It’s Saturday, January 12th, 2103….and since (1) TLJ has Bunko tonight, and (2) our plans to watch as much football as possible this weekend will likely impact our ability to get the Monday edition out on time, we thought we’d use the time to pump out a little weekend extra.  Also, be sure to check out a compendium of some of our favorite 2nd Amendment promos in today’s Cover Story, featured on our home page at www.thedailygouge.com.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of the AEI, Jonah Goldberg points out the gaping flaws in….

Biden’s faulty lifeguard logic

“If it saves one life” — at what cost?

 

Faulty: the only variety in which Liberal logic comes.

‘As the president said, if your actions result in only saving one life, they’re worth taking,” Vice President Joe Biden declared on Wednesday as he previewed what his commission on gun violence might actually do. “There are executive orders, there’s executive action that can be taken. We haven’t decided what that is yet. But we’re compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required.”

Biden insisted that it is a moral imperative for the White House to do something: “It’s critically important that we act.” Most of the attention, understandably, is on Biden’s suggestion that the president will consider using executive orders to do things he couldn’t possibly accomplish legislatively. The imperial presidency is always troubling, but when it rubs up against the Bill of Rights it is especially so.

But what I find to be arguably the most disturbing — and definitely the most annoying — part of Biden’s remarks is this nonsense about if it saves only one life, the White House’s actions would be worth it. Maybe it’s because I wrote a whole book on the way phrases like “if it saves only one life, it’s worth it” distort our politics, but whenever I hear such things the hairs on the back of my neck go up.

The notion that any government action is justified if it saves even a single life is malarkey, to borrow one of Mr. Biden’s favorite terms. Worse than that, it’s dangerous malarkey.

Let’s start with the malarkey part. The federal government could ban cars, fatty foods, ladders, plastic buckets, window blinds, or Lego pieces small enough to choke on and save far more than just one life. Is it imperative that the government do any of that? It’s a tragedy when people die in car accidents (roughly 35,000 fatalities per year), or when kids drown in plastic buckets (it happens an estimated 10 to 40 times a year), or when people die falling off ladders (about 300 per year). Would a law that prevents those deaths be worth it, no matter the cost?

Now one obvious response to this sort of argument ad absurdum is to say, “We don’t have to ban buckets or cars to reduce the number of deaths. We can simply regulate them.” And that’s true.

Indeed, that’s the point. But when we regulate things, we take into account things other than the singular consideration about saving lives. Banning cars would cost the economy trillions — and also probably cost lives in various unintended ways. So we regulate them with speed limits, seat-belt requirements, etc. And even here we accept a certain number of preventable deaths every year. Regulators don’t set the speed limit at 5 miles per hour, nor do they make highway guardrails 50 feet high.

Every serious student of public policy — starting with Joe Biden and Barack Obama — knows this to be true. Some just choose to pretend it isn’t true in order to push through their preferred policies. The idea that the government can regulate or ban its way into a world where there are no tragedies, no premature deaths, is quite simply ridiculous. But that is precisely the assumption behind phrases like “if only one life is saved, it’s worth it.”

Which brings us to the dangerous part. Pay attention to what Biden is saying. The important thing is for government to act, not for the government to act wisely. And that’s the real problem with this kind of rhetoric. Not only does it establish a ridiculously low standard for what justifies government action — indeed, action itself becomes its own justification — but it also sets the expectation that the government is there to prevent bad things from happening.

Biden has a warrant to investigate the role not just of gun laws but also video games, movies, mental-health policies, and lord knows what else in order to make sure we don’t have another Newtown or Aurora massacre. I am wholly sympathetic to the desire to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. But for starters, I would first like to hear exactly what Biden would have us do with regard to the First, Second, and Fifth Amendments before I think action is self-justifying on the grounds that if it saves even one life, it’s worth it.

Hey, Julia Childs should be glad she’s gone; knives are next!

In a related item of absolute Liberal insanity, courtesy of Bill Meisen and Politicker.com, yet another senseless restriction from the Boob who banned Big Gulps:

Bloomberg Slaps Down Criticism of Painkiller Restriction Plan 

 

Yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and city officials unveiled a new initiative to limit supplies of prescription painkillers in the city’s emergency rooms as a way to combat what they described as a growing addiction problem in the region. Some critics, as documented by The New York Times, however, felt the move would unnecessarily hurt poor and uninsured patients who use emergency rooms as their primary care doctor. Needless to say, Mr. Bloomberg was not swayed by this line of argument.

