It’s Friday, June 1st, 2012….but before we begin, congratulations go out to an old and very dear friend who just had the weight of the world lifted from his carefully coiffed head and shoulders:

Jury Finds Southern Cal Real Estate Mogul Not Guilty

Chris Wilson: like the Werewolves of London, his hair is perfect!

Chris Wilson, owner of Wilson Commercial Real Estate, Southern California’s premier brokerage firm, past president of the prestigious Lakeside Golf Club, the only two-time champion in the history of the Lakeside Four-Ball tournament and five-time winner of the John Edwards look-alike contest was found not guilty in federal court of charges stemming from a conspiracy to hide the source of funds used to pay for the love-child he fathered with Rosie O’Donnell.

Jurors interviewed following the surprise verdict said their decision hinged on the defense assertion the daunting dimensions of O’Donnell’s midsection made it impossible for anyone with Wilson’s limited plumbing to have done the deed.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of George Lawlor, New York’s Daily News offers its suggestion as to….

What Bam owes Dubya

We know it’s never going to happen, but it should. Two little words spoken by President Obama to predecessor George W. Bush and the Bush anti-terror team — VP Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, et al. Two little words that would demonstrate the Leader of the Free World has learned a few things during 40 months in office. Two little words that everyone’s mother taught them to say when they shot their mouths off and later found out that not only were they wrong, but they were LOUD wrong.

“I apologize.”

Obama owes Bush & Co. that much after The New York Times revealed this week that Obama himself gives the final word on a top-secret “Kill List” of suspected al Qaeda operatives. This is the same “liberal law professor” Obama who spent the 2008 campaign excoriating the Bush War on Terror and promising to close the Guantanamo lockup for suspected terrorists.

Now he’s going through a list of names and checking it twice — before giving the thumbs up or thumbs down. In fact, the Times also reports a suspicion that the president’s decision to kill terror suspects relieves him of the politically tricky call of where to send them if they had been captured. How’s that for political expediency?

The Times story also details Obama’s controversial decision to step up drone attacks and classify all military-age men in a strike zone as combatants unless evidence arises to prove that they’re not. Funny how things change when you’re in office, as opposed to complaining from the outside. 

And the president doesn’t do a thing without first checking with a fellow named John O. Brennan, his counterterrorism chief and a 25-year CIA veteran who helped run the intelligence agency under Obama’s predecessor. Brennan might have become CIA head if not for the wailing and gnashing of teeth from those on the left upset about Bush-era interrogation practices.

The Times characterizes Brennan as “a priest whose blessing has become indispensable” to Obama. The irony is thick. (Nearly as thick as Joe Biden.)

We have no problem with what the president is doing. It’s exactly the role the commander-in-chief should play, and it’s far preferable to when Obama was advocating reading suspected terrorists their Miranda rights.

But he really should give his predecessor his due. C’mon, it’s only two words. How hard can it be?

Judging from his inability to remain civil even in the most ceremonial of circumstances….

….well nigh impossible!

He’ll apologize to the world for America’s supposed sins, but the only “sorry” you’ll hear here at home is from those increasingly concluding all B. Hussein represents is….

Next up, another classic column from Victor Davis Hanson, compliments of Townhall.com:

Culture Still Matters

Holy biting-the-hand-that-feeds-you, Batman!

This week I am leading a military history tour on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You can learn a lot about Europe’s current economic crises by just ignoring the sophisticated barrage of news analysis and instead watching, listening, and talking to people as you go down river.

Switzerland, by modern standards, should be poor. Like Bolivia, it is landlocked. Like Italy, it has no real gas or oil wealth. Like Afghanistan, its northern climate and mountainous terrain limit agricultural productivity to upland plains. And like Turkey, it is not a part of the European Union.

Unlike Americans, the Swiss are among the most homogeneous people in the world, without much diversity, and make it nearly impossible to immigrate there.

So Switzerland supposedly has everything going against it, and yet it is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Why and how?

To answer that is also to learn why roughly 82 million Germans produce almost as much national wealth as do 130 million Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, and Spaniards. Yet the climate of Germany is somewhat harsh; it too has no oil or gas. By 1945, German cities lay in ruins, while Detroit and Cleveland were booming. The Roman historian Tacitus remarked that pre-civilized Germany was a bleak land of cold weather, with little natural wealth and inhabited by tribal savages.

Race does not explain present-day national wealth. From 500 B.C. to A.D. 1300, Switzerland and Germany were considered brutal and backward in comparison to classical Greece and Rome, and later Renaissance Venice and Florence.

Instead, culture explains far more — a seemingly taboo topic when economists nonchalantly suggest that contemporary export-minded Germans simply need to spend and relax like laid-back Southern Mediterraneans, and that the latter borrowers save and produce like workaholic Germans to even out the playing field of the European Union.

But government-driven efforts to change national behavior often ignore stubborn cultural differences that reflect centuries of complex history as well as ancient habits and adaptations to geography and climate. Greeks can no more easily give up siestas than the Swiss can mandate two-hour afternoon naps. If tax cheating is a national pastime in Palermo, in comparison it is difficult along the Rhine.

I lived in Greece for over two years and often travel to northern and Mediterranean Europe and North Africa. While I prefer the Peloponnese to the Rhineland, over the years I have developed an unscientific and haphazard — but often accurate — politically incorrect method of guessing whether a nation is likely to be perennially insolvent and wracked by corruption.

Do average passersby throw down or pick up litter? After a minor fender-bender, do drivers politely exchange information, or scream and yell with wild gesticulations? Is honking constant or sporadic? Are crosswalks sacrosanct? Do restaurant dinners usually start or wind down at 9 p.m.? Can you drink tap water, or should you avoid it? Do you mostly pay what the price tag says, or are you expected to pay in untaxed cash and then haggle over the unstated cost? Are construction sites clearly marked and fenced to protect pedestrians, or do you risk walking into an open pit or getting stabbed by exposed rebar?

To put these crude stereotypes more abstractly, is civil society mostly moderate, predicated on the rule of law, and meritocratic — or is it better characterized by self-indulgence, cynicism and tribalism?

The answers to these questions do not hinge on race, money or natural wealth, but they do involve culture and the way average people predictably live minute by minute. Again, these national habits and traditions accrued over centuries, and as much as politics or economics, they explain in part why Bonn is not Athens, and Zurich is not Naples, or for that matter why Cairo is unlike Tel Aviv or why Mexico City differs from Toronto.

There is one final funny thing about contemporary culture. What people say and do about it are two different things. We in the postmodern, politically correct West publicly pontificate that all cultures are just different and to assume otherwise is pop generalization, but privately assume that you would prefer your bank account to be in Frankfurt rather than Athens, or the tumor in your brain to be removed in London rather than Lisbon.

A warm sunset with an ouzo on a Greek island beach may be more relaxing than schnapps on the foggy Rhine shore, but to learn why Greeks will probably not pay back what they owe Germany — and do not believe that they should have to — take a walk through central Athens and then do the same in Munich.

This snippet from Der Spiegel, courtesy of the WSJ, quoting a Pew Research Center poll proves Hanson’s point:

“Greek views of themselves and Germany diverged widely from its European neighbors, who all see Germany as the “most hard working” nation. Greece rated itself the hardest working.

“Greece is the polar opposite” of Germany, the report said, noting that Germany is not the only country that has issues with the southern European country. “None of its fellow EU members surveyed see it in a positive light,” the authors wrote.”

And in International News of Note, here’s a headline, courtesy of Bill Meisen, that should allow Liberal Appeasers the world over a peaceful night of sleep:

Enrichment ‘not a step towards a bomb’: Ahmadinejad

Which is of course all The Dear Misleader needed to hear:

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Jonah Goldberg, writing at NRO‘s The Corner, courtesy of Conn Carroll and the Morning Examiner, has a suggestion for the new leader of The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight:

Memo to Mitt: Run Against Bush

Speaking of uncontrolled spending, James Pethokoukis, writing at the AEI‘s Enterprise Blog has the CBO’s latest analysis of Project Porkulus:

CBO: Obama stimulus may have cost as much as $4.1 million a job

But hey, if it bought The Obamao just one more vote, it was worth every penny of your money!

