In Wake of Mitt Romney Call for Obama to Fire ‘Gas Hike Trio,’ Obama Campaign Dings Romney for Raising Gas Taxes
By Jake Tapper Mar 18, 2012 12:21pm
Responding to Republican Mitt Romney’s call that President Obama fire his “gas hike trio” – Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar – the Obama campaign took a shot at Romney Sunday for having raised gas taxes on Massachusetts motorists.
“As a result of the president’s all-of-the-above energy strategy, domestic oil and gas production has increased each year and our dependence on foreign oil is at a 16-year low,” Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt told ABC News, when asked for a response to Romney’s call for the president to fire three members of his cabinet. “In Massachusetts, Gov. Romney raised the gas tax by 400 percent. Now Mitt Romney rolled out a tax plan that continues to charge taxpayers $4 billion a year to subsidize oil and gas companies making record profits and he opposed raising fuel economy standards, which will save consumers an average of $8,000 per vehicle.”
Just this morning on “Fox News Sunday,” Romney told guest anchor Bret Baier that when Obama “ran for office he said he wanted to see gasoline prices go up. He said that energy prices would skyrocket under his views and he has selected three people to help him implement that program: the secretary of energy, the secretary of the interior and the EPA administrator. And this ‘gas hike trio’ has been doing the job over the last three and a half years and gas prices are up. The right course is they ought to be fired.”
Romney said that “the president has apparently suffered an election-year conversion” since he has “decided that gasoline prices should come down. Well, the ‘gas hike trio’ has been going in the other direction. Time for them to go, probably hand in their resignations, if he’s really serious about that, and start drilling for energy here [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdQmqflNrDc (embedded)].”
“Consider the tax on gasoline. Driving your car is associated with various adverse side effects, which economists call externalities. These include traffic congestion, accidents, local pollution and global climate change. If the tax on gasoline were higher, people would alter their behavior to drive less. They would be more likely to take public transportation, use car pools or live closer to work. The incentives they face when deciding how much to drive would more closely match the true social costs and benefits.
”Economists who have added up all the externalities associated with driving conclude that a tax exceeding $2 a gallon makes sense. That would provide substantial revenue that could be used to reduce other taxes. By taxing bad things more, we could tax good things less.”
President Obama and his team seem to be feeling quite vulnerable on the issue of gas prices, fearing that the skyrocketing prices could undermine the fragile economic recovery as well as consumer confidence – and thus the president’s poll numbers. The president has held three energy-related events in as many weeks. LaBolt’s assertion that domestic production is up and dependence is down “as a result” of President Obama’s energy policies is disputed by energy experts, who say the reasons are far more complicated, including steps taken by previous administrations and the recession.
But GOP frontrunner Romney and his team must also know that the governor is vulnerable on the issue of gas taxes, given that in 2008, the campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., attacked Romney for the gas fee, which Romney raised from half a cent per gallon to 2.5 cents per gallon, as the governor in 2003 sought ways to pay down the deficit.
McCain campaign communications director Jill Hazelbaker responded to a Romney attack on McCain over energy issues by saying, “Mitt Romney has proven in this campaign that he will say anything to anyone at any time if he thinks it will help him politically. … As governor, Mitt Romney effectively raised gas taxes on every single motorist in Massachusetts.”
The McCain campaign noted that in a 2007 Boston Globe story by Brian Mooney, the fee hike was described as “clearly excessive,” because the increase would generate $60 million per year for a de-contamination program but produced vast surpluses amounting to tens of millions of dollars. McCain has this year endorsed Romney.
Then and in 2003, when the fee was raised, Romney and his team disputed that the fee increase was a tax increase.
