Watch Out For Rule By The "Smart" -- Part III

Each day I skim over the op-eds in the New York Times so that you don't have to.  And what do I come upon yesterday but an op-ed by two prominent Republican economists (not quite an oxymoron), Martin Feldstein and Gregory Mankiw, advocating for "A Conservative Case for Climate Action."  Uh-oh.  And then, upon checking my emails, I learn that there is a nearly-identical op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, titled "A Conservative Answer to Climate Change," this time with different authors -- former Treasury Secretaries George Shultz and James Baker.  A co-ordinated attack!

Get ready:  A bunch of Grand Pooh-Bahs, calling themselves "conservatives," have formed something they are calling the Climate Leadership Council to advocate for a new approach to tackling "climate change."  Besides the authors listed above, the members include another ex-Treasury Secretary (Hank Paulson), an ex-chairman of Wal-Mart (Rob Walton), a venture capital guy (Thomas Stephenson), and long-time do-gooder Ted Halstead (who seems be the one who rounded the whole thing up).  All of these guys have co-authored a new paper, just released, titled "The Conservative Case For Carbon Dividends."  

Now, these authors are obviously a collection of really, really smart guys.  And, because they are really, really smart, they have that special ability that you and I lack, which is the ability to devise ultimate solutions to the most difficult societal problems through the magic of the government's power to tax and spend.  And, you will not be surprised to learn, they have used their very special ability to devise the solution to that most critical problem of our time, "climate change."  And what is the solution?  You guessed it!  A large and steadily-growing tax!:

[T]he federal government would impose a gradually increasing tax on carbon dioxide emissions.  It might begin a $40 per ton and increase steadily.  this tax would send a powerful signal to businesses and consumers to reduce their carbon footprints.    

Does anything about this sound familiar?  Oh yes, it was the "Risky Business Coalition," another small collection of Grand Pooh-Bahs who also issued a clarion call for drastic action by the U.S. federal government to stop "climate change," this one back in mid-2014.  That call was the subject of my first post in this series on June 25 of that year, "Watch Out For Rule By The "Smart."  The Climate Leadership Council and the Risky Business Coalition have substantial overlap in their small list of members -- Paulson, Shultz and Walton lent their names to both groups.  (The other members of the RBC were Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer.)  RBC advocated a massive transition away from fossil fuels and toward so-called "clean energy" -- although its mechanism of how to make that happen was far from clear.    

All the members of this new Climate Leadership Council are obviously people of great ability and great accomplishment.  No one would doubt that they are really "smart."  But, before seeking to impose hundreds of billions of dollars of new taxes on the American people, do you think that people this smart could be troubled to ask a couple of the most basic questions?  Questions like:  Even assuming the U.N.'s worst-case projections for world temperature increase caused by CO2 emissions, how much could this tax be expected to reduce that increase?  Of course they do not address that question.  Hey, everybody knows that we have to reduce carbon emissions -- we're just coming up with the best way to do it!  However, if we humble peasants are interested in the answer to the question, we can go the the Cato Institute's handy Carbon Tax Temperature Savings Calculator (which in turn is based on the government's own model known as MAGICC).  If we go there, we will find that, assuming that this new tax can reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 60% (that will never happen), and that climate "sensitivity" is 3 deg C per doubling of atmospheric CO2 (crazy high), then this new tax will save a big 0.032 deg C of warming by 2050, and 0.076 deg C of warming by 2100.  Why, 83 years from now, that's almost enough to be as large as the margin of error of the measurement!

Or maybe these really "smart" guys could ask whether there is actually any dangerous warming going on that requires these kinds of massive government-directed "solutions."  I won't go here into the extensive government temperature data alteration that is the subject of my series "The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time."  But Roger Simon at PJ Media yesterday was quick to point out the disastrous timing of the NYT/WSJ op-eds, coming as they did just a few days after whistleblower John Bates's revelations of data manipulation at NOAA intended to dupe world leaders into making "climate" agreements.  How much of recent world temperature increase is real, versus an artifact of altered data?  Maybe we will find out as the new Trump administration takes control of the reins. 

