It’s Monday, November 12th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First, up, courtesy of the WSJ, it’s the Joe Friday segment, ma’am….and just the….

The Hard Fiscal Facts

Individual tax payments are up 26% in the last two years.

 

While the rest of America was holding an election last week, the gnomes at the Congressional Budget Office released the final budget totals for fiscal 2012. They’re worth reporting because they illuminate the real fiscal choices that confront the country, as opposed to the posturing you’ll be hearing over the next few weeks.

The nearby table lays out the ugly details. The feds rolled up another $1.1 trillion deficit for the year that ended September 30, which was the biggest deficit since World War II, except for each of the previous three years. President Obama can now proudly claim the four largest deficits in modern history. As a share of GDP, the deficit fell to 7% last year, which was still above any single year of the Reagan Presidency, or any other year since Truman worked in the Oval Office.

Tax revenue kept climbing, up 6.4% for the year overall, and at $2.45 trillion it is now close to the historic high it reached in fiscal 2007 before the recession hit. Mr. Obama won’t want you to know this, but this revenue increase is occurring under the Bush tax rates that he so desperately wants to raise in the name of getting what he says is merely “a little more in taxes.” Individual income tax payments are now up $233 billion over the last two years, or 26%.

This healthy revenue increase comes despite measly economic growth of between 1% and 2%. Imagine the gusher of revenue the feds could get if government got out of the way and let the economy grow faster.

Now let’s look at outlays, which declined a bit in 2012. That small miracle was achieved thanks to a 4% fall in defense spending, a 24% fall in jobless benefits, and an 8.9% decline in Medicaid spending. Note, however, that federal spending remains at a new plateau of about $3.54 trillion, or some $800 billion more than the last pre-recession year of 2007. One way to think about this is that most of the $830 billion stimulus of 2009 has now become part of the federal budget baseline. The “emergency” spending of the stimulus has now become permanent, as we predicted it would.

When Beltway politicians claim they want a “balanced” approach to reducing the deficit, what they really mean is raising taxes to finance this new higher spending level. And the still-higher level that is coming with ObamaCare.

The reality is that the fastest way to raise revenue is with faster economic growth. To the extent that raising tax rates will reduce the rate of growth, it will slow the flow of tax revenue and increase the deficit.

Even if Mr. Obama were to bludgeon Republicans into giving him all of the tax-rate increases he wants, the Joint Tax Committee estimates this would yield only $82 billion a year in extra revenue. But if growth is slower as a result of the higher tax rates, then the revenue will be lower too. So after Mr. Obama has humiliated House Republicans and punished the affluent for the sheer joy of it, he would still have a deficit of $1 trillion.

Most of our readers know all this, but we thought you’d like some new evidence to rebut the kids who voted for your taxes to go up when they return from college for Thanksgiving. Maybe they’ll figure it out when they have a job, if they can find one.

Next, in a forward from Balls Cotton, Andrew McCarthy, writing at National Review, offers his insight regarding a fact we frankly had more than a little difficulty wrapping our arms around:

The Voters Who Stayed Home

They need better choices.

 

The key to understanding the 2012 election is simple: A huge slice of the electorate stayed home.

The punditocracy — which is more of the ruling class than an eye on the ruling class — has naturally decided that this is because Republicans are not enough like Democrats: They need to play more identity politics (in particular, adopt the Left’s embrace of illegal immigration) in order to be viable. But the story is not about who voted; it is about who didn’t vote. In truth, millions of Americans have decided that Republicans are not a viable alternative because they are already too much like Democrats. They are Washington. With no hope that a Romney administration or more Republicans in Congress would change this sad state of affairs, these voters shrugged their shoulders and became non-voters.

“This is the most important election of our lifetime.” That was the ubiquitous rally cry of Republican leaders. The country yawned. About 11 million fewer Americans voted for the two major-party candidates in 2012 — 119 million, down from 130 million in 2008. In fact, even though our population has steadily increased in the last eight years (adding 16 million to the 2004 estimate of 293 million Americans), about 2 million fewer Americans pulled the lever for Obama and Romney than for George W. Bush and John Kerry.

