The national battle over abortion, for decades firmly planted outside the Kansas clinic of Dr. George R. Tiller, has erupted here in suburban Omaha, where a longtime colleague has taken up the cause of late-term abortions.

Since Dr. Tiller was shot to death in May, his colleague, Dr. LeRoy H. Carhart, has hired two people who worked at Dr. Tiller’s clinic and has trained his own staff members in the technical intricacies of performing late-term abortions.

Dr. Carhart has also begun performing some abortions “past 24 weeks,” he said in an interview, and is prepared to perform them still later if they meet legal requirements and if he considers them medically necessary.

What should the dividing line be for legal, late-term abortion?  I do not have a good answer, but I offer a few thoughts.

1. The frequency of late-term abortions is likely to be low, even when legal, because so many people - including some doctors and nurses - oppose them.  For example,

The late-term abortions, coming after the earliest point when a fetus might survive outside the womb, are the most controversial, even among some who favor abortion rights. A few of Dr. Carhart’s employees quit when he told them of his plans to expand the clinic’s work.

2. It is easy to demonize late-term abortions as immoral, yet banning them can harm women who face serious health risks from carrying a baby to term.

3. A reasonable way to balance competing concerns is to leave the legality of late-term abortion (like abortion generally) to individual states.  A few will permit late-term abortions, but most will significantly restrict or outlaw.  This hodgepodge may not be "perfect," but no perfect solution exists.   Any federal involvement - for or against late term abortions - is likely to do more harm than good.

In the weeks leading up to the Copenhagen climate conference, countries from China to Singapore have pledged cuts to their greenhouse-gas emissions.

One question still lurks unanswered: Who is going to pay for it?

Short answer: no one.  So any agreements made in Copenhagen will pretend to cut emissions but will not impose any mechanism for achieving those cuts.

More broadly, no international agreement will ever achieve meaningful reductions in emissions because the costs created and the cross-country transfers implied would require a level of coercion that the relevant powers are not willing to utilize.

So it is time to accept that whatever climate change is going to happen is going to happen, and learn to adapt to whatever costs this creates.

In a recent op-ed, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke argues that proposals in Congress to reduce the Fed's powers or increase Congressional oversight are misguided.  My reactions to Ben's piece are as follows:

1. Given that the Fed exists, it probably made sense for it to lower interest rates in response to the financial crisis.  The private sector expected this; had the Fed not undertaken these actions, the confusion generated might have been counterproductive.

2. The Fed should have argued vociferously against, rather than for, the bailouts of Wall Street banks.  These bailouts probably made things worse rather than better in the short term by generating uncertainty and delaying appropriate adjustments in bank balance sheets.  And the bailouts virtually guarantee increased moral hazard in the long term.

3. Granting more regulatory power to the Fed is silly.  Regulation of large, complex, and constantly evolving finanicial market activities is not going to fix anything, since the financial sector will innovate around it.  Worse, regulation gives some investors a false sense of security.

4. Giving Congress more oversight of the Fed is a terrible idea; libertarians, in particular, should be wary of fixing bad government with more government.  The way to improve the Fed is to eliminate the Fed.

The event, tomorrow night at the Skirball Center at NYU, is produced by Intelligence Squared; see here for details.

Fareed Zakaria, Andres Martinez, and I will aruge in favor of the proposition:

America is to Blame for Mexico's Drug Wars

Jorge Casteneda, Chris W. Cox, and Asa Hutchinson will argue against.

Stay tuned for the outcome; I2 identifies the winner as the side that moved the most undecided members of the audience to its position.

For the past many months, President Obama has been trying to convince us that the nation can lower its health care costs by adopting a new government health insurance program that will cost at least $1 trillion over the next ten years.

In tonight's address from West Point, the President will try to convince us that we can implement a good exit strategy from Afghanistan by sending another 30,000 troops there.

Really?

It was a gentlemen's protest: Scores of cigar-smokers filed into an upscale steakhouse in Reston on Monday night to light up their stogies over cocktails and beef Wellington and lament that the smoking police had finally come to, of all places, Virginia.