That defense was greeted with some skepticism. In an April 11, 2003 Boston Herald story called “Pump it up! Goosing the gas tax with Mitt,” Cosmo Macero, Jr., described the fee hike this way:
“Gov. Romney’s administration is whacking motorists with the equivalent of a 2-cent-a-gallon gas tax hike, thanks to a little-known fund that pays for cleaning spills and underground leaks at local filling stations. Gas wholesalers pay a fee into the fund for every 10,000 gallons they deliver to retail filling stations in Massachusetts. As of April 1, on the Romney crew’s say-so, the fee went from $ 50 for every 10,000 gallons to … $ 250. That stunning fivefold increase looks particularly onerous when you break it down to the per-gallon cost: from a half-cent per gallon to 2 1/2 cents in one fell swoop. What it means: At least $30 million a year to the cleanup fund for every penny the fee is increased.
“‘It’s a nice little backdoor tax increase,’ is how one former state official explains it. That’s because wholesalers almost always pass the cost directly down to retailers, and they pass it to consumers. ‘Taxes or fees are usually a direct pass-through,’ says Stephen Dodge, who represents the Massachusetts chapter of the American Petroleum Council. ‘It would be disingenuous to say that’s not the case.’”
A spokesman and lobbyist for AAA Southern New England later told Macero that the fee was “a backdoor tax.”
Photograph by Damon Winter/The New York Times/Redux.
Posted by Amy Davidson March 20, 2012
[Updated.]
What happens when an unstoppable Javelin meets an immovable Petrus? Those are the Secret Service code names Mitt Romney, who won the Illinois primary Tuesday, and Rick Santorum have chosen for themselves. Petrus means rock, and invokes an exchange in the Bible between Jesus and Peter (“thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church…”); Santorum told reporters [ http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2012/03/20/santorum-honors-grandfather-secret-service-nickname ] that he picked it because it was his grandfather Pietro’s name in Latin and also because of the rock thing. And why Javelin? “Perhaps ‘Javelin’ is a reference to the sixties muscle car made by American Motors Corporation, the company once run by George Romney,” Marc Ambinder wrote, in a post for GQ [ http://www.gq.com/news-politics/blogs/death-race/2012/03/exclusive-gq-reveals-romneys-and-santorums-secret-service-code-names.html#ixzz1pfezsCXQ ], which reported the code names first. Romney did say, in the same speech in which he talked about how “the trees are the right height” in Michigan, that in his youth “If you showed me one square foot of almost any part of a car I could tell you what brand it was, the model and so forth.” Sounds like the sort of hobby Mitt would master.
But still: why would he symbolically portray himself as an object that goes wherever others throw it, with no motoring mind of its own and a tendency to shift direction in a strong wind? Or maybe Javelin is an homage to Kennedy, whose code name was Lancer. (Obama, by the way, is Renegade; George W. Bush was Trailblazer; Dick Cheney was Angler; and Karenna Gore, inimitably, was Smurfette. Coming up with the perfect Secret Service code name is almost as fun as figuring out which gadget a politician is most like [ http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/03/if-lbj-was-a-blackberry-is-santorum-a-nook.html ]).
And what kind of rock does Santorum expect to be, and for whom? On Tuesday, he attended a sermon in Greenwell Springs, Louisiana, at which the Reverend Dennis Terry preached:
I don’t care what the naysayers say. This nation was founded as a Christian nation. The god of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. There is only one God. There is only one God, and his name is Jesus. I’m tired of people telling me that I can’t say those words. I’m tired of people telling us as Christians that we can’t voice our beliefs or we can’t no longer pray in public. Listen to me. If you don’t love America, and you don’t like the way we do things, I’ve got one thing to say, get out!…We don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Mohammed, we don’t worship Allah. We worship God. We worship God’s son Jesus Christ.
Who are the “naysayers” here? The man saying no to this country’s values and history, as well as to millions of its citizens, is the one shouting, “Get out.” As for Santorum, he stood there and reportedly cheered at the end. Later, when reporters asked him what he agreed and disagreed with, he answered with a line about his support for “freedom of religion,” bolstered on either side by some rambling evasions: “I do remember him saying that, I said, well, I wasn’t quite sure he was saying it for himself, I wasn’t quite listening to everything to be honest with you. But I wasn’t sure whether he was speaking for himself or speaking generally, but I didn’t clap when he said that because it’s not how I feel.”
