Again the Victim Card

Why is it every time when Republicans come out on the short end of the stick in a public debate they bemoan the meanness and pettiness of polarized partisan politics? Our latest entrant in the "we're the victim" derby is one Michael Gerson, former speech writer for George W. Bush. His piece in the Washington Post whines about how mean President Obama is being to poor defenseless W. Mitt Romney for picking on Romney's record at Bain and questioning Romney's connections to the company after he gallantly galloped off to run the 2002 Olympics.

Romney can't figure out exactly when he quit the company. He won't release tax returns that would clarify the issue. He's being roundly ridiculed for claiming he "retroactively" resigned from Bain in 2002 effective in 1999. 

Gerson worked for Bush from 2000 until 2006. In case Gerson forgot, there was a presidential campaign in 2004 in which his boss's cronies spewed the coarsest lies about John Kerry's record in Viet Nam. Lies that were far worse than any of the partisan snipes the Obama campaign has leveled against Romney. The whole Swiftboating incident was especially vile because while Kerry was dodging bullets in Viet Nam Bush was lounging on an air base in Texas  (or was it Alabama?), or snorting coke, or AWOL—it's all kind of hazy.

Also, in case Gerson forgot, the current line of attack against Romney and Bain was begun by fellow Republican Newt Gingrich. Remember the slick 28-minute video "When Mitt Romney Came to Town"? In it Gingrich's campaign slammed Romney and Bain for their heartless firings of workers in companies that Bain gutted, milked for "fees" and then forced into bankruptcy (and there were lots of them).

The video that savaged Romney was financed by Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who's now promised to spend a hundred million bucks to get Romney elected. I suppose that's Adelson's way of apologizing for the hack job.

In 2008 Republicans launched a similar attack on Barack Obama with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. They tried to link Obama to Wright and cast him as an angry black man. It didn't work because Obama's connection to Wright was tenuous, and Obama just isn't an angry black man.

But with Bain it's much different. Romney claims his Bain experience is what qualifies him to be president (his experience as governor of Massachusetts is far more relevant, but totally alienates The Base). Bain is Romney's baby: after 1999 he still owned 100% of its stock, was still listed as CEO and had complete control. Bain operated same way before and after 1999: milking other companies for cash and sticking it in their own pockets. And Romney did still have well-documented business dealings with certain Bain interests.

The stupid thing is, by Republican lights Mitt Romney did nothing wrong at Bain. All he did was fire people from struggling companies, help companies send jobs to foreign countries to maximize their profit, and take advantage of the corporate bankruptcy system. Why hide from it? Why try to weasel out of his connection with Bain for the three years that also include Bain's biggest success stories?

After all, throwing people out on the street and outsourcing jobs to China is just business. Nothing personal.

Not A Shock, Really

Why is it again that people with money support the Republican Party? I wonder what the folks at Bain would say about this...hmm....

John McCain Warned You About This...

It sounds like a plot from a spy thriller: a wealthy American casino magnate trying to buy the American election is caught paying a Macau influence peddler and funneling profits through the Hong Kong Triads, infamous for running the Chinese opium trade.

Sheldon Adelson, the man who has publicly pledged to spend a hundred million dollars to get W. Mitt Romney elected, is under investigation for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Both Nevada and the feds are looking into Adelson's dealings in Macau with a man named Leonel Alves, a Chinese-Portuguese lawmaker who has hooks in several different levels of Macau's government.

Adelson's company, Las Vegas Sands, paid Alves almost three-quarters of million dollars in "legal fees" for his help in getting casinos and other luxury properties built in Macau.

In addition:

Nevada officials are now poring over records of transactions between junkets [money-laundering organizations used to circumvent mainland China's laws against large money transfers to Macau], Las Vegas Sands and other casinos licensed by the state, people familiar with the inquiry say. Among the junket companies under scrutiny is a concern that records show was financed by Cheung Chi Tai, a Hong Kong businessman. 

Cheung was named in a 1992 U.S. Senate report as a leader of a Chinese organized crime gang, or triad. A casino in Macau owned by Las Vegas Sands granted tens of millions of dollars in credit to a junket backed by Cheung, documents show.

I have been on Adelson's case for a long time because of his connections to foreign countries. He seems more concerned about the welfare of Israel and Macau than he does about the people in his home state of Nevada, which has been particularly hard hit by the recession.

Just a month ago John McCain predicted that a scandal would erupt from Adelson's unlimited contributions and his foreign connections. Because of the secrecy inherent in the corporate world,  the nature of multinational corporations, and the lack of disclosure requirements after Citizens United, it's impossible to guarantee that foreign money isn't being used to influence American elections.

So, if profits from Adelson's casinos in Macau are being funneled through Chinese Triads, into Sheldon Adelson's pockets, then into Super PACs supporting Mitt Romney, don't say John McCain didn't warn you.

You Know It's Trouble...

...when The Christian Science Monitor starts talking about it.

When did Romney leave Bain?

The documents, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, place Romney in charge of Bain from 1999 to 2001, a period in which the company outsourced jobs and ran companies that fell into bankruptcy.

But at least three times since then, Bain listed Romney as the company's "controlling person," as well as its "sole shareholder, sole director, chief executive officer and president." And one of those documents — as late as February 2001 — lists Romney's "principal occupation" as Bain's managing director. The Obama campaign called the SEC documents detailing Romney's role post-1999 a "big Bain lie." 

And Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter said the presumptive GOP nominee may have even engaged in illegal activity. "Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony," Cutter said, "or he is misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investments."

Mitt could mitigate this problem by releasing all of his tax returns but he as refused to do so thus far.
Why?

The Romney Doctrine

In the last few days there's been a lot of arguing about exactly what W. Mitt Romney did at Bain, and when he stopped doing it. The essence of the story, as reported in the Boston Globe, is this:

[A] Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003 states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital in 2002. And Romney’s state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain “executive” in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.

There are reports of much closer ties between Bain and Romney during this period, but they're coming from the Huffington Post, and I trust them little more than I trust Fox News.

Usually people have to wait until they're elected president to have a doctrine named after them. Mitt Romney already has one teed up: "I wasn't directly responsible." He sounds like a concentration camp guard, using the CEO version of "I was just taking orders."


According to the Romney Doctrine, he wasn't running Bain after 1999 and therefore wasn't "technically" responsible for whatever it did. Yet the company was his baby—his legacy, he owned it, he received a salary twice as large as the average American and he still claims credit for Bain's success stories, like Staples, during that period.

Time for an analogy. Let's say there was a wealthy Massachusetts businessman who owned a really expensive sports car. Before he set off to Utah on a skiing trip he gave his teenaged sons the keys to that car. He didn't transfer the registration or the car insurance, saying he might do so when he got back from vacation.

When the sons used the car to drive old ladies to the grocery store, the businessman  bragged about what great sons he had raised. But when they got speeding tickets, then drove drunk, and finally crashed the car into a line of people outside a popular Boston club and killed three girls, the businessman said that he had disowned those rotten kids the instant he handed over the keys to the car.

