Jeff Goldstein has an interesting analysis on the Casey/Alito bit that we have been talking about for the past few days.
This Matt Welch piece about Tony Pierce is also tangentially related.
Malpractice Premiums Drop in West Virginia
Some good news in the Mountain State:
The West Virginia Mutual Insurance Company has been granted a 5 percent rate increase according to Insurance Commissioner Jane L. Cline. The new rates take effect Jan. 1, 2006.
West Virginia Mutual filed for the rate decrease with the Offices of the Insurance Commissioner in August. The decrease was granted Oct. 24, 2005.
“This rate decrease is evidence that we are achieving our goal of having an available, affordable and stable medical liability insurance climate in West Virginia,” said Governor Joe Manchin III.
West Virginia Mutual was created in July 2004 to address the medical malpractice crisis. Currently, there are 1,647 physicians insured by the Mutual.
“This is not only good news for physicians insured by the Mutual, it is another major step forward toward stabilizing the health care delivery system in our state,” said Dr. Robert Ghiz, chairman of West Virginia Physicians’ Mutual Insurance Company board of directors.
The combination of the nonprofit and a decrease in malpractice suits since legislation was changed seems to be having an effect.
Malpractice Premiums Drop in West VirginiaPost + Comments (10)
Oil Profits
The inevitable and misplaced backlash against the oil companies begins:
The major oil and gas companies knew there would be a public backlash against their massive profits from higher fuel prices and took out advertisements urging conservation, suggesting they were looking out for consumers.
Yet Amy Myers Jaffe, energy expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, says they could have done more than signal higher fuel bills; they could have helped prevent them.
She says the majors must reinvest more profits in new exploration and production, substantially increase refining capacity and store refined products in the US to prepare for the sort of emergency the country experienced this summer, when two hurricanes struck at the heart of the nation’s energy infrastructure.
It is because those measures are not being taken, she says, that global inventories are so low and prices are so high. “You and I are paying for that,” Ms Jaffe says.
I am pretty sure that this is a case of the reporter ‘interpreting’ what Ms Jaffe really, said, because if it were that simple, companies would do it. It isn’t, what with oil reserves diminishing, regulation, etc., and it is inaccurate to portray this as simply oil company perfidy, as comforting and entertaining as that may be.
Furthermore, it appears they have a point about their profits:
Yet Exxon believes the oil industry is being targeted unfairly.
“We earned $9.9bn on $100.7bn in revenue – 9.8 per cent. Citigroup and Microsoft earned 33 per cent, by comparison,” said Mark D. Boudreaux, Exxon spokesman. “There only seems to be talk about windfall profit taxes on oil, while there are over 20 Fortune 500 companies who made significantly more than ExxonMobil on an ‘apples to apples’ comparison – cents income per dollar of revenue.”
Nonetheless, with record profits by Exxon, Royal Dutch/Shell and others, and polls showing anger over rising prices, politicians are talking about imposing a windfall profit tax.
Your outrage about high fuel prices (which is misplaced, because if you want lower fuel prices, you should be mad at yourself for your over-consumption, you should be mad at Detroit for making gas hogs, and you should be mad at other Americans for continuing to overconsume, not the people who provide the commodity), is going to be used as an excuse to wrestle the profits out of the hands of the shareholders (you and me) who own the company and given to the government, all in the interest of mitigating our pain and anger.
These bastards in Congress have some balls, don’t they? And while we are at it, let’s remember who benefits the most from sales of gasoline:
As illustrated in Figure 1, between 1977 and 1985, the oil industry recorded relatively high profits—averaging nearly $33 billion per year, after adjusting for inflation. These good times were followed by ten years of relatively flat profits, averaging just $12.3 billion per year. In 1996, profits began to rise again but have been anything but stable, ranging from $9 billion to nearly $42 billion per year. Between 1977 and 2004, the industry’s domestic profits totaled $643 billion, after adjusting for inflation.
In contrast, federal and state taxes on gasoline production and imports have been climbing steadily since the late 1970s and now total roughly $58.4 billion. Due in part to substantial hikes in the federal gasoline excise tax in 1983, 1990, and 1993, annual tax revenues have continued to grow. Since 1977, governments collected more than $1.34 trillion, after adjusting for inflation, in gasoline tax revenues—more than twice the amount of domestic profits earned by major U.S. oil companies during the same period.
