It’s Friday, August 17th, 2012….but before we begin, since Sunday marks the 200th anniversary of one of the greatest single-ship battles in the annals of our nation’s history, a bit of Naval History is in order.
On August, 19, 1812, the USS Constitution under the command of Captain Isaac Hull engaged the HMS Guerriereand Captain James Richard Dacres in the Atlantic southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Hull fought a brilliant action; and despite a marked inferiority to the Constitution in both number of guns and weight of broadside, Dacres fought his ship for all she was worth. When one of Hull’s Lieutenants finally boarded the stricken Guerriere to inquire if she had surrendered, Dacres laconically replied, “Well, Sir, I don’t know. Our mizzen mast is gone, our fore and main masts are gone…I think on the whole you might say we have struck our flag.”
So impressed was Hull was by the courage of Dacres and his crew he allowed the Guerriere‘s commander to keep his proferred sword, and ordered the return of Dacres’ mother’s Bible. Hull also noted though ten impressed American seamen were among the Guerriere‘s crew, Dacres had not forced them to fight against their country, allowing them to remain below decks during the engagement.
Though hardly a victory on a par with Trafalgar, Hull’s success over the vaunted Royal Navy so shortly after the commencement of hostilities in the War of 1812 provided a significant boost in moral to both the United States and her fledgling Navy.
Less important at the time, but far more important to the eventual legend of the USS Constitution, was an event occurring early in the engagement. During one of the early British broadsides, an American sailor, seeing a round shot bounce harmlessly off his frigate’s thick oaken side, is said to have cried, “Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!”
The rest, as they say,….
….is history!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
Leading off the last edition of the week, National Journal editor Josh Kraushaar offers his observations regarding Mitt’s miraculous reinvigoration:
Watching Mitt Romney on the campaign trail this weekend after he tapped Paul Ryan as his running mate, it was hard not to be struck by how significantly the candidate’s message and delivery improved. Romney was newly energized, almost sounding like an evangelist preacher as he preached the merits of capitalism and the free market.
His rhetoric was sharp and specific as he contrasted his policy vision with that of President Obama’s. With Ryan, he looked confident in his sit-down interview with CBS’ Bob Schieffer.
It was as if the ghost of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie entered the cautious, often-awkward pol’s body, to great effect. (Indeed, like Christie, he even challenged a heckler at last night’s event in Waukesha County, Wisconsin.)
This is the type of change that’s very tough to measure in even the best polls and focus groups. Romney overruled his top consultants in picking Ryan; they wanted him to go with a more cautious choice, like Tim Pawlenty.
But Romney clearly felt a kinship with the younger Ryan, and the chemistry was undeniable on their first couple of days on the campaign trail.Romney felt unshackled, and felt free to play to his biggest political asset—a fiscal conservatism that’s been the one consistent hallmark of his career, from working at Bain Capital to the Salt Lake City Olympics to his tenure as governor of Massachusetts.
This carries risk, of course. Romney’s hallmark of his campaign so far has been his cautiousness. . . .
Even Christie, known as the blunt political truth-teller to his fans in New Jersey, was a much more cautious pol when he ran against Gov. Jon Corzine in 2009. Indeed, his campaign was rapped for not offering specific plans, resorting to anti-incumbent generalities. It wasn’t until he was elected that he developed his persona as a straight-talking reformer.
In a sense, Romney is one-upping Christie, and placing the even riskier bet that calling for major changes is a political winner in the middle of a heated presidential race. High-risk, high-reward, indeed.
Furthering our nautical theme, as the legendary John Paul Jones, father of the United States Navy and no shrinking violet once observed, “He who will not risk cannot win”. And Romney’s aiming for the biggest prize of all; at a time when his country’s future may well rise or fall on his own success or failure….just like Jones.
We’d say more than a modicum of risk is in order.
In a related item, courtesy of the MorningExaminer, Conn Carroll describes what he terms….
The Ryan Rally
Paul Ryan is the most liked candidate in this year’s presidential race and his addition to Mitt Romney’s campaign has vaulted the Romney/Ryan ticket into the lead, according to a new poll of 12 swing states.
The August PurpleStrategies of 12 swing states (including Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin) shows Romney/Ryan beating Obama/Biden 47 percent to 46 percent. In July, the very same poll showed Obama beating Romney 47 percent to 45 percent.More importantly, PurpleStrategies polls of Ohio and Virginia both show Romney/Ryan pulling ahead of Obama in these key swing states. Obama was ahead 48/45 in Ohio and 46/44 in Virginia. But now Romney/Ryan is winning in both states by 46/44 and 48/45 margins respectively. Other highlights from the poll include:
The Romney-Ryan ticket is fueled by an 11-point advantage among independents. This represents an increase from July, when Romney held a 5-point margin over Obama among that key group.
