It’s Wednesday, October 31st, 2012….and if the ghouls, ghost and goblins knocking on your door this evening aren’t enough to scare you, think about this:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, a quick correction; the photo we featured yesterday purporting to show members of the 3rd Infantry Regiment guarding the Tomb of the Unknowns was actually taken during a driving rain in September.  The picture below correctly depicts the scene during Sandy.

We apologize for the error.

In a related item, James Taranto poses the question why Liberals assume….

A Big Storm Requires Big Bird?

Necessary government doesn’t justify extravagant government.

 

Some people prepare for natural disasters by stocking up on food, water and batteries. At the New York Times, they stockpile tendentious ideological arguments. Thus within hours, as other journalists were scrambling around the storm zone in search of facts, the Times was ready with a set-piece editorial that hit the Web just hours after the storm called Sandy made landfall in the Northeast.

The title was “A Big Storm Requires Big Government,” and here’s the nut: “Disaster coordination is one of the most vital functions of ‘big government,’ which is why Mitt Romney wants to eliminate it.” That’s a straw man, as the Times itself admits at the end of the editorial by linking to a Politico story reporting “Romney would not abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

“Gov. Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions,” Politico quotes a Romney spokesman as saying. “As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities, and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA.”

It’s not clear if the Times disagrees with Romney’s actual position, which more or less describes the status quo. If you spent hours yesterday watching local TV news in New York, as we did, you saw a lot of Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and you heard a lot about state and local policemen, firemen and other emergency personnel. The federal government’s role was largely invisible.

The Times is also aghast that supposedly “Mr. Romney not only believes that states acting independently can handle the response to a vast East Coast storm better than Washington, but that profit-making companies can do an even better job.” For our part, we’d like to thank Con Edison for the uninterrupted electricity.

Let’s stipulate that FEMA is a vitally important agency, a point on which there seems to be no serious disagreement anyway. How exactly does that make the case for “big government”? FEMA’s annual budget is $14.3 billion, according to lefty Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein. That’s approximately 1/272nd of total federal spending, estimated at $3,888.4 billion by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

To be sure, there are other crucial government functions, such as defense, that cost more than FEMA does. But the Times has it utterly backward in suggesting that necessary government justifies extravagant government—that FEMA’s work somehow redeems everything from ObamaCare to Solyndra to Big Bird. (Speaking of which, further to the Times’s contempt for profit-making companies, yesterday afternoon all of New York’s commercial TV stations pre-empted their regular programming for news of the approaching storm. PBS’s Channel 13 was showing a cartoon.)

Making our point symbolically, Government Executive reports that most of the federal government responded to the storm by shutting down: “Washington-area federal agencies will remain closed Tuesday as Hurricane Sandy continues to unleash its wrath up and down the East Coast. . . . Emergency employees are required to report to work. Everyone else affected will be granted excused absence.”

And here’s President Obama, speaking yesterday afternoon at FEMA headquarters: “My message to the governors, as well as to the mayors, is anything they need, we will be there. And we’re going to cut through red tape. We’re not going to get bogged down with a lot of rules.”

Howz a busy ‘Bama find time for a hurricane brief?  Easy; no fundraisers scheduled and the golf courses are all closed.

Even the most leftist president in American history is suddenly touting deregulation. Of course, he’s faced with responsibility to act in an emergency, not to mention a tough re-election challenge. The only real-world pressures on the Times editorialists were a deadline and an empty page. Still, you’d think a modicum of professional pride would stop them from filling it with such nonsense.

No doubt now the storm has passed, the Old Grey Nag will return to her in-depth coverage of the Benghazi Betrayal.

And since we’re on the subject of the first time in living memory an entire Administration, as well as the Pentagon, aided and abetted a deliberate lie, here’s two views on what could well prove the straw that broke The Dear Misleader’s political back:

If Brit Hume was accusatory, Pat Caddell is downright damning:

For more on the subject, we turn to the latest from Jonah Goldberg, describing what he sees as….

