Hillary Clinton vs. John McCain

At this very moment, that looks like the probable matchup in November. Looking ahead to some of the big states that hold primaries on Super Tuesday (California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Massachusetts), Hillary leads in all but one, and the same goes for John McCain. They also both have leads in most of the remaining states that hold primaries on that day. If the races go as predicted by the latest polls, the game will probably be over by February 6. Neither candidate will have the requisite number of delegates, but they will enjoy headlines like "Clinton, McCain Sweep Super Tuesday Primaries." If that happens, the other candidates will be facing an uphill struggle, to say the very least.

Let's look at a few of the relevant polls, starting with the Democratic races. These are all tabulated by RealClearPolitics.com:







In every case except for Obama's home state of Illinois, Clinton would seem to have the advantage. Now let's look at the Republicans:







In every state except for Massachusetts, McCain would seem to have the advantage. Looking through the polls for the remaining states, much the same story emerges (i.e., Clinton and McCain are on track to win most of them).

Then again, I can understand why people believe that it is not yet over on the Democratic side. After all, Obama has been closing the gap with Clinton in national polls:



It could be that this is an inexorable trend that will continue until Obama overtakes Clinton, and we'll just have to wait and see if that happens. My own feeling is that it's not going to happen. The most recent poll was taken under these conditions:

As recently as Jan. 18-20, Clinton led Obama by 20 points. Today's Gallup Poll Daily tracking is based on interviews conducted Jan. 27-29, all after Obama's overwhelming victory in South Carolina on Saturday. Two out of the three nights interviewing were conducted after the high-visibility endorsement of Obama by Sen. Edward Kennedy and his niece Caroline Kennedy.

That's about as good as it gets for Obama. Shortly thereafter, Hillary trounced him in Florida, which suggests that the Kennedy endorsement may not matter all that much (and that Obama's win in South Carolina may not carry him very far).

It might be imagined that the departure of John Edwards from the race will boost the Obama campaign. In fact, that's the one recent development that makes it harder than it usually would be to predict what will happen on Super Tuesday. My guess is that those who supported Edwards will not flock in unison to Obama. My only reason for saying so is that in South Carolina, Obama received more than 75% of the black vote, Clinton received about 20% and Edwards received about 3%. That was a real shocker to me, and it suggests that Edwards and Obama appeal to very different sets of voters. Still, we can't know for sure where his supporters will go, and that's what makes the upcoming vote interesting.

Meanwhile, the national polls on the Republican side appear to suggest that the race is all but over:



Well, that's what the polls say. Who are bettors betting on? Clinton and McCain. At InTrade, Clinton is currently favored over Obama by 62% to 38%. John McCain is favored by even more (85% for McCain, 12% for Romney, and essentially 0% for the others).

Far be it from me to suggest that the future can be accurately predicted with a high degree of confidence. A lot can happen between now and Tuesday, and much more can happen after that. At this very moment, though, I'd bet the same way that real bettors are: in November, it will be Hillary Clinton vs. John McCain.

UPDATE: Here are some amazingly informative charts from pollster.com. The first one shows the results for the Democrats. The individual states are listed down the left side of the graph, and you can look along the lines to the right to see the results of individual polls for that state (shown as dots). The bigger the dot, the more delegates there are at stake, and the darker the dot, the more recent the poll. Dots that fall over to the right indicate a lead a lead for Clinton; those to the left indicate a lead for Obama:


It's basically the same story I gave you above, but it is presented in one award-winning chart (well, if there were awards for charts, it would deserve one).

Here is the story for the Republicans:


Things could change, of course, but it looks like Clinton vs. McCain at this point.

GDP Growth Slowed in the Last Quarter of 2007

The initial estimate of 4th-quarter GDP growth was a "lower-than-expected" 0.6%, which is the same as it was for the 1st quarter of 2007:

Economy Nearly Stalled in 4th Quarter

By JEANNINE AVERSA – 40 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The economy almost stalled in the final quarter of last year with a growth rate of just 0.6 percent, culminating its worst year since 2002.

The Commerce Department's report on the gross domestic product, released Wednesday, showed an economy that had deteriorated considerably during the October-to-December quarter as worsening problems in the housing market and harder-to-get credit made individuals and businesses more cautious in their spending. Fears of a recession have grown.

For all of 2007, the economy grew by just 2.2 percent, the weakest performance in five years, when the country was struggling to recover from the 2001 recession. The housing collapse dealt the economy its biggest blow last year. Builders slashed spending on housing projects by 16.9 percent on an annualized basis, the most in 25 years.

The fourth-quarter's performance was much weaker — half the pace — than economists were expecting. They were forecasting growth to clock in a 1.2 percent pace.

The GDP figure will be revised in a few weeks and may up being closer to what economists were expecting, but for now it seems that it came in low. So, for the four quarterly reports of 2007, the figures came in low, high, high (way high, in fact) and low. You might think that the economy was rocketing up and down throughout the year, but the truth is that real data are noisy. As an analogy, imagine trying to estimate the height of the typical American by first measuring the average height of 10 people in the winter, then doing again for another 10 in the spring, then doing it for another 10 in summer, and finally doing it for another 10 in the fall. The values for the 4 sets of 10 people might come in at 5'4", 6'0", 6'1", and 5'5". When confronted with numbers like these, you might be alarmed because the average height of Americans is jumping all over the place from quarter to quarter. But the truth is that your sample size is small, which means that your measure is noisy. It's that way with quarterly GDP measures as well. Thus, the 4.9% figure for the 3rd quarter did not indicate a screaming economy any more than the 0.6% figure for the first indicated a stalled economy (same goes for the 0.6% figure for the just-released 4th quarter).

A year's worth of data is much more meaningful. The estimated GDP growth for the year was 2.2%, which is a bit low by Bush-economy standards but would be cause for celebration in the other major industrialized nations of the G7. Here is a chart that compares GDP growth in the U.S. vs. the other 6 nations of the G7 from 2003 to 2007 according to figures from the International Monetary Fund:


The IMF predicted that GDP growth in the U.S. for 2007 would be only 1.9%, but it actually came in higher than that (at 2.2%). Still, in 2007, the U.S. did not perform better than the average of the G6, and that's a rare bit of mediocre performance. The pessimistic economists at the IMF are predicting 1.9% growth for 2008 as well (not the recession that you think is on the way), and they'll probably lower that estimate to, say, 1.7% at some point down the line (actually, I think they just did that, but it doesn't show up in their database yet).

Of course, the economy is an incredibly complex beast, and its behavior cannot be accurately predicted by anyone. The best guess is what the IMF suggests: slow growth for the U.S. (1.7% to 1.9%) and the G6 (also predicted to be 1.9%) for 2008.

Here is an interesting editorial in the Financial Times that nicely illustrates just how hard it is to predict what will happen down the line. Watch this guy try to think through what the future holds:

Bernanke’s reflation gamble may work too well

By Martin Wolf

Published: January 29 2008

Whatever else it may be, the Federal Reserve is not boring. Indeed, by the standards of other central banks, it is hyperactive. The shock 0.75 percentage point reduction in the Federal Funds rate of interest last week, particularly if followed by the widely expected 0.5 percentage points on Wednesday, is a dramatic example. The Fed is the exemplar of an activist central bank. But US fiscal authorities are not far behind, as the $150bn (just over 1 per cent of gross domestic product) fiscal package going through Congress demonstrates.
...
Will these actions work? We need to decide what “working” would mean. The obvious definition is the Fed’s own, namely, elimination of any risk of a collapse into Japanese-style deflation. Alternatively, one might take the bipartisan political objectives – a rapid return to robust growth – as the definition of success.

The answer to this question is that the policy will work if pursued with sufficient ruthlessness. Those who see the parallels between the US predicament of high domestic debt, declining asset prices and a crisis-hit financial sector and that of Japan in the 1990s might doubt this.

But, despite the disturbing parallels, Japan’s initial predicament was worse: its assets were more overvalued and its companies more indebted. Japan’s response was also longer delayed. Provided inflation does not become a huge concern, monetary and fiscal expansion will reflate the US economy. If the worst comes to the worst, a central bank can finance the fiscal deficit almost without limit.

True, pessimists argue that the combination of declining asset prices (particularly house prices) with household overindebtedness and a fragile banking system means that monetary policy is, in the celebrated words of John Maynard Keynes, like “pushing on a string”.

It may not be quite that bad. But, on its own, monetary policy will not act swiftly unless employed on a dramatic scale. The case for fiscal action looks strong.

Yet, in current US circumstances, monetary loosening should have some expansionary effects: it will encourage refinancing of home mortgages; it will weaken the exchange rate, thereby improving net exports; it will, above all, strengthen the health of banking institutions, by giving them cheap government loans.

This brings us to the biggest question: what are the risks? Unfortunately, they are large. One is indefinite continuation of an excessively low rate of US national saving. Others are a loss of confidence in the US currency and much higher inflation.Yet another is a further round of the very asset bubbles and credit expansion that created the present crisis. After all, the financial fragility used to justify current Fed actions is, in large part, the direct result of past Fed efforts at the risk management Mr Mishkin extols.

Moreover, the risks are not just domestic. If the US authorities succeed in reigniting domestic demand, this is likely to reverse the decline in the current account deficit. It will surely reduce the pressure on other countries to change the exchange rate, fiscal, monetary and structural policies that have forced the US to absorb most of the rest of the world’s huge surplus savings.

The US seems to be getting away with its gamble, at least so far. One indicator is the decline in long-term interest rates and the steadiness of inflation expectations, as shown by the gap between conventional and inflation-proof Treasury bonds. Another is recent steadiness of the dollar.

Finally, there has been no upsurge in core inflation, though the same cannot be said of the headline variety. (See charts.)


It is conceivable, then, that the emerging Washington policy consensus offers the right macroeconomic response to the present crisis. But it is risky. Moreover, if the International Monetary Fund’s modest downgrading of growth prospects is correct, the action could even prove overdone.

Whew! No wonder no one can predict a recession. The economy is a lot like the global climate: it's just to complicated to predict with any degree of accuracy. That being the case, I'm still not ready to declare the end of the economic world, despite a growth rate of just 0.6% in the 4th quarter of 2007. Then again, I am slow to believe a trend. For example, after the Iowa caucuses, I did not declare the end of the Hillary Clinton campaign (quite the opposite, actually) and I did not consider Huckabee to be a serious contender. The mainstream media (the same one that is already sure that we are in a recession) thought we were going to see a presidential election between Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee.

Polling Results on the Surge and on Today's Primary

Before turning to the final election polls in Florida, I thought I'd give you an updated look at how the troop surge in Iraq appears to be doing in the minds of the American public. Take a look:


Back in June of 2006, which was a few months after the infamous bombing of the Golden Mosque but before the hellacious escalation of sectarian violence was fully appreciated, Americans were evenly divided on the question of whether or not we were making progress in Iraq. In later months, perceptions turned decidedly negative, as you might expect. During this period of time, al Qaeda was winning the war by accomplishing their objectives of (a) creating sectarian chaos in Iraq and (b) demoralizing what they perceived to be a weak-willed America. But while the American public reacted in the way that al Qaeda knew they would, George Bush ordered a troop surge. The first large effect of the surge on civilian casualties in Iraq did not occur until September of 2007 (marked by the green arrows in the chart). This is when (a) casualties from suicide bombings simply plummeted and (b) Hillary Clinton effectively accused General Petraeus of being a liar for suggesting as much. Since that time, we've seen dramatic progress in Iraq, and Americans seem to be getting the message (slowly, but surely). If you happen to be an anti-Bush extremist, this must be an alarming state of affairs. I guess that's why this is happening:

Anti-Bush campaign planned

WASHINGTON - A liberal advocacy group plans to spend $8.5 million in a drive to ensure that President Bush's public approval doesn't improve as his days in the White House come to an end.

Americans United for Change plans to undertake a yearlong campaign, spending the bulk of the money on advertising, to keep public attention on what the group says are the Bush administration's failures, including the war in Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the current mortgage crisis.

If the troop surge results in an American victory over al Qaeda in Iraq (which seems likely), and especially political reconciliation is forthcoming in Baghdad, it's going to take a lot more than $8.5 million to do the trick. But knock yourselves out, guys. It's hard to imagine a more productive way to spend $8.5 million, isn't it? Perhaps these guys are angling for the next Nobel Peace Prize. They should be strong contenders for that.

Meanwhile, in Florida today, the final polls suggest that Romney and McCain are essentially tied for first, with Giuliani and Huckabee both fading fast as they battle it out for 3rd and 4th place:


If the polls are right, it should be a 2-man race on the Republican side after today.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, it looks like Hillary Clinton is going to run away with it:


Her delegates won't count because Florida broke the rules by having an early primary, but the psychological effect of a big win there will surely boost her campaign. An unexpected loss would be catastrophic, and even a closer-than-expected challenge from Obama could mean trouble for her. But I want her to do well becasue she's a uniter, not a divider. After all, the far left and the far right have come together in their extreme dislike for her. It's nice to see them finally agreeing on something.

The Economy is Rapidly Plunging into a Recession

It's tough out there, with every single economic indictor foretelling impending economic disaster, like this one:

Durable Goods Orders Rise by 5.2 Percent

Tuesday January 29
By Martin Crutsinger, AP Economics Writer

Orders for Big-Ticket Manufactured Goods Jump by Largest Amount in 5 Months

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Orders to factories for big-ticket manufactured goods soared in December by the largest amount in five months, welcome news for an economy buffeted by talk of recession.

The 5.2 percent increase in orders was a surprise finish for the manufacturing sector at year's end -- a segment of the economy considered to have had a poor year.

The increase in orders, as reported Tuesday by the Commerce Department, was far larger than had been expected.
...
The December orders increase was more than double what had been expected.
...
The unexpectedly big jump in December closed out a lackluster year for manufacturers.

Don't wait for any economic facts to roll in. Instead, have a panic attack right now because everyone knows that the future can be predicted with great accuracy (and the mainstream media is predicting the end of the economic world). We all know that nothing unexpected ever happens, and the expectation of a recession is clearly in the air. Therefore, it's crisis time.

OK, enough goofing off. I'm not saying that the economy is in great shape. Not at all. I am simply saying that you should wait for all of the relevant data to roll in before you conclude that all is lost. Perhaps the end of the economic world is finally at hand, but I'd just like to see the numbers before I jump off a building.

Tomorrow, we'll get the latest figure for GDP growth:

The government will issue its first look Wednesday at the overall economy's performance for the final three months of 2007. Many economists believe that will show the gross domestic product (GDP) was rising at an anemic 1.2 percent annual rate in the October-December quarter, a significant slowdown from the 4.9 percent growth rate of the July-September period.

If the 4th-quarter figure does come in at 1.2%, I'm going to remind you that this is double the rate of growth observed in the 1st quarter of 2007. That being the case, it is clear that one weak quarter of GDP growth is obviously not an indication that it is time to repent. In fact, a 1.2% rate of growth -- over a mere 3-month period -- would exceed the average rate of growth in both Germany and Italy from 2001 to 2006.

It's hard to have the patience to await the evidence, but since no one can predict the future, it's what you have to do.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here:

The Economy Is Fine (Really)

By BRIAN WESBURY
January 28, 2008; Page A15

It is hard to imagine any time in history when such rampant pessimism about the economy has existed with so little evidence of serious trouble...

Saddam Hussein Misled this Nation into War

George Bush thought Saddam Hussein (a) was hiding WMDs and (b) had ties to al Qaeda. An FBI agent who interrogated the former Iraqi dictator for seven months elicited information suggesting that Bush was wrong on both counts.

If you are a standard emotional left-wing surface-scratcher, you actually believe that George Bush lied about these issues because (a) it is not possible for a president to be wrong and (b) he needed some justification to invade Iraq in order to serve corporate interests (or fulfill a Christian prophecy or whatever). But the truth is a lot more interesting than that, and we've known the truth for a long time. In case you don't know, the truth is that Saddam Hussein lied about his WMDs. That is, he deliberately deceived the world into thinking that his WMD program was still intact, and he had a very good reason for doing so. In an interview with 60-Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, the FBI's chief Saddam interrogator (George Piro) explained this old news:

"And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?" Pelley asks.

"He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the '90s. And those that hadn't been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq," Piro says.

"So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?" Pelley asks.

"It was very important for him to project that because that was what kept him, in his mind, in power. That capability kept the Iranians away. It kept them from reinvading Iraq," Piro says.

Before his wars with America, Saddam had fought a ruinous eight year war with Iran and it was Iran he still feared the most.

"He believed that he couldn't survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?" Pelley asks.

"Absolutely," Piro says.

All of this was documented long ago by the Iraq Survey Group (as I discussed here), but you may be hearing this news for the first time. If so, you really need to think through the implications. Like a lot of Americans, you may think that, in retrospect, George Bush should have allowed the UN inspectors to continue their work in Iraq instead of rushing to war. After all, even though Saddam Hussein was not being fully cooperative (which was the do-or-die condition set forth by George Bush), UN inspectors indicated that they were making progress anyway. That being the case, why not let the inspection process continue for a while? Perhaps the inspectors would have eventually concluded with a high degree of confidence that Iraq was free of WMDs, in which case we could have been spared this unnecessary war.

The problem with this line of thinking is that Saddam Hussein was intent on keeping the world deceived about his WMDs because, as it turns out, he feared that Iran would invade if they knew that he had disarmed. And this is precisely why Saddam would never fully cooperate (i.e., he used his failure to cooperate as a way to keep doubts alive). If the world started to become convinced that his WMDs had been destroyed, Saddam had the power to raise their suspicions once again. All he had to do was to deliberately behave like a guilty man by denying the inspectors access to something they wanted to see. That was the game he was playing.

