kenlacrosse

A SELF-REGULATED MILITIA, BEING NECESSARY . . . “If the government doesn’t back us, we must do what we can”: Mexican Citizens Create Private Forces to Fight Cartels. “In the face of kidnappings and extortion from cartels and a lack of reliable protection from the police and military, groups of Mexican citizens are taking matters (and weapons) into their own hands and protecting themselves. . . . Mexico has extremely strict private gun ownership laws, which is why part of the news coverage seems focused on ‘disarming’ the vigilantes. That the military is unable to even disarm its own law-abiding citizenry (other than the gun laws anyway), and that armed citizens appear to be a better choice to keep cartels at bay (they actually have a stake in the outcome) may indicate an important shift for Mexicans in fighting the violence in their country. The New York Times frets these vigilante leaders may have ties to other criminal gangs, but there’s little to indicate in either their story nor Fusion’s that they are victimizing these communities further or worse than what they had been living under.”

UPDATE: From the comments: “Finally, a group in Mexico the Obama administration will not sell guns to.”

Jennifer Corbett Dooren / Washington Wire:
Official: “back-end” of HealthCare.gov still being built, with unknown completion date  —  Under Construction: HealthCare.gov's Payment System  —  An Obama administration official told Congress Thursday that the “back-end” of HealthCare.gov is still being built and he didn't forecast a completion date.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Stark warning: Admiral concedes U.S. losing dominance to China.

(John Hinderaker)

Scott has been writing insightfully about the Iran nuclear deal. Michael Ramirez sees the deal the same way Scott does; click to enlarge:

THE RISE OF THE BARISTAS: The Growth of College Grads in Dead-End Jobs (In 2 Graphs).

(Steven Hayward)

There’s the old observation that people who say “I hate to tell you this but. . .” don’t really hate to tell you that at all.  Ditto for “I hate to say I told you so.”  So for more than two decades now climate realists have been been saying “I hate to tell you this, but when economic reality intrudes, your climate dreams will disappear like most such wisps before it.”

Likewise, as much as I’d like to say “I hate to say I told you so,” I’d be lying, because I don’t hate saying this at all.  The other day in my post about coal I mentioned that coal was roaring ahead because of economic reality.  Yesterday the New York Times ran with this headline:

Sluggish Economy Prompts Europe to Reconsider Its Intentions on Climate Change

The European Union, which for years has sought to lead the world in addressing climate change, is tempering its ambitions and considering turning mandatory targets for renewable energy into just goals.

The union’s policy-making body is also unlikely to restrict exploration for shale gas using the disputed technique known as hydraulic fracturing.

A deep and lasting economic slowdown, persistently high prices for renewable energy sources and years of inconclusive international negotiations are giving European officials second thoughts about how aggressively to remake the Continent’s energy-production industries.

There’s more of interest in the story, but it’s enough for me to say: I told you so.

It’s all following the script of Anthony Downs’s “issue-attention cycle,” according to which at some point policy makers reach what I call the Emily Litella moment: “Never mind.”  From that old post:

As Downs explains, there comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.”

“The previous stage,” Downs continued, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.  In the final [post-problem] stage,” Downs concluded, “an issue that has been replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.”

Climate change is increasingly Downs for the count.  (Or maybe we should say the climate campaign is suffering from Downs’ Syndrome?)

I SAY, DECLARE VICTORY AND GET OUT: Robert Rector: How The War On Poverty Was Lost.

On Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson used his State of the Union address to announce an ambitious government undertaking. “This administration today, here and now,” he thundered, “declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”

Fifty years later, we’re losing that war. Fifteen percent of Americans still live in poverty, according to the official census poverty report for 2012, unchanged since the mid-1960s. Liberals argue that we aren’t spending enough money on poverty-fighting programs, but that’s not the problem. In reality, we’re losing the war on poverty because we have forgotten the original goal, as LBJ stated it half a century ago: “to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities.”

The federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. . . . If converted to cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all official poverty in the U.S.

They aren’t programs to help the needy. They’re Democratic vote farms.

FRACKING: Top Saudi Lets The Cat Out Of The Bag. The frackers are basically saving America, and western civilization. No wonder so many people hate them.

Amid the hubub over former SecDef Robert Gates's new memoir--and disclosures that Hillary and Barack Obama staked out national security positions based purely on political concerns--comes this rather surprising announcement from the Pentagon::

"The U.S. is sending an additional Army combat force of 800 soldiers to South Korea with tanks and armored troop carriers.

A brief Pentagon announcement said the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment from the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, will deploy to two locations in South Korea on Feb. 1.

A Pentagon spokesman, Army Col. Steve Warren, said the increase in troop strength and firepower had been in the planning stages for more than a year and is part of a "rebalance" of U.S. military power toward the Asia-Pacific region.

According to the military, the battalion will spend the next year in South Korea, reinforcing the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division, which has been stationed there for decades.  The deployment will allow soldiers to train alongside their American and ROK counterparts, in terrain they would defend against a North Korean invasion of the south.

