It’s Thursday, November 3rd, 2011….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, Colorado ballot results as detailed in the WSJ which should serve to sober even the drunkest Spendocrats, be they sailors or nay:

‘A Killing Field for Tax Measures’

It’s still a tea party in Colorado.

You probably won’t be reading much about it, and don’t look for the results to get a lot of airtime on CNN or MSNBC, but Colorado held a referendum on taxes on Tuesday. The tax increasers got blown away.

By a nearly 2 to 1 margin, voters rejected a $2.9 billion income and sales tax increase ostensibly earmarked for education. Proposition 103 would have raised the income tax rate to 5% from 4.63% and the sales tax to 3% from 2.9%.

Supporters claimed the tax would merely have been “temporary” and was needed to make up for recent cuts in state spending for K-12 and college education. Both are familiar ploys to sell tax hikes that fund higher spending and typically become permanent.

The education gambit was a sneaky attempt to undermine the state’s landmark and popular Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which was approved by voters in the 1990s and has slowed the growth of government. Tabor, as it is known, caps the state budget to the growth of population and inflation each year while rebating revenues above that limit to taxpayers. The union scheme was to erode the spending caps by exempting education spending and earmarking new tax revenues to schools, which already command 40% of the state’s general fund budget.

The Independence Institute, a free-market think tank, warned Coloradans that exempting education from the spending cap is what undermined California’s Gann Amendment budget ceilings in the 1980s. California’s spending and tax burden exploded in the aftermath, leading to its current fiscal and economic laments.

Colorado’s antitax mood was equally clear at the local level. The Denver Post reports that “Aurora voters rejected a $114 million tax increase for recreation centers, Douglas County voters said ‘no’ to school tax increases, and Cañon City voters rejected a tax for library improvements.” The paper called the overall results “a killing field for tax measures.”

Even in the People’s Republic of Boulder, voters only narrowly approved (with 50.27%, a margin of 141 votes) a $1.9 million tax to finance a new a municipal electric utility to replace the state’s main electricity supplier Xcel Energy. Boulder residents will now have the pleasure of paying for their anticarbon indulgences.

Notably, too, voters in Denver elected two reformers to the school board, while suburban Douglas County elected a slate of pro-voucher candidates. Earlier this year Douglas County began a controversial voucher program that provides Choice Scholarships for low-income students and is now being challenged in court. The election results show that the voucher advocates have public support.

Oh, and one more burst of democratic common sense: Denver voters rejected, also by nearly 2 to 1, another union measure that would have mandated that all businesses pay sick leave for all workers. In 2008, Barack Obama carried Denver overwhelmingly and Colorado with 53.5% of the vote. Tuesday’s results suggest that the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ mood that has so enthused Washington elites has yet to reach the Rockies.

Speaking of the increasingly tedious OWS movement, as Conn Carroll notes in his the Morning Examiner, the increasingly vapid vagrants may, with the active assistance of the Liberal establishment, finally be reaching for the proverbial bridge too far:

Occupy Your Neighborhood

Today, Occupy Oakland is organizing what could turn out to be the largest demonstration since the Vietnam War: a city wide general strike. But it is possible Occupy Oakland already made bigger news last night when the General Assembly voted to encourage occupiers to squat in bank-owned/foreclosed properties. If this spreads across the nation, it could be a game-changing moment for the movement.

The main Occupy Oakland encampment already has tons of support from the same dysfunctional institutions that are bankrupting California. Oakland Mayor Jean Quann is now 100% behind the movement, and she has given all city workers – except the cops – the day off to join the protests. California’s big unions are also supporting the occupiers, with the Oakland teachers union footing the bill for at least nine portable toilets for the protesters, and the California Nurses Association planting a garden to provide occupiers with fresh food.

But all this pampering is not enough. The occupiers want more. Hence the resolution last night to begin occupying empty homes throughout the city. The current Occupy Oakland encampment is in a lightly used area of downtown Oakland. There are few businesses and fewer residents. Occupying homes will bring the reality of the movement a lot closer to many city residents than ever before. And what if this tactic spreads to other cities? Oakland is fairly temperate and it would not be hard to camp-out there year-round.. But in other colder cities, the move to occupy homes could be just the warm ticket frozen occupiers need to survive the winter.

