as in Persona Non Gratis.  At my in-laws  Was there for dinner tonight and someone asked where buckwheat came from.  D started to look it up on her smart phone.  Her father said "don't use Fox news" and I cam out of my chair.  I said - "yes, because heaven forbid we get the right answer."  He started to sputter and I jumped - "You Germans seem to go for that State supported media thing and we all know how THAT worked out.  We Americans prefer our Constitutionally protected speech."

Maybe he'd had too much to drink to remember.

On the one hand, I appreciate the fact that Neil Irwin is at least dealing with the cognitive dissonance that the blogging Keynesians have set up for themselves, with respect to the allegedly slam-dunk empirical evidence against “austerity.” He writes:

This is the U.S. economy in a nutshell, as revealed in Tuesday’s news ticker: Housing prices rose faster over the past year than they have in the past seven. Consumer confidence hit its highest level in five years. The stock market rallied another 0.9 percent to hover near an all-time high, as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500. And the national retail price of gasoline has fallen for six days straight and is down 16 cents a gallon since late February, providing nice relief to drivers.

Which all raises an obvious question: Whatever happened to the austerity economy?

Later he writes something that you would never read from Krugman:

[T]he direct evidence that tighter fiscal policy is damaging growth is scarce, so far at least; study the internal details of major economic reports, and even if you squint you don’t see a lot of concrete evidence of the squeeze.

But never fear, kids, Irwin does provide an escape hatch:

So was the impact of tighter fiscal policy oversold? Not necessarily; the models used by both private forecasters and independent agencies like the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve which show a significant economic drag from tighter fiscal policy do not necessarily imply a precise timing or the exact channels through which that drag will take place. It’s an exercise in counterfactuals, and what is happening now is essentially the reverse of what happened in 2009. Then, the economy contracted significantly even amid fiscal stimulus, with models concluding that the contraction would have been worse in its absence. Now, the economy is performing well even with higher taxes and spending cuts, suggesting that growth might be even stronger otherwise.

In case you aren’t seeing how funny the above is, here’s what’s going on:

==> When the passage of the Obama “stimulus” package coincided with the economy falling off a cliff, the Keynesians said, “Oh wow, good thing we passed that! The economy is even worse than we realized!”

==> When the implementation of “austerity” coincided with an economy improving according to the standard metrics, the Keynesians said, “Phew! We got lucky! The economy was doing a lot better than we realized.”

Now there’s nothing wrong with counterfactuals; they are in fact the only way to couch economic principles. It would just be nice if some of the more prominent Keynesian bloggers stopped running victory laps and claiming they have a monopoly on empirical support for their policy recommendations. No, they really don’t.

from Bob Murphy

The Parliamentary Question that started this was put by Lord Donoughue on 8 November 2012. The Question is as follows.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government … whether they consider a rise in global temperature of 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1880 to be significant. [HL3050]

The Answer claimed that “the temperature rise since about 1880 is statistically significant”. This means that the temperature rise could not be reasonably attributed to natural random variation — i.e. global warming is real. 

…

The issue here is the claim that “the temperature rise since about 1880 is statistically significant”, which was made by the Met Office in response to the original Question (HL3050). The basis for that claim has now been effectively acknowledged to be untenable. Possibly there is some other basis for the claim, but that seems extremely implausible: the claim does not seem to have any valid basis.

=============================================

The Met office website text is here and there is a blog post here.

Former Pot Smoker Mayor Bloomberg Calls Medical Marijuana a "Hoax," Opposes Recreational Legalization

sometimes it's just TOO easy.

This is just a sampling from the last ten days or so ... too long?

Ttoward the end of his remarks, to the AAPI  the president said:

We’ve got to do everything we can to make sure everybody works hard, everybody plays by the rules, everybody has a chance to get ahead -- to start their own business, to earn a degree, to write their own page in the American story -- that the laws respect everybody, that civil rights apply to everybody.

He neglects to mention -- all that talk about the chance "to earn a degree" and "civil rights" notwithstanding -- that his Department of Justice does not believe that the civil-rights laws prevent AAPIs from being discriminated against in university admissions via affirmative action.

THE HILL: Obama sponsored bill that would have made Verizon order illegal.

President Obama co-sponsored legislation when he was a member of the Senate that would have banned the mass collection of phone records that his administration is now engaged in.

The SAFE Act, introduced by former Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), would have amended the Patriot Act to require that the government have “specific and articulable facts” to show that a person is an “agent of a foreign power” before seizing their phone records.

