Global warming provokes laughter, even in the San Francisco Bay Area

The executive committee in charge of developing and implementing the carbon-reduction plans for the whole of the San Francisco Bay Area met last Thursday in Oakland. With the wide-ranging impact of these plans, it is not surprising that there was an overflow crowd of Bay Area residents there to listen:
Targets for carbon reduction are set by the California State laws known as AB32 and SB375. These laws are intended to show that California is doing its part to lessen the effects of global warming on the environment.

It didn't go as expected, however. Commissioner Rebecca Kaplan started her speech with what liberals would think of as widely-accepted and unremarkable comments. She said: "we know that the oil is running out and the planet will not survive." Watch as the audience bursts out laughing:

It's a paradox, guns-sales edition

The Daily Caller is shocked: "Gun crime continues to decrease, despite increase in gun sales." Any NRA member could have told the reporter that it is not "despite" but "because." But, that is not a concept that a liberal can easily wrap his mind around.

PREVIOUSLY on the paradoxes that vex liberal minds:
•Paradox: student test scores improve despite school funding decrease
•It's a paradox: Congress unpopular "despite record"
•"Ironically," conservatives and their children are happier
•It's a paradox!: Crime down when criminals are in jail.
•Paradox: crime is down (again)
•Paradox: few fraudulent voters if voters are required to have IDs

The Obamacare fraud

It is not just conservatives who see yesterday's Obamacare vote as the root of future disaster. Jane Hamsher, of the left-wing Firedoglake, says this is not a "universal" health care bill and it will cause insurance rates to rise. Here is her (left-wing) summary of the frauds ("myths") that Obama and Pelosi have perpetrating with this bill:

