The Daily Gouge, Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

On July 31, 2012, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Wednesday, August 1st, 2012….and before we begin, if you’re not regularly reading it, please check out today’s Cover Story on our home page at www.thedailygouge.com.  It details an issue not only near and dear to our heart, but critical to America’s continued global security and preeminence.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, this headline from Townhall.com says it all:

Boom: Cruz Wins Texas Run-off

 

And another Tea Party-backed, pro-growth, high-profile Conservative heads to the Senate; his Hispanic heritage is simply sauce for the goose!

The Romney Foreign Tour

He commits the Washington error of telling the truth.

 

So Mitt Romney’s foreign tour has ended, and the media verdict is that it rated somewhere between an embarrassment and a fiasco. We guess that’s one way to describe a trip that garnered virtual endorsements from Israel’s Prime Minister and Poland’s most famous citizen, raked in $1 million or so in campaign cash, and gave the presumptive GOP nominee a chance to lay out a foreign-policy agenda.

Granted, this is a trip that got off on the wrong foot. Many Londoners might privately agree that some of the security preparations for the Olympics were “disconcerting,” as Mr. Romney put it in an interview, but they didn’t need a traveling American politician to tell them.

Yet one definition of a gaffe is to tell the truth, and that’s certainly the case with Mr. Romney’s other supposed mistakes, this time in Israel. One was to call Jerusalem the capital of Israel. Another was to talk tough on Iran. The third was to suggest—egads!—that Israeli and Palestinian culture might have something to do with the respective state of their economies.

Jerusalem is the capital of Israel—the seat of its government, the home of its President and Prime Minister, the location of its parliament and supreme court. That’s true even if the U.S. State Department puts its embassy in Tel Aviv.

The tough talk on Iran was no different from what Mr. Romney—or President Obama—has been saying for years. At least Mr. Romney showed that he understood that Tehran is a dedicated and fanatical enemy of Israel and the U.S., not a misunderstood nation seeking a better bargain from the West. Too bad Mr. Obama didn’t demonstrate the same realism about the mullahs four years ago.

As for Mr. Romney’s observations about “culture”—denounced as “racist” by one Palestinian spokesman—it’s worth noting that forward-looking Palestinians are also seeking to emulate Israel’s culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. The pity for Palestinians is a political culture in which Hamas is a dominating force, economic co-operation with Israelis is called “collaboration” and often punished by death, and children are reared to think of terrorists as martyrs. If Palestinians now complain of the restrictions Israel imposes on them, perhaps it has something to do with a “culture” they continue to celebrate.

Equally to Mr. Romney’s credit was his celebration of Poland both as a role model for defying political tyranny during the Cold War and for its economic policies ever since. “A march toward economic liberty and smaller government has meant a march toward higher living standards,” he said in Warsaw, one of the rare European capitals that has lived within its means and not tipped into a sovereign debt crisis.

That’s another statement of the obvious that rankles in Washington (and, as importantly, the MSM) because it’s true, and because it is so markedly at odds with America’s own economic mismanagement.

Not to mention Dimocratic dogma.

Speaking of Dimocratic dogma, next up, Thomas Sowell offers his thoughts on the….

Big Lies in Politics

 

It was either Adolf Hitler or his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who said that the people will believe any lie, if it is big enough and told often enough, loud enough. Although the Nazis were defeated in World War II, this part of their philosophy survives triumphantly to this day among politicians, and nowhere more so than during election years.

Perhaps the biggest lie of this election year, and the one likely to be repeated the most often, is that the income of “the rich” is going up, while other people’s incomes are going down. If you listen to Barack Obama, you are bound to hear this lie repeatedly.

But the government’s own Congressional Budget Office has just published a report whose statistics flatly contradict this claim. The CBO report shows that, while the average household income fell 12 percent between 2007 and 2009, the average for the lower four-fifths fell by 5 percent or less, while the average income for households in the top fifth fell 18 percent. For households in the “top one percent” that seems to fascinate so many people, income fell by 36 percent in those same years.

Why are these data so different from other data that are widely cited, showing the top brackets improving their positions more so than anyone else?

The answer is that the data cited by the Congressional Budget Office are based on Internal Revenue Service statistics for specific individuals and specific households over time. The IRS can follow individuals and households because it can identify the same people over time from their Social Security numbers.

Most other data, including census data, are based on compiling statistics in a succession of time periods, without the ability to tell if the actual people in each income bracket are the same from one time period to the next. The turnover of people is substantial in all brackets — and is huge in the top one percent. Most people in that bracket are there for only one year in a decade.

All sorts of statements are made in politics and in the media as if that “top one percent” is an enduring class of people, rather than an ever-changing collection of individuals who have a spike in their income in a particular year, for one reason or another. Turnover in other income brackets is also substantial.

There is nothing mysterious about this. Most people start out at the bottom, in entry-level jobs, and their incomes rise over time as they acquire more skills and experience. Politicians and media talking heads love to refer to people who are in the bottom 20 percent in income in a given year as “the poor.” But, following the same individuals for 10 or 15 years usually shows the great majority of those individuals moving into higher income brackets.