The announcement is surprising for several of reasons; first, it came with no advance notice.  Army officials revealed the news with very little fanfare, and there were no advance leaks that the deployment was coming--something that's fairly rare in this age of social media and 24-hour cable news. 

Secondly, the timetable for this move is fairly quick for what is (technically) a non-combat deployment.  The first elements of the battalion will begin moving to Korea in only three weeks, and it is expected that all troops--along with their amored vehicles and support equipment--will be in place by late March.  Residents of Killeen, Texas, the community adjacent to Fort Hood, can expect to see a lot of C-17 and charter flights out of the local airport (which serves military and civilian traffic) in the weeks to come.

Thirdly, the deployment comes amid renewed tensions on the Korean Peninsula.  A few weeks back, a senior ROK official postulated that chances for a North Korean provocation would remain very "high" until the early spring, a period that coincides with the peak of the Winter Training Cycle, the period when military activity in the DPRK reaches its annual peak.  So far this winter, most of the attention in Korea has been focused on Kim Jong-un's "purge" of senior party leaders, and the latest round of "basketball diplomacy" with Dennis Rodman. 

But the sudden move of the calvary unit to Korea suggests that something else may be afoot.  Has training surged during this WTC?  Are there indications that the new DPRK tyrant is preparing to make good on past threats against South Korea?  The WTC has been an annual event for more than 50 years, yet it has rarely prompted deployment of U.S. ground forces, except during times of escalating tensions, such as the winter of 1968, when North Korea seized the spy ship USS Pueblo and detained the crew for nearly a year.

And, while the forces sent to Korea during the Pueblo crisis eventually returned home, it looks like the new deployment will become a long-term commitment.  When the 1/12th returns to Fort Hood in early 2015, their tanks, IFVs and other equipment will remain behind, to be used by other units that will pick up the rotation in the future.

With the war in Afghanistan winding down, the Army has more flexibility for deployments like the one starting in Korea.  The mission also allows the service to claim a (slightly) greater role in the U.S. strategic pivot to Asia, which is based largely on air and sea power.  Rotating battalions to Korea reminds political leaders that land units are also a key part of the Asia equation, and could provide a case against future cuts in troop strength.

It should be noted that the 1/12 is not the first stateside unit to deploy to Korea.  The 4th Squadron, 6th Calvary regiment deployed to the peninsula next fall and like the Fort Hood unit, they will leave their equipment in place, indicating that deployment will also become a permanent rotation.  In fact, the Army views Korea as an ideal location for training and experimentation in the years ahead.  The service recently concluded a field test of MRAP vehicles in Korea and decided that "standard" armored vehicles (such as the M1 Abrams tank and the M2 Bradley fighting vehicle) were better suited for Korea's rugged terrain.  The latest deployment will add about 40 tanks and 40 IFVs to the U.S. Army arsenal in South Korea.

Rotating units to Korea will also allow the the service to add more combat punch to existing brigade combat teams (BCTs) in 2 ID, which currently have only two battalions per brigade.  The Army is currently in the process of reducing the number of brigades, but preserving some maneuver battalions by adding them to remaining BCTs.  Three of the four brigade combat teams assigned to 2 ID are based at Fort Lewis, Washington, so the rotations will give commanders more assets that are immediately available, should Kim Jong-un decide to attack across the DMZ.    
That's why this latest deployment strikes us as more than a bit curious.  Sure, the Army has plenty of budgetary and force structure reasons for rotating units to Korea, but the announcement--and the actual deployment--could have been delayed for several months, if not a year.  There is little doubt the Korean peninsula has become less stable over the past 18 months, and that trend is evident elsewhere in northeast Asia, where China and Japan are bickering over disputed islands, while Beijing flexes its growing military muscle.  In that sort of environment, it makes a lot of sense to add a couple of battalions to our ground forces in South Korea, just in case.                
 

PARASITES EXPLORE NEW POTENTIAL HOST: UAW sets up organizing committee at Tesla’s Fremont factory.

I WASN’T EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Scientists discover supervolcano trigger that could herald humanity’s doom: Turns out we may get very little warning before big bang.

As J. Storrs Hall says on Facebook, the Precautionary Principle demands that we establish an interplanetary civilization ASAP.

Related: German Volcano Could Devastate Europe.

Anthrozoologist John Bradshaw insists that cats really aren't terribly domesticated and think that humans are the same species as them, but oddly "non-hostile." [Read more]

PEELING THE ONION OF FAIL: “The administration delivered a resounding judgment on its claim that Obamacare’s website problems were over by firing the prime contractor, CGI Federal.”

Avik Roy:

On January 9, health insurance bellwether Humana formally announced something that industry observers have long suspected: that healthy and young people don’t think Obamacare’s insurance plans are a good deal for them. Those people, Humana indicated, are choosing to stay on their previous health plans, where allowed, instead of participating in the Obamacare exchanges. As a result, Humana “now expects the risk mix of members enrolling through the health insurance exchanges to be more adverse than previously expected.”

