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Romney confident as voters end heated Fla. primary (AP)

[ at 2012-2-1 in: lions share]

TAMPA, Fla. ? Florida Republicans were putting an end to a raucous, big-spending, character-bashing primary campaign Tuesday as they decided whether a confident Mitt Romney or a defiant Newt Gingrich would win the state’s 50 delegates, the biggest prize of the GOP race so far.

Romney grinned as he thanked campaign volunteers in Tampa, while Gingrich swooped in on polling places to shake voters’ hands and complain that Romney had stymied him with outsized spending on “ads that are dishonest.”

Romney, in turn, said he had been forced to defend himself on Florida’s airwaves after losing to Gingrich in South Carolina ? a loss he attributed to negative commercials aired on Gingrich’s behalf.

“I needed to make sure that instead of being outgunned in terms of attacks, that I responded aggressively, and hopefully that will have served me well here,” Romney told reporters.

Romney is heavily favored in the winner-takes-all primary, the final and possibly pivotal contest in a high-stakes month in which the former Massachusetts governor has claimed one win and two second-place finishes so far. Two other candidates ? Rick Santorum and Ron Paul ? have ceded Florida in favor of smaller, less expensive contests.

Gingrich dismissed suggestions that he might be hobbled by a significant loss in Florida, telling reporters outside an Orlando polling place that the race wouldn’t be decided until June or July ? “unless Romney drops out earlier.”

Several Florida voters seemed eager for an end to the continuous volley of charges and countercharges that colored the campaign.

Dorothy Anderson, voting for Gingrich at a retirement community in Pinellas Park, Fla., said “The dirty ads really turned me off on Mitt Romney.”

“In fact if he gets the nomination, I probably won’t vote for him,” Anderson added.

At the same polling place, Romney supporter Curtis Dempsey felt the same about voting for Gingrich if he becomes the nominee. Dempsey said “the only thing Newt Gingrich has to offer is a big mouth.”

Romney and his allies have poured more than $14 million into Florida television advertising primarily attacking Gingrich, who has struggled to compete with Romney’s fundraising ability, staffing and network of high-profile supporters. Gingrich and his allies spent roughly $3 million on Florida advertising, much of it attacking Romney.

In Miami’s Little Havana, car salesman Osvaldo Mitat, 69, favored Gingrich. He’s impressed by the former House speaker’s “commitment to the Cuban community,” Mitat said, and Gingrich’s marital history doesn’t bother him. Mitat has been divorced four times himself.

“Romney also has a past,” he said. “Everyone has a past.”

In Palm Beach, Julian Stoopler, a 68-year-old investment adviser, said he decided to vote for former business leader Romney. “The condition of the country has deteriorated so badly that we need a CEO to turn it around,” Stoopler said.

For a time, Gingrich reset the GOP race with his overwhelming victory in South Carolina. But in the 10 days since, the contest turned increasingly hostile, Gingrich turned in uncharacteristically lackluster debate performances, and polls swung in Romney’s direction.

Gingrich admitted that his momentum against Romney had slowed in Florida.

“He can bury me for a very short amount of time with four or five or six times as much money,” Gingrich said in a television interview Monday. “In the long run, the Republican Party is not going to nominate … a liberal Republican.”

But, without predicting a winner or endorsing a candidate, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told CNN: “The winner of Florida is in all likelihood going to be the nominee of our party.”

The Gingrich campaign noted that he had raised more than $5 million in January, more than half following his win in South Carolina, after raising $10 million total in the last three months of 2011. Romney’s campaign has said he pulled in more than twice that in the fourth quarter: $24 million.

Romney’s campaign scheduled a night celebration at the Tampa Convention Center. Gingrich visited two polling stations and was stopping at the Polk County campaign headquarters before gathering with supporters for a primary night party in Orlando. The last polls close at 8 p.m.

The path to the Republican nomination ? and the right to face President Barack Obama this fall ? shifts to a series of lower-profile contests in February. Romney was to kick off the month Wednesday with events in Minnesota and Nevada.

The race for delegates is still in its early stages. A candidate needs to collect 1,144 delegates to win. Coming into Florida, Romney had 37 delegates to Gingrich’s 26.

Santorum, who’s won 14 delegates, and Paul, with four, chose to skip Florida on its primary day, instead campaigning across Colorado and Nevada. At Colorado State University, Paul spoke to a boisterous crowd of about 1,100, including Chase Swift, who shrugged off Paul’s abdication of Florida. “Everyone thinks he has no chance,” said Swift, 49, of Wellington. “Now we’ll see.”

