The Daily Gouge, Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

On August 20, 2012, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Tuesday, August 21st, 2012….but before we begin, submitted for your approval, some startling statistics, along with a picture truly worth a thousand words.  First up, a few factoids from the Washington Examiner‘s Mark Tapscott:

Next, a brief summary of the major achievements constituting an accurate history of The Dear Misleader’s tenure:

And finally, courtesy of Shannon Wood, a man who embodied everything The Obamao isn’t:

Anyway you slice it, America cannot afford, and likely will not survive, at least in the form we know it, another four years of Barack Hussein Obama.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the Tuesday line-up, today’s Cover Story, which describes the latest effort by a hopelessly inept marksman from The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight to snatch defeat from the jaws of near-certain victory:

The Todd Akin Fiasco

 

Next up, it’s the “Pure Michigan” segment, courtesy of the WSJ and Jarrett Skorup, writing at MichiganCapitolConfidential.com:

 

Despite having no horses, the water and sewerage department for the city of Detroit employs a horseshoer. . . .The horseshoer’s job description is “to shoe horses and to do general blacksmith work . . . and to perform related work as required.” The description was last updated in 1967.

The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) has a large debt, rising water prices and inefficient services—using almost twice the number of employees per gallon as other cities like Chicago. A recent independent report about the DWSD recommends that the city trim more than 80 percent of the department’s workforce. The consultant who wrote the report found 257 job descriptions, including a horseshoer. . . .

In response to the report, John Riehl, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 207, which represents many of the DWSD employees, told the Detroit Free Press that the department needs more workers. “They don’t have enough people as it is right now,” Riehl said. They are just dreaming to think they can operate that plant with less.”

Let alone live without a farrier; after all, where would all the horse’s asses in Detroit otherwise get their shoes?!?

Speaking of horses asses, the WSJ‘s Bill McGurn details the rank hypocrisy of Leftist Catholics:

Social Justice and Ryan the Heretic

Church liberals launch an odd line of attack against a free-market champion.

 

Say this for the liberal impulse in American Catholicism: In its day, it leavened the faith. Against the church’s tendencies to clericalism, it promoted the contributions of the laity. Against suspicions in Rome, it championed the American experiment. In particular, the liberal impulse advanced the idea of religious liberty for all that would ultimately triumph in the 1960s at the Second Vatican Council.

No longer, alas. Today the liberal impulse in American Catholic life has substituted political for religious orthodoxy. In retrospect, the turning point is easy to spot: liberal Catholicism’s acquiescence in the Democratic Party’s drift toward supporting abortion at a time when church leaders had the influence to stop it.

So here we are in 2012, when all but one of the active senators and representatives who are members of the official Catholics for Obama campaign team enjoy a 100% approval rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America.

This fundamental dissent from a basic church teaching is now a fact of modern Democratic Catholic life. The result for our politics is an extraordinary campaign, in the 10 days since Paul Ryan became the Republican candidate for vice president, by those on the Catholic left to strike a moral equivalence between Mr. Ryan’s reform budget and Democratic Catholic support for the party’s absolutist position on abortion.

Thus the column in the National Catholic Reporter characterizing Mr. Ryan as a “champion of dissent” regarding the church’s social teaching. Or the headline at the website Jezebel, “Badass Nun Says Paul Ryan is a Bad Catholic.” When this sort of thing seeps into the mainstream, it takes the form of the recent article in the Washington Post that found moral parallels between the two vice-presidential candidates: Mr. Ryan is a dissenter from “social justice,” while Vice President Joe Biden, also Catholic, dissents on issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion.

Once upon a time, Catholic Democrats would explain away their position with the Mario Cuomo-inspired halfway apology: They were “personally opposed” to abortion but unwilling to do anything about it. These days we have moved to the full Nancy: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s complaint that Catholics need to overcome their “conscience thing” regarding abortion.

