Mike DeWine Insults Our Intelligence, Part God-Knows-What: Here’s part of the latest campaign e-mail from Mike DeWine –

All this is yours for a $25 donation to the DeWine campaign.

Here’s a recipe for a genuine Attorney General who would serve Ohio that probably didn’t make Fran’s cookbook:

• Throw Constitution Party candidate Bob Owens onto the ballot, banishing Jennifer Brunner’s brutishness from the brew.
• Add DeWine, a faux conservative backed by ORPINO (the Ohio Republican Party In Name Only), who hasn’t won a general election in almost 10 years.
• Throw in incumbent Attorney General Richard Cordray, who is fine with allowing the federal government to trample the U.S. Constitution by forcing Buckeye State residents to buy health insurance.
• Add sufficient Tea Party tea leaves to the mixture.
• Allow to simmer for enough time with open exposure.
• Observe as Owens rises to the top.

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Evil insurance companies? The bolded point made in a Wall Street Journal editorial today slaps readers in the face (full access may require subscription):

This week it became impossible in Massachusetts for small businesses and individuals to buy health-care coverage after Governor Deval Patrick imposed price controls on premiums. Read on, because under ObamaCare this kind of political showdown will soon be coming to an insurance market near you.

The Massachusetts small-group market that serves about 800,000 residents shut down after Mr. Patrick kicked off his re-election campaign by presumptively rejecting about 90% of the premium increases the state’s insurers had asked regulators to approve. Health costs have run off the rails since former GOP Governor Mitt Romney and Beacon Hill passed universal coverage in 2006, and Mr. Patrick now claims price controls are the sensible response to this ostensibly (sic) industry greed.

Yet all of the major Massachusetts insurers are nonprofits. Three of largest four—Blue Cross Blue Shield, Tufts Health Plan and Fallon Community Health—posted operating losses in 2009.

Yet another sneak preview of how no one will be safe from ObamaCare — thanks largely to Objectively Unfit Mitt Romney “legitimizing” state-run health care.

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Even in complimenting former President Bush for his AIDs initiative, CBS’s “60 Minutes” ignored the real reason for its success (noted in a column I wrote two years ago), which was in its approach to the problem:

five years after PEPFAR first began, the efficacy and importance of promoting abstinence and ‘be faithful’ initiatives have been demonstrated. The evidence is compelling” …..

PEPFAR ….. relies on the ABC model, which stands for “Abstain, Be faithful, use Condoms.” ….. the ABC model “is now recognized as the most effective strategy to prevent HIV in generalized epidemics” The legislation’s emphasis on ABC activities has been an important factor in the fundamental and needed shift in USG prevention strategy from a primarily C approach prior to PEPFAR to the balanced ABC strategy.

….. No generalized HIV epidemic has ever been rolled back by a prevention strategy primarily based on condoms.

….. Serara Selelo-Mogwe, a public health expert and retired nursing professor at the University of Botswana ….. said (to the Washington Post in March 2007), “If you just say use the condom, we will never see the daylight of the virus leaving us.”

President Obama suspended PEPFAR shortly after he assumed office. Whatever has followed has not been well-received, at least as of December:

Activists are expressing disappointment with President Barack Obama’s plans for the Aids treatment programme in Africa, charging that he has fallen short of the achievements of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

“President Obama has all but failed to fulfil his commitments to wage an aggressive battle against global Aids,” a coalition of Aids-focused groups declared last week, assigning him a grade of D+ for his performance to date.

Gregg Gonsalves, a leading US anti-Aids campaigner, warned an audience in New York last week, “I am about to say something shocking: I miss George W Bush.”

“Somehow,” CBS avoided bringing this point up.

From Rome:

Apr 8, 2010 / 10:27 am

The Holy Shroud was transferred from Turin during World War II to keep it out of reach of Adolph Hitler, according to a Benedictine priest in a southern Italian abbey. Monks in Avellino, Italy stored the relic until 1946 “officially to protect it from bombs, in reality to hide it from the Fuhrer, who was obsessed with it,” the monk said.

Sensing the dangers posed by German officials’ interest in the Shroud during a visit from Hitler to Italy in 1938, the following year the Vatican and the royal Savoy family decided to move the unique and revered cloth bearing the likeness of Christ to a locale offering more safety than the Cathedral of Turin.

