Newsweek's freedom to mock Mormons

I know that we have very low expectations for Newsweek Magazine. In fact, it's always a surprise when I see that it is still publishing. But I agree with Jim Geraghty that its cover this week photoshopping Mitt Romney's head onto the body of a dancing student from a poster from Broadway's Trey Parker and Matt Stone's musical The Book of Mormon. The cover story is entitled "The Mormon Moment: How the Outsider Faith Creates Winners. Inside the article they headline their story with hist sophomoric beginnin:, "Mormons Rock! They've conquered Broadway, talk radio, the U.S. Senate - and they may win the White House. Why Mitt Romney and 6 million Mormons have the secret to success." "Mormons Rock!"?? Really? Is that the way to indicate the magazine is taking a serious approach to discussing what they say is the fourth largest religion in the United States today?

The article itself is generally respectful, but it contains a lot of golly, gee whiz sort of commentary by noting how many Mormons hold positions of prominence in our culture and society. Can you imagine such an article being written today about Jews, for example, with the tone of "did you know that so-and-so was Mormon?" It would be regarded as religious bigotry. And a bigger jump would be to imagine Newsweek putting the face of a prominent Muslim on the body of a cartoonish Muslim character from South Park. It just wouldn't happen. And there wouldn't be a hit musical on Broadway about Muslims with catchy little songs. The faith would be treated with respect. But for Mormons, Newsweek doesn't see any problem with such a cover. it must have seen as a twofer for Newsweek's art department. They can make Mitt Romney look goofy while putting up a jokey depiction of Mormonism from the Broadway show instead of the usual staid photo of a Mormon temple.

No other religion would be treated with so little respect. Newsweek demonstrates once again why it has earned such a well-deserved oblivion.

David Paul Kuhn has a long column examining poll results to determine if a MOrmon could become president. I believe that it is not Mormonism which is the biggest threat to Mitt Romney's candidacy; it is the policy positions that he has chosen. He has a tremendous burden that he's dragging around through the nomination contest - Romneycare. In a party united in opposition to Obamacare, it seems unrealistic to think that they would nominate a guy who championed a very similar program in his own state. And coming to Iowa to praise ethanol subsidies is not going to win him any friends outside of Iowa. Many people just feel that Romney has been too plastic in his positions, scrapping previous positions that were necessary in liberal Massachusetts but are not winners in a Republican primary. Ironically, if he'd been governor of another state - perhaps his father's Michigan, he wouldn't have so many of these slipperiness questions. At least his prominence in this election may have accomplished getting Americans more ready to accept a Mormon president, just a different one than Mitt Romney.

Cruising the Web

Here's a frightening statistic: Half of the jobs from last month's meager employment numbers came from McDonald's hiring more people for the summer.

Naomi Schaefer Riley writes about the college bubble and asks a question that more people may soon be asking: what is a college education really worth?

More evidence that makes it more unlikely that Weiner's Twitter account was hacked and easy for the Capitol Police to quickly figure it all out. And Yfrog denies that their program was hacked to send the picture.

Liberal Washington state wants to block-grant Medicaid. Apparently, Rhode Island has had success with that approach. Kathleen Sebelius has to decide whether to grant federal permission for a waiver to have a block grant. Will ideology or effectiveness decide the issue? And if she does, how many states will follow suit?

The state of literature for young adult readers is dismal and coarse.

William Voegeli has a good formulation to describe the differences between how liberals and conservatives approach government spending.

My answer is that one way to describe the difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals want government spending to be the independent variable that determines tax levels, and conservatives want government spending to be the dependent variable determined by taxes.

With the liberal formulation, government indulges in fantasy budgeting that way underestimates the costs of programs and then demands new taxes to cover their budgeting mistakes when the bill comes due.

The Syria government paid protesters who took place in riots along the Syria-Israel border. The going rate for their rent-a-demonstrator program is $1000 for showing up and $10,000 to their families if they get killed. Since the average monthly salary for Syrians is $200, it's no surprise that they could get a bunch of poor farmers to show up at the rally.

