The Daily Gouge, Monday, August 27th, 2012

On August 27, 2012, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Monday, August 27th, 2012….but before we begin, we pay homage (www.thedailygouge.com) to an authentic American hero:

Astronaut Neil Armstrong dies at 82

Armstrong may have boldly gone where no man had gone before, but he never forgot his fame was founded on the blood, sweat, toil and tears of hundreds of thousands of other, less-heralded Americans, as this quote featured in the WSJ details:

I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 people over a decade and that the nation’s hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out. With those pressures, it seemed the most important thing to do was focus on our job as best we were able to and try to allow nothing to distract us from doing the very best job we could. . . .

Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I’ve been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures.

In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have. I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, “If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.” And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that’s the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off. . . .

When I was working here at the Johnson Space Center, then the Manned Spacecraft Center, you could stand across the street and you could not tell when quitting time was, because people didn’t leave at quitting time in those days. People just worked, and they worked until whatever their job was done, and if they had to be there until five o’clock or seven o’clock or nine-thirty or whatever it was, they were just there. They did it, and then they went home. So four o’clock or four-thirty, whenever the bell rings, you didn’t see anybody leaving. Everybody was still working.

The way that happens and the way that made it different from other sectors of the government to which some people are sometimes properly critical is that this was a project in which everybody involved was, one, interested, two, dedicated, and, three, fascinated by the job they were doing. And whenever you have those ingredients, whether it be government or private industry or a retail store, you’re going to win.

Note Armstrong used 1st-person, singular pronouns only when referencing his own recollections or thoughts, and always used the plural “we”, “us” or “our” when speaking about the mission; humility, though undoubtedly natural, which was due in part to the knowledge every other NASA astronaut gladly would have, and could have, flown in his place.

Now, juxtapose Armstrong’s modesty against the unbridled, unwarranted braggodocio of….

….the quintessential anti-hero; a man whose entire life is a lie….who deserves none of the accolades he’s been awarded….who’s never worked a day, nor taken a real, personal risk, in his life.

RIP, Neil Armstrong; they may still make ’em like you, but they’re few and far between….and non-existent on the Left side of the aisle.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of George Lawlor and the The Weekly Standard, Jay Cost weighs in on….

The State of the Race

Obama is ahead, barely.

With just over two months until Election Day, Barack Obama holds a narrow lead over Mitt Romney in the race for the presidency. The lead is shallow, however, and a careful look at the landscape reveals significant weaknesses for the president. The key question remains whether Romney can capitalize on them.

President Obama has enjoyed a lead over Romney in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls every day since October 2011. Yet the president is bedeviled by problems. For one thing, he remains locked at around 47 percent support; for the last quarter-century, this has been roughly the floor for Democratic presidential candidates, suggesting that all the president has done to date is consolidate the Democratic base.

Beyond that, Obama faces substantial roadblocks. His job approval rating has hovered between 47 and 48 percent for months. Given that incumbent presidents rarely win voters who disapprove of their performance in office, this is a red flag for the Democrats. Worse, support for the president among the critical bloc—independents—is anemic at best, clocking in at just 41 percent in the latest Gallup poll. Compounding the White House’s difficulties, Obama’s job approval on the top issues of the campaign is much lower than his overall approval rating; his marks on the economy and the deficit are quite weak, and a majority of the country still opposes Obamacare.

Yet the president enjoys a lead, even with all of these problems. What accounts for this? Part of the explanation is that summer polls usually survey registered voters, which tends to include more Democrats than actually show up to vote on Election Day. In the Rasmussen daily tracking poll of likely voters, Romney has been mostly in the lead since May.

Still, Obama’s narrow lead means that the GOP cannot rest on its oars this cycle. Moving forward, Romney still needs to accomplish two tasks. One will be easy, the other less so.

