It’s Friday, April 8th, 2016…but before we begin, as this quote from one Yousef Al-Otaiba, UAE Ambassador to the United States confirms…
“Sadly, behind all the talk of change, the Iran we have long known — hostile, expansionist, violent — is alive and well, and as dangerous as ever.“
…there’s at least one Muslim in Washington…
…who knows the score in the Middle East, not to mention the game being played!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
We lead off the last edition of the week with four editorials from the WSJ detailing how The Left is assaulting the country, our Constitution and the rule of law on so many fronts it’s tough to keep track of it all. First, and be honest, is anyone out there aware…
“President Obama’s regulators aren’t slowing down, alas. And on Wednesday they unveiled another part of their plan to push Americans out of private investment accounts and into government-run plans.
The Department of Labor says its so-called fiduciary rule will make financial advisers act in the best interests of clients. What Labor doesn’t say is that the rule carries such enormous potential legal liability and demands such a high standard of care that many advisers will shun non-affluent accounts. Middle-income investors may be forced to look elsewhere for financial advice even as Team Obama is enabling a raft of new government-run competitors for retirement savings. This is no coincidence.
Labor’s new rule will start biting in January as the President is leaving office. Under the rule, financial firms advising workers moving money out of company 401(k) plans into Individual Retirement Accounts will have to follow the new higher standards. But Labor has already proposed waivers from the federal Erisa law so new state-run retirement plans don’t have the same regulatory burden as private employers do.
This competitive advantage could be significant. Last month the board of California’s new “Secure Choice” retirement plan wrote to state legislators about their “exciting win” in Washington. They reported that employers enrolling workers in the new government-run plan “would have no liability or fiduciary duty for the plan.” Score! The California bureaucrats added that “we have been given the green light to auto-enroll workers into an Individual Retirement Account (IRA).”…”
Not to mention, with all of America in government-run plans…
…the better to misappropriate your retirement funds, my dears!
Second, the Journal explains one of the primary reason those retirement funds haven’t been growing as of late:
“I’m supposed to be serving the taxpayers, not the President? Seriously?!?”
“…“If the rules can be changed arbitrarily and applied retroactively, how can any U.S. company engage in the long-term investment planning necessary to compete,” Mr. Read writes. “The new ‘rules’ show that there are no set rules.Political dogma is the only rule.”
He’s right, as every CEO we know will admit privately. This politicization has spread across most of the economy during the Obama years, as regulators rewrite longstanding interpretations of longstanding laws in order to achieve the policy goals they can’t or won’t negotiate with Congress. Telecoms, consumer finance, for-profit education, carbon energy, auto lending, auto-fuel economy, truck emissions, home mortgages, health care and so much more.
Capital investment in this recovery has been disappointingly low, and one major reason is political intrusion into every corner of business decision-making. To adapt Mr. Read, the only rule is that the rules are whatever the Obama Administration wants them to be.The results have been slow growth, small wage gains, and a growing sense that there is no legal restraint on the political class.“
Yeah…so the Progressives purposefully promoting an increasingly anemic economy, who brought us Project Porkulus, Cash for Clunkers, The Utterly Unaffordable Care Act and a myriad of other dubious spending programs, not to mention a doubling of the national debt and 96 million permanently unemployed Americans, now want to manage the nation’s private retirement programs?
Hey, why not; after all, haven’t Social Security, Medicare and every other government program…
…been rousing success stories?!? Oh,…maybe if they changed the names; but more on that later.
Next, as Dan Henninger notes, far from standing athwart the issue like a contrary colossus, Bernie’s an integral part of the Panama problem:
“…Most governments, including ours, overtax their citizens to feed their own insatiable need for money.Then the legal thieves running the government and their cronies, unwilling to abide the tax levels they created, move their wealth offshore to places like Panama. Arguably, all the world’s people should be able to move their assets “offshore” to escape governments that are smothering economic life and growth, which has stalled in the U.S., Europe and Asia…”
Here’s the juice: Liberals are, at their core, contrarians:
Now, to the heart of the matter; for as Bret Stephens reports, they’re corrupt contrarians at that:
“I scratch your ample Socialist backside, you scratch mine!”
