It’s Thursday, June 12th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!
At the top of today’s order, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger lends his considerable intellectual weight to a point we’ve made repeatedly over the past week:
Mitt Romney’s Summer Vacation
If that jet-ski ride was the candidate’s call, his campaign is headed for a Dukakis-like catastrophe.
“You know, I’m delighted to be able to take a vacation with my family. I think all Americans appreciate the memories they have with their children and their grandchildren.”
—Mitt Romney, July 6, 2012
Truer words were never spoken. Fourth of July, family, grandkids. That’s what it’s all about. So how did it come to pass that in this particular Fourth of July week, amid a presidential election, the memory Mitt Romney allowed to imprint itself on the American electorate was an Associated Press photo of himself looking absolutely fabulous on a fire-engine red jet ski driven by his fabulous-looking wife?
Surly news editors instantly likened it to failed presidential candidate John Kerry windsurfing off Nantucket Island. Political junkies by the thousands stepped away from backyard grills to send the jet-ski photo to their distribution lists: “Have you seen this??!!”
What the Romneys thought they were doing with this innocent spin around the lake is irrelevant. Mr. Romney happens to be the GOP’s candidate for the American presidency.That fellow in the jet-ski photo would be the same Mitt Romney described in political analysis the previous week as having taken on water with the public because of the Obama campaign’s attacks on him as a rich guy from Bain Capital.
It would be the same Mitt Romney whom Barack Obama plans to define from now till November as out of step with a middle-class America in which “so many folks are just trying to get by.”
And this would be the same Mitt Romney who had to interrupt his July 4 respite to personally address and disentangle the mess his campaign made over the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Obama health-care mandate.
Coming atop these events, the jet-ski photo was a little like the kid who celebrates the Fourth of July by lighting and dropping a cherry bomb at his own feet. This was the week that got people wondering if the Romney campaign needs a change of personnel. (Not to mention a restraining order to keep them 500′ away from Romney in the event he snatches victory from the jaws of defeat.)
Little noticed with the jet-ski photo making waves was an alternative photo of Mitt Romney taken by the AP’s paparazzi, one that put the candidate perfectly in sync with middle-class anxiety. It was a photo of an older, middle-aged guy in a bathing suit, schlumped in a plastic chair on a spit of beach, his wife beside him, surrounded by their grown children and a covey of grandkids playing in the sand.
This is a photo of an American at rest with his family. It is the man Mr. Romney no doubt wants the country to vote for. The guy in the jet-ski photo is the man they don’t want to vote for—not amid the current anxiety.
The Obama Democrats will smirk that up from that modest beach on Lake Winnipesaukee sits a grand and expensive house. Really? Would that be like the “Kennedy compound” of legend at Hyannis Port, FDR’s homes at Springwood and Campobello, or beloved Progressive candidate Teddy Roosevelt’s house at Sagamore Hill on Oyster Bay? Even in our day, Democrats also make money in the U.S. economy.
Wrong Romney
Right Romney
A question of some urgency hangs over these two photos. We may assume the family beach photo was the one intended to run through the July Fourth news cycle. If so, did anyone in the Romney campaign warn the candidate that the beach photo would evaporate the moment the couple on that jet ski entered a lake teeming with press-corps piranhas? Two possible conclusions flow from the answer.
If no one warned Mr. Romney of the Kerryesque lobster roast his ride would guarantee, then calls for a campaign upgrade are plausible.
But what if the campaign staff did warn Mr. Romney but were waved off by the candidate himself, confident in his own judgment? If that happened, then neither the second coming of Lee Atwater nor James Carville will save this candidate from blowing himself up eventually with another bad call, such as a Dukakis-like photo of the candidate riding in an Abrams tank in front of the press.
This is not the 1960s, when a photo of JFK on a sailing yacht might float past on three evening TV shows, briefly in newspapers, and then evaporate. On the Web, nothing dies. A bad picture, like poorly chosen words about Supreme Court decisions, becomes a monster, terrifying voters adrift on the electronic ocean.
Mr. Romney is right that he was entitled to a family vacation. But let’s put it this way. The man on that jet ski will be able to spend the next four years on vacation. The granddad on the beach just might spend four years with the grandchildren playing in the White House. If the candidate can’t see the difference between the two, he really does need someone along for the ride who can.
Nero fiddled as Rome burned; Romney jet-skied while three critical swing-states baked. Is anyone else detecting a pattern here?!?
