Cato Daily Dispatch for December 1, 2005
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Alito on Abortion"Medicare's Muddled Meddling"
Specialists Predict Frenzied Hurricanes for Next Decade
Alito on Abortion
"As a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. helped devise a legal strategy to persuade the high court to restrict and eventually overturn Roe v. Wade, the historic decision legalizing abortion," The Washington Post reports.
In "The Key Issue for the Court Isn't Abortion," Cato's president Edward Crane writes: "For too long conservatives who understand the Enumerated Powers doctrine and the role the Constitution plays in limiting the power of government have allowed the religious right and Planned Parenthood to control the debate over the future of the judiciary in America. The litmus test for any judge must always be his or her view on Roe v. Wade, as though abortion and abortion alone should determine who sits on the federal bench.
"Now, abortion is a serious issue -- one in which I've always believed neither side gave due credit to the valid arguments of the other. But the fact that the abortion debate so controls the debate over judicial philosophy is unfortunate. There are more important issues out there, such as federalism and private property rights, the cornerstones of our liberty."
"Medicare's Muddled Meddling"
"Congressional investigators said Wednesday that they had found serious, widespread problems in a government program that issued drug discount cards to 6.4 million Medicare beneficiaries, as a precursor to the full-fledged drug benefit that takes effect next year," The New York Times reports.
In "Medicare's Muddled Meddling," Cato senior fellow Alan Reynolds, writes: "We got into this mess as a result of 40 years of political hubris. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, legislators and bureaucrats continue to believe they should dictate what sort of insurance coverage seniors should be allowed to buy.
"When it comes to the new Medicare drug plans, Congress assumes folks in their 80s must be sufficiently proficient with computers to log on to medicare.gov and pick between dozens of different Medicare drug plans. Yet that same Congress imagines those same seniors must be protected from any opportunity to choose insurance that makes economic sense."
Specialists Predict Frenzied Hurricanes for Next Decade
According to The Los Angeles Times: "The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, the most active and destructive on record, came to an official end Wednesday, with weather specialists cautioning that at least 10 more stormy years lay ahead.
"Most meteorologists agree that the Atlantic Ocean experiences multi-decade cooling and warming cycles, with warmer water spawning increased storm activity since 1995. This year, surface ocean temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees higher than normal, one of the reasons for the frenzied hurricane activity, said [Gerry] Bell, [lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Md]."
In "Warming Unlikely Culprit with Hurricanes," Cato senior fellow Patrick Michaels, writes: "I checked the actual relationship between sea temperatures and hurricane intensity in recent decades -- a period of global warming. In reality (as opposed to the virtual reality of the computer), only 10 percent of storm-to-storm variation in intensity is related to sea surface temperatures. Ninety percent is due to other factors, such as El Niño, (a warm current of water). Some of these factors are actually less favorable to hurricanes in a warmer world.
"Almost all severe hurricanes must experience water of 82 degrees sometime in their life cycle. Oddly enough, there is no relationship between more intense hurricanes and ocean surface temperature once this threshold is reached."
Kristen Kestner, editor, kkestner@cato.org
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