Mayor de Blasio marches New York back to the future

The New Neo Posted on by

Gotta placate those teachers:

Since the city’s recovery from the 1975 fiscal crisis, mayors and the media have treated the city’s budget-day announcement as a sober technocratic event. Mayor de Blasio, by contrast, used his annual unveiling of the city’s revenue and spending blueprint on May 8 as a campaign-style opportunity to push what he himself called a “progressive” agenda. The budget adds money to enforce the city’s new mandated sick-leave law for private employers, and it spends more for public housing and education. But the most controversial and fiscally explosive portion offers retroactive pay raises to the city’s teachers and, later, raises for other city employees at a projected added cost of $9 billion over four years.

The mayor calls his budget “historic” and “transcendent.” Indeed, for the first time since New York recovered from its near-bankruptcy of the 1970s, the city is willing explicitly to spend beyond its means to buy labor peace. The new teachers’ contract, including $4.3 billion in retroactive pay raises back to 2009, is the acute example.

De Blasio’s plan to march New York right back to the brink of bankruptcy might be stopped by a sort of mayoral safety net put in place after the debacle of the 70s:

After the fiscal crisis of the ’70s, New York state and city set up institutional checks and balances to make sure that no mayor can ruin the city again. Mr. Stringer and State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli serve on the state’s Financial Control Board, ultimately controlled by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The board can take over if it finds an operating deficit of more than $100 million, or if it finds the city is borrowing for operating expenses. Proper accounting for the teachers’ deal would expose the city as committing both of those sins.

Read the whole thing, and remember that de Blasio won in a landslide, 72.2% to 24%. For reasons I’ve not seen satisfactorily explained—but which I think represented lack of enthusiasm for both candidates—the turnout in that election was a record low of 24%.

Meanwhile, back at the EPA, Obama’s plans to bankrupt the coal industry quietly go forward

The New Neo Posted on by

There are so many crises generated by the Obama administration that it’s easy to lose sight of some. But in just a little over a week a probable new one will be unleashed when the EPA announces rules for existing coal power plants, to go with the rules for new plants that were announced last January:

The January proposal sets carbon-emission limits for new power plants fueled by natural gas and coal. It also requires new coal-fired plants to use carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), a technology not in use by any commercial-scale power plant in the US.

In comments filed this month responding to the January proposal, the American Coal Council cited an Energy Information Administration estimate that the capital cost of a new integrated combined-cycle coal plant with CCS would be $6,599/kw.

That’s more than capital requirements for new hydro, onshore solar, wind, and nuclear plants and more than six times the capital cost of a new gas-fired combined-cycle generating plant without CCS, according to ACC.

Even before EPA’s January proposal, low gas prices were discouraging construction of coal-fired capacity. The proposal essentially makes coal-plant construction unlikely regardless of the gas price.

It also gives the coal business reason to expect rugged treatment of existing plants.

The January proposal affects growth. The June proposal will affect cost. If those costs are high, as they probably will be, a recent trend of coal-fired plant closures will accelerate.

Yes, gas-fired capacity will make up much of the loss. But the oil and gas business should welcome none of this.

EPA won’t stop with coal.

This process is happening through the EPA rather than Congress for two reasons. The first is that Obama can’t convince Congress or the American people to approve, so he’s going around both in his favorite manner, though a government agency. The second is that a month ago the Supreme Court gave him the green light to do it that way.

This course of action regarding coal is something Obama has been intent on for many a long year. No one on earth who’s been paying a particle of attention should be surprised, least of all those in a coal-producing states like Pennsylvania who voted for him despite that fact (the first map is of the results in the 2012 election, and the second is the coal-mining counties of PA):

election2012

coalregionpa

In one of the debates in 2012 Obama falsely presented himself as being a friend of fossil fuels, but that should have fooled no one. Obama had stated his plans for coal back in January of 2008, in an interview which came to light a few days before the 2008 election and which I wrote about at that time in a post entitled “Obama’s lump of coal.” Here’s an excerpt:

But he is advocating an extreme pro-environmental and anti-industry position nonetheless. Rather than banning new coal plants de jure, he plans to drive them out of business de facto, because the environmental requirements of his policies would be so stringent that new plants would be unable to comply and the penalties for noncompliance would be catastrophic. In other words,, any new plants would have to pay penalties so Draconian that they would be bankrupted””and the listener is left to wonder whether even older plants might be required to retrofit in order to comply, and be forced out of business as well.

Obama’s plan is that market forces would dictate that, as new coal production would become impossible, people would be forced to quickly fill in for the lack of power by developing the wonderfully clean alternative sources of energy that he is so sure would be available if only the will were there. We have no way of knowing whether it would work out that way, of course. But in the meantime we could be sure that the economic costs would be very high, as Obama unapologetically states.

This is his position on nuclear power as well…

So the plan was very, very clear very very early in the game, before Obama’s first term.

In the interim, however, a funny thing happened: shale fracking technology has improved and expanded enormously, and with it the ability to extract a lot more natural gas than before. Natural gas is cleaner than coal, and so despite the very strong objections environmentalists have to fracking, natural gas is what Obama and others have come to suggest could be a “bridge” fuel in the interim, until some other sources magically become practical and plentiful. Note that word “magically”; my point in using it is that it is very hard to replace fossil fuels, and nuclear power (which could probably do so to a large extent) doesn’t have the environmentalists’ blessing either.

One of the largest American shale deposits (known as the Marcellus Formation) is located in certain states that also have historically mined coal, such as West Virginia and Pennsylvania, as well as New York and a few others. But New York has banned fracking for years, and there’s been a long-term “temporary” ban in New Jersey as well, and other states may follow suit because of the perceived threat to groundwater, whether they have major shale deposits or not.

New Jersey is not as yet a big candidate for fracking anyway. But in Pennsylvania, where part of the Marcellus Formation lies and where fracking is big, there’s a fairly strong (though so far unsuccessful) movement to ban it as well.

The entire campaign against the coal industry is predicated on the theory of human-caused global warming. Whatever you think about the truth or falsehood of such claims, let’s focus on that word “global” in that warming equation. American coal production and use is actually a fairly minor factor in what may or may not be happening as a result of fossil fuel use worldwide. Unless there’s a worldwide approach, and especially unless India and China are onboard, this is almost inconsequential.

What’s more, burning gas may not really be as much of an improvement over coal as some say. And yet the overall cost of the new coal regulations is probably going to be high, even with the gas alternative.

Depending on the source, this is expected to cost the energy industry anywhere from $6 to $20 billion annually- all costs that will be passed on to utility customers… The Heritage Foundation estimates that once fully implemented, these regulations will cost the country 800,000 jobs- 280,000 in manufacturing alone. Jobs in the coal mining industry are expected to decline by 43%. Because converting plants to natural gas would be a better option for compliance, more of that commodity would be diverted to power plants and the price of natural gas would rise an estimated 42% unless production increased. But, environmentalists are blocking that option with their opposition to fracking.

More here from the Coal Council (which of course is hardly an objective group) about the possible drawbacks of natural gas:

The American Council for Clean Coal Electricity said EPA’s proposal would effectively ban new coal generation, since it will require a technology that is not widely available.

“Banning new coal-fueled power plants is bad energy policy for our nation because it will result in an overreliance on natural gas for new base load generation ”” a fuel that has a long history of price volatility and deliverability challenges,” ACCCE wrote in its comments.

ACCCE said the rule, also known as New Source Performance Standards (NSPS), would actually discourage CCS development, because companies would no longer have an incentive to build new plants. The group asked that EPA withdraw its proposal and write a new one based on emissions from new plants that do not use CCS.

The National Mining Association (NMA) urged EPA to rescind the proposal, for fear that it would reduce diversity in power supplies.

“EPA’s approach risks overreliance on one power source and jeopardizes the reliability that is inherent in having a diverse energy portfolio,” the NMA said. “NMA cautions EPA to proceed with great care in this rulemaking as it is merely step one of the agency’s plans for regulating the power sector under the [Clean Air Act] to reduce CO2 emissions.”

The Electricity Reliability Coordinating Council said the new rule could be a way to eliminate coal electricity, which would make power less reliable.

“The proposed rule is an example of regulation at its worst in that it attempts to direct market forces with only the vague hope of being able to deliver real benefits,” ERCC said. “Unfortunately, the costs of the proposed rule are very real in terms of limiting future electricity generation options, with consequent potential threats to electric reliability, affordability, and all of the economic and health harms that are associated with those results.”

I freely confess that I’m no expert on energy sources and how they work, either scientifically or economically. But my guess is that out there among my readers there are some who know a great deal about it. You can enlighten us in the comments section.

CNN stands firm against covering Benghazi, and against feeling shame

The New Neo Posted on by

Neo-neocon, writing on the morning of Monday, May 19, 2014:

…[Trey Gowdy’s questions for the press show] how negligent and/or collusive with [the Obama] administration the press has been in covering (or rather, covering up) the Benghazi incident.

If it were possible for the press to reflect and to feel shame, Gowdy’s words would make them do that and feel that. But I’m afraid it’s not.

CNN President Jeff Zucker, speaking on the evening of Monday, May 19, 2014:

CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker on Monday said that the network probably won’t be covering the House select committee to investigate Benghazi.

“We’re not going to be shamed into it by others who have political beliefs that want to try to have temper tantrums to shame other news organizations into covering something,” he said when asked if CNN would cover the committee during an interview at a Deadline Club dinner, as recorded by Capital New York.

I’m not saying Zucker reads neo-neocon. It’s just—odd.

This, however, is beyond odd [emphasis mine]:

Zucker also addressed the network’s round-the-clock coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane and how CNN will approach news after the plane era.

“If I take a step back from our coverage of the Malaysian plane’s disappearance, I’m incredibly comfortable with it. I believed early on, right from the start, that it was an enormously important story…

…[N]ow that CNN’s coverage of the missing plane is winding down, Zucker said they’ll start to introduce new programming aimed at a younger audience.

“So we’re still there whenever that happens, but we’re going to supplement that with some different kind of storytelling,” Zucker said of the network’s plane coverage going forward.

What on earth is the “plane era”? And is CNN planning to become the Nickelodeon of cable news? Lastly and perhaps most importantly, what does Zucker mean by “storytelling”?

I can imagine.

1956: Robert Frost, commencement speaker

The New Neo Posted on by

All this news about commencement speakers being scared away or disinvited or staying the course despite adversity or giving students a tongue-lashing makes me want to return to a commencement address from an earlier time.

That time was 1956, nearly a full sixty years ago. The place was Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and the speaker was the poet Robert Frost. What he had to say to the students there may surprise you. If you want to read the whole speech, go here, but the part that I was most interested in is this portion, which I’ve condensed into short excerpts from the original:

Is our dream, our American dream—that I think Dreiser thought was “An American Tragedy”—is that dream over? Are we on a new dream?

Or is the Constitution something that isn’t performing—a sort of vanishing act, fading as we watch it, and turning into something else? When they call it “a living document,” that means they can have it any way they want it for this generation. That’s the danger…

Let me say what I’d do about it if I were you. I’d go back and read some of the “Federal Papers.” I’d go back and see whose dream it was. Plenty of time, you’ve got it all before you…

…for me the man that comes nearest what I think was the dream, that may be ours still, was Madison. In the “Federal Papers,” go to Madison and see what he thought it was going to be.

What was it going to be? Go along and think about that—using the “think” in the slang: “You’ve got another think coming.” You see? I’ve got another think coming…

I would think that Tom Paine was very little in it…I’ve read a good deal of Tom Paine, and I know a good deal of what he thought. He thought there was something started about the brotherhood of man that was going to set the whole world on fire, sweep the whole world.

So he rushed right off to France about it. And we see what came of it. They had a revolution there. And they had four republics—and not to mention three or four monarchies—since then. Their dream was a very confused dream, if they had a dream.

Another thing that I pick up…about freedom and equality. It occurred to me not so terribly long ago—rather recently—that the more equality I have, the less freedom I have. These two things balance each other.

If one party leans a little more towards the freedom—freedom of enterprise, freedom to assert yourself, freedom to achieve, freedom to win—the other comes in with the tone of mercy and says: “Let’s not let anybody get too far ahead. Let’s have a Sherman Act or something, to keep people from getting too rich.” That’s toward the equality, the fraternity of it.

I didn’t know that for years, didn’t know that the more freedom I had, the less equality I could expect—somebody’d beat me and get ahead of me if we had freedom. (I’m willing to let him get ahead of me, if he can.)…

Can you imagine any poet giving a similar commencement speech today? In fact, I can hardly imagine anyone giving a similar commencement speech today. Frost assumed a certain context for his graduating class listeners—for example, that they knew something about who Dreiser and Tom Paine and Madison might be, and he assumed that what these men said and thought might actually interest and inform them. I’m not at all sure that would be the case now.

I’ll close with one more quote from Frost, who was an educator for many years of his long long life—not just a poet, although he was certainly that, and not just a farmer, although he did that too when a young man. He was a teacher at all levels: grade school, high school, and college. He was a teacher in many places. He was a teacher when he was obscure and when he was very very famous.

Here’s what he had to say about his attraction to teaching, from a lecture he gave in 1961 at the University of Minnesota:

I’m almost as interested in education as I am in poetry…I’ve had so much to do with education that I say I’m like some monkeys that Darwin tells about.

He showed them a bagful of snakes. And they looked at ’em and and shrieked and threw up their arms and fled. But they couldn’t stay away. They kept coming back and and looking in the bag at the snakes and throwing up their arms and shrieking and running away again.

That’s the way I’ve done for education, about the last fifty, sixty years—sixty, sixty-five years. And here I am again.

Frost died a little over a year later, at the age of 88.

Oregon’s ban on gay marriage struck down

The New Neo Posted on by

Oregon’s gay marriage ban has been declared null and void:

In a ruling that might never be tested in an appeal, a federal judge in Oregon at midday Monday ruled that the state’s ten-year-old ban on same-sex marriage is invalid under the federal Constitution. U.S. District Judge Michael J. McShane of Eugene did so by applying the most relaxed constitutional test [no “rational basis” for the law].

…It is not clear at this point that anyone has the legal right to pursue an appeal; state officials refused to defend the ban and, in fact, added their support to the challenge by four same-sex couples.

The only other entity that has come forward to provide a defense ”” the National Organization for Marriage, a strong opponent of same-sex marriage ”” was denied a role in the case by Judge McShane last Wednesday. It is now seeking to appeal…

So Oregon follows the same pattern as many other states:

Critics note most states still do not allow gay marriage and that in most of those that do, it was the work of courts or legislatures, not the will of the people.

Oregon law has long prohibited same-sex marriage, and voters added the ban to the state constitution in 2004. The decision [was] approved by 57 percent of voters…

The pattern is of judges saying there’s no rational argument to ban gay marriage, although apparently until a couple of years ago there was not only such an argument, but most people assumed it was self-evident that it was a valid one. Another pattern is of state AGs refusing to defend a current state law as they have sworn to do as part of their jobs. Another pattern is populations who vote overwhelmingly to preserve traditional marriage and have their will overturned by a single judge on these newly-found constitutional grounds. But if the will of the people on the gay marriage issue is changing towards acceptance, as it appears to be (after all, the previous Oregon vote was in 2004, which is the dark ages on this issue), and a new statewide vote on gay marriage could be held to reflect this (which is the way I think it should be done), then why not hold such a vote? In Oregon, they were planning to do so if the judge hadn’t done their work for them, but the judicial route is much simpler and far less risky.

There’s still another pattern, one that was demonstrated in this case and in one of the first cases that set the stage for it, the striking down of Proposition 8. Both bans were overturned by a judge who happens to be gay. Judge Michael J. McShane, the Oregon judge who was appointed by President Obama and took office only a year ago, is the first openly gay federal judge in Oregon:

With one longtime ex-partner, McShane adopted a young boy, now 20, who had come from an abusive home. He’s now helping rear the 13-year-old nephew of his current partner, Gregory Ford, who has gone back to school to become a nurse…

John Eastman, a constitutional law professor and chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay marriage group, questions whether McShane has a conflict.

“The question is not his sexual orientation,” says Eastman, “but whether he is situated identically to the plaintiffs and will benefit from the exact relief he provides to them.”

In other words, McShane could also get the right to marry his partner if he strikes down the Oregon prohibition on gay marriage.