At 45% to 39%, Paul Ryan is the only member of either major party ticket who currently has higher favorables than unfavorables. Independents have an overall 46%/37% favorable opinion of him.
Romney’s personal image appears to have improved following the announcement: rising from a net -8 to just a net -3.
By a 3-point margin, Purple state voters believe that Romney and Ryan have a better plan “to reduce the deficit, create jobs, and get the economy moving again” (46% to 43%). This advantage is substantially larger among independents: 48% to 34%.
Just 29% believe that the economy is getting better.
By a 6-point margin, voters in these key swing states believe that Romney and Ryan are more likely “to bring real change to Washington,” a margin that is +17 among independents.
Don’t look for Hairplug Joe to bring similar life to the Dimocratic party.
Next up, the WSJ suggests by demonizing Paul Ryan, the Dims may have unwittingly sowed the seeds of their own demise:
The Mediscare Boomerang
ObamaCare gives Republicans a chance to win the Medicare debate.
President Obama all but called Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform un-American in 2011, and Democrats have since spent 16 months running their familiar Mediscare campaign. But all of a sudden liberals and their media bodyguards claim to be scandalized because Mitt Romney has the nerve to defend himself by describing Mr. Obama’s own “Medicare cuts.” How dare he?
The double standard is predictable, but the furor is also instructive. For the first time in memory, voters this year may have a choice between two very different philosophies about how Medicare ought to evolve. The political class is spitting nails because, thanks largely to ObamaCare, a reform agenda might finally get a fair hearing.
“You paid in to Medicare for years, every paycheck,” the voiceover runs in a new Romney TV commercial. “Now, when you need it, Obama has cut $716 billion from Medicare. Why? To pay for ObamaCare. So now the money you paid for your guaranteed health care is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you.”
If this horror show sounds familiar, perhaps that’s because the Romney ad is a variation on classic Democratic media buys not merely in the Tea Party era but the 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s, the 1970s, if not to the very creation of Medicare in 1965. Any time Republicans so much as suggest that the entitlement state has a problem, and even if they don’t, Mediscare becomes a main election theme.
According to the usual Beltway rules, the Washington potentates call for an honest debate even as they defend or excuse the rank Democratic falsehoods in order to defeat even the modest reform that they will then claim we need, if only there had been an honest debate. The Republicans are supposed to act like Quakers amid the pummeling and are only allowed to appeal to columnists and wonks with their boring old budget charts and obscure details.And then lose elections.
Well, now we’re learning that the same tactics can be used against Democrats too. The difference this time is that the Romney-Ryan ticket is trying to create a political shock absorber against Mediscare so voters can consider the substance of a genuine reform alternative that modernizes the entitlement state, rather than simply expanding it.
For the record, President Obama’s $716 billion is a “cut” only in the sense of slowing the rate of spending growth over 10 years, which is the baseline Democrats always use. Medicare spending will continue to rise rapidly. The Obama “cuts” come by cranking down Medicare’s price controls for hospitals and by gutting Medicare Advantage.
The real term for this familiar Beltway ploy should be Medicare austerity—i.e., keep the status quo, only less of it—rather than reducing costs over time through the structural change the program needs. But it is factually correct to say that Democrats took money from Medicare and then used the “cuts” to hide ObamaCare’s true 13-figure cost.
Either Mr. Obama’s apologists can defend raiding one insolvent entitlement to finance another one and own the cuts. Or they can say these Medicare cuts don’t really count as cuts, as the media fact checkers are suddenly finding ways to do.In which case it means repudiating Mr. Obama’s repeated claims that the Affordable Care Act reduces the deficit and that “I have strengthened Medicare,” as he put it in Dubuque on Wednesday.
The larger reality is that Medicare cannot and will not continue as it is, as the President used to admit. A sampler of his rhetoric from the town-hall summer of 2009: “Mark my words,” he declared in Grand Junction, Colorado, “Medicare in about eight to nine years goes into the red. . . . It is going broke.” He added in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that “What is truly scary—what is truly risky—is if we do nothing” because Medicare is “unsustainable” and “running out of money.” In Belgrade, Montana, he said the program must be reformed “to be there for the next generation, not just for this generation.”
What he rarely mentions is how he plans to fix Medicare under ObamaCare. First the government will do things like arbitrarily commanding providers to deliver the exact same benefits except for $716 billion less. When that doesn’t work, as it surely won’t, the feds will take control of the case-by-case decisions currently made between patients and doctors and substitute the judgment of technocrats. (See what’s already happening in Massachusetts, “RomneyCare 2.0,” August 6.)
