The last time this happened, I blogged that I “declined to help” PolitiFact.  That’s actually not true.  The whole purpose of my PolitiFact boycott is to help them.

PolitiFact Just Asked Me to Be a Source, Again. I Declined, Again. is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Someone called Stephen Metcalf writes at Slate of his horror at finding in “an otherwise quite groovy loft” in New York’s SoHo “not one but two copies of something called The Libertarian Reader.” Given that he manages to lump not just Paul Ryan and South Park but Sarah Palin into the libertarian basket, you can appreciate his dismay.

Metcalf puts Robert Nozick at the center of his argument, understandably enough. My colleague Tom Palmer says that academic critics almost always cite one chapter of one book, Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and declare that they have grappled with libertarian ideas. Still, it’s a good book and worth grappling with, and it did have an impact, as Metcalf notes:

I like to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in ’75 [1976], the same year Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts, culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops, nobody knows.

I’ll leave it to my more learned colleagues to analyze how successfully Metcalf actually deals with Nozick’s arguments. I just want to note one thing here. Like many other critics of libertarianism, Metcalf triumphantly announces:

How could a thinker as brilliant as Nozick stay a party to this? The answer is: He didn’t. “The libertarian position I once propounded,” Nozick wrote in an essay published in the late ’80s, “now seems to me seriously inadequate.”

Yes, yes, yes. It gets repeated a lot: “Even Nozick renounced libertarianism.” If it were true, it’s not clear what it would mean. Libertarianism is true, or not, whether or not Paul Krugman or Russell Kirk believes it, and whether or not Robert Nozick believes it. The idea stands or falls on its own. But as it happens, Nozick did “stay a party” to the libertarian idea. Shortly before his death in 2002, young writer Julian Sanchez (now a Cato colleague) interviewed him and had this exchange:

JS: In The Examined Life, you reported that you had come to see the libertarian position that you’d advanced in Anarchy, State and Utopia as “seriously inadequate.” But there are several places in Invariances where you seem to suggest that you consider the view advanced there, broadly speaking, at least, a libertarian one. Would you now, again, self-apply the L-word?

RN: Yes. But I never stopped self-applying. What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated. I think this book makes clear the extent to which I still am within the general framework of libertarianism, especially the ethics chapter and its section on the “Core Principle of Ethics.”

So Nozick did not “disavow” libertarianism. Indeed, Tom Palmer adds a point that

David Schmidtz told at a forum about Schmidtz’s book from Cambridge University Press, Robert Nozick, held October 21, 2002 at the Cato Institute. According to David, Nozick told him that his alleged “apostasy” was mainly about rejecting the idea that to have a right is necessarily to have the right to alienate it, a thesis that he had reconsidered, on the basis of which reconsideration he concluded that some rights had to be inalienable. That represents, not a movement away from libertarianism, but a shift toward the mainstream of libertarian thought.

Metcalf’s criticisms of libertarianism will have to stand on their own, as will libertarianism itself. He doesn’t have Nozick on his side. As for Metcalf’s final complaint that advocates of a more expansive state have been “hectored into silence” by the vast libertarian power structure, well, I am, if not hectored, at least stunned into silence.

P.S. Matt Welch notes that if Metcalf doesn’t have Nozick on his side, at least he has Ann Coulter.

Misunderstanding Nozick, Again is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

That’s the argument Ben Friedman and I made in our “Think Again” piece for Foreign Policy magazine. Our point there was that someone reading newspapers and watching television would think that Secretary Gates was some sort of transformational figure who took hold of a boneheaded grand strategy, two failing wars, and one broken bureaucracy and made them into successes. We argued that this description, which one finds almost everywhere one finds the secretary’s name, is wrong. (For responses to some of the critiques of our piece, Ben has a post up at The Skeptics.)

Dana Milbank, Defense Analyst

Over the weekend Dana Milbank authored a column demonstrating the tendency to represent Gates as something of a messiah. He does so by juxtaposing…Sarah Palin’s and Robert Gates’s current tours, which show a stark contrast in “hubris and humility,” respectively:

The week’s dueling tours of Gates and Palin show the best and worst in American public life. Both call themselves Republicans, but he comes from the best tradition of service while she is a study in selfishness. He’s self-effacing; she’s self-aggrandizing. He harmonized American foreign policy; she put bull’s-eyes on Democratic congressional districts and then howled about “blood libel.”

Milbank then offers the usual laundry list of Gates’s accomplishments. He

set a new standard for honesty when, at his confirmation hearing in 2006, he admitted that the United States was not winning in Iraq. At the Pentagon, he brought new openness: He ended the gag order banning coverage of flag-draped caskets at Dover Air Force Base. He hired a journalist, Geoff Morrell, to repair press relations. He penned personal notes to families of fallen soldiers and attended funerals.

Gates brought new accountability, firing top officials over the outrages at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the mishandling of nuclear weapons. He fought with Congress and the military bureaucracy to redirect funds toward troop protection. His championing of mine-resistant vehicles saved countless lives, and his push for better Medevac in Afghanistan cut the average time-to-hospital for wounded soldiers to 40 minutes from 100.

His unusual frankness continued right into his farewell tour. During his trip, he affirmed that “everything is on the table” for defense spending cuts, spoke in detail about disputes with China, discussed shortcomings in Afghanistan and acknowledged his disagreement with Obama’s decision to attack Libya.