Senator Richard Lugar chides President Obama for not making his case to Congress for the action of Libya and asking for a joint resolution with the force of law to support his actions. There would be a value to getting our nation's politicians to vote on the record instead of simply politicking before the cameras.

Blacks rally in Harlem to protest the NAACP's decision to throw their lot in with the teachers union instead of with poor black children.

David Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzes the real costs of the auto bailout. Of course, it is a very different story than the one the administration is peddling. And then there is the way that the government's actions have altered bankruptcy practice by sending the message that the government will step in to help in those industries that are deemed too big to fail. What bankruptcies in the future will the government be pressured to interfere in?

And Conn Carrol does the arithmetic on the cost of the Chrysler bailout. Guess what: the President is not telling the truth on his claims that Chrysler has repaid back "every dime and more of what it owes the American taxpayer."

My husband links to this story that GM dealerships are selling Chevy Volts to other dealers and then taking the $7500 tax credit. Hmmm - wasn't that tax credit supposed to be for consumers and not for Chevy dealers offloading new cars to then be resold? And is this how GM is gaming the numbers for the demand for the the Volt?


Michael Barone looks at the crazy numbers involved in the administration's support of the high-speed rail project in California. No one seems to have a good idea about how much the project will cost or where the money is going to come from.

Cruising the Web

Newbusters has a great catch of how MSNBC is using natural disasters to explain increased unemployment now versus how they thought that natural disasters explained increased employment back when Bush was president.

Monica Hesse speaks for a lot of women out there when she advises guys to stop thinking that sending out pictures of their package are a great come-on to women. though I'm not on the same page with the woman who yearns for a picture of a man alphabetizing the books in his library.

Oh, and calling the Capitol Police to get rid of a local TV reporter is never a good media strategy. I guess it shows that there are indeed some infractions that Weiner thinks it's worth spending the taxpayers' money on to call in the police.

The AP does a fact check of how the Democrats are distorting the GOP Medicare proposal and concludes, "Wasserman Schultz and some other Democrats who accuse the GOP of wanting to "end Medicare" have skipped past the complicated crux of that debate, instead attacking provisions that do not exist." AP has problems with the Ryan plan because they're still comparing it to the ideal vision of how Medicare would continue working in the future just as it has worked in the past. That is the real fallacy when the media assesses the GOP plan. But the Democrats don't have anything but lies to put forward.

Peggy Noonan has found the sentence to summarize Obama's presidency: "He made it worse." Hard to disagree with that.

What does it say about the historical ignorance of the middle-schoolers who put Bush and Cheney in their yearbook on a list of the "worst five people of all time?" Not only does that school need a new yearbook supervisor, but an entire new history staff.

Kimberley Strassel focuses on the same problem that I have with Sarah Palin. Palin had an opportunity after the 2008 election to recast herself as a serious candidate by studying policy and coming out with her own proposals to address the nation's problems. She chose a different path. And while that might make her a fine media personality and make her base happy, she hasn't demonstrated any ability to appeal to voters beyond that base. And that is what the GOP nominee in 2012 will have to do. Republicans want a winner not just someone who can stick it in the eye of the MSM.

Dorothy Rabinowitz has some good advice for whomever that GOP nominee will be.

Obama's Solicitor General makes the argument in favor of the mandate that if someone didn't like being forced to buy insurance that person could just choose to make less money. Now that's a comfort, isn't it?

The Washington Post can't understand why the NAACP would side with the teachers union over the interests of students. Their naiveté is sweet, but myopic.

Tim Geithner picked the wrong week to praise the administration on the auto bailout.

Jim Geraghty notes that Obama wants to pretend that he's above paying attention to the 2012 race...except for all those fundraisers he's jetting around to.

Why the debt ceiling fight is healthy for our government

Charles Krauthammer explains why the debt ceiling debate is salutary for our government. The government doesn't have to default; there is money to pay interest on the debt. But that means that we will have to make choices about the rest of the budget.

