It’s Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, for one of the few times in an otherwise uninterrupted life of lies, The Obamao utters the truth: it IS unprecedented….Tick-Tock’s continuing assault on the Supreme Court, that is:

Obama warns ‘unelected’ Supreme Court against striking down health law

 

We’ll assume the separation of powers wasn’t something “Professor” Obamao covered in his lectures on constitutional law.  As the WSJ observes….

Obama vs. Marbury v. Madison

The President needs a remedial course in judicial review.

 

President Obama is a former president of the Harvard Law Review and famously taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. But did he somehow not teach the historic case of Marbury v. Madison?

That’s a fair question after Mr. Obama’s astonishing remarks on Monday at the White House when he ruminated for the first time in public on the Supreme Court’s recent ObamaCare deliberations. “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” he declared. (“Strong majority”?!?  It passed by only 7 votes in the House, and that was after every bribe, shortcut and legislative trick they could muster.)

Presidents are paid to be confident about their own laws, but what’s up with that “unprecedented”? (He’s not confident….he’s lying.) In Marbury in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall laid down the doctrine of judicial review. In the 209 years since, the Supreme Court has invalidated part or all of countless laws on grounds that they violated the Constitution. All of those laws were passed by a “democratically elected” legislature of some kind, either Congress or in one of the states. And no doubt many of them were passed by “strong” majorities.

As it happens, probably stronger majorities than passed the Affordable Care Act. Readers may recall that the law was dragooned through a reluctant Senate without a single GOP vote and barely the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. Despite a huge Democratic majority in the House, it passed by only 219-212.

One reason the law may be overturned is because it was rushed through Congress without a standard “severability” clause that says that the rest of the law stands if one part is judged unconstitutional. Congress jammed it into law because it became ever more unpopular the more the public looked at it. The law is even less popular today than it was on the day it passed in 2010.

Mr. Obama’s remarks suggest he is joining others on the left in warning the Justices that they will pay a political price if they dare to overturn even part of the law. As he runs for re-election, Mr. Obama’s inner community organizer seems to be winning out over the law professor.

In a related item courtesy of George Lawlor and The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead suggests Marxifying America may not be any easier for Progressives in the immediate future….

The Health Care Disaster and the Miseries of Blue

 

After oral arguments before the Supreme Court this week, the odds that the Court will strike the individual mandate rose sharply; Intrade markets after the hearings showed bettors thought there was a 62 percent chance that the mandate will fall.

I can’t tell you whether the law is unconstitutional; I can’t even tell you whether the Supreme Court will uphold it — or, if the mandate goes, what else might stay.

But the health care law’s troubles shed some further light on the crisis of American progressivism and the blue social model it has built. Those who believe in the blue model and want to extend it have lost their touch; the dream machines of the blue social engineers don’t sail serenely across the azure sky anymore. Think of the various carbon exchanges and environmental planetary schemes; think of high speed rail proposals like California’s $100 billion train to bankruptcy; think of Obamacare. These days the experts, “social entrepreneurs” and smart young blue twenty somethings fresh out of the Ivy League whomp up social programs with as much verve and dedication as their New Deal and Great Society predecessors, but the new Dreamliners don’t take off. At most they roll around the runway, emitting clouds of noxious smoke; wings fall off, windows pop out, turbines misfire and the tires go flat.

Obamacare was supposed to be the capstone in the arch of a new progressive era. The Dems were going to show us all that government really does work. Smart government by smart people, using modern methods and the latest up to the minute research from carefully peer reviewed articles in well regarded social science journals can solve big social problems. Obamacare was going to be such a big hit that even the bitter clingers would have to put down their guns and their Bibles long enough to thank the Democrats for this wonderful new benefaction.

But even if the Supreme Court doesn’t pull the trigger and kill the law in June, the darn thing won’t fly. The public hates it, and the longer it’s on the books the less popular it gets. This isn’t like Social Security, a program the public fell in love with early on and still cherishes today. It isn’t like Head Start, which remains dearly beloved even though there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that it helps anybody other than the people it employs. Obamacare is only marginally more popular than the Afghan War; already its estimated cost has doubled and we all know these numbers are likely to continue to increase. Obamacare so far is a political flop and shows ominous early signs of being a policy misfire as well. The benefits don’t seem to measure up to the hype, more people are going to lose their existing insurance, premiums are going up and the impact on the deficit is going to be worse.

