The Daily Gouge, Monday, September 24th, 2012

On September 23, 2012, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Monday, September 24th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, in the “This Says It All” segment, the would-be leader of The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight is apparently going to ignore this particular problem until it swims up and bites him….and the country….on the ass:

Romney: My campaign doesn’t need a turnaround

 

Mitt Romney says his campaign for president doesn’t need a turnaround and that he’s keeping up with President Obama in the polls, despite criticism generated by a recently revealed tape of him referring to the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay taxes. The Republican presidential candidate talked with Scott Pelley in a 60 Minutes interview to be broadcast Sunday, Sept. 23 at 7:30 p.m. ET and 7:00 p.m. PT.

Pelley’s interview with Romney is part of a 60 Minutes focus on the 2012 presidential campaign. President Obama will also appear on 60 Minutes Sunday in a separate interview with Steve Kroft. A transcript of the excerpt follows:

Scott Pelley: You are slipping in the polls at this moment. A lot of Republicans are concerned about this campaign. You bill yourself as a turnaround artist. How are you going to turn this campaign around?

Mitt Romney: Well, actually, we’re tied in the polls. We’re all within the margin of error. We bounce around — week to week– day to day. There are some days we’re up. There are some days we’re down.

That’s great, Mitt; provided, of course, November 6th is one of your “up” days.

Romney’s sanguinity might be understandable….were the future of the country not at stake….were he not running against the reincarnation of Jimmy Carter….and were it not for the fact under current conditions any reasonably competent campaign/candidate would be kicking The Obamao’s Communist kiester six ways ’til Sunday!

Other than that; yeah….

….looking good, Mitt!

In a related item, here’s today’s “Too Little, Too Late” segment, courtesy of a campaign which truly might be the most reactive in history:

Campaign says Romney’s average effective tax rate was 20 percent over 2 decades

 

The Romney campaign is releasing Mitt and Ann Romney’s 2011 tax return today. The campaign previews a few of the highlights here:

  • In 2011, the Romneys paid $1,935,708 in taxes on $13,696,951 in mostly investment income.
  • The Romneys’ effective tax rate for 2011 was 14.1%.
  • The Romneys donated $4,020,772 to charity in 2011, amounting to nearly 30% of their income.
  • The Romneys claimed a deduction for $2.25 million of those charitable contributions.
  • The Romneys’ generous charitable donations in 2011 would have significantly reduced their tax obligation for the year. The Romneys thus limited their deduction of charitable contributions to conform to the Governor’s statement in August, based upon the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years.

Additionally, the Romney campaign is releasing a summary of 20 years of taxes, between 1990-2009, detailing their tax expenditures during those years:

This is akin to closing the stable door after the horse has bolted; or, perhaps more appropriately, Marlon Brando bemoaning….

Alas, if Mitt takes a dive in November, the Romneys will still have their boats, jet-skis, multi-million dollar vacation homes, horses and vast fortune….along with the best healthcare their money can buy.

The rest of us will be….

….stuck with Stupid.

Since we’re on the subject of the Learning Impaired, Jonah Goldberg offers his observations as to why….

Free Speech Isn’t the Problem

 

“No One Murdered Because Of This Image.” That was a recent headline from The Onion, the often hilarious parody newspaper. The image in question is really not appropriate to describe with any specificity in a family newspaper. It’s quite simply disgusting. And, suffice it to say, it leaves nothing to the imagination.

Four of “the most cherished figures from multiple religious faiths were depicted engaging in a lascivious sex act of considerable depravity,” according to The Onion, and yet “no one was murdered, beaten, or had their lives threatened, sources reported Thursday.” “Though some members of the Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist faiths were reportedly offended by the image, sources confirmed that upon seeing it, they simply shook their heads, rolled their eyes, and continued on with their day.”

There was one conspicuous no-show for the celestial orgy: the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

The Onion’s point should be obvious. Amidst all of the talk of religious tolerance and the hand-wringing over free speech in recent days, one salient fact is often lost or glossed over: What we face are not broad questions about the limits of free speech or the importance of religious tolerance, but rather a very specific question about the limits of Muslim tolerance and the unimportance of free speech to much of the Muslin world.

It’s really quite amazing. In Pakistan, Egypt and the Palestinian territories, Christians are being harassed, brutalized and even murdered, often with state support, or at least state indulgence. And let’s not even talk about the warm reception Jews receive in much of the Muslim world.

And yet, it seems you can’t turn on National Public Radio or open a newspaper or a highbrow magazine without finding some oh-so-thoughtful meditation on how anti-Islamic speech should be considered the equivalent of shouting “fire” in a movie theater.

It’s an interesting comparison. First, the prohibition on yelling “fire” in a theater only applies to instances where there is no fire. A person who yells “fire” when there is, in fact, a fire is quite likely a hero. I’m not saying that the people ridiculing Muhammad — be they the makers of the “Innocence of Muslims” trailer or the editors of a French magazine — have truth on their side. But blasphemy is not a question of scientific fact, merely of opinion. And in America we give a very wide legal berth to the airing of such opinions. Loudly declaring “It is my opinion there is a fire in here” is not analogous to declaring “It is my opinion that Muhammad was a blankety-blank.”

You know why? Because Muslims aren’t fire, they’re people. And fire isn’t a sentient entity, it is a force of nature bereft of choice or cognition of any kind. Just as water seeks its own level, fire burns what it can burn. Muslims have free will. If they choose to riot, that’s not the same thing as igniting a fire.

Indeed, the point is proven by the simple fact that the vast majority of Muslims don’t riot. More than 17 million people live in greater Cairo. A tiny fraction of a fraction of that number stormed the U.S. Embassy to “protest” that stupid video. And yet, the logic seems to be that the prime authors of Muslim violence are non-Muslims who express their opinions, often thousands of miles away.

I absolutely agree that our devotion to free speech can cause headaches and challenges. But so can any number of non-negotiable facts of life. Anyone with a child knows that having a kid creates all sorts of problems and inconveniences. But few decent parents respond to those problems and inconveniences by loving their kid any less. And as a general rule, only evil, incomprehensibly stupid or selfish people would consider getting rid of their kid to avoid the inconvenience.

There’s nothing wrong with exercising sound judgment, even caution, when it comes to offending anybody’s most cherished beliefs. But the First Amendment isn’t the problem here, the dysfunctions and inadequacies of the Arab and Muslim world are.

James Burnham famously said that when there is no alternative there is no problem. If free speech in America causes a comparative handful of zealots to want to murder Americans, the correct response is to protect Americans from those zealots (something the Obama administration abjectly failed to do in Libya) and relentlessly seek the punishment of anyone who succeeds. Because, as far as America is concerned, there is no alternative to the First Amendment.

Well….at least most Americans:

Or more specifically, most native-born, patriotic, anti-Communist Americans….who actually recognize the Constitution of the United States as the Law of the Land.

In a related item, the great Victor Davis Hanson analyzes the mental impairment that is….

Middle East madness

 

Last week, Muslim mobs took to the streets to murder the American ambassador in Libya and three of his staffers. American embassies were attacked from Egypt to Yemen.

Embarrassed White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice insisted that these assaults were just reactions to an insensitive video circulating on the Internet that disparaged Islam. As embassies burned, we were assured that there was no animosity directed at America in general, or at this administration and its foreign policy in particular.

That is hogwash. The weeks-old video was a mere pretext, in the manner of the Danish cartoons that Islamists use to stir up mobs in their war against the West. The street rioting was long ago synchronized across the Middle East to celebrate the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Apparently, the administration was left stunned and without a clue about the latest Middle East madness.

President Obama chose not to support nearly a million Iranian dissidents in 2009. Two years later, he belatedly offered encouragement to the revolutionaries who overthrew Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak. Yet those snubbed in Iran were far more likely to oppose radical Islam than the protestors who later put the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Cairo.

Who, exactly, were we “leading from behind” in Libya? Muammar Gadhafi was a monster, but also one in a sort of rehab who was seeking better relations with the West. As for Syria, the Obama administration has called dictator Bashar al-Assad a reformer. Then he became a mass murderer who had to step down. Then we called in Kofi Annan and the U.N. to practice soft-power diplomacy. Then we threatened to intervene. Now we have backed off.

As a candidate and as president, Obama assumed that his own multicultural politics, his familiarity with Islam, his novel transracial personal story and his repudiation of George W. Bush would all combine to win over the Middle East. Supposedly, Middle Eastern dislike of America had little to do with longstanding existential differences that did not start with Bush and won’t end with Obama.

Obama’s al Arabiya interview, Cairo speech and loud reset diplomacy sent mixed messages. He gave the impression that Middle East anger was largely either America’s fault or due to misunderstandings that the sensitive Obama alone could mitigate — as he distanced himself from the supposed pathologies of prior American policy in the region.

That myth-making is now discredited. But it still makes it hard for the administration to admit that hatred in Egypt is deep-seated and irrational — and has very little to do with a silly video. Those in the Arab street hate the West and America because they are told daily that our supposed godlessness and decadence should not make us so rich and powerful — especially when such pious believers as themselves are so poor and impotent.