The bill was referred to the Judiciary Committee in 2005, but never received a vote. It had 15 co-sponsors in all, including then-Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who are now members of Obama’s Cabinet.

Experts said the bill that Obama supported in the Senate would have prohibited the sweeping surveillance that has come to light at the National Security Agency (NSA).

Well, sure, but there was a Republican in the White House then.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: “FLASHBACK: Back in January 2009, Team Obama predicted jobless rate just above 5% by May 2013 if Congress passed stimulus.”

Obama Repeats Lies on Obamacare 'Lower Rates'

Dem Rep: Obama Should 'Go Back and Read His Own Speeches' on Privacy

Obama on Privacy Concerns: My Emails Could Be Targeted Too: I guess he thinks that makes it OK.

Obama: Privacy Invasions 'Modest Encroachments'

'FALSE': Congress Denies Obama Claim 'Every Member' Briefed on Surveillance

I see that the White House has taken to referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as the "Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act" (scroll down).

That seems a less inaccurate name for it.

Obama Tells Fatcat Donors Democrats Favor Free-Market Solutions and Less Government Regulation.

False: Obama Claims Immigration Bill Requires Illegals to Learn English

There.   THAT should give you enough reading for a day or two!

We saw it in New Orleans.  We saw it on the east coast last year.  We saw it a little in Oklahoma last month.  We DIDN'T see it in Mizzou two years ago.

1) Natural disaster (tornado, hurricane, flood, earthquake, fire, snowstorm, heavy rainstorm, volcano) kills multiple people.

2) President (Obama, Bush II, Clinton, Bush I) vows to survivors that the federal government will "be with you every step of the way" in the rebuilding process.

3) One or two fiscal conservatives (Sen. Tom Coburn [R-Oklahoma], Rep. Eric Cantor [R-Virginia], Sen. Rand Paul [R-Kentucky]) will suggest that a federal blank check isn't the best way to respond to local disasters, point out that annual federal emergency-declarations have grown exponentially from 28 during the Reagan presidency to 44 under Bush I to 90 under Clinton to 130 under Bush II and 153 under Obama; complain that disaster bills get laden with unseemly pork, observe that disaster relief inevitably transfers money from low-risk states (like Michigan) to high-risk states (like Florida), and as a result of all this propose spending cuts to offset the cost of the federal bailout.

4) They will be treated as hideous idelogues by both the press and office-holding Republicans in the affected area.

5) The blank check will arive.

6) After a respectful interval, rebuilding locals will complain that the federal money comes with bureaucratic strings and a general outsidery cluelessness.

7) Natural disaster kills multiple people....

A critical element in this dreary and sometimes deadly farce is the attempt by free-spending pragmatists to assert that the only "ideology" on display here is that of people who dispute the virtue of the blank check. Here's the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, for example:

Although we resolved the slavery debate, our nation seems in many ways to be regressing back to the politics of that era. Disaster relief is not a slam dunk anymore because an issue of basic decency has become entangled with a renewed assault on federal power and a belief that cutting the budget is the nation's single highest priority.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) is so philosophically consistent that his office let it be known that he believed even assistance to those suffering in his home state should be offset by budget cuts. He later said he would not get in the way of relief, but it's astonishing that emergency spending on behalf of innocent people would be used as a vehicle for more austerity. [...]

May the people of Oklahoma get the help they need. Rigid ideology is no substitute for generosity of spirit.

Related reading from me: "The Simpletons: David Brooks, Thomas L. Friedman, and the banal authoritarianism of do-something punditry," and "No Labels, and the Ideology of Non-Ideology." And to quickly fact-check E.J. Dionne's claim that "disaster relief is not a slam dunk anymore," check out the Federal Emergency Management Agency's last 60 disaster declarations.

above from Reason.com

I’m an enormous admirer of this country, and I have enormous faith in the ability of the American people, and particularly the American business community, to always find opportunity, always seize it, and always create a better future. That’s been the history of this country. I think it requires a helluva lot of effort by everybody in Washington to make that not true. And I just don’t think they can sustain that kind of effort indefinitely, so . . .

Don’t you love “particularly the American business community”? Would a Democrat ever say that? I mean, except about Solyndra or something?    That was Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister of Canada. Speaking in New York last week.

for you to think about as you (ok...as I) drift off to sleep:

If the programs needed secrecy to succeed, will NSA shut them down now? If not, did they ever need be secret?

'Trust Us,' Says the President, Even as the Government Proves It Can't Be Trusted

I'm sure it bothers him.  Leno is piling on with "Americans always wanted a POTUS who listens to ALL Americans.  No we have one."