It’s Thursday, March 1st, 2012….but before we begin, we pause a moment to recognize the passing of pop legend:

The Monkees singer Davy Jones dead at 66

 

Forget John Lennon, THIS guy we’ll miss.  He gave TLJ and us many happy memories (we’re listening to Daydream Believer as we write); as Neil Diamond wrote, done too soon.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the first edition of March 2012 with a headline that might well have been written today….except it wasn’t:

Energy Secretary Chu Embraces High Gas Prices, Again

 

It was featured almost a year ago, March 21, 2011 to be exact, in Heritage.org‘s The Foundry.  The “Again” referenced was the occasion of Energy Secretary Steven Chu defending a 2009 statement advocating $8/gallon gasoline prices to force the public off of oil.

Not satisfied with twice having voiced Team Tick-Tock’s intention to beggar average Americans, Chu used his appearance Wednesday before a House committee to restate what should be a ready-made campaign ad for the GOP:

“But is the overall goal to get our price” of gasoline down, asked [Mississippi Congressman] Nunnelee .

“No, the overall goal is to decrease our dependency on oil, to build and strengthen our economy,” Chu replied. “We think that if you consider all these energy policies, including energy efficiency, we think that we can go a long way to becoming less dependent on oil and [diversifying] our supply and we’ll help the American economy and the American consumers.”

Chu obviously didn’t win his Nobel Prize in Economics (though having done so hasn’t stopped Paul Krugman from displaying an abysmal ignorance of the subject), but one would think a guy brilliant enough to win one in Physics would understand $8+/gallon gasoline and helping the economy are mutually exclusive goals.

As Hank Murphy noted, the major difference between genius and stupidity is genius has its limitations.

Consider the federal government; the Department of Agriculture is proud to distribute the greatest number of food stamps ever, while at the same time the National Park Service pleads Americans to not feed the animals, as it makes them dependent and unable to fend for themselves.

The energy debacle represents Team Tick-Tock at its core; Republicans need to be hammering this point home from now until the election.

Since we’re on the subject of the message the GOP needs to convey to America, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger offers his thoughts on….

Obama’s Mythical America

The president will win if his Depression-era picture of America goes unanswered.

 

It of course was no coincidence that on the day Michiganders voted to give Mitt Romney a three-point win in his primary shootout with Rick Santorum, Barack Obama delivered a high-powered defense of the Detroit auto bailout to the United Auto Workers Convention. No, he wasn’t in Detroit. That’s the UAW’s second favorite city. He and the UAW were in home sweet home—Washington, D.C. That’s where the money is.

A pattern is emerging. Like some World Wrestling troupe on tour, the Republican rasslers travel through their primary states slamming each other into the turnbuckles. By contrast—and “contrast” is the most important word in election politics—the incumbent president continues to deliver the same speech, which defines him as saving America from them.

To be sure, the Obama re-election speech, as delivered to the auto union this week, isn’t very presidential. It sounds like something one might have heard around South America in the 1950s: “They’re saying that the problem is that you, the workers, made out like bandits. . . . Even by the standards of this town [Washington] that’s a load of you-know-what.” (It certainly IS!)

But make no mistake: Barack Obama is defining his opposition, clearly and relentlessly. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are ensuring that their own base will end up with no idea who its nominee really is or what he stands for. That’s not quite right. One thing is proven: Both have traduced “conservative principles.”

The Obama campaign knows it has to compete in big, “working-class” states laden with electoral votes—Ohio (18 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (16) and Wisconsin (10). To this end, the Obama narrative, his mythic America the Unfair, is now set. As defined in speeches from the State of the Union through the UAW barnburner, it goes like this:

Working men and women are the true American patriots: “It’s unions like yours that helped build an arsenal of democracy that defeated fascism.” (A nice Gingrichian touch there.)

You were in trouble: “The heartbeat of American manufacturing was flatlining.”

They were going to sell you out: “Some even said we should ‘let Detroit go bankrupt.'”

I saved you: “It wasn’t just because of anything management did. It was because I believed in you. I placed my bet [the $80 billion bailout] on American workers.” (Sorry, was that YOUR money, B. Hussein Douche Breath?!?)

They resent you: “They’re still talking about you as if you were some greedy special interest that needs to be beaten.”

The deck is stacked: “We will not settle for a country where a few people do really well, and everyone else struggles to get by.”

The answer, as always, is America’s abandoned values: “Hard work. Fair play. The opportunity to make it if you try.”

Only one place to go—to the ramparts: “So I’ll promise you this: As long as you’ve got an ounce of fight left in you, I’ll have a ton of fight left in me. . . . God bless the work you do, and God bless America.” (So much for the politics of unity and healing.)

