Kooky Paul Krugman Calls for 'Death Panels' to Cut Health-Care Costs -- Really!

Last week New York Times economics columnist and liberal hero Paul Krugman actually said "death panels," the critique of Obama-care popularized by Sarah Palin and universally mocked by liberals, while discussing the necessity of cutting health care costs.

On January 30, Krugman spoke at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in D.C. (Krugman is out hawking the paperback edition of "End This Depression Now!," his paean to more government spending on infrastructure and other forms of stimulus.) During the Q&A, Breitbart's Joel Griffith noted, Krugman was asked about the rising national debt. A truncated version of his remarks follows:

We’re going to need more revenue, we're going to need, and probably in the end, surely in the end it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well. So again, we won’t be able to pay for the kind of government the society we want without some increase in taxes, not a huge one, but some increase on taxes on the middle class, maybe a value-added tax.... And we’re also going to do, really, we're going to have to make decisions about health care, not pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits. So you know the snarky version I use, which is, I shouldn’t even say because it will get me in trouble, is death panels and sales taxes is how we do this."

This opens Krugman up to charges of hypocrisy, since he called the "death panel" accusation a "smear" in a March 22, 2010 column and an example of the "dishonesty" of Obama-care opponents in a June 29, 2012 column. Does this mean Krugman accepts Sarah Palin's argument that Obama-care's cost containment strategy will require health-care rationing?

Clay Waters is the director of Times Watch, an MRC project tracking the New York Times. Click here to follow Clay Waters on Twitter.

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Fox And Friends: Polar Bears Prove Climate Change Is ‘Not Really Real’

(Photo credit: AP)

Polar bears can’t catch a break anywhere, least of all Fox News.

On Fox and Friends this morning, Fox Legal Analyst Peter Johnson Jr. was asked about last week’s ruling by the D.C. Circuit to uphold the decision to protect polar bears as a “threatened” species. He made the case that environmentalists use polar bears as a fundraising tool, and that the threat to polar bears may be imaginary:

JOHNSON: It really depends upon whether you believe the global warming is real, whether polar bears are actually threatened or not. This has become a big fundraising tool and it’s become a problem, too, for oil interests throughout the world because they have to act in a way that is very expensive in terms of making modifications.… So is global warming real or not real? I’ve heard a lot of people say it’s not really real.

Watch it:

Global warming is undoubtedly real. In fact, the real climate debate has shifted to how much climate scientists have actually underestimated global warming impacts.

With regard to polar bears, the court said that the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the polar bear correctly as “threatened”:

“The Listing Rule rests on a three-part thesis: the polar bear is dependent upon sea ice for its survival; sea ice is declining; and climatic changes have and will continue to dramatically reduce the extent and quality of Arctic sea ice to a degree sufficiently grave to jeopardize polar bear populations…. No part of this thesis is disputed and we find that FWS’s conclusion – that the polar bear is threatened within the meaning of the ESA – is reasonable and adequately supported by the record.” [Page 14]

It went on to say that 13 out of 14 peer reviewers found the rule generally “represented a thorough, clear, and balanced review of the best scientific information available from both published and unpublished sources of the current status of polar bears.”

Polar bears depend on sea ice for feeding. Arctic sea ice volume has collapsed. The question on threats to polar bears is not over whether general population estimates are stable. (Where there is sufficient data, many more subpopulations are decreasing than are increasing.) If Fox and Friends wants to get to the root of the issue, they should host a discussion about whether polar bears should be classified as “threatened” or “endangered.”

Polar bear ranges will only get more crowded by other animals. Under an incorrect-yet-ironic headline (“Study: Global Warming Helps Polar Bears,”) Fox News reported in January that many mammal species will expand their ranges northward as the Arctic warms. As the sea ice melts, the polar bears will surely welcome their new grizzly bear overlords from the south.

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Kooky Paul Krugman Calls for 'Death Panels' to Cut Health-Care Costs -- Really!

Last week New York Times economics columnist and liberal hero Paul Krugman actually said "death panels," the critique of Obama-care popularized by Sarah Palin and universally mocked by liberals, while discussing the necessity of cutting health care costs.

