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Re: She might have saved herself some subsequent embarrassment had she checked Georgia's district map. B. Christopher Agee

I'm not at all surprised.

The Carbon Tax Charade

Charade is the right word.


 As the carbon-tax bandwagon gathers steam, some interesting enthusiasts are jumping on board. Last week, six major European oil and gas companies sent the U.N. a letter of support "because," according to a New York Times editorial, "they realize something must be done." But who exactly is steering this bandwagon, and who is being taken for a ride? Big energy companies win big from a carbon tax. What's good for business is often good for society as well, and industry support for a policy is by no means an indictment per se. But here those gains would come at the expense of low-income households and long-term economic growth, while failing to achieve the environmental objectives set out to justify a tax in the first place.

How do companies that produce fossil fuels benefit from a tax on fossil fuels? First, they don't end up paying it. Most economists expect nearly the entire cost increase to be passed directly on to consumers through higher prices. Second, for many fossil-fuel producers, the tax will increase rather than decrease their business. The largest energy companies are traditionally focused on oil and natural gas. Coal, representing 30 percent of global energy supply and the largest primary fuel for generating electricity, would be badly damaged by a tax. The biggest beneficiary of the damage would be natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide and would thus face a lower tax. If higher oil prices push consumers away from gasoline and toward electric cars, the electricity for those cars can come from natural gas as well.

Passing costs on to others while maintaining—or even growing—sales will minimize any effects on the industry. Much of the benefit to fossil-fuel producers from a carbon tax will come from a third factor: a fine is a price. That insight is the title of a paper by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini analyzing changes in parent behavior at preschools that imposed fines for late pick-ups. Counterintuitively, fines made parents more likely to arrive late. The sense of guilt that had once motivated them to arrive on time was replaced by a sense of permission to pay for the extra minutes of child care.

For energy producers, and all users of fossil fuels, a similar dynamic is at work. If a carbon tax is established at a price that economists and policymakers agree compensates society for the potential dangers of climate change, then anyone who wants to pay the price is implicitly welcome to emit the carbon dioxide. The result would presumably not be an increase in emissions as it was with increased late pick-ups. But paying the tax buys legal, economic, and moral permission for the very activity that the tax is designed to discourage. Energy producers get this benefit without even bearing the burden of the tax.

For the rest of society, perhaps the worst problem with a carbon tax is that it is extraordinarily regressive. Because poorer households spend a much greater share of their income on energy than do wealthier households, the price increases created by a tax eat up a greater share as well. Economists from the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute found that a $15-per-ton carbon tax would cost the bottom 10 percent of households more than 3.5 percent of their income, and most taxes under consideration are two to three times higher. That's the equivalent of a new income tax of 10 percent for the lowest-income households and 2 percent for the highest-income ones.

A rebate could offset this regressive effect, but sending a monthly check to every American has problems of its own (not least of them the de facto establishment of a guaranteed income). Unfortunately, analyses also consistently show that the economic drag of a new carbon tax could be counteracted only if the revenues from that tax are used to reduce corporate income-tax rates. Take your pick: a carbon tax that hurts the poor or a carbon tax that slows economic growth. Most likely we'll get a carbon tax that does a little bit of both.

The entire exercise is supposed to be in service of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions and averting climate catastrophe. But the carbon-tax proposals under discussion cannot achieve their emissions-reduction targets, let alone make a noticeable dent in global emissions. Even a global tax—a political non-starter—would fail to push oil and gas prices any higher than they already were several years ago, a time at which environmentalists were hardly sanguine about the future. But once businesses and consumers are paying the "right price" for their emissions, where will the case be for other action?

There are political points to score with a carbon tax, and profits to capture, too. But these won't benefit society; they will come at its expense.

Oren Cass is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

 http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon0608oc.html

Hillary Clinton's real Libya problem

Indeed.


 Washington (CNN)Hillary Clinton has another Libya problem.

