LA Times:

At a time when county government is tightening its belt, a new Times investigation examined how the five L.A. County supervisors spend $3.4 million a year they receive in discretionary funding.

According to records, they use the money in part to pay chauffeurs, hold parties for friends and lobbyists and support pet projects. They also use it to help bolster programs and services in their districts.

Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas gave $25,000 last year to throw a reception for a for-profit exhibit on the African American experience organized by TV and radio host Tavis Smiley, a longtime friend.

He also donated $25,000 last year to the Diva Foundation, whose mission is to support groups that conduct AIDS research, education and support. Its president, Tony-nominated Sheryl Lee Ralph, emceed his 2008 campaign kickoff. The charity holds one main event each year, a concert in Beverly Hills, outside Ridley-Thomas’ South Los Angeles district. Ridley-Thomas used $25,000 to buy a place in Who’s Who in Black Los Angeles.

Check out a searchable database that allows readers to look at how the county supervisors spent their discretionary funds.

Read Garrett Therolf’s story here to see how Zev Yaroslavsky, Don Knabe, Gloria Molina and Mike Antonovich spend their funds.

Salt is necessary for life. Only people with certain conditions need to adhere to a low sodium diet.

Some New York City chefs and restaurant owners are taking aim at a bill introduced in the New York Legislature that, if passed, would ban the use of salt in restaurant cooking.

“No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises,” the bill, A. 10129, states in part.

6 of the 10 richest counties in U.S. are in DC area

Loudoun ranks as the richest county in the United States, immediately followed by Fairfax and Howard counties, while Montgomery, traditionally one of the wealthiest, is now 10th.

Forbes magazine ranked eight other Washington-area counties in its list of the nation’s 25 wealthiest counties, far more than any other area in the country. The rankings are based on 2008 median household income data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

We got a letter yesterday from the Census Bureau advising us that we’d be getting our actual census form in another mailing in a week.

Typical.

The founders created the census for one reason: to count people to apportion Congressional districts. Now…

Fully one-quarter of the space on this year’s form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government’s business (despite the New York Times’ assurances to the contrary on today’s editorial page).

So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks “What is Person 1’s race?” (and so on, for other members of the household).

My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don’t do it.

Randall Hoven in American Thinker

“Mr. President, I’ll try to be brief.  There’s a lot to talk about.  I’d like to focus it though on the deficit, impact on the deficit, which we’re all talking about.  And I must tell you, maybe I’ve been around too long, but I am always reluctant, after being here 37 years, to tell people what the American people think.  I think it requires a little bit of humility to be able to know what the American people think.  But — and I don’t, I can’t swear I do.  I know what I think, I think I know what they think, but I’m not sure what they think.”  Vice President Joe Biden (winner of the Biden-Palin debate of 2008), Feburary 25, 2010.

Iraqpundit:

Yesterday I thought I had heard the worst of it all. I thought when the WaPo reporters called terror leader Qais Al Khazaali “cerebral,” that was as bad as it could get. But I was wrong. WaPo was topped today by the NYT, which attributes the finest qualities imaginable to none other than Moktada Al Sadr.

“Since 2005, when Iraqis elected a national assembly to draft a constitution, Mr. Sadr has proved maddeningly Delphic in his pronouncements.” Delphic?!! Mookie?!!??

The NYT writer explains why he chose the word: “He refused to support that election, as long as American troops occupied the country, but stopped short of calling for a boycott. Last year, his loyalists declared that they would not participate officially in the vote, but offered their support to independents.”

What’s with these reporters who get dazzled by the odd politician? The NYT guy says: “On Thursday, Mr. Sadr’s stance was clear. He called the coming vote an act of ‘political resistance,’ a compliment in Mr. Sadr’s lexicon.” Lexicon?!! Mookie?!!?? This is the guy who can barely put two words together. Remember what his, um, lexicon includes? This is the guy who argues that soccer is an Israeli conspiracy to distract young men. His “Delphic” ness is so nonexistent that his handlers rarely, if ever, permit him to speak in public. Mookie pretty much always speaks via a statement he most likely has never seen. In other words, it was written by his handlers. Maybe the NYT should notice what he writes: “’We cannot say at this time that the elections are illegitimate,’ he said in a statement.”

I have yet to meet anyone here in Iraq who thinks Moktada is anything but a buffoon. I’m not saying he has no supporters. But the words I hear over and over again used to describe him are “child” and “fool.” Nobody has said Moktada was wise, at least not that I have heard.

Of course there are people in Iraq who believe Moktada Al Sadr would make a fine prime minister based on his lineage. But there are people who are ready to vote Nancy Ajram in as prime minister. There are days when I can see the wisdom of voting for Ajram, but there are never days when voting for Mookie is an option.

Via Instapundit who notes, “Personally, I’d like to see some Congressmen forced to testify before a panel of car dealers, about the budget deficit’s Sudden Acceleration Problem.”

Toyota has recalled millions of cars and trucks—4.2 million to replace floor mats that might impede throttle-pedal travel, and 2.4 million to install a shim behind the electronic pedal assembly. All of the affected pedal assemblies were made by Canadian supplier CTS. Toyota’s boffins have documented a problem that can make a few of these pedals slow to return, and maybe even stick down. Problem solved.