Technically, the businessman wouldn't be criminally liable for those girls' deaths. He couldn't go to jail. But his insurance company would have to pay up, and the parents of those girls would sue him for millions. And probably win.

When Romney rode off to rescue the Olympics, he gave the keys to the corporation to his Bain underlings. But unlike the sons who drove recklessly, the underlings operated Bain no differently after 1999: they made money for Romney and themselves, damning the consequences to American jobs. "Technically" Romney didn't fire the people who lost their jobs due to Bain's machinations, but he set the pattern, still received a salary and still had complete ownership of the company.

Romney wants to have it both ways. He takes credit for the positive things Bain did during his absence, and disavows the bad things. By trying to weasel out of his association with Bain after 1999, Romney has conceded that Bain destroyed American jobs and hurt America.

While "technically" winning this argument about his direct involvement, morally and ethically Romney has lost.

Don't Tell Me What To Do!!!

Andy over at Electoral-Vote.com echoed me the other day about mandates.

Congressional Mandates Go Back over 200 Years 

Although it is almost 3 months old now, an article by a Harvard Law professor, Einer Elhauge, about early congressional mandates may be of interest to people who missed it. In 1790, the first Congress mandated that ship owners buy medical insurance for their seamen. (The idea was revived by Richard Nixon in the form of a general employer mandate to provide health insurance for employees, but it didn't pass.) Then in 1792, Congress, with 17 framers of the Constitution as members, passed a mandate requiring that all able-bodied men buy a gun. President Washington signed the bill. In 1798, Congress realized that its 1790 employer mandate didn't cover hospital stays, so it mandated that individual seamen buy their own hospital insurance. The bill was signed by President John Adams. 

 If Congress can order seamen to buy hospital insurance, can it not order teachers or short-order cooks or undertakers to do so? Arguments that the framers of the Constitution were against individual mandates are clearly untrue: some of them actually voted for one or more and specifically for a health insurance mandate. Furthermore, Presidents Washington and Adams signed bills with mandates that they could have vetoed. It is surprising that although independent authorities have verified Elhauge's story, it has gotten so little publicity although it was mentioned on the Smithsonian Institution's Website last week.

Yep.

Folks, the federal government has been telling us what to do from Day One. Falling back on the Founding Fathers isn't going to cut it anymore. They did the same thing that our leaders today are doing because they recognized that there was a greater good served by these sorts of laws.

We live in a culture with other people and we can't simply do what we want all the time...a phrase I find myself saying quite a bit these days with a junior high school kid in my house. Hmm....

Another Myth Torpedoed

Conservatives in this country are under the impression that they can tap into their adolescent rage, make a statement, and then it's reality. Take, for example, the one that states that "the president is destroying free enterprise." This comes from a general notion that the president and his fellow Democrats are over-regulating business.

Yet a recent article in Politico says otherwise.

Even though that’s not official policy, the administration has been increasingly frugal in issuing regulations, according to a POLITICO review of government data and more than two dozen interviews with current and former administration officials, lawmakers in both parties, business leaders and liberal activists. The analysis of the federal rule-making database shows Obama as of Tuesday had issued 1,004 final regulations since arriving in office. That’s fewer than his two immediate predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. This year, Obama is also on pace to put out the fewest “economically significant” regulations of any year in his presidency. 

Oh really? How exactly does this happen?

Republicans “just assert stuff and the facts have never encumbered them. I think there’s a sense that Democrats are regulation-bound or regulation-minded and so the assertion sticks. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that,” said Harold Ickes, who served as deputy chief of staff to Clinton and then counted delegates for Hillary Clinton when she ran against Obama. 

No shit.

Well, there goes another myth torpedoed.

They've voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act (or parts of it) how many times? Ah well, as long as they aren't childish or anything about losing...

They sure are hard at work on that one issue they ran on...what was it again?...Oh, yes, JOBS. 

Masters of the Universe? Not So Much...

In the last month or so we've had a never-ending litany of financial misconduct from the same folks who brought us the meltdown in 2008:

• JPMorgan's "London Whale" losses, which double or triple every time Jamie Dimon turns around.
• The Libor scandal, in which banks across the world conspired to manipulate interest rates.
• MF Global, which somehow misplaced a billion dollars in customer funds.
• Bit-player Peregrine, who similarly mislaid a paltry $215 million of their customers' money.

And the beat goes on...

Most of these losses are due to lax regulation: i.e., these guys can't be trusted any further than Robert Reich could throw them.

Yet Mitt Romney is campaigning hard for even less regulation of Wall Street. Not surprisingly, these guys are opening the sluice gates to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into Super PACs and anonymous non-profits to get Romney elected. It really makes you wonder how they got all that money they're spending so freely on Romney.

These so-called financial wizards are no masters of the universe. They can't even master simple arithmetic.

Can Global Warming Cause an Ice Age?

Though some parts of the country have been hammered by powerful storms and roasted by hellish heat waves, climate change skeptics insist that this is just normal variation and not proof of global warming. But a year and a half ago many of those same skeptics were saying that the extensive snowfalls that hit the northeast "proved" that climate change was a hoax, and that we were really on the brink of an ice age. Why is one snowy winter sufficient to disprove climate change, while a 100-year trend of ever-increasing average temperatures no proof at all?

Other articles, like this one from Pravda, claim that theories of Anthropegenic Global Warming ignore long-term historical trends and that we're really entering another ice age. The article insists that humans aren't generating the increased CO2 levels, but rather natural warming is causing CO2 levels to rise. The mechanism they propose is potentially reasonable for previous ice age cycles, but this time it's different: this time seven billion people are pumping megatons of CO2 into the air every day. CO2 levels are increasing much faster than the historical norms they're referencing.

It's interesting that the Koch brothers and the Communist propaganda organ Pravda are on the same side of the climate debate. Could it have anything to do with the fact that Russia is one of the world's biggest oil exporters?

Forecasting climate change is complex and difficult science. But predictions that NASA scientist James Hansen made 20 years ago in an article in Science are proving to be true. From the article's abstract:

Summary. The global temperature rose by 0.20C between the middle 1960's and 1980, yielding a warming of 0.4°C in the past century. This temperature increase is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect due to measured increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Variations of volcanic aerosols and possibly solar luminosity appear to be primary causes of observed fluctuations about the mean trend of increasing temperature. It is shown that the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the century, and there is a high probability of warming in the 1980's. Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climatic zones, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.

We are seeing all of these effects, just 20 years on.

The funny thing about the climate change skeptics' claims that we're entering an ice age is that scientists have long feared global warming could cause an ice age. The reason is that a current along the American east cost, the Atlantic Conveyor, brings warm water up from the south Atlantic to Europe: this is why western Europe has much warmer winters than land-locked Russia.

The melting of the Greenland ice sheet could bring a flood of fresh water into the north Atlantic, deflecting the Atlantic Conveyor away from Europe. A colder Europe would have more snow cover, reflecting more light back into space, cooling the planet, allowing more snow to fall in North America, which would cool the planet even more and potentially cause an ice age.