The easy job is to consolidate the base Republican vote. In presidential elections in the last quarter-century, that has been about 46 percent of the public (controlling for third-party challenges). Romney’s numbers have consistently fallen below 45 percent, meaning that he must still pull in the last stragglers of the Republican coalition. The Republican National Convention, combined with the GOP’s forthcoming advertising onslaught, should accomplish this task. It is a sure bet that Republican voters will come out strongly for the GOP ticket this year, given their antipathy toward the president.

More difficult is convincing the all-important independents that Romney will make a better president than Obama. There is little the Democrats can do about the president’s weak job approval with this bloc. After all, independents have had three and a half years to observe the president and formulate an opinion. Instead, the left has taken to demagoguing Mitt Romney in the hopes of scaring the middle of the country away from the Republican party. This strategy has its origins in LBJ’s vicious “frontlash” campaign against Barry Goldwater in 1964; Johnson knew that he was bound to face a backlash over the Great Society and civil rights, so he sought effectively to disqualify Goldwater among middle-class moderates by casting the Arizona conservative as a threat to humanity.

This explains why Team Obama has dogged Romney so relentlessly on his tenure at Bain Capital. The hope is to define the GOP nominee as a heartless plutocrat who will make the rich richer and the poor poorer. This is, of course, an argument Democrats typically employ, going all the way back to 1896, but it forms the centerpiece of the Obama attack this cycle.

It is incumbent upon Romney to counter this—and not just by pointing out falsehoods and exaggerations in the Obama message. Instead, Romney will have to aggressively project a positive message over the next few months. That does not mean he has to distribute white papers to the mailboxes of all undecided voters. But he does have to combine a sunny optimism that America’s best days are ahead with enough specifics to leave the impression that he actually knows how to execute the turnaround the nation so desperately needs.

This task is at least as important as attacking the president’s record, arguably more so. After all, most voters have a well-formed opinion of the president. Further attacks on Obama need not convince people that he has done a bad job—they already think so—but must keep that opinion in the forefront of voters’ minds. After a certain point, attacks will not enhance the GOP argument; that’s where the positive message must begin.

The good news for conservatives is that Romney seems to understand this. His op-ed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal focuses on his tenure at Bain, but with a twist. Romney explains in detail what his tenure at Bain taught him about turning around troubled institutions. This is a perfect setup for a fall campaign that connects his biography to the challenges now facing our troubled country.

His vice presidential selection also shows that he understands the need to make a positive case. The “play it safe” strategy called for a vice presidential nominee who delivered votes in a big swing state, like Ohio or Florida. By going with Paul Ryan, Romney has signaled that he sees developing a message for change as his most important job. Ryan has become, without doubt, the intellectual leader of his party. Nobody in America has thought more about what the GOP should do when it returns to power, and by selecting Ryan, the former Massachusetts governor conveys that he will emphasize solutions in the fall campaign.

Many conservatives have been frustrated that Team Romney has not yet launched an aggressive counter-attack to the Obama message. After all, the president has spent tens of millions of dollars on negative advertising: Shouldn’t the GOP campaign have engaged?

The answer to that question lies in the old military maxim: Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes. Obama’s ad blitz over the summer seems largely to have been wasted. Voters were paying little attention, and the polls have actually tightened. Sure, Romney’s favorable ratings remain less than stellar; the most recent RealClearPolitics average of polls finds 45.5 percent of respondents viewing him favorably, 45 percent unfavorably. Nevertheless, swing voters likely make up most of the 10 percent who have not yet formed an opinion. The time to get them thinking positively about the GOP ticket begins at the convention. Team Romney may have been right to hold its fire through the summer.

While it is difficult to predict the outcome of a presidential election so far from the big day, the following nevertheless seems like a fair take:

Obama’s numbers remain 3 to 4 points short of a nationwide majority, and so far there is precious little evidence that the president can turn that around. This gives the Republicans an opening, but they will have to seize the initiative. Rather than waiting for victory to fall into his lap, Mitt Romney will have to pursue it aggressively. Fortunately, the choice of Ryan suggests that the GOP nominee understands this.

He most certainly does.