Ben and I examine almost every one of those plaudits in our article, and even granting that many of them were indeed successes, we argue that Gates’s legacy far outstrips his actual accomplishments.

For our take on Gates’ tenure as secretary of defense, go here. Also, Chris Preble had an op-ed in today’s Defense News on Gates’s record, available here.

Robert Gates Is Overrated is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Reporters at PolitiFact.com have used me as a resource half a dozen times or so when fact-checking something someone said about health care reform. Sometimes we disagree about where the truth lies, but I’ve always been happy to help. That changed recently, and I should let PolitiFact’s reporters know why.

At the end of each year, PolitiFact sifts through the many claims its reporters have deemed untrue and selects one to be their Lie of the Year. The Lie of the Year award is easily PolitiFact’s biggest publicity-generator. In 2009, they picked Sarah Palin’s “death panels” claim. In 2010, they picked the claim that the new health care law is a “government takeover” of health care.

Looking at those two Lies of the Year together brought a couple of things home for me.

The first is not so much that each of those statements is actually factually true; it is rather that they are true for reasons that PolitiFact failed to consider. PolitiFact’s “death panels” fact-check never considered whether President Obama’s contemporaneous “IMAC” proposal would, under standard principles of administrative law, enable the federal government to ration care as Palin claimed. (In an August 2009 oped for the Detroit Free Press, I explain how the IMAC proposal would do just that.) PolitiFact’s “government takeover” fact-check hung its conclusion on the distinction between “public” vs. “private” health care, without considering whether that distinction might be illusory. (In a January 2011 column for Kaiser Health News, I cite well-respected, non-partisan sources – and even one of President Obama’s own health care advisors – to demonstrate that this distinction is illusory.) Aside from whether they arrived at the truth, each of these fact-checks was woefully incomplete.

Second, PolitiFact’s decision to go further by declaring those statements lies highlights a logical flaw in their Lie of the Year award. For a statement to be a lie, the speaker must know or believe it to be false. In neither the case of “death panels” nor “government takeover” has PolitiFact offered any evidence that the speakers knew or believed their statements to be false. Until PolitiFact offers such evidence, it has no factual basis for calling either statement a lie. Moreover, if PolitiFact’s reporters believe that Sarah Palin et alia believe that what they said was true – and I would be willing to bet good money that they do – then PolitiFact’s reporters know that their past two Lies of the Year aren’t really lies.

I have concluded that the errors in those two fact-checks, plus the fundamental (and rather ironic) error at the heart of PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year award, are serious enough that until PolitiFact addresses them I can no longer serve as a resource for PolitiFact in good conscience. Since January, I have declined maybe four requests for help from PolitiFact reporters, and will politely continue to do so until they address these errors.

Some conservatives think PolitiFact is a left-wing outfit. I don’t think that’s true, and I have defended PolitiFact against that charge. I believe that PolitiFact’s reporters are earnestly doing their best to get at the truth. But there’s a tension between that belief and these errors. Whether PolitiFact recognizes and addresses that tension will tell us a lot about PolitiFact.

Why I’m Boycotting PolitiFact is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a column for Kaiser Health News, Michael L. Millenson, President of Health Quality Advisors LLC, laments that conservatives in the U.S. House are approaching ObamaCare like, well, conservatives.  He cites comments by unnamed House GOP staffers at a recent conference:

The Innovation Center at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services? “An innovation center at CMS is an oxymoron,” responded a  Republican aide…”Though it’s great for PhDs who come to Washington on the government tab.”

There was also no reason the government should pay for “so-called comparative effectiveness research,” another said.

“Everything’s on the chopping block,” said yet another.

No government-funded comparative-effectiveness research?  The horror!  For my money, those staffers (and whoever hired them) should get a medal.

Millenson thinks conservative Republicans have just become a bunch of cynics and longs for the days when Republicans would go along with the left-wing impulse to have the federal government micromanage health care:

After all, the McCain-Palin health policy platform in the 2008 presidential election called for coordinated care, greater use of health information technology and a focus on Medicare payment for value, not volume. Once-and-future Republican presidential candidates such as former governors Mike Huckabee (Ark.), Mitt Romney (Mass.) and Tim Pawlenty (Minn.), as well as ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, have long promoted disease prevention, a more innovative federal government and increased use of information technology. Indeed, federal health IT “meaningful use” requirements can even be seen as a direct consequence of Gingrich’s popularization of the phrase, “Paper kills.”

He even invokes the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, as if Buckley would disapprove of conservatives standing athwart ObamaCare yelling, Stop!

Millenson’s tell comes toward the end of the column, when he writes:

traditional GOP conservatives… [have] eschewed ideas in favor of ideological declarations.

Eschewed ideas in favor of…ideas?  My guess is that what’s really troubling Millenson is that congressional Republicans are eschewing left-wing health care ideas in favor of freedom.

Better late than never.  Now if only GOP governors would do the same.

How Dare Conservatives Stand athwart ObamaCare Yelling, Stop! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It would appear that I am the Liar of the Year.

