If a man be gracious to strangers,
it shows that he is a citizen of the world,
and his heart is no island,
cut off from other islands,
but a continent that joins them.
Francis Bacon
Romney Beats Santorum in Michigan,
Wins Arizona Going Away, 2-1 Over Santorum
As I write, roughly 99% of the precincts in Michigan have reported and the race has been called, with Romney leading Santorum 41%-38%. Romney won this despite dirty tricks by pro-Obama forces out to sabotage and embarrass Obama's most viable opponent Romney's attempts to win the nomination from his home state, abusing Michigan's open primary:
"I have to tell you a lot of my Democratic friends will vote for Santorum in something they are calling Operation Hilarity," Michael Moore said at the end of an interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.
However, Santorum also hypocritically, pathetically reached out to Michigan Democrats through robocalls over the weekend in a desperate attempt to keep up any momentum from his caucus/nonbinding primary hat trick from a few weeks back. The fact is that Santorum has always been critical of open primaries for exactly what he tried to do here. (He lamely tried to excuse his actions, saying that he was merely trying to resurrect the "Reagan Democrats" coalition. It's one thing to make a pitch to more conservative Democrats (if any of them still exist any more) during the GENERAL election, not the GOP primary--and in any event, Santorum and Gingrich do very poorly among moderates and independents in almost any poll I've seen this year. He's done better in more recent polls, but that probably has more to do with a relatively unpopular Obama with a 45% approval rating. In fact, I bet I could run against Obama without a single voter knowing whom I am or what my positions are and get at least 40-45% of the vote; all I need to do is change my given name to "Nobama".
The attempts to manipulate the Michigan primary almost worked, and if I was running the Romney campaign, I would make it a campaign issue (notice that the Democrats voted for Santorum 19 points higher than the 34% of independents):
Nearly 1-in-10 voters in the Michigan Republican primary identified with the Democratic Party. These Democratic voters overwhelmingly supported Santorum, casting 53 percent of their ballots for him while awarding only 17 percent to Romney. By comparison, Romney defeated Santorum among the 59 percent of Republicans casting ballots by a margin of 48 percent to 37 percent and independents by a margin of 35 percent to 34 percent. If the Democrats had not crossed over and voted in the Republican contest, Romney would have won the Michigan Republican primary by 8 percentage points, in the process changing the characterization of the result from a close race to a comfortable victory.
With 90% of the Arizona precincts in, Romney beat Santorum by a better-than-projected 20 points: 47%-27%. The biggest factors making for Romney's sweep of the doubleheader: electability and business experience.
In other political news, one of the liberal Senators from Maine, Olympia Snowe (recall, she was one of 3 Republicans to vote for the massive spending-in-stimulus'-clothing binge) announced that she would retire. This could create a problem for the GOP to hold, because the two Congressmen from Maine are both Democrats. The GOP in Maine has a thin bench (will Maine's new GOP governor run?), although I'm intrigued by Tea Party activist Andrew Ian Dodge; from what I can tell, he is a libertarian conservative just like Ron or Rand Paul and myself. I am more of a pragmatist, i.e., I abide by the Serenity Prayer (see below). Dodge has to avoid being predictably defined by progressive Democrat opponents as an extremist. I think Rand Paul, after a shaky start, has done very well so far.
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| Reinhold Niebuhr's classic prayer courtesy of this source |
In terms of the GOP Presidential race, Romney has stretched his lead to 5 over Santorum in the Gallup daily tracking poll (I expect tonight's victories to stretch that out more).and consistently runs better than his competition state by state and nationally. For example, although Georgia favorite son Newt Gingrich is polling well ahead of virtually tied Santorum and Romney, Romney has a bigger lead than Gingrich against Obama. Before tonight's double-win, Romney was trailing Santorum in the single-digit range in Ohio, and I saw one Tennessee poll where Santorum had a comfortable lead. Here's the point: Romney had 41% of the cumulative vote to date going into tonight, he's won 4 of 6 primaries and finished second in the two others. He is less than 10 points of an absolute majority in a field of 4 candidates. I do not know how the party can deny Romney the nomination. It should be interesting to see if Romney starts picking up some key endorsements and momentum this week heading into Super Tuesday.