I have to admit the Atlantic Conveyor seems rather esoteric. Hansen's paper, however, brings up a different scenario when he mentions volcanic aerosols. It's well known that massive volcanic eruptions can cause world-wide cold snaps. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa cooled temperatures globally by 1.2 C for five years. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 cooled the earth by one-half to one degree Celsius. The Little Ice Age may have been caused by volcanoes. And the Bubonic Plague may have been caused by volcanic eruption in 535.

Now there's a lot of water locked up safely in the polar ice caps. When they melt that water will go into the sea, causing sea levels to rise, and into the air, as water vapor.

If a large volcanic eruption such as Krakotoa were to occur during the Northern Hemisphere winter, temperatures would cool drastically. The water that global warming had freed from the ice caps at the poles could then precipitate out as snow over the entire Northern Hemisphere. This would reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the earth and amplifying the effects of the volcanic aerosols. This could mean years with no summer and no growing season.

Each year of the cold snap caused by the volcano more and more of the snow would stay, and the earth would grow cooler. After the the effects of the volcano wore off it would be too late: the northern hemisphere would be locked in permanent winter, for thousands of years.

If all that water had still been locked in the poles, the area of the volcano-caused snow cover would be inherently limited, and an ice age would be less likely. But since global warming allowed the water in polar ice to migrate across the planet, all that ice could reform further south as snow, cooling the planet significantly.


Of course, a sufficiently large volcanic eruption could cause an ice age by itself. But with so much water freed from the poles by global warming, much smaller eruptions—which happen every few years—could have the same effect, raising the likelihood of an ice age.

U.S. Olympic Uniforms Made in China

So it turns out some of the uniforms for the US Olympic teams were made in China. And members of Congress are not pleased.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said simply of the USOC, "You'd think they'd know better."

Really? The uniforms were provided by a sponsor, Ralph Lauren, who uses China to manufacture everything at lower cost than they can in the United States. That's because as recently as two years ago Chinese textile workers got paid 65 cents an hour, even less than the more highly skilled workers who manufacture iPads.

This is the natural outcome of the way the American business and sports sponsorships operate. Boehner should be the first one to congratulate Ralph Lauren for putting profit first and country last by shifting production to low-cost China, instead of America where workers live in actual houses and apartments instead of dorms.

You can't really blame Ralph Lauren. It wouldn't make any sense for them to set up a special production line in the United States for the limited number of uniforms they'd make for the Olympic team.

But it puts the lie to the jingoistic pride that Republicans spew whenever they shout that we're number one. Unless number one in offshoring and outsourcing jobs is something to be proud of.

It's embarrassing that American Olympic uniforms are being made in China. But what the politicians should be hopping mad about is the huge security risk this country is running: nearly all the cell phones, computers and electronic components we use in business, government and are manufactured in China and Asia.

The Price of Inequality

I highly recommend reading Professor Stiglitz's book which you can purchase here.

Don't Super Size Me!

Last month New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a big splash when he banned the sale of sugary sodas larger than 16 ounces. Late-night hosts like Jon Stewart went ballistic with their outrage, lampooning the decision incessantly.

Bloomberg's action is one of several he has taken to address a problem that has been well known for years, and made notorious by the documentary Super Size Me, in which director Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's food for a month. (It took him 14 months to lose the 20 pounds he gained in that single month.)

There are solid reasons for people to cut back on their consumption of soda (including diet soda), as I've noted on this blog before. Americans are becoming severely—even morbidly—obese, resulting in rampant diabetes and the attendant miseries of amputation, blindness, heart disease and stroke. Pervasive diabetes is a major contributor to skyrocketing health care costs.

The problem with oversized drink containers is that they cause people to consume far greater quantities of soda than they would otherwise, in large part because once they've drunk their fill no one wants to let the extra "go to waste." Instead it goes to fat.

A common trick for dieting is to use smaller plates and glasses. People eating a meal from a small full-looking plate feel like they're getting more food than if they eat the same amount from a large empty-looking plate. If you've ever gone to a fancy restaurant and said, "I paid how much for that?" when they brought out gigantic plates with apparently tiny portions you know exactly what I mean.

Because of this quirk of human cognition, limiting your choices at the theater concession stand to 8-, 12- and 16-ounce cups, you will never feel deprived by the absence of 32-ounce sperm-whale size. You will drink a more modest 16 ounces and feel completely sated and a little less bloated. And you won't have to visit the rest room half way through the movie.

What's more, the capacity of an average human stomach is 900 mL, or 30.4 ounces. Since no one likes flat, warm, watery soda the 32-ounce size is overkill for anyone except gigantic NFL linebackers who burn 5,000 calories a day by just breathing.

It's ironic that people are screaming bloody murder when Bloomberg reduces the maximum size of soda containers, but when the companies that sell food cut down on the size of the containers and charge the same price no one utters a peep. That's because the companies know the plate-size trick and use it to fool us into thinking we're getting the same amount of food.

For example, the standard size of "family-sized" ice cream containers used to be half a gallon. Several years ago most dairies cut the size of half-gallon containers to 1.5 quarts. They changed the dimensions of the container to make them look bigger, usually making them taller and thinner and putting a half-inch empty space at the bottom of 4.5-inch tall containers. Some dairies then upped the size to 1.75 quarters, to give "almost 20% more!"

Ninety-six-ounce bottles of orange juice have been redesigned with different shapes, bigger spouts and 89-ounce capacities. Half-gallon cartons of lemonade have been reduced to 59 ounces. These companies aren't doing this for our health: they're selling us less food for the same money while using deceptive packaging to hide the fact that they're ripping us off.


And when you're in the juice aisles in the grocery store you have to be extremely careful to make sure that you're actually getting juice: most of the products sold these days contain only a small percentage of real juice. They consist mainly of filtered water and high-fructose corn syrup. To deceive us into thinking these contain real juice, the bottles are often emblazoned with a huge "100%" over a tiny "of daily vitamin C from ascorbic acid," which is typically a chemically produced nutrient.

No matter how you slice it, Bloomberg isn't tromping on anyone's freedom. He's not stopping anyone from buying 32 ounces of soda: just buy two 16-ouncers if your gullet is really that big.

There's nothing wrong with occasionally drinking moderate amounts of soda, or eating ice cream and baked goods if you're physically active enough to burn off the excess calories. But having a Big Gulp every day will put you on the Type 2 train to an early death. And cost the rest of us billions of dollars in extra health care costs and lost productivity.


Who's the real villain here? Bloomberg, for trying to deal with a serious problem like obesity that's killing millions of people and costing us hundreds of billions of dollars each year in medical costs?


Or companies that use deceptive packaging to mislead us and charge us more? Companies like McDonalds, whose share holders demand that profits spiral ever upward, which can only occur if Americans eat more junk food and gain more weight? Companies like PepsiCo (which owns juice bottlers in addition to its soft drink concerns) who have been silently weaning us off pure, nutritious juice to more profitable watered-down "juice drinks" and sodas filled with empty calories from corn syrup?