Saddam was not going to allow the world to believe that he was free of WMDs because he simply couldn't risk it, and that's what you have to come to grips with. Had Saddam Hussein been allowed to remain in power, we'd still suspect that he had WMDs. So would Iran. Not only would we still believe that Saddam had WMDs (because he would make sure that we did), he probably would have them again in time:

In fact, Piro says Saddam intended to produce weapons of mass destruction again, some day. "The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there," Piro says.

"And that was his intention?" Pelley asks.

"Yes," Piro says.

"What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?" Pelley asks.

"He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program," says Piro.

"Chemical, biological, even nuclear," Pelley asks.

"Yes," Piro says.

George Bush did not lie about Saddam's WMDs. Saddam himself did that, and the world believed him (understandably enough). Saddam did not think that Bush would actually invade, so he thought he could keep the deception up without too much fear of being toppled. It was a monumental miscalculation.

What about al Qaeda? Surely Bush lied about Saddam's ties to that terrorist organization, right? Wrong, and we've known that for a long time, too. Bush was wrong (probably), but he did not lie. We know this because an excruciatingly detailed bipartisan investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence unanimously concluded as much in 2004:

The Committee found that none of the analysts or other people interviewed by the Committee said that they were pressured to change their conclusions related to Iraq's links to terrorism. After 9/11, however, analysts were under tremendous pressure to make correct assessments, to avoid missing a credible threat, and to avoid an intelligence failure on the scale of 9/11. As a result, the Intelligence Community's assessments were bold and assertive in pointing out potential terrorist links.

Obviously, that was the issue. Having missed very serious threats in the past, intelligence analysts had a hair trigger for detecting ties to terrorism so as not to repeat that costly mistake. In so doing, they made the opposite mistake (i.e., they "detected" nonexistent ties between Saddam and al Qaeda). This is fine by me because, although you are probably not aware of it, you only get to choose the error you are likely to make, not whether to be right or wrong. That is, we are going to make intelligence errors in the future (it's time for you to come to grips with that fact), so you should decide which error you'd rather make (missing a real threat until it is too late or detecting a threat that turns out not to be real). Thinking along these lines is not as much fun as angrily accusing George Bush of having lied, but it has the advantage of being tethered to reality.

In any case, George Bush believed what intelligence analysts had to say about Saddam's ties to al Qaeda. But because the intelligence analysts were wrong, he was, too:

Among the most important questions for U.S. intelligence was whether Saddam was supporting al Qaeda, as had been claimed by some in the Bush administration.

What was Saddam's opinion of Osama Bin Laden?

"He considered him to be a fanatic. And as such was very wary of him. He told me, 'You can't really trust fanatics,'" Piro says.

"Didn't think of Bin Laden as an ally in his effort against the United States in this war against the United States?" Pelley asks.

"No. No. He didn't wanna be seen with Bin Laden. And didn't want to associate with Bin Laden," Piro explains.

Piro says Saddam thought that Bin Laden was a threat to him and his regime.

Before the war, many on the left thought that Saddam would never associate with bin Laden because, if anything, bin Laden would be more of a threat than an ally. It seems likely that the left was correct about this (though it's probably also true that Iraq's intelligence agencies had some degree of interaction with al Qaeda, which is what caused intelligence analysts to get it wrong). The fact that the left had this right makes them blind to what came later in Iraq. What came later was al Qaeda's relentless and malicious suicide bombing campaign against Shiites in Iraq. Thus, a war that started out as an effort to eliminate Saddam's WMDs and end his support for al Qaeda (and to bring democracy to Iraq) morphed into an unwanted war with al Qaeda. At that point, our choice was to win that war or to lose that war. But the left has maintained an errie code of silence about al Qaeda in Iraq because, being stuck in the past, they thought that the argument was over. The classic example of this bizarre state of affairs comes from a November, 2006 interview with Nancy Pelosi in which she is asked to comment on some videotaped remarks by George Bush:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place fomented, in my opinion, because of these attacks by uh -- by al Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal.

THOMAS FERRARO, REUTERS: (INAUDIBLE) blame the surging violence in Iraq on al Qaeda deny the country is in the midst of a civil war?

NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), HOUSE SPEAKER-DESIGNATE: My response on the president's representations are well known. But the 9/11 Commission dismissed that notion a long time ago and I feel sad that the president is resorting to it again.

Note the complete absence of logic in her response. In this exchange, Bush said that, in 2006, al Qaeda was trying to incite sectarian violence (which is true beyond any doubt), yet Pelosi responds by saying (effectively) that it is simply not true because, before 2003, al Qaeda was not in Iraq. It is a non-sequitur. The left wing brain is constitutionally unable to come to grips with the fact that al Qaeda declared war on American forces in Iraq because they are still celebrating the fact that Bush was wrong about Saddam's ties to al Qaeda before the war. It is downright bizarre, and it is helped along by a mainstream media that is so clueless that it actually believes that George Piro is telling us something that is not already extremely well known (hence, the 60 Minutes interview). Well, the interview with Piro did reveal one thing that I did not know:

The Piro interviews with Saddam turned up other revelations about one of the most notorious war crimes of his regime: the use of chemical weapons on Kurdish civilians in 1988. Iraq gassed its own people in something called the Anfal campaign to counter Iranian incursions and Kurdish resistance to his rule.

Piro says Saddam told him he himself gave the orders to use chemical weapons against the Kurds in the North. When shown the graphic pictures of the aftermath, Piro says Saddam reacted by saying, "Necessary."

Chilling. And that's the main that the left would have protected from George Bush. That's the man who would still be in power today had the likes of Barack Obama been in power. That's the man who would still be threatening the world with WMDs that no one knew were fictitious (and that would not be fictitious for long).

Despite what many mistakenly believe, the last chapter of the invasion of Iraq has not yet been written. Pollsters are fond of asking Americans if they believe that the invasion was worth it, as if the story is basically over and that a final determination can already be made. Most Americans now say that it was not worth it. But most Americans do not even know that Iraq has become a better place as a result of the troop surge. Eventually, they will come to know that. Eventually, democracy may actually succeed in Iraq (and the deep pessimism that pervades your liberal brain has no bearing on whether or not it will). Eventually, another poll will be taken in Iraq asking how life is now compared to how it was under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein that the left hoped to preserve. In response, a huge majority will say that they much prefer what they have now.

But even if all of this happens, the left will insist that a tyrannical dictator with the blood of 2 million people on his hands -- a man who personally ordered the horrific chemical weapon attack against the Kurds and who, when shown the graphic pictures of the aftermath, responded by saying, "Necessary" -- should have been allowed to remain in power. In fact, the left believes that it was immoral to bring him down. That way of thinking reflects a moral code that is (and that always will be) utterly foreign to me.

The Troop Surge is Making History

Given the evident success of the troop surge in Iraq, it is interesting to go back and consider the president's reasoning back in the fall of 2006 (before the surge actually began). This is when violence was out of control in Iraq, and we were about to have an election in which the party that advocated immediate withdrawal (and effective surrender to al Qaeda) was clearly going to pick up seats. Fred Barnes has a piece on on Bush's pre-surge thinking in the Weekly Standard. I have only a few quibbles about this otherwise excellent article, which you should read in its entirely (instead of reading this post!). My main quibble is with this brief review of a critical time in Iraq's history (an issue that matters a lot to me even though it is tangential to the main points being made in the article):

On February 22, 2006, the golden dome of the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest Shia mosques in Iraq, was bombed. That single act of violence would change everything. For several weeks, Iraqi Shia and their militias didn't react, and Bush and his advisers thought they'd dodged a bullet.

Then in April, violence exploded with a fury unseen in Iraq in the nearly three years since American troops had deposed Saddam Hussein. Shia militias hadn't responded to earlier al Qaeda and Sunni provocations. But now they erupted in a killing spree. Shia death squads slaughtered thousands of Sunnis. Baghdad became a free fire zone. Iraq was on the verge of an all-out civil war.

All true, but even a brief review should always emphasize the fact that the bombing of the Golden Mosque came on the heels of a 2-year suicide bombing campaign against Shiite civilians by al Qaeda terrorists that was deliberately intended to provoke the Shiite militias into killing Sunnis in Baghdad (which is exactly what they did after the final straw in Samarra). If it were explained like that, readers would understand that "this single act of violence" (a) occurred in a context of a larger offensive by al Qaeda and (b) was not part of a spontaneous civil war between Sunnis and Shiites that was based on "raw hatred." Yes, al Qaeda is made up of Sunnis, but, no, they were not killing Shiites on behalf of Sunnis fighting a civil war. Instead, al Qaeda was trying to create a civil war that was not happening on its own. The Sunnis of Iraq were, somewhat self-destructively, making it possible for al Qaeda to carry out their atrocities. Why they initially chose to do that is hard to know, but part of the explanation may be that al Qaeda was also an effective fighting force against American troops. Moreover, so long as the Shiite militias stayed on the sidelines, al Qaeda's suicide bombing campaign against Shiite civilians probably seemed acceptable to the Sunnis because it served to destabilize the new Shiite government they opposed. And another big plus was that it also fueled helpful anti-war sentiment in America. Eventually, though, the Sunnis of Iraq got far more than they bargained for.

In response to al Qaeda's provocations, Barnes is right to say that "Shia death squads slaughtered thousands of Sunnis," but it is important to emphasize that their goal in slaughtering Sunnis was to end al Qaeda's suicide bombing campaign against them. You can call that a civil war if you like, but it certainly wasn't the kind of civil war you thought you saw (i.e., one that was based on "blind sectarian hatred"), and that's my point. It was al Qaeda killing Shiite civilians to start a civil war, and Shiite militias putting a stop to it by killing every Sunni male they could get their hands on in Baghdad. When that happened, al Qaeda had largely achieved one of its major objectives (as clearly outlined in a letter written by Zarqawi in 2003), but the Sunnis of Iraq began to rethink matters. Suddenly, their self-defeating deal with the devil was losing its appeal. The Sunnis were also getting a bit tired of al Qaeda enforcing Sharia Law on them, as noted in this article from back in April:

But their indiscriminate killing of civilians and a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam have alienated traditionally minded tribal leaders and escalated a power struggle in Sunni ranks.

This article in Time Magazine made the same point:

Last week, an influential nationalist group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, asked Osama bin Laden to rein in al-Qaeda in Iraq's more extreme tactics, such as targeting Iraqi civilians and brutally enforcing Sharia Law.

This is what happened in Iraq, and al Qaeda was a decisive factor. That's why I am reluctant to use the phrase "civil war." That phrase calls to mind the superficial analysis of Iraq that you find everywhere on the left according to which the removal of Saddam Hussein led to an explosion of sectarian violence merely because of raw hatred between Shiite and Sunnis. Many, many people mistakenly think along those lines, including, I would say, most Americans. They have some vague understanding that al Qaeda was in the mix as well, but your average American has no idea what al Qaeda was trying to accomplish and what an incredibly powerful force they really were. They don't know, for example, that al Qaeda's foreign suicide bombers killed nearly 4000 Iraqi civilians in 2007 alone. As such, they don't yet know what a crushing defeat al Qaeda has suffered in Iraq.

You can define "victory" to mean political reconciliation in Baghdad, as everyone on the left does, but I don't (even though I hope it happens and expect it will). I define victory as the crushing defeat of the terrorist organization that attacked America on 9/11 and then came to Iraq to defeat American forces there. And that victory would appear to be at hand.

Despite my very slight quibbles with some of what Barnes had to say, I certainly agree with how he concludes:

The 20-minute speech on January 10, 2007 [note: the speech in which he outlined the purpose of the troop surge], was not Bush's most eloquent. And it wasn't greeted with applause. Democrats condemned the surge and Republicans were mostly silent. Polls showing strong public opposition to the war in Iraq were unaffected.

But the president, as best I could tell, wasn't looking for affirmation. He was focused solely on victory in Iraq. The surge may achieve that. And if it does, Bush's decision to spurn public opinion and the pressure of politics and intensify the war in Iraq will surely be regarded as the greatest of his presidency.

It may, in fact, be regarded as one of the greatest presidential decisions in recent history.

A Democratic Primary in South Carolina

The aggregate polling results from Pollster.com predict a big win for Barack Obama in South Carolina today:


Polls have had a hard time predicting Hillary Clinton's finishing position in several earlier primaries, but I'll be pretty surprised if she pulls this one out. Although she still seems like the inevitable Democratic nominee, Obama seems likely to win some races in the south.

There is no telling what will happen down the line, but if Huckabee drops out of the Republican race at some point, then my guess is that the general election will come down to Clinton vs. Romney (because Huckabee's supporters, and maybe Thompson's too, seem likely to get behind Mitt). It's obviously too early to count McCain and Giuliani out, but a Clinton-Romney contest, which had seemed pretty unlikely not so long ago, does not seem far-fetched at all anymore.

UPDATE: I've seen a lot of stories like this:

SC Dem Primary Marked by Talk of Race

By BETH FOUHY
The Associated Press
Saturday, January 26, 2008; 10:02 AM

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Democrats headed to the polls here Saturday in an unusual contest that pitted Barack Obama against two Clintons. Race was a persistent subtext in the first primary to feature a large number of black voters.

But this analysis just amazes me (via Glenn Reynolds):

It’s no-win for Barack

Clintons marginalize him as black candidate
...
In fact, it is possible Obama won’t win a single state after South Carolina. He could even lose his home state of Illinois.

Why?

As Morris puts it:

“If Hillary loses South Carolina and the defeat serves to demonstrate Obama’s ability to attract a block vote among black Democrats, the message will go out loud and clear to white voters that this is a racial fight. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton.”

No matter what happens in South Carolina today - even if Obama wins a plurality among white voters - the Clintons and their media stooges have turned South Carolina into “the black primary.”

In fact, the bigger his win, the more it reinforces the campaign-killing message that Barack Obama is “their” candidate.

If tomorrow’s headlines read “Obama Crushes Clinton, Wins 80 percent of African-American Vote,” every non-black voter will get the message that Obama is somebody else’s candidate, not theirs.

Good heavens. Could the Clintons really be that diabolical?

UPDATE II: Here is more on the supposed race-oriented Clinton strategy in South Carolina:

With Obama heading towards victory in South Carolina, Bill Clinton has sought to draw attention to Obama's dependence there on black voters.

Clinton put his not-very-subtle strategy on display in Charleston on Thursday when he told an audience: "As far as I can tell, neither Senator Obama nor Hillary have lost votes because of their race or gender," he said. "They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender -- that's why people tell me Hillary doesn't have a chance of winning here."

The exit polls tell the story of how whites and blacks voted yesterday. If I am reading them correctly, CNN exit polls show that about 55% of voters were black and 45% were non-black. This puzzles me a bit because a check of Census figures shows that the population of South Carolina is only about 29% black. So, if I am not making a mistake, then either blacks are registered in higher numbers there or they had a much higher turnout.

In any case, now that it's over, it looks like Obama got about 55% of the overall vote. The exit polls suggest that he got about 77% of the black vote and about 21% of the white vote. Hillary got about 20% of the black vote and 33% of the white vote. Curiously, Edwards received almost no black support (about 3%), whereas he actually got slightly more support than Clinton among whites (38% maybe). So, Obama beat Clinton because of the black vote, and Clinton beat Edwards because of the black vote, too.

The core of the hypothetical Clinton plan was to emphasize that Obama could not win among whites. That seems to be true of South Carolina, but I don't see anyone making that point in the media. Obama got a huge percentage of the black vote and a small percentage of the white vote (the smallest of the three). It probably matters a lot that Obama is not drawing whites in droves, but I don't think that the Clintons managed to drive this race-based message home to voters (and, in truth, I don't really know if they were trying to do that anyway).

It's a Crisis, and Your Job is to Panic

First, we have this really scary news:

Gore predicts worsening climate change

Climate change is taking place even faster than the worst predictions made by the UN's Nobel prize-winning panel on climate change, Al Gore said this morning.

The former US vice-president and winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize said that there were forecasts that the North Pole ice cap could disappear during summer months within five years.

Mr Gore, who shared the Nobel with the panel for his own efforts to counter climate change, said: "We could take the whole session talking just about the new scientific evidence of the last few weeks and months.

"The climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] projections had warned us."

If that were true, wouldn't you expect global temperatures to have budged at least one iota during the Bush years? But they haven't:


I am sure than one can find some measure according to which the climate crisis has suddenly spiraled out of control, but global temperatures remain the central issue.

Don't get me wrong. It's not at all unreasonable to think that global temperatures are still on the rise based on temperature changes that have been observed in recent decades:


By looking at this chart, you can see why many believe that global temperatures are going to increase even though they have reached a plateau in recent years. They've reached apparent plateaus in the past and then resumed their upward march. The same thing could easily happen again, and you don't need a climate model to think along those lines. But it just seems odd to be ramping up the climate hysteria during a pause in the global warming action.

If, after listening to the latest from Al Gore, your overall emotional state is not yet at its maximum level of hysteria, then you may want to consider completely freaking out in light of our obvious economic plunge into the next great depression. The Congressional Budget Office just released its projections for the economy in 2008. What do they foresee with regard to changes in real GDP? This:


No, even the CBO can't predict the future, but they have a much better fix on things than you do. And they project economic growth in 2008 to be a rather weak 1.7%. That is, for one bad year, America's economy is projected to grow at a rate that equals or exceeds the average rate of growth from 2001 through 2006 in France (1.7%), Germany (0.95%), Italy (0.88%), and Japan (1.45%). For those 4 nations of the G7, 1.7% growth is actually something to crow about (data here). Only the Unites States, Canada and the U.K. grew at greater than 1.7% over those years. My point is not that 1.7% growth is good. It obviously isn't. Instead, my point is that a fit of apoplectic hysteria does not seem like the right reaction to the current economic state of affairs.

