It’s Tuesday, June 19th, 2012….but before we begin, a quick Father’s Day-related slice of Americana with which most of us are hopefully unfamiliar.

TLJ was in the doctor’s office last week, and started chatting with the obviously-pregnant pretty young receptionist.  Seemingly educated and certainly well-spoken, the 22-year-old was carrying the baby of a 32-year-old man who’d already fathered 2 babies out of wedlock, which should come as no surprise considering her mother had birthed 7 children from 5 different men, and her sister had 2 offspring by as many fathers.

The young lady’s primary concern?  Not being pregnant out of wedlock….not that her paramour, despite having sired previous illegitimate offspring hadn’t married her….not the statistics showing single-motherhood almost certainly doom her unborn child to poverty and privation.  Rather she was focused on her lacking an engagement ring, as if somehow a diamond on the third finger of her left hand would provide the power to improve her circumstances.

3 women….10 children….0 fathers; it’s a morality tale that no amount of money, education or opportunity will ever impact.  It bespeaks a lack of judgment, absence of consequences and an ever-increasing need for instant self-gratification which defies solution….and which renders Father’s Day in many parts of the nation a meaningless holiday.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Jonah Goldberg details….

The myth of the good conservative

For liberals, he always existed yesterday.

The Left’s true view of good Conservatives mirrors Phil Sheridan’s sentiments on Indians

My daughter learned a neat rhetorical trick to avoid eating things she doesn’t like. “Daddy, I actually really like spinach, it’s just that this spinach tastes different.” Democrats and the journalists who love them play a similar game with Republicans and conservatives. “Oh, I have lots of respect for conservatives,” goes the typical line, “but the conservatives we’re being served today are just so different. Why can’t we have Republicans and conservatives like we used to?”

Q: What kind of Republicans are extremists, racists, ideologues, pyschopaths, radicals, weirdos, hicks, idiots, elitists, prudes, potato-chip double-dippers, and meanies?

A: Today’s Republicans.

“The Republican Party got into its time machine and took a giant leap back into the ’50s. The party left moderation and tolerance of dissent behind.” So reported the Washington Post’s Judy Mann — in July of 1980.

Today, of course, the 1950s is the belle époque of reasonable conservatism. Just ask New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, or, for that matter, President Barack Obama, who insists that the GOP is in the throes of a “fever” and is displaying signs of “madness.” It’s his humble wish that the GOP will regain its senses and return to being the party of Eisenhower.

Today’s intellectual conservatives, likewise, are held against the standard of yesterday’s and found wanting. New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus wrote a book on “the death of conservatism” a few years ago (inconveniently, right before conservatism was dramatically revivified by the Tea Party, which helped the GOP win historic victories in the 2010 elections), in which he pined for the conservative intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s.

Of course, the Tanenhauses of their day were horrified by the very same conservative intellectuals. Within a year of William F. Buckley’s founding of National Review in 1955, liberal intellectuals insisted that the magazine’s biggest failure was its inability to be authentically conservative. The editor of Harper’s proclaimed the founding editors of NR to be “the very opposite of conservatives.” Liberal titan Dwight Macdonald lamented that the “pseudo-conservative” National Review was nowhere near as wonderful the old Freeman magazine.

Again and again, the line is the same: I like conservatives, just not these conservatives.

As far as I can tell, there are competing, or at least overlapping, motives for this liberal nostalgia for the conservatives and Republicans of yesteryear. Some liberals like to romanticize and glorify conservatives from eras when they were least effective but most entertaining. Some like to cherry-pick positions from a completely different era so as to prove that holding that position today is centrist.

But whatever the motivation, what unites them is the conviction that today’s liberals shouldn’t cede power, respect, or legitimacy to today’s conservatives. Hence when compassionate conservatism was ascendant, liberals lamented that the GOP wasn’t more libertarian. When, in response to the disastrous explosion in debt and spending over the Bush/Obama years, the GOP enters a libertarian phase, the same people who insisted they’d love Republicans if they became libertarian are horrified by their “social Darwinism.”

The latest twist on this hackneyed hayride is the renewed caterwauling about how Ronald Reagan couldn’t even get elected today. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush reignited the topic by lamenting how Reagan couldn’t be nominated today because the GOP has become too rigid and ideological for even the Gipper. I think Jeb Bush is one of the best conservative politicians in the country, but this was not his best moment. Assuming Mitt Romney gets the nomination, here are the GOP nominees since Reagan left office: Bush I, Dole (Gerald Ford’s running-mate in 1976), Bush II, McCain, and, finally, Romney — the Massachusetts moderate the Tea Party spent much of the last months lambasting as, well, a Massachusetts moderate.

Look at all those crazy right-wingers! Looking at that record, any rational person would conclude that Reagan couldn’t get elected today because the party has become too liberal. Of course, the reality is more complicated than that. But the idea that Reagan’s problem today would be his moderation is quite simply ridiculous.

Look where G. W. Bush’s moderation got him: denounced as a crazed radical by much of the liberal establishment, despite having run as a “compassionate conservative” and, once in office, expanded entitlements and worked closely with Teddy Kennedy on education reform. Right on schedule, Dubya is now entering the rehabilitation phase. It’ll be some time before liberals bring themselves to say, “I miss George W. Bush.” But already the New York Times is proclaiming that Bush represented “mainstream conservatism,” unlike today’s Republicans, of course.

As always, the problem with conservatism today is today’s conservatives.

That….and Progressivism’s absolute inability to articulate any sound, sensible solutions to the problems their policies have propagated.

In a related item, as the WSJ opines….

We Believe You, Mr. President

Immigration becomes the latest issue enlisted in the re-election effort.

In a speech last year to La Raza, a Hispanic civil rights organization that has criticized the White House for the lack of progress on immigration reform, President Obama mused that he’d like “to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own.” He added, “Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you.”

We’ll take the President at his word. Yesterday he gave into political temptation. He sidestepped Congress and announced that young illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children would be spared deportation. The new policy will apply to people who entered the U.S. illegally before they were 16, have no criminal record and are currently under 30. It will not grant citizenship to these individuals but it will give them legal status and the right to work here.

Mr. Obama said that he was changing the deportation policy because “it’s the right thing to do.” Translation: It’s the politically expedient thing to do in an election year in which Hispanic voters are expected to play a key role in determining whether he wins a second term. Hispanic voter registration is down considerably from 2008 in swing states such as Florida and New Mexico that Mr. Obama is counting on in November. Next week the President is scheduled to address the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. The timing of this announcement is no coincidence. One begins to wonder if anything this President does is about anything larger than his re-election.

Like many Americans, we sympathize with the plight of young people who find themselves in the U.S. illegally through no fault of their own. But this is not a long-term solution and in fact could make it harder to achieve one. As with the Administration’s decision to sue Arizona over its efforts to deter illegal immigration, the deportation decision will further poison the debate and make Republicans more reluctant to come to the negotiating table and cut a deal.

It’s passing strange that the President is saying on the stump that the Republicans in Congress refuse to compromise with him at every turn. This issue, whose resolution clearly requires bipartisanship, is screaming for compromise. One vehicle for starting that process is the Dream Act, which would do legislatively what Mr. Obama is doing on his own. And in fact, there had been bipartisan interest of late in a modified version of the Dream Act, particularly from GOP Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. The White House could have worked with Mr. Rubio toward a bipartisan consensus. Instead, Obama aides trashed Senator Rubio’s proposal because they wanted the issue to use against Republicans in the fall.

Unfortunately, this reflects the probable Obama modus operandi for policy in a second term. Whether immigration, energy policy or health care, executive command authority will be the blunt instrument of completing the Obama agenda. We’re a long way from 2008.

To which, courtesy of The New Medial Journal, Iowa Congressman Steve King offers the following response:

GOP Lawmaker Announces Plans to Sue Obama Over Immigration Policy

Iowa Congressman Steve King is considering filing a lawsuit to block a new policy that would allow some youths brought into the country illegally to stay if they don’t present a risk to public safety. “I expect to bring a lawsuit against the president of the United States to suspend his executive order,” King told The Des Moines Register in a telephone interview today. Some of the best constitutional conservative lawyers have their heads together now, he said.

As many as 800,000 youths would be low priorities for deportation because of this new policy, which President Barack Obama ordered using his executive authority. Friday morning the US Department of Homeland Security announced that, starting now, some young people younger than 30 who were brought to the United States before age 16 and “do not present a risk to national security or public safety” will be considered for deportation relief. This policy is similar to the DREAM Act but doesn’t provide a pathway to citizenship.
King argues that Obama violated the oaths of his office because this executive order violates the Constitution and US statute.