Private Equity in Action

The New York Times has an interesting article that illustrates how private equity firms are driving up costs in the United States health care system. Private equity firms, like Mitt Romney's Bain Capital, often enter business sectors where they see an opportunity to milk huge profits in a short time, regardless of the consequences for the country overall. At issue is "physician dispensing" of drugs.

Supposedly a tremendous convenience to patients, this involves doctors selling drugs to patients in their offices, instead of sending patients to a pharmacy. The problem is that the docs charge up to ten times what drug stores do. Since this is often billed to workers comp insurance, patients never even realize it's happening. From the article:

Most common among physicians who treat injured workers, it is a twist on a typical doctor’s visit. Instead of sending patients to drugstores to get prescriptions filled, doctors sell the drugs in their offices to patients who walk out the door with them. Doctors can make tens of thousands of dollars a year operating their own in-office pharmacies. The practice has become so profitable that private equity firms are buying stakes in the businesses (emphasis added) and political lobbying over the issue is fierce. 

Doctor dispensing can be convenient for patients. But rules in many states governing workers’ compensation insurance contain loopholes that allow doctors to sell the drugs at huge markups. Profits from the sales are shared by doctors, middlemen who help physicians start in-office pharmacies and drug distributors who repackage medications for office sale. 

Alarmed by the costs, some states, including California and Oklahoma, have clamped down on the practice. But legislative and regulatory battles over it are playing out in other states like Florida, Hawaii and Maryland. 

In Florida, a company called Automated HealthCare Solutions, a leader in physician dispensing, has defeated repeated efforts to change what doctors can charge. The company, which is partly owned by Abry Partners, a private equity fund, has given more than $3.3 million in political contributions either directly or through entities its principals control, public records show.

This trend is extremely troubling. Such physicians have a direct economic interest in prescribing medications. There have been accusations that practices with in-house imaging and diagnostic equipment are doing unnecessary tests to pad their bottom lines, driving up the cost of health care. Now practices that dispense drugs will have an incentive to overprescribe them.

Considering that many workers comp injuries involve painful back injuries that sometimes require narcotic painkillers, you have to wonder whether private equity firms hounding physicians to increase profits might turn the docs into drug pushers.

Physician dispensing isn't necessarily bad, but wildly varying costs between states indicate there's a problem. In Maryland a physician charged $7304 for 360 lidocaine patches, while the same number only cost $4068 in California (one provider of the patches charges physicians $2863). The difference is that California enacted regulations to prevent such rip-offs.


In Florida a bill was introduced to prevent this kind of abuse, but was prevented from coming to a vote by the Senate president, who was heavily lobbied by the company that supplies physicians with the system for selling drugs. This, despite the state insurance commissioner's estimate that the law would have saved $62 million.

Private equity firms like Abry Partners are exploiting injured workers and ripping off the small businesses that pay the majority of workers comp taxes. This is exactly the kind of crony capitalism that Mitt Romney's money-money-money ethos engenders, and is another example of how money is being redistributed from average Americans to the very wealthiest.

Yes. Yes I Am

Rooting for America to fail since 2008.

No President Since...

The drone from the "liberal" media of late regarding the re-election chances of President Obama usually revolves around the same line: No president since FDR has been re-elected with an unemployment rate over 8 percent. In looking at this fact alone, liberals should be nervous, right? 

Not really.

First, we need to look at who has lost re-election since FDR. We have Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George HW Bush. I think we can all agree that all three of these men had problems beyond jobs. 

Second, people like President Obama personally even if they plan on not voting for him. Right now he's running a few points ahead of Mitt Romney (48-46 or something around there). Yet some of those 46 percent approve of him personally as he consistently polls in the mid 50s in polls on him as a person.  Some polls have even had him as high as 75 percent!  Doggone it, people like him:) And that's despite the right's continued pummeling of him as a person which, honestly, gives me a great deal of hope about America. 

More important than both of these (and VASTLY under reported by the media) is the rate of unemployment in the swing states. You see, folks, it really doesn't matter that unemployment is at 11 percent in Rhode Island or nearly 11 percent in California. Those states are going to go for the president. Heck, they may not even approve of the job he is doing but they are still going to vote for him over Mitt Romney because they know that the latter is going to make things worse. To put it simply, the Democrats have done their job in those states. 

Take a look at the unemployment rates by state.  And now look at the swing states. Iowa has a 5.1 percent unemployment rate. That's well below the national average and jobs may not be on the minds of folks in that state. I know this because most of my in-laws are from there. Any president would kill for this rate in joblessness so look for the president to focus on other issues here. New Hampshire is right around here as well (5 percent) as is Virginia at 5.6 percent. Wisconsin and New Mexico are at 6.7 and 6.8 percent respectively. Again, well below the national average. Even Ohio and Pennsylvania are at 7.3 and 7.4 percent Most political wonks agree that if unemployment dips to around 7.5 percent, the election is over. Colorado is the final state that is below the national average at 8.1 percent. 

So, if you add all these states to the president's base of a solid 196, you get 281 electoral votes and enough to win. That's assuming, of course, that because the unemployment rate is so low, that these states will think the president is doing a good job on the economy. If you look at Andy's map over at Electoral-Vote.com, this jibes with what I am saying here with the exception of Iowa. The conservative, evangelical base has grown very strong there over the years so I wouldn't be surprised if Romney won that state. But that only takes away 6 votes which leaves the president with 275.

We are left with Nevada, Florida, North Carolina and Michigan. North Carolina is barely Republican and will probably go to Romney after the whole gay marriage flap.Andy's map shows us that the rest of those will go to the president's column with Nevada being likely Democratic with Florida and Michigan at barely Democratic. Nevada and Florida have such heavy Latino populations that Romney is going to have real problems in both of these states. Michigan is likely a go for the president for obvious reasons which brings us to 326-212. 

At this point, this is my prediction for the election. Obviously, a lot could change between now and then but I honestly don't think that the unemployment rate is going to matter because the battle is really down to 12 states or less. South Carolina could have an employment rate of 0 percent and they would never vote for the president. 

Conservatives keep pushing the economy as the main issue but are they paying attention to the unemployment rate in the swing states? Certainly, the media is not. 

Every Single Word Of This Is True

The Common Person Doesn't Get It

At Mitt Romney's fund raiser in the Hamptons last weekend one person said:

I don't think the common person is getting it. ... We've got the message. But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies -- everybody who's got the right to vote -- they don't understand what's going on. I just think if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated, two, they don't understand how it works, they don't understand how the systems work, they don't understand the impact.

The thing is, I agree with this person: average Tea Party and uneducated low-income Republicans   just aren't getting it. They don't know how truly egregious and outrageous the advantages that wealthy people like the Koch brothers derive from their wealth, how they pay almost nothing for oil leases on federal land that net them billions, how wealthy investors get access to special stock deals and inside information from their brokers, and how people Mitt Romney's position pay a paltry 13% tax rate while the commoners pay double that or more.