But the media, Congress—and personal-injury lawyers—smell the blood in the water. Not to diminish the injuries and a few deaths attributable to these very real mechanical problems, but they’re statistically only a very small blip, which may explain why Toyota took so long to identify the issue, especially when it has symptoms similar to the similarly documented floor mat recall. Plus, sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) is notoriously difficult to diagnose because, more often then not, the problem can’t be repeated in front of a mechanic.

Let’s not forget the Audi SUA episode back in the ’80s; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration eventually concluded that there was no mechanical problem. The culprit, as hard as this is to admit, was most likely driver error. To put the issue into context, in the last decade, there were about 24,000 customer complaints about SUA involving almost every major automaker. The NHTSA investigated fewer than 50.

The issue now is whether there’s a more insidious problem unrelated to the two recalls already extant. Specifically, whether there’s some design flaw in the entire concept of electronic throttle control. Some are questioning whether electromagnetic interference from devices like cellphones could be contributing to the acceleration problems.

Mark Steyn:

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen – because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18.

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 – or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: 10 grandparents have six kids have four grandkids – i.e., the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility – the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared with Spain and Italy, Greece has the least-worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when 10 grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

By the way, you don’t have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian “public service” of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. Still, America as a whole is not yet Greece. A couple of years ago, when I wrote my book “America Alone,” I put the Social Security debate at that time in a bit of perspective: On 2005 figures, projected public pensions liabilities were expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of GDP. In Greece, the figure was 25 percent: in other words, head for the hills, Armageddon outta here, The End. Since then, the situation has worsened in both countries. And, really, the comparison is academic: Whereas America still has a choice, Greece isn’t going to have a 2040 – not without a massive shot of Reality Juice.

Is that likely to happen? At such moments, I like to modify Gerald Ford. When seeking to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, President Ford liked to say: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” Which is true enough. But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the point Greece is at. Its socialist government has been forced into supporting a package of austerity measures. The Greek people’s response is: Nuts to that. Public sector workers have succeeded in redefining time itself: Every year, they receive 14 monthly payments. You do the math. And for about seven months’ work: for many of them the work day ends at 2:30 p.m. And, when they retire, they get 14 monthly pension payments. In other words: Economic reality is not my problem. I want my benefits. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, who cares as long as they keep the checks coming until I croak?

We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government: Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.

Dear Michael,

I see you’re back to your ranting about Social Security. In Tuesday’s column you wrote about GOP Congressman Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future.

Social Security comes in for particular abuse. Ryan states that “Social Security’s shrinking value and fragile condition pose a serious problem. . . . To maintain the program’s significant role as a part of the retirement security safety net, Social Security’s mission must be fulfilled . . . without bankrupting future workers.”

One doesn’t want to be picky about an elected congressman’s words, but with all due respect, these words are pure bilge. They come straight from the talking points of Social Security’s historical enemies: conservatives who have never believed that the government should play such an important role in people’s retirement planning, and mutual fund and insurance companies that hanker for the business generated by millions of Americans looking for a profitable place to park their retirement assets.

Golly, why would anyone think that?

Take my own example: my wife is a teacher and thus exempt from Social Security. Even though she has worked 12 fewer years than I, and even though the state teacher’s retirement fund (CalStrs) lost 1/3 of its value since the meltdown, she is still on track to receive twice as much per month as Social Security will pay me.

Conclusion? Social Security is a bad deal — it pays a stinking 3% return. Any stock fund with those results would be out of business.

Chile once has a system like ours (Ponzi scheme), but hired an American economist to help them convert to a mandatory, private system. Today, even the lowest peon in Chile has assets. Assets he can use for retirement or leave to his heirs.

You mock President Bush for trying to modify our system to let young people invest a small portion of their Social Security contribution into an index fund. But you and your Democrats — the party of No — threw a tantrum.

By the way, even when the program starts paying out more in benefits than it collects in payroll tax, that’s not a “crisis,” as it’s often portrayed — it’s the expected outcome of changes implemented after 1982, when the tax was raised sharply to provide a cushion against the coming wave of baby-boomer retirements. The accumulated surplus in the program’s trust fund at the end of 2008 was $2.4 trillion.

Michael, do you really think we’re that gullible?

Yes, there is a file drawer with IOUs from the federal government for $2.4 trillion owed to SS. But the feds are deep in the red, so how can they make good on the debt? By taxing people who still have jobs!

Seriously, how can debt owed by one arm of the government to another be counted as an asset?

You might not care, but I have kids and grandkids who will be stuck paying this off. I guess that’s just the price we pay for folks like you who make a fetish of government control.

Yours,

Jim Bass

Hugh Hewitt:

The New York Times lead story at this hour is a classic of agenda journalism:  Blame gridlock for the deeply worrying deficit and debt problem, and not the Democrats who control both houses of the Congress and the presidency.

When the GOP lost control of the House and Senate, the annual budget deficit was $161 billion.  President Obama’s budget for next year –with no stimulus and no TARP– calls for $1.6 trillion in red ink.

Thus in three years of democratic control the deficit has swell from 161 billion to 1,600 billion.

That’s the opposite of gridlock –that is one party rule by the party of massive spending and unlimited pork.

