Kautzman’s AP GO PO Blog

Want to eliminate what otherwise will soon be the world’s second leading cause of death? Impose a global speed limit of 5mph.

By George F. Will

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 3:30 PM ET Oct 13, 2007

Economics is “the dismal science,” in part because it puts a price tag on the pleasure of moralizing. This is pertinent to the crusade, often masquerading as journalism, aimed at hectoring developed nations into taking “strong” actions against global warming. For such nations (developing nations have more pressing priorities), the question, plainly put, is: How much are they willing to pay—in direct expenditures, forgone economic growth, inefficiencies and constricted freedom—in order to have a negligible effect on climate change?

Zealots say fighting global warming is a moral imperative, so cost-benefit analyses are immoral. Like our Manichaean president, they have a simple fixation: Are you with us or not? But in his book “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” the Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg suggests that global warming, although real, is not apt to be severe; that many of its consequences will be beneficial, and that the exorbitant costs of attempting to substantially curtail it would squander resources that, put to other uses, could have effects thousands of times more ameliorative. He offers cautionary calculations:

The warming that is reasonably projected might be problematic, although not devastating, for the much-fretted-about polar bears, but it will be beneficial for other species. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment anticipates increasing species richness.

Global warming was blamed for 35,000 deaths in Europe’s August 2003 heat wave. Cold, however, has caused 25,000 deaths a year recently in England and Wales—47,000 in each winter from 1998 to 2000. In Europe, cold kills more than seven times as many as heat does. Worldwide, moderate warming will, on balance, save more lives than it will cost—by a 9-to-1 ratio in China and India. So, if substantially cutting carbon dioxide reverses warming, that will mean a large net loss of life globally.

How cool do we want the world to be? As cool as it was when the Arctic ice pack extended so far south that Eskimos in kayaks landed in Scotland? Just cool enough to prevent the oceans from inundating us?

The U.N.’s 2007 report estimates that by 2100, sea levels will rise about a foot—as much as they have risen since 1860. That will mean a number of local problems, not a planetary crisis. More people now live near coasts (which is why hurricanes have become more costly; they have not become more frequent or violent), but protecting people and property from the sea would be far less costly than attempting to turn down the planet’s thermostat.

In an example of what has been called titillating “climate porn,” we have been warned that warming might make malaria endemic in Vermont. Well. Malaria kills more than a million people a year worldwide and was endemic in parts of America’s South within living memory (which is why the Centers for Disease Control are in Atlanta). But Lomborg says malaria is “related strongly to economic development and weakly to changing climate.” Increasing prosperity and low-tech methods like mosquito nets, not controlling climate change, is the key to preventing 85 million malaria deaths by 2100.

Warming will help agriculture in some regions and hurt it in others, but even a net negative effect will be less injurious than current agriculture policies are. The farm bill currently taking odious shape in Congress will be a killer—literally. Rich countries subsidizing their agriculture limit the ability of poor countries to prosper—and become healthier—by selling their products in rich countries’ markets.

Recent loopiness about warming has ranged from the idiotic (an academic study that “associated” warming with increased Italian suicide rates) to the comic (London demonstrators chanting, “What do we want? Carbon taxes! When do we want them? Now!”). Well, you want dramatic effects now? We can eliminate what the World Health Organization says will be, by 2020, second only to heart disease as the world’s leading cause of death.

The cause is traffic accidents. The surefire cure is speed limits of 5mph. In 2008 alone, that would save 1.2 million lives and $500 billion in damages, disproportionately in the Third World, which will be hardest hit by increasing traffic carnage. But a world moving at 5mph would be, over the years, uncountable trillions of dollars poorer, which would cost some huge multiple of 1.2 million lives through forgone nutrition, education, infrastructure—e.g., clean water—medicine, research, etc.

The costs of such global slowing would be the medievalization of the world, so the world accepts the costs of velocity. There also are high costs of what Lomborg calls “impossibly ambitious and yet environmentally inconsequential” plans for inventing a “big knob of climate change” that we can give a twist or two, thereby making the climate “better” and making nothing worse.

Sums that are small relative to the cost of trying to fine-tune the planet’s climate could prevent scores of millions of deaths from AIDS, unsafe drinking water and other clear and present dangers. If nations concert to impose antiwarming measures commensurate with the hyperbole about the danger, the damage to global economic growth could cause in this century more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot combined. Nobel Peace Prize, indeed.

Democrats are kicking the tar out of their rivals this campaign cycle.

By Daniel Gross

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 3:30 PM ET Oct 13, 2007

Don’t take this the wrong way. But everything you know about the link between business and politics is incorrect. For nearly the entire 20th century, a simple formula held: business people like Republicans and don’t like Democrats. Republican politicians and voters heartily embrace free trade and lower taxes, while Democratic politicians and their constituencies cotton to protectionism and higher taxes. Over the decades, racial, ethnic and geographic realignments altered the shape of the national parties beyond recognition.

But when it came to the wealthy, there was less movement than in the facial muscles of an over-Botoxed newscaster.

