Liberal Politics in Action

The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.

Despite its good intentions, San Francisco is not leading the country in gay marriage. Despite its good intentions, it is not stopping wars. Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, its homeless problem is worse than any comparable city's. Despite its spending more money per capita, period, than almost any city in the nation, San Francisco has poorly managed, budget-busting capital projects, overlapping social programs no one is certain are working, and a transportation system where the only thing running ahead of schedule is the size of its deficit.

...Amazingly, this gets worse. After securing the bond funding to save Laguna Honda as a hospital for the elderly, the Department of Public Health began transferring younger, often dangerous and mentally ill patients there and mixing them among the old people. This went about as well as you'd think: A 2006 state and federal licensing survey noted numerous instances of elder abuse, staff abuse, and patients toting drugs, alcohol, and even loaded weapons. One patient was assaulted four times in four months; to address this problem, staff erected signs reading "No Hitting." (That didn't work.) To cap it off, elder activists now worry that a 2009 Department of Public Health–commissioned report will pave the way for even more relatively young, mentally ill patients heading to Laguna Honda. The massively overbudget, behind-schedule hospital may not even end up primarily serving the elderly population that voters were promised it would.

Read the whole thing. San Francisco municipal government makes the DC municipal government look competent.

Circling the Wagons

Physics Group Splinters Over Global Warming Review

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.

..."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.

Wait, it gets better!

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.

And the warmers wonder how people could ever doubt! When a company's books are called into question by the shareholders, the audit isn't handed over to the people keeping those books. Instead, the shareholders (and the SEC) demand an independent audit. For years, what most skeptics (and many climate scientists!) have called for is just such an audit, in the face of substantial evidence that the AGW "books" are at least slightly cooked.

Yet what we have seen over and over again, and what is on full display in the HCRU dump, is the "circle the wagons" mentality that shuts out all independent scrutiny of the details in the "books."

Instead, the response is to try to shoot those darn Injuns.

Is This the Change You Were Hoping For?

The Return of the Inflation Tax

In order to raise enough money to make their plan look like it won't add to the deficit, House Democrats have deliberately not indexed two main tax features of their plan: the $500,000 threshold for the 5.4-percentage-point income tax surcharge; and the payroll level at which small businesses must pay a new 8% tax penalty for not offering health insurance.

This is a sneaky way for politicians to pry more money out of workers every year without having to legislate tax increases. The negative effects of failing to index compound over time, yielding a revenue windfall for government as the years go on. The House tax surcharge is estimated to raise $460.5 billion over 10 years, but only $30.9 billion in 2011, rising to $68.4 billion in 2019, according to the Joint Tax Committee.

Americans of a certain age have seen this movie before...

I also recall some yak-yak from Our Puffery in Chief about only raising taxes on the rich. Being of a certain age, I remember the much less radical Bill Clinton making that same promise, and my subsequent annoyance at discovering that despite having a middle-class income at best we were somehow among "the rich."

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does play encores for the short-of-memory.

Election Night 2009

I'm kicking back with a bowl of popcorn to watch the results come in, for much the same reason a hardcore baseball fan will go watch a Little League game rather than hang out in a bar.

The pundits and partisans have spent weeks or months telling us what all the results will mean, and they're pretty much all full of crap. Without having turned on the newsfeed yet, I can tell you that Virginia is getting a GOP guv, Maine will probably turn back the anti-gay-marriage forces, NJ will have voter fraud and perhaps be contested, and that the NY 23rd is a unique situation that mostly just shows us the more strident divisions in the GOP and the right wing.

Jay Cost says it better than I do.

Wow. The pundit class is in full swing, interpreting the meaning of NY-23. "What's it say about Obama's administration?" "What's it say about the state of the Republican Party?" "What's it say for the upcoming health care debate?" So many questions. I'll do my best to answer them, each in turn.

Nothing, nothing, and nothing!

If you're watching the elections tonight rather than, say, re-runs of CSI, then you're a politics junkie like me. But you need to admit to yourself that there is little actual meaning of any national import in tonight's results. All politics is local, and we get to see a few isolated examples of the local struggle playing out without the big contextual backdrop of nation-wide contests. Enjoy it. But don't read too much into it, because there really isn't all that much there.

Capital Flight In Action

Tax refugees staging escape from New York

More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country. The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City -- meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out.

What's worse is that the families fleeing New York are being replaced by lower-income newcomers, who consequently pay less in taxes.

Naturally. Not only do they pay less in taxes, but some of them are paying a lot less in taxes than they use up in government largess, which makes the tax revenue effect larger than the raw numbers would suggest. Why, you'd almost think they had monetary motivations...

Hey, I told you so.

Re-Branding...

Pelosi: Health care 'public option' needs new name

A government-sponsored "public option" for health care lives, though it may be more attractive to skeptics if it goes by a different moniker, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday.

In an appearance at a Florida senior center, the Democratic leader referred to the so-called public option as "the consumer option." Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., appeared by Pelosi's side and used the term "competitive option."

Toe-MAY-toe. Toe-MAH-toe. Giant Wooden Rabbit. Giant Wooden Badger. What's in a name, right? Sing it all together, boys and girls!

Branded!
Marked with a coward's shame.
What do you do when you're branded,
Will you fight for your name?

Useful Idiots

Maddow/Olbermann Invited to White House Chat with Obama, But Fox Isn't a News Organization?

The White House has sent TVNewser the complete list of those who attended the off-the-record briefing Monday: Eugene Robinson, E.J. Dionne, Ron Brownstein, John Dickerson, Rachel Maddow, Frank Rich, Jerry Seib, Maureen Dowd, Keith Olbermann, Bob Herbert, Gloria Borger, and Gwen Ifill. Several members of the staff also attended.

Nice to have a list of the top-tier anointed puppets, though it's not as if the strings weren't already obvious. And I see others have made the non-welcome list...

UPDATE: LOL. Heh. And more HEH.

Also: Reliable puppet Joe Conason didn't make the invite list? That's gotta sting.

First Amendment? What's That?

Jonathan Turley notes the Obama admin's support for speech restrictions:

Perhaps in an effort to rehabilitate the United States’ image in the Muslim world, the Obama administration has joined a U.N. effort to restrict religious speech. This country should never sacrifice freedom of expression on the altar of religion.

Seems that "wall of separation" between church and state is highly selective in the admin's eyes. Given their attempts to muzzle health insurers and the press, no one should be surprised.

Missing in Action

Journalism: Not Dead Yet

Not as long as we still have some actual journalists, such as Jake Tapper.