The Daily Gouge, Thursday, December 13th, 2012

On December 12, 2012, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Thursday, December 13th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, a poll of absolute no probative value whatsoever:

WSJ/NBC News Poll: Strong Support for Reaching ‘Cliff’ Deal

 

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A month after the presidential election highlighted divisions over taxes, spending and political stewardship, Americans now solidly back compromise to solve the biggest budget challenges facing the country, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds. About two-thirds of Americans of all political stripes would like Congress to strike a deal to reduce the federal budget deficit, even if it means cutting Social Security and Medicare and boosting some tax rates, the survey released Wednesday found.

An even larger share — more than three-quarters of Americans, including 61% of Republicans — said they would accept raising taxes on the wealthy in order to avoid a “fiscal cliff” of large spending cuts and tax increases now set to take place in January.

In other words, we’re solidly behind some nonspecific, to-be-determined, absolutely ambiguous”compromise”….provided of course it doesn’t costUS a dime!  Anybody stupid enough to act on this bit of insightful intelligence oughta be in Congress.

In a related item, courtesy of the AEI, Michael Barone details, quite accurately in our opinion, several….

‘Fiscal cliff’ causes problems that don’t faze Obama

 

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Is Barack Obama bluffing when he threatens to go over the “fiscal cliff” if Republicans refuse to agree to higher tax rates on high earners? Some analysts think so. Keith Hennessey, a former top staffer for the Bush White House and Senate Republicans and a veteran of budget negotiations, argues that Obama’s whole second term would be blighted if he allows the fiscal cliff tax increases and sequestration budget cuts to take place next month.

His argument is based on three assumptions. One is that going over the fiscal cliff would trigger a sharp recession and a weak economy thereafter. Many economists agree. Some disagree. I leave that argument to them.

Hennessey’s second assumption is that Obama has other second term policy goals — immigration reform, cap-and-trade legislation, tax reform — that would be difficult to achieve if he breaks sharply with Republicans.

Third, he assumes that Obama, like previous presidents, wants vibrant economic growth and chooses policies that he thinks will stimulate it.

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I wonder whether these second two assumptions are true. (As do we.) On policy it seems clear that Obama wants to preserve Obamacare and to continue something like the high levels of domestic spending of his first term — 24 to 25 percent of gross domestic product.

But it’s not clear he really wants comprehensive immigration reform. As a senator he voted for immigration amendments that Edward Kennedy opposed as poison pills, fracturing the bipartisan coalition needed for passage. As president he failed to press for immigration legislation when Democrats had supermajorities. It was a useful issue in the 2012 campaign, but that is over.

Cap-and-trade legislation is a nonstarter so long as Republicans retain a majority in the House and unlikely even if Democrats gain one in 2014. Too many Democrats in marginal districts would look back at the Democrats whose 2009 votes for cap-and-trade helped defeat them in 2010. Nor does Obama seem much interested in a 1986-style tax reform that lowers rates and reduces tax deductions. He’d rather raise rates on high earners, as would happen if we go over the fiscal cliff.

But doesn’t this president, like his predecessors, want bounteous economic growth? Maybe not. First-term presidents want strong economic growth because they think they need it to be re-elected. But Obama has already been re-elected without it. And economic growth produces things Obama doesn’t like. Some people — and not necessarily those with government subsidies — get very rich. (What’s worse, many of them aren’t Dimocrats!) Obama prefers a more equal income distribution. The Depression of the 1930s did a great job of increasing economic equality.

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Obama seeks to direct the economy in certain politically correct channels. He delights in subsidizing “green jobs” making solar panels or electric cars. Not coincidentally, losers like Solyndra and Fisker had backing from Obama political insiders. The oil and natural gas boom ignited by hydraulic fracturing — fracking — on private lands does not delight him so much. He sought credit for it on the campaign trail. But his regulators are itching to stamp it out.

One of the problems of prosperity, from this perspective, is that you can’t predict what will happen next. People operating in free markets produce innovations that no one else anticipates. Sluggish growth and recession, in contrast, make things more predictable. Constituencies that enjoy political favor — UAW members at General Motors or Chrysler, for example — can be subsidized to remain in place.

The cost of such subsidies can be extracted from disfavored constituencies. This is called, in Obama’s words to Joe the Plumber, “spreading the wealth around.” Remember when ABC’s Charlie Gibson asked candidate Obama if he would raise capital gains tax rates even if it brought less revenue to the government. Yes, Obama said. “I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” In contrast, it was after Bill Clinton agreed to cut the capital gains rate in 1997 that large enough gushers of revenue poured in to balance the federal budget.