The number who reach all the way to the top 20 percent greatly exceeds the number still stuck in the bottom 20 percent over the years. But such mundane facts cannot compete for attention with the moral melodramas conjured up in politics and the media when they discuss “the rich” and “the poor.”

There are people who are genuinely rich and genuinely poor, in the sense of having very high or very low incomes for most, if not all, of their lives. But “the rich” and “the poor” in this sense are unlikely to add up to even ten percent of the population.

Ironically, those who make the most noise about income disparities or poverty contribute greatly to policies that promote both. The welfare state enables millions of people to meet their needs with little or no income-earning work on their part.

Most of the economic resources used by people in the bottom 20 percent come from sources other than their own incomes. There are veritable armies of middle-class people who make their livings transferring resources, in a variety of ways, from those who created those resources to those who live off them.

These transferrers are in both government and private social welfare institutions. They have every incentive to promote dependency, from which they benefit both professionally and psychically, and to imagine that they are creating social benefits.

For different reasons, both politicians and the media have incentives to spread misconceptions with statistics. So long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it.

To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, there’s lies, damned lies….and anything uttered by a Dimocrat, particularly in an election year.

In a related item, courtesy of George Lawlor and the Boston Herald, whatever Fauxcahontas is selling….

Critics don’t buy Elizabeth Warren’s biz-friendly spiel

 

http://bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view.bg?articleid=1061149814&position=0

In the words of the immortal Vincent LaGuardia Gambini….

Sorry….everything that DAME just said!

And in International News of Note, coming soon to a city, county, state or country near you, courtesy of the AP and Carl Polizzi:

UK police arrest man over Twitter insult

 

Police say a man has been arrested in connection to Twitter postings directed at British Olympic diver Tom Daley. Daley’s father died of brain cancer a year ago and the 18-year-old Olympian had hoped win a medal “for myself and my dad.” But he finished fourth on Monday in the 10-meter synchronized platform with teammate Pete Waterfield.

Afterward, a Twitter user sent him several negative messages, including: “You let your dad down i hope you know that.”

Dorset Police said early Tuesday that a 17-year-old man was arrested at a guest house in Weymouth “on suspicion of malicious communications” in relation to Twitter threats made against Daley. In Britain, tweeting messages considered menacing can lead to prosecution.

You know, like preaching from the Bible in….GASP!….churches in Canada; or attempting to exercise your First Amendment rights on almost any college campus in the good old US of A!

And since we’re on the subject of the products of America’s institutions of higher learning, here’s Today’s Money Quote, courtesy of James Taranto and Richard Cohen, who reveals himself as just another educated idiot:

Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen is the latest to attempt a defense of “You didn’t build that,” the collectivist theme developed by George Lakoff, popularized by Warren and destroyed by Obama. Here’s how his column beings:

My boyhood friend Jack became a doctor–and a conservative. He had gone to public schools, attended college with the help of a government scholarship, went to medical school on the Army’s dime, and learned his specialty in military hospitals. He insisted that the government had done nothing for him. In that way, he is both the soul and the wit of the Republican Party.

As Taranto goes on to point out:

We sure hope Warren and Obama pick up on this innovation–the idea that veterans owe bureaucrats a debt of gratitude for giving them an opportunity to serve.”

Frankly, were we running the RNC or a Conservative Super Pac, we’d be already be incorporating Cohen’s words into a commercial.

On the Lighter Side….

And in another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter, we learn:

3 people carry guns into movie theater in Putnam County

 

Despite a sign prohibiting weapons, police said three people had brought guns into a movie theater Friday night where the Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises” was showing. According to the Herald Citizen, all of the gun carriers had permits.

Police said the movie was stopped briefly and officers entered the Carmike Highland Cinemas on South Jefferson Avenue around 9 p.m. According to investigators, a theater employee called police after seeing a man with a holstered pistol walk into the theater. Police found the gun carriers after making an announcement in the theater.

The officers explained the policy prohibiting weapons and asked the men to return their guns to their vehicles, which police said they did. Police said the theater sign showing that weapons are prohibited was not large enough to be seen easily, so officers advised that it should be made more visible.

After all, given recent events, who would want armed, law-abiding citizens in movie theaters?!?

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the “Fuggedaboutit” segment, aka “News from New Jersey”:

Cult activity suspected after body stolen from New Jersey mausoleum

 

New Jersey: sorta like the rest of the country….minus any taste and with an STD.

Cult activity is suspected in the theft of a woman’s body from a southern New Jersey mausoleum. Pleasantville police say someone broke into a mausoleum at Greenwood Cemetery on Thursday night or Friday morning and stole the body of Pauline Spinelli. She died in 1996 at the age of 98.

Police say the body may have been taken for use in some sort of ritual. Police Capt. Rocky Melendez tells WMGM-TV this is a first for him after more than 20 years on the police force.

Undoubtedly intended to bring Snooki eternal youth and beauty….er,….eternal youth!

Magoo



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