The president and his congressional allies can indeed use reconciliation on budget matters with no controversy whatsoever.  They have the ability to slice and dice the deficit.  On fiscal matters they only need 51 votes in the Senate, and they have 59.  They can raise taxes.  And they most assuredly can dramatically and deeply cut the spending and the size of government.

But the Democrats don’t want to.  MSM’s unwillingness to candidly cover this obvious fact –this defining reality of D.C.– is why it is so utterly out of gas with the average American.

“Gridlock” is MSM code for “It isn’t Obama’s fault,” when in fact the deficit and debt are his fault and will remain his fault.  He doesn’t need a bipartisan commission to lead the charge against the out-of-control spending and massively burgeoning federal government.  He needs a bipartisan commission to cover the fact that he wants the spending to rise and the government to expand.

Victor Davis Hanson:

There is no reason to review all the standard reasons why the American people are terrified of an all-powerful federal or state government. The case has been made in thousands of elegant treatises and books, and is best reflected in the Constitution and the written work of the Founding Fathers.

But let me list a few other, less elegantly expressed worries, many anecdotal in nature.

1) Juvenal’s “Who will police the police?”

One of the scariest things about government is its exemption from laws by virtue of its monopoly on lawmaking and enforcement. I see this every day, from the mundane to the profound.

Go to any downtown in America, and one can see how some supposedly efficient, job-creating con-artist once promised a new hotel, stadium, or enterprise zone, then convinced the city council to steal land from some and hand it over to others (e.g., him) — and left an ungodly mess in his wake.

That power to condemn creates a real paranoia in our own lives. While we can defend our homes from the intruder, there is no remedy against eminent domain, especially once we have lost faith in the collective wisdom of those who flock to political office.

On the more mundane level, this week I saw the following examples of government exemption. A local police car randomly did a running stop at a 4-way intersection (should I have called 911?); a city bus driver (very common) cell phoning against California law (report him to the cop running the intersection?); a city garbage truck spewing trash out its top as it sped down Freeway 41 (call his cousins at the state EPA?).

We are all routinely pulled over for any of the above infractions. But the larger the government, the more its power, and so the more its employees feel that they are royal and exempt from enforcement. In other words, big government creates millions who feel the law does not pertain to themselves. Ask Tom Daschle, Duke Cunningham, Chris Dodd, or Timothy Geithner. The result is an increasingly lawless society.

Political push-back stalls stock market rally on Wall Street

Washington spent months nursing the financial system back to health after the 2008 economic crisis, stabilizing then reviving battered markets and ultimately restoring trillions of dollars in investor losses. Wall Street’s political fortunes have not fared as well.

Now, an aggressive stance against the bankers, financiers and even government officials popularly blamed for causing the crisis is gaining political momentum, and there are signs it is eroding the very financial stability the government championed.

Moves to rein in the country’s biggest banks and talk of blocking the reappointment of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S. Bernanke torpedoed confidence in the stock market last week, sending share prices into their steepest decline in nearly a year. Analysts fear conditions could worsen before they improve, as anger at Wall Street morphs into uncertainty about its business practices and prospects.

The anti-Wall Street mood darkened after President Obama’s Democratic Party suffered a stunning upset in the Massachusetts Senate race. That loss, attributed to concerns that the administration wasn’t focused sharply enough on the country’s continuing economic woes, came as many of the financial firms bailed out by taxpayers in the past two years reported massive profits and announced another round of big bonuses.

By Friday’s closing bell on the stock exchange floor, the Dow Jones industrial average had plunged 4 percent over four days. The Chicago Board Options Exchange’s Volatility Index, which measures the degree to which investors expect stocks to swing and is often called the “fear gauge,” had shot up 50 percent for the week. And in a move reminiscent of the depths of the financial crisis, investors piled into government bonds, seeking cover from the turbulence.

Obama Seen as Anti-Business by 77% of U.S. Investors

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) — U.S. investors overwhelmingly see President Barack Obama as anti-business and question his ability to manage a financial crisis, according to a Bloomberg survey.

The global quarterly poll of investors and analysts who are Bloomberg subscribers finds that 77 percent of U.S. respondents believe Obama is too anti-business and four-out-of-five are only somewhat confident or not confident of his ability to handle a financial emergency.

The poll also finds a decline in Obama’s overall favorability rating one year after taking office. He is viewed favorably by 27 percent of U.S. investors. In an October poll, 32 percent in the U.S. held a positive impression.

“Investors no longer feel they can trust their instincts to take risks,” said poll respondent David Young, a managing director for a broker dealer in New York. Young cited Obama’s efforts to trim bonuses and earnings, make health care his top priority over jobs and plans to tax “the rich or advantaged.”

Carlos Vadillo, a fixed-income analyst at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in San Francisco, said Obama has been in a “constant war” with the banking system, using “fat-cat bankers and other misnomers to describe a business model which supports a large portion of America.”

Oh, the soaring optimism of the Great Society…

“Head Start,” the flagship pre-kindergarten program introduced in 1965, has been a $166 billion failure. That’s the upshot of a sophisticated multi-year study just released by the Department of Health and Human Services.

An earlier iteration of the study, published in 2005, had found a few modest improvements in the language skills of participating students while they were enrolled in the program. But by the end of the first grade, even those few effects have disappeared, according to the follow-up released this month. Out of 44 separate cognitive tests given to former Head Start students at the end of the first grade, only two showed even marginally significant effects. The other 42 showed no statistically significant effect at all.