But that's just me. I am slow to believe a trend, and I sometimes miss a trend for that reason. When sectarian violence in Iraq was spiraling out of control back in March of 2006 (right after the bombing of the Golden Mosque), the available data initially suggested to me that monthly casualties had jumped to a new level but were not increasing beyond that (i.e., the situation was clearly worse but not out of control). Later, it became clear that things were quite a bit worse than the early evidence suggested. Still, you have to base your opinions on the objective evidence. That evidence can be wrong, but it is the best you have. I'm often surprised that even college students don't realize that this is the way to think. Many of them think that the most important thing to do is to have an opinion and to hold that opinion strongly so long as it feels right (and if it is reinforced by a well-meaning but clueless mainstream media). A better idea is to have as many opinions as you like but to hold strong opinions only about those issues you have investigated for yourself. Because if you haven't investigated the matter for yourself, then you are letting the mainstream media do you thinking for you, and that's something you should never do.

Putting Climate Models to the Test

I came across an interesting blog called Prometheus. The professor who runs that blog has simply the nailed the issue with regard to climate models. For those of us who believe that the climate debate is not quite over, the most interesting question is whether or not climate models can predict the future with any degree of accuracy. I am already positive that they cannot (even if global warming is real), and you are probably already positive that they can (because, for some odd reason, you really believe that the debate is over). My confidence in the inability of climate models to predict the future comes from knowledge of models in general, not because of what I know about climate models in particular. In fact, I don't know anything about climate models, but I do know a lot about serious attempts to model the behavior of complex systems in general. It is a very useful endeavor (for reasons I won't go into here), but predicting the future behavior of that complex system is not one of them. They just can't do it, and there is no reason to believe that it will be different when it comes to climate models.

I'm not sure why people don't discuss the more general issue of modeling the behavior of complex systems (like the brain or the economy) when they discuss the particular issue of climate models. It could be that climate scientists are vastly more brilliant and infinitely more capable than neuroscientists or economists, so their models are uniquely able to accurately predict the behavior of a complex system. But that just seems incredibly unlikely to me. Hence, my skepticism.

At the Prometheus blog, you'll find lots of posts concerned with testing the predictions of climate models. It's a little hard to test those predictions because the IPCC offers projections for a whole variety of scenarios (depending on CO2 output, methane output, etc.), and one can argue forever about which scenario is actually unfolding. This makes the models almost untestable, which is great for global warming enthusiasts (because, like Frued's theory of psychoanalysis, the models can't be proven wrong). Also, various temperature readings that can be used to test the models seem to wildly disagree with each other, so determining what is actually happening to the global temperature is not as easy as I thought. For example, here is one graph that looks at IPCC projections for the worst-case CO2 output scenario (called the A1F1 scenario):


At the beginning of the graph, you can see recent temperature measurements taken by satellite (the little red squiggly line). Most agree that CO2 output these days corresponds to the worst case scenario, so temperatures ought to be increasing according to these predictions. So far, though, the satellite measures suggest that we are a bit too cool.

In later posts, other temperature readings are shown, such as surface temperatures taken by NASA. The NASA values more closely correspond to the model predictions. Unfortunately, the highly politicized scientist James Hansen is apparently in charge of those measurements. This is one reason why it's bad for scientists to be political animals. Would you trust findings reported by a conservative right wing activist scientist purporting to show that abortions cause women to later suffer from debilitating mental illness? No, you'd wait for other non-partisan scientists to weigh in on the matter. Even the most honest partisan scientists (which James Hansen may very well be) cannot keep their unconscious biases at bay. This obvious phenomenon applies to every domain of scientific research, though, again, perhaps climate scientists are uniquely superhuman in this regard. In any case, here is the same chart, but this time Hansen's measurements included (in blue):


If you trust Hansen's measurements, the planetary emergency is unfolding right on schedule.

The UK Meteorological Service also takes global temperature measurements and makes projections that apparently correspond to those made by the IPCC. Here is a nifty chart (again, taken from the Prometheus blog):


The white line shows the model prediction, which had to be adjusted in the early 1990s because of an unexpected volcano eruption (such eruptions cool things off). The green line represents actual temperature measurements through 2007, and the blue dot is the forecast for 2008. If that forecast turns out to be right, then 2008 will do nothing to settle the issue. It will still be the case that temperatures have remained essentially constant since 2001 even though CO2 is increasing at an always "alarming" rate. Of course, this is a short window of time to draw any real conclusions, so we'll just have to watch this unfold for some years to come.

In a way, the deck is hugely stacked in favor of the climate models. First, the earth has been in in a warming trend in recent decades, and the best predictor of what will happen in the near future is the recent past. If the same warming trend continues for the next 20 years or so, then temperatures are likely to be pretty close to at least one of the model predictions (whether or not CO2 is a major culprit). Also, even if temperatures have truly reached a plateau and have stopped increasing for the foreseeable future, we are going to have another El Nino event sometime in the next 5 years or so. When that happens, we'll have a warm year (i.e., temperatures will temporarily spike above the plateau), ice will melt, and the media will just go hysterical. All of this explains why the deck seems to me to be stacked in favor of the models. The only real way thay can be proven wrong is if temperatures remain flat or begin to drop over the next 10 years. That may be happening right now, though I, myself, would not bet on its continuation.

You can also find predictions and measurements of global sea levels on the Prometheus blog. Here is a chart showing IPCC predictions, which have been all over the place (and which is also the point):


This is really instructive if you think that climate scientists can predict the future. Here is what the proprietor of the Prometheus blog has to say about that:

The fact that the IPCC has been unsuccessful in predicting sea level rise, does not mean that things are worse or better, but simply that scientists clearly do not have a handle on this issue and are unable to predict sea level changes on a decadal scale. The lack of predictive accuracy does not lend optimism about the prospects for accuracy on the multi-decadal scale.

If the models fail to predict the future (which, to me, is a given), it will be too bad. Climate scientists have a point to make, and efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions are worthwhile. But the environmental movement, led by Nobel-Prize-winning and Oscar-winning Al Gore in collaboration with political operatives at the IPCC, have hysterically declared a planetary emergency based on the untested predictions of climate models (models that almost certainly cannot do what they purport to do). If the models are eventually shown to be wrong, then the pendulum may swing way too far in the other direction. And if that happens, we'll have Al Gore to thank for it.

UPDATE: Pay no attention to this because the debate is over:

Study on hurricanes, warming creates storm

WASHINGTON - Global warming could reduce how many hurricanes hit the United States, according to a new federal study that clashes with other research. The new study is the latest in a contentious scientific debate over how manmade global warming may affect the intensity and number of hurricanes.
...
One group of climate scientists has linked increases in the strongest hurricanes — just those with winds greater than 130 mph — in the past 35 years to global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said "more likely than not," manmade global warming has already increased the frequency of the most intense storms.

But hurricane researchers, especially scientists at NOAA's Miami Lab, have argued that the long-term data for all hurricanes show no such trend. And Wang's new research suggests just the opposite of the view that more intense hurricanes result from global warming.

Don't Stimulate the Economy

Don't get me wrong. I want to have my cake and eat it too. And I can hardly wait to get my $800 check, which I'll promptly put into a savings account. But I really don't think that the government should me that check. And if people want to panic, they should be allowed to do so. I realize that this seems like a preposterous suggestion at a moment when the stock market has opened 400 points lower, but the free-fall of the stock market reflects panic among amateurs (who are going to lose a lot of money). Others are going to make a killing off of this. Sometimes, you have to let the pros pickpocket the amateurs. It has happened before, it is happening right now, and it will happen again in the future.

Why would I recommend against stimulating our rapidly deteriorating economy? First, most economists don't believe that we are heading for a recession. Second, they have no idea what the future holds anyway, so what they think about the future isn't all that informative. Third, the most recent GDP growth figure (for the 3rd quarter of 2007) was a much better than average 4.9%. We should at least wait a week to find out how bad things were in the 4th quarter of 2007 before taking drastic action. And then we should wait for the report after that (concerning GDP growth in the first quarter of 2008) because a single quarter of sluggish growth is almost meaningless.

But let's say that we are headed for a recession. We certainly could be (and I can't predict the future behavior of a complex system any better than anyone else can), so let's just say that we are. When did the idea of the business cycle become outdated? An economy cannot expand at a rapid clip forever because, in good times, companies that are flush with cash start spending money on dopey things. Although I don't actually want to go through a recession, I know what it's like to manage a pretty big budget and I know how people in that position behave when when times get tough. What's the first thing you do when the income stream starts to slow? You cut all the ridiculous stuff you've been funding for years because money was so plentiful, which allowed you to avoid many hard decisions. When you finally have to make the hard decisions, the overall efficiency of your operation increases considerably. I would like to think that we've evolved beyond the business cycle, but I don't think we have. We are not going to eliminate recessions no matter how hard we try much as I would like to believe otherwise.

The U.S. economy is not the strongest in the world because we never have recessions. Not by a long shot. Instead, through the ups and downs of the business cycle, the U.S, economy forges upward like no other economy on earth. That's the point, and that's why I'm not sure it's a good idea to try to avoid a recession by sending free money to everyone.

Our panic-driven efforts to address a perceived crisis by sending money to everyone (i.e., with the U.S. government acting like Santa Claus) just contributes to the emergency atmosphere. Panicky investors in the stock market making self-defeating decisions against a backdrop of strong world economies is not an emergency. Here are some similar thoughts:

The economy: Calm down ...

Sunday, January 20, 2008

We interrupt what you likely think will be a regularly scheduled hand-wringing lament about the lousy shape of the economy and the looming "recession" to offer something that's in woefully short supply these says:

Perspective.
...
Indeed, there are some serious economic challenges. But as Mr. Gitlitz reminds, there also remain some very significant bright spots:
= Commercial and industrial lending remains robust -- at an annualized rate of nearly 30 percent over the last eight weeks

= Wage and salary growth actually has rebounded -- more than 5 percent over the last three months versus a mid-2007 rate of under 0.5 percent

= And a 0.3 percent uptick in the unemployment rate to 5 percent should not be cause for grave concern; 5 percent actually is low and the 30-year unemployment average is above 6 percent

I am not for one moment suggesting that the economy is going great guns. I am saying that you don't yet know that it isn't. What you are doing is something you should never, ever do, and that is to allow the mainstream media to do your thinking for you. To your average reporter, if it feels like a recession then it is a recession (and it's time to panic, so get moving). Instead of panicking, I think we should gather some data and take drastic action only when it becomes clear that it is needed. But if you feel we must take drastic action right now, is sending everyone a check really the best thing to do? If your answer is "yes," my question is this: on what basis do you make that claim? I have not inquired into the relevant evidence myself, but others have, and they seem to have discovered that past efforts along those lines have not accomplished anything of value:

But in 1974, the White House was keen on the idea of cutting taxes to stimulate private spending. Since it was feared that a permanent tax cut might be inflationary, President Gerald Ford and the Democratic Congress agreed on a one-shot tax rebate. It was thought that cash-strapped consumers would take their government checks and immediately run out and spend them on food, clothing and other necessities. This would give the economy a Keynesian boost.

One dissenter was economist Milton Friedman. His research had led him to conclude that consumer spending was less a function of liquidity than something he called "permanent income."
...
Subsequent studies by MIT economists Franco Modigliani and Charles Steindel, and Alan Blinder of Princeton, showed that Friedman's prediction was correct. The 1975 rebate had very little impact on spending and much less than a permanent tax cut -- which would change peoples' concept of their permanent income -- of similar magnitude.

In 2001 -- despite the thoroughness and general acceptance of these studies -- Congress and the White House once again chose a one-shot tax rebate to deal with an economic slowdown in 2001.

To his credit, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill cautioned against the rebate. "I was here when we tried that in 1975, and it just didn't work," he said. "If we want to change consumption patterns, we need to make permanent changes in peoples' tax burdens." But President George W. Bush overruled his Treasury secretary and approved the rebate idea. Checks of $300 to $600 per taxpayer were sent out in the late summer. Contemporaneous polls by Gallup, Bloomberg and the University of Michigan all found that the vast bulk of consumers expected to save the money or use it to pay bills. Subsequent studies confirmed these forecasts.

In short, there is virtually no empirical evidence that tax rebates are an effective response to economic slowdowns.

If it's true that there is no empirical evidence that tax rebates are an effective response to economic slowdowns, then why the heck are we doing the same thing again? My fear is that it is all psychological. That is, the media has whipped up panic ("now we have an economic emergency on top of our planetary emergency!!"), so Bush is proposing an economically useless package that is merely designed to calm people down.

Well, if not rebates, then at least interest rates should be cut. Right? I'm not so sure:

Just how low will the economy go? There are conflicting signals. It's clear that the economy is losing steam. The plummeting value of America's houses is chilling consumer spending, layoffs are mounting, and banks and other creditors burned by the subprime crisis are far more reluctant to lend to everyone from small-business owners to private equity firms. But GDP increased by 4.9% in the third quarter, and economists estimate that GDP was still growing in the fourth quarter. Exports are strong, thanks to the weak dollar. The Fed did a brilliant job last summer by flooding the banks with money to prevent a full-scale credit crunch. Credit is far more expensive today, but it's also becoming more plentiful, as demonstrated by the falling rates on everything from LIBOR - the rate at which international banks lend to each other - to junk bonds. So while a recession is a real possibility, it's not inevitable - even the Fed is not forecasting one this year.
...
By cutting rates early and often, Bernanke is acting as though a recession - even a mild one - would be a calamity that must be avoided at all costs.
...
But Bernanke is setting the stage for an even bigger recession down the road. Just as the ultra-low rates of the early 2000s created many of the problems we're experiencing today, pumping money into the system would probably stoke inflation, forcing the Fed to hike rates sharply in the near future. "It's better to take a small recession and kill inflation immediately instead of facing high inflation and a really big recession later," says Carnegie Mellon economist Allan Meltzer.
...
So what is the right course for the Fed? Bernanke should hold the Fed funds rate exactly where it is now, at 4.25%. Standing pat might well push the economy into a recession. But the Fed's newfound vigilance on inflation would boost the dollar, effectively lowering the prices of oil and other imports. America would suffer a short downturn and restore price stability, paving the way to a strong recovery in 2010 or 2011.

But in a move that is sure to reinforce the emergency atmosphere, the Fed just cut interest rates by a whopping 3/4 of a percent -- and they didn't even wait for their scheduled meeting next week. Obviously, it's a crisis situation. More than 25 years of solid economic growth in America, which was 4.9% in the most recent quarter for which statistics are available, has suddenly fallen off a steep cliff, and we are rapidly descending in an out-of-control tailspin straight into the depths of economic hell. Either that, or everyone is having a panic attack before they have the evidence to justify such concern. Instead of sending everyone $800, I think that Bush should immediately implement Marshall Law and order our soldiers to deliver tranquilizers to the doorstep of every American.

UPDATE: This is interesting:

Paulson: U.S. economy resilient but needs stimulus

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said on Tuesday that the U.S. economy remains resilient and has healthy long-term fundamentals, but has slowed "materially" in recent weeks and needs a short-term stimulus.

"We need to do something now, because short-term risks are clearly to the downside, and the potential benefits of quick action to support our economy have become clear, said Paulson in prepared remarks to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington.

"The U.S. economy is resilient. The unemployment rate remains low and job creation continues, albeit at a modest pace. The structure of our economy is sound and our long term economic fundamentals area healthy," he said.

This guy already has the GDP data that will be released in a week or so. I translate what he says to mean that the GDP figure will indicate slow growth. However, because everyone is having a panic attack, he also seems to think that we should do something to address that overreaction.

Maybe we should because maybe we have nothing to fear but fear itself. But I'd be more inclined to let matters sort themselves out for a while, even if it means we might have a recession. That's because I suspect that frantic efforts to prevent a looming recession will only make things worse down the line.

Evaluating the Troop Surge Through the Eyes of the Left

A perfectly liberal analysis of the troop surge just appeared in the Washington Post. In the end, the poor fellow ties himself up in knots trying to figure out why our troops are still there, and, as usual, his confusion can be traced directly to his refusal to name the enemy in Iraq. In addition, despite the fact that his piece appears in the esteemed Washington Post whereas my response appears on this lowly blog, his piece is filled with sweeping and unsubstantiated assertions whereas my response is filled with direct evidence and links to each source (so you can check these matters for yourself). Odd that it has to be that way. In any case, let's see what he has to say:

Surge to Nowhere

Don't buy the hawks' hype. The war may be off the front pages, but Iraq is broken beyond repair, and we still own it.

By Andrew J. Bacevich
Sunday, January 20, 2008; Page B01

As the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom nears, the fabulists are again trying to weave their own version of the war. The latest myth is that the "surge" is working.
...
As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstanding, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that "Iraq is sovereign," that sovereignty remains a fiction.

Wow. There's an awful lot packed into that paragraph, so let's take it apart real slow. First, back when civilian casualties were spiraling out of control, anti-war extremists loved to cite very detailed casualty statistics (such as the number of bodies piling up in the Baghdad morgue every month). Not any more. Now, the incredible success of the troop surge with respect to casualties in Iraq is relegated to a mere one-half of one single sentence, as if it is quite painful to discuss but is also too obvious to simply ignore. Here is his entire analysis of the effect of the troop surge on casualties in Iraq: "As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates..." That's it? Are any lives being saved? Or are we just protecting a few bridges that were once being bombed? Let me show you what violence abating looks like in terms of innocent human lives (according to detailed statistics from Iraq Body Count):


I haven't adjusted the data at all, and the numbers are fairly complete through November (which is the most recent month shown). You can see a big one-month spike in casualties from a panic-driven stampede that killed over 1000 people way back in August of 2005, but otherwise casualties were generally in the vicinity of about 1000 per month until early 2006. The black bar marks the month that al Qaeda bombed the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which set off a wave of uncontrollable sectarian violence (and brought casualties to nearly 3000 per month). The purple bars show the months of the troop surge, which began to unfold in February of 2007 and became operational only last June. From September on, casualties are down to about 1000 per month again. Thus, what Bacevich relegates to a mere half-sentence translates into almost 2000 civilian lives being saved every month. Let me repeat that: almost 2000 civilian lives are being saved every month. I guess that's chump change to the decent left, so much so that it can be accurately summarized by simply saying that violence is abating.

