This is great news for Norm Coleman, who could be a vulnerable GOP incumbent otherwise. Al Franken is one of the most thin-skinned people out there, his speaking style is atrocious, and Minnesota’s last affair with electing someone to office based solely on celebrity didn’t go so well.
Franken can certainly play to the urban angry liberal set, but he’ll go over like a fart in church outside the Patchouli Belt. Especially given that his angry liberal schtick won’t be relevant without Moby Bush to kick around in 2008.
The second Franken displays his infamous temper and storms out of an interview, it’ll be all over. I’m not convinced he’ll last long enough to even get through the general, especially when the DFL has plenty of candidates who aren’t has-been comedians.
Mr Chavez has said the legislation will transform the country into a socialist society. Opponents describe the new law as an abuse of power.
In the open-air public ceremony in the capital, lawmakers voted unanimously to grant the Venezuelan leader the new powers, shouting: “Long live Socialism.”
Congressional Vice President Roberto Hernandez said the assembly passed the law so Mr Chavez could “urgently set up the framework for resolving the grave problems we have”.
According to the so-called enabling law, the president can remake laws for “the construction of a new, sustainable economic and social model” to achieve an equal distribution of wealth.
The only question from now on is how high the death toll will be — whether Chavez’s “socialist” revolution will be kind by historical standards and only involve the deaths of a few hundred thousand or whether the death toll will rise to the millions.
George Satayana once noted that those who fail to learn from history are damned to repeat it — and now the people of Venezuela are truly damned by Chavez’s authoritarian visions.
One can only hope that there’s a Brutus waiting somewhere in the wings…
The science blog Respectful Insolence has an excellent and in-depth piece on why why the “miracle drug” DCA isn’t a cure for cancer and why the conspiracy stories surrounding it are baseless. Once again, the people who scream the loudest have the least informed opinions:
What irritates me about the hysteria some bloggers are whipping up over this is that it is at its heart basically paranoid conspiracy mongering, and the reason this story has any legs at all is because people are inherently distrustful of big pharma. There are some good reasons for this and many reasons that boil down to little more than an inherent distrust of big corporations. Even now, for example, our old “friend” Dean Esmay is likening big pharma’s disinterest in DCA to its disinterest in the use of high dose vitamin C against cancer. Never mind that Dean doesn’t know what he is talking about when it comes to the alleged efficacy of vitamin C against cancer. Never mind that vitamin C never in even Linus Pauling’s hands showed anywhere near the efficacy against cacncer cells in vitro and in animal models that DCA has. Never mind that even high dose vitamin C has shown in essence no evidence of efficacy against cancer in humans. Given those facts, it’s not surprising that pharmaceutical companies aren’t interested in vitamin C as a treatment for cancer, regardless of its cost or patentability.
What is most pernicious about the conspiracy-mongering stories being spread about DCA is that it builds false hope. People with cancer hear about this drug, and they think there’s an amazing cure out there that’s being withheld from them because of the greed of big pharma. Big pharma may show a lot of greed at various times, but that’s nonetheless a very distorted version of the true situation.
I’ve lost a number of relatives to cancer. The idea that there’s some magic bullet out there is very appealing. It’s also completely untrue. Cancer isn’t one disease, it’s a process by which a number of diseases turn healthy cells into malignant ones. What cures or prevents one form of cancer won’t necessarily work on another. In fact, the substance being touted as the next miracle drug itself has observed carcinogenic effects.
It’s another example of simplistic thinking — big pharmaceutical companies are assumed to be evil because some people don’t understand the way the drug market actually works. There are plenty of legitimate critiques of the pharmaceutical industry to be made — but most people never bother to do the research necessary to build an intelligent argument. It’s another example of how sloppy thinking and bad science join together to spread misinformation, fear, and ignorance rather than reasoned and informed opinion.
We have written a fair bit about the question of minimum wages over the last few months. It is probable that the minimum wage increase will not cost enough jobs to make its effects readily distinguishable from random economic variation. It is also probable that it will improve the lot of a few poor people, though not many, as fewer than 20% of those who earn the minimum wage live in poor households now. On the other hand, it also seems probable that much of any benefit that goes to poor families will come out of the pockets of other poor people—very probably even poorer people, such as convicts, who are currently barely hanging onto the fringes of the labour force.