Well, now for the good news.  I don't know how it happened, but somehow, at some point,  Republican politicians stopped being susceptible to falling for the climate alarm scam.  The old guys had all fallen for it.  Presidential candidates McCain and Romney were both on board with the climate alarm bandwagon.  And this Climate Leadership Council crowd is considerably older still (Shultz is 96 (!), Baker 86, Paulson 70, Feldstein 77).  Meanwhile, in today's Congress, you literally won't find a single Republican to speak in favor of massive fossil fuel restrictions to stop the existential threat of "climate change."  Could they have figured out that the politics of "climate change" is really about massive government programs and handouts and growth that will have little to no effect upon the climate?  Probably.  You don't actually have to be very smart to figure that out.    

Not A Single Senate Democrat Stands Up To Teachers Unions

What's been predicted for the past week or so has now occurred:  Betsy DeVos has been confirmed as Secretary of Education by a  51-50 vote, with Vice President Mike Pence called upon to cast the tie-breaking vote.  Not a single Democrat broke ranks.  Apparently this is the first time in history that a Vice President was called upon to cast a tie-breaking vote for the confirmation of a cabinet secretary.

Obviously, defeat of DeVos was a top priority for the teachers unions, and they pulled out all the stops.  DeVos has devoted much of her life to the cause of school choice, particularly to giving poor and minority children the ability to escape failing unionized public schools.  Fox News yesterday described the "furious push" to find one more Republican to vote against DeVos and defeat the nomination.  Forbes on January 17 accurately identified DeVos as "public enemy number one" with the teachers unions.

The guiding theme of the anti-DeVos campaign has been that she has "used her money, power and influence to destroy public education. . . . ," (per "education activist" Marie Corfield, quoted in the Forbes piece).  Funny, but when I was a kid, the inner city public schools in essentially all major cities were already a disaster -- and that was well before DeVos started her advocacy.

Well, you don't have to look very far, or think very hard, to understand what this is all about.  School choice absolutely does pose an existential threat to the teachers unions.  When there is educational choice, that means charter schools and private schools, most of which are non-union. The charter and private schools can out-perform the traditional public schools precisely because they can institute teacher evaluations, pay differentials and termination of under-achieving teachers -- all things that are verboten in the unionized schools.  So as soon as the alternatives are available, parents move their kids away from the traditional schools and into the alternatives.  

According to a UFT dues schedule here, each unionized teacher means about $1300 - 1400 in dues revenue per year to the union.  With about 3 million K-12 teachers in public schools, that means that each 1% loss in market share costs the teachers unions some $40 million in dues revenue per year.  Real money.  If public school alternatives suddenly went from their current market share of about 7% to more like 20%, we could be talking about a loss of multiple hundred million dollars per year for the teachers unions.  And, of course, the teachers unions are the number one funders of the Democratic Party and its candidates.

Somehow, few seem to comment on the fundamental immorality of denying school choice to poor and minority kids in order to keep open the taxpayer money spigot for the teachers unions and the Democratic Party.  An exception is David Harsanyi.  His January 22 piece at the Patriot Post is headlined "Dem's Fight Against School Choice Is Immoral"; sub-headline: "Teachers unions are the only organizations that openly support segregated schools."  Excerpt:

Democrats often tell us that racism is one of the most pressing problems in America. And yet, few things have hurt African-Americans more over the past 40 years than inner-city public school systems. If [former] President Obama is correct and educational attainment is the key to breaking out of a lower economic stratum, then no institution is driving inequality quite as effectively as public schools.  Actually, teachers unions are the only organizations in America that openly support segregated schools. In districts across the country — even ones in cities with some form of limited movement for kids — poor parents, typically those who are black or Hispanic, are forced to enroll their kids in underperforming schools when there are good ones nearby, sometimes just blocks away.  The National Education Association spent $23 million during the last election cycle alone to elect politicians to keep low-income Americans right where they are.