She's already grappling with the political headaches from deleted emails and from the terror attack that left four Americans dead in Benghazi.

But she'll face a broader challenge in what's become of the North African country since, as secretary of state in 2011, she was the public face of the U.S. intervention to push out its longtime strongman, Moammar Gadhafi.

Libya's lapse into the chaos of failed statehood has provided a breeding ground for terror and a haven for groups such as ISIS. Its plight is also creating an opening for Republican presidential candidates to question Clinton's strategic acumen and to undermine her diplomatic credentials, which will be at the center of her pitch that only she has the global experience needed to be president in a turbulent time.

READ: First round of Hillary Clinton State Department emails released

Gathering questions over Libya also point to one of the central complications of Clinton's campaign for the Democratic nomination, due to formally launch on Saturday: the fact that she must own a record at the State Department that lacks clear-cut diplomatic triumphs. She'll also have to answer for misfires in the Obama administration's wider foreign policy as GOP candidates who have not faced the same tough choices can nitpick her record with the advantage of hindsight.

 Libya has long been a vulnerability for Clinton because of the deaths of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in an attack on the Benghazi consular building and a CIA installation on September 11, 2012.

But Republicans have yet to prove that she was personally negligent or to convince voters that she's not fit for higher office because of the controversy. So now they're opening a new front on the wisdom of the intervention itself.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a GOP presidential candidate, has called Libya a "jihadist wonderland" and Hillary Clinton a "war hawk" in questioning the mission, which he is using to flesh out a wider critique that American military interventions in the Middle East have backfired badly.

"Somebody needs to ask Hillary Clinton, was it a good idea to topple Gadhafi in Libya? I think it's a disaster. Libya is a failed state. Someone ought to pay and Hillary Clinton needs to answer questions about it," Paul said at an Iowa Republican Party Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines on May 16.

Another GOP presidential candidate, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, said in an interview with Charlie Rose of PBS in May that "the result in Libya was a protracted conflict that killed people, destroyed infrastructure and left behind the conditions for the rise of multiple militias who refused to lay down their arms."

Democrats voice concern on Libya
Concern over what has become of Libya is not confined to the Republican Party.

Possible Democratic challenger Jim Webb, a former Virginia senator, complained in a recent appearance with CNN's Jake Tapper that: "We blew the lid off of a series of tribal engagements. You can't get to the Tripoli Airport right now, much less Benghazi."

Though Webb did not criticize Clinton directly, his comments raise the possibility that the issue could surface in the Democratic primary race.

So Clinton must be ready to explain why she backed a military operation in a region laced with extremism without effective planning for the aftermath. It's the kind of question that has long challenged Republicans in the wake of President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.

Clinton's campaign declined to comment for this story, so it is unclear whether what happened in Libya after Gadhafi fell has changed her thinking on military intervention.

But when she is challenged, she is likely to stress that Obama's national security aides feared that Gadhafi, who had threatened to hunt down opponents like rats, was poised to unleash a massacre in Benghazi as his forces advanced on rebels crowded in the city in March 2011.

 It is clear that Clinton and other top administration aides perceived an agonizing dilemma: Should they take action to avert human carnage or stand by and be accused of abetting genocide?

"Imagine we were sitting here and Benghazi had been overrun, a city of 700,000 people, and tens of thousands of people had been slaughtered, hundreds of thousands had fled," Clinton said on ABC's "This Week" in March 2011. "The cries would be, 'Why did the United States not do anything?' "

Clinton might have been thinking about the recriminations that flew when her husband Bill Clinton's administration failed to thwart a genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The former president has since said his decision not to intervene was one of his biggest regrets.

Initially, the operation was billed as a purely humanitarian effort to create a no-fly zone to thwart Gadhafi's forces, which was endorsed by a U.N. Security Council resolution.