In a related item, just as Paul Ryan’s honesty and forthrightness has breathed new life into the GOP, the WSJ relates how the hypocrisy, disinformation and deceit endemic in anything and everything connected with the Left continues to dim the prospects for The Dear Misleader in November:

Cheesecake Factory Medicine

Paul Ryan’s critics and the architects of ObamaCare reveal their real vision for health care: coercion.

The liberal assault on Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform has often been ugly, but that’s not to say it hasn’t been instructive. While ripping Mr. Ryan, ObamaCare’s intellectual architects have been laying out in more detail their own vision for the future of American health care. It’s a vision that all Americans should know about before they go to the polls in November.

No one did more to sell the Affordable Care Act than Peter Orszag, the former White House budget director who claimed during 2009-2010 that as much as a third of health spending is “waste” that doesn’t improve outcomes. But now that he’s repaired to Wall Street and writes an online column, he’s deriding the idea that better incentives can reduce costs and sneering at the “health-care competition tooth fairy.”

So get a load of Mr. Orszag’s Tinker Bell alternative, which he called the “most important institutional change” after ObamaCare passed in 2010: the Independent Payment Advisory Board composed of 15 philosopher kings who will rule over U.S. health care.

Who are these Orszag 15? Well, nobody knows. The board was supposed to be up and running by the end of September, but the White House is avoiding naming names for Senate confirmation until after the election. (Which begs the question why this isn’t yet the subject of a GOP ad blitz.) No one knows, either, what this group of geniuses will propose, but that too is part of the grand Orszag plan.

ObamaCare included dozens of speculative pilot programs that are supposed to make health-care delivery and business models less wasteful. Mr. Orszag’s payment board is then supposed to apply the programs that “work” to all of U.S. medicine through regulation, without Congressional consent or legal appeal. Seriously.

It doesn’t take a mythical childhood metaphor to mock this theory. Mr. Orszag’s style of central planning—in what was already the heaviest regulated U.S. industry before ObamaCare—has failed over and over again in Medicare since the creation of the fiat pricing fee schedule in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, another ObamaCare godfather, the surgeon and influential New Yorker magazine writer Atul Gawande, has further instructions for the medical masses, this time from—believe it or not—the Cheesecake Factory, the chain restaurant.

Dr. Gawande’s point is that medicine would function better if care were delivered by huge health systems that can achieve economies of scale, like commercial kitchens. Care ought to be standardized like preparing a side of beef, with a “single default way” to perform each treatment supposedly based on evidence, with little room for personalization.

No doubt health care could learn a lot about efficiency from a lot of industries, but to understand the core problem with assembly-line medicine, recall that ObamaCare actively promotes medical corporatism. The reason isn’t to encourage business efficiency but for political control. Liberals believe in health-care consolidation because fewer giant corporations are easier for Mr. Orszag’s central committee to control, and more amenable to its orders.

Thanks to ObamaCare, Cheesecake Factory medicine is already becoming a reality. Irving Levin Associates, a research firm that tracks health-care mergers and acquisitions, reports that M&A hit $61.2 billion in the second quarter and the highest annual levels since the 1990s. Three of five hospitals now belong to a parent company’s network, while more than half of physicians are employed by hospitals or systems, not independent practitioners.

On the insurer side, too, incumbents are demolishing their smaller rivals. Aetna is buying Coventry Health Care, a company that administers Medicare and Medicaid benefits, for $5.6 billion. WellPoint made the same play in acquiring Amerigroup for $5 billion in July, while last October Cigna laid out $3.8 billion for HealthSpring.

This bureaucratization will amplify everything patients and businesses despise about the current system: the unintelligible $103,234.61 bill for a turned ankle, the doctor who can’t take a phone call because of how the hospital schedules shift.

Why aren’t mom’s eight specialists aware of each other’s existence? Why is health care mostly conducted via a pad and pen, and beepers and fax machines, in the iPhone era? Why are there so few geriatricians when the first wave of Baby Boomers is already turning 65? Why is it still so hard to find usable information about quality and prices?