I would only comment that that $23 million from the NEA in the last cycle is but a small part of the total value of teachers union cash and in-kind contributions to the Democratic Party, its allies, and its candidates.  First, in addition to the NEA there are the UFT and various other independent teachers unions.  Then there are contributions to various PACs, Super-PACs, and "issue advocacy" organizations.  Then there are the in-kind efforts:  phone banks, mailings, voter cards, driving people to the polls.  A fair estimate of the total value of the cash and in-kind contributions of teachers unions on behalf of the Democratic Party, allied groups, and candidates in an election cycle is a minimum of $200 million. 

So, poor and minority kids and your parents, face the facts:  you contribute pennies per election cycle to the Democratic Party and its candidates, and the teachers unions contribute hundreds of millions of dollars.  The Dems know where their bread is buttered, and it's not by you.  Not one single one of them will stand up for you when it counts.

Nick Gillespie at Reason today has an excellent round-up of the results of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by reputable researchers as to whether school choice, particularly charter schools, improves student performance.  Here are his bullet points with embedded links:

 In Boston, a team of researchers from MIT, Harvard, Duke, and the University of Michigan, conducted a RCT and found:: "The charter school effects reported here are therefore large enough to reduce the black-white reading gap in middle school by two-thirds."

A RCT of charter schools in New York City by a Stanford researcher found an even larger effect: "On average, a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English."

The same Stanford researcher conducted an RCT of charter schools in Chicago and found: "students in charter schools outperformed a comparable group of lotteried-out students who remained in regular Chicago public schools by 5 to 6 percentile points in math and about 5 percentile points in reading…. To put the gains in perspective, it may help to know that 5 to 6 percentile points is just under half of the gap between the average disadvantaged, minority student in Chicago public schools and the average middle-income, nonminority student in a suburban district."

And the last RCT was a national study conducted by researchers at Mathematica for the US Department of Education. It found significant gains for disadvantaged students in charter schools but the opposite for wealthy suburban students in charter schools. They could not determine why the benefits of charters were found only in urban, disadvantaged settings, but their findings are consistent with the three other RCTs that found significant achievement gains for charter students in Boston, Chicago, and New York City.

I wouldn't expect much to change over night now that DeVos is Education Secretary.  Most of the federal funding to K-12 schools is pre-allocated by appropriation bills and funding formulas, and the Education Secretary can't just start moving money around tomorrow.  But the upcoming budget (for the next fiscal year starting in October) can start moving things around, including providing strong funding (or de-funding) incentives for states and districts that variously encourage or discourage school choice.  Expect the teachers unions to fight to the death for every inch of turf.  But this could be the beginning of a long, slow, painful decline.

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XIII

The "Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time" is the world temperature data tampering fraud, by which the politicized keepers of world temperature data, most notably at U.S. agencies NOAA and NASA, alter past temperature records to support a narrative of ongoing record-setting global warming.  Past articles in this series (Parts I through XII) can be found at this link.

I have always thought that the fraud would finally crack when a whistleblower or two would step forward.  But with the government passing out all the money, and strict conformance to orthodoxy required to keep your job and career in the field of climate science, that has not occurred.  Until now.  Two weeks ago we got President Trump, and a pledge to "drain the swamp."  Over this weekend, the first whistleblower on the temperature data tampering fraud has stepped forward.  He is Dr. John Bates, recently (late 2016) retired from the job of "Senior Scientist" at NOAA's temperature data operation in Asheville, NC, which is known (after a recent name change) as NCEI (National Centers for Environmental Information).  The particular subject on which Bates has blown the whistle is the data underlying a June 2015 paper that appeared in Science magazine, authored by Thomas Karl and others, titled "Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus."  Karl, until his own recent retirement, was the Director of NCEI. 

