† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, There’s Many A Slip ‘Twixt The Cup And Lip): Numerous polls suggest that half of Americans want ObamaCare repealed. The very people that the law purports to help are also demonstrating their displeasure by refusing to enroll in state-run high-risk insurance pools, reports The Washington Post:

The number of people who have bought the plans, known as high-risk pools, has increased from slightly fewer than 8,000 nationwide as of early November to nearly 12,500 as of the beginning of this month, according to figures released Thursday by federal health officials.

Several months ago, the special insurance pools became one of the earliest facets of the new health-care law to take effect. They are intended as a temporary coping mechanism for people with medical conditions that traditional insurance companies do not want to cover. The program is temporary, because, starting in 2014, the law will forbid insurers to reject customers based on whether they are healthy or sick.

Last spring, the Medicaid program's chief actuary forecast that 375,000 Americans would have joined new high-risk pools by the end of 2010.

Late last year, administration officials said the plans' relative lack of popularity reflected early growing pains; they predicted that enrollment would grow swiftly as more people found out that they exist. Some state health officials and would-be customers said the more fundamental problem is that insurance for people with medical problems remains too expensive for some.

By “some” The WaPo evidently means the 97 percent of uninsured or underinsured people who confounded the Obama administration’s expectations by not signing up. 

† Updates To Previous Posts (seventh item, “Person Of Interest” Steven Hatfill To Earn Lots Of Interest Income From Huge DOJ Payout): After falsely accusing Steven Hatfill of the 2001 anthrax attacks, the FBI’s fickle finger of guilt pointed to Army scientist Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008 after becoming the prime suspect. Now National Research Council scientists are questioning the government’s conclusion that Ivins “single-handedly prepared and mailed the deadly anthrax spores,” reports The Washington Post:

A panel of prominent scientists … questioned the link between a flask of anthrax bacteria in Ivins's lab at Fort Detrick, Md., and the anthrax-infested letters that killed five people and sickened 17 others.

The Justice Department has said genetic testing conclusively linked the letters to spores in the flask - labeled RMR-1029 - found at the laboratory, where Ivins was a longtime researcher. …

"The scientific link between the letter material and flask number RMR-1029 is not as conclusive as stated in the DOJ Investigative Summary,'' said the $1.1 million report by the council, which was commissioned by the FBI. …

The 190-page document [summary] by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences also said the FBI's scientific methods in collecting samples of the strain of anthrax used in the attacks were "not optimal,'' and it said the authors could not verify the government's contention that only Ivins and a select group of scientists possessed the required expertise to prepare the spore-laden letters.

"This shows what we've been saying all along: that it was all supposition based on conjecture based on guesswork, without any proof whatsoever,'' said Paul Kemp, a lawyer who represented Ivins in negotiations with federal prosecutors who were preparing to charge him before his death. Kemp called for congressional hearings into the investigation.

The report makes no judgment about Ivins's guilt or innocence, and federal law enforcement officials on Tuesday stood behind their contention that Ivins was the anthrax killer.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Romney: The Sequel): Winning the NV primary is key to Mitt Romney’s presidential ambitions, but he may not have a lock on the contest, reports The Boston Globe:

Nevada is among the first four states in the tentative primary schedule, and it holds outsized importance for the former Massachusetts governor. If he runs for president, as appears likely, he would not be expected to win two of the other early states: Iowa and South Carolina.

Under almost any scenario, that means he must win in New Hampshire. And Nevada, coming just after the Granite State, would present the second key test of his strength.

By the numbers, Romney … should perform strongly in the Silver State. An estimated 7.5 percent of Nevada residents share Romney’s Mormon faith, and exit polls showed Mormons accounted for one in four caucus voters in 2008.

But although he would start the 2012 Nevada contest with a formidable organization and as the overwhelming favorite, the landscape in this Western state is more hostile.

Seeking to become more than a primary backwater bypassed by most candidates, Nevada changed its caucus rules for next year’s campaign to make the outcome binding on its delegates to the Republican National Convention.

The intent was to increase the state’s prominence in the primaries, and it is working. Nevada is attracting stronger interest from such would-be candidates as Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty, who have made early visits and are planning more.