This is a horrible piece of legislation — as misbegotten and useless to its friends as it is menacing to its enemies. The question is: why? Why did the blues write such a bad law?  Why, given a once in a lifetime chance to pass a program that Dems have longed to achieve ever since the New Deal, did they craft a sloppy mess that nobody understands and few admire, and then leave their law so unnecessarily vulnerable to constitutional challenge?

The answers tell us much about why blue progressive thinking is losing its hold on the body politic — and why blue methods generally aren’t working as well as they used to.

First, there is the question of complexity. The health care system has become incredibly complicated. It is huge — roughly one sixth of the national economy. It is like a tropical rain forest: an ecosystem that is so complicated that nobody understands the complicated interrelationships of its web of life. Tweak something here, and something completely unexplained happens over here. You can’t regulate something this complicated effectively by a government bureaucracy any more than you can regulate a rain forest by decree: telling the thousands of species of butterflies when to mate, the army ants where to march, the sloths which trees to prune, the jaguars what to kill and when, repressing the anacondas just a touch while encouraging the otters.

Blue regulation works best in simple systems. Social Security doesn’t have a lot of whistles and bells. Retirement, retirement age, actuarial projects, payroll tax deductions: these are relatively simple things. (Even so, we’ve gotten it badly wrong, but Social Security is far from our most serious budgetary problem.) Social Security could be run by accountants with adding machines; there is no rocket science involved.

Not so the government’s brave ventures into health care. People who’ve devoted their lives to the study of our health care system (really, system of systems or just systemic chaos) don’t understand everything about it or how it all works. Tweak a Medicare reimbursement formula, and suddenly nurses are getting a windfall in Chicago while GP practices are shutting down across Kansas. As the numbers grow, and the complexity of the system increases, the opportunities and incentives for fraud balloon — again, often in ways that those trying to ‘fix’ the system don’t understand or predict.

Then comes the second problem: the throngs of cooks that spoil the broth of progressive legislation these days.  As the system to be regulated becomes larger and more money flows through it, the ‘legislative space’ is suddenly populated with very effective and sophisticated lobbies. Everybody from the AARP to the NOW, the NCAA, the NAACP and the Catholic Church wants a bite at this apple. Community hospitals, teaching hospitals, outpatient clinics, drug manufacturers, chiropractors and osteopaths, firms selling catheters on television infomercials, psychologists, rehab clinics, pregnancy test manufacturers, doctors’ associations, staff unions: there is no end to the number of groups who want to tweak health legislation on this or that issue. (Nor to the money they throw at the politicians overseeing its crafting.)

There is no way that a “pure” policy proposal can emerge from this feeding frenzy unscathed. No law that Congress passes affecting this many interests in this many ways will be less than a thousand pages long, and the bulk of those pages will be filled with carve outs, exemptions, special provisions and good old fashioned train robberies.

It is a perverse but very real fact of life that the more complex and rich the system to be regulated, the less the “experts” and the goo-goos have the political power to impose their vision on the regulatory process. The more carefully crafted a law needs to be, the more it is going to be full of lobby lollipops and sweetheart deals. A legislative body trying to write a health care law for a country like ours is like a neurosurgeon operating, drunk, with one hand holding a chainsaw and the other in a boxing glove.

The third problem that makes it hard for blue methods to work well in health care has to do with the state of the system. Government regulation and centralized organization work best when an industry is in a steady state. Utility companies in the 1950s for example were using tried and true technologies. Their costs were predictable, their business model didn’t change much, and, for all its flaws the system seemed to work pretty well.  Government could regulate rates and access and while there may have been costs and inefficiencies that resulted from the regulation, on the whole it was relatively easy to develop and apply a reasonable set of regulations and policies. With no concerns about global warming, air pollution or shortages of hydrocarbons, there was little sense that the industry needed to change. We had the grid and the generating system we figured that we needed; all we had to do was maintain what we had and grow it a few percent every year to take care of population and economic growth. That is the kind of situation that blue model thinking can manage fairly well: Fairly simple, not too many complicated interlocking feedback mechanisms, no driving need for discontinuous and disruptive change, no existential threats or challenges requiring flexibility or systemic change.