ObamaCare does this by empowering an unelected 15-member panel to rule over medicine and tell doctors how to practice, with no legislative or judicial review. Before he decided to fire up Mediscare again, Mr. Obama used to concede that this form of rationing by elites was inevitable. In a 2009 interview with David Leonhardt, he mused whether his own grandmother’s hip replacement after a terminal cancer diagnosis represented “a sustainable model” for society.
Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are proposing an alternative to protect Medicare patients from this government-run future, and nothing in the GOP Mediscare counterattack is remotely as misleading as the attacks that Mr. Obama has been making against their reform. The Romney-Ryan plan doesn’t “end Medicare as we know it,” doesn’t include vouchers, and doesn’t force seniors to shoulder the $6,400 in higher health costs that Mr. Obama mentions at every campaign stop.
Their “premium support” reform explicitly preserves traditional fee-for-service Medicare. Starting in 2023, seniors could either pick traditional Medicare or choose from a menu of regulated private plans. The reform is modeled after the health program that already covers all federal workers, including Members of Congress. The subsidies increase with health costs, so seniors wouldn’t bear more risk.
The plan wouldn’t kick in for a decade, shielding everyone who is in or near retirement. Our preference would be to start immediately, but the delay is one of many political accommodations to help ease the worries of current retirees.
In a normal political year, the liberal Mediscare tom-toms might have scared Republicans from this issue, and Mr. Ryan probably would have remained an admired if sidelined Congressman. But Mr. Obama decided via the Affordable Care Act to remake the entire health-care system including Medicare, and thus he also changed the politics.
The destructive policy and unpopularity of ObamaCare have made Paul Ryan’s reform politically possible, meaning that voters may be open to hearing the real choice they face between command and control or private competition and more patient choice. Throw in the lousy economy and the Obama spending and debt binges, and the GOP this year has a chance to win a health-care debate if it goes on offense and contrasts its solutions to Mr. Obama’s.
That’s the real reason liberals and the press corps claim to be so upset by the Romney Medicare ad. By governing so far to the left, Mr. Obama may have neutralized Mediscare and made voters more receptive to center-right solutions.Medicare is already changing because it must. The difference this year is that Republicans have a plan to save it.
In a similar vein, courtesy of George Lawlor, Yuval Levin, writing at NRO‘s The Corner, agrees, detailing how….
Obamacare Changed Everything
Watching some of the Sunday shows yesterday and reading the usual suspects online, I was struck by how even knowledgeable liberals still do not understand what Obamacare has done to them. They have a sense that health care is no longer a good issue for them, that it might have cost them the 2010 elections and will hurt in 2012, but they haven’t grasped that Medicare — which for decades has been a trusty battering ram against Republicans in the contest for the votes of seniors and others — is also no longer their issue.
This becomes evident in part when you consider that the arguments the Democrats naturally fall back upon regarding Medicare are just false now. So for instance David Axelrod on CNN’s State of the Union referred to “Congressman Ryan’s idea that we should turn Medicare into a voucher program, shifting thousands of dollars ultimately onto the backs of seniors.” But that’s simply a lie — Ryan’s actual Medicare proposal (which Romney has backed) simply doesn’t shift costs to seniors.
But it’s even more evident when liberals try to confront what they themselves — the supporters of Obamacare — propose to do to Medicare.Thus we find Rachel Maddow like a deer in headlights when Rich Lowry asked her a simple question on Meet the Press yesterday: “Do you support $700 billion in cuts in Medicare over the next ten years?” Obamacare takes that amount out of the program and spends it on other things, especially its new exchange subsidies. Maddow literally refused to answer the question. At one point she even said she shouldn’t have to answer it because “I’m not running for anything,” even though her occupation, as I understand it, is to express her opinion. And in the end, her defense of the cuts (though she still never said she supported them) was that Paul Ryan’s budget actually keeps them in place, eliminating Obamacare’s spending but not its Medicare cuts.
It’s at least a bit odd for Democrats who say Ryan is the devil to defend President Obama’s raid on Medicare by saying Paul Ryan does the same thing — and what’s more, it’s not true. The Ryan budget puts those $700 billion into the Medicare trust fund, to shore up the program’s future and reduce the deficit, rather than spending the money on yet another new entitlement. And Mitt Romney proposes not to make those Obamacare cuts in the first place — keeping the money in Medicare’s operating budget and so leaving the program simply as it is for today’s seniors and starting his premium-support reform for younger Americans when they retire, beginning a decade from now. Both undo Obama’s raid on Medicare, and both support a plan to save Medicare from bankruptcy in the years ahead.
