It’s Thursday, March 8th, 2012….and as we’ll be taking Friday off, we’ll catch you all on Monday.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, writing in Political Diary, Paul Gigot gives Mitt Romney all he needs to away from Super Tuesday:
Exit Poll Statistic of the Year
An exit poll in Massachusetts about health care shed’s light on Romney’s standing in the GOP primaries.
Romneycare: unfortunately, like Obamascare, the joke’s on taxpayer.
The Super Tuesday exit polls yielded a mountain of data in 10 states, but the most telling single statistic may have been in Massachusetts, which Mitt Romney won in a largely uncontested rout. Yet believe it or not, he still lost on health care.
The exit poll asked voters their opinion of the “Massachusetts Health Care Law,” with the options of Did Not Go Far Enough, About Right and Went Too Far. Remarkably, 51% said the bill went too far, while only 37% said it was about right, and 6% said not far enough.
Granted these are GOP primary voters, who are largely conservatives. But the result reveals how unpopular government-mandated health care is, even in its Massachusetts birthplace. Mr. Romney says during debates that RomneyCare is popular in the liberal Bay State, and that’s true among all voters. But the exit poll shows why the health-care bill continues to be a political liability for the former governor in the GOP primaries.
Exit polls in other states didn’t ask about health care, alas, focusing on the budget deficit, abortion, the economy and (tediously) illegal immigration in the question about which issues most influenced voters. The candidates differ little or not at all on immigration. The exit poll designers would be wise to include ObamaCare or RomneyCare next time as an indicator of what is moving voters to Rick Santorum, or away from Mr. Romney. Mr. Santorum is hammering away on RomneyCare because he understands it is working for him politically.
Even were Mitt to finally get the message, it may well be too late for him to execute a graceful reverse double-somersault flip-flop in the pike position.
Next up, Jonah Goldberg details the realities of the Left’s….
Birth Control Agitprop
In 1984, Mario Cuomo pioneered the argument that one may be “personally opposed” to abortion, while supporting abortion rights. (Yet at the same time willing to allow his personal opposition to capital punishment to override the expressed will of rights of the vast majority of New Yorkers.)
Ever since, this convenient locution has become a staple for countless Democratic politicians, particularly Catholic ones. It is Vice President Joe Biden’s view and was Senator John Kerry’s stance when he ran for president in 2004.
Cuomo’s argument was a mess.(Oh, what tangled webs we weave….) For instance, in order to buttress his argument he touted the (alleged) refusal of American Catholic bishops to forcefully denounce slavery. The bishops “weren’t hypocrites; they were realists,” Cuomo explained. They offered a “measured attempt to balance moral truths against political realities.”
As Ramesh Ponnuru writes in “The Party of Death”: “It is a mark of the strength of contemporary liberalism’s commitment to abortion that one of its leading lights should have been willing to support temporizing on slavery in order to defend it.”
I bring this up because according to the logic of Democrats these days, all of these politicians want to ban abortion. It doesn’t matter that they support abortion rights, in word and deed. It doesn’t matter that they’re willing to forgive tolerance for slavery to defend the distinction. They are personally opposed to abortion, usually as a matter of faith, and so they must favor banning it.
That’s the upshot of the shockingly dishonest propaganda being peddled by leading Democrats and media outlets about the Republican push to “ban” contraception.Part of the problem is simply psychological projection. Since many liberals believe there’s no valid limiting principle on government’s ability to do “good,” they assume that conservatives believe there’s no valid limiting principle to do “bad.”
Rick Santorum, who unproductively helped inject birth control into the GOP primaries, nonetheless explained the flaw in this thinking. “Here’s the difference between me and the Left, and they don’t get this. Just because I’m talking about it doesn’t mean I want a government program to fix it.That’s what they do. That’s not what we do.”