As for Mr. Ryan, what drives progressives bonkers is that he insists on talking about spending in terms of promises made to the American people. In this sense, “Can we pay for it?” is a moral as well as practical question.

Manifestly some bishops do not like Mr. Ryan’s answers. Then again, Catholic social teaching itself holds that the bishops possess no special competence on the subject. Applying the principles of Catholic social teaching involves prudential judgments that are the special province of Catholic laymen and laywomen.

Mr. Ryan’s own bishop, the Most Rev. Robert C. Morlino, addressed the subject with his most recent column in the diocesan paper for Madison, Wis. The church, he wrote, regards abortion as an “intrinsic evil” (meaning always and everywhere wrong, regardless of circumstances). In sharp contrast, he said, on issues such as how best to create jobs or help the poor, “there can be difference according to how best to follow the principles which the church offers.”

“I’m not endorsing Paul Ryan,” the bishop told me later by phone. “People are free to disagree with him, and disagree vehemently. But it’s wrong to suggest that his views somehow make him a bad Catholic.”

Unfortunately, suggesting that Mr. Ryan is a bad Catholic is the entire case. Stuck with the fact of Mr. Biden, who has long since made his peace with the party’s absolutism on abortion, progressive Catholics know that it would be laughable to try to present Mr. Biden as faithful to church teaching. They know too that clarity about church teaching does not work to their advantage. The only way to take on Mr. Ryan is to tear him down(Hardly a manifestation of Christian teaching.)

Think about that. In another age, Catholic progressives would have laughed at the suggestion that people were corrupted by reading certain works; now they believe Paul Ryan’s soul is in peril for his having read Ayn Rand. Before, they would not have feared science; now they insist that a program such as food stamps ought to continue ad infinitum without consideration of its effects. And while they believe that the pope and bishops have nothing of value to offer about the sanctity of marriage or the duty of protecting unborn life, when it comes to federal spending, suddenly a miter means infallibility.

In the past, the liberal Catholic vision sought to inspire. Today, in the pages of the venerable lay Catholic magazine Commonweal, a blogger tries to diminish Paul Ryan by saying, “like the rest of us, he is a Cafeteria Catholic.” Surely it says something about a movement when its most powerful argument against an opponent is this: You are just as lousy as we are.

Meanwhile, in the “Strength in Numbers” segment, if this next item The New Media Journal is even close to accurate, we guess the “science” must be settled:

400 Independent Economists Support Romney’s Plan

 

Over 400 independent economists signed a statement at the website Economists for Romney in support of what they call the Republican presidential candidate’s “bold economic plan for America.” Five Nobel laureates (Gary Becker, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, Edward Prescott, and Myron Scholes) signed the statement which, in part, reads, “We enthusiastically endorse Governor Mitt Romney’s economic plan to create jobs and restore economic growth while returning America to its tradition of economic freedom.”

The economists also denounced Obama’s economic ideas, claiming they led to an “an anemic economic recovery and high unemployment.” They further assert, “his future plans are to double down on the failed policies, which will only prolong slow growth and high unemployment.”

The economists write that Romney’s plan is based on sound principles:

“…more contained and less intrusive federal government, a greater reliance on the private sector, a broad expansion of opportunity without government favors for special interests, and respect for the rule of law including the decision-making authority of states and localities.”

These economists note that Romney would:

Reduce marginal tax rates on business and wage incomes and broaden the tax base to increase investment, jobs, and living standards.

End the exploding federal debt by controlling the growth of spending so federal spending does not exceed 20 percent of the economy.

Restructure regulation to end “too big to fail,” improve credit availability to entrepreneurs and small businesses, and increase regulatory accountability, and ensure that all regulations pass rigorous benefit-cost tests.

Improve our Social Security and Medicare programs by reducing their growth to sustainable levels, ensuring their viability over the long term, and protecting those in or near retirement.

Reform our healthcare system to harness market forces and thereby reduce costs and increase quality, empowering patients and doctors, rather than the federal bureaucracy.

