The Daily Gouge, Thursday, November 17th, 2011

On November 17, 2011, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Thursday, November 17th, 2011….and before we begin, a brief bit of commentary.

On the way to BWI to pick up TLJ’s mother earlier tonight, we listened as Mark Levin, who we like and respect, hung up on a caller that had intimated the time might be approaching when the 2nd Amendment’s provisions for an armed citizenry would come into play.  Levin, as he unfortunately often is, was dismissive of the caller, stating words to the effect that “I don’t even know how to respond to that”, and “I’m not there yet”.

Of course not.  But then again, neither was the caller.  But Levin’s reaction got us thinking; what will it take to make Americans stand up and claim their birthright?  This nation, while certainly conceived in liberty and indeed dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, was also birthed only through force of arms.  Not through the efforts of a standing army, but a relatively motley collection of citizen soldiers.

The Founding Fathers took arms against a tyrannical, but technically-legitimate government who taxed the Colonies unmercifully, while at the same time refusing to consider their legitimate grievances.

Today, America increasingly confronts a ruling elite intent on ensuring its continued power through the redistribution of the fruits of the labor of it’s most productive, a federal judiciary more than willing to trample the very Constitution which grants its authority and a majority of the population that can vote itself money from the remainder.  At what point do patriotic Americans say, “We’re mad as hell….and we’re not going to take this anymore”?!?

Roe v. Wade….Kelo….McCain-Feingold; just because the SCOTUS tells us 2+2=5 doesn’t make it so….neither does it change our view of reality.  Likewise, the mere fact a majority of the Supremes somehow deem Obamascare’s individual mandate constitutional DOESN’T MAKE IT SO!

Unless circumstances dramatically change, and that right soon, Americans will eventually be faced with three inescapable choices: (a) run, (b) relent (i.e., receivership) or (c) revolt.

As ’tis often said, when in doubt….choose (c)!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, classic Coulter:

If Not Romney, Who? If Not Now, When

 

So now, apparently, we have to go through the cycle of the media pushing Newt Gingrich. This is going to be fantastic.

In addition to having an affair in the middle of Clinton’s impeachment; apologizing to Jesse Jackson on behalf of J.C. Watts — one of two black Republicans then in Congress –- for having criticized “poverty pimps,” and then inviting Jackson to a State of the Union address; cutting a global warming commercial with Nancy Pelosi; supporting George Soros’ candidate Dede Scozzafava in a congressional special election; appearing in public with the Rev. Al Sharpton to promote nonspecific education reform; and calling Paul Ryan’s plan to save Social Security “right-wing social engineering,” we found out this week that Gingrich was a recipient of Freddie Mac political money. (receiving for several years $25,000/mo. for acting as “an historian”….no, wait….”a consultant”….uh, I mean….they hired me because “I’d been Speaker of the House”; no sh*t, Sherlock!)

(Even I will admit, however, that Newt was great when he was chairman of GOPAC back in the ’90s with Gay Gaines at the helm.)

Although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the institutions most responsible for the nation’s current financial crisis — were almost entirely Democratic cash cows, they managed to dirty up enough Republicans to make it seem like bipartisan corruption.

Democrats sucked hundreds of millions of dollars out of these institutions: Franklin Raines, $90 million; Jamie Gorelick, $26.4 million; Jim Johnson, $20 million.

By contrast, Republicans came cheap. For the amazingly good price of only $300,000 apiece, Fannie and Freddie bought the good will of former Reps. Vin Weber, R-Minn., Susan Molinari, R-N.Y., and Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.* Former Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y., was even cheaper at $240,000.

[*Correction: After Gingrich admitted last week to receiving $300,000 from Freddie, we found out this week that it was actually closer to $1.6 million.]

So now conservatives shy away from denouncing these crooked organizations for fear of running into Vin Weber at a cocktail party. Sorry, guys — on the plus side, you’re millionaires, but on the downside, you’ve earned the contempt of your fellow man.

The mainstream media keep pushing alternatives to Mitt Romney not only because they are terrified of running against him, but also because they want to keep Republicans fighting, allowing Democrats to get a four-month jump on us. Meanwhile, everyone knows the nominee is going to be Romney.

That’s not so bad if you think the most important issues in this election are defeating Obama and repealing Obamacare.

