In the West Virginia Democratic presidential primary, Obama lost 41% of the vote to a Keith Judd, a Texan federal inmate. This marks as one of Obama’s worst performance in the primary cycle. Oh, sure, Obama has had other bad showings despite being the sitting president. Obama only got 57.1% in the Oklahoma primary and 76.5% in the Louisiana primary and received less than 90% of the vote in nine other states… so far.  He’s lost 13 delegates to other candidates. Now, Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee, no question, but it’s obvious there is discontent with Obama’s policies even among the Democrats.

Democrats took this somber moment of disunity to accuse each other of racism.  Liberals on Twitter did their best to demean West Virginians, generally as a whole, with various disparaging slurs. Here are some of the worst tweets from the West Virginia primary fallout presented without comment:

And 10 more with links instead of pictures:

Tweeted by @CJLFloyd: Of COURSE a state like West Virginia would prefer an inmate over Obama. Anything but a black man, right? #ignorance #backwoods

Tweeted by @Saundersmu: @BarackObama So sorry for the ignorance of my home state of West Virginia. We are not all dumb hicks. Thank you.

Tweeted by @WuDatWuz: Would it be fair to say a blk person doesn’t stand a chance in West Virginia? #Justice? #Equality? #Fairness? Deep seated Racists?

Tweeted by @journalschism: Love the media in awe of this Judd BS. Is it a shock that one of the most racist states in country voted for anyone but PBO? #WV

Tweeted by @K_Shingleton: I’m extremely embarrassed to be from WV today… 4 out of 10 ppl voted for a convicted felon instead of Obama yesterday #racist #idiots

Tweeted by @RChrisSkinner: WV should be ashamed. Thank you, idiots, who made us look like racist, morons, just like the rest of America already thinks we are. #Sad

Tweeted by @jasondusett: Really, West Virginia voters? Trying to end stereotypes your state is full of bigoted, uneducated hillibillies? http://abcn.ws/K0XCPy FAIL.

Tweeted by @glamgoddess34: West Virginia is the dumbest most bigoted state ever #word

Tweeted by @LeighMelone: Congrats 2 WV in their attempt 2 unseat NC as the most backwoods inbred hillbilly state. U only made runner up but it was a valiant effort.

Tweeted by @JPughMI: RNC is really pumping that a death row inmate almost beat Obama in WV? What does that prove other than West Virginians are kinda racist?

–Jonathan Ellis (Twitter @JHartEllis)

The April jobs report is full of grim news.  Only 115,000 jobs were added, which would barely be enough to keep up with the population, but the actually number of people employed actually fell by 169,000 and another 342,000 left the work force.  There are now 88.4 million Americans not in the labor force, and “the labor-force participation rate — the percentage of the work-age population either working or looking for work — dropped to 63.6 percent, the lowest since December 1981.”  With people giving up on looking for work, the unemployment rate fell from 8.2% to 8.1%.  The news sent the stock market down sharply.

With these terrible numbers, here’s the reaction from the White House:

“Today’s employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression”

People falling out of the labor force is a sign of healing?  What’s worse is that this nearly perfectly echoes the sentiment from March when the unemployment rate fell for the same reason:

“[T]oday’s employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.”

Healing!

 Of course, Obama acolytes eat this up and think the drop in the unemployment rate is nothing but good:

Mitt Romney quickly responded to the bad numbers:

“Normally, that would be cause for celebration, but anything near 8 percent or over 4 percent is not cause for celebration,” Romney said. “The reason the rate came down was because around 340,000 dropped out of the workforce … this is a sad time in America, where people who want work can’t find jobs.”

However, these people saw it a different way:

Eric Boehlert from Media Matters had this to say:

Knowing nothing about the US economy would probably look more like calling people dropping out of the labor force “healing”.  You only have to go back to 2000 to find a 4% unemployment rate.

On the added jobs rate, here’s some math.  With 88.4 million people not in the labor force yielding a 63.6% labor participation rate, and a peak participation rate of 66.4% in 2007, and backing 90,000 out of the 500,000/month rate due to population growth…

(88,400,000-[1/(1-.636)]x88,400,000x(1-.664))/(500,000-90,000) = 16.58 months

Adding 500,000 a month for 16.5 months would roughly get us back to a 2007-level participation rate.  That would be a normal, healthy, V-shaped recovery.  These April numbers are a far cry from that.

Whether or not Romney’s optimism should slide, the media is covering for Obama, and so are supporters:

Indeed.

–Jonathan Ellis (Twitter @JHartEllis)

Vice President Joe Biden recently said to cheers on the campaign trail that the Obama administration wanted to create a “global minimum tax” on foreign profits of American companies.  Considering that National Economic Council director Gene Sperling had iterated this same sentiment last month, this must be a view that permeates the thinking of the Obama administration.

Now this isn’t some globalist call for international taxing authority for the United Nations or other international organizations as might be assumed, but it is wrongheaded nonetheless.  For years, decades even, U.S. companies have had little incentive to repatriate profits earned overseas back to the United States because of onerous tax rates.  This problem has been exacerbated over the years as corporate income taxes in the U.S. have remained high as other developed countries have precipitously lowered their respective tax rates, insomuch that the combined federal and state taxes in the U.S. are now the highest in the world.  The hundred of billions of dollars of foreign profits tend to sit idly or get reinvested in operations in those countries because the tax bill would be so high.  Indeed, many companies have probably kept profits overseas because they expected the U.S. to finally wise up and lower the corporate tax rate.

So instead of tackling this issue sensibly by following the capitalistic examples of Europe and Japan (yeah, that shouldn’t sound right), the Obama administration is getting impatient with these self-interested American companies and wants to punish them for doing the only financially reasonably thing to do.  By extending the arm of the IRS into these international ventures, taxes can be extracted from the companies without the funds actually being repatriated.  This would be an affront on the legal rights of the wholly-owned subsidiaries most of these ventures operate under, and it would ensure extremely high effective tax rates on these ventures as they’d be taxed by both the IRS and the country of the operations.  Sperling spared us the “gory details” of how this would actually work, but collaboration with foreign taxing entities would certainly be complicated and could strain international relations.

I’ve seen a misperception about these sort of taxes before in that some people would think that profitable foreign enterprises would continue because they would still be profitable even with the extra layer of taxes.  However, looking at initial capital requirements and return on investment demands helps to see this issue correctly.  Say a $100 million venture is projected to earn $10 million per year.  With this new tax, say it only earns $8 million per year.  Still profitable, right?  Well, depends on the target ROI of the investors.  If that $8 million per year profit stream were too low, the venture won’t even be put into place.

The Obama administration will defend this global tax as somehow promoting fairness.  Indeed, Sperling talked about this in context of “shared sacrifice,” but there’s really nothing fair about even taxing foreign profits at all.  If the United States were to move to something like a consumption tax or the FairTax, these profits certainly wouldn’t be taxed.  Plans for a “holiday” in which these profits could be repatriated without tax penalty are certainly a step in the right direction.  Steep cuts to the corporate tax would go far in preventing these idle funds from building up in the first place and would raise government revenue, which is what Obama supposedly wants.

The Obama administration is also very oddly thinking this sort of tax scheme will help avoid a “race to the bottom.”  It can be inferred that Biden was speaking about manufacturing plants moving out of the country into more favorable tax jurisdictions, but there’s really nothing this tax would do to prevent that.  American manufacturers would simply sell to investors in the country of destination to avoid the tax.  But that would leave the tax to wreak havoc on American companies that have simply naturally expanded their marketing into other countries such as store chains opening abroad or even American manufacturing companies selling their products.  Was this tax supposed to help manufacturers, or was anti-competitiveness really supposed to be part of this “shared sacrifice”?

This is also sort of insulting because Obama has been out campaigning on a host of business reforms that would purposefully segregate business into differently taxed strata.  At the most vilified and most taxed would be the oil companies, which would be targeted to provide subsidies for the most beloved alternative energy companies (think more Solyndras).  Under oil companies, which would have their taxes raised, would be non-manufacturing businesses, which would simply be stuck at the status quo of an effective 39% tax rate.  As Biden said, manufacturers would get a tax cut, and high-tech manufacturers would get an even bigger tax cut.  This complex hierarchy doesn’t really resemble anything like “shared sacrifice,” but it would be rife for corruption and expand the power of government immensely.

The main problem with this global minimum tax, however, is that it perpetuates and exemplifies the hostile attitude that the Obama administration has towards American enterprise.  We should hope that our native businesses can do well and be profitable both here and abroad.  Really, shouldn’t we want Americans to get rich from foreign activities?  Exporting American business models can also spread U.S. influence and go far in strengthening foreign relations and developing poorer nations.  Unfortunately, Obama is too stuck on bloated government to recognize the good of actual wealth creation.

–Jonathan Ellis

Almost.  Sure, they’re paying some lip service to gas prices that are the highest ever for this time of year even adjusted for inflation.  Obama, who has previously wanted energy prices to “skyrocket” and who said the $3.80/gallon gas of May 2008 was a “really cheap rate,” has recently said, “…just from a political perspective, do you think the President of the United States going into reelection wants gas prices to go up higher?”  Incidentally, gas again costs $3.80, but now it’s a different election, and Obama is singing a pleasantly different tune–someone must have told him that driving up energy prices is a political loser.  However, this “political perspective” approach certainly seems to have an expiration date.  If Obama can feign sympathy about gas prices until past the election, then he’ll be free to stop pretending to care.  In the meantime he can push for his “all-of-the-above” strategy, which has a dozen asterisks that undermine its all-of-the-aboveness.

Showing solidarity within the administration, Energy Secretary Steven Chu is also stepping back from previous desires to see gas prices rise to European levels of $8+.  Again, it’s nice to have someone not actively trying to sabotage your pocketbook, but Chu’s remarks have an expiration date as well.  Chu stated, “I think right now in this economic, very slow, return–these prices could very well affect the comeback of our economy.”  The key there is “right now.”  A couple years down the road when the economy is hopefully doing better, Chu can then resume beating the drum for insanely high gas prices.

Even some of the liberal base is temporarily sounding almost reasonable.  William Galston of the Brookings Institution has an article about What Obama Should and Shouldn’t Do About High Gas Prices.  Galston actually lists some specific examples:

[President Obama] could expedite consideration of the revised Keystone XL pipeline route and approve it sometime this summer. He could make it clear that absent compelling scientific evidence to the contrary, his administration will not prevent the use of hydrofracking, a technique that has spurred the development of natural gas reserves. He could indicate his administration’s interest in pursuing new technologies for using coal cleanly and efficiently.

These sound pretty good until you realize why these might be acceptable.  Galston says these things “will mute the discontent of millions of average families who are struggling to get by in the face of rising prices and stagnant wages” and that “[Obama's] best chance to defuse the issue is to dramatize his active engagement and concern. Make sure people know that he cares, and that this is on his agenda.”  So these items would not be meant to do much to lower gas prices; the main purpose would just be to throw the angry mob some sop until they forget about the issue.

Galston’s proposals under scrutiny do indeed look small.  Keystone necessarily has to be minor according to the current talking point of creating “only” 20,000 jobs (a good start, I’ll add).  Obama NOT threatening to destroy the fracking business sort of underscores a problem: Obama is harboring a hostile energy business environment.  Obama shouldn’t have to say that we should be grateful he doesn’t make things worse.  Clean coal is one of those asterisks on the “all-of-the-above” strategy, and Obama’s previous desire to see coal go bankrupt would be hard to overcome.  Good thing Galston only asks Obama to talk about it instead of taking any action.

At least Galston was offering something.  Many outfits are simply denying that Obama can do anything.  Laughably, a Huffington Post piece first states that it’s “[t]oo bad presidents have no control over [gas prices]” before going on to list a lot of liberal pipe dreams (No, not Keystone XL) for kneecapping domestic energy consumption that would presumably affect gas prices.  The piece says “there’s no quick fix for presidents to lower [gas prices].”  Considering the debate mostly hasn’t been about “quick fixes,” at least this is an admission that solutions do exist and that the president does have some control over gas prices through long-term policies.  Maybe this admission would put an end to the argument that ANWR shouldn’t be developed because it would take 10 years to produce oil (even though this has been said for the last 10 years).

All of these shifts lack any real sincerity inasmuch as they’re just to act as damage control to help Obama’s reelection chances.  Moreover, these shifts are focused more on messaging than actual changes in policy.  However, while it wouldn’t be too much to ask for an unequivocal commitment to lower gas prices, it’s sort of comforting having everyone at least acknowledging the problem.

