now know a lot more about life in the period before the Cambrian. The ancient lineages that eventually diversified extend far back in time, a long fuse leading to the eventual explosion.

While the rapid evolution during the Cambrian is described as geologically brief, it is important to define what that means. On human timescales, the shortest estimation for the length of the Cambrian explosion, about 10 million years, is incomprehensibly long. Moreover, the tiny Cambrian arthropods likely had much faster maturations and much shorter lifespans than humans. Our anthropocentric perception of the flow of time, in which a family might have only three or four generations per century, is very different from the number of generations Cambrian critters produced. Ten million years provides plentiful time, as Lee et al. showed. Yet creationists insist that there was not enough time for such biological complexity to arise, without ever defining why that time frame is insufficient.

Mark Halperin: Obamacare Contains "Death Panels" | Video | RealClearPolitics

Link: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/11/25/mark_halperin_obamacare_contains_death_panels.html#.UpPVCOdeqp4.twitter

NEWSMAX: The Affordable Care Act contains provisions for "death panels," which decide which critically-ill patients receive care and which won't, according to Mark Halperin, senior political analyst for Time magazine.

"It's built into the plan. It's not like a guess or like a judgment. That's going to be part of how costs are controlled," Halperin told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.

MALZBERG, HOST: A lot of people said you weren't going to be able to keep your health care, but also they focused on the death panels, which will be coming, call them what you will, rationing, is part of it...

HALPERIN: No, I agree, and that's going to be a huge issue, and that's something else on which the president was not fully forthcoming and straightforward.

MALZBERG: So, you believe there will be rationing, a.k.a. death panels?

HALPERIN: It's built into the plan. It's not like a guess or like a judgment. That's going to be part of how costs are controlled.

Lenski's experiment: 25 years and 58,000 generations - The Panda's Thumb

Link: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2013/11/lenskis-experim.html

25 years ago, according to a recent article in Science magazine, Richard Lenski put samples of E. coli bacteria into a dozen flasks filled with a solution of glucose and other nutrients, incubated them, stirred them, and every day removed 1 % and repeated the process, day after day, for 25 years (except for a brief interruption when he moved from one university to another). The author of the article, Elizabeth Pennisi, notes that Lenski's bacteria

are proving as critical to understanding the workings of evolution as classic paleontology studies such as Stephen Jay Gould's research on the pace of change in mollusks. Lenski's humble E. coli have shown, among other things, how multiple small mutations can prepare the ground for a major change; how new species can arise and diverge; and that Gould was mistaken when he claimed that, given a second chance, evolution would likely take a completely different course. Most recently, the colonies have demonstrated that, contrary to what many biologists thought, evolution never comes to a stop, even in an unchanging environment.

You may read Pennisi's article for yourself, but what I (a nonbiologist) found most interesting was that evolution keeps going, even in a stable environment; there are no fitness peaks (at least among E. coli in bottles). Equally, the fact that several different lines learned to metabolize citrate by means of different series of mutations suggests (as in the Pennisi quotation above) that the course of evolution might be more predictable than we had thought.

Fortunately there is some decent non-paywalled coverage of this experiment. Ars Technica has a write-up that describes the basic experiment and the findings in this newest paper, with a link to coverage the earlier result about the evolution of a citrate metabolism among some of the populations.

 

What Politicians Don't Say About the Military's Sexual Assault 'Epidemic'

Link: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/11/24/The-Military-s-Sexual-Assault-Epidemic-in-Context (via shareaholic.com)

When I joined the U.S. military in January 2011, a family member asked me: "Aren't you worried about being raped?" And she wasn't the only one. Many people cautioned me that I would be entering an institution synonymous with machismo, authoritarianism, and violence.
What I found instead was very different: professionalism, respect, and a strong presence of women in the highest ranks. I also found the most transparent, aggressive, and in-your-face Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) program I had ever witnessed.

Under the UCMJ, any military service member or even retiree can be punished for offenses (UCMJ Article 77), including accessories (78) and anyone who conspires in the punishable activity (87). People who attempt to commit an offense and fail to succeed may also be court-martialed (80). And offenders may be punished for any lesser included offenses (79).
So even if the preponderance of evidence fails to support a conviction for rape or sexual assault, an accused soldier may still be discharged from the military and punished for a related offense like failure to obey an order (92), cruelty toward and maltreatment of a subordinate (93), unbecoming conduct (133), fraternization (134), or providing alcohol to a minor (134).
If service members fail to obtain justice through the regular process, which is largely at the discretion of their Commanding Officers (COs), there already is a way for them to circumvent the CO and file a complaint of wrongs against the CO under UCMJ Article 138.
That is why I have been surprised to hear U.S. Senators imply that service members currently have no recourse outside their CO and that a new, parallel organizational structure is needed.