First, some background so that you will understand the importance of this development.  The year 2015 was targeted by the Obama administration to be the culmination of its climate agenda.  A big summit was scheduled in Paris for December, to be attended by President Obama himself, and at which he badly wanted to sign the U.S. on to a global treaty calling for restrictions on "greenhouse gas" emissions.  But the administration had a problem, which was that according to the best (satellite) data, as of mid-2015 world temperatures had been in a "pause," or "hiatus," showing no trend either up or down, for some 17 years since 1998.  The "pause" had become the number one talking point of so-called climate "skeptics" and others seeking to de-rail the upcoming Paris meetings.  

Then, with exquisite timing, the Karl, et al., paper appeared in Science on June 4.  It claimed to do a re-analysis of temperature records and trends, based in large part on new or updated data sets, to reach a conclusion that there had been no "pause" or "hiatus" at all; rather, the paper concluded, based on its updated data, that the so-called "hiatus" was an "artifact of data biases."  Needless to say, the Karl paper came out with a massive government-orchestrated press barrage, and was picked up and parroted in all the usual "mainstream" media sources.  (E.g., New York Times, June 4, 2015, "Global Warming 'Hiatus' Challenged by NOAA Research").  Skeptics were equally quick to debunk the Karl paper.  (See, for example, Anthony Watts and Bob Tisdale at Watts Up With That, June 4, 2015, "NOAA/NCDC’s new ‘pause-buster’ paper: a laughable attempt to create warming by adjusting past data"; and don't forget Manhattan Contrarian, June 7, 2015, "The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part V").  According to a later post by Anthony Watts here, he told Karl in an email in June that his "highly questionable" paper was going to be the "Waterloo" for its authors.

The next step came in October 2015, when the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, chaired by Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas, issued a subpoena to NOAA for the research documents underlying the Karl, et al. paper.  And then, in a highly unusual move, NOAA flatly refused to comply with the Congressional subpoena.  (Inside Climate News, October 28, 2015, "NOAA Stiff-Arms House Science Committee Subpoena Questioning 'Hiatus' Study"). And the Obama Justice Department refused to enforce the subpoena on behalf of Congress.  As far as I can ascertain, Smith never got the information he was seeking.  Something tells me some people at NOAA may shortly be wishing that they had complied.

Which brings us up to the recent events.  According to this post at Judith Curry's Climate, etc., upon his retirement from NOAA late last year, Dr. Bates initially submitted an op-ed to the Washington Post in December 2016 setting forth his revelations.  Needless to say, the Post declined to publish it.  After discussions with Ms. Curry, they decided to publish a longer version of the revelations at her site, and it appeared there on Saturday February 4.  Bates also provided his revelations to David Rose of the UK's Daily Mail, and a long article appeared there today.  The headline for Rose's article is "Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data." 

Rather than try to paraphrase, I'll include some fairly long quotes from Rose's article.

A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.

The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.

But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data. . . .  

His vehement objections to the publication of the faulty data were overridden by his NOAA superiors in what he describes as a ‘blatant attempt to intensify the impact’ of what became known as the Pausebuster paper. . . .  

In an exclusive interview, Dr Bates accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of ‘insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy’.

There's lots more in the Mail article, and in Dr. Bates's post at Climate, etc.  Among the most important points are (1) the data underlying the Karl, et al., paper have never been properly archived, in violation of policy of both NOAA and Science, with the result that the paper cannot be replicated; and (2) the computer on which the secret Karl, et al., data resided has crashed and is unusable.  In other words, it's more or less the usual for the "science" coming out of NOAA and purporting to support the global warming narrative.

This story has just broken this weekend, and is already all over the skeptic sites like Watts Up With That, Icecap, Powerline, Climate Depot, Tallbloke, Breitbart, Zero Hedge and others.  But my searches don't turn up anything on any "mainstream" source, like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Bloomberg, or for that matter any major science site like Scientific American, Science or Nature.  Are they going to just try to ignore this and see if they can get away with it?

