but now it's just a mistake.  Outting a spy, that is.

The Washington Post’s Spin: “So… Bush never actually outed a CIA agent — Richard Armitage did — but that didn’t stop the Left from engaging in a two year witchhunt. But Obama can out CIA agents with impunity, I guess, no investigation required?”

from Bozel & Graham:

When George W. Bush was president, a week didn't go by when the press wasn't dismissing his intelligence and proclaiming his administration's incompetence. Over the weekend, President Obama made a surprise visit to the troops in Afghanistan. Someone on his staff demonstrated truly jaw-dropping incompetence by accidentally releasing to 6,000 journalists the name of the CIA station chief in Afghanistan as part of Obama’s welcoming delegation. That is a death sentence, not just for the agent but for all those around him.

Try to imagine the media firestorm this would have created had the transgression occurred during the W years. Remember the endless coverage, day after day, week after week, over the disclosure of Valerie Plame's name, a veritable D.C. paper-pusher by comparison? She became the poster child in a relentless campaign to undermine President Bush's foreign policy -- and the man himself.

read more

BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY:

Scooter Libby got convicted when prosecutors compared his memory about Plame to the memory of journalists.

And now journalists can’t remember what Libby got convicted for.

And all those layers of editors and fact-checkers didn’t help.

IS PATRICK FITZGERALD AVAILABLE? White House Counsel to Review Naming of CIA Chief in Kabul. 

source of my headline: BYRON YORK: When Bushies blew a CIA cover, it was ‘treason.’ Now, it’s a mistake.

cause the anti-science Donks HATE this!

Interesting graph – Fraction of the Globe in Drought: 1982-2012  Unless my eyes deceive me, it looks like there is no net change in global drought area for 30 years.

 Then there's the NEW scientific method:

Then there's the little problem of interpreting date.  Don’t Trust Joe Romm to Interpret IPCC Tables

money graphs:

Romm and his interventionist allies can’t have it both ways. The IPCC is reporting that whatever the economic costs of immediate stabilization policies are, they will increase by 28 to 44 percent (as best guesses) if governments around the world wait until 2030 to begin implementing them. So which is it, Romm & Company? If you are telling us that waiting until 2030 would mean humanity is screwed, then that means we’re screwed right now: We might only make ourselves 28 percent better off by starting now, rather than in 2030—what’s 0.72 times “totally screwed”?

On the other hand, if it’s true as Romm says that taking immediate action will be “super cheap,” then delaying until 2030 will only raise the price tag of those “super cheap” climate fixes by 28 to 44 percent, and so our best guess is that Romm’s climate fixes would be—what?—“still pretty darn cheap” or maybe “hey, not too shabby” at that time.

To repeat, this is the rhetorical corner into which the alarmists have painted themselves. They want to scare everybody into thinking that governments need to take immediate and aggressive action to avoid the literal disruption of human life as we know it. On the other hand, they want to assure us that their draconian policy proposals—if implemented next Tuesday—will only cause a slight hiccup in our present standard of living. Those two pictures do not fit together, and that’s why Romm & Company have to cherry-pick from the IPCC’s reports on the published literature.

But some folks DO make sense: Why don’t we all just agree on Global Warming?

of econ news .... and NONE of it's good

Workers Really Are Dropping Out of the Job Market

 The Entire Inequality Debate Summed Up In One Chart

We Are the 99.9999%!

JAMES TARANTO: Socialist Supermodel: Not long ago, the left raved about the VA.

ROGER SIMON: The Veterans Scandal: Socialized Medicine on Trial.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, WHAT HAS HE FIXED, BESIDES MAYBE AN ELECTION HERE AND THERE? Megan McArdle: Why Obama Can’t Fix The VA.

 An Even Better Post From Krugman on the Wonderful Veterans Health Administration

odds and ends and interesting reading.

It's a Good Thing That Obama Reads the Paper Because Otherwise He'd Have No Idea What His Administration is Doing

with apologies the james Thurber. 

A roundup of the developments of the last month or so.  Our hero, Mr. P, pens a text that out Marx's Marx and he becomes a leftwing media (but I repeat myself) darling.  Then it's discovered that his numbers are wrong, either through intentional error (bad) orinnocent mistake (not so bad) and when the CORRECT numbers are used his premise is turned on it's head.  This the Left finds quite discioncerting.  So here are some greater mind's than mie on the topic.