Health care doesn’t fit that mold. We don’t actually have a working, sustainable system: what we are doing now is on course to bankrupt us sooner or later as the population ages, new technologies force rapid change, and, for various hard to decipher reasons, costs internal to the system keep rising faster than the rate of inflation.

We don’t need to administer an existing system smoothly into the future. We need to reform, reinvent and renew our health care system. We need drastic innovation that can use the power of IT to make the health care system much more productive: able to deliver better outcomes at lower costs.

This calls for the opposite of a steady state regulatory model. It calls for the opposite of greater central control and greater standardization of methods and procedures. Obamacare, despite well intentioned cost control efforts and some genuinely positive steps toward the use of electronic patient data and other promising approaches that could make the system more efficient, will have the effect of locking in existing practices. And once the system is politicized, the lobby groups (unions, hospital companies, insurance companies, professional groups and many others) will make reform and adjustments impossibly hard. The system will stagnate and freeze, making real innovation harder at just the time we need it most.

These problems all loom large in the health care reform effort, but they rear their heads almost anytime people today seek to address pressing social problems with progressive era methods. All our systems are growing more complex as time goes by, and therefore harder to regulate effectively. Lobbyists and pressure groups play an increasing role in the political process as government’s role grows and as more companies and other groups feel the need to influence Washington to protect their interests. And the IT revolution is pushing us to restructure and reform the learned professions and the intellectual guilds in the face of rising costs and low productivity.

Obamacare reveals the mismatch between the progressive imagination and both the needs and opportunities of our time. It is a 20th century solution for a 21st century society.

The question before the country isn’t whether the law will stand. It is headed for failure; the question is whether the Supreme Court will kill it quickly and at a relatively low cost, or will it impose huge costs and inefficiencies across the country as its contradictions and inadequacies are successively revealed.

I opposed the law when it was passed on the grounds that it represented another rip off of the country’s young people to lower costs for the Boomers and the middle aged. Young men (increasingly the most vulnerable people in a society that cares little or nothing about most of their issues) especially are going to be forced to pay too much for insurance they don’t need.  It is their artificially inflated premiums that will provide the money that lets the social engineers of Obamacare play their complex games with the health care system.

Supporters of the program rise to argue that when the young men grow older they will need more care and then they will benefit from cheaper premiums as they in turn are subsidized by the next wave of suckers, excuse me, young people. But Obamacare isn’t fiscally balanced or sustainable; its true costs were disguised by accounting tricks like postponing some of its impacts while collecting its revenues so that the first ten years of the program looked good on Congressional Budget Office scoring sheets.

Cheap tricks might work to befuddle lazy reporters (or allow the ideologically committed to collude in the deception of readers for the greater good), but they won’t pay the bills or stop the inexorable rise in health costs. By the time today’s young people are ready to collect, without the kind of innovation that Obamacare is likely to prevent rather than encourage, the system will have to be curtailed out of financial necessity. The care they get will likely be less generous than the care the first generation in the system gets; this is wrong both from a moral and a policy standpoint.

Our health care policy today needs to begin from the understanding that the system we have today simply cannot serve us ten, twenty or thirty years into the future. In the real world it is impossible to avoid a significant government presence in the health care sector; from veterans’ care to pediatric care to the care of the poor, there are too many reasons why government at some level must ensure care to build a purely private health system.

But our approach to health care must be to create possibilities and incentives for innovation and change, rather than to keep the current system alive by pumping ever growing volumes of money into it. Developing a highly efficient health care system is more important to the country’s future prosperity than all the high speed trains and “green jobs” boondoggles ever dreamed up. It matters more than almost anything else we do. The federal government should be encouraging states to try different approaches rather than nudging them toward standard models. It should be looking to give consumers more power over (and more responsibility for) their own choices in health care. Health care reform must try to do a very short list of things very well; the longer these laws get and the more issues they try to take on, the more lobbyists and special interests are able to twist those laws toward their own limited ends.

