The blog of South Mountain Company, a Martha's Vineyard-based design-build firm that does a fair amount of energy work, has an interesting anecdote about how one China-based solar company is wooing potential customers: The manager of the South Mountain Company's energy department went to the Solar Energy Industries Association conference in September in Florida and spent some time talking to representatives of a Chinese company called ReneSola. After the conference, ReneSola "contacted him and offered an all expenses paid trip to Shanghai for Rob and two colleagues," an offer that the Americans wound up accepting.
The South Mountain Company blog goes on, "Although it's easy to jump on the bandwagon and say that we are not interested in doing business with Chinese companies, there are few solar product choices these days that don't have some connection to Chinese manufacturing."
The Boston Globe has a news article quoting two anonymous Harvard professors who are quite negative about Paula Broadwell, the biographer who apparently had an extramarital affair with her subject, General David Petraeus. (This, by the way, is a problem I never had with Samuel Adams.)
From the Globe:
One of Broadwell's former professors at Harvard described her as a self-promoter who would routinely show up at office hours.
"It was very much, 'I'm here and you're going to know I'm here,' " said the professor, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of ongoing investigations. "She was not someone you would think of as a critical thinker. I don't remember anything about her as a student. I remember her as a personality."
Maybe I missed it, but I sure don't recall President Obama running for re-election on a platform of a $1.6 trillion tax increase. I remember him saying something about "asking" the wealthy to pay "a little more." You'd think that maybe Mitt Romney might have made an issue of it, as in, "My opponent wants to raise taxes by $1.6 trillion. I think Americans already pay plenty of taxes." Or as in, "Gee, Mr. President, you talk about 'asking' the wealthy to pay 'a little more.' How much money exactly do you mean by 'a little more,' and what happens if when you 'ask' they say, 'no thank you'?" It would have been nice to have this discussion before the election in the terms that the president is now all too happy to be explicitly clear about.
Update: In his press conference today, Mr. Obama said of his tax increase position, "This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone." He also used the "little bit" formulation to describe the tax increase.
Bjorn Lomborg has a column on Sandy and global warming:
The authors of one of the central Science papers for the UN's hurricane estimates put it clearly: "It is premature to conclude that human activities … have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane activity." ...In fact, the US has not seen a hurricane of Category 3 or higher since Wilma in 2005. Those seven years without strong hurricanes is the longest such span in more than a century."
Update: In his press conference today, President Obama declined to make a direct link between Hurricane Sandy and climate change. "We can't attribute any particular weather event to climate change," the president said.
USA Today has an editorial on federally subsidized flood insurance:
The creators meant well, but here's the flaw: The program's premiums don't reflect the actual risks, especially in an era of rising sea levels and extreme weather. As a result, federal insurance has encouraged developers to overbuild in risky areas, buyers to purchase there and residents to rebuild even after repeated flooding....Sandy shows that bigger changes are needed...eliminate taxpayer subsidies of the insurance market. Premiums would surely rise, some drastically, reflecting the true risk of living so close to the water. And that's the whole point.
Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein offers this post mortem of the the Romney campaign:
One of the great tragedies of the Romney campaign is that it failed to spell out, with sufficient concreteness, the risks this nation faces going forward if it does not rein in the size of government.
Intellectually, his greatest omission in the debates was his failure to challenge the president on the administration's stubborn line that tax reductions and deregulation can do nothing to improve the faltering economic position of this nation, with its feeble growth rate and declining standard of living.
I don't believe that most people in this country would take so dismissive an attitude to these fundamental reforms.
The University of Chicago's John Cochrane, noting a Daily Princetonian report that of donors in the presidential campaign who listed Princeton University as their employer, 157 gave to the Obama campaign, while 2 gave to the Romney campaign, observes, "The point is diversity. If you never hear from the other side, if nobody where you live and work has anything remotely like their views, you become insular, and your own opinions, never challenged, can harden on serious mistakes. Academia especially profits when lots of widely different views contest, not when it becomes a claque of uniformity."