Compare all this to the model for sexual assault prevention and response at the institution I belonged to before the military—Harvard College. There, complaints of sexual assault are filed with the Administrative Board, or "Ad Board," comprised of deans and faculty members. The written policies regarding sexual assault are far less favorable to victims, requiring non-consent to be expressed "verbally or physically" and requiring the Ad Board members to be "sufficiently persuaded" that an assault occurred.
In stark contrast to the stories I've heard about military perpetrators landing up in Leavenworth Prison, Harvard's history of dealing with sexual assault cases might easily give more encouragement to perpetrators than victims.
During my time at Harvard College, between 2005 and 2009, I had one friend who was sexually assaulted by a fellow student, another who was beaten by her boyfriend (a fellow student), and another who was involved in a highly improper and abusive relationship with a professor. Not one of these incidents was ever reported.
In the five years from 2005 to 2010, according to the Harvard Crimson, eight cases of sexual misconduct were brought before Harvard's Ad Board. Only three perpetrators were required to withdraw from Harvard College for at least six months, and none received a permanent expulsion.

Krauthammer On Filibuster Change: "Democrats Will Absolutely Rue The Day" | Video | RealClearPolitics

Link: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/11/21/krauthammer_on_filibuster_change_democrats_will_absolutely_rue_the_day.html (via shareaholic.com)

Just how many Americans will really have their health insurance affected by Obamacare? | AEIdeas

Link: http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/11/just-how-many-americans-will-really-have-their-health-insurance-affected-by-obamacare/

So what do the numbers look like? Based on the administration's own estimates from 2010, Veuger projects that tens of millions of people with employer-based insurance policies will be 'affected' by Obamacare, their plans either modified or cancelled. A far cry from Professor's Gruber's claim that only 9 million Americans, "three per cent of the population, will have to buy a new product that complies with the A.C.A.'s more stringent requirements for individual plans."

Articles: Forcing Mom into Medicaid was Part of the Plan

Link: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/11/forcing_mom_into_medicaid_was_part_of_the_plan.html (via shareaholic.com)

Hype and Chains - The Hideous Duke Rape Hoax On the evening of...

Link: https://www.facebook.com/Hypenchains/posts/476851202423976

Massachusetts: An Apples to Oranges Comparison | National Review Online

Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/critical-condition/339511/massachusetts-apples-oranges-comparison-grace-marie-turner

The Minimum-Wage Myths | National Review Online

Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/364486/minimum-wage-myths-kevin-d-williamson

How the Minimum Wage Hurts Poor People | National Review Online

Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/364671/how-minimum-wage-hurts-poor-people-mario-loyola

It's important to see how the supposed benefits fail in the case of the minimum wage, and Kevin Williamson does a typically great job debunking those arguments in his recent piece on the homepage. But the minimum wage also creates unconscionable social losses, particularly for the poorest of the poor.

The minimum wage is not a "protection," as progressives often style it. It doesn't confer a "right" to be paid any amount of money, because nobody has an obligation to hire you. The minimum wage only says that it's illegal to work for less than x, no matter how badly you need that job. To the extent the minimum wage is set above where the market clears on a given wage category, businesses will typically respond with some combination of raising wages, cutting hours, and laying people off.

George Zimmerman girlfriend | Samantha Scheibe | Set Up

Link: http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/11/developing-zimmerman-defense-narrative-girlfriend-set-him-up/ (via shareaholic.com)

Almost as soon as George Zimmerman was arrested, a report surfaced that girlfriend Samantha Scheibe, who made the dramatic phone call to 911, had been shopping her story to national media for several weeks – but no one would pay her what she wanted.
The Orlando Sentinel confirmed that at least one national media outlet (unnamed) had such communications:

WKMG's report that the women were seeking money for interviews with national news organizations was confirmed to the Sentinel by one such organization.

Not unexpectedly, the Zimmerman defense team is letting it be known that this was a set-up

Marc Thiessen: Obama’s 16 words - The Washington Post

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-obamas-16-words/2013/10/31/17b955ae-4227-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html?tid=pm_pop

Well, now it seems President Obama has his own 16 words to answer for: "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan." (Actually, it was a little more than 16 words if you include what the president said next: "Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.")
Obama attempted to move the goal posts in his speech in Boston's Faneuil Hall Wednesday, declaring that if you like your current health plan, "For the vast majority . . . you can keep it." Sorry, he didn't say "the vast majority" back in 2009. He said you can keep your plan. Period. No matter what.
Indeed, Obama repeated this promise on at least 24 separate occasions — before and after the law went into effect. It was critical to his case. Without his 16-word pledge that no one would lose his or her health plans, Obamacare might never have become law.
But Obama's 16 words were untrue. Across the country, Americans are now seeing their health plans discontinued — and experts say the cancellations could eventually reach 16 million. As one woman in California who got a cancellation letter from her insurer told the Los Angeles Times, "All we've been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it . . . I'm infuriated because I was lied to."
Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the administration not only knew but fully intended for all these people to lose their existing plans. The Health and Human Services Department specifically wrote regulations to ensure that they would — narrowing a provision in the law "grandfathering" in existing plans so that "40 to 67 percent" of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their policies. That's because moving millions of customers out of the individual and small group markets and into the exchanges is critical to making the scheme financially viable. Indeed, the survival of Obamacare depends on it.

It was Obama's objective from the start to destroy the market in order to fund Obamacare. He wants these people to lose coverage so they have no choice but to sign up for the exchanges. Obama all but admitted this in his Boston speech. "If you're getting one of these [cancellation] letters, just shop around in the new marketplace," he declared. In other words, don't worry if the plan you're happy with is being cancelled, just join Obamacare! That was the plan all along.

The Economics of the Corn Dog : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

Link: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-economics-of-the-corndog#axzz2kwoYFu1H

"Greed" is an easy explanation for high prices. 
In fact, it's too easy.  Any time it's cited, we should be suspicious that it's a mere cop-out.

Next I thought: Maybe it's just greed? Perhaps they jacked up the price just because they could. There was clearly competition from other vendors, but their corn dogs were all similarly priced. If I'd stopped thinking here I might have assumed there's a corn dog cartel that schemes in a smoky room and agrees to their inflated prices beforehand.
That seemed unlikely, so I took a step forward in the line.
Then I wondered about the cost of paying the City of Galveston for a vendor's license for the weekend. While I don't know the exact price, it's a safe assumption that it's not cheap. A quick glance at the vendor application page shows that vendors also need to pay a fire tent fee, a health permit fee, and a state sales tax registration fee. All these sunk costs are certainly factors in the production cost and subsequent price, but also come with the effect of limiting competition, to where a local guy on a bike cannot choose to meet the sudden demand by selling cheaper corn dogs from a bicycle stand. Maybe this guy set up in a dark alley selling black-market corn dogs—but if so, I didn't see him.
I suspected most of those vendors were from out of town, maybe out of state. So the cost of transporting all their equipment, in large, fuel-guzzling trucks, must also be a factor. And these people had to sleep somewhere for the weekend, so there's another cost that has to be considered.
OK, maybe they're not so evil after all. I took another step up in line.
And then there's the cost of compensating the employees. To work in those conditions, at that pace, for that amount of time, the compensation must be worth the effort. Sure, many of these stands are probably family-owned and -staffed, but still: The profits must be greater than what this amount time and energy could be worth in other lines of employment. In other words, all this must be worth more than they could make simply flipping burgers or whatever. And how many opportunities do they get to sell to this kind of crowd? There's not a rally every day.
This line of thought stirs feelings of empathy; these people work hard, and despite their seemingly high prices, probably don't make all that much when all things are considered. Maybe they're the ones being exploited.  

No Such Thing As Free Health Benefits - Reason.com

Link: http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/13/no-such-thing-as-free-health-benefits

Here's an idea: If you don't want people to feel that you've betrayed them, don't betray them. Don't promise, dozens of times without qualification, that they will be able to keep their health plans if they like them when you know that is not true.

Here's another suggestion: When you are apologizing for misleading people, don't seek to minimize the significance of your deception. "We're talking about 5 percent of the population," Obama told NBC's Chuck Todd. "It only affects a small amount of the population."

Obama was referring to the 14 million Americans who obtain health insurance through individually purchased policies, which is hardly a small number. According to studies by the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation, the policies these people find in Obamacare's insurance exchanges typically will cost more than what they have now.