Four hundred years after John Rolfe planted the nation's first commercial tobacco in Virginia, and decades after state leaders paid homage to the crop by carving its leaves into the ceiling of the old state Senate chamber, smoking officially becomes illegal Tuesday in the state's 17,500 bars and restaurants.

Smoking bans in restaurants make no sense for the simple reason that anyone who dislikes second-hand smoke can frequent non-smoking restaurants.  Market demand has produced large numbers of smoke-free restuarants because that is what much of the public wants.  Bans impose the preferences of some on the many, without justification.

A bigger cost of smoking bans is that they will evolve into prohibitions on tobacco.  When that happens, the tobacco wars will mimic the drugs wars in all but name.

At most colleges, marijuana is very much an extracurricular matter. But at Med Grow Cannabis College, marijuana is the curriculum: the history, the horticulture and the legal how-to’s of Michigan’s new medical marijuana program. ...

Even though the business of growing medical marijuana is legal under Michigan’s new law, there is enough nervousness about the enterprise that most students at a recent class did not want their names or photographs used. An instructor also asked not to be identified.

“My wife works for the government,” one student said, “and I told my mother-in-law I was going to a small-business class.”

 The rest of the story is here.

George Will writes an interesting column on medical marijuana. 

Will argues that a large fraction of "medical" marijuana purchases are in fact for recreational use, a claim no reasonable person disputes.  Will believes that widespread circumvention of the law's official intent undermines respsect for the rule of law, and I agree.

Will also suggests that estimates of the tax revenue states can collect from medical marijuana are probably inflated; my own estimates suggest he is right on this as well.

But the most intriguing issue is Will's last sentence:

By mocking the idea of lawful behavior, legalization of medical marijuana may be more socially destructive than full legalization.

This last sentence leaves us hanging: is Will advocating legalization, or arguing that legalization is undesirable and medicalization is even worse? 

If Will is true to his small government, individual responsibility ideals (which I share), he must surely advocate full legalization.  To the best of my knowledge, however, he has yet to do that in so many words. 

Now would be a good time.

In 1939, FDR decided to move Thanksgiving Day forward by a week. Rather than take place on its traditional date, the last Thursday of November, he decreed that the annual holiday would instead be celebrated a week earlier.

The reason was economic. There were five Thursdays in November that year, which meant that Thanksgiving would fall on the 30th. That left just 20 shopping days till Christmas. By moving the holiday up a week to Nov. 23, the president hoped to give the economy a lift by allowing shoppers more time to make their purchases and—so his theory went—spend more money.

 The plan did not turn out too well:

For the next two years, Roosevelt continued to move up the date of Thanksgiving, and more states resigned themselves to celebrating early. By 1941, however, the facts turned against Roosevelt.

By then, retailers had two years of experience with the early Thanksgiving, and data were available regarding the 1939 and 1940 Christmas shopping seasons. In mid-March 1941, The Wall Street Journal reported the results of a survey done in New York City. The Journal's headline put it succinctly: "Early Thanksgiving Not Worth Extra Turkey or Doll." Only 37% of stores surveyed favored the early date. In Washington, the federal government reported that the early Thanksgiving resulted in no boost to retail sales.

And so, on May 20, 1941, FDR called a press conference at the White House and announced that he was changing Thanksgiving Day back to its traditional date. The early Thanksgiving had been an "experiment," he said, and the experiment failed. It was too late to move the 1941 Thanksgiving back to the traditional date, but in 1942 Thanksgiving would revert to the last Thursday of the month. This was "the first time any New Deal experiment was voluntarily abandoned," a Washington Post columnist wrote.

Apparently during the debate over whether to honor the Roosevelt's wishes,

People started referring to Nov. 30 as the "Republican Thanksgiving" and Nov. 23 as the "Democratic Thanksgiving" or "Franksgiving."

On the heels of its ballyhooed "Cash for Clunkers" program for cars, the federal government is expected to finalize details in the coming weeks of another tax-supported shopping extravaganza, known as "Cash for Appliances."

Supported by $300 million from the economic stimulus, the program will offer rebates to consumers who buy energy-efficient refrigerators, dishwashers, air conditioners and other appliances to replace their older models.

