OMB and CBO

For those of you not into Federal alphabet soup - that's the Office of Management and Budget (part of the Executive Branch - i.e., works for President) and the Congressional Budget Office (part of the Legislative Branch, and set up to be non-partisan). This report (http://hotair.com/archives/2009/07/26/the-omb-cbo-throwdown/) of the OMB pressuring the CBO is really quite a serious thing. The (relative) independence of the CBO is critical to Congressional budgeting decisions - and, as a part of the Legislative Branch, the Executive Branch has little business even being at the meetings, much less "pressing his old CBO colleagues to change past practices".

This could lead to more of an "Imperial Presidency" than anything Bush or even Nixon did.

Federal Health Care

I'm pretty firmly opposed to every options I've heard discussed for expanded health care. Partly because I have fundamental issues with the Federal Government providing health care at all (I know, that's a lost cause) and partly because of the expense. On the expense, specifically, all the plans I've seen assume major savings from increased efficiency. I work for the Federal Government, and have for more than 30 years. I think every Administration I've worked for has claimed they would reduce the cost of something or other by increasing efficiency. I've seen no demonstrated successes. So for proponents of health care - demonstrate the savings in medicare and medicaid first - then we can talk about how much more money would be saved by expanding federal health care programs.

Must be a slow day - 2 posts in one day is a record for me!

Afganistan Attacks

In headlines I would have expected more during Pres. Bush's administration (which may reflect my prejudice) most of the major news outlets are talking about the the 7 suicide bombers - but the headlines are about the attacks, not about what seems to me to be more important - the attacks all failed as a result of Afgan security forces taking action. The headlines don't even imply this was a victory, when it obviously was - see, for example:
The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/26/taliban-afghanistan-khost-attack
CNN International - http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/07/25/afghanistan.wrap/
and
AP - http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hvWEqwq3CrRvaQCmt21MfoYhjZJQD99LMNAO4

Climate Change

One of the more interesting - to me at least - current issues is the debate about climate change. I've expressed my concerns before about the uncertainty in the science, and here's a recent peer-reviewed article that illustrates some basis for the uncertainty: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2008JD011637.shtml

The basic conclusion is that the Southern Oscillation (a fancy phrase for the periodic temperature changes in the Pacific Ocean) can explain most the variability we have seen in climate for the last 50 years or so. The Climate change proponents (I almost said fanatics) have immediately raised a number of issues - some appear legitimate, some are more in the line of personal attacks and name-calling. Here are the 3 I found:

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/old-news/
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/is-our-whole-dissembly-appeared/
http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2009/07/surprising-conclusions-from.html

Note that none of these are peer reviewed - and I'm far from a climate scientist!

One point they make which may have some value is that the Southern Oscillation study did not include trend data. But I 'm not sure that was the point - the point seems to me that climate models have to include the effects of the southern oscillation if they are to represent the what the climate appears to work - and currently they don't.

So, this is another source of uncertainty in the models that make me skeptical on their scenarios (since even they don't call them predictions).