It is highly likely that criminal conduct occurred here, both in the intentional manipulation of data and in the obstruction of refusing to comply with a valid subpoena.  It seems like the paper's authors were counting on the Justice Department remaining in friendly hands until the expiration of the statute of limitations.  Unfortunately for them, that has not occurred.

Climate Alarmism Doesn't Seem To Be Scaring Anybody Any More

In a post back in December, I made this prediction:

As soon as the United States stops parroting the global warming line, the other countries will quickly start backing away from it as well.

Look around and you will find that this is happening much faster than even I would have thought.  Scott Pruitt hasn't even been confirmed yet as EPA administrator, and already the floodgates are starting to open around the world to rapidly expanding fossil fuel use, particularly coal.  Now mind you, no country has actually officially stated that "we don't buy that global warming crap any more."  If you just listen to their official words and pronouncements, it might seem that not all that much has changed.  But then, take a look at what they are doing, and you get a very different picture.

Let's have a round-up:

Japan.  Do you remember Japan's pledge, after the Fukushima nuclear plant incident in 2011, to transition away from nuclear and fossil fuels and toward the holy grails of wind and solar power?  It seems that that did not work out too well.  Andrew Follett in the Daily Caller on February 1 reports on Japan's newly revised energy plans.  Wind and solar?

Officials promised to replace nuclear power with wind or solar, but this caused the price of electricity to rise by 20 percent.

Enough of that foolishness!  What are the new plans?

Japan [has] plans to build as many as 45 new coal-fired power stations in the coming years.  Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is still firmly behind plans to build coal plants, despite repeated pressures from environmentalists to stop construction of the major new coal plants. Abe wants more new coal plants to make sure the island nation isn’t too reliant on any one source of electricity. . . .  Japan got 24 percent of its electricity from coal in 2010 and the country plans to get more than a third of its power from coal by 2040.

According to Follett, Japan is also planning to add natural gas capacity, as well as to restart most of its nukes.  Back to energy sanity!

Australia.   Do you remember that back on September 28 a big storm in South Australia caused the amount of power coming from its extensive wind farms to swing so wildly that it knocked out electricity to the entire province for a couple of days?  Going in to that disaster, South Australia was one of the world champions of wind power, crowing that it got up to 50% of its power from wind on some days.  Well, what are they going to do now to keep the disaster from re-occurring?  From The Australian on February 1:

Australia’s Turnbull government is planning to help fund the construction of new clean-coal-fired power stations­ in an extraordinary meas­ure to intervene in the looming energ­y security and pricing crisis. . . .  [T]he federal government will look to either repurpose plants or directly invest in the construction of new-generation coal-fired plants in partnership with the ­private sector.

Canada.  In 2015 the Canadians voted out the notorious Conservative "climate denier" Stephen Harper and voted in trendy lefty Justin Trudeau.  Surely this guy would carry forth the torch of the fossil fuel restriction movement?  Don't count on it.  From Yale Environment 360, January 17, "Canada's Trudeau Is Under Fire For His Record on Green Issues":

Trudeau’s critics say that while he has talked a good game on climate change, his actions have been in stark contrast to that rhetoric. Trudeau has approved two contentious pipeline projects to transport Alberta tar sands oil. One, the Enbridge Line 3 Pipeline, would carry oil from Alberta to the U.S. Midwest and beyond. The other, Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline, would move oil and bitumen to ports in British Columbia for export, thus extending for decades the life of tar sands operations.  Trudeau also supports the highly controversial Keystone XL Pipeline, which would transport tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. . . .  In addition, Trudeau has approved the $11.4 billion Pacific NorthWest liquefied natural gas (LNG) project that would be built by the Malaysian national oil company, Petronas, at the mouth of British Columbia’s Skeena River.

