Haven't posted in a while. Just don't care to right now. Maybe I'm finished with this blog, maybe not. Time will tell.

Governor McGreevey is going to have to explain himself better if he wants the Democrats to have a chance in this November's election, and if he wants to be re-elected. All of the previous scandals were bad, but I think this takes the cake.



For those who don't know about this, or aren't from New Jersey: Right before Governor McGreevey took office, in January 2002, the state parole board denied parole for a guy named Angelo Prisco. Prisco is said to be a capo in the Genovese crime family and the head of its New Jersey branch. His lawyer just happened to work for a firm that was a top fund-raiser for Governor McGreevey and state Democrats. In May 2002, the parole board changed its mind and decided to let Prisco go, even though he had served less than half his term. Recently, this story has become public. State and Federal prosecutors are now investigating the "very unusual" circumstances of Prisco's release. Republicans are demanding more investigation into what happened. McGreevey recently made an angry speech denying any inappropriate behavior by himself or his lieutenant (who has also been criticized). The speech reminded me of one of ex-Senator Bob Torricelli's speeches during his own meltdown, and it appears to have made the Governor's situation worse.

I'm a loyal Democrat. I was happy that we won the last election. I even think McGreevey's much-criticized budget is fairly good, if I accept his idea that breaking the no new taxes pledge would be politically disasterous. But this sort of thing really disgusts me. I hope McGreevey was not responsible for Prisco's release, because right now I feel like my Governor is no different from Assemblyman Zellman in the Sopranos.

I usually tell people that I like Washington Monthly. But I just read this article, and it stinks. I don't know how they can publish this garbage.

The article says that the best way to improve the economy and make people happier would be to increase creativity. Great. It says that only about 30% of people are in creative jobs, and the rest should be brought in from the cold. Great. But it doesn't say how this should be done. For example, the author's first specific prescription for government policy deals with education. Look at what he says:

First, we need an education system that develops and harnesses the creative talent of all our people. The current K-12 system is a vestige of the old mass-production age and is beyond tinkering with. The current education reform movement is laudable, but must be taken to its logical conclusion. No one wants to admit this openly, but we're already headed toward effective federal government takeover of troubled public schools. It was George W. Bush, after all, who passed the most federally intrusive education bill in American history, the No Child Left Behind Act. Only a national strategy can repair the now broken connection between good local schools and regional prosperity.

Education reform must also, at its core, make schools into places where human creativity is cultivated and can flourish. With the same zeal that schools and communities across the United States have embraced athletics and fitness, they now need to embrace creativity. We revel in the legendary stories of young creators like Michael Dell building new businesses in dorm rooms, or in the garage, in their spare time. The question to ask is: Why are they doing these things in their spare time? Isn't this the real stuff of education in the creative age? One person I interviewed told me that he'd bought his kids drums and guitars, and encouraged them to form a band, just because he thought it might keep them home at night and out of trouble. He'd never imagined, he said, that they would go on to learn useful skills by looking for and booking gigs and then producing and marketing their CDs. This kind of activity needs to be encouraged in schools.

Now, does anybody notice that besides an extremely vague suggestion of more federal control over education, he doesn't really propose anything specific to increase creativity or creative education?

He never gives any specific suggestions as to how to move more people into creative jobs. This flaw wouldn't be so bad, except that it's a terribly long article. And I don't even think he made such a good case for moving more people into "creative" jobs. So why did the Washington Monthly publish this article?

I support a war in Iraq, because I think it is less bad than any alternative. But the situation in Iraq doesn't worry me more than all other threats. The situation with North Korea is genuinely frightening. I've been very worried that Kim Jong Il isn't sane and reasonable enough to avoid war. But another thing that worries me, and gets far less attention, is Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons, and the possibility that the government of that country might fall to Taliban-style fundamentalists. This scary BBC story says that the main Pakistani Islamist party is praising the captured Al Qaida number 3 man, Khalid Shaikh Muhammed, as a "hero of Islam".

