It’s Tuesday, September 4th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, yet another reason nary a Dimocrat will provide a straight answer to the question, “Are we better off now than four years ago?”….

U.S. gas prices at highest ever for Labor Day weekend

Meanwhile, as The Obamao’s standard stump speeches suggest, the answers to what ails us are as foreign to these fools as free-market Capitalism:

And which is why, as the WSJ details, there is no joy in the Queen City:

The Charlotte Democrats

Hope and change have given way to a grim determination.

The Democrats gathering in Charlotte this week are united behind President Obama but more than a little nervous about their November prospects. The thrill of 2008 is gone, replaced by an almost grim determination. The party of hope and change has become the party of grind-it-out, slug-it-out, and hope to win as less awful than Mitt Romney.

This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. The Obama Presidency was going to usher in a new era of long-term Democratic dominance, and the circumstances to make it happen were on their side. Democrats took power in a recession they could pin on Republicans, knowing they could take credit for the inevitable economic recovery and ride that to re-election. Young people went for them 2 to 1 and might have been loyal for decades. It all might have worked had they made the economy their priority. (Or better yet, bothered to learn how it works!)

But this misjudges the modern Democratic Party. Four years ago in Denver, we wrote that the country deserved to know that the Democrats who would really be running the country in 2009 would be named Henry Waxman, John Dingell, John Conyers, David Obey, George Miller, Barney Frank and James Oberstar. Those were—and mostly still are—the liberal barons of the House.

They weren’t about to let a crisis go to waste, and so they went about using their accidentally large majorities to drive through a generation of pent-up liberal legislation. Mr. Obama famously let them write the stimulus and health-care bills. Republicans were helpless to stop them for two years. Liberals got nearly everything they wanted—which is what may be their ultimate undoing.

Democrats of the Obama era are united by cultural liberalism, but above all else they agree on the goal of expanding the reach of government. The Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist idea shop of the Clinton years, is moribund. The vanguard of ideas for the Obama White House is the Center for American Progress, which churns out proposals for government to mediate every sphere of economic life.

In this view, the entire American economy is a giant market failure—except perhaps Silicon Valley. Health-care costs can be controlled by dictating prices and medical practice. The climate can be controlled by putting coal out of business and subsidizing wind, solar and ethanol. Wall Street can be controlled by more rules and hanging the occasional banker in the public square as an example.

Most important, government spending can conjure private growth by “investing” in whatever seems like a good idea. So taxes must rise and rise again to pay for these “investments.”

The same priorities prevail, by the way, in the rare states where Democrats still dominate. While a wave of GOP Governors elected in 2010 have been reforming government, Democrats in Illinois, Maryland, Connecticut and California are bent on protecting every corner of government they can. The first three have raised taxes enormously, and Jerry Brown is desperate to get voter approval in November so he can raise the top income-tax rate in California to 13.3%.

There are very few Chris Christie Democrats. The closest might be Andrew Cuomo in New York, but his productive first year has given way to status-quo accommodations to unions on school and pension reform and a tax increase. This reflects today’s Democratic coalition, which is dominated by affluent cultural liberals, voters who depend on government, and especially public-employee unions.

Here and there in the hinterlands, you can see a glimpse of new Democratic thinking. Gloria Romero in California wants to reduce the power of teachers unions, and treasurer Gina Raimondo dared to rein in public pension benefits in Rhode Island. Even President Obama sometimes sounds like a reformer on education, until election years when he resorts to proposing more federal spending to hire more teachers.

But those reform voices won’t be anywhere in evidence in Charlotte, where the message will be four more years of more of the same. The main theme is to preserve the government that Democrats have expanded. Democrats made a generational bet in 2009-2010 that the country was ready to be yanked sharply to the left, and they know that nearly all of their grand ambitions will be undone if Mr. Obama loses.

Yet the liberals who dominate the party believe that if Mr. Obama wins, however narrowly, their gamble will have been a great success. They may have lost the House in 2010, and perhaps they’ll lose the Senate this year, but those can be won back.

Meanwhile, ObamaCare won’t be repealed, its subsidies will start to flow in 2014, and then another huge chunk of the private economy and voting public will be dependent on the government for decades to come. Nancy Pelosi will take her bows as an icon of the entitlement state.

Thus the frowning resolve to grind out a victory by whatever means possible. It’s hardly an optimistic vision and it’s far from commanding the oceans, but if Democrats win, what you’ve seen is what you’ll get.

Unfortunately, what we’ve seen may well have been the best case scenario; based on The Obamao’s own words, what we’re likely to get will be worse….

….significantly worse.

Even so, as this next item forwarded by George Lawlor details, at least you’d think your closest allies could spell your name wright:

Is it “Cory” or “Corey”?!?

Speaking of making things worse, as per this story from the Daily Caller, contrary to what has been made public to date, The Dear Misleader not only may have played a key role in creating the housing bubble, but bankrupted a number of those he was sworn to serve in the process….which, based on his performance as President, seems a role he was born to play:

With landmark lawsuit, Barack Obama pushed banks to give subprime loans to Chicago’s African-Americans

Funny….they’re lawyer seems to have done okay for himself!

President Barack Obama was a pioneering contributor to the national subprime real estate bubble, and roughly half of the 186 African-American clients in his landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices. As few as 19 of those 186 clients still own homes with clean credit ratings, following a decade in which Obama and other progressives pushed banks to provide mortgages to poor African Americans.