But air attacks on Libyan forces designed to make the skies safe for Western aircraft helped tip the balance of the battlefield toward the rebels and left critics of the war, such as Russia, convinced that an international coalition under the umbrella of NATO had always been bent on regime change.

In the end, Gadhafi was indeed toppled, capping a four-decades-long legacy steeped in blood, including violent repression at home and accusations that he was behind the bombing of a U.S. airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Gadhafi's ouster first seen as a triumph
Initially, the Libya intervention seemed set to go down as one of the Obama administration's triumphs.

"We came, we saw, he died," Clinton joked with a television reporter in the wake of the death of the fugitive Gadhafi at the hands of a mob, days after she visited Tripoli in support of Libya's transitional government.

But when Gadhafi fell, he left a land of eviscerated political institutions ill-prepared for its sudden freedom.

Torn by tribalism, ruled by two rival parliaments and with hundreds of civilians killed during the subsequent civil war, Libya is suffering a complete breakdown of political authority, which has spurred the rise of a host of terror groups. The unrest has also spawned a huge refugee crisis as desperate migrants flee across the Mediterranean on overcrowded boats.

And where chaos and anarchy rein, terror groups often see opportunity.

ISIS is seeking to expand its franchise in Libya and to grab a foothold from which it could export terror across the Mediterranean to Europe. The surf literally ran with blood earlier this year when ISIS beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians in a show of brutality on a Libyan beach.

READ: Inside Clinton's Benghazi emails

While some experts blame Libya's interim leaders themselves for not doing enough to keep the country together after the war, even Obama admits that he made mistakes in Libya. In an interview with The New York Times last year, he defended the intervention but said he should have asked, "Do we have an answer for the day after?"

For Clinton's part, she seemed to indicate in her book "Hard Choices" that she knew all along that Libya would face a tough road.

"I was worried that the challenges ahead would prove overwhelming for even the most well-meaning transitional leaders," Clinton wrote.

"If the new government could consolidate its authority, provide security, use oil revenues to rebuild, disarm the militias, and keep extremists out, then Libya would have a fighting chance at building a stable democracy.

"If not, then the country would face very difficult challenges translating the hopes of a revolution into a free, secure, and prosperous future. And, as we soon learned, not only Libyans would suffer if they failed."

Clinton has little choice but to own what happened in Libya. An email to Clinton in April 2012 from her former top adviser Jake Sullivan, released last month, appears to show that initially her aides were keen to trumpet her role in the intervention and saw it as legacy-enhancing.

Clinton 'a critical voice on Libya'
"HRC has been a critical voice on Libya in administration deliberations, at NATO, and in contact group meetings -- as well as the public face of the U.S. effort in Libya. She was instrumental in securing the authorization, building the coalition, and tightening the noose around Qadhafi and his regime," Sullivan wrote.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates also describes her pivotal role in the decision making in his memoir.

Gates said the intervention, which he initially opposed, split the administration down the middle, with heavy hitters such as Vice President Joe Biden and national security adviser Tom Donilon also against.

On the other side were U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and National Security Council staffers including Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power.

"In the final phase of the internal debate, Hillary threw her considerable clout behind Rice, Rhodes and Power," Gates wrote.

Clinton's prominent role in the decision making on Libya was a political risk at the time, and it now threatens to return to haunt her four years on.

 "We haven't gotten the full story yet, but from everything we do know, it appears that without her advocacy for this intervention, it wouldn't have happened," said Alan Kuperman of the Lyndon B. Johnson school of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, who has studied the causes and outcome of the Libya operation.

Some critics now question whether the administration, presumably working from intelligence provided by rebels, miscalculated on Gadhafi's intentions. And they say that the administration did not do enough to consider the consequences of an operation that ended up toppling Gadhafi.

"If you were going to break this place, it was going to require enormous resources to keep it together," Kuperman said. "It would have required an occupation force, and it was clear that the U.S. did not have the stomach for that."

He concluded: "Did she screw up? Yes, she screwed up."

