August 2009 – Page 3

Shorebird of the Week – August 6, 2009

One of the fan-friendliest of the Shorebirds, Cliff Flagello chats up the crowd before a recent game.

Cliff Flagello tuning up before an appearance against Lexington on July 15th.

When a player is demoted they can handle it in two ways. Some continue the poor play which led to their backslide in the first place.

But then you have guys like Cliff Flagello, who is completely throttling opposing SAL batters.

“Jello” certainly merited the promotion to Frederick given his 5-3, 2.29 ERA and 1.13 WHIP he accomplished here in 2008. But Cliff was treated much worse by the Carolina League, compiling a 1-2 record with a 7.55 ERA – more alarmingly he allowed 25 walks in 31 innings. So at the midseason break he was transferred to Delmarva.

His numbers here are even better than the glowing 2008 figures, as in 12 appearances Cliff has allowed just 1 earned run, leading to a microscopic 0.45 ERA. Better still, his WHIP is a nifty 0.75 and he’s allowed just 8 hits and 7 walks in 20 innings. SAL batters are hitting a punchless .121 against him.

This may be the step that saves the 24-year old’s career, as he was drafted out of tiny Shorter College in Georgia back in 2007 as a 25th round pick. Continuing dominance here may yet result in a Frederick return for Cliff before season’s end.

The battleground

It looks like the opponents of liberty on the left want to join the health care battle. This came to my e-mailbox from “Organizing for America” (yep, I’m on their e-mail list):

For one month, the fight for health insurance reform leaves the backrooms of Washington, D.C., and returns to communities across America. Throughout August, members of Congress are back home, where the hands they shake and the voices they hear will not belong to lobbyists, but to people like you.

Home is where we’re strongest. We didn’t win last year’s election together at a committee hearing in D.C. We won it on the doorsteps and the phone lines, at the softball games and the town meetings, and in every part of this great country where people gather to talk about what matters most. And if you’re willing to step up once again, that’s exactly where we’re going to win this historic campaign for the guaranteed, affordable health insurance that every American deserves.

There are those who profit from the status quo, or see this debate as a political game, and they will stop at nothing to block reform. They are filling the airwaves and the internet with outrageous falsehoods to scare people into opposing change. And some people, not surprisingly, are getting pretty nervous. So we’ve got to get out there, fight lies with truth, and set the record straight.

That’s why Organizing for America is putting together thousands of events this month where you can reach out to neighbors, show your support, and make certain your members of Congress know that you’re counting on them to act.

But these canvasses, town halls, and gatherings only make a difference if you turn up to knock on doors, share your views, and show your support. So here’s what I need from you:

Can you commit to join at least one event in your community this month?

In politics, there’s a rule that says when you ask people to get involved, always tell them it’ll be easy. Well, let’s be honest here: Passing comprehensive health insurance reform will not be easy. Every President since Harry Truman has talked about it, and the most powerful and experienced lobbyists in Washington stand in the way.

But every day we don’t act, Americans watch their premiums rise three times faster than wages, small businesses and families are pushed towards bankruptcy, and 14,000 people lose their coverage entirely. The cost of inaction is simply too much for the people of this nation to bear.

So yes, fixing this crisis will not be easy. Our opponents will attack us every day for daring to try. It will require time, and hard work, and there will be days when we don’t know if we have anything more to give. But there comes a moment when we all have to choose between doing what’s easy, and doing what’s right.

This is one of those times. And moments like this are what this movement was built for. So, are you ready?

Please commit now to taking at least one action in your community this month to build support for health insurance reform:

http://my.barackobama.com/CommitAugust

Let’s seize this moment and win this historic victory for our economy, our health and our families.

Thank you,

President Barack Obama

(Emphasis in original.)

Despite the fact I’m going on vacation in a week or so and have a thousand other things on my plate, I think I can commit to attending an event. They may not like what I have to say, but I can attend an event – you betcha.

And if enough like-minded people who oppose items like mandatory end-of-life counseling or losing their private insurance if they wish to change policies (oops, I better be careful because I’m spreading “outrageous falsehoods” by relating what’s really in the bill – someone may narc on me) show up at these events then perhaps the powers that be will realize that Obama’s is a losing cause – after all, most are generally happy with their health coverage most of the time.

So those of you on the left feel free to report me. From the whitehouse.gov blog:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Last time I checked there is a First Amendment and if Obama can’t handle the truth, tough toenails.

I can’t wait to see what events are in my area, this ought to be fun. Who’s in with me?

Twofer Tuesday

No, I’m not making this a weekly feature. I just had two items I wanted to talk about and I didn’t think either would be enough for a full post. So here you go.

First of all, I was reading the left side of the local blogosphere (Two Sentz) when they linked to an AP story republished in the Daily Times. It talks about the “recessionproof” lobbying industry. I decided to add my own two cents (pun intended) and commented:

Shrink the pie and you won’t need $24.7 million to get your slice at someone else’s expense.

Legitimate functions of government rarely need lobbyists.

What was written back by Chuck was:

Tell that to Lockheed, KBR, and every contractor for the DoD.

Despite the fact the actual thread I was referring to was about our state government in Annapolis, I’ll bite.

The last time I checked national defense was a legitimate function of government. We can argue all day whether our projection of power throughout the globe is part of that legitimate function (I happen to think it is for the most part) and I’m not going to lie and say to you that there’s not waste and fraud aplenty in the Department of Defense. Some of our more esoteric weaponry may have been created with a particular contractor in mind and not necessarily to further military goals.

But their piece of the pie is nowhere near the size found in our entitlement programs and it’s within that realm the lobbyists seeking the most lucrative honeypots reside. Most of those programs don’t fall into what our Founders spelled out when they wrote the Constitution.

On a state level, our bloated budget (about half of which is comprised of federal transfer payments) is rife with a number of honeypots for lobbyists to stick their fingers into. It amazes me how many different funds comprise the state budget, each with one or more dedicated revenue streams to take money from our pockets but not always with a clear purpose. And if the federal mandates on spending – many created by lobbyists – weren’t present I believe the state could be much more efficient with its tax dollars and could lighten the burden on the Marylanders who are saddled with paying a hefty tax bite.

Now to shift gears. On Thursday State Senator Lowell Stoltzfus has scheduled an invitation-only gathering to discuss his future plans. It’s important because the announcement will break a logjam of candidates on both sides who aren’t quite set in stone which office they wish to pursue.

For example, one rumor has Delegate Jim Mathias setting his sights on the Senate seat if Stoltzfus bows out. Michael James, who’s been coy about his ambition, could decide to try for the Senate, or, there’s the possibility Page Elmore may also step up should Lowell decide another term isn’t in the cards. Pocomoke City Mayor Mike McDermott is also in the mix but more likely would settle in to run for Delegate. In turn, a number of names (including the aforementioned James and McDermott) have been floating around as possibilities to challenge Norm Conway and for the possible open Mathias seat in District 38B.

On the other hand, if Stoltzfus stays it would probably leave things pretty much as they were in 2006, where James was a challenger to Mathias and Conway for the District 38B seats, Stoltzfus was unopposed for his Senate seat, and Elmore had token competition in District 38A.

It will make my left column expand by quite a bit as I add the local races in with those who have jumped in statewide.

Turnover in Delaware

According to the Sussex Countian, Republican Joe Booth was the overwhelming winner of the Special Election held today in Delaware’s 19th Senate District.

The election was made necessary due to the passing of a Democratic fixture, State Senator Thurman Adams, who died earlier this summer. Adams had held the seat since 1972 and daughter Polly Adams Mervine was among the four running for the post as the Democratic candidate.

The unofficial totals are as follows:

Joe Booth (Republican) – 4,335 (63%)
Polly Adams Mervine (Democrat) – 2,085 (30.3%)
Matt Opaliski (Independent Party of Delaware) – 408 (5.9%)
Wendy Jones (Libertarian) – 56 (0.8%)

Plus there were 10 write-in votes.