That is staggering. And, as if to ensure that conservatives continue making the same mistakes that have given us four more years of ruinous debt, economic stagnation, unsustainable dependency, Islamist empowerment, and a crippling transfer of sovereignty to global tribunals, Tuesday’s post-mortems fixate on the unremarkable fact that reliable Democratic constituencies broke overwhelmingly for Democrats. Again, to focus on the vote is to miss the far more consequential non-vote. The millions who stayed home relative to the 2008 vote equal the population of Ohio — the decisive state. If just a sliver of them had come out for Romney, do you suppose the media would be fretting about the Democrats’ growing disconnect with white people?

Obama lost an incredible 9 million voters from his 2008 haul. If told on Monday that fully 13 percent of the president’s support would vanish, the GOP establishment would have stocked up on champagne and confetti.

To be sure, some of the Obama slide is attributable to “super-storm” Sandy. Its chaotic aftermath reduced turnout in a couple of big blue states: New York, where about 6 million people voted, and New Jersey, where 3.5 million did. That is down from 2008 by 15 and 12 percent, respectively. Yet, given that these solidly Obama states were not in play, and that — thanks to Chris Christie’s exuberance — our hyper-partisan president was made to look like a bipartisan healer, Sandy has to be considered a big net plus on Obama’s ledger.

There also appears to have been some slippage in the youth vote, down 3 percent from 2008 levels — 49 percent participation, down from 52 percent. But even with this dip, the under-30 crowd was a boon for the president. Thanks to the steep drop in overall voter participation, the youth vote actually increased as a percentage of the electorate — 19 percent, up from 18 percent. Indeed, if there is any silver lining for conservatives here, it’s that Obama was hurt more by the decrease in his level of support from this demographic — down six points from the 66 percent he claimed in 2008 — than by the marginal drop in total youth participation. It seems to be dawning on at least some young adults that Obamaville is a bleak place to build a future.

Put aside the fact that, as the election played out, Sandy was a critical boost for the president. Let’s pretend that it was just a vote drain — one that explains at least some of the slight drop in young voters. What did it really cost Obama? Maybe a million votes? It doesn’t come close to accounting for the cratering of his support. Even if he had lost only 8 million votes, that would still have been 11 percent of his 2008 vote haul gone poof. Romney should have won going away.

Yet, he did not. Somehow, Romney managed to pull nearly 2 million fewer votes than John McCain, one of the weakest Republican nominees ever, and one who ran in a cycle when the party had sunk to historic depths of unpopularity. How to explain that?

The brute fact is: There are many people in the country who believe it makes no difference which party wins these elections. Obama Democrats are the hard Left, but Washington’s Republican establishment is progressive, not conservative. This has solidified statism as the bipartisan mainstream. Republicans may want to run Leviathan — many are actually perfectly happy in the minority — but they have no real interest in dismantling Leviathan. They are simply not about transferring power out of Washington, not in a material way.

As the 2012 campaign elucidated, the GOP wants to be seen as the party of preserving the unsustainable welfare state. When it comes to defense spending, they are just as irresponsible as Democrats in eschewing adult choices. Yes, Democrats are reckless in refusing to acknowledge the suicidal costs of their cradle-to-grave nanny state, but the Republican campaign called for enlarging a military our current spending on which dwarfs the combined defense budgets of the next several highest-spending nations. When was the last time you heard a Republican explain what departments and entitlements he’d slash to pay for that? In fact, when did the GOP last explain how a country that is in a $16 trillion debt hole could afford to enlarge anything besides its loan payments?

Our bipartisan ruling class is obtuse when it comes to the cliff we’re falling off — and I don’t mean January’s so-called “Taxmageddon,” which is a day at the beach compared to what’s coming.

As ZeroHedge points out, we now pay out $250 billion more on mandatory obligations (i.e., just entitlements and interest on the debt) than we collect in taxes. Understand, that’s an annual deficit of a quarter trillion dollars before one thin dime is spent on the exorbitant $1.3 trillion discretionary budget — a little over half of which is defense spending, and the rest the limitless array of tasks that Republicans, like Democrats, have decided the states and the people cannot handle without Washington overlords.

