It’s Thursday, April 26th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, it’s the “Councils Of War Never Fight….and Neither Do Committees” segment, courtesy of the WSJ and Team Tick-Tock’s determination to revive….

The Spirit of Kellogg-Briand

Obama’s committee to abolish human evil.

The occasion was solemn, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Elie Wiesel showed President Obama around the Washington museum that memorializes Jewish victims of the Nazis. In his speech on Monday, the President repeatedly invoked the phrase “never again.” Then he touted the Administration’s newest weapon against genocide: the Atrocities Prevention Board.

This is not an item from the Onion. A new permanent “interagency” committee that gathered for the first time Monday is now America’s first line of response to brewing trouble. Meetings will be called. Treasury, State and the Pentagon will have seats at the table. Hot coffee will no doubt be served. White House aide Samantha Power, who wrote a book on America’s failure to respond to genocide, is the board’s first chairman. Let’s hope this committee to stop human evil works better than the Kellogg-Briand pact to end all war in 1928.

The panel’s unveiling at the Holocaust Memorial Museum was the anticlimax of an otherwise strong speech. Mentioning every important killing field between Buchenwald and Darfur, Mr. Obama declared that, “National sovereignty is never a license to slaughter your people,” adding the obvious caveat that this “does not mean that we intervene militarily every time there’s an injustice in the world.”

Yet the idea of an atrocities board is revealing. The Obama Administration’s approach to human rights and foreign policy puts process, consensus, committees and U.N. approval above American leadership and possibly contentious action, which requires political will and the courage of conviction. The choice rests with Commanders in Chief, not a committee. President Clinton acted in Kosovo; he didn’t in Rwanda, to his later regret. (Yeah….right up until he found his next target to hit on.)

Mr. Obama’s own Rwanda test is Syria, which (to use his words) reveals “man’s endless capacity for cruelty” with 10,000 dead and counting. Bashar Assad’s regime is Iran’s best friend and an enemy of the West, but the U.S. has largely sat on the sidelines, using Russian and Chinese opposition at the United Nations as an excuse to do very little.

Maybe the Atrocities Prevention Board can chew over the Administration’s Syrian abdication at its next session.

Which is yet another way for The Obamao to vote “present” without leaving any fingerprints.  The only place the buck stops with this guy….

….is on someone else’s desk.

Next up, Jonah Goldberg updates us on a “former” Tick-Tock confidante who’s been flying under the radar of late:

Obama’s Tainted Bundler

Jon Corzine left Goldman Sachs with a net worth far exceeding even that of Mitt Romney today. Many accounts of his tenure at Goldman suggest he “failed up” the corporate ladder.

Pushed out of Goldman in a power struggle (sparked in part by his support for a government bailout of Long-Term Capital Management), he nonetheless pocketed somewhere between $350 million and $500 million when the company went public. He used the cash to buy himself a Senate seat, spending $62 million out of his own pocket.

After the Senate, he spent nearly $40 million of his own money to win the New Jersey governorship. While he was running for senator, the married-but-separated Corzine struck up a romantic relationship with Carla Katz, also married and head of Local 1034 of the Communications Workers of America. They broke up in 2004, but the flirting apparently never ended. In 2007, Katz and Corzine were both involved in negotiations over a state workers contract. In one email during that time obtained by the Newark Star-Ledger, Katz informs the governor, “BTW, I had an over the top erotic dream about you last night. Bad boy!!”

This alone should have disqualified Corzine from any position requiring judgment!

Bad boy indeed. When the couple broke up, and after her union had endorsed Corzine and worked for his re-election, the governor’s lawyers negotiated a settlement whereby he reportedly paid Katz more than $6 million and forgave a half-million-dollar loan he made to her when they were still an item.

When Corzine ran for re-election as governor, both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden stumped for him. Biden explained that from the moment he and the president sat down to figure out their economic strategy, “Literally, the first guy I called was Jon Corzine. It’s not a joke. It’s not a joke. (Trust us, Joe; with $1.6B of other people’s money still missing, no one’s laughing.) First of all, he’s the smartest guy I know in terms of the economy and on finance, and I really mean that.” (Biden needs to widen his circle of economic contacts.)

Despite that ringing endorsement, Corzine lost his 2009 re-election bid to reformer Chris Christie. So Corzine went back to Wall Street, as chief executive of MF Global Holdings, a bond trading firm. A research note from the firm of Sander O’Neill Partners summarized what the Street expected from Corzine: “We suspect that his contacts in Washington could prove useful as MF Global navigates a shifting regulatory environment.”