I noticed that Booth had a booth at the Delaware State Fair when I visited there last week, so it’s obvious he was quite prepared to run this race. And the overwhelming victory for a Republican helps to chip away at the Democrats’ Senate advantage. (it’s now 25-16; alas the GOP held a 22-19 edge prior to last year’s election.)

(Let me try that again, from the top. The Senate advantage for Democrats drops from 16-5 to a slightly less disgusting 15-6 while the House of Delegates will be 25-15 in favor of the Democrats until Booth’s seat is filled. It was a 22-19 GOP advantage there until the 2008 election.)

Since Booth is moving up from the House of Delegates to the Senate the same process could begin anew under Delaware election law, just on a smaller scale covering House District 37. (Although in my reading of the law this may not happen for awhile since the General Assembly doesn’t reconvene until next January.) In that case, the Democrats have the opportunity to place the House of Delegates to a larger advantage by turning the seat over to their side.

Most sad about this election situation is that the state Board of Elections website didn’t have the results. (Update: they are up now.)

Effigy optional

Read this and ponder how much is already going on locally. This comes from Bill Wilson at Americans for Limited Government:

Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today urged more than 400,000 ALG activists nationwide to “hold rallies, demonstrations, tea parties, and protests in opposition to Barack Obama’s insidious efforts to take over the health care system and take away private health options from the American people.”

Wilson said that “Homegrown, grassroots efforts staged in front of House members’ district offices and at town hall meetings across the nation against ObamaCare are all the more imperative as Blue Dog Democrats attempt to defend the compromise they reached this week with House leadership on the language for the health care bill.”

Wilson said local efforts in Congressional districts throughout the month of August will culminate in the August 22nd “Recess Rally,” which Americans for Limited Government is co-sponsoring.

“There are going to be boots on the ground in districts across the country, and they’re not going to be happy when the politicians return home for their August recess and try to defend this mealy-mouth ‘compromise’ reached by the Blue Dogs,” Wilson promised.

The deal reached between Blue Dog lead negotiator Congressman Mike Ross (AR-CD4) and House leaders would cut $50 billion out of a bill that Kaiser Health News reports would cost more than $1.5 trillion.

Said Wilson of the deal, “96.6 percent of a catastrophe is still a catastrophe. The government-run health care legislation still creates an unsustainable entitlement that will permanently shackle taxpayers to an insurmountable burden that can never possibly be paid back.”

The House legislation proposes to cover individuals individuals up to 400 percent of the poverty level, or making approximately $43,320 or less annually, will be eligible for some level of health coverage under the plan whether through the public “option,” Medicaid, or otherwise.

“Barack Obama has promised the impossible: expanding care to 45 million without raising costs or increasing the deficit,” said Wilson.

“An average premium goes for $4,700, bringing the total cost of the additional care to 45 million more people to roughly $211.5 billion extra annually. That money is not going to grow on trees—it’s going to come off the printing press and from overseas loans from China and Japan,” Wilson explained.

Wilson instead promoted what he called the “private option” as an alternative to the bill proposed in Congress. “We desperately need entitlement reform, not an entitlement expansion. The private option means giving all Americans the option not to participate at all in any government-sponsored plan,” said Wilson.

Wilson continued, “It means unrestrained consumer choice, unrestricted insurance companies, the removal of all insurance coverage mandates, no obligatory coverage either for employers or individuals, market-set pricing instead of government-appropriated and controlled pricing, increased competition by reducing and removing those barriers to entry for insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, and other health care institutions, and finally, entitlement reform.”

“Medical institutions are already in the red, and they will not emerge by permanently funding the health care system by a government that has expanded the national debt for every single year since 1958. That is a path to certain national insolvency,” Wilson concluded. (Emphasis mine.)

When you look at the political awakening which has occurred in our fair region just in the last six months (remember, the Rick Santelli rant which led to the initial April TEA parties occurred in mid-February), it’s a fascinating study in political activism. In that span we’ve had two TEA parties (April 15th and July 4th), seen the formation of a local Americans for Prosperity chapter, and had the protest that inspired the title of this post. Even the Salisbury city election occurring in the midst of the planning of the original TEA Party seemed quite sedate by comparison.

(An interesting sidebar occurs to me in reviewing the healthcare protest post because I also added the items from Melody Scalley there – how much is this grassroots awakening helping her in the Virginia House of Delegates District 100 race or the Independent Party member, Libertarian, and Republican running in a special election just across the border today in Delaware Senate District 19. From what I’ve heard, even the Democrat in that Sussex County district is running as sort of a Blue Dog.)

So I don’t know yet if we’ll have a formal event locally on August 22nd but I suspect the protest last Tuesday at Frank Kratovil’s doorstep won’t be the last one we’ll see – not by a long shot. It may even shake up the Republican Party establishment a little bit.

Late edit, Monday 10 a.m. Julie Brewington at AFP reminded me that the Congressman will be touring around the Eastern Shore this week, and he’s scheduled a number of agriculture-related events this week (probably to brag about the billion dollars he cost taxpayers in the middle of the night.) From his Congressional website, this is his official schedule for the week.

Note that:

All events listed are open to the press but RSVPs are appreciated to ensure proper accommodations.

A clunker of a bailout

With the passage late last week of a bailout for the “Cash for Clunkers” program, it would be appropriate to remind you that I thought it was a boondoggle in the first place. Once again, both of our local Congressmen voted for our government’s newest entitlement – the “right” to have a government subsidy to help you purchase a car.

Again, we have a situation where the market is bent to assure a particular outcome. You can’t get this on just any car; the car has to reach a certain fuel mileage standard so if you happen to want a larger vehicle for a good-sized family you may find yourself out of luck.

And it wouldn’t be surprising that after this (now) $3 billion is gone that future incarnations of the CARS program will create more exclusions, both for fuel mileage and for manufacturing point. I’m waiting for some Rust Belt Congressman like my onetime so-called representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio’s Ninth District (a truly bleeding-heart liberal if I ever saw one) to change the program to only accept American-made cars. We need to bail out the UAW even more after buying up Chrysler and GM for their use and shafting the former bondholders.

However, even at the $4,500 per car taxpayers fork over to auto purchasers that $3 billion will only pay for around 660,000 new sales – hardly a dent in the multi-million vehicle shortfall between calendar year 2008 sales and sales so far this year. This means that in the minds of lawmakers the only way to bring sales back would be to ramp up the CARS program even more – if $3 billion won’t do it, their reasoning goes, why not $30 billion?

Of course, by Fedzilla picking winners there has to be someone who loses. Welcome to the plight of the used car dealer and the salvage yard. Michael Laprarie at Wizbang writes (h/t Atlas Shrugs):

By all counts, it appears that the Obama Administration’s good-hearted attempt to decrease domestic fuel consumption has critically wounded both the used car and auto salvage businesses. The government will not reimburse car dealers for the cash for clunkers bonus unless the dealer can prove that the trade-in car has been destroyed, so dealers must destroy the cars, which leaves the dealers with no other way to recover their clunker rebates if the government reimbursements don’t come through (or come through soon enough — and no, the government has absolutely no concept of “cash flow”). While many of these trade-ins probably are “clunkers,” the destruction of these trade-ins means that thousands of potentially good used cars will never be available for resale. And auto salvage operators are left with no choice in the matter; their primary source of income (salvaged engines) has been destroyed by government fiat.

Thus, for every job which may be “saved” at a UAW plant, there’s one or two lost at the salvage yard or the used car dealership. And remember, used car dealers make their living selling the dealer trade-ins so if there’s no trade-in their supply is limited – in turn, that drives the used car supply down and the prices up. Of course, then those in the market for a car who can’t afford a reasonably decent used car that’s a few years old will demand the same government subsidy their neighbor got when he bought his little Ford Focus – and the destruction of the free market will continue apace.

