It’s Friday, August 24th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the last edition of the week, it’s A Tale of Two Twits; first, Twit (R):

Yeah, Todd; only if you ignore Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Karl Rove, the NRSC, the editors of the National Review, and just about every living former GOP Senator from Missouri.

Then there’s Twit (MSM), which is the subject of today’s “MSM Bias….WHAT Bias?!?” segment, courtesy of Bill Meisen and Best of the Web:

The Vetting

“NBC News unsuccessfully went back to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to request an interview for this week’s prime-time special on the Mormon faith,” the Associated Press reports:

The newsmagazine’s [“Rock Center”] producers thought it worthwhile to examine the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the eve of one of its members becoming the Republican nominee for president. During the hour, correspondent Harry Smith does a piece on why Mormons are so successful in business and tours a Salt Lake City warehouse where a huge amount of supplies is kept for the needy. . . .

“What we set out to do very broadly is not an hour on Mitt Romney but an hour about the religion that has played a very important role in shaping who he is,” [executive producer] Hartman said Wednesday.

That sounds fine, but do you remember NBC’s 2008 prime-time special exploring the views of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ and its pastor, Jeremiah Wright? Neither do we.

Twenty years The Dear Misleader sat in his pew; yet he cannot recall hearing a single discouraging word.  Nor did the MSM bother to report one.  Incidentally, ABC ran a similar segment last night.  MSM bias….WHAT bias?!?

And since we’re on the subject of deafening silence, the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel reports on why it seems the Boy Blunder is running on a campaign of a….

The Silent Second-Term Agenda

Despite the Democrats’ shellacking in 2010, the president moved left. Re-election in November will reinforce his view that he was correct to do so.

President Obama has a reputation for talking, but not necessarily for saying much. He has achieved new levels of vagueness this election season. Beyond repeating that he’s in favor of making the “rich” pay for more government “investment,” he hasn’t offered a single new idea for a second term. This is deliberate.

The core of the Obama strategy is to make Americans worry that whatever Mitt Romney does, it will be worse. That’s a harder case for Mr. Obama to make if he is himself proposing change. And so the Obama pitch is that this election is a choice between stability (giving Mr. Obama four more years to let his policies finally work) and upheaval (giving Mr. Romney four years to re-ruin the nation).

The pitch is profoundly dishonest. (Well, at least he’s consistent!) While the choice between four more years of Obama status quo and Mr. Romney is certainly vivid, it isn’t accurate. The real contrast is between Mr. Romney’s and Mr. Obama’s future plans. And while the president hasn’t revealed what those plans are, there is plenty of evidence for what a second term would look like.

Let’s dispense with the obvious: An Obama second term will be foremost about higher taxes and greater spending. The president has been clear about the former and will consider victory in November a mandate to raise taxes on higher-income Americans and small businesses—at the least.

Meanwhile, no matter how the coming budget sequester sorts out, nobody should forget why it came into being: It was the result of Mr. Obama’s refusal to consider any real changes to Social Security or Medicare. There will be no reason to budge in a second term. Absent reform to these drivers of debt, and given Mr. Obama’s ambitions to further “invest” in education, energy and infrastructure, a second term means proposals for even broader and bigger tax hikes—and not just for his favorite targets. Continued and growing deficits are likely as well.

Presidents often use re-election to revive leftover policy objectives. A New Yorker magazine article in June noted: “The President has said that the most important policy he could address in his second term is climate change.” Such an unpopular policy focus might seem crazy if Republicans hold the House, but then again Mr. Obama will want an issue where he can press his advantage and blame an obstinate GOP. The president has to date been unconcerned by how his agenda hurts congressional Democrats; he’s unlikely to begin caring once he has been re-elected.

Yet since the probable outcome of his approach would be continued gridlock, his real efforts will be devoted to fine-tuning the regulatory apparatus he has designed specifically to go around Congress—as the administration has done the past two years. The Environmental Protection Agency in particular will resurrect rules it delayed implementing before the election (see: costly ozone regulations) and move to take over new areas like natural-gas fracking.

The same goes for other agencies, from the Labor Department to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The National Labor Relations Board will continue to cement union dominance over employers. The Solyndras will continue. What Mr. Obama cannot accomplish via regulation, he will attempt through executive order—much as he did with his recent immigration directive.

Most voters understand that a second Obama term means the continuation of ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank financial regulations. But there is also the carte blanche that re-election will give the president to supercharge those laws, which are only now entering key rulemaking periods. The same Obama appointees who have already taken vast liberties with these laws (see: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s ObamaCare slush fund) will be crafting the new regulations. The bureaucrats will also have four more years to put in place key civil servants who can be counted on to keep the rules going even past an Obama administration.

It is likely the Supreme Court will offer up another vacancy, and Mr. Obama might finally have his chance to shift the balance of the court. A slew of appellate-court positions are also in limbo as the campaign proceeds; they would be filled by a second-term Obama.