“The city hospitals we control, so…we’re going to do it and we’re urging all of the other hospitals to do it, voluntary guidelines. Somebody said, oh, somebody wrote, ‘Oh then maybe there won’t be enough painkillers for the poor who use the emergency rooms as their primary care doctor,’” the mayor said on his weekly radio show with John Gambling. “Number one, there’s no evidence of that. Number two, supposing it is really true so you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit. The other side of the coin is people are dying and there’s nothing perfect….There’s nothing that you can possibly do where somebody isn’t going to suffer and it’s always the same group [claiming], ‘Everybody is heartless.’ Come on, this is a very big problem.”

In the same interview, Mr. Bloomberg stressed the initiative’s simple rationale is to prevent extra pills from piling up in the cabinets of New Yorkers who no longer need them, where they can pose a health risk if they’re abused.

“We talk about drugs, heroin and crack and marijuana, this is one of the big outbursts–and it’s a lot worse around the country than it is here. It’s kids and adults getting painkillers and using them for entertainment purposes, or whatever field of purposes, as opposed to what they are designed for,” he explained. “If you break a leg, you’re going to be in pain, nothing wrong with getting something that reduces the pain. But if you get 20 days worth of pills and you only need them 3 days, there’s 17 days sitting there. Invariably (“invariably”?  Any evidence of THAT?!?) some of the kids are going to find them, or you’re going to take them and get you addicted.”

Mr. Bloomberg also argued the number of pain pills currently being prescribed had even contributed to an uptick in violent crimes outside of pharmacies from robbers looking to steal the drugs. “You see there’s a lot more hold-ups of pharmacies, people getting held up as they walk out of pharmacies,” he explained. “What are they all about? They’re not trying to steal your shaving cream or toothpaste at the point of a gun. They want these drugs.”

Like his 24/7 armed security, we somehow doubt Mayor Boobberg will ever be without unfettered access to as many painkillers as he, in his sole and absolute discretion, deems appropriate.

And since we’re on the subject of hypocritical Liberals, it’s today’s installment of “Do As I Say, NOT As I Do” segment, and yet another Progressive casting stones from her glass house:

Chicago Teachers Union President: ‘Kill the Rich’

 

Separated at birth?!?

The Chicago Teachers Union is not just about looking out for its members’ interests. The union wants to fundamentally change America, too. That shift occurred when the radical Karen Lewis was elected as its president two years ago. She’s best known for mocking US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s lisp and for taking on -– and defeating -– Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the district’s first teachers’ strike in a generation.

CTU leaders have been on a victory lap of sorts since the September strike, with union activists seeing themselves as protectors of union power during a time of membership decline and education reform at the state and local level. They’ve also taken on the role of social activities, fighting for causes like the Occupy movement and gay marriage, which have nothing to do with education. Some union leaders have called for violence and other radical tactics to achieve social goals.

When Lewis appeared at the Illinois Labor History Society’s “Salute to Labor’s Historic Heroes from the History Makers of Today,” she didn’t disappoint the crowd. She threw gasoline onto the fire of class warfare, and even mentioned mob killings of wealthy Americans.

“… Do not think for a minute that the wealthy are ever going to allow you to legislate their riches away from them. (Nor should they!) Please understand that. However, we are in a moment where the wealth disparity in this country is very reminiscent of the robber baron ages. The labor leaders of that time, though, were ready to kill. They were. They were just – off with their heads. They were seriously talking about that.”

Some in the audience laughed and clapped at her remark. “I don’t think we’re at that point,” Lewis laughingly replied, without specifying when “that point” might arrive. “And that’s scary to most people. But the key is they think nothing of killing us. They think nothing of putting our people in harm’s way. They think nothing of lethal working conditions.”

She then used schools without air conditioning as an example of “lethal working conditions.”

No air conditioning constitutes “lethal working conditions”….in Chicago?!?  No offense, but Ms. Lewis looks like she could spend more than a little time in an actual sauna….

….wearing a wetsuit.

And though we couldn’t find a definitive figure as to Jabba the Butt’s annual compensation, it’s well in excess of $250K, which makes her a millionaire by The Dear Misleader’s own definition….and making 5X the income of the average family in the Windy City.

Speaking of those totally undeserving of what they’re receiving, here’s a follow-up to yesterday’s item detailing Der Schlickmeister having been named Father of the Year, courtesy of Hope n’ Change:

 

Because this week’s news wasn’t surreal enough already, the National Father’s Day Council has declared Bill “Stinky Finger” Clinton to be “Father of the Year.” And technically, it seems like they might have jumped the gun a little since the awards ceremony won’t happen until June, and just maybe someone will show himself to be an even better father than Bill Clinton in the next six months – perhaps by not sexually abusing anyone.