Santorum bristled Tuesday when asked about Gingrich seeming to suggest that the former Pennsylvania senator should quit the race. “I don’t think people should be telling other folks to get out of the race and get out of the way,” Santorum told Fox News Channel.

Florida originally had 99 delegates but lost half as a penalty for holding its primary early, in violation of national party rules.

GOP officials in Florida were anticipating a big turnout of more than 2 million voters, up from a record 1.9 million in the Republican primary in 2008.

___

AP writers Christine Armario in Miami, Matt Sedensky in Palm Beach, Tamara Lush in Pinellas Park, Shannon McCaffrey in Orlando and Connie Cass in Washington contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120131/ap_on_el_pr/us_gop_campaign

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Tags: gingrich, gop race, newt gingrich

Sarah Palin: The Fix Is In For Mitt Romney

[ at 2012-1-31 in: lions share]

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Is the fix in for Mitt Romney? Sarah Palin seems to think so, going on an epic Facebook rant against Republicans trying to smack down Newt Gingrich … but is she even more full of it than the establishment she rails against?

It’s true that Republican officials and mainstream media figures do seem to be forcing the argument that Romney is the inevitable GOP nominee, despite the widespread antipathy toward the former Massachusetts governor nationwide.

Palin’s arguments may be thinner than her melting Alaskan ice caps, however, and her motives are highly questionable aside from making sure Sarah Palin remains a topic of discussion. In that respect, guess we fell for it. Sorry.

In a post this weekend, she attacks the Republican “establishment cannibals” for using “Alinsky” tactics against Newt Gingrich in the run up to the Florida primary.

It’s undeniable that Newt’s win in South Carolina triggered a backlash against the former House Speaker by Romney supporters bent on blunting his latest surge.

But is the motivation really Gingrich’s lack of qualifications? Or simply a desire to stop any sort of uprising from those looking for an alternative to the status quo?

Palin’s main objection appears to be that those who question Gingrich’s ties to Ronald Reagan have done so inappropriately and are doing the work of the left.

Never mind that Gingrich has tied himself to Reagan and his accomplishments with every other breath he takes. And who is the GOP “establishment,” anyway?

How do you rant against people without specifying who you are talking about? And why not just endorse Newt if you feel so strongly about it? It’s all puzzling.

Palin’s full Facebook post appears after the jump:

We have witnessed something very disturbing this week. The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent.

We will look back on this week and realize that something changed. I have given numerous interviews wherein I espoused the benefits of thorough vetting during aggressive contested primary elections, but this week’s tactics aren’t what I meant. Those who claim allegiance to Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment should stop and think about where we are today. Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, the fathers of the modern conservative movement, would be ashamed of us in this primary. Let me make clear that I have no problem with the routine rough and tumble of a heated campaign. As I said at the first Tea Party convention two years ago, I am in favor of contested primaries and healthy, pointed debate. They help focus candidates and the electorate. I have fought in tough and heated contested primaries myself. But what we have seen in Florida this week is beyond the pale. It was unprecedented in GOP primaries. I’ve seen it before – heck, I lived it before – but not in a GOP primary race.

I am sadly too familiar with these tactics because they were used against the GOP ticket in 2008. The left seeks to single someone out and destroy his or her record and reputation and family using the media as a channel to dump handpicked and half-baked campaign opposition research on the public. The difference in 2008 was that I was largely unknown to the American public, so they had no way of differentiating between the lies and the truth. All of it came at them at once as “facts” about me. But Newt Gingrich is known to us – both the good and the bad.

We know that Newt fought in the trenches during the Reagan Revolution. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out, Newt was among a handful of Republican Congressman who would regularly take to the House floor to defend Reagan at a time when conservatives didn’t have Fox News or talk radio or conservative blogs to give any balance to the liberal mainstream media. Newt actually came at Reagan’s administration “from the right” to remind Americans that freer markets and tougher national defense would win our future. But this week a few handpicked and selectively edited comments which Newt made during his 40-year career were used to claim that Newt was somehow anti-Reagan and isn’t conservative enough to go against the accepted moderate in the primary race. (I know, it makes no sense, and the GOP establishment hopes you won’t stop and think about this nonsense. Mark Levin and others have shown the ridiculousness of this.)

