It’s Thursday, May 31st, 2012….but before we begin, a quick question: Don’t you just love this guy?!?

We only wish there were more in Congress like him….regardless of their race, creed, religion or sexual orientation.  

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up on the last edition of May, courtesy of the WSJ, a healthcare success story the RNC should be shouting from the rooftops:

ObamaCare in Reverse

Maine deregulates the insurance market. Premiums fall.

One tragedy of the Affordable Care Act is that we already know what its regulations will do to insurance markets, because the states have been conducting policy experiments since the 1990s. But we also know from the states that the damage is reversible, as shown by Maine’s emerging insurance turnaround.

In 1993, Augusta passed coverage laws that resemble those that ObamaCare is about to impose nationwide: Insurers could only vary premiums within narrow bands regardless of age or health status, a regulation known as community rating. Four of Maine’s five insurers in the individual market stopped offering coverage and fled, and the state entered an insurance “death spiral” in which premiums don’t cover underlying medical costs. That leads to higher premiums, consumers dropping coverage as a result, and still higher premiums in turn.

Then the 2010 electoral wave carried in Republican Governor Paul LePage and a GOP legislature, and they took modest steps to deregulate the insurance market. Insurers are now allowed to sell policies for premiums that range from 3 to 1 on the basis of age, rather than the prior 1.5 to 1, and to offer incentives or discounts for consumers to choose high-value providers.

The state also created a reinsurance fund that taxes all health plans by $4 a month. If someone ends up requiring extremely expensive care, the fund picks up some of the costs, which means insurers can better manage their future liabilities and pass the savings on to individuals.

The returns are now rolling in for the new coverage that can be offered starting on July 1, and premiums are falling by as much as 69% for Maine’s dominant insurer, Anthem.

According to the Maine Bureau of Insurance, a married couple age 40 to 44 with one child will pay $1,919 a month for a policy with a $2,250 deductible in 2013 if they choose to re-up their current policy. If the same family switches to the new health plan, or buys the plan for the first time, their premium will fall to $920, a 52% decrease. A couple over 60 could buy the same policy for $1,290, down from $2,466 under the old system. Or a young adult 25 to 29 could buy a high $10,000 deductible plan for catastrophic expenses for $232, previously $665.

The old and new products are not identical, so the comparison isn’t perfect. On top of the rule changes, the benefits are slightly different, such as separate deductibles for in- and out-of-network services. And many of the year-over-year reductions are less dramatic, in the range of 10% to 20%, while a few older consumers will see rate increases.

Still, any premium decrease is remarkable on the U.S. health cost escalator, which is being accelerated by ObamaCare. Maine consumers who choose to stay with their current policy (same benefits, old rules) will see an average premium rate increase of just 1.7% from 2012 to 2013—compared to an historical trend of about 10%. Some 46% of the existing book of business will see a rate decrease.

The major irony is that Maine’s reform merely brings its community rating rules into compliance with ObamaCare, which is actually less restrictive than the rules the state passed in 1993. The new national health law will block a further Maine liberalization that is due for 2016.

Maine learned the hard way that the most heavily regulated insurance markets are the most expensive. But the more ominous lesson out of Vacationland is for the 33 states that had the wit never to make the Maine-ObamaCare mistake. They’re the ones that are about to see premiums spike under the Affordable Care Act—perhaps by as much as 69%, and likely by far more.

Which basically translates as….

….yet again.

And since we’re on the subject of Dimocratic policy blunders, Carl Polizzi forwarded news of The Dear Misleader’s latest faux pas as detailed by Matthew Kaminski in the WSJ:

‘Gafa Obamy’

A presidential faux pas mangles World War II history and insults Poland.

No….seriously; George W. Bush TOLD me to say that!

Sometimes the best-intentioned gesture can backfire on the unwitting politician. This is the story of President Obama and the Poles.

