AlchemyToday

So ACORN is evil because the people that provide tax help there are idiots or something?  I mean, really, do these people think they were fooling anyone?  Have they ever seen a prostitute or a pimp in Baltimore?  This video makes you stupid.  I really don’t get the point other than proving that there are many idiots in the world; some of them work for ACORN and some of them are undercover conservative activists.

Easy enough, pick the most innocuous item in the report and repeat it ad nauseam for your readers to give the impression that it accurately characterizes the alleged misdeeds in the report.  In the case of the CIA IG’s report on improper interrogation techniques, we have Michael Leeden blowing smoke:

And not just to foreign terrorists, but to friends, family, dinner guests, fellow bridge players, and even professors.  Very rarely I deliberately forced smoke into their faces, but only very rarely, and then only when I was really, really annoyed.

In my own defense, I insist that the cigars were invariably very good ones.  Before Kennedy banned the Cuban cigars, they were almost always from the island.  More recently, they’ve come from Central America and sometimes Miami.

If it can be demonstrated that the cigars in question were cheap cigars, crappy cigars, then I think the redacted interrogators should be prosecuted with vengeance.  Otherwise, they’ve got an invitation to come over for dinner and I’ll provide the cigars and limoncello.

Leeden’s parties must be a blast… if I’m going to get smoke blown into my face until I vomit, it must be top quality:

Powerline thinks that only two bad things happened, and they weren’t by one of our guys so it’s OK:

As a threshold matter, it is important to note that the allegations that have been reported in the press are just that–allegations, sometimes based on hearsay. The CIA’s Inspector General singled out two incidents for special investigation, both of which involved the same debriefer–not a trained interrogator.

Never mind that many of the incidents are described by people who participated in them or directly witnessed them.  The debriefer in question here thought threatening someone with getting shot or drilled in the head was OK because he had already participated in interrogations with CIA agents in which mock executions were used to terrify detainees.   This confirmed by numerous witnesses and participants:

And Powerline’s lying about there only being two incidents under further investigation.  There’s also, you know, beating someone to death:

Oh, and as far as torture being OK because we do it to our own guys (to teach them how to withstand torture)… apparently that wasn’te enough:

And never mind that there are whole categories of torture that are redacted here and we still know nothing about.  63 consecutive sections are entirely redacted including the 9 or 10 section headings.

Here’s K-Lo questioning Tom Ridge’s claimed concern over discussions about raising the terror threat level a few days before the Presidential election in November 2004:

I wasn’t in the room. But how can someone whose title is director of homeland security not resign if he believes the security of the homeland is being compromised in some way by the White House? How do you wait all these years before saying something?

Here’s the second paragraph of the NY Times article that she links in her post:

After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

He resigned three weeks later.  I don’t know what to say.  As far as not making this public before now, there are two obvious reasons.  First, it would have completely undermined the public’s trust of Bush on national security; Ridge could be very concerned about this but unwilling to cause havoc.  More cynically, he filed it away under “memoirs” to have something to use in the press releases for his book.  My guess is that he was actually quite torn about including this information in the book … normally these sort of gotcha tidbits in memoirs are promoted several weeks ahead of publication to generate interest and orders for books.  It looks like Ridge only agreed at the last minute to publish this, so we’re finding out about it less than two weeks before the book hits the street.

Betsy McCaughey was on the Daily Show last night explaining her contention that the House health bill, HR3200 (PDF here), will lead to people being denied medical treatment against their will at the end of their life because they were forced into making living wills before that moment:

John Stewart does a decent job pointing out that, of course, the bill doesn’t actually do that. But he doesn’t recognize the main lie that McCaughey’s employing here. Here’s the relevant text of the bill:

McCaughey claims that doctors will be penalized if patients don’t adhere to their living wills, and that doctors will force patients to stick to their previous decisions and deny requests for life-sustaining care.  That’s her lie.  ”Adherence to orders for life-sustaining treatment,” refers to adherence by the health care provider, not adherence by the patient to previous plans.  If the patient is able to communicate, they can make their desires known and direct their treatment.  This will still count as adhering to the patient’s will, and doctors will still be credited for doing the right thing.

McCaughy says she’s on the side of doctors, but seems to be willing to assume that doctors are so evil that they’ll pretend they’re not hearing a patient’s call for help as they’re pulling the plug.  This section requires measurement of quality of end-of-life care based on whether doctors do what you asked them to do.  If you are able to ask them to do something else, they have to do that.  If you are unable to direct your own care, doctors will be judged on following the directions you laid out instead of the emotional (and often conflicting) pleas of your family members.  Pretty simple.

On health care, Bill Kristol doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  He was just on the Daily Show where he said that the United States millitary has the best health care in the country and said, “I’m not sure the VA, for example, which is another government agency has the best health care.  I’m not sure Medicade and Medicare which are government programs provide the absolute best health care.”

Bashing the VA is ignorant and unfortunatley quite common.  It has its roots in complaints about the treatment of soldiers at Walter Reed since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  However, that’s Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and it’s not a part of the VA.  In fact, the VA provides care for almost 8 million Americans at a cost of $45 billion per year.  That works out to under $6000/person.  The national average is $8000/person.  While saving $2000/person, the VA provides a level of care that’s better than that received by most Americans in every measurable category.  Expanding the VA to be the United States’ National Health Service would unquestionably increase the quality of care for the vast majority of Americans and go a long way towards avoiding the impending catastrophe of increased health costs.  The down side is that insurance companies and medical providers would go out of business and drug companies would have to stop relying on America for the entirety of their profits around the world.  In reality, Kristol is worried about this downside and doesn’t really believe that quality of care will suffer or that government healthcare can’t work.  He should probably pick an example closer to reality for his bogeyman, though.