Obamacare is junk insurance | WashingtonExaminer.com

Link: http://washingtonexaminer.com/obamacare-is-junk-insurance/article/2538366 (via shareaholic.com)

When Obama claims your old plan was "junk," he's not leveling with you. Your health plan wasn't canceled out of some kind of concern that you are insufficiently insured. Rather, you simply must pay more – and get less – to make Obamacare's finances work.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/11/04/49-state-analysis-obamacare-to-increase-individual-market-premiums-by-avg-of-41-subsidies-flow-to-elderly/

In the average state, Obamacare will increase underlying premiums by 41 percent. As we have long expected, the steepest hikes will be imposed on the healthy, the young, and the male. And Obamacare's taxpayer-funded subsidies will primarily benefit those nearing retirement—people who, unlike the young, have had their whole lives to save for their health-care needs.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/lies-of-obamacare-documented.php

Over the last day or two, the major breaking story has really been a throwback: in 2010, the Obama administration promulgated rules governing what plans that pre-existed Obamacare would be "grandfathered" under that statute, and allowed to continue. In the context of announcing its rules, the administration predicted that because of their restrictiveness, many millions of Americans would lose their existing insurance coverage, whether they liked it or not.

Obama Isn’t the Only One Who Lied | Power Line

Link: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/obama-isnt-the-only-one-who-lied.php

The Obama administration has run aground on the president's promise that if you like your health care plan, you can keep it: Scott Rasmussen finds that 55% of voters rate Obama's performance on health care as "poor." But, as Byron York notes, at least 27 Democratic senators made the same false promise to their constituents:

The list includes the entire Democratic leadership in the Senate as well as Democrats facing tough re-election races in 2014, like Mary Landrieu, Mark Begich, and Kay Hagan.

To pass health plan, Obama and Dems kept mum about its downsides | WashingtonExaminer.com

Link: http://washingtonexaminer.com/to-pass-health-plan-obama-and-dems-kept-mum-about-its-downsides/article/2539185 (via shareaholic.com)

Cohn is right that there was no serious conversation about those tradeoffs back when Congress was considering the law's passage in 2009 and 2010. But why was that? It was because President Obama and his Democratic allies could not speak seriously — and honestly — about those tradeoffs and still pass their bill.

So instead, Obama assured Americans they could keep health care policies they liked. And it wasn't just Obama. "One of our core principles is that if you like the health care you have, you can keep it," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in August 2009. "If you like what you have, you can keep it," said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in October of the same year.

Many, many Democrats promised the same thing. They had to. If they had declared openly that millions of Americans would lose their current coverage and face higher premiums and deductibles — if Obama and Democratic leaders had said that, they would not have been able to maintain party unity in support of the bill, and the Affordable Care Act would never have passed Congress.

It would not have mattered that Republicans opposed the bill unanimously. A frank public discussion of Obamacare would have divided Democratic support, with the result being no new law at all.

Obamacare, Deconstructed - YouTube

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxWMbqxgMDo#t=113 (via shareaholic.com)

Advice to a Libertarian Physicist on the Climate Policy Debate | Somewhat Reasonable

http://blog.heartland.org/2013/11/advice-on-climate-science-for-a-libertarian-physicist/

Here at The Heartland Institute, we have frequently debated the wisdom (or lack of wisdom) of taking the science seriously. Most free-market think tanks don't. But failing to do so rendered them irrelevant in what is arguably the biggest public policy debate of our lifetimes. We decided not to debate "what should be done about global warming." We looked under the hood at the science touted by the other side and found it to be utterly unpersuasive.

So we set out to persuade the public and their elected representatives that global warming is not a crisis, it needs neither a government solution nor a private property solution. Opinion polls and political outcomes in recent years show we were remarkably successful.

Effectively Irrational : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

Link: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/effectively-irrational#axzz2kLtf4hmx

30 common fallacies used against libertarians

We've decided to offer you a fun list of them, which you can use as a handy guide in the process of engaging in well-mannered, reasoned discourse online.

Escape from Book Boredom -- RobertRinger.com

Link: http://robertringer.com/escape-from-book-boredom/ (via shareaholic.com)

And if you're a writer (or aspire to be one), I believe you'll find my words to be of value to you when it comes to honing your craft.  I say this because the very reasons that make me give up on a book early include some of the most important factors that every author should focus on when he writes — at least if he wants to sell his book to me.