And so we have a wobbly javelin, a prickly rock, and a primary in Illinois tonight. Maybe, by the time all of the votes in Illinois are counted, he’ll have won decisively enough to scare at least one of the others away. Or maybe Mitt the inevitable, if not unstoppable, will continue to run up against not only Santorum but also Newt Gingrich (is there a code name for something both squishy and clingy?) and Ron Paul (“Gold bug” is too obvious; maybe “Tesla Coil,” or some sort of electrified squiggle). What’s the solution to the physics problem created when they all meet? Maybe, down in Tampa, an open convention.
TRUST Mitt Romney to be on top of the latest trend of the superrich: the trophy basement.
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported on the new fashion to look low-key on the outside while digging deep for opulence — carving out subterranean spaces for Turkish baths, Italianate spas, movie theaters, skateboarding ramps, squash courts, discos and golf-simulation centers.
The Journal reported that Romney has filed an application to replace his single-story 3,000-square-foot beach house in La Jolla, Calif., with a 7,400-square-foot home featuring an additional 3,600 square feet of finished underground space.
It’s a metaphor alert, reinforcing the two image problems Romney has: that he’s an out-of-touch plutocrat and that his true nature is buried where we can’t see it.
His two-year missionary stint in France taught Mitt to steel himself against rejection. Still, he must feel awful heading into Illinois (where Joseph Smith, the Mormon Church founder, was running for president when he was killed by a mob), spending so much money to buy so little affection.
There’s a certain pathos to Romney. His manner is so inauthentic, you can’t find him anywhere. Is he the guy he was on Wednesday or the guy he was on Thursday?
He has the same problem that diminished the equally animatronic Al Gore. Gore kept mum on the one thing that made him come alive, the environment, fearing he’d be cast, as W. liked to say, as “a green, green lima bean.”
Romney also feels he must hide an essential part of who he is: a pillar of the Mormon Church. He fears he would turn off voters by talking too much about a faith that many evangelicals dismiss as a cult and not a true Christian religion.
Rick Santorum is drawn to the extreme and ascetic Opus Dei and sometimes sounds more Catholic than the pope — like his promise on his Web site to banish hard-core porn if he’s elected president. Yet he has successfully crowded Romney with a fraction of his money by wearing his religion and his immigrant, blue-collar roots on his sleeve.
Mitt works overtime pretending he’s a Nascar, cheesy-grits guy and masking his pride in his bank account and faith.
When he talked about his beliefs in his last presidential run, it sometimes provoked confusion, like this explanation to an Iowa radio host about the second coming of Christ: that Jesus would first appear in Jerusalem and then, “over the thousand years that follow, the millennium, he will reign from two places, the law will come from Missouri, and the other will be from Jerusalem.”
Just as Romney did not step up immediately after Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke “a slut,” he has yet to step up as the cases have mounted of Jews posthumously and coercively baptized by Mormons, including hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims; the parents of the death camp survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal; and Daniel Pearl, the Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Al Qaeda in Pakistan. (His widow, Mariane, told CNN she was “shocked.”)
Believing that only Mormons can get into the highest level of heaven, the Celestial Kingdom, and that others will be limited to the Terrestrial and Telestial Kingdoms, they have baptized anyone and everyone, including Anne Frank, Gandhi, Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin and Elvis.
Asked by Newsweek in 2007 if he had done baptisms for the dead, which involve white garb and immersion in water, a startled Romney replied, “I have in my life, but I haven’t recently.”
Mormon feminists got upset this winter when they found that young women in some temples had not been allowed to do proxy baptisms while they were menstruating.