The fact-checking journalists at PolitiFact.com gave their 2010 Lie of the Year award to the notion that ObamaCare is “a government takeover of health care,” and in 2009 gave the same award to Sarah Palin’s “death panels” claim.  But as I explain in my latest column for Kaiser Health News, the fact-checkers left out a few facts.  Read the column to find out what PolitiFact missed.  Here’s my conclusion:

From my vantage point, the evidence shows that ObamaCare is a government takeover of health care, and Sarah Palin’s “death panels” claim was essentially true. If that makes me Liar of the Year, so be it.

But another way to look at it is this: PolitiFact has now misappropriated this award for two years in a row.  Not only is each of these “lies” factually true, but — and this is more important — the people who made those statements believe them to be true, which means they fall short of the dictionary definition of a lie: “An assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive.“ There is simply no factual basis — and no excuse — for calling them lies.

PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year award has proven as  conducive to civil discourse as Rep. Joe Wilson’s, R- S.C., dyspeptic “You lie!” outburst during one of President Obama’s previous addresses to Congress. Rather than continue to poison the well by dispensing another award this year, PolitiFact should just let it lie.

PolitiFact should also revisit its evaluations of those two claims.

Just Call Me ‘Liar of the Year’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Post-Tucson will campaign trail rhetoric change in any discernible way? Should it change? What phrases or words should be considered out of bounds? Or is that approach a way of silencing legitimate criticism of political candidates?

My response:

Post-Tucson campaign trail rhetoric won’t change because, as Charles Krauthammer put it brilliantly in yesterday’s Washington Post, fighting and warfare are routine political metaphors for obvious reasons: “Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power — military conquest. That’s why the language persists,” why we speak of “battleground states” or “targeting” opponents.

That doesn’t mean that no charge is “out of bounds.” It’s perfectly all right for Sarah Palin to “target” 20 potential swing districts — Democrats do the same. And her use yesterday of “blood libel,” as Alan Dershowitz explains, is entirely acceptable too. What is out of bounds is the kind of scurrilous charges we’ve seen from The New York Times, the Paul Krugmans, E.J. Dionnes, Jonathan Alters, and their ilk, that the Tea Party and the political discourse around it contributed to the Arizona shooting — when there isn’t a shred of evidence to support that, and every indication that a lone mentally disturbed individual was responsible.

But far deeper issues are at play here, and they’re brought out in a penetrating piece by Daniel Henninger in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, “Why the Left Lost It.” He points first to the devastating, potentially sea-changing midterm elections — “Republicans now control more state legislative seats than any time since 1928” – which “came atop the birth of a genuine reform movement, the tea parties.” And the debt crises, state and federal, that animate the Tea Party pose a mortal threat to a liberal agenda that stretches back at least to Goldwater.

As Henninger writes, the divide between today’s left and its conservative opponents “is deep, and it will never be bridged. It is cultural, and it explains more than anything the ‘intensity’ that exists now between these two competing camps.” Read it.

Behind the Political Rhetoric Are Profound Differences is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Radley Balko writes:

[I]t’s worth remembering that the government initiates violence against its own citizens every day in this country, citizens who pose no threat or harm to anyone else. The particular policy that leads to the sort of violence… is supported by nearly all of the politicians and pundits decrying anti-government rhetoric on the news channels this morning. (It’s also supported by Sarah Palin, many Tea Party leaders, and other figures on the right that politicians and pundits are shaming this weekend.)

I hope Rep. Giffords—and everyone wounded yesterday—makes a full recovery. It’s particularly tragic that she was shot while doing exactly what we want elected officials to do—she was making herself available to the people she serves. And of course we should mourn the people senselessly murdered yesterday, government employees and otherwise: U.S. District Judge John Roll, Dorothy Murray, Dorwin Stoddard, nine-year-old Christina Green, Phyllis Scheck, and Gabe Zimmerman.

That said, I long for the day that our political and media figures get as indignant about innocent Americans killed by their own government—killed in fact, as a direct and foreseeable consequence of official government policy that nearly all of those leaders support—as they are about a government official who was targeted by a clearly sick and deranged young man. What happened this weekend is not, by any means, a reason to shunt anti-government protest, even angry anti-government protest, out of the sphere of acceptable debate. The government still engages in plenty of acts and policies—including one-sided violence against its own citizens—that are well worth our anger, protest, and condemnation.

The worst outcome would be for all dissent to become suspect. “Anti-government” is a concept used, essentially, to stifle debate, by conflating reasonable criticisms with the actions of lunatics. Both — of course! — are “anti-government,” and both are therefore guilty. It should be obvious what sort of agenda this furthers: Everything “government” is good.

Government and Violence is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

An article in today’s The USA Today titled, “With Many Still in Dark, Groups Shed Light on Health Care Law,” aims to correct misinformation about ObamaCare.  Ironically, the article is itself a monument to misinformation.

It begins:

True or false: The new health care law will cut Medicare benefits for seniors. It will slash Medicare payments to doctors. It will ration health care.

In three polls conducted last month, large percentages of Americans answered “true” to each statement. All three are false.

In fact, two of the three statements are 100-percent true.

First, ObamaCare will cut payments to the private health insurance companies that provide coverage to the 20 percent of Medicare enrollees who participate in the Medicare Advantage program.  That will eliminate many types of coverage for seniors in Medicare Advantage.  That should be painfully obvious, but if you require confirmation, visit FactCheck.org.  ObamaCare will also ratchet down the price controls that Medicare uses to pay hospitals and many other health care providers.  It should likewise be obvious that that will reduce access to services that are ostensibly “guaranteed” to all enrollees.  But again, if you need confirmation, check in with Medicare’s chief actuary, who works for President Obama.  We can debate whether that’s good or bad.  What’s not up for debate: ObamaCare in fact “will cut Medicare benefits for seniors.”