I don’t think Axelrod and Maddow were just setting out to lie exactly — it’s worse than that. Listening to them, it seemed as if they really hadn’t realized until now the situation they were in. They’re used to a certain order of things on Medicare and have not stopped to grasp what Obamacare has done to them. They assume it must be true that Republicans want to cut benefits and Democrats want to preserve them. But it’s not true, not anymore. You could see that panicked realization slowly rising in Maddow’s eyes as she was pressed.
What she was probably recognizing was this: Obamacare changed everything. In the wake of that law, it is now clearer than it ever could have been before that the market solution is also the best one for seniors — that the conservative approach that would dramatically reduce the deficit is also the one that would avoid any disruptions for current beneficiaries and the one that would save Medicare in the longer run without shifting costs to future beneficiaries. And the Left can’t claim any of those benefits for its own approach to Medicare. (If’n the Left HAD an approach to Medicare!)
Even some conservatives haven’t quite realized this, and have been uneasy about criticizing Obama’s Medicare cuts — after all, aren’t we supposed to be for Medicare cuts? But this attitude fails to consider the nature of Obama’s cuts (an arbitrary raid of the system to fund a new unsustainable entitlement) and the nature of the Romney-Ryan alternative (a market solution that would turn recipients into consumers and make Medicare a model of how competition can create efficiency and reduce costs without undermining value or access). There’s a broad consensus in America that the elderly should have access to highly subsidized health coverage. Cutting the cost of the program does not need to mean cutting the level of that coverage — unless, that is, you think central planning is the only way to run the program.The Left apparently does believe that, and now they’ll have to face the consequences.
President Obama has put Democrats in the position of being the party that seeks to cut current seniors’ benefits (especially those in Medicare Advantage) and access to care (thanks to the IPAB) while still allowing the program to collapse in the coming years and so watching the deficit explode and bringing on fiscal disaster. And Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have put the Republicans in the position of being the party that wants to protect current seniors’ benefits and make them available to future seniors while still saving the program from collapse in the coming years and so dramatically reducing the deficit and averting fiscal disaster.
Whether you’re now a senior and concerned about your health coverage, are younger and worry if you’ll have affordable coverage when you retire, or are most concerned about the nation’s fiscal health and economic future, the Democrats offer you a very bad deal on Medicare and the Republicans offer you a good one.
The Democrats still don’t see that, and think that turning to Medicare in the wake of Ryan’s selection will yield great political rewards. Perhaps Romney and Ryan should inform them of how the two parties actually stand on the issue. And they might think about informing some voters as well.
Only time will tell how the Mediscare gambit plays out, but keep in mind one fact; while most Americans may be dumb, only die-hard Liberals are stupid.
Next up, it’s the “Your Tax Dollars At Work” segment, brought to us today by Lachlan Markay and Heritage.org, courtesy of Conn Carroll and the Morning Examiner….
Rural Utilities Create Zero Jobs With $47 Million in Stimulus Funding
A stimulus program designed to create jobs by funding rural utility projects has created only about 12% of the jobs projected at the outset of the program in a sample of towns recently examined by the Agriculture Department’s Inspector General.
The IG examined 22 local utilities and government agencies to receive stimulus money. The Rural Utilities Service (RUS), a division of the USDA, projected that the sample of companies would create 3,384 jobs.To date, however, those companies have used their stimulus awards to create a mere 415 jobs.
Some of the recipients have not used their stimulus awards to create a single job. The Wholesale Water Commission of Atchison County, Missouri, for instance, received a $22 million stimulus award, but has yet to even begin construction on the project for which the money was earmarked. Result: no jobs created.
The cities of Elkins, WV; Thomasville, AL; Ruidoso Downs, NM; Big Bend, WV; and City of War, WV, likewise have not created a single job between them, despite having been obligated, with Atchison County, a combined $47 million in stimulus funding through the RUS.
A host of other cities have posted disappointing job performances, as seen in this spreadsheet:
While proponents of the stimulus would likely point to even this tepid job creation as a success, the effectiveness of economic stimulus is generally gauged against alternatives. In this case, the issue is not whether jobs have been created at all, but rather how many jobs these funds could have created if they had not been drained from the private sector or piled on top of the federal government’s record-high national debt.
“Every dollar Congress injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy,” explained Heritage’s Brian Riedl in a 2010 Backrounder. “No new spending power is created.It is merely redistributed from one group of people to another.” That redistribution likely creates few jobs, and may even be a net drag on employment.