This program is just as misguided as the original Cash for Clunkers.  The only half-way respectable argument in its favor is the one offered by the Council on Economic Advisers:

Clunkers "is one of several stimulus programs whose purpose is to shift expenditures by households, businesses, and governments from the future to the present," the council wrote in a September report. "Such time-shifting is valuable in a recession, when the economy has an abundance of unemployed resources that can be put to work at low net economic cost."

This view could be right in principle, but it is unlikely to be right in practice.  Just as governments are error-prone and easily swayed by special interests when it comes to picking industries to support (industrial policy), they are likely to miscalculate often in picking when and where to stimulate.

Plus, this particular stimulus requires destruction of consumer durables that still work, an unambiguous waste.

Given its $300 million size, the program cannot have much influence.  But a better approach with that $300 million is to reduce tax rates and let consumers choose how to spend their money.

A discussion at the New York Times's Room for Debate.  My bottom line:

Any policy to reduce emissions may be more costly than the emissions themselves, given the unintended consequences of such policies (e.g., pushing carbon-emitting activity to countries with lower carbon prices).

As millions of Americans struggle to hold on to their homes, Wall Street has found a way to make money from the mortgage mess.

Investment funds are buying billions of dollars’ worth of home loans, discounted from the loans’ original value. Then, in what might seem an act of charity, the funds are helping homeowners by reducing the size of the loans.

But as part of these deals, the mortgages are being refinanced through lenders that work with government agencies like the Federal Housing Administration. This enables the funds to pocket sizable profits by reselling new, government-insured loans to other federal agencies, which then bundle the mortgages into securities for sale to investors.

While homeowners save money, the arrangement shifts nearly all the risk for the loans to the federal government — and, ultimately, taxpayers — at a time when Americans are falling behind on their mortgage payments in record numbers.

Yet one more reason why the deficit situation is far worse than the administation admits. Many of these insured mortgages will fail, and taxpayers will foot the bill.

The comments feature of this blog was not working properly. I believe I have fixed it. Please let me know if you still have problems. Thanks, jeff

My thoughts at Alister and Paine.

In the next several months, the Supreme Court will decide at least a half-dozen cases about the rights of people accused of crimes involving drugs, sex and corruption. Civil liberties groups and associations of defense lawyers have lined up on the side of the accused.

But so have conservative, libertarian and business groups. Their briefs and public statements are signs of an emerging consensus on the right that the criminal justice system is an aspect of big government that must be contained.

Libertarians and civil liberties groups have long agreed on many of these issues. The surprise is that prominent conservatives (e.g., former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese) have moved into the libertarian camp.

Alas,

the conservative re-evaluation of crime policy is not universal, of course. Two notable exceptions to the trend, said Timothy Lynch, director of the Cato Institute’s criminal justice project, are Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Still, with Justices Thomas and Scalia in the limited government camp, some reigning in of the worst abuses seems possible.

Probably not, although environmentalists are jumping on this bandwagon:

Nuclear power -- long considered environmentally hazardous -- is emerging as perhaps the world's most unlikely weapon against climate change, with the backing of even some green activists who once campaigned against it.

It has been 13 years since the last new nuclear power plant opened in the United States. But around the world, nations under pressure to reduce the production of climate-warming gases are turning to low-emission nuclear energy as never before. The Obama administration and leading Democrats, in an effort to win greater support for climate change legislation, are eyeing federal tax incentives and loan guarantees to fund a new crop of nuclear power plants across the United States that could eventually help drive down carbon emissions.

Nuclear power may be low emissions, but that is not the whole story.  In the United States, the Price-Anderson Act of 1957 limits the liability of the nuclear power industry in the case of accidents. In other countries governments own and operate the nuclear industry and, implicitly, insure themselves, thereby hiding the liability cost of nuclear power.

Without government-subsidized insurance, the nuclear power industry would have to buy private insurance, which would be prohibitively expensive. Thus the true costs of nuclear power are much higher than they appear.  These costs must be balanced against any reductions in emissions achieved by nuclear power.

Why does this piece feel like it's real, and not satire?

Obama's Home Teleprompter Malfunctions During Family Dinner

I eat fast food, and I know it's pure crap. But thank the fucking lord that I never ate public school food - my mom always packed me a lunch.