I've never been a big fan of Nick Kristof columns. Maybe I'm put off by his (in my opinion incorrect) belief that China is going to overtake the US economically. But anyway, I just read his column today. As I'm reading it, it seems like he has a somewhat mocking tone towards evangelical Christians. This didn't bother me, and I've read things like it before. He said this:

President Bush has said that he doesn't believe in evolution (he thinks the jury is still out). President Ronald Reagan felt the same way, and such views are typically American. A new Gallup poll shows that 48 percent of Americans believe in creationism, and only 28 percent in evolution (most of the rest aren't sure or lean toward creationism). According to recent Gallup Tuesday briefings, Americans are more than twice as likely to believe in the devil (68 percent) as in evolution.

In its approach to evangelicals, the national news media are generally reflective of the educated elite, particularly in the Northeast. It's expected at New York dinner parties to link crime to deprived childhoods — conversation would stop abruptly if someone mentioned Satan.

So ok, he's writing a column to tell educated northeastern liberals about who evangelical Christians are, and he's doing it in the sort of tone that educated northeastern liberals would use in private conversations. But then he says this:

But liberal critiques sometimes seem not just filled with outrage at evangelical-backed policies, which is fair, but also to have a sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself. Such mockery of religious faith is inexcusable. And liberals sometimes show more intellectual curiosity about the religion of Afghanistan than that of Alabama, and more interest in reading the Upanishads than in reading the Book of Revelation.

Now I really have no problem with him saying either of these two things. Honestly, these aren't issues that I care about very deeply. I'd much rather discuss health insurance, taxes, foreign policy, etc. But I'm annoyed by the apparent contradiction. It's like he's criticizing what he just wrote a few paragraphs ago. Or like he's trying to have it both ways. For evangelicals and their defenders, he writes how bad insulting evangelicals is. But for his secular liberal friends, Kristof makes it clear that he understands very well why they don't like evangelicals. Am I missing something here?

I haven't posted in a while, because I've been busy. But this story in the "liberal" New York Times forced my hand.

"Bush's Goal for Medicare: Good Doctor-Patient Relationship
The president offered a vision today of full coverage of prescription drugs and preventive services."

Why couldn't they have used a more honest headline? The article doesn't mention anything that Bush is doing that would improve doctor-patient relationships. He simply used that phrase multiple times in a speech before the AMA. The article does say that Bush is proposing some sort of prescription drug plan. But what does that have to do with doctor-patient relations? The headline could have been something like: "Bush Pushes for Medicare Changes". That would have been an honest, unbiased headline.

But wait. Doesn't Mickey Kaus say that the Times is a liberal paper? So I've gotta be wrong.

I had wanted to read this story about the McWane pipe company when it first came out, and now I have. It's shocking. I find it difficult to believe that 19th century capitalism, the sort of thing I read about in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, is still alive and well in America. Here are some illustrative quotes:

To keep up production, McWane eliminated one of three shifts; instead of three shifts of eight hours, there were two 12-hour shifts. At the end of a shift, supervisors often marched through yelling, "Four more hours!" So employees worked 16-hour days, sometimes seven days a week.

and

Workers are covered with black residue from the foundry sand. Many work areas are dark, due to poor lighting and clouds of sand. Despite all the ignition and fuel sources, exit paths are not obvious. Many workers have scars or disfigurations which are noticeable from several feet away. Burns and amputations are frequent.

and

But it was not until pumpkin heads started showing up with electronic monitoring bracelets that people realized the company was recruiting at Texas prisons. Many of the newly released prisoners did not last. They worked up to 16 hours a day, sometimes for 14 days straight, then were fired or quit before they qualified for benefits or union protection.

According to interviews and company documents, turnover at times approached 100 percent. Many rookie employees got hurt and left. It was a vicious cycle: injuries fueled turnover; turnover fueled injuries.