But don’t tell that to the Democrats who are desperate to accuse the Republicans of Comstockery. “Let’s admit what this debate is really and what Republicans really want to take away from American women. It is contraception,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) outrageously claimed while opposing the Blunt Amendment. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) said the GOP was yearning to return to “the Dark Ages … when women were property that you could easily control, even trade if you wanted to.”
The Obama campaign insists that “if Mitt Romney and a few Republican senators get their way, employers could be making women’s health care decisions for them” and require that women seek a permission slip to obtain birth control.
It’s all so breathtakingly dishonest. Rather than transport us to President Franklin Pierce’s America, never mind Charlemagne’s Europe, the Blunt Amendment would send America hurtling back to January 2012. In that Handmaid’s Tale of an America, women were free to buy birth control from their local grocery store or Walmart pharmacy, and religious employers could opt not to subsidize the purchase. What a terrifying time that must have been for America’s women.
To be sure, Republicans invited some of this madness upon themselves. But it was Barack Obama who started this mess by breaking his vow to religious institutions to allow them to keep the same conscience protections that even Hillary Rodham Clinton’s proposed health-care reforms in 1994 recognized as essential.
The lying demonization of Republicans isn’t nearly so offensive, or at least surprising, as the extremist policy assumptions liberals are now using to defend Obama’s “accommodation” of religious institutions. They argue, in short, that if employers and the government — using taxpayer money — do not provide birth control (and some abortifacients), for “free,” then they are banning birth control. Taking them seriously — no easy task — Democrats are saying that there’s no legitimate realm outside of government.
In other words, there’s no room for anybody to be personally opposed to paying for someone else’s birth control. That means the people who want birth control to be a personal matter and no one else’s business are demagogically fighting for a policy in which your birth control is in fact everyone’s business, starting with the government’s.
Whether you take them seriously or not, this is EXACTLY what Dimocrats are saying….and more importantly, fervently believe.
Meanwhile, as the WaPo‘s Dana Millbank reports, courtesy of G. Trevor, Lord High King of All Vietors, Team Tick-Tock continues to reveal no matter how much people hoped, things haven’t changed; in fact, they’ve gotten much worse:
Settling in to Washington’s ways
“Ricchetti has been through the revolving door more often than a bellhop at the Mayflower Hotel….”
Three years into his presidency, Barack Obama has finally overcome his pesky, puritanical aversion to K Street. As a candidate, Obama pledged that lobbyists “will not run my White House.” But on Monday, the president brought in one of this town’s most prominent lobbyists to run his White House — or at least a nice piece of it.
Steve Ricchetti, whose long list of lobbying clients included Fannie Mae, General Motors, the American Hospital Association and Eli Lilly, was tapped to be counselor to Vice President Biden.
Ricchetti achieved this feat — getting around the ban on lobbyists serving in the administration — by using one of Washington’s most-honored traditions: the loophole. Just as Obama won the presidency, Ricchetti de-registered as a lobbyist for his various clients. But he remained president of the lobbying firm that continued to work for many of those same clients, as well as a few more, such as the American Bankers Association.
Only in today’s Washington could a president circumvent his own ban on hiring lobbyists by hiring the head of a lobbying firm.
Ricchetti no doubt will give Biden excellent counsel; he has more than a quarter-century of experience in politics and government, and he is highly regarded around town. But his appointment shows just how flimsy Obama’s ethical reforms have been — and how absurd the official standards are for who is a “lobbyist” in the influence industry.For many Americans, this sort of chicanery adds to a suspicion that the fix is in.
Or, to put it more accurately, that The Obamao lies like a….
….take your pick!
Speaking of the Post, it’s the subject of a commentary by J.D. Foster writing at Heritage.org‘s The Foundry, courtesy of Conn Carroll’s Morning Examiner:
WaPo Admitting Keynesian Stimulus Failed?
Does unprecedented deficit-spending such as on highways stimulate the economy? For the last few years, some have argued it could. Some have argued it might. Some have argued it would if done right.