I think I'm going to start a new Iraq Body Count, one that keeps track of the minimum number of civilians that would have died every month had our troops been withdrawn, as humanitarians on the left wanted to do even though they knew perfectly well that it would result in genocide. The number of innocent lives saved as a result of the troop surge is going up fast, and I suspect it will keep going up for a long time to come.

Continuing with the first sentence of that jam-packed paragraph, Bacevich refers to "economic dysfunction" (with no data or citations to back his point, of course). Here's what the International Monetary Fund has to say about that:

Iraqi economy set to accelerate, IMF predicts

The Iraqi economy should enjoy a significant acceleration in growth this year if the country's security situation continues to improve, the International Monetary Fund predicted today.

The IMF expects the economy to expand as much as 7pc this year, possibly rising to 8pc in 2009, after anecdotal evidence suggested the country has topped the fund's prediction of 1.3pc growth for last year.

Perhaps Bacevich is a more credible source than the IMF, but I don't regard him as such. To me, he seems like little more than a snotty liberal doing his best to minimize the remarkable success in Iraq. Some of Bacevich's specific economic concerns fall in the areas of electricity and oil production:

Even today, Iraqi electrical generation meets barely half the daily national requirements. Baghdad households now receive power an average of 12 hours each day -- six hours fewer than when Saddam Hussein ruled. Oil production still has not returned to pre-invasion levels.

Geez. The troop surge achieved its incredible success a mere 4.5 months ago. What do you want, an economic miracle to happen in that short time? Well, that's basically what you have. The best way to look at electricity is with regard to megawatts generated in Iraq as a whole (not hours of electricity in Baghdad). Here are those numbers for each month of each year (data taken from the Iraq Index):


The dashed line represents the average pre-war level. As you can see, the last few months have seen the highest output yet (with that high output being associated with the success of the troop surge in reducing casualties). I don't think that fact comes through from reading Bacevich's evidence-free diatribe.

With regard to oil production, it's true that Iraq has still not hit its pre-war peak, but you really should look at the recent trend (because, after all, conditions have improved only recently):


The dashed line indicates the pre-war peak, and you can see that output is nearing that level. You can also see why the IMF is optimistic about the future even though Bacevich isn't. Indeed, the increased production and increased price of oil has been great for oil revenues:


Those are some economic facts and figures about Iraq. Sweeping it all away by mindlessly referring to "economic dysfunction" is a downright bizarre thing to do.

And about that political reconciliation that Bacevich also tries to minimize even as it unfolds before his very eyes, here is what the UN has to say:

UN sees Iraq progress despite misgivings

BAGHDAD, Jan 16 (Reuters) - The United Nations envoy to Baghdad said on Wednesday he would present a positive picture of progress in Iraq in a report to the Security Council despite earlier having serious misgivings about reconciliation efforts. U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura said the passing of a key law allowing former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party to return to government jobs had changed what had been a pessimistic view of progress in a crucial year for Iraq.

Bacevich is the kind of person who typically reveres the UN, so this UN analysis upsets his apple cart just a bit.

At the end of his column, Bacevich gets to the very heart of the matter:

But how exactly do these sacrifices serve the national interest? What has the loss of nearly 4,000 U.S. troops and the commitment of about $1 trillion -- with more to come -- actually gained the United States?
...
In reality, the war's effects are precisely the inverse of those that Bush and his lieutenants expected. Baghdad has become a strategic cul-de-sac. Only the truly blinkered will imagine at this late date that Iraq has shown the United States to be the "stronger horse." In fact, the war has revealed the very real limits of U.S. power. And for good measure, it has boosted anti-Americanism to record levels, recruited untold numbers of new jihadists, enhanced the standing of adversaries such as Iran and diverted resources and attention from Afghanistan, a theater of war far more directly relevant to the threat posed by al-Qaeda. Instead of draining the jihadist swamp, the Iraq war is continuously replenishing it.

Many on the left think like this because they are simply blind to the fact that al Qaeda decided to make Iraq (not Afghanistan) the central front in their war with America. You can blame Bush for that, but it's downright bizarre not to acknowledge that (a) al Qaeda suicide bombers deliberately provoked Shiite militias into killing Sunnis and (b) after the bombing of the Golden Mosque, the Shiite militias complied in an effort to eliminate al Qaeda's suicide bombing campaign against them. Instead of acknowledging this undeniable reality, Bacevich adheres to the standard liberal fiction that al Qaeda was in Afghanistan, not Iraq. In this regard, he has joined the likes of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, both of whom also failed to notice the transparently obvious fact that while al Qaeda's suicide bombers were killing thousands in Iraq, they were hardly doing anything in Afghanistan.

Does Bacevich exhibit any curiosity at all about who the suicide bombers of Iraq might be? No, because like almost everyone on the left, his mind is enfeebled by the mistaken civil war scenario advocated by our left leaning mainstream media. But he really should pick up today's paper, where he'll find this news:

Papers Paint New Portrait of Iraq's Foreign Insurgents

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 21, 2008; Page A01
...
The cache of documents was discovered last fall by U.S. forces in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar.
...
The records are "one of the deepest reservoirs of information we've ever obtained of the network going into Iraq," according to a U.S. official closely familiar with intelligence on the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq.
...
Suicide attacks by the Sunni group against Shiite targets sparked the sectarian violence that swept Iraq in 2006 and the first half of last year. Al-Qaeda in Iraq carried out more than 4,500 attacks against civilians in 2007, killing 3,870 and wounding nearly 18,000, the military announced yesterday.

Based on the Sinjar records, U.S. military officials in Iraq said they now think that nine out of 10 suicide bombers have been foreigners, compared with earlier estimates of 75 percent.

Get the picture? That this story is now coming through loud and clear in the mainstream media is nothing short of extraordinary. It makes it clear that, contrary to what everyone of the left believes, the suicide bombers are foreign al Qaeda terrorists who have been incredibly deadly (killing nearly 4000 innocent civilians in 2007 alone). My only complaint about the story is that it does not make a critical point that the vast majority of readers need to have spelled out for them. In particular, it makes no mention of why al Qaeda is slaughtering innocent Muslims by the thousands in Iraq. Thus, readers are left to think along these lines: "well, let's see, al Qaeda is made up of Sunnis, and there's a civil war in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites that George Bush stirred up with his misbegotten adventure in Iraq, so it must be the case that al Qaeda is fighting on the Sunni side of that civil war."

To the extent that a casual consumer of the news thinks about al Qaeda in Iraq, they are likely to think along those lines. But they could not be more wrong. We've known for years what al Qaeda is trying to accomplish with their suicide bombing campaign because the late leader of al Qaeda in Iraq (Zarqawi) spelled it all out in a letter that was intercepted way back in 2004. He made it quite clear that he did not want to join a civil in Iraq. Instead, because such a war was not happening on its own, he decided to incite one. That is, he decided to goad the Shiite militias into killing Sunnis because the resulting chaos would suit al Qaeda's purposes. Inciting a civil war is different from joining a civil war. Here is some of what he said:

The Shi'a in our opinion, these are the key to change. Targeting and striking their religious, political, and military symbols, will make them show their rage against the Sunnis and bear their inner vengeance. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis who are fearful of destruction and death at the hands of these Sabeans.
...
As far as the Shi'a, we will undertake suicide operations and use car bombs to harm them.
...
Some people will say, that this will be a reckless and irresponsible action that will bring the Islamic nation to a battle for which the Islamic nation is unprepared. Souls will perish and blood will be spilled. This is, however, exactly what we want...

That is, al Qaeda's plan (i.e., Zarqawi's wickedly ingenious idea) was to slaughter Shiites using suicide bombers and to destroy Shiite mosques to goad them into killing Sunnis. In Zarqawi's mind, that's the scenario that would advance the cause of al Qaeda in Iraq.

But Bacevich, like just about everyone on the left, is blissfully unaware of all of this. That explains why he thinks that al Qaeda's crushing defeat in Iraq is some sort of propaganda victory for them (not the propaganda disaster it actually is). That's exactly what you'd think if you didn't know the facts and lived in a liberal echo chamber (as he I assume he does).

Bacevich doesn't appear to know that al Qaeda's suicide bombers were killing Muslims by the thousands in Iraq, but the Muslim world is not that naive. They know perfectly well who has been slaughtering innocent Muslims in Iraq, which is why al Qaeda's reputation has simply plummeted throughout the Muslim world according to the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey:


According to opponents of the invasion of Iraq, it wasn't supposed to happen this way. Instead, the invasion was supposed to inflame the passions of the Muslim world and provide a propaganda victory to al Qaeda. Instead, the Muslim world has turned against al Qaeda. They have also turned increasingly against al Qaeda's method of fighting their war, which consists of suicide bombings that target innocent civilians:


Al Qaeda's only hope of recovering its former glory was to achieve victory over America by helping the Democrats to force a troop withdrawal, thereby allowing al Qaeda's relentless slaughter of innocent Shiites to continue unopposed. And this also helps to explain the eerie code of silence about al Qaeda in Iraq among Democrats. That is, Democrats think of themselves as being "decent" people. It is an explicit part of their identity, and they feel that it separates them from the indecent party (namely, the Republicans). I know this feeling well because I have been a Democrat all my life. I obviously don't feel that way anymore, but I do know the mind set. And it explains why the liberal mind is so reluctant to accept the undeniable fact that al Qaeda declared war on America in Iraq. Because no decent person would recommend throwing innocent Iraqis to the wolves of al Qaeda (especially since our invasion attracted al Qaeda to Iraq), the only way to maintain one's sense of decency while simultaneously calling for a troop withdrawal that would permanently discredit George Bush was to ignore (and even deny) the existence of al Qaeda in Iraq. So that's what the Democrats did, and they are still doing it today.

Ironically, Bacevich says that the war has "...recruited untold numbers of new jihadists" even though we can be pretty sure that his preferred approach (namely, withdrawal) is what would have done that. This is based on a National Intelligence Estimate that Democrats once gleefully leaked to the press because it said that our invasion had become a cause celeb for jihadists around the world. Indeed, it had. That's why Bacevich is stuck on that idea. But like everyone on the left (and everyone in the mainstream media), he missed the rest of what that very NIE had to say:

The Iraq conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.
...
we judge that al-Qa’ida will continue to pose the greatest threat to the Homeland and US interests abroad by a single terrorist organization.
...
Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

Not only has al Qaeda's reputation been shot down throughout the Muslim world, jihadists leaving Iraq must now perceive themselves to have failed. It cannot be otherwise. But the exact opposite would have happened had the Democrats gotten their way. In that case, they would have achieved a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just as Bush achieved a self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e., Iraq became became the central front in the war on terror that it wasn't at the time we invaded), the Democrats could have had theirs, too (i.e., our withdrawal would have caused the jihadists to have perceived themselves to be victorious, which, in turn, would have helped them to recruit untold numbers of new jihadists). Fortunately for everyone, the Democrats did not get their way.

Finally, let's revisit the heart of the matter. Bacevich asked: "But how exactly do these sacrifices serve the national interest?" Great question. For the answer, look at what is happening in Iraq and then also look at al Qaeda's standing in the world. If things continue as they are in Iraq, history will not overlook what Bacevich chooses not to see: al Qaeda will have suffered a crushing defeat of historic proportions because they invested everything in Iraq. We were going to have this war with al Qaeda whether or not we invaded Iraq. We didn't know it at the time, but, in retrospect, it seems clear that the suicide bombers were coming, either to Afghanistan or, as it turned out, to Iraq. Our only choice was to defeat them, and, for that reason, I am very grateful that John Kerry did not defeat George Bush in 2004. It seems likely to me that Kerry would have surrendered to al Qaeda in Iraq, perhaps without even realizing what he was doing. By contrast, when al Qaeda struck hard and created sectarian strife in Iraq (by design), Bush ordered a troop surge that is now saving many innocent lives per month, is promoting political reconciliation, and has simply crushed al Qaeda in Iraq while shattering their reputation throughout the Muslim world. To you, that might seem like "a surge to nowhere," but, to me, it seems like a historic victory over the al Qaeda jihadists who declared war on America on September 11, 2001.

MSNBC Presents the "News"

I always go to MSNBC to get my news first thing in the morning. I do that because I don't want to live in a conservative echo chamber when it comes to national security issues. I want the bad news, and I want it exaggerated in the way that liberals do when they cover issues like Iraq, al Qaeda, wiretapping, etc. That's precisely why I choose MSNBC to get my news.

I sometimes forget that people who don't follow politics closely can be shocked when I matter-of-factly state that the media has a liberal bias. All evidence (and there is a lot of it) suggests that they do, but most people don't know about that. All they know is that conservatives complain about a liberal bias in the media and that liberals deny it. To many, it's just a partisan spat, not an issue that has been definitively settled based on a veritable mountain of evidence (all of which points in the same direction).

MSNBC leans very far to the left, and there is simply no doubt about it. I especially love today's leading headline and the introductory blurb that accompanies it:


The "wake of his wreckage?" Nothing but objective and honest reporting for MSNBC (OK, if you look closely, you'll see that it is labeled as an "analysis" -- I think "opinion" in large print prior to the headline would get the point across in a more truthful way). When you click on the story, you find that it is written by Evan Thomas, who has this to say:

The GOP's long ascendancy in American politics was based on performance, not just showmanship.

President George W. Bush has squandered that trust. His presidency has been, in essence, faith-based—not just faith in God, but faith in Bush. After 9/11, he asked the nation to invest in his narrative of good versus evil. He seemed to be saying, "I'm taking care of this, you have to trust me." Critics and naysayers were scorned as ditherers or cowards. Bush wanted to appear resolute, but at times he just seemed bullheaded and oblivious. As Jacob Weisberg shows in the following excerpts from his new book, "The Bush Tragedy," the president constantly changed his rationale for invading Iraq—indeed his entire foreign policy—as inconvenient facts popped up or the mood moved him. Other crises, like Hurricane Katrina and more recently the sinking economy, seemed to catch him by surprise.

This is the headline story at MSNBC right now, and it is written by a man who has, in the past (and to his credit), been completely honest about the liberal media that he is a big part of:

The nation's newsrooms are Democratic strongholds, and that cannot help but affect their coverage of the news. Evan Thomas, the assistant managing editor of Newsweek, put it plainly last month.

"Let's talk a little media bias here,'' he said on the PBS program "Inside Washington'' on July 11. "The media, I think, want Kerry to win. And I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards . . . as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all, there's going to be this glow about them that is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them, that's going to be worth maybe 15 points.''

I agree. That's why the election was much closer than it ever should have been. Evan Thomas knows that although Fox News leans to the right, the vast majority of the media leans to the left and is an integral part of the Democratic campaign for president. This is fine with me. I just wish more people were cognizant of this fact.

Tom Ridge Says that Waterboarding is Torture

Well, that settles it:

Tom Ridge: Waterboarding Is Torture

WASHINGTON (AP) — The first secretary of the Homeland Security Department says waterboarding is torture.

"There's just no doubt in my mind — under any set of rules — waterboarding is torture," Tom Ridge said Friday in an interview with the Associated Press. Ridge had offered the same opinion earlier in the day to members of the American Bar Association at a homeland security conference.

"One of America's greatest strengths is the soft power of our value system and how we treat prisoners of war, and we don't torture," Ridge said in the interview. Ridge was secretary of the Homeland Security Department between 2003 and 2005. "And I believe, unlike others in the administration, that waterboarding was, is — and will always be — torture. That's a simple statement."

And it is a simple statement that comes from a simple mind.

If you are on the left, you think that the torture debate amounts to bulldozing people into declaring that waterboarding is torture. And when people on the right comply (as Tom Ridge just did), you feel like you've won the argument. But shaming someone into agreeing with you (by effectively declaring them to be a morally corrupt supporter of torture if they don't share your view) is cutting off debate, not having a debate.

To see the absurdity of the mindless black-and-white liberal approach to this issue, consider an analogy. Instead of arguing over whether or not a particular interrogation technique is or is not torture, let's debate the issue of whether or not a particular person is or is not old. And just for fun, let's ask this question about Osama bin Laden:

Sat Mar 10, 2007

SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden, if he's alive, celebrates his 50th birthday on Saturday, and his friends in the Taliban prayed for his long life.

Now, let's have an argument about whether or not he is "old." Do you think he is? I don't. If you do, then I wonder which one us is right? Are you right or am I right? Think hard about that, and then give me your answer.

Obviously, there is no answer. Everyone agrees that a 5-year-old is not old and that an 85-year-old is old. Agreement among the verbal community about how to label the chronological status of people in their 80s is what makes the concept of "old" useful. But Osama bin Laden's age lies in between young and old and is quite far from both extremes. That's precisely why we have the concept of "middle aged." There comes a point in life when you are obviously no longer young, but, just as obviously, you aren't old yet either. Even if you browbeat me into calling him old (because, for some reason, only morally corrupt neocons would regard someone who just turned 50 as not being old), it would not make him more like an 85-year-old than he is now. Calling him young doesn't make him like a 5-year-old either. That's why arguing over the question of whether or not Osama bin Laden is old is a ridiculous waste of time.

