It’s Wednesday, November 16th, 2011….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, whatever he’s smokin’….

….must be some gooooood sh*t!

Obama: I delivered “change you can believe in”

 

To recapture some of his 2008 magic, President Obama attacked Republicans while assuring a hometown Hawaii crowdthat he has delivered “change that you can believe in” during his first term in office. He acknowledged, however, that not all Americans wanted that change at the time, (And less like it since!) and that the last three years have seen some “false starts.”

After greeting a crowd that included his tenth-grade teacher, Obama contrasted his campaign with the “narrow, cramped vision of an America where everybody is left to fend for themselves” that he implied Republicans hold. “That was what the campaign was about — the belief that the more Americans succeed, the more America succeeds,” Obama said. “We knew it wouldn’t come easy, we knew it wasn’t going to come quickly, but three years later, because of what you did in 2008, we’ve already started to see what change looks like.”

Yeah….

….now we know exactly how it looks!  We put it to you, the benighted boobs that elected this manifestly unqualified community organizer to the highest office in the land: how you like him….

 ….NOW?!?

Next, in a follow-up to yesterday’s Video Clip of the Day, Bernie Goldberg reacts to what amounted to CNN’s Dan Lothian:

(a).  Falling to his knees and worshiping the Anointed One.

(b). Checking his impartiality at the door.

(c).  Pulling a Lewinsky.

 

Powerline Blog‘s Scott Johnson confirms the wisdom of the old adage, “when in doubt, choose (c)”:

Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler awards one to four Pinnochios to politicians he judges guilty of shading the truth. Following Kessler’s example, I’m awarding Lothian four Lewinskys for his performance as a member of the Obamamania media yesterday. We should have thought of some form of recognition like this in 2008 and 2009, when we could have paid our respects to David Brooks, Chris Matthews, and Evan Thomas, for example, but here is the first award in what should prove to be a continuing series. Dan Lothian, this one’s for you.

Lothian, like so many others in the MSM, has forgotten, if he ever learned it in the first place, the cornerstone of a “free” press is….freedom….from bias!

Speaking of quizzes, Steven Landsburg, Econ professor at the University of Rochester, writing in the WSJ offers….

A Short Econ Quiz for the Super Committee

Why an extra trillion in ‘irresponsible’ deficit spending can’t become ‘responsible’ if paid for by higher taxes.

 

Suppose that year after year, you spend more than you earn. You are worried that you’ve become fiscally irresponsible. Which of the following could be paths back to fiscal sanity for your household?

A) Spend less.

B) Earn more.

C) Stop at the ATM more often so you’ll have more cash in your pocket.

Do we all understand why C is a really bad answer? Good. Now let’s try another one.

Suppose that year after year, your government spends more than it collects in taxes. You are worried that it’s become fiscally irresponsible. Which of the following could be a path back to fiscal sanity for your government?

A) Spend less.

B) Collect more tax revenue.

Spending less—at least spending less on things you don’t need—can be a first step toward sanity for a government just as it can for a household. So A is a pretty good answer. What about B?

As the deadline looms for the congressional super committee, there’s seems to be a growing sense that tax revenue for the government is like income for the household. That’s wrong. (See the Pete Stark video clip immediately below.) Raising taxes is nothing at all like earning income. Instead, it’s a lot more like visiting the ATM.

The government’s debt is the American people’s debt. If we pay down that debt through higher taxes, we will, for the most part, pay those taxes by drawing down our savings. That’s no more “responsible” than drawing down those savings to finance overconsumption within the household.

If you buy a kayak you don’t need and can’t afford, you’re unlikely to placate your spouse by saying “Don’t worry, dear, I withdrew the money from our retirement account.” If your government insists on maintaining social programs we don’t need and can’t afford, nobody should be placated by a congressional agreement to finance that program with money withdrawn from those same accounts.

Here’s another way to say essentially the same thing: The government’s chief asset—in fact, pretty much its only asset—is its ability to tax people, now and in the future. The taxpayers are the government’s ATM. Make a withdrawal today, and there’s less available tomorrow. (An unfortunate fact lost on The Obamao, Pete Stark and every other spendaholic in the federal government!)

Now the ability to tax is a pretty huge asset and the government has not (yet!) come close to depleting it. In that sense, there’s a lot of money in the bank. But no matter how much you’ve got in the bank, a policy of ever-increasing withdrawals is nothing at all like a decision to earn more income. It’s important to get the analogy right. And it’s clear from the blogs and the op-ed pages that not everybody gets this.