The rightward tug of insurgents in the Republican Party, meanwhile, has added a measure of antiestablishment volatility to the Nevada electorate that was largely absent four years ago and could seriously hurt Romney, whose health care plan in Massachusetts, used as the model for the national overhaul last year, is widely despised by conservatives.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, When Environmental Values Collide): Tim Searchinger, a fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, explains the role  biofuels play in the food crisis that has already toppled Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and is also roiling Yemen in this Washington Post op-ed:
 

Each year, the world demands more grain, and this year the world's farms will not produce it. …

Demand for biofuels is almost doubling the challenge of producing more food. Since 2004, for every additional ton of grain needed to feed a growing world population, rising government requirements for ethanol from grain have demanded a matching ton. Brazil's reliance on sugar ethanol and Europe's on biodiesel have comparably increased growth rates in the demand for sugar and driven up demand for vegetable oil. …

Biofuels have grown rapidly, from consuming 2 percent of world grain and virtually no vegetable oil in 2004 to more than 6.5 percent of grain and 8 percent of vegetable oil last year. Governments worldwide seek to triple production of biofuels by 2020, and that implies more moderately high prices after good growing years and soaring prices after bad ones.

The good news is that relief is possible. The same economic studies imply that food prices should come down if we can just limit biofuel growth. Corn ethanol is nearing Congress's requirement for 15 billion gallons a year, and lawmakers need to hold it there. Similarly, Europe must rethink its mandates. For "advanced biofuels" required by Congress, the Obama administration needs to focus on fuel sources that do not compete with food, such as garbage and crop residues, and not grasses grown on good cropland. Otherwise, the sequel to the food crisis is likely to turn into a series.

Searchinger won’t get an argument from Don Coxe, a respected expert on agricultural commodities, who makes the case that this latest food crisis is driven by Asian prosperity (“three bowls of rice are being replaced by three squares-a-day” that includes protein) and by ethanol (“the abuse of grains through biofuels’):

Prosperity is raising demand for protein. And the plant-to-meat conversion plays a large role in raising the prices and production of food. China's per capita meat consumption is nearly 50 percent of United States. It takes seven units of vegetable protein to produce a unit of beef protein, six to produce protein in the form of milk or pork, and about two and a half in the form of chicken. While rice is consumed only by people, wheat as well as the other grains can be used for meat production. The plant-to-meat conversion plays a large role in raising the prices and production of food.

As the U.S.D.A. documents, the number of grain acres under cultivation worldwide has, for the past decade, been growing less than half as rapidly as the demand. …

The greens and the Iowa caucuses have combined to loot more than 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop, and the Europeans have driven the cost of soya oil and palm oil sky high for biodiesel.

What is needed is greater use of technology to produce protein, and abandonment of the production of biofuels.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Is Obama’s Birth Certificate Fake?): Brett Decker, editorial page editor of The Washington Times, blames President Barack Hussein Obama for birthing the birther conspiracy:

All of the question marks lurking around President Obama‘s background could be answered with a little transparency. … As liberal MSNBC host Chris Matthews frustratingly asked about the hullabaloo over Mr. Obama‘s birth certificate, “Why doesn’t the president just say, ‘Send me a copy right now?’ Why doesn’t [White House spokesman Robert L.] Gibbs and [presidential Senior Adviser David M.] Axelrod say, ‘Let’s just get this crappy story dead?’ Why not do it? If it exists, why not put it out?” …

The whole saga is tawdry. Like the constant drip of lurid revelations about Bill Clinton‘s adulterous affairs, it’d be nice if the smarminess all went away. …

A lot of Mr. Obama‘s problems can be chalked up to bad public-relations practices and incompetent crisis management. … Drama engulfs everything these people do. At the end of the day, it’s a head-scratcher: Why does everything about this guy have to be so weird? Why can’t Barack be a little more normal?

The holdup is that this particular politician is not a transparent person. As a candidate and as president, Mr. Obama has been so stage-managed that it’s not easy to know who the heck the guy really is, and his own aides get tangled up trying to decide what’s true and what’s spin. …

The image of Mr. Obama is such an artificial construct that it’s necessary to deconstruct some of the artifice. That work is not character assassination; it’s how the game is played in the rough and tumble of Washington.

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II): The documentary "Waiting for Superman," raised the question of just how incompetent, negligent or miscreant a teacher has to be before (s)he can be fired. So too, this Washington Post editorial:

If a D.C. arbitrator's ruling stands, taxpayers will be on the hook for unearned back pay to a former teacher who, in one school year, registered 24 instances of tardiness and 20 days of absences (mostly on Mondays and Fridays) after returning from two months of sick leave. And to a teacher who had to be warned about playing DVD movies during class time, playing gospel songs in class and using inappropriate language with students. And to a teacher who had sketchy or nonexistent lesson plans and whose every marking period had an excessive number of students failing.