We have consistently argued that deficit spending on highways or anything else intended to lift aggregate demand, and therefore jobs, must and would fail. The economic evidence that we were right has now been joined by the illustrious trio of The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and the esteemed Alice Rivlin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget.
Monday’s edition of the Post carries a story sourced to the Associated Press entitled, “Highway bills pitched as by lawmakers as job creators, but are they really? Economists say no.”
Notice especially the subject of the piece: federal highway spending. If ever there was a sympathetic topic for stimulus, it is infrastructure spending, especially highway funding. Remember, these were some of President Obama’s “shovel-ready” projects that turned out to be not so shovel ready, as he later admitted.
So what went wrong? Why is this not short-term stimulus? The widely respected Rivlin explained it clearly and succinctly: “Investments in infrastructure, if well designed, should be viewed as investments in future productivity growth.”
Exactly right—future productivity growth.
She went on to say that if investments in infrastructure “speed the delivery of goods and people, they will certainly do that. They will also create jobs, but not necessarily more jobs than the same money spent in other ways.”
Exactly right—a dollar spent is a dollar spent.A job gained here, a job lost there.
This speaks to a longstanding flaw of highway spending arguments. Proponents argue that this spending creates tens of thousands of jobs, and they are half right. The other half is the tens of thousands of jobs not created (or saved) by shifting spending to highways from other areas in the economy. The valid argument about infrastructure spending is: If done right, it will lift future productivity growth, not current job growth.
The central failing—the essential fiscal alchemy of Keynesian stimulus—is the belief that government can increase total spending in the economy by borrowing and spending. What Keynesians ignore is that we have financial markets whose job in good times and bad is first and foremost to shift funds from savers to investors, from those who have money they do not wish to spend today to those who have a need to borrow to spend as much as they’d like, whether on new business equipment, a home, or a car.
There are no vast sums of “excess funds” just sitting around in bank tellers’ drawers waiting for government to borrow and spend them. Government borrowing means less money available to the private sector to spend. So government deficit spending goes up, and dollar-for-dollar private spending goes down. America’s resources are generally speaking spent less wisely, and the federal debt is unequivocally higher.
If past is prologue, the current infatuation with Keynesian deficit spending as stimulus will fade, just as it always has in the past, in this country as elsewhere. Perhaps this simple WaPo article marks the beginning of the end for the latest incarnation of this fiscal folly.
In a related item, the powers that be in Sacramento still can’t read the handwriting on the walls….or understand the meaning of a negative balance in the state’s checkbook:
Facebook to the Non-Rescue
IPO windfalls and other California budget illusions.
California is again in fiscal trouble—when isn’t it?—and this time it’s betting on a new savior—the Facebook IPO. The state Legislative Analyst’s Office reports that the $5 billion stock offering expected this year could yield $2.5 billion over the next five years in extra revenue due to “extraordinary one-time” events.
One way to think about this is that God protects fools and California politicians, pardon the redundancy. No state has done more to punish business, but suddenly a single business success could cover a multitude of spending sins. Isn’t capitalism grand?
On the other hand, we’ve seen this windfall before. Recall the “Google surplus.” In 2004 Google’s IPO contributed to a one-time $7 billion revenue gusher that included a 49% leap in capital-gains receipts. The state was instantly flush with cash and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democrats blew through the cash like they were Google partners—which, in a sense, they were.
It didn’t last.When the temporary revenue bonanza ended, the state couldn’t sustain what had become a new higher plateau of spending. The boom turned into a revenue drought that continues.
Now with Facebook and other California Internet sensations looking to go public, legislators are again counting on big paydays to finance another spending binge while avoiding the reforms imperative for long-term solvency.According to a fiscal analysis by state Assembly Republicans, Governor Jerry Brown’s budget calls for a $6 billion or 7% increase in spending this year, and a 30% increase over four years.
Apart from the Facebook infusion, Mr. Brown is also counting on $500 million from the state’s cap-and-trade law that forces manufacturers, truckers and utilities to pay a tax on carbon emissions. But carbon-trading schemes haven’t worked anywhere they’ve been tried, and revenues always come in below projections. Some California firms have already moved out of the state to avoid the new costs. The state’s fiscal auditor warns that it may be illegal under the California constitution to use revenues from such “fees” to finance general-fund spending.
Here’s another beauty. In 2002 California decided to securitize over 25 years its anticipated share of the state Medicaid tobacco settlement money so politicians could collect about $5 billion right away. They spent the $5 billion while providing a guarantee against general tax revenue to pay interest on $16 billion in bonds.
Trouble is, fewer people are smoking, so the tobacco settlement revenues aren’t coming as predicted. Bond raters are now warning that tobacco money may not be able to meet those bond payments, which means taxpayers would have to match the shortfall. Maybe Mr. Brown needs a new slogan: Light up to save the Golden State.
We can see it now!
Mr. Brown is also assuming that voters will approve his huge tax increase ballot initiative in November. He predicts this would raise $31 billion over five years from a 0.5% increase in the state sales tax rate to 7.75% (including city and county add-ons the rate can hit 10%) and by phasing in higher tax rates on Californians with incomes of more than $250,000 ($500,000 for couples). Millionaires would pay a 12.3% tax rate, the highest state rate in the nation.
Good luck. The state Franchise Tax Board recently reported that Californians earning $500,000 a year or more fell to 98,610 in 2009 from 146,221 in 2007. They make up 0.5% of tax filers but pay 32% of income taxes. No state other than perhaps New York is so dependent on such a sliver of the tax base.
This overreliance on the fortunes of a few causes the revenue peaks and valleys that have characterized the California budget for two decades.In 2007 the richest 1% paid $25.7 billion in taxes. In 2009 that income source crashed and their tax payments fell to $12.3 billion, according to an analysis of tax returns by the Sacramento Bee.
State auditors announced last week that Mr. Brown’s revenue estimates are $6.5 billion too optimistic, and that’s without assuming any harm to growth from the tax increases. But even if the economy improves and Mr. Brown’s revenues come in on target, this is a budget that sets the state up for another crash. There simply aren’t enough billion-dollar IPO windfalls to soak.
And since we’re on the subject of the Land of Fruits & Nuts, we turn now to the Environmental Moment, where we learn all energy industries are NOT created equal:
Windmills vs. Birds
About 70 golden eagles are killed every year by turbines at California’s Altamont Pass, reports the LA Times.
For years, the wind energy industry has had a license to kill golden eagles and lots of other migratory birds. It’s not an official license, mind you. But as the bird carcasses pile up—two more dead golden eagles were recently found at the Pine Tree wind project in Southern California’s Kern County, bringing the number of eagle carcasses at that site to eight—the wind industry’s unofficial license to kill wildlife is finally getting some serious scrutiny.
Some 77 organizations—led by the American Bird Conservancy, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Endangered Species Coalition and numerous chapters of the Audubon Society—are petitioning the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to toughen the rules for the siting, permitting and operation of large-scale wind projects.
It’s about time. Over the past two decades, the federal government has prosecuted hundreds of cases against oil and gas producers and electricity producers for violating some of America’s oldest wildlife-protection laws: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Eagle Protection Act.
But the Obama administration—like the Bush administration before it—has never prosecuted the wind industry despite myriad examples of widespread, unpermitted bird kills by turbines.(Yet another reason we’ll never want another Bush near the White House.) A violation of either law can result in a fine of up to $250,000 and imprisonment for two years.
The renewed focus on bird kills is coming at a bad time for the wind industry, which is being hammered by low natural-gas prices and a Congress unwilling to extend the 2.2 cents per-kilowatt-hour production tax credit that has fueled the industry’s growth in recent years.
Last June, the Los Angeles Times reported that about 70 golden eagles are being killed per year by the wind turbines at Altamont Pass, about 20 miles east of Oakland, Calif. A 2008 study funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency estimated that about 2,400 raptors, including burrowing owls, American kestrels, and red-tailed hawks—as well as about 7,500 other birds, nearly all of which are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act—are being killed every year by the turbines at Altamont.