Instead, the notion persists that an extra trillion in federal spending can be converted from “irresponsible” to “responsible” as long as it’s accompanied by an extra trillion in tax hikes. That’s like saying a $500 haircut can be converted from “irresponsible” to “responsible” as long as you withdraw the $500 from your bank account. If the super committee loses sight of this fundamental truth, it is doomed to fail.

Yeah….along with the rest of the country!

And just to demonstrate such profound misunderstandings of basic economics isn’t limited to the Executive Branch, check out this video clip of an interview with Congressman Pete Stark, courtesy of Doug Burr:

Like The Obamao, Steven Chu and a number of other DC denizens, Stark has multiple degrees (a BS in engineering from MIT and an MBA from Berkeley) from prestigious institutions of higher learning….which makes him, like almost all the others, nothing more than an educated idiot.  He’s not only condescending and dismissive, but completely wrong on the facts.  Stark represents not only everything that’s wrong with Washington, but why, absent term limitations, we’ll never clean up Cesspool-on-the-Potomac.

By the way, this video clip was filmed in 2008….which makes Stark this week’s winner of the Rhah Memorial award for being “Wrong?!?  You ain’t never been RIGHT!”:

Turning to The Gang That Rarely Shoots Straight, we turn these words of wisdom from….

Chris Christie: Don’t Underestimate Obama in 2012

 

We couldn’t agree more.  For those out there who still don’t get it, Team Tick-Tock’s like the Terminator: They won’t stop….at anything!  They’ll try to wade through us and reach down America’s throat and pull her f*ckin’ heart out….BUT ONLY IF WE LET THEM!

In a related item, Thomas Sowell asks the question the answer to which inquiring Conservative minds want to know:

Will Republicans Blow It?

 

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catch phrase could stop thinking for 50 years. One of the often-repeated catch phrases of our time — “It’s the economy, stupid!” — has already stopped thinking in some quarters for a couple of decades.

There is no question that the state of the economy can affect elections. But there is also no iron law that all elections will be decided by the state of the economy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was re-elected for an unprecedented third term after two terms in which unemployment was in double digits for eight consecutive years.

We may lament the number of people who are unemployed or who are on food stamps today. But those who give the Obama administration credit for coming to their rescue when they didn’t have a job are likely to greatly outnumber those who blame the administration for their not having a job in the first place.

An expansion of the welfare state in hard times seems to have been the secret of FDR’s great political success in the midst of economic disaster. An economic study published in a scholarly journal in 2004 concluded that the Roosevelt administration’s policies prolonged the Great Depression by several years. But few people read economic studies.

This economy has been sputtering along through most of the Obama administration, with the unemployment rate hovering around 9 percent. But none of that means that Barack Obama is going to lose the 2012 election. Even polls which show “any Republican” with more public support than Obama does not mean that Obama will lose.

The president is not going to run against “any Republican.” He is going to run against some specific Republican, and that Republican can expect to be attacked, denounced and denigrated for months on end before the November 2012 elections — not only by the Democrats, but also by the media that is heavily pro-Democrat.

We have already seen how unsubstantiated allegations from women with questionable histories have dropped Herman Cain from front runner to third place in just a couple of weeks. In short, it takes a candidate to beat a candidate, and everything depends on what kind of candidate that is.

The smart money inside the Beltway says that the Republicans need to pick a moderate candidate who can appeal to independent voters, not just to the conservative voters who turn out to vote in Republican primaries. Those who think this way say that you have to “reach out” to Hispanics, the elderly and other constituencies.

What is remarkable is how seldom the smart money folks look at what has actually been happening in presidential elections.

Ronald Reagan won two landslide elections when he ran as Ronald Reagan. Vice President George H.W. Bush then won when he ran as if he were another Ronald Reagan, with his famous statement, “Read my lips, no new taxes.” But after Bush 41 was elected and turned “kinder and gentler” — to everyone except the taxpayers — he lost to an unknown governor from a small state.

Other Republican presidential candidates who went the “moderate” route — Bob Dole and John McCain — also came across as neither fish nor fowl, and also went down to defeat.

Now the smart money inside the Beltway is saying that Mitt Romney, who is nothing if not versatile in his positions, is the Republicans’ best hope for replacing Obama. If conservative Republicans split their votes among a number of conservative candidates in the primaries, that can mean ending up with a presidential candidate in the Bob Dole-John McCain mold — and risking a Bob Dole-John McCain result in the next election.