But even that overstates the case for Head Start. That’s because, on each of the 44 separate tests, there is a 1 in 10 chance of a false positive: a test result that appears to show a positive impact but is really just a random fluke. With so many test results, we’d expect to see at least a few false positives. Statisticians have ways to control for this problem, and when the authors themselves applied such a control, they found that the two apparently “significant” effects vanished.

What’s more, this applies to all the non-cognitive tests administered to students as well. After controlling for the likelihood of false positives, the study’s authors found no “socio-emotional” benefits and no “parenting practice” benefits either. No benefits to Head Start of any kind at the end of first grade. None.

Why is this important? Because $166 billion has been squandered on this program over the past half century, and the Obama administration is wasting even more, even faster. The president already increased annual spending on Head Start by more than a third last year, from $6.8 billion to $9.2 billion. He has made clear he does not intend to stop there.

Sheesh, no wonder the stimulus didn’t work. Mike Flynn at Big Government:

The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (the Stimulus Bill) has been such an epic failure, that even the mainstream media has started to notice. The White House has tacitly acknowledged this and recently announced that it would no longer ‘count’ jobs ‘created or saved’ by the Stimulus. The basic problem is that the bulk of the spending went to programs or projects that have nothing to do with economic growth.

The latest example of this is a $500,000 grant to Michael Mann, Professor at Penn State University and unintended c0-star of the ClimateGate e-mail scandal. The leaked e-mails revealed collaboration among scientists to stifle dissenting views on the extent of man-made global warming.

Mann is also the creator of the “Hockey Stick” graph, which purported to show a sharp increase in recent temperatures. That work has been thoroughly discredited by researcher Stephen McIntyre. Yet, in June 2009, the National Science Foundation awarded Mann a three-year $500,000 to further study the climate’s response to human activity. According to the grant award:

The broader impacts involve supporting postdoctoral scholars and graduate students and contributing to the understanding of abrupt climate change.

So, the research is supposed to give us a better ‘understanding of abrupt climate change.’ Mind you, the research isn’t to determine whether there is abrupt climate change occurring. Given that Mann is known for using “tricks” to finesse his data, the National Science Foundation will not be pleased with the results.

George Will thinks the Constitution might stop Obamacare:

Although Democrats think their health-care legislation faces smooth sailing to implementation, there is a rock dead ahead — a constitutional challenge to the legislation’s core. Democrats who assume it is constitutional to make it mandatory for Americans to purchase health insurance should answer some questions:

Would it be constitutional for the government to legislate compulsory calisthenics for all Americans? If not, why not? If it would be, in what sense does the nation still have constitutional, meaning limited, government?

Supporters of the mandate say Congress can impose the legislation under the enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce. Since the New Deal, courts have made this power capacious enough to include regulating intrastate activity that “substantially affects” interstate commerce. Hence Congress could constitutionally ban racial discrimination in “public accommodations” — restaurants, motels, etc. — as an impediment to interstate commercial activity.

Opponents of the mandate say: Unless the commerce clause is infinitely elastic — in which case, Congress can do anything — it does not authorize Congress to forbid the inactivity of not making a commercial transaction, of not purchasing a product (health insurance) from a private provider.

“Congress can regulate commercial activities in which people choose to engage, but cannot require that they engage in those commercial activities.” So says Sen. Orrin Hatch, who also notes that if Congress can mandate particular purchases to help the economy, there was no need for Cash for Clunkers: Congress could have ordered people to buy cars (with subsidies, if necessary). Why not the Anti-Couch Potato Act to Make Calisthenics Mandatory and to Impose a $50 Excise Tax on Cheeseburgers Because Unhealthy Lifestyles Affect Interstate Commerce?

Why? Because it’s not about education (or healthcare for that matter), it’s about control.

The Dems are always demanding a “conversation” about race. Given that most of the students affected by this are black, why not start here?

The leaders of D.C.’s school choice movement, Kevin P. Chavous (former D.C. Councilman) and Virginia Walden Ford (executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice), today issued the following statement:

“House and Senate Appropriators this week ignored the wishes of D.C.’s mayor, D.C.’s public schools chancellor, a majority of D.C.’s city council, and more than 70 percent of D.C. residents and have mandated the slow death of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. This successful school voucher program—for D.C.’s poorest families—has allowed more than 3,300 children to attend the best schools they have ever known.

The decision to end the program, a decision buried in a thousand-page spending bill and announced right before the holidays, destroys the hopes and dreams of thousands of D.C. families. Parents and children have rallied countless times over the past year in support of reauthorization and in favor of strengthening the OSP.

Yet, despite the clearly positive results and the proven success of this program, Sen. Dick Durbin, Rep. Jose Serrano, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Secretary Arne Duncan worked together to kill the OSP. Funding the program only for existing children shrinks the program each year, compromises the federal evaluation of the program, denies entry to the siblings of existing participants, and punishes those children waiting in line by sentencing them to failing and often unsafe schools.

What is incredibly disappointing to low-income families in Washington, D.C. has been the silence of President Barack Obama. The President, who benefited from K-12 scholarships himself, worked on behalf of low-income families in Chicago, and exercises school choice as a parent, has stood silently on the sidelines while his Secretary of Education belittled the importance of helping such a small number of children in the nation’s capital.