This isn't another horror story about teacher tenure, because the 75 teachers fired for cause in 2008 didn't have tenure. They were rookies or transplants from other school systems, on probation, who had been told when they were hired that they would need recommendations from their principals to win tenure. Nonetheless, arbitrator Charles Feigenbaum …said that the teachers had been denied due process because they were not given reasons for their terminations. …

Even more astonishing is that [arbitrator Charles ] Feigenbaum's decision comes despite his acknowledgment that the system had reason to fire these teachers, based on his review of principals' evaluations. … A small consolation is his finding that the schools could make a new determination to again terminate those reinstated, if they modify their process.

† Updates To Previous Posts (seventh item, Global Warming Is In The Eye Of The Beholder): Since New Year’s Day, the four corners of the world have been battered by everything from floods to blizzards of biblical proportions. Are man-made CO2 emissions to blame?  The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project finds no evidence that this spate of freakish weather is extreme by historical standards, reports The Wall Street Journal:

"In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project. … “So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased [global atmospheric] circulation going back to 1871." …

We do know that carbon dioxide and other gases trap and re-radiate heat. We also know that humans have emitted ever-more of these gases since the Industrial Revolution. What we don't know is exactly how sensitive the climate is to increases in these gases versus other possible factors - solar variability, oceanic currents, Pacific heating and cooling cycles, planets' gravitational and magnetic oscillations, and so on.

Given the unknowns, it's possible that even if we spend trillions of dollars, and forgo trillions more in future economic growth, to cut carbon emissions to pre-industrial levels, the climate will continue to change - as it always has. …

Global-warming alarmists insist that economic activity is the problem, when the available evidence show it to be part of the solution. We may not be able to do anything about the weather, extreme or otherwise. But we can make sure we have the resources to deal with it when it comes.

† Updates To Previous Posts (ninth item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ): Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) - who has answered the Justice Department's legal challenge of SB 1070 with a lawsuit against the federal government for its "failure" to enforce immigration laws – says that more than 43,000 donors nationwide have contributed $3.7 million for the legal defense of the law. AZ’s countersuit contends that the federal government has failed to gain "operational control" of the border; has failed to enforce multiple immigration laws; has failed to protect the state from the economic damage and violence associated with illegal immigration, as ordered by the U.S. Constitution; and has acted negligently in not paying the state $760 million in expenses for jailing undocumented criminals, as well as in impeding the state from exercising its constitutional right to protect the health and well-being of its citizens.

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, An Age-Old Question): Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse - the Somali pirate who first pleaded not guilty in the hijacking of the American-flagged cargo ship Maersk Alabama in April 2009 but later changed his plea - has been sentenced to 33 years and nine months in prison on charges of hostage taking, kidnapping, hijacking and conspiracy.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Is Hasan A Crazy Terrorist, Or A Terrorist Crazy?): The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz compares Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, Great Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy unequivocal condemnation of multiculturalism as “a proven disaster and a threat to society” with “the multiculturalist zeal” and “magical thinking” that enabled Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to wage jihad at Fort Hood and that prevents the military from stating the true nature of his extremism:  

In November 2010, each branch of the military issued a final report on the Fort Hood shooting. Not one mentioned the perpetrator's ties to radical Islam … a signal to the entire Defense bureaucracy that the subject is taboo.

For the superiors in charge of Hasan's training at Walter Reed and his two years at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the taboo was of a more complicated order - one that required elaborately inventive analyses through which Hasan's stated beliefs, ominous pronouncements, and evident unconcern with standards of behavior required of an officer could all be represented as singular virtues, proof of his exceptional value to the Army. It could not have been easy. Still, they managed. …

The same Hasan who set off silent alarms in his supervisors - the Psychiatric Residency Program Director at Walter Reed was one of them - would garner only plaudits in the official written evaluations at the time. He was commended in these as a "star officer," one focused on "illuminating the role of culture and Islamic faith within the Global War on Terrorism." One supervisor testified, "His unique interests have captured the interest and attention of peers and mentors alike." No single word of criticism or doubt about Hasan ever made its way into any of his evaluations. …

A resident who didn't represent the diversity value that Hasan did as a Muslim would have faced serious consequences had he behaved half as disturbingly. Here was a world in which Hasan was untouchable, in which all that was grim and disturbing in him was transformed. He was a consistently mediocre performer, ranking in the lowest 25% of his class, but to his evaluators, he was an officer of unique talents.