Obama seeks to advance what Alexis de Tocqueville in “Democracy in America” called “soft despotism,” with “a network of small, complicated, painstaking rules” — think Obamacare — to “finally reduce … each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which government is the shepherd.”

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Or so it seems to me. If so, why not risk a recession? It would keep the herd in need of shepherding.

It’s the Left’s ultimate joke on the all the other….

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….less-equal animals.

Speaking of animals, here’s the latest from Hope n’ Change on two species, the first of which is extinct, and the second we pray will be joining it in the hopefully not-to-distant future:

Tyrannosaurus Tax

 

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Yale, the world’s number one creator of snobs and padlocks, has just announced that they’ve named a newly discovered species of dinosaur “Obamadon Gracilis” to honor the president and exponentially increase their likelihood of getting another buttload of grant money.

The name, when translated from Latin, combines words which mean “Obama’s teeth” and “slender,” because the dinosaur was thin and toothy and presumably had a “great smile.” It was probably also a gifted liar and a sneaky little egg sucker, both of which qualities probably sound a lot better when translated into Latin (as is the case when they’re printed on diplomas from Yale’s law school).

The dinosaur died out about 65 million years ago after an asteroid struck the Earth. Coincidentally, a 3-mile wide asteroid is even at this moment rocketing towards the Earth. Tragically, it is expected to whoosh by within the next 24 hours without affecting our current infestation of Obamadon Gracilis.

Unless, of course, the Mayans really did know what they were talking about…

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To borrow a phrase from the immortal John Hammond:

Next up, courtesy of NRO, we offer the words of another immortal; in this case, Victor Davis Hanson, who describes….

Ripples from the Election

“Hope and change” has been replaced by envy and jealousy.

 

Now that the election is over, we are starting to see the contours of what lies ahead for the next four years. Here are some likely consequences from the Obama victory.

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1. Barack Obama is not very interested in tax reform, deficit reduction, or curbing annual spending. He believes in big government, and the bigger the better. His tenure is not so much a repudiation of Reaganism as it is of Clintonism, and the whole notion of keeping the annual growth of federal spending at or below 2 percent, balancing the budget, and declaring the era of big government over. Going off the cliff would give Obama the extra revenues from across-the-board tax hikes on the 53 percent that can fund further expansions for the 47 percent in federalized health care, food stamps, unemployment, and disability insurance and in block grants to bankrupt cities, states, and pension funds. Gorging the beast always demands more revenue; and more revenue will always come from those who must “pay their fair share.” That is also a good thing in itself given the innately unfair compensation of the marketplace, which must be rectified by an intelligent, always-growing government, run by humane technocrats rather than grasping Wall Street speculators. In other words, why should we expect serious discussions on the deficit? When so many have so much less than so few, we have hardly begun the necessary “redistributive change.” That is facilitated, not retarded, by large deficits and the need for much higher taxes on the fat cats who did not build their own wealth.

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2. One could make the argument that Barack Obama was the first president since Jimmy Carter to put daylight between Israel and the United States — both rhetorically and materially on issues such as settlements, the Netanyahu government, and disputes with the Palestinians. Yet Obama still received over 60 percent of the Jewish-American vote. That anomaly might suggest a number of things. For all practical purposes, the supposed Israeli lobby is now analogous to the fading Greek lobby — with similarly diminishing clout in foreign policy.

If Obama can still count on a strong majority of the self-identified Jewish vote, then he has established that U.S. policy toward Israel is largely freed from domestic political concerns. Diehard support for Israel now no longer rests with the American Jewish community, though it may come from evangelical Christians and from Americans in general who prefer to support consensual governments in their wars against authoritarians. Obama correctly saw that, more than six decades after the creation of Israel, and a century after the great Jewish immigrations from Eastern Europe, many of today’s American Jews are assimilated and intermarried, not all that familiar with Israeli issues, or simply no more aware of being Jewish than I am of being Swedish. That may be a good thing for the melting pot of America, but it is most certainly a different thing as far as U.S. support for Israel is concerned — as we return to a pre-1967 relationship with a Jewish state that is increasingly on its own.

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3. The traditional conservative antidote to Obamaism has fallen short. That is, the arguments of principled conservatives about the perils of big government, redistributionist economics, and diminutions in personal freedom seem for a majority of Americans to be outweighed by the attraction of government subsidies and entitlements. If there is going to be a check on Barack Obama’s redistributionist agenda, it will probably have to come from upper-middle-class independent voters and blue-state residents. Such Obama supporters may soon notice that the new federal and state tax rates, the envisioned end to traditional deductions such as those for blue-state high taxes and for mortgage interest, and means testing for most government services are aimed precisely at themselves. When the Palo Alto resident grasps that his total income- and payroll-tax burden will be well over 50 percent, his tax deduction for the mortgage interest on his million-dollar-plus, 1,000-square-foot home will be eliminated, and his $250,000 salary still gets him counted as “rich” even after huge taxes and mortgage costs, we may see change — perhaps not in terms of the number of large swings in actual votes, but in the nature of campaign donations, political commentary, and campaign organization. Blue-state elites do not yet believe the voracious Obama tax monster is coming for them, but it isas they will see.