It’s not that Romney shouldn’t be able to spend time and vacation with his family. But as Ecclesiastes 3:1 says, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” More importantly, as The Obamao never saw fit to soak his shirt in sweat along with those waiting for their power to be restored, Romney abbreviating his vacation to share our distress would have unquestionably proven more powerful.
Like him or not, Romney’s our only horse in the race. It’s just painful seeing him duplicate Bob Dole and John McCain’s singular inability to get out of the gate.
Next up, a brief bit of commentary from Senator Jim DeMint, a man we’d prefer to see running for President:
Jonathan Gruber’s Incoherent Claptrap on Obamacare & Jobs
Writing in the New Republic, paid Obamacare consultant Jonathan Gruber puts forward a series of arguments about how the law will help jobs and the economy — several of which contradict each other. First, Gruber says Obamacare will create jobs in the health care sector:
The Affordable Care Act will boost the economy. By now, most people who follow politics know that the law will result in more than 30 million additional Americans getting health insurance. But what few realize is that, by expanding insurance coverage, the law will also increase economic activity. These newly insured individuals will demand more medical care than when they were uninsured. While it takes many years to train a family physician or nurse practitioner, it doesn’t take much time to train the assistants and technicians (and related support staff) who can fill much of this need. In many cases, these are precisely the sort of medium-skill jobs that our economy desperately needs—and that the health care sector has already been providing, even during the recession.
Several paragraphs later, he claims the law will reduce health costs:
Of course, the long-term goal of the Affordable Care Act is to reduce spending on health care. And the best projections suggest that it will. Although the law will boost spending initially, the effect is likely to be modest. The official Medicare Actuary projects that, by 2019, the ACA will raise health spending by 1 percent, or 0.2 percent of GDP; this is less than one-sixth of one year’s growth in national health expenditures. Over time, however, the multiple initiatives in the ACA will kick in to help “bend the cost curve,” through increasing consumer incentives to shop for low-cost insurance, moving towards prospective payment methodologies that reward value rather than treatment intensity, and assessing which strategies are cost effective for managing illness.
Let’s unpack these claims one by one:
The op-ed claims Obamacare will “boost the economy” — the New Republic’s website went so far as to say the article demonstrates “Why Obamacare Can Cure Unemployment.” But Gruber himself claims the law will lead to only “modest” increases in spending in its first few years, which raises an obvious question: How can “modest” increases in health spending “cure unemployment?”At minimum, the law will either result in skyrocketing costs or minimal job growth — but Gruber attempts to argue both sides of this equation.
Former Speaker Pelosi’s claim at the White House health summit that Obamacare would “create 4 million jobs — 400,000 jobs almost immediately” was based on a Center for American Progress report that claimed the law would create jobs by slowing the growth of health care costs — i.e., by taking away those fast-growing health care jobs Pelosi said made Obamacare a “jobs bill.” Yet Gruber is now arguing the inverse proposition – that Obamacare will “help” the economy by leading to more hiring for health care jobs, which will RAISE, not lower, overall health care spending.
Gruber also claims that CBO said Obamacare’s reduction in the labor force “will be largely voluntary.” What he didn’t mention is that CBO also said that the law’s “phaseout of the [health insurance subsidies] as income rises will effectively increase marginal tax rates, which will also discourage work.” In other words, people will “voluntarily” choose to work less — because in some cases, earning an extra $1,000 of income could cause a family to lose thousands of dollars in insurance subsidies. If Gruber thinks these perverse incentives will somehow boost the economy — or that it’s “voluntary” for a family to keep its income flat for fear of incurring thousands of dollars in effective penalties by working additional hours — some may say he’s spent too much time in the ivory tower.
Finally, Gruber admits that “newly insured individuals will demand more medical care than when they were uninsured.” What he and other Obamacare supporters have failed to acknowledge is that this demand could well “bid up” the cost of health care services — leading to higher medical inflation. On that count, the non-partisan Medicare actuary agrees about the threat of higher prices after 2014:
In estimating the financial impacts of the PPACA, we assumed that the increased demand for health care services could be met without market disruptions. In practice, supply constraints might initially interfere with providing the services desired by the additional 34 million insured persons.Price reactions — that is, providers successfully negotiating higher fees in response to the greater demand — could result in higher total expenditures or in some of this demand being unsatisfied….Either outcome (or a combination of both) should be considered plausible and even probable initially.
As with Secretary Sebelius’ op-ed this morning (see today’s Cover Story at www.thedailygouge.com), some may argue that Gruber’s feeble and inconsistent claims once again demonstrate the need for repeal — because the fact that the law’s supporters have to take both sides of an argument about Obamacare’s impact on jobs and the economy shows they really don’t have an argument at all.