Arguing about whether or not waterboarding is torture is exactly like that. It is for people who don't like to think too deeply about important matters, such as the harshest interrogation technique that should be allowed by law. It is clearly not like the interrogation techniques used by al Qaeda (which cause extreme pain and permanent physical harm), but it also a far cry from polite questioning. In other words, it falls in between and is quite far from both extremes. And that's what you need to think about. Apparently, someone in Canada's foreign ministry could use some thinking lessons:

Canada removes U.S., Israel from torture watchlist

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's foreign ministry, responding to pressure from close allies, said on Saturday it would remove the United States and Israel from a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured.

Both nations expressed unhappiness after it emerged they had been listed in a document that formed part of a training course manual on torture awareness given to Canadian diplomats.

Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier said he regretted the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual, which also classified some U.S. interrogation techniques as torture.

Well, at least they eventually came to their senses.

The word "torture" is useful because virtually everyone agrees that the term applies to inflicting severe pain and/or permanent physical harm on a detainee. That is, the word applies to the interrogation techniques used by al Qaeda. Similarly, the word "old" is useful because virtually everyone agrees that the term applies to people in their 80s and 90s. But trying to stretch useful terms far beyond their usual meaning is a useless waste of time.

One respectable reason why people want to attach to the label "torture" to waterboarding might be because they believe that this interrogation technique should be illegal. That is, some people who are not engaging in moral exhibitionism genuinely believe that the waterboarding technique is too harsh for the CIA to use even when thousands of innocent lives are stake. I don't agree with that position, but I don't regard it as being intellectually indefensible either. However, one needs to be clear about the fact that making something illegal and declaring it to be torture are two completely separate issues. The argument about whether or not to label waterboarding "torture" is all about moral grandstanding. The argument about whether or not that harsh interrogation technique should be illegal is intellectually interesting. In fact, if we had that discussion, it would highlight the most intriguing aspect of this debate -- one that is completely submerged by the furious efforts of some to apply the word "torture" to waterboarding. Specifically, if we were debating the question of whether or not to make a particular harsh interrogation technique (like waterboarding) illegal, it would quickly lead to a natural question: what is the harshest interrogation technique that should be legal? That's the question. In fact, that's the only question.

You can always spot someone who is interested in moral grandstanding on the issue of torture. Such people -- and there are many -- will rant and rave about how waterboarding amounts to torture but they will never say one word about the harshest interrogation technique they would condone. That's because their interest lies in declaring Bush to be a supporter of torture (like someone in the Canadian foreign ministry apparently wanted to do), not in working out a tough issue. If you lean left, accusing Bush of condoning torture is loads of fun. But if you get serious and actually specify the harshest interrogation technique that you would support, then some hysteric to the left of you will adopt your very approach to the issue and accuse you of condoning torture. And if you try to avoid that fate by declaring that "polite questioning" of an al Qaeda mass murderer is the only interrogation method that should be allowed, then you will reveal yourself to be on the far left fringe (and your views will be quickly dismissed by most). Where's the fun in that?

So, forget the hard stuff and just try to browbeat people into calling waterboarding "torture" by implicitly or explicitly accusing them of being morally corrupt unless they comply. It is, ironically, the mindless black-and-white approach to a complex issue that is supposed to characterize conservative thinking, but at least it's fun.

Primary Predictions

Here are predictions about today's primaries (all based on final polling data at pollster.com):

DEMOCRATS:

South Carolina: Barack Obama wins, Clinton second, the irrelevant Edwards third

Nevada: Clinton first, Obama second, Edwards third

REPUBLICANS:

South Carolina: John McCain first, Huckabee second, Romney third, Thompson fourth

Nevada: Romney first, McCain second, and Giuliani and Huckabee in a close fight for third

It may not turn out this way, but this is the best guess because these predictions are based on averaged polls (and there is no better guide). If it does turn out this way, then I guess Thompson is out, and so is Edwards (well, he's already effectively out -- he just hasn't quit yet). And Huckabee will be yesterday's news as well.

If Obama does not win both contests today, it will reinforce my view that Clinton is still the strong favorite. I'd keep her as the favorite even if Obama wins both contests, but, in that case, my confidence that Clinton will be the ultimate nominee will be considerably reduced.

UPDATE: I guess the Democratic contest in South Carolina won't take place for another week or so, but the pre-election polls did a pretty good job of predicting the outcome of the races that were held today. They picked the winner in Nevada on both sides, though the size of Romney's win was unexpectedly large (and the irrelevant Ron Paul was not supposed to finish a distant second). In South Carolina, it looks like McCain will defeat Mick Huckabee, as predicted (although the race has not been called as I write this). Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul, and John Edwards are pretty much done after today. And it seems likely to me (as it has all along -- even after the Iowa caucuses) that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee when all is said and done.

Shocking News about the Bhutto Assassination

Much to everyone's amazement, it turns out that al Qaeda was behind Benazir Bhutto's assassination:

CIA chief places blame for Bhutto assassination

Echoing Musharraf, Hayden says al-Qaeda, militants behind ex-PM’s death

The CIA has concluded that members of al-Qaeda and allies of Pakistani tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud were responsible for last month's assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and that they also stand behind a new wave of violence threatening that country's stability, the agency's director, Michael V. Hayden, said in an interview.

Offering the most definitive public assessment by a U.S. intelligence official, Hayden said Bhutto was killed by fighters allied with Mehsud, a tribal leader in northwestern Pakistan, with support from al-Qaeda's terrorist network. That view mirrors the Pakistani government's assertions.

Who could have possibly imagined that al Qaeda was responsible for this sickening act of violence? There must have been some crack inspector on this case who was able to interpret incredibly subtle cues to finally figure out the mysterious, top-secret organization that was behind this atrocity.

Actually, as I noted right after the attack, this was pretty obvious from the outset. Not to you, though. To you, skeptical analyst that you are, it was quite possibly a case of Musharraf using his security forces to knock off a political rival. And the amazing thing is that al Qaeda knew perfectly well that you (and, more importantly, the people of Pakistan) would react that way. They kill and then sit back munching popcorn while the robotic masses savage their own leaders. You should care about that, especially if you, yourself, have a tendency to immediately join al Qaeda's political wing whenever they slaughter innocent people.

When al Qaeda killed 200 innocent people in Spain 3 days before their national election, the jihadists knew that anger would be directed toward the politician who was ahead in the polls and who they were trying to defeat (and did defeat). Right on cue, the people of Spain (and people around the world, for that matter) thought that the big story was that Prime Minister Aznar initially blamed Basque separatists for the attack. But that was the little story. The big story was that everyone was acting like puppets on strings controlled by al Qaeda. Aznar was defeated, and his socialist successor immediately obeyed al Qaeda's demand that Spanish troops be withdrawn from Iraq. Yes, opinion polls showed that the Spanish people wanted troops withdrawn from Iraq. But, in the more important poll (i.e., the election that was about to take place), they were going to empower a man who pledged to keep the troops in Iraq to fight al Qaeda. And that's precisely why al Qaeda decided to direct the Spanish people to elect someone else instead (and the Spanish people sheepishly complied).

In America, people reacted with disgust directed at George Bush when al Qaeda deliberately engineered an explosion of sectarian violence in Iraq. For the most part, mainstream media reporters and mainstream Democrats refused to even allow for the possibility that al Qaeda was the single most important cause of the sectarian chaos. Instead, for reasons that I will never completely understand (but that al Qaeda seems to understand very well), everyone went through preposterous mental contortions in a truly Herculean effort to frame the situation in Iraq as a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, who have hated each other for centuries.

That's how good al Qaeda is. Not only do they successfully engineer savage attacks on a country's leader by deliberately slaughtering innocent people, they do so repeatedly and no one learns from it. What that means is that, in time, they'll do it again. When it happens, watch your reaction. And before you do what you are impulsively inclined to do, consider using the British as your model. When trains were bombed in London, the British did not immediately savage Tony Blair. That was impressive to me. When al Qaeda bombs a train (or worse) at some point in the future, I suggest that you use the British as your model.

Economic Hysteria

I'm still quite fascinated by the gloom and doom evident in the mainstream media and in candidate speeches when it comes to the economy. The reason I am intrigued is that we have not yet had any real evidence over a sustained period of time that, overall, things are bleak. I'm not suggesting that they aren't bleak, but I am suggesting that the degree of hysteria is a lot like the hysteria that accompanied the onset of the troop surge in Iraq. In that case, many were certain of a disaster. Now, we may have won the war (an outcome that was almost unthinkable a scant 5 months ago). I did not confidently predict victory in Iraq, but I didn't predict a disaster either. It's really hard to predict the future of a complex system, but few people (and no mainstream media reporters) seem to appreciate that fact.

Everyone agrees that there are signs of weakness in the economy, but no one really knows what the future holds. One sign that things may be weak here is that they appear to be weak in Europe. For example, the Guadian reports this news:

France's central bank added to growing evidence of slowdown by trimming its estimate of growth in French gross domestic product for the fourth quarter of 2007 after its monthly business survey, which revealed a drop in morale in December...

Germany, which accounts for nearly a third of the euro zone economy, saw growth at a six-year high of 2.9 percent in 2006 and data on Tuesday showed it slowed only slightly to 2.5 percent last year. But it too finished 2007 with weakening growth...

The German government is expected to lower its growth forecast for 2008 next week, to between 1.8-1.9 percent from 2.0 percent currently.

In Italy, the central bank slashed its forecast for Italian growth this year to 1.0 percent from 1.7.

Our global economy is unlikely to be immune to the economic forces at play elsewhere in the world. Thus, slowing growth in the U.S. seems like a real possibility, at least for the beginning of 2008. Still, it's hard to say for sure.

Here are the latest GDP growth projections for the G7 (i.e., the advanced industrialized nations) from the International Monetary Fund:


There are a few things to note here. Looking back (i.e., from 2004 through 2006, for which the numbers are complete), you can see why Americans are so upset about George Bush's handling of the economy. After all, America's GDP growth was consistently excellent over that period of time (averaging 3.2%) and exceeded the percentage growth of of all other G7 nations (though there are a couple of ties). Not good enough! In America, excellent GDP growth that exceeds the growth evident in all other G7 nations gets you an economic approval rating of about 30% (which is about where Bush's rating has been for years).

Now let's look at the projected figure for 2007. Here, the tentative figure for the U.S. comes in at a fairly weak 1.9%. This puzzles me. After all, growth in the first 3 quarters has been 0.6%, 3.8% and 4.9%. If growth for the last quarter comes in at, say, 1% (which most economists predict even though they don't really know), the average for 2007 will be about 2.6%. That is, yet again, the figure for the U.S. will be pretty good and will probably fall at the top of the G7. You hysterics out there may want to take note of that fact. Does it fit with your current thinking about our economy? No, it doesn't.

Well, perhaps we didn't even manage 1% growth in the 4th quarter. That is, perhaps we are already slipping into recession territory (i.e., negative growth). After all, many people reason like this: it feels like a recession to me, therefore it must actually be a recession. This isn't reasoning. Instead, it is emoting. I, myself, refuse to refuse to emote along those lines. Instead, I am going to let the evidence dictate my views of the economy, which means that, unlike you, I am forced to wait until the evidence is in. When the evidence suggests a recession, then I will happily accept the fact that we are in a recession (but not before).

I just stumbled across a new clue about economic growth in the 4th quarter of 2007:

Beige Book Expects Slow Growth, But Offers No Signs of Recession

By BRIAN BLACKSTONE
January 16, 2008 4:03 p.m.

WASHINGTON -- In its regular round-up of reports from individual districts released Wednesday the U.S. Federal Reserve offered no sign of impending recession, but rather one of a "slower pace" of growth compared with the previous period.

The economy "increased modestly during the survey period of mid-November through December, but at a slower pace compared with the previous survey period," the Fed said in its beige book report, a summary of activity prepared for the Jan. 29-30 Federal Open Market Committee meeting.
...
Yet there was little indication in the beige book that the economy is in dire need of stimulus....

And then we have this account of the Beige Book report:

US Fed's Beige Book sees slowing economy, 'subdued' holidays

WASHINGTON (Thomson Financial) - Holiday sales, housing and autos all got weaker over the last six weeks or so but the US economy was still moving forward, if at a 'slower pace,' according to the Federal Reserve's latest Beige Book survey of its regional banks.

Seven of the twelve Federal Reserve districts reported a 'slight increase' in economic activity, and three said things were turning down.

'The tone of the Beige Book is less gloomy than recent developments in financial markets, highlighting the different perceptions of Wall and Main Street,' said Harm Bandholz at HVB. 'Moreover, it is definitely not a report describing an economy which was virtually in a recession in late 2007.'

The Beige Book offers no numbers, so it seems reasonable to expect that the 4th quarter GDP number will be positive, but low (somewhere in the 0 to 2% range, I guess). If the U.S. economy did grow in the 4th quarter, then the gloomy estimate for U.S. GDP growth in 2007 offered by the International Monetary Fund will need to be seriously revised (upward). In that case, no matter how much it feels like we are in a recession, we obviously won't be.

We Have Already Plunged into a Deep Recession

Just kidding! But one could be forgiven for thinking that our economy has simply collapsed based on the constant drumbeat of worrisome economic news:

Consumer spending drop raises new fears

WASHINGTON - Consumer spending, the critical bulwark that has kept the country out of a recession, is showing signs of cracking. Retail sales plunged by 0.4 percent last month as consumers battered by a sinking housing market, rising unemployment and the credit crunch, handed retailers their worst Christmas in five years.
...
Even before the problems with December retail sales, businesses were seeing inventories rise, including a 0.4 percent increase in November. An unwanted rise in inventories can translate into future production cutbacks by factories. A key gauge of manufacturing activity gave a recession reading earlier this month, falling to its lowest level in five years.
...
Unemployment jumped from 4.7 percent in November to 5 percent in December, the biggest one-month leap since October 2001 when the country was still reeling from the shocks of the terrorist attacks.
...
Many economists believe that economic growth, which was powering ahead at a 4.9 percent rate in the third quarter, thanks to continued strong consumer spending, slowed to a barely discernible 1 percent rate in the final three months of last year and may now be dipping into negative territory.

Reports from the AP used to predict "a barely discernible 1.5%" GDP growth figure for the 4th quarter, but I guess the estimate is now down to 1%. In about 2 weeks, we'll know the answer, and I am interested to see if these predictions hold.

Meanwhile, in an effort to keep things in perspective, I took a look at some of the latest figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. First, let's look at quarterly GDP over the last few years:


The first quarter of 2007 was a "barely discernible" 0.6%, but it turned out not to mean anything. That was the lowest figure in years, but growth in the 3rd quarter of 2007 was the highest in years. This does not mean that the economy nearly ground to halt at the start of the year and then picked up steam later in the year (only to stall again in the 4th quarter, perhaps). Instead, it means that there is a lot of random noise in quarterly data. But everyone is going to quickly forget that fact if GDP growth in the 4th quarter comes in low.

Consumer spending makes up roughly 70% of GDP. What do we know about that? Here are the numbers we have so far:


You can see that for October and November, consumer spending (the yellow bars) increased, and the two months averaged together look pretty typical. So, for two-thirds of the final quarter, the number that makes up two-thirds of GDP increased in typical fashion. In December, retail sales (which make up one part of consumer spending) dropped by .4%. We'll know the full figure soon. But my point is that the basic statistics so far do not even show a single month of poor economic performance. December may finally be that month, but let's just wait and see. Even if it turns out to be bad, a month's worth of data (indeed, even a quarter's worth of data) is not as informative as it will be made out to be. You need 6 months of contraction for a recession to be declared. There are signs of weakness in the economy, and the Fed is likely to drop interest rates again in response. That makes it hard to predict what will happen.

And don't kid yourself: reporters cannot predict our economic future, a fact that will remain true even if they have finally guessed right about 4th-quarter GDP. To them, the future is always bleak, so you have to look at the past to get a real feel for the strength of the economy. Pretty soon, we'll be able to look back on 4th-quarter growth to see if the hysteria and predictions of "barely discernible growth" were warranted. Perhaps they were, but they haven't been warranted in the past (even though similar predictions were made). Even a stopped clock is right every now and then, so reporters may have something to celebrate this time.

Predicting the Outcome of the Michigan Primary

You can't predict the future. Unless, that is, you look at averaged polls taken in the days before an election. Then you can.

Michigan holds a primary for the Republicans today, so we have another chance to test the accuracy of averaged polls. Here is the latest snapshot from pollster.com:


These are not exactly averaged polls (instead, a model is fit through the data), but it's basically the same thing. And the numbers suggest that Romney is finally going to win one, with McCain coming in second and Huckabee third. I expect that will happen, but we'll know soon enough.

People are still trying to figure out what the heck happened in New Hampshire. As I said earlier, most analyses fail to take note of the fact that the estimated support for every candidate on the Republican side and for every candidate on the Democratic side -- except for Clinton -- was pretty accurate. For her, the numbers were way off, and nobody really knows why.

As you might expect, the experts at pollster.com did not overlook the accuracy of the polls for everyone but Clinton:

What we see for the Democrats is quite stunning. The polls actually spread very evenly around the actual Obama vote. Whatever went wrong, it was NOT an overestimate of Obama's support. The standard trend estimate for Obama was 36.7%, the sensitive estimate was 39.0% and the last five poll average was 38.4%, all reasonably close to his actual 36.4%.
...
If the polls were systematically flawed methodologically, then we'd expect similar errors with both parties. Almost all the pollsters did simultaneous Democratic and Republican polls, with the same interviewers using the same questions with the only difference being screening for which primary a voter would participate in. So if the turnout model was bad for the Democrats, why wasn't it also bad for the Republicans? If the demographics were "off" for the Dems, why not for the Reps?