My column this week is about the outlines of a potential budget deal between President Obama and congressional Republicans. It's not a deal I am particularly enthusiastic about, but it may be where things are headed. Please check the column out at the New York Sun (here), Newsmax (here), and Reason (here).
The Sunday New York Times had a full-page graphic of the Edison Research exit poll for the National Election Pool, which was based on 25,565 questionnaires completed by voters and 4,408 telephone interviews with early and absentee voters. The most striking thing about it, to me, was that, at least according to the exit poll, Romney won voters with family income from $50,000 to $99,999, by 52% to 46%. He won voters with family income of $100,000 to $199,999, by 54% to 44%, and voters with family income of $200,000 or more, 54% to 44%. The only income groups that President Obama won, according to the poll, were those with family income less than $30,000, which Mr. Obama won 62% to 35%, and those with family income $30,000 to $49,999, which Mr. Obama won 56% to 42%.
Spencer Ackerman has an article explaining how journalists helped to build up the myth of General David Petraeus: "none of this was the old quid-pro-quo of access for positive coverage. It worked more subtly than that: the more I interacted with his staff, the more persuasive their points seemed. Nor did I write anything I didn't believe or couldn't back up — but in retrospect, I was insufficiently critical....None of this is to say that Petraeus was actually a crappy officer whom the press turned into a genius. ... But it is to say that a lot of the journalism around Petraeus gave him a pass, and I wrote too much of it. Writing critically about a public figure you come to admire is a journalistic challenge."
It's interesting to think about how this dynamic might work with other public figures, such as Lance Armstrong, or President Obama, or Alan Greenspan, or Paul Ryan or Marco Rubio.
The Fall issue of Columbia Magazine carries an interview with the president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, who is beginning his second decade in that job. Among the topics discussed is race-based affirmative action in college and university admissions, which is again up for review by the Supreme Court. Mr. Bollinger says:
If a majority were to go the full distance, overruling the Grutter case and declaring that considering race under any circumstances, under any program in American universities is unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment, it would have a drastic negative effect on racial and ethnic diversity on the leading campuses across the United States. All you have to do is look at what happened to Berkeley and UCLA since California's Prop. 209 in 1996 to see the long-term negative effects of not being able to consider ethnicity in admissions.
The New York Times has a perceptive review of 'Park Avenue,' the PBS program I wrote about over the weekend. The Times critic writes that it "certainly accomplishes one thing: If you were still on the fence about whether to despise the superrich, this film will almost surely make a hater out of you."
That just about accurately sums up the tone of the film: it is full of hate, and intended to turn viewers into haters. Why PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would want to fund or enable such a hate-fest is a good question.
The New York Post ran an op-ed piece I wrote about a public television program that blames poverty in America on rich people who live on Park Avenue. Please check the article out here.
business must stop acting whiny and petulant about the president. I'm astonished that so many wealthy people were wounded because Obama generically referred to "fat cats" three years ago on "60 Minutes." They need to grow up and recognize that he needed to position himself as the champion of the middle class to get re-elected.
This was not, as Mr. Alter would have it, a "generic" reference. The full quote was "fat cat bankers on Wall Street." It was a specific reference to Wall Street bankers.
As for Mr. Alter's argument that this language was necessary for Mr. Obama's re-election, the argument breaks down on three levels.
The press, which was very interested in FEMA's failures in New Orleans during the Bush administration, seems much less interested in the severe conditions post-Sandy in parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. I keep getting calls for volunteers to help rescue elderly storm victims from high-rise apartment buildings without heat or power. The gas lines are still long, at the few stations that have gas. And a lot of the shelters seem to be relying on volunteer staff to deal with people who may have some serious health issues.
The press seems mildly interested in faulting the utility companies for their response to the storm, but the whole "heck of a job Brownie" feeding frenzy that occurred post-Katrina is absent here. I wasn't in New Orleans so it is hard to compare directly, but from what I gather here, it is certainly no picnic at all post-Sandy, either.
Update: This YouTube video gives a sense of the situation:
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