Obamacare is not all bad, but it is not close to being an answer to this country’s present and future health care issues. If the Supreme Court finds the law unconstitutional and sends the whole thing back to the Congress to have another try, it will do us all a favor.

If a majority of American voters find Tick-Tock & Company unfit for office and send the whole team back to Chicago, they’ll be doing themselves a favor.

Next up, as Edward Pinto, writing at the Enterprise Blog notes….

Actually, the affordable housing push did cause the subprime crisis

 

Attempts continue in the blogosphere to deny the government’s central role in the housing collapse and ensuing crisis. The latest is by Washington Post reporter Suzy Khimm: “No, the affordable housing push didn’t cause the subprime crisis.” What Ms. Khimm and others ignore is the inherently risky nature of real estate lending and the government’s well-documented role in weakening credit standards.

One can explain what happened in three sentences:

1.    The private sector has a long history of booms and busts in real estate, which demonstrates it is perfectly capable of doing incredibly dumb things on its own, without the government’s active encouragement.

2.    While the private sector usually can sustain dumb things for 3 years or so before defaults soar, it took government policies promoting dumb and irresponsible things such as no down payment loans with 30-year or longer amortization terms to promote a housing boom which continued unabated for 13 years in nominal dollars and 9 years in real dollars.

3.    This created the largest housing bubble in our history followed by the largest housing bust.

Here are excerpts from a 2007 NYT op-ed entitled “‘Irresponsible’ Mortgages Have Opened Doors to Many of the Excluded” by Professor [Austin] Goolsbee, who  went on to become the chief economist for the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. He was also the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and a member of the Cabinet. This was written at a time when promoters of the government’s efforts to use loosened underwriting to expand home-ownership were still taking credit for the seemingly positive results. He noted with approval:

[t]he three decades from 1970 to 2000 witnessed an incredible flowering of new types of home loans. These innovations mainly served to give people power to make their own decisions about housing, and they ended up being quite sensible with their new-found access to capital.

Also, the historical evidence suggests that cracking down on new mortgages may hit exactly the wrong people. As Professor Rosen explains, “The main thing that innovations in the mortgage market have done over the past 30 years is to let in the excluded: the young, the discriminated against, the people without a lot of money in the bank to use for a down payment.” (You know….the people who couldn’t actually AFFORD a home!) It has allowed them access to mortgages whereas lenders would have once just turned them away.

The Center for Responsible Lending estimated that in 2005, a majority of home loans to African-Americans and 40 percent of home loans to Hispanics were subprime loans. The existence and spread of subprime lending helps explain the drastic growth of homeownership for these same groups. Since 1995, for example, the number of African-American households has risen by about 20 percent, but the number of African-American homeowners has risen almost twice that rate, by about 35 percent. For Hispanics, the number of households is up about 45 percent and the number of homeowning households is up by almost 70 percent.

And do not forget that the vast majority of even subprime borrowers have been making their payments. Indeed, fewer than 15 percent of borrowers in this most risky group have even been delinquent on a payment, much less defaulted.

When contemplating ways to prevent excessive mortgages for the 13 percent of subprime borrowers whose loans go sour, regulators must be careful that they do not wreck the ability of the other 87 percent to obtain mortgages.

Unlike Professor Goolsbee, HUD could not keep its story straight on what had caused this revolution in affordable lending. HUD in 2004:

Over the past ten years, there has been a ‘revolution in affordable lending’ that has extended home-ownership opportunities to historically under-served households. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been a substantial part of this ‘revolution in affordable lending’. During the mid-to-late 1990s, they added flexibility to their underwriting guidelines, introduced new low-downpayment products, and worked to expand the use of automated underwriting in evaluating the creditworthiness of loan applicants. HMDA data suggest that the industry and GSE initiatives are increasing the flow of credit to underserved borrowers. Between 1993 and 2003, conventional loans to low income and minority families increased at much faster rates than loans to upper-income and non-minority families.