Myth	Truth
1. This is a universal health care bill.	The bill is neither universal health care nor universal health insurance. Per the CBO: Total uninsured in 2019 with no bill: 54 million Total uninsured in 2019 with Senate bill: 24 million (44%)
2. Insurance companies hate this bill	This bill is almost identical to the plan written by AHIP, the insurance company trade association, in 2009. The original Senate Finance Committee bill was authored by a former Wellpoint VP. Since Congress released the first of its health care bills on October 30, 2009, health care stocks have risen 28.35%.
3. The bill will significantly bring down insurance premiums for most Americans.	The bill will not bring down premiums significantly, and certainly not the $2,500/year that the President promised. Annual premiums in 2016, status quo / with bill: Small group market, single: $7,800 / $7,800 Small group market, family: $19,300 / $19,200 Large Group market, single: $7,400 / $7,300 Large group market, family: $21,100 / $21,300 Individual market, single: $5,500 / $5,800* Individual market, family: $13,100 / $15,200*
4. The bill will make health care affordable for middle class Americans.	The bill will impose a financial hardship on middle class Americans who will be forced to buy a product that they can’t afford to use. A family of four making $66,370 will be forced to pay $5,243 per year for insurance. After basic necessities, this leaves them with $8,307 in discretionary income — out of which they would have to cover clothing, credit card and other debt, child care and education costs, in addition to $5,882 in annual out-of-pocket medical expenses for which families will be responsible.
5. This plan is similar to the Massachusetts plan, which makes health care affordable.	Many Massachusetts residents forgo health care because they can’t afford it. A 2009 study by the state of Massachusetts found that: 21% of residents forgo medical treatment because they can’t afford it, including 12% of children 18% have health insurance but can’t afford to use it
6. This bill provide health care to 31 million people who are currently uninsured.	This bill will mandate that millions of people who are currently uninsured must purchase insurance from private companies, or the IRS will collect up to 2% of their annual income in penalties. Some will be assisted with government subsidies.
7. You can keep the insurance you have if you like it.	The excise tax will result in employers switching to plans with higher co-pays and fewer covered services. Older, less healthy employees with employer-based health care will be forced to pay much more in out-of-pocket expenses than they do now.
8. The “excise tax” will encourage employers to reduce the scope of health care benefits, and they will pass the savings on to employees in the form of higher wages.	There is insufficient evidence that employers pass savings from reduced benefits on to employees.
9. This bill employs nearly every cost control idea available to bring down costs.	This bill does not bring down costs and leaves out nearly every key cost control measure, including: Public Option ($25-$110 billion) Medicare buy-in Drug reimportation ($19 billion) Medicare drug price negotiation ($300 billion) Shorter pathway to generic biologics ($71 billion)
10. The bill will require big companies like WalMart to provide insurance for their employees	The bill was written so that most WalMart employees will qualify for subsidies, and taxpayers will pick up a large portion of the cost of their coverage.
11. The bill “bends the cost curve” on health care.	The bill ignored proven ways to cut health care costs and still leaves 24 million people uninsured, all while slightly raising total annual costs by $234 million in 2019. “Bends the cost curve” is a misleading and trivial claim, as the US would still spend far more for care than other advanced countries. In 2009, health care costs were 17.3% of GDP. Annual cost of health care in 2019, status quo: $4,670.6 billion (20.8% of GDP) Annual cost of health care in 2019, Senate bill: $4,693.5 billion (20.9% of GDP)
12. The bill will provide immediate access to insurance for Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition.	Access to the “high risk pool” is limited and the pool is underfunded. It will cover few people, and will run out of money in 2011 or 2012 Only those who have been uninsured for more than six months will qualify for the high risk pool. Only 0.7% of those without insurance now will get coverage, and the CMS report estimates it will run out of funding by 2011 or 2012.
13. The bill prohibits dropping people in individual plans from coverage when they get sick.	The bill does not empower a regulatory body to keep people from being dropped when they’re sick. There are already many states that have laws on the books prohibiting people from being dropped when they’re sick, but without an enforcement mechanism, there is little to hold the insurance companies in check.
14. The bill ensures consumers have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to challenge new insurance plan decisions.	The “internal appeals process” is in the hands of the insurance companies themselves, and the “external” one is up to each state. Ensuring that consumers have access to “internal appeals” simply means the insurance companies have to review their own decisions. And it is the responsibility of each state to provide an “external appeals process,” as there is neither funding nor a regulatory mechanism for enforcement at the federal level.
15. This bill will stop insurance companies from hiking rates 30%-40% per year.	This bill does not limit insurance company rate hikes. Private insurers continue to be exempt from anti-trust laws, and are free to raise rates without fear of competition in many areas of the country.
16. When the bill passes, people will begin receiving benefits under this bill immediately	Most provisions in this bill, such as an end to the ban on pre-existing conditions for adults, do not take effect until 2014. Six months from the date of passage, children could not be excluded from coverage due to pre-existing conditions, though insurance companies could charge more to cover them. Children would also be allowed to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26. There will be an elimination of lifetime coverage limits, a high risk pool for those who have been uninsured for more than 6 months, and community health centers will start receiving money.
17. The bill creates a pathway for single payer.	Bernie Sanders’ provision in the Senate bill does not start until 2017, and does not cover the Department of Labor, so no, it doesn’t create a pathway for single payer. Obama told Dennis Kucinich that the Ohio Representative’s amendment is similar to Bernie Sanders’ provision in the Senate bill, and creates a pathway to single payer. Since the waiver does not start until 2017, and does not cover the Department of Labor, it is nearly impossible to see how it gets around the ERISA laws that stand in the way of any practical state single payer system.
18 The bill will end medical bankruptcy and provide all Americans with peace of mind.	Most people with medical bankruptcies already have insurance, and out-of-pocket expenses will continue to be a burden on the middle class. In 2009, 1.5 million Americans declared bankruptcy Of those, 62% were medically related Three-quarters of those had health insurance The Obama bill leaves 24 million without insurance The maximum yearly out-of-pocket limit for a family will be $11,900 (PDF) on top of premiums A family with serious medical problems that last for a few years could easily be financially crushed by medical costs

*Cost of premiums goes up somewhat due to subsidies and mandates of better coverage. CBO assumes that cost of individual policies goes down 7-10%, and that people will buy more generous policies.

