gdp's Comments

Commentary Magazine : Is Romney Losing the Medicare Argument?

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 21:28:52 +0000

McCain and Obama both agreed on cutting $500 billion from Medicare by reducing the rate of future increase of certain payments to providers. Calculating that over a later time frame (2013-2022 instead of 2010-2019) yields $716 billion instead of $500 billion. Bending the cost curve down is helping to strengthen and save Medicare. After 2007, Congress put "Pay As You Go" back into effect. The $716 billion from Medicare is counted against the costs in the Affordable Care Act to show that the latter is revenue neutral, but no money is coming from Medicare taxes or its trust fund to pay for anything in Obamacare. I wonder what it is that Romney and Ryan are opposed to? Bending the Medicare cost curve down, or requiring that all new federal spending is offset by cuts in other areas?

CSMonitor: World : World Cup tie breakers: What the USA needs to do to advance - CSMonitor.com

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:09:59 +0000

@BSK: If both England and the USA win today, then both will advance to the knockout round. It's just down to which one is first in the group, and which is second, which, as you point out, could go either way depending on how the goal differential stacks up after today's games.

CSMonitor: USA : ASNUB - CSMonitor.com

Thu, 27 May 2010 21:43:23 +0000

Wow! Over 100,000 hits on Google! Unfortunately, Google hits (or ghits) are not a valid measure of how hot a topic is, and it is irresponsible to use them in a news story. When you do a Google search, Google creates a rough estimate of number of hits based on statistics in its database on the frequency of the individual search terms. It then returns the top 10 hits as fast as possible. It doesn't look for all the results because if it actually took the time to make up a list of 100,000 items before showing the first 10, by the time it finished, everyone would be using Bing. So, on Thursday, there may have been over 100,000 pages that mention Obama, or Arlington, or the word "off", or some form of the verb "blow". I can believe that, but I'm not sure what its news relevance is. And Google won't show 100,000 results. It only shows 675. See for yourself: http://www.google.com/search?q=Obama+blows+off+Ar... By the way, if you put quotation marks around your query it will actually search for the PHRASE "Obama blows off Arlington", and tell you there are about 441 results (slightly less than 100,000), but, again, it won't display 441. It only shows 59. Again, see for yourself: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Obama+blows+off... Google hits are not scientific way to measure how a topic is trending and should not be used as such.

Right Across the Atlantic : What Is "Lawful Contact"?

Tue, 4 May 2010 18:10:43 +0000

As far as I have been able to discern, lawful contact is simply any contact that is not illegal i.e., is not an abuse of the LEO's authority. So, if someone approached a police officer to report that they had been the victim of a mugging, and their wallet had been stolen, that would be lawful contact. If the officer then felt that there was reasonable suspicion that the person was an illegal immigrant (say, speaking with broken English), the officer could demand proof of citizenship from the person whose wallet had just been stolen, and detain them if they were not able to produce it.