Until now. Democrats, who have never out-fund-raised Republicans in the modern political era, are kicking the tar out of their rivals this campaign cycle. Through the first half of this year, Democratic entities—congressional, presidential and party operations—raised $388.8 million, compared with $287.3 million for their Republican counterparts, according to The Wall Street Journal. In the third quarter, the top three Democratic candidates—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards—raised 50 percent more money than the top four Republicans.

The Democrats’ funds aren’t just coming from enraged readers of DailyKos.com who chip in $20.08 via the Internet. They’re flowing in from people who can afford to throw $4,000 in post-tax income into campaign coffers. You know the Reagan Democrats, NASCAR dads and soccer moms. Now we have the Fed-Up CEOs and the Angry Yuppies.

Back in 2000, George W. Bush called his base “the haves, and the have-mores.” But the have-mores are clearly more receptive to Democrats than they were seven years ago. “It’s a much easier pitch drumming up support this cycle from business people, there’s no question,” says Steve Rattner, founder of the private-equity firm Quadrangle Group, who is a longtime Clinton backer. His take: Fed-Up CEOs are reacting to the bungled war in Iraq, poor fiscal and disaster management, and to conscious outreach efforts by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

As happens every four years during the primary season, Republican business leaders are rallying around the establishment candidate. This time, however, it’s a Democrat. Morgan Stanley chief executive officer John Mack, who raised more than $200,000 for W’s 2004 campaign, came out for Hillary this spring. James Robinson III, the Atlanta-born banker, former CEO of American Express and co-founder of RRE Ventures, tells NEWSWEEK: “I’ve been a Republican all my life. I believe in fiscal conservatism and being a social moderate.” But this Fed-Up CEO now makes the case for Hillary as effectively as James Carville. “It seems to me she’s the person who has got the broadest experience. She understands the importance of business development, innovation and entrepreneurship,” he says.

The financial and personal endorsements are partially a symptom of the business world’s chronic trendiness. As the noted management guru Bob Dylan once said: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Wall Street CEOs can read polls as well as they read balance sheets, and they like to be on the winning team. Also, many well-heeled donors give the maximum to several Democratic and Republican candidates—the way you and I might buy a few packages of Girl Scout cookies, and then toss a dollar into the Salvation Army bucket. For hedge-fund managers, maxing out to multiple candidates is a cheap hedge. And plenty of well-known business leaders are sticking with Republicans. Ebay CEO Meg Whitman was the finance co-chair for Mitt Romney’s exploratory committee.

But it’s not just the ultrarich who are abandoning Republicans. CNN’s exit poll last fall showed that voters in the East making between $150,000 and $200,000 favored Democratic candidates by a 63-37 majority. Since 2004, the percentage of professionals identifying themselves as Republicans fell from 44 percent to 37 percent, according to a September Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The same survey found 59 percent of Republican voters agreed with the statement that free trade has been a negative for the country.

Things have clearly changed. But you wouldn’t know it from the campaigns—on either side. In last week’s Republican economic debate, the leading candidates sang loudly from the GOP hymnal: hailing income inequality as a wonderful product of the free market, and blaming economic woes on lawyers and Democrats.

With the exception of John Edwards, the Democratic candidates and their congressional allies have been loath to embrace measures that would alienate their new friends. The trial balloon floated earlier this month to enact a war income surtax, which would weigh heavily on high earners, was swiftly shot down. Closing the loophole that allows private-equity and hedge-fund managers to pay low long-term capital-gains taxes on the compensation they get for managing other people’s money would be a popular way to pay for Democratic priorities. But last week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told private-equity lobbyists that Congress would move no such legislation this year.

After all, it’s primary season. And during primary season candidates must shore up their base.

Linda P. Campbell
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
October 20, 2007

The day an ambulance transported a player from a football scrimmage, I prayed he would be all right.

The night the trainer was holding up fingers in front of a dazed defender, I prayed the injury wasn’t major.

And when a tight end was helped to the sideline and then taken to the hospital, I prayed he wouldn’t suffer lasting damage.

There might not be crying in baseball, but there is praying in football.

It’s a violent game. Contested in an emotional atmosphere. By young men who in the best of worlds have bonded with their teammates and their coaches. And people get hurt.

So a little head-bowing, a moment of silence, a reminder from the announcer that “it’s just a game” strike me as comforting, not constitutional tinder.

But a New Jersey town has been upended over what separation of church and state means for locker rooms, playing fields and pregame rituals.

Last year, U.S. District Judge Dennis Cavanaugh decided that football coach Marcus Borden, who also teaches Spanish at East Brunswick High School, could take a knee and bow his head during his players’ pregame prayers.

Cavanaugh ruled from the bench that Borden wasn’t leading the prayers – or even really participating in them.

“I agree that an Establishment Clause violation would occur if the coach initiated and led the activity, but I find nothing wrong with remaining silent and bowing one’s head and taking a knee as a sign of respect for his players’ actions and traditions, nor do I believe would a reasonable observer,” wrote Cavanaugh, who was appointed to the bench in 2000 by President Clinton.