Just so you know what is really going on when the inevitable cries for taxes on ‘windfall profits.’ What they really mean is they want to rip off the mutual funds and retirement portfolios of normal Americans who own stock in these companies and spend it however they see fit. It is an excuse to thieve, and little more than that, and it is made only worse by the fact that some of the population, so convinced in the evilness of oil companies, will support this nonsense.
Buckley on Plame
William F. Buckley on the Plame affair:
The hot-blooded search for criminality in the matter of Cheney/Libby/Rove has not truly satisfied those in search of first degree venality. Very soon after the indictment of Mr. Libby, the tricoteuses glumly conceded that no conspiracy has been uncovered. It is not alleged that Mr. Cheney whispered to Mr. Libby that he should conceal the truth from the grand jury or the special prosecutor. The great blast of publicity came from the technical exposure of Mr. Libby to (in his case, at his age) a life term in jail, plus a million-odd-dollar fine. If John Jones is hauled in and word is given out that if found guilty he will be hanged and his severance pay confiscated, the public’s attention will be drawn to his crime even if it was to double park…
We have noticed that Valerie Plame Wilson has lived in Washington since 1997. Where she was before that is not disclosed by research facilities at my disposal. But even if she was safe in Washington when the identity of her employer was given out, it does not mean that her outing was without consequence. We do not know what dealings she might have been engaging in which are now interrupted or even made impossible. We do not know whether the countries in which she worked before 1997 could accost her, if she were to visit any of them, confronting her with signed papers that gave untruthful reasons for her previous stay — that she was there only as tourist, or working for a fictitious U.S. company. In my case, it was 15 years after reentry into the secular world before my secret career in Mexico was blown, harming no one except perhaps some who might have been put off by my deception…
The importance of the law against revealing the true professional identity of an agent is advertised by the draconian punishment, under the federal code, for violating it. In the swirl of the Libby affair, one loses sight of the real offense, and it becomes almost inapprehensible what it is that Cheney/Libby/Rove got themselves into. But the sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted.
In other news, it appears the some in the White House are deciding they can not get past Plame with Rove still around:
Top White House aides are privately discussing the future of Karl Rove, with some expressing doubt that President Bush can move beyond the damaging CIA leak case as long as his closest political strategist remains in the administration.
If Rove stays, which colleagues say remains his intention, he may at a minimum have to issue a formal apology for misleading colleagues and the public about his role in conversations that led to the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame, according to senior Republican sources familiar with White House deliberations.
Meanwhile, Tom Maguire gets snarky.
Yet Another Reason
To not vote for the Republican party (or the Democrats, for that matter):
Online political expression should not be exempt from campaign finance law, the House decided Wednesday as lawmakers warned that the Internet has opened up a new loophole for uncontrolled spending on elections.
The House voted 225-182 for a bill that would have excluded blogs, e-mails and other Internet communications from regulation by the Federal Election Commission. That was 47 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed under a procedure that limited debate time and allowed no amendments.
The vote in effect clears the way for the FEC to move ahead with court-mandated rule-making to govern political speech and campaign spending on the Internet.
The roll call of the vote can be found here, and you can see whether your Representative failed you. Alan Mollahan, my representative, voted against it, while Nick Rahall and Shelley Moore Capito voted for the bill. At any rate, after a closer look at the roll call vote, a clearer portrait of my predicament as a voter could not be painted.
179 Republicans voted for the bill, 38 voted against. 46 Democrats voted vor the bill, 143 voted against. The bill was vigorously opposed by Chris Shays, a moderate, and received the majority of its support from the more conservative members of the Republican caucus. The majority of Democrats opposed it.
Once again, on an issue I really care about, the only support I can find is among the more conservative wing of the caucus- the group who also gives me all the agita over their social votes. The moderates and the Democrats, who I generally agree with on social isses- nowhere to be found, or overtly opposing the bill. This is not unlike last week, when Tom Coburn and a small gang of Senators attempted, and failed, to remove a bunch of pork (the Don Young ‘Road to Nowhere’ and other projects) from spending bills and have it either removed or applied to the Katrina relief packages. That failed (91-9, if I rememb er correctly), with the only support coming the firebreathing social cons).