Father Andrea Davide Cardin, rector of the library of the Benedictine abbey of Montevergine, told Italy’s Diva e Donna magazine that the “unusual and insistent questions” from the Nazi hierarchy put the Church and the royal family “on alert.”

King Umberto II of Savoy, whose family had owned and protected the Shroud since the 15th century, thought that the Vatican was the only place it might be safe, while Pope Pius XII was inclined to send it to Montecassino for hiding, related Fr. Cardin. In the end, the decision was made to store it with the Benedictines in the town of Avellino, more than 500 miles from Turin in the southern region of Campania.

The decision was fortuitous as the monastery at Montecassino was later destroyed by Allied bombing meant to dislodge a Nazi stronghold there.

Fr. Cardin described the great secrecy with which the operation was carried out in Sept. 1939. The Shroud was secretly transported from Turin by way of Rome, to be placed below an altar in the abbey under the cover of night.

The secret was kept throughout the war despite a search of the premises carried out by German soldiers in 1943 following a bombing of Avellino. The relic was protected, said Fr. Cardin, as, upon hearing of the coming of the soldiers, the monks retired to pray at the altar. “An officer,” he explained, “seeing them in prayer, gave the order not to disturb (them) and that was how the sacred relic went undiscovered.”

Hitler apparently sought the linen for its “sacred power.”

Go here for the rest of the story.

One would think that in a story about how a four-year move-up of higher fleet gas mileage requirements being imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency would at least look at which manufacturers might be more or less affected by them based on what they currently sell, and how those sales are trending.

Well, most readers here don’t think like writers at the Associated Press. Heck, in his report last Friday, the AP’s Ken Thomas didn’t even mention the fact that the EPA’s regs represented a four-year move-up, and to a slightly higher standard — apparently because doing so would have required him to mention the B-word (Bush) in connection with something seen as environmentally positive. Thomas also allowed “global warming” advocacy support to go unchallenged, as if the ClimateGate scandal that has wrecked the alarmists’ entire case didn’t exist.

Here are selected paragraphs from the AP report:

New mileage rules: Pay more for cars, less at pump

Drivers will have to pay more for cars and trucks, but they’ll save at the pump under tough new federal rules aimed at boosting mileage, cutting emissions and hastening the next generation of fuel-stingy hybrids and electric cars.

The new standards, announced Thursday, call for a 35.5 miles-per-gallon average within six years, up nearly 10 mpg from now.

By setting national standards for fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes, the government hopes to squeeze out more miles per gallon whether you buy a tiny Smart fortwo micro car, a rugged Dodge Ram pickup truck or something in between.

The rules will cost consumers an estimated $434 extra per vehicle in the 2012 model year and $926 per vehicle by 2016, the government said. But the heads of the Transportation Department and Environmental Protection Agency said car owners would save more than $3,000 over the lives of their vehicles through better gas mileage.

… “Because of these standards, Americans will drive vehicles that save them money at the pump, cut the country’s oil dependence and produce a lot less global warming pollution,” said Jim Kliesch, a senior engineer in the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Vehicles Program.

… The changes will cost the auto industry about $52 billion, but the government says the program will provide $240 billion in savings to consumers, mostly through lower fuel consumption. The changes also could help U.S. manufacturers who produce advanced vehicles, batteries and engines, the government said.

The EPA is setting a tailpipe emissions standard of 250 grams (8.75 ounces) of carbon dioxide per mile for vehicles sold in 2016, equal to what would be emitted by vehicles meeting the mileage standard. This represents the EPA’s first rules ever on vehicle greenhouse gas emissions, following a 2007 Supreme Court decision.

Each auto company will have a different fuel-efficiency target, based on its mix of vehicles. Automakers that build more small cars will have a higher target than car companies that manufacture a broad range of cars and trucks. For example, passenger cars built by General Motors Co. will need to hit a target of 32.7 mpg in 2012 and increase to 36.9 mpg by 2016. Honda Motor Co., meanwhile, will need to reach passenger car targets of 33.8 mpg in 2012 and ramp up to 38.3 mpg in 2016.