–Jonathan Ellis

So here’s my foray into blogging.  Why not just start with dissecting a bad article?  The New Republic has an article out attacking Mitt Romney and others for eschewing crony capitalism: Why ‘Crony Capitalism’ is as American as Apple Pie. Diving right into the absurdity, here we go.

Conservatives are supposed to cherish tradition, to draw on customs and policies which worked well in the past to guide what office-holders ought to do in the future.

That’s not really a good definition of conservatism.  At least it’s some sort of definition…

So it is ironic, if not hypocritical, that they constantly peddle a notion about the separation of business and government that has no basis in American history.

…but it has nothing to do with this.  First, a minor point: there’s nothing “ironic” here.  Even accepting the extraordinarily odd position that crony capitalism is inherently conservative, not subscribing to ideological dogma makes one less of an ideologue and not a symbol of irony.  It would be like saying that Kazin not giving all his money away as a good socialist is “ironic” or Kazin not offing himself to stave off climate change is “ironic”.  It’s not irony to not follow the tenets of ideology just as it’s not irony for someone religious to sin.  That might be tragic or show a lack of conviction, but it’s not ironic.  It’s also not hypocritical.  So here Kazin is simply stretching for attacking adjectives.  Kazin could almost get away with using ‘hypocritical’ if he said even a throw-away line about Romney benefiting from crony capitalism, but he doesn’t, so it’s nonsense.

Still, the worse part of all this is that crony capitalism isn’t a conservative position from the get-go.  Just because something has been around for a long time doesn’t mean conservatives are required to embrace it.  Crony capitalism is often just a form of legalized theft, and it’s not as if conservatives have to embrace crime just because it’s persistent.

Conservatives now object to “crony capitalism,” but for much of U.S. history, businessmen have been hungry for it. Since the early nineteenth century, the government has helped fuel economic growth and corporate profit-making, and savvy businessmen and, recently, businesswomen have lobbied hard to keep those benefits coming.

The assertion about fueling economic growth is specious inasmuch as growth occurred while crony capitalism also existed.  Kazin’s main point here though is that crony capitalism is good because businessmen push for it.  So?  They’re the primary beneficiaries of dealing with the government at the expense of everyone outside the deal.  When businessmen are getting wealthy off the backs of the taxpayers, the opinions of the taxpayers are more relevant.

Kazin then goes on to conflate government spending in general with crony capitalism by asserting that all federal infrastructure and even the postal system are somehow the result of crony capitalism.

By the turn of the century, a sizeable number of Americans were calling for an end to the torrid affair between business and government.

Wait, so this conservative opposition has been around for over 100 years?  So what was that first bit about cherishing tradition?  Oh, well.

Before World War I, progressives pushed through measures to curb the trusts, regulate the money supply, and protect consumers from unsafe meat and drugs. Yet the largest meatpacking corporations also welcomed the FDA, knowing it would signal that their products were safe to eat while raising the costs of production just enough to drive smaller firms out of business.

This is an important admission: that crony capitalism drives smaller firms out of business.  Is that a model that “works well”?  Is killing and preventing small firms part of the success or just a necessary casualty?

Kazin again says that recipients of federal money have generally been happy to get money and then makes this ridiculous statement:

The real political question has never been, should government be large or small but whose interests should it serve?

Except, of course, that that has been a central theme of debate since the founding of the country.  So “special interests” are king.  Special interests are good.  We should all embrace one side or the other where both sides are big government.  Incidentally, Kazin doesn’t feel the need to chastise Dems that run against special interests even though they’d supposedly be wrong in doing so.

Even if he knew this history, Mitt Romney would probably still spend the next eight months promising to free the economy from the shackles of “big government.” But if that rhetoric ever became reality, there would be nothing conservative about it.

Um, okay, so what would it be?  Certainly not liberal–Kazin says the liberal Dems are for big government that serves their own interests (please run on this Dems).  But what would a smaller government without special interests be called other than conservative?

Crony capitalism is not something that has worked well in the past–we’ve somehow managed to survive it, but it’s a problem that is getting worse, and rose-tinted glasses of the past gloss over burdens on taxpayers and abject unfairness to small businesses and start-ups.  And that’s not even delving into laughably horrible failures like Solyndra.  Perpetuating corruption through crony capitalism is also most certainly not something on which to base future decisions, but it looks like the liberals are being clear that that’s where they want to take this country in the short run.

–Jonathan Ellis