Benghazi — no mere ‘October surprise’

A conservative’s challenge to the so-called mainstream media: Where is the feeding frenzy on the Libya story?

 

If you want to understand why conservatives have lost faith in the so-called mainstream media, you need to ponder the question: Where is the Benghazi feeding frenzy?

Unlike some of my colleagues on the right, I don’t think there’s a conspiracy at work. (?!?) Rather, I think journalists tend to act on their instincts (some even brag about this; you could look it up). And, collectively, the mainstream media’s instincts run liberal, making groupthink inevitable. 

In 2000, a Democratic operative orchestrated an “October surprise” attack on George W. Bush, revealing that 24 years earlier, he’d been arrested for drunk driving. The media went into a feeding frenzy. “Is all the 24-hour coverage of Bush’s 24-year-old DUI arrest the product of a liberal media almost drunk on the idea of sinking him, or is it a legitimate, indeed unavoidable news story?” asked Howard Kurtz in a segment for his CNN show “Reliable Sources.” The consensus among the guests: It wasn’t a legitimate news story. But the media kept going with it. 

One could go on and on. In September 2004, former CBS titan Dan Rather gambled his entire career on a story about Bush’s service in the National Guard. His instincts were so powerful, he didn’t thoroughly check the documents he relied on, which were forgeries. In 2008, the media feeding frenzy over John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, was so ludicrous it belonged in a Tom Wolfe novel. Over the last couple of years, the mainstream media has generally treated Occupy Wall Street as idealistic, the “tea parties” as racist and terrifying.

To be sure, there’ve been conservative feeding frenzies: about Barack Obama’s pastor, John Kerry’s embellishments of his war record, etc. But the mainstream media usually has tasked itself with the duty of debunking and dispelling such “hysteria.”

Last week, Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin reported that sources on the ground in Libya say they pleaded for support during the attack on the Benghazi consulate that led to the deaths of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. They were allegedly told twice to “stand down.” Worse, there are suggestions that there were significant military resources available to counterattack, but requests for help were denied.

If true, the White House’s concerted effort to blame the attack on a video crumbles. Yet, last Friday, the president claimed that “the minute I found out what was happening” in Benghazi, he ordered that everything possible be done to protect our personnel. That is either untrue, or he’s being disobeyed on grave matters.

This isn’t an “October surprise” foisted on the media by opposition research; it’s news.

This story raises precisely the sort of “big issues” the media routinely claim elections should be about. For instance, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week that the “basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on, without having some real-time information about what’s taking place.” If real-time video of the attack and communications with Americans on the ground begging for assistance doesn’t constitute “real-time information,” what does?

This is not to say that Fox News is alone in covering the story. But it is alone in treating it like it’s a big deal. Of the five Sunday news shows, only “Fox News Sunday” treated this as a major story. On the other four, the issue came up only when Republicans mentioned it. Tellingly, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” host David Gregory shushed a guest when she tried to bring up the subject, saying, “Let’s get to Libya a little bit later.”

Gregory never did get back to Benghazi. But he saved plenty of time to dive deep into the question of what Indiana U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s comments on abortion and rape mean for the Romney campaign. Typically, Gregory’s instincts about the news routinely line up with Democratic talking points, in this case Obama’s ridiculous “war on women” rhetoric.

I am willing to believe that journalists like Gregory are sincere in their desire to play it straight. (We are decidedly not!) But among those who don’t share his instincts, it’s hard to distinguish between conspiracy and groupthink. Indeed, it’s hard to think why one should even bother trying to make that distinction at all.

We find Goldberg’s dismissal of a MSM conspiracy rather curious, particularly in light of the revelations regarding JournoList and similar Fourth Estate forums.  Then again, perhaps he simply prefers to define a collective, concerted effort by everyone in the same business to simultaneously and in unison do everything in their power to reelect a particular president as “groupthink” rather than “conspiracy”.

