It’s Monday, August 3rd, 2015…and here’s The Gouge!

First up, as contributors Jeff Foutch and Bill Meisen so accurately observed…

…it’s not that Debbie can’t answer the question, she won’t; because there IS no difference between a Socialist and a modern Dimocrat, be they Sanders, Clinton, Warren, or O’Money.  And THAT, friends, The Obamao’s devastating depredations notwithstanding, STILL doesn’t play in Peoria!

Speaking of the worst plague visited upon America since Lyndon Baines Johnson…

Gun Used in Terror Attack on Mohammed Cartoon Contest Sold Through Operation Fast and Furious

We’re shocked…shocked…the Obamao’s Administration would play a part in the murder of Americans:

Not to mention the inevitable fallout of his pernicious policies.

In a related item of Progressive prevarication, as Katie Pavlich reports at Townhall.com…

We Now Know Where Lois Lerner’s Emails and Backup Tapes Were Destroyed

“There have been dozens of questions surrounding the disappearance of emails belonging to former IRS official Lois Lerner, the woman at the center of the IRS targeting scandal. Some of Lerner’s emails have been recovered, after IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said under oath they were lost forever. Thousands are still missing. But perhaps the most compelling questions that have been asked since the IRS targeting scandal broke in May 2013 are 1) Exactly where were Lerner’s emails and backup tapes destroyed? 2) Who destroyed them?

Now, we have an answer. According to Americans for Tax Reform, Lerner’s hard drive was destroyed by the IRS “Midnight Unit” in West Virginia:

Backup tapes containing as many as 24,000 Lois Lerner emails were destroyed by an IRS entity officially known as the “Media Management Midnight Unit” located in Martinsburg, West Virginia, according to documentation released this week by the House Oversight Committee. In all, 422 backup tapes holding the emails were magnetically “degaussed” despite an agency-wide preservation order and congressional subpoena. Degaussing is a process whereby powerful magnets are used to erase data on a storage tape.

The preservation order came from IRS Chief Technology Officer Terence Millholland in response to Congressional subpoenas over Lois Lerner’s emails. However, the agency completely failed to ensure the order was followed or understood. According to the House Oversight report:

“The IRS failed to ensure compliance with the preservation order at each turn. The IRS failed to confirm compliance with the preservation order in February 2014, upon learning of the gap in emails; failed to ensure the Media Management Midnight Unit, the team that destroyed the backup tapes, properly understood the preservation order; and failed to make certain that individuals who ordered the destruction of the specific media, in this instance the backup tapes, properly understood the preservation order.”

Keep in mind Lerner’s hard drive didn’t simply “crash” on its own, but instead had physical damage. According to one Treasury Inspector General, the hard drive likely crashed due to “an impact of some sort.” The question is who damaged the hard drive and whether it was done on purpose to destroy evidence…”

“Question”…WHAT “question“?!?

First, please, explain to us what’s so difficult to “understand” about a “preservation order”?!?  The “Media Management Midnight Unit” does comprender Inglés…

…no?!?

Though the failure to follow such an order…particularly when instructed to disregard it by a much more senior source, whether by inference or a direct countermanding order…

…is far easier to comprender!

Here’s the juice: for the first time in American history, we’re faced with an entire Administration which lies every time anyone in it opens their lips, and which is antithetically opposed to the constitutional republic put in place by the Founding Fathers.

And in the Environmental Moment, since we’re on the subject of the creature committed to subverting the Constitution, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again; and he’s at it…again:

Obama set to announce steeper emissions cuts from US power plants

“President Barack Obama will impose steeper cuts on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants across the country than previously expected, senior administration officials said Sunday, in what the president called the most significant step the U.S. has ever taken to fight global warming.

The Obama administration is expected to finalize the rule at a White House event on Monday, a year after proposing unprecedented carbon dioxide limits. Obama, in a video posted on Facebook, said the limits were backed up by decades of data and facts showing that without tough action, the world will face more extreme weather and escalating health problems like asthma.

“Climate change is not a problem for another generation,” Obama said. “Not anymore.”…”

For once this lying piece of Socialist sh*t is telling the truth; he actually is trying to make the junk science of climate change a problem for this generation.  Just ask…

…the good citizens of West Virginia and Kentucky.

Yet still the they cling to the claim their policies will reduce energy costs while improving grid reliability; you know…similar to the impact of Obamacare on your health insurance rates and quality of medical care!!!  So how does this square with their own estimation the increased CO2 standards will raise electricity rates a minimum of 4.9% by 2020…not to mention closing every non-conforming coal-fired plant in the country?!?  Yeah…that ought to work!