Now, the fate of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and the low-income children it serves and could serve depends on the willingness of Congressional supporters to insist that the FY 2010 budget allows additional children to participate in the OSP. We call on President Obama and Senator Durbin to stand up and do the right thing. Stand with the children of low-income families in Washington, D.C. who deserve access to a quality education right now—not five years from now—but right now. These children deserve that opportunity.”

Dr. Gilbert Ross in TCS Daily

The pharmaceutical industry gets blamed for many flaws in America’s healthcare system. Witness an editorial in last week’s The Lancet, a widely read British medical journal calling for new antibiotics to be created.

The Lancet editors (likely including editor in chief Richard Horton, who published a tragic anti-vaccine article in that journal eleven years ago) wish that drug companies would simply ignore the potential profitability of new drug pipelines — devoting their resources to more charitable research aims in accord with the journal’s own public health goals. The editors assert that the executives in charge of Big Pharma’s long-term goals “may not perceive development of antimicrobial drugs to be attractive — owing perhaps to a clinical need restricted to short courses of therapy, and the likelihood that the drugs’ useful lives will be truncated by resistance.”

In other words, according to the “J’accuse” folks at The Lancet, Big Pharma prefers to develop blockbusters that millions of people will take for decades rather than diverting R&D budgets to fight renegade bacteria. Never mind that drugs for chronic diseases such as heart disease and high blood pressure benefit millions — even while contributing to the financial wellbeing of the drug makers, allowing them to invent more lifesaving drugs for future generations.

The editors in London overlook the fact that financial incentives are the engine of the pharmaceutical industry (and that regulatory obstacles to developing and bringing to market effective new antibiotics are myriad, increasing costs). New drugs will not miraculously appear just because The Lancet, even in consort with all knowledgeable authorities, suddenly realizes we are in desperate need of them.

This attitude — that drug companies should become charitable endeavors– is not confined to The Lancet. When Marcia Angell was editor at the New England Journal of Medicine in 2006, she wrote a book in effect demanding that drug-makers stop producing expensive new drugs and settle for the generic versions, abandoning insufficiently-unique “me-too” drugs as well — one size should be good enough to fit all. After all, why should drug companies exploit sick patients for profit?

But going down that path would lead to stagnation in drug pipelines, and the current scarcity of effective new drugs (including antibiotics) would soon be looked back upon as an innovative Golden Age, as we consigned our children and grandchildren to vintage-2009 drug options.

Rather than pointing fingers, maybe the Lancet mega-brains should consider the reasons new antibiotics and other potential lifesaving drugs are in such short supply:

• Drug companies now fear to invest in hugely expensive and decade-long drug development and clinical trials when pressures from every side encourage short-term, profit-making research areas: lifestyle drugs and cardiovascular risk-reducers help create profits to re-invest.
• The companies have to pay millions of dollars in what amounts to blackmail to get “a seat at the table” with government negotiators — only to find themselves looked upon as a budget-gap-filling item on the menu rather than as guests.
• More and more stringent rules govern so-called “conflict of interest” practices, limiting interaction between academia and industry and restricting medical communications between doctors and drug companies
• Predatory tort lawyers sue perceived deep-pocketed companies for any untoward reaction
• Even the President implies that drug makers should be content to produce a cheaper “red pill” and pass on the expensive new “blue pill.”
• Now, even the once-dead proposal to allow “imported” drugs (cheap thanks to foreign price controls, yes — but of uncertain provenance and components) into our pharmacies has been resurrected to haunt us again in the new Senate “health reform” bill.

From the Tax Prof blog:

IRS Has 70% Error Rate in Issuance of Taxpayer ID Numbers, Resulting in Fraudulent Tax Refunds

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration yesterday released Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers Are Being Issued Without Sufficient Supporting Documentation (2010-40-005):

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) today publicly released its review of the IRS’s processing of applications for Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs).

TIGTA reviewed a sample of ITIN applications and found that almost 70% contained significant errors and/or raised concerns that should have prevented the issuance of an ITIN. The IRS estimates that it has issued more than 14 million ITINs as of December 2008.

And

IRS Cannot Verify Taxpayer Eligibility for 2/3 of $325 Billion of Stimulus Tax Benefits

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration today released Evaluation of the Internal Revenue Service’s Capability to Ensure Proper Use of Recovery Act Funds (2010-41-011):

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration today publicly released its review of the IRS’s ability to verify taxpayer eligibility for tax benefits and credits provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The Recovery Act contains 56 tax provisions with a potential cost of more than $325 billion that are intended to provide tax relief for individuals and businesses. These include 20 provisions for individuals that provide tax relief to working or retired Americans and their families. Thirty-six additional provisions provide tax relief and incentives for businesses, including provisions that encourage investment in sources of renewable energy and promote the hiring of unemployed veterans. They also allow for the sale of bonds to provide for construction, financing, environmental and manufacturing improvements.

Sen. Harry Reid bribed senators to advance his Obamacare bill.

…Senate Democrats said the payoffs are nothing unusual, and in fact typical.

“People fight for their own states. That’s the nature of a democracy,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said on “Fox News Sunday,” defending Nelson against withering attacks from the GOP.