There is no drop-dead date. There is no overnight default. Debt service amounts to about 6 percent of the federal budget and only about 10 percent of federal revenue. This means that for every $1 of interest payments, there is roughly $9 of revenue the government spends elsewhere.

Move money around — and you’ve covered the debt service. Cover the debt service — and there is no default. What scares Geithner is not that we won’t be able to pay our creditors but that his Treasury won’t be able to continue spending the obscene amounts of money (about $120 billion a month) it doesn’t have and will (temporarily) be unable to borrow.

Good. The government will (temporarily) be forced to establish priorities. A salutary exercise.

This fight is a preview of the real crisis that will come in the ever-nearer future when the whole house of cards that is our federal spending pattern comes tumbling down.

The current debt-ceiling showdown, therefore, is an instructive dry run of an actual Greek-like default, which awaits if we don’t solve our debt problem.

With one difference, of course. During today’s debt-ceiling fight, if the markets start to get jittery, interest rates on U.S. debt spike and the economy begins to teeter, the whole exercise can be called off with a push of a button — an act of Congress hiking the debt ceiling. When the real crisis comes, however, there is no button. There is no flight-simulator reset. We default, and the economy really does crash.

Which is why the current debt-ceiling showdown is to be welcomed. It creates leverage to force fiscal sanity.

I'd endorse Krauthammer's recommendation that the House demand spending caps that can only be overridden by a super-majority vote. Then maintain Boehner's proposal of dollar-for-dollar cuts for every dollar raising the debt ceiling. That is tough, but getting us on the road to fiscal sanity was never going to be easy. If it were easy, we'd already be there.

It ain't over...

Forget politics. The real excitement was the Mavericks' comeback last night. The Heat should learn a lesson about gloating and celebrating too early. Now they've become another storyline of teams that blew big leads in the fourth quarter against the Mavs. Heh, heh.

And all those sportscasters who drew a straight line extrapolating from Miami's win in the first game to predicting subsequent victories should know better. They should read this Onion satire of sportscasting. "Realistic Announcer Shouting How Kevin Durant Making His Last 4 Shots Has No Bearing On Whether He Will Make Next Shot." We can't generalize about the Heat from their collapse last night. If the game had gone to the Heat last night, you know all the commentary would have been completely different after the game.

Rick Reilly has twenty reasons why the rest of the country is pulling for the Mavs. Here are a few of those reasons.

Pull for Dallas because when you ask Nowitzki why he didn't bolt the way everybody else does, he simply says, "Because this is where my heart is."

Pull for Dallas because Nowitzki didn't try to win a title the new way, didn't pick the best kids on the playground and take on everybody else, didn't get a bunch of super-human friends and schedule himself a ring, like you might a kegger or your birthday party.

Pull for Dallas because Nowitzki has this crazy idea about trying to win one the old fashioned way, by getting better.

Pull for Dallas because James is so heaven-sent talented that he'll get more than his share of rings before he's done.

Pull for Dallas because Nowitzki is much closer to done than starting now.

Pull for Dallas because 38-year-old Jason Kidd deserves one, too, despite what he says. "I want this more for Dirk than for me," says Kidd, who's played in three decades -- 17 years -- in this league without champagne in his hair. "All the work Dirk's put in, all the time. Man he deserves it more than anybody on this team. Plus, if he gets it, that means I get one too, right?"

Pull for Dallas because Kidd is the guy everybody likes, the Ray Bourque of the NBA, the one everybody wants to see hold the trophy over his head someday. If he doesn't win it now, in his third Finals try, he'll never win it.

Pull for Dallas because it has the best locker room in the NBA, not a whiner among them. There are more good guys in that room than in some divisions.

Pull for Dallas because it doesn't do pre-championship celebrations. Dallas has this crazy notion that you should actually hold the trophy in your hands before you throw the parade. Wouldn't it be nice to give them one?

Cruising the Web Some More

The New York Times profiles sportswriter Bill Simmons. This is what well-deserved success looks like.

Could schadenfreude be keeping Democrats from rushing to Anthony Weiner's support? Or do they think his ever-changing responses sound as fishy as conservatives think they do? Except for MSNBC does the guy have all that many friends?

So the government announces that we lost about $14 billion on the auto bailout. Add in another $14 billion that the government gave GM in a tax break. Megan McArdle analyzes what has gone down in the entire GM bailout and concludes,

No, the question was not whether GM could make a profit after a bankruptcy that stiffed most of its creditors and shed the most grotesque burdens of its legacy costs, nor whether giving companies money will make them more profitable. The question is whether it was worth it to the taxpayer to burn $10-20 billion in order to give the company another shot at life. To put that in perspective, GM had about 75,000 hourly workers before the bankruptcy. We could have given each of them a cool $250,000 and still come out well ahead compared to the ultimate cost of the bailout including the tax breaks--and over $100,000 a piece if we just wanted to break even against our losses on the common stock.

Read the rest and ask yourself if this was the correct policy and if the taxpayer has gotten his money's worth. Then ask yourself, as Mickey Kaus is asking, whether the government could have gotten a better deal for GM and the taxpayers if it had been willing to drive a tougher deal with the UAW, perhaps a deal that "would have given GM a better shot at surviving and served as a deterrent to future union leaders who might want to gamble with their employer’s solvency."

John Podhoretz imagines what would have happened if the American public had adopted Representative Weiner's proposed drinking game for the State of the Union with Weiner's own statements: mass cirrhosis of the liver. And Andrew McCarthy shoots down Weiner's preposterous statement that an ordinary citizen couldn't get an official investigation of a cyber crime such as he alleges caused the whole story in the first place.

Watch your Senate at work as it manages to take a vacation while not going into recess because Republicans refused to give unanimous consent unless the Democrats actually proposed a budget. Harry Reid didn't want to have a roll call vote that could be embarrassing to Democrats who voted for the recess while not voting for any sort of budget. So they're just holding pro forma minute-long sessions. Just what James Madison envisioned, right?

The NYT finds that the Obama Justice Department has been more partisan in its hiring practices than the Bush Justice Department.

Nearly a quarter of the hires of the Bush group had conservative credentials like membership in the Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, while only 7 percent had liberal ones.

By contrast, during the first two Obama years, none of the new hires listed conservative organizations, while more than 60 percent had liberal credentials. They consisted overwhelmingly of prior employment or internships with a traditional civil rights group, like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Pause for contemplating the obligatory "What if Bush had done this..." question.

Why should the taxpayers be paying for federal employees to conduct union business during the workday. The newest estimate from the Office of Personnel Management is that federal employees in 2009 spent a total of about 3 million work hours on union business at a cost of $129 million dollars with a 7% increase from 2008. I guess that having a pro-union president necessitated all that increased union activity on the taxpayer dime. Does this make sense to anyone other than union members?

Cruising the Web

There is a general rule in politics that it's never good when you're the subject of widespread jokes. Representative Weiner has reached well beyond that point. And when a man can't answer whether or not the lewd Twitpic was of him, the man has gone well beyond the joke phase. How many men have taken pictures of themselves in their underwear? And since he can't answer that question, all the other questions are fair game. The man has demonstrated the worst crisis-management skills since Al Gore tried to not answer questions about campaigning in the Buddhist temple. The man is not acting like an innocent man. And saying that he's trying to save the taxpayer money by not getting the authorities involved in this is as lame as can be. He's toast. Insert your own puns here.

Daniel Henninger explains why Barack Obama owns this economy.

Here is an odd statistic that Mike Antonucci has uncovered. In the 2008-2009 school year, the Census reports that there was a loss of over 157,000 students in K-12 public schools. In the same period there was an increase of over 81,000 teachers. He adds in more data to demonstrate that this is the trend in public education. I know that the push is for smaller classes, but it is surprising that, in a recessions with politicians bemoaning cuts in education, this has been the trend across the country.