HUD in 2010:

… the sharp rise in mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures is fundamentally the result of rapid growth in loans with a high risk of default—due both to the terms of these loans and to loosening underwriting controls and standards. Mortgage industry participants appear to have been drawn to encourage borrowers to take on these riskier loans due to the high profits associated with originating these loans and packaging them for sale to investors. While systematic information on borrowers’ motivations in obtaining these loans is not available, existing evidence suggests that some borrowers did not understand the true costs and risks of these loans while others were willing to take on these risks to tap accumulated home equity or to obtain larger homes.

HUD and others deniers of the government’s role can’t have it both ways.

Sure they can….particularly when the MSM is letting them.

Speaking of the MSM, as this next item from James Taranto confirms, these educated idiots truly are living in Liberal bubbles:

The Perils of Kathleen

 

“I can’t tell you how depressing and demoralizing it is to still, nearly 50 years after the dawn of the second wave feminist movement, be fighting for basic issues of diversity, representation and inclusiveness,” writes The Washington Monthly’s Kathleen Geier: “And to have to be making the case for the value of women’s full humanity and participation in society to a so-called ethicist, yet!”

We’ll give you three guesses as to what this is all about. Foot-binding? Clitoridectomies? Stoning of rape victims? Wrong, wrong and wrong!

[New York Times] Ethicist columnist Ariel Kaminer has announced a contest inviting omnivores to write essays about why it is ethical to eat meat. The problem? The panel of luminaries she’s selected to judge the contest are ethicists Peter Singer and Andrew Light, food writers Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, and novelist Jonathan Safer Foer. All, as you may notice, white dudes.

Do pause and savor this complaint, because it’s ludicrous on multiple dimensions. It would be a shame if the triviality of Geier’s demand for sexual tokenism diverted attention from the absurdity of anyone caring about what the New York Times Ethicist columnist does.

It’s like Chris Matthews said after the SCOTUS burst his balloon by actually CONSIDERING the constitutionality of ObamaScare:

“….I was totally unprepared because of the way people talked. I never heard it discussed politically as a prospect, that they actually might get his [Obama] major achievement just ripped off the books. I have a broad section of friends and colleagues and not one of them saw this coming. Not my co-workers like Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, and Lawrence O’Donnell. My old boss Jimmy Carter? Not one of them thought the individual mandate could be ruled as anything but constitutional. I’m flabbergasted!“

We don’t know what’s scarier; that an individual who leads such an insular existence as Matthews has a national opinion platform….or that he’s actually ignorant enough not to recognize it?

Turning to the Business Section, as Conn Carroll’s Morning Examiner details,….

Obama is the corporate tax king

 

By doing absolutely nothing President Obama had managed to make the United States a world wide leader in at least one category: high corporate tax rates.

As of midnight Sunday, when Japan lowered their corporate tax rate from 39.5 percent to 36.8 percent, the United States now has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world at 39 percent. While this milestone did happen on Obama’s watch, he cannot take full credit for the accomplishment. Learning from the success of President Reagan’s tax cuts in the 80s, the rest of the world has been slashing their corporate tax rates for decades. As recently as 1990, the average corporate tax rate among the world’s largest economies was above 45 percent.

But while other countries have been making themselves more competitive places to do business, the United States has been treading water. Today, the average corporate tax rate in the industrialized world is 26 percent. That is a full 13 points lower than in the United States.

Of course, very few businesses pay the full 39 percent rate. Most corporations pay accountants and lobbyists in Washington millions of dollars a year to game the system so they pay a much lower effective rate. As Obama’s own Treasury Department has noted, however, this is terrible for the economy: “Currently, tax expenditures in the tax code vary dramatically by industry. … The result is a tax system that distorts investment decisions. By allocating capital inefficiently, this system lowers living standards now and could impede technological innovation.”

Unfortunately, Obama’s tax plan only makes this problem worse. The plan does remove some loopholes, but mostly just on industries Obama hates anyway (like the oil and gas industry, jet manufacturers and insurance companies). But for every loophole Obama closes, he creates another. Manufacturers, clean energy firms and firms that do not do business overseas all get new benefits under Obama’s plan.