A Very Darwinian Halloween - The Panda's Thumb

Link: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2013/10/a-very-darwinia.html (via shareaholic.com)

Including a discussion on the evolution of the Venus Flytrap

The Myth of Americans' Poor Life Expectancy - Forbes

Link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/11/23/the-myth-of-americans-poor-life-expectancy/ (via shareaholic.com)

Life expectancy is an appealingly simplistic, but deeply flawed, way to think about the quality of a country's health-care system. After all, shouldn't good health care make you live longer? Well, yes, but. The problem, of course, is that there are many factors that affect life expectancy.
One is wealth. It's gross domestic product per capita, and not health-care policy, that correlates most strongly to life expectancy. Gapminder has produced many colorful charts that show the strong correlation between wealth and health. Here's one from Lane Kenworthy of the University of Arizona:

If you really want to measure health outcomes, the best way to do it is at the point of medical intervention. If you have a heart attack, how long do you live in the U.S. vs. another country? If you're diagnosed with breast cancer? In 2008, a group of investigators conducted a worldwide study of cancer survival rates, called CONCORD. They looked at 5-year survival rates for breast cancer, colon and rectal cancer, and prostate cancer. I compiled their data for the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, and western Europe. Guess who came out number one?

A few years back, Robert Ohsfeldt of Texas A&M and John Schneider of the University of Iowa asked the obvious question: what happens if you remove deaths from fatal injuries from the life expectancy tables? Among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults from 19th place to…you guessed it…first. Japan, on the same adjustment, drops from first to ninth.

Finally, U.S. life-expectancy statistics are skewed by the fact that the U.S. doesn't have one health-care system, but three: Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurance. (A fourth, the Obamacare exchanges, is supposed to go into effect in 2014.) As I have noted in the past, health outcomes for those on government-sponsored insurance are worse than for those on private insurance.

For further reading on the topic of life expectancy, here are some recommendations. Harvard economist Greg Mankiw discusses some of the confounding factors with life expectancy statistics, citing this NBER study by June and Dave O'Neill comparing the U.S. and Canada. (Mankiw calls the misuse of U.S. life expectancy stats "schlocky.") Chicago economist Gary Becker makes note of the CONCORD study in this blog post. In 2009, Sam Preston and Jessica Ho of the University of Pennsylvania published a lengthy analysis of life expectancy statistics, concluding that "the low longevity ranking of the United States is not likely to be a result of a poorly functioning health care system."

Lies of Obamacare, documented

From PowerLine

Given the lies with which Obamacare was promoted–"If you like your health care plan, you can keep it"–this is of course a blockbuster story. So I spent some time today tracking down the original sources to verify it.

The Obama administration projected low-end, mid-range and high-end estimates for how many plans would be terminated, in total and broken down between large and smaller employers. The bottom line is that the administration expected 51% of all employer plans to be terminated as a result of Obamacare. That is the mid-range estimate; the high-end estimate was 69%. So as of 2010, the Obama administration planned that most Americans with employer-sponsored health care plans would lose them, whether they liked those plans or not.

In the Federal Register, the administration candidly acknowledged:

The collective decisions of plan sponsors and issuers over time can be viewed as a one-way sorting process in which these parties decide whether, and when, to relinquish status as a grandfathered health plan.

The administration was prepared to be patient as the "one-way sorting process" ran its course, and all Americans lost the plans they had, whether they liked them or not.

--

The Wheel of the Year: Now available on Amazon Kindle

The Official Manual for Spice Cadets: Now available on Amazon Kindle

Chemists show life on Earth was not a fluke

Link: https://theconversation.com/chemists-show-life-on-earth-was-not-a-fluke-19452 (via shareaholic.com)

In order to recreate this molecular crowding, Stano added a chemical called POPC to the dilute solution. Fatty molecules such as POPC do not mix with water, and when placed into water they automatically form liposomes. These have a very similar structure to the membranes of living cells and are widely used to study the evolution of cells.
Stano reports in the journal Angewandte Chemie that many of these liposomes trapped some molecules of the assembly. But remarkably, five in every 1,000 such liposomes had all 83 of the molecules needed to produce a protein. These liposomes produced large amount of GFP and glowed green under a microscope.
Computer calculations reveal that even by chance, five liposomes in 1,000 could not have trapped all 83 molecules of the assembly. Their calculated probability for even one such liposome to form is essentially zero. The fact that any such liposomes formed and that GFP was produced means something quite unique is happening.
Stano and his colleagues do not yet understand why this happened. It may yet be a random process that a better statistical model will explain. It may be that these particular molecules are suited to this kind of self-organisation because they are already highly evolved. An important next step is to see if similar, but less complex, molecules are also capable of this feat.
Regardless of the limitations, Stano's experiment has shown for the first time that self-assembly of molecular machines into simple cells may be an inevitable physical process. Finding out how exactly this self-assembly happens will mean taking a big step towards understanding how life was formed.