But one U.S. official involved with the planning of the Libya engagement defended Clinton's position.

"I think that it is tempting always in hindsight to say Libya would be better somehow if we had not intervened," said Derek Chollet, a close national security adviser to Clinton and Obama at the time of the Libya operation.

"I think that is a highly dubious proposition. It is one where, had we not intervened, the conversation we would be having is thousands and thousands of people died and Libya looks like Syria."

But it is always hard in political campaigns to prove that but for a specific course of action, things could have turned out worse than they actually did. And Clinton's opponents, especially Republicans who want to dismantle her credentials as a potential commander in chief, are already signaling that Libya will be a significant political battleground in 2016.

 http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/08/politics/hillary-clinton-libya-election-2016/index.html

Return of the Speech Police

I thought this a good read.


 You won't read much about it in the Beltway press corps, but a behind-the-scenes effort is under way to lobby the Federal Election Commission and Justice Department to stifle free political speech the way the Internal Revenue Service did in 2012. Don't be surprised if the subpoenas hit Republican candidates at crucial political moments.

In late May the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 asked the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Right to Rise Super PAC for violating campaign-finance law. According to the letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, "If Bush is raising and spending money as a candidate, he is a candidate under the law, whether or not he declares himself to be one."

 The theory behind this accusation is campaign "coordination," the new favorite tool of the anti-speech political left. Earlier this year the Justice Department invited such complaints with a public statement that it would "aggressively pursue coordination offenses at every appropriate opportunity."

Under federal law, illegal coordination occurs if a campaign expenditure (say, a TV ad) mentions a candidate by name in the 120 days before a presidential primary, or if it advocates for a candidate and if the candidate and Super PAC have coordinated the content of the ad.

The liberals claim that a Super PAC raising and spending money in favor of a Bush candidacy should be treated as coordinated expenditures, making them de facto contributions to his campaign. Candidate is the operative word here, a designation that has always been applied to those who announce they are running for public office.

Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer says Mr. Bush should be considered a candidate who is illegally coordinating because if you asked "100 ordinary Americans" if he is a candidate, they will say yes. What a bracing legal standard. What would the same 100 Americans have said about Hillary Clinton in 2013, or Ted Cruz in high school? Where is the limiting principle?

Under actual law, a politician becomes a candidate for federal office when he declares he is, and when he has raised or spent more than $5,000 on the candidacy. Once a candidate declares, he must abide by federal contribution limits of $2,700 each for the primary and general elections ($5,400 per donor per election cycle) and report contributors to the FEC. Candidates considering a run must also abide by the contribution limits to fund specific "testing the waters" activities like taking a poll, but they needn't disclose donors or expenditures until they make it official.

The liberal accusers say Mr. Bush is over the line because the law defines political contributions and expenditures as money spent "for the purpose of influencing an election." The problem with that argument is that in Buckley v. Valeo the Supreme Court ruled that the "purpose of influencing" language was unconstitutionally vague unless it refers to advertising that calls for the election or defeat of a candidate.

Justice's involvement elbows in on the regulatory province of the FEC, an agency explicitly designed with a 3-3 partisan split to prevent it from being co-opted by one party. And that's the point. Democracy 21 says it is lobbying Justice because the FEC has become "dysfunctional."

We don't recall any such cry when the FEC dismissed a similar complaint against the Ready for Hillary PAC regarding an email sent by the independent group to a list-serve provided by Friends of Hillary. The complaint set forth activities that could have constituted coordination with a candidate. The FEC unanimously dismissed the complaint in February 2015 on grounds that Mrs. Clinton was at the time only a potential candidate.

Criticism of the FEC is part of the left's strategy to turn the commission into its agent to intimidate conservative groups and limit their political speech. The letter writing campaigns use the same accusations about "dark money" that the groups used to lobby the IRS in the 2012 election cycle.