Among this year’s 13 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Mr. Obama posthumously honored Jan Karski. As a member of the Polish underground during World War II, Karski was the first to provide eyewitness evidence of the Nazi extermination of Jews in occupied Europe. In 1942, he sneaked into the Warsaw ghetto and a German death camp, then made it out to London and Washington—no easy task at the time—to call on Western leaders to save the Jews. This effort included a meeting with President Roosevelt. But Karski was ignored. (By DIMOCRATS we might add!) “No one did enough,” Karski said later. But he did more than anyone at the time.

Important constituencies were satisfied with the award. Poles and Polish-Americans (a key voting bloc in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Wisconsin) were delighted. The Jewish Week newspaper called the medal “well-deserved.”

The mood soured a bit before Tuesday’s award ceremony. The Poles wanted Lech Walesa to receive the medal on Karski’s behalf, but the White House nixed the choice. Last year, during Mr. Obama’s visit to Poland, the hero of Solidarity refused to attend a large gathering to meet the younger leader. Mr. Walesa felt entitled to a tete-a-tete. Administration officials told Polish journalists that Mr. Walesa’s presence was too “political” for this week’s occasion. Poles read something else into it: Mr. Obama holds grudges. (Completely out of character for a supposed Christian….but more than comon for a Muslim.) The counter-snub was the talk of Poland last week.

Former Foreign Minister Adam Rotfeld, a Polish Jew, stood in at the White House celebration. The Walesa episode was fading into memory when President Obama made his opening remarks. Karski was “smuggled into . . . a Polish death camp to see for himself,” he read off the teleprompter, that Jews were being murdered. On second reference, Mr. Obama noted it was a Nazi camp. Too late. The damage was done.

“Gafa Obamy,” declared Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s leading daily newspaper, in a story about “Obama’s gaffe” on its website. The linguistic faux pas went viral. In another day this would have been ridiculed as a “Bushism,” before we got a president with a Harvard Law degree who claimed to practice “smart diplomacy.”

Poles are prickly about World War II. When their nation was stuck behind the Iron Curtain for four decades, they couldn’t defend themselves against charges of complicity in the mass murder of Jews. Yet unlike Vichy France, the Poles didn’t collaborate with the Nazis in running the country, much less in the Holocaust. The Polish underground tried to help Jews during the war, smuggling arms into the Warsaw Ghetto during the 1943 uprising. Christian Poles sheltered thousands of Jewish children and faced certain death if found by the Nazis.

Mr. Rotfeld, who was one of those kids, several years ago said that, “The thoughtless or intentional use of the phrase ‘Polish death camp’ is insulting and shameful. Not only does it blur responsibility for those crimes—it slanders our nation, which was the first victim of the criminal practices of Hitler’s Germany.” The Karski award was, in part, supposed to straighten this historical record.

As outrage grew, White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said “We regret this misstatement.” Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, wasn’t satisfied. “I am convinced that our American friends can today allow themselves a stronger reaction,” he told reporters in Warsaw on Wednesday. Obama’s words had “hurt all Poles.”

So much for goodwill.

Two thoughts occur to us; first, we see a President willing to seek the world’s forgiveness for sins America didn’t commit unwilling to apologize for egregious errors he personally perpetrated.

Second, such hypocrisy should surprise no one, coming as it does from a man categorically opposed to subjecting a single captured terrorist to “enhanced interrogation”….yet more than delighted to deal out indiscriminate death to dozens from 10,000 ft.

And in the Environmental Moment, first it was oil, then coal; you knew it was just a matter of time until the….

Sierra Clubs Natural Gas

The green lobby picks its next fossil fuel target.

Natural gas: dirtier than Chicago politics.

The media are finally catching up to America’s shale natural gas boom, with even Fortune magazine waddling in with a cover story. But the bigger recent news is that one of the most powerful environmental lobbies, the Sierra Club, is mounting a major campaign to kill the industry.

The battle plan is called “Beyond Natural Gas,” and Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune announced the goal in an interview with the National Journal this month: “We’re going to be preventing new gas plants from being built wherever we can.” The big green lobbying machine has rolled out a new website that says “The natural gas industry is dirty, dangerous and running amok” and that “The closer we look at natural gas, the dirtier it appears; and the less of it we burn, the better off we will be.” So the goal is to shut the industry down, not merely to impose higher safety standards.

This is no idle threat. The Sierra Club has deep pockets funded by liberal foundations and knows how to work the media and politicians. The lobby helped to block new nuclear plants for more than 30 years, it has kept much of the U.S. off-limits to oil drilling, and its “Beyond Coal” campaign has all but shut down new coal plants. One of its priorities now will be to make shale gas drilling anathema within the Democratic Party.

The political irony is that not too long ago the Sierra Club and other greens portrayed natural gas as the good fossil fuel. The Sierra Club liked natural gas so much (and vice versa) that from 2007-2010 the group received $26 million in donations from Chesapeake Energy and others in the gas industry, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. Some of that money was for the Beyond Coal campaign.

One reason for this once-mutual affection is that natural gas produces much less carbon emissions than does coal—and the Sierra Club claims to want fewer such emissions.

The federal Energy Information Administration reports that in 2009 “the 4% drop in the carbon intensity of the electric power sector, the largest in recent times, reflects a large increase in the use of lower-carbon natural gas because of an almost 50% decline in its price.” The Department of Energy reports that natural gas electric plants produce 45% less carbon than coal plants, though newer coal plants are much cleaner.

Researchers at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences found that electric power plants reduced their greenhouse gases by 8.76% in 2009 alone. Most of the carbon reduction was driven not by mandates or regulation but by the economics of lower gas prices. The lead researcher, professor Michael McElroy, says: “Generating one kilowatt-hour of electricity from coal releases twice as much CO2 to the atmosphere as generating the same amount from natural gas, so a slight shift in the relative price of coal and natural gas can result in a sharp drop in carbon emissions.”

Even the liberal Union of Concerned Scientists admits benefits from burning natural gas, finding that the resulting drop in emissions from sulfur, mercury and nitrogen oxides “translate into public health benefits, as these pollutions have been linked with problems such as asthma, bronchitis, lung cancer and heart disease for hundreds of thousands of Americans.”

So why is the Sierra Club suddenly portraying natural gas as a villain? The answer surely is the industry’s drilling success. The greens were happy to support natural gas as a “bridge fuel to the 21st century” when it cost $8 or more per million BTUs and seemed to be in limited domestic supply.

But now that the hydraulic fracturing and shale revolution has sent gas prices down to $2.50, the lobby fears natural gas will come to dominate U.S. energy production. At that price, the Sierra Club’s Valhalla of wind, solar and biofuel power may never be competitive. So the green left has decided it must do everything it can to reduce the supply of gas and keep its price as high as possible.

The losers if this effort succeeds would be the millions of Americans who are benefitting from the shale boom. Some 600,000 jobs in the natural gas industry could be vulnerable, according to an analysis by the consulting firm IHS Global Insight. That’s almost eight times more jobs than are employed by the wind industry.

But the losers would also include electricity consumers paying lower prices at home; the steel workers in Youngstown, Ohio who have been rehired to make pipe for gas drillers in the Marcellus Shale; and the thousands of high-paying jobs in chemicals, fertilizer and other manufacturing that is returning to the U.S. because natural gas prices are so much lower.

The Sierra Club campaign underscores that the modern green agenda is about far more than clean air and water and protecting wildlife. The real goal is to ban all fossil fuels—regardless of economic cost. It’s hard to imagine a campaign that poses a greater threat to the U.S. economy, energy security and American health.

Which is simply in keeping with Team Tick-Tock’s stated goals and objectives:

By the way, are we the only one who heard The Dear Misleader in the first video mention natural gas in the same breath as coal?  And remember, THAT was back in 2008!