Race-Hustling Results: Part III - Thomas Sowell - Page full

Link: http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/10/24/racehustling-results-part-iii-n1730144/page/full (via shareaholic.com)

One of the reasons for being glad to be as old as I am is that I may be spared living to see a race war in America. Race wars are often wars in which nobody wins and everybody ends up much worse off than they were before.
Initial skirmishes in that race war have already begun, and have in fact been going on for some years. But public officials pretend that it is not happening, and the mainstream media seldom publish it at all, except in ways that conceal what is really taking place.

Sadly, what happened in Milwaukee and Chicago were not isolated incidents. They were part of a pattern repeated in dozens of cities, located in every region of the country. Colin Flaherty's book, which is subtitled "The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It," reveals this pattern in painful detail.

It would be easy to simply dismiss Kersey as a racist. But denouncing him or ignoring him is not refuting him. Refuting requires thought, which has largely been replaced by fashionable buzz words and catch phrases, when it comes to discussions of race.
Thought is long overdue. So is honesty.

The left substitutes insults for reasoned argument | PrairiePundit

Link: http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-left-substitutes-insults-for.html

There's no right answer | Columbia Daily Spectator

Link: http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2013/10/02/theres-no-right-answer

I am not conservative by any stretch of the imagination. Every fall break I have gone to campaign for liberal causes, and as an underclassman I was on the board of the Columbia University Democrats. But the more time I spend in class the more sympathy I have for conservatives, not necessarily for their beliefs, but for the position they have in public discourse at Columbia. My perspective may be skewed since I am a Middle Eastern studies major, but in my classes it is taken for granted that the set of liberal positions is a list of objective truths. I don't think it is funny when professors crack jokes about the IQs of Republicans. It makes it more difficult to have genuine political discussions at best, and it perpetuates the stereotype of the Ivy League as a circle-jerk of liberalism at worst.

(1) Alternative Energy: Should other nations follow Germany's lead on promoting solar power? - Quora

Link: http://www.quora.com/Alternative-Energy/Should-other-nations-follow-Germanys-lead-on-promoting-solar-power-1?share=1#ans3266927

The answer is the most forceful possible no.

Solar power itself is a good thing, but Germany's pro-renewables policy has been a disaster. It has the absurd distinction of completing the trifecta of bad energy policy:

1. Bad for consumers
2. Bad for producers
3. Bad for the environment (yes, really; I'll explain)

Pretty much the only people who benefit are affluent home-owners and solar panel installation companies. A rising tide of opposition and resentment is growing among the German press and public.

I was shocked to find out how useless, costly, and counter-productive their world-renowned energy policy has turned out. This is a serious problem for Germany, but an even greater problem for the rest of the world which hopes to follow in their footsteps. The first grand experiment in renewable energy is a catastrophe! The vast scale of the failure has only started to become clear over the past year or so. So I can forgive renewables advocates for not realizing it yet -- but it's time for the green movement to do a 180 on this.

Why the Reviled Tea Party Was Right about Obamacare | The Fiscal Times

Link: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2013/10/09/Why-Reviled-Tea-Party-Was-Right-about-Obamacare (via shareaholic.com)

Before we march the Tea Party off to the Guillotine, let's remember what fired up that unruly crew to begin with. In the midst of the economic crisis, the government went on a spending spree, shelling out hundreds of billions for TARP, Cash for Clunkers, the Stimulus – the list seemed endless. Our nation's debt and deficits soared; the financial crisis became a fiscal crisis.

And then came Obamacare. President Obama's signature healthcare bill promised even higher deficits (no one but Paul Krugman believed you could provide free healthcare to 30 million people and save money), more government intrusion, and possible chaos. The Tea Party was born.

Few deny that our government should help the truly needy. Many agree, moreover, that every American should have access to healthcare. However, the majority of Americans who were content with their doctors and insurance programs fear that Obamacare will damage our superb healthcare infrastructure.
Many also imagine that the cost of Obamacare will be considerably greater than advertised. In part, excess expenditures may derive from lax supervision. To again quote Dr. Coburn, "We have a new program coming out, the Affordable Care Act otherwise known as Obamacare, and there's no income verification at all. So we know that's going to get defrauded to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, so why would we continue to do the same thing that put us in trouble that we're in?"
The program could also cost more than expected because it is fatally flawed. Some hint that Obamacare's potential economic problems come from the frantic effort to sign up healthy young people. While we have heard breathless tales of the millions who have tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to log onto the government websites, we have heard little about what kinds of people have actually signed up.
Anecdotal evidence points to those receiving subsidies being top of the list; it is possible that the undoing of Obamacare is even now taking place.  If the Tea Party had a little more patience, the country might end up standing with them. At the least, they might spare them the guillotine.

