It’s Monday, October 15th, 2012….but before we begin, our thoughts and prayers go out to Derek Jeter regarding the broken ankle he suffered late in the Yankee’s loss Saturday night to Detroit.  We despise the overall concept of the Yankees, along with pretty much everything else having to do with the City of New York; but Jeter is a class act, and one of the greatest shortstops ever to play the game.

As badly hurt as he was, he told Manager Joe Girardi, “Don’t carry me off.”

Who’s gonna argue with Derek Jeter?!?  Here’s wishing The Captain a quick and complete recovery.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, the WSJ comments offers its insight on….

Biden’s Intelligence

Nuclear Iran? Resurgent al Qaeda? ‘Let’s all calm down.’

 

Joe Biden’s unbounded id is the talk of the nation after Thursday’s debate. But the Veep is also the elder Democratic statesman on international affairs, and in between his snickers, guffaws and “malarkey,” he shed newsworthy light on Obama Administration foreign policy. Let’s roll the tape.

On Iran, Mr. Biden broke new ground, though most of the media missed it. To a question about the Administration’s willingness to stop the Tehran regime from going nuclear, he said what matters isn’t Iran’s ability to enrich uranium to weapons grade. It’s whether it can build and deliver a bomb.

“They are a good way away,” he said. “When my friend [Paul Ryan] talks about fissile material, they have to take this highly enriched uranium, get it from 20% up. Then they have to be able to have something to put it in. There is no weapon that the Iranians have at this point.”

“Let’s all calm down a little bit here,” Mr. Biden said a few minutes later.

In other words, Iran may have made progress toward enriching enough uranium to sufficient strength to build a bomb in the past four years, but that’s immaterial. Based on the Vice President’s intelligence, Iran isn’t close to getting the trigger mechanism, missiles and all the other things needed to deploy a weapon. So don’t worry.

Hmmm. For a decade, the U.S. and Europe have focused on coaxing and coercing the Iranians to stop enrichment above all else. That’s because this is the hardest thing about building a bomb. (In truth, it’s the only difficult step.) Iran has in any case worked to develop missiles and triggers with help from Russians, North Koreans and others. In a clearer moment this summer, Mitt Romney said he would insist that Iran not enrich any uranium, even ostensibly for peaceful purposes. He failed to repeat this demand in his foreign-policy speech this week.

To hear Mr. Biden tell it, the Obama Administration now has a new red line on Iran. The mullahs can enrich as much uranium as they wish as long as they “don’t have something to put it in.” This isn’t the red line Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu had in mind during his recent speech before the United Nations. Nor are Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others looking for proof of an Iranian ICBM before they decide to go nuclear themselves. Iran becomes a regional nuclear power when it demonstrates its ability to get the bomb at almost a moment’s notice, which is when it has developed enough fuel for it.

The Veep made a spirited case as well for doing nothing in Syria—no “no fly” zones, direct arms supplies to the rebels, or any U.S. political lead in an intervention. “If, in fact, it blows up and the wrong people gain control, it’s going to have impact on the entire region, causing potentially regional wars,” he said of Syria. News stories suggest this is happening already without any U.S. involvement, as the Syrian war pulls in Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey.

Mr. Biden appeared to preview another Obama policy shift on Afghanistan. With a 2014 deadline to transition the security lead to the Kabul government, the discussion will shift to how large the American military footprint will be afterward—with up to 30,000 U.S. troops left behind to ensure the Taliban don’t overrun Kabul again.

But Mr. Biden said something different: “We are leaving in 2014, period, and in the process we’re going to be saving over the next 10 years another $800 billion.” He added that Afghan forces are ready to defend the country themselves and lead the fight in the difficult east, another piece of intelligence that’s news to us.

On the attacks in Benghazi, Mr. Biden turned uncharacteristically terse. A day before the debate, a House hearing revealed that the U.S. Embassy in Libya had been concerned about a rising al Qaeda-linked Islamist threat and had requested, but was denied, security reinforcements.

“Well, we weren’t told they wanted more security again,” said Mr. Biden, contradicting the testimony of State Department officials. He also blamed “the intelligence community” for the Administration’s initial and false assertions that Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American colleagues were killed in a “spontaneous” protest against an anti-Islam video on YouTube. This is the same “intelligence community” he is sure can tell us with certainty when Iran has a bomb and the Taliban is defeated.

Asked Friday about Mr. Biden’s claims, White House spokesman Jay Carney said: “He was speaking directly for himself and for the President. He meant the White House. . . . No one who testified about this matter suggested that requests for additional security were made to the President or the White House. These are issues appropriately that are handled by security professionals at the State Department. And that’s what he was talking about.” So blame State and the intelligence community.