Recent stories about Mitt Romney's real wealth have exposed some of these tricks: from Cayman Island tax havens, to secret Swiss bank accounts, to IRAs that magically grow to $100 million, to executive perks like free clothes, apartments, 50-yard-line luxury boxes at football games and multi-million-dollar golden parachutes for execs no matter how badly they screw up. Yeah, those poor uneducated Republicans don't have a clue how truly tilted the system is in favor of the wealthy and how the rest of us are paying for their goodies.

I would grant that those who really did create new jobs and wealth, like Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, deserve huge financial rewards. But most wealthy people never had to work for their money, Heirs to fortunes like the Koch brothers, hedge-fund managers and hired-gun CEOs never created anything new in their lives.

My dad is one of those uneducated Republicans. Back in the Sixties he ran a small business and often paid employees cash under the table to evade payroll taxes (he had to pay back taxes for years). Today he lives on Social Security and a pension from a unionized municipal bus company. He's alive today due to a pacemaker paid for by Medicare and his pension's health care plan. Yet all he can do is complain about socialism, keeping the government's hands off his Medicare, how Obama wasn't born in this country and how those damned dirty Mexicans bringing disease into this country.

If the Republicans carry through with their plans, my dad will lose his "Cadillac" government-funded retiree pension plan, and Social Security and Medicare will be privatized. But exactly who will be paying for retirees currently enrolled in those programs? What will happen to the decades of contributions I made to those programs? I will still be a year too young to qualify for them if Romney and Ryan carry out their threats. They can't give the money back to me, because current retirees are living on that money.


The only people who will come out ahead in the privatization of Medicare and Social Security will be the big banks and investment firms. Just as with 401(k)s and IRAs, all of our money will be put in their hands. Every year "management" fees will nibble away at the money we're supposed to be saving in our retirement accounts, and in the end Wall Street will have even more of our money than they do now. This is why Wall Street is backing Mitt Romney: they want to get their claws in that huge pot of money that's currently paying for my dad's Social Security and Medicare.


There's no doubt that Wall Street will screw up again, like they did just a few years ago. JP Morgan did it a couple of months ago. But even when they bankrupt the rest of us, they'll still attend fund raisers in the Hamptons, get their big fat golden parachutes, and live on the money they squirreled away in Cayman Island and Swiss bank accounts.


Yes, the common person doesn't get it. Because the wealthy are getting everything.

The Charlie Brown of the Supreme Court

In a piece on Slate Dahlia Lithwick wonders why conservatives are so bent out of shape because Chief Justice John Roberts voted for the ACA act, but when "liberal" justices like Elena Kagan vote with the conservatives, liberals don't bring out the pitchforks, tar and feathers.

The problem is that the justices face exactly the same situation that Charlie Brown does when Lucy tees up the football for him to kick.

When Roberts assumed office in 2005, the mandate was a basic tenet of conservative thought. Mitt Romney and the Heritage foundation said it the only responsible funding mechanism for universal health care, to avoid the infamous free riders.

After teeing up the health care mandate football in conservative health care position papers for decades, and after Romney implemented said mandate in Massachusetts, conservatives yanked the ball away just as Roberts about to kick it, the way Lucy always does to Charlie Brown.

In the last 20 years the Republican Party has been hijacked by a cabal of extremely wealthy individuals with a very specific agenda. The answers nominees to the court gave that Republicans loudly applauded in confirmation hearings seven to ten years ago would be roundly booed and proclaimed treasonous by conservatives today.

This is the real difference between the liberal and conservative viewpoints on the court.

Conservatives appear to believe the court is nothing but an extension of the political process, and appointees should be required to carry out the wishes of the political party that appointed and confirmed them, even years after that party has changed its platform about an issue. For conservatives the court is nothing but another mechanism to enforce their hyperpartisan view of the way the country should be run.


Conservatives used to believe that judicial appointments were the dead hand of long defunct administrations, allowing Ronald Reagan to shape policy from beyond the grave. But this view has morphed completely. Now, with big new campaign contributors entering the fray, they believe that the court should make the decision they want at this moment, because they've given so much cash to candidates and bought all that TV time. And these businessmen demand results for their money.

Liberals believe that court decisions should set precedents that last for decades, if not centuries. They believe justice in the courts should be durable and dependable, and that justices must be able to make decisions independent of the whims of legislators who are looking to feather their own nests and improve their own reelection chances, and campaign donors looking to remold America in the feudal model.

The Supreme Court should be rendering lasting legal precedents, not political expediency. Expedient decisions, like Citizens United, are fleeting Pyrrhic victories that everyone will come to regret in time. I imagine Judge Roberts is already regretting that decision more than anyone else.

Yes. Yes I Can.

A Cult Member Deprogrammed

Remember that link I put up recently from Bill Maher in which he mentioned Johnathan Krohn?  Well, young Mr. Krohn has apparently outgrown his adolescent power fantasy and is now an Obama supporter. Why? check out the clip.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So, he started....reading? Interesting.

Actually, it reminds me of this quote from a recent Op/Ed piece in my hometown paper.

Conservatives decry the liberal bias in the universities. It is true that most college professors are liberals, but I don't think it has anything to do with bias. It is because college professors are intelligent people, and intelligent people tend to be liberal. I have had many conversations with colleagues about why so many people vote against their own best interests, and the only conclusion that is ever reached is that those people are swayed by emotional arguments, not by intelligent thought.

Young Jonathan thankfully has discovered this as well and grown up.

I KNEW IT!!!!

The falling crime rate amid the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression has puzzled some criminologists, since crime historically spikes during hard times. But countering that trend, some say, have been improvements in US policing tactics, tough sentencing laws that keep recidivists off the streets, an aging population, the popularity of video games that keep young people inside, and even communal solidarity in the face of economic adversity.

Just like I have been saying all along...

We may have a whole other problem on our hands with laziness and lack of motivation but video games sure have made a significant dent in violent crime.

The Perfect Man For The Part

Well, this made me laugh my ass off about 89 times.

Kerry Will Play Romney in Mock Debates

I can't think of a better man for the role!

He Likes Mandates!

TomKat Splitting Up! Xenu to Blame!

Everyone is buzzing about TomKat splitting up. For those of you who aren't in the know, that means Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are getting a divorce. And speculation is rife that the cause is Tom Cruise's religion, Scientology.

Apparently Cruise was planning on sending six-year-old Suri off to Scientology's Sea Org (the Sea Organization). Katie, however, has enrolled Suri in a Catholic school. Sea Org members sign a billion-year contract. Sea Org officers wear naval uniforms. They have ranks like captain, lieutenant and ensign. Officers, including women, are addressed as "sir."

If that sounds a little Trekkie to you, it's no surprise. L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, was a science fiction writer who published a self-help book called Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950. The book was announced in an issue of Astounding Science Fiction (which became Analog Science Fact & Fiction in 1960). The editor of Astounding, John Campbell, had published many of Hubbard's short stories and became an early convert to Dianetics. Campbell claimed that Dianetics cured his sinusitus. In a letter to Jack Williamson he wrote, "I know dianetics is one of, if not the greatest, discovery of all Man's written and unwritten history."