Nitpicking aside, like Mona Lisa Vito’s torque wrench, he’s dead-on balls accurate.

Next, Thomas Sowell details the Dims strategy for wishing Benghazigate away; it’s called….

‘Cooling Out’ the Voters 

Confidence men know that their victim — “the mark” as he has been called — is eventually going to realize that he has been cheated. But it makes a big difference whether he realizes it immediately, and goes to the police, or realizes it after the confidence man is long gone. So part of the confidence racket is creating a period of uncertainty, during which the victim is not yet sure of what is happening. This delaying process has been called “cooling out the mark.”

The same principle applies in politics. When the accusations that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton first surfaced, he flatly denied them all. Then, as the months passed, the truth came out — but slowly, bit by bit. One of Clinton’s own White House aides later called it “telling the truth slowly.”

By the time the whole truth came out, it was called “old news,” and the clever phrase now was that we should “move on.” It was a successful “cooling out” of the public, keeping them in uncertainty so long that, by the time the whole truth came out, there was no longer the same outrage as if the truth had suddenly come out all at once. Without the support of an outraged public, the impeachment of President Clinton fizzled out in the Senate.

We are currently seeing another “cooling out” process, growing out of the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11th this year. The belated release of State Department e-mails shows that the Obama administration knew, while the attack on the American consulate was still underway, that it was a coordinated, armed terrorist attack. They were getting reports from those inside the consulate who were under attack, as well as surveillance pictures from a camera on an American drone overhead.

Now….how was it Paul Newman did that?!?

About an hour before the attack, the scene outside was calm enough for the American ambassador to accompany a Turkish official to the gates of the consulate to say goodbye. This could hardly have happened if there were protesting mobs there.

Why then did both President Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice keep repeating the story that this was a spontaneous protest riot against an anti-Islamic video in America? The White House knew the facts — but they knew that the voting public did not. And it mattered hugely whether the facts became known to the public before or after the election. What the White House needed was a process of “cooling out” the voters, keeping them distracted or in uncertainty as long as possible.

Not only did the Obama administration keep repeating the false story about an anti-Islamic video being the cause of a riot that turned violent, the man who produced that video was tracked down and arrested, creating a media distraction.

All this kept the video story front and center, with the actions and inactions of the Obama administration kept in the background. The White House had to know that it was only a matter of time before the truth would come out. But time was what mattered, with an election close at hand. The longer they could stretch out the period of distraction and uncertainty — “cooling out” the voters — the better. Once the confidence man in the White House was reelected, it would be politically irrelevant what facts came out.

As the Obama administration’s video story began to slowly unravel, their earlier misstatements were blamed on “the fog of war” that initially obscures many events. But there was no such “fog of war” in this case. The Obama administration knew what was happening while it was happening.

They didn’t know all the details — and we may never know all the details — but they knew enough to know that this was no protest demonstration that got out of hand. (Like Jonah Goldberg, Dr. Sowell is again giving the Administration the benefit of the smallest doubt; based on everything we’ve learned, they knew all they had to know!)

From the time it took office, the Obama administration has sought to suppress the very concept of a “war on terror” or the terrorists’ war on us. The painful farce of calling the Fort Hood murders “workplace violence,” instead of a terrorist attack in our midst, shows how far the Obama administration would go to downplay the dangers of Islamic extremist terrorism.

The killing of Osama bin Laden fed the pretense that the terrorism threat had been beaten. But the terrorists’ attack in Libya exposed that fraud — and required another fraud to try to “cool out” the voters until after election day.

Their efforts at obfuscation and deception having failed, and quite miserably, Jack Kelly, courtesy of Real Clear Politics.com and Randy Jurgensmeyer, concludes we’re….

Watching the Collapse of the Obama Campaign

 

To borrow a phrase from T.S. Eliot, “This is the way the news biz ends, This is the way the news biz ends, This is the way the news biz ends, Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy today of Carl Polizzi and OccupyCorporatism.com, we learn….