There may be better ways to stop Obamacare than Romney, but, unfortunately, they’re not available right now. (And, by the way, where were you conservative purists when Republicans were nominating Waterboarding-Is-Torture-Jerry-Falwell-Is-an-Agent-of-Intolerance-My-Good-Friend-Teddy-Kennedy-Amnesty-for-Illegals John McCain-Feingold for president?)

Among Romney’s positives is the fact that he has a demonstrated ability to trick liberals into voting for him. He was elected governor of Massachusetts — one of the most liberal states in the union — by appealing to Democrats, independents and suburban women.

He came close to stopping the greatest calamity to befall this nation since Pearl Harbor by nearly beating Teddy Kennedy in a Senate race. (That is when he said a lot of the things about which he’s since “changed his mind.”) If he had won, we’d be carving his image on Mount Rushmore.

He is not part of the Washington establishment, so he won’t be caught taking money from Freddie Mac or cutting commercials with Nancy Pelosi. Also, Romney will be the first Republican presidential nominee since Ronald Reagan who can talk. Liberals are going to have to dust off their playbook from 30 years ago to figure out how to run against a Republican who isn’t a tongue-tied marble-mouth.

As we’ve known for years, his negatives are: Romneycare and Mormonism.

We look forward with cheery anticipation to an explosion of news stories on some of the stranger aspects of Mormonism. The articles have already been written, but they’re not scheduled for release until the day Romney wraps up the nomination.

Inasmuch as the Democrats’ only argument for the big-eared beanpole who’s nearly wrecked the country is that you must be a racist if you oppose Obama, one assumes a lot of attention will be lavished on the Mormon Church’s historical position on blacks. Church founder Joseph Smith said blacks had the curse of Cain on them and banned blacks from the priesthood, a directive that was not revoked until 1978.

There’s no evidence that this was a policy fiercely pushed by Mitt Romney. To the contrary, when his father, George Romney, was governor of Michigan, he was the most pro-civil rights elected official in the entire country, far ahead of any Democrat.

No one is worried Romney will double-cross us on repealing Obamacare. We worry that Romneycare will make it harder for him to get elected.

But, again, Romney is the articulate Republican. He’s already explained how mandating health insurance in one particular wealthy, liberal Northeastern state is different from inflicting it on the entire country. Our Constitution establishes a federalist system that allows experimentation with different ideas in the individual states.

As governor, Romney didn’t have the ability to change federal laws requiring hospital emergency rooms to treat every illegal alien, drug dealer and vagrant who walked in the door, then sending the bill to taxpayers. (Although David Axelrod, Michelle Obama, Eric Whitaker and Valerie Jarrett did figure out a way to throw poor blacks out of the University of Chicago Medical Center..)

The Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank, supported Romneycare at the time. The biggest warning sign should have been that Gingrich supported it, too.

Most important, Romney has said — forcefully and repeatedly — that his first day in office he will issue a 50-state waiver from Obamacare and will then seek a formal repeal. Romney is not going to get to the White House and announce, “The first thing I’m going to do is implement that fantastic national health care plan signed by my pal, Barack!”

Unlike all other major legislation in the nation’s history, Obamacare was narrowly passed along partisan lines by an aberrationally large one-party majority in Congress. (Thanks, McCain supporters!) Not one single Republican in Congress voted for it, not even John McCain.

Obamacare is going to be repealed — provided only that a Republican wins the next presidential election.

If a Republican does not win, however, it will never be repealed. Recall that, in order to boast about the amazing revenue savings under Obamacare, Democrats had to configure the bill so that the taxes to pay for it start right away, but the goodies don’t kick in until 2014. Once people are thrown off their insurance plans and are forced to depend on the government for “free” health care, Obamacare is here to stay. (And Newt Gingrich will be calling plans to tinker with it “right-wing social engineering.”)

Instead of sitting on our thumbs, wishing Ronald Reagan were around, or chasing the latest mechanical rabbit flashed by the media, conservatives ought to start rallying around Romney as the only Republican who has a shot at beating Obama. We’ll attack him when he’s president.

It’s fun to be a purist, but let’s put that on hold until Obama and his abominable health care plan are gone, please.

As William F. Buckley so famously observed, our choice should be the most Conservative candidate that’s….ELECTABLE!  Newt’s damaged goods; it’s not about forgiveness….it’s all about JUDGMENT!