Of course, the award isn’t given solely because of what Mr. Clinton has done for his own alleged daughter Chelsea (and we say “alleged” because Bill Clinton personally claimed to be sterile after raping Juannita Broaderick), but because of the great fatherly messages which he’s delivered to all of our nation’s youth.

For instance, he taught young girls that oral sex wasn’t sex at all – it was just really, really, really friendly. He improved women’s health by pointing out that when a tampon wasn’t readily available, a cigar could be substituted in an emergency. He bested Martha Stewart by showing how to make a beautiful, inexpensive fashion accessory out of bodily fluids. And giving the best fatherly gift of all to teens across the fruited plain, he made it perfectly acceptable to lie about sex. Including under oath – let alone when being questioned by pissed off parents!

Frankly, Hope n’ Change Cartoons suspects that the “National Father’s Day Council” isn’t really using their heads when they make a selection as stupid as this one (or, in 2007, when they chose Democrat John Edwards, who created an out of wedlock child while screwing around on his cancer-stricken wife).

In fact, we’re rather suspicious that there is no “National Father’s Day Council,” and that it’s really just a cover story for a bunch of guys who go out whoring once a week and don’t want their wives or their children to find out.

Or was that the Secret Service?

Which we guess qualifies Linda Lovelace, at some point, for Mother of the Year.

Next up, it’s the “MSM Bias….WHAT Bias?!?” segment, and yet another story you’ll never catch on the evening news:

Robbery halted by grandmother with a gun

Arrest made after police release surveillance video

 

Which brings to mind an earlier incident you likely only viewed on The Daily Gouge:

If law-abiding citizens utilize guns whilst defending themselves in the forest, and the MSM refuses to report it….do their guns make a sound?!?

And in the Environmental Moment, the WSJ‘s Holman Jenkins reports the truth behind the Environazi lies and obfuscations:

Our ‘Hottest Year’ and Al Gore’s Epic Failure

Its moment has come, but the global warming lobby is too discredited to seize it.

 

Only one….among many!

When the president says “my dog has no nose,” trust the media to fashion an accurate restatement of his statement, something along the lines of “the president said today his dog has no nose.”

When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says 2012 was the hottest year on record in the “contiguous United States,” trust the media to transcribe the statement accurately. A disaster for public understanding begins only when the media stop transcribing and start using their own brains. Said the New York Times climate blog, in an assertion that was echoed throughout the media:

“The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but 2012 blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.”

Really? If that were true, then hair-on-fire news should have been the fact that 2012 was 2.13 degrees hotter than 2011. That’s a far more dramatic change, and in a single year. Nor was it mentioned that 2008, in the contiguous U.S., was two degrees cooler than 2006. Or that 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were all cooler than 1998 by a larger margin than 2012 was hotter than 1998.

Are you getting the picture? None of this was mentioned because it makes a mockery of using trends in the Lower 48 as a proxy for global warming, the misguided intent that permeated media coverage of the NOAA revelation.

The contiguous United States isn’t the globe. It isn’t even the United States, omitting Alaska and Hawaii. The Lower 48 represent just 1.58% of the total surface area of the Earth. The law of large numbers is at work here: The smaller the sample, the more volatile its patterns compared to a larger sample. And the fact remains, in all the authoritative studies, the warmest year on record globally is still 1998 and no trend has been apparent globally since then.

Until this week, the media’s previous favorite way to evade this reality was to report, as a joint CBS/New York Times broadcast did on a recent Sunday morning, that the past decade was the “hottest decade ever recorded.”

Uh huh. Because year-to-year changes in global (as opposed to contiguous U.S.) temperature are indeed teensy, it would be astonishing if the decade following the warmest year on record were not the warmest decade on record. But the appeal of this formulation is that it allows the media to talk about global warming in our time without mentioning that, ahem, global warming has ceased in our time.

Is climate warming getting ready to resume? Possibly. Is man’s contribution to climate change significant and worth worrying about? Possibly. But climate change and gun control have one thing in common. Their advocates are more interested in asserting their moral superiority and denouncing their “enemies” than in making progress, which explains why there has been no progress. (With all due respect to Holman Jenkins, no; their models and predictions have been repeatedly proven fabricated and irretrievably erroneous.)

Al Gore is a perfect case in point. He unburdened himself of a remarkable self-delusion in a talk last month to the New York League of Conservation Voters, claiming a nefarious cabal of “carbon polluters” and “ideologues” in Congress were blocking change.

In fact, the oil industry and most industry long ago threw in the towel, seeing no point in contending against the overwhelming media, political and elite consensus in favor of man-made warming, especially as it became clear that voter self-interest would nevertheless remain an insurmountable barrier to costly energy policies aimed at influencing climate change.