The left wants to argue that the minimum wage is a transfer of assets from the rich (business owners) to the poor. The reality of the minimum wage is that it ends up being an asset transfer between poor people — or more likely an asset transfer between disadvantaged people and less disadvantaged people. Any increase in the marginal cost of labor tends to be felt most strongly at the bottom — if labor costs rise, businesses are less likely to hire workers who have a higher likelihood of producing less value for their costs. That means people who have families, less reliable access to transportation, or other personal problems. Single mothers, ex-convicts, people on drug treatment, all of those groups that are the most disadvantaged.
Increasing the minimum wage is pure political theater. All it does is assuage the guilt of wealthy white liberals while doing little to nothing to help people. In fact, it’s even a form of corporate welfare:
CEO’s who support higher minimum wages are not, as the media often casts them, renegade heros speaking truth to power because their inner moral voice bids them be silent no more. They are by and large, like Mr Sinegal, the heads of companies that pay well above the minimum wage. Forcing up the labour costs of their competitors, while simultaneously collecting good PR for “daring” to support a higher minimum, is a terrific business move. But it is not altruistic, nor does it make him a “maverick”. Costco’s biggest competitor, Wal-Mart, also supports a higher minimum wage, and for the same reason. Wal-Mart’s average wage is already above the new minimum; it will cost the company little, while possibly forcing mom-and-pop stores that compete with Wal-Mart out of business. This seems blindingly obvious to me. Though I don’t expect we’ll see “the minimum wage—it’s great for Wal-Mart!” in many Democratic campaign commercials.
In in all, raising the minimum wage has low societal costs — it won’t raise unemployment all that much. What it will do is impact the most vulnerable and benefit the least vulnerable. It won’t affect McDonald’s all that much, but it will affect the small-town cafe that can afford to pay its cooks $6.00/hour but not $7.25/hour. Big business doesn’t have much incentive to fight — why take the PR hit when most of them already pay more than the minimum. It’s the small fry that get the shaft.
Raising the minimum wage has nothing to do with poverty, or justice, or any of the other high-minded ideals that are used to justify it — not after rationally looking at what it really does. All this is about is pretending to care rather than actually doing something constructive — which seems to be enough for politicians and the American public. For those who actually need the most help, it isn’t enough and never will be.
“If They’re Going To Support Us, Support Us All The Way”
January 30th, 2007 · 12:38 pm
NBC News ran this rather frank interview with American troops in Iraq on how they deal with the criticism of the war:
They’re right — the “dissent” over the war with Iraq cannot be made without consideration that it actively makes the jobs of our troops harder. The argument that “dissent” is automatically “patriotic” is simply false. If one were to say “Al-Qaeda should win and America should be destroyed” that would certainly be a dissenting view, but only a fool would call it patriotism.
The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not “insurgents” or “terrorists” or “The Enemy.” They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush?
Anyone who wants to argue that such a view is even remotely patriotic under any rational definition of the word is debasing the meaning of the word into uselessness.
Those who do not support this war cannot support the mission of our troops, are undermining their morale, and are emboldening the enemy. Those are inescapable conclusions that cannot be brushed aside. That doesn’t mean that they can’t argue that the greater good is still being served, but the notion that an antiwar position is at all compatible with full support of the troops is intellectually dishonest.
It’s like saying that one supports the marriage of two friends while actively telling one of the partners to divorce the other. If we want to argue that the mission in Iraq is impossible that failure is inevitable, we’re saying that our troops cannot do the job they were assigned to do. Our troops think Iraq is a winnable conflict — and they’re the ones dodging IEDs and enemy gunfire. If they can support the war under those incredibly trying circumstances either they are hopelessly gullible or far braver than the American body politic. (The antiwar crowd subtly and not-so-subtly intimates the former — witness John Kerry’s statement about being “stuck in Iraq.”)
I maintain it’s the latter. Our troops know the stakes, they have the most involvement in this conflict, and they see things a hell of a lot clearer from the ground in Iraq than we do through the lens of a media that is not neutral on this issue. When political “courage” constitutes saying what’s popular it is clear that one US soldier has more bravery than nearly the entire Congress put together.
The soldier interviewed by NBC is right — if we’re going to support the troops, we can’t divorce ourselves from supporting the mission. We can’t say we support our brave men and women fighting this war while cutting off their reinforcements and constantly impugning their ability and spitting on their mission.
The Big Three have hurt themselves with overly generous union contracts, including lavish health and retirement benefits and restrictive work rules; an overemphasis on light trucks and sport utility vehicles that have lost their appeal amid higher gasoline prices; and a lack of exciting new models. No appreciation of the yen will save the Big Three from competition against nonunion plants turning out stylish, dependable and fuel-efficient cars in the American heartland.
Other labor costs add to the bill. Contract issues like work rules, line relief and holiday pay amount to $630 per vehicle – costs that the Japanese don’t have. And paying UAW members for not working when plants are shut costs another $350 per vehicle.
Here’s one example of how knotty Detroit’s labor problem can be:
If an assembly plant with 3,000 workers has no dealer orders, it has two options. One is to close the plant for a week and not build any cars. Then the company still has to give the idled workers 95 percent of their take-home pay plus all benefits for not working. So a one-week shutdown costs $7.7 million or $1,545 for each vehicle it didn’t make.
If the company decides to go ahead and run the plant for a week without any dealer orders, it will have distressed merchandise on its hands. Then it has to sell the vehicles to daily rental companies like Hertz or Avis at discounts of $3,000 to $5,000 per vehicle, which creates a flood of used cars in three to six months and damages resale value. Or it can put the vehicles into storage and pay dealers up to $1,250 apiece to take them off its hands.
The Big Three are facing a “perfect storm” of factors — better quality competition, higher gas prices, poor labor management, and greedy and uncompromising unions. The massive losses at Ford can’t be blamed on anyone but the management and union leadership that have tried to preserve an unsustainable system. Union rules have made Big Three plants far less flexible that non-union shops, and skyrocketing labor costs add thousands of dollars in costs to each and every American car.
Sooner or later the system will collapse, and it appears that collapse has already begun. The union activists who demanded the moon and the executives who caved will end up both losing together — while the American workers who have jobs in the non-union plants in the South continue to make just as much as their counterparts in Detroit and have more job security thanks to a system of labor that doesn’t encourage workers to try to take everything they can get from their employers.
For all the talk about how unions protect the interests of American workers, the only ones who seem to be benefitting are the influential few who have been gaming the system to their advantage to decades.
UPDATE: Robert Kuttner argues that GM’s biggest problem is that they produce crappy cars. I won’t argue against that one, although I have a feeling that the reason that they produce such crappy cars is that they can’t hire enough good engineering talent because of the costs of their manufacturing labor. The Japanese automakers, despite having roughly equivalent labor costs, save so much on shop flexibility and healthcare costs that they can afford to reinvest in other areas. In some ways it’s a chicken and egg problem — which means that if the Big Three want to survive, they’re going to have to fix the whole system rather than just replace the management at the top.
Bill Roggio has more on this weekend’s fighting in the Iraqi city of Najaf, home to the Shrine of the Imam Ali, one of the holiest sites in Shi’ite Islam. Over 300 Sunni terrorists and Shi’ite cultists were killed in the battle. 2 US and 8 Iraqi soldiers and police died in the fighting.
This battle is interesting, as it involves both Sunni insurgents and Shi’ite militias fighting in a coordinated effort. The conventional narrative is that these groups are at odds with each other, but the reality is that al-Qaeda has every interest in promoting more violence in Iraq, regardless of who ends up doing the fighting. It seems likely that al-Qaeda forces are working with Shi’ite groups to divide and conquer Iraq on the theory that the enemy of one’s enemy is at the very least a temporary ally.
Roggio also notes that the combined US/Iraqi force managed to defeat a large, coordinated, and heavily-armed force with a minimum of casualties. Killed in the fighting was the leader of a fourth major Shi’ite militia, the Armies of Heaven. Ahmed Hassani al-Yemeni, who claimed to be the Imam Mahdi, was killed in the attack. It would seem that particular militia is likely to survive as an independent body for much longer now that their leader has been killed.
The political reality in Washington and the reality on the ground in Iraq seem to be wildly divergent as the ongoing counterinsurgency fighting continues to wear down the terrorists in Iraq. Reports are indicating that years of continuous fighting are taking their toll on the “insurgency” in Iraq as one-sided engagements like the one this weekend continue to be the norm.
Counterinsurgency fighting is long, difficult work. However, so long as the US and coalition forces don’t cede the battlefield to the enemy, there is no reason to believe that Iraq is damned. It is all about continuing to keep the pressure up — and now that our soldiers know that reinforcements are on the way, that makes things easier on them. Iraq is quite winnable, but it requires our political will to be the equal of the courage of our fighting men and women. This battle in Najaf may have prevented a massive attack against the upcoming Ashura festival and further kept the enemy from achieving their goals of destabilizing and conquering Iraq.