Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/295484911?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Saturday, March 30, 2013
Is this man America's worst economics writer? | The Daily Caller
At National Review Online, Kevin D. Williamson plucks the laurel wreath from the woolly head of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and crowns Associated Press chief economics writer Martin Crutsinger our country?s worst economics writer.
Crutsinger is a destructive force in our public discourse, Williamson writes, for a number of reasons, among them ?shallowness,? ?unbearable prose? and ?parroting conventional wisdom.? An example of this last is his repetition of the truism ?Consumer spending drives 70 percent of economic activity.?
Most importantly, unlike Nobel laureate Krugman, who is merely popular, AP prose is ubiquitous and usually unacknowledged. Williamson notes that AP?s ?endless sludge of dreary grey copy ? is not, in the minds of most readers, tendentious commentary ? it is simply ?the news.??
The AP?s?pro-inflationary Keynesian consensus is especially striking today, when most of the media posit?a strengthening economy based on news that consumer spending is becoming more profligate and that real estate prices are being re-inflated. Very few news sites are willing to note, for example, the troubling news that the rate of personal savings is close to its all-time low.
But there?s something even stranger about the strengthening-economy story?that dominates?the news today. How can we be recovering when just a month ago the Obama administration and the mainstream media were predicting sequestration would hurl the United States back into a recession? (Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf is now trying to disambiguate the impact of government spending slowdowns on the economy.)?Williamson gives one good reason for that anomaly ??the built-in mismeasure of government spending and its effects on economic growth:
You will be hard-pressed to find an Associated Press report acknowledging the fact that government spending is accounted for at cost when calculating GDP. What that means is that $1 spent by the government on purchases, salaries, services, and the like (but excluding entitlement transfer payments) shows up at $1 in GDP, regardless of whether that $1 was put to some productive use.
?
For example, if the federal government should spend $200 billion on old newspapers, and then pay me $100 billion to set them on fire on the National Mall, that would add $300 billion to GDP, equivalent to adding the entire economic output of Venezuela to the U.S. economy in exchange for a lot of charred AP copy. So writing that an increase in government spending boosts GDP is the equivalent of writing that an increase in government spending boosts government spending. That this is a tautology ? if we increase the things we measure, the things we measure will increase ? seems never to have occurred to the ladies and gentlemen of the Associated Press economics desk, even though criticism of conventional GDP measurement is common both among conservatives and among more progressive economists, such as Joseph Stiglitz.
How does that differ from the way private spending is measured? Robert Higgs, the Independent Institute?s senior fellow in political economy, explained in an interview with The Daily Caller: ?If you have a private firm and you spend a ton of money to pay employees, but what you produce is a flop, there will be no value to GDP. But government spending all gets counted as contributing to economic growth. That?s why in the early days of creating these measurements, some people didn?t want to count government spending.?
In economics, the real danger isn?t the things people don?t know, but the things they know that ain?t so. Krugman has a gift for obfuscation and a relationship to plain dealing that can most charitably be described as ?arm?s length,??but his overt opinion-making and clear (if misguided) point of view do less harm than the osmosis of bad economics Williamson describes here.
Tim Cavanaugh is The Daily Caller?s executive editor.
Source: http://dailycaller.com/2013/03/29/is-this-man-americas-worst-economics-writer/
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Friday, March 29, 2013
Ouya in action at GDC 2013
What's a backer launch without a party?
Ouya had their big backer launch bash at GDC 2013, giving everybody a shot to try out the $99 Android-powered gaming console. There has been a lot of excitement leading up to this launch, not only because it stands to be yet another Kickstarter success story, but also because it's paving the way for a whole new product category of Android devices.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/Uk3tQRqrUz0/story01.htm
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Homes evacuated after Ark. oil pipeline ruptures
MAYFLOWER, Ark. (AP) ? Authorities are working to clean up an oil spill in central Arkansas after a pipeline ruptured.
Mayflower Police Chief Robert Satkowski says an ExxonMobil pipeline sprung a leak Friday afternoon in his small city about 20 miles northwest of Little Rock.