Many scientists and even other science fiction writers, like Isaac Asimov, blasted Dianetics as quackery. Writing in Scientific American, Nobel-prize winning physicist I.I. Rabi wrote, "this volume probably contains more promises and less evidence per page than has any publication since the invention of printing."

Hubbard apparently took the criticism to heart and formed the Church of Scientology in 1952. Many believe that Hubbard actually started the church because religions are exempt from taxes. Whatever the reason, Scientology is a money-making enterprise first and foremost. Members undergo "auditing" sessions to become "clear," all for a fee. While most religions want the Holy Word to be publicized broadly, the CoS sues anyone disseminating their sacred texts for copyright and trade secret violations. In order to rise to higher levels in the organization you are required to undergo training sessions that cost many thousands of dollars (which were apparently waived for sufficiently notable people, like Cruise and John Travolta). As you rise in the Church, more of the theology is revealed:

Among these advanced teachings is the story of Xenu (sometimes Xemu), introduced as the tyrant ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy." According to this story, 75 million years ago Xenu brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs in the volcanoes. The thetans then clustered together, stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to do this today.

Sure, the whole Xenu story sounds crazy. But is it any crazier than an angel named Moroni telling Joe Smith where to dig up the Golden Plates for the Book of Mormon and then make him give them back? Crazier than Jehovah's Witnesses who would let their children die rather than take a blood transfusion? Crazier than Christian Scientists who would let their children die rather than accept any medical treatment? Crazier than Catholics who think that any priest can miraculously transubstantiate bread and wine into Christ's actual flesh and blood, which parishioners then consume in ritual cannibalism and vampirism? Crazier than Jews who slice off bits of infant penises?

Sea Org's billion-year contract sounds preposterous. But is it any less ridiculous than the infinitely longer contract of eternal life in some unknown and unknowable place promised by so many other religions?

No matter how well respected a religion might be today, every single one started out as a heresy, in direct defiance of the established orders of the day. The real question isn't how crazy a religion is, but how well it serves the people. Does is provide harmony, happiness, health and long life? Or does it cause suspicion, strife, hatred and death?

The Highest Paid Member of President Obama's Re-Election Campaign

Man, I hope he keeps coming up with this stuff between now and November 6th. Maybe it's time for some comments on Latinos as well.

Votes cast with emotion? BWAAAAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAA!!!!!!!

A Perfect Explanation

I've been thoroughly enjoying the new Aaron Sorkin show on HBO entitled The Newsroom. The show centers around a news anchor named Will Mcavoy who has a Howard Beale like moment at Northwestern University and changes his career path forever. He, along with his ex-girlfriend producer, decide to report the actual news without any of the usual bullshit we see in the media today.

The show is filled with all the atypical, frenetic Sorkin dialogue and last Sunday's episode had a line worth noting as it perfectly sums up the "liberal" media.

If the Republicans tried to pass a law that said the Earth was flat, the headline the next day from the Times would be Democrats and Republicans Debate Shape of Earth. 

The Cult of Both Sides perfectly explained by one of the best writers of this generation.

What's More Popular Than Congress?

The approval rating of Congress stands is around 10%. Here is a list of 10 things more popular than Congress. 

1.President Obama (46%)
2. The Internal Revenue Service (40%)
3.  The airline industry (29%)
4. Lawyers (29%)
5. Richard Nixon at his lowest (24%)
6. The banking industry (23%)
7. The oil and gas industry (20%) 
8. BP during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (16%) 
9. Paris Hilton (15%) 
10. America becoming a Communist nation (11%)

The last one really cracks me up!

Also Perfect For Today.

I wonder if those people who are frothing at the mouth about the health care mandate would also be upset about the 1792 law, passed by 17 signers of the Constitution and President Washington, that every able bodied man in the United States must own a firearm.

A federal mandate saying that you must own a firearm? Personally, I wouldn't mind that at all but only if it were amended to include women as well:)

More Romney Money Uncovered?

It turns out Mitt Romney has been hiding his true wealth. He has a shell company in Bermuda named Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd. Because of the way the law is written (i.e., the wealthy lobbied Congress to make it that way), Romney wasn't required to disclose the investment.

But he's obviously hiding something, because of the tricks he's been playing:

Sankaty was transferred to a trust owned by Romney’s wife, Ann, one day before he was sworn in as Massachusetts governor in 2003, according to Bermuda records obtained by The Associated Press. The Romneys’ ownership of the offshore firm did not appear on any state or federal financial reports during Romney’s two presidential campaigns. Only the Romneys’ 2010 tax records, released under political pressure earlier this year, confirmed their continuing control of the company.

What is Sankaty? It's not really clear, and Romney refuses to say. But in the past it has been used as a slush fund for Bain Capital's financial machinations:

Named for a historic Massachusetts coastal lighthouse, Sankaty was part of a cluster of similarly named hedge funds run by Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded and led until 1999. The offshore company was used in Bain’s $1 billion takeover of Domino’s Pizza and other multimillion-dollar investment deals more than a decade ago.

Today Romney's financial advisers have valued Sankaty at less than $1,000. But this is misleading:

While Sankaty no longer plays an active role in Bain’s current deals, private equity experts said such holdings could provide significant income to Romney under his 10-year separation agreement from Bain, which expired in 2009. Investment funds typically churn “carried interest,” profit shares due to the managers of the funds that often range as much as 20 percent of a fund’s annual profit — known as “the carry.” Even after investment funds are exhausted, profit shares and other late earnings from those stakes can continue to stream, arriving as lucrative “tails,” tax experts say. In some circumstances, the analysts added, offshore companies like Sankaty could also offer limited tax deferral advantages.

Which means Romney could still reap a ton of money from Sankaty. Last month he got a $1.9 million "true-up" payment from another asset in his separation deal with Bain. Thus, millions of dollars could erupt from Sankaty at any time.

The tax code is riddled with loopholes and exemptions that allow wealthy people like Mitt Romney to avoid paying taxes on literally trillions of dollars. The rest of us have to make up that missing revenue to pay for all that disaster relief for people hit by wave after wave of tornadoes, violent storms and wildfires, in addition to regularly budgeted items like defense and highway maintenance.

Mitt Romney obviously sees nothing wrong with this situation. His wealthy billionaire pals, ones like Sheldon Adelson who have business interests overseas and have been giving Republican PACs $10 million a pop, want to keep their special treatment going. They know Romney will never eliminate these tax gimmicks.

There's nothing wrong with being rich or legally using the tax code to maximize your income. Warren Buffett certainly does, but he has also acknowledged that it's outrageously unfair that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. And he's called for changes to the tax code to correct that injustice.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is still hiding his investments overseas, and refuses to release his tax records from his last years at Bain. If he were just an obscure businessman at Bain that would be fine. But he wants to be president of these United States.

A man who hides his true wealth, uses all these tax gimmicks and continues to defend those loopholes cannot be trusted to give all Americans an even break.