What happens, moreover, when we have a truly egregious Washington scandal, like the terrorist murder of Americans in Benghazi? What do Republicans do? The party’s nominee decides the issue is not worth engaging on — cutting the legs out from under Americans who see Benghazi as a debacle worse than Watergate, as the logical end of the Beltway’s pro-Islamist delirium. In the void, the party establishment proceeds to delegate its response to John McCain and Lindsey Graham: the self-styled foreign-policy gurus who urged Obama to entangle us with Benghazi’s jihadists in the first place, and who are now pushing for a repeat performance in Syria — a new adventure in Islamist empowerment at a time when most Americans have decided Iraq was a catastrophe and Afghanistan is a death trap where our straitjacketed troops are regularly shot by the ingrates they’ve been sent to help.

Republicans (Many, not all) talk about limited central government, but they do not believe in it — or, if they do, they lack confidence that they can explain its benefits compellingly. They’ve bought the Democrats’ core conceit that the modern world is just too complicated for ordinary people to make their way without bureaucratic instruction. They look at a money-hemorrhaging disaster like Medicare, whose unsustainability is precisely caused by the intrusion of government, and they say, “Let’s preserve it — in fact, let’s make its preservation the centerpiece of our campaign.”

The calculation is straightforward: Republicans lack the courage to argue from conviction that health care would work better without federal mandates and control — that safety nets are best designed by the states, the people, and local conditions, not Washington diktat. In their paralysis, we are left with a system that will soon implode, a system that will not provide care for the people being coerced to pay in. Most everybody knows this is so, yet Republicans find themselves too cowed or too content to advocate dramatic change when only dramatic change will save us. They look at education, the mortgage crisis, and a thousand other things the same way — intimidated by the press, unable to articulate the case that Washington makes things worse.

Hardly a winning campaign slogan for the GOP.

Truth be told, most of today’s GOP does not believe Washington makes things worse. Republicans think the federal government — by confiscating, borrowing, and printing money — is the answer to every problem, rather than the source of most. That is why those running the party today, when they ran Washington during the Bush years, orchestrated an expansion of government size, scope, and spending that would still boggle the mind had Obama not come along. (See Jonah Goldberg’s jaw-dropping tally from early 2004 — long before we knew their final debt tab would come to nearly $5 trillion.) No matter what they say in campaigns, today’s Republicans are champions of massive, centralized government. They just think it needs to be run smarter — as if the problem were not human nature and the nature of government, but just that we haven’t quite gotten the org-chart right yet.

That is not materially different from what the Democrats believe. It’s certainly not an alternative. For Americans who think elections can make a real difference, Tuesday pitted proud progressives against reticent progressives; slightly more preferred the true-believers. For Americans who don’t see much daylight between the two parties — one led by the president who keeps spending money we don’t have and the other by congressional Republicans who keep writing the checks and extending the credit line — voting wasn’t worth the effort.

Those millions of Americans need a new choice. We all do.

While we understand McCarthy’s point, we’re also certain displeasure with party differences, or lack thereof, doesn’t satisfactorily explain how any sentient voter could fail to appreciate the significance of last Tuesday.

Or, as Darth Helmet might have said upon waking Wednesday morning:

In a related item, we go back to the ranch with The Gang That May Never Shoot Straight, courtesy of CommentaryMagazine.com, as Bethany Mandel details….

Romney’s Get Out the Vote Fiasco

 

The Wednesday before the election, Mitt Romney sent a special message to volunteers about a special project his campaign was working on: “With state of the art technology and an extremely dedicated group of volunteers, our campaign will have an unprecedented advantage on election day.” What is it they say about something that sounds too good to be true? It probably is. That was the case with the Romney campaign’s “Project ORCA.”

The idea behind Project ORCA was simple, albeit far too complex in execution. Romney’s Boston headquarters wanted a way to track who had been to the polls in swing states, and who had not. It was the most complicated GOTV (get out the vote) effort in GOP history. (Ruh roh!) Volunteers in swing states would be assigned polling places. They would be given lists of every registered voter assigned to that polling location. Those voters would be reported on to Boston via a web application when they arrived to vote, and if that failed, via phone or, as a last resort, voice. Volunteers were to log in to the application, use their assigned pin number and password, and begin reporting on voters who had come through their polling place by ID number. A source familiar with the campaign told me that Boston would initiate calls and visits to those who had not yet gotten to the polls.