Church leaders have lately stepped up efforts to stop such baptisms, reminding church members that their “pre-eminent obligation” is not to celebrities and Holocaust victims but to their own ancestors. (Ann Romney’s Welsh dad, who disdained organized religion, was baptized.)
Matthew Bowman, who wrote “The Mormon People,” says Mormons “have a hard time understanding why people from other religions find this so offensive. Mormons don’t think of these people as being made Mormon unless their spirit accepts the Gospel. They just think they’ve given them an opportunity. Mormonism is wildly optimistic.”
Mormons had designated Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, as “ready” for a posthumous proxy burial, even though he is very much alive at 83 and still teaching at Boston University and in Florida.
Wiesel calls “the whole process very strange,” and faults Romney, a Mormon stake president: “After all, Romney is not simply a Mormon. He’s been a bishop of the Mormon Church. He could have called and told me he wanted me to know that he spoke to the elders and told them to stop it. Silence doesn’t help truth.”
He added: “They have baptized over 600,000 Holocaust victims. There is nothing positive in what they are doing. It’s an insult. You cannot ask the dead their opinion.
“Poor Anne Frank. As if she didn’t suffer enough.”
In China, millions make themselves at home in caves
Ma Liangshui, 76, has lived in caves around Yanan his entire life. (Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times / February 1, 2012)
Some are basic, others beautiful, with high ceilings and nice yards. 'Life is easy and comfortable here,' one cave dweller says.
By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times
March 18, 2012 Reporting from Yanan, China— Like many peasants from the outskirts of Yanan, China, Ren Shouhua was born in a cave and lived there until he got a job in the city and moved into a concrete-block house.
His progression made sense as he strove to improve his life. But there's a twist: The 46-year-old Ren plans to move back to a cave when he retires.
"It's cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It's quiet and safe," said Ren, a ruddy-faced man with salt-and-pepper hair who moved to the Shaanxi provincial capital, Xian, in his 20s. "When I get old, I'd like to go back to my roots."
More than 30 million Chinese people live in caves, many of them in Shaanxi province where the Loess plateau, with its distinctive cliffs of yellow, porous soil, makes digging easy and cave dwelling a reasonable option.
Each of the province's caves, yaodong, in Chinese, typically has a long vaulted room dug into the side of a mountain with a semicircular entrance covered with rice paper or colorful quilts. People hang decorations on the walls, often a portrait of Mao Tse-tung or a photograph of a movie star torn out of a glossy magazine.
The better caves protrude from the mountain and are reinforced with brick masonry. Some are connected laterally so a family can have several chambers. Electricity and even running water can be brought in.
"Most aren't so fancy, but I've seen some really beautiful caves: high ceilings and spacious with a nice yard out front where you can exercise and sit in the sun," said Ren, who works as a driver and is the son of a wheat and millet farmer.
The caves have an important role in modern Chinese history. The Long March, the famous retreat of the Communist Party in the 1930s, ended near Yanan, where Mao took refuge in caves. In "Red Star Over China," writer Edgar Snow described a Red Army university that "was probably the world's only seat of 'higher learning' whose classrooms were bombproof caves, with chairs and desks of stone and brick, and blackboards and walls of limestone and clay."
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, who is expected to succeed Hu Jintao next year as president, lived for seven years in a cave when he was exiled to Shaanxi province during the Cultural Revolution.
"The cave topology is one of the earliest human architectural forms; there are caves in France, in Spain, people still living in caves in India," said David Wang, an architecture professor at Washington State University in Spokane who has written widely on the subject. "What is unique to China is the ongoing history it has had over two millenniums."
In recent years, architects have been reappraising the cave in environmental terms, and they like what they see.
"It is energy efficient. The farmers can save their arable land for planting if they build their houses in the slope. It doesn't take much money or skill to build," said Liu Jiaping, director of the Green Architecture Research Center in Xian and perhaps the leading expert on cave living. "Then again, it doesn't suit modern complicated lifestyles very well. People want to have a fridge, washing machine, television."