Second, it is also true — ipso facto – that ObamaCare “will ration health care.”  To ration is to limit consumption.  When ObamaCare reduces coverage for Medicare Advantage enrollees and reduces access to care for all Medicare enrollees, it limits seniors’ consumption of medical care.  We can debate whether that’s good or bad.  What’s not up for debate: that is rationing.

Finally, yes, it is technically false that ObamaCare “will slash Medicare payments to doctors.”  But since current law will slash Medicare payments to doctors if Congress does nothing, and since an earlier version of ObamaCare would have eliminated those cuts, but ObamaCare’s architects dropped that provision so as to make ObamaCare appear deficit-neutral… well, perhaps the public can be forgiven if it confuses “eliminating a provision that would have prevented cuts in Medicare payments to doctors” with “slashing Medicare payments to doctors.”

USA Today continues:

The debunked idea raised by opponents during congressional debate that “death panels” could make end-of-life decisions is seen as real by nearly half of those surveyed.

I’ll rate this statement misinformed and misleading.

First, Sarah Palin’s claim about “death panels” was true at the moment she said it, even if she didn’t know why.

Second, by rationing Medicare enrollees’ access to medical services (see above), ObamaCare will effectively make end-of-life decisions for seniors.  According to Medicare’s chief actuary, ObamaCare could force one in six hospitals to stop accepting Medicare patients.  If ObamaCare results in there no longer being a hospital bed waiting for Grandma at the end of her life, that’s an end-of-life decision.  It wasn’t a personalized decision.  It’s not even necessarily the wrong decision.  But let’s drop this nonsense about ObamaCare not making end-of-life decisions for seniors.  And ObamaCare did create a panel that will make many of these implicit rationing decisions.  It’s called the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

But my guess is that people tell pollsters that ObamaCare will make end-of-life decisions because they understand the Golden Rule, and that he who pays the piper calls the tune.  So long as the government purchases medical care, it will be the government that decides who receives it and who doesn’t.  And ObamaCare gave government a lot more of the gold.

USA Today packed a lot of misinformation into this one sentence:

The National Council on Aging posed 12 questions about the law to 636 seniors and found that fewer than 17% of them knew half the answers.

Actually, it’s NCOA that doesn’t know the answers.  Here are a few of their poll’s true-false questions:

• “The new law will result in future cuts to your basic Medicare benefits.” A plurality of seniors (42 percent) responded “true.”  And they’re right: as Medicare’s chief actuary has explained and as NCOA should know, ObamaCare will reduce access to care for Medicare enrollees.  That’s a benefit cut, unless you think “coverage without care” counts as a benefit.  Yet according to NCOA, the correct answer is “false.”  Just 22 percent of seniors agreed.
• “Under the new health reform law, Medicare Advantage plans will cut benefits and increase premiums.” NCOA says the correct response is “don’t know,” and that’s the answer that 56 percent of seniors gave.  Perhaps seniors haven’t read the chief Medicare actuary’s report, which found that ObamaCare “will result in less generous benefits packages” in Medicare Advantage and “when the MA provisions will be fully phased in, enrollment in MA plans will be lower by about 50 percent.”  But NCOA should have read that report, and should therefore know that the correct answer is “true.”
• “The new law is projected to increase the federal budget deficit over the next ten years and beyond.” Again, a plurality (49 percent) responded “true.”  Again, they’re right.  Yet NCOA thinks the correct response is “false.”  No doubt NCOA would point to the Congressional Budget Office projections that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit.  But those projections are valid only if  ObamaCare “remain[s] unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation.” The CBO wrote this would particularly be a problem with ObamaCare, which “would maintain and put into effect a number of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time.”  So one could reasonably interpret the CBO to have projected an increase, not a decrease in the deficit.  Alternatively, seniors could have been thinking about former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who projected in The New York Times that ObamaCare “would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion.”  There are lots of reasons why “true” is in fact the correct answer.  (One of them is that NCOA used the passive construction “is projected.”)  Only 14 percent of seniors agreed with NCOA.
• “As a result of the new law, the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund will be extended by about 9 years to 2026.” A majority of seniors responded “don’t know” (54 percent), while another 22 percent responded “false.”  Either answer is more correct than NCOA’s preferred answer (“true”).  There are no assets in the Medicare “trust fund.”  Thus there is no date by which those non-assets will be exhausted.  Indeed, the “trust fund” has absolutely no effect on Medicare’s solvency.  The very premise of this question is a fraud.  Someone needs to educate seniors about the Medicare trust fund, but NCOA is not the group to do it.
• “The health care reform law will cut Medicare payments to doctors.” A plurality of seniors responded “true” (45 percent), while only 14 percent of seniors gave NCOA’s preferred response (“false”).  But again, perhaps seniors can be forgiven on this one (see above).

USA Today should have dug a little deeper.

More misinformation:

More than four in 10 people in the Kaiser poll wrongly believe the law included a government panel to make end-of-life decisions for Medicare patients.