So far King has no others joining him for the possible suit, he said. He said he’s not sure when he might file. But his successful lawsuit 13 years ago against then-Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, on a similar constitutional issue gives him the experience to know he’s on “very solid constitutional ground,” he said.

In 1999, King sued after Vilsack signed an executive order that barred discrimination against gays, lesbians and transgender individuals in state government employment. A Polk County judge said in December 2000 that Vilsack exceeded his authority in issuing the order.

“It’s a very, very similar case,” said King, who is now running against Vilsack’s wife, Christie, in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District. “It’s not longer about what policy you might prefer and it’s whether you uphold the Constitution and rule of law,”said King, who is one of the most vocal opponents of illegal immigration in the nation. “I’ve taken an oath to uphold the Constitution.”

US Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, also questioned the president’s authority. In a statement, Grassley said that Obama’s action is “an affront to the process of representative government by circumventing Congress and with a directive he may not have the authority to execute.” “The president once denied that he had the legal authority to do this, and Congress was assured more than once that the administration would consider individuals for this sort of deferred status on a case-by-case basis only, and that there was no plan to implement a broad-based program. It seems the president has put election-year politics above responsible policies,” Grassley said.

To put the issue in proper perspective, we turn to Conn Carroll, who notes in the Morning Examiner:

Obama hits the panic button

There are really only two ways to look at President Obama’s immigration announcement Friday: 1) as a principled policy change by a confident and secure leader looking to bring some resolution to a controversial issue; or 2) as the panicked act of a weak incumbent desperately trying to distract from his failed economic record.

Considering his position in the latest tracking polls (Gallup has him down one to Mitt Romney head-to-head) and his widely panned economic speech in Cleveland Thursday, it is safe to rule out the first explanation. However, judging from this Sunday’s talk shows, Obama did succeed in distracting the press … for now.

But as former Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo notes, Obama’s decision has set a precedent that could last well beyond his own term in office:

Imagine the precedent this claim would create. President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital-gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.

So what we have here is a president who is refusing to carry out federal law simply because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices. That is an exercise of executive power that even the most stalwart defenders of an energetic executive — not to mention the Framers — cannot support.

Team Romney has done a good job sticking to their message on the economy, but when they are asked about Obama’s immigration policy, the damage it did to the Constitution should be their first response.

Unfortunately, as Mark Krikorian details at NRO‘s The Corner….

Romney Screws the Pooch on Immigration

Though as the WSJ reports, given Team Tick-Tock’s latest in an unbroken string of recent reversals in a federal court system definitely tilted its favor, the odds of this pronouncement surviving any judicial challenge are rather remote:

An Overtime Victory

The Supreme Court takes down another Obama legal claim.

The Supreme Court doesn’t get overtime pay, but maybe it ought to for striking down a novel Obama Administration interpretation of labor law on Monday.

In Christopher v. SmithKline Beecham Corp., a 5-4 majority clarified that white-collar sales reps for drug companies don’t qualify for overtime. Two employees for SmithKline Beecham made such a claim, and the Obama Labor Department jumped in with an amicus brief in this and similar cases. A favorable ruling would have freed the plaintiffs bar to bring class actions on behalf of 90,000 drug reps for billions in back pay.

The High Court ruled that the claim wasn’t required under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which was enacted to protect workers from “substandard wages and oppressive working hours” and explicitly exempted “outside salesmen.” The plaintiffs argued they aren’t in sales because they merely “promote” drugs to physicians. But the Court noted that federal laws bar drug companies from selling certain products directly to consumers; they must be prescribed by physicians.

By persuading doctors to write prescriptions, the drug reps are making sales. They are trained in sales, make more than $70,000 a year, receive incentive pay based on sales volume, and work mostly out of the office. These are “hardly the kind of employees” that the 1938 law was “intended to protect,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito.

The majority was also not amused by the Labor Department’s attempt at regulation-by-amicus brief. Justice Alito wrote that Labor had not once—in 70 years of the drug-rep pay system—filed an enforcement action of this kind. Instead of going through a formal rule-making, the agency joined lawyers (TRIAL lawyers!) to force what Justice Alito called an “unfair surprise” on the industry.