Interesting: two potential recall election Democrat opponents against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker only have leads within statistical significance (i.e., a tie). Of course, you can expect union members to go all out during the recall, like they came out to get Harry Reid reelected, so if I was Walker, I would press the battle unless I have a 15-point lead. House Democrats seem to think they have a good shot to bounce back in 2012. I haven't looked at the races yet, but at least two Blue Dog Congressmen have announced their retirements, which I don't think they would do if they thought the Dems were going to win. I think in both cases the GOP should pick those seats up, plus there are at least 2 or 3 GOP seats in NY that the Dems are currently occupying and other seats were left on the table. Barring a meltdown in the Presidential contest, I think a successful Romney win has coattails. I'll probably start looking at the House races over the next month or two, but the Senate races are starting to look good for a takeover this fall, with Virginia's George Allen with his biggest lead to date against Kaine. If the Senate goes GOP, which I think is more likely than not, I expect the House GOP to hold serve.
Guest Talking Point of the Day:
Russ Roberts/Cafe Hayek,
"The Insanity of Health Insurance"
Reading Cafe Hayek economists Roberts and Boudreaux is like grabbing an exquisite chocolate from a Whitman's sampler box.
It is insane that we get our health care from our employers. Our employers are just a conduit for government mandates, rent-seeking and inefficiency related to health care. The real outrage is that the government mandates the mix of my compensation package, biasing it toward a luxury health-care package that is the result of special interest clamoring.I'm not an economist by training, but let me try to explain in laymen's terms: rent-seeking in practice refers to a practice of spreading the wealth around instead of creating new wealth, typically as a result of some government intervention or other legal constraints. There are lots of examples of this in the real world. For example, there is a union contract that only allows the use of union labor and time-and-a-half for overtime. If all your available union workers have put in their 40 hours, your marginal labor costs have just jumped 50%, but you are getting the same number of widgets per man/hour and the price of your widgets is still the same.
From real life, I recently worked on a subcontract where the client with budget problems had to let me go. It turned out my agency was taking half of the bill rate, although it had done little more than make the introduction and some minor payroll overhead. If we had arranged it directly, they would have gotten twice the service for the same amount of money.
These sorts of things happen with health care, too. For example, the tax-free basis of job-related health care premiums is effectively a government subsidy for health insurance. In turn, this provides the employer and/or employees with an incentive to buy more health care for the same amount of money or to shift taxable wages into higher-cost benefits. These tax subsidies must be offset by tax revenues elsewhere in the economy, and they reduce the natural incentive for insurance companies to achieve cost savings in order to protect margins and market share. Employers, with government mandates to require a particular type of compensation or benefit, find themselves losing control over their own cost structure to the government and/or crony special interest groups interested in socializing expensive health care, e.g., in vitro fertilization. Employers are still operating under the law of supply and demand. (Maybe the only way they can offset increased compensation costs is to lay off workers...) It would be better off if we simply rolled back the government mandates or subsidies and vested people in health care transactions. (I think the best role for any government involvement deals with catastrophic care.)
Drones in America?
Spying on American Citizens?
No Due Process?
Oh, the elites, the government bureaucrats will rationalize all of this high tech stealth surveillance. Let's give an example: a child abduction. If we monitor all movements outside one's house, we may have some leads to pursue--say, an auto arrives or leaves the area. If there is no surveillance, we'll not have that lead at all. Who has any legal rights of privacy beyond one's house?
There are various things to say about the courts seeming to have given broad deference to other authorities. Now, personally, I've worked on government computers, and I have had zero problems with their monitoring any and everything I do, and I'm used to companies being able to monitor emails on their systems. I simply think that people have a right to be left alone. For example, a lot of people reading newspapers hate someone reading their newspaper over their shoulder--go buy your own paper! Attractive women don't care for being leered at, and people don't like being stalked by strangers. Our privacy exists more than just within the confines of our homes.
The whole reason for the Bill of Rights was to flesh only a minimal, not an exclusive list of negative rights. But clearly the burden of proof of having to justify an invasion of another person's space, to stalk them--especially by the government, should be on the party in pursuit.
I remember when I had to conduct empirical research--even something as innocuous like administering a questionnaire--I had to go up before a committee for the protection of human subjects. I had to put into writing things like, say, if I administered a questionnaire at a place of business, employees had a right to refuse to participate. In the case of the government, they often need little,if any real justification. It isn't a question of whether we have anything to hide: it's about an arrogant government subjugating individual liberty without any real need to show probable cause. We don't need drones overhead--we do not live in a police state. Let the state go before a judge, but the burden is on the state.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Paul McCartney & Wings, "Junior's Farm"