The story of how monumental a failure Project ORCA was on Election Day was first reported by a volunteer, John Ekdahl, on the Ace of Spades blog. After tweeting the article, I was contacted by several other volunteers who were eager to explain in greater detail just how many things went wrong with Project Orca on Tuesday.

I spoke with one volunteer in a rural Virginia county who had a similar experience to the blogger on Ace’s site. Shoshanna McCrimmon signed up to volunteer on Romney’s website several months ago. She was contacted by Dan Centinello of the Romney campaign and underwent online and phone training that lasted for several hours in order to volunteer locally on Election Day. Because of secrecy concerns, the application itself was inaccessible until the morning of the election. From the outset there were failures of organization. (No….not by Republicans!)

Shoshanna wasn’t given the credentials necessary to gain access to the polling place and was told to arrive when the polls opened at 7. A few days before the election, she was emailed a PDF packet, which she was meant to print out, containing the names of all of the registered voters at her polling place and instructions. Her location’s packet was only dozen or so pages; Ekdahl’s packet was over sixty. The packet was supposed to contain credentials, but they did not. Shoshana’s email to the Romney campaign the night before the election about the lack of credentials went unanswered. When Shoshanna arrived on time at 7 a.m., she learned that polls had actually opened an hour prior. 

Unable to test her pin number and password until that morning, she discovered, only after after she arrived at the polling location ready to work, that her pin was invalid. She spent until 2:30 that afternoon on calls to Boston every 45 minutes trying to get a new one. She attempted to input the voter information via phone dial-pad–the first backup plan–but her invalid pin number was useless. Plan C, calling in to Boston and verbally transmitting the information, was also a wash. The same phone number for dial pad and voice reporting was given–there was no option to ask to speak to Boston directly after calling in.

Not than anyone will be on the other end of the line!

After finally getting her pin number in the late afternoon, Shoshanna attempted to log into the site. She had been sent an email from the Romney campaign that morning (after polls opened) telling her that cell phones were often not allowed in polling places, after she was previously warned not to forget to bring her cell phone in other emails. Thankfully, her polling place allowed her to use her cell phone. The website, on a secure server, was inaccessible from her cell phone (Ekdahl explains why in detail). By this point hundreds of voters had passed through Shoshanna’s polling station, unreported. Nevertheless, she went home, retrieved her laptop, and thanks to the pastor at the polling place (a church) she gained access to a locked wireless network. It was only at that point that Shoshanna was able to access ORCA, with only a few hours left before polls closed. (Other than that, how’d you enjoy the most important election in modern American history, Mrs. Lincoln?!?)

Shoshanna’s experience was far from unique. Starting in the early afternoon, reports were coming in from across swing states that ORCA had crashed. That morning, when Shoshanna was on the phone with Boston, she was told the system was crashing, unable to withstand thousands of simultaneous log-ins. The system had never been stress tested and couldn’t handle the crush of traffic all at once. Thousands of man-hours went into designing and implementing a program that was useful on one day and one day only, and on that day, it crashed. My source familiar with the campaign described it this way, “It was a giant [mess] because a political operative sold a broken product with no support or backup plan. Just another arrogant piece of the arrogant Romney campaign.”

The operative in question, Dan Centinello, Romney’s Deputy Political Director, was Shoshanna’s only point of contact with the campaign. After a two-and-a-half-hour conference call with volunteers across the country, Shoshanna still had questions about minor details about ORCA and volunteering at her polling place. Her emails were answered within 24 hours, always by Centinello. There appears to have been no delegation on Centinello’s part, and every question sent was answered by the ORCA project manager personally. It’s likely that if this was taking place with the thousands of volunteers in Project ORCA, Centinello was spending hundreds of hours answering basic questions from volunteers that could have been addressed by lower level staffers. This time would have been better spent, I would argue, testing the capabilities of ORCA and its servers and testing the application on small groups of trusted volunteers, especially elderly ones who might have difficulty with its interface (which, on election day, they did).