Will the same problems that have plagued Occupy camps nationwide (drug dealing, sexual assault, rape, noise disturbances, violence, etc.), continue into residential neighborhoods? Will otherwise lawful homeowners tolerate these lawless hovels?

For what our two cents is worth, the more America sees of these fools (as detailed in today’s Cover Story and Lighter Side feature segment), the less we tolerate, let alone support them.

In a related item, more of the undeniable wisdom of Thomas Sowell:

Democracy Versus Mob Rule

In various cities across the country, mobs of mostly young, mostly incoherent, often noisy and sometimes violent demonstrators are making themselves a major nuisance. Meanwhile, many in the media are practically gushing over these “protesters,” and giving them the free publicity they crave for themselves and their cause — whatever that is, beyond venting their emotions on television.

Members of the mobs apparently believe that other people, who are working while they are out trashing the streets, should be forced to subsidize their college education — and apparently the president of the United States thinks so too.

But if these loud mouths’ inability to put together a coherent line of thought is any indication of their education, the taxpayers should demand their money back for having that money wasted on them for years in the public schools.

Sloppy words and sloppy thinking often go together, both in the mobs and in the media that are covering them. It is common, for example, to hear in the media how some “protesters” were arrested. But anyone who reads this column regularly knows that I protest against all sorts of things — and don’t get arrested.

The difference is that I don’t block traffic, join mobs sleeping overnight in parks or urinate in the street. If the media cannot distinguish between protesting and disturbing the peace, then their education may also have wasted a lot of taxpayers’ money.

Among the favorite sloppy words used by the shrill mobs in the streets is “Wall Street greed.” But even if you think people in Wall Street, or anywhere else, are making more money than they deserve, “greed” is no explanation whatever.

“Greed” says how much you want. But you can become the greediest person on earth and that will not increase your pay in the slightest. It is what other people pay you that increases your income.

If the government has been sending too much of the taxpayers’ money to people in Wall Street — or anywhere else — then the irresponsibility or corruption of politicians is the problem. “Occupy Wall Street” hooligans should be occupying Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.

Maybe some of the bankers or financiers should have turned down the millions and billions that politicians were offering them. But sainthood is no more common in Wall Street than on Pennsylvania Avenue — or in the media or academia, for that matter.

Actually, some banks did try to refuse the government bailout money, to avoid the interference with their business that they knew would come with it. But the feds insisted — and federal regulators’ power to create big financial problems for banks made it hard to say no. The feds made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

People who cannot distinguish between democracy and mob rule may fall for the idea that the hooligans in the street represent the 99 percent who are protesting about the “greed” of the one percent. But these hooligans are less than one percent and they are grossly violating the rights of vastly larger numbers of people who have to put up with their trashing of the streets by day and their noise that keeps working people awake at night.

As for the “top one percent” in income that attract so much attention, angst and denunciation, there is always going to be a top one percent, unless everybody has the same income. That top one percent has no more monopoly on sainthood or villainy than people in any other bracket.

Moreover, that top one percent does not consist of the “millionaires and billionaires” that Barack Obama talks about. You don’t even have to make half a million dollars to be in the top one percent.

Moreover, this is not an enduring class of people. Nor are people in other income brackets. Most of the people in the top one percent at any given time are there for only one year. Anyone who sells an average home in San Francisco can get into the top one percent in income — for that year. Other one-time spikes in income account for most of the people in that top one percent.

But such plain facts carry little weight amid the heady rhetoric and mindless emotions of the mob and the media.

Next, in a follow-up to an earlier item regarding Team Tick-Tock’s bureaucratic response to the problem of increasingly frequent prescription drug shortages, we present today’s “Oh What Tangled Webs They Weave….Whenever The Government Gets Involved In ANYTHING!” segment, where the WSJ reveals the federal government IS the problem:

The Bush-Obama Rx Shortages

Critical cancer drugs are in short supply thanks to price controls.