And people wonder why there’s the movement against Obamacare?

On a personal note, I happened to look and this is monoblogue’s 1500th post spanning its 44 months (and one day) of existence. It’s nice to reach milestones like this and reflect back. Hopefully as the next 1500 posts are placed on here the country will return from the brink it’s teetering on and revert to a more Constitutional government, where Fedzilla knows its place!

Conference call with members of the Media Fairness Caucus

On Thursday I had the pleasure and opportunity to speak with two members of Congress regarding a fairly new group that’s about a dozen strong currently, the Media Fairness Caucus.

MFC Co-Chairs Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas and Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia hosted the call, which featured their statements and a question-and-answer period. Unfortunately, because they’re fairly new to the world of blogger conference calls there was no transcript kept so I’m summarizing from memory and from notes. A transcript was something I suggested in a follow-up e-mail to Rep. Smith’s staff.

In his opening remarks, Smith opined that the “greatest threat to our democracy is a biased media” and noted the 3-to-1 bias on positive to negative stories about Barack Obama and the 20-to-1 disparity of contributions by reporters to Democrats vs. the GOP.

Kingston then chimed in by citing a Business and Media Institute study I previously noted in my latest Sunday evening reading. Additionally, he told those of us on the call that Obama’s poll numbers are falling in part “because of bloggers like you guys.”

Jack is a veteran blogger himself who was one of the first Congressmen to have a blogsite (even predating this site by a couple months) and wistfully recounted that President Bush “could have put blogs on the map” as a news source but didn’t do much in that arena.

Lamar then pointed out, returning to Obama’s polling numbers, that despite the glowing media reports on the Messiah (my term, not his) he’s on the “bottom rung of popularity”, ranking either 10th or 11th among Presidents six months into their terms depending on the pollster. And as an example of an item glossed over by the mainstream media, Smith cited the Heritage Foundation study of cap-and-trade’s impact on the Gross Domestic Product that the Congressional Budget Office’s study of the financial impact of Waxman-Markey buried in a footnote because they didn’t figure it into their overall numbers – an impact Heritage calculated could cost an average family up to $1600.

There were three participants who asked questions. First up was Pamela Geller, who writes the blog Atlas Shrugs. She wanted to see about putting together a sort of alternate system of getting information out, comprised of “higher-level people.”

This is where I wish I had a transcript because basically the Congressmen thought the idea was a good one and noted that several bloggers were already doing these sorts of things in a loosely organized way. Unfortunately, by this point I was already trying to figure out how to phrase my question so I didn’t catch the second lady and her specific question since it was sort of a follow-up to Pamela’s.

For I had two points I wanted to make when it was my turn to speak.

First, it’s not widely reported for obvious reasons that not only do reporters have a personal stake in political outcomes but many times their corporate bosses do too – take NBC as an example. General Electric has great potential business in alternative energy so it’s obviously in their interest to push that sort of legislation and report the news in a way favorable to their interests as opposed to true journalism. It’s a conflict of interest that I wanted to point out and a place to focus future blogger reporting on. (I figured with someone as widely read as Pamela Geller listening it wouldn’t be a bad suggestion!)

The second point I made was stating that as a Republican Party their interest should be in shrinking the size of government and not just changing one set of masters for another. There’s less incentive for people to stick their fingers in the pie if the pie is smaller, I remarked.

By and large the Congressmen agreed with my remarks, which I was pleased to hear. Truly it wasn’t a soliliquy because I took maybe 5 minutes of the call with my question and their answer, which turned out to be near the end of the conversation. Geller followed up by having the Congressmen pledge to make these conference calls on a regular basis.

I’d be happy to participate and aside from the lack of a transcript (which I’m sure will be corrected next time) I look forward to chatting with the pair as my availability dictates.