o add insult to injury, this “anti-Reagan” claim was made by a candidate who admitted to not even supporting or voting for Reagan. He actually was against the Reagan movement, donated to liberal candidates, and said he didn’t want to go back to the Reagan days. You can’t change history. We know that Newt Gingrich brought the Reagan Revolution into the 1990s. We know it because none other than Nancy Reagan herself announced this when she presented Newt with an award, telling us, “The dramatic movement of 1995 is an outgrowth of a much earlier crusade that goes back half a century. Barry Goldwater handed the torch to Ronnie, and in turn Ronnie turned that torch over to Newt and the Republican members of Congress to keep that dream alive.” As Rush and others pointed out, if Nancy Reagan had ever thought that Newt was in any way an opponent of her beloved husband, she would never have even appeared on a stage with him, let alone presented him with an award and said such kind things about him. Nor would Reagan’s son, Michael Reagan, have chosen to endorse Newt in this primary race. There are no two greater keepers of the Reagan legacy than Nancy and Michael Reagan. What we saw with this ridiculous opposition dump on Newt was nothing short of Stalin-esque rewriting of history. It was Alinsky tactics at their worst.

But this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party grassroots and independent Americans who are sick of the politics of personal destruction used now by both parties’ operatives with a complicit media egging it on. In fact, the establishment has been just as dismissive of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Newt is an imperfect vessel for Tea Party support, but in South Carolina the Tea Party chose to get behind him instead of the old guard’s choice. In response, the GOP establishment voices denounced South Carolinian voters with the same vitriol we usually see from the left when they spew hatred at everyday Americans “bitterly clinging” to their faith and their Second Amendment rights. The Tea Party was once again told to sit down and shut up and listen to the “wisdom” of their betters. We were reminded of the litany of Tea Party endorsed candidates in 2010 who didn’t win. Well, here’s a little newsflash to the establishment: without the Tea Party there would have been no historic 2010 victory at all.

I spoke up before the South Carolina primary to urge voters there to keep this primary going because I have great concern about the GOP establishment trying to anoint a candidate without the blessing of the grassroots and all the needed energy and resources we as commonsense constitutional conservatives could bring to the general election in order to defeat President Obama. Now, I respect Governor Romney and his success. But there are serious concerns about his record and whether as a politician he consistently applied conservative principles and how this impacts the agenda moving forward. The questions need answers now. That is why this primary should not be rushed to an end. We need to vet this. Pundits in the Beltway are gleefully proclaiming that this primary race is over after Florida, despite 46 states still not having chimed in. Well, perhaps it’s possible that it will come to a speedy end in just four days; but with these questions left unanswered, it will not have come to a satisfactory conclusion.

Without this necessary vetting process, the unanswered question of Governor Romney’s conservative bona fides and the unanswered and false attacks on Newt Gingrich will hang in the air to demoralize many in the electorate. The Tea Party grassroots will certainly feel disenfranchised and disenchanted with the perceived orchestrated outcome from self-proclaimed movers and shakers trying to sew this all up. And, trust me, during the general election, Governor Romney’s statements and record in the private sector will be relentlessly parsed over by the opposition in excruciating detail to frighten off swing voters. This is why we need a fair primary that is not prematurely cut short by the GOP establishment using Alinsky tactics to kneecap Governor Romney’s chief rival.

As I said in my speech in Iowa last September, the challenge of this election is not simply to replace President Obama. The real challenge is who and what we will replace him with. It’s not enough to just change up the uniform. If we don’t change the team and the game plan, we won’t save our country. We truly need sudden and relentless reform in Washington to defend our republic, though it’s becoming clearer that the old guard wants anything but that. That is why we should all be concerned by the tactics employed by the establishment this week. We will not save our country by becoming like the left. And I question whether the GOP establishment would ever employ the same harsh tactics they used on Newt against Obama. I didn’t see it in 2008. Many of these same characters sat on their thumbs in ‘08 and let Obama escape unvetted. Oddly, they’re now using every available microscope and endoscope – along with rewriting history – in attempts to character assassinate anyone challenging their chosen one in their own party’s primary.

So, one must ask, who are they really running against?

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2012/01/sarah-palin-the-fix-is-in-for-mitt-romney/

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Tags: newt gingrich, sarah palin

Gingrich: Only I can go ‘toe to toe’ with Obama (AP)

[ at 2012-1-25 in: lions share]

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WASHINGTON ? Emboldened by his victory in South Carolina’s Republican primary, Newt Gingrich said Sunday his hardline conservative views and confrontational style will be needed by Republicans this fall to fight President Barack Obama’s “billion-dollar war chest” and take back the White House.