China.  Of all the countries on the world climate stage, China is my favorite.  They are willing to say the most transparently deceptive things to make the environmental crowd think that they are going along with the program, when in fact they are just thumbing their noses -- and the environmentalists get completely taken in every time.  And thus on January 18 came the big announcement that China was canceling some 103 coal plants previously planned to be built.  Exciting!  From the New York Times of that date:

China is canceling plans to build more than 100 coal-fired power plants, seeking to rein in runaway, wasteful investment in the sector while moving the country away from one of the dirtiest forms of electricity generation, the government announced in a directive made public this week.

That sure sounds like something for a greenhouse gas-hating environmentalist to cheer about!  So let's try to put it in some perspective.  How much coal electricity-generating capacity does China already have, and how much is it still building even after the cancelation of the 103 plants?  As of 2015, China's coal-fired electricity-generation capacity was over 900 gigawatts, according to Bloomberg, and continuing to grow rapidly.  It seems that they had planned another 350 gigawatts; but with these cancelations, they will now limit that to another 200 or so gigawatts, to achieve a "limit" of about 1100 gigawatts of coal-fired generation capacity.  From Next Big Future on November 8:

China will need to cut about 150 gigawatts of coal-fired power from projects that are either approved for construction or already under construction to maintain the 1,100-gigawatt limit, Huang Xuenong, director of the power generation division of NEA said during the webcast. Without restrictions the country’s coal-fired power capacity could reach about 1,250 gigawatts by 2020, he said.
By contrast, the evil pollution-happy planet-destroying U.S. has coal-fired electricity-generation capacity of a big 305 gigawatts.  So China's announcement of cancelation of that last 150 gigawatts of planned capacity means that they are graciously going to "limit" their coal electricity-generation capacity to 3.7 times the U.S. capacity, rather than the previously-planned 4.2 times.  That sure sounds like "climate leadership" to me!   From Isabel Hilton at Yale Environment 360 on November 21:

With Donald Trump threatening to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, China is ready to assume leadership of the world’s climate efforts. For China, it is a matter of self-interest – reducing the choking pollution in its cities and seizing the economic opportunities of a low-carbon future.   

Sure, Isabel.  And here's another way that China is seizing the "climate leadership" away from the United States:  by building well over a dozen new coal-fired power stations in the Balkan states of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovinia and Montenegro.  From Not A Lot Of People Know That on September 21:

The Balkan region’s first privately-funded power plant came online on Tuesday, increasing the region’s dependency on coal-fired power stations even as environmental concerns are driving them to the brink of the extinction elsewhere in Europe. It was built by China’s Dongfang Electric Corp and financed with the help of a 350 million euro ($391.13 million) loan from the China Development Bank. 

And that plant is just the first of many.  Paul Homewood of Not A Lot Of People Know That helpfully provides this map of planned coal-fired power stations in the Balkan countries, largely to be financed and built by Chinese investors and construction companies:

The best part about all of this is that in the time since President Trump's election the voices of climate alarm have reached entirely new levels of hysteria.  It's just that it seems that they aren't scaring anybody any more.  

The Bureaucrats Think That They Don't Answer To The President

Look in the Constitution, and you will find this very simple statement about the executive power of the United States (Article 2, Section 1):

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Sometimes it's called the "unitary executive."  Every single person in the executive departments of the federal government answers to the President.  It did not have to be set up this way.  For example, under the constitutions in many states, there are executive officers who are separately elected and don't answer to the governor.  In my own state of New York, this is true of the Attorney General and the Comptroller.  But in the federal executive branch, absolutely everybody works for the President.

Of course, that's not their view.  I mean, as long as the President is someone that you fundamentally agree with, it's generally OK to go along with him.  But, really -- Donald Trump???  Isn't there a basic constitutional principle that it's OK just tell him to get lost?