“This is just part of the normal legislative process,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

And that’s the problem, you dope.

As a measure of just how typical they are, a slew of payoffs and concessions have been struck over the past several months.

– Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., won between $100 million and $300 million in additional federal aid for her state’s Medicaid population. The deal, secured before she cast her critical vote in favor of bringing the health bill to the floor, was immediately dubbed the “Louisiana Purchase,”  though the actual Louisiana Purchase was considerably cheaper.

– Vermont and Massachusetts got $1.2 billion in Medicaid money — a change that was described as a correction to the current system which exempts those two states because they have robust health care systems. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders also boasted Saturday that he requested and won an investment worth between $10 and $14 billion for community health centers.

– Western states secured higher federal reimbursement rates for doctors and hospitals that serve Medicare patients. The provision covers the low-population “frontier” states and applies to Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming — the latter two states are both represented by two Republicans, but ended up as beneficiaries anyway since they qualify. The legislative language defines frontier states as states where at least 50 percent of the counties have fewer than six people per square mile. Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, defended the “special deal,” telling “Fox News Sunday” that those five states were getting an increase in reimbursements because they get the lowest amount in the country. “That doesn’t offend me at all,” he said. “It’s in fact, fair.”

– Florida, New York and Pennsylvania — where five of six senators are Democrats — will have their seniors’ Medicare Advantage benefits protected, even as the program sees massive cuts elsewhere.

– Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., reportedly secured expanded Medicare coverage for victims of asbestos exposure in a mine in Libby, Mont.

– One unknown state is receiving $100 million for a “health care facility” affiliated with an academic health center at a university that contains the state’s only “public academic medical and dental school.” It’s unclear for which state that language was written.

– Nebraska’s Nelson won permanent federal aid for his state’s expanded Medicaid population, a benefit worth up to $100 million over 10 years. Other states get the federal aid for three years, but Nebraska’s benefit is indefinite. His state also got an exemption for nonprofit insurance companies from a health insurance company tax. Many believe this was targeted at Mutual of Omaha, but senior Democratic aides would not confirm that.

An LA County — government run — killed so many patients it had to be shut down, even after five years of attempted reforms.

The LA schools, a failure by any measure, just figured out something basic.

Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines ordered administrators Thursday to weed out ineffective new teachers before they become permanent, acknowledging that the nation’s second-largest school system has largely failed to adequately evaluate teacher performance.

“This district can be rightly criticized for the promotion of ineffective teachers over the years. That is about to change,” Cortines said. “We do not owe poor performers a job.”

Well, duh. Did it take a new educational theory to learn that basic truth?

Taking aim at weak probationary teachers now could spare the district from firing others who are more effective but have slightly less experience next summer when there will probably be another round of layoffs. Teachers must be let go by seniority, according to state law, which has forced the Los Angeles Unified School District to ignore performance in its dismissals, officials said.

Hmm. Do you think the teachers union got that law passed?

The announcement came a week after The Times presented L.A. Unified with the results of an investigation that found the district often doesn’t meaningfully assess new teachers before they are granted tenure. The story is scheduled to appear in Sunday’s paper.

What a concept: weed out bad teachers before you offer them lifetime employment.

The global warmongers’ response to “Climate Gate” has been to say that the underlying science is sound and that the scandal doesn’t mean a thing.

However, as CBS reported a few days ago, this is not true.

In fact, the society of American physicists is experiencing internal dissension as it weighs its position on man-made global warming.

The scientist who will head the American Physical Society’s review of its 2007 statement calling for immediate reductions of carbon dioxide is Princeton’s Robert Socolow, a prominent supporter of the link between CO2 and global warming who has warned of possible “catastrophic consequences” of climate change.

Socolow’s research institute at Princeton has received well over $20 million in grants dealing with climate change and carbon reduction, plus an additional $2 million a year from BP and still more from the federal government. In an interview published by Princeton’s public relations office, Socolow called CO2 a “climate problem” that governments need to address.

“It is Socolow whose entire research funding stream, well over a million dollars a year, depends on continued alarm over global warming,” says William Happer, a fellow Princeton University professor and head of the Happer physics lab who has raised the question of a conflict of interest. The reason: the ostensibly neutral person charged with evaluating a statement endorsing man-made global warming is a leading proponent of precisely that theory whose funding is tied to that theory.

Liberals are quick to find financial motives for “skeptics,” yet are blind to the corruption inherent in Big Science spending Big Government $$$.

As previously reported by CBSNews.com, Happer and other members of the APS have been urging the society to take a second look at the 2007 statement, which claims the evidence for the CO2-global warming link is “incontrovertible” and “we must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.” Their letter circulated last month says: “By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen… We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done.”

Neither the current APS president, Harvard’s Cherry Murray, nor its incoming president, Princeton’s Curtis Callan, replied to questions on Thursday, and Socolow could not be reached for comment. The APS leadership has chosen not to withdraw its statement but has authorized a limited review of the language’s “clarity and tone” — although that was announced before the embarrassing leak from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit occurred.

Hal Lewis, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has been an APS member for 65 years, says that he asked both the current and incoming APS presidents to require that Socolow recuse himself from a review of this subject, and both refused.