Promote energy policies that increase domestic production, enlarge the use of all western hemisphere resources, encourage the use of new technologies, end wasteful subsidies, and rely more on market forces and less on government planners.

In “stark contrast,” Obama, according to the economists, “has failed to advance policies that promote economic and job growth, focusing instead on increasing the size and scope of the federal government, which increases the debt, requires large tax increases, and burdens business with many new financial and health care regulations…”

“In sum, Governor Romney’s economic plan is far superior for creating economic growth and jobs than the actions and interventions President Obama has taken or plans to take in the future,” the economists write. This November, voters will make a fundamental choice between differing visions of America’s economic future.”

We have a choice alright; between….

….Heaven and Hell.

Moving on to today’s Money Quote, courtesy of Jim Gleaves, Mike Huckabee expounds on Team Tick-Tock’s willingness to subvert national security for short-term political gain:

If we want to keep our nation’s secrets a ‘SECRET’ then we should store them where President Obama stores his college transcripts and birth certificate.

And in the Environmental Moment, Forbes.com reports….

Game-Changing Study Finds Half of Global Warming is Fictitious

 

A reanalysis of U.S. temperature station data shows temperatures are rising only half as much as claimed by the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) and other government overseers of temperature data. The reanalysis is the first using the Siting Classification System devised by the MATEO-France French national meteorological service and recently approved by the World Meteorological Organization.

The new analysis, conducted by a team of scientists led by temperature station expert Anthony Watts, shows government overseers are improperly reporting double the temperature increase that is occurring in the real world. Fully 92 percent of the overstated temperature rise results from erroneous and scientifically unjustified government “adjustments” to the raw temperature data.

The new analysis shows U.S. temperatures rose only 0.155 degrees Celsius per decade from 1979 through 2008 according to high-quality surface temperature stations. The 0.155 degree increase is substantially less than is claimed by government temperature overseers, and it is sufficiently moderate to rebut fears of an imminent global warming crisis. The U.S. temperature increase from 1979 through 2008 is even less worrisome when considering that temperatures over the oceans are warming at a slower pace than temperatures over land, and that global temperatures cooled during the 30 years prior to 1979.

The authors note global temperature trends are unlikely to be substantially different from the U.S. temperature trends analyzed in their new analysis. Lead author Anthony Watts explained how government overseers overlook meaningful siting problems that add fictitious warming to the raw data:

“The USHCN is one of the main metrics used to gauge the temperature changes in the United States,” wrote Watts in a press release announcing the findings. “The first wide-scale effort to address siting issues, Watts, (2009), a collated photographic survey, showed that approximately 90% of USHCN stations were compromised by encroachment of urbanity in the form of heat sinks and sources, such as concrete, asphalt, air conditioning system heat exchangers, roadways, airport tarmac, and other issues. This finding was backed up by an August 2011 U.S. General Accounting Office investigation and report titled: Climate Monitoring: NOAA Can Improve Management of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network.”

The authors also explain how government overseers’ improper manipulation of the raw temperature data manufactures fictitious warming.

It’s the patented Progressive procedure: create a crisis; offer your pet policy as the only possible solution.

The only difference between the junk science of the Climatescammers and Todd Akin is party affiliation.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this from Jim Gleaves:

FemiNazis view of Disney heroines….

Finally, in the Entertainment Section, we note the passing of three industry giants:

Phyllis Diller, outlandish comedian, dies at 95

 

San Francisco Anthem Singer Scott McKenzie Dies at 73

 

Mckenzie may have been a one-hit wonder, and we may not have agreed with the politics the song promoted, but we always enjoyed the sound.  That he co-wrote Kokomo is simply sauce for the goose.

And though Tony Scott was the polar-opposite of a one-hit wonder….

Top Gun director Tony Scott dies after jumping from Los Angeles bridge

 

….we’d argue he’ll be forever known as the having directed the most memorable and exciting opening scene in the history of Hollywood:

Truly the Big Screen at its best.

Magoo



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