This week President Obama finally confronted a major U.S. health-care disgrace—the growing shortages of lifesaving drugs, especially anticancer therapies. For some reason the White House lumped its executive order with its “we can’t wait” campaign against House Republicans, but the pity is that we will have to wait, because the only genuine fix is a liberal anathema: market prices.

Shortages have more than tripled since 2005, according to the University of Utah’s Drug Information Service, and by the end of the year more than 300 products are likely to be back-ordered, in short supply or totally unavailable. Some are anesthetics and pain therapies, others emergency room “crash cart” drugs. But most—about 70% in 2010—belong to the class of drugs known as “sterile injectables” that are mainstays of the chemotherapy arsenal, such as paclitaxel or cytarabine.

The result is that more and more patients are receiving substandard care—relying on less effective or more expensive substitutes or else forced to postpone treatment. In oncology, delays of weeks or even days can be fatal.

Most sterile injectables have been off-patent for decades, but unlike other cheap generic drugs with low profit margins, production is complex and requires special facilities. Nonetheless, George W. Bush and the Republican majority decided that Medicare was “overpaying” for these cancer drugs and included a 6% cap on price increases every six months in the 2003 prescription drug bill. These new price controls (which apply to the providers that purchase the drugs) took effect in 2005, when the shortages began. (The plot thickens!)

In a rational market, sterile injectable prices would now be rising to encourage more supply, since the demand for cancer drugs is inelastic. The old reimbursement system, called “buy and bill,” was imperfect, but at least it allowed prices to float and wasn’t producing the scarcity that central planning always does. The sterile injectables that are in short supply currently sell for $37.88 a dose on average, and modest price increases could make the market economic.

The problem is compounded because Food and Drug Administration rules cause pointless delays. It takes as long as two and a half years to receive FDA manufacturing approval for a generic, so other drug makers can’t ramp up production if a company cancels a product line due to these disincentives or even if the fragile supply chain for sterile injectables is contaminated and manufacture is delayed.

Mr. Obama’s executive order will do little if any good since it doesn’t address or even mention this underlying distortion that Medicare has created. Instead, it merely expands the FDA reporting requirements about production interruptions or terminations. This is supposed to be an early warning system, but the scandal is that the availability of basic medicines could be allowed to become an emergency.

The order also tells the Justice Department to crack down on the “grey markets” that have sprung up to deliver supplies to doctors and hospitals, albeit with the inevitable markups. So rather than allow price signals to govern supply and demand, Mr. Obama wants to suppress them further.

The larger danger apart from the risks to the patients forced to receive compromised treatment is to the future of cancer progress. The common chemotherapy drugs are critical in clinical trials as the standard regimen or in combination with new options, and the Coalition of Cancer Cooperative Groups reports that as many as half of all ongoing trials require the drugs that are vanishing. This is a delay that really is killing people.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for any of the MSLSD crew to cover this latest example of government ineptitude; the truth just ain’t in ’em!

Since we’re on the subject of strangers to the truth, we turn now to today’s Muslim Minute, where we learn….

Man Publicly Beheaded in Saudi Arabia for Being a ‘Sorcerer’

“‘E turned me into a NEWT”, one witness stated.

“I got better”, he later added.

And in the “Heights of Hypocrisy” segment, aka “THAT Was Then, THIS Is Now!”:

Obama Praises New Boeing Jobs in Florida

President Obama has praised the creation of potentially hundreds of new jobs by a Boeing deal in Florida; a state still hurting from the loss of some 7,000 Kennedy Space Centerjobs after the president ended NASA’s space shuttle program. “The next era of space exploration won’t wait, and so we can’t wait for Congress to do its job and give our space program the funding it needs,” the president said in a statement Tuesday.

“That’s why my administration will be pressing forward, in partnership with Space Florida and the private sector, to create jobs and make sure America continues to lead the world in exploration and discovery,” he added.