An interesting item found after digging into the numbers a bit is that the two car companies controlled by the government are so far the ones who are on balance doing the least about their gas-hungry mix of vehicles, based on this look at the top five best-selling brands in the US (data is from the Wall Street Journal’s March Auto Sales report):

Governent/General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler have the three highest mixes of “light trucks” (SUVs, pickup trucks, etc.). But GM’s mix is tilting a bit towards light trucks, not away from them. It would appear that Ford’s light vehicles sales percentage will drop below GM’s in the near future. Chrysler wouldn’t even exist without light trucks, and its mix is so high that it will take years (assuming it hangs on) for its mix to come down to even Ford’s or GM’s current levels. I should also not that since its the smallest of the five U.S. sellers listed above, it will likely be the least able to afford whatever fixed costs are associated with EPA compliance.

If the company-defined targets identified in Thomas’s report are fixed, as he implies by not qualifying the specific numbers with an “about,” GM will have to reverse its product-mix trend and move from higher-profit light trucks at a time when it’s still losing money even after going through a government-orchestrated bankruptcy.

As to the Bush-related news, it comes from this item carried at the New Mexico Independent:

A renewed focus on increasing fuel efficiency standards came in 2007, when President George W. Bush signed the federal Energy Independence and Security Act which required automakers to increase fuel efficiency to 35 miles per gallon fleetwide by 2020.

Of course, many sensible people believe that the government has no business dictating fleet mileages, especially since the entire global warming enterprise has been exposed as the fraud that it has always been. There seems to be no reasonable basis for the requirements, other than to give the EPA a reason to feel self-important while driving up the cost of vehicles and compromising driver safety — another factor Ken Thomas chose to ignore.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Lucid Links:

Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press, writing on this morning’s initial unemployment claims report –

Initial jobless claims increase unexpectedly

The Labor Department said Thursday that first-time claims increased by 18,000 in the week ending April 3, to a seasonally adjusted 460,000. That’s worse than economists’ estimates of a drop to 435,000, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

The report covers the week that includes the Easter holiday, and a Labor Department analyst said seasonal adjustment for Easter can be difficult since the holiday occurs in different weeks each year.

Ummm … since when is Easter Week especially good or bad for employment in any given year?

The “difficulty” of interpreting things is why it’s a good idea to look at the NOT seasonally adjusted (NSA) numbers, and compare them to prior years. There’s a tool for that on DOL’s site. An AP writer and the rest of the business press should be visiting it routinely.

For the current and previous three years, here are the NSA and seasonally adjusted (SA) numbers:
- Week ending April 3, 2010 — NSA – 414,657; SA – 460,000
- Week ending April 4, 2009 — NSA – 623,279; SA – 643,000
- Week ending April 5, 2008 — NSA – 357,209; SA – 354,000
- Week ending April 7, 2007 — NSA – 328,266; SA – 332,000

This past week’s NSA result is 16% higher than two years ago, when the National Bureau of Economic Research (but not normal people) said we were in a recession. The economy was losing about 100,000 seasonally adjusted jobs per month at that point.

That said, the 2010 v. 2008 NSA differential is not as bad as the 30% SA difference for the same two years, which I suspect is distorted by how bad 2009 was (as has been the case with the monthly Employment Situation Report). Things aren’t as bad as the SA difference would indicate, but the real NSA numbers show that they are far from ideal.

I could look over the four-week averages year over year going back more than one year, but I don’t have time. Anyway, that was Rugaber’s job. I can’t do everything for him.

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This is really an outrage, and unless ObamaCare is repealed, it’s also part of our future:

A Christian nurse in Britain lost a discrimination claim on Tuesday after fighting a policy that barred her from wearing her crucifix to work.

Shirley Chaplin, 54, was told by the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Trust Hospital last year that the crucifix she has worn for almost 40 years on the job without incident needed to be removed for “health and safety reasons.”

Chaplin refused to comply and consequently took the hospital to an Employment Tribunal which ruled on Tuesday that Chaplin is not facing discrimination, as it asserted that all employees are treated equally. Under the Trust’s current uniform policy, however, one can wear a hijab for religious reasons but not a cross.

In due time, similar bureaucratic encroachment will ensue under ObamaCare’s statist regime. The fact that a given hospital might have a religious affiliation won’t save its practicing employees from such arbitrariness.

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Nancy Pelosi, who told us that she’d let us know what’s in ObamaCare after it passes came up with another doozy on Tuesday (HT NeoNeocon):

The Speaker compared it to the enactment of social security, medicare and the civil rights act.

And while she said it may not be perfect, it’s a bold step in the right direction.