Seriously, whatever their ultimate vision for America, it’s a country none of us would recognize….let alone one in which we’d wish to abide.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s these two beauties from our favorite Texas ranchero, Shannon Wood:

And in the “Oh for the day we’ll ALL be a protected class!” segment….

Overweight women experience obesity stigma even after weight loss, study finds

I eat, therefore I am….and you should be legally required to love me!

Overweight women face a multitude of hardships – such as discrimination in the workplace – that arise from the stigma surrounding obesity.  While weight loss may seem like the solution for women hoping to escape anti-fat prejudice, it may not be that simple after all.

New research out of the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, The University of Manchester and Monash University, has revealed that anti-fat prejudice still persisted against former obese women, even after they had lost a significant amount of weight.

“Previous research has shown that the harmful nature of obesity stigma crossed many domains,” Dr. Janet Latner, the study’s lead author at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, told FoxNews.com.  “So we designed an experiment to look at whether obesity sting persisted once the weight had been dropped.”

Published in the journal Obesity, the study asked young men and women participants to read various stories about a woman who had lost about 70 pounds, or a woman who was currently obese or thin who had remained stable. The participants were then asked to rate the women’s attractiveness and then give their opinions on fat people in general.

“We were surprised to find that currently thin women were viewed more differently depending on their weight history,” Latner said in a press release.  “We found that people who had lost weight were viewed more negatively in terms of attractiveness than people who had remained stable” – regardless of whether or not they had remained thin or obese, Latner told FoxNews.com.

Negative attitudes toward the obese targets also seemed to increase when the participants were falsely told that the person’s weight was easily controllable.

Though the researchers cannot explain exactly why the findings were the way they were, Latner and her colleagues theorized that people are perhaps more judgmental towards the obese, because they believe that it is something the person can easily manage.

“There are several theories as to why anti-fat stigma persists,” Latner said.  “The leading theory is controllability theory – suggesting that stigmatized conditions are despised more when they are perceived as easily controllable, a widespread perception about obesity.  Our findings partly supported this theory by demonstrating that reading vignettes describing weight loss led to greater obesity stigma than reading vignettes describing weight stability.”

Because of their staggering findings, Latner and her team agree that government intervention is necessary to reduce the prejudice against the overweight and obese.

“Because of their staggering findings”; which, by the “researchers” own admission, are merely THEORIES!  Hells bells!  At this rate, these educated idiots are going to demand we overturn the entire world economy because of some half-assed theory predicting an imminent global environmental catastrophe!

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Pauline Kael Memorial “Perhaps You Should Consider Widening Your Circle Of Friends” segment,  courtesy of Best of the Web:

Mayor Bloomberg’s Special World

On his “Taking Note” blog (formerly “The Loyal Opposition”), Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of the New York Times, mocks a study by the Tax Foundation that found high-taxing New York state has lost a net 1.3 million residents in the past decade:

[The foundation’s Scott] Hodge gives us no reason to think that taxes played a part in a single person’s decision to leave New York–let alone that taxes “may have” spurred “many more” departures than weather. The Tax Foundation did not commission a poll on the topic, and does not present any evidence to support that assertion. Not even anecdotal evidence.

Rosenthal, by contrast, conducts a scientific study that turns up contrary results:

I’ll give the last word to Mayor Mike Bloomberg, also known as the richest man in New York City. Asked in 2008 if state tax hikes on the wealthy would cause them to leave, he said, “I can only tell you, among my friends, I’ve never heard one person say I’m going to move out of the city because of the taxes. Not one. Not in all the years I’ve lived here. You know, they can complain, ‘Ugh, I got my tax bill, it’s heavy.’ But my friends all want to live here.”

Tomorrow, Rosenthal will explain that George McGovern won the 1972 presidential election because Pauline Kael only knew one person who voted for Nixon.

If they can just hold that mindset through the first Tuesday in November.

Magoo