In several televised interviews, the former House speaker said rival Mitt Romney was a moderate who left GOP voters cold and that only he, Gingrich, could go “toe to toe” with Obama.

“I think in South Carolina it began to become really clear that if you want to beat Barack Obama, then Newt Gingrich is the only person who has the background, the experience and the ability to get on the stage and drive home a conservative message with authenticity,” he said.

Gingrich’s win in South Carolina has helped invigorate his once struggling campaign and cast fresh doubt on Romney’s ability to easily cinch the Republican nomination.

Returns from 95 percent of the state’s precincts showed Gingrich with 41 percent of the vote to 27 percent for Romney. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum was winning 17 percent, and Texas Rep. Ron Paul 13 percent.

Next stop is Florida, where Gingrich and Romney will compete with Santorum in the Jan. 31 primary. Paul has said he was bypassing the state in favor of smaller subsequent caucuses.

Romney and his supporters are dismissing Gingrich’s win in South Carolina and say his nomination would be a disaster for the Republican Party, citing his rocky tenure leading House Republicans in the 1990s and allegations of ethics violations.

“I think Newt Gingrich has embarrassed the party, over time,” said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. “Whether he will do it again in the future, I don’t know. But Gov. Romney never has.”

Christie, who has endorsed Romney’s nomination, said he would “listen” if Romney were to ask him to be his running mate this fall. But, he added, he expects to remain in his current position as governor.

Gingrich says his views on lower taxes, less government regulation and foreign policy put him in stark contrast to Obama and that the dynamics of a Gingrich-Obama fight are much more alluring to voters.

“I think Gov. Romney’s core problem was that he governs (as) a Massachusetts moderate, which by the standards of Republican primary voters is a liberal. And he can’t relax and be candid,” he said.

Gingrich spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union,” NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CBS “Face the Nation.” Christie spoke on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120122/ap_on_el_pr/us_gingrich

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Tags: newt gingrich, percent, republican nomination

Romney’s mountain of wealth could cause loud echo (AP)

[ at 2012-1-25 in: lions share]

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WASHINGTON ? Mitt Romney’s tax returns tell the tale: Yes, he’s rich ? really rich.

His returns, spanning more than 500 pages and released under political pressure Tuesday, represent an extraordinary financial accounting of one of the wealthiest U.S. presidential candidates in generations, with his annual income topping $20 million.

It remains unclear how the details of Romney’s fortune will play among American workers, who on average earn less in a lifetime than Romney paid in taxes in 2010 alone. Meanwhile, the typical taxpayer pays a similar share of his income to Uncle Sam as he does, roughly 15 percent.

Romney’s returns ? which include a 2011 tax estimate ? spilled out new details of his scattered holdings, tax strategies and charitable donations. Romney paid about $3 million in federal income taxes in 2010, having earned more than seven times that from his investments.

The documents quickly became fodder for his opponents, with Democrats chiding the former Massachusetts governor for not disclosing more about his financial history. The White House also weighed in about tax fairness as President Barack Obama prepared for his State of the Union Address.

Romney is hardly the only wealthy American seeking the presidency, though he’s on a level all his own.

Republican rival Newt Gingrich, who had publicly pressed him to release his tax information, released his own return for 2010 last week. It revealed that Gingrich earned more than $3.1 million, mostly from $2.5 million paid by his companies, partnerships and investments, and paid just under $1 million in federal tax, a rate of about 31 percent.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, reported income of $1.73 million last year, mostly from the books he’s written, and paid $453,770 in federal taxes.

Romney’s tax returns showed he continues to profit from Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded but no longer runs; from a Swiss bank account closed just as he launched his campaign and from new listings of investment funds set up overseas.

Romney had long refused to disclose any federal tax returns, then hinted he would offer a single year’s return in April. Yet mounting criticism from his rivals and a hard loss in last week’s South Carolina primary forced his hand.

“Governor Romney has paid 100 percent of what he owes,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, the campaign’s legal counsel. Ginsberg and other advisers said Romney did not use any aggressive tax strategies to help reduce or defer his tax income.

For 2011, Romney will pay about $3.2 million with an effective tax rate of about 15.4 percent, the campaign said. Those returns haven’t yet been filed yet with the Internal Revenue Service. In total, he would pay more than $6.2 million in taxes on $45 million in income over the past two years, his campaign said.