Obama is ducking a leader's duty - latimes.com

Link: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks-obama-leadership-20131004-16,0,6646621.story

Indeed, studies show that taking responsibility is one of the key traits people expect from a leader. In one 2006 study, two researchers at the University of Kent in England conducted a laboratory experiment in which human subjects in a group were given money and a choice: They could either keep it all or contribute some portion to a "group fund" that would be doubled and divided equally between all participants. Some people cooperated for the good of all, while others did not.
In a second phase of the experiment, the participants were asked who would be the best leader for the group. Eighty percent of the time, they chose the person who had contributed the most to the fund in the first phase. When people can choose the people who will lead them, they prefer people who proactively take responsibility for group welfare.
This brings us to the current debate over the shutdown of the federal government. The conventional narrative is that conservative policymakers are holding the nation hostage and hamstringing the helpless president.
Americans will likely see through this. A majority dislikes the current Republican strategy, but they know that ultimate culpability lies with leadership at the top. This sorry episode will reinforce the growing perception of the president as a leader who is more comfortable denouncing subordinates for disagreement than in taking responsibility.
Obama's image as a strong leader has dropped like a stone since 2009. A month after his first inauguration, a CBS News/New York Times poll found 85% of Americans said the president had "strong qualities of leadership."
By January 2010, just 66% in a Quinnipiac poll said the president had "strong leadership qualities." In the very same poll Tuesday, only 53% gave this response. A few weeks earlier, a Fox News poll about foreign policy found that only 42% of Americans say Obama is "a strong and decisive leader."
Some of this no doubt reflects the bitter partisanship of our times. But some of it is also logically due to a growing sense that the president is unwilling or unable to take responsibility in difficult circumstances and blames others instead. Indeed, half of Americans currently say he "spend[s] too much time blaming others," according to the Fox News poll cited above.
Is this assessment fair? Sample his public pronouncements and judge for yourself. Just this week, he washed his hands of the government shutdown by asserting that Republicans alone are "shutting down the government over an ideological crusade."

Bookworm Room � The House’s refusal to fund Obamacare is entirely constitutional — and James Madison personally approves this message

Link: http://www.bookwormroom.com/2013/10/03/the-houses-refusal-to-fund-obamacare-is-entirely-constitutional-and-james-madison-personally-approves-this-message/

My stock response to all those liberal Facebook friends who have insisted that the House is "unconstitutionally" holding Obamacare hostage, is that the Founders named it the "House of Representatives" and gave it the power of the purse for a reason.
....
The above response came off the top of my head.  If I had studied the Federalist papers recently, however, I could simply have quoted James Madison. one of the Constitution's primary architects, writing in Federalist No. 58 (and a groveling h/t to Tom Elias, of The New Editor, for this brilliant find):

The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.  (Emphasis added.)

What the House is doing is entirely constitutional, and we conservatives should be doing our best to trumpet that fact.  Moreover, given the federal takeover of the Lincoln Memorial, we should remind everyone that we live in a nation guaranteed "government of the people, by the people, for the people."  Unlike a monarchy, the federal government doesn't own the properties it is denying us.  Instead, we own the federal government.  The government is merely a caretaker, and a pretty damn surly, ineffectual, greedy, and tyrannical one at that.

And there's also this:
http://nationalreview.com/article/360228/origins-origination-clause-andrew-c-mccarthy

In a Bench Memos post, my friend Matt Franck objects to the contention in my column for last weekend that the Constitution's Origination Clause (Art. I, Sec. 7) gives the House of Representatives primacy over spending as well as taxing. Matt claims that my interpretation is bereft of historical support, a defect I'm said to camouflage by an extravagant reading of an "at best . . . ambiguous" passage in Madison's Federalist No. 58.
It is Matt's history, though, that is incomplete. As Mark Steyn observes, there is a rich Anglo-American tradition of vesting authority over not merely taxing but also spending in the legislative body closest to the people. This tradition, stretching back nearly to the Magna Carta, inspired the Origination Clause. It also informed Madison, whose ruminations, besides being far from ambiguous on the House's power of the purse, are entitled to great weight — not only because he was among the Constitution's chief architects but also because his explication of the Framers' design helped induce skeptics of centralized government and its tyrannical proclivities to adopt the Constitution.
Plainly, Matt is correct that the Origination Clause refers to "bills for raising revenue." From the time it was debated at the Philadelphia convention, however, the concept at issue clearly referred to more than tax bills. It was about reposing in the people, through their most immediately accountable representatives, the power of the purse. Indeed, the term persistently used throughout the Framers' debates was "money bills" — the phrase used by Elbridge Gerry, perhaps the principal advocate of the Origination Clause, when (as the debate records recount) he "moved to restrain the Senatorial branch from originating money bills. The other branch [i.e., the House] was more immediately the representatives of the people, and it was a maxim that the people ought to hold the purse-strings."
...The Heritage Foundation's Guide to the Constitution, for example, notes that the clause was meant to be "consistent with the English requirement that money bills must commence in the House of Commons." Traditionally, that requirement aggregated taxing with spending — the "power over the purse" — which the Framers sought to repose "with the legislative body closer to the people."
Similarly, the Annenberg Institute for Civics, in its series on the Constitution, instructs students that the Clause means "the House of Representatives must begin the process when it comes to raising and spending money. It is the chamber where all taxing and spending bills start" (emphasis added)...