But the president recently sliced a chunk out of the space exploration job market by ending NASA’s long-running space shuttle program. He did that, he said, so that NASA could refocus on less routine travel and ultimately send a mission to Mars.

Obama says he’ll make the final decision on Keystone oil pipeline

President Obama strongly suggested Tuesday that he will make the final decision on whether the administration will approve the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline. His remarks come a day after White House press secretary Jay Carney appeared to put some space between Obama and the controversial project by stating“This is a decision that will be made by the State Department.”

But Obama, in an interview with a Nebraska TV stationfrom the White House, indicated that the State Department – which is leading the federal review of TransCanada Corp.’s plan – would put the final decision in his hands.

“[State] will be giving me a report over the next several months and, you know, my general attitude is, what is best for the American people? What’s best for our economy both short-term and long-term? But also, what’s best for the health of the American people?,” Obama told KETV’s Rob McCartney.

“Because we don’t want for example aquifers . . . adversely affected. Folks in Nebraska obviously would be directly impacted, and so we want to make sure we’re taking the long view on these issues,” Obama added. Obama said he will weigh those concerns against energy security needs when recommendations cross his desk.

Gee….should it come as a surprise the Environazis have cited “fears pipeline spills could contaminate the Ogallala aquifer in Nebraska and other states along the route” as a primary reason they stand in opposition to the pipeline?!?  Along with of course the standard screeds about “greenhouse gas emissions, forest damage and other impacts from oil sands projects”.

Perhaps in reaching his decision, The Obamao would be kind enough to request the Environazis answer these simple questions:

(1).  How many forests lie between the pipelines point of entry from Canada south across, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska?

(2).  The Keystone XL pipeline will be constructed underground using state-of-the-art technology and utilizing every available environmental safeguard.  The Alyeska pipeline, constructed above ground in 1973, has shipped over 16,000,000 barrels of oil from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, has suffered only two minor leaks (approximately 16,000 and 6,500 barrels respectively), both the results of deliberate damage inflicted by firearms and both repaired and remediated within two days of the incidents.  As the Ogallala aquifer is, at its nearest point to the surface, over 100′ beneath the soil of Nebraska, what is the likelihood of any leak, let alone one significant enough to damage the aquifer?

(3).  Let’s assume for the moment the pipeline isn’t built; will anyone in the United States drive less, thereby decreasing greenhouse gas emissions?  Or will folks only pay more per mile for their fuel?

Yeah….we thought so!

On the Lighter Side….

Turning next to the Crime Blotter, we learn that the….

Wisconsin Woman Accused of Killing Pregnant Woman And Fetus Pleads Insanity

Utah Man, Shoots Neighbor For ‘Telepathically Threatening’ Him

A Utah man shot and severely wounded a neighbor who he believed had been “telepathically threatening” him and his wife, according to police. Michael Selleneit, 53, is accused of opening fire on Tony Pierce at around 4:55 p.m. on Oct. 30 in their Centerville trailer park, hitting the 41-year-old victim in the back and the leg.

“It was totally unprovoked. The victim was working in his yard with his back to the shooter,” Lt. Paul Child, of the Centerville Police Department, told Fox 13. “There was no argument or anything that precipitated this particular event.”

For his part, Selleneit reportedly claims he fired on his neighbor in self-defense. The suspect insisted to investigators that Pierce had been “telepathically threatening” himself and his wife, and claimed his neighbor “had telepathically raped his wife on many occasions,” police told The Tribune.

Selleneit, has a “diminished mental capacity,” according to Fox 13. (Gee….ya THINK?!?) Police say he believed Pierce was attempting to break into his trailer — an allegation the suspect had lobbed at other neighbors before. Investigators recovered a .380-caliber semi-automatic handgun believed to have been used in the attack. Police say Selleneit is not allowed to own a firearm due to a 1990 conviction for forcible sexual abuse of a child.

There oughta be a LAW!  Oh….there is?  Well….there oughta be ANOTHER law!

Magoo