The question now is whether the conservative Republican candidates who have enjoyed their successive and short-lived boomlets — Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain — are prepared to stay in the primary race to the bitter end, or whether their conservative principles will move them to withdraw and throw their support to another conservative candidate.

There has probably never been a time in the history of this country when we more urgently needed to get a president out of the White House, before he ruined the country. But will the conservative Republican candidates let that guide them?

Only time will tell.

Turning now to the Environmental Moment, brought to us today by Jeff Foutch, we learn about…

A Gold Rush of Subsidies in Clean Energy Search

 

P.G.& E., and ultimately its electric customers, will pay NRG $150 to $180 a megawatt-hour, according to a person familiar with the project, who asked not to be identified because the price information was confidential. At the time the contract was awarded, that was about 50 percent more than the expected market cost of electricity in California from a newly built gas-powered plant, state officials said

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/business/energy-environment/a-cornucopia-of-help-for-renewable-energy.html?_r=3&ref=energy-environment

Sounds like a bargain at TWICE the price….literally!  Hey, he wasn’t lying when he said….

Which brings us to the Money Quote, courtesy of Helen K. Billings, PhD:

“When they give a person a Bachelors degree, they take away their mouth, when they give them a Masters degree, they take away their brains, and when they give them a PhD, they give them back their mouth.“

Meet Stephen Chu, PhD….as in Douchebag:

The President’s Venture Capitalist

Steven Chu, Solyndra and the political allocation of capital.

 

Lately Energy Secretary Steven Chu has been dismissing his Solyndra critics with mock apologies: “Hindsight is often said to be 20/20,” he said last week. “In this case I think some of the hindsight was 20/10, or even better—clairvoyant.” Ho ho ho. Maybe Mr. Chu will be more contrite when he pays a visit to the House Energy and Commerce Committee Thursday, but for now let’s step back and review the story of this fiasco.

Mr. Chu’s defense is particularly ironic because the self-proclaimed clairvoyants—make that carnival mind readers—actually inhabit the White House. The Solyndra economic model is that government knows how to allocate the national wealth better than private investors do, with Mr. Chu among the oracles who saw something in the now-bankrupt solar panel maker that capital markets never did. To adapt Rick Perry, oops.

The green energy promotion program that ultimately resulted in Solyndra’s $535 million loan guarantee originated in the Bush years as a $4 billion fillip in the 2005 energy bill. Democrats saw that and raised the Energy Department’s total guarantee capacity to $77 billion, as part of the stimulus.

To put that influx in perspective, at the time total U.S. venture capital under management was about $176 billion. To put it doubly in perspective, DOE’s annual budget during the 2000s held constant at about $27 billion, most of which went towards nuclear security.

President Obama hired Mr. Chu as his chief venture capitalist, though his 1997 Nobel Prize in physics and work on climate change as the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggested no special expertise in, say, financing start-ups. Solyndra was Mr. Chu’s first pick, a month after the stimulus passed. And rather than merely guaranteeing a commercial loan —i.e., eliminating any private downside for failure—Solyndra borrowed its money directly from taxpayers through the Federal Financing Bank.

It soon became apparent that Solyndra’s balance sheet was shedding cash. Its sales growth held at 0% after it received the Chu loan, and it was selling its panels at a loss. Its production floor was almost as much of a shambles as its executive suite. Its few private investors had little skin in the game—27% of the project’s cost, well below the industry standard 35% equity contribution.

Mr. Chu decided to throw good taxpayer money after bad. (After all, if you’ve got a PhD in Physics, business must be a piece of cake!)

In February of this year, DOE decided to restructure Solyndra’s loan so that taxpayers were suddenly subordinate to the company’s private backers if it was liquidated. This dispensation came after Solyndra had already technically defaulted on Mr. Chu’s original terms. The Treasury typically reviews the term sheet in such cases, but email traffic made public suggests DOE tried to stymie its Treasury and White House budget office critics.

As reams of internal Administration emails have shown, other Obama economic officials were treating Solyndra’s viability and the wider DOE loan program as something of a running joke. And little wonder: The latest revelation is that days before the company went bust, DOE was negotiating a second restructuring that would have left taxpayers even worse off.

Much of the Washington debate now turns on whether Mr. Chu showed favoritism toward such Solyndra investors as the Tulsa billionaire and Obama fundraiser George Kaiser, or whether such political connections were incidental to a well-vetted play that simply didn’t pan out. This deserves scrutiny but it misses the larger point: Every green energy firm has some kind of political connection, given that the entire industry is a creation of the government.