This is the best reason to think that the failure of polling in New Hampshire was tied to swiftly changing politics rather than to failures of methodology. However, we can't know until much more analysis is done, and more data about the polls themselves become available.

"Swiftly changing politics" also seems like the simplest explanation to me as well, but you can review a lot of other theories (none of which really have any supporting evidence and some of which can be rejected based on the evidence) here. Perhaps the most likely explanation will turn out to be a combination of factors. For example, it turns out that Hillary's name was listed first on the New Hampshire ballot. That might have accounted for a small part of her unpredicted wave of support. Also, the "Bradley effect" (interviewees being unwilling to admit that they would not support a black candidate) may have played a tiny role as well. After all, Obama got slightly less than predicted even though the prediction was quite accurate for him. And the undecided voters probably broke hard for Hillary, perhaps because of her crying episode or because of late rumors that she might withdraw if she lost (and I doubt that very many Democrats want that to happen). That third factor (essentially "swiftly changing politics") probably accounts for most of the unexpected total for Hillary.

In any case, it seems extremely unlikely to me that the polling methodology was flawed. That is, I doubt that any other polling method (or any other "likely voter" model) would have performed any better. Polls like the ones performed in New Hampshire have been just too accurate over the years to strongly question them merely because they failed to detect a last-minute swing for Clinton (while accurately predicting what would happen for everyone else). Then again, we have a lot of tests coming, stating with Michigan today. We'll soon know how those polls performed.

Global Warming is Making it Snow in Baghdad

I don't think that global warming enthusiasts do themselves any favors by making claims like this:

World warming despite cool Pacific and Baghdad snow

OSLO (Reuters) - Climate change is still nudging up temperatures in the long term even though the warmest year was back in 1998 and 2008 has begun with unusual weather such as a cool Pacific and Baghdad's first snow in memory, experts said.
...
"The more frequent occurrence of extreme events all over the world -- floods in Australia, heavy snowfall in the Middle East -- can also be signs of warming," he said.

Even if it is somehow possible that global warming is causing snow to fall in Baghdad, it might be best to avoid making such counterintuitive (and easily mocked) claims.

Meanwhile, I stumbled across this article on the possible role of the sun in global warming (which occurred between the mid 1970s and the late 1990s) and global cooling (which may be just around the corner):

Ray of hope: Can the sun save us from global warming?
...
Looking back through sunspot records reveals many periods when the Sun's activity was high and low and in general they are related to warm and cool climatic periods. As well as the Little Ice Age, there was the weak Sun and the cold Iron Age, the active sun and the warm Bronze Age. Scientists cannot readily explain how the Sun's activity affects the Earth but it is an observational correlation that the Sun's moods have a climatic effect on the Earth.

Today's climate change consensus is that man-made greenhouse gases are warming the world and that we must act to curb them to reduce the projected temperature increase estimated at probably between 1.8C and 4.0C by the century's end. But throughout the 20th century, solar cycles had been increasing in strength. Almost everyone agrees that throughout most of the last century the solar influence was significant. Studies show that by the end of the 20th century the Sun's activity may have been at its highest for more than 8,000 years. Other solar parameters have been changing as well, such as the magnetic field the Sun sheds, which has almost doubled in the past century. But then things turned. In only the past decade or so the Sun has started a decline in activity, and the lateness of cycle 24 is an indicator.

Astronomers are watching the Sun, hoping to see the first stirrings of cycle 24. It should have arrived last December. The United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted it would start in March 2007. Now they estimate March 2008, but they will soon have to make that even later. The first indications that the Sun is emerging from its current sunspot minimum will be the appearance of small spots at high latitude. They usually occur some 12-20 months before the start of a new cycle. These spots haven't appeared yet so cycle 24 will probably not begin to take place until 2009 at the earliest. The longer we have to wait for cycle 24, the weaker it is likely to be. Such behaviour is usually followed by cooler temperatures on Earth.

I don't know if all of this is right (this comes from a science writer, not a research scientist), but the general idea that the sun might have something to do with global temperature trends does not strike me as being an inherently preposterous idea. The most interesting claim in the article was this:

The past decade has been warmer than previous ones. It is the result of a rapid increase in global temperature between 1978 and 1998. Since then average temperatures have held at a high, though steady, level. Many computer climate projections suggest that the global temperatures will start to rise again in a few years. But those projections do not take into account the change in the Sun's behaviour.

The models don't take into account the sun's behavior? I wonder if that's true. I don't have any confidence in the ability of these models to predict the future, and I'm not sure that I would even if they tried to account for the effect of a changing sun on global temperatures. Still, I'm surprised to learn that the consensus is that the sun is irrelevant, especially if, as this author claims, scientists believe that the Little Ice Age (which occurred between 1645 and 1715) was caused by changes in the sun's activity.

Well, the grand experiment is underway. Global temperatures peaked in 1998, but they've remained flat ever since (data here):


The climate models say it's an illusion and that the upward trend will soon resume. Others seem to be predicting that this is the end of the warming trend and that global cooling will be upon us in the not-too-distant future. In 10 years time, we'll have some further data to assess which view is correct.

Meanwhile, a new study helps to resolve a puzzle about shrinking ice. You have all heard how alarmed scientists are about shrinking ice coverage in the Arctic. A puzzle was that the same phenomenon was not apparent in Antarctica. If we are in a warm period -- and everyone agrees that we are -- why isn't ice melting everywhere? Well, maybe it is:

Escalating ice loss found in Antarctica

Sheets melting in an area once thought to be unaffected by global warming

WASHINGTON - Climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, researchers reported yesterday, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates.

While the overall loss is a tiny fraction of the miles-deep ice that covers much of Antarctica, scientists said the new finding is important because the continent holds about 90 percent of Earth's ice, and until now, large-scale ice loss there had been limited to the peninsula that juts out toward the tip of South America. In addition, researchers found that the rate of ice loss in the affected areas has accelerated over the past 10 years -- as it has on most glaciers and ice sheets around the world.

This actually makes some sense to me. After all, the last decade has been the warmest in a long time. If the earth is warm (whether it's a final plateau or a mere pause in the inevitable rise), ice should be shrinking, not growing. If this new report is correct, it means that what you'd expect to be true actually is true.

To be sure, it seems clear to me that the authors really have no idea why the ice is shrinking:

The Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking despite land temperatures for the continent remaining essentially unchanged, except for the fast-warming peninsula.

The cause, Rignot said, may be changes in the flow of the warmer water of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that circles much of the continent. Because of changed wind patterns and less-well-understood dynamics of the submerged current, its water is coming closer to land in some sectors and melting the edges of glaciers deep underwater.

"Something must be changing the ocean to trigger such changes," said Rignot, a senior scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We believe it is related to global climate forcing."

Well, of course you do, but you don't really know. Still, it seems like a reasonable conjecture. Against this scientific uncertainty is a degree of alarmism in the news article that should really brighten your day:

The new finding comes days after the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the group's next report should look at the "frightening" possibility that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could melt rapidly at the same time.

"Both Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet are huge bodies of ice and snow, which are sitting on land," said Rajendra Pachauri, chief of the IPCC, the United Nations' scientific advisory group. "If, through a process of melting, they collapse and are submerged in the sea, then we really are talking about sea-level rises of several meters."
...
"The information from Antarctica is consistent with what we are seeing in all other areas with glaciers -- a melting or retreat that is occurring faster than predicted," he said. "Glaciers, and especially the high-elevation tropical glaciers, are a real canary in the coal mine. They're telling us that major climatic changes are occurring."

Now this is just dopey. "Faster than predicted" is not a phrase that should worry you since there is no predicting the future. What we know is that temperatures have remained stable for about 10 years, so if ice is melting with sudden speed (as is happening in Arctic especially), you can be sure that it is not the result of a faster-then-expected rise in temperatures over the last 10 years.

The earth has held steady at a warm level for a decade, and during that time, ice has been melting. No matter how fast the ice is melting and no matter what the cause, the core issue is global temperature (which has not been increasing lately). Climate models assert that the earth's temperature will continue to increase and that nothing is going to change that. If those models predicted the current 10-year pause (a period during which CO2 emissions from human activity increased dramatically), then your faith in those models should increase accordingly. But I don't think they did predict what actually happened.

A more reasonable stance is to ignore the models altogether because climate models are just like all other models of complex systems that are only partially understood (such as the economy and the brain): modelers just love them, but the models cannot actually predict the future. Reasonable scientists (even those who are not modelers) suspect that CO2 emissions are contributing to global warming, so you should take that under advisement. But you should not become hysterical (not yet, anyway) because there is a great deal of uncertainty associated with this issue, and some even see signs of global cooling in our future. All we can do for now is watch the temperature readings as they roll in over the next few years. Either that, or we can just accept that the more vocal and politically active scientists are so obviously right that we should immediately start spending untold trillions of dollars to adjust the earth's future temperature by, say, 3 degrees. I prefer the go-slow approach even though I realize that the most hysterical scientists out there are terribly concerned that we are at a "tipping point," so immediate and dramatic action is needed. Well, we might be at a tipping point, but I'm not sure if we are tipping into global warming or global cooling.

On the Left, the Troop Surge is a Failure

I came across this post on what I believe is a popular left wing web site (called Crooks & Liars) that perfectly sums up the left's position on the surge:

The Year of the Surge: Failure

By: John Amato on Thursday, January 10th, 2008

Today has been the anniversary of Bush’s surge in Iraq. Clearly there is no political reconciliation in Iraq so the surge is and always will be a failure no matter how many times Joe Lieberman and John McCain proclaim it so. This has been an immoral war started by neocon warmongers and the end result at this point is that the Iraqi people have suffered dearly for our sins.

If you are on the left, I guess this is what failure looks like:


I suppose that a post entitled The Year of the Surge: Success would have been written had Bush not ordered the troop surge so that genocidal violence had spiraled completely out of control (with many thousands of innocent civilians being killed every month). That was the plan favored by just about everyone on the left. If the massive reduction in civilian casualties associated with the troop surge is evidence of failure, then I suppose that the massive increase in civilian casualties that would have accompanied their preferred course of action constitutes success (presumably because those deaths could have been pinned on Bush).

Actually, though, left leaning pundits don't like to talk about casualties at all now that they are on the way down (unless a new study comes out showing how high casualties have been in the past). Instead, if you are on the left, you have been willingly programmed to believe that the only purpose of the surge was to create the conditions for political reconciliation to occur. You believe that to be true because you can't stand to actually read Bush's address to the nation on January 10, 2007, in which he spelled out the actual purpose of the troop surge for the American people. Part of the reason that you cannot assimilate the main purpose of the troop surge is that you are constitutionally unable to assimilate the transparently obvious fact that the main enemy in Iraq is al Qaeda. Many of you on the left still preposterously believe that al Qaeda in Iraq is a big neocon snow job. But that's just you. Here is the purpose of the troop surge, according to Bush:

As we make these changes, we will continue to pursue al Qaeda and foreign fighters. Al Qaeda is still active in Iraq. Its home base is Anbar Province. Al Qaeda has helped make Anbar the most violent area of Iraq outside the capital. A captured al Qaeda document describes the terrorists' plan to infiltrate and seize control of the province. This would bring al Qaeda closer to its goals of taking down Iraq's democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.

Our military forces in Anbar are killing and capturing al Qaeda leaders, and they are protecting the local population. Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on al Qaeda. And as a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists. So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops. These troops will work with Iraqi and tribal forces to keep up the pressure on the terrorists. America's men and women in uniform took away al Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan -- and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq.

Got that? What you see in these words was the actual purpose of the troop surge, as explained by the man who ordered that surge (not as processed through the minds of left wing reporters in the mainstream media). If you cannot comprehend the fact that we are fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, then I guess it makes sense that you are also unable to process this part of the speech. But that says something about you, not about the purpose of the troop surge. We are fighting al Qaeda, and al Qaeda simply does not care about those much vaunted political benchmarks. Oh, and we are finally winning the war against al Qaeda in Iraq, in case you care (which, for some odd reason, I don't think you do).

The mainstream media and programmable left wing pundits misunderstood the purpose of the surge because, in the same speech, Bush also warned the Iraqi government that America's patience will run out if they don't make some political progress:

I've made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people -- and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act. The Prime Minister understands this.

That makes sense to me, but Bush did not put this on the table as the purpose of the troop surge. The purpose of the surge, as explained by Bush, was to prevent al Qaeda from achieving its goals in Iraq. It is preposterous to think that Bush would have allowed al Qaeda to do that if he thought that Iraqi politicians would not pass laws that the Americans believe are important for peace. Al Qaeda needed to be defeated no matter what.

Even though the purpose of the surge was not to ensure that political benchmarks would be passed, it is also true that we are all hoping for just such an outcome. After all, in addition to defeating al Qaeda, normal people hope that the neocon dream of a peaceful and democratic Iraq will be fulfilled. You are hoping for political reconciliation in Iraq (and, unfortunately, the ultimate vindication of the neocon dream), aren't you?

Just as the left was sure that the troop surge would not reduce casualties (Barack Obama said so, for example), and just as they were certain that casualties were not being reduced even while it was happening before their very eyes (Hillary Clinton said so, for example), they are now similarly sure that no political reconciliation will take place, even while that, too, is happening before their very eyes:

Iraq eases restrictions on Saddam's Baath party

Move wins Washington's praise for helping to reconcile warring sects

BAGHDAD - Iraq's parliament passed a law on Saturday to let members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party return to public life, winning Washington's swift praise for meeting a benchmark aimed at reconciling warring sects.
...
Iraq's failure to pass the bill last year had been seen as one of the main signs that political progress toward reconciliation was stalled even as security improved.

"The law has been passed. We see it as a very good sign of progress and it will greatly benefit Baathists. It was passed smoothly and opposition was small," said Rasheed al-Azzawi, a Sunni member of the committee which helped draft it.

Civilian casualties are way down in Iraq, al Qaeda is being routed, and political reforms aimed at reconciliation are slowly but surely starting to happen. To me, it's like a dream come true, but I can't help feeling that, to you (if you hail from the left), it is more like Nightmare on Elm Street.

UPDATE: I love this (via Glenn Reynolds):

I wonder how the anti-war crowd will spin this. My guesses:

1. It's too late -- the sky is already falling!
2. Too many people have died to make freedom worth it.
3. (crickets chirping)

Well, just for the record, I believe I know how the left will spin this. The trick is to start out the very definite conclusion that American efforts in Iraq have failed. Let your brain marinade in that thought for a long time, and then work backwards from there. When casualties are high, Iraq is a failure for that reason. When casualties drop, Iraq is failure because political benchmarks have not been passed. When those benchmarks are passed, Iraq will be a failure because displaced people are not yet home. When they come home, Iraq will be a fialure because certain government officials are corrupt. That final fallback position is always available. Watch for it as more benchmarks are passed and more Iraqis come home.

Indecsion about Retail Sales in December

Bad news about retail sales from MSNBC yesterday:

Retailers post sluggish December sales

NEW YORK - The economic outlook became more uncertain Thursday after many of the nation’s big retailers reported weaker than expected holiday sales, the result of consumers cutting their spending due to higher energy prices and the ongoing housing slump.

Many merchants failed to meet their already lowered sales projections during December, and their performance during this critical sales period led some stores to reduce earnings outlooks for the fourth quarter.

The weak results crossed all retail categories...

Not good. Offsetting that bad news from MSNBC about retail sales in December was this good news from CNN about, well, retail sales in December [UPDATE: just enjoy my error here -- as a reader points out, I failed to take note of the fact that this story is from 2005!]:

Retail sales jump in December

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Retail sales rose sharply in December, a government report showed Thursday, boosted by strong auto sales as car manufacturers courted consumers with deep incentives.

The Department of Commerce report showed overall sales up 1.2 percent in December compared to November, when sales rose 0.1 percent.

The CNN report appears to be the more accurate of the two as it cites data from the Department of Commerce, whereas the MSNBC report seems to selectively focus on the performance of retail chains. If people spent more on cars in December, it would not be shocking to find that they spent less at retail chain stores. But if you myopically focus on the latter, it seems like a crisis (and you can write a scary news story).

In another helpful story at MSNBC, a reporter asks this question:

Aren’t we already in a recession?

Our story on Friday’s worse-than-expected December jobs report — and the increasing odds of a recession — drew heavier-than-usual reader mail. Many wonder why we don’t just come out and say the U.S. is already in a recession. But others take issue with our “negative” focus on the economic data that are now flashing warning signs — arguing that these stories just spook consumers and make matters worse.
...
We pick our words carefully, and the word recession has a very specific meaning. Though popular definitions vary, the term generally refers to a period of more than a few months of declining gross domestic product. Economic conditions in some regions of the U.S. (especially in the industrial Midwest) and some industries (like housing) already appear to be headed in reverse. But a national recession can't be confirmed until the economic data show that the overall economy is in decline.

Well, no kidding. It might have been helpful at this point to indicate for concerned readers what the most recent figure is for GDP growth (i.e., the figure for the 3rd quarter of 2007). An excellent 3% growth? A pretty good 2% growth? Weak 1% growth? Pathetic 0% growth? Or a recession-like contraction of -1%? Don't you think that readers might like to know as they try to figure out if we are already in a recession? The answer happens to be that GDP growth in the 3rd quarter of 2007 was an astounding 4.9%. The quarter before that? 3.8%.