“…But nobody can be surprised by any of this. And nobody should look away from the central lesson of the scandal, though they’re trying. To wit, the story here isn’t about tax evaders and offshore accounts, deplorable as they may be. It’s about public policies and incentives that make a career in politics an expedient route to personal enrichment.
The point is illustrated by Brazil, where state-owned oil giant Petrobras sits at the center of the multiplying corruption scandals. The former chairwoman of Petrobras was Ms. Rousseff, whose main qualification for the job—she’s also a former Marxist guerrilla—was her reputation as an aggressive party hack.She has not been accused of using her position for personal enrichment, but Lula is under investigation for accepting Petrobras kickbacks in the form of a luxury apartment and other goodies. He denies the charges.
Meanwhile, Petrobras last year estimated its corruption-related losses at $17 billion.At least 57 Brazilians are being investigated for using Mossack Fonseca to open 107 offshore companies. Throughout all this, the ruling party’s explicit economic agenda is to build “national champions” like Petrobras through the use of a state-owned “development bank” and other government subsidies.
…Which brings us to Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee and—if Republicans nominate either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz—likely the next president of the United States. Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangements are supposed to be the scandal that will fell her, but what ought to frighten Americans is the way the Clintons mix money and power in the black box of their eponymous foundation to award themselves more of each.
This is the Brazilianization of American politics, albeit with more legal finessing.But the stench is the same, and it’s why so many Americans, Democrats included, instinctively recoil at the thought of another Clinton presidency…”
And you don’t want to see Hillary with a Brazilian! The mere thought alone is reason enough to usher her into blissful and permanent obscurity.
Oh,…by the way, we disagree with Stephens’ assessment of Ted Cruz as an inevitable loser to Hillary in the general election.
Moving on, in this article from Townhall.com, Stephen Moore asks…
“The idea of American exceptionalism has been embedded in our collective DNA for generations. It is the faith-based belief that, as Ronald Reagan put it, America is a “shining city on a hill.” Do modern liberals believe that?
I almost never try to get into the other side’s head or ascribe ill motives to those on the left. They are, I’ve always believed, misguided, not malign.But I’m having second thoughts after listening to Barack Obama’s defense of communism/socialism when he was in Argentina. He advised young people to get behind “what works” economically — as if there is some deep mystery here.
Obama didn’t misspeak.The modern left in America really has come to believe that communism, socialism, Marxism and totalitarianism — or other terms for the monopolization of power into the hands of a ruling elite — are superior to free-market capitalism.
The president of the United States is supposed to be the global spokesman for free enterprise. But, instead of traveling to Cuba to point out to the world the decades of stagnation, deprivation and dehumanization at the hands of the Castros, and instead of using this moment in history to showcase the triumph of capitalism 90 miles away, Obama praises Cuba’s health care and education systems.
He might as well have been praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time.Even more unbelievable: The media applauded. (Not unbelievable when one realizes they’re all singing from the same sheet of music!)
How far the Democratic Party has fallen. Can anyone imagine Obama, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders having the gumption or wisdom to tell Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”?…”
Color us surprised only by the fact Moore is just now coming to this realization. Progressives initially abandoned the America of the Founding Fathers not in the 60’s, but in the heady days of Teddy and Woodrow; the New Deal and Great Society simply highlighted their departure from the reservation of the Republic. The ascendency of The Obamao, Hillary and Bernie confirm they’re operating in completely detached dimension.
Speaking of those detached from reality, PJ Media relates the thoughts of…
“Ben Stein lashed out at Donald Trump on Monday for “very scary” economic pitches and chalked up Trump’s performance among voters concerned about the economy to “sheer idiocy.”
