The American Spectator : On Your Mark

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On Your Mark

12.15.08 @ 6:01AM

Not buying Newt's accounting. Gore knows no rules. Prepared for duty. A Boogeyman sighting. Plus more.

(Page 3 of 3)

BEST NOT TO PROBE LIBERAL DREAM-PASSIONS
Re: Brian Wesbury's Rules Have Consequences:

"Rules! What rules? There are no rules in a knife fight."

Or in a liberal dream-passion, it appears.
-- A. C. Santore

PROPS FOR JEFFREY LORD
Re: Jeffrey Lord's Reagan's Crocodile Eats a Riverboat:

Here's a writer who gets it! Here's a person who sees what is, not what one dreams!

Is this "truth to power?" Or is that passe?

Chairman Mao comes forward with his work plan for us peasants! Hot damn Obama!

You da man!
-- R. Philips
New Mexico

TWO-STATE SOLUTION FOR ILLINOIS
Re: Kenneth Miller's letter (under "Hatin' on the Illini") in Reader Mail's For the Thrill of It:

Kenneth Miller writes of the Blagojevich episode: "What I really finding disgusting, though, are the majority of Illinois voters who keep putting the Daley Capone gang back in office decade after decade."

Blagojevich is just another in a long list of prairie state politicians caught picking the lock. There is little doubt that there are far more who manage to cover their footsteps a bit better than the current hapless Governor. Illinois politics is rife with corruption and few but the gullible in the state deny it. Some despair over it. Others embrace it.

I would take exception to Mr. Miller's sweeping indictment, however. There are two places in Illinois: Chicago and "down state" (everything else). At least since the time of Lincoln, the southern part of Illinois has resented and felt put upon by the Windy City. Chicago is the big black hole for tax dollars—dollars it could use and dollars the rest of the state could do without. In this state of affairs, Chicago thinks the rest of the state should be grateful because…well…Hell!! it's Chicago. Think of all the chewing gum and beef jerky we get to sell (taxed, of course) when all those people to stop for gas on their way to the Second City. Recently, there had been some rumblings about moving the state's capital from Springfield to Chicago—I suppose to save the Chicago pols the drive.

There is a sort of joke and thinly disguised yearning among those in the southern part of Illinois that Chicago would be declared a state all to itself --leaving the rest of Illinois free to manage its own business. That's probably nothing more than a pipedream. One thing's for sure: As television moves closer and closer toward High Definition, like a lot of Hollywood actors and actresses, Chicago politics will get less handsome and less pretty.
-- Mike Dooley

NO SUCH THING AS A FREE BANQUET
Re: Philip Klein's Daschle's Long March:

One of the Top Ten Rules of Life is: when you host a free banquet, you must limit who gets to dine. If America intends on providing "free" health care to all, don't you think we should close our borders to illegal immigrants first? The same people who demand free health care will also claim that illegals have the same rights to the freebies as American citizens and legal immigrants. They will sue to make it so.

Hold on to your wallets, Americans! Land of the free? Atlas shrugged.
-- David Shoup
Dublin, Georgia

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Letter to the Editor View all comments (7) | Leave a comment

frost| 12.15.08 @ 9:38AM

Thom Bateman nailed it. Period. Good stuff.

iamse7en| 12.15.08 @ 10:31AM

via my buddy, John Lott:

"The SEC (very) partially solves the mark-to-market accounting rule problems."
http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2008/12/sec-very-partially-solves-mark-to.html

Thomas| 12.15.08 @ 10:40AM

An excellent assessment by Mr. Bateman. Just don't look for anyone in the Federal Government to listen.

David Govett| 12.15.08 @ 12:11PM

We have become a people of the government, by the government, and for the government.