Romney had been cast by his GOP opponents as a wealthy businessman who earned lucrative payouts from his investments while Bain slashed jobs in the private sector. Romney concedes that some companies Bain invested in were unsuccessful but says others created large numbers of jobs.

As for his own tax payments, he said in Monday night’s debate in Tampa, “I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more. … I don’t think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes.”

He added, “You’ll see my income, how much taxes I’ve paid, how much I’ve paid to charity.”

Romney’s 2010 return showed about $4.5 million in itemized deductions, including $1.5 million contributed to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Romney’s charitable giving is above average, even for someone at his income level, according to IRS data.

Romney’s GOP rivals did not immediately comment on his tax disclosures. But House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, defended him, telling reporters that Romney’s tax rate is close to the 15 percent rate most Americans pay on long-term capital gains from the sale of investments.

Romney’s advisers stressed that he met all his federal tax obligations, provided maximum transparency and did not take advantage of what they described as “aggressive” strategies often used by the ultra-rich. Still, for millions of taxpayers grappling with their own returns as tax season looms, Romney’s multimillion dollar wealth provides a window into an unfamiliar world.

His 2010 return shows a number of foreign investments, including funds in Ireland, Switzerland, Germany and Luxembourg. Most of Romney’s vast fortune is held in a blind trust that he doesn’t control. A portion is held in a retirement account.

Romney’s advisers acknowledged Tuesday that Romney and his wife, Ann, had a bank account in Switzerland as part of her trust. The account was worth $3 million and was held in the United Bank of Switzerland, said R. Bradford Malt, a Boston lawyer who makes investments for the Romneys and oversees their blind trust, which was set up to avoid any conflicts of interest in investments during his run for the presidency.

In 2009, UBS admitted assisting U.S. citizens in evading taxes and agreed to pay a $780 million penalty as part of a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department.

The political discussion over releasing Romney’s tax information highlighted an argument that Democrats are already starting to use against him ? that he is out of touch with normal Americans. And it may well have hurt him in the South Carolina primary, where he lost by 12 percentage points to Gingrich after spending several days resisting calls to release the returns.

Asked during a round of television interviews about Romney’s relatively modest tax rate, Obama adviser David Plouffe said: “We need to change our tax system. We need to change our tax code so that everybody is doing their fair share.” Obama planned to talk about economic fairness in his State of the Union speech to Congress Tuesday night.

Other Democratic Party voices were less restrained. “He used every loophole in the book available to the wealthy and corporations to avoid paying his fair share,” said Democratic National Committee Executive Director Patrick Gaspard.

On the other hand, Romney’s wife, Ann, had told supporters at a Florida rally on Sunday: “I want to remind you where we know our riches are. Our riches are with our families.”

___

Associated Press writers Stephen Ohlemacher and Alan Fram in Washington and Kasie Hunt in Tampa, contributed.

___

Follow Jack Gillum at http://twitter.com/jackgillum

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120124/ap_on_el_pr/us_romney_taxes

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Tags: mitt romney, newt gingrich, percent

Santorum declared Iowa winner (Politico)

[ at 2012-1-23 in: lions share]

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GREENVILLE, S.C. ? On the eve of the South Carolina primary, ? Iowa Republicans dealt Mitt Romney?s campaign a blow by formally declaring Rick Santorum the winner of their Jan. 3 caucuses.

At 18 minutes before midnight Friday, South Carolina time, the Republican Party of Iowa released a statement revising its Thursday announcement that reported Santorum ahead of Romney but also saying the two-week-old race had no clear winner.

?In order to clarify conflicting reports and to affirm the results released January 18 by the Republican Party of Iowa, Chairman Matthew Strawn and the State Central Committee declared Senator Rick Santorum the winner of the 2012 Iowa Caucus,? the state GOP?s statement read.

The news that Romney ? who for two weeks celebrated what he jokingly called a ?landslide? eight-vote victory in Iowa, only to see it reversed this week when the state GOP certified Santorum the leader by 34 votes ? officially lost the first contest muddies his narrative, especially as Newt Gingrich surges in the polls in South Carolina.

It?s also a boon to Santorum, who can now claim victory in one of the three key early states, though the former Pennsylvania senator badly trails Gingrich and Romney in polls here.

Strawn?s Thursday announcement, which placed Santorum ahead but didn?t definitively declare him a winner because eight precincts had yet to report their results, had left enough uncertainty for Romney?s campaign to suggest that the state was a draw.

Now, with Iowa formally in the Santorum column and Romney polling behind Gingrich in the most recent public poll in South Carolina, the former Massachusetts governor faces the prospect of leaving here Sunday morning one-for-three in early state voting ? a dramatically different scenario than when he arrived.