I don't know what the number will be for the final quarter of 2007, but just as everyone was wrong to think that they could predict the end of the Hillary Clinton campaign before the votes were counted in New Hampshire, the stampeding mainstream media may be wrong to predict a recession. At least wait for one bad quarter -- just one -- before declaring that all is lost.

It does seem clear that, one of these days, we are going to have a quarter of weak growth. We had one of those in the first quarter of 2007 (0.6% growth), and I would not be surprised if growth in the last quarter of 2007 turns out to have been weak as well. But it's a hard thing to predict. One reason why it's hard to know what will happen is that adjustments will be made to signs of weakness, and those adjustments might serve to keep the economy humming right along.

Bernanke, in his first public comments of 2008, said that "additional policy easing may well be necessary."

That probably means the central bank will cut the short-term interest rate it controls by half a percentage point at its meeting at the end of the month, economists said. Such a move would stimulate the economy by making it cheaper for consumers and businesses to borrow money.
...
As Bernanke indicated that he is willing to use monetary policy to combat the risk of a serious downturn, momentum continued to gather for using the government's other major economic policy tool -- fiscal stimulus -- to combat the slump in the economy.

President Bush has said he may propose government action to stimulate the economy -- probably a tax cut. Congressional Democrats are formulating stimulus measures of their own. Yesterday, former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, former Fed vice chairman Alice Rivlin and other leading economic thinkers joined the chorus advocating for such a move.

So let's wait for at least one small sign of a recession (like one single quarter of negative growth) before declaring that a recession is at hand. Right now, we really don't know how the subprime mortgage issue will play out. But if you have to make a prediction, either go with the prediction made by hysterical reporters in the mainstream media who lack expertise in these matters or with the prediction made by Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke:

"The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession," Bernanke said. "We are forecasting slow growth. But as I mentioned today, there are downside risks and therefore it's very important for us to stand ready . . . to take substantive action to address those risks and provide some insurance against those negative outcomes."

I try to be careful (and humble) about making predictions, but if I had to make one, it would be what he said.

A New Estimate of Casualties in Iraq

Recently, a story in the National Journal offered yet another devastating critique of that infamous Lancet study on casualties in Iraq. You may recall that, based on a few interviews, that study concluded that 655,000 civilians had died in the aftermath of the invasion. Just the timing of the study was enough raise suspicions in the mind of anyone with the slightest interest in the truth of the matter:

Three weeks before the 2006 midterm elections gave Democrats control of Congress, a shocking study reported on the number of Iraqis who had died in the ongoing war. It bolstered criticism of President Bush and heightened the waves of dread -- here and around the world -- about the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Of course, the news media and academia either did what they were supposed to do (i.e., investigate the credibility of a report that seemed suspiciously timed to engineer the results of an approaching election) or they did what they usually do (i.e., embrace any anti-Bush story to help the American people vote the right way). Let's see:

Editorials in many major newspapers cited the Lancet article as further evidence that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, and the liberal blogosphere ridiculed Bush for his response. Prominent mainstream media outlets quoted various academics who vouched for the study's methodology, including some who said they had reviewed the data before publication.
...
Democrats who had opposed Bush's Iraq campaign embraced the report. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., for example, issued a statement saying that the "new study is a chilling and somber reminder of the unacceptably high human cost of this war.... We must not stay on the same failed course any longer." Such remarks, amplified by myriad articles, broadcasts, and blogs, helped to cement Americans' increasingly negative perceptions of the war. "For those who wanted to believe it, it gave them a new number to circulate, [and] it was a defining moment" in attitudes toward the war, said pollster John Zogby, who commended the report in a CNN interview.

The Lancet II article was also publicized widely overseas, especially in the Middle East. One Al Jazeera pundit said that the study revealed "what is surely the greatest crime in human history." A Pakistani columnist declared, "According to [the] highly reputed Lancet, an English science and medical journal, 650,000 Iraqis have been killed since the American invasion ... to fulfill the imperial lust of Washington and its cohorts."

The article goes on to cite many, many reasons to question the ridiculously high casualty count in the Lancet study, but my point today is that there is a new study on casualties in Iraq, one that used a similar (but improved) methodology and that arrived at a much lower estimate:

A new survey estimates that 151,000 Iraqis died from violence in the three years following the U.S.-led invasion of the country. Roughly 9 out of 10 of those deaths were a consequence of U.S. military operations, insurgent attacks and sectarian warfare.
...
The three-year toll of violent deaths calculated in the survey is one-quarter the size of that found in a smaller survey by Iraqi and Johns Hopkins University researchers published in the journal Lancet in 2006.

Both teams used the same method -- a random sample of houses throughout the country. For the new study, however, surveyors visited 23 times as many places and interviewed five times as many households. Surveyors also got more outside supervision in the recent study; that wasn't possible in the spring of 2006 when the Johns Hopkins survey was conducted.
...
Iraq's health minister, Salih al-Hasnawi, in a conference call held by WHO yesterday morning, said: "Certainly I believe this number. I think that this is a very sound survey with accurate methodology."

Other experts not involved in the research also expressed confidence in the findings, even though, as with the earlier survey, the 151,000-death estimate has a wide range of statistical uncertainty, from a low of 104,000 to a high of 223,000.

Similar to the Lancet study, this new study covered the period from March 2003 until June 2006. But here's my point: this study was a methodologically superior version of the Lancet study, and it has, once and for all, proven the Lancet study wrong. Even the high end of the new range of uncertainty (223,000 deaths) is a mere one-third the estimated total from the Lancet study. This should be the final nail in Lancet's coffin, which, like the New York Times, will remain credible mainly among radical left-wing extremists.

If you found yourself strongly supporting the conclusions of the Lancet study against attacks by neocon war-mongers, you have a little problem. Beyond any doubt, your prior defense of that politically motivated and politically timed study reflects your own strong political bias (not an interest in the truth). Knowing that about yourself -- as you do now -- you should adjust your thinking. You could start by finally coming to grips with the fact that violence in Iraq is not mainly a Shiite-vs.-Sunni civil war that is smoldering because of the failure to pass political benchmarks in Baghdad (which you have been robotically trained to believe by the same media that embraced the Lancet study). Instead, as has always been true (but has you've long denied because you've been too busy explaining why that Lancet study is right on the money), al Qaeda is the enemy in Iraq. Yet again, a major offensive has been launched against these wretched terrorists who are not fighting for a better oil deal (and who will not stop fighting when an oil deal is finally passed):

BAGHDAD — A new military operation involving 74,000 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers is targeting the epicenter of al Qaida in Iraq's operations and the source of recent attacks that have unsettled Iraq after months of relative calm.

The objective of Iron Harvest, part of the nationwide Operation Phantom Phoenix, is to begin ousting Sunni Muslim militants from their stronghold in Iraq's northern provinces this week. Kirkuk, Salah al Din, Nineveh and especially the agricultural lands of Diyala province have been riddled with violence, and the extremist group has targeted U.S.-backed Sunni militia groups and local officials pushing for reconciliation with Iraq's Shiite-led central government.

Sunni Muslim militants? I can't stand it when brain-dead reporters refuse to call a spade a spade. These so-called militants have deliberately targeted and successfully slaughtered uncounted thousands of innocent men, women and children in Iraq gathered at market places, mosques and funerals. The "militants" are not trying to free the Iraqi people from tyranny or occupation, and they are not fighting on one side of a Shiite-vs.-Sunni civil war. Instead, they are killing civilians and security forces in an effort to plunge Iraq into sectarian chaos because they know that the very same fools who supported the Lancet study will respond to their malicious endeavor not by blaming the perpetrators but by instead preposterously savaging their own president in the time of war. Even now, the leading Democrats refuse to name the enemy in Iraq and want to withdraw our troops instead of finishing off the terrorists whose hands would be freed (and whose spirits would be lifted) the day that Barack Obama is elected president.

But back to the new casualty study for a moment. During the period of time in question, Iraq Body Count (IBC) puts the civilian casualty total at about 50,000. They meticulously document every death, so they miss undocumented deaths. As such, the real total is surely higher than that. They also make an effort to exclude militants and members of the Iraqi army from their casualty counts (deaths that are not excluded from the new survey study). If you add them into the casualty count, the conservative estimate from IBC might be closer to 80,000 for the period in question. This gets us pretty close to the low end of the uncertain range offered by the new survey study (104,000). People are free to choose any number they wish given the range of uncertainty associated with the new study, and prior supporters of the ridiculous Lancet study are sure to choose the high end figure (223,000). If we had no information about casualties except this new study, the best guess would be the middle number (151,000). But we have lots of additional information from sites like Iraq Body Count. Neither method (the one used by IBC nor the one used in this new survey study) is flawless, so it makes sense to me let both constrain your thinking to some degree. As such, my own best estimate of casualties in Iraq over that period of time in somewhere in the 100,000 to 150,000 range (with perhaps 1/3 being militants).

But if you strongly supported the Lancet study, what do you think? More importantly, what do you think about whether your interest lies in the truth of the matter or in savaging your own president no matter what the truth happens to be?

The Pre-Election Polls in New Hampshire were not Inaccurate

As you know, I was surprised that nearly everyone had given the Clinton campaign up for dead merely because she lost in Iowa. I was not going to pronounce her campaign dead (not even close) even if she had also lost in New Hampshire. However, I did have to admit that a loss in New Hampshire seemed likely given what the averaged polls were saying. What you know if you've read my blog for a long time is that individual polls (e.g., "Barack Obama up by 13 points in latest shock poll!") should always be ignored. Many of these polls are based on a sample of only 600 people, which is far too small to get a sense of the true numbers. But when you average polls together, you often have an effective sample size of 5000 or more, and that kind of information is useful.

Everyone thinks that the polls were way off the mark with regard to New Hampshire, but they are talking about a few meaningless (i.e., individual) polls taken just before the election yesterday. As usual, the averaged polls (which I presented in yesterday's post) did very well even though they seemed to mistakenly predict that Obama would win.

First, let me show you what the averaged polls looked like relative to the actual outcome on the Republican side:


Obviously, the polls nailed it. It looks to me as if those who made up their minds at the last minute broke for McCain and Romney in roughly equal numbers (no matter what exit polls have to say about that), which is why they both ended up with a few more votes than predicted. All in all, though, the averaged polls predicted the outcome with a high degree of accuracy.

Now let's look at the performance of averaged polls on the Democratic side:


Again, the averaged polls align closely with reality. The only surprise is that the undecided voters (whose behavior cannot be predicted by any poll) broke for Clinton, which is why she ended up with a higher total than expected. To me, that's really interesting. Something happened in the last few days of the campaign that turned voters toward Clinton. Was it that crying episode? I don't know, but I did watch that incident and found it to be compelling. Whatever it was, Clinton and Obama are surely studying the phenomenon.

In any case, the story today will be that the polls were way off the mark. That's dead wrong. The averaged polls were, as usual, amazingly accurate. What no poll can do -- and what no one else can do either -- is read the minds of the undecided voters. Usually, that doesn't matter much because those voters typically break for the candidates in rough proportion to the existing levels of support (so the outcome is not much affected). But, in this case, the Democratic race was not like that. Instead, the undecided voters almost all broke for Clinton, and there must be some interesting reason for that.

Obama vs. McCain on the Troop Surge

I think I'm the last person on earth who is not ready to count Hillary Clinton out of the race, but it seems clear that famously independent New Hampshire is now dependent on Iowa (at least of the Democratic side of things). Obama is surging away, but only because Iowans decided that they liked him better than Hillary Clinton. McCain is also surging, but his surge began before his 4th-place finish in Iowa in response to a slew of newspapers endorsing his candidacy.

Here are the final polls from pollster.com, and I suspect that they will be on the money:




Are the Democrats really going to nominate Obama? It may not be such a bad idea because independents like him (which will help in the general election), and I think that the improving situation in Iraq may help him as well. I doubt that even the Democrats would vote for an inexperienced politician if the world seemed to be a more dangerous place than it seems right now. Now, the world situation might seem to be safe enough to elect a nice guy who is everybody's Rorschach Inkblot Test (in the sense that you can project whatever you want onto him). Well, maybe you can. I can't project onto him the image of a strong leader in the face of a national security crisis. He would speak soothing words, but I'm not sure he's the leader to face down radical Islam. Remember, Osama bin Laden openly favors the Democrats:

People of America: the world is following your news in regards to your invasion of Iraq, for people have recently come to know that, after several years of tragedies of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven’t made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions to continue the killing and war there.

Well, Barack Obama may be Osama bin Laden's guy. Hillary has also talked about withdrawing our troops in an effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory (thereby replicating the glorious Vietnam years after all), but I never really believed her. She's just saying those words in an effort to appeal to the radical left wing of her party during the primaries (and it represents a complete about face from her earlier, and very consistent, views). But Obama? I think that, deep down, he agrees with Osama bin Laden on this point. And Osama thinks that the Republicans (well, corporate America, which is supported by the Republicans) are the real terrorists:

And with that, it has become clear to all that they are the real tyrannical terrorists. In fact, the life of all mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations, yet despite that, the representative of these corporations in the White House insists on not observing the Kyoto accord...

Where does Barack Obama stand on the Kyoto Protocol? Do I even have to ask? Maybe I should look it up, but I suspect he thinks that we should act just like the Europeans and the Canadians on this score: sign the protocol, loudly thump our chests because our deep regard for the planet, and then proceed to increase greenhouse gas emissions anyway. My point is not that everyone who supports the Kyoto Protocol is a stooge of Osama bin Laden. My only point is that if you have to pick the guy who Osama bin Laden would choose, it would likely be Obama. That might not matter to you, but it does to me.

I don't really know where Obama stands on Kyoto, but I did go back and check to see where he stood on the troop surge. In advance, did his extensive experience on national security issues lead him to support a hellacious explosion of genocidal violence that would unfold before the horrified eyes of the world and be blamed on Bush? Or did he favor a surge of troops that would, if successful, save many thousands of innocent lives while securing America's victory over al Qaeda radicals who sought to defeat us (and almost did defeat us) by deliberately igniting a civil war? This story provides the answer for both of the apparent winners in New Hampshire today:

Appearing on Face the Nation Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a potential presidential candidate, said a stronger case for Bush's proposal should be made, but that a change in strategy is needed.

"I can't guarantee it will succeed, but I can guarantee catastrophe if we fail or continue the present strategy — and that is that we will go in and we will clear and hold and build," McCain told Bob Schieffer. "As most people know, we have gone in to clear and left, and the insurgents have returned. This is a chance under the new leadership of General Petraeus and Admiral Fallon to have a chance to succeed. Do I believe it can succeed? Yes, I do."

According to some Democrats, this plan is the McCain Doctrine. McCain is one of the few politicians who is speaking for a troop increase when most others are calling for a drawdown.

"I think maybe I could call it McCain Principle that when I vote to send young Americans into harm's way and to carry out a mission that I'm committed to seeing that mission through," he said, "and to see that it succeeds."

McCain said that the people supporting the resolution of disapproval should take it a step further and vote to cut off funding. He said he sees the resolution as little more than a political ploy to damage the president. He wouldn't however, filibuster it.

"The American people deserve this debate," McCain said. "I think we can make our case in that debate and convince some of our colleagues, who are frankly and understandably agonized and frustrated by this whole situation."

Another probable presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), said rather than increasing troops, the governemnt should be bringing them home in a phased withdrawal.

"Senator McCain and the president seem to believe that only a military solution can accomplish our goals there," he said. "And every objective observer that I've talked to believes that in fact what we have is a political problem between Shia and Sunni, and it's important for us to get that political track moving. That was absent from the president's speech."

Obama said Congress needs to find options to constrain the president, but also needs to make sure that the troops have all the supplies and equipment they needs. He said he wasn't ready to support the resolution proposed by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) to cut funding for the war.

"I personally think that, if there are ways that we can constrain and condition what the president is doing so that, four to six months from now, we are beginning a phased withdrawal while making sure that the troops on the ground have the equipment that they need to succeed, then that is going to be the area that I'm most interested in supporting," he said.

OK, Obama endorsed genocide and defeat for America at the hands of radical Islam. That's good enough for me (i.e., he'll never get my vote). And I'm not sure it speaks well of him to now falsely say that he predicted that the surge would result in reduced sectarian violence. According to this post at the NRO Corner, he said this at the debate in New Hampshire Saturday night:

Now, I had no doubt — and I said at the time, when I opposed the surge, that given how wonderfully our troops perform, if we place 30,000 more troops in there, then we would see an improvement in the security situation and we would see a reduction in the violence.

That's what he said after seeing the results of troop surge. Before seeing those results, he apparently said this:

The problem we have is Shia and Sunni are unwilling to compromise and arrive at the sort of accommodations that would lead to stability. And in the absence of that, 20,000 troops is not gonna make a difference.

And this:

But I did not see anything in [President Bush’s] speech or anything in the run-up to the speech that provides evidence that an additional 15,000 to 20,000 more U.S. troops is going to make a significant dent in the sectarian violence that's taking place there.

But I guess you can project anything you want onto Obama, even the idea that he knew that reinforcing troops in Iraq would result in a reduction in sectarian violence (despite what he actually said about that). Well, maybe you can, but I can't.

UPDATE: Cogent points at Captain's Quarters, who offers this excerpt from the editors of the Washinton Post:

A reasonable response to these facts might involve an acknowledgment of the remarkable military progress, coupled with a reminder that the final goal of the surge set out by President Bush -- political accords among Iraq's competing factions -- has not been reached. (That happens to be our reaction to a campaign that we greeted with skepticism a year ago.) It also would involve a willingness by the candidates to reconsider their long-standing plans to carry out a rapid withdrawal of remaining U.S. forces in Iraq as soon as they become president -- a step that would almost certainly reverse the progress that has been made.
What Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson instead offered was an exclusive focus on the Iraqi political failures -- coupled with a blizzard of assertions about the war that were at best unfounded and in several cases simply false. Mr. Obama led the way, claiming that Sunni tribes in Anbar province joined forces with U.S. troops against al-Qaeda in response to the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections -- a far-fetched assertion for which he offered no evidence.