The startling failure rate among Obama’s private sector clients was discovered during The Daily Caller’s review of previously unpublished court information from the lawsuit that a young Obama helmed as the lead plaintiff’s attorney.

Since the mortgage bubble burst, some of his former clients are calling for a policy reversal. “If you see some people don’t make enough money to afford the mortgage, why would you give them a loan?” asked Obama client John Buchanan. “There should be some type of regulation against giving people loans they can’t afford.” (There was….until your attorney got involved.)

Banks “were too eager to lend to many who didn’t qualify,” said Don Byas, another client who saw banks lurch from caution to bubble-inflating recklessness. “I don’t care what race you are. … You need to keep financial wisdom [separate] from trying to help your people,” said Byas, an autoworker. (Too soon old, too late wise!)

Nonetheless, Obama has pursued the same top-down mortgage lending policies in the White House.

You could almost feel sorry for these poor fools….if they hadn’t agitated so vociferously for, and profited from, the very outcome they sought, having participated in a game they themselves chose to play.  Like so many in America today, they wanted the reward without assuming any of the risk.

And in International News of Note, proof yet again one cannot pay attention to what The Dear Misleader SAYS, rather one must consider only what he DOES….or in this case, DOESN’T do:

Obama to Iran: Won’t Back Israeli Strike If US Interests Left Alone

The United States has indirectly informed Iran, via two European nations, that it would not back an Israeli strike against the country’s nuclear facilities, as long as Tehran refrains from attacking American interests in the Persian Gulf, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Monday.

According to the report, Washington used covert back-channels in Europe to clarify that the US does not intend to back Israel in a strike that may spark a regional conflict. In return, Washington reportedly expects Iran to steer clear of strategic American assets in the Persian Gulf, such as military bases and aircraft carriers.

Israeli officials reported an unprecedented low in the two nations’ defense ties, which stems from the Obama administration’s desire to warn Israel against mounting an uncoordinated attack on Iran.

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/6671 

Anyone, Jew or Gentile, who believes The Obamao’s got Israel’s back is either willfully ignorant, woefully stupid….or in a position to profit personally from the potential annihilation of the Jewish State.

Then there’s this bit of insightful commentary from Bill Buckler at ZeroHedge.com, courtesy of Tom Bakke:

The Rulers And The Ruled

The truth that without property rights, no other rights are possible has been known for millennia. In the formalised study of politics, it is more than 300 years old, having been articulated with great care by John Locke in the late 17th century. The modern study of economics is well over 200 years old. Adam Smith’s Wealth Of Nations was published in 1776 – the same year as Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration Of Independence. The great work which finally integrated money with politics and economics celebrates its centennial this year. Ludwig von Mises published his Theory Of Money And Credit in 1912 – the year before the US inaugurated an income tax and a central bank. Ten years after that in 1922, von Mises published Socialism – a book which established beyond refutation the fundamental truth that any form of central planning and/or government control of the means of production cannot work because it makes economic calculation impossible. Picture if you will the state of ANY other branch of human endeavour if ALL the knowledge about it gained over the past three centuries had been summarily dismissed.

Property rights are a prerequisite for any kind of exchange – direct or indirect. The ability to exchange is fundamental to any type of viable economic activity. The efficiency of exchange is fundamental to the success of that economic activity and the resultant prosperity of the nation that engages in it. Indirect exchange using a MEDIUM of exchange or money is hugely more efficient than direct exchange or barter. That makes money the most important economic good in existence. The tragedy of our present global plight is the simple fact that money is also the least understood economic good in existence.

The first pre-requisite of the establishment of a “society” of the rulers and the ruled has always been the same. The rulers must gain control over the medium of exchange. For obvious reasons, no nation can ever progress to a state of advanced economic activity until a medium of exchange is established. Once it is established, there is no going back. An advanced economy cannot operate by means of barter. The problem is that once the government or the rulers gain control of money, it progressively ceases to be a medium of exchange and becomes a medium of control. That impinges on the functioning of markets which in turn impinges on the maintenance of property rights. Thus, we come full circle from a free society to a command society. There has never been any shortage of those who want to rule. The problem has always been with the vast majority who are content to be ruled. Today’s global outcry for the manufacturing of more and more “money” out of thin air is an eloquent testimony. It shows that most people have no understanding of freedom, markets or money. Lacking such understanding – and having no desire to gain it – most people have accepted government as their masters.

As Robert Heinlein stated the problem – it is impossible to free a serf or a slave. He or she must free themselves and most are much more terrified of that prospect than they are resentful of being ruled.

Which just goes to prove what Benjamin Franklin wrote over 237 years ago still holds true today: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”.  And in the end, they’ll receive neither.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s these two gems forwarded by Sandy Martindale:

Finally, in the “What Goes Around Comes Around” segment:

Great white shark mystery after carcass washes ashore in Massachusetts

A Massachusetts marine biologist who examined a 13-foot great white shark carcass found ashore near the Rhode Island state line wasn’t able to determine how the shark died, state officials said Sunday. “They will have a difficult time, if at all, figuring out how he was killed,” said Krista Selmi, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.

State biologist Greg Skomal performed a necropsy on the 1,500-pound male shark Saturday and found no signs of trauma.

Times have changed:

Maybe the little Kintner boy just didn’t agree with him.

Magoo