”It’s like the back of the refrigerator. You see all these wires and the rest,” said Pelosi. “All you need to know is, you open the door. The light goes on. You open this door, you go through a whole different path, in terms of access to quality, affordable healthcare for all Americans.”

Well, when you open a refrigerator, you do look into a cold, chilly world, so in that sense she has a point.

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Lightly-Commented Lightning:

• James Poulos at Pajamas Media — “In Bid To Reform Fannie and Freddie, Obama Can’t Shake Crony Clintonistas Who Caused the Mess; Clintonistas like Rahm Emanuel and Andrew Cuomo ran Fannie and Freddie into the ground, but Obama now relies on many of them for his reform plans.” Welcome to the perpetual, and perpetually corrupt “housing crisis.” And they wonder why the Tea Partiers are gaining steam?
• Lest I inflict avoidable suffering on unsuspecting visitors, I will warn readers that what follows is six minutes of Barack Obama’s 17-minute awful non-answer to a woman at a town hall meeting who noted that “we’re overtaxed”:

  Six minutes of non-stop nails on a chalkboard is less painful.

Comment-Free Lightning:

• Daniel Foster at The Corner — “Obama’s Fake Macho”
• At CNS News — “Rep. Wasserman Schultz Insists Health Care Law Doesn’t Require Individuals to Buy Insurance” … “despite language in the law that plainly says otherwise.”
• At Hot Air, concerning the New York Times’s de facto acknowledgment of the reality of death panels in ObamaCare — “O-Care Is Really No Care.”

From New York City:

French tourist says he didn’t think twice about aiding child
Updated 10:25 a.m. ET, Wed., April 7, 2010

A French tourist who rescued a toddler who fell into New York’s East River says he didn’t think twice about diving in to save the girl.

Two-year-old Bridget Sheridan fell off a gangplank at the South Street Seaport museum Saturday. Her father, David Anderson, says she slipped through guardrails when he averted his eyes to adjust his camera.

Julien Duret, of Lyon, France, jumped into the water. Anderson followed closely behind. Duret scooped up the girl and gave her to her father.

“The emotion took over,” Duret told the Daily News Tuesday from his hometown of Lyon, France. “I didn’t think at all. It happened very fast. I reacted very fast. … I’ve never done anything like that before.”

The New York Daily News says the 29-year-old tourist got in a cab after the rescue. Duret says he doesn’t think he’s a hero and that anyone would do the same thing. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Government/General Motors announced today that it lost $4.3 billion during the second half of 2009 (actually from July 10 through the end of the year). A further look at that result will come later after yours truly has time to digest GM’s 10K Report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

What stood out even further for me about the announcement was GM’s top line, i.e., global revenues. That figure came in at $57.5 billion.

Ford’s revenues during the final two quarters of 2009 came in at $66.3 billion, or roughly 15% higher. GM’s ten missing days in July would only explain about one-third of that difference.

It may be out there, but I haven’t seen a lot of establishment media recognition that Ford is a bigger company worldwide than General Motors, and has been since the first quarter of last year. Given that GM was larger than Ford for about the previous 80 years, Ford’s ascension to the top spot among US-based companies in worldwide revenues would ordinarily be what is known as “news.”

In fact, though it is true that Ford’s domestic unit sales still trail GM, the Associated Press’s Dee-Ann Durbin still treated the smaller company as the kingpin in her coverage of GM’s brief announcement today. Durbin also wrote as if the idea that the government-controlled company will be able to go public is a certainty, and threw in a laugher of a paragraph about how things are supposedly getting better at Chrysler, where year-over-year sales are still in decline (bolds are mine):

GM owes an additional $45.3 billion to the government. That will be repaid when GM makes a public stock offering, which Liddell says will happen “when the markets and the company are ready.”

Liddell, who came to GM at the beginning of the year from Microsoft Corp., wouldn’t say whether GM will make money in the first quarter, but said there’s a good chance the company will make a profit in 2010 based on encouraging first-quarter sales and production. GM plans to release first-quarter results next month.

“I think there is a danger of overpromising and underdelivering,” he said. “When we put the numbers on the board, we will come out and tell you about them.”

GM, which remains the largest car company by sales in the U.S., saw a slight gain in U.S. market share in the first three months of this year compared to a year ago.