In this symbiotic world, cause and effect blur. Loan programs like DOE’s are always going to pick the Solyndras of the world, since their reason for being is to help companies that can’t acquire private financing, and can’t persuade enough investors that the risks they take on will be profitable. A government program dedicated to uneconomic goals is naturally going to end in economic failure.

The amazing thing is that by this standard Solyndra may not be the worst investment, relatively speaking, since the entire DOE portfolio seems to be such a dog. “What’s terrifying is that after looking at some of the ones that came next, this one started to look better,” one White House budget staffer wrote in an April 2010 email. “Bad days are coming.”

They would certainly be coming for Mr. Chu if the Energy Department were a company accountable to shareholders who could demand a change in management. But Mr. Chu is an appointee doing the political bidding of the President, so voters will have to wait until the next election to hold someone responsible. Perhaps the Energy Secretary will still do the honorable thing, if only for the sake of his reputation.

Unfortunately, the man who, like a bizarro version of the Red Queen, suggested painting every roof in America white as the solution to anthropogenic global warming sacrificed any reputation he had long ago on the altar of climate change.

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, since we’re on the subject, we’ll wrap things up with the Sports Section.  First, a question: if an older woman attracted to younger men is a cougar, what do you call older men attracted to young boys?

The New York Post‘s Michael Goodwin offers an appropriate benediction for an institution once as American as apple pie:

Penn State’s Cowardly Lions

 

It is a cliché to say that football is like life. At Penn State, it is also insufficient. For under Joe Paterno, football was life.

And now a glorious era is finished, demolished beyond redemption. The scandalous end of Paterno’s career has wiped out the university’s sterling reputation and shattered the trust of an entire sport. Riots by crackpot students and death threats punctuate the madness.

To Pennsylvanians and millions of football fans everywhere, the fall of the House of Paterno is like the collapse of an empire. It crashed without warning or mercy. In truth, the core values rotted away over the years, the work done secretly in the dark, like that of termites and cancer. The end only seemed sudden.

It could be a long time before we know the full extent of the pedophilia horror allegedly perpetrated by a former coach and the outrageous silence of many, perhaps dozens, of people. But already the most important lesson is clear. Civilizations, from single universities to national cultures, must be defended with relentless vigilance and courage, or they will not survive. Only the details of their demise will differ.

A sage, perhaps Edmund Burke, once said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

That describes the fate of Penn State. The brilliant days of sunshine, victory and integrity in Happy Valley were not a mirage. They were real for generations of players, parents, students, alums and fans who, over the 46-year tenure of Paterno, believed in the “grand experiment” — of winning the right way, with honor.

But evil triumphed because of a fundamental failure by Paterno and others to uphold the principles the experiment represented. And so the whole enterprise lies in shambles, everyone associated with it tarnished and generations of adherents suffering an angry loss of faith.

I share that loss because I grew up in the shadow of Penn State, just 30 miles from the shining oasis he created. In my youth, Paterno and Penn State football were synonymous with the working-class values of the hardscrabble mountains of central Pennsylvania. He was the pope of a secular religion that forged friendships and family bonds. Under his benevolent dictatorship, “old school” became a term of rectitude and integrity.

Uniforms were simple, the players were legitimate students and the code of sportsmanship meant something. Paterno and his wife contributed $4 million to the university, some of it to enhance the teaching of classics. The righteousness of the path was confirmed by the fact that Paterno won more games than any major-college coach in history.

Yet the rot was quietly hollowing out the foundation. The first report that respected coach Jerry Sandusky was a pedophile was quietly investigated, and dropped without explanation in 1998. Other reports followed, with the most important one coming in 2002, when a young assistant said he spotted Sandusky, then retired, raping a child in a locker-room shower. The assistant told Paterno, who told his supervisors — but nobody told the police.

So Sandusky, according to the shocking indictment against him, was allowed to continue his predations for nine more years. The price for that shameful silence must be measured in tens of millions of dollars, reputations lost and lives ruined.

All of which gives rise to these questions: Those men and women who remained silent in the face of this evil — are they truly good? Or are they cowards who were simply not willing to take a modest personal risk for the preservation of the one thing they supposedly valued most?

I believe they are cowards. Their goodness was found wanting when it was needed most, and so was shallow if it existed at all. They are sunshine patriots who could not be counted on when the stakes were highest.

In life, even more than in football, courage is required.

Amen.

Magoo