Mr. Gore must continue to flog the image of himself as a lonely voice battling a sinister conspiracy to account, frankly, for his own policy failure. Yet had he and his fellow activists been less sanctimonious, less prone to self-discrediting hysteria and false assertions about global warming, their cause might be seizing the high ground right now.

Tax reform is on the nation’s agenda. An intelligent contingent of the environmental community once had a bright idea to overcome the biggest barrier to climate action (a barrier that many greens resolutely ignore), namely the problem of costs and benefits. Their idea, known as the “double dividend,” proposed a carbon tax to change energy-use patterns while the proceeds would be used to reduce taxes on labor and capital and encourage economic growth.

The appeal of this proposal was its realism—to recognize that nagging uncertainties exist concerning climate change and man’s role, yet here was a policy that politicians and voters could support out of self-interest rather than sackcloth and ashes. And, for once, environmentalists would not be seen as wanting everyone to be poorer.

This idea might seem especially ripe now that we want tax reform simultaneously to grow the economy and help pay for the welfare state. Yet advocates of a carbon tax are all but invisible in the debate. Mr. Gore and his allies wore out their welcome with their exaggerations, their self-righteousness, and their perfectly foolish insistence (like the gun controllers) that a plurality of voters could be morally bullied into giving up their self-interest if chastised long and loudly enough by Mr. Gore.

Politically, this worked as well as you might expect: Tax reform is on the agenda for the first time in a generation and the greens have mouthed themselves out of contention.

Hey, Al had to pay for dumping Tipper somehow!

On the Lighter Side (which definitely doesn’t include Karen Lewis!)….

And in the Sports Section….

Golfer has iPhone stolen by raccoon on golf course, finds it using GPS

 

Using a cell phone while on a golf course is typically frowned upon. The Okeeheelee Golf Course in Palm Beach County is lucky enough to have a raccoon on staff to help keep golfers from spending time on their smart phones and screwing up the rate of play. That’s right — a raccoon.

According to the South Florida Sun Sentinel, a golfer named Brian Acker recently had his iPhone 4 stolen while playing on the second hole of the Eagle Course at Okeeheelee. The device was taken by a raccoon that course workers and regulars call Rocky. He is known for snatching various items from unsuspecting players such as wallets and food, but the way Acker recovered his cell phone makes the story even more entertaining.

Because of a GPS app, Acker was able to “ping” his phone and trace it to the top of a palm tree on the second hole of the course. Workers used a ladder to climb the tree and found Acker’s cell phone case before snagging the phone itself about 12 feet up the tree. It was accompanied by several food wrappers.

Finally, we’ll call it a day with News of the Bizarre, and this forward from Jim Crilley and the WaPo:

Flatulent SSA worker’s reprimand is rescinded

 

Turn up your noses if you must, but this is one of those tales that can only occur in that vortex of life, work and bureaucracy. The Social Security Administration reprimanded an employee last month for allegedly creating a “hostile work environment” by regularly passing gas at the office, according to an official letter sanctioning the worker.

The Smoking Gun Web site published the document online. The agency said it withdrew its action against the employee before the letter was publicized, but officials did not respond to requests for a date of the rescinding action. “When senior management became aware of the reprimand it was immediately rescinded,” agency spokeswoman Dorothy J. Clark said in an e-mail.

The reprimand letter, which came from the agency’s Office of Disability Operations, cited 60 documented instances of the worker passing gas in his office over about 12 weeks. Names on the document had been redacted. The episodes occurred as much as nine times a day, according to a log the employee’s supervisors created after his alleged offenses continued for more than three months.

Smoking Gun described the employee as a 38-year-old man working at a Baltimore Social Security office. The site posted what it claims to be a picture of the worker posing with Pepe Le Pew — the Looney Tunes cartoon character — at an amusement park. According to the reprimand letter, the man told a supervisor in July that he would start turning on a fan in his work space, but the manager said such action would only “cause the smell to spread and worsen the air quality in the module.”

In August, the man told a supervisor that he was lactose intolerant and would purchase Gas-X to help deal with his problem, the letter said. But the log showed the issue continued for the next several months. The worker provided proof of medical conditions that could prevent him from working full days at times, but the disability operations manager said: “Nothing that you have submitted has indicated you would have uncontrollable flatulence. It is my belief that you can control this condition.”

The American Federation of Government Employees declined to comment, and the union’s Local 1923, which represents Social Security workers in Baltimore, did not respond to queries. Television’s “The Office” couldn’t have produced a better script.

What’s next; an outright ban on the occasional manly scratch or package adjustment?!?  As Sam Kinison so eloquently noted….

Magoo