Uhhhh….was I supposed to hit “save”?

One of the most basic tenets of conservatism is a loathing and mistrust of big government and bureaucracy. Project ORCA was the embodiment of big government, top-down management. Information was sent by volunteers in swing states across the country to Boston, and those in Boston were then tasked with assigning other volunteers in those same swing states to contact those who had not yet been to the polls. Boston was, at best, a detour and an unnecessary middleman in the GOTV efforts, and when that link in the chain broke, Romney’s GOTV effort crumbled on the most crucial day of his campaign. One of the most successful components of Karl Rove’s GOTV efforts with George W. Bush’s campaigns was his small-government ideological approach. Each volunteer was tasked with personally getting a handful of voters from their area to the polls, voters that they were already familiar with from their church, their children’s schools and their community. Instead of this strategy, Boston was the hub; information was sent there and GOTV assignments were delegated from thousands of miles away by Romney staffers largely unfamiliar with individuals and communities. At Ace of Spades, Ekdahl described the organizational approach of Project ORCA: “The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters).”

Was ORCA’s failure the reason why Romney lost Virginia by almost 116,000 votes, Ohio by 103,000, Iowa by 88,000 or why Florida is still, days later, too close to call? It’s impossible to know what a Romney campaign with working GOTV technology would have been able to accomplish. Ekdahl explained that with the failure of Project ORCA’s organization and its later meltdown on Election Day “30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc.” The possibility that all of the efforts of Romney’s campaign, all of the enthusiasm, went unharnessed and dormant on Election Day when they could’ve at least led to a closer election result, if not a victory, is becoming beyond frustrating for thousands of his staffers, for the millions of Americans who gave their time and money to elect Mitt Romney president as they come to learn just what a disaster ORCA seems to have been.

And we, unfortunately, are one of them….and frankly more than we could afford.

Meanwhile, as Joel Gehrke details in The Washington Examiner, at least one single-issue organization appears to have learned their lesson:

Pro-life group vows changes after Akin debacle 

 

Was it something I said?

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, said that her organization is changing its endorsement process in the wake of Todd Akin’s self-inflicted defeat in the U.S. Senate race in Missouri. “We think that women are great spokeswomen, they’re natural spokeswomen — that’s why we have an emphasis on electing women as pro-life leaders,” Dannenfelser said to The Washington Examiner today while discussing Akin’s campaign. (SBA List endorsed Tea Party favorite Sarah Steelman against Akin in the Republican primary.) “In addition to that, how we talk about that and how we communicate it in a compassionate and true way — without fear — is vitally important.”

The GOP primary this year was regarded as a race for the privilege of defeating Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., whose vote for Obamacare made her deeply unpopular in the state. Akin threw that opportunity away during a general election debate, when he was asked if he opposed abortion in when pregnancies result from rape. “From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” he said. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment. But the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

Dannenfelser said that response spurred them to change how they vet candidates. “With Akin, when asked about rape, there’s only one thing you should say: ‘what a horrible tragedy,’” she said. “He clearly could have used a little bit of debate prep before he made that statement.”

She said that it’s likely that SBA List endorsement committee will work to pick the candidates most capable of articulating the group’s position at the national level. “We go through and I drill you on all the questions, all the tough things, and then you give it back to me,” Dannenfelser said in outlining the process they will likely adopt. “And then we see if that actually merits endorsement or not, because if you can’t handle a rape question after everything that we just went through and all the damage that that caused, then you’re not paying attention and you don’t care enough to figure it out.”

Which is what we said in our post-election analysis the GOP should have been doing….for years.

Then again, the more some things change, the more others remain the same, i.e., Dimocrats dissembling, as these next two headlines confirm:

Clinton Declines to Testify on Benghazi, Cites Scheduling Conflict

 

Petraeus: ‘This Has Nothing To Do With Benghazi’

 

Just take our word for it, folks; nothing to see here….move along!

Moving on, Jonah Goldberg describes what he terms….

A Victory for Creatures of the State

 

The Progressives won on Tuesday. I don’t mean the people who voted Democrat who call themselves “progressive.” Though they won, too. I mean the Progressives who’ve been waging a century-long effort to transform our American-style government into a European-style state.

