{"id":5652,"date":"2012-04-10T22:49:07","date_gmt":"2012-04-11T02:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thedailygouge.com\/?p=5652"},"modified":"2012-04-10T22:49:20","modified_gmt":"2012-04-11T02:49:20","slug":"the-daily-gouge-wednesday-april-11th-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thedailygouge.com\/?p=5652","title":{"rendered":"The Daily Gouge, Wednesday, April 11th, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s Wednesday, April 11th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Leading off the mid-week edition, Conn Carroll’s Morning Examiner<\/em> examines….<\/strong><\/p>\n

Buffett Rule Math<\/span><\/h1>\n

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President Obama is going to deliver a speech in Boca Raton, Florida today about what The New York Times describes as, \u201ca tax proposal that has become a centerpiece of Mr. Obama\u2019s campaign for re-election.\u201d They are, of course, referring to The Buffett Rule.<\/p>\n

But going into the speech, the White House wants to make sure everybody knows that the Buffett Rule has nothing to do with reducing the debt. According to Politico, White House National Economic Council Deputy Director Jason Furman held a conference call yesterday where he explained to reporters that Obama\u2019s Buffett rule, \u201cwas never our plan to bring the deficit down and get the debt under control.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/span> This is a wise admission by the White House. A Joint Committee on Taxation report released last month showed that the Buffett Rule would only raise $47 billion over 11 years. That is .7 percent of the $6.4 trillion in debt Obama\u2019s budget would create over the same time frame.<\/p>\n

So if the Buffett Rule is not about lowering the debt, what is it about?<\/strong><\/span> \u201cFairness<\/em><\/span>.\u201d<\/span><\/strong> During a different Monday conference call with reporters, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said, \u201cThe Buffett rule will help make our system reflect our values as all Americans play by the same rules, do their fair share and get a shot at success.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Problem is, the same math the proves the Buffett Rule fails to reduce the debt also shows it is even worse at redistributing wealth.<\/strong> Just think about it.<\/span> The United States economy will allocate about $15.3 trillion worth of goods and services in 2012. The Buffett Rule would redistribute about $4.3 billion of that $15.3 trillion. That is .03 percent<\/em><\/span>.<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Vice President Joe Biden inaugurated his new twitter account yesterday by tweeting out, \u201cI\u2019m for the Buffett Rule because it just makes sense. Like the President says\u2014it\u2019s not class warfare. It\u2019s math<\/em><\/span>.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The White House has already admitted that the math shows the Buffett Rule is a deficit dud. A quick look at the math of our nation\u2019s gross domestic product shows it is a \u201cfairness\u201d failure as well.<\/span> So if its not about the deficit, and its not about fairness, class warfare is the only explanation left<\/span><\/em>.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

For more on the subject of Team Tick-Tock’s fuzzy math, and brazen class warfare, we turn to a snippet from the WSJ<\/em> describing….
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The Obama Rule<\/span><\/h1>\n

He says taxation is about fairness, not growth or revenue.<\/span><\/h2>\n

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….When President Obama first proposed this new minimum tax he declared that the rule “could raise enough money” so that we “stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade.” Then he added: “This is not politics; this is math.” Well, remedial math maybe<\/em><\/span>.<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Obama Treasury’s own numbers confirm that the tax would raise at most $5 billion a year\u2014or less than 0.5% of the $1.2 trillion fiscal 2012 budget deficit and over the next decade a mere 0.1% of the $45.43 trillion the federal government will spend. When asked about those revenue projections, White House aide Jason Furman backpedaled from Mr. Obama’s rationale by explaining that the tax was never intended “to bring the deficit down and the debt under control.”<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Okay. So what is the point?<\/p>\n

The goal, Mr. Furman explained, is to establish a “a basic issue of tax fairness<\/em><\/span>.”<\/strong><\/span> Millionaires should pay an effective tax rate no lower than a middle-class secretary or a plumber. But wait: IRS data show that middle-class workers on average pay just under 15% of their income in federal taxes, while the richest 0.1% pay almost twice as high a rate on average, or 26%<\/em><\/span>.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052702303815404577336010655038338.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Speaking of The Great Prevaricator, the WSJ<\/em>‘s Allysia Finley details one segment of the electorate that appears to be swallowing Tick-Tock’s lures like a hungry grouper:
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All the President’s Women<\/span><\/h1>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Typical Female Obama Supporter<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Could President Obama’s play for women voters get any more naked? (Or anyone who finds his lies believable any more ignorant?!?)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The White House hosted a forum on women and the economy on Friday. To summarize, the Obama administration is doing “everything it can to create an economy built to last for America’s women.”<\/strong><\/span> That includes defending entitlement programs and the Affordable Care Act from Republicans like Rep. Paul Ryan, who allegedly want to throw both seniors and women off a cliff. The Obama administration also warned that a Supreme Court ruling striking down ObamaCare “would be devastating for women.”<\/p>\n

The president probably can afford to lose the male vote if he maintains a double-digit lead among women, as he has throughout his term.<\/strong><\/span> In March 2010, Public Policy Polling had the president leading Mitt Romney by 10 points among women. A year later, the president held a 17-point advantage. Last month it was down to 11 points. Recall also that women favored the president by 12 points in the 2008 election.<\/p>\n