How unions are attempting to unionize charter schools without a vote of the staff.

Shouldn't Chris Christie have better political sense than to take the state helicopter to his son's baseball game? Even if the state police say that the flight was used for training purposes, how many training flights just happen to deliver the governor to a personal event?

John Taylor explains why economists believe that raising the debt ceiling should be tied to spending reform now and not to some point in the future as Obama wants. If politicians can't agree to cut spending now, why should we believe that they will agree to cut spending in the future?

The US Postal Service is going broke. David Leonard describes the problems in Business Week and argues that now is the time to rethink our postal system. In fact, as he describes the problems and proposed solutions, we could learn some lessons from how the European Union has updated the reformed their postal operations.

The EPA doesn't need no stinkin' cost-benefit analysis

According to the head of EPA, the EPA isn't supposed to take into account the cost to the economy when passing a regulation.

The Environmental Protection Agency informed Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) in a recent letter that it considers itself “prohibited” by law from considering costs when setting National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS).

Hmmm/ Perhaps Lisa Jackson, the head of the EPA, missed the fact that President Obama issued an executive order this year that regulations "must take into account benefits and costs, both quantitative and qualitative."

Or better yet, the EPA doesn't think that the order applies to them because of the way that Obama phrased the order. As the WSJ noticed at the time, he inserted a provision that, while agencies are supposed to consider costs and benefits they should also take into consideration values.

Among many others, the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement that it was "confident" it wouldn't need to alter a single current or pending rule. "In fact, EPA's rules consistently yield billions in cost savings that make them among the most cost-effective in the government."

Perhaps the EPA's confidence owes to a little-noticed proviso in Mr. Obama's order. When the agencies weigh costs and benefits, the order says, they should always consider "values that are difficult or impossible to quantify, including equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts."

Talk about economic elasticities. Equity and fairness can be defined to include more or less anything as a benefit. Under this calculus, a rule might pass Mr. Obama's cost-benefit test if it imposes $999 billion in hard costs but supposedly results in a $1 trillion increase in human dignity, whatever that means in bureaucratic practice. Another rule could pass muster even if it reduces work and investment, as long as it also lessens income inequality.

And Lisa Jackson has been determined to implement what she calls "environmental justice."

One of Administrator Lisa Jackson's top priorities is "explicitly integrating environmental justice considerations into the fabric of the EPA's process," as a July 2010 memo to all senior regulators put it.

"Environmental justice" is the left-wing grievance movement that claims pollution has a disproportionate effect on minorities and the poor. Ms. Jackson's memo introduced new regulatory guidance—that is, rules about how to make rules—so every EPA action has "a particular focus on disadvantaged or vulnerable groups."

Ms. Jackson wrote that a new goal for rulemaking, enforcement and permitting is to have "a measurable effect on environmental justice challenges." But these amorphous concepts are not measurable at all. According to this guidance, EPA must nonetheless consider them when estimating the "economic impacts of regulations," and even its scientific analysis should "encompass topics beyond just biology and chemistry." So put on your lab coat and complete a randomized controlled experiment in politics.

Sure enough, EPA justifies its 2009 carbon "endangerment finding" by noting that climate change will "add further stress to an existing host of social problems that cities experience, including neighborhood degradation, traffic congestion, crime, unemployment, poverty, and inequities in health and well-being." Oh, and it will "accentuate the disparities already evident in the American health care system, as many of the expected health effects are likely to fall disproportionately on the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and the uninsured."

So while Mr. Obama wants the country to think a new rigorous empiricism is guiding his government, his appointees can justify any rule that fits their ideological goals. This sounds more like the end of cost-benefit analysis than the beginning.

So that is why the EPA figures that it doesn't need to consider the costs to the regulations that it imposes on the American economy. It's all about justice and such talk of cost-benefit would just be too, too tawdry when there is human dignity to establish.