The words “government” and “state” are often used interchangeably, but they are really different things. According to the founders’ vision, the people are sovereign and the government belongs to us. Under the European notion of the state, the people are creatures of the state, significant only as parts of the whole.

This European version of the state can be nice. One can live comfortably under it. Many decent and smart people sincerely believe this is the intellectually and morally superior way to organize society. (We disagree either adjective can be applied to those advocating a model which is demonstrably unworkable.; we prefer “arrogant” and “stupid”.) And, to be fair, it’s not a binary thing. The line between the European and American models is blurry. France is not a Huxleyan dystopia, and America is not and has never been an anarchist’s utopia, nor do conservatives want it to be one.

The distinction between the two worldviews is mostly a disagreement over first assumptions, about which institutions should take the lead in our lives. It is an argument about what the habits of the American heart should be. Should we live in a country where the first recourse is to appeal to the government, or should government interventions be reserved as a last resort?

These assumptions are formed and informed by political rhetoric. President Obama ran a campaign insisting that Democrats believe “we’re all in it together” and that Republicans think you should be “on your own” no matter what hardships you face. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ “keepers,” according to Obama, and the state is how we “keep” each other. The introductory video at the Democratic National Convention proclaimed, “Government is the one thing we all belong to.”

Exactly 100 years before Barack Obama’s re-election victory, Woodrow Wilson was elected president for the first time. It was Wilson’s belief that the old American understanding of government needed to be Europeanized. The key to this transformation was convincing Americans that we all must “marry our interests to the state.”

The chief obstacle for this mission is the family. The family, rightly understood, is an autonomous source of meaning in our lives and the chief place where we sacrifice for, and cooperate with, others. It is also the foundation for local communities and social engagement. As social scientist Charles Murray likes to say, unmarried men rarely volunteer to coach kids’ soccer teams.

Progressivism always looked at the family with skepticism and occasionally hostility. Reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman hoped state-backed liberation of children would destroy “the unchecked tyranny … of the private home.” Wilson believed the point of education was to make children as unlike their parents as possible. Hillary Clinton, who calls herself a modern progressive and not a liberal, once said we must move beyond the notion there is “any such thing as someone else’s child.”

One of the stark lessons of Obama’s victory is the degree to which the Republican Party has become a party for the married and the religious. If only married people voted, Romney would have won in a landslide. If only married religious people voted, you’d need a word that means something much bigger than landslide. Obviously, Obama got some votes from the married and the religious (such people can marry their interests to the state, too), but as a generalization, the Obama coalition heavily depends on people who do not see family or religion as rival or superior sources of material aid or moral authority. (Including The Dear Misleader.)

Marriage, particularly among the working class, has gone out of style. In 1960, 72 percent of adults were married. Today, barely half are. The numbers for blacks are far more stark. The well-off still get married though, which is a big reason why they’re well-off. (The most important determiner for adult and child poverty being part of a single-female-parent household.) “It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, told the New York Times.

Religion, too, is waning dramatically in America. Gallup finds regular church attendance down to 43 percent of Americans. Other researchers think it might be less than half that.

In the aftermath of massive American urbanization and industrialization, and in the teeth of a brutal economic downturn, Franklin D. Roosevelt promised to fight for the “forgotten man” — the American who felt lost amidst the social chaos of the age. Obama campaigned for “Julia” — the affluent single mom who had no family and no ostensible faith to fall back on.

In short, the American people are starting to look like Europeans, and as a result they want a European form of government.

Which brings us to James Taranto thoughts on the results of the Massachusetts Senate race:

They Were Warrened

 

….Here’s a report from the Boston Herald on Sen.-elect Warren’s first press conference:

A jittery U.S. senator-elect Elizabeth Warren gave one-sentence answers, ducked questions and even passed one on to Gov. Deval Patrick in an awkward first press conference since the election. . . .

After being asked her first question–how she’d protect defense spending–Warren was silent as she turned to Patrick. “Defense spending is you,” Patrick prodded Warren. “Oh, that’s mine,” Warren replied. . . .