A pernicious double standard is at work here. And it riles Eric Glitzenstein, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who wrote the petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He told me, “It’s absolutely clear that there’s been a mandate from the top” echelons of the federal government not to prosecute the wind industry for violating wildlife laws.
Mr. Glitzenstein comes to this issue from the left. Before forming his own law firm, he worked for Public Citizen, an organization created by Ralph Nader. When it comes to wind energy, he says, “Many environmental groups have been claiming that too few people are paying attention to the science of climate change, but some of those same groups are ignoring the science that shows wind energy’s negative impacts on bird and bat populations.”
That willful ignorance may be ending. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife recently filed a lawsuit against officials in Kern County, Calif., in an effort to block the construction of two proposed wind projects—North Sky River and Jawbone—due to concerns about their impact on local bird populations. The groups oppose the projects because of their proximity to the deadly Pine Tree facility, which the Fish and Wildlife Service believes is killing 1,595 birds, or about 12 birds per megawatt of installed capacity, per year.
The only time a public entity has pressured the wind industry for killing birds occurred in 2010, when California brokered a $2.5 million settlement with NextEra Energy Resources for bird kills at Altamont. The lawyer on that case: former attorney general and current Gov. Jerry Brown, who’s now pushing the state to get 33% of its electricity from renewables by 2020.
Bats are getting whacked, too. The Pennsylvania Game Commission estimates that wind turbines killed more than 10,000 bats in the state in 2010.
Despite the toll that wind turbines are taking on wildlife, the wind industry wants to keep its get-out-of-jail-free card. Last May, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed new guidelines for wind-turbine installations. But the American Wind Energy Association quickly panned the proposed rules as “unworkable.”
Given that billions of dollars are at stake, the wind industry’s objections don’t surprise Mr. Glitzenstein. And while the lawyer wants more thorough environmental review of proposed wind projects, what he’s really hoping for is a good federal prosecution. So far, he says, the Interior Department has been telling the wind industry: “‘No matter what you do, you need not worry about being prosecuted.’ To me, that’s appalling public policy.”
Then again, the entire wind turbine industry is appalling public policy.
On the Lighter Side….
And finally, in the Wonderful World of Science, Carl Polizzi forwarded the following which fits rather nicely with the subject of today’s Cover Story, available at our home page, www.thedailygouge.com:
DARPA ‘Cheetah’ Robot Can Run Faster Than You
Looking like a four-legged “Star Wars” creature, the Pentagon’s “Cheetah” robot can gallop up to 18 mph, a land speed record for legged robots. The robot is the product of the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “The robot’s movements are patterned after those of fast-running animals in nature,” stated a news release on DARPA’s website . “The robot increases its stride and running speed by flexing and un-flexing its back on each step, much as an actual cheetah does.”
Powered by an off-board hydraulic pump, the robot ran on a laboratory treadmill in a demonstration. A boom-like device keeps it running in the center of the treadmill. The military plans to test a free-running prototype later this year.
The robot’s high speed of 18 mph might not sound all that impressive, but it is nearly five mph faster than the previous record of 13.1 mph, set in 1989. Also, 18 mph is much faster than the average human jogger, according to Wired.com. And Usain Bolt, the human world-record holder, was clocked at 28 mph during the 100-meter sprint in 2009.
Boston Dynamics, the company behind Cheetah would like the robot to sprint as fast as 60 mph or 70 mph – the speed of a real cheetah, according to Wired.com.
The website reported that DARPA has not yet revealed what the robot will be used for.Along with its eventual high speeds, the device could be designed so it can zigzag to chase and evade. It could be used for emergency response, firefighting, advanced agriculture and vehicular travel.
Given Eric Holder’s ambiguous assassination analysis, we’re thinking maybe….Skynet?
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