The plant was filled with workers who barely knew their way around, let alone grasped the dangers they faced. In April 1996, a crew of outside contract workers was sent up onto the roof to clean gutters. One worker, Juan Jimenez, stepped through a skylight and plunged 55 feet to his death.

and

His maintenance crew had finished work on a production line and, hurrying to get out of the way, cut through a molding machine. The line started up, and Jerry Hopson was crushed by a hydraulic piston. A year later, after more than 20 operations, he died.

"He was just a swell feller," his brother, the former union president, said, brushing back tears. In the local paper, a plant executive had called Jerry Hopson "a good man who made a very big mistake." But Bobby Hopson insisted that senior supervisors were well aware of the shortcut and its hazards, yet made no effort to stop its use.

"If you lose a minute, you've already lost, you know, maybe a fitting or two," he said.

and

The question was what to do with a pile of 200 old tires. It would have cost about $750 to have them hauled away to a hazardous waste dump. But company documents show that Mr. Stoker had another solution, even though he had been told that it violated state air-quality laws.

"He wanted the tires burned and he wanted them burned now," an internal company document stated. And so they were, in the cupola. Buckets of contaminated grease disappeared the same way, workers said.

What happens if an employee doesn't keep an injury secret?

As many companies do, McWane insists that injured workers return to work as soon as possible on "modified duty." Mr. Page described modified duty as a beneficial program that speeded recovery. At Tyler Pipe, though, records and interviews show that modified duty often meant humiliating and punitive jobs like cleaning toilets.

it goes on...

At Atlantic States Cast Iron Pipe, the McWane plant in Phillipsburg, N.J., residents have complained about pollution for decades. Local newspapers reported that crossing guards near the plant once had to wear gas masks. Since 1995, the plant has been found in violation of state and local environmental rules and emission limits more than 150 times. It has paid or faces more than $3 million in fines. Even so, regulators still consider it one of the state's worst polluters.

I could have gone on and on, because pretty much the whole long article is made up of frightening factoids like the ones above. But is any of this necessary to compete, or is the McWane family simply evil? The way that the Acipco company does business suggests the latter:

Acipco, as workers and managers there describe it, is a place where safety and a clean environment are not captive to the demands of production. Workers take yoga classes in a modern health club with the latest in weight-training equipment and a spring-loaded floor for aerobics. They get cash bonuses if they keep their cholesterol down. The company has even spent millions of dollars to install special air-conditioned booths in the hottest parts of the plant.

`"We had people say, `You're crazy, that won't work. Why are you doing that?'" the company's president and chief executive, Van L. Richey, said. But they did it, he said, and productivity increased.

Just this week, Acipco was ranked sixth in Fortune magazine's list of the 100 best employers in America. Acipco, in short, sounds almost like a caricature of blue-collar paradise. But it also strongly suggests that the McWane way is not the only way to survive, and succeed, in the dangerous and increasingly competitive business of making cast-iron pipe.

I often get worried when I hear the latest government warnings of terrorist attacks. Orange alert, stuff like that. Cable news tends to be scary. But then I read stories like this one, about the tragedy in South Korea, where some nutjob arsonist killed at least 120 people, and I wonder, "Why haven't the terrorists been able to do anything in the US since Sept. 11?" You'd think that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups would have been able to do something that killed a lot of people. Maybe not on the scale of September 11, but one or two attacks in the US like this attack in Korea would have scared everyone. I can think of only three reasons why the terrorists haven't done a similar attack in the US. One is that the US government has stopped all the planned attacks. Another is that there are hardly any terrorists in the whole country. The last reason I can think of is that the terrorists are just stupid, and haven't thought of any of the dozens of easy ways to kill lots of people, and are instead focused on doing a difficult attack with something like ricin or a dirty bomb.

I don't believe the government security agencies are competent enough to have stopped lots of terrorist attacks. Maybe a few, but not many. So that means that either Al Qaeda is much smaller than the public has been led to believe, or is really stupid.

This chilling story about North Korea implies that the people there really do believe the propaganda they are subjected to.

But every year, a million North Koreans, about 5 percent of the population, go through the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang, where exhibits indicate that the United States attacked North Korea.

and

Indoctrination here is so deep that when five Japanese citizens returned to Japan last fall, 25 years after they had been kidnapped by North Korea, the Japanese government had to resort to a cult deprogrammer to get them to abandon plans to return to Pyongyang.

and, most frighteningly,

Kim Chong Duk, a North Korean band manager, argued here today with South Koreans that the sole obstacle for uniting the two Koreas into a nation of 63 million people was the presence of American troops on the peninsula. "The South must expel that presence," he said. "Only then will it be possible to unify."

Apparently, posters like the ones on the right work.

I'm a bit worried about how this is going to turn out...

There has been a lot of discussion recently about problems with medical malpractice insurance, but most of it has blamed greedy lawyers, as opposed to, you know, actual medical malpractice. I just saw a story on 60 Minutes about one huge case of malpractice. It told the story of Dr. Moon. Dr. Moon told patients left and right that they needed heart bypasses, even though nothing was wrong with them. Eventually, the FBI raided his office, and Dr. Moon isn't prescribing any more heart bypasses or anything else, but hundreds of people got unnecessary and dangerous surgery. No co-workers said anything for years, even though the story made it clear that they believed Dr. Moon prescribed unnecessary surgeries.

The story didn't make any connection between guys like Dr. Moon and malpractice suits, or between Dr. Moon's co-workers' silence and malpractice suits. It should have. I'm not sure about whether some type of ceiling on malpractice suit payments is a good idea, but I do think that cases like that of Dr. Moon show us that the medical community needs to do a better job of policing itself.

Via CalPundit, I read that the Republicans are going to raise five times as much hard money as the Democrats in 2004. It looks like we're going to need the ketchup money to stand a chance...

It looks like President Bush has forgotten Afghanistan.

I'd like to recommend to anyone who reads this (anyone?) a tv show I first saw a few weeks ago. It's called Penn & Teller: Bull! It features Penn, Teller, and a healthy dose of skepticism. In the two shows I've seen, they take down psychics like John Edward and that Von Praagh guy, and show how stupid non-medical health care like magnet therapy and chiropractic treatments are. The show is funny and enlightening. I hope more people watch it. Today's episode, on at 10:05, is supposed to feature alien abductions.

The only problem I can think of about this show is that I don't see how they can find enough quack ideas to make it into a regular series. I've read that they've signed up for 13 episodes, but I don't see how they could do more, even if the ratings are good. How many popular quack ideas are out there? There are lots of weird ideas, but most of them aren't very well known.

Not a crisis, not a crisis, not a crisis...

Ahh, the liberal New York Times. Always sure to give a fair hearing to liberals' points of view. At least that's what Mickey Kaus says. Here in the real world, the Times publishes stories like this one: "Long Lines Mar Canada's Low-Cost Health Care"

This is another story suggesting that Canada's burning. It says that waiting times for treatment are too long. To back it up, it seems to get its facts from the right-wing Fraser Institute. It even produced a nice graph, titled "Universal Health Care's Downside"..

There are four problems with this story. One is that you shouldn't trust anything the Fraser Institute says. Like its compatriots in America, when the Fraser Institute does a study, it is not troubled by distorting the truth or even outright lying in order to prove the conclusion that it had already come to before doing any research at all. This does not mean that everything the Fraser Institute, or the Cato Institute, or the Heritage Foundation say is always wrong, but it does mean that they cannot be trusted to provide reliable information. The late Steve Kangas gave a very good explanation as to what right wing think tanks are here. Unfortunately, Kangas appears to me to have gone crazy before he killed himself, and started writing conspiracy stories. But the writings on the weblog of the very un-crazy Brad DeLong seems to confirm exactly what Steve Kangas said about right wing think tanks.