That means the review will be “chaired by a guy who is hip deep in conflicts of interest, running a million-dollar program that is utterly dependent on global warming funding,” Lewis says. In addition, he points out that the group charged with taking a second look at the 2007 statement, the Panel on Public Affairs, is the same body that drafted it in the first place. That, “too has a smell of people investigating themselves,” Lewis says.

One works for the government; the other pays their way.

Michael Medved:

An astonishing review of federal pay data by USA Today shows a shocking rise in federal hiring rolls as well as government salaries. Since the beginning of the recession in December, 2007, private employment has gone down 6.3%, but the federal, non-military workforce has expanded by 9.8%.

The average salary for federal workers has soared 6.6% in just eighteen months, and now stands at $71,000 – more than $30,000 above the private sector average. Nineteen percent of the federal workforce now consists of six-figure-salary jobs, and 22,000 federal workers draw salaries above $170,000, an increase of 93%.

While the public rightly protests big pay packages for government-assisted banks that lost billions, we should be similarly indignant about all the new workers and skyrocketing salaries for the government itself, which is already operating trillions of dollars in the red.

Given our generousity, you’d figure federal employees would be the first to pay their taxes. Wrong.

Federal workers owe more than $3 billion in income taxes they failed to pay in 2008. According to Internal Revenue Service documents, 276,300 federal employees and retirees owe $3,042,200,000.

The IRS tracks the voluntary compliance rate of federal employees and retirees each year, and each year feds come up short. The one bright spot in this year’s report is that after several years of a steady increase, the amount owed by feds is down from the previous year.

Robert Steinback is a diabetic who worked for the Miami Herald for 24 years before being downsized.

His health insurance coverage will expire in January and no one will cover him. He will die without expensive treatment he cannot afford.

It’s hard not to notice the irony of the debate in Washington over health insurance reform. Some politicians and their supporters say they will work to defeat the bills because they cost too much and might raise taxes. Too bad I can’t offer those people a choice: Would you rather have a higher tax burden, or Type 1 diabetes? I’d gladly trade, if I could.

Some who describe themselves as prolife say they will oppose the bills if there is even a hint of funding support for abortion rights. The American Journal of Public Health estimates that 45,000 people die in the United States each year for lack of health insurance coverage. Failure to pass health care reform is going to kill a lot of people like me — so how exactly does defeating health insurance reform qualify as prolife?

Abortion is pro-active killing if you define a fetus as a living being. Compelling citizens to pay for something they consider morally wrong is the issue.

Still, Steinback surely has a point.

But suppose he needs a heart transplant that costs $658,000 (the average in 2007). Does he deserve that as a matter of course? This procedure didn’t even exist when I was in high school.

There is no easy answer.

Some say they won’t accept a so-called government-option health insurance plan. I don’t understand people who fear government bureaucrats — who have no profit motive and ultimately must answer to the people — yet feel fully at ease with corporate bureaucrats whose sole interest is the bottom line and answer only to shareholders.

People fear government bureaucrats precisely because they do not answer to the people. Witness the decline of public schools.

Medicare loses 10% of its budget to fraud every year. Why? Because bureaucrats do not lose their jobs — they just pass along costs, which raise taxes or deficits.

A private insurer would never tolerate such losses because it couldn’t  compete. It would go out of business. That’s why the private sector is responsive — we can easily fire them.

The totalitarian nature of the left occasionally bursts into the open. Consider this editorial in the Canadian Financial Post arguing for imposing a one-child policy on the world:

…The fix is simple. It’s dramatic. And yet the world’s leaders don’t even have this on their agenda in Copenhagen. Instead there will be photo ops, posturing, optics, blah-blah-blah about climate science and climate fraud, announcements of giant wind farms, then cap-and-trade subsidies.

None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed. Unfortunately, there are powerful opponents. Leaders of the world’s big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control. And most political leaders in emerging economies perpetuate a disastrous Catch-22: Many children (i. e. sons) stave off hardship in the absence of a social safety net or economic development, which, in turn, prevents protections or development.

China has proven that birth restriction is smart policy. Its middle class grows, all its citizens have housing, health care, education and food, and the one out of five human beings who live there are not overpopulating the planet.

For those who balk at the notion that governments should control family sizes, just wait until the growing human population turns twice as much pastureland into desert as is now the case, or when the Amazon is gone, the elephants disappear for good and wars erupt over water, scarce resources and spatial needs.

The point is that Copenhagen’s talking points are beside the point.

The only fix is if all countries drastically reduce their populations, clean up their messes and impose mandatory conservation measures.

Jonah Goldberg notes:

One of the simultaneously heartening and dismaying aspects of the Obama era is how it demonstrates that bad ideas never, ever, ever, die. They can go into remission, to be sure, but the the bacillus lives on. Via Drudge, I just read this hideous call for a planetary one-child policy.

I don’t have the time to go through all of the arguments why Diane Francis’s supposedly brave truth-telling is disgusting and idiotic, but the good news is that I’ll have plenty of opportunities in the future!

But one point does cry out to be made. Imagine if someone wrote an op-ed saying that we need a planetary ban on abortion. Feminists would get their dresses over their heads in outrage about such a naked assault on “reproductive freedom.” But here is a woman in a very prestigious Canadian newspaper arguing, in effect, that every country in the world should force women everywhere to have an abortion if they already have a child. Put aside, for a moment, the pro-life objections to this. Even if you think the unborn are really just a bunch of cells, mere “uterine contents” with no more moral import than fingernail clippings, how on earth can anyone believe in “reproductive freedom” and not be absolutely horrified by the police-state evil of such proposals?