The reason isn’t a lack of hospital administrators or technocratic experts. More often than not it’s that patients aren’t the true consumers. The government is, and medical providers inevitably serve the paymaster.

Mr. Ryan’s insight is that health care would work better if patients were controlling their own dollars. His reform accepts the fact that health, disease and treatment are usually complex, individual and unpredictable, not commodities that can and should be reduced to protocols, metrics, algorithms.

The immediate danger of the Orszag-Gawande-Obama vision is that layer on layer of new regulation will lock in less-than-best practices. This makes the status quo worse, because too-big-to-fail oligopolists have less incentive to innovate to reduce costs and improve quality.

The longer-run danger is that Mr. Orszag’s cost board starts to decide what types of care “work” for society at large and thus what individual patients are allowed to receive. One way or another, health costs must come down. And if Mr. Ryan’s market proposal is rejected, then government a la Orszag will do it by brute political force.

A murderer’s row of liberal health-care gurus—Zeke Emanuel, Neera Tanden, Don Berwick, David Cutler, Uwe Reinhardt, Steve Shortell, Mr. Orszag, many others—recently acknowledged as much in the New England Journal of Medicine. They conceded that “health costs remain a major challenge” despite ObamaCare. That would have been nice to know in, oh, 2009 or 2010.

Anyhow, their big idea is the very old idea of price controls that are “binding on all payers and providers,” much as post-RomneyCare Massachusetts is already doing. When that strategy fails as it always has, and the public denies further tax increases, the Orszag payment board will then start to ration or prohibit access to medical resources that it decides aren’t worth the expense.

These political choices will be unpopular and even deadly, which is why Mr. Orszag worked so hard to insulate his payment board from oversight or accountability. Congress can only reject the board’s decisions if it substitutes something else that reduces costs by as much. More amazing still, only a minority of the board can be “directly involved” in the provision of health care.

This latter provision is supposed to prevent the alleged conflicts of interest that come from knowing something about how health care is provided in the real world. What it reveals instead is that this board isn’t about medical quality at all. It is purely a balance-sheet exercise to make sure that the Orszag-Obama agenda of top-down health care can’t be undone by something as crude as democratic consent.

And they claim that Paul Ryan’s proposal is “radical”?

What the debate over Mr. Ryan’s reform is revealing is that the real health-care choice, and the real choice this November, is about the role of government. The Orszags of the world ultimately have what President Obama would call an “ideological” preference for coercion over individual choice. They want to impose the unilateral decisions of the state over those of millions of Americans.

The larger irony is that ObamaCare’s architects claim that all of this will lead to more equity in the delivery of medical services, but in practice it will have the opposite effect. Americans of even middle-class means will not tolerate being told they cannot spend their own money to improve their own health or save the lives of their loved ones, so under price-controlled ObamaCare we will quickly see the emergence of a two- or even three-tier system outside the reach of government.

The affluent will get their own special level of service. Certainly Mr. Orszag, a vice chairman of corporate and investment banking at Citigroup, won’t be getting treatment at some municipal hospital. The Cheesecake Factory is a great place to eat but you probably wouldn’t want to be operated on there—especially if it’s run by the government.

Or, to put it another way:

Yeah….us, not them!

And since we’re on the subject of premeditated Progressive prevarication, as Stephen Dinan reports in The Washington Times….

Deportation statistics said to be inflated

Say hello to my little friend, America!

The Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is charging that the Obama administration has “falsified” deportation records to artificially boost numbers — a move critics of the Homeland Security Department have long suspected.

Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texan who runs the committee, said the Obama administration has for the past several years been mixing some Border Patrol apprehensions with the deportation statistics from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency chiefly responsible for interior enforcement and for deporting aliens. His investigation found that when the Border Patrol numbers are subtracted, deportations actually have gone down every year since Mr. Obama first took office in 2009, dropping from about 395,000 that year to about 330,000 in 2011.

And 2012 is shaping up to have even fewer deportations once the Border Patrol figures are subtracted, the committee said.