Liu helped design and develop a modernized version of traditional cave dwellings that in 2006 was a finalist for a World Habitat Award, sponsored by a British foundation dedicated to sustainable housing. The updated cave dwellings are built against the cliff in two levels, with openings over the archways for light and ventilation. Each family has four chambers, two on each level.
"It's like living in a villa. Caves in our villages are as comfortable as posh apartments in the city," said Cheng Wei, 43, a Communist Party official who lives in one of the cave houses in Zaoyuan village on the outskirts of Yanan. "A lot of people come here looking to rent our caves, but nobody wants to move out."
The thriving market around Yanan means a cave with three rooms and a bathroom (a total of 750 square feet) can be advertised for sale at $46,000. A simple one-room cave without plumbing rents for $30 a month, with some people relying on outhouses or potties that they empty outside.
Many caves, however, are not for sale or rent because they are handed down from one generation to another, though for just how many generations, people often can't say.
Ma Liangshui, 76, lives in a one-room cave on a main road south of Yanan. It is nothing fancy, but there is electricity — a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. He sleeps on a kang, a traditional bed that is basically an earthen ledge, with a fire underneath that is also used for cooking. His daughter-in-law has tacked up photographs of Fan Bingbing, a popular actress.
The cave faces west, which makes it easy to bask in the late afternoon sun by pulling aside the blue-and-white patchwork quilt that hangs next to drying red peppers in the arched entrance.
Ma said his son and daughter-in-law have moved to the city, but he doesn't want to leave.
"Life is easy and comfortable here. I don't need to climb stairs. I have everything I need," he said. "I've lived all my life in caves, and I can't imagine anything different."
barbara.demick@latimes.com
Nicole Liu of The Times' Beijing bureau contributed to this report.
The time has come to leave the man cave — to bulldoze the bro bunker, to kick the kegerator to the curb. The safe house for the Y chromosome is no longer safe; the perimeter has been breached. The man cave is no longer a tenable refuge from the real world.
The handwriting appeared on the beer-postered wall last year when the phrase “mom cave” began to spread and “man cave” joined the list of phrases from our lexicon that are misused, overused and targeted for their general uselessness, much like “baby bump” and “the new normal.” But the real blow had to be the news earlier this month that a man cave would be among the amenities at the 2012 Philadelphia International Flower Show. Yes, the man cave has gone from sacred space to flower-show bait.
The spirit of the man cave has been co-opted by so many marketers hawking grill tools, barware and even neon lights in the shape of the words “man cave” (in case it needs to be spelled out for the fairer sex, one presumes) that if we don't roll a boulder to block the mouth of the cave now, the strip-mining will continue unabated until Hallmark rolls out a line of man cave cards (“Greetings from the grotto!”) and guy-asylums across the country will groan under the weight of scented candles.
Maybe that's an overreaction, but it's easy to see how the cave-craving crowd might feel as if its natural habitat is under siege. After all, the man cave is nothing new. Its roots go back to our slope-headed forebears. Boys have long had their forts, grown men their hunting camps, Thoreau his Walden Pond, Superman his Fortress of Solitude. But perhaps the cast-away couch has become so overcrowded that the only way to save the cave is to bid it a wistful farewell, especially with its place in our pop culture about to mark an important milestone: its 20th anniversary. An article March 21, 1992, in the Toronto Star had the first known use of the term “man cave,” said Mike Yost, a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer, founder of mancavesite.org [ http://mancavesite.org/ ] and coauthor with Jeff Wilser of the 2011 guide “The Man Cave Book.”
The next month, a little book called “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” hit shelves across the U.S. It would go on to sell about 50 million copies worldwide. In one chapter, author John Gray explains the male need to retreat — as if into a cave — as a way of dealing with stress.