If you want to maximize the power of Washington to pick winners and losers through the tax code, then the higher the nominal corporate tax rate, the better. As long as Obama is president don’t expect any real tax reform anytime soon.

Meanwhile, out on the Left Coast, real evidence of an actual hate crime inexplicably fails to draw the attention of the Race Hustlers:

7 Black California Teens Arrested in Attack on Hispanic Boy

 

Seven black teens have been arrested on suspicion that they committed a hate crime when they attacked a 15-year-old Hispanic boy while he was walking home from school in Southern California, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office. The March 14 beating in Palmdale was captured on video and posted on YouTube, but has since been removed from the site. The seven boys, ages 13 to 16, were arrested Wednesday for investigation of assault and committing a hate crime, Lt. Don Ford said.

The video shows as many as 10 boys surrounding the victim and challenging him to a fight. The suspects then began hitting the teen while others watched. During the beating, the teens made racially derogatory statements that were captured on the video, Ford said.

After the victim fell to the ground, the assailants kicked him multiple times in the head, knocked out several teeth and left shoe impressions on his skin, Ford said. The victim was able to get to his feet and escape the onslaught, and will need to undergo dental surgery. The teens who were arrested were identified from the video, which was discovered by a Palmdale sheriff’s deputy and has been retained for evidence. Authorities are not releasing the video.

No comments as of yet from The Obamao, the Department of Injustice or the Reverends.  Trust us, if the skin color of the victim and perps had been reversed, they’d have been all over this like, if you’ll forgive the term, white on rice.  Guess some races are more important to the professionally-sensitive than others.

And in the Environmental Moment, it’s Science/Fracking 3, Environazis 0:

EPA Agrees to Dismiss Well Contamination Case

 

The Environmental Protection Agency agreed to end a lawsuit that would’ve forced Range Resources Corp. to fix natural-gas wells the government said were contaminating water in Parker County, Texas. The agency withdrew an administrative order yesterday and joined with Range seeking dismissal of the case in a filing today in federal court in Dallas. The government wants to “shift the agency’s focus in this particular case away from litigation” and instead test water wells in the area, the agency said in a statement.

EPA ordered Range to fix leaks in the area in 2010, saying state regulators at the Texas Railroad Commission weren’t acting fast enough after residents complained of gas in their water wells. Range, based in Fort Worth, Texas, said gas was already present in local water and its operations weren’t the cause. The EPA said in 2010 that the wells were fractured; it didn’t say whether fracking caused the gas leaks…

The decision is “a vindication of the science-based processes at the Railroad Commission,” Barry Smitherman, chairman of the three-member state agency, said in a statement. Range will sample 20 private water wells in the area each three months for a year and turn over the results to the federal government, according to a letter provided by the EPA. Range may also turn over data it got from state regulators. Pitzarella said the company had already committed to doing those tests before the EPA withdrew its order.

The EPA is conducting a nationwide study to determine if gas drilling and fracking contribute to water contamination.

On March 15, the agency said gas found in 11 water wells in Dimock, Pennsylvania, didn’t pose a health risk, a finding three scientists questioned after reviewing the results and seeing elevated methane levels. The agency agreed with Wyoming state regulators on March 8 to conduct more tests at a site in Pavillion, where initial results found evidence that fracking contributed to water pollution. State regulators and industry officials questioned those initial results.

In a related item, the The New York Post‘s Jon Entine relates yet another reason you cannot believe a word the New York Times prints:

Anti-fracking journalist adds to list of reporting blunders on shale

 

New York Times natural-gas reporter Ian Urbina last week launched another salvo in his crusade against the shale-gas industry and the “fracking” method that’s opened up new vistas of gas exploitation. And, yet again, he screwed up. In a March 18 article, Urbina reported that the Agriculture Department was about to require expensive and extensive home-by-home environmental reviews before issuing mortgages to aspiring rural homeowners who may want to lease out the natural-gas rights on their property.

But his main evidence was a few internal e-mails from lower-level regional administrators. For example, Jennifer Jackson, a junior program director for rural loans in the Ag Department’s New York office, had written: “We will no longer be financing homes with gas leases.”