The lawsuit was part of the Administration’s campaign to bring more workers under wage-and-hour laws, the better to unionize and provide trial-bar jackpots. Courts have mostly taken a dim view of these legal runarounds, and the Supremes deserve credit for upholding long-settled labor law.

And in International News of Note, when the going gets tough….

Syria Violence Too Much for U.N. Monitors

….the U.N. gets going; out of harm’s way.  What….were all the U.N. monitors in Syria French?!?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, yet another member of The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight for which we had terribly high hopes demonstrates when push comes to shove, money talks:

A Tale of Two Conservatives

Sixteen Senate Republicans, including Marco Rubio, vote to preserve the sugar quota program.

One test for economic conservatives is whether they are willing to oppose constituent business interests looking for government favoritism. On that score, two recent contrasting votes by Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida are instructive.

Last month the Senate easily voted to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, 78-20, a vote that was never much in doubt given the backing from business lobbies and the White House. But it’s still worth saluting the 20 votes in opposition—19 Republicans and independent socialist Bernie Sanders—and especially Mr. DeMint, a rare case of a Senator voting for principle against the biggest interests in his home state.

Boeing is the largest beneficiary of Ex-Im bank taxpayer loan guarantees and it has a new plant to turn out 787s in North Charleston. General Electric and Caterpillar have major plants in South Carolina and get Ex-Im help too. Mr. DeMint went so far as to lead the charge against Ex-Im, much to the annoyance of Chambers of Commerce in the Palmetto State.

“I gave a speech to 400 Chamber members and everyone was for Ex-Im Bank,” he says. “So I asked them: ‘How many of you would sign your own name to this loan?’ Not a single hand went up.” Mr. DeMint says he voted as he did because he’s concluded that “we’ve created a culture in Washington that has almost every major business in the country with its nose in the trough.”

That includes the sugar lobby, which last week narrowly defeated a bipartisan attempt at reforming its egregious quota program that gouges American consumers to benefit a mere 5,000 or so farmers. The Senate voted 50-46 to table Senator Pat Toomey’s reform bill, but the reform would have passed if not for the votes of 16 GOP Senators. (See the nearby table.)

The usual sugar beet and sugar cane state suspects dominate the list, but one name leaps out—Mr. Rubio, the freshman from Florida who won his seat in 2010 while running as a tea party favorite in opposition to the crony capitalism and government meddling of the Obama Administration.

Mr. Rubio nonetheless voted against consumers and for the big sugar-cane producers, including Florida’s Fanjul family. Mr. Rubio thus voted to the left of the 16 Democrats who joined 30 Republicans in supporting sugar reform. Unlike Mr. DeMint, the Floridian was not a profile in courage on this issue, or even a profile.

The political habit of favoring big business is bipartisan, as the sugar and Ex-Im Bank votes show. If Republicans want the political credibility to reform middle-class entitlements, they had better be prepared to eliminate corporate welfare too. Kudos to Mr. DeMint for understanding this.

Will this cause us to throw the baby out with the bath water?  No.  Is it a decided disappointment?  Most definitely.

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, in another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter, we learn….

Retiree, 73, shoots dead former classmate in revenge for locker room jockstrap prank more than FIFTY YEARS ago

A jockstrap pulled over his head in a high school locker room more than 50 years ago provoked a 73-year-old South Dakota man to fatally shoot his long-ago classmate, a prosecutor said Friday. Carl Ericsson of Watertown, who last month pleaded guilty but mentally ill to second-degree murder, was sentenced to life in prison Friday. Ericsson was charged in the Jan. 31 killing of retired Madison High School teacher and track coach Norman Johnson, who was shot twice in the face as he answered his front door.

Kenneth Meyer, the Lake County state’s attorney, said Ericsson has indicated that the decades-old locker room incident led to the shooting. Mr Johnson was a high school sports star and Ericsson was a student manager….

At his arraignment hearing last month, Ericsson told Judge Vince Foley that he rang the doorbell at Mr Johnson’s house then asked his old classmate to verify his identity before shooting him with a .45-caliber pistol.

So much for attending our upcoming 40th high school reunion!

Magoo