Documentation:

1. March 11, Letter from Doug Elmendorf to Harry Reid (PDF)
2. The AHIP Plan in Context, Igor Volsky;Max Baucus WellPoint/Liz Fowler Plan" rel="bookmark" href="http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/09/08/liz-fowlers-plan/"> The Max Baucus WellPoint/Liz Fowler Plan, Marcy Wheeler
3. CBO Score, 11-30-2009
4. “Affordable” Health Care, Marcy Wheeler
5. Gruber Doesn’t Reveal That 21% of Massachusetts Residents Can’t Afford Health Care, Marcy Wheeler; Massachusetts Survey (PDF)
6. Health Care on the Road to Neo-Feudalism, Marcy Wheeler
7. CMS: Excise Tax on Insurance Will Make Your Insurane Coverage Worse and Cause Almost No Reduction in NHE, Jon Walker
8. Employer Health Costs Do Not Drive Wage Trends, Lawrence Mishel
9. CBO Estimates Show Public Plan With Higher Savings Rate, Congress Daily; Drug Importation Amendment Likely This Week, Politico; Medicare Part D IAF; A Monopoloy on Biologics Will Drain Health Care Resources, Lancet Student
10. MaxTax Is a Plan to Use Our Taxes to Reward Wal-Mart for Keeping Its Workers in Poverty, Marcy Wheeler
11. Estimated Financial Effects of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009,” as Proposed by the Senate Majority Leader on November 18, 2009, CMS (PDF)
12. ibid
13. ibid
14. ibid
15. Health insurance companies hang onto their antitrust exemption, Protect Consumer Justice.org
16. What passage of health care reform would mean for the average American, DC Examiner
17. How to get a State Single Payer Opt-Out as Part of Reconciliation, Jon Walker
18. Medical bills prompt more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies, CNN.com; The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Section‐by‐Section Analysis (PDF)

I disagree, for one, with Ms. Hamsher's claim that this bill is not a pathway to single-payer: the bill seems to me to be designed to make such a mess of private health care that Democrats will later be able to argue that only the government can fix it. (To say that such was Pres. Obama's goal would be to accuse him of being a disciple of Saul Alinsky.)

Hat tip: Instapundit.

PREVIOUSLY on Obamacare:
•Pelosi: Pass Obamacare so artists can quit their day jobs
•How many House Democrats would be vulnerable this fall because of Obamacare?
•Britain's Obamacare: Hospital patient dies of thirst as nurses ignore his pleas for water
•Nobel Laureate economist explains why socialized medicine always fails
•Rep. Ryan explains the dishonesty of Obamacare economics
•Obamacare 2.1 and its discontents (illustrated)
•Pushing a losing agenda
•The Obama enigma
•An encounter with the Ideologue-in-Chief
•Democrats' stealth plan to resuscitate Obamacare
•Those who want to go done with the ship: Obamacare Dead-enders
•Obamacare may raise insurance costs by 54%
•Harvard's Dean of Medicine opposes Obamacare
•How good is Canadan health care?
•Rahm Emanuel explains that they are not even trying have Obamacare make sense
•Harvard economist explains why Obamacare will raise premiums
•HHS says Obamacare will cause costs to go up and cause employers to drop coverage
•To protest Obamacare, San Francisco holds a sick-in
•Polls say majority of voters oppose Obamacare
•Obama wants to kill your mother!
•VP Biden offers medical advice
•"The Post Office, with scalpels"
•Dems oppose affordable medicine
•Socialized medicine in Japan: Baby dies after 8 hospitals refuse to admit mother
•The Canadian health care collapse
•Canadian official: "the system is imploding"
•Canadian MP flies to US for treatment

The population bomb: why it didn't explode

In 1977, John Holdren wrote a book detailing what should be done about the then trendy coming population bomb: (1) forced abortions, (2) sterilization via infertility drugs in the water supply, (3) sterilization of those who "contribute to social deterioration," and (4) the formation of a trans-national armed police to enforce these policies. A person of such extreme views should have remained on the fringes except that Pres. Obama has just appointed Holgren to be his science czar.

For the skeptical, Zombietime has the details including scans of pages from Holdren's book.