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4. Barack Obama has successfully conducted a number of wars of hyphenated-Americans against the regressive establishment. When the Obama campaign asked supporters to check off which “constituency groups” they identified with but did not include “whites” or “men” among the options, or when the Reverend Joseph Lowery, who gave the 2009 inaugural benediction, can declare without pushback that white people are going to Hell, or when one totals up the Obama administration’s vocabulary of racial polarization (e.g., “nation of cowards,” “my people,” “punish our enemies,” “put y’all back in chains”) and collates the invective with that of the Black Caucus and the likes of MSNBC, then we are headed for a backlash analogous to that of the 1970s among the white working class. In the new racialist landscape, is it any surprise that Jamie Foxx can joke about killing white people, or that Chris Rock can call the Fourth of July “white people’s independence day,” or that Samuel L. Jackson can brag of voting along strictly racial lines, or that Morgan Freeman can equate opposition to Obama with racism, even as he reminds us that Obama is only half black?

Many of us had hoped that the phenomenal rate of intermarriage and assimilation had made the old racial rubrics anachronistic, if not irrelevant, but Obama has managed in brilliant fashion (with the MSM’s active, enthusiastic support) to resurrect them in terms of minority groups’ having grievances against the assumed white majority that does all sorts of awful things, from arresting children on their way to purchase ice cream to stereotyping people solely on the basis of race.

It was almost surreal to watch the pre–November 6 media and political commentariat daily allege racism and attempts to prevent minorities from voting, only to witness their post–November 6 jubilation that Obama’s reelection had given America a reprieve and proven the power of the Other to express itself at the ballot box. When asking a would-be voter to show his a driver’s license is declared tantamount to voter intimidation, while 59 Philadelphia precincts collectively reporting a margin of 19,605 to 0 against Romney is merely proof of the president’s popularity in minority communities, then we have a growing divide that will not be assuaged by cheap “no more red state/blue state” rhetoric from those who help to foster it.

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5. In the new climate of “fat cats,” “corporate jet owners,” “pay your fair share,” “you didn’t build that,” and “1 percent,” the more Americans have, the more they are envious of those who have more. One might have thought that the technological revolution, in combination with the welfare state, had redefined poverty altogether in ways that the fossilized entitlement bureaucracy could hardly grasp. Certainly, a Kia, an iPhone, and a big-screen TV do not disqualify one from the menu of American entitlements. That today’s earner or recipient of $35,000 in wages or entitlements has better appurtenances — in terms of computer power, phone, and car — than the $250,000 earner of 30 years ago means little. The point is not that the modern iPhone gives the poor man access to more knowledge than the entire RAND Corporation had 50 years ago, but that the contemporary RAND Corporation has more access than what an iPhone can provide, leaving its owner in relative terms still poor. That today’s Kia is better in many ways than yesterday’s Mercedes matters little — it is still not today’s Lexus. One of the great lessons in the age of Obama is that wealth and poverty will always remain relative. Happiness is now defined not as having the basics I need, but as ensuring that someone else does not have more. Obama has successfully appealed to the oldest and basest of human emotions — envy and jealousy, masked with the notion of enforced fairnessand for now they trump even the human desire to be free.

Liberals, particularly those masquerading as Christians, seem to have forgotten envy and jealousy, aka “covetousness”, are sins in both the Old and New Testaments.  Couldn’t be a purposeful oversight; must be simple ignorance of Scripture.  Likely because they’ve never read it!

Meanwhile, over at CommentaryMagazine.com, Seth Mandel reports on another aspect of the Michigan Right-to-Work story the MSM hasn’t seen fit to cover:

McGovern’s Futile Warning on Unions

 

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The extent to which George McGovern, who died in late October, was identified with American liberalism itself can be seen in headlines of his various obituaries. CNN’s headline called him an “unabashed liberal voice”; PBS went with “Liberal Icon”; the New York Times chose “Prairie Liberal” (though the online edition dropped the word “prairie”); and the Nation called him a “Touchstone of Liberalism.” The Nation obit, written by John Nichols, proclaimed McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, “the most progressive nominee ever selected by the Democratic Party.”