Don’t worry, be happy may be a good campaign theme for Mr. Biden. Don’t worry about a resurgent al Qaeda in North Africa. Or the escalating war in Syria. Or Iran’s mullahs with weapons grade uranium, or Vladimir Putin’s increasingly anti-American policy, or China’s muscular antics in the Pacific. Overseas, said Mr. Biden, this Administration has “repaired our alliances so the rest of the world follows up again.” He clearly knows something the world doesn’t.

Or, as seems far more likely to us, and as this forward from Mark Foster suggests, Joe knows….

….absolutely nothing at all!

And since we’re on the subject of intelligence, or rather the lack thereof, the Journal details another example of what we can expect in a 2nd Obama term, as well as the realities of the Liberal idyll of bipartisan governance:

Schumer to Tax Reform: Drop Dead

A Senate Democratic leader lays down a partisan 2013 marker.

The polls say voters want more bipartisanship, and one possibility in 2013 is tax reform that trades lower rates for fewer loopholes. Well, so much for that. The man who wants to be the next leader of the Senate Democrats has declared that this “old-style of tax reform is obsolete.”

The anti-reformer is Chuck Schumer, the Senator from Wall Street, er, New York, who averred at the National Press Club last week that his party will have nothing to do with tax reform of the kind that Ronald Reagan negotiated with Democrats in 1986, or that the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission proposed in 2010, or that the Gang of Six Senators have been working on. It’s Chuck’s way or no way. (Strikingly similar to Hairball Harry’s non-existent annual budgets.)

The Reagan model of reform “doesn’t fit the times because there are two new conditions that didn’t exist in 1986, but that are staring us in the face today,” Mr. Schumer said. “A much larger, more dangerous deficit, and a dramatic increase in income inequality. Old-style tax reform could make both conditions worse.”

Mr. Schumer says the only way to reform is to broaden the tax base and raise tax rates. If you’re wondering how this differs from a plain vanilla tax increase, good question. The Democrat says that all revenue from any tax loophole closing must go to “reduce the deficit, which is strangling our economic growth.” (Understand; overspending isn’t the problem, but rather a lack of revenue.)

That’s a good one coming from a Senator who has never met a spending increase he didn’t like and who has led the fight against spending cuts offered by House Republicans in the last two years. When he says all revenue should go toward “deficit reduction,” he’s merely offering political cover for more future spending. Without a change in the tax code or permanent changes in the structure of entitlements, there is no way to prevent Congress from spending every dime raised from loophole closing.

Mr. Schumer’s real agenda is betrayed by his other reason for opposing tax reform—income inequality. The affluent simply make too much money, so they must have more of it taken away and redistributed by . . . Mr. Schumer.

To be more precise, tax rates must rise to give the appearance of taking more income from the rich. We say “the appearance” because Mr. Schumer knows that higher tax rates increase the incentive for Congress to write loopholes that the rich are in the best position to exploit. And guess which Finance Committee Senator will be standing in Gucci Gulch charging a campaign-finance toll for writing those loopholes? The ol’ Harvard Law populist himself.

Mr. Schumer ignores that the tax code is already steeply progressive, with the richest 1% paying 38.7% of all income taxes in 2009. He also claims that tax rates have little or no effect on growth, citing a study that is an outlier in the economic literature. The mainstream agrees with Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson, who recently told Congress that tax reform would raise long-term U.S. output “equivalent to a $7 trillion increase in our national wealth.”

Curiously, Mr. Schumer also says “it is imperative that we seek to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35%” in a revenue-neutral way. He says lower rates for companies will “boost growth and encourage more companies to reinvest in the United States.”

So a 35% tax rate on corporations hurts growth and investment, but tax rates approaching 50% on small businesses and subchapter S corporations (which pay taxes at the individual rate) are no problem. This is Democratic corporatism, favoring big over small business. In particular look for Mr. Schumer to protect the 15% tax rate on carried interest to please his hedge-fund contributors. A genuine tax reform would tax business income at the same rate.

Mr. Schumer’s speech is best understood as a political marker no matter who wins re-election. If Mitt Romney wins, Mr. Schumer will browbeat any Democrat who even thinks about supporting a Simpson-Bowles-Reagan-style reform. If President Obama wins, the Senator will fight the kind of tax deal that House Speaker John Boehner has said he wants as part of a grand budget compromise. Who’s the real partisan obstructionist?

Duh!  Like we needed another reason to despise the state of our birth.

Speaking of things we despise, as this next item from FOX News reports, our President appears to have been violating his oath of office….and that repeatedly:

Obama’s refusal to deport illegal aliens unconstitutional, say law professors

 

Two law professors, including one who served in the Bush Justice Department, have published a paper charging that President Obama violated the Constitution with his directive to law enforcement not to deport illegal aliens.

In the paper entitled, “The Obama Administration, the Dream Act and the Take Care Clause,” authors Robert Delahunty of the University of St. Thomas [Minnesota] and John Yoo, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley and former U.S. deputy assistant attorney general, blast Obama’s moratorium on deporting certain illegal immigrants. The professors dismissed the idea that the decision on whether to deport illegal immigrants who are arrested for minor infractions is a matter of prosecutorial discretion.

“If there’s one case and it’s left to the prosecutor well that’s fine, but what Obama did was take a million cases and leave it up to prosecutorial discretion, “John Yoo said to FoxNews.com. “The only reason it’s under [Department of Homeland Security Secretary] Janet Napolitano’s discretion is because Obama had made his decision. If she’s doing it under her own, she would have to be fired.”

An abstract for the paper debunks the claim that the president has the Constitutional to not enforce civil laws crafted and passed by Congress. “It’s the duty of the president. He must always uphold the law,” Yoo said, adding that the only exceptions in doing so are if laws are unconstitutional or if prosecuting them can be reasonably deemed not viable.

Officials from the White House declined to comment on the paper, referring FoxNews.com to DHS.

So why, inquiring minds want to know, have Republicans not filed suit, against this or any of the other innumerable unconstitutional measures The Obamao’s promulgated through executive orders, including his appointments of uncounted, unaccountable, czars?!?

Meanwhile, as Carol Plat Libeau notes at Townhall.com, another acolyte who entered into a marriage of convenience with The Obamao may soon have their neck in a noose:

That Bus Is Rolling . . .Hillary’s Headed Under?

 

As Eliana Johnson points out over at NRO, this morning, David Axelrod continued to throw Hillary Clinton and the State Department under the bus, doubling down on the story that Joe Biden’s royal “we” at the veep debate referred only to a party of two — himself and the President — not knowing about the requests for enhanced security In Libya. Apparently, in the Obama presidency, the buck doesn’t stop with the President . . . it stops with, in Axelrod’s words, “the security folks at the State Department.”

What Biden and Axelrod are essentially saying is that Hillary Clinton is thoroughly to blame for this debacle.  If she somehow knew about the requests but denied them (and then failed to communicate that fact to the higest levels after the attacks), she’s been guilty of a serious breach of judgment.  It’s really a firing offense (not that President Obama can do that for political reasons . . .) If, on the other hand, those requests were being denied and she didn’t even know about them, then she’s manifestly incompetent — also a firing offense. (We wonder why the same logic doesn’t apply to Eric Holder in the wake of Fast & Furious?)

I’ve never been a big fan of Hillary Clinton’s, but I can hardly believe she’d make the mistake of not doing proper CYA on a matter of this magnitude, especially when thoughts of 2016 lurk in her (and certainly her husband’s) brain. It seems to me more likely that the Obama White House generally is just trying to insulate itself from blame by letting all the garbage run downhill into the Secretary of State’s office.  And in addition, Joe Biden would probably looove to dispatch a potential rival for 2016, since he apparently harbors presidential ambitions (case closed: that means he’s absolutely delusional, especially after that bizarre debate outing last week).

Ed Klein is reporting that Bill Clinton doesn’t like this turn of events one bit.  As I predicted here, the whole Clinton-Obama dynamic is becoming more fascinating by the day.  Indeed, “rev the bus — someone’s going under it” . . . but the Clinton are no doubt determined that Hillary isn’t going to be the one to take the fall for this.

So expect more details damaging to Obama and Biden slowly to trickle out.

Come the end of the day, two things are certain; first and foremost, Hillary’s all about Hillary.  Second, and almost as importantly, having remained silent to ensure her the presidential success of her philandering husband, Hillary undoubtedly feels the Dimocratic Party owes her one….particularly having been left at the altar in 2008 in favor of The Disjointed One.

We wouldn’t put it past her and her husband, whose narcissism is exceeded only by B. Hussein’s, to torpedo Obama’s chances in November in order to set Hillary up for a run in 2016.

Stay tuned!

Next up, it’s Tales From the Darkside, and the latest from Ann Coulter, who asks….

GOT RACISM?

 

When Michael Steele ran for senator from Maryland, he was depicted in blackface and with huge red lips by liberal blogger Steve Gilliard. Sen. Charles Schumer’s Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee dug up a copy of Steele’s credit report — something done to no other Republican candidate. Is that more or less racist than Romney mentioning his sons? More or less racist than the word “apartment”?

Mia Love, a black Republican running for Congress in Utah had her Wikipedia page hacked with racist bile, heavy on the N-word. Her campaign headquarters has been bombarded with racist graffiti and slimy mailings with pictures of Klansman next to photos of her family. Some would say that’s even more racist than Romney talking about his sons.

On less evidence than the birthers have, liberals slandered both Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain with the racist stereotype of black men as sexual predators.