In September 2011, Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center wrote to then IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman and Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner requesting an IRS probe into whether "certain organizations are ineligible for tax exempt status under section 501(c)(4)." Around the same time, the IRS created its process that targeted conservative groups. The same outfits are back at it, filling the FEC's docket with complaints that target Republicans or GOP-leaning organizations 75% or more of the time.

If these liberal outfits don't like Super PACs, they should look in the mirror. Super PACs are the inevitable reaction to campaign-finance limits on candidates. Instead of unleashing another round of political targeting, this time corrupting the Justice Department, true liberals should deregulate politics.

 http://www.wsj.com/articles/return-of-the-speech-police-1433803829

Global Warming: The Theory that Predicts Nothing and Explains Everything

A very good read.  There are some graphs from the story I couldn't copy and paste to Zangle, sorry about that.  I put the site address at the bottom of the article if you want to check it out.


 A lot of us having been pointing out one of the big problems with the global warming theory: a long plateau in global temperatures since about 1998. Most significantly, this leveling off was not predicted by the theory, and observed temperatures have been below the lowest end of the range predicted by all of the computerized climate models.

So what to do if your theory doesn't fit the data? Why, change the data, of course!

Hence a blockbuster new report: a new analysis of temperature data since 1998 "adjusts" the numbers and magically finds that there was no plateau after all. The warming just continued.

Starting in at least early 2013, a number of scientific and public commentators have suggested that the rate of recent global warming has slowed or even stopped. The phenomena has been variably termed a "pause," a "slowdown," and a "hiatus."...

But as a team of federal scientists report today in the prestigious journal Science, there may not have been any "pause" at all. The researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) adjusted their data on land and ocean temperatures to address "residual data biases" that affect a variety of measurements, such as those taken by ships over the oceans. And they found that "newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA's NCEI do not support the notion of a global warming 'hiatus.'"
How convenient.

It's so convenient that they're signaling for everyone else to get on board.

One question raised by the research is whether other global temperature datasets will see similar adjustments. One, kept by the Hadley Center of the UK Met Office, appears to support the global warming "hiatus" narrative—but then, so did NOAA's dataset up until now. "Before this update, we were the slowest rate of warming," said Karl. "And with the update now, we're the leaders of the pack. So as other people make updates, they may end up adjusting upwards as well."
This is going to be the new party line. "Hiatus"? What hiatus? Who are you going to believe, our adjustments or your lying thermometers?

 The new adjustments are suspiciously convenient, of course. Anyone who is touting a theory that isn't being borne out by the evidence and suddenly tells you he's analyzed the data and by golly, what do you know, suddenly it does support his theory—well, he should be met with more than a little skepticism.

If we look, we find some big problems. The most important data adjustments by far are in ocean temperature measurements. But anyone who has been following this debate will notice something about the time period for which the adjustments were made. This is a time in which the measurement of ocean temperatures has vastly improved in coverage and accuracy as a whole new set of scientific buoys has come online. So why would this data need such drastic "correcting"?

As climatologist Judith Curry puts it:

The greatest changes in the new NOAA surface temperature analysis is to the ocean temperatures since 1998. This seems rather ironic, since this is the period where there is the greatest coverage of data with the highest quality of measurements–ARGO buoys and satellites don't show a warming trend. Nevertheless, the NOAA team finds a substantial increase in the ocean surface temperature anomaly trend since 1998.
NOAA corrected the ocean temperature measurements to be more consistent with a previous set of measurements. But those older measurements were known to be a problem. Scientists relied on measurements from merchant vessels, which had slowly switched from measuring water in buckets dipped over the side to measuring it on its way through intake ports for cooling the ship's engines. But that meant that water temperatures were more likely to be increased by contact with the ship, producing an artificial warming.

Hence the objection made by Patrick Michaels, Richard Lindzen, and Chip Knappenberger:

As has been acknowledged by numerous scientists, the engine intake data are clearly contaminated by heat conduction from the engine itself, and as such, never intended for scientific use. On the other hand, environmental monitoring is the specific purpose of the buoys. Adjusting good data upward to match bad data seems questionable.
That's putting it mildly.