McGovern, then, possessed unimpeachable liberal credentials. Yet four years before McGovern passed, the liberal blog site Firedoglake was ready to send him packing, and used the occasion to call McGovern perhaps the nastiest insult in the liberal lexicon: “Wal-Mart Lover.” What could have prompted such spite? McGovern, though a committed liberal through and through, was concerned about the growing and coercive power of unions. He felt the need to speak out against the Democrats’ proposed anti-choice legislation, card-check. McGovern chastised his party for its extremism in the Wall Street Journal:

The key provision of EFCA is a change in the mechanism by which unions are formed and recognized. Instead of a private election with a secret ballot overseen by an impartial federal board, union organizers would simply need to gather signatures from more than 50% of the employees in a workplace or bargaining unit, a system known as “card-check.” There are many documented cases where workers have been pressured, harassed, tricked and intimidated into signing cards that have led to mandatory payment of dues.

Under EFCA, workers could lose the freedom to express their will in private, the right to make a decision without anyone peering over their shoulder, free from fear of reprisal.

Anyone who doubts that such “reprisals” were and are a serious danger might have been convinced by what they saw yesterday in Michigan, where Governor Rick Snyder signed right-to-work legislation, which allows people to work without forced unionization as a condition of their employment, into law. Earlier in the day, the Democratic contingent in the state legislature promised violence if the bill went through. The bill did, and Democratic violence and death threats from unions and their Democratic allies emerged immediately. Union leader Jimmy Hoffa then went on CNN and promised more “war.”

It is a testament to the disappearance of moderate Democrats that George McGovern was concerned enough about the party’s growing anti-Democratic extremism to speak out. That aforementioned blog post at Firedoglake made it explicitly clear that “McGovern is the one who is out of step.” Union coercion, according to the left, is mainstream; moderation was long gone.

This has long been a challenge for modern liberalism: how to keep the violence that is always brimming just below the surface of leftist protest movements from getting out of control. But in order to do that successfully, the Democratic Party must have leaders who, like McGovern, are willing to take a stand against it. You’ll search in vain for such leaders today; the White House wouldn’t condemn either the threats of violence or the actual violence yesterday. Perhaps they didn’t want to draw attention to President Obama’s appearance at a pro-union rally the day before.

Democratic leaders might want to admit–even if just to themselves–that McGovern was right. McGovern might have recognized recent events as the natural outgrowth of the unchecked extremism of a Democratic Party too liberal for its “liberal icon.”

The Dims passed “Liberal” long ago; about the same time they pegged the old….

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Which brings us to today’s Money Quote, courtesy of the WSJ and H.L. Mencken, circa the 1930’s:

Here is the perfect pattern of a professional world-saver. His whole life has been devoted to the art and science of spending other people’s money. He has saved millions of the down-trodden from starvation, pestilence, cannibalism, and worse—always at someone else’s expense, and usually at the taxpayer’s. . . .

Of such sort are the young wizards who now sweat to save the plain people from the degradations of capitalism, which is to say, from the degradations of working hard, saving their money, and paying their way. This is what the New Deal and its Planned Economy come to in practise—a series of furious and irrational raids upon the taxpayer, planned casually by professional do-gooders lolling in smoking cars, and executed by professional politicians bent only upon building up an irresistible machine.

And remember, that was back in the ’30’s; which just goes to prove, the more things change, the more they do in fact stay the same.

Then there’s this cautionary tale for The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight, courtesy of Jonah Goldberg, who advises Republicans consider making….

The GOP – not a club for Christians 

 

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In the scramble to make the GOP more diverse, a lot of people are looking at Asian Americans, whom many believe are a natural constituency for the party. I would love it if Asian Americans converted en masse to the Republican Party, but the challenge for Republicans is harder than many appreciate.

President Obama did spectacularly well with Asian Americans, garnering nearly three-quarters of their vote. This runs counter to a lot of conventional wisdom on both the left and the right. On average, Asian American family income is higher and poverty is lower than it is for non-Latino whites. Entrepreneurship, family cohesion and traditional values all run strong among Asian Americans, and reliance on government runs weak.

And yet, Asian Americans — now the fastest-growing minority in Americaare rapidly becoming a core constituency of the Democratic Party.

I’ve joked for years with my Indian American relatives and friends that they are the new Jews because their parents bury them in guilt and overeducate them. Sociologist Milton Himmelfarb observed that “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” Well, Indian Americans earn like Jews and … vote like Jews.

The comparison to Jews is instructive. Perhaps the most common explanation for the GOP’s problem with Asian Americans is the party’s pronounced embrace of Christianity, which turns off many Jews as well.

