The Daily Gouge, Wednesday, September 12th, 2012

On September 11, 2012, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Wednesday, September 12th, 2012….and as we’ll be on the road from early Wednesday morning through late Sunday evening, look for our next offering on Tuesday the 18th. As for today’s edition, given we’ve gotta get up at 0445 to make a 0700 launch, you’ll forgive us if it’s somewhat abbreviated.

Now, without further ado, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Liberal protestations notwithstanding, recent events lead us to believe it must indeed have been The Dear Misleader that removed the Jerusalem plank from the Dimocratic Party platform:

Obama to Israel: You’re On Your Own

No ‘red lines’ for Iran and no time to meet Netanyahu.

Does President Obama want Israel to bomb Iran before the election? If we had more faith in this Administration’s competence, we’d be tempted to think so.

Both publicly and behind the scenes, Administration officials have insisted they oppose a unilateral Israeli strike for many reasons: Diplomacy and sanctions still need time to work; an Israeli attack could destabilize the region; Israel doesn’t have the military means to do the job thoroughly; and so on.

It’s no secret the Israelis don’t want to strike Iran either, provided the U.S. is serious about keeping a bomb out of the mullahs’ hands. But Israel’s confidence in Mr. Obama’s seriousness is fading fast. This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Bloomberg Radio that “we’re not setting deadlines” for Iran to halt its program.

That prompted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to note that “those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

That’s the kind of tough diplomatic exchange that an Administration should want to smooth over, at least if it’s truly intent on forestalling an Israeli attack. But now comes word that Mr. Obama will not even meet with Mr. Netanyahu during the latter’s visit later this month to the U.S. Scheduling conflicts, you know.

Maybe Team Obama means to send a signal of disapproval to Mr. Netanyahu for his outspokenness. But the message that’s reaching Jerusalem these days is closer to “you’re on your own, pal” than to “we’ve got your back.” Israel will have to factor that into its security calculations as it contemplates whether to act against Iran, and when.

It’s possible this is how President Obama wants it, in order to leave the job of stopping Iran to Israel while avoiding American entanglements. But it’s hard to imagine an Israeli attack that didn’t ultimately entangle that country’s most important ally.

The Administration’s diplomatic rebukes to Israel are also telling Iran that it is that much freer to move ahead with its nuclear plans. If Israel does strike Iran, Mr. Obama’s mishandling of our ally will be a major reason.

To borrow a phrase from the Reverend Johnson….

Whether The Obamao pulled the plank from the platform or not, one thing’s for certain: he’s certainly trying to pull the wool over the eyes of Jewish voters….as well as the rug out from under Israel.

Next up, John McCormack, writing at The Weekly Standard observes….

Obama Demands $1.1 Trillion Tax Hike, Won’t Get Specific on Spending Cuts

During an interview Sunday on Face the Nation, GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan was pressed repeatedly by host Norah O’Donnell for specifics on the Romney-Ryan tax reform plan. But Obama made it through an interview that aired on the same program without being pressed for specifics on his own tax and spending plans.

“There isn’t a Romney plan that’s been specific about which deductions and loopholes he will close,” O’Donnell said. Romney has proposed a tax reform that would lower tax rates and reduce or eliminate tax loopholes to make up for any loss in revenue.

Ryan mentioned studies that show it is possible to lower rates and reduce or nix loopholes without having a net tax increase on the middle class, and he said that a Romney administration would work with the new Congress on dealing with specific loopholes. “We want to have a debate out in front, work with Congress, work with the public to find out what are the priorities we want to have in the tax system,” Ryan said.

Asking Ryan to name which loopholes he and Romney will close is a perfectly fine question. (I asked him the same question in April 2011.) But compare and contrast CBS’s Ryan interview with its Obama interview on the very same program (emphasis added):

PELLEY: If you win, would you be willing to compromise? What are you will to give in order to complete this grand bargain on the budget that have failed?

OBAMA: Well, I — keep in mind that the trillion dollars that cut, it was a painful exercise. You know, there are some programs that are worthy but we just can’t afford right now. (Such as….?!?) And I’m willing to do more on that front, because as I argued at the convention, those of us who believe that government can be a force for good when it comes to creating opportunity for folks who are willing to work hard and play by the rules to get into the middle class.

We have an obligation to make sure government works and there’s still waste there. There’s still programs that don’t work. There are still ways that we can make it leaner and more efficient. So I’m, you know, more than happy to work with the Republicans. And what I’ve said is in reducing our deficits, we can make sure that we cut $2.50 for every $1 of increased revenue.

PELLEY: That’s the deal they turned down, Mr. President.

OBAMA: And that — well and, you know, that’s part of what this election’s about. Governor Romney said he wouldn’t take a deal with $10 of spending cuts for $1 of revenue increases.

And the problem is the math, or the arithmetic, as President Clinton said, doesn’t add up. You can’t reduce the deficit unless you take a balanced approach that says we’ve got to make government leaner and more efficient, but we’ve also got to ask people like me or Governor Romney who have done better than anybody else over the course of the last decade and who’s taxes are just about lower than they’ve been in the last 50 years to do a little bit more.

And if we go back to the tax rates for folks making more than $250,000 a year, back to the rates that we had under Bill Clinton, we can close the deficit, stabilize the economy, keep taxes on middle class families low, provide the certainty that I think all of us will be looking for and I’m also going, by the way, to make some adjustments to Medicare and Medicaid (Such as….?!?) that would strengthen the programs. But the way to do that is to keep health care costs low. (As Fauxcahontas would say, “How”?) It’s not to voucherize programs so that suddenly seniors are the ones who are finding their expenses much higher.

The follow-up questions for Obama are pretty obvious: What specifically would he cut? If Obama wants a $4 trillion deficit reduction package that has a 2.5-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases, how would he cut $2.9 trillion in spending and raise $1.1 trillion in revenues? We know that he’d like to raise taxes on those making more than $250,000, but that would still leave him a few hundred billion short of $1.1 trillion.

Obama says the Romney-Ryan plans for Medicare and Medicaid are bad, but at least they’ve been specific on how they’d reform these programs. How exactly would Obama keep “costs low” for Medicare and Medicaid? Where is his plan?

But Obama wasn’t subjected to specific, pointed questions like Paul Ryan was. The president gets away with a vague promises about taking a “balanced approach” and being “willing to do more” on deficit reduction.

One final point: Obama’s insistence on a 2.5-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax hikes does not show that he’s willing to go back to the “grand bargain” he and John Boehner entertained in 2011–that is a rejection of the “grand bargain.” As Obama publicly acknowledged in a July 2011 news conference, the deal he and Boehner were entertaining involved $800 billion in revenue and $3.2 trillion in spending cuts–a ratio of 4-to-1, not 2.5-to-1. Obama said he couldn’t “stomach” that deal:

“There were about $800 billion in revenue that were going to be available,” Obama said at a White House press conference. “And what we said was when you’ve got a ratio of $4 in cuts for every $1 of revenue, that’s pretty hard to stomach.”

Then there’s this from a rightly skeptical Thomas Sowell:

An Economic ‘Plan’?

Former president Bill Clinton told the Democratic National Convention that Barack Obama has a plan to rescue the economy, and only the fact that the Republicans stood in his way has stopped him from getting the economy out of the doldrums. From all this, and much else that is said in the media and on the campaign trail, you might think that the economy requires government intervention to revive and create jobs. It is Beltway dogma that the government has to “do something.”

History tells a different story. For the first 150 years of this country’s existence, the federal government felt no great need to “do something” when the economy turned down. Over that long span of time, the economic downturns were neither as deep nor as long lasting as they have been since the federal government decided that it had to “do something” in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which set a new precedent.

One of the last of the “do nothing” presidents was Warren G. Harding. In 1921, under President Harding, unemployment hit 11.7 percent — higher than it has been under President Obama. Harding did nothing to get the economy stimulated. Far from spending more money to try to “jump start” the economy, President Harding actually reduced government spending, as the tax revenues declined during the economic downturn.

This was not a matter of absent-mindedly neglecting the economy. President Harding deliberately rejected the urging of his own Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, to intervene. The 11.7 percent unemployment rate in 1921 fell to 6.7 percent in 1922, and then to 2.4 percent in 1923. It is hard to think of any government intervention in the economy that produced such a sharp and swift reduction in unemployment as was produced by just staying out of the way and letting the economy rebound on its own.

Bill Clinton loudly proclaimed to the delegates to the Democratic National Convention that no president could have gotten us out of the recession in just one term. But history shows that the economy rebounded out of a worse unemployment situation in just two years under Harding, who simply let the market revive on its own, as it had done before, time and time again for more than a century.

Something similar happened under Ronald Reagan. Unemployment peaked at 9.7 percent early in the Reagan administration. Like Harding and earlier presidents, Reagan did nothing, despite outraged outcries in the media. The economy once again revived on its own. Three years later, unemployment was down to 7.2 percent — and it kept on falling, as the country experienced twenty years of economic growth with low inflation and low unemployment.

The Obama party line is that all the bad things are due to what he inherited from Bush, and the few signs of recovery are due to Obama’s policies beginning to pay off. But, if the economy has been rebounding on its own for more than 150 years, the question is why it has been so slow to recover under the Obama administration.

The endless proliferation of anti-business interventions by government, and the sight of more of the same coming over the horizon from Barack Obama’s appointees in the federal bureaucracies, creates the one thing that has long stifled economic activity in countries around the world — uncertainty about what the rules of the game are, and the unpredictability of how specifically those rules will continue to change in a hostile political environment.

Both history and contemporary data show that countries prosper more when there are stable and dependable rules, under which people can make investments without having to fear unpredictable new government interventions before these investments can pay off.

A great myth has grown up that President Franklin D. Roosevelt saved the American economy with his interventions during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But a 2004 economic study concluded that government interventions had prolonged the Great Depression by several years. Obama is repeating policies that failed under FDR.

Despite demands that Mitt Romney spell out his plan for reviving the economy, we can only hope that Governor Romney plans to stop the government from intervening in the economy and gumming up the works, so that the economy can recover on its own.

And when he’s not energetically engaged in ruining the American economy, he’s busy lowering the nation’s defenses, as this next item, courtesy of the Marc Thiessen writing at the WaPo, details:

Why is Obama skipping more than half of his daily intelligence meetings?

President Obama is touting his foreign policy experience on the campaign trail, but startling new statistics suggest that national security has not necessarily been the personal priority the president makes it out to be. It turns out that more than half the time, the commander in chief does not attend his daily intelligence meeting.

The Government Accountability Institute examined President Obama’s schedule from the day he took office until mid-June 2012, to see how often he attended his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) — the meeting at which he is briefed on the most critical intelligence threats to the country. During his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his PDB just 536 times — or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent — falling to just over 38 percent. (While at the same time, quite coincidentally, his golf handicap fell commensurately.) By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.

I asked National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor about the findings, and whether there were any instances where the president attended the intelligence meeting that were not on his public schedule. Vietor did not dispute the numbers, but said the fact that the president, during a time of war, does not attend his daily intelligence meeting on a daily basis is “not particularly interesting or useful.” He says that the president read his PDB every day, and he disagreed with the suggestion that there is any difference whatsoever between simply reading the briefing book and having an interactive discussion of its contents with top national security and intelligence officials where the president can probe assumptions and ask questions. “I actually don’t agree at all,” Vietor told me in an e-mail, “The president gets the information he needs from the intelligence community each day.”

Psst! I have no clue what I’m doing!

Yet Vietor also directed me to a Post story written this year in which Obama officials discuss the importance of the intelligence meeting and extol how brilliantly the president runs it. “Obama reads the PDB ahead of time and comes to the morning meeting with questions. Intelligence briefers are there to answer those questions, expand on a point or raise a new issue,” The Post reported. “One regular participant in the roughly 500 Oval Office sessions during Obama’s presidency said the meetings show a president consistently participating in an exploration of foreign policy and intelligence issues.”

Not so consistently, it seems. Since Obama officials have actively promoted the way the president runs his daily intelligence meeting as evidence of his national security leadership (even releasing a photo of him receiving the briefing on an iPad), it is fair to ask why he skips the daily meeting so often.

According to former officials who have detailed knowledge of the PDB process, having the daily meeting — and not just reading the briefing book — is enormously important both for the president and those who prepare the brief. For the president, the meeting is an opportunity to ask questions of the briefers, probe assumptions and request additional information. For those preparing the brief, meeting with the president on a daily basis gives them vital, direct feedback from the commander in chief about what is on his mind, how they can be more responsive to his needs, and what information he may have to feed back into the intelligence process. This process cannot be replicated on paper.

While the Bush records are not yet available electronically for analysis, officials tell me the former president held his intelligence meeting six days a week, no exceptions — usually with the vice president, the White House chief of staff, the national security adviser, the director of National Intelligence, or their deputies, and CIA briefers in attendance. Once a week, he held an expanded Homeland Security briefing that included the Homeland Security adviser, the FBI director and other homeland security officials. Bush also did more than 100 hour-long “deep dives” in which he invited intelligence analysts into the Oval Office to get their unvarnished and sometimes differing views. Such meetings deepened the president’s understanding of the issues and helped analysts better understand the problems with which he was wrestling.

When Obama forgoes this daily intelligence meeting, he is consciously placing other priorities ahead of national security. As The Post story that the Obama White House sent me put it, “Process tells you something about an administration. How a president structures his regular morning meeting on intelligence and national security is one way to measure his personal approach to foreign policy.”

Indeed it is. So is how often he holds it. With President Obama, it seems, the regular morning meeting on intelligence is not so regular.

Must be nice to be so smart you can pick up the finer points of running the country absent any qualifying experience whatsoever….and without having to work at anything but….

….lowering your handicap.

Next up, courtesy of the WSJ, it’s what’s….

Notable & Quotable

Frank Buckley on President Obama as a Weberian charismatic leader.

[A] crucial attribute of a charismatic leader is his ability to make his supporters identify with him. He presents himself to his people and asks “Are you in?” Are you part of his mystical body? Will you give me your wedding, your birthday presents? The attraction must be mutual, for he draws his magical powers from the crowd’s adulation. Whatever difficulties the country might face, the answer is always a speech which reaffirms the special bond between The One and the many. Don’t look for substance. The speech is the substance. In truth, the country’s problems are of little interest. What matters is only the relation between the One and his people, the communion between them.

Who but a Weberian charismatic leader would have said, when a spectator collapsed at an Obama rally, “Looks like somebody might’ve fainted up here. . . . Don’t worry about it: Folks do this all the time in my meetings.”

He’s precisely what we’re warned to eschew in II John: 7-9.

On the Lighter Side….