They also point to another big change in the adjusted data: projecting far northern land temperatures out to cover gaps in measurement over the Arctic Ocean. Yet the land temperatures are likely to be significantly warmer than the ocean temperatures.

I realize the warmists are desperate, but they might not have thought through the overall effect of this new "adjustment" push. We've been told to take very, very seriously the objective data showing global warming is real and is happening—and then they announce that the data has been totally changed post hoc. This is meant to shore up the theory, but it actually calls the data into question.

 Anthony Watts, one of the chief questioners of past "adjustments," points out that to make the pause disappear, they didn't just increase temperatures since 1998. They also adjusted downward the temperatures immediately before that. Starting from a lower base of temperature makes the "adjusted" increase look even bigger. That's a pattern that invariably shows up in all these adjustments: the past is always adjusted downward to make it cooler, the present upward to make it warmer—an amazing coincidence that guarantees a warming trend.

All of this fits into a wider pattern: the global warming theory has been awful at making predictions about the data ahead of time. But it has been great at going backward, retroactively reinterpreting the data and retrofitting the theory to mesh with it. A line I saw from one commenter, I can't remember where, has been rattling around in my head: "once again, the theory that predicts nothing explains everything."

 There is an important difference between prediction before the fact and explanation after the fact. Prediction requires that you lay down a marker about what the data ought to be, to be consistent with your theory, before you actually know what it is. That's something that's very hard to get right. If your theory is going to be able to consistently predict data before it is gathered, it has got to be pretty darned good. Global warming theories have a wretched track record at making predictions.

But explanations of data after the fact are a lot easier. As they say, hindsight is 20/20. It's a lot easier to tweak your theory to make it a better fit to the data, or in this case, to tweak the way the data is measured and analyzed in order to make it better fit your theory. And then you proclaim how amazing it is that your theory "explains" the data.

 If this difference between prediction and explanation seems merely technical, remember that the whole political cause of global warming is based on the theory's claim to make predictions before the fact—way before the fact, projecting temperatures for the next century. We're supposed to base the whole organization of our civilization, at a cost of many trillions of dollars, on those ultra-long-term predictions. So exulting that they can readjust the data for the last few years to jibe with their theory after the fact is not exactly the reassurance we need.

Anyone with the slightest familiarity with science ought to be immediately skeptical of this new claim, so naturally mainstream media "science reporters" repeat it with complete credulity and even pre-emptively inoculate us against the sin of doubt. The Washington Post report/press-release-transcription has a nice little passive-aggressive twist, sneering that "The details of the data adjustments quickly get complicated—and will surely be where global warming doubters focus their criticism." Those global warming doubters, always finding something to kvetch about! What are you gonna do?

Worse, the Post ends by passing along a criticism of mainstream scientists for even discussing the global warming pause before now.

Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes recently co-authored a paper depicting research on the "hiatus" as a case study in how scientists had allowed a "seepage" of climate skeptic argumentation to affect the formal scientific literature. Of the new NOAA study, she said in an e-mail: "I hope the scientific community will do a bit of soul searching about how they got pulled into this framework, which was clearly a contrarian construction from the start."
Remember that everybody's data was showing a plateau in global temperatures, and many of the studies focused on this were attempting to uphold the global warming theory in the face of that evidence. Yet now some of the theory's own supporters are going to be thrown under the bus for showing too much faith in the data and too little faith in the cause. They will get the message stated bluntly by Oreskes: science must never be contaminated by skepticism.

That gives us a pretty good idea of what is going on here. Because any field where people say this sort of thing is by that very fact not a field of science any longer.

Follow Robert on Twitter.

 http://thefederalist.com/2015/06/08/global-warming-the-theory-that-predicts-nothing-and-explains-everything/