Perfect For Today

If one tries to imagine how Gouverner Morris, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the others who wrote the Constitution would have felt--in an era when most Americans were yeoman farmers or craftsmen living in small towns--they would surely have found it preposterous that the federal government require people to buy insurance. But they would also have found it unbelievable that the federal government required hospitals to treat anyone who showed up for emergency care for free if they couldn't pay. In their view, that would have been a state issue, not a federal issue, since hospitals did not operate across state boundaries then. They also probably could not have imagined the federal government licensing the electromagnetic spectrum or sending rockets to the moon. A lot has changed since 1788 and not every modern dispute can be resolved by looking at the text of the Constitution.---Electoral-Vote.Com

An interesting statement that begs the question...what if it's OK to say that the Founding Fathers would have been against something like the health care law but it's still good policy for today? Given that they didn't face the same issues that we do, it's likely they really shouldn't be any sort of authority.

In addition, I'm not sure I agree with Andy here as President Adams signed into a law a bill that forced seamen to hand over some of their pay check for health care.

Too many liberals cower in fear when the right invokes the spirit of the Founding Fathers. I wish they would point out the fact that the FFs argued constantly among themselves. It was out of this debate that our country was born, for better or worse. Even with all the animosity that floats around these days, it's clearly been for the better. 

And it's improving every day. Happy 4th of July everyone!

Offshored, Outsourced and Out of Luck

Mitt Romney's strength is supposedly his experience in the private sector running companies. He knows how to make money. The problem is, his tenure at Bain Capital destroyed a lot of jobs, left a lot of companies in bankruptcy and ruin, but left him a whole lot richer from other people's misery.

I'll be the first to admit that some of those companies were were headed into the dumpster anyway. But Romney took a lot of cash out of less troubled companies and put it in his own pocket. How many of those would have survived and prospered had they not been milked dry and left to die in the ditch, so that Ann Romney could buy Olympic-caliber horses at $100,000 a pop?

A story in the Washington Post covers another aspect of Mitt Romney's experience in destroying American jobs. It examines the role of Bain Capital in the decades-long exodus of American jobs overseas. The Romney campaign complained that there is a difference between outsourcing and offshoring. It's a moot point: either way, Americans are out of luck.

A recent Doonesbury cartoon sums it up succinctly:

The problem with the massive exodus of manufacturing to Asia is that some industries are essential to the security of the United States: first and foremost, electronics and computers. These days every aspect of business, government and defense depends heavily on computers and electronic components.

Nearly all computers and their components are manufactured in Asia. American electronics companies are now even moving the design of integrated circuits to Asia. How can we be sure that Red Army agents haven't infiltrated these companies and are designing back doors into these circuits as you read this? There are reports that this has already happened, though it's not clear the design flaw was intentional. But these devices are incredibly complex and have millions of components and millions of lines of code, making it impossible to ensure that they don't have back doors. The only thing we can do is trust the source. Is that really wise?

Since corporations by definition exist only to make money, they have no allegiance to the United States. That means the US government needs to take steps to ensure that we have reliable domestic sources for all the technology critical to our business and defense needs.

Like any soulless, stateless corporation, Mitt Romney has shown his allegiance is to money and not America, American security and American workers. Romney may not be the Manchurian Candidate, but he helped send American jobs to Manchuria.

A Corner Turned?

Most of you have likely heard the story of Karen Klein, the bus monitor who was mercilessly teased by some junior high kids a couple of weeks back. If not, here is the story.



I have to say that I am honestly glad that this story has come out and people can see what is at the very core of our problem in schools: children's behavior. This is the main reason why test scores are low and children are going off to college with all sorts of issues.

It all starts in the home and with the parents. Time and again, children's parents take the side of their children and not the instructor or administrative staff. This leads to continued problems both with the student and the rest of the class. In short, parents don't parent their fucking kids and teachers like me get blamed for poor test scores. Granted, I don't have as many issues in high school but I can tell which kids (by the time they get to me) have been coddled by the parents. And it's far, far too many.

Certainly, there are some teachers and assistants (like Ms. Klein here) who need to grow a pair. If a kid pulled something like that on me (and I have worked over the years in junior high), they'd be one sorry asshole in less than a second. But this video does illustrate the limits the schools have on discipline.

In my children's school district, they are very strict. If someone is sent to the office they get one warning and then they are suspended on the second offense. Continued poor behavior leads to expulsion and it's off to the "jail" school. More schools need to adopt this sort of no tolerance policy.

Bottom line, we need to be tougher on kids. Very tough, if you ask me. They have far too much power today and it's most parents (conservative or liberal) that are giving them this power. Either they are too lazy or are working too much or both, but something has to change....now.

My hope is that this incident with Ms. Klein will be the turning point.

Romney Says Mandate Is Not a Tax

Didn't Mitt Romney get the memo? He says that the mandate in the Affordable Care Act isn't a tax:

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign on Monday rejected a Republican attack on the Affordable Care Act, repudiating a contention made in last week’s Supreme Court decision that the law’s requirement that individuals carry medical coverage amounts to a tax. 

The Romney team’s refusal to invoke the word “tax” with regard to the individual mandate puts the candidate at odds with others in his party at a moment when Republicans are attempting to capi­tal­ize on the Supreme Court’s decision, which deemed President Obama’s health-care law constitutional. Some Republican-led states are now trying to thwart the legislation’s effort to cover the poor.

The whole thing is pointless bickering over meaningless semantics: penalty, tax, what's the difference? It'll be reported on your taxes if you fail to buy health insurance, so why not let the Republicans have their hissy fit and call it a tax?

But it's irrelevant, because only freeloaders and fools will be paying this tax. A completely optional tax you pay only if you're careless or obstinate isn't really a tax at all. Anyone with a good job will be covered by their employer. Poor people will be covered by Medicaid. Responsible self-employed adults and real small businesses will finally be able to buy decent insurance policies without getting shafted by insurance companies. People who really can't afford it will be given subsidies or exemptions.

Is Romney's disagreement just posturing? Did he get permission from his commanding officer, Grover Norquist, to disagree on the question of whether the mandate is a tax? Is Grover letting Mitt do this in order to make Romney seem somehow more acceptable to independents in the fall? If it is, it shows the depths to which Republicans have to stoop to make their candidates seem electable.


Romney says the first thing he's going to do if elected is repeal Obamacare. Except that Romney says that he's going to keep the part about adult children being covered. And stop insurance companies from kicking you off. And get rid of preexisting condition clauses and lifetime limits. And now he's saying the mandate's not a tax. Basically, Obamacare is identical to the Massachusetts health care law Romney signed.


So, the only real problem are some details about things like how "small" 50-person companies should cover employees. Which means that the law just needs some tweaking around the edges, something which Obama has long said was true: he had to make a lot of compromises to get it passed, and would be glad to fix such problems.

In the end, the only real policy difference between Romney and Obama is that Romney would let some states continue to force hospitals and the rest of us to foot the bill for the health care of obtuse jerks who refuse to take care of themselves.

Sorry, Mitt. We're tired of paying the way for freeloaders. Wait—I'm starting to sound like a Republican!

