The Sanity Gap

From Gallup:

Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans report having excellent mental health, compared to 43% of independents and 38% of Democrats. This relationship between party identification and reports of excellent mental health persists even within categories of income, age, gender, church attendance, and education.

...

One could be quick to assume that these differences are based on the underlying demographic and socioeconomic patterns related to party identification in America today...

But an analysis of the relationship between party identification and self-reported excellent mental health within various categories of age, gender, church attendance, income, education, and other variables shows that the basic pattern persists regardless of these characteristics. In other words, party identification appears to have an independent effect on mental health even when each of these is controlled for.

...income, education, gender, church attendance, and being a Republican are significantly related to self-reported mental health -- each such relationship occurring even when the impact of the other variables is taken into account.

...

The reason the relationship exists between being a Republican and more positive mental health is unknown, and one cannot say whether something about being a Republican causes a person to be more mentally healthy, or whether something about being mentally healthy causes a person to choose to become a Republican (or whether some third variable is responsible for causing both to be parallel).

...the key finding of the analyses presented here is that being a Republican appears to have an independent relationship on positive mental health above and beyond what can be explained by these types of demographic and lifestyle variables.

Perhaps Michael Savage was right.

Click here for graphs and more details.

Progress

John Stossel writes:

The market has solved environmental problems many times in the past. Before the automobile, America's cities suffered from a terrible pollutant. It bred disease and emitted noxious odors.

It was horse manure.

As economist Nobel laureate Robert Fogel said, "There were 200,000 horses in New York City at the beginning of the 20th century defecating everywhere. ... When you walked around ... you were breathing pulverized horse manure". From such air and water pollution, people contracted cholera, typhoid and other deadly diseases.

When the internal-combustion engine came along, the air and ground became much cleaner. Environmentalists romanticize the days before the car, but who wants to go back to that filth and disease?

The answer is clear: those who are ignorant of history, possibly intentionally.

Mark Steyn on the "Uninsured"

Mark Steyn reminds us why reality and math guarantee that most politician-annointed crises aren't crises at all:

...out of 45 million uninsured Americans, 9 million aren't American, 9 million are insured, 18 million are young and healthy. And the rest of these poor helpless waifs trapped in Uninsured Hell waiting for Hillary to rescue them are, in fact, wealthier than the general population.

Read it all here.

Not Everything Revolves Around New York

From a New York Times article on September 11th commemorations (a shoddy bit of work that makes no reference to geography):

What might happen on Sept. 11 a hundred years from now? "It's conceivable that it could be virtually forgotten," said [Dr. John Bodnar, a professor of history at Indiana University]. "Does anyone go out on the streets of New York and commemorate the firing on Fort Sumter?"

No, they go to Fort Sumter.

On Health "Insurance"

From a fairly comprehensive article in Commentary Magazine:

It is, indeed, a very odd thing that more than 180 million Americans should be covered by insurance purchased for them by their employers. The companies we work for do not buy our food and clothing, or our car and home insurance. They pay us for our labor, and we use that money to buy what we want.

No less odd is the character of what we call health insurance. Insurance usually means coverage for extreme emergencies or losses. We expect auto insurance to kick in when our car is badly damaged in an accident, not when we need a routine oil change; homeowner’s insurance covers us after a fire, flood, or break-in, not when we need to repair the deck or unclog the gutters. But when it comes to health, we expect some element of virtually every expense to be covered, including routine doctor checkups and regular care.

America’s insurance system is largely a historical accident. During World War II, the federal government imposed wage controls on American employers. No longer able to raise salaries to compete for employees, companies turned instead to offering the lure of fringe benefits, and the era of employer-based health care was born. Thanks to a 1943 IRS ruling allowing an exemption for money spent by employers on health insurance, an enormous tax incentive was created as well. Rather than giving a portion of every dollar to the government, employees could get a full dollar’s worth of insurance through their company.

Of course, wage controls are long gone, but the system they inadvertently created, including the tax exemption, remains in place.

The article also reviews Medicaid and Medicare, but the excerpt above is most educational.

U.S. Navy Renames the Persian Gulf

Rich Galen's July 5th column alerted me to an update to an earlier post, Iran Gets Something Right - the U.S. Navy has joined in the effort to rename the Persian Gulf. Today's example comes from the Fifth Fleet, "the seaborne component of the US Navy's Central Command operations."

Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/ Commander, 5th Fleet's area of responsibility encompasses about 7.5 million square miles and includes the Arabian Gulf, Red Sea, Gulf of Oman and parts of the Indian Ocean. This expanse, comprised of 27 countries, includes three critical chokepoints at the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal and the Strait of Bab al Mandeb at the southern tip of Yemen.

Interestingly, the CUSNC website contains 15 pages referring to both the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Gulf. Overall, navy.mil has at least 574 such documents. However, the Navy has 25,700 pages with the term "Persian Gulf" vs. 26,800 with the term "Arabian Gulf." It sounds like some geography (as well as consistency) lessons are needed.

The fleet also provides a map, including a notation for the well-known Arabian Sea, which should now be named the Indian Sea to avoid confusion with the neighboring gulf. Since there's already an Indian Ocean, the Indian Ocean will henceforth be known simply as "The Ocean".

Reuters Misreports "Clean Water" Decision

Reuters:

US court fails to decide wetlands regulation issue

A splintered U.S. Supreme Court failed on Monday to decide whether the federal government can regulate wetlands away from navigable waters in a case that provided the first indication of anti-environmentalist views by President George W. Bush's two appointees.

Bloomberg:

Clean Water Act Reach Limited: U.S. Supreme Court Overview

The U.S. Supreme Court limited the reach of the Clean Water Act, saying it applies only to wetlands with a close connection to a river, lake or some other major waterway.

Notice the difference yet?

Reuters:

By a 5-4 vote, the justices set aside a U.S. appeals court ruling that upheld the government's authority to regulate the specific wetlands at issue and sent both cases back for more hearings.

While the court did not decide the issue at the heart of the case, it was the first indication of anti-environmentalist views by Bush appointees Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito on a significant environmental issue.

Bloomberg:

The justices, voting 5-4, ordered a new round of hearings for two sets of Michigan landowners whose efforts to build on their property have been stymied by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The majority was divided in its reasoning, with Justice Anthony Kennedy refusing to join four other justices in putting even more restraints on the federal regulators.

Kennedy's separate opinion now becomes the controlling law. He established a new test, saying the Corps can regulate only wetlands that have a "significant nexus'' to a major waterway. He also said that in both cases before the justices, the Corps had at least some evidence of that type of connection.

In what is currently a case of statutory interpretation (apparently turning on the meaning of the word "adjacent"), the Reuters report does a disservice to readers. Only Justice Kennedy supports the Kennedy test, but as a practical matter it is the law for now.

Reuters:

The two cases generated five separate opinions from the nine members of the high court.

Bloomberg:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas joined Scalia's opinion. The case marked the first environmental test for the court's newest justices, Roberts and Alito.

Reuters does not explain that Scalia's opinion represented four justices (as did Stevens' dissent), implying a much more fragmented Court.

Bloomberg also reports on a much more important question:

"The court is clearly troubled by the federal government's view that it can regulate every pond, puddle and ditch in our country,'' said Reed Hopper, a Sacramento, California, lawyer who represented landowner John Rapanos in one of the cases. "We are encouraged by this decision and believe it represents a good first step toward common sense regulation.''

In focusing on the meaning of the Clean Water Act, the court didn't decide a more far-reaching question presented by the case -- whether Congress has power to regulate those wetlands under the Constitution's Commerce Clause.

Under the Commerce Clause, any waterway that cannot be used for interstate commerce should fall outside of Congressional authority. That's a question of following the Constitution, not environmentalism.

In a better article, the Washington Post includes a good summary of the near-majority opinion:

In his opinion, Scalia wrote scathingly of federal regulators, saying they have gone too far in expanding the definition of "waters of the United States" over which they have jurisdiction.

The Corps of Engineers "exercises the discretion of an enlightened despot" in deciding whether to grant or deny permits to build on wetlands, and the average applicant for an individual permit has to spend more than two years and $270,000 to complete the process, Scalia said. The result is that more than $1.7 billion is spent each year by the private and public sectors to obtain wetlands permits, he said.

The case against Rapanos illustrates "the immense expansion of federal regulation of land use" under the Clean Water Act without any actual change in the law, Scalia wrote. In the past 30 years, he said, the Corps and the Environmental Protection Agency have interpreted their jurisdiction over "the waters of the United States" to cover up to 300 million acres of "swampy lands," including half of Alaska and an area the size of California in the lower 48 states.

He said the Corps "has also asserted jurisdiction over virtually any parcel of land containing a channel or conduit" through which rainwater or drainage may flow, even occasionally or intermittently. The definition of "waters of the United States" thus has come to include storm drains, roadside ditches, ripples of sand in the desert that may contain water once a year, and lands that are covered by floodwaters once every 100 years," Scalia wrote.

In applying the definition so broadly, he said, "the Corps has stretched the term 'waters of the United States' beyond parody."

And it is opposing that extraorginabuse of power that Reuters labels "anti-environmentalist."