Again, ObamaCare does include a panel that would implicit rationing decisions, including for Medicare patients at the end of life (see above).

More misinformation still:

As the Department of Health and Human Services issues the regulations needed to implement the law, it’s trying to get the facts out through its website, healthcare.gov. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is helping, most recently with a cable TV ad featuring Andy Griffith.

FactCheck.org found that Andy Griffith used “weasel words” to “mislead” seniors about ObamaCare.  How is USA Today not aware of that?

USA Today Abets ObamaCare Supporters’ Misinformation Campaign is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

State Rep. Raul Labrador walloped Republican establishment favorite Vaughn Ward in Idaho’s 1st District congressional primary. Idaho native Sarah Palin campaigned for Ward, who had worked in the McCain presidential campaign in 2008. Labrador drew strong support from Tea Party activists. According to Politico, “Ward’s defeat also came despite his high-profile support from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who did more to assist Ward than she did for almost any other House candidate. Last Friday, she headlined a rally and fundraiser for Ward, and her parents and in-laws were supporters of Ward’s campaign.”

Lots of Republican incumbents lost their legislative seats, too, suggesting the continuing power of Tea Party activism and general populist unrest.

Tea Party Defeats Palin in Idaho is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

My Washington Examiner column this week begins with a look back at the Disco Era:

In his high school yearbook photo, President Barack Obama sports a white leisure suit and a Travolta-esque collar whose wingspan could put a bystander’s eye out. Hey, it was 1979.

Maybe that explains the rest of young Barry’s yearbook page, with its “still life” featuring a pack of rolling papers and a shout-out to the “Choom gang.” (“Chooming” is Hawaiian slang for smoking pot.)

Survey data suggest some 100 million Americans have tried pot, including political elites and drug war supporters Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. So the point here isn’t to play “gotcha” by calling the president out on some harmless fun three decades ago. It’s to ask why he isn’t doing more to change a policy that treats people engaged in such activities as criminals.

As I note in the column,

in his new National Drug Control Strategy [.pdf], Obama “firmly opposes the legalization of marijuana or any other illicit drug” and boasts of his administration’s aggressive approach to pot eradication. Watch your back, Choom Gang.

This may present Obama with a serious moral dilemma if and when California votes to legalize recreational use of marijuana this November. (More here in this podcast).

Barack Obama’s War on ‘Chooming’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Sarah Palin has endorsed Carly Fiorina for U.S. Senate in California, showing commendable charity toward a woman who gave her one of her many Bad Headline Days in September 2008 by telling an interviewer that Palin wouldn’t be qualified to run a major company. (Fiorina did add, “But you know what? That’s not what she’s running for.”)

Palin is way off base, though, when she writes:

I support Carly as she fights through a tough primary against a liberal member of the GOP who seems to bear almost no difference to Boxer, one of the most leftwing members of the Senate.

Ignoring conservative Chuck DeVore, who probably has the support of a lot of Palin fans, Palin is taking aim at frontrunning former congressman Tom Campbell. But if her aim was that far off on a moose hunt, she’d come back empty-handed. Tom Campbell is often described as a moderate Republican, and sometimes as a (moderately) libertarian Republican. But he’s certainly no liberal, and it’s just nuts to say that he’s no different from Barbara Boxer. Here are the ratings that Boxer and Campbell received from various rating organizations in 2000, the last year they were both in Congress:

Sarah Palin Needs New Glasses is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A correspondent for The Economist, whose initials are M.S., posts this on the Democracy in America blog:

[T]he new health-care-reform law passed in March is an entirely private-insurer, free-market-based reform. If someone were to refer to it as a “government takeover of the health-care sector”, that person would hold a factually incorrect ideological belief.

I wonder what convinced M.S. that the new health care law is an entirely free-market-based reform.  Was it the expansion of the government’s Medicaid program to another 16 million Americans?  Was it the 19-million-plus other Americans who will receive government subsidies to purchase private health insurance? Was it the new price controls that the law imposes on health insurance?  Or the price and exchange controls that it will extend to even more of the market?  Was it the dynamics those regulations set in motion, which will reduce variety and innovation in health insurance?  Was it the mandates that require private actors to spend their resources according to the wishes of the state?  Or the new federal regulations that will shape every health insurance plan in the United States, whether purchased through the employer-based market, the individual market, or the new health insurance “exchanges”?  Was it the half-trillion dollars of (explicit) tax increases over the next 10 years?  

I wonder what it is about this law that M.S. thinks is consonant with the principles of a free market.  Perhaps we have a different idea of what “free” means.

M.S. lists other “factually incorrect beliefs,” including:

that the Clinton plan would deny patients their choice of doctor, and that the health-care-reform bills in Congress at the time involved government “death panels” that could decide to withhold care from elderly patients on a cost-benefit basis.

I won’t dredge up the Clinton health plan.  But I have previously demonstrated that, when Sarah Palin claimed that President Obama wanted to give a government panel the power to deny medical care to the elderly and disabled based on cost-effectiveness criteria, the president had in fact proposed a panel with the power to do exactly that.

I agree with M.S. about this much: “once people are exposed to false information, it’s extremely difficult to convince them it’s false.”