This is a caricature of a $15 trillion American economy functioning amid the complexities of the world circa 2012. Even Upton Sinclair, who wrote this sort of thing in “The Jungle” in 1906, would be embarrassed to pump out such a vision today. (Which is par for the course for this Administration.)

Embarrassment is not in the Obama vocabulary. Mr. Obama’s stock “working man” speech has been designed to paint the affluent businessman Mitt Romney as a cartoon Monopoly figure. Who would buy it? The same sort of people who bought Mitt Romney’s caricature of Newt Gingrich in Florida. (With all due respect to Dan Henninger, which is quite significant, we’re not sure we agree with that.) In politics, simple works, if simple is repeated and goes unanswered. And of course the Obama working-man myth is intended as a marker against Rick Santorum’s variation of the myth pulled from the Pennsylvania coalfields.

Excepting the unlikely event that Mr. Romney sweeps Super Tuesday next week, it looks as though the Republican candidates could run until the June 5 primary with California’s 172 delegates and New Jersey’s 50 at stake. If what’s to come the next three months is more of the same, then the winner, whether Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum, will emerge as pulp. Neither man is likely to let up on the other. So be it. That’s how this game is played.

Inexcusable, though, would be if the GOP bruisers let Barack Obama’s Depression-era portrait of America to go unchallenged. On current course, enough American voters really will believe that Barack Obama saved them from the 1930s. (Which is why Newt needs to recognize the inevitable and start serving the country instead of himself and his wide-eyed third wife by dropping his hopeless candidacy and start acting as the party’s hatchet man.)

But this rewrite of reality is precisely where Mr. Obama is most vulnerable. The economic and social world Barack Obama inhabits, and has always inhabited, is totally static. Your lot in life—income, status, mobility—is largely set, with little prospect of escaping upward.

He spoke in the UAW speech of “sons and daughters” aspiring to assembly-line jobs held by their grandparents. (So much for his stated goal of 99% of American kids attending college….unless of course the entire 1% who don’t belong to the UAW.) Even they don’t believe life is that static. He promises to solve their economic problems by expropriating money from the wealthy. (France’s Socialist presidential candidate called for a 75% top tax rate this week.) Boeing will be forced to make planes in Washington state—forever. Naturally this president’s biggest believers live in Hollywood.

Most Americans are not so credulous. But unless the GOP candidates start spending more time dismantling Obama’s mythical America instead of each other, this grim fairy tale could win.

Sorta like a Republican candidate canvassing Democrats for support in his opponents home-state primary?

Speaking of The Gang That Still Can’t Hit Anything But Their Feet, the Morning Examiner‘s Conn Carroll offers his observations on the Tuesday primary results:

Santorum’s blue surge fizzles

 

Almost 10 percent of those who voted in yesterday’s Michigan primary were Democrats, but those liberal votes were not enough to push Rick Santorum over Mitt Romney last night. You can easily see the influence of Santorum’s liberal voters in the exit polls. Santorum won among those who oppose the Tea Party, 39 percent to 35 percent, and union households, 45 percent to 30 percent.

Santorum also won among some regularly more social conservative demographics. Those who believe abortion should always be illegal went for Santorum 60 percent to 25 percent. And Santorum dominated among voters who picked abortion as the most important issue in 2012, 77 percent to 13 percent.

While Romney did have a good night, he beat Santorum 41 percent to 38 percent in Michigan and 47 percent to 26 percent in Arizona, he still showed some weaknesses among key groups. He lost 18-29-year-olds to Ron Paul, 37 percent to 26 percent. He lost those who never attended college, 42 percent to 36 percent. And he lost those making less than $50,000 a year, 41 percent to 36 percent.

Romney does not have a lot of time to savor these wins. Super Tuesday is next Tuesday. He is behind by double digits in Georgia, Ohio, and Oklahoma. A normal candidate would expect a big bounce out of two huge wins in different regions of the country. But Romney has proven completely incapable of sustaining any political momentum. Remember his “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” line after he won Florida?

Santorum suffered two big losses last night, but nothing big enough to knock him out of the race. Unless Romney suddenly becomes a much better campaigner, this  campaign could go all the way to the convention.

Earth to Senator Sweater Vest; “Reagan Democrats” are extinct, the term an absolute oxymoron in the current culture….and you know it.  Santorum’s plea to Michigan Democrats was a tactic born of desperation; and it doesn’t reflect well upon either the candidate or his suitability for office.

In a related item, the WSJ describes….

Romney’s Rebound

He won in Michigan on the economy.