Another problem is that it doesn't compare waiting periods in Canada with other advanced countries, especially the United States. Even if you accept the Fraser Institute's data, how does that compare with the United States? Yes, I know that there are no waits in the US if you have unlimited cash to spend. But what about normal people, who have mediocre HMOs? What about the uninsured, or people on Medicaid? The article doesn't say. Maybe Canada has the shortest waits in the world, or the longest? But without knowing, the raw numbers are fairly meaningless.

Yet another problem is that the article strongly implies that the waits (if they exist) are a serious medical problem, without providing any medical or statistical evidence. Instead, it talks about people's comfort with waiting. For example, the article includes this quote:

"Your worst fear is it is going to grow while you are waiting," said Pat McMeekin, a 53-year-old hospital clerical worker, recalling the two months she had to wait between a mammogram and the first of two biopsies confirming she had breast cancer last summer. "When you have something, you want to take care of it and be done with it."

The problem with this is that the psychology of patients has very little to do with actual medical outcomes. What is the difference in breast cancer survival rates between Americans and Canadians? I don't know, but I do know that Pat McMeekin says that she felt afraid.

Also, even if Canada's system is lousy compared to America's (which isn't true), does that condemn all universal health care systems? I have heard that France's system has virtually no waits, and everyone gets excellent care. It also costs a lot less than America's system. What about other countries? My point is that if Canada's system works better than the US system (which is does), then that shows that a universal health care system can improve health care in the US. But if Canada's system is bad, all it shows is that Canada's system is bad. Maybe another country has a better universal system that we should adopt. Maybe not. But it doesn't prove that universal health is always bad.

Meanwhile, the OECD has real statistics (which the Times reporter didn't care about). It says that in the year 2000, the US spent $4631, while Canada spent $2535 on health care. And as a percentage of GDP, the US spent 13%, while Canada spent 9.1%. Then there's life expectancy. Portugal, Slovak Republic, Turkey, Poland, Mexico, South Korea, Hungary, Czech Republic each have a lower life expectancy for males than the US. We're tied with Ireland and Finland. Everyone else beats us, often by about 4 years. I didn't bother checking females, because I'm sure the ranking of each country would be about the same as for males. (I'm actually somewhat surprised that France beat us by a few years, because so many more people smoke there.) Then there's infant mortality. Time spent in hospitals for acute care. Acute care beds per 1000 people. And on and on and on. Go to the OECD site to see for yourself.

But the Times says that Canada's health care system is bad,
and it must be true,
for the New York Times is a liberal paper.

NBC news just did a piece on single-payer healthcare. It was mostly fair. It attempted to be even-handed by spending time noting the waiting lists for treatment. It also said that Canadians paid higher taxes. It didn't note that Canada spends half of what the US spends on health care. But it was basically a positive piece. I'm very surprised. I would have expected a story suggesting that "Canada's Burning".

What appears to be a transcript of the story is here.

I'm reading ABC's the Note now. It says Bob Graham is going to run for President. And I just read Howard Kurtz' column, which says that Dennis Kucinich is going to run. There have been rumors that Gary Hart will run. I don't know what's up with this race. How is it going to play out with so many people running? Will any of the candidates be able to get a message out? And who would this help? My guess is that it would help Joe Lieberman, because he has the best name recognition. But what if John Kerry spends the ketchup money? This looks like it's going to be a very competitive race.

For the second time in the past year, rebel troops are approaching the Liberian capital. I like this quote from the Times article:

Mr. Taylor, returning from a summit meeting of African leaders, invited the rebels to peace talk and swore he would not surrender. "We do not see how anyone can come to power by violence and force of arms," said the president, who came to power after a brutal seven-year war.

Today's New York Times has an article about the Presidential candidates and the South Carolina economic boycott to oppose the Confederate flag. It had one amusing part that illustrates what Dick Gephardt stands for:

Mr. Gephardt switched speeds on the issue of the flag itself. After first declining to take a position on it, he issued a statement the next day saying he had been "too cautious in stating my views in regard to the Confederate flag."

"The Confederate flag is a hurtful, divisive symbol and in my view, has no place flying anywhere in any state in this country," he said.