But while this RUS program, like a number of the stimulus’s attempts at job creation, has performed remarkably poorly, a primary purpose of the President Obama’s first legislative initiative was not immediate job creation, as Scribe has noted, but in fact geared towards long-term left wing objectives.
To whit, the impwessive bwain powah of Bawney Fwank:
“….beyond Ronald Reagan”; yeah….as if ANYONE who lived through Carter to see Reagan wouldn’t take the Dutchman over The Obamao right about now.
Next we turn to the latest from Victor Davis Hanson, who says, “Sorry, Virginia….
There is no California
Driving across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts without ever crossing a state line.
Consider the disconnects: California’s combined income and sales taxes are among the nation’s highest, but the state’s deficit is still about $16 billion. It’s estimated that more than 2,000 upper-income Californians are leaving per week to flee high taxes and costly regulations, yet California wants to raise taxes even higher; its business climate already ranks near the bottom of most surveys. Its teachers are among the highest paid on average in the nation, but its public school students consistently test near the bottom of the nation in both math and science.
The state’s public employees enjoy some of the nation’s most generous pensions and benefits, but California’s retirement systems are underfunded by about $300 billion. The state’s gas taxes — at over 49 cents per gallon — are among the highest in the nation, but its once unmatched freeways, like 101 and 99, for long stretches have degenerated into potholed, clogged nightmares unchanged since the early 1960s.
The state wishes to borrow billions of dollars to develop high-speed rail, beginning with a little-traveled link between Fresno and Corcoran — a corridor already served by money-losing Amtrak. Apparently, coastal residents like the idea of European high-speed rail — as long as noisy and dirty construction does not begin in their backyards.
As gasoline prices soar, California chooses not to develop millions of barrels of untapped oil and even more natural gas off its shores and beneath its interior. Home to bankrupt green companies like Solyndra, California has mandated that a third of all the energy provided by state utilities soon must come from renewable energy sources — largely wind and solar, which presently provide about 11 percent of its electricity and almost none of its transportation fuel.
How to explain the seemingly inexplicable?There is no California, which is a misnomer. There is no such state. Instead there are two radically different cultures and landscapes with little in common, each equally dysfunctional in quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly, together a disaster.
A postmodern narrow coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley, where the weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money, and values are green and left-wing. This Shangri-La is juxtaposed to a vast impoverished interior, from the southern desert to the northern Central Valley, where life is becoming premodern.
On the coast, blue-chip universities like Cal Tech, Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA in pastoral landscapes train the world’s doctors, lawyers, engineers and businesspeople. In the hot interior of blue-collar Sacramento, Turlock, Fresno and Bakersfield, well over half the incoming freshman in the California State University system must take remedial math and science classes.
In postmodern Palo Alto or Santa Monica, a small cottage costs more than $1 million. Two hours away, in premodern and now-bankrupt Stockton, a bungalow the same size goes for less than $100,000.
In the interior, unemployment in many areas peaks at over 15 percent.The theft of copper wire is reaching epidemic proportions. Thousands of the shrinking middle class flee the interior for the coast or nearby no-income-tax states. To fathom the state’s nearly unbelievable statistics — as the state population grew by 10 million from the mid-1980s to 2005, its number of Medicaid recipients increased by 7 million during that period; one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients now reside in California—visit the state’s hinterlands.
But in the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood and the wine country, millions live in an idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can afford to worry about the state’s trivia — as their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects to save the 3-inch delta smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents.
But in the less feel-good interior, crippling regulations curb timber, gas and oil, and farm production. For the most part, the rules are mandated by coastal utopians who have little idea where the gas for their imported cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil and pasta.
On the coast, it’s politically incorrect to talk of illegal immigration. In the interior, residents see first-hand the bankrupting effects on schools, courts and health care when millions arrive illegally without English-language fluency or a high school diploma — and send back billions of dollars in remittances to Mexico and other Latin American countries.
The drive from Fresno to Palo Alto takes three hours, but you might as well be rocketing from Earth to the moon.
So tell us again which political party can’t feel the pain of the “working class”?!?
On the Lighter Side….
Then there’s this one in honor of Team Tick-Tock, the Reverends Al, Jesse, Jeremiah and Louie, the New Black Panther Party and every other race-hustler/racist around the world:
Finally, we’ll call it a week with another startling medical breakthrough:
Researchers develop prototype for male birth control device
You don’t even have to swallow it; just look at it every night before you retiring to bed, and….
….it’s guaranteed you’ll never have the urge to reproduce….EVER!
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