 

For all of his struggles as a campaigner, Mitt Romney doesn’t lack for resilience. That character trait is essential in a President, and Mr. Romney proved again Tuesday that he has it by winning primaries in Arizona and in an especially rough contest against Rick Santorum in Michigan. Mr. Romney never makes it look easy, but as Hillary Clinton knows from 2008, victory beats the alternative.

While narrow, Mr. Romney’s triumph in Michigan was important in showing he could win his native state and in the Midwest. He won in part by hammering away at Mr. Santorum’s voting record on spending and union issues as a two-term Senator.

But Mr. Romney also improved his case for his own candidacy, stressing a reform agenda as much as his business biography. In the final days in particular, he pressed his new plan for a 20% across-the-board income tax cut, as well as Medicare reform. He stressed his ability to revive the economy, which remains the dominant issue even among conservatives, despite the prominence of social issues in the last week.

Mr. Romney still lost among tea partiers and the most conservative voters, and he’s never going to look like a natural populist. He’s lousy at faking sincerity. But in Mr. Santorum he is facing his most formidable conservative rival, a candidate with genuine populist skills and resonance. Mr. Romney’s comeback in Michigan speaks well of his determination, as well as his appeal across a large swath of Republican and independent voters. He also won despite some strategic Democratic voting for Mr. Santorum.

As for the former Pennsylvania Senator, one lesson is to do less swinging from the lip. We don’t hold with those, on the left and right, who say Mr. Santorum isn’t “electable” in November because of his views on social issues. His views are no different than Mr. Romney’s on those issues, and in opposing gay marriage he’s no different than President Obama.

The problem is tone and, well, political maturity. It simply isn’t Presidential to say that reading John F. Kennedy’s speech on the separation of church and state made him “throw up.” Many listeners won’t get past the crudeness to hear his argument, which is overstated in any case.

JFK in 1960 wasn’t saying that religious values shouldn’t ever inform government. He said that his own faith and the institutions of the Catholic Church would not dictate his decisions as President. This was important to say in a country that was Protestant-dominated with large pockets of anti-Catholic sentiment and had never elected a Catholic President.

Religion is now far more under siege than it was then in American public life, and millions would welcome a President who will speak up for religious values and freedom. The key is to defend those values against government attack, not to sound as if he wants to impose his values on other Americans.

Mr. Santorum should consider a serious speech of his own on the subject, of the sort Kennedy delivered, rather than always speaking off the cuff in TV interviews or at town halls. It’s nice to hear an unscripted candidate, but a serious subject like the role of religion in modern public life deserves more thoughtful treatment. Mr. Obama showed how such treatment can help politically when he delivered his speech on race in the 2008 primaries. To get elected, Mr. Santorum needs to reassure non-religious voters as much as he needs to speak on behalf of the faithful.

The race moves on to Super Tuesday next week, and if past is prologue it is far from over. The media are already predicting that no Republican can defeat Mr. Obama, despite his low approval rating and 8.3% unemployment, and many GOP hand-wringers seem to agree. (Gee, whose side are THEY on?!?) But most of the American public hasn’t begun to pay close attention, much less decided to re-elect this President.

The candidates can help themselves if they stop playing the game of who-is-the-real-conservative? They are all conservatives of one stripe or another. GOP voters want to hear a critique of Mr. Obama, but above all they want to hear an agenda and vision for a better future that can rally a majority to defeat him.

Which brings us to a rather lengthy but pertinent piece by Peter Suderman writing at Reason.com:

Is RomneyCare Working?

 

Here’s the latest good news about RomneyCare, the 2006 Massachusetts health care overhaul that served as the model for President Obama’s 2010 reform: It might not wreck the state’s budget quite as fast as previously thought.

As Ezra Klein noted yesterday, a new analysis of the 2010 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) data by Fred Bauer indicates that health premiums in Massachusetts are not rising as fast as they were. The most favorable statistic? After several years of family health insurance premiums rising faster than the national average, average family premiums in the Bay State actually dropped slightly in 2010. As The Boston Globe noted last December, instead of boasting the most expensive employer-sponsored family health insurance premiums in the U.S., as it did in 2008 and 2009, the state’s 2010 premiums are merely in the top quintile, coming in at number nine. By other measures, Massachusetts’ premiums are still rising, though the rate of growth slowed in 2010.

Klein argues that this means that “RomneyCare is working. Across the board.” But at minimum, I think it’s too early to tell. Bauer notes—and Klein quotes—that between 2006 and 2010, “employer-sponsored health-care premiums for a family rose about 19% in Massachusetts, while they rose about 22% in the US as a whole.”