We don’t know how Urbina got access to those internal e-mails — but it’s a good bet he was leaked them by sources who wanted this to be the policy. He also cited an Agriculture congressional liaison’s e-mails to a few anti-fracking Democrats, which said the agency would consider revising current policies, but lacked the money for such a review.

His story notes that he couldn’t get comment from top Agriculture officials; I’m told there’s little trust in the department for the mistake-prone reporter.

More important: A bit more reporting — or, perhaps, more honesty about the biases of his sources — would have revealed that what was really going on was a campaign by activists pushing to use obscure environmental rules to scuttle shale-gas extraction. The Agriculture Department has provided more than $165 billion in loans and guarantees under the Rural Housing Service Program, which helps the poor and small businesses almost exclusively. Activists hoped to see the National Environmental Policy Act applied to the program, further slowing (and stigmatizing) natural-gas exploitation.

But Urbina failed to note that NEPA, a vague 42-year-old statute that in limited cases requires environmental reviews before federal money is spent, had never covered any aspect of the rural aid —and that, were it applied, it would bring the whole program to a halt. For that reason, Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack sent out an e-mail rebuke just hours after Urbina’s tale was published: “As indicated in previous statements, USDA will not make any policy changes related to rural housing.”

Even Mother Jones, no friend to fracking, called out Urbina the day after Vilsack’s e-mail. “According to sources who have been following the issue in Washington,” the magazine wrote, “the possible change to require NEPA reviews was only a discussion draft and had not been approved by senior officials.” Indeed, the policy reversal “would have made it more difficult — if not impossible — to obtain these rural loans.”

In other words, what Urbina reported as a fait accompli was really the unlikely agenda of his sources. And not for the first time. Last summer, the Times’ public editor, Arthur Brisbane, wrote two columns sharply rebuking the reporter’s attacks on fracking. “My view is that such a pointed article needed more convincing substantiation, more space for a reasoned explanation of the other side and more clarity about its focus,” Brisbane wrote.

Undeterred, and apparently unrestrained by the Times’ news editors, Urbina subsequently dredged up a 27-year-old incident to claim that hydraulic fracturing fluids contaminated a well in West Virginia. That turned out to be false, too. With more than 1 million gas wells having been fracked in this country, there is still not a single documented example that the drilling has polluted groundwater.

What’s the take away? To anti-gas campaigners, and apparently Urbina, truth and the fate of poor rural Americans trying to buy homes or keep businesses afloat are acceptable casualties in the drive against shale-gas development.

As the AEI‘s Mark Perry notes, such undisguised bias on the part of MSM is a significant part of the reason….

The Newspaper Association of America reported that advertising revenue for print newspapers in the U.S. fell to $20.7 billion in 2011. Adjusted for inflation, that’s the lowest annual advertising revenue for newspapers since 1951, sixty years ago.

It took 50 years to go from about $20 billion in inflation-adjusted annual newspaper ad revenue in 1950 to $63.5 billion in 2000, and then only 11 years to go from $63.5 billion back to about $20 billion in 2011.

To which we say good riddance to bad rubbish.

Then there’s this personal note from Newsbusters.org‘s Noel Sheppard:

….I wanted to share a story told to me by a man sitting next to me on a recent plane flight. One of his daughters is an extremely gifted geologist with a Ph.D from MIT. She’s been traveling the world collecting data on rock foundations. Despite her liberal leaning, during her studies she has concluded that the entire AGW theory is nonsense bearing absolutely no basis in fact or scientific principles.

She brought her findings and conclusions to folks within her department and was surprised to find many of her colleagues shared the same view. When she asked why no one has stood up and exposed the emperor’s nudity, she was told the department would lose all funding if that happened.

And this is where America is losing its prestige in the scientific community.

Finally, we’ll call it a day with “The Fish Rots from the Head” segment:

US agency chief quits after reports of lavish spending

 

Gee….wonder where Martha Johnson, the head of the GSA could have gotten the impression the ostentatious waste of taxpayer money on vacation boondoggles was official U.S. government policy….

Sure beats the hell outta us….but we’ve a sneaking suspicion some of us are more equal than others!

Magoo