… Things are also on the mend at Chrysler Group LLC, which also went into bankruptcy protection last year and is now managed by Fiat SpA. Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said last week that the automaker has $5 billion in cash on hand and expects to break even this year. Chrysler plans to provide more detailed financial results later this month.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s monthly vehicle sales report, Durbin’s final excerpted statement is so barely true that it wasn’t even worth citing. GM’s first quarter 2009 market share was 18.5%, while the first quarter of 2010 came in at 18.7%. Subtract out the effects of what was from all appearances a government- and media-orchestrated campaign against Toyota that had its worst effects during January and February, and GM’s model lineup is in no way better than it was a year ago.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

UPDATE, April 8: I also should note that the AP’s headline at its main site about GM’s $4.3 billion loss was “GM ready to repay govt. loan, sees chance of profit.” Zheesh.

After a bit of a respite primarily due to NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics, the audience desertion from the Big 3 networks’ evening news broadcasts has again resumed.

Not that the first quarter of 2010 was all peaches and cream. Last week, Media Bistro noted that ABC’s “World News Tonight” had “its lowest-rated first quarter ever.”

But the results for the first week of the second ratings quarter are beyond awful. The total audience for all three evening news shows came in under 20 million. For context, recall that during a traditionally low-audience summer week in 2006, Drudge headlined (“TV’s Lowest Week“) a disastrous drop — to 21 million viewers. Now it appears that what was once considered a really bad summer week four years ago (noted at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) might be a typical week during 2010′s prime spring viewing season.

Here’s how last week’s audiences compare to the same week a year ago:

There are double-digit drops across the board. The overall decline is even worse in the 25-54 demographic.

Perhaps the decades-long, slow-motion audience revulsion at the networks’ insufferable bias is being aided and abetted currently by their more recent efforts at demonizing Tea Partiers, i.e., ordinary Americans. If that’s so, their springtime audience crash may accelerate.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

The only question is: By how much?

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Note: This column went up at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Monday.

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For decades, following three fundamental certainties of Uncle Sam’s finances have been that:

1. Tax collections resulting from tax increases are always less than what the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts.
2. Tax collections resulting from across-the-board and investment-related tax cuts always exceed CBO predictions.
3. The annual growth rate of federal spending always exceeds inflation.

Perhaps the excesses of the Obama administration and the rise of the Tea Party movement will finally do something about Item 3. But for the moment, let’s look at Items 1 and 2. To do that requires a closer look at the CBO

First, let me be clear that what follows isn’t necessarily a knock on the people who there. From all appearances, the folks at the agency, which has been particularly beleaguered since Barack Obama took office, do their jobs professionally and effectively. Despite apparent attempts by the administration to put pressure on the CBO and its Director Doug Elmendorf — including inappropriately summoning Elmendorf to the White House last summer (he reports Congress, not the executive branch) — I haven’t seen any indication that CBO has twisted its data, projections or reports to favor any predetermined conclusion on its own (the key words are “on its own,” which I’ll explain shortly).

But the CBO has three problems. The first is common to any financial forecasting, which is that it’s about as predictable as the weather. There are simply too many variables that are beyond anyone’s control. Assumptions that appear reasonable now often look downright silly in retrospect, but that’s the nature of the beast. Despite this obvious shortcoming, establishment media reporters all too often treat CBO projections — especially the ones containing conclusions that they like — as if they have a special kind of clairvoyance. Katie Couric at CBS News described the CBO’s ObamaCare report released a few days before the legislation’s passage as having a “certified price tag.” That statement by Couric is certifiable.

A second and more serious problem is that politicians are more frequently and brazenly telling CBO what to assume. From what I can tell, as long as these dictated assumptions aren’t completely ridiculous, CBO has to use them. This problem reared its ugly head during the run-up to ObamaCare’s passage in the House, and the extent to which it forced a preordained conclusion is probably unprecedented. Elmendorf & Co. were ordered to use a set of assumptions that led it to “conclude” that Medicare spending growth will trail its historical average by a couple of percentage points. That conclusion runs counter to over four decades of history, and in a 10-year projection probably understated total future costs by hundreds of billions of dollars. CBO qualified its report as much as it could, but it could not change the, ahem, “certified” numbers.

The third problem is that the agency uses what is known as static analysis. This means that it is not allowed to factor in any kind of behavior change by individuals or businesses resulting from new federal legislation. For example, it absurdly assumes that individuals and businesses won’t take any actions that might reduce their reported taxable income next year when federal income tax rates on the highest-earning 5% of the population are slated to go up dramatically.

Many pundits, think-tankers, and others would like to see CBO incorporate dynamic analysis the would estimate the impact of changed behavior into its work. It’s one thing to predict lower receipts than static analysis would predict; it’s quite another to forecast and defend how much the change would be. I don’t think it’s possible with any degree of precision, and it would therefore be a mistake to allow CBO to try. While static analysis is far less than perfect, it can at least be calculated, defended, and understood. Any attempt to apply dynamic analysis would very quickly erode CBO’s hard currency of credibility even more quickly than the mandated assumptions problem previously noted.

That said, sensible politicians have every right — in fact, a duty — to explain why CBO’s static numbers won’t work out as predicted, and why. That’s especially true when it comes to federal tax collections. In the current economic environment, which the Wall Street Journal has called “the uncertainty economy,” and what yours truly has been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy, tax collections continue to lag, and Obama administration policies and posturing are the reasons why.

In August of last year, CBO predicted that fiscal collections for year that will end on September 30, 2010 would be $2.264 trillion, an increase of almost $160 billion over fiscal 2009′s total of $2.105 trillion. Reality stubbornly continues to differ. Barring a last-second surprise, the government’s Monthly Treasury Statement for March will show that receipts through six months are actually down from last year by at least $40 billion. Though collections in February and March 2010 came in a bit ahead of 2009, the turnaround is not yet significant enough to be a trend, especially since collections from individuals who pay quarterly estimated taxes continue to trail last year on a monthly basis.

For the same reasons that receipts are staying in the tank, as well as the history lessons in Items 1 and 3 above, ObamaCare’s tax increases will also not produce the amounts the static-analyzing CBO predicts, while higher spending will cause annual deficits to spiral further out of control. You can take it to the bank.

It is an understatement to say that we’re in a world of hurt if ObamaCare isn’t repealed. We’re not heading into a financial ditch; we’re on the edge of a cliff.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Friday morning (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

The subheadline is:

Here’s how to address the mediocrity problem, expand the field, and create a whole new level of interest and excitement.

Since it appears inevitable that the NCAA will expand its Division I men’s basketball tournament whether we like it or not, the column presents a way to do so while rewarding regular-season conference champs and post-season conference tournament champs for their achievements, without diluting the field to such a degree that teams from so-called major conferences with barely winning records get in.

Coach K at Duke is on record supporting part of “my” approach, but I go farther by bringing the early games on campus.

Go there and see what you think.

The problem isn’t that the best and brightest aren’t in charge (though they aren’t).

It’s that even an assemblage of geniuses can’t do better than the marketplace, as points out Reynolds first in his latest Washington Examiner column (“Progressives can’t get past the Knowledge Problem”).

But it goes beyond that. Thanks to over 75 years of dedication to growing the federal leviathan, these slef-proclaimed geniuses don’t even understand the workings of the government they’re in charge of, because no one can:

But recent events suggest that it’s not just the economy that regulators don’t understand well enough — it’s also their own regulations.

This became apparent when various large businesses responded to the enactment of Obamacare by taking accounting steps to reflect tax changes brought about by the new health care legislation. The additional costs created by Obamacare, conveniently enough, weren’t going to strike until later, after the November elections.

But both Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them. As the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle wrote:

“What AT&T, Caterpillar, et al did was appropriate. It’s earnings season, and they offered guidance about, um, their earnings.”So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable.”

They were also bad publicity for Obamacare, and they seem to have come as an unpleasant shock to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who immediately scheduled congressional hearings for April 21, demanding that the chief executive officers of AT&T, John Deere, and Caterpillar, among others, come and explain themselves.

Obamacare was supposed to provide unicorns and rainbows: How can it possibly be hurting companies and killing jobs? Surely there’s some sort of Republican conspiracy going on here!

More like a confederacy of dunces. Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can’t possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what’s more striking is that Waxman’s outraged reaction revealed that they don’t even understand their own area of responsibility — regulation — well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.

With well over a hundred years of worldwide history demonstrating that dominant, collectivist governments underperform ones that are smaller and rely more heavily on free markets, they really do have to be stupid to think that somehow, they’ll be different. We’ve already seen, with stimulus snafus and the like, that they aren’t.

I suspect that “progressive” (read “socialist”) insiders already know all of this, including the inscrutability of the mass of laws and regulations Harlan cited, but are fine with maintaining the pretense of omniscience as long as the concomitant corruption works its magic on their personal and political behalf.

From New York City (original New York Post column is here):

Apr 5, 2010 / 05:11 pm

Carolyn E. Davis, a staff writer for Us Weekly magazine, wrote a moving column published Easter Sunday in the New York Post focusing on why she is a proud Catholic, despite recent media attacks attempting to drag down the Catholic Church.

“Sure, it was explained to me when I converted that the gate would be narrow, but I had no idea,” she wrote.

Born “nothing,” Davis completed her adult catechism and chose to become a Catholic in 2000, “to the thinly veiled displeasure of people close to me.”

“Archbishop Fulton Sheen put it right when he said, ‘There are not over a hundred people in the US that hate the Catholic Church, there are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church, which is, of course, quite a different thing,’” she said.

Davis acknowledged that “the horrific replay of the 2002 clerical sexual-abuse scandals has again stirred up sadness, anger and the inevitable stream of negative postings on my social-networking feeds.”

“There is zero tolerance for pedophiles in the Church today,” she explained, “And the test of moral credibility the Holy See is charged with really applies to the whole church — not just clergy but the whole mystical body of Christ.”

“If we all made this past Lenten season a truly repentant and earnest one, then we’re surely continuing on the path to clearing out the evil and healing those who still suffer its terrible wounds. The beauty of Easter isn’t just the expiation of our own sins but that Jesus suffered and was put to death in the flesh once for us all (1 Peter 3:18) and that his resurrection holds the great promise of his return (Luke 21:25-28),” Davis also wrote.

“The Catholic Church,” she continued “is more than this scandal. I, for one, want to help serve with a church that has done more to help the sick, poor, hungry, suffering and forgotten than any other group in recorded human history.”

Go here for the rest of the story.

I’m sure they’ll have an excuse for this, but whatever it is, it won’t fly with yours truly.

Saturday, the New York Times published a feature called “The Pay at the Top.” Instead of preparing the usual “Who made the most?” list, it instead disclosed the “pay for 200 chief executives at 199 public companies that filed their annual proxies by March 27 and had revenue of at least $6.3 billion.”

But at a link called “Calculating the Pay Figures,” the Times told us that, “The data includes information for 200 executives at 199 companies with annual revenue of at least $5.78 billion” for U.S-based companies that “filed a preliminary or definitive proxy statement by March 26.”

Why the difference? Besides a bit of the sloppiness that is all too characteristic at the paper these days, I believe the difference may inadvertently reveal why the Times chose to prepare its report as it did.

I submit that there is a high likelihood that the Times chose the “200 companies with the highest revenues” method to avoid having to disclose Times CEO Pinch Sulzberger’s embarrassingly overgenerous compensation package last year to its readers (from Page 51 of the company’s March 12 proxy statement):

The $12.25 million in combined total compensation paid to Sulzberger and Janet Robinson is over 60% of the company’s reported after-tax profit of $19.9 million in 2009.

Of the 200 high-revenue companies listed, Sulzberger’s total comp of just just under $6 million was higher than 62 of the CEOs listed in the Times’s high-revenue 200, while Its 2009 revenues of $2.44 billion would have placed it 784th on last year’s Fortune 1000 list. It’s possible, though not likely, that a straight highest-paid 200 list might have included Sulzberger. It clearly would have been way, way above #784.

Most of the 60 or so CEOs earning less on the Times’s list clearly have responsibilities that dwarf those of Mr. Pinch and Ms. Robinson, including but not limited to the heads of these well-known companies (CEO total comp in parens): United Parcel Service ($5.5 mil), General Electric ($5.5 mil), Motorola ($3.8 million), Costco ($2.7 mil), Microsoft ($1.3 mil), JP Morgan Chase ($1.3 mil), Whole Foods ($700,000), and Tyson Foods ($500,000).

I also daresay that the vast majority of those in the 200 highest-revenue list haven’t seen their companies’ revenues shrink by 25% in the past three years, as has been the case at the Times, and that very few have cut the pay of most of their employees by 5%-10% in the past year, as the Time infamously did last year.

If any CEO besides Sulzberger were doing this, the Times would be portraying him or her as a greedy capitalist pig, as would much of the rest of the press, which has been largely silent about the Sulzberger-Robinson cash drain.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.