I have nothing to add, because “I told you so” seems gauche. Instead I’ll leave you with a question from Roy:

Will taxpayers have to pick up the bill for the Obama administration’s last-minute changes to the law?

Bailouts now, bailouts tomorrow, bailouts forever!

They said health rationing would never come, that if you liked your plan and doctor, you could keep it.  They lied, and now that that’s over let’s move on. Since it’s the government’s doctor not yours any more, Maryland has announced a bold deal with state and federal officials not to treat people unnecessarily.

Maryland officials have reached what analysts say is an unprecedented deal to limit medical spending and abandon decades of expensively paying hospitals for each extra procedure they perform. If the plan works, Maryland hospitals will be financially rewarded for keeping people out of the hospital — a once unimaginable arrangement.

“This is without any question the boldest proposal in the U.S. in the last half century to grab the problem of cost growth by the horns,” said Uwe Reinhardt, a healthcare economist at Princeton University.

Yes, progress is not treating people. Hospitals are preparing for this brave new world by firing employees.

“We’ve all been cutting staff, looking at our expenses aggressively over the last couple of years,” said Scott Furniss, chief financial officer for St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore. “But we’ve done most of what we can do easily now.”

Carmela Coyle, CEO of the Maryland Hospital Association, called the plan “historic” and “a challenge,” adding: “We needed to move away from a fee-for-service-driven healthcare system, where the incentive was to do more to be paid more, and instead move to a system where the incentives are aligned to what we all feel needs to be done.”

The agreement had to be blessed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the Medicare program offering coverage to seniors and helps fund Medicaid care for the poor.

Of course much of the problem of overtreatment is one of government’s own making. Think tort law. One of the major reasons why American treatments cost so much is defensive medicine.

Defensive medicine, also called defensive medical decision making, refers to the practice of recommending a diagnostic test or treatment that is not necessarily the best option for the patient, but an option that mainly serves the function to protect the physician against the patient as potential plaintiff. Defensive medicine is a reaction to the rising costs of malpractice insurance premiums and patients’ biases on suing for missed or delayed diagnosis or treatment but not for being overdiagnosed. U.S. physicians are at highest risk of being sued, and overtreatment is common. The number of lawsuits against physicians in the USA has increased within the last decades and has had a substantial impact on the behavior of physicians and medical practice. Physicians order tests and avoid treating high-risk patients in order to reduce their exposure to lawsuits, or are forced to discontinue practicing because of overly high insurance premiums. This behavior has become known as defensive medicine, “a deviation from sound medical practice that is indicated primarily by a threat of liability.

Defensive medicine comprises up to 34 cents on the health care dollar. If there are three doctors in the room one of them is a lawyer.

In a recent Gallup survey, physicians attributed 34 percent of overall healthcare costs to defensive medicine and 21 percent of their practice to be defensive in nature. Specifically, they estimated that 35 percent of diagnostic tests, 29 percent of lab tests, 19 percent of hospitalizations, 14 percent of prescriptions, and 8 percent of surgeries were performed to avoid lawsuits.

But since you can’t reform the system by getting rid of the lawyers, (you can’t ever get rid of lawyers) the only choice is to reform medicine instead by firing the hospital staffers.

One of the unanswered questions in the Maryland reform is whether the projected savings will be achieved by making individual procedures cheaper or just ordering fewer of the same overpriced services. Paul Abramson, MD was curious to know how much an X-Ray really cost. He did some digging and it turned out that a $517 X-Ray actually costs $73 bucks.  It  really cost 1/7th of the list price.

Why? Because prices are set, not by the market, but by what giant insurance companies and government agencies agree to pay the providers. Barry Werth, writing in the MIT Technology Review examined the case of two drugs, Kalydeco and Zaltrap. Treatment with Kalydeco costs $294,000 a year and Zaltrap costs $11,000 a month.  He asked himself, why so expensive?

The primary customers in the United States are not patients or even individual physicians, although physicians can drive demand for a drug; rather, the customers are the government (through Medicare and Medicaid) and private insurance companies. And since the insurer or government is picking up the check, companies can and do set prices that few individuals could pay. In the jargon of economics, the demand for therapeutic drugs is “price inelastic”: increasing the price doesn’t reduce how much the drugs are used. Prices are set and raised according to what the market will bear, and the parties who actually pay the drug companies will meet whatever price is charged for an effective drug to which there is no alternative. And so in determining the price for a drug, companies ask themselves questions that have next to nothing to do with the drugs’ costs. …

There are inherent problems with a system where the government is one of the biggest payers, and where doctors, hospitals, insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, drug companies, and investors all expect to profit handsomely from treating sick people, no matter how little real value they add to patients’ lives or to society. Drug companies insist that they need to make billions of dollars on their medicines because their failure rate is so high and because they need to convince investors it is wise to sink money into research. That’s true, but it’s also true that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, buys more than 50 percent of its prescription drugs. And it buys them at prices designed to subsidize the rest of the industrial world, where the same drugs cost much less, although most poor governments can’t afford them at even those lower prices.

