It’s Wednesday, September 26th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, for those still uncertain as to the magnitude of the MSM’s misrepresentation of Mitt’s standing relative to The Obamao, the following two charts, courtesy of Balls Cotton and WorldNetDaily.com, should serve to ease your concern:

Numbers may not lie; but Dimocratic Party shills who purposefully skew the polling questions, samples and results most certainly do….and that often and repeatedly.

Do we believe Romney’s a lock?  Most decidedly not, particularly in light of increasing reports of voter fraud and the advantages which accompany The Obamao’s 24/7 MSM….

….love-fest.  And though Mitt’s still more than capable of shooting himself in the foot (while aiming at his head!), neither do we believe he trails, let alone by the margins most media-sponsored polls would have us believe.

Next up, the WSJ offers this analysis of what it terms….

The 10% President

The annotated Obama: How 90% of the deficit becomes somebody else’s fault.

 

A question raised by President Obama’s immortal line on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday—”I think that, you know, as President, I bear responsibility for everything, to some degree”—is what that degree really is. Maybe 70% or 80% of the buck stops with him? Or is it halfsies?

Nope. Now we know: It turns out the figure is 10%. The other 90% is somebody else’s fault.

This revelation came when Steve Croft mentioned that the national debt has climbed 60% on the President’s watch. “Well, first of all, Steve, I think it’s important to understand the context here,” Mr. Obama replied. Fair enough, so here’s his context in full, with our own annotation and translation below:

“When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history.1 And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90% of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for,2 as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for,3 a prescription drug plan that was not paid for,4 and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.5

“Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10% of this increase in the deficit,6 and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.7“

Footnote No. 1: Either Mr. Obama inherited the largest deficit in American history or he won the 1944 election, but both can’t be true. The biggest annual deficit the modern government has ever run was in 1943, equal to 30.3% of the economy, to mobilize for World War II. The next biggest years were the following two, at 22.7% and 21.5%, to win it.

The deficit in fiscal 2008 was a mere 3.2% of GDP. The deficit in fiscal 2009, which began on October 1, 2008 and ran through September 2009, soared to 10.1%, the highest since 1945.

Mr. Obama wants to blame all of that on his predecessor, and no doubt the recession that began in December 2007 reduced revenues and increased automatic spending “stabilizers” like jobless insurance. But Mr. Obama conveniently forgets a little event in February 2009 known as the “stimulus” that increased spending by a mere $830 billion above the normal baseline.

The recession ended in June 2009, but spending has still kept rising. The President has presided over four years in a row of deficits in excess of $1 trillion, and the spending baseline going forward into his second term is nearly $1.1 trillion more than in fiscal 2007.

Federal spending as a share of GDP will average 24.1% over his first term including 2013. Even if you throw out fiscal 2009 and blame that entirely on Mr. Bush, the Obama spending average will be 23.8% of GDP. That compares to a post-WWII average of a little under 20%. Spending under Mr. Bush averaged 20.1% including 2009, and 19.6% if that year is left out.

Footnotes No. 2 through 4: Liberals continue to claim that the main causes of the current fiscal mess are tax rates established in, er, 2001 and 2003 and the post-9/11 wars on terror. But by 2006 and 2007, those tax rates were producing revenue of 18.2% and 18.5% of GDP, near historic norms.

Another quandary for Mr. Obama’s apologists is that he has endorsed nearly all of these policies. The 2003 Medicare drug benefit wasn’t offset by tax hikes or spending cuts, but Democrats expanded the program as part of ObamaCare.

The President also extended all the Bush tax rates in 2010 for two more years in the name of helping the economy, and he now wants to continue them for people earning under $200,000, which is where 71% of their “cost” resides. The Iraq campaign was won and beginning to be wound down when he took office, and he himself surged more troops in Afghanistan.

Footnote No. 5: Mr. Obama keeps dining out on the excuse of the recession, but that ended halfway through his first year. The main deficit problems since 2009 are a permanently higher spending base (see Footnote No. 1) and the slowest economic recovery in modern history. Revenues have remained below 16% of the economy, compared to 18% to 19% in a normal expansion.

The 2008 crisis is long over. The crisis now is Mr. Obama’s non-recovery.

Footnote No. 6: Even at face value, Mr. Obama’s suggestion that he is “only” responsible for 10% of what the government does is ludicrous. Note that in addition to his stimulus, what he calls “emergency actions” include his new health-care entitlement that will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even using low-ball assumptions.

But the larger point concerns executive leadership. Every President “inherits” a government that was built over generations, which he chooses to change, or not to change, to suit his priorities. Mr. Obama chose to see the government he inherited and grow it faster than any President since LBJ.

The pre-eminent political question now is whether to reform the government we have to make it affordable going forward, or to keep growing the government and raise taxes to finance it, if that is even possible.

Mr. Obama favors the second option, though he pretends he can merely tax the rich to do it. Nobody who has looked honestly at the numbers believes that—not his own Simpson-Bowles commission and not the Congressional “super committee” he sanctioned but then worked to undermine.

At every turn he has demagogued the Romney-Ryan proposals to modernize the entitlement state so it is affordable, and he personally blew up the “grand bargain” House Speaker John Boehner was willing to strike last summer.

Footnote No. 7: Mr. Obama’s posture as the tightest skinflint since Eisenhower is a tutorial in how to dissemble with statistics. (Which is a gentile way of calling him a liar.) The growth rate seems low because he’s measuring from the end of fiscal 2009, after a one-year spending increase of $535 billion. That is the year of his stimulus and thus spending is growing off a much higher base. The real annual pace of government growth is closer to 5%, and that doesn’t count ObamaCare.

In another news-making bit with “60 Minutes,” which the program decided not to air, Mr. Obama conceded that “Do we see sometimes us going overboard in our campaign, mistakes that are made, areas where there’s no doubt that somebody could dispute how we are presenting things, that happens in politics.”

Note the passive voice, as if the President’s re-election campaign is disembodied from the President. If Mr. Obama’s campaign seems dishonest enough that even Mr. Obama is forced to admit it, this is because it’s coming from the top.

Bill Clinton may be an unapologetic liar and perjurer, but he was a rank amateur compared to Tick-Tock, who vies with Tommy Flanagan….

….for the title of World’s Most Pathological Liar.

Turning now to International News of Note, the Morning Examiner‘s Conn Carroll details….

Obama’s State Department meltdown 

 

President Obama is set to speak at the United Nations today, but he will not be meeting with any foreign leaders. Apparently his campaign is so worried about his crumbling foreign policy agenda that they do not want to risk any potentially embarrassing moments. So instead, Obama sat down for an interview with ladies of The View yesterday, who all sat attentively as Obama told them he was “eye candy.”

Back in the real world, things were not going as easy for Obama’s State Department against tougher questioning from the press. When Buzzfeed‘s Michael Hastings emailed State Department spokesman Philippe Reines for comment on what other sensitive materials may have been left exposed in the Benghazi consulate raid, Reines insisted that the real story was CNN’s reporting on murdered U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens diary. Hastings disagreed, replying to Reines:

From my perspective, the scandal here is that the State Department had such inadequate security procedures in place that four Americans were killed. And then the Ambassador’s diary–and who knows what else–was left behind for anyone to pick up. Thankfully, it was CNN–and not Al Qaeda or some other militia–that found it and was able to return it to the family. That CNN used portions of the material in the diary they found at the scene–material that appears to contradict the official version of events that State/WH has been putting out–is completely in line with practices of good journalism.

This sent Reines into meltdown mode. He shot back to Hastings, “I now understand why the official investigation by the Department of the Defense as reported by The Army Times The Washington Post concluded beyond a doubt that you’re an unmitigated asshole. How’s that for a non-bulls**t response? Now that we’ve gotten that out of our systems, have a good day. And by good day, I mean F**k Off.”

If this is the best defense that the Obama administration has for its Middle East policies, then no wonder Obama is sticking to The View.

Meanwhile, Islamic terror has claimed the lives of 4 more Americans, exclusively due to the inaction and ineptitude of the Obama Administration.  And as the WSJ notes, they’d love to raise that tally into the millions; 6 million to be exact:

Israel Must Be ‘Eliminated’

Netanyahu has to take Iran’s words seriously. Why doesn’t Obama?

 

‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

—George Orwell

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks at the United Nations today, which also happens to be Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. The timing is apt because when it comes to Iran and Israel, the hardest thing for some people to see or hear is what Iranian leaders say in front of the world’s nose.

“Iran has been around for the last seven, 10 thousand years. They [the Israelis] have been occupying those territories for the last 60 to 70 years, with the support and force of the Westerners. They have no roots there in history,” Mr. Ahmadinejad told reporters and editors in New York on Monday.

“We do believe that they have found themselves at a dead end and they are seeking new adventures in order to escape this dead end. Iran will not be damaged with foreign bombs. We don’t even count them as any part of any equation for Iran. During a historical phase, they [the Israelis] represent minimal disturbances that come into the picture and are then eliminated.”

Note that word—”eliminated.” When Iranians talk about Israel, this intention of a final solution keeps coming up. In October 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad, quoting the Ayatollah Khomeini, said Israel “must be wiped off the map.” Lest anyone miss the point, the Iranian President said in June 2008 that Israel “has reached the end of its function and will soon disappear off the geographical domain.”

He has company among Iranian leaders. In a televised speech in February, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei called Israel a “cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut,” adding that “from now on, in any place, if any nation or any group that confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear of expressing this.”

Major General Hassan Firouzabadi, chief of staff of the armed forces, added in May that “the Iranian nation is standing for its cause that is the full annihilation of Israel.” This pledge of erasing an entire state goes back to the earliest days of the Iranian revolution. “One of our major points is that Israel must be destroyed,” Ayatollah Khomeini said in the 1980s.

Former Iranian President Akbar Rafsanjani—often described as a moderate in Western media accounts—had this to say in 2001: “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”

So for Iran it is “not irrational” to contemplate the deaths of millions of Muslims in exchange for the end of Israel because millions of other Muslims will survive, but the Jewish state will not.

The world’s civilized nations typically denounce such statements, as the U.S. State Department denounced Mr. Ahamadinejad’s on Monday. But denouncing them is not the same as taking them seriously. Sometimes the greatest challenge for a civilized society is comprehending that not everyone behaves in civilized or rational fashion, that barbarians can still appear at the gate.

Thus we hear in U.S. and European policy circles that Israel is overreacting to such publicly stated intentions because Iran would never act on them and, in any case, Israel has its own nuclear deterrent. But no one believes Israel would launch a nuclear first-strike to wipe out Tehran, and an Israeli counterstrike would be too late to protect Israel from being “eliminated.”

The tragic lesson of history is that sometimes barbarians mean what they say. Sometimes regimes do want to eliminate entire nations or races, and they will do so if they have the means and opportunity and face a timorous or disbelieving world.

No one knows that more acutely than Israeli leaders, whose state was founded in the wake of such a genocide. The question faced by Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and other Israelis is whether they can afford to allow another regime pledged to Jewish “annihilation” to acquire the means to accomplish it. The answer, in our view, is as obvious as Mr. Ahmadinejad’s stated intentions.

In his U.N. speech Tuesday, President Obama took a tougher-than-usual election-season line against Iran, stating that “the United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” But the cold reality is that after nearly four years of failed diplomacy and half-hearted sanctions that he opposed until Congress forced his hand, neither Iran nor Israel believe him.

Someone should put Orwell on the President’s reading list before it’s too late.

“….the United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”, including meaningless, talk, posturing and diplomacy; anything which might actually prove even remotely effective NOT included!

The Anointed One’s UN debacle forced even CNN….

and the New York Times….

‘….The tensions between Mr. Obama and the Gulf states, both American and Arab diplomats say, derive from an Obama character trait: he has not built many personal relationships with foreign leaders. “He’s not good with personal relationships; that’s not what interests him,” said one United States diplomat. “But in the Middle East, those relationships are essential. The lack of them deprives D.C. of the ability to influence leadership decisions.”‘

….to confront his emphatically flawed judgment and leadership.  Even were Hillary possessed of twice the talent the MSM ascribes to her, she’s still a woman interacting with Islamists, the most misogynistic miscreants on the planet.  Good luck with that.

Team Tick-Tock’s response was all too predictable:

Yeah, yeah, yeah; and General Motors is still alive.

Moving on, Thomas Sowell offers what should be the substance of a campaign ad the GOP runs continuously between now and November 6th:

Obama Versus Obama

 

Many voters will be comparing Mitt Romney with Barack Obama between now and election day. But what might be even more revealing would be comparing Obama with Obama. There is a big contrast between Obama based on his rhetoric (“Obama 1”) and Obama based on his record (“Obama 2”). (As in Light and Dark.)

For example, during the 2008 election campaign, Obama 1 spoke of “opening up and creating more transparency in government,” so that government spending plans would be posted on the Internet for days before they passed into legislation. After he was elected president, Obama said, “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

This Obama 1 sounds like a very good fellow. No wonder so many people voted for him.

But then there is Obama 2. He passed a mammoth ObamaCare bill so fast that even members of Congress didn’t have time to read it, much less the general public. It was by no means posted on the Internet for days before the vote, as promised.

The Constitution of the United States requires transparency as well. When people are nominated by a President to become Cabinet members, the Constitution requires that they be confirmed by the Senate before they can take office, so that facts about them can become known before they are given the powers of their offices.

Although President Obama complied with this requirement when he appointed Cabinet members, he also made other appointments to powerful positions created by Executive Orders — people aptly called “czars” for the vast, unchecked powers they wielded, in some cases greater than the powers exercised by Cabinet members.

These