It’s almost certain that Mitt Romney will lose the female vote for the simple reason that many more women are Democrats than Republicans.<\/strong><\/span> The president needs to focus more on ensuring that his support among women voters doesn’t drop too much and that they turn out in large numbers, which is probably his bigger concern. The real purpose of the contraception mandate\u2014and Democrats’ ballyhooing that Republicans want to take away women’s reproductive rights\u2014is to get women to the polls in the fall.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Here’s the juice: anyone ignorant enough to vote for Obama, regardless of race, sex, religion or political viewpoint cannot be won over by facts.\u00a0 They’re voting based on “feelings”; and Dimocrats….<\/strong><\/p>\n

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….have a strong influence over the weak-minded.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The GOP needs to energize not only its base, but far more importantly, the disinterested masses, be they male or female, black, white or brown, with a message which sets in stark, unambiguous terms what’s at stake this election: the future of their children, their children’s children….and every generation beyond.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As we’ve noted before, The Obamao’s given them the rope with which to hang him: his own words; on ObamaScare….on the Stimulus….on energy and oil.\u00a0 They need to use them relentlessly, remorselessly and continually between now and November.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Next up, Byron York offers yet another example of The Great Prevaricator’s stunning hypocrisy….and the MSM’s refusal to report it:<\/strong><\/p>\n

To Obama, Legal Precedents Are All About Politics<\/span><\/h1>\n

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In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act by huge bipartisan votes — 342 – 67 in the House and 85 – 14 in the Senate. President Bill Clinton signed the measure into law.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Now, the Obama administration says DOMA, which permits states to refuse to recognize gay marriages from other states and creates a federal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, is unconstitutional.<\/strong><\/span> In Boston recently, Stuart Delery, an attorney for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, urged the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to find DOMA violates the Constitution by discriminating against gays and lesbians. “I’m not here to defend (the law) on any standard,” Delery told the court.<\/p>\n

What was striking about Delery’s request that a federal court strike down DOMA was that at virtually the same time, President Obama was railing at the very notion that a federal court would strike down any law passed by Congress<\/em><\/span>.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

“I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” Obama said about the arguments over Obamacare before the nation’s highest court. The danger presented in the health care case, the president continued, is that “an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”<\/p>\n

Obama immediately ran into a barrage of questions. How can the Supreme Court overturning a law be “unprecedented” when the court has done it more than 150 times in U.S. history?<\/span> And does the president even recognize the court’s authority to rule on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Backtracking, Obama said the next day that “the Supreme Court is the final say on our Constitution and our laws, and all of us have to respect it.” He also claimed, without convincing many people, that he called the Obamacare case “unprecedented” because it’s been awhile since the court overturned “a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue, like health care.”<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

But what about that “strong majority”? When reporters pointed out that Obamacare passed the House by a narrow margin of 219 – 212, White House spokesman Jay Carney quickly revised “strong majority” to simply “majority.”<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

But all that backing and filling — including Carney’s claim that Obama was misunderstood “because he is a law professor” — was before the DOMA arguments made news.<\/span> If the president was so concerned about a court overturning a duly constituted law passed by a democratically elected Congress, why was he urging a small group of unelected judges to strike down DOMA, a measure that won passage by a far greater margin than Obamacare?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The answer is, of course, that the administration is making a political argument for its positions, not a legal one<\/span><\/em>.<\/strong><\/span> And perhaps counterproductively, the president’s decision to bring up Obamacare’s history in Congress could end up reminding the public of the tangled circumstances of its passage. Even with a huge majority in the House, Democrats barely passed the bill in the face of bipartisan opposition. And in the Senate, Obamacare succeeded as the result of a set of freakish circumstances that allowed Democrats to pass an unpopular measure into law.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Those circumstances included the wrongful prosecution of a Republican senator (Ted Stevens), resulting in his seat going to a Democrat; the defection of another Republican senator (Arlen Specter) to the Democrats;<\/span> and a change in one state’s laws (Massachusetts) to allow a Democratic governor to immediately appoint a Democrat to succeed the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and give the Senate a 60-vote Democratic supermajority. And then there were the policy payoffs to some Democratic senators who were undecided about the bill.<\/span> Even then, Democrats held a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for just 134 days before Massachusetts elected a Republican senator, Scott Brown, who ran specifically on the platform of stopping Obamacare. But in those 134 days, Democrats managed to pass an unpopular bill into law without a single vote to spare.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Now, the timing of the arguments over Obamacare and DOMA has revealed the flexibility of the administration’s arguments over constitutionality.<\/strong><\/span> And the flap over Obama’s remarks is just a preview of what is coming when the court issues its decision on Obamacare this June.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A decision on DOMA, which has not yet arrived at the Supreme Court, lies in the future. But if those arguments come when Barack Obama is president, perhaps DOMA’s defenders will remind the administration of the president’s respect for duly constituted and passed laws.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

And since we’re on the subject of willful ignorance of the Constitution and laws the nation’s highest law enforcement officials are sworn to uphold and protect:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Holder’s DOJ: Evidence of Voter Fraud ‘Manufactured’<\/span><\/h1>\n

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The Department of Justice is in full-on spin mode over the James O\u2019Keefe Project Veritas tape in which a young white man is offered Attorney General Eric Holder\u2019s ballot. Desperate to prove that voter ID should not be presented in order to obtain a ballot, the DOJ fired back at O\u2019Keefe and Project Veritas today, with a DOJ official telling tried-and-true media ally Talking Points Memo, \u201cIt\u2019s no coincidence that these so-called examples of rampant voter fraud consistently turn out to be manufactured ones<\/em><\/span>.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n