Just as important are the things Mr. Obama will not do. His record gives no indication he will revive America’s leadership in free trade. Nor is he likely to restore America’s influence in the international arena. And so we will inch closer to a nuclear-armed Iran and the threats that the regime will pose to international peace and order.

None of this is hyperbole. Mr. Obama is open about his tax aims, is proud of his spending and has never apologized for his regulatory ambitions. Despite a shellacking in the midterms, he moved left, and a November victory will reinforce his sense that he was correct to do so.

While Democrats will take careful pains in coming convention weeks to avoid outlining the president’s intentions, they are sitting in plain sight. The real choice this fall will be between Mitt Romney’s reform agenda and a Supersized Obama. No wonder the Democrats are keeping mum.

This must have been just before Sandy Burglar stole those classified documents from the National Archives.

Meanwhile, as Michael Barone relates in the Washington Examiner, yet another of The Obamao’s crowning achievments crumbles into dust:

GM goes from bad to worse despite Obama bailout

Akerson’s selling his ’58 ‘Vette….but not because he has to; after all, he’s got no skin in this game!

Readers with long memories may recall that Charles E. Wilson, president of General Motors and nominee for secretary of defense, got into trouble when he told a Senate committee, “What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”

That was in 1953, and Wilson was trying to make the point that General Motors was such a big company — it sold about half the cars in the United States back then — that its interests were inevitably aligned with those of the country as a whole.

Things are different now. General Motors’ market share in the U.S. is below 20 percent. It has gone through bankruptcy and exists now thanks to a federal bailout. But Barack Obama seems to think that it’s as closely aligned with the national interest as Charles E. Wilson did.

“When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse,” Obama told a campaign event audience in Colorado earlier this month, “I said, let’s bet on America’s workers. And we got management and workers to come together, making cars better than ever, and now GM is number one again and the American auto industry has come roaring back.”

His conclusion: “So now I want to say that what we did with the auto industry, we can do in manufacturing across America. Let’s make sure advanced, high-tech manufacturing jobs take root here, not in China. Let’s have them here in Colorado. And that means supporting investment here.”

Was he calling for a federal bailout of other American manufacturing companies? And what does he mean by “supporting investment”? White House reporters have not asked these obvious questions, for the good reason that the president, who has been attending fundraisers on an average of one every 60 hours, has not held a press conference in something like two months.

Obama talks about the auto bailout frequently, since it’s one of the few things in his record that gets positive responses in the polls. But he’s probably wise to avoid probing questions, since the GM bailout is not at all the success he claims.

GM has been selling cars in the U.S. at deep discount and, while it’s making money in China — and is outsourcing operations there and elsewhere — it’s bleeding losses in Europe. It’s spending billions to ditch its Opel brand there in favor of Chevrolet, including $559 million to put the Chevy logo on Manchester United soccer team uniforms — and just fired the marketing exec who cut that deal.

It botched the launch of its new Chevrolet Malibu by starting with the green-friendly Eco version, which pleased its government shareholders but which got lousy reviews. And it’s selling only about 10,000 electric-powered Chevy Volts a year, a puny contribution toward Obama’s goal of 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

“GM is going from bad to worse,” reads the headline on Automotive News Editor-in-Chief Keith Crain’s analysis. That’s certainly true of its stock price. The government still owns 500 million shares of GM, 26 percent of the total. It needs to sell them for $53 a share to recover its $49.5 billion bailout. But the stock price is about $20 a share, and the Treasury now estimates that the government will lose more than $25 billion if and when it sells.

That’s in addition to the revenue lost when the Obama administration permitted GM to continue to deduct previous losses from current profits, even though such deductions are ordinarily wiped out in bankruptcy proceedings.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that GM is bleeding money because of decisions made by a management eager to please its political masters — and by the terms of the bankruptcy arranged by Obama car czars Ron Bloom and Steven Rattner. Rattner himself admitted late last year, in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, that “We should have asked the [United Auto Workers] to do a bit more. We did not ask any UAW member to take a cut in their pay.” Nonunion employees of GM spin-off Delphi lost their pensions. UAW members didn’t.

The UAW got its political payoff. And GM, according to Forbes writer Louis Woodhill, is headed to bankruptcy again. Is this really what Obama wants to do for all manufacturing across America? Let’s hope not.

Michael Barone needs to wake up and smell the coffee.  The GM fiasco isn’t what The Obamao WANTS for union manufacturing across America; it’s the only possible consequence of his policies!!!

Speaking of the only possible consequence of a hopelessly misguided policy, we learn….

Dempsey ‘disappointed’ by anti-Obama campaign by ex-military members

No, General Dempsey; the problem lies with YOU….and the rest of the senior officers who perpetuated the artifice of political-correctness which permitted this THIS animal….

….to slaughter 13 innocent servicemen and women at Fort Hood.  And which today delays his just execution because of a question regarding his beard.  Which is why, General Dempsey, we offer you our heartiest….

And a four-star douchebag at that!