Over at the Corner, Jim Manzi back up his colleague Mark Steyn’s appraisal that, “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade.”  What he’s saying is that if you are 29 you graduated in 1998 and that if you are graduating high school you were starting 1st grade in 1998–which was warmer than average (the second warmest year ever); there has been only one warmer year since and last year was not it.  Ergo, look at these two endpoints and there’s been no global warming for a decade!  Fortunately, we have many more than two data points.  If you look at all of the available data and subject it to a linear fit, you’ll find the following rates of global warming:

1999-2009: 1.52 degrees C/century

1960-2008: 1.34 degrees C/century

Jim Manzi looks at these graphs and says, “The funny thing is that if you zoom in on about the last ten years, you see this: There has not been a lot of measured warming for the last ten years.”  In fact, global warming has been faster over the past 10 years than it has over the past half century; in other words, the best evidence that we have shows that global warming is happening and is accelerating.  If you fit the 1960-2008 data to a second order polynomial, the rate of global warming is increasing by 0.02 degrees/century every year.

The only way to look at the data and come to the conclusion shared by Mark Steyn, George Will, and Jim Manzi is to be ignorant or knowingly deceitful.

Tonight Obama fielded two questions that should be a cinch to answer.  First, from Steve Koff at the Plain Dealer:

One, can you guarantee that this legislation will lock in and say the government will never deny any services, that that’s going to be decided by the doctor and the patient, and the government will not deny any coverage?

Then from Jake Tapper at ABC:

But experts say that in addition to the benefits that you’re pushing, there is going to have to be some sacrifice in order for there to be true cost-cutting measures, such as Americans giving up tests, referrals, choice, end-of-life care.

When you describe health care reform, you don’t — understandably, you don’t talk about the sacrifices that Americans might have to make. Do you think — do you accept the premise that other than some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, the American people are going to have to give anything up in order for this to happen?

The answer here is obvious: Do you and your doctor get everything you want and everything that’s best for your care in the current system?  Do you really have choice?  No.  Your insurance company will decline claims all the time for questionable medical reasons.  A public plan will ensure that doctors will make these decisions based on effectiveness and not profitability.  On top of that, millions of Americans don’t get to make these decisions at all because they aren’t insured and they will be with insurance reform.  And the plans on the table now require preventative care and early detection testing that aren’t always covered by insurance.  It’s not about what will be taken away but about what’ll be gained.

Bernd Beber has responded to my (and others’) criticisms of his article on suspected Iranian election fraud authored with Alexandra Scacco.  An annotated and updated version of the article is available.

A key criticism leveled against Alex Scacco’s and my Washington Post op-ed on the election in Iran is that we argue that a fair election is unlikely to produce a lot of variation in last-digit frequencies, but then use an inappropriate test in evaluating the data from Iran against this claim. We should have reported the results from a chi-square test, not the probability of particular digits occurring more or less often than expected.

Is a chi-square test the most appropriate statistic for this type of data? Yes. That’s exactly why we report the result in the annotated version of our op-ed. (We initially reported only a nearly equivalent test statistic involving the standard deviation of last-digit frequencies, but since then we’ve clarified that this is the same result one obtains from a chi-square test.)

But is this test the most appropriate one for a general audience? Only if there isn’t a more transparent alternative that captures the same intuition and gives the same substantive result. In our view, the test statistic we report is precisely such an alternative.

Read the rest of this entry »

From Baltimore’s fireworks show last night.

Of course the plural of anecdote isn’t really data, but that won’t stop Mark Steyn from spinning the tragic death of a cancer patient in the UK into an indictment of public health care:

When we quote stories like these at NRO, we get a lot of e-mail saying these are just “anecdotes”. And yes, if you look on yourself as being part of a government health system of millions of people, getting a bedsore and dying in hideous pain is no big deal in the scheme of things. But I look on myself as being part of the Mark Steyn health system. So if I get a bedsore and die, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a 100% systemic failure. The difference between government health care and a private system is that, under the latter, you’re free to say, “This dump’s filthy. I’m going to the state-of-the-art joint five miles up the road.” You may have to get out your checkbook, but ultimately the decisions are yours.

The problem is that there actually is data to look at here, gathered by the OECD.  And while I realize Steyn’s tongue is in his cheek, bedsores aren’t just a rare problem in the UK or in the United States.  Thousands of patients die in the United States each year from this almost entirely preventable problem.

In fact, the rate of death from medical misadventures (including bedsores) is 40% higher in the United States than the UK.  It’s higher than every OECD country except Australia, Austria, Greece, and Iceland (I would guess that Italy, Portugal, and Turkey might also compete here, but they don’t have 2004 data).

Beyond that, the “Mark Steyn health system” exists in the UK, too, and out-of-pocket, uninsured costs are lower or the same than in the United States.  As a related example, the cost of removal of a breast lump is £1,200 – £2,000 in the UK ($2,000-$3300) and over $3,000 at one American hospital.

Mark’s also fascinated with maggot therapy:

That’s not a bug, it’s a… No, wait: It’s a bug and a feature! The maggot is apparently the leech of 21st century government health care. But, as with everything else, there weren’t enough of them.

Boy, that sounds scary!  As it turns out, this therapy was developed at Johns Hopkins, reintroduced by the VA, and is used in hundreds of American hospitals (not just unleashed on patients on the government dole, either).  A gross and awesome video of maggot therapy below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »