Mostly Bad Advice

U.S. News offers some bad advice to college students: 13 Ways to Make Your Professor Love You

Professors are human beings, too, with real human feelings. How your professor feels about you can influence how much time he or she is willing to put in to help you with the course, and even how good a recommendation he or she is willing to write for grad school or a job. Surprisingly enough, only 1 in 100 students thinks about this. Assuming you're one of the other 99, we offer you our baker's dozen of tips on how to ingratiate yourself to your professor:

Yes, because there is nothing we professors like better than ingratiating toadies!

1. Look interested.

Well, duh. If you are asleep or surfing the web, well, I won't think you are the greatest. But, you know what? Kids know this already. They actively decided, "Screw it."

2. Say hi to the professor when he or she enters the room.

This would bug the ever living hell out of me. Too much of this and I'd become W.C. Fields. "Get away kid, you bother me."

3. Ask a question.

As long as it isn't totally idiotic and/or shows a complete lack of engagement with the material.

4. Put in your two cents' worth.

See number 3 above.

5. Continue the conversation outside class.

Danger Will Studentson! Danger! If you are not engaged in the material, well, idiotic class comments don't get any better when they become one on one comments. Oh, under this heading US News gives this gem as well...

If you are shy, an E-mail to the professor following up on some issue raised in class can also do the trick.

AUGH!!!!!!! There is nothing I hate more than email from students! Besides, if the whole point is to "get in good" with the prof, this doesn't help do that. On an average work day I get 25-40 emails. Do you really think I'm gonna remember an email from some student whose face I couldn't pick out of a crowd?

6. Volunteer first.

This would be fine if they were seven and I wanted someone to clean my erasers. Otherwise, it's not gonna come up in my lecture class.

8. Ask the profs what they're working on.

Yes, we can be narcissistic bastards, but don't push it. This is particularly so if you aren't really interested. The average student is a bad liar and a worse actor. Don't try and fake it. That can only lead to bad things.

9. Participate in departmental activities.

This generally won't hurt you, and can help. But, as above, don't fake it.

10. Alert your professor to current events related to the class.

This is generally viewed by a prof as an attempt to avoid talking about the reading assignment for a given day. The prof might be OK with that, but that is what we feel is going on there.

11. Congratulate the professor on an achievement.

Help! Stalker!

12. Tell your prof you like the class.

While you are in the class, I don't wanna hear much about it. I'll buy a little, but not too much. If you are no longer in my class and want to talk me up, well, I'll eat that shit up with a spoon. You'll get bonus points if you are graduated.

13. Thank the professor when he or she does you a favor.

This is pretty good advice. This will also never happen.

I find it distressing that the real way to get in good with a prof is not listed. It's pretty simple actually.

DO THE DAMN READING!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's amazing how many good thing can flow from that.

I'll Have To Designate A New More Moronic Kind Of Moron To Categorize This

Yikes! Conservapedia Launches Effort to Translate the Bible Into Conservativespeak

There's a verse in the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus enters a synagogue on the Sabbath and finds a man with a withered hand. "And they watched him," according to the King James version of the Bible, referring to those in the temple, "whether he would heal him on the sabbath day; that they might accuse him."

But a new—and still evolving—conservative translation of the Bible prefers a more populist, Glenn Beckish take: "The intellectuals watched Jesus to see if he might catch and accuse him of healing on the Sabbath."

The new translation is part of the Conservative Bible Project, sponsored by Conservapedia, a Wikipedia for the right. "Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations," the project's home page explains.

You've got to be kidding me. Oh, don't get me wrong, there are some silly things going on with modern translations of the Bible (like the constant neutering of God), not to mention an almost pathological dislike of beauty and poetry. Richard John Neuhaus put it this way:

Back in May 2001, I wrote in this space, under the title “Bible Babel,” about the translation that is the unfortunate New American Bible (NAB). It is a subject that should not be dropped. Not, mind you, that I expect anybody to do anything about it any time soon. But some day, please God, there will be a real reform of the misguided reforms of recent decades, and the NAB (along with the Revised NAB and the Amended Revised NAB and whatever version of the NAB that crops up in this Sunday’s Mass guide) should be on the agenda. Robert Louis Wilken has written wisely that the Bible is the lexicon of the Church and the liturgy is the grammar of the Bible. Among Catholics subjected to the NAB, and all are now subjected to it, the lexicon takes a terrible beating.

Everyone who has sung or listened to Handel’s “Messiah” knows the words: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6, KJV). Magnificent. Here, as of this week’s amended Missalette, is the New American Bible: “For a child is born to us, a son is given us; upon his shoulder dominion rests. They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.” Try singing that.

Absolutely right. So, I'm certainly not against curbing the excesses of the soul-less translations that abound.

But attempting to read Smith, Hayek and Friedman back into the Bible is just plain nuts. And, yes, that is exactly what they want to do. Among their "guidelines":

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias...

4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle"

5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots"; using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census...

7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story

As I said before.... yikes!

Others on this:

The Anchoress: This is where I get off the boat.

Rod Dreher:

More seriously, the insane hubris of this really staggers the mind. These right-wing ideologues know better than the early church councils that canonized Scripture? They really think it's wise to force the word of God to conform to a 21st-century American idea of what constitutes conservatism? These jokers don't worship God. They worship ideology.

Ed Morrissey:

... if one believes the Bible to be the Word of God written for His purposes, which I do, then the idea of recalibrating the language to suit partisan political purposes in this age is pretty offensive — just as offensive as they see the “liberal bias” in existing translations. If they question the authenticity of the current translations, then the only legitimate process would be to work from the original sources and retranslate. And not just retranslate with political biases in mind, but to retranslate using proper linguistic processes and correct terminology.

All good thoughts, but I'd add this; No conservative, someone who had read (and understood) Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshotte, would have even begun such a process. A real conservative would have honored the tradition and not attempted to pervert scripture to suit the partisan aims of a given day. After all, for the conservative, our role in this world is to pass on to future generations those things that are good we have received from generations past. We don't get to mutilate them first.

The More You Read Krugman, The Less You Know

I was reading this post today about my favorite partisan hack (h/t The Anchoress) when I came upon this quote from our hero made in 2006:

...it seems to me that [NASA climatologist Dr. James Hansen], whose predictions about global warming have proved remarkably accurate, didn’t believe that he could successfully be portrayed as an unreliable exaggerator.[emphasis added]

Heaven forbid, we criticize the guru of Anthropogenic Global Warming. After all, Krugman seems to regard him as a veritable Kreskin of prognostication.

So, I went back and looked at what Krugman feels represents "remarkably accurate" predictions from Dr. Hansen. Back in his famous 1988 testimony before Congress Hansen presented the following set of predictions:



So, now we are 22 years into this prediction. How did he do? Well, here is the UAH data on Global monthly average lower troposphere temperature since 1979:



So, let us do a little reality check for Dr. Hansen's predictions. He gave himself three potential scenarios (A, B and C), so we will look at all of them at 4 year intervals (1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008). Luckily, 1988 in the UAH data is practically at zero, so we can just go with the numbers. (These are the running 37 month average and predicted values pulled from the graphs themselves, so they do lack a little specificity, but not enough to obscure the basic point.)

1992:

Observed: -0.05
Scenario A: 0.5 (predicted value off by 1100%)
Scenario B: 0.4 (predicted value off by 900%)
Scenario C: 0.35 (predicted value off by 800%)

Hmm...not great. But maybe Hansen will rally.

1996:

Observed: 0.05
Scenario A: 0.6 (predicted value off by 1100%)
Scenario B: 0.4 (predicted value off by 700%)
Scenario C: 0.2 (predicted value off by 300%)

2000:

Observed: 0.175
Scenario A: 0.9 (predicted value off by 414%)
Scenario B: 0.55 (predicted value off by 214%)
Scenario C: 0.55 (predicted value off by 214%)

2004:

Observed: 0.26
Scenario A: 0.95 (predicted value off by 265%)
Scenario B: 0.75 (predicted value off by 188%)
Scenario C: 0.5 (predicted value off by 92%)

2008:

Observed: 0.2
Scenario A: 0.95 (predicted value off by 375%)
Scenario B: 0.85 (predicted value off by 325%)
Scenario C: 0.65 (predicted value off by 225%)

OK, so obviously Scenarios A & B suck pretty badly, but Scenario C isn't too bad, right? (Relatively speaking, of course.)

Well, no. Sorry to be a bastard about it, but I didn't tell you what these "scenarios" are supposed to represent.



So, of these options, Scenario A would seem to be closest to the actual situation vis-a-vis trace gas emissions. Scenario C would only apply if drastic cuts had been enacted.

So Krugman was greatly impressed by predictions that averaged being wrong by a mere 651%.

That explains much.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Catholic Beliefs Are "Outrageous"

This makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg no longer attends the "Red Mass"--a Roman Catholic service for members of the legal profession in Washington--because she doesn't want to be lectured by bishops on the evils of legal abortion....

"Before every session, there's a Red Mass," Ginsburg said. "And the justices get invitations from the cardinal to attend that. And a good number of the justices show up every year. I went one year, and I will never go again, because this sermon was outrageously anti-abortion."

Sorry Justice Ginsburg, but it would be a pro-abortion Catholic mass that would be "outrageous."

Nice to know there is a Supreme Court Justice who seems to believe they are the arbiter of what is and isn't acceptable for a believer to believe.

What's A Krugman Hater To Do?

The answer? Revel in this: How did Paul Krugman get it so Wrong?

Many friends and colleagues have asked me what I think of Paul Krugman’s New York Times Magazine article, “How did Economists get it so wrong?”

Most of all, it’s sad. Imagine this weren’t economics for a moment. Imagine this were a respected scientist turned popular writer, who says, most basically, that everything everyone has done in his field since the mid 1960s is a complete waste of time. Everything that fills its academic journals, is taught in its PhD programs, presented at its conferences, summarized in its graduate textbooks, and rewarded with the accolades a profession can bestow, including multiple Nobel prizes, is totally wrong. Instead, he calls for a return to the eternal verities of a rather convoluted book written in the 1930s...

It gets worse. Krugman hints at dark conspiracies, claiming “dissenters are marginalized.” Most of the article is just a calumnious personal attack on an ever-growing enemies list, which now includes “new Keyenesians” such as Olivier Blanchard and Greg Mankiw. Rather than source professional writing, he plays gotcha with out-of-context second-hand quotes from media interviews. He makes stuff up, boldly putting words in people’s mouths that run contrary to their written opinions. Even this isn’t enough: he adds cartoons to try to make his “enemies” look silly, and puts them in false and embarrassing situations. He accuses us of adopting ideas for pay, selling out for “sabbaticals at the Hoover institution” and fat “Wall street paychecks.” It sounds a bit paranoid.

It’s annoying to the victims, but we’re big boys and girls. It’s a disservice to New York Times readers. They depend on Krugman to read real academic literature and digest it, and they get this attack instead. And it’s ineffective. Any astute reader knows that personal attacks and innuendo mean the author has run out of ideas.

That’s the biggest and saddest news of this piece: Paul Krugman has no interesting ideas whatsoever about what caused our current financial and economic problems, what policies might have prevented it, or what might help us in the future, and he has no contact with people who do. “Irrationality” and advice to spend like a drunken sailor are pretty superficial compared to all the fascinating things economists are writing about it these days.

How sad.

This is from John Cochrane of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and, as you can tell, he has had it with the intellectual dishonesty that is Paul Krugman. And he's pretty much dead on as to why.

So what is Krugman up to? Why become a denier, a skeptic, an apologist for 70 year old ideas, replete with well-known logical fallacies, a pariah? Why publish an essentially personal attack on an ever-growing enemies list that now includes practically every professional economist? Why publish an incoherent vision for the future of economics?

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that Krugman isn’t trying to be an economist, he is trying to be a partisan, political opinion writer. This is not an insult. I read George Will, Charles Krauthnammer and Frank Rich with equal pleasure even when I disagree with them. Krugman wants to be Rush Limbaugh of the Left.

Alas, to Krugman, as to far too many ex-economists in partisan debates, economics is not a quest for understanding. It is a set of debating points to argue for policies that one has adopted for partisan political purposes. “Stimulus” is just marketing to sell Congressmen and voters on a package of government spending priorities that you want for political reasons. It’s not a proposition to be explained, understood, taken seriously to its logical limits, or reflective of market failures that should be addressed directly.

Why argue for a nonsensical future for economics? Well, again, if you don’t regard economics as a science, a discipline that ought to result in quantitative matches to data, a discipline that requires crystal-clear logical connections between the “if” and the “then,” if the point of economics is merely to provide marketing and propaganda for politically-motivated policy, then his writing does make sense. It makes sense to appeal to some future economics – not yet worked out, even verbally – to disdain quantification and comparison to data, and to appeal to the authority of ancient books as interpreted you, their lone remaining apostle.

Most of all, this is the only reason I can come up with to understand why Krugman wants to write personal attacks on those who disagree with him. I like it when people disagree with me, and take time to read my work and criticize it. At worst I learn how to position it better. At best, I discover I was wrong and learn something. I send a polite thank you note.

Krugman wants people to swallow his arguments whole from his authority, without demanding logic, or evidence. Those who disagree with him, alas, are pretty smart and have pretty good arguments if you bother to read them. So, he tries to discredit them with personal attacks.

This is the political sphere, not the intellectual one. Don’t argue with them, swift-boat them. Find some embarrassing quote from an old interview. Well, good luck, Paul. Let’s just not pretend this has anything to do with economics, or actual truth about how the world works or could be made a better place.

Krugman backers, being the sane, rational people we all know them to be, are also given an instruction from Prof. Cochrane:

Krugman fans: Please don’t bother emailing me to tell me what a jerk I am.

Ahhhh..... the intellectual acumen of the Krugmanites. Can't you smell it?

Two Countries Separated By A Common Language...Again

BBC gives us this:

A man is seriously ill in hospital after being shot by firearms officers in north London. [emphasis added]

In the States would wouldn't say this guy was "ill." We'd say "Dude, you've been shot!"

We're weird that way.

Can't A Guy Get A "Do Over"?

Wildwood councilman quits, then asks for post back:

Bruce Colella admits he let his anger get the best of him when he abruptly resigned from the Wildwood City Council during a contentious council meeting Monday night.

In fact, it only took him about an hour and a half to realize his mistake and take back his resignation.

But now, it's uncertain what effect that momentary lapse will have on Colella's ability to remain in office.

Mayor Tim Woerther says he doesn't know if in fact Colella is still a council member.

Just after he informed the audience he was stepping down, Colella followed it up with a message confirming the resignation sent from his Blackberry at 10:05 p.m Monday. It said he was resigning for personal reasons.

Then at 11:32 p.m., Colella changed his mind.

"I may have acted hastily in my previous missive," he wrote in another email. "Please rescind my resignation."

Woerther declined to do so. Instead at 12:28 a.m. on Tuesday, Woerther replied to Colella's initial e-mail, saying that he was accepting Colella's resignation.

The timing is critical.

Colella maintains he made an offer to resign. The resignation wasn't accepted. Then he withdrew the offer. Therefore, according to contract law, he never resigned and is still on the council. The mayor, Colella argues, had no authority to accept his resignation.

Woerther says he's not so sure.

I'd love to see this make it to court. I really would.

Our Cultural Ignorance Shocks Me

I saw this and cringed: Lincoln Was 'The Man' First

Abraham Lincoln wasn't just honest. He was The Man! long before Shaq and others who claim that title. The recently reopened Ford's Theatre Museum reveals that among the artifacts it may display is a Lincoln inaugural medallion etched with these words: "Thou Art The Man." Gloria Swift, museum curator, says, "Every time I hear the current phraseology of that, I'm always thinking of that coin, and I'm like, oh, yeah, let me tell you, it goes way back."

Look, I'm not a huge Bible reader, but even I looked at this and thought "This has to come from scripture."

Sure enough.

2 Samuel 12:7-11

And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man. Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, I anointed thee king over Israel, and I delivered thee out of the hand of Saul;And I gave thee thy master's house, and thy master's wives into thy bosom, and gave thee the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would moreover have given unto thee such and such things.

Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the LORD, to do evil in his sight? thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon.

Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house; because thou hast despised me, and hast taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be thy wife.

Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbor, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun.

The connection is pretty obvious, although Lincoln seems to be being equated with Nathan and not king David in that it is Lincoln who is informing us of our sins and leading us towards repentance.

No wonder my students cannot make such connections. Even our journalists can't.

Hockey Sticks Belong In Hockey Games...And Nowhere Else

More of what looks like outright fraud in the wild and wacky world of AGW belief: Cherry Picking of Historic Proportions

The Briffa temperature graphs have been widely cited as evidence by the IPCC, yet it appears they were based on a very carefully selected set of data, so select, that the shape of the graph would have been totally transformed if the rest of the data had been included.

Kieth Briffa used 12 samples to arrive at his version of the hockey stick and refused to provide his data for years. When McIntyre finally got hold of it, and looked at the 34 samples that Briffa left out of his graphs, a stark message was displayed. McIntyre describes it today as one of the most disquieting images he’s ever presented.

Here is the image in question:



Not only does the cherry picking of data to use look bad, but researchers had been denied access to the data for years making any independent assessment of the original findings impossible to carry out. (Yeah, that sounds like science. /eye roll)

Here is QandO's take:

I call it the “great unraveling”. The hoax is coming unglued. And this shameful conduct will set real science back 100 years.

The question is, will the politicians see it before it is too late? Will the administration which promised that science would again take the forefront actually keep its word and ensure that happens? Methinks we’re going to find out that a political agenda and ideology are much more powerful than science. Science, quite honestly, is only useful to politicians – any politician – as long as it advances their agenda. If it doesn’t then the politician will claim it to be false science – regardless of how overwhelming the evidence is to the contrary.

Remember, this now discredited "data" was a main pillar of the IPCC climate change report that is being used to justify the alarmist ideological agenda. This behavior is shameful, and it is time for the scientific community to step forward and correct the record. After all, it was their negligence that has been causing the problems in the first place.

Morons Abound

Really they are everywhere:

The US Secret Service is investigating a poll posted on social networking site Facebook, asking people if they think President Obama "should be killed".

The poll, posted on Saturday, was taken off the site as soon as the company was made aware of it.

It was put up on the site using a third-party application that was unconnected with the social networking site itself.

US Officials will take "the appropriate investigative steps," a spokesman said.

The poll, described by Facebook as "offensive", asked respondents "Should Obama be killed?" and offered four possible responses: "No", "Maybe", "Yes", and "Yes if he cuts my health care".

Really, I have to wonder what the poll creator was smoking.

I also wonder if authorities are gonna try to investigate anyone who answered the poll, if that is even possible.

Commander In Chief? Eh... Not So Much

I can't tell if this is good news or bad news:

The military general credited with capturing Saddam Hussein and killing the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says he has spoken with President Obama only once since taking command in Afghanistan.

"I’ve talked to the president, since I’ve been here, once on a VTC [video teleconference]," Gen. Stanley McChrystal told CBS reporter David Martin in a television interview that aired Sunday.

"You’ve talked to him once in 70 days?" Mr. Martin followed up.

"That is correct," the general replied.

Part of me finds this shocking and a gross dereliction of Presidential duty. Another part of me is kinda glad that Obama, who seems completely at sea when it comes to anything military, has decided to give the whole Commander in Chief thing a miss.

So, good news, bad news.

I Want The Federal Government Out Of My House

Didn't we kill a whole lot of British once upon a time for something analogous to this?

Cap and trade is back in the news. By the end of this month, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is expected to unveil new legislation along the lines of the Waxman-Markey bill, which passed the House on June 26.

That bill contains 397 new regulations. One of them would affect almost everyone who buys or sells a home. If Waxman-Markey becomes law, homes for sale that qualify as “federally related transactions” — which is almost all of them — would be required to undergo an environmental inspection.

Many politicians are upset about depressed housing prices. And true, environmental inspections are one way to raise them. But this is not the way to do it. Sen. Boxer should see to it that the Senate version of cap and trade leaves the environmental inspection provision out.

Inspections are not free. Nor is fixing the inevitable violations. Compliance with new energy-efficiency standards would make homes, especially older ones, more expensive. Selling one’s home would become even harder than it already is in this down market if Waxman-Markey-style cap and trade becomes law.

QandO sees it this way:

Suppose you wanted to sell your house “as is” and let the person who buys it fix it up, for a suitable discount of course.

That is no longer a choice you’ll have. The buyer and seller wouldn’t be allowed to make that decision anymore. The party that continuously claims that “choice” is important to them apparently believe that particular choice is one neither the buyer or seller should have. The transaction is subject to the regulations of Mr. Waxman and Mr. Markey’s bill and you’ll not sell anything government inspectors haven’t deemed “green” enough to sell and certified as such.

Nothing, of course, could go wrong with that, could it? And of course, the article deals with just one of the unintended consequences. Let me again point out that it includes 397 new regulations – that means there’s at least one unintended consequence for each of them (and possibly more) and it will most likely be a nasty surprise.

This is yet another example of governmental over-reach into the lives of ordinary citizens. I use such language deliberately. We are living in an age of a new elected (and unelected) nobility, which sees itself as the intellectual and moral superior of the general citizenry. The vast number of Americans are deemed by the Democrats (and many Republicans for that matter) to be nothing but sheep that need to be led by shepherds - benevolent of course - who will control ever increasing amounts of their lives for their own good.

To be fair, Obama never really hid his desire to control the minutia of our lives up to and including what temperature we set our thermostats to in our own homes. Now, we will be legally unable to sell our own property unless the Democrats deem it politically correct to do so.

Oh, and remember, we're not allowed to call them socialists. That's name calling.

I Did Not Know That

Evidently if one is an artiste one gets to anally rape children with immunity.

Who knew?

How To Be A Scumbag: 101

Unbelievable:

First Big Business, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs, the Religious Right, the Wall Street Journal, Mitch McConnell, and Karl Rove came for ACORN, and the Democrats did not speak out -- because they were not ACORN.

So, now Acorn, an organization that has racked up over 30 fraud convictions in the last three years alone AND has scores under investigation at this moment, is the moral equivalent of the victims of the Holocaust!

What sort of moral pygmy could make such a claim? Surprise, surprise, it's a tenured academic.

What were the chances?

The Democrats War On The Elderly

From The Washington Times:

Yes, there are death panels. Its members won't even know whose deaths they are causing. But under the health care bill sponsored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, Montana Democrat, death panels will indeed exist - oh so cleverly disguised as accountants.

The offending provision is on Pages 80-81 of the unamended Baucus bill, hidden amid a lot of similar legislative mumbo-jumbo about Medicare payments to doctors. The key sentence: "Beginning in 2015, payment would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician's resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization." Translated into plain English, it means that in any year in which a particular doctor's average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor's payments by 5 percent.

Forget results. This provision makes no account for the results of care, its quality or even its efficiency. It just says that if a doctor authorizes expensive care, no matter how successfully, the government will punish him by scrimping on what already is a low reimbursement rate for treating Medicare patients. The incentive, therefore, is for the doctor always to provide less care for his patients for fear of having his payments docked. And because no doctor will know who falls in the top 10 percent until year's end, or what total average costs will break the 10 percent threshold, the pressure will be intense to withhold care, and withhold care again, and then withhold it some more. Or at least to prescribe cheaper care, no matter how much less effective, in order to avoid the penalties.

The National Right to Life Committee concludes that this provision will cause a "death spiral" by "ensur[ing] that doctors are forced to ration care for their senior citizen patients." Every 10th doctor in the country will fall victim to it. Libertarian columnist Nat Hentoff calls the provision "insidious" and writes that "the nature of our final exit" will be very much at risk.

THink about this for a second. They are planning on incentivizing poor care.

No wonder Congressional Democrats don't want to be "covered" by the public option.