“Designed to subsidize the rest of the industrial world” has a nice ring to it. After all, subsidies are good. Why not have more of them?

“Negotiated prices” between mammoth pharmaceutical companies and equally mammoth insurance companies and government agencies produce mammoth prices. The don’t produce itty-bitty prices. And since the prices are so gigantic, is Maryland is going to pay for fewer of them? Does this mean the X-Rays will be charged at seventy three bucks? Or are they simply going to order only 1/7th the number of $517 X-Rays to stay within the budget?

The reason it’s important is because Obamacare officials are making Maryland the template for the national system. “A top official with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Friday that a state plan to reduce hospital visits could serve as a national model for curbing costs while improving patient outcomes.”  Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post says: “State officials hope that the firm budget — combined with the state’s pre-existing power to dictate hospital prices — will put downward pressure on health spending, forcing hospitals to spend their limited dollars on the most cost-effective health care.”

Hope? Is that it? Is that all they got? That didn’t work so well at cutting costs in the Defense Industry, or for that matter with CGI Federal. Talk about a $517 X-ray. CGI gave the public a $300 million Error 404.

Nowhere in the landscape of reform is there hide or hair of market-price setting. Just what is going to bring the prices down or are they just going to serve up less of the same overpriced stuff?  Most of the Federal Bureaucracy is exempting itself from Obamacare. A great vote of confidence in the bold new Maryland experiment.

---

Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free
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Tom Fletcher speaks with President Johnson on his front porch in Martin County, Kentucky in 1964.  LBJ used the visit to launch his "War on Poverty."  (Louisville Courier-Journal)

Fifty years into our War on Poverty, National Review has a superb article by one of their best writers, Kevin Williamson.  He paid a recent visit to Appalachia, a region mired in misery and despair decades before Lyndon Johnson sat on Tom Fletcher's front porch and launched his ill-fated crusade to eliminate poverty, once and for all.

Six decades later, Mr. Williamson found that little has changed.  A few excerpts:



 

(John Hinderaker)

Even if, like me, you are beyond being shocked by anything the Democrats do, this is remarkable. For the second time, Harry Reid and his Senate Democrat cohorts have refused to allow an amendment to revise the Ryan-Murray spending deal to be voted on. The amendment would restore the cuts in veterans’ benefits that are part of the deal, and instead raise the money by closing a loophole that makes it easy for illegal aliens to defraud the federal government out of billions of dollars. It seems like a pretty easy choice: keeping our promises to veterans, versus enabling fraud by illegal immigrants. But the Democrats have again chosen, not just to prioritize illegal immigrants over veterans, but to prioritize fraud by illegal aliens over maintaining existing veterans’ benefits. You almost have to see it to believe it.

The motion to allow the amendment to come to the floor for a vote was made by Kelly Ayotte:

It is remarkable that on a day when our news media are consumed by a lane closure on a bridge, the Democrats’ support for billions of dollars in fraud by illegal aliens isn’t even a news story.

(Scott Johnson)

How does a member of the mainstream media report on the bizarre spectacle of Rachel Maddow’s latest attack on the Koch brothers? John lucidly exposed Maddow’s attack as a crazy piece of fiction in “Rachel Maddow is crazy, too.” One of the virtues of John’s post is that one comes away with a deeper understanding of important phenomena: MSNBC, a certified left-wing media star (Maddow), the Democrats’ war on the Koch brothers, the crossover between the mainstream left and the sick left, the institutional support for Democratic talking points.

I’ve been curious to see whether the mainstream media would itself take a look at the story and what MSNBC would have to say when asked. So far as I am aware, the story has generally been greeted with a discreet silence, with the exception of Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple. Wemple turns to the story in the long post “MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow hunkers down on Koch Bros. Claim.”

Wemple holds himself out as hosting “a reported opinion blog on news media.” His Maddow post follows a traditional reported format, withholding his own opinion and leaving the conclusion somewhat in doubt. He adds an update, for example, asserting that the connection alleged by Maddow between the Florida Foundation for Government Accountability and the Koch brothers is “tenuous,” which is almost right. He’s getting there. He’s close.

Deep into Wemple’s post, he circles in:

Important distinction: Maddow didn’t allege that the Kochs pushed for the Florida law. She merely stated that a Koch-affiliated group did so. But just how affiliated are the FGA and the Koch brothers? Melissa Cohlmia, director of corporate communication for Koch Companies Public Sector LLC, says that “Koch has not contributed to the Foundation for Government Accountability. We have had no involvement whatsoever with FGA or the Florida law.”