Gray explains that the concept can be traced back to the differences in the way men's and women's brains are wired: “For most men, taking time for themselves is a coping mechanism for lowering stress — and a very effective one,” he writes, later adding that “women's brains are not linked that way. When a woman is stressed, there is eight times more blood flow to the emotional part of the brain, which is connected to the talking parts of the brain. So women lower their stress by talking about what's going on.”
In a recent phone interview, Gray said people still thank him.
“Women come up to me and say: ‘Thank you for explaining his cave. I always used to take it personally, and now I understand he just needs time in the cave and then he comes out.'”
Yost, 49, launched mancavesite.org in 2008 as a clearinghouse for man cave photos, ideas and resources for like-minded cave-dwellers. “I kind of did it as an ‘I'll build it and see if they'll come' kind of thing,” said Yost, who lives in Sierra Vista, Ariz. And come they have, about 1,200 unique visitors a day.
Interior designer Courtney Cachet noted that, back in 2005, the man cave would just have been called the media room. Whether guys are looking at a two-bedroom apartment or a huge house in the suburbs, she said, the man cave remains part of the vision.
“I promise you, as soon as the economy takes even a little bit of an uptick, there will be a resurgence that will put to shame what we've seen so far,” she said. “People will be pulling out all the stops. We'll see man caves with bowling alleys.”
If marketers are invading the man cave, however, maybe it's time for men everywhere to get moving. Gray pointed out that the man cave manifests itself in different ways.
“In Australia, for example, men have their sheds — little rooms apart from the house,” he said. “And in India men escape to the cave by meditating.”
In other words, men don't really need a physical place to reap the benefits — just a man cave state of mind. So we bid adieu and kick our collective cave to the curb. It won't be forever. The desire to retreat to the cave is too strong. The spirit of the man cave will manifest itself anew, someday.
Just one bit of advice: Don't jump the gun and start installing that big-screen TV in your office cubicle. Not until the man cube catches on.
KEY DATES IN MAN CAVE HISTORY
July 16, 1943: The Batcave, perhaps the most famous man cave in comic book history, premieres in a Batman movie serial episode titled “The Bat's Cave.” Hidden beneath Wayne Manor and accessible by secret entrance, it's an actual cave filled with millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne's high-tech gadgets and tricked-out vehicles.
March 21, 1992: Toronto home consultant Joanne Lovering pens a humorous guest column for the Toronto Star suggesting alternative names for rooms on a standard Canadian floor plan. “Let's call the basement, man cave,” she writes, the first known time the phrase is published in this context.
April 23, 1992: John Gray, the Johnny Appleseed of man cavery and the one most responsible for entrenching it in modern vernacular, releases his book “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.”
Dec. 13, 2003: A bearded, disheveled Saddam Hussein is pulled from a “spider hole” near his hometown of Tikrit, proving that decamping to the man cave is never a permanent solution to running from your problems.
June 16, 2007: DIY Network launches “Man Caves,” a half-hour series in which general contractor Jason Cameron and former NFL player Tony Siragusa transform drab basements and ignored garages into covet-worthy rooms filled with flat screens and cigar smoke. Cameron said he probably has hammered more than 100 man caves for the show.
March 1, 2011: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants retailer HomeGoods service mark protection for the phrase “mom cave.”
Nov. 7, 2011: Canadian paint company CIL launches its Ultimate Man Caves collection, giving more manly sounding names to 20 colors. The color formerly called Butterscotch Tempest is rebranded as Beer Time. Venetian Turquoise morphs into Bro Code.
March 4, 2012: The 2012 Philadelphia International Flower Show commits the unpardonable sin of using a man cave to lure flower-averse men to its garden bosom. Room 204B of the convention center is transformed with big-screen sports games, gambling tables, a virtual golf game and a full bar.
adam.tschorn@latimes.com
Image: Peter and Maria Hoey / For The Times
Photos: An inside look at a man cave. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times
Photo: Christian Bale as Batman. Credit: David James / Warner Bros.
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