Meanwhile, remember Team Tick-Tock’s dedication to “shovel-ready” construction projects?

State Department Won’t Budge on Call for Pipeline Review Despite Rerouting

 

A day after Canadian oil company Trans Canada agreed to reroute its proposed Keystone oil pipeline around Nebraska’ ecologically sensitive Ogallala Aquifer, the State Department refused to budge on a new environmental review of the project that is not slated for completion until 2013 — after the presidential election.

The State Department on Tuesday denied that the delay is designed to appease environmentalists, a core constituency of the Obama administration. “I can only say, as we’ve said repeatedly on the record, that the White House had no bearing on the decision-making process,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Tuesday. “The State Department has the lead on this issue, and we’re going about it in a very transparent and apolitical way.”

But representatives of the oil industry beg to differ. “Unfortunately, this was clearly a political decision on the part of the president. He sacrificed 20,000 new American jobs to save one and that was his own….”

For more on the Keystone XL travesty, we turn to the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger:

Obama Abandons (Private) Labor

The Keystone decision is a signal to blue-collar workers that this is no longer their fathers’ Democratic Party.

 

The decision by the Obama administration to “delay” building the Keystone XL pipeline is a watershed moment in American politics. The implication of a policy choice rarely gets more stark than this. Put simply: Why should any blue-collar worker who isn’t hooked for life to a public budget vote for Barack Obama next year?

The Keystone XL pipeline would have created at least 20,000 direct and indirect jobs. Much of this would have been well-paid work for craftsmen, not jobs as hod carriers to repave the Interstate.

On a recent trip to Omaha, Neb., Mr. Obama signaled where his head was on the pipeline during a TV interview: “Folks in Nebraska, like folks all across the country, aren’t going to say to themselves, ‘We’re going to take a few thousand jobs if it means our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health.” Imagine if he’d been leading a wagon train of workers and farmers across the Western frontier in 1850.

Within days of the Keystone decision, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, said his country would divert sales of the Keystone-intended oil to Asia. Translation: Those lost American blue-collar pipeline jobs are disappearing into the Asian sun. Incidentally, Mr. Harper has said he wants to turn Canada into an energy “superpower,” exploiting its oil, gas and hydroelectric resources. Meanwhile, the American president shores up his environmental base in Hollywood and on campus. Perhaps our blue-collar work force should consider emigrating to Canada.

Recall as well the president’s gut reaction in 2010 to the BP Gulf oil spill: an order shutting down deep-water drilling in U.S. waters. The effect on blue-collar workers in that industry was devastating. Writing in these pages this week, Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski described how Mexico, the Russians, Canada and even Cuba are moving to exploit oil and gas deposits adjacent to ours, while the Obama administration slow-walks new drilling permits.

No subject sits more centrally in the American political debate than the economic plight of the middle class. Presumably that means people making between $50,000 and $175,000 a year. The president fashions himself their champion.

This surely is bunk. Mr. Obama is the champion of the public-sector middle class. Just as private business has become an abstraction to the new class of public-sector Democratic politicians and academics who populate the Obama administration, so too the blue-collar workers employed by them have become similarly abstracted.

You would think someone in the private labor movement would wake up and smell the tar sands. Last week’s Big Labor “victory” in Ohio was about spending tens of millions to support state and local government workers. Many union families attached to the state’s withering auto plants no doubt voted with their public-sector brothers in solidarity. But why? Where the rubber hits the road—new jobs that will last a generation—what does this public-sector vote do for them?

Many farmers, ranchers and timber workers went Republican years ago over an increasingly ideological and uncompromising Democratic environmentalism that was wrecking their livelihoods. Now the same thing is happening to blue-collar workers. Mr. Obama from his first days made clear his hostility to carbon production. At best he views much of the private blue-collar work force as carbon enablers for whom he himself will create a new harmony of “green” industries. That would be Solyndra.

Solyndra isn’t just a fiasco. It’s a clear warning that launching new industries onto the big muddy of massive public subsidies is fraught with economic and political problems.

The Democratic promise to private blue-collar workers has been that the party would use its clout to in effect “manufacture” new jobs out of public budgets—high-speed rail projects, school construction and the like. But surely that’s gone aglimmering.

Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, New York and California—whose blue-collar families traditionally hand those states to Democratic candidates—are all locked in budgetary death struggles to pay for their public workers. That conversation is about generations-long budget commitments. There isn’t going to be anything large left over for “public-private” job schemes.

There’s little hope that anyone in the leadership of the traditional union movement, public or private, would entertain a rethinking of their historic ties to the Democratic Party. But younger workers should. The economic crisis of the past two years is no blip. In some construction unions, unemployment is well over 25%. The only force out there that can create real jobs over the longer term is the strongest private economic growth the U.S. can muster. The past three years of a Democratic administration’s economic policies have the U.S. mired in a growth rate rotating like a forgotten flywheel around 2%.

America’s workers, no matter the color of their collars, desperately need a higher economic growth rate than decisions such as the delay on Keystone are going to give them. The Keystone shuffle should make clear to many middle-class workers that this is no longer their fathers’ Democratic Party. It’s going in a different direction, toward the clouds. This may be the year to open negotiations with the alternative.

Henninger’s very valid points notwithstanding, we’ve yet to hear or read anyone identify the REAL losers should the Keystone XL’s approval be denied.  It’s not the Environazis, whose concerns over “potential” petrochemical contamination and “possible” environmental impact are entirely bogus….nor is it the theoretical loss of jobs for the various construction trades. No; the biggest loser, as is often the case in purely political conflicts, would be John Q. Average Middle-Class Citizen, who will not only continue to pay higher prices at the pump, but also send more and more of his son’s overseas to ensure the flow of Arab oil necessitated by a lack of dependable domestic and friendly foreign sources.

It sorta begs the question, whose side are Dimocrats on?!?

Since we’re questioning whose side our government is on, we learn the….

TSA Makes Major Changes to Airport Security Ahead of Busy Travel Season

 

This weekend marks the beginning of the Thanksgiving holiday travel surge. More than 23 million passengers are expected at the nation’s airports, and to make travel a little less hectic, the federal Transportation Security Administration is showcasing some major changes to airline security.
In one key change, kids 12 and younger won’t need to take off their sneakers at the screening check points. Although that change has been in place for a couple of months, the Thanksgiving rush is its first major test.
TSA chief John Pistole told Fox News that the new approach is driven by the intelligence gathered on potential threats. “Children themselves, of course, are not terrorists. But we also know that they can be used by terrorists to do bad things, which we’ve seen overseas,” he said. “Fortunately we haven’t seen that here.”
Pistole said the decisions also come down to measuring risk, because the TSA can’t protect every passenger and every airplane all of the time. “This is all about risk mitigation, risk management. It’s not risk elimination,” Pistole emphasized, adding that kids are low risk compared to the shoe bomber who tried to bring down a jet over the Atlantic 10 years ago.“
The shoes Richard Reid had in December of ’01 were large shoes, so simply from an explosives standpoint, smaller shoes, smaller feet – much less likely in terms of something bad.”

Soooo….we’re making this revelation public….WHY?!?  What….Al-Queda doesn’t peruse America’s MSM?!?

Moving to today’s Money Quote, Hairball Harry once again demonstrates his amazing grasp of economics and basic business….

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday bashed Republicans’ persistent focus on slashing regulations as a way to improve the economy.

My Republican friends are yet to bring a single piece of evidence that the regulations they hate so much have the economic harm they claim,” said Reid from the floor. “That’s because there isn’t any.

Speaking of dim bulbs, we turn to the “And Your Point Is….?!?” segment, courtesy today of James Taranto and another sterling example of modern Liberalism’s educated idiocy:

Michael Muskal of the Los Angeles Times raises an imaginative historical analogy in a blog post titled “Occupy Wall Street Camps Are Today’s Hoovervilles”:

The Occupy sites that sprouted up in recent months in response to the poor economy resemble the Great Depression’s so-called Hoovervilles, shanty villages inhabited by a newly created class of poor people.

Named for Republican President Herbert Hoover, who was thrown out of office after one term because of his failed policies in dealing with the Depression, the Hoovervilles ultimately helped shape the New Deal and the vision of a liberal state that would provide an economic safety net.

One question he never answers, though: If the camps are today’s Hoovervilles, who is today’s Hoover?

On the Lighter Side….

Magoo



Archives