A small drama over this issue has just played out at the Justice Department, where Trump's nominee for Attorney General has been stalled for several days by Senate Democrats.  That has left in charge as Acting Attorney General an Obama holdover named Sally Yates.  As Trump's flurry of executive orders got to the big one on immigration, Yates took the opportunity to assert the federal bureaucrat's "I don't care what you say and I'll do as I please" privilege.  According to this article in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, Yates sent an email to the lawyers in Justice's Civil Division instructing them not to defend President Trump's executive order in court (in the face of a series of lawsuits that required immediate defense).  In her email, Yates acknowledged that the executive order had been reviewed by the Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which had determined that it was "lawful on its face."  Her email then stated that she had concerns about the legality of some aspects of the order, but did not specify what those concerns might be.  And then Yates said that, even without specific basis to believe the order to be contrary to law, she would direct the Department to decline to enforce it, because OLC's determination of facial legality did "not address whether any policy choice embodied in an executive order is wise or just. . . ."  

Needless to say, Trump promptly fired Yates.  But really, is it OK for the senior Justice Department official to thwart a direct order from the President, not on grounds of any specific illegality, but rather because of disagreement with the "policy choice" in question?  Of course, the DNC promptly rose to Yates's defense, with a spokesman calling her a "brave patriot" who "dare[s] to speak truth to power."  Huh?  Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz (one of the very few progressives willing to state an honest opinion as opposed to an official talking point on any subject), writing in the Hill, got it right:

[Yates] referred to [the order's] possibly being unconstitutional and unlawful. Had she stuck to the latter two criteria she would have been on more solid ground, although perhaps wrong on the merits. But by interjecting issues of policy and directing the Justice Department not to defend any aspect of the order, she overstepped her bounds.  An attorney general, like any citizen, has the right to disagree with a presidential order, but unless it is clear that the order is unlawful, she has no authority to order the Justice Department to refuse to enforce it.

So, in this first round of Trump v. The Bureaucracy, Trump seems (for now) to have gotten his way.  But without doubt, this is only the beginning of a protracted struggle, likely to play itself out in many agencies and departments.  Another place where the struggle has already begun is the EPA.  As readers here well know, EPA is badly afflicted with the use of junk "science" to support its dreams of bigger budgets, a bigger empire, and greater control over the economy.  See, for example, my posts here and here as to EPA's more or less complete lack of scientific support for the proposition that there is any empirically-validated relationship between human emissions of CO2 and global temperatures.

So does the incoming administration -- which is rightfully skeptical of the politicized "science" coming out of EPA -- have any ability to stop the dissemination of junk science and make its own independent reassessment of the scientific landscape?  Look around and you will already find the crazed screams of "censorship" and "gag orders" hurled at every attempt of the new administration to try to get even a little control over the message.  For a particularly hysterical exemplar (but there are many) try this from the Daily Banter on January 26:

With Trump's Announcement That He Will Censor the EPA, America is Now a Pre-Fascist State . . . .  According to the AP the Trump administration will now be "Mandating that any studies or data from scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency undergo review by political appointees before they can be released to the public.”  

Apparently the position of the bureaucracy and its media allies is that the President has no ability to direct or restrict what public messages or information may be put out on behalf of his government.  That's "censorship"!  Does the same apply, I wonder, to national security information in the possession of agencies like State, NSA and the CIA?

Of course, we do have a First Amendment, and any current bureaucrat has the right under that provision to say whatever he or she wants on climate change and most other subjects.  But not on behalf of the government.  If you disagree with the new administration, and you want to speak out against them, the honorable thing to do is to resign.  If you don't, the President is well within his rights to fire you.  I don't think that the bureaucrats see it this way.  

Can Actual Evidence Ever Convince A Progressive Of Anything?

A key purpose of this blog is to present the easily available data and statistics that show progressive myths -- particularly myths about the efficacy of government spending and programs -- to be false.  But some of those myths just seem so intuitively obvious that they can't possibly be wrong!  Or can they?  