Romney campaign officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment early Saturday morning.

Strawn also did not immediately respond to messages left at his home and office.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/politico_rss/rss_politico_mostpop/http___www_politico_com_news_stories0112_71757_html/44252858/SIG=11mtf701v/*http%3A//www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71757.html

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Tags: newt gingrich, senator rick santorum, State

Obama wants payroll tax extended for entire year (AP)

[ at 2011-12-20 in: lions share]

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WASHINGTON ? President Barack Obama, rebuffed by Congress on a yearlong extension of a Social Security payroll tax cut, said Saturday that it would be “inexcusable” for lawmakers not to lengthen the short-term deal when they return from their holiday break.

The measure, passed by the Senate shortly before the president spoke briefly at the White House, would extend the tax cut and long-term jobless benefits for just two months ? a partial victory for Obama that also sets the stage for another fight in February.

While pleased by the Senate vote, Obama said “it would be inexcusable for Congress not to further extend this middle class tax cut for the rest of the year. It should be a formality, and hopefully it’s done with as little drama as possible when they get back in January.”

He added, “This really isn’t hard. There are plenty of ways to pay for these proposals.”

The renewal of the 2-percentage-point cut in the Social Security payroll tax for 160 million workers and unemployment benefits averaging about $300 a week for the additional millions of people who have been out of work for six months or more is a modest step forward for Obama’s year-end jobs agenda.

As a condition for GOP support of the payroll tax measure, Obama has to accept a provision that forces him to decide within 60 days whether to approve or reject a proposed a Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline that promises thousands of jobs.

Obama made no reference to the pipeline in his remarks.

The bill awaits House action next week.

“I’m looking forward to the House moving forward and getting this done when they get back on Monday,” Obama said.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111217/ap_on_bi_ge/us_obama_tax_cut

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The individual mandate: Health-care’s inherent controversy (The Week)

[ at 2011-12-17 in: lions share]

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New York ? President Obama’s health-care bill requires that every American have health insurance. Is that constitutional?

Who first proposed making health insurance compulsory?
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. In the late 1980s, when Democrats were pushing to require employers to provide health insurance, the foundation started thinking about ways to achieve universal coverage without placing a heavy burden on business. Its experts soon encountered the “free rider” problem: In a system where insurers are barred from refusing applicants with pre-existing conditions, many people ? especially the young and healthy ? would only buy a policy when illness struck. But if only sick people bought coverage, insurers would pay out more in doctors’ bills than they received in premiums, and quickly go bust. To overcome this death spiral, the Heritage Foundation suggested that every American be required to buy health insurance, a requirement known as the individual mandate.

Which politicians took up that idea?
Many Republicans did in the early 1990s, after President Clinton introduced a plan that would have forced companies to cover employees. “I am for people, individuals ? exactly like automobile insurance ? having health insurance and being required to have health insurance,” said Newt Gingrich, then House minority whip, in 1993. When the Clinton plan collapsed in 1994, talk of the individual mandate died with it. But a decade later, Mitt Romney, then the governor of Massachusetts, resurrected the concept for his state health-care plan, which requires residents to buy health insurance or pay up to $1,212 in annual penalties. “It’s a Republican way of reforming the market,” Romney said when the law debuted, in 2006. “[To have] people show up [at a hospital] when they get sick, and expect someone else to pay, that’s a Democratic approach.”

SEE MORE: The Supreme Court and ‘ObamaCare’: A concise guide

So why did Obama adopt a Republican proposal?
At first, he didn’t want to. During his 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination, Obama ran a TV ad criticizing rival candidate Hillary Clinton’s support for a mandate, saying she would force everyone “to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it.” But after President Obama and the Democratic Congress began to construct his health-care plan, advisers warned that free riders would undermine the objectives of extending insurance coverage to anyone who wanted it. For health reform to work, young, healthy people had to be pushed into the pool, to spread cost and risk. So the president allowed his 2010 Affordable Care Act to incorporate a provision that, by 2014, all Americans must have health coverage or face a tax penalty. Conservatives decried that directive as a gross infringement of individual liberty, and their anger helped fuel the rise of the Tea Party. Twenty-six states and the National Federation of Independent Business are now challenging the mandate’s constitutionality at the Supreme Court, which will make a final judgment by June.