And, as is usually the case on issues that matter to me, the Democrats are even worse. In this current system, I literally have the worst of both worlds on any issue that matters to me. At least I can take solace in that a majority of the House supported this bill, leading the way to future bills with a chance of passing.
Red State and Kos discuss. The Instapundit has a link round-up.
More here from Adam B. at the Daily Kos and Rep. Marsha Blackburn at Red State.
Required Reading
Brent Scrowcroft says important things in the New Yorker. Go read.
Done?
OK. First, the color commentary. If you saw the last Bond flick, Die Another Day, you’ll remember the climactic father-son confrontation on board a burning cargo plane. That’s what I think is going on here, minus the part where the son electrocutes the father with an armored satellite laser vest.
This article also matters because it provides important backstory behind why people in this administration do what they do.
For example, Condoleeza Rice:
The disintegrating relationship between Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice has not escaped the notice of their colleagues from the first Bush Administration. She was a political-science professor at Stanford when, in 1989, Scowcroft hired her to serve as a Soviet expert on the National Security Council. Scowcroft found her bright—“brighter than I was”—and personable, and he brought her all the way inside, to the Bush family circle. When Scowcroft published his Wall Street Journal article, Rice telephoned him, according to several people with knowledge of the call. “She said, ‘How could you do this to us?’ ” a Scowcroft friend recalled. “What bothered Brent more than Condi yelling at him was the fact that here she is, the national-security adviser, and she’s not interested in hearing what a former national-security adviser had to say.”
The two worked closely in the first Bush Administration, although Rice tended to take a tougher line than Scowcroft on Soviet issues. Robert Gates, then Scowcroft’s deputy and Rice’s boss, recalled how he and Rice would argue with Scowcroft in 1990 and 1991, during the period when Boris Yeltsin, as the elected leader of the Russian republic, became a rival to the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. “Condi and I felt very strongly about reaching beyond Gorbachev,” he said. “Brent and Baker believed you could only deal with one President of the Soviet Union at a time.”
Rice’s conversion to the world view of George W. Bush is still a mystery, however. Privately, many of her ex-colleagues from the first President Bush’s National Security Council say that it is rooted in her Christian faith, which leads her to see the world in moralistic terms, much as the President does. Although she was tutored by a national-security adviser, Scowcroft, who thought it intemperate of Ronald Reagan to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” she now works comfortably for a President who speaks in terms of “evildoers” and the “axis of evil.”
Seriously, go read. It’s worth it.
When it comes to online debate I usually dismiss somebody who frames their opponent as ‘evil.’ Yes, this applies as much to liberals as to conservatives. It’s intellectually lazy and it gets in the way of understanding the real and often rational reasons why people do things. Further, in a fight not understanding your opponent usually goes along with losing. There’s no reason why that same rule shouldn’t apply equally well to politics.
Call it Cole’s LawTim F’s Law, after the proprietor hereabouts. For a crucial precedent see Godwin v. Usenet.
***Update***
Christopher Hitchens counterpoints the specific criticisms leveled by Scrowcroft. On goes the increasingly open war between the camps of Bush pere et fils.
Keep in mind when criticizing Scrowcroft that the man traditionally served and continues to serve as a cutout for George H.W. Bush himself.
***Update 2***
Balloon Juice scholars have informed me that there already exists a Cole’s Law. In order to forestall a constitutional crisis, I propose the following as Tim F’s Law:
In the context of a debate, calling another’s motivations ‘evil’ should be considered synonymous with, ‘I don’t understand and am too lazy to find out.’
Hard To Disagree
It is very difficult to disagree with this David Broder assessment of the politics of Bush’s SCOTUS pick:
Under other circumstances, President Bush’s choice of Judge Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court would have been seen as a bold move by a strong president with a clear policy objective. By choosing a man of superior intellectual heft and an indelible record of conservative views on major social issues, Bush would have been challenging his critics on the Democratic side to test their arguments in an arena where everything favored him: a Republican Senate.
But after the fiasco of the Harriet Miers nomination and the other reversals of recent days and weeks, the Alito nomination inevitably looks like a defensive move, a lunge for the lifeboat by an embattled president to secure what is left of his political base. Instead of a consistent and principled approach to major decision making, Bush’s efforts look like off-balance grabs for whatever policy rationales he can find. The president’s opponents are emboldened by this performance, and his fellow partisans must increasingly wonder if they can afford to march to his command.
Read the whole thing.