According to Pew studies, barely a third of Chinese Americans are Christian and less than a fifth of Indian Americans are. “Whenever a Gujarati or Sikh businessman comes to a Republican event, it begins with an appeal to Jesus Christ,” conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza recently told the New York Times magazine. “While the Democrats are really good at making the outsider feel at home, the Republicans make little or no effort.” My friend and colleague Ramesh Ponnuru, an Indian American and devout Catholic, says the GOP has a problem with seeming like a “club for Christians.”

That rings true to me. (Remember, this is Jonah Goldberg writing.) I’ve attended dozens of conservative events where, as the speaker, I was, in effect, the guest of honor, and yet the opening invocation made no account of the fact that the guest of honor wasn’t a Christian. I’ve never taken offense, but I can imagine how it might seem to someone who felt like he was even less part of the club.

A few years ago, Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist, reported this finding: As racial and ethnic diversity increases, social trust and cohesion plummets. “Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer,” Putnam found. “People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

The villain isn’t racism or bigotry or anything so simple. The phenomenon is much more complex. Indeed, it’s not clear why this happens, but it’s clear that it does. Economic inequality and cultural attitudes do not matter much. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” Putnam writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” Part of the explanation stems from the fact that people with shared experiences and cultures draw strength from working together, whereas with strangers, language often becomes guarded, intentions questioned.

The GOP is not a Christian club, but there’s no disputing that Christianity is a major source of strength and inspiration for many Republican activists. This is nothing new. The abolitionist, progressive and civil rights movements were all significantly powered by Christian faith.

As someone who’s long argued for theological pluralism and moral consensus on the right, it strikes me as nuts for the GOP not to do better with Asian Americans, particularly given how little religion has to do with the policy priorities of the day.

Twenty years ago, conservatives started referring to Judeo-Christian values in an effort to be more inclusive. The challenge now is to figure out how to talk in a way that doesn’t cause decent and dedicated Christians to pull in like a turtle, while also appealing to non-Judeo-Christians and the nonreligious. That’ll be hard, requiring more than name-dropping Confucius or Krishna.

And, it’s important to note, ignorance….

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….is neither a virtue nor principle of Christianity.

On the Lighter Side….

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And in the Education Section, courtesy today of George Lawlor, a little lesson the Dutch finally learned:

Amsterdam to ban smoking marijuana in school

 

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The city of Amsterdam, famed for its weed cafes and easygoing approach to toking up, plans to ban smoking marijuana at schools.

City spokeswoman Iris Reshef says the move is necessary because stoned students are a problem at some schools. Schools had always forbidden the drug, but found it difficult to enforce the rule due to the country’s tolerance policy. Under tolerance, pot is technically illegal but police cannot prosecute people for possession of small amounts.

After a change in national law, the city can now ban the drug at schools under a public nuisance ordinance, and police can levy fines against students who break the rules.

Which brings to mind yet another Liberal conundrum….a hypocritical riddle if you will: why are tobacco products taboo, but smoking weed all the rage?

Finally, since we’re on the subject of Liberal hypocrisy, we’ll call it a day with this sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter, courtesy of Townhall.com‘s Katie Pavlich:

Democrat Jim Moran’s Son Pleads Guilty to Fracturing Girlfriend’s Skull

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War. On. Women.

Remember Patrick Moran? He’s the son of Democratic Rep. Jim Moran and the guy who was caught on video earlier this year encouraging voter fraud while working for his father’s re-election campaign. Today, he pleaded guilty in court for slamming his girlfriend’s head into a metal trash can which fractured her skull. He’s lucky he didn’t take out her eye.

As first reported by Washington City Paper, Patrick Moran and his girlfriend were arguing outside a bar on 14th Street on Dec. 1, when, according to a police report, an officer saw Moran “slam her head into the metal trash can cage.”

The report notes that Moran’s girlfriend was “bleeding heavily from her nose and … her nose and right eye were extremely swollen.” She was transported to Howard University Hospital, and a medical technician told police her nose appeared to be broken and her right eye socket could be fractured.

Moran was sentenced to 90 days in jail which was suspended by the judge, and one year of probation. If he violates his probation he will serve the 90 days. He must also enter a domestic violence intervention program, pay a $50 fine to a domestic violence program and complete 50 hours of community service.

And what brilliant thing did Rep. Moran say in light of the incident?

Rep. Moran told City Paper his son and his son’s girlfriend are “good kids” in an “embarrassing situation.”

Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and now Patrick Moran. It never ends.

Another Liberal apple that didn’t fall far from the tree.  Were we the father of Patrick Moran’s girlfriend, both he and his father would be spending some time in the ICU.

Magoo



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