How has Obama responded?
His administration argues that the mandate is authorized by the Constitution’s commerce clause, which allows the federal government to regulate interstate economic activity. Several conservative judges agree. In a November appeals court decision that upheld the mandate, Judge Laurence Silberman, a Reagan appointee, declared that Congress must “be free to forge national solutions to national problems.” And this summer, Judge Jeffrey Sutton ? a George W. Bush appointee to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ? concluded that the individual mandate is a legally sound way to prevent taxpayers and hospitals from having to pick up the cost of treating the uninsured. “Not every intrusive law is an unconstitutionally intrusive law,” he wrote.

SEE MORE: A conservative judge’s ‘compelling’ defense of ‘ObamaCare’

Haven‘t other judges disagreed?
Yes. In August, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals declared that it could find no precedent for ordering Americans to buy health insurance. “Even in the face of a Great Depression, a World War, a Cold War, recessions, oil shocks, inflation, and unemployment,” the majority wrote, “Congress never sought to require the purchase of wheat or war bonds, force a higher savings rate or greater consumption of American goods.” Other federal judges and critics of “Obamacare” warn that the mandate sets a dangerous precedent that the government could use to make citizens purchase whatever it deems good for them ? or for the economy. “Congress could require every American to buy a new Chevy Impala every year,” said a 2009 Heritage Foundation report.

What happens if the individual mandate is voided?
It depends. If the Supreme Court decides that the Affordable Care Act can’t function without the individual mandate, it could strike down the entire law. But it might declare the mandate “severable,” and remove that particular part of the law, while letting the rest of it limp along, with far fewer uninsured people covered and less ability to rein in costs. Some experts have proposed that instead of the uninsured being required to buy insurance, they could be “nudged” into the health-care system by giving them a window of time during which they could buy insurance relatively inexpensively; once that window closed, the cost would rise sharply. The problem with any alternative to the individual mandate, said Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, is that it would have to be approved by the bitterly divided Congress. “You can’t expect that in these times,” he said. “People don’t work on these compromises too readily anymore.”

SEE MORE: The ‘ObamaCare’ case: Should Elena Kagan and Clarence Thomas sit out?

How the Supreme Court could punt
Next year’s Supreme Court hearing has been billed as judgment day for Obama’s Affordable Care Act. But it might end with no judgment at all. Before the justices rule on the individual mandate’s constitutionality, they will first have to decide whether the 1867 Anti-Injunction Act bars the claimants’ challenge. That law prevents citizens from challenging the legality of a tax before it goes into effect. If the court finds that the penalty for defying the Affordable Care Act’s mandate is a tax, they could push a legal challenge back to 2015, when the first fines will be levied. And that, said Simon Lazarus, an expert at the National Senior Citizens Law Center, might “be a good solution for a court that doesn’t really care to be Public Issue No. 1 in an election year.”

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Gringrich and science (Time.com)

[ at 2011-12-16 in: lions share]

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The busy mind of Newt Gingrich has been much in the news lately. He’s the man of grand ideas — a thinker, a theorist, the big brain in a GOP field of bureaucrats and simpletons. Don’t believe it? Don’t worry, Gingrich himself will tell you.

Gingrich’s mind indeed does churn. The problem is, he approaches ideas the way a gluttonous gourmand approaches food — with a rich, complex and subtle appetite, but also a hopeless weakness for corn dogs and Twinkies. If it’s edible — or, in his case, imaginable — he’s interested. This can be awkward, particularly when he steps outside of his comfort zone of history and public policy and starts to muck around with science. (Watch “10 Questions for Newt Gingrich.”)

Much has been made of some of Gingrich’s wackier ideas in the past few weeks, beginning with his oft-repeated worry that a rogue state with a nuclear weapon could shut down the U.S. power grid. To give Gingrich his due, there’s a grain of truth in his fears. Scientists agree — theoretically at least — that a missile detonated at the right altitude could trigger what’s known as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that could fry the circuits of whatever country lay below. The one experiential data point that supports this idea occurred in 1962, when an atmospheric test of an American atomic weapon caused street lights in Hawaii to go temporarily dark.

Of course, it’s a big step from there to shutting down an entire country, especially when the bad actors Gingrich imagines blacking out America are the Iranians and North Koreans, who have nowhere near the missile technology or targeting know-how to pull off such a stunt — at least without being detected — and in the case of Iran, don’t even have a bomb yet. What’s more, if either country did want to launch a strike, it would be a whole lot easier to go the point-and-shoot route — pick a city and try to take it out directly. Yet Gingrich has continued to sound the EMP alarm, arguing that preparing for an attack should be an important part of the country’s defense posture.