Michael L. Hauschild| 12.15.08 @ 12:31PM

RE: David Shoup
Here is the problem with the global warming alarmist models. Most “weather stations” are now where they have always been, now encompassed by municipal heat islands. A typical example of this is official temperatures being taken ten feet from the exhaust vent of an air conditioner. There really is no overall change in the average temperature, just an anomaly in the local distribution. Heat is being generated but it is at the source of the power plant. No rational meteorologist would place a recording site on the top of a cooling tower.
Second, and this is the most significant, is the model itself. Historical temperatures “averages” are linear, simple lines on a graph. It is ironic that the adage, “climate is what is supposed to happen, weather is what occurs,” is ignored. The global warming school will use changing (+) temperatures to write headlines but not allow cyclic climate change to be deemed relevant within the prediction models.
Meteorological science is just now beginning to get a handle on the two-dimensional aspect of “weather.” In some locations prediction is relatively simple. For instance weather stations in San Diego could be staffed by a third grader with a radio, just call a ship four hundred miles off the coast to the west, ask that ship its ambient air temperature, barometric pressure, wind direction and velocity, humidity and precipitation conditions. Write that up, hand it to some very attractive on air personality and bingo, twenty-four hours later astounding accuracy.
The wrench in the works occurs the closer you get to the center of a continental area with those long “reaches” where air move across mountains, hot areas where solar radiation penetrates to the surface, cool areas where the surface is either obscured by clouds or lighter colored and less absorbent. All this convergence makes these areas a virtual battleground of factors, what happens fifty miles away from a weather station quite often bears little resemblance to what is happening to actual the observer. Accurate prediction at such a site is measured in hours, not days. This “map” two-dimensional model is the stage of our learning curve, if you do not believe the “weather” forecast for the next day how could you place any credence in the ability of anyone to predict the climate for the next decade or century?
Furthermore, any model being used for “prediction” is only as accurate as the data it is based on. The hundred thousand feet of atmosphere above the surface in which these variables occur is a virtual unknown. The interface at the earth’s surface is the only place in this vast virtually transparent volume that can be measured easily. Weather balloons, hurricane planes, and other instrument platforms traversing this “volume” still only report basic “linear” cross-sections. The energy and matter transfer exchanges that occur in this dynamic area are so vast and unmonitored that virtually every month someone comes up with a new (and often contradictory) explanation for a process.
Mankind someday will develop an extensive set of tools to measure the millions of cubic miles of atmosphere involved and a matching computer powerful enough to store and evaluate that data. As of yet, nothing exists with that processing capability, much less the ability to build a reliable model for prediction. Until that happens take all this “doomsday” rhetoric with a grain of salt.

Bryan St. James| 12.15.08 @ 2:13PM

Re: Paul Chesser's Truth, Economics, and Politics

There is a host of basic facts that make the theory of recent-term human-driven carbon dioxide output warming as impossible:
1. Over the last 6000 years, there have been 6 universally documented warming and cooling periods with several having more severe highs and lows than today’s changes. How could these have occurred if there was a dramatically smaller human footprint and NO industry to speak of? This indicates a natural forcer of climate.
2. From the 1940’s to the 1970’s, during the peak of human growth and industrial spread, we went through a period of Global Cooling. See Newsweek’s April 1975 alarmist article on impending global cooling (not to be confused with their spate of 2006-2008 global warming catastrophe articles).
3. There has been no cooling since 1998. What happened to continued catastophic warming due to the measured climb in carbon dioxide levels?
And when you look at the above, is it warming OR cooling from what magic temperature? In a 5 billion year old planet, do we think the average temperatures of the last 5, 20, or 250 years are close to meaningful? There have been periods ranging from hundreds to thousands of years where the temperature was several degrees Celsius warmer or colder than today.

If you are interested in open debate on this topic, check out a recent body of scientific evidence by Henrik Svensmark that makes sense with ALL the major aspects of our climatic history. You can read on the internet on his work about the interplay of the sun and cosmic rays and its global effect on cloud cover and therefore, global temperature change. He also has a book out with Nigel Calder called “The Chilling Stars”.

Regards,
Bryan St. James
Blog: The Practical Philospher (http://pracphilosblog.wordpress.com/)
In Minnesota; Current temp: -8 F, windchill -26 F

James M. Mulcahy| 12.18.08 @ 10:32AM

RE: Market Sanity

Mr. Donatelli's make a number of excellent points but misses the fundamental issue. That issue is whether or not the use of MtM accounting in times of financial panic help or hinder the equilibrating process. The idea that using MtM allows investors to get a more accurate picture of a firm's true value is shown to be wrong during gridlocks such as we are currently experiencing. If the goal of MtM is to inform investors then make it mandatory to disclose it in the footnotes to the financial statements and require firms to explain differences between balance sheet amounts and the MtM ones. The investing class will have as much information as before but capital accounts won't be devastated due to a panic situation. The current writedowns imply that the whole subprime market will default and all assets have zero value. Does anyone seriously believe that? While the assets clearly aren't worth 100 cents on the dollar, they are worth much more than they are being carried at.

Making this one simple change: MtM in the footnotes, not on the balance sheets and income statements; would do more to unfreeze the capital markets than everything else done so far, or contemplated doing in the future.