The Congressional Budget Office in a new report:

When [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] was being considered, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that it would increase budget deficits by $787 billion between fiscal years 2009 and 2019. CBO now estimates that the total impact over the 2009–2019 period will amount to about $831 billion.

By CBO’s estimate, close to half of that impact occurred in fiscal year 2010, and more than 90 percent of ARRA’s budgetary impact was realized by the end of March 2012. CBO has estimated the law’s impact on employment and economic output using evidence about the effects of previous similar policies and drawing on various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy. …

On that basis CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the first quarter of calendar year 2012 compared with what would have occurred otherwise:

– They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 0.1 percent and 1.0 percent,

– They lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.1 percentage points and 0.8 percentage points,

– They increased the number of people employed by between 0.2 million and 1.5 million,

– They increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 0.3 million to 1.9 million. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

OK, so without the stimulus, there would be anywhere from 200,000 to 1.5 million fewer people employed right now? That means the current cost-per-job created is somewhere between $4.1 million and $540,000.

At the very least, I think the CBO report should raise more questions about whether $831 billion of temporary tax cuts and government spending was the best use of that money back in 2009. It should also make Washington cautious about further such stimulus measures if the U.S. economy should slip back into recession. Better we try what Sweden did.

And, again, here is the CBO’s take on the long-run impact of the stimulus:

In contrast to its positive near-term macroeconomic effects, ARRA will reduce output slightly in the long run, CBO estimates—by between zero and 0.2 percent after 2016. But CBO expects that the legislation will have no long-term effects on employment because the U.S. economy will have a high rate of use of its labor resources in the long run. ARRA’s long-run impact on the economy will stem primarily from the resulting increase in government debt.

To the extent that people hold their wealth in government securities rather than in a form that can be used to finance private investment, the increased debt tends to reduce the stock of productive private capital. In the long run, each dollar of additional debt crowds out about a third of a dollar’s worth of private domestic capital, CBO estimates.

In other words, we’re stimulating ourselves into insolvency.

And since we’re on the subject of idiotic Liberal ideas, FOX News reports on how….

NYC plans to ban sales of sugary drinks over 16 ounces

No more super-sized Cokes. Forget about stomach-busting 64-ounce sodas at KFC. Even 20-ounce Snapples are on Mayor Bloomberg’s latest heath-conscious hit list. New York City plans to ban the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks in an effort to combat obesity.

The proposed first-in-the-nation ban would impose a 16-ounce limit on the size of sweetened drinks sold at restaurants, movie theaters, sports venues and street carts. It would apply to bottled drinks as well as fountain sodas. The ban, which could take effect as soon as March, wouldn’t apply to diet sodas, fruit juices, dairy-based drinks or alcoholic beverages.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Wednesday that he “thinks it’s what the public wants the mayor to do.”

Look, New York City could disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow and we wouldn’t lose a minute of sleep; but this is absurd.  Think about it: Bloomberg and the other nitwits running New York must not get out much.  Like….they’ve never heard of refills?!?

Regardless, we know one drink the consumption of which Liberals will never look to limit:

Good to the last drop….of other people’s blood, sweat, toil and tears!

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll call it a week with the Jimmy Malone Memorial “There Goes the Next Chief of Police” segment, courtesy of Best of the Web and a rather confused would-be Congressman:

Baffled by Bicameralism

Bill Bloomfield, prototypical Liberal: he understands everything….except his job.

A businessman named Bill Bloomfield is running for Congress in California’s 33rd District, which covers most of the Los Angeles County coast. He’s an independent and has adopted the ” ‘NoLabels’ 12-point plan” as his platform. Here are two of the points:

2. Up or Down Vote on Presidential Appointments: All presidential nominations should be confirmed or rejected within 90 days of the nomination.

3. Fix the Filibuster: Require real (not virtual) filibusters and end filibusters on motions to proceed.

Yes, this maroon is running for the House and promising to change the rules of the Senate!

He’s perfect….just as clueless as the rest of the Liberals on the Hill!

Magoo