Asked what impact more women in the Senate would have, Warren punted. “You want to try answering that?” she said, turning to Patrick, who stepped in again.

In our view, Warren is an exponent of ugly and destructive ideas. But the saving grace of her victory is six years worth of comic material.

What inquiring minds want to know is why Warren held her first post-election press conference in the company of Deval Patrick; not to mention why, supposedly possessed of an unrivaled academic brilliance exceeded only by The Obamao, she required his assistance in answering even the most basic questions?

Then again, we’d be lying if we claimed to be sad at Brown’s departure.

In news of other electoral egregiousness, the WSJ details another disaster waiting to happen:

California’s Liberal Supermajority

Taxpayers are going to get all the government they ever wanted.

 

For Republicans unhappy with Tuesday’s election, we have good news—at least most of you don’t live in California. Not only did Democrats there win voter approval to raise the top tax rate to 13.3%, but they also received a huge surprise—a legislative supermajority. Look out below.

The main check on Sacramento excess has been a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds majority of both houses to raise taxes. Although Republicans have been in the minority for four decades, they could impose a modicum of spending restraint by blocking tax increases. If Democratic leads stick in two races where ballots are still being counted, liberals will pick up enough seats to secure a supermajority. Governor Jerry Brown then will be the only chaperone for the Liberals Gone Wild video that is Sacramento.

Mr. Brown can blame himself for this predicament, after he drove more young voters to the polls by threatening to cut $500 million from higher education, which would have brought on large tuition increases. Voters between the ages of 18 and 29 made up 28% of the electorate, up from 22% in 2008 and 15% in 1996.

Unions also ramped up their turnout machine to kill a ballot initiative that would have barred unions from automatically withholding money from worker paychecks for political spending. The high Democratic turnout in moderate and right-leaning districts helped the party pick up three seats in the senate and four in the assembly.

So now Californians will experience the joys of one-party, union-run progressive governance. Mr. Brown is urging lawmakers to demonstrate frugality and the “prudence of Joseph.” As he said the other day, “we’ve got to make sure over the next few years that we pay our bills, we invest in the right programs, but we don’t go on any spending binges.” That’s what all Governors say. Trouble is, merely paying the state’s delinquent bills will require tens of billions in additional revenues if lawmakers don’t undertake fiscal reforms.

Lawmakers have been borrowing and deferring debts for the past decade merely to close their annual deficits, and those bills will soon come due. The legislature has raided $4.3 billion from special funds and deferred $10 billion in constitutionally required payments to schools. The state has also borrowed $10 billion from Uncle Sam to pay for jobless benefits and $313 million this year from the state disability insurance trust fund for debt service on those federal loans. Democrats have proposed replenishing the state’s barren unemployment insurance trust fund by raising payroll taxes on employers. Expect that to happen now.

Then there’s the more than $200 billion in unfunded liabilities the state has accrued for worker retirement benefits, which this year cost taxpayers $6.5 billion. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System says it needs an additional $3.5 billion and $10 billion annually for the next 30 years to amortize its debt.

The state has $73 billion in outstanding bonds for capital projects and $33 billion in voter-authorized bonds that the state hasn’t sold in part because it can’t afford higher debt payments. Unissued bonds include $9.5 billion for a bullet train, which will require $50 billion to $90 billion more to complete. Sacramento will also need more money to support an $11 billion bond to retrofit the state’s water system, which is planned for the 2014 ballot.

 With no GOP restraint, liberals can now raise taxes to pay for all this. They’ll probably start by repealing Proposition 13’s tax cap for commercial property. Democrats in the Assembly held hearings on the idea this spring. Then they’ll try to make it easier for cities to raise taxes.

The greens want an oil severance tax. Other Democrats want to extend the sales tax to services, supposedly in return for a lower rate, but don’t expect any “reform” to be revenue neutral. Look for huge union pay raises and higher pension benefits.

The silver lining here is that Americans will be able to see the modern liberal-union state in all its raw ambition. The Sacramento political class thinks it can tax and regulate the private economy endlessly without consequence. As a political experiment it all should be instructive, and at least Californians can still escape to Nevada or Idaho.