LA is deep in the red, but has money for this.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will lead a delegation of nearly a dozen Los Angeles officials to Copenhagen this week as part of a business and environmental trip tied to the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

Villaraigosa will leave Saturday for his first stop in Berlin, where he will meet with government and business leaders involved in the solar power movement.

“The mayor hopes to advance some talks that have been going on and talk of the benefits that are available in Los Angeles with tax breaks in economic zones and the Community Redevelopment areas,” spokeswoman Sarah Hamilton said Monday.

Europe and the 27 countries in the European Economic Community account for $30 billion in business in Los Angeles and, Villaraigosa said, there is wide interest in what Los Angeles has done on the environmental front.

“In four years – and no one thought it was possible – the DWP has gone from 4 percent renewables to 15 percent and we are looking to get to 20 percent,” Villaraigosa told a group of environmental leaders Monday meeting in his office, where he talked of his plans for the summit.

Yep, and rates have shot up. Way to go, Speedy.

As abortion took center stage in the Senate’s historic debate over health care reform, Sen. Barbara Boxer was right in the middle of the fight, comparing an effort to limit women’s access to abortion to restricting men’s access to Viagra.

Taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing Viagra or any other recreational drug.

William McGurn:

…at a time when many claim to see no difference between the two political parties, President Obama and his Democratic allies are making one distinction paramount: their operating assumption that bigger government is better government.

Many of the people in the Obama administration, the president included, enjoy all the credentials we associate with the best and the brightest: the right schools, the good grades, the successful careers. Alas, whether it be allocating health care or defining the kind of jobs the economy ought to create, the policies they favor suggest a strong belief that they know what’s best not just for themselves, but for everyone else too.

Of course, the kind of people who are apt to push for government-imposed solutions are those who are also apt to believe they will be the ones imposing decisions, not the ones who have to live with decisions imposed by others. Sometimes that’s because they enjoy the wealth that gives them escape hatches unavailable to the less affluent, such as their ability to ensure that their own children never have to set foot in a public school. Mostly, however, their trust in government reflects their confidence that they have all the answers and that it’s government’s job to enforce them.

What about conservatives? Don’t we have confidence in our judgment and abilities? Of course we do. The difference is that we trust free citizens to make decisions about themselves—and are skeptical about government. As someone who worked inside a White House, I say you really believe government should be small when you see your friends running it.

Now, I know there are people who believe that George W. Bush was a Big Government Republican. And you can make arguments about spending and so forth. Even so, however, there’s simply no comparison with the Obama administration.

That’s because conservatives believe that even our smartest friend is no match for the collective wisdom of the marketplace. If we were to wake up and find that someone we knew well had been given control over some important part of the economy, the conservative would not likely think, “Everything will be fine now that Harry’s in charge.” Far more likely we’d be saying to ourselves, “If it weren’t for his wife, Harry would be wearing red and purple socks every day—and we’re giving him that kind of power?”

Mr. Obama and his team appear to be unburdened by such modesty.

Read on.

One hand destroys jobs, while the other tries to create them. Sheesh.

James Pethokoukis in Reuters:

Here’s the theory about the new U.S. position on greenhouse gases. The official finding by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that the emissions endanger human health sets the stage for permit requirements on power plants, factories and automobiles. It also supplies President Barack Obama with more evidence at the Copenhagen summit of a “new normal” in America when it comes to climate policy. And back home, it supposedly gives a nudge to the Senate where cap-and-trade legislation is stuck on the back burner.

But in practice, the only thing certain about the EPA ruling is more regulatory uncertainty leading to less economic growth and fewer jobs. Bad news, to be sure, for American businesses already flummoxed by the mercurial state of healthcare, financial and tax reform. Call it Obama’s Uncertainty Tax.

It’s astounding how much damage this band of clowns can cause the nation in just one year.

Ilya Shapiro and Travis Cushman in The American:

Today the Supreme Court hears a case on the unconstitutional Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. To uphold checks and balances—and for the sake of the economy—the Supreme Court should strike down this new branch of government.

Imagine a government agency with the authority to create and enforce laws, prosecute and adjudicate violations, and impose criminal penalties. Then throw in the power to levy taxes to pay for all the above. And for good measure, make the agency independent of political oversight.

As any middle-schooler could tell you, such an entity goes against every principle of American civics. Still, it’s an accurate description of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB, pronounced “peek-a-boo”).

PCAOB enforces the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“Sarbox”) by monitoring public companies’ accounting practices. The board wields all the powers traditionally divided among the three branches of government and so is widely considered its own branch—or, rather, a government in microcosm.

An accounting firm subject to Sarbox (Beckstead and Watts, LLP), along with a nonprofit advocacy group (the Free Enterprise Fund), filed a lawsuit challenging PCAOB’s constitutionality. They contend that the board violates separation of powers principles and the appointments clause, which requires that the president appoint high government officials and that even “inferior officers” report to “heads of departments.” Today, the Supreme Court hears arguments in the case that will decide PCAOB’s fate, Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB.

Read on.