Bob Murphy:

You know how some of you have been saying, “What the heck Murphy, why do you keep talking about this Piketty book? So what if it was #1 on Amazon, and all the progressives are giddy about it? He just wants to raise tax rates right?”

Uh, no. Check out my latest Mises Canada post. You need to realize what is in this book. It’s not simply that he has a bad theory of interest or ignores supply-side effects on estate tax bases (as Martin Feldstein points out, correctly). Here I’ll give you just three examples, but click the link for more:

“Taxation is not a technical matter. It is preeminently a political and philosophical issue, perhaps the most important of all political issues. Without taxes, society has no common destiny, and collective action is impossible.” (p. 493)

“When a government taxes a certain level of income or inheritance at a rate of 70 or 80 percent, the primary goal is obviously not to raise additional revenue (because these very high brackets never yield much). It is rather to put an end to such incomes and large estates, which lawmakers have for one reason or another come to regard as socially unacceptable and economically unproductive…” (p. 505)

“From the standpoint of the general interest, it is normally preferable to tax the wealthy rather than borrow from them.” (p. 540)

She must be so proud ... now.  Elizabeth Warren to Appear with Thomas Piketty, Author Hailed as the 'New Karl Marx'

YA THINK? Piketty’s Book — Just Another Excuse For Legal Plunder And Expanding The State.

ANOTHER LEFTY NARRATIVE IN TROUBLE: Facts Are Stubborn Things . . . As Thomas Piketty Is Beginning to Find Out. “

WELL, I DON’T THINK MCCLOSKEY HAS FAKED UP HER NUMBERS, SO THERE’S THAT: Has Thomas Piketty met his match? Well, I think I might have met his match. She’s called Deirdre McCloskey.

I recommend her Bourgeois Dignity.

From mild: Obama: Republicans' Only Goal Making People 'Cynical,' 'Angry,' 'Suspicious' to Win Elections

Democrat Billionaire to Fund Attack on 'Anti-Science' Republicans

to wild:

Howard Dean: “Republicans Aren’t American!” “Yes, he really did say that Republicans aren’t American. And that they should stay away from the United States, and go to Russia where they belong. One gets the feeling that if the Democrats ever have the opportunity, they will have us all arrested. Or deported.”

After Years of Threats, Prominent Climate Alarmists Still Seek to Jail Climate ‘Deniers’

House Candidate Clay Aiken Wanted to Punch Ann Coulter in the Face

(nsfw)

MSNBC's Al Sharpton Denies, Then Defends His Use of Racial Slurs

Michael Tomasky: More Fat, Dumb Kids Means More Republican Voters

Libtalker Mike Malloy Actually Pines for Duel With Joe the Plumber

because it's been in the news alot and we may see it even more in the months to come

Before declaring that there’s a ‘rape epidemic’ in the US, has anybody bothered to check the actual data? Apparently not.

Listened to a two hour lecture on the definition of Fascism and the rise of Mussolini on the way home from Flint yeasterday.  And then the following snippet rose to the top of my stack this morning. Just sayin'.

POPEHAT ON SPYING:

I had an insight just now.

We know that the NSA collects all sorts of information on American citizens. We know that the FBI and the CIA have full access to this information. We know that the DEA also has full access to that data. And we know that when the DEA busts someone using information gleaned by the electronic panopticon of our internal spy organization, they take pains to hide the source of the information via the subterfuge of parallel construction.

The insight is this: our government is now dealing with the citizenry the same way that the British dealt with the Nazis: treating them as an external existential threat, spying on them, and taking pains to obfuscate the source of the information that they use to target their attacks.

Yeah, Godwin’s law, whatever, whatever. My point is NOT that the NSA is the same as the Nazi party (in fact, my argument has the NSA on the opposite side). My point is that the government now treats ordinary civilians as worthy of the same sort of tactics that they once used against the Nazis.

Charming.

if McCarthyism is silly.

 Another ‘Climate McCarthyism bombshell’, leaked memo shows concern within ranks on ‘professional ethics’ of climate science

ANOTHER CLIMATE SCANDAL? “The lead story in The Times of London today declares ‘Scientists in Cover Up of “Damaging” Climate View.’ The Times thinks the story, concerning peer reviewers suppressing a scientific paper purely for political reasons, may amount to the next ‘Climategate,’ on par with the scandal of the leaked emails back in 2009.”

If you want to be trusted as nonpolitical experts, don’t act like lying partisans.

related: They Tried to Warn Us About “Green” Vehicles Decades Ago

John Kerry reaches new highs of beclowning himself with temperature