Meanwhile, though by their own under-estimations Team Tick-Tock forecasts their emissions limits will cost consumer $8.8 billion a year by 2030, in exchange, the biggest liars in U.S. history assure Americans they will experience significantly fewer extreme weather patterns and asthma attacks:

In the words of the immortal Frank Gorshin, riddle us this, Obamaman: since new, more efficient plants have been replacing older ones since 2005, and have supposedly reduced CO2 emissions by some 13% to date…has America experienced a commensurate decrease in “extreme weather patterns and escalating health problems like asthma?

We didn’t think so.

Next up, courtesy of Townhall.com, John Hawkins recounts the wisdom of a man possessed of more wisdom and common sense in his little finger than Barry Obama in his oversized ears…or his wife’s bloated backside:

In Honor of His 103rd Birthday, Here Are The 20 Best Quotes From The Late, Great Milton Friedman

Yesterday would have been the 103^rdbirthday of Milton Friedman, who was one of the most brilliant economists of the last century. In honor of Friedman, here are his 20 best quotes.

20) “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

19) “Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era.”

18) “It is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.”

17) “So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.”

16) “When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union – like public housing in the United States – look decrepit within a year or two of their construction…”

15) “The great danger to the consumer is the monopoly – whether private or governmental. His most effective protection is free competition at home and free trade throughout the world. The consumer is protected from being exploited by one seller by the existence of another seller from whom he can buy and who is eager to sell to him. Alternative sources of supply protect the consumer far more effectively than all the Ralph Naders of the world.”

14) “Two major arguments are offered for introducing socialized medicine in the United States: first, that medical costs are beyond the means of most Americans; second that socialization will somehow reduce costs. The second can be dismissed out of hand — at least until someone can find some example of an activity that is conducted more economically by the government than private enterprise. As to the first, the people of the country must pay the costs one way or the other; the only question is whether they pay them directly on their own behalf, or indirectly through the mediation of government bureaucrats who will subtract a substantial slice for their own salaries and expenses.”

13) “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

12) “The supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number – for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs – jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.”

11) “I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.”

10) “There is all the difference in the world, however, between two kinds of assistance through government that seem superficially similar: first, 90 percent of us agreeing to impose taxes on ourselves in order to help the bottom 10 percent, and second, 80 percent voting to impose taxes on the top 10 percent to help the bottom 10 percent – William Graham Sumner’s famous example of B and C decided what D shall do for A. The first may be wise or unwise, an effective or ineffective way to help the disadvantaged – but it is consistent with belief in both equality of opportunity and liberty. The second seeks equality of outcome and is entirely antithetical to liberty.”

9) “When the United States was formed in 1776, it took 19 people on the farm to produce enough food for 20 people. So most of the people had to spend their time and efforts on growing food. Today, it’s down to 1% or 2% to produce that food. Now just consider the vast amount of supposed unemployment that was produced by that. But there wasn’t really any unemployment produced. What happened was that people who had formerly been tied up working in agriculture were freed by technological developments and improvements to do something else. That enabled us to have a better standard of living and a more extensive range of products.”

8) “I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tentacles and get bad results elsewhere.”

7) “We economists don’t know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can’t sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you’ll have a tomato shortage. It’s the same with oil or gas.”

6) “The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”

5) “Workers paying taxes today can derive no assurance from trust funds that they will receive benefits from when they retire. Any assurance derives solely from the willingness of future taxpayers to impose taxes on themselves to pay for benefits that present taxpayers are promising themselves. This one sided ‘compact between the generations,’ foisted on generations that cannot give their consent, is a very different thing from a ‘trust fund.’ It is more like a chain letter.”

4) “There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.” (And THAT was THEN!!!)

3) “Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it… gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

2) “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

1) “I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”

On the Lighter Side…

Finally, in News of the Bizarre, coming soon to a socialized Obamacare facility near you:

Woman wakes from hysterectomy to find front teeth missing

“A woman in the UK who underwent a hysterectomy said she woke from surgery to find her doctor had removed two of her front teeth. “I woke up from an operation with two teeth missing, and I cannot believe that I still have not been able to get a straight answer from the hospital,” Clare Jones, 47, of Newcastle-under-Lyme told Metro.co.uk.

…Doctors allegedly could not account for her additional missing teeth…

…which has now led to an investigation…”

Yeah…like Fast & Furious, the IRS, Benghazi, etc., etc., etc. ad infinitum ad nauseam!

One brief administrative note: as Tuesday marks the 36th anniversary of our betrothal to TLJ, in the interests of marital bliss, we’ll be taking Wednesday off.  Catch you on Friday.

Magoo