Corzine proceeded to do exactly the sorts of things Wall Street has become infamous for: making crazy bets with other people’s money, counting on governments to bail out the private sector and, allegedly, expecting to get friendly treatment from regulators. Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was an old friend and colleague of Corzine’s at Goldman Sachs and in Washington. Gensler had been a key aide to Sen. Paul Sarbanes and had reportedly worked closely with Corzine writing the Sarbanes-Oxley bill. At MF Global, under Gensler’s watch, Corzine bet more than $6 billion on the European sovereign debt crisis, using borrowed client money. MF Global also apparently commingled client and company funds to pay off financial obligations, which is illegal.

Under Corzine, MF Global lost well over $1 billion, and I don’t mean in the profit/loss sense. I mean it was physically misplaced and Corzine cannot account for where it went. The Justice Department is investigating, and news media accounts suggest a criminal prosecution is likely. Somewhat better late than never, Gensler recused himself after MF Global went bankrupt.

So, why the trip down memory lane? Because the Obama campaign just announced that Corzine is still on the list of top-tier bundlers for the Obama re-election campaign. Corzine has raised more than half a million dollars for Obama.

Obama is constantly denouncing “millionaires and billionaires” for playing by their own rules. It’s true that the campaign told one reporter in February that it wouldn’t take more money from Corzine himself, but it’s been happy to let the man solicit donations for Obama even as Corzine is under investigation by Obama’s own Justice Department. How cozy.

Tell me, what’s the point of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and its countless sympathizers in the Democratic Party and the media, if that’s good enough? Whatever happened to changing how Washington works?

We’re about to enter a very long campaign in which where an apparently squeaky-clean Mitt Romney is going to be demonized for his success and dragged through the gutter. Meanwhile, Obama took cash from a true denizen of the gutter.

Then again, he launched his political campaign in the home of a true denizen of the gutter….

….bought his house from a true denizen of the gutter….

….spent 20 years listening to the racist rantings of a true denizen of the gutter….

….and learned his politics from true denizens of the gutter:

His entire life has been spent in the gutter.  Hells bells; by now it’s his nature.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the WSJ sees an opening for the new leader of The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight:

The Romney Opportunity

Running on biography and the economy won’t be enough.

With Newt Gingrich finally leaving the GOP Presidential race, Mitt Romney is now closer to realizing the ambition he has so long pursued: He has an even-money chance to become America’s 45th President. He’s more likely to fulfill that ambition if he overcomes his cautious nature and runs a campaign that is equal to America’s current political moment.

This will not be the instinct of Mr. Romney or his close-knit group of advisers. Looking at the polls, they see a nearly even race, with President Obama below 50% despite the beating Mr. Romney took in the primaries.

The temptation will be to assume the public has decided to fire the incumbent and so run a campaign to become the safe alternative. Take no policy risk, stress Mr. Romney’s biography, his attractive family and the seven habits of highly effective businessmen, and then hammer away on the economy.

It’s possible, if job creation sputters again or Europe goes into bond-market arrest, that this kind of campaign will be enough to win. It’s also possible—more likely in our view—that this will play into Mr. Obama’s strengths of personal likability and Oval Office experience, especially if the economy keeps chugging on its current slow-growth path. Mr. Romney will have to make a case not merely against Mr. Obama’s failings but also for why he has the better plan to restore prosperity.

On the economy in particular, such a larger argument would fit the country’s current mood. The public’s anxiety isn’t merely about the failures of the last three years, as important as it is for Mr. Romney to score this Administration for its failed stimulus, crony capitalism, hyperregulation, soaring debt and ObamaCare.

Americans are more deeply worried than at any time since the 1970s about their country’s long-term prospects. Why aren’t middle-class incomes rising? Why are nonmilitary public institutions failing—from K-12 education to entitlements?

Mr. Obama understands these anxieties, even if he has no new answer for them. So his diversionary re-election strategy will be a combination of class warfare, more government subsidies (free student loans!), and personal attacks on Mr. Romney for being wealthy. Mr. Romney will need allies who can rebut these attacks.

But he’ll find it easier to defeat Mr. Obama’s argument—even to transcend it—if he offers his own economic narrative that reaches back to the mistakes of the Bush Administration to explain how we got here and how he can get us out. Politically, this will help shield Mr. Romney from Mr. Obama’s inevitable attempt to link the Republican to the Bush era. Such a critique also has the advantage of being true.

Before Mr. Obama’s stimulus, Mr. Bush joined with Nancy Pelosi and Larry Summers on the blunder of “targeted, temporary” tax cuts. Mr. Bush began playing business favorites for ethanol and green energy fads. Republicans in Congress spent like Democrats and protected Fannie Mae and the housing lobby. And Mr. Bush and most Republicans embraced an easy-money Federal Reserve that favored Wall Street and asset bubbles at the expense of real middle-class incomes.

Coming from outside Washington and with his business background, Mr. Romney can make the case for an economic restoration that corrects the mistakes of both the Bush and Obama eras. He can join with the younger generation of GOP reformers—in the states and on Capitol Hill—to pursue an agenda that promises to fix our ailing public institutions, wean Wall Street from Washington, and create more opportunity for all Americans.