Population trends were well understood by economists even when Holgren was writing his book: populations follow an S-curve. In undeveloped societies, even though the reproduction rates are typically near the biological maximum, population is constant due to limits of the food supply. (Under such conditions, many births are needed to ensure that one of your children survives to work the farm and provide for you in your old age.) As a society begins economic development, its population grows. This is the rising part of the S-curve. Developing societies start with the same birth rate as undeveloped societies but, since more children survive due to improved health and food production, the population grows rapidly. In developed countries, even though most children survive, population levels off or even declines (this is the top of the S) because, as people move away from the farm and also come to understand that most of their children will survive, they choose to have fewer children. Those who didn't understand these dynamics, such as Paul Ehrlich and Holgren, however, imagined that population would grow forever until disaster struck and therefore extreme policies were required. One can just hope that, as 'science czar,' Holgren will have little influence on actual policies.

Michelle Malkin has more on liberal advocacy of eugenics for racial improvement.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll points to this AP story which shows Holdren still advocating irresponsible policies, this time in the service of the "global warming" crisis:

The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air.

Liberal true-believer

The naivety of the "world peace" crowd never ceases to amaze, as the BBC reports:

An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.

The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the northern city of Gebze on Friday.

She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.

When a liberal wants to put her beliefs to the the test individually, it is, I suppose, noble, even if tragic. The greater problem is when, through politics, they try to force the rest of us to join them in their suicide attempts.

Update (Feb. 2009): Police say she was gang-raped before she was murdered. One suspect is on trial.

Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.

The possibilities are endless

On Air America, Randi Rhodes proposes that maybe Blackwater is behind the San Diego arson. She is not alone in this belief.

Nations: children who won't grow up?

Is foreign policy just like kindergarten? The liberal/left seems to think so. This was discussed here as an explanation of Sen. Clinton's foreign policy pronouncements. Interestingly, a 1923 Sunday New York Times Magazine article explicitly uses the same unruly-child-in-need-of-a-parent analogy to explain foreign policy, at least as seen by the article's author:

WHO'LL BE HEAD OF THE FAMILY?

February 25, 1923, Sunday

By ANNE O'HARE McCORMICK

Section: The New York Times Magazine, Page SM1, 2866 words

THE task of saving the world lies heavy on the heads of statesmen of all nations. They realize that the greatest political opportunity in the outline of history is within the grasp of some bold hand. But whose? And how? In what Parliament hides the harmonizing genius, the Pied Piper who will entrance all the spoiled and snarling children of the world out of their own discordant houses into some peaceful family of nations?

...

Great Britain has never blinked the fact [sic.] that some marriage of convenience, or necessity, would eventually force us all, unwilling and frightened stepchildren, into some kind of family of nations. She has never doubted who would be the head of that family. Experienced in heading a good-sized family of her own, and, with all her mistakes, the most successful stepmother of nations in human history, she had reason to believe that no one in the world seriously question her claims or her qualifications. [emphasis added]

This world-as-family analogy would be merely an amusing rhetorical device except that, 80+ years later, as we have seen, and despite some disastrous consequences, it is still the way that liberals think of foreign policy. Indeed, for 15 years after Ms. McCormick wrote this article, liberal world leaders treated Mussolini and Hitler as children to be placated rather than as serious enemies.

The liberal belief in the concept of an international "head of family" is also unchanged. Now, despite its decades of failures, the United Nations is assigned that role. As Ms. McCormick noted, Great Britain had previously had that role.

Liberals also apply the the child-in-need-of-parent concept to domestic politics, as discussed within this post.

A possible relationship between liberalism and childhood pain was noted here. The connection between the family analogy and foreign policy may have been taken too far by Democratic presidents who, however seriously, make a show of asking their children for foreign policy advice.

Those foreign "moderates"

One of the repeating left/liberal ideas in foreign policy is that a leader of an enemy is actually a "moderate" and we should not push him too hard because his country would then fall to the more extreme contingent. We heard this about the USSR under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gorbachev. We have heard this occasionally about the leadership of Iran, although not about Iran's current president who does not even pretend to pose as a moderate. A terrorist like Arafat and his successor, Abbas, have both succeeded in convincing liberals that they are "moderates." This left/liberal idea is not new. In 1933, the New York Times was playing Hitler as a moderate who might lose control to the extremists: A July 23, 1933 article by Anne O'Hare McCormick was entitled "HITLER THREATENED BY EXTREME NAZIS; OUTBREAKS FEARED" [caps in original]. The NY Times to the contrary notwithstanding, history shows that Hitler was not threatened by extreme Nazis. Rather, Hitler was an extreme Nazi.