On Friday, Gabrielle Gurney in the American Prospect (even more progressive than the New York Times!) took up some of the top obviously false pieties of the progressive cause in an article headlined "It's the Poverty, Stupid, Not Trump's Imagined Carnage."   I already discussed the question of whether the "carnage" in Democrat-controlled American cities is real or imagined in this post last week.  But Ms. Gurney now seeks to take the "imagined carnage" theme in a different direction by arguing that even if there might be some excessive crime in a few places, the solution is more government spending to address the underlying problem of poverty:

Most municipal leaders understand that crime reduction hinges on addressing multiple underlying economic factors like poverty, which requires dollars and innovative strategies, not beatdowns. Chicago officials want more federal funding for education, economic development, and gun control, not the National Guard.

I mean, what could be more obvious than that crime increases with the rate of poverty, and therefore the most effective way to reduce crime must be through reduction in the rate of poverty?  And what could be even more obvious than that "more money" for government "anti-poverty" programs is the way to reduce poverty?  Indeed, these things are so obvious that if you don't believe them you have earned the sobriquet "stupid" from Ms. Gurney.  But before you buy into Ms. Gurney's thesis because you don't want to be called "stupid," perhaps you should consider some easily-available data about New York City that may point to an opposite conclusion.

First, consider the question of whether government "anti-poverty" spending actually decreases measured poverty.  I have covered this issue multiple times at this blog (see posts collected under my Poverty tag) and won't repeat all those things in this post.  Suffice it to say that nationally, the War on Poverty began in 1965 with little-to-no "anti-poverty" spending and a measured poverty rate of about 15.5%; and 50 years later governments were spending about $1 trillion per year on "anti-poverty" spending, and the measured poverty rate was still 15.5%.  

But the results of "anti-poverty" spending in New York City have been far, far worse.  The first decennial census after the War on Poverty began was in 1970, when big "anti-poverty" spending was just getting going.  An article by Levitan and Wieler for the New York Federal Reserve Bank collects poverty statistics for New York City for the three decades from then to 2000.  New York City's measured poverty rate in the 1970 census was 14.5%, about in line with the national norm.  Progressive icon John Lindsay had just been elected mayor, and began to implement the Cloward/Piven program of vastly increased welfare spending as the solution to poverty.  Ten years later, in the 1980 census, the measured poverty rate in New York City was -- 20.2%, about a 40% increase from 1970's rate.  That's about half a million more people in poverty than before government started to meddle.  Good work, guys!  In 1990 the City's poverty rate had dipped a little to 18.8%, but by 2000 it was back up to 21.9%.  The most recent poverty rate for New York City from the Census Bureau is 20.6% (2015).  So it's not just that all the "anti-poverty" spending in New York hasn't made a dent in the poverty; it's that poverty has actually gone up some 40% from where it started, in the face of ever-increasing spending.  And all the new and "innovative" programs and spending over the years have never, ever, ever gotten the poverty rate to head back to anywhere even near where it started.

And how has crime in New York City correlated with the poverty rate?  From 1970 to 1990, crime increased along with the poverty rate, seeming to validate the poverty-causes-crime hypothesis.  But then, something went haywire.  In 1990, when the poverty rate was 18.8%, the number of murders was 2245 (per data from the New York Police Department here).  That gave New York a murder rate of about 28 per 100,000 -- about the same as Chicago's rate today.  But then in came Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and new policing strategies; and he was followed by another kind-of Republican, Mike Bloomberg.  By 2010, when the poverty rate had increased to 20.1%, the number of murders had declined spectacularly by about 75% to 536.  Since 2010, the poverty rate (collected by a different method in between decennial surveys) has inched up to 20.6%; but the murder rate has continued its precipitous decline, reaching a low of 334 in 2016.  Our murder rate is now less than 4 per 100,000.  Trends for other crimes have been roughly comparable to the trends for murders.  (I like to focus on murders because the numbers are much less subject to influence by subjective judgment than the numbers for other crimes.)

Can anybody look at these numbers and continue to believe that spending taxpayer money on government programs supposedly designed to reduce poverty has anything to do with the level of crime?  Well, there's the American Prospect.  And they are far from alone among progressives.