On January 30, Krugman spoke at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in D.C. (Krugman is out hawking the paperback edition of "End This Depression Now!," his paean to more government spending on infrastructure and other forms of stimulus.) During the Q&A, Breitbart's Joel Griffith noted, Krugman was asked about the rising national debt. A truncated version of his remarks follows:

We’re going to need more revenue, we're going to need, and probably in the end, surely in the end it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well. So again, we won’t be able to pay for the kind of government the society we want without some increase in taxes, not a huge one, but some increase on taxes on the middle class, maybe a value-added tax.... And we’re also going to do, really, we're going to have to make decisions about health care, not pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits. So you know the snarky version I use, which is, I shouldn’t even say because it will get me in trouble, is death panels and sales taxes is how we do this."

This opens Krugman up to charges of hypocrisy, since he called the "death panel" accusation a "smear" in a March 22, 2010 column and an example of the "dishonesty" of Obama-care opponents in a June 29, 2012 column. Does this mean Krugman accepts Sarah Palin's argument that Obama-care's cost containment strategy will require health-care rationing?

Clay Waters is the director of Times Watch, an MRC project tracking the New York Times. Click here to follow Clay Waters on Twitter.

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Fracking is Blamed for … Well, Everything, Really.

Boom! goes the dynamite, not the frack fluid.

Blaming natural phenomena on fracking is this year’s fad, reminiscent of the mood ring, the pet rock or Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Item 1. Vice-President of the United States Joe Biden may not know what hydrofracking is, but he does know that it sounds plenty scary.

“… There’s a thing called fracking. They’ve got to go crack the rock in order to get [oil and gas] out. You can environmentally do that well or you can environmentally do that poorly,” the vice president said.

“If you do it poorly, you use up the water aquifer. [Huh?! - Ed.] You can create, in some cases the argument is, earthquakes,” he concluded.

Mr. Biden was referring to a string of minor tremors over the past year in the Youngstown, Ohio, area, including a 4.0 quake that shook the city on New Year’s Eve.

But state officials have confirmed that the temblors were the result of a wastewater-disposal well, not fracking itself.

As I commented at the time, the problem here is not that frack fluid is being injected. Mother Gaia is indifferent to whether the fluid is frack water, bong water or mother’s milk. Fracking is not the culprit; if you inject lots of fluid into an existing fault zone, that may create a problem, but its a problem best addressed by state authorities. They are in a much better position to appreciate local geomechanics than is a Federal agency like the EPA.

The evidence here reveals one thing that is definitely caused by hydraulic fracturing: Vice-Presidential confusion.

Item 2. Is hydrofracking causing the mysterious Clintonville (WI) booms?

Um, no.

I first asked the question on March 28: Who will be the first to blame Clintonville WI “booms” on #fracking?

Since then, my blog registers several hits a day from Google searches containing the words “Clintonville” and “fracking”. When I did my own search, this was one of the most popular hits:

This is a breathless video from a young man who knows that there must be some connection between oil and gas fracking and the Clintonville booms, but his concept of fracking is fuzzier than V.P. Biden’s hairline.

In it, there is reference made to a map of “fracking sites in Wisconsin” (reproduced at right). Very interesting indeed, because there is no oil and gas drilling in Wisconsin.

Closer inspection shows that the sites identified on the map are sources of frac sand. Fracking uses lots of plain, old quartz sand. Sand that’s pure, round-grained and of uniform grain size works best. But the sand comes from a plain old sand pit, just like the sand that would be used in construction, glassmaking or a kid’s play yard.

Mother Gaia must know that She’s going to be violated with this particular sand, because she puts up quite a fuss. Why Clintonville, WI became ground zero for Her wrath is anybody’s guess.

I’ll leave that to the smart guys, like Joe Biden.

For those who may have a lingering suspicion that old Vladimir is full of crapola and that the Clintonville booms just might have some connection to oil and gas drilling activity, consider the map below. It is a map of all the oil and gas drilling activity in the upper Midwest.

The blue triangles denote rigs drilling for oil, while the red circles indicate rigs drilling for gas.

Moral of the story: There may be a spot in the Lower 48 that is more remote from drilling activity than Clintonville, Wisconsin, but you’ll have to look a good while to find it.

Cross-posted at stevemaley.com.

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