Mr. Obama acknowledged some reduction of violence, but said he had predicted that adding troops would have that effect. In fact, on Jan. 8, 2007, he said that in the absence of political progress, "I don't think 15,000 or 20,000 more troops is going to make a difference in Iraq and in Baghdad." He also said he saw "no evidence that additional American troops would change the behavior of Iraqi sectarian politicians and make them start reining in violence by members of their religious groups." Ms. Clinton, for her part, refused to retract a statement she made in September, when she said it would require "a suspension of disbelief" to believe that the surge was working.

If you are a Democratic supporter of Obama or Clinton, you know what to do in response to cogent criticisms like these: ignore the issue completely, change the subject right quick, and hysterically savage Bush for some imagined crime (like "trashing the constitution"). That's the thing to do when there simply is no effective counter to devastatingly accurate criticism such as that leveled by the editors of the Washington Post.

I'm Just Fine, but the Country is heading for Disaster

At Fark.com, I came across a link to this column from a few days ago:

The Pre-Election Paradox

While 70% say U.S. is a mess, 84% say they're happy. Is progress possible?

On New Year's Eve, Gallup's poll delivered unto us the good news that 84% of Americans say they are satisfied with how things are going for them personally. What Woody Allen might say about that phenomenal datum of good cheer one can only guess. One then has to account for the darker data Gallup released two weeks earlier: Some 70% of those responding believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction.

Explanations for this paradox would fill screen after screen of comments on Internet blogs, written no doubt by the 16% who can never be satisfied with "how things are going." Sample: It's the 46 million uninsured, stupid!

The best line from this column is the following (which was written just before the Iowa caucuses):

Let me describe a pre-election moment of perspective this way: Later today some people who will start their evening with Iowa's caucus by watching angry Lou Dobbs--convincing themselves, again, that they and this country are getting shafted, and coming to this conclusion while watching a $700, 32-inch Samsung flat-panel, high-definition TV with Lou's sad song flowing through Monster digital coax cables to five Onkyo HT-SR800 home theater speakers.

He goes on to document the phenomenal improvement in our general living situation over the last 25 years (as well as the phenomenal improvement in Iraq during the last year), but no matter. The feeling that somehow everything is all wrong runs deep.

Great Britain's Fabulous Economy

I've long been interested in the astronomical disconnect between the anemic state of the American economy as portrayed by mainstream media reporters and its factual status as the strongest economy on earth. My interest in this bizarre phenomenon is not based on a strong belief that George Bush's economic policies are superior to the policies advocated by the Democrats (that is a separate issue and a separate debate). My point is simply that reporters are dead wrong to believe that our economy is weak relative to its past performance or relative to the performance of the European socialist welfare states (like France and Germany and Italy).

In all my prior comparisons involving the advanced industrialized nations of Europe, one European country has stood out as being more economically competitive than the others. That country is the United Kingdom. Why might that be? The answer is that the UK converted to an economic model much like the one that applies in the US. The story is summarized in a book that a reader drew to my attention some time ago. The book, published in 2004 and edited by David Card, Richard Blundell and Richard B. Freeman, is called "Seeking a Premier Economy: The Economic Effects of British Economic Reforms, 1980-2000." Here is a little of what they have to say:

In the 1980s and 1990s, successive U.K. governments enacted a series of economic reforms designed to establish a more market-oriented economy. The goal was to arrest the long-term economic decline in the United Kingdom relative to other advanced countries and to establish a premier-league economy that would improve living standards for all citizens. At the beginning of the period, the United Kingdom was a highly regulated economy with large nationalized industries, an extensive welfare state, and exceptionally obstreperous labor-management relations. By the end of the period, the United Kingdom was one of the least regulated and nationalized economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Devel opment (OECD), with a welfare system that was increasingly based on in-work benefits, rather than benefits to persons out of work, and a trade union movement that was concerned with the "value added" that unions can bring to the economy more than other union movements in the advanced world. Indexes of economic freedom that measure the market friendliness of economic policies and institutions show that the United Kingdom had moved from the middle of the pack of OECD countries to a lead position, close to that of the United States.

Thanks in part to Margaret Thatcher, the UK has an economic system more like the one that prevails in the US than the one that prevails elsewhere in Europe. And that's precisely why the UK is the only one of the major industrialized nations of Europe that has a strong economy. The other 3 European economies in the G7 (France, Germany and Italy) have weak economies because they still adhere to the socialist welfare state model.

Today, there is a new article on just how great the British economy is:

From The Sunday Times
January 6, 2008

UK living standards outstrip US

Living standards outstrip those across the Atlantic for first time in over a century

LIVING standards in Britain are set to rise above those in America for the first time since the 19th century, according to a report by the respected Oxford Economics consultancy.

The calculations suggest that, measured by gross domestic product per capita, Britain can now hold its head up high in the economic stakes after more than a century of playing second fiddle to the Americans.
...
“The past 15 years have seen a dramatic change in the UK’s economic performance and its position in the world economy,” said Adrian Cooper, managing director of Oxford Economics. “No longer are we the ‘sick man of Europe’. Indeed, our calculations suggest that UK living standards are now a match for those of the US.”

Although many people will be surprised by the figures, Americans have long complained that average incomes have been stagnant in their country. One often-quoted statistical comparison suggests that in real terms the median male full-time salary in America is no higher now than it was in the 1970s.

Well, not really. A little detail pointed out later in the article reveals why Britain's per capita GDP still lags that of America's, but it's true that the British are catching up. That little detail concerns the cost of living. If someone in Country A makes $50,000 per year and someone in Country B makes the same amount, they are not equally well off if the cost of living in Country A is 10 times that of Country B. Thus, when you compute GDP per capita, you have to adjust for cost of living differences. If you don't do that, per capita GDP in the UK now equals that of the US. If you do make the appropriate adjustment, however, you get a somewhat different story (based on economic statistics provided by the International Monetary Fund):


Although the UK has not yet caught up with the US, you can see that, in recent years, it is pulling away from the other 3 major economies of Europe. In time, the UK will probably catch the US (which is what this article somewhat misleadingly suggests has already happened).

The US economy under George Bush has been relentlessly fabulous, despite what you have been robotically trained to believe. The only reason you don't appreciate this glaringly obvious fact is that you allow hopelessly misguided but well meaning mainstream media reporters to do your thinking for you (never do that). If you have to summarize the economic performance of a nation in a single statistic, it would be GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power parity). On that measure (and on just about every other relevant measure as well), no major economy on earth rivals the US economy. But, in time, the UK economy will because they have adopted basically the same economic model.

I am certainly not trumpeting the greatness of Americans compared to Europeans even though it might seem like I am. As I have noted before, I trumpeting one economic model (the one that prevails in the US and, now, the UK) over another (the one that still prevails in France, Germany and Italy). In advance, no one really knew for a fact which economic model was superior, the free market model or the welfare state model. Several decades ago, we began an experiment to find out. Halfway through that experiment, the UK decided that the results were good enough for them, and they switched over to the free market model as well (hence, their economy is now thriving). France, Germany and Italy will eventually get the picture. When they do, their economies will become more competitive as well.

Has the Earth's Warming Trend Peaked?

I was intrigued by a new article in the New York Times on global warming that made some entertaining points:

In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: January 1, 2008
...
A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”

Is that really true? I went searching for the answer to find out. First, I found this BBC article from early last year:

Thursday, 4 January 2007, 00:38 GMT

2007 to be 'warmest on record'

An extended warming period, resulting from an El Nino weather event in the Pacific Ocean, will probably push up global temperatures, experts forecast.

They say there is a 60% chance that the average surface temperature will match or exceed the current record from 1998.
...
"We have two methods of forecasting the effect of the El Nino. One is a statistical method based on two patterns of sea surface temperatures in the El Nino region, and the other is a complex mathematical model."

He said that the forecast was then fine-tuned by looking back over data from the previous 50 years.

"We have actually run this forecast three times, updating it every month... and it is completely stable."

Well, if the models say so, who am I to question it? 2007 will be the hottest year (60% chance, anyway). Last month, the BBC reported this news:

Thursday, 13 December 2007, 15:30 GMT

2007 data confirms warming trend

Well, OK then. The prediction was that 2007 would be the warmest year ever, and the data apparently confirm that prediction. Right? Here's what the article really says:

This year has been one of the warmest since 1850, despite the cooling influence of La Nina conditions, according to scientists.

The UK's Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia conclude that globally, this year ranks as the seventh warmest.

The 11 warmest years in this set have all occurred within the last 13 years. For the northern hemisphere alone, 2007 was the second warmest recorded.

Why don't they just come right out and say that 2007 was the warmest year ever? And why single out the northern hemisphere? The globe has a southern hemisphere, too, and the issue of interest is global warming (not hemispheric warming). The article includes global temperature measures for certain years, so I plotted them up:


The 2007 value is a preliminary estimate. I can see why people are starting to speculate that the global warming trend has reached a peak. Others argue that this apparent plateau is just a blip on the inevitable rise in global temperatures. There is really no way to be sure who is right, and that's what makes this interesting. For the next ten years or so, people will be watching the numbers very closely. Right now, we just don't know whether or not temperatures peaked in 1998, though I think it's fair to say that most climate scientists believe that the increasing trend will soon resume.

People sometimes argue that it is unfair to include 1998 as a comparison year because it was a strong El Niño year. But some argue that the increasing frequency of El Niños is itself a result of global warming:

Seems like in the '90s, El Niño just didn't want to go away. El Niño, an unusual rise in sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, visited three times from 1990 to 1995. In between, temperatures never went quite back to normal, as if it were all one long El Niño. This has led to some intriguing but speculative discussion about the possible link between rising global temperatures and the apparent increase in El Niños.

One respected climate scientist who has gone out on a limb about the global warming-El Niño connection is Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. He thinks that El Niño may function as a kind of pressure release valve on the tropics. In an era of global warming, Trenberth says, ocean currents and weather systems might not be able to bleed off all the heat pumped into the tropical seas. Periodically, it has to get rid of the excess that builds up, he suggests, and that safety valve is El Niño.

If El Niño is being caused by global warming, then we should keep 1998 in the picture as we look for trends. Whether or not we do, what's clear is that 2007 was not warmer than 1998, as predicted (at least based on a preliminary estimate). It wasn't warmer than 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 or 2002 either. This has increasingly led to speculation that the warming trend of the previous 20 years or so is leveling off. Time will tell.

Tierney's article also makes this interesting point about ice coverage (which I see others mentioning with increasing frequency as well):

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

Is that true? Again, I went looking for the answer. I found this really nice sea ice graphic for the Arctic. I can't reproduce it here (because it is interactive), but you should go have a look for yourself by clicking on that link. Arctic ice coverage is shrinking rapidly, and you've probably seen articles about how alarmed scientists are. But I wonder why the ice is shrinking so fast all of a sudden despite the fact that global temperatures have remained constant over the last 10 years or so? In fact, a huge decrease occurred in 2007 relative to 2006 even though 2007 was ever so slightly cooler than 2006. That seems a little odd to me.

I then went looking for a similar graphic for Antarctica, but reporters seem a lot less interested in that. Every once in a while, though, you see some mention of what is happening down ther, even if you do have to look past the headline:

September 21, 2007

Scientists Report Severe Retreat of Arctic Ice
...
While satellite tracking of polar sea ice has been done only since 1979, several ice experts who have studied Russian and Alaskan records going back many decades said the ice retreat this year was probably unmatched in the 20th century, including during a warm period in the 1930s. “I do not think that there was anything like we observe today” in the 1930s or 1940s, said Igor Polyakov, an ice expert at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

The ice retreat has been particularly striking this year. The Alaskan side of the Arctic Ocean has stretches of thousands of square miles of open water; the fabled Northwest Passage through the islands of northern Canada was free of ice for weeks; and the sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans north of Russia was nearly clear a week ago, with one small clot of ice around a group of Siberian islands.

Mark Serreze, a senior researcher at the snow and ice center, said it was increasingly clear that climate change from the buildup of greenhouse gases was playing a role in the Arctic warming, which is seen not only in the floating ice but also in melting terrestrial ice sheets, thawing tundra and warming seawater.

“We understand the physics behind what’s going on,” Dr. Serreze said. “You can always find some aspect of natural variability that can explain some things. But now it seems patterns that used to help you don’t help as much anymore, and the ones that hurt you hurt you more.”

It seems odd to me that that global temperatures have not increased over the last few years, but the arctic sea ice is suddenly vanishing anyway. Perhaps there is a good global-warming-related explanation for that, but my real question has to do with the southern hemisphere. What's going on there? The very last sentence of the article says this:

Sea ice around Antarctica has seen unusual winter expansions recently, and this week is near a record high.

That's the whole story. Not one further word. Don't you think that's an odd way to end an article about the alarming effects of global warming on polar ice?

I also found a chart of southern ice here, which seems to confirm this point:


The extent of sea ice obviously changes a lot over time, but if there is any trend, it is not a decreasing trend.

Now I know perfectly well that strong advocates of the standard global warming scenario can come with some explanation as to why the shrinking ice near the north pole is evidence of global warming whereas growing ice near the south pole is irrelevant. Still, if the southern ice cap were shrinking, you know perfectly well that it would be taken as evidence for global warming. The fact that the ice is increasing can't also be evidence for global warming.

My entire discussion today has been about the issue of whether or not we are in a warming trend. It seems undeniable that we have been in a warming trend from about 1970 to about 1995. We may still be, but the evidence that we are is not overwhelming. Even if the earth is still warming (which it probably is), there is the sepaate question of what is responsible for it.

Hillary is the Inevitable Democratic Nominee

No, I can't really predict the future, and neither can anyone else. Even so, contrary to my usual style, today I am simply expressing a strong opinion that has no real basis (i.e., today, I'm acting like a typical pundit). It's fun to do that every once in a while.

Almost everyone seems to think that Obama's victory yesterday was highly significant and that everything has changed. Now, according to just about everyone, Hillary is in real trouble, and her air of inevitability has evaporated, just like that. But that's not how it seems to me. To me, it looks like yet another case of Iowans voting for someone who will not be the nominee. Same goes on the Republican side. In the end, the Democrats are not going to nominate Obama and the Republicans are not going to nominate Huckabee. We are probably only about a month away from knowing for sure, and I can hardly wait to find out.

Meanwhile, the averaged polls I presented yesterday did reasonably well in predicting the outcome. On the Republican side, the final average had Huckabee in the lead, Romney second, and McCain and Thompson essentially tied for third. I thought McCain would edge out Thompson, but Thompson finished just ahead. Basically, though, the polls pretty much called it.

On the Democratic side, there was one surprise: Hillary performed worse than predicted. This seems to have happened because people who claimed they were going to vote for Richardson or Biden went for Obama (and, to a lesser extent, Edwards) instead. Richardson and Biden were supposed to get nearly 10% of the vote (roughly 5% each, according to the final polls), but they ended up with about 3% between them instead (2% for Richardson and 1% for Biden). To me, this turn of events is not that significant. Hillary has a huge lead in national polls, and these polls include Al Gore as a choice. Quite a few of Gore's supporters seem likely to break for Hillary when the time comes, so I just don't see the scenario according to which Obama gets the nod.

But that's just my intuition, and I obviously could be wrong. In a month or so (after super Tuesday), I'll know if I can start a new career as a pundit who makes prophetic pronouncements about the future based solely on intuition.

Final Iowa Polls

As we head into today's Iowa caucuses, it's useful to remember that the individual polls you've been reading lately (with leads seemingly changing on a daily basis) are largely meaningless. By contrast, averaged polls are usually pretty accurate because they are based on a much larger sample size. At Pollster.com, you can always see what the aggregate polls have to say. Here is how things look for the Democrats in Iowa:


If this is right, either Obama or Clinton will win, with the other coming in a very close second. For the Republicans, it looks like this:


Huckabee has a slight lead, but things appear to be in flux, so don't be shocked if Mitt Romney wins. The McCain surge appears to be a real phenomenon, so he seems likely to come in third.

If it turns out that the results in Iowa matter down the line, I'll be surprised. In the long run, I don't really think the results matter all that much except in one way. Anyone who campaigned there and who has a terrible finish anyway may be in trouble. But a narrow win by Huckubee and/or Obama over another strong candidate won't matter at all (or, if it does, I'll be surprised).

For moment, it still seems inevitable to me that Clinton will be the choice of the Democrats no matter what happens in Iowa. And if I had to bet, I'd bet on Giuliani on the Republican side (though that outcome seems far less certain to me).

UPDATE: Robert Novak has a much different take:

The threat of Obama winning Iowa makes it white-knuckle time for Clinton. With Obama ahead in some New Hampshire polls, a double loss for Clinton in the first two tests of 2008 would raise the specter of Howard Dean's total collapse four years ago after losing in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Clinton is surely no Howard Dean. Furthermore, Michael Dukakis finished third in Iowa in 1988 and went on to be nominated (as was the case on the Republican side for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1988 after losing Iowa). But Obama's winning in Iowa could be fatal for Hillary Clinton.

Well, he's a famous pundit and I'm just a lowly anonymous blogger, so you should probably see things his way. But I don't. The reason I don't is that Hillary's lead over Obama nationally is just incredibly strong, and both are already known quantities. I don't really see how this national trend is going to change very much (except on a temporary basis) if Obama wins the first two primaries:


Is that huge lead really going to collapse because of what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire? I don't think so, but Novak does.