The Largely Ignored Victory

Any loss for the juveniles on the right is always more devastating given their tendencies towards wild emotional swings (see: junior high). That's why I'm still surprised to see very few celebrating the glaringly obvious victory that has come out of the Supreme Court's ruling on the health care bill. For the first time since the New Deal, the Commerce Clause has been defined in such a way that libertarians have declared victory.

“Under the government’s theory, Congress could address the diet problem by ordering everyone to buy vegetables,” the chief justice wrote. “That is not the country the framers of our Constitution envisioned.”

“We finally won a three-decades-long battle over the commerce clause,” John Eastman, a conservative constitutional scholar and a professor at Chapman University, told me hours after the court’s decision. 

This might seem a paradox, given that the court upheld the legislation. But the decision may ultimately prove a Pyrrhic victory for supporters of expansive Congressional power. The opinion reads like a hymn to the ideal of limited government. And by embracing the broccoli argument, it sharply limits the commerce clause — until now the source of ever-expanding legislative power since Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1824 that Congressional power to regulate commerce “may be exercised to its utmost extent.”

“The commerce clause is not a general license to regulate an individual from cradle to grave,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. Libertarians and conservatives have been seeking such a declaration since the New Deal.

You'd think they be happy but no...oh no...Obama won something so it's the end of the world for the 89th time. It's a good thing they don't value "winning the argument" above all else.

Both Sides are Not Equally Hysterical

The difference in rhetoric between Republicans and Democrats couldn't be starker these past few weeks. Republicans are saying the Fast and Furious program is a scandal far worse than Watergate (which is, as Republicans love to say, laughable, since the program was started under George Bush). They're calling the Supreme Court's decision on the health care law "the end of freedom," when all it does is make people take responsibility for themselves.

Meanwhile, Colorado is burning. Texas is burning, and is likely to be hit by a severe power shortage this summer, causing rolling blackouts. Texas isn't on the national power grid, so they don't know what they're going to do. To make things worse, the prevalent forms of power generation, from hydro, to coal, to nuclear, all use vast amounts of water. Many areas in the western half of the US has been in severe drought conditions for years. Earlier this year the south was clobbered by wave after wave of ferocious tornadoes, starting in February. The eastern half of the country has just been hammered by powerful storms, knocking out power for millions, and is now broiling in 90-100 degree temperatures. This heat and lack of air conditioning will kill dozens if not hundreds of the elderly, children and people with asthma and similar diseases.


The increased frequency and severity of these events are due to climate change, but there's a noticeable absence of hysteria about it from national Democratic figures, even though we're probably past the point of no return on climate change.


If climate change were part of the Republican™ brand, though, they would be screaming it was the end of the world, that Armageddon was upon us. They would label the Koch brothers tools of the devil, in league with Saudi princes to jack up the price of oil and bring Sharia law to America. They would say God is punishing us for destroying the environment by turning the environment against us.

But every time it snows more than an inch, or we have a normal winter like those that were common 30 years ago, they say that it's "proof" climate change is a myth. In Virginia law makers removed references to climate change and sea level rise, changing the law to refer to "recurrent flooding," even though sea levels on some parts of the east coast have risen by as much as 3.8 millimeters a year since 1950. Globally, sea level has been rising by eight inches a century since 1843.

And every time we have a heat wave or hurricane, climate scientists will admit, "We can't say this particular severe weather event was caused by climate change." And the nay-sayers immediately pounce and say, "Told you so!"

But that's because climate scientists are honest and have integrity. They won't make a statement they can't prove to be true, because any particular storm might have occurred under any climate regime. What they have predicted is that there will more tornadoes, hurricanes, and thunderstorms, and that they will on average be more severe. Just as we've seen.


Why? Since the atmosphere and ocean are warmer, there is more energy in storm systems. Since the arctic ice is almost completely melting during the summer, there is more water in the atmosphere, the jet stream over the north pole is shifting and weather patterns are changing. This is causing some areas to be hit by colder winters, while others will have much milder ones (like the Twin Cities, where the ground was still bare in mid-January). Some areas will get socked by big snowfalls and floods, while other areas will languish in drought, without enough snow to replenish the snow pack. The result is that Glacier National Park will cease to have glaciers in my lifetime, and people who depend on winter snowfall in the Rockies for their water supply will have to go thirsty.


And it gets more insidious: higher temperatures have allowed insects like pine beetles to migrate north into formerly cool areas, infesting trees that have no defenses. Entire forests die, and then the dead trees burn. Which is exactly what's happening in the Colorado fire.


In short, the "freak" weather we've seen over the last 10 years is doing exactly what climate scientists said it would do. Temperature increases, CO2 levels and sea-level rise are at or above the numbers predicted by the models.


The Republican tactic of throwing a temper tantrum might work for stopping tax increases or repealing health care for all Americans. But it won't stop people from dying of heat stroke or prevent more intense and frequent hurricanes and floods. In the long run, all that damage caused by severe weather and rising seas will cost us trillions of dollars, money we could spend to make our air cleaner and cooler, and making all Americans healthier.

Say Thanks

Remember a couple of months back when President Obama was secretly plotting to drive up gas prices in order to usher in an area of green and clean energy for all his Solyndra like buddies? (This, along with the same plot to walk guns into Mexico which would, in turn, lead to him being able to take guns away here at home.What a crafty Kenyan!)

Yeah, well, things didn't quite happen that way. 

In case you never heard about it, in April the Obama administration asked Congress to spend $52 million to regulate this speculation. According to the Washington Post, this included the following steps:

• Increase by a factor of six Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) surveillance and enforcement staff “to better deter oil market manipulation."

 • Boost 10-fold, to $10 million, the civil and criminal penalties against “firms that engage in market manipulation."

 • Give the CFTC authority to increase the trader margins — the amount of their own capital that traders must set aside for each bet. The administration officials said such authority “could help limit disruptions in energy markets,” according to the Post.

So what’s happened since April? Oil ended the month at $106, and as of June 22, it had lost 21 percent of its value — sitting at $84. I guess I under-estimated the impact of the CME’s boost in margin requirements for oil speculators. 

As I stated back when this flap started, the problem was never the president. The problem was the speculators. Why?

When regulators raise those requirements, oil speculation becomes less attractive to traders, and they place bets elsewhere. And when margin requirements drop, the traders pile into their oil speculations — confident that they can borrow enough to limit their downside while boosting their upside opportunity.

 In February 2011, when commodities exchanges raised the amount of their own capital that speculators must set aside in order to trade — according to Bloomberg, the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) increased its margin requirements 20 percent to $6,075 per contract, and the International Exchange (ICE) increased its margin requirement 7 percent to $5,200 – the price of oil fell 10 percent within a few months.

And a year later, the commodities exchanges cut the amount of capital that speculators need to set aside before trading — the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) cut by 9 percent to $6,885 the amount that Nymex crude speculators have to post to trade the so-called front-month contract, according to MarketWatch – leading prices to soar to $109 that month.

A fine example of how the government can sometimes improve market outcomes and increase market efficiency. These speculators weren't actually trading in oil and were distorting the market. 

So, the next time you fill up at the pump. thank the president for implementing this plan. After all, he is saving you hundreds of dollars a year!