What Do The Economist‘s Bloggers Think a Free Market Is, Anyway? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As the nation contemplates the new health care entitlements that Congress and President Obama just created, it is worth noting an article in today’s Washington Post, which reports on the performance of past efforts to eliminate fraud in another health care entitlement:

More than a decade ago, Congress set out to squeeze the fraud out of Medicare billing at nursing homes, requiring more precise justifications for costs. It created new “ultra-high” billing categories intended to be used for only 5 percent of the patients needing highly specialized care and rehabilitation.

But within a few years, nursing homes flooded the ultra-high categories with patients, contributing to $542 million a year in potential overpayments, federal analysts found.

Since then, the numbers in the ultra-high categories have quadrupled, and the amount of waste and abuse could reach billions of dollars a year…

The article ends with the ominous implication that eliminating fraud in entitlement programs like Medicare will ultimately require government agencies to decide whether certain services are medically necessary.

Death panels, anyone?

Medicare Fraud: 1, Anti-Fraud Measures: 0 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today Politico Arena asks:

Comment please on Podhotetz on Palin

My response:

To complete Norman Podhoretz’s thought in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, “I knew Ron Reagan. Ron Reagan was a friend of mine. Governor Palin, you’re no Ron Reagan — but I like you all the same.” And that distinguishes Podhoretz from those “conservative intellectuals” whose antipathy to Sarah Palin and “the loathsome Tea Party rabble” is ultimately explained, he believes, by “the same species of class bias that Mrs. Palin provokes in her enemies and her admirers.”

To be sure, that “class bias” explains a good measure of the hostility Mrs. Palin has faced, especially among that often diverse band called neoconservatives. For like their counterparts on the left, most neoconservatives find their roots in progressivism, not in limited government classical liberalism, and hence in the idea that society should be “run” by elites trained at the “best schools” — the difference being that in engineering society the neoconservatives march to different drummers than modern liberals. Both camps have greater faith in government than does ”the common man,” who is distrusted by both camps (not always without reason), although Podhoretz seems more trustful than most in his band.

Where he errs, I believe, is in his too breezy comparison of Palin to Reagan. There are similarities of course – especially in the reactions of elites to both, on which his essay dwells — the most important of which is that both show a certain common sense approach to the world and to public affairs. Their intuitions seem sound, that is. But it takes more than sound intuition to be a successful president. Ronald Reagan was always underestimated. Unlike so many of his elite critics, left and right, he came from humble beginnings, but he was an autodidact his whole life. He read and understood economists, political theorists, historians, and biographers. That knowledge, coupled with a wealth of experience, including two successful terms as governor of the nation’s largest state, distinguishes him from Mrs. Palin. Both have that common sense that enables them to speak to “the common man,” but the similarity ends there.

Perhaps Mrs. Palin will find the life she has carved out since leaving the governorship of Alaska will be attractive enough to encourage her to continue in it. My sense, however, is that the millions of Americans who today are deeply troubled by the direction the country is taking under the Obama administration are still looking for candidates who combine the understanding, the common sense, and the humility that Ronald Reagan so clearly embodied.

Podhoretz on Palin is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The U.S. remains stuck in Iraq, as the country moves toward a potentially messy and not so democratic (lots of disqualified parliamentary candidates, etc.) election.  Iran’s refusal to back away from its nuclear program has intensified calls for an American military strike — which, Sarah Palin assures, would even help the president politically.  North Korea unsurprisingly is showing reluctance to rejoin international talks over its nuclear program: renewed proposals for a U.S. military build-up in South Korea and even war against the North are likely to follow.  And then there is Afghanistan.

Even though President Barack Obama talks about deadlines and drawdowns, there is little in present policy to suggest that the U.S. will be able to leave Afghanistan in even the mid-term.  Afghan President Hamid Karzai certainly doesn’t think so.  He figures on U.S. military support for at least another decade, with continuing international financial support for years after that.

Reports the Associated Press:

Afghan President Hamid Karzai warned Thursday that foreign troops must stay in his country for another decade, as world powers agreed on an exit map including a plan to persuade Taliban fighters to disarm in exchange for jobs and homes.Divisions emerged between the U.S. and its partners over Kabul’s willingness to offer peace to Taliban leaders who once harbored al-Qaida, instead of the more limited deal for lower-ranking fighters emphasized by the Americans.

All agree that reconciliation means bringing on board what Mark Sedwill, NATO’s newly appointed civilian chief in Afghanistan, called “some pretty unsavory characters.”

The conference was called to help the U.S. and its allies find a way out of the grinding Afghan war amid rising U.S. and NATO casualties and falling public support. NATO has agreed to accelerate the training of Afghan security forces and gradually transfer more combat responsibility to them.

“With regard to training and equipping the Afghan security forces, five to 10 years will be enough,” Karzai told the BBC. “With regard to sustaining them until Afghanistan is financially able to provide for our forces, the time will be extended to 10 to 15 years.”

It sounds a bit like the Afghan equivalent of the Eagles’ Hotel California.  Defeat or bribe the Taliban and keep Karzai in power, and we will have “won” — but we still won’t be able to leave.  And the Afghan government, assuming it achieves a modicum of honest competence, will still have little incentive to meet even President Karzai’s distant check-out date.  Who in Kabul will want to do without abundent Western cash 10 or 15 years from now?

In 2001 the U.S. had a simple, important, and achievable mission in Afghanistan:  disrupt al-Qaeda and oust the Taliban.  American military forces succeeded.  Alas, we’ve spent the succeeding eight years attempting to build a nation state where none exists.  It’s time to draw down our forces and again focus on combatting terrorists.