Globalists Suggest Engineering Smaller Humans to Preserve Natural Resources

 

No….we’re serious.  You can access the entire article through the link below, but the following excerpt tells you all you need to know about the latest and greatest ideas from Those Who Know What’s Best For YOU!

“….Liao, like Daly, believes that parents could use genetic engineering or hormone therapy to birth smaller babies that would be less resource-intensive throughout their lifetime. Larger people consume more food and energy over their life. Smaller people consume less. Liao states that larger people use more fuel per mile in their cars, need more clothing to cover them, wear out their shoes, carpets and furniture faster because of their weight. Liao suggests that the average US citizen’s height should be reduced by 15cm. This would reduce the body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women. A massive reduction in height and mass would slow down metabolic rates by 15% – 18%, meaning less energy and nutrient needs.

The logic is inescapable; but wait, there’s MORE!

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have in their arsenal Depo-Preovera; an implantable fertility control provided from Shanghai Dahua Pharmaceuticals, and donations from Merck to further their advancement of the UN’s Millenium Development Goals which states that there be a 75% reduction in births under the guise of maintaining maternal mortality.

By 2020, Melinda Gates hopes to extend the use of forced sterilization through manipulation of foreign governments to further the scheme of preventing 80 million of “unwanted pregnancies” in places like Africa, India and Southeast Asia. Gates believes she can prevent 40% of people who would otherwise have been born, thereby justifying family planning as a scheme to make women healthier who have “families are more successful and their communities are more prosperous.”

http://occupycorporatism.com/globalists-suggest-engineering-smaller-humans-to-preserve-natural-resources/

Why is it we get the feeling the Gates’ progeny will never participate in either her forced sterilization program or Mr. Liao’s Lilliputian breeding initiative?  They’re Liberals: do as they say, not as they do!  So shut up and drink the Kool-Aid; after all….

On the Lighter  Side….

And just in time for Halloween, the latest fashions for fatwa-fearing females, courtesy of Jim Gleaves:

And lastly, Balls Cotton poses the question….

Next, another sordid story of criminal stupidity ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter:

Suspects liken driving into joggers to playing video game

 

Police in the southeast Missouri town of Cape Girardeau say two men accused of driving into a group of joggers likened it to playing a video game. Three joggers suffered bumps and bruises Sunday morning when they were struck by a car. Police believe it was intentional

The suspects, 19-year-old Vincent Anderson of Little Rock, Ark., and 27-year-old Marcus Jones of Cotton Plant, Ark., are both jailed. Police say Anderson was driving a 1994 Ford Thunderbird that was reported stolen moments before the joggers were struck. The Southeast Missourian reports that according to a probable cause statement, cellphone videos found with the suspects indicated they thought the experience was “fun” and likened it to the video game “Grand Theft Auto.”

If Vincent and Marcus thought playing the real-life Grand Theft Auto was fun, wait ’til they getta load of the Missouri State Penitentiary version of I Da’ Husband, You Da’ Wife!

Finally, in News of the Bizarre, this just in from the Land of Fruits & Nuts:

Irvine woman wants roadside memorial to honor fish killed in truck crash

 

An Orange County woman has asked the city of Irvine to erect a sign honoring hundreds of truck crash victims — who were fish. About 1,600 pounds of saltwater bass died on Oct. 11 when a container truck hauling them to market got into a three-way crash.

Dina Kourda, a local volunteer with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, wrote the head of street maintenance requesting a sign at the intersection to honor the fish. Kourda’s letter notes that while roadside memorials traditionally honor human beings, she hopes an exception will be made to remind drivers that all animals — in her words — “value their lives and feel pain.”

Irvine spokesman Craig Reem tells the Los Angeles Times that no memorial is planned.

Have you ever seen anyone make a bigger bass of themselves?

Magoo