Which just goes to prove Magoo’s Addendum to Twain’s Theorem: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and Dimocrats!
Meanwhile, as this next item from the WSJ details, the seeds sown of Socialism continue to produce a bitter harvest in the Land of Fruits & Nuts:
As San Bernardino Goes . . .
Another city goes bankrupt, thanks to rich union contracts.
After the California city of Stockton declared bankruptcy last month, politicians and credit raters assured investors that municipal bonds were still safe and that the city’s insolvency presented no systemic risk. Does that script sound familiar? In reality, expensive labor agreements are threatening municipalities across the U.S., though the people who should be most concerned are taxpayers.
On Tuesday the city council of San Bernardino, a city of about 210,000 in California’s Inland Empire, authorized Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy. The city is running a $45 million deficit on a $130 million budget and didn’t have enough cash to pay its vendors or workers. As in Stockton, tax revenues have plummeted in recent years due to high home foreclosure and unemployment rates while labor costs have exploded.
Since its biggest creditors—workers and retirees—have been unwilling to renegotiate contracts and benefits, the city has had to cut its workforce by 20% in the last four years. The unions’ idea of a concession is allowing newly hired public safety officers to retire with 90% of their highest salary at age 55 instead of 50. One upside of bankruptcy is that it will enable the city to restructure collective-bargaining agreements, which is critical since labor costs make up three-quarters of the general fund.Debt service is merely 4% of the city budget.
Unfortunately, the city probably won’t be able to use bankruptcy to modify retirement benefits. When the Bay Area city of Vallejo declared bankruptcy in 2008, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System threatened litigation if city leaders attempted to restructure pensions. San Bernardino bondholders may therefore have to take a larger haircut. The bankruptcy should underscore to investors that tax-exempt municipal bonds aren’t without risk.
Ultimately, however, the biggest victims of the city’s fiscal crisis are taxpayers. Despite paring public services, the city projects $45 million annual deficits for the next five years. Since further service reductions could endanger public safety and cause an exodus of residents, the city manager and its director of finance suggest that the city explore raising revenues.Their recent budget analysis recommends increasing the property transfer tax by nearly 500%.
San Bernardino’s problems aren’t much different from those of Stockton or even Detroit and Los Angeles. Most municipalities have postponed necessary labor reforms in hopes that a robust economic recovery would avert insolvency. That recovery has never arrived. Their hands have also been tied by collective-bargaining agreements, which are the real systemic risk to municipal finance—and to investors who think they’re a tax-free lunch.
San Bernadinans are only now coming to grips with what most of us have known all along: the assertions of Nancy Pelosi, Sandra Fluke and the First Marxette with regard to birth control notwithstanding, nothing is free.
Next up, two related headlines that should help you sleep better at night:
CNO ready to cut back on F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
Consider that prior to The Anointed One’s ascension the United States was not only the world’s preeminent economic engine, but enjoyed a AAA credit rating and status as the sole and undisputed global superpower. So you tell us, after the last 3-1/2 years, is America in better shape….or a whole helluva lot worse-off?
And in the Follow-Up segment, Carl Polizzi forwarded an update on Eric Holder’s latest bit of race-baiting hypocrisy:
NAACP Requires Photo I.D. to See Holder Speak in State Being Sued Over Voter ID
Earlier today, Attorney General Eric Holder addressed the NAACP Nation Convention at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas. What did media need in order to attend? That’s right, government issued photo identification (and a second form of identification too!), something both Holder and the NAACP stand firmly against when it comes to voting. Holder’s DOJ is currently suing Texas for “discriminatory” voter ID laws. From the press release:
All media must present government-issued photo I.D. (such as a driver’s license) as well as valid media credentials. Members of the media must RSVP to receive press credentials at http://action.naacp.org/page/s/registration. For security purposes, media check-in and equipment set up must be completed by 7:45 a.m. CDT for an 8:00 a.m. CDT security sweep. Once the security sweep is completed, additional media equipment will NOT be permitted to enter and swept equipment will NOT be permitted to exit.
Ironically, NAACP President Ben Jealous railed against voter ID just before Holder took the stage.
The head of the NAACP on Monday likened the group’s fight against conservative-backed voter ID laws that have been passed in several states to the great civil rights battles of the 1960s.