Hotel Afghanistan: We Can Check Out but Never Leave is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The AP reports:

In a land dispute pitting Madonna against African villagers, Malawi’s government has sided with the pop star who has pumped millions into the impoverished Southern African country and adopted two of its children.

Villagers have been refusing to move from a plot of land near the capital, Lilongwe, where Madonna wants to build a $15-million school for girls. The government, however, says it had originally planned to develop the plot, and only allowed the villagers to live there until a project was identified.

Lilongwe District Commissioner Charles Kalemba, accompanied by other government officials and representatives from Madonna’s Raising Malawi charity, on Thursday met with about 200 villagers and told them they would have to move. The villagers have been offered other government land.

“Government allowed you to occupy this land because there was no project yet. But now that Madonna wants to build you a school you have to give way,” Kalemba told the villagers. “You are lucky that Madonna has compensated you for your houses, gardens and trees.”…

Headman Binson Chinkhota urged residents to move, saying the school would benefit their children. But Amos Mkuyu said the $1 500 in compensation he received from Madonna for mango trees and three homes was not enough. He said his family had been living on his three-hectare plot for three generations.

Susette Kelo vs. Madonna — that would be a great battle. As usual, the government has a beneficent purpose in taking these people’s land. They took Kelo’s home for a development that would yield “new jobs and increased tax revenue.” They’re taking Amos Mkuyu’s home for a school.  But stealing land is not beneficent; it is not an act of kindness and charity.

In this case the Malawian government says that the villagers are living on government land. But Mkuyu says his family has been there for three generations. Sounds like they thought it was theirs. For a discussion of collective and traditional property inspired by the movie “Avatar,” click here. Hernando de Soto, author of The Mystery of Capital, has spent a career showing how the lack of well-defined property rights hurts the poorest people in the world.

Is Madonna Eminent? Or Is This Just “Celebrity Domain”? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Washington Times recently used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain letters sent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture by numerous Republican lawmakers seeking stimulus money for their constituents. All of these Republicans had publicly criticized the stimulus and voted against it.

Georgia Rep. John Linder wrote on his website in October that recent unemployment figures “only reinforce the fact that the $787 billion ‘stimulus’ signed into law eight months ago has done nothing for job growth in this country.” But just two weeks earlier the congressman had sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on behalf of a foundation in his district seeking stimulus funds in which he claimed “the employment opportunities created by this [foundation’s] program would be quickly utilized.”

Remember South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson who infamously shouted “You lie!” during President Obama’s speech to Congress in September? Here’s what he had to say in a letter to Secretary Vilsack on behalf of a foundation in his district:

“We know their endeavor will provide jobs and investment in one of the poorer sections of the Congressional District.”

According to his spokeswoman, Rep. Wilson opposed the stimulus as a “misguided spending bill,” but wanted to make sure his constituents “receive their share of the pie.” That’s pretty much the same excuse the rest of the GOP lawmakers gave: the stimulus is bad but my constituents deserve their “fair share.”

So much for principles.

Speaking of principles, it’s stories like this that should give the burgeoning Tea Party movement pause before getting too close to GOP politicians. I spoke to a newly formed group of a hundred or so tea partiers in southern Indiana back in December. The vast majority was concerned about Washington’s spending addiction and Beltway encroachment on their lives. In the two hours I fielded questions, only one brought up illegal immigration and nobody brought up Obama’s birth certificate. They weren’t worried about Muslims and gays — they were worried about what the mounting federal debt meant for their children and grandchildren’s future.

Therefore it was disconcerting to read that the organizers of this past weekend’s Tea Party Convention in Nashville brought in Tom Tancredo and Sarah Palin to speak. Tancredo’s agenda was typically nasty and counterproductive, while Palin’s combined her formulated hockey mom shtick with a sophomoric jingoism that should have appalled devotees of limited government. Yet, according to the video of her speech, the crowd loved it.

Instead of spending $100,000 on Palin, I suggest Tea Party organizers bring in my colleague John Samples to speak at the next convention. (John’s worth $100,000 but can be had for considerably less.) John recently wrote a column, entitled “Tea Partiers Shouldn’t Date the GOP,” that every budding tea partier should read.

Here’s an excerpt:

The quality that gives the Tea Party movement its legitimacy is that it is so fundamentally illegitimate: outside the establishment, bereft of representation on K Street, and without an identifiable face to speak for it on Meet the Press. This is a movement that sprang deep from within the viscera of America, not from some political poll or focus group.

It is not Republican; it is not even conservative. It has no interest in debating the merits of No Child Left Behind, abstinence-only sex education or George W. Bush’s rationale for going to Iraq. Replacing a “spend and borrow” Democrat with a “spend and borrow” Republican is not the goal of the Tea Party movement.

This movement is simply saying: “We are fine without you, Washington. Now for the love of God, go attend a reception somewhere, and stop making health care and entrepreneurship more expensive than they already are.”

I hope John’s right because if the movement allows itself to become entangled with the same party that publicly eschews big government stimulus while groveling behind the scenes for a piece of it, the [Tea] party will be over.