The Maddow show’s bridge between the FGA and the Koch brothers comes from the State Policy Network (SPN), a group that supports “state-focused think tanks that promote and safeguard the principles of limited government, rule of law, property rights, personal freedom and economic liberty.” According to Cohlmia, the Kochs have given SPN a total of $40,000 spread out over five years between 2002 and 2012. In turn, SPN has worked with FGA. “Ms. Maddow makes a giant leap if that’s the connection she’s pointing to,” says Bragdon.

As NewsBusters’ Noel Sheppard has noted, Maddow didn’t treat her readers to an explication [sic] of just how she made the connection between FGA, SPN and Koch. Salon reported last year that Comcast has contributed to SPN, which might just make the FGA a “Comcast-affiliated group.” Comcast is the parent company of MSNBC.

So where does Wemple come out? He doesn’t quite say. He does, however, show us his reportorial inquisitiveness:

The Erik Wemple Blog has presented MSNBC with questions on this matter: What’s the standard for calling a group “Koch-affiliated”? Is it any free-market, libertarian or conservative interest group? Is it any group that has a first- or second-generation funding or affiliation relationship with some Koch entity? Or is it a more strict standard? Holden notes that David Koch has given generously to the Lincoln Center, as well as to the Smithsonian. “Are they Koch groups?” asks [Koch general counsel Mark] Holden. “Where does it end?”

It is a virtue of Wemple’s post that he lets us hear from Holen/Koch. Indeed, his post his framed around Holden. But what is Wemple’s judgement? C’mon, man, you’re hosting a blog. What’s your opinion? Why so shy?

Wemple gives the intelligent reader sufficient information to draw his own conclusions, but we come to a blog for a little bit more than the he said/she said routine. Over at the Weekly Standard, the Scrapbook shows how it’s done in “MSNBCrazy”: “At this point, expecting a modicum of integrity from anyone at MSNBC is probably expecting too much.”

Two more elements of Wemple’s post reflect the standard reportorial routine, but they have their own bite in this context. Wemple answers my question about what MSNBC would have to say when asked: “Attempts to get comment from MSNBC were unsuccessful.” And he concludes his post with the obligatory parenthetical: “(Disclosure: Maddow is a monthly Post columnist).” Which kind of says it all.

UPDATE: PunditFact weighs in here.

Glenn linked to this Todd Shepherd report yesterday, and since it’s local news and ♡bamaCare, I figure I ought to see what I could do with it. The short version is, Senator Mark Udall — who I used to think of merely as inadequate, but whom I now know is also corrupt — tried to cook the books on Coloradans’ insurance cancellations. Here’s the scoop:

At the height of controversy surrounding President Obama’s promises on the federal health care overhaul, U.S. Senator Mark Udall’s office worked assiduously to revise press accounts that 249,000 Coloradans received health care cancellation notices. Because the 249,000 figure was produced inside the Colorado Division of Insurance, Udall’s office lobbied that agency to revise the figure, or revise their definition of what qualified as a cancellation.

From an email inside the Colorado Division of Insurance (DOI), Director of External Affairs Jo Donlin bluntly stated to her colleagues:

Sen. Udall says our numbers were wrong. They are not wrong. Cancellation notices affected 249,199 people. They want to trash our numbers. I’m holding strong while we get more details. Many have already done early renewals. Regardless, they received cancellation notices.

I know extrapolation is a risky business, but maybe we can glean something from Colorado’s 249,000 cancellations.

According to Wiki, Colorado in 2010 represented 1.53% of America’s population. We’ve had some decent growth here, so let’s go ahead and round that up to 1.6% in 2013. We’re trying to err on the conservative side, so if I’ve overestimated Colorado’s population, that will serve to drive the extrapolated figure downward, not up.

If we go by median income, Colorado ranks 15th in the nation at $55,387. Again, I’m using Wikipedia’s numbers, and this is the sort of thing Wiki usually gets right. Our per capita GDP is a bit lower than our median income, at $51,940 — but that’s good enough to us in 12th place producing 1.79% of the gross national product. These figures come from 2012 so I assume not much has changed.

If we go by population, to extrapolate from Colorado to nationwide, you’d have to multiply by 62.5 (100/1.6). If we go by state GDP, the multiplier drops to 55.87 (100/1.79). We have a lot of active duty and retired military, which should tend to drive Colorado’s portion of self-insured down. But Colorado is also small-business friendly, which would tend to drive that number back up. So I’m going to apply some Colorado windage, and drop the multiplier to an even 50 — and again, this will cause us to err on the conservative side.

So… if Colorado is fairly representative of the nation at large, and had 249,000 health insurance policies cancelled due to ♡bamaCare’s strictures, we would multiply that by 50 to see what might be happening nationally.

My handy desktop calculator says 12,450,000 cancellation notices from sea to shining sea.

That would be a lot of angry voters.

(Steven Hayward)

Last month we took notice of the case of John Beale, the highest paid employee at the EPA and climate change expert who hadn’t actually worked at the CIA for nearly a decade, claiming instead to be a deep-cover CIA agent.  Beale was sentenced today to 32 months in prison (seems rather light) for what the government called “massive fraud.”  Somehow, however, none of the reporters following this story have seemed interested in looking into whether any of his climate change work was equally fraudulent.

There is, however, this little detail buried in Michael Isikoff’s story about the sentencing:

[Beale] also said he used the time “trying to find ways to fine tune the capitalist system” to discourage companies from damaging the environment. “I spent a lot of time reading on that,” said Beale.

Let that sink in for a few moments.  Forget Beale: this detail captures perfectly the presumption of the entire mandarin class in Washington.  Beale actually thought this excuse would help mitigate his sentence, or explain what he was up to.  There are lots of Beales in Washington, people who really do think it is their job, and within their competence, to “fine tune” everything.  Beale will now have lots more time to “read up on that.”  He deserves lots of company, though.

Puts me in a frame of mine to recall another famous Beale (Howard): “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it any more!”  Time for the American people to recapture this sentiment.

By the way: Do they serve Green Weenies in federal prison?  Hope so.

TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: Some find health insurers have no record of them: As consumers try to use new medical policies, many find their insurers have no record of them.

RADLEY BALKO: Exposing Corrupt Prosecutors.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Harvard Business Review: The Degree Is Doomed. “The value of paper degrees will inevitably decline when employers or other evaluators avail themselves of more efficient and holistic ways for applicants to demonstrate aptitude and skill.”

SUDDENLY, THEY’RE COST-CONSCIOUS: Transparency: Obama Opposes Weekly Reports on ObamaCare.

FOR SMALL BUSINESSES, SMALL MATTERS.

We tend to talk of entrepreneurship and business growth as if it were a matter of tweaking a few simple policy buttons: lowering taxes, making health insurance cheaper, hamstringing the EPA. Unsurprisingly, these issues map well onto big national policy battles. And yet, when I talk to small-business owners, I’m more likely to get an earful about their state’s workers’ compensation scheme or the local utility’s pricing schedule than I am about the federal tax rate. Yet almost none of the policy journalists I know could even describe in detail how workers’ compensation insurance works, much less articulate a coherent policy agenda for it.

Then there are the sort of soft institutional issues that Meyer highlights, such as whether the local legal system encourages frivolous lawsuits, or some arcane regulatory issue that’s specific to businesses. These things matter a lot, but they’re hard to measure and even harder to fix.

There are a few lessons in this: If you want to encourage entrepreneurship, talk to business owners, not policy wonks. And you often need to think local, not global.

Too much work for journalists and pundits.

GROWING UP UNVACCINATED: I had the healthiest childhood imaginable. And yet I was sick all the time. A couple of centuries ago, every kid was breastfed and ate organic food. Most of ‘em died.

(John Hinderaker)

This news story is offered without comment: “Peace meeting in Ramallah broken up by stone throwers.”

Palestinians threw rocks Thursday at a West Bank hotel, shattering windows and breaking up a meeting of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists.

The conference was cut short and three dozen Israeli participants were rushed out the back door, put on Palestinian police buses and driven to safety, organizers said.

Here, the protesters try to force their way into the hotel to get at the peace activists, but are stopped by locked gates and (presumably armed) guards. Click to enlarge:

Something about this story doesn't add up. 

As you probably know, veterans make up a disproportionate share of the nation's homeless.  In fact, the Veteran's Administration launched an emergency effort a couple of years ago to get them off the street and provide various forms of assistance.  Of course, the VA discovered what other agencies serving the homeless already know: the vast majority of those living on the streets or in shelters are not hard-working Americans who are down on their luck; instead, most have a long history of mental illness and/or drug and alcohol abuse.  For those veterans, solving their housing situation tackling the serious problems that led to them becoming homeless. 

But retired Air Force Colonel Robert Freniere doesn't fit that profile.  According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Freniere, who concluded a 30-year military career in 2006, spends most of his nights in an old minivan, not far from the military academy where his son is a student.  Despite an impressive service resume--and multiple graduate degrees--Freniere has struggled to find work in recent years:

"After his retirement, Freniere said, it took him a year to find work. Like many retired servicemen, he turned to jobs with defense contractors. Twice, the work took him to Afghanistan, he said.


When he came home, he had nowhere to go after separating from his second wife. (In an interview, she said that he does not help her pay the mortgage on their home.)

Freniere said he had not been able to find a contracting job since August 2012. He blames the federal sequestration for squeezing contractors of money and of the confidence to hire people. He has not lasted long at other jobs, as a substitute teacher and an executive in a company writing proposals for government grants.

One of his complaints about the latter job was that it took him too far from his sons - Bobby, enrolled at a community college in Virginia, and Eric, at VFMA.

Eric, 21, plans to follow in his father's military footsteps. "My dad's the most motivated person I've ever met in my whole life, and he's living out of his van," Eric said. "A full colonel with three master's degrees? I don't get it at all - it doesn't make sense to me. If he had a job right now, we'd be fine. We're not fine right now."

Freniere says dyslexia makes focusing on a computer screen difficult. Online applications are so hard for him, he said, that tears well in his eyes as he describes his days at public libraries.

"How many applications can you fill out in a day? And it takes you six or seven hours, and then you don't hear from any of them. You start getting hopeless," he said.

But Freniere said that he had not lost hope, that he returns to tropes he learned back in survival training - "stay calm," "get the job done" - when he needs comfort."

Yet, elements of Colonel Freniere's story are puzzling.  For starters, there's the income issue; as a retired O-6, with 30 years of service, Freniere receives a pension equivalent to 75% of his base pay, somewhere around $8,000 a month.   We'll assume that his ex-wife gets half of his pension, as mandated by federal law.  That still leaves the Colonel with upwards of $4,000 a month to live on.  Sure, southeastern Pennsylvania is a high-cost-of-living area, but studio apartments aren't that expensive.  And there are plenty of extended stay hotels (like this one), which offer a room with utilities, cable TV, free internet and maid service for under $1,500 a month.   Presumably, that would still leave enough for other expenses, such as food and gas for his vehicle. 

Another odd element.  Freniere spent most of his military career as an intelligence officer and an aide to senior officials.  That means he held a TS/SCI clearance, with access to SAR/SAP programs, and tons of leadership and managerial expertise on his resume.  And, his entry into the civilian workforce coincided with one of the largest build-ups in the history of the intelligence community.  More than a decade into the War on Terror, there is still a huge demand for individuals with intel experience and an active security clearance; there are monthly job fairs in the Washington, D.C., area aimed at individuals with that sort of background.  We're guessing that Colonel Freniere has made the rounds of these events; still, it's strange that a government agency or defense contractor wouldn't snap up someone with his background and experience. 

Obviously, no two situations are alike, and everyone's circumstances are unique.  We wish the Colonel the best; no one who spent 30 years in the military should be living in a van, or in a homeless shelter for that matter.  But it sounds strange that someone with his background and experience can't find work, or afford a place to live. 

There are a lot of active duty military members, retirees and dependents who are readers of this blog.  You tell us: are we being too tough on Colonel Freniere, or is there something missing in his story?    
                

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Gonorrhea, Syphilis Regain Traction in U.S., CDC Reports.

An Air Force MC-12 surveillance aircraft, like the one that crashed today in Afghanistan.  Previous crashes and near-catastrophic stall incidents involving the MC-12 have been blamed on limited crew training.  Most pilots flying the MC-12 are drawn from other USAF platforms and fly the aircraft for only a few months (USAF photo via Time magazine)    

For the second time in less than a year, an MC-12 surveillance aircraft has crashed in Afghanistan.  The latest mishap, which occurred earlier today, claimed the lives of three U.S. crew members.  Details from ABC News.com:

“International Security Assistance Force service members and one ISAF civilian died following an aircraft mishap in eastern Afghanistan today,” said a statement released by NATO in Afghanistan.


A defense official told ABC News that the incident involved an MC-12 reconnaissance aircraft flying a nighttime mission over eastern Afghanistan.

MC-12′s are Beechcraft propeller aircraft that carry multiple surveillance systems that enable the monitoring of different areas at the same time. The feeds are monitored by technicians who fly in the rear of the small aircraft.

The crash comes on the same day that an ISAF spokesperson confirmed that a Blackhawk helicopter crash in mid-December that killed six soldiers was the result of “enemy action.”   While the Pentagon hasn't released the names of the dead crew members--or their unit of assignment--the aircraft was most likely operated by the U.S. Air Force, which rushed the MC-12 into service to provide more surveillance in Afghanistan.  And that has led to problems, as detailed by Mark Thompson of Time magazine last October.  Mr. Thompson obtained details of the crash report on Independence 08, an MC-12 that went down in Afghanistan last April, killing its four-man crew.  The report highlights some of the hazards associated with taking an "off-the-shelf" aircraft, equipping it for a new mission, and manning the cockpit with pilots from other airframes, who fly the "Liberty" as a temporary duty assignment.    The previous crash, which occurred on 27 April of last year, began as a routine mission:   The plane took off from Kandahar air field at mid-day. After a 30-minute flight 110 miles northeast, the aircraft began tracing a leftward orbit in the sky, using various sensors to seek out a high-value insurgent that soldiers on the ground wanted to get.

It found him — and bad weather — about 10 minutes later. “Looking at scattered and broken 16-170, plus this giant thing we’re flying around going up to about FL240,” one of the back-seaters radioed at 12:34 p.m. Translation: there were scattered clouds beginning at about 16,500 feet above sea level, and a rapidly-rising towering cumulus cloud reaching to 24,000 feet right in front of them. The rugged terrain down below averaged about 6,000 feet above sea level.

The pilot, sitting in the left front seat of the $20 million plane, began climbing to get try to get out of the clouds. He ordered the climb through the plane’s autopilot, which isn’t completely “auto”: the pilot must manually adjust the plane’s power to maintain airspeed during the climb.