The problem is, though, the Republicans don't seem to remember their pledge to the Constitution.
http://nationalreview.com/article/359767/how-constitutionally-fund-government-andrew-c-mccarthy

The Little Lies The Media Tell About ObamaCare - Investors.com

Link: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-obama-care/092013-671982-40-little-lies-the-media-tell-about-obamacare-.htm

• "It'll mark the 40th vote by the Republican-controlled House to repeal some or all of the law. Such measures have died in the Democratic-controlled Senate." (Associated Press)

• "House Republicans have now voted 41 times to repeal ObamaCare, knowing each time that those bills would go nowhere in the Senate." (Huffington Post)

Just one problem: Twenty percent of those bills made it to Obama's desk and secured his signature.

Obama signed House bills to kill a costly ObamaCare reporting rule, terminate its long-term care insurance program and repeal the "free choice voucher" program. He also signed bills cutting funds for the so-called CO-OP program, a public health slush fund and other ObamaCare programs.

Two other House-passed bills — one to end the Independent Payment Advisory Board and another terminating the medical device tax — have strong bipartisan support. Another simply codified the employer mandate delay Obama himself had already ordered.

Yet the media pretend these things never happened. This is admittedly a little thing. But as the Good Book says: "The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones."

Verbatim “Climate” Journalism

Link: http://www.aim.org/guest-column/verbatim-climate-journalism/?utm_source=AIM

I concluded that the Journal had fallen into the common error of “verbatim reporting”, another way of saying that the two reporters bylined on the article had done nothing more than take the UN news release regarding the “summary report” of this week’s fifth “Assessment Report” (AR5) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and then embellished it with a few calls to people identified as experts or spokespersons.
This isn’t journalism. It’s public relations. I know because I practiced both of these magical arts for many years. All governments, all institutions, all organizations, and all enterprises of every description practice public relations. The job of journalists, however, is to lend some balance to the claims or to expose outright lies.

Instapundit � Blog Archive � WELL, YES: The Tea Party Movement Was Born Under George W. Bush. Glad to see the reference to Pork…

Link: http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/176997/ (via shareaholic.com)

WELL, YES: The Tea Party Movement Was Born Under George W. Bush.

The Fiscal Consequences of the Affordable Care Act | Mercatus

Link: http://mercatus.org/publication/fiscal-consequences-affordable-care-act?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=macro&utm_campaign=fbpage (via shareaholic.com)

...between now and 2021, the ACA is expected to add as much as $530 billion to federal deficits while increasing spending by more than $1.15 trillion.

Obamacare and Trader Joe's: The Rest of the Story - Political Calculations - Townhall Finance Conservative Columnists and Financial Commentary - Page full

Link: http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/politicalcalculations/2013/09/28/obamacare-and-trader-joes-the-rest-of-the-story-n1711869/page/full (via shareaholic.com)

We must remember that before the law's provisions kicked in, the company was very willing to provide very generous benefits to all of its employees. We're just starting to find out how the law has changed their perspective on the value of their crew members so much that they're now willing to kick 23% of them to the curb. The company is being compelled by President Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to break the trust they worked hard to build with their crew members.

And that's perhaps the biggest problem with Obamacare. ObamaCare breaks trust.

Jonah Goldberg's G-File on National Review Online

Link: http://old.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200505111449.asp (via shareaholic.com)

What is, and what is not, conservatism?

Among other things,

The Conservative Faith

In Tuesday's column, Derbyshire listed six tenets of Anglo-American conservatism (I prefer Russell Kirk's but these will do): 1. a deep suspicion of the power of the state.
2. a preference for liberty over equality.
3. patriotism.
4. a belief in established institutions and hierarchies.
5. skepticism about the idea of progress.
6. elitism.