Stimulus Hypocrisy and the Tea Partiers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

“Take Sarah Palin seriously,” David Broder writes in the Washington Post. ”In the present mood of the country, Palin is by all odds a threat to the more uptight Republican aspirants such as Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty — and potentially, to Obama as well.” Palin’s own Captain Ahab, Andrew Sullivan, wrings his hands that she’s the “leader of the opposition” and a real threat to be president. Time‘s Joe Klein goes even further: “Is Sarah Palin the favorite to win the Republican nomination and therefore someone to be taken absolutely seriously? You betcha.”

Yes, well, I’m old enough to remember that Newsweek prepared six covers for the week of the 1968 election (I was very precocious), and one of them proclaimed “President-elect George Wallace.” Wasn’t gonna happen. Nor is this. As for those who compare Palin to Ronald Reagan, yes, there are some similarities. They both lived in the West, they’re both “conservative” in some sense, and they were both dismissed by effete East Coast intellectuals. But I see just a few differences:

1. Reagan served eight years as governor of a very large state; he didn’t quit after half a term.
2. Reagan had spent a long time developing a real political philosophy, one that had changed a great deal during his adult life. In his time as president of the actors’ union, 1947-52, he was known as a liberal, anti-communist Democrat. A long life of watching the world, paying taxes, and reading moved him to the libertarian right. Palin couldn’t name any newspapers she reads. Reagan told Rowland Evans in an interview, “I’ve always been a voracious reader — I have read the economic views of von Mises and Hayek, and … Bastiat…. I know about Cobden and Bright in England — and the elimination of the corn laws and so forth, the great burst of economy or prosperity for England that followed.” Reagan thought a lot about what he believed, and his deep understanding of a set of political principles was perhaps his most notable characteristic when he emerged on the political stage.
3. Reagan was smart and could articulate his views on public policy. One of the standard defenses of Palin is “liberals said Reagan was dumb.” Yes, they did, even after he out-debated Bobby Kennedy in an internationally televised debate just months after he became governor. Democratic mandarin Clark Clifford, who didn’t realize that the bank he chaired was run by actual criminals, famously called Reagan an “amiable dunce.” But now that Reagan’s hand-written radio commentary scripts have been published, no one really makes this claim any more. Read Reagan in His Own Hand, read the commentaries he wrote on yellow pads while being driven from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, and ask yourself: Could Sarah Palin do that?

Sarah Palin can be a dazzling performer. But she’s still capable of saying that Obama could improve his chances for reelection if he ”played the war card … decided to declare war on Iran.” Her articulation of political ideas remains remarkably thin. The Republican bench may be weak, but I don’t think it’s that weak.

President Palin? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Politico asks, “Was he convincing?”

My response:

In Copenhagen this morning, President Obama convinced only those who want to believe — of which, regrettably, there is no shortage.  Notice how he began, utterly without doubt:  “You would not be here unless you, like me, were convinced that this danger is real.  This is not fiction, this is science.”  The implicit certitude is no part of real science, of course.  But then the president, like the environmental zealots cheering him in Copenhagen, is not really interested in real science.  Theirs, ultimately, is a political agenda.  How else to explain the corruption of science that the East Anglia Climate Research email scandal has brought to light, and the efforts, presently, to dismiss the scandal as having no bearing on the evidence of climate change?  If that were so, then why these efforts, or the earlier suppression of contrary or mitigating evidence that is the heart of the scandal?

We find such an effort in this morning’s Washington Post, by one of those at the center of the scandal, Penn State’s Professor Michael E. Mann.  Set aside his opening gambit — “I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested” — this author of the famous, now infamous, “hockey stick” article seems not to recognize himself in Climategate.  That he then goes after Sarah Palin as his critic suggests only that on a witness stand, confronted by his real critics, he’d be reduced to tears by even a mediocre lawyer.  One such real critic is my colleague, climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, who documents the scandal and its implications for science in exquisite detail in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

But to return to the president and his speech, having uncritically subscribed to the science of global warming, Mr. Obama then lays out an ambitious policy agenda for the nation.  We will meet our responsibility, he says, by phasing out fossil fuel subsidies (which pale in comparison to the renewable energy subsidies that alone make them economically feasible), we will put our people to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings, and we will pursue “comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy.”

Mark that word “legislation,” because at the end of his speech the president said:  ”America has made our choice.  We have charted our course, we have made our commitments, and we will do what we say.”  But we haven’t made “our choice” — cap and trade, to take just one example, has gone nowhere in the Senate — even if Obama has made “our commitments.”  And that brings us to a fundamental question:  Can the president, with no input from a recalcitrant Congress, commit the nation to the radical economic conversion he promises?

Environmental zealots say he can.  Look at the report released last week by the Climate Law Institute’s Center for Biological Diversity, “Yes He Can: President Obama’s Power to Make an International Climate Commitment Without Waiting for Congress,” which argues that in Copenhagen Obama has all the power he needs under current law, quite apart from the will of Congress or the American people, to make a legally binding international commitment.  Unfortunately, under current law, the report is right.  I discuss that report and the larger constitutional implications of the modern “executive state” in this morning’s National Review Online.

There is enough ambiguity in the president’s remarks this morning to suggest that he may not be prepared to exercise the full measure of his powers.  But there is also enough in play to suggest that it is not only the corruption of science but the corruption of our Constitution that is at stake.

Obama’s Copenhagen Speech is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog