Kyle Wingfield

You’ve heard of lies, damned lies, and statistics? Well, here’s Exhibit A: a column at MarketWatch by Rex Nutting.

Nutting’s column, titled “Obama spending binge never happened,” has caused a lot of excitement among people who would like to believe it’s true. And the bottom-line numbers — which are as far as Nutting goes in his column — do show that total spending has risen more slowly between fiscal 2009 and fiscal 2013 than you might have otherwise believed. Annual federal spending growth during President Obama’s first term, Nutting’s numbers show, has been 1.4 percent. That would be slower than in any of the seven previous terms, dating to the beginning of the Reagan years. Going out of his way to be even-handed, Nutting even graciously attributes Obama’s “stimulus” spending in FY09 to Obama rather than to George W. Bush, under whom that fiscal year began.

What a guy!

But what Nutting’s surface-level “analysis” fails to acknowledge — aside from the fact that he’s giving …

Continue reading About the idea that Obama’s spending has been tame »

The problem the proposed transportation sales tax, or T-SPLOST, purports to solve would seem obvious. Here’s how the first advertisement by a group pushing the tax framed the issue:

“Metro Atlanta, we have a problem: one of the longest average commutes in America, over an hour a day. Five hours a week you don’t spend with your family; 260 hours a year.”

But what if the length of our commutes isn’t a problem we can solve? At least, that is, not by building new infrastructure to relieve congestion.

That’s the implication of new data from INRIX, a private company that tracks traffic information.

The latest INRIX Traffic Scorecard, updated this week with data through April, shows traffic congestion increases the average commute in metro Atlanta by only about 10 percent — less than six minutes a day.

Let me repeat that: Congestion adds less than six minutes to the average metro Atlanta commute. And to reduce — not eliminate — that six-minute problem, we are asked to tax …

Continue reading T-SPLOST: Is traffic really a problem in Atlanta? »

In Chicago yesterday, President Obama described the essence of his campaign against Mitt Romney. Asked during a press conference about his campaign ads criticizing Romney’s record at Bain Capital in the 1980s and ’90s, Obama disagreed with fellow Democrats’ advice to focus on other issues:

[T]his is not a distraction. This is what this campaign is going to be about — is what is a strategy for us to move this country forward in a way where everybody can succeed?

Well, now. That’s just completely different from every other presidential campaign in history…

Some commentary has focused on what Obama said just before that: his description of the job of president vs. the job of a private equity CEO. And with good reason. There is plenty to address: from his assertion that the president should be involved in helping individual communities plan their economic development, to the obvious conclusion that the job, as he’s described it, is not one he’s done particularly well given the …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: Obama wants the election to be about a topic he doesn’t understand »

If you thought the Catholic Church and universities affiliated with it would quietly accept the Obama administration’s “compromise” for the contraception mandate, well, think again. From Fox News:

Some of the most influential Catholic institutions in the country filed suit in federal district court Monday against the so-called contraception mandate, in one of the biggest coordinated legal challenges to the rule to date.

Claiming their “fundamental rights hang in the balance,” a total of 43 plaintiffs filed a dozen separate lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the requirement. Among the organizations filing were the University of Notre Dame, the Archdiocese of New York and The Catholic University of America.

The groups are objecting to the requirement from the federal health care overhaul that employers provide access to contraceptive care. The Obama administration several months back softened its position on the mandate, but some religious organizations complained the …

Continue reading Catholic groups sue to overturn Obama’s contraception mandate »

Following up on last week’s post about the state GOP’s chance to put ethics reform on the July primary ballot: Georgia Republicans did just that at their annual convention in Columbus, as well as approving a resolution calling on lawmakers to address the issue of lobbyist gifts in the next legislative session. It was a strong message from the party’s grassroots membership to the elected officials who wear the GOP label, and primary voters now have a chance to reinforce that message with a “yes” vote in July.

Speaker David Ralston was critical of this message, however, when he made his own remarks in Columbus:

In times of great majorities like we enjoy now, we must remember that there are those around us who seek nothing less than to divide us. There are those who would sow the seeds of dissension and discord in order to advance a self-absorbed agenda that’s not consistent with the best interests of our party.

Let me be very clear. Regardless of the course that others may take, …

Continue reading About the ‘liberal’ plot to get those ‘good people’ at the Gold Dome »

The claim by proponents of the T-SPLOST that there is “no Plan B” — no alternative to the proposed 1 percent increase in the sales tax and the $6.1 billion in regional transportation projects it would build — has always struck me as silly.

Is there another plan already prepared and waiting in the wings should voters reject the tax in July? Probably not. In that sense, the “no Plan B” talk rings true. But surely no one believes local and state officials would just quit trying to speed up the construction of new roads and mass transit. A second option would emerge, probably sooner than later.

That said, there is one real nightmare scenario for those who would have to create a Plan B: The tax fails in metro Atlanta, but passes elsewhere.

We in metro Atlanta tend not to think about the tax referendum outside our 10-county region. But the rest of the state is divided into 11 other T-SPLOST regions, and the tax might very well pass in some of them.

Legislators discussed the …

Continue reading What’s Plan B if T-SPLOST fails here, passes elsewhere? »

Facebook goes public today, listing shares on Nasdaq at $38 apiece; if you want to buy, trading of stock listed as “FB” commences at 11 a.m.

So, do you? Do you want to buy Facebook stock at that price?

On one hand, there is precedent for highly anticipated tech listings that soared and have not (to date) flamed out. Google of course comes to mind: The search-engine company went public in August 2004 at $85, more than doubled in price by year’s end, and has been trading lately in the $600s — more than seven times its IPO price.

Of course, Google has a way to make money, and lots of it. Facebook? Well, the numbers would indicate it’s at least as good a moneymaker as Google was circa 2004. But there was ominous news this week, when GM said it was pulling its paid advertisements on Facebook because it didn’t think they were effective.

Continue reading Poll Position: Is Facebook stock worth the asking price? »

Stories like this one from today’s AJC are infuriating to me:

For all the tens of millions of dollars that taxpayers pour into the Fulton County jail every year, the lockup can’t perform the basic function of keeping inmates locked up in cells.

The 23-year-old jail has such shoddy door locks that inmates can jam them with soap, toilet paper, shards of cloth or other trash and leave their cells at will. Motor-operated sliding doors on the maximum security levels can be jimmied open with pieces of cardboard.

This year’s Fulton County budget includes $68.1 million for the jail. Since a 2006 federal court order to improve security at the overcrowded jail, the county has spent more than $50 million to house inmates elsewhere and an estimated $86 million more, including interest, to renovate the facility.

And yet, the locks on the $@^*@&! cells don’t even work properly.

Consider stories like this one as you read about Georgia Republicans’ plans to shrink Fulton County’s impact on …

Continue reading Oh, Fulton County: A jail with locks that don’t work (Updated) »

UPDATE at 3:42 p.m., Friday, May 18: The Georgia GOP’s executive committee voted to put a question about ethics reform on the July 31 primary ballot. No exact wording available yet, but the references to “unlimited spending” and a $100 cap sound promising.

ORIGINAL POST:

A year ago, Georgia Republicans convening in Macon flashed an independent streak: They re-elected a grassroots favorite as state party chairman over the hand-picked candidate of new Gov. Nathan Deal. The message was that the party faithful would maintain a bit of separation between themselves and the man they worked to elect.

Tomorrow, party leaders have a chance to make a similar declaration of independence from the legislators they send to Atlanta in droves, over the matter of ethics reform.

Ethics reform went nowhere in this year’s legislative session, but it wasn’t for lack of effort by grassroots conservatives. Tea partyers allied with such groups as Common Cause to draft an ethics bill, recruited …

Continue reading Georgia GOP can send lawmakers a loud message about the need for ethics reform (Updated) »

State Sen. Deb Fischer came out of nowhere yesterday to become Nebraska Republicans’ nominee for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Ben Nelson. By my count, she’s the first woman to be nominated for Senate or governor by either major party this year — although several female incumbents will almost certainly be renominated when the time comes, such as Democrats Kristen Gillibrand of New York and Maria Cantwell of Washington, and several female challengers are strong possibilities to capture nominations, including Republicans Linda Lingle of Hawaii and Heather Wilson of New Mexico.

If we add each party’s nominations for Senate and governor from 2010, we get 11 Republican women and 14 Democratic women — 10 Republicans and eight Democrats if we don’t include incumbents. (These figures don’t include Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who lost the 2010 GOP Senate primary but won the general election as a write-in Republican.) Which can only mean one thing if follow liberal logic:

In the …

Continue reading GOP’s ‘war on women’ continues in Nebraska »