The former Nixon/Ford speechwriter, actor and writer told CNN that in all his years as an economist, “which is roughly 50 years, I’ve never seen such nonsense as we just heard from Mr. Trump and it breaks my heart, it makes me want to cry because I’m Republican, I’ve never voted for a Democrat, and to think the guy who’s our likely standard bearer has such nonsensical ideas of every single aspect of the economy is just breathtakingly horrible.”
Stein was responding to Trump telling supporters at a Wisconsin rally Monday that the U.S. is “going to go into a massive recession.” “But I also say, if I’m president, that’s not going to happen because I’m going to straighten things out before it happens,” Trump added…”
Ignoring the politically-correct Progressive talking points, this typifies…
…The Donald’s response to everything; i.e., utter idiocy!!!
Following up on our earlier reference to Liberals attempting to alter the meaning of what “is” is, courtesy of NRO, the great Victor Davis Hanson offers his observations on…
“The Obama administration must be aware that in the 1930s, the Soviet Union wiped clean all photos, recordings, and films of Leon Trotsky on orders from Josef Stalin. Trotsky was deemed politically incorrect, and therefore his thoughts and photos simply vanished.”
“…So what is the point of trying to change reality by making up new names and phrases? It’s mostly politics. If Hollande had used the label “skinheads” to describe European right-wing movements, the White House might not have altered the video. If a half-million right-wing Cubans were pouring illegally into Florida each year, or if 100,000 Serbs were crossing the border from Canada, the Library of Congress might not object to calling them “illegal aliens.” Clapper and Brennan are unlikely to claim that the Crusades were largely secular or an exercise in self-purification.
The Obama administration probably would not describe rogue police officers charged with crimes as “justice-involved police.” If cities with conservative mayors declined to enforce the Endangered Species Act or federal firearms statutes, they probably would not be known as “sanctuary cities,” but rather as “nullification cities.”
Orwell also wrote about a futuristic dystopia ruled by a Big Brother government that created politicized euphemisms to reinvent reality. He placed his novel in the year 1984, warning Westerners about what was in their future. We are now 32 years beyond 1984, but we are at last living Orwell’s nightmare.“
“…It’s very difficult, keeping up with the ever-changing PC permutations of the language. We all understand that what was once global cooling and then global warming is now just plain climate change. And that when Democrats pander to the “working class,” they really mean the “non-working class.”
With these people, every day is 1984 and they’re the Ministry of Truth. Obamacare is the Affordable Care Act — and it’s unaffordable. And when your income-tax return is docked because you couldn’t afford affordable care, it’s not a fine, it’s a “shared responsibility tax.”
How about the word “settled”? Settled science is in fact religion, and any researcher who dares dissent from the various cults’ orthodoxies will lose his research grant and any chance for tenure, and eventually may even be prosecuted. (Ask Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.)
Settled law means anything the moonbats agree with. Five seconds after the Supreme Court overturned the eternal definition of marriage, the gays were calling it “settled law.”
But if this same crowd doesn’t like a law, they tell us the Constitution is a “living document,” by which they mean they want to get rid of some of the Bill of Rights, starting with the Second Amendment.After 230 years, it should be replaced with “common-sense gun laws,” common sense being decided by the same people who gave you Obamacare and Fast and Furious…”
Here’s the bottomline: be it altering the data disproving the theory of anthropogenic global warming or the methodology behind the calculation of the unemployment rate, Progressives play fast and loose with the figures whenever it suits the promotion of their policies.
In other words, 1 John 2:4. And no, Donald, it’s “First” John, not “One” John.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side…
And we’ll call it a week with this little bon mot from Doug Burr, the Mountaineer who put the “pump” in West Virginia’s state sport:
Finally, truth in political advertising!
Magoo
P.S. For those unfamiliar with the wild and wonderful ways of West Virginia, the state sport is synonymous with the state vegetable: “pumpkin”.
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