Moving to the Health Section, the AEI‘s Scott Gottlieb and Thomas Miller, writing at Forbes.com, detail what we’ve been saying for months:

The closer one looks at Obamacare, the more it looks like Medicaid

Before November’s presidential election gives Americans a final vote on whether Obamacare survives, consumers should consider the kind of health insurance that they would get under the President’s plan. So far, President Obama is withholding the final set of regulations that describe just what health benefits the Obamacare plans will deliver. He may be waiting until after the election. But there’s enough detail already in the law to make decent estimates.

The answer turns out to get a lot worse, the closer one looks. There’s good reason to believe that in short order, the health plans sold in Obamacare’s heavily regulated, state-based insurance exchanges will degrade into something akin to today’s Medicaid managed care plans. If a lot of consumers who presently get their health coverage at work are dumped into these state exchanges (as many independent analysts predict), then tens of millions of Americans could find that they’re worse off under the new law and that their health benefits have been substantially devalued. (But we’ll guarantee no one on Team Tick-Tock will be found waiting for service!)

A lot of this relates to the relatively low “actuarial value” required for most of the health plans that consumers are likely to buy in those exchanges, how that figure is determined, and the limited subsidies most people will get to buy that coverage.

Participating insurers won’t be able to increase cost sharing, or drop mandatory benefits quickly and deeply enough to escape the growing squeeze between rising health care costs and the mounting federal budget deficits. The president’s mislabeled “Affordable Care” Act is structured in a way to almost guarantee that the quality of the health coverage offered in the exchanges must erode over time.

And these health plans aren’t likely to start out as a rich set of benefits either.

That actuarial value put on the benefits that plans could offer is priced off a measure of what kind of health services a “standard population” would need. Not the cost of the care actually delivered to people enrolled in a plan. This construction will compel competing plans to offer roughly the same standardized set of benefits, with the same level of out-of-pocket costs foisted on consumers. That’s the idea behind Obamacare. It envisions health plans as commodity products, with little variation in cost sharing or the “essential benefits” that federal regulation lets insurers offer.

Because permissible cost-sharing features will become more uniform, better plans that reduce the costs of their covered health spending will be driven to compete by offering lower premiums (instead of using the savings to offer broader benefits, pay more to attract better providers, or lower out-of-pocket costs paid by consumers.)

In contrast, Medicare’s Part D drug benefit and its Medicare Advantage program that allows seniors to access private health plans each give insurers incentives to compete on benefits as well as cost. But by benchmarking the Obamacare plans off a standard set of benefits, the only incentive plans have is to drive down their premiums, mostly by driving down what they pay to providers, just like Medicaid operates. The plans will have little option but to squeeze on those aspects of the health coverage that affects their costs but don’t reduce the actuarial value of the benefits (since those financial terms are set by the federal government). That means clamping down on things such as the quality of networks and providers.

Another factor that will drive down the quality of the health coverage is the benchmark for determining how much a plan will be subsidized by the federal government. Obamacare uses the cost of the second cheapest plan in a given state market. That means that each year, all of the health plans in a particular state exchange will get priced off whatever plan had the second cheapest benefit package.

That cheap plan could be an outlier – for example, one that offers very narrow networks of providers, sold perhaps as an intentional loss leader by a healthcare business looking to penetrate a market. This mechanism was intended to hold down costs. But its effect will be to steadily reduce the value of the coverage over time.

Right now, the regulations also suggest that health plans will be able to get away with only offering one drug from each major medical category. This is a standard less generous than most Medicaid coverage and far worse than Medicare drug plans.

Finally, the law also caps how much the government can spend on subsidizing the health plans. Beginning in 2019, enrollees can pay a higher percentage of income to enroll in a particular plan if Uncle Sam’s total cost of subsidizing all of the exchanges in the prior year exceeded 0.504 percent of GDP. This arbitrary cap was put in place as a surefire formula to meet the promised costs estimates for Obamacare. That cap is likely to be breached early because the exchange subsidies are projected to grow faster than GDP. Health plans must be cheapened further to stay under it.

The cap can be hit even faster if GDP continues to stagnate, or if the states move more of their Medicaid eligible citizens into the exchanges. The latter seems likely following the recent Supreme Court decision. It gives states the ability to opt out of the Medicaid expansion. By instead moving lower-income residents into the exchanges, then more of a state’s costs could be picked up by the feds.

With the benefits that the health plans must offer mandated by the government, with their profit margins controlled through regulation, their premiums capped by political jawboning, and the costs that they can pass onto consumers tightly fixed, the only way health plans will be able to compete on price is by cheapening the product that they offer. That means cheapening the quality of the coverage.

The President wants Americans to make peace with his law. First, consumers should know the value of their new coverage. Taken together, Obamacare’s adverse incentives will cause the quality of health benefits to be cyclically degraded as plans compete almost entirely on squeezing costs rather than raising quality.

In other words….

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll call it a week with another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter:

Rodney King’s death ruled accidental, Police say

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Where have we heard this before?!?

Magoo