“It is dishonest to count illegal immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol along the border as ICE removals,” Mr. Smith said. “These ‘removals’ from the Border Patrol program do not subject the illegal immigrant to any penalties or bars for returning to the U.S. This means a single illegal immigrant can show up at the border and be removed numerous times in a single year — and counted each time as a removal.”

ICE did not directly dispute Mr. Smith’s claim but defended its enforcement strategy.

….Mr. Smith’s committee obtained documents that show 72,000 people caught by the Border Patrol and sent to ICE under the Border Patrol’s Alien Transfer Exit Program are being included in the ICE statistics. Administration officials told the committee they have been including those numbers in their official count since 2011.

The Obama administration has been trying to walk a fine line between those who want to see more deportations and immigrant-advocacy groups that say deportations should he halted altogether. Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano has said that her department only has the resources to deport about 400,000 aliens a year, and she uses that limit to justify the administration’s policy that rank-and-file illegal immigrants without major criminal records shouldn’t be a priority for deportation.

Republicans, though, say the administration is turning a blind eye to most illegal immigrants, enacting de facto amnesty.

Here’s the juice. It’s as we’ve said: everything….and we mean everything….about this President and his Administration is built and maintained on lies. Unemployment figures, polling results, budget numbers, healthcare statistics, etc., etc., etc….ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

The question at hand isn’t whether or not they are lying, but rather when they’ve ever told the truth….about anything!

Which brings us to the Education Section, courtesy again of the WSJ:

California’s School Head Fake

Sacramento tries to strip student performance from teacher evaluations.

Covering the skulduggery in Sacramento is a full-time job, and sometimes it’s hard to keep up, but we’ll try. The latest example is an education bill that seeks to pre-empt a recent court order requiring that teachers be evaluated in part on student test scores. As always, the unions are getting the last word.

The school reform movement is sweeping the country as even many liberal Democrats seek to unite with parents against the union establishment. The Obama Administration has helped at the margin by making teacher accountability a factor in requests for more federal aid. Half of states now link teacher evaluations with student learning, and another half dozen are moving in that direction. Then there’s California, which is doing a moon-walk on school reform.

In 1971 the state passed the Stull Act requiring that teacher evaluations take into account student progress. The legislature amended the law twice in the 1990s to make state standardized test scores a criterion for measuring progress. However, since most school boards take their marching orders from the unions, the law has been largely ignored. That was until a handful of parents last year sued the Los Angeles Unified School District for noncompliance.

In June Superior Court Judge James Chalfant ordered the district to include student test scores in teacher evaluations in accordance with the law. As the judge noted, something’s amiss when 99.3% of teachers receive the highest grade on their evaluations, but only 46% of students score proficient on language arts state tests. The ruling set a precedent for parents across the state to demand that their districts also obey Stull.

This has alarmed the unions, which ordered their friends in the legislature to supercede the Los Angeles court order and ward off more legal challenges. The Assembly has dutifully passed a bill, which the Senate is now considering, that makes teacher evaluations entirely subject to collective bargaining. The bill would supposedly require evaluations to measure student academic growth, but that too would be subject to union negotiations.

Here’s the kicker. Governor Jerry Brown and state Superintendent Tom Torlakson think they can sell this legislation as genuine reform to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who should know better. According to Mr. Torlakson, the bill would make the state’s application for a No Child Left Behind waiver “more attractive.”

Only in the eyes of the union beholders and beholden. One of the Education Department’s criteria for a waiver is that states link a significant share of teacher evaluations to student achievement and test scores.

The anti-reformers are betting the White House will bend because it needs union support this fall. If Mr. Duncan does oblige, he’ll be undermining his own standards for federal aid and betraying California students.

Speaking of the spineless betrayal, this weekend saw Team Tick-Tock welcomes another kindred spirit:

Former GOP Gov. Charlie Crist Endorses Barack Obama

Gee….what’s changed between then….

….and now….other than the fact Crist is an self-centered, opportunistic politician conclusively crushed by Marco Rubio 49%-30%….in a three-way race?

So, here’s to you, Charlie: