It’s Monday, September 3rd, 2012….and since we, like most of you, have worked our backside to the bone most every day of our working life, we’ll dispense with commemorating a holiday honoring the contributions of organized labor.

Speaking of labor, we’d appreciate everyone reviewing the effort we put into today’s Cover Story; the Monday edition is particularly good, and while you’re there, enjoy our three new video clips.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, The Obamao’s campaign platform, courtesy of Rahmbo:

Emanuel praises Obama’s tenure: GM alive, bin Laden isn’t

 

On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, Mayor Rahm Emanuel appeared on “Meet the Press” today to make the pitch for electing President Barack Obama to a second term. Emanuel is set to deliver a speech on Tuesday that he says will “testify” to his experience in Obama’s White House, where Emanuel served as chief of staff.

Obama’s first term can be summed up like this, Emanuel said: “General Motors is alive and well. Osama bin Laden is not.”

This from the mayor of city which has seen well over 300 of its citizens murdered since the 1st of the year….and watched 82 shot in the last 1-1/2 weeks. Is anyone else detecting a pattern here?  With Tick-Tock, it’s anything BUT the economy, stupid!  And while Chicago kills itself, Mayor Emanuel is focused on partying in Charlotte….when he’s not busy attacking the real source of The Windy City’s problems:

And what does it say about an Administration when its most ardent supporters cites the funneling of taxpayer funds to the UAW and ordering the killing of a known mass-murderer, the first not only illegal but absolutely unnecessary and the second such an easy call a 5th-grader could have made it, as its only accomplishments?!?

Next up, in his latest column, courtesy of Robin Mayer and Investors.com, Thomas Sowell echoes Dinesh D’Souza in explaining why….

Obama’s ‘Confident Ignorance’ At Root Of His Failure

 

After reading Barack Obama’s book “Dreams from My Father,” it became painfully clear that he has not been searching for the truth, because he assumed from an early age that he had already found the truth — and now it was just a question of filling in the details and deciding how to change things.

Obama did not simply happen to encounter a lot of people on the far-left fringe during his life. As he spells out in his book, he actively sought out such people. There is no hint of the slightest curiosity on his part about other visions of the world that might be weighed against the vision he had seized upon.

As Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School has pointed out, Obama made no effort to take part in the marketplace of ideas with other faculty members when he was teaching a law course there. What would be the point, if he already knew the truth and knew that they were wrong?

This would be a remarkable position to take, even for a learned scholar who had already spent decades canvassing a vast amount of information and views on many subjects. But Obama was already doctrinaire at a very early age — and ill-informed or misinformed on both history and economics.

His statement in “Dreams from My Father” about how white men went to Africa to “drag away the conquered in chains” betrays his ignorance of African history. The era of the Atlantic slave trade and the era of European conquests across the continent of Africa were different eras. During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, most of Africa was ruled by Africans, who sold some of their slaves to white men.

European conquests in Africa had to wait until Europeans found some way to survive lethal African diseases, to which they lacked resistance. Only after medical science learned to deal with these diseases could the era of European conquests spread across sub-Saharan Africa. But the Atlantic slave trade was over by then.

There was no reason why Barack Obama had to know this. But there was also no reason for him to be shooting off his mouth without knowing what he was talking about.

This is similar to Obama’s characterization of the Nile as “the world’s greatest river.” The Nile is less than 10% longer than the Amazon, but the Amazon delivers more than 50 times as much water into the Atlantic as the Nile delivers into the Mediterranean. The Nile could not accommodate the largest ships, even back in Roman times, much less the aircraft carriers of today that can sail up the Hudson River and dock in Midtown Manhattan.

When Obama wrote that many people “had been enslaved only because of the color of their skin,” he was repeating a common piece of gross misinformation. For thousands of years, people enslaved other people of the same race as themselves, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Western Hemisphere.

Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought in bondage to the Western Hemisphere. The very word “slave” is derived from the name of a European people once widely held in bondage, the Slavs.

As for economics, Obama thought that Indonesians would be worse off after Europeans came in, used up their natural resources and then left them too poor to continue the modern way of life to which they had become accustomed, or to resume their previous way of life, after their previous skills had atrophied.

This fear of European “exploitation” prevailed widely in the Third World in the middle of the 20th century. But, by the late 20th century, the falseness of that view had been demonstrated so plainly and so often, in countries around the world, that even socialist and communist governments began opening their economies to foreign investments. This often led to rising economic growth rates that lifted millions of people out of poverty.

Barack Obama is one of those people who is often wrong but never in doubt. When he burst upon the national political scene as a presidential candidate in 2008, even some conservatives were impressed by his confidence. But confident ignorance is one of the most dangerous qualities in a leader of a nation. If he has the rhetorical skills to inspire the same confidence in himself by others, then you have the ingredients for national disaster.

Then again, what can one expect from a man who’s met a female corpse-man, and visited all 57 states….except Alaska and Hawaii of course.

In a related item, forwarded by Randy Jugs, Victor Davis Hanson suggests The Obamao’s problems may be as a result of roosting….

Liberal Chickens

Virtually every left-wing attack on Bush can legitimately be turned against Obama.

It could not last — the attendee of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church sermonizing on tolerance; the practitioner of Chicago politics lecturing on civility; the most partisan voting record in the Senate as proof of a new promised bipartisanship; earlier books and speeches calling for hard-core progressivism as evidence of a no-more-red-state-blue-state conciliation. And in fact the disconnect did not last, and Barack Obama finds himself dealing with assorted chickens coming home to roost.

In the summer of 2004, Michael Moore released a crude propaganda film, Fahrenheit 9/11, full of distortions and half-truths, and yet passed off as a documentary — all designed to help swing the election to Democratic challenger John Kerry. Hollywood, the media, and the Left in general did not worry about the film’s inaccuracies or the mythology that the infomercial was a disinterested documentary. Instead, liberals deified Moore. Indeed, he was an honored guest at the Democratic Convention, and liberal luminaries paid him obeisance at various showings of the film.

The goddess Nemesis took note, and this year Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan followed Moore’s model. The result is a blockbuster “documentary,” 2016: Obama’s America, that does more to Barack Obama than Michael Moore once did to George W. Bush. The Left is perturbed, unappreciative that its own methods and objectives have been turned against itself, and in a more sophisticated and far more effective manner than Moore’s buffoonery.

The Left in the era of Barack Obama established other ends-justify-the-means precedents. In 2008, Obama surmised that no one else would ever raise the sorts of gigantic sums that he was then amassing (in toto nearly $800 million, more than twice the amount raised by John McCain), and so was the first candidate to renounce public financing of a presidential campaign in the general election since the law was passed. But, of course, Obama never imagined that four years later his approval ratings would be less than 50 percent, or that he would be running against a financier who could match his efforts dollar for dollar.

Nor did Obama think that a mesmerized Wall Street, from which he raised more cash than any prior candidate, would object all that much to his populist boilerplate against “1 percenters,” “fat-cat bankers,” and owners of “corporate jets.” So now what exactly will he do? Appeal to Romney to abide by public-financing rules? Blast Romney for raising too much money? Damn Romney for courting Wall Street?

Beneath the folksy veneer and the serial calls for “civility,” Obama proved vicious in his denunciations of George Bush, at one point calling him “unpatriotic” for adding $4 trillion to the national debt over eight years. Obama offered two general arguments: that the chief executive is solely responsible for economic hard times, and that four years is easily long enough to right the ship. Obama scoffed at the Bush defense that politically driven interventions by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — hand in glove with congressional overseers — had distorted the real-estate market and contributed to the subprime-mortgage collapse, which destroyed an otherwise strong economy.

Obama boasted further that he would cut the deficit by half during his first term, and asserted that he would rather be a successful president than a two-term one. And he added that he should not be reelected if the economy was not restored to health. Apparently Obama assumed that after every recession (this one ended in June 2009) there is a natural recovery, the latter all the more robust when the former is severe. For all the right-wing scare talk about Obamacare, federal takeovers, more taxes, and too many regulations, Obama also took for granted that the cry-wolf private sector would bounce back — no matter how much his policies threatened it — and would almost magically continue to make so much money that an ever-growing government could redistribute ever more of it.

Yet now Romney is echoing Obama’s exact arguments: Yes, the chief executive is responsible for things like 43 months of 8 percent–plus unemployment, $5 trillion in new debt, and anemic GDP growth; and, yes, if things do not improve after four years, then it is time to change the president.

Obama established a wink-and-nod type of negative attack. As he called in sonorous tones for hope and change and a new civility, he negatively stereotyped a stunning cross-section of Americans: The white working class became “clingers,” the police “stereotype” minorities and act “stupidly,” small-business owners “didn’t build” their own businesses, doctors lop off limbs and yank out tonsils, bankers are “fat cats” — apparently on the premise that such groups would never take all this invective seriously. At various times Mitt Romney has been reduced to a dastardly financial pirate, a killer of innocent cancer victims, a veritable racist, and now a misogynist. After the class-warfare card and the race card, we await only Obama’s use of the Mormon card. Yet the polls remain roughly even, and Obama is about to be the target of a no-holds-barred assault fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars. Ethically speaking, what possible Romney sin might Obama object to? That super-PAC ads are unfair? That Romney has gone negative? That Romney stereotypes entire groups? That Romney’s inner staff are ethically compromised? This, after Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, was paid $100,000 for two speeches in Nigeria in December 2010, to a company that was eager for influence and whose affiliates did business with an embargoed Iran; Plouffe made the trip to Nigeria about a month before he joined the administration as a senior adviser. Just this month, deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter on national television asserted something demonstrably false — that she did not know the facts about the woman Mitt Romney supposedly caused to die of cancer.

During the Bush administration, the Left established another caricature: the gaffe-prone, golf-playing elitist George Bush. Did they ever imagine that they were ensuring like caricature for the leftist academic Barack Obama, who quite unexpectedly would play golf four times more often in four years than Bush did in eight years? Or that for every Bushism there would be a “corpse-man”? Or that the small ranch house in Crawford, Texas, would be trumped by First Family jaunts to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, and Aspen? I would like to think a slip like “57 states” is just a slip, or that golf is valuable presidential relaxation, but I was taught by the Left that such garbled speech is a window into a confused mind, and that presidential golf is elite recreation that betrays class privilege.

In 2008, there was a lot of sloganeering on energy policy. Obama assured us that we could “not drill” our way out of a spike in gas prices. “Millions of new green jobs” was heard at almost every rally, along with shouts about wind and solar this and that. In less guarded moments, Obama assured us that he would pass cap-and-trade legislation, “bankrupt” coal companies, and allow coal-based energy prices to “skyrocket.” These were the heady days of “peak oil” and the liberal attack against “oil men in the White House” — on the eve of the Chevy Volt and breakthrough new companies with names like Solyndra.

At the very time when well-connected crony capitalists were squandering hundreds of millions of dollars in federal wind and solar subsidies, a quiet private-sector revolution in horizontal drilling and fracking vastly expanded America’s gas and oil reserves — despite, not because of, Obama’s energy policies. The paradox finally become so absurd that Obama was reduced to bragging that the United States was producing more gas and oil under his watch than ever before, apparently on the logic that oil men were so adept that they could find vast amounts of new sources of energy on private lands without worrying about the Obama administration’s efforts to virtually cut off all new leasing on federal lands. The result is that our first green president is facing $4-a-gallon gas while he brags that what he tried to stop proved unstoppable.

Nemesis, remember, is not just karma, but payback with an absurd twist.

And as we all know….

And what, inquiring minds want to know, will the Dimocrats and the their MSM shills do when they’re totally out of airspeed, ideas and any kind of positive campaign message; say….about the time their convention concludes?  As Joah Goldberg informs us, we’ll watch as the….

Liberal Media Brings Out the Hockey Pucks

 

In 2004, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then a popular figure in the Republican Party, gave an exciting, upbeat and surprisingly funny speech at the GOP convention. He covered a lot of territory: the story of how he came to America, how he became a Republican after listening to Richard Nixon, and other highlights of his life story.

Afterwards, then-CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported that Schwarzenegger “slapped John Kerry around like a hockey puck.” The only problem: Schwarzenegger never mentioned John Kerry, not even once.

I bring it up because it’s hardly news that much of the press likes to report the convention as they want it to be rather than as it is. It’s also somewhat less than a thunderclap revelation that the press and the Democratic Party tend to see things the same way. Which is why it’s unremarkable that the “fact-checkers” and Democratic Party press-release writers are on the same page.

Hence the relentless coverage of vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s “lies” during his convention speech. His story about a Janesville, Wis., GM plant, in particular, has stirred up a journalistic fuss:

“A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.’ That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year.”

The Associated Press fact-checkers were among the most restrained in their “correction.”

“The plant halted production in December 2008,” the AP explained, “weeks before Obama took office and well before he enacted a more robust auto industry bailout that rescued GM and Chrysler and allowed the majority of their plants — though not the Janesville facility — to stay in operation.”

The first problem is that Ryan wasn’t referencing the bailout at all, but the sorry state of the overall economy and President Obama’s record of over-promising and under-delivering.

A bigger problem is that the AP didn’t even look up its own reporting about the Janesville plant. “Production at the General Motors plant in Janesville is scheduled to end for good this week,” the news services reported on April 19, 2009. “GM spokesman Christopher Lee says operations at the southern Wisconsin plant will cease Thursday.”

And there’s the small matter that everything about Ryan’s statement was true if you go by the plain meaning of the words.

Or consider the media’s obsession with the alleged racism of the GOP. The folks at MSNBC are particularly obsessed with the race angle. New York Magazine political reporter John Heilemann and “Hardball” host Chris Matthews concluded the other night that the word “Chicago” is racially loaded code.

“They keep saying ‘Chicago,'” Matthews said. “That’s another thing that sends that message — this guy’s helping the poor people in the bad neighborhoods, screwing us in the ‘burbs.” Heilemann nodded, adding, “There’s a lot of black people in Chicago.”

One standard cliché is to bemoan the fact that there are so many “white faces” among the delegates. This potted observation is usually brought up in connection with some chin-pulling insight about the GOP’s problems reaching out to minorities.

Many an hour can be wasted listening to the gang at MSNBC expressing their deep concerns about this pressing issue and how the GOP must adapt to a more diverse America. Perhaps the GOP would do better if allegedly serious people stopped going on national television and saying that even the use of the word “Chicago” is now racially loaded.

Meanwhile, one thing the GOP could do is put forward some really attractive and compelling minority speakers to deliver its message. Indeed, that’s what the GOP did on its first night of the convention — and the concerned folks at MSNBC opted to stop covering the speeches whenever a minority took the stage.

If the coverage of this convention is an indication of the trajectory the media will follow for the rest of the campaign, you can be sure of three things: Lies will be defined as facts that are inconvenient to President Obama, racists will be understood to be Republicans who are winning an argument, and truth will be slapped around like a hockey puck.

And in International News of Note, as FOX News, courtesy of Carl Polizzi reports:

Bolivian Police Seize 2 Tons of Uranium

 

Bolivian police on Tuesday confiscated two tons of uranium that was being stored at a building in central La Paz located near the U.S. and Spanish embassies. Four people, all of them Bolivian nationals, were arrested while they were transferring the uranium from one vehicle to another, Deputy Interior Minister Jorge Perez said. The radioactive material was in sacks of jute and nylon, he said.

Since Bolivia does not produce uranium, Perez said, authorities assume the consignment originated in either of two neighboring countries that do: Brazil or Chile. The commander of the elite police unit that carried out the operation, Col. Eddy Torrez, said the seizure was the fruit of a six-week investigation.

Police pounced when they learned the people in possession of the uranium planned to meet Tuesday with a potential buyer, the colonel said. Perez said one of the people arrested is an engineer who told police he was holding the uranium for other people, but provided no information on the owners of the cache.

“Other” people; gee, we wonder who?

Then there’s these headlines detailing two more success stories for Eric Holder’s Department of Injustice:

DoJ Won’t Bring Charges Over CIA Interrogations

 

Feds close criminal investigation into Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio

And since we’re on the subject of failing….and miserably at that, in today’s Muslim Minute, another Fractured Factoid courtesy of the Religion of Pieces:

DNC Jumah Organizer Claims Muslim Guided Columbus to America

 

Forgetting for the moment organizer Jibril Hough knows as much about history as The Obamao does economics, or the fact the predicted 20,000 attendees numbered closer to 500, we call your attention to the discreet distance the Muslim women are forced to maintain behind their men during prayer.  Is it any wonder Muslims have such an affinity for the Party of….

….Clinton, Edwards, Wiener and the Kennedys.

On the Lighter Side….

Moving on to the Wonderful World of Science, we learn….

‘Science Guy’ Bill Nye Says Creationism Hurts Kids

 

“God created everything by number, weight and measure.” – Sir Isaac Newton

….Isaac Newton!  As for The Science Guy’s other tripe masquerading as informed opinion, if Nye’s serious about a belief in Biblical creation inhibiting the ability of America to “build stuff” and “solve problems”, how can he support Barack Hussein Obama, a self-declared Christian who supposedly believes the Bible to be the inspired word of God?!?

Meanwhile, over in the Psychology Section, courtesy today of Speed Mach and CBSlocal.com, what would we do without studies?!?

Study: Phrase ‘That’s So Gay’ Causes Lasting Harm

 

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but a new University of Michigan study shows words can wound for life. The study found the commonly used phrase “that’s so gay” to describe something undesirable can have negative consequences for gay, lesbian or bisexual students.

Although subtle, such language is hostile, and can be harmful to sexual minorities, said study author Michael Woodford, an assistant professor of social work at U-M. The findings appear in the current issue of the Journal of American College Health.

Researchers examined the impact of hearing “that’s so gay” among 114 gay, lesbian and bisexual students between the ages of 18 to 25 through an online survey. Students reported how often they heard the phrase on campus in the past 12 months. They also answered questions about their perceived social acceptance on campus, physical well-being, mental health and willingness to disclose their sexual orientation.

Data suggests gay, lesbian and bisexual college students who heard “that’s so gay” more frequently were more likely to report feeling isolated and to suffer negative health symptoms, such as headaches, poor appetite or eating problems. Practically every respondent reported hearing “that’s so gay” on campus at least once in the past 12 months. Nearly half of the students said they’ve heard the phrase more than 10 times within the year. Only 14 respondents—or 13 percent—hadn’t heard it at all.

Hearing the phrase more often was found to increase students’ risk of health problems and feelings of isolation. “Given the nature of gay-lesbian-bisexual stigma, sexual minority students could already perceive themselves to be excluded on campus and hearing ‘that’s so gay’ may elevate such perceptions,” Woodford said, adding, “‘That’s so gay’ conveys that there is something wrong with being gay.  And, hearing such messages about one’s self can cause stress, which can manifest in headaches and other health concerns.

Woodford suggested a solution, saying colleges must address “low-level hostility,” including language, to eradicate “that’s so gay” from college student vernacular. “Policies and educational programs are needed to help students, staff and faculty to understand that such language can be harmful to gay students. Hopefully, these initiatives will help to eliminate the phrase from campuses,” he said in a press release.

Yeah….that oughta do it.  Gee….no chance anyone who would be inclined or willing to take such a survey might be a basket to begin with!

Magoo