This is almost as funny as the Dukakis tank photo

This suggests a four-year shift starting in the year that RomneyCare passed. But in fact, between 2006 and 2009 family premiums in Massachusetts rose faster than in the rest of the nation: Bay State premiums were 108 percent higher than the U.S. average in 2006, 112.1 percent higher in 2008, and 113 percent higher in 2009 (no data is available for 2007). The favorable comparison to the U.S. growth rate is accomplished by the change in the final year.  So far, at least, this isn’t a trend—it’s a blip.

With individual premiums, the story is similar, though the difference is even less dramatic. Bauer notes that although “health-insurance premium growth did not slow as much for individuals as it did for family plans… it still did slow in absolute terms and relative to the nation as a whole.” He continues:

By the 2008-2010 period, the individual premium in Massachusetts grew about 5% slower than it did for the US (Bay State premiums grew 11.9% while US premiums grew 12.6%), so the gap between the two premium growth rates did narrow over the period.

As with family premiums, however, the change that makes the story is in 2010. From 2006 through 2009, Massachusetts average individual premiums rose steadily faster than the national rates, going from 108 percent of the national average in 2006 to 112.8 percent in 2009. But in 2010, the growth rate dropped: Bay State premiums came in at 109.6 percent of the national average. Once again, the work is done by a single year.

And what happened during that single year? For one thing, the economy was in the midst of a miserable recession: The crash at the end of 2008 led to layoffs and thrift throughout 2009. Given the lag in premium-setting cycles, the corresponding changes in premiums would’ve shown up most prominently in 2010.

What else happened in 2010? As Bauer notes, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and his insurance commissioner underwent a very public fight over rate increases in the small group health insurance market, rejecting nearly 90 percent of proposed increases under emergency legislation. The insurers eventually settled and limited their rate hikes, despite a judgment by an appeals panel overturning the administration’s rate caps for one of the state’s insurers. Bauer argues that the rate hike fight does not “fully explain” the drop in family premiums. Surely, however, it explains some of it; in the short term, political pressure and price controls can reduce prices, even if such controls are not sustainable long-term cost-control measures. And for a time, they can also exert more subtle pressure throughout a system, acting as an implicit threat.

And price controls typically reveal themselves in other ways, which is why it’s worth asking what those premiums were actually buying. Part of the explanation for the dip in 2010 prices may simply be that insurers and employers were scaling back in terms of what they were buying. In April of 2010, amidst both the specific fight over rate hikes and a broader climate of worry about the state’s rising health care costs, The Boston Globe reported that health insurers in the state were beginning to limit access to popular but expensive hospitals; one way to cut back on premiums is to cut back on services.

Meanwhile, in a presentation on premium trends in private health insurance sponsored by the state’s Division of Health Care Finance and Policy last June, Dianna Welch noted that premiums in the state weren’t merely increasing: consumers, in response, were also buying substantially less insurance. That can disguise the growth of premium prices—what she calls “buy down.”

Think about it this way (these numbers are hypothetical): In 2010, you buy a plan for $100. In 2011, you have the option to either buy the same plan for $106 or pay $103 for a less comprehensive plan than in 2010 sold for $90. If you take the latter option, you’re actually paying a lot more, on a unit basis, despite the smaller dollar increase. It’s not clear how much buy down accounted for the 2010 figures, but we know it was already happening in the years prior:  Welch notes seeing “significant” buy down in 2008 and 2009.

Finally, it’s worth noting that during the same series of presentations, which reviewed data through all of 2009 and preliminary data from 2010, Massachusetts officials and influencers did not view the state’s health spending trends as successful. Over the course of three days last summer, various policy bigwigs in the state heard from a who’s who of Massachusetts’ health policy hotshots. Here’s a sampling of what they said about the state’s health system.

Jeffrey Sanchez, Chairman of Massachusetts Joint Committee on Public Health:

There’s one graph that I enjoy bringing out to groups throughout my district, and even throughout the Commonwealth. It’s that Mass taxpayer foundation pie chart that shows how much our health care costs were in 2000 as opposed to how much we’re spending now. In 2000, we were spending about 20% of our costs.  Now, we’re up to, what, 34, 35%? It’s just unsustainable.

 JudyAnn Bigby, the state’s Secretary of the Executive Office of Health and Human Services:

Just in case people don’t know, we spend nearly $37 billion annually on health care in Massachusetts. Given that number, it’s no surprise that it’s the number one player in Massachusetts. Between 2007 and 2008, spending overall increased by nearly 5%. That growth was highest in the private market, at about 6%…

Jay Gonzalez, from the Executive Office for Administration and Finance:

Health care costs are eating up a bigger and bigger share of the state budget. In 1998, fiscal ’98, it was about 21% of all state spending. Next year, it will be about 40% of all state spending.   Based on our analysis, if things just continue to go the way they have been going, by 2020, just eight years beyond next year, it will be 50% of the state budget. It is crowding out everything else state government needs to do. …We’re on a path that if we continue, we will end up being — government will end up doing nothing more than providing health insurance, which obviously is not an acceptable result.