Opponents of same-sex marriage unsuccessfully made the same argument in California when they tried to erase U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s 2010 decision striking down that state’s anti-gay-marriage initiative.

After Walker retired from the bench, he said publicly for the first time that he was gay and in a long-term relationship.

Walker’s successor, Judge James Ware, refused to vacate the decision, saying that the presumption about Walker’s state of mind “is as warrantless as the presumption that a female judge is incapable of being impartial in a case in which women seek legal relief.”

In an initial court hearing with attorneys involved with the current case, McShane made clear his willingness to recuse himself if there were any concerns ”“ and he didn’t hear any.

This is an incredibly knotty legal question. I’m glad to hear that McShane at least offered to recuse himself if there were objections; I don’t think Judge Walker even made the suggestion, since he wasn’t “out” when the California case he ruled on was decided. But with no one defending the gay marriage ban in Oregon, who would have voiced those objections to McShane? Judges often recuse themselves if there’s even the appearance of a special interest, and there certainly was the appearance of one here. And no, it’s not the equivalent of a category as general as a woman ruling on matters that affect women, because as a gay man in a committed relationship in the state of Oregon, Judge McShane’s interest was far more specific than that (as was Judge Vaughn’s in California).

I don’t think another judge would have found differently in Oregon, however, for the simple reason that no defense was mounted. It’s this rash of AGs refusing to defend the will of the people of their state that is the more global issue here.

[NOTE: Here’s an earlier post of mine on the issue of state AGs refusing to defend state laws.]

Obama says “if only Obama knew”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…about the problems in the VA:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney…told reporters that President Barack Obama first learned from a TV news report that his Veterans Administration was denying medical care to vets with secret off-the-books-waiting lists.

The actual quote is this; note how careful Carney is to parse his words about the “specific” reports, because he knows that the White House was told about the general problem when Obama first took office in 2008:

A CNN reporter asked Carney on Monday when the president was ‘first made aware … of these fraudulent lists that were being kept to hide the wait times’ at VA medical centers.

‘You mean the specific allegations,’ Carney asked, ‘that I think were reported first by your news network out of Phoenix, I believe?’

‘We learned about them through the reports.

He’s a sly one, that Carney, isn’t he?

As for Obama, it’s a good thing we have the news, because otherwise he’d never learn about anything that happened under his watch:

After the Operation Fast and Furious scandal broke, Obama responded to national outrage in an interview broadcast by CNN’s John King on October 12, 2011, similarly saying he was out of the loop until he turned on his television…

A few months into his presidency, Obama’s White House approved an unannounced New York City flyover by Air Force One…It was a mistake,’ the president said on April 28, 2009, the day after the flight. ‘It was something we found out about along with all of you. And it will not happen again.’

Last year on May 14, Carney told reporters that Obama had learned about his Department of Justice seizing two months’ worth of Associated Press journalists’ phone records ‘from news reports yesterday, on the road.’

‘We don’t have any independent knowledge of that,’ Carney insisted.

That punt came just one day after Obama himself told the Washington press corps during a joint press conference with UK Prime Minister David Cameron that he was in the dark ”“ until it hit news reports ”“ that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative nonprofit groups for special inquisitions when they applied for tax-exempt status.

‘I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this,’ he said in the East Room of the White House on May 13, 2013. I think it was on Friday…

Why shouldn’t Obama keep doing this? With the cooperation of the MSM, it has worked for him so far.

At the moment, it still looks good for Republicans in 2014

The New Neo Posted on by

At the moment, anyway.

Polls taken in states with competitive Senate races and many contested Congressional districts indicate that people are leaning Republican for 2014. The reason seems to be Obamacare, Obamacare, Obamacare:

As for Obamacare, only 16 percent favor keeping the law as it is. 36 percent favor modification. 48 percent favor outright repeal. 89 percent of voters consider the issue important in deciding how they will vote and 49 percent consider it very important.

On immigration, it’s not at all clear:

The pro-amnesty crowd will emphasize that, by a margin of 71-28, those surveyed favor “comprehensive immigration reform.” But the result is meaningless because respondents weren’t asked whether they favor legalizing illegal immigrants, much less whether they favor allowing them to become citizens. Nearly every conservative I know favors some form of comprehensive immigration reform

Why ask a question so general it can be used by nearly anyone to prove nearly anything? Perhaps that’s the goal.

The VA hospital scandal spreads

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t yet written a big post on the mess at the VA hospital system, and this won’t be that post. But the news on the VA is one of those outrages that even the left can’t quite coverup, it is so blatant.

What went on with the VA hospitals in recent years has been an escalation of the disorganization in what was already a flawed and seemingly cold-hearted system. The news taps into what most people already knew about the VA system in general and for many decades, which is that there’s been a lot to complain about. In turn, all of that undermines the left’s arguments for a government-run healthcare system.

Here’s a thread to talk about it.

Why the Jill Abramson story interests me

The New Neo Posted on by

I know a lot of you aren’t interested in it. After all, who cares what’s going on at that leftist Pravda the Times, except for the fact that the story vaguely embarrasses the paper and exposes its hypocrisy and disorganization?

I confess to a bit of fascination with the story, but it’s probably for different reasons than most people who are taken with it. I’m not especially interested in whether there was gender discrimination involved, for example. If there was, it wouldn’t be the first or last time, and if there are merely false accusations of it, it wouldn’t be the first or last time, either. No, it’s the ins and outs of workplace power struggles and personalities that interest me, something like the problems of families or of any group, the interpersonal brouhahas that get people going.

Workplace intrigue stories have many of the same qualities as problem families. They involve groups of people interacting, miscommunications and misunderstandings, power struggles, and intense feelings. The workplace is a little like the family, minus the love and the sex (although, come to think of it, sometimes plus the love and the sex). There are no children in the workplace, but there are certainly people there who can be very very childish.

I don’t read detective novels, but I do like to try to figure out how people tick and especially how groups of people interact with each other. With the Abramson story, we get a tiny little window of the information we’d need to figure out how this snafu happened, and I like to try to guess. That’s it for me—a sort of real-life whodunnit and why.

You can skip the rest of this post if you’re utterly and completely bored by such things. But I’m still interested, and I was happy to see today that David Carr of the NY Times has revealed what I had suspected from the very start, which is that Dean Baquet, who ascended to Abramson’s job when she was canned, had not only complained about her to his buddy Sulzberger but had threatened to leave the Times if she stayed. Baquet played his biggest card, and he triumphed.

Carr’s column, which appeared in the Times itself, is pretty bold considering that fact, and worth reading if you’ve followed the story at all:

When The Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., stood up at a hastily called meeting in the soaring open newsroom where we usually gather to celebrate the Pulitzers and said that Jill was out, we all just looked at one another. How did our workplace suddenly become a particularly bloody episode of “Game of Thrones”?

It is one thing to gossip or complain about your boss, but quite another to watch her head get chopped off in the cold light of day. The lack of decorum was stunning…

Mr. Sulzberger, working with Mr. Baquet and Mr. Thompson, may have failed to understand the impact Ms. Abramson’s firing would have, both internally and with the public. Planning went into immediately erasing her name from the masthead, but not so much into the splatter it would create…

The current mayhem aside, Mr. Sulzberger’s real failing has been picking two editors who ended up not being right for the job.

Sulzberger is Carr’s boss, too. Wonder if Carr has a back-up offer from another newspaper?

Trey Gowdy: “You were supposed to provide oversight”

The New Neo Posted on by

This video of Trey Gowdy speaking to the press on Benghazi demonstrates a few things simultaneously.

The first is why Gowdy was a very successful prosecutor. The second is that the manner in which the Obama administration has handled the Benghazi debacle is an outrage and a disgrace. And the third is how negligent and/or collusive with that administration the press has been in covering (or rather, covering up) the Benghazi incident.

If it were possible for the press to reflect and to feel shame, Gowdy’s words would make them do that and feel that. But I’m afraid it’s not.

I don’t remember the first time I ever saw Gowdy, but I do remember thinking that he was a bit strange-looking. But when he opened his mouth and spoke, it almost immediately struck me that he was one of the smartest and most articulate members of Congress I’d ever heard. And nothing I’ve ever heard him say since then has disabused me of that notion.

I listed three things the video demonstrated. But I’d like to offer a fourth: how rare and refreshing it is to hear a politician speaking with clarity, focus, brains, and conviction.