“While or just after initiating the climb, the Mishap Pilot continued working an orbit adjustment to better service tracking an active target,” the probe says. Amid the clouds — with no visual clues outside the cockpit as to speed or orientation — 25 seconds passed before the pilot realized that his plane, like The Little Engine That Could, was slowing down as it climbed.

[snip]

But the aircraft pilot and mission commander--who had spent their careers flying larger aircraft--were already behind the curve:

Eventually the pilot realized what was happening. “A little slow,” he acknowledged. “Correcting.” Too slow, he knew, and the plane could lose the lift that keeps it aloft and begin dropping like a stone.


Even as Independence 08 continued its climb, it had already started down a slippery slope. “From approximately 10 seconds from climb initiation until loss of [communications] feed, the climb rate increases and the airspeed decreases at a rapid rate,” the investigation says. “The Mishap Aircraft airspeed decreased from 150 knots to 116 knots during the final seconds of controlled flight.”

Seven seconds passed before the mission commander, sitting in the right front seat, spoke up. “Alright,” he ordered the pilot, according to a snippet of chatter captured by the cockpit voice recorder detailed in the report, without emotion or punctuation. “Firewall.” That was an order to push the plane’s throttles forward — “through the firewall” — and send more power to the propellers. “Max power, max power.”

This is where Independence 08 entered a perfect aerodynamic storm:

— To avoid the clouds, it was climbing.

— It was already making a left-hand turn, as part of its prescribed orbit.

— To fly the orbit, it was already banked to the left.

— The MC-12W’s props do not spin opposite one another, but in the same direction. Boosting their power tugs the aircraft to the left."

Seconds after calling for max power, the aircraft banked at least 50 degrees to the left, followed shortly by the stall warning horn.  The mission commander took control of the MC-12, but was unable to correct what became a fatal plunge.  Falling more than 15,000 feet--at a speed in excess of 300 mph-- the aircraft struck the ground just 80 seconds after entering its planned climb. 

While the crew of Independence 08 was highly experienced, their proficiency in the MC-12 was limited, as indicated in the mishap report: 

"Both pilots were on their first MC-12W deployment and were inexperienced in their roles on the mishap sortie. Their limited recent experience was compounded by the fact that they had not flown together in the past…Inexperience would have made the Mishap Pilot less familiar with the MC-12W, affecting his visual scan and instrument crosscheck proficiency, and making him more susceptible to task saturation while tracking his first target on his first mission. This delayed detection of the pitch, the decreasing airspeed, and the imminent stall. During spin and spiral recovery, inexperience likely caused him to pull vice relax the yoke, and delayed prompt reduction of power. Finally, it was also the Mishap Mission Commander’s first flight as a newly qualified certifier who was just completing his second month of his first MC-12W deployment. This explains his delayed intervention in both preventing the stall and recovering the Mishap Aircraft. Limited weapon system experience is common with MC-12W combat operations due to the high rate of crews temporarily assigned to the platform. This is a result of known program risks."

Note the verbiage: "known program risks."  In other words, when you take a plane with these flight characteristics--and crew them with pilots who are essentially "passing through"--you run the risk of this type of mishap, where limited experience, coupled with a dicey situation, leads to fatal results.

It is too early to know if similar circumstances contributed to the most recent MC-12 accident in Afghanistan.  But certain "fixes" could be made, to lessen the risk of future crashes; these include:

 First, determine the long-term future of the MC-12 program.  While the USAF largely dominates the ISR mission, it was (reportedly) a reluctant participant in acquiring and operating the Liberty.  Senior officers believed the money spent on the MC-12 could be better invested in other platforms, such as Predator and Reaper UAVs. 

Indeed, there was also a perception that the MC-12 will disappear when our participation in Afghanistan ends.  So, there was little incentive to create a cadre of pilots who would fly the Liberty for most of their career; indeed, many Air Force pilots wanted no part of the MC-12, viewing a long-term assignment as a career killer, especially if they had experience in other airframes.  So, the Air Force hit on the notion of crewing the Liberty with pilots who would fly it for a short time, then return to their original aircraft.      


But the U.S. will retain some involvement in Afghanistan (and other low-intensity conflicts) through the end of this decade, so it makes sense to retain the MC-12.  So, the Air Force must decide whether to retain the Liberty, or....

Give the aircraft--and the mission--to the Army.  That service has been operating C-12 variants for decades, and they have pilots (usually warrant officers) who spend their careers in that airframe, which would ceratinly raise the experience factor.  However, getting the Air Force to surrender their MC-12s may be easier said than done; the USAF owns most of the systems that exploit information collected by the aircraft, and while the service is a reluctant operator of the "Liberty," there are certain operational and budgetary advantages in "owning" the entire mission.   

Before last April's crash, there were at least four other incidents in which MC-12s entered into stalls, resulting in near-catastrophic altitude loss.  Limited crew training played a factor in each of those incidents.  Now, it will be up to investigators to determine if similar factors contributed to the latest crash.