(Read a transcript at www.thnt.com/assets/html/ B535522726.HTM.)

If only it were so simple.

For most of his 24 years at East Brunswick, Borden perpetuated the “tradition” by appointing players to lead prayers at mandatory pregame meals and conducting a locker room prayer circle, according to court filings.

He did it even though the Supreme Court ruled in the 1960s that the First Amendment bars school officials from conducting classroom prayers or Bible devotions.

Even though the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that public schools unconstitutionally promote religion by organizing or leading graduation prayers.

Even though the Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that school officials can’t appoint or arrange for students to lead public prayers before football games.

Borden did it until 2005, when some cheerleaders, players and parents complained to the superintendent. They told her, among other things (according to a court brief), that those who objected to pregame dinner prayers were told to wait them out in the bathroom.

When the district told Borden to stop leading prayers, he quit his job; then he withdrew his resignation and sued for a court order allowing him to quietly bow his head and take a knee with his team.

District officials have asked the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the Virgin Islands, to rule that even his silent action would go too far toward endorsing religion.

“Borden does not get to infringe students’ and parents’ religious freedom because, as a public employee, he does not get to make policy: The District does,” the district’s lawyers argue in a brief. A three-judge panel heard arguments Oct. 3.

They’re absolutely correct about public employees not coercing students to engage in favored religious conduct. Teachers shouldn’t evangelize on school time. They shouldn’t use their positions of influence to promote certain beliefs, denigrate others or make students feel ostracized.

But honestly, once we start policing what’s intended when people take a knee, have we divorced the law from reality?

When is it genuflection and when sincerely secular?

Ideally, coaches should neutrally respect their athletes’ choices to pray or not, but where’s the line that they dare not cross between promoting unity and seeding discord?

And when you hear about a coach secretly selling players’ medical information to big-money donors, how do you escape the sense that there are worse things that a coach can do than take a knee with his team?

Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services
October 20, 2007

Just as it appears the United States may have turned an important corner in Iraq with the reported disabling of al-Qaida, Turkey is threatening to invade northern Iraq in an attempt to stop attacks by Kurdish rebels on Turkish territory.

House Democrats added fuel to the combustible situation when the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Oct. 10 passed a resolution that recognizes as genocide the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The resolution is opposed by the Bush administration, not necessarily because it disagrees that genocide occurred nearly a century ago, but because such a resolution will inflame passions at a time when there are passions enough in the neighborhood. Democrats, who control Congress, are playing a dangerous game that might severely damage America’s foreign policy, further diminish President Bush, hand over a weakened presidency to his successor and put more of our troops in jeopardy. That reality apparently began to reach the Democratic congressional leadership by midweek, as supporters of the resolution began a retreat and senior Democrats urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to drop her support for the measure.

Since Saddam Hussein was toppled from power, Turkey has been threatening to invade northern Iraq to settle old scores. Turkey has the provocation it believes it needs in the killing of 30 Turkish soldiers and civilians by members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (known as the PKK) in just the last two weeks.

Writing in the publication Insight, Gallia Lindenstrauss notes, “(Turkish) President Abdullah Gul accused American politicians of sacrificing big issues for petty games of domestic politics.” That sounds about right. Are Democrats so cynical that they would stir an already boiling pot in hopes that it would negate whatever success America may finally be having in quelling terrorist acts in Iraq? One would hope that is not the case, but given their leadership’s rhetoric about the war already being lost and their refusal to acknowledge even the slightest progress in Iraq as positive lest it reflect well on the Bush administration, cynicism about their cynical actions might be justified.

If Turkey will not be dissuaded from entering Iraq to root out the rebels, the Bush administration might consider helping the Turks do the job quickly and as painlessly as possible so that they might hastily return to their side of the border. If the Kurds wish to continue with their prosperous and more peaceful lifestyles, they will help locate and expunge the rebels among them. The last thing the region needs is to inflame Islamic fundamentalists, who, despite tensions that have long threatened to topple Ankara’s secular government, have so far managed to peacefully coexist with moderate Muslims, as well as secularists.

A senior commander of the rebel group, Duran Kalkan, was quoted in an Associated Press story as saying the Turkish military will suffer a serious blow if it launches a cross-border offensive and would be “bogged down in a quagmire.” Another quagmire is precisely what is not needed in Iraq. Oil prices, which have increased in recent days in anticipation of Turkish military action, would go even higher should another front be opened in Iraq.

There should be no rush to condemn a genocide that took place more than nine decades ago (and the very word “genocide” is in dispute as a description of what happened). Politically, it might play well for Democrats, but it could backfire and have severe repercussions for American foreign policy, American forces in Iraq (supply lines could be disrupted) and American interests in Iraq and throughout the region for years to come. The next president cannot possibly enjoy long-term benefits from such shortsightedness by House Democrats.

Whatever immediate political gain Democrats might hope to extract from this misguided and ill-timed resolution will be overcome by the long-term pain it generates. Apparently, there are limits beyond which even Democrats are not willing to go in their pursuit of political gain. There are some issues that ought to transcend partisanship, and this is one of them.