“In theory, a relatively small device detonated over Omaha would knock out about half the electricity generated in the United States,” he warned in Iowa last week, according to the New York Times.

Gingrich’s advocacy of space mirrors — albeit years ago, in a 1984 book — has provoked eye rolling too. The thinking is that scientists could position giant mirrors in space that would point toward Earth, reflecting sunlight downward and creating as much illumination as several full moons. This would eliminate the need for nighttime lighting on highways and brighten shadowy neighborhoods as a deterrent to crime. (Read “Newt Gingrich: Potential President, or Skilled Showman?”)

Put aside what this would also do to the day-night cycle under which all life on Earth is accustomed to operating; put aside what it would do to the simple business of looking up and trying to see a star. The technical obstacles are dizzying. The U.S. has already orbited one whopping big mirror — a slab of polished glass inside the Hubble Space telescope that measures close to 8 ft. (2.4 m) in diameter. But reflective space mirrors would have to be far bigger, perhaps the size of a football field. Even the massive International Space Station, which measures 357 ft. (109 m) across, appears to be little more than a moving star at the lowest point of its orbit, 234 mi. (376 km) above ground. To provide permanent illumination to a target area, you’d have to position your mirrors a whole lot farther away — in geosynchronous orbit, 22,236 mi. (37,786 km) above sea level, so that their rate of revolution matches the rotation of the globe.

The weight problem alone makes this impossible — at least if you were trying to fly a giant mirror made of glass, like the Hubble’s. While University of Arizona engineers have developed mirror material only .04 in (1 mm) thick, this doesn’t address other problems like the cost of launching and maintaining the mirrors, not to mention keeping so big a target safe from meteors and other space debris. All of this seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to for an illumination problem that highway lights and porch lamps already solve rather neatly.

It’s Gingrich’s advocacy of moon mining, however, that is getting the most attention — and drawing the most derision — partly because this is a drum he doesn’t seem willing to quit banging. For the most part, the moon is a pretty prosaic mix of very familiar materials — including silicon, iron, calcium, aluminum, potassium and phosphorous. There is, however, also helium-3. A light isotope of common helium, helium-3 streams toward Earth all the time as part of the storm of charged particles coming from the sun, but our planet’s magnetic field deflects most of it. This is not so on the moon, which has a magnetic field far weaker than Earth’s. What makes this important is that helium-3 also turns out to be a cracker jack fuel for fusion reactors — far more efficient than the deuterium currently used. But it’s not just a matter of going to the moon, scooping up what you need and powering the world on it. (Watch TIME’s video “Earth Is Running Out of Helium.”)

First of all, a practical fusion reactor has not yet been invented and there’s no realistic projection for when it might be — though scientists have been trying for decades. What’s more, the moon’s helium-3 is not just there for the taking. Apollo samples revealed that the isotope is present in lunar soil in concentrations no greater than 30 parts per billion. Harrison Schmitt, the lunar module pilot on Apollo 17 and the only geologist to walk on the moon, estimates that it would take 220 lbs (100 kg) of helium-3 to power one city the size of Dallas for one year, and to collect that much you’d have to dig a trench three quarters of a mile square by 9 ft. deep (1.9 sq km by 2.7 m).

That’s a lot of digging, and it doesn’t even touch the cost of getting the stuff home. Even aboard cheap rockets like the Russian Proton, it costs $2,200 to launch a pound of payload to low Earth orbit. The shuttle, nobody’s idea of a bargain ship, cost $8,100 per lb. Things are a lot cheaper on the moon, where lower gravity means everything weighs less, but that doesn’t mean every ounce doesn’t cost — a lot. There’s a reason the skin of the Apollo lunar module was no thicker than three sheets of aluminum foil and that its windows were triangular, a shape that shaved a few ounces off of the framing and sealant that would have been needed for round windows of approximately the same size.

In the last presidential debate, Gingrich responded to Mitt Romney’s criticism of the moon mining concept by not responding. “I’m happy to defend the idea that America should be in space and should be there in an aggressive, entrepreneurial way,” he said — which most people agree with and which is not what Romney was questioning at all.

Answering evasively, of course, is what politicians do, as is dreaming big dreams of New Frontiers and Great Societies and shining cities on hills. But dreams aren’t science — and politicians, for the most part, aren’t scientists. Newt Gingrich may play one on TV, but that doesn’t mean anyone is required to listen.

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