But rather than addressing the real causes of their present misery — tribalism, misogyny, statism, corruption, authoritarianism, fundamentalism and religious intolerance — amid rich natural resources, Islamists scapegoat. Sometimes they fume at American support for Israel, at other times at an obscure video, cartoon, or rumor of a torched Koran. We only feed these adolescent tantrums when America wrongly apologizes for the occasional insensitivity of a few of our citizens, who enjoy free speech under the U.S. Constitution.

America looks even weaker when this administration sends confusing signals about U.S. power. It too often spikes the ball — whether Joe Biden bragging about killing Osama bin Laden, the president joking about Predator assassination missions, Hillary Clinton high-fiving over the death of Gadhafi, or unnamed top officials disclosing classified secrets about the cyber-war against Iran.

Yet at other times, amid promised defense cuts, the Obama administration loudly announces a strategic pivot away from the Middle East toward Asia, or derides the very antiterrorism protocols — Guantanamo Bay, renditions, tribunals and preventative detention — that it later embraced.

Nothing is more dangerous in regard to the contemporary Middle East than misunderstanding the source of Islamist rage. Speaking loudly while carrying a small stick only makes that confusion worse.

What can we do?

Start developing vast new oil and gas finds on public lands here at home. Get our financial house in order. Quietly cut back aid to hostile Middle East governments. Put travel off-limits. Restrict visas and call home ambassadors — at least until Arab governments control their own street mobs.

Develop a consistent policy on the so-called Arab Spring that applies the same criticism of illiberal dictators to the theocrats who depose them. Keep quiet and keep our military strong. Don’t apologize for a few Americans who have a right to be crude. Instead, condemn those premodern zealots who would murder anyone of whom they don’t approve.

Meanwhile, the Boy Blunder, following in the footsteps of the other great appeasers in history, continues prove there truly are none so blind as those who WILL not see:

Speaking of those who will not see….

Before Assad unleashed violence, UN showcased wife Asma as a ‘champion’ of reform

 

Before Syrian President Bashar al-Assad unleashed a wave of violence against his own people last year, the United Nations Development Program, or UNDP spent $18 million to create an elaborate structure of reform initiatives to demonstrate that Assad was moving toward a more modern, liberalized regime, according to documents obtained by Fox News.

One major element: creating a high-profile role for Asma al-Assad, the glamorous wife of the Syrian dictator, as a champion of greater citizen participation in the dictatorship’s anti-poverty and social programs.

The process quickly proved to be a façade. As soon as demonstrators took to the streets in March, 2011, demanding a  larger say in how Syria was ruled, the UNDP-sponsored reform movement crumbled as President Assad responded with a campaign of arrest, torture and bombardment.

Lest we forget, as recently as March 2012, the MSM-anointed Greatest Diplomat in the World saw Mrs. Assad’s husband as a “reformer”:

Ten’ll get you twenty were YouTube around in the ’30’s, we’d have a video of Neville Chamberlain singing similar praises of Herr Hitler.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this bit of random coincidence:

And if lousy service and lost luggage weren’t reasons enough not to frequent the Unfriendly Skies, here’s the icing on the cake:

United Airlines President to Hold Swanky Event For Planned Parenthood

 

Finally, we’ll call it a day with another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter:

Washington woman convicted in saw attack on husband

 

A Washington state woman accused of trying to decapitate her sleeping husband with an electric saw was convicted Thursday of attempted murder. Jurors needed only about three hours to reach a verdict in the trial of Renee Bishop-McKean of Everett. They also convicted the 44-year-old woman of first-degree assault for hitting the man in the head with a hatchet and mallet.

The jury was told the noise of the saw woke the victim last Oct. 14 and he fought his wife off. He was treated for cuts and scrapes.

Bishop-McKean told police an attacker must have entered the home through an open window, found the saw and attacked her husband. Deputy Prosecutor Paul Stern noted the window was locked so it would only open a few inches. He called the woman’s theory the “Tinkerbell did this” defense.

The woman, who did not testify, shook her head in disagreement when the verdicts were announced. Bishop-McKean faces at least 15 years in prison at sentencing set for Oct. 4.

The couple had been living apart but jurors were told the woman invited her husband over and told him to sleep on a mattress that she had wrapped in plastic, then covered with normal sheets. Police found evidence that Bishop-McKean had purchased the saw, hatchet and mallet shortly before the attack and stockpiled bleach and a supply of large garbage bags. You don’t need to be concerned about the `why,”‘ Stern said in closing arguments Thursday. “You care about the `who.”‘

Then again, assuming the King of the Swamp Castle was right….

Magoo



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