This does not require a daily recitation of Paul Ryan’s House budget. But it will require more policy content than the gauzy American exceptionalism that Mr. Romney offered in his Tuesday night speech. His remarks had the right tone, the necessary optimism and some nice lines, such as the rebuke of politicians who end up “spreading poverty” in the name of spreading the wealth. But the speech was policy-free. To be credible, a reform agenda has to have some reform substance.

To offer one example, Mr. Romney might as well go on offense on Medicare. This will no doubt horrify Stuart Stevens and his other advisers, since entitlements are supposed to be a Democratic strength. But it’s not as if Mr. Romney can dodge the argument.

He has already endorsed enough of Mr. Ryan’s premium-support plan to have to defend it, and Mr. Obama is vulnerable with his Medicare cuts and unaccountable rationing board that are part of ObamaCare. Mr. Romney won’t win the election on Medicare, but even a draw will be a political victory. Leading on the debate will show voters he is willing to take on difficult issues and give him a reform mandate if he wins.

One of Mr. Romney’s trickiest challenges will be how to handle Mr. Obama’s, er, veracity. More than any President we’ve seen, this incumbent is willing to say things that aren’t in the area code of the truth. Thus he gives himself credit for the natural gas drilling boom, the deficits are still Mr. Bush’s fault, Mr. Obama has never raised taxes, and “green jobs” in his dream economy are blooming by the millions. (In other words….

Mr. Romney can’t let the President get away with this, or Mr. Obama will conjure a vision of unreality that enough voters might believe. The challenger has to find a way to mock the mirage of an “economy built to last” without sounding arch or personal. He needs his version of Reagan’s “there he goes again.”

For all of his challenges, the most important political news is that Mr. Romney has a fighting chance to win. The incumbent’s accomplishments are unpopular and the economy is failing average Americans. To win the GOP nomination, Mr. Romney has shown reserves of tenacity and discipline. To win the White House, he’ll need to show a larger vision and the nerve to pursue it.

Speaking of The Dear Misleader’s plentiful prevarications, Bret Baier has another to add to the ever-growing list:

Today marks Armenia’s Remembrance Day recognizing the estimated 1.5 million Armenians killed at the hands of the Ottoman Empire roughly a century ago. ABC’s Jake Tapper points out, President Obama has broken his campaign promise for a fourth year in a row, choosing to avoid the word genocide in his presidential statement.

Then-Senator Obama called it genocide numerous times, even saying — quote — “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide…I intend to be that president.”

Today, President Obama’s statement read – quote — “I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915. My view of that history has not changed.” The Armenian community calls the lack of recognition a betrayal and a capitulation to Turkey.

Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?

But who’s counting?  Sure as hell no one in the MSM.

Turning to today’s Money Quote, Mr. Peabody sets the Wayback Machine to 1946 for Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson,” courtesy of the WSJ: 

“When a corporation loses a hundred cents of every dollar it loses, and is permitted to keep only 60 cents of every dollar it gains, and when it cannot offset its years of losses against its years of gains, or cannot do so adequately, its policies are affected. It does not expand its operations, or it expands only those attended with a minimum of risk. . . .

There is a similar effect when personal incomes are taxed 50, 60, 75 and 90 per cent. People begin to ask themselves why they should work six, eight or ten months of the entire year for the government, and only six, four or two months for themselves and their families. If they lose the whole dollar when they lose, but can keep only a dime of it when they win, they decide that it is foolish to take risks with their capital. In addition, the capital available for risk-taking itself shrinks enormously. It is being taxed away before it can be accumulated. In brief, capital to provide new private jobs is first prevented from coming into existence, and the part that does come into existence is then discouraged from starting new enterprises. The government spenders create the very problem of unemployment that they profess to solve.“

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s helpful health tip for Sandra Fluke, courtesy of JC….

Finally, where’s a discredited lawyer go after selling out his credibility in the service of The Dear Misleader?

Justice official leaving for law school post after criticism over ‘Fast and Furious’ claim

The top Justice Department official who signed a letter erroneously telling lawmakers investigating “Operation Fast and Furious” that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives never allowed guns to be sold to cartel members will be leaving the department to head up a law school. Ronald Weich, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, will become the new dean of the University of Baltimore’s school of law in July.

“During this time of considerable transition in legal education and the legal profession, it is important to have leadership with integrity and vision,” University of Baltimore President Robert Bogomolny  said in a statement issued Wednesday. “Ron Weich embodies those qualities. I look forward to working with him, and I know our students, faculty, staff and alumni will be energized by his arrival.”

What….John Edwards and Mike Nifong turned the job down?!?  Reports the University of Baltimore’s accreditation has been subsequent to Weich’s hiring remain unconfirmed.

Magoo