…I just want to end by making clear, in case I haven’t already, health care costs, and the growth trend in health care costs, threaten the very viability of government. Everything government does is threatened if we do not address this challenge.

This is not a picture of a system that is working—or even on the verge of working. It is not a system that’s on an obvious track to success, or that has shown mostly positive signals. As recently as last summer, armed with data running through all of 2009 and the early part of 2010, these officials—most of whom have voiced some generalized support for Romney’s health overhaul and its insurance expansion—did not perceive a state health system that was in any way fiscally sound. Which suggests that the 2010 data does not tell us that the Massachusetts health system is firmly headed in the right direction; at very best, it suggests that the system may have taken a single step towards somewhat slower cost growth. If so, this would be welcome news. But nationally, premium growth declined in 2010, dropping to about three percent after several years running at five. In 2011, however, they shot way up, rising by nine percent. Which suggests that this brief slowing of the Bay State’s premium growth may well be just a temporary stopover on the too familiar road to fiscal ruin.

In other words, Taxachusetts is jogging, not sprinting towards fiscal ruin.

Turning to News of the Absolutely Meaningless….

North Korea Agrees to Nuclear Moratorium, Says U.S.

 

“Can you believe those dopes keep falling for the same bullsh*t?!?“

The U.S. said North Korea had agreed to suspend uranium enrichment and to a moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland also said Wednesday that the North had agreed to allow International Atomic Energy Inspectors to verify and monitor the moratorium on uranium enrichment and to confirm disablement of its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.

Her statement said the U.S. will meet with North Korea to finalize details for a proposed package of 240,000 metric tons of food aid.

This literally defies comprehension; not only do the NoKo’s receive the food, almost none of which will ever reach the starving civilian population, absent any verification, but the agreement doesn’t apply to their plutonium program, which is the key to their current weapons program.  Also, the regime included in their acceptance of the agreement the ability to abrogate all of its terms if they, in their sole and absolute discretion, determined future talks weren’t making progress.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.  Anything beyond that requires a career diplomat….or a Progressive President desperate to divert attention from his record.  Any way you slice it, this more than meets Einstein’s definition of insanity….or….

Next up, it was only a matter of time:

Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say

 

Coming soon to a town, city, county, state and country near you….make NO mistake about it!

“Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are ‘morally irrelevant’ and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued,” London’s Daily Telegraph reports:

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life.” The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article’s authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.”

Here’s a longer excerpt of Savulescu’s note on the subject:

What the response to this article reveals, through the microscope of the web, is the deep disorder of the modern world. Not that people would give arguments in favour of infanticide, but the deep opposition that exists now to liberal values and fanatical opposition to any kind of reasoned engagement.

He’s half right. People who issue death threats in response to an academic article are indeed “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.” But so are people who write or publish academic articles arguing in favor of the murder of children.

No….he’s all wrong!

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this touch of Texas from Mark Foster….

….and this forward from Carl Polizzi demonstrating the effectiveness of B. Hussein’s Surrender to Islam initiatives:

The world hasn’t witnessed such success since Neville Chamberlain kowtowed to Herr Hitler.

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with News of The Bizarre, courtesy of James Taranto, who provides yet another reason you can never really say you’ve heard it all:

Dogged Pursuit

 

“Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrested three people Monday on suspicion of using Craigslist to find a dog for one of them to have sex with,” reports the Arizona Republic:

Deputies arrested San Tan Valley residents Sarah Dae Walker, 33, and Shane Walker, 38, on charges of conspiring to commit an act of bestiality. Officers also arrested 29-year-old Robert Aucker of Gilbert. . . .

Aucker told detectives he had a sexual relationship with Sarah Walker for about a month. She reportedly told him that she had dreams about having sex with a dog, the Sheriff’s Office said.

“People who do this for enjoyment are a different breed, that’s for certain,” Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said.

Come to think of it, the same can probably be said of dogs.

Some thirty-five years ago the APA (American Psychological Association) deemed homosexuality normal; it was only several years ago they advocated accepting pedophiles.  Can it really be that long until Ms. Walkers perverted proclivities are pronounced permissible?

On the other hand, we’re tempted to ask, “What did Sarah Dae Walker say when she sat on the sandpaper?  “I like it ‘ruff’!”

Magoo