Benjamin Todd Jealous, the CEO and president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said these are “Selma and Montgomery times,” referring to historic Alabama civil rights confrontations. He challenged those attending the NAACP’s annual convention to redouble their efforts to get out the vote in November.
“We must overwhelm the rising tide of voting suppression with the high tide of registration and mobilization and motivation and protection,” he said.“Simply put, the NAACP will never stand by as any state tries to encode discrimination into law,” Jealous said.
And in the Environmental Moment, Newsbusters‘ Noel Sheppard exposes a truth you’ll never catch on the Evening News:
New Study Thoroughly Debunks Global Warming, Will Media Notice?
In the past several weeks as much of the nation suffered under a massive heatwave, global warming-obsessed media depicted the high temperatures as evidence of Nobel laureate Al Gore’s favorite money-making scam.
A new study published in the journal Nature Sunday completely debunks all previous claims that temperatures in recent decades are in any way historic demonstrating instead that things were much hotter on this planet during Roman times:
Here, we present new evidence based on maximum latewood density data from northern Scandinavia, indicating that this cooling trend was stronger (−0.31 °C per 1,000 years, ±0.03 °C) than previously reported, and demonstrate that this signature is missing in published tree-ring proxy records. The long-term trend now revealed in maximum latewood density data is in line with coupled general circulation models indicating albedo-driven feedback mechanisms and substantial summer cooling over the past two millennia in northern boreal and Arctic latitudes. These findings, together with the missing orbital signature in published dendrochronological records, suggest that large-scale near-surface air-temperature reconstructions relying on tree-ring data may underestimate pre-instrumental temperatures including warmth during Medieval and Roman times.
The website of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz published a more reader-friendly explanation of the study Monday:
Professor Dr. Jan Esper’s group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC. In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling. “We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low,” says Esper. “Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today’s climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.” […]
For the first time, researchers have now been able to use the data derived from tree-rings to precisely calculate a much longer-term cooling trend that has been playing out over the past 2,000 years. Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.
“This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant,” says Esper. “However, it is also not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1°C. Our results suggest that the large-scale climate reconstruction shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimate this long-term cooling trend over the past few millennia.”
The UK Register observed Tuesday:
Americans sweltering in the recent record-breaking heatwave may not believe it – but it seems that our ancestors suffered through much hotter summers in times gone by, several of them within the last 2,000 years.
A new study measuring temperatures over the past two millennia has concluded that in fact the temperatures seen in the last decade are far from being the hottest in history.
Here’s a nice little graph to demonstrate what’s really happened in the past 2,000 years:
This thoroughly debunks the claim that temperatures on the planet today are in any way historic or unprecedented.
The Register continued:
In the IPCC view, the planet was cooler during Roman times and the medieval warm spell. Overall the temperature is headed up – perhaps wildly up, according to the famous/infamous “hockey stick” graph.
The new study indicates that that’s quite wrong, with the current warming less serious than the Romans and others since have seen – and the overall trend actually down by a noticeable 0.3°C per millennium, which the scientists believe is probably down to gradual long-term shifts in the position of the Sun and the Earth’s path around it.
Just as many climate realists have been saying for years. The only question remaining is whether America’s global warming-obsessed media will pay any attention to this new information.
Yeah….the MSM will notice; about the time….
On the Lighter Side….
Then there’s this view of the legendary Courage le Francais, courtesy of our middle son Mike:
Surrender: outside of fine wine, terrible movies, poorly made automobiles and tanking the EU, what may well be remembered as….
….modern France’s greatest achievement.
Finally, we’ll call it a day with our “NASCAR Nation” segment, where we learn dedication to stock car racing took on a whole new meaning as a….
Michigan woman watches NASCAR with a corpse
A woman said she kept the dead body of her companion in a chair in their southern Michigan house because she didn’t want to be alone.
Linda Chase, 72, said she kept the remains of Charles Zigler clean and dressed and talked to the body while watching NASCAR on television. “It’s not that I’m heartless. … I didn’t want to be alone. He was the only guy who was ever nice to me,” Chase told the Jackson Citizen Patriot.
Jackson police discovered Zigler’s body in a living room chair last week. Authorities believe he died of natural causes at age 67 in December 2010, although Chase said it was last December.She said there wasn’t a bad smell.
She has not been arrested but is being investigated for financial fraud. Chase admits cashing Zigler’s benefit checks after his death. “I’m probably going to prison,” she told the newspaper. “I told them the truth. I didn’t lie about that.”
Rumors Chase originally hails from West Virginia remain unconfirmed.
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.