You can depend on two things; first, the crash is inevitable.  Second, when it comes, like GM, Sacramento will be looking to Washington, i.e., YOU, for a bail-out.

And since we’re on the subject of The Land of Fruits & Nuts:

San Francisco to provide transgender surgeries for uninsured

 

No word yet from whence those funds will be coming….let alone how they plan to deal with every deviant in the country looking for free sex-change surgery suddenly become 49er fans.

And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy of NewMediaJournal.us, another bludgeon with which the Romney campaign inexplicably failed to hit The Obamao about the head:

EPA ‘Haze’ Plans Designed to Circumvent Court Rulings

 

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has expanded its control of state regulations known as Regional Haze Rule in order to impose more stringent regulations on coal-fired power plants and avoid the judicial injunction against air quality regulations that it tried to impose in 2011.

The EPA imposed haze plans on North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Nebraska in 2011 and 2012 that will increase energy compliance costs by almost $375 million. It also rejected plans in Wyoming and Arizona, demanding stricter regulations that would add at least $200 million to energy production, according to William Yeatman, an environmental regulations expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

“Ultimately every state will face this; Ohio, Pennsylvania, everyone,” Yeatman said. “The EPA positioned Regional Haze to stand in for other regulations that didn’t pass constitutional muster. It is clearly moving aggressively to extend these rules to all coal-fired plants.”

The EPA attempted to usher in new regulatory processes for coal with the Cross State Air Pollution Rule, which would have enabled the department to cap emissions for power plants operating in the states because pollution can travel across state lines. A federal appeals court blocked the rule from taking effect in 2011 and struck it down in August 2012, citing the rule’s onerous requirements and regulatory overreach.

The courts may have thwarted the rule from taking effect, but that did not prevent the department from using its costly guidelines on existing regulation such as the Regional Haze Rule, a 1999 standard that requires states to enhance visibility in federal parks. The EPA allowed the states to count existing air quality standards, such as the Clean Air Interstate Rules, toward its haze plans.

The EPA replaced the Clean Air Interstate Rules baseline with the more stringent Cross State Air Pollution Rule in May 2012 despite being on shaky legal ground. The agency then assumed the authority not only to approve haze plans, but also to replace them with federal plans if states refused to comply…

Mark Lewis sits on the board of the Central Arizona Project, a public water management system that relies on the Navajo Generating Station’s coal plants to pump water throughout the state. He said the Regional Haze Rules proposed by the EPA would “destroy 65 years and $4 billion of infrastructure investments” because they would force the Navajo Station to spend $1 billion on upgrades. This has left the state no choice but to challenge the haze rules.

“This is targeted to shut down coal plants and they’re going to end up bankrupting the largest tribe in the country, as well as the farmers that use it for their water supply and the taxpayers who use it for electricity,” he said. “The EPA and environmental activists have overplayed their hands in these job-killing regulations.”

We wouldn’t bet on it.  But seriously, other than Oprah, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet (and truth be known Buffet’s secretary), who in the country hasn’t been impacted by our skyrocketing energy costs?  More importantly, why wasn’t Team Tick-Tock’s anti-energy agenda a prime subject of Romney’s campaign spots?!?

On the Lighter Side….

Then the author of Hope n’ Change provides us a first-look at Eric Holder’s rumored replacement at Injustice Department:

Finally, we’ll call it a day with Another Sign the Apocalypse is Upon Us, courtesy of the Drudge Report and CNSNews.com:

Axelrod’s Next Project: Inspiring Young People to Become ‘Journalists’

 

President Barack Obama’s senior campaign adviser David Axelrod said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that his next project will include inspiring young people to become “journalists.” “What do you do next?” CBS’s Bob Schieffer asked Axelrod.

“I’m going to spend part of my time starting an institute of politics at the University of Chicago,” said Axelrod. “My feeling is if I can help inspire some young people to get into this arena as candidates, as strategists, as journalists, then that would be a great contribution to make.”

Yes, Dave; right up there with the invention of the hemorrhoid.  Only a Liberal could fail to see the conflict inherent in an “institute of politics” involving “journalists”; wouldn’t that make them propagandists?

Magoo