As the preceding short list suggests, liberals usually limit their racist slime to conservative blacks. But not always. In 2008, Bill Clinton said of Obama “a few years ago this guy would have been carrying our bags.” Democratic Sen. Harry Reid praised Obama for not speaking in a “Negro dialect.” Joe Biden complimented Obama for being “clean” and “articulate.”

Did I mention that Kevin Baker thinks that Romney referring to his “five boys” is racist?

Two years ago, liberal newsman Dan Rather said the criticism of Obama was that he “couldn’t sell watermelons if you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.” (I immediately called for Rather’s firing for that, and then remembered that he didn’t have a job.) Last week, Rather won the 2012 Edward R. Murrow Award for Lifetime Achievement from Washington State University. That’s not a joke — or at least not my joke.

Meanwhile, evidence of alleged Republican racism invariably consists of tenuous connections and apocryphal signals normally associated with schizophrenics and sufferers of “Thrilled Leg Syndrome.”

Since February 2008, the primary evidence of racism has been failure to fully support Obama’s election, policies or re-election. As Slate magazine’s Jacob Weisberg put it during the last presidential campaign, only if Obama were elected president would children in America be able to “grow up thinking of prejudice as a nonfactor in their lives.”

I wish I had a nickel for every kid who’s come up to me in an airport and said, “What I wouldn’t give to be able to think of prejudice as a non-factor in my life …” Curiously, liberals weren’t concerned about what children in America would think if Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination had been defeated. No, only electing the most liberal person ever to seek the presidency on a major party ticket would prove that the country could “put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.”

The left’s racial demagoguery worked: In 2008, Obama received a larger proportion of the white vote than any Democrat running for president in nearly 40 years. (Though he tied Clinton’s 1996 white vote record.)

And look how well that turned out! We haven’t heard another peep about racism since then.

Yeah; and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad….

….suddenly developed a hankering for bacon.

Then there’s our Money Quote, courtesy of today of James Taranto quoting Paul Krugman, aka “The Mouth That Roared”:

“Republicans are dead wrong.

The latest devastating demonstration of that wrongness comes from the International Monetary Fund, which has just released its World Economic Outlook, a report combining short-term prediction with insightful economic analysis. This report is a grim and disturbing document, telling us that the world economy is doing significantly worse than expected, with rising risks of global recession. But the report isn’t just downbeat; it contains a careful analysis of the reasons things are going so badly. And what this analysis concludes is that a disproportionate share of the bad news is coming from countries pursuing the kind of austerity policies Republicans want to impose on America.

O.K., it doesn’t say that in so many words.“

Thus Krugman provides yet another insightful illustration of Liberal illogic, joining other immortal inanities such as:

“The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.“ – Rachel Smolkin in the American Journalism Review, explaining how the MSM and the Blue Devil faculty got the Duke lacrosse scandal so wrong.

“The memos are fake, but accurate.” – Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather defending the validity of forged memorandums fabricated to impugn the integrity of George W. Bush.

“The police acted stupidly.“ – President B. Hussein Obama, erroneously shooting from the hip on the arrest of Harvard Professor and friend Skip Gates without any knowledge whatsoever of the facts or circumstances surrounding the case.

Oh….then there’s “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin.“  No Barry, if you had a son, he’d….

….have your ears and Michelle’s personality.

On the Lighter Side….

Turning to the Science Section, we present another bit of News You Can’t Use:

‘Jurassic Park’ may be impossible, scientists decide

 

We know we’ll sleep better at night knowing we won’t plucked off the throne by a prehistoric monster running wild in a theme park on a remote island off the coast of Central America.

Finally, in the Arlen Specter Memorial “Just Deserts” segment, we learn….

Bus Driver Fired After Bullying Child Over Romney Sign

 

A Wisconsin bus driver has been fired after telling a 12-year-old boy that he should have been aborted because his parents had a Mitt Romney campaign sign in their yard. Durham School Services confirmed in a statement to Fox News that the 78-year-old driver “engaged in a political debate with students” and “made an inappropriate remark to a child.”

After a brief investigation, the driver was subsequently fired, the statement read. “The driver’s remark was insensitive and inappropriate,” the statement read. “Durham has apologized to the family.”

The incident occurred in New Bern, Wis. and was first reported by the Freedom Eden website. The child’s mother was a guest on Fox News Radio affiliate WISN where she told her side of the story. She said the trouble started two weeks ago when they put a Romney sign in their front yard. “The only reason your parents are Romney fans is because they’re rich,” she allegedly told the child.

The boy’s mother – who was only identified as Debbie – told the radio station that several days ago some students in the back of the bus were chanting “Romney, Romney.” “She made my son come up to the front (of the bus) and told him all Republicans are liars,” she said. “He didn’t want to take it. He said Obama is pro-abortion. She said, ‘Well, maybe your mom should have chosen abortion for you.’”

Liberals…. can’t you just FEEL the love!

Magoo