Government schools have crappier food than the crap they serve at Taco Bell, and even KFC! Yes, KFC! Remind me why, again, do most people consider it a bad thing when public education funding is cut or public schools are shut down?

From USA Today:

USA TODAY examined about 150,000 tests on beef purchased by the AMS for the school lunch program. The agency buys more than 100 million pounds of beef a year for schools, and the vast majority of it would satisfy the standards of most commercial buyers. But USA TODAY also found cases in which the agency bought meat that retailers and fast-food chains would have rejected.

Like the AMS, many big commercial buyers reject meat that tests positive for salmonella or E. coli O157:H7. But many fast-food chains and premium retailers set tougher limits than the AMS on so-called indicator bacteria. Although not necessarily dangerous themselves, high levels of the bacteria can suggest an increased likelihood that meat may have pathogens that tests might miss.

From 2005 to this year, the AMS purchased six orders of ground beef that exceeded the limits some commercial buyers set for indicator bacteria. The meat came from five companies: Beef Packers of Fresno, which filled two of the orders; Skylark Meats of Omaha; Duerson Foods of Pleasant Prairie, Wis.; N'Genuity Enterprises of Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Palo Duro Meat Processing of Amarillo, Texas.

Palo Duro is the largest provider of ground beef to schools. Beef Packers is one of the most troubled; it has been suspended as an AMS supplier three times, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., called this week for the plant to be closed temporarily in the wake of two recalls.

From late November 2008 through January this year, the AMS bought nearly 500,000 pounds of ground beef from Beef Packers and Skylark with unusually high levels of an indicator bacteria known as "generic E. coli." The organism is considered an indicator of whether potential contaminants from the intestines of cattle have gotten into slaughtered meat — a source of the far more dangerous E. coli O157:H7.

The indicator bacteria are measured in CFUs, or colony-forming units. Jack in the Box, which pioneered many of the safety standards now used across the fast-food industry, won't accept beef with generic E. coli levels of more than 100 CFUs per gram. The AMS, on the other hand, will buy beef for the school lunch program with generic E. coli counts of up to 1,000 CFUs per gram — 10 times the Jack in the Box limit.

"That's a significant difference," says Marsden, the professor and beef industry adviser.

The shipments of beef that the AMS bought a year ago had generic E. coli levels up to four times higher than what Jack in the Box would accept. "Most higher-end companies certainly would reject that," Marsden says. Those bacteria levels "would be a yellow light (that) something's not right."

E. coli isn't the only indicator bacteria that the AMS allows at higher levels. The government also accepts beef with more than double the limit set by many fast-food chains for total coliform, which is used to assess whether a beef producer is minimizing fecal contamination in its meat.

"We look at those (measures) to gauge how a supplier is doing," says David Theno, who developed the safety program at Jack in the Box before retiring last year. If shipments regularly exceed the company's limits on indicator bacteria, "we'd stop doing business with them," he says.

First story: A woman asks LAPD for protection from her angry ex-lover. They escort her to her residence and wait outside. She gets stabbed multiple times in her residence. Cops hear her screams, burst inside and shoot the angry ex-lover to death, but it still wasn't fast enough to save her. Even when the cops are literally seconds away, it is still not enough. Instead of asking the cops for help, she should have taken matters into her own hands, bought a gun, and helped herself. She may still be alive today if she had a gun in her hand instead of having armed retards sitting outside her front door.

Second story: A UK military veteran discovers a shotgun discarded in his garden. Believing he is doing the responsible thing, he personally turns it in to the local police department. Result? He got arrested and convicted of illegal gun possession, and is facing 5 years of jailtime. Prosecutors acknowledge that he had no ill intent, but they insist intent is not relevant to the law. That's right, the UK has laws that, in practice (though not through intent - ha ha), discourage people from turning in found guns.

These two stories teach the same two lessons. First lesson: Never, ever, trust a cop, and by extension, any government employee. Second lesson: If you don't own a gun, buy one, and if you find a gun, keep it (and keep your mouth shut about it).

I'm so glad to finally see those terrorist Berkeley students getting the shit kicked out of them by our glorious peace officers. That'll learn 'em to go to a liberal college and get edumacated! MERIKUH!