Satkowski says the pipeline has since been shut off. The spill forced authorities to evacuate dozens of homes. Oil spilled onto the road and lawns, but it's unclear exactly how much.
Arkansas Department of Emergency Management spokesman Brandon Morris initially said oil had reached nearby Lake Conway, but he later said that was incorrect.
ExxonMobil says it's investigating and working with local authorities in clean-up efforts. The company says the breach was in a pipeline that originates in Illinois and carries crude oil to the Texas Gulf Coast.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/homes-evacuated-ark-oil-pipeline-ruptures-223738724.html
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Striking Guantanamo prisoners say water denied
MIAMI (AP) ? Prisoners taking part in an expanding hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay leveled new complaints about their military jailers Wednesday as a team from the International Committee of the Red Cross made a fact-finding trip to the U.S. base in Cuba.
In an emergency motion filed with a federal court in Washington, lawyers say guards have refused to provide drinking water to hunger strikers and kept camp temperature "extremely frigid," to thwart the protest. A spokesman for the detention center denied the allegations.
"The reality is that these men are slowly withering away and we as a country need to take immediate action," said Mari Newman, a human rights lawyer based in Denver, who was among those who submitted the motion.
They filed the petition after interviewing Yemeni prisoner Musaab al-Madhwani by phone Monday. He told them that guards were refusing to provide bottled water and telling prisoners to drink from tap water that inmates believe is non-potable. The lawyers say in their motion that the lack of drinkable water has "already caused some prisoners kidney, urinary and stomach problems," in addition to the health effects of the hunger strike.
Along with their motion, they submitted an affidavit from Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired general, who believes that the hunger strike and lack of adequate drinking water "sets them up for gastrointestinal infections and a quick demise." The doctor also said the 34-year-old al-Madhwani suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder linked to his torture while in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and could be worsened by harsh conditions at Guantanamo.
The U.S. government has not filed a response to the motion. Navy Capt. Robert Durand, a spokesman for the prison, said prisoners are provided with bottled water and that the tap water is safe to drink.
"It's potable water. It's the same water I make my coffee with and that they make lunch with," Durand said. He also denied that there had been any change to the air conditioning settings inside the prison camps.
Accounts of the hunger strike have been in sharp conflict for weeks. Lawyers who have visited or interviewed their clients say a majority of the 166 men held at Guantanamo have joined the protest and some have lost significant weight and are at serious risk.
The military said that as of Wednesday, there were 31 men on hunger strike, up from 28 on Monday. Three men were at the hospital being treated for dehydration and 11 were being force-fed with a liquid nutrient mix to prevent dangerous weight loss.
A two-person delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross that includes a doctor is at the base to assess the situation. They started a week earlier than planned because of the hunger strike, said spokesman Simon Schorno. Their findings will be presented to the camp commander and Miami-based Southern Command, which oversees the prison, but will not be made public.
Lawyers for the prisoners say the hunger strike began on Feb. 6 as a protest of the men's indefinite confinement without charge and because of what they said was a return to harsh treatment from past years, including more intrusive searches and confiscation of personal items such as mail from their families. The military says no policies or procedures have changed at Guantanamo and the strike is an attempt to draw attention to their cause.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest say Obama's team is closely monitoring the hunger strikes, but deferred to the Pentagon for any specifics.
"The administration remains committed to closing the detention facility at Guantanamo bay," Earnest said, noting that legislation passed by Congress makes it likely that process won't be quick.
____
Associated Press writer Nedra Pickler contributed from Washington.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/striking-guantanamo-prisoners-water-denied-152817946.html
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Thursday, March 28, 2013
What?s new and what?s not for women in war? A Yahoo! News chat
By Brian Homewood March 28 (Reuters) - Swiss champions FC Basel, renowned for their youth development programme, face a constant battle to stop teenage players moving to English, Spanish and Italian clubs. President Bernhard Heusler told Reuters in an interview that parents often do not listen to the club when warned against taking their sons elsewhere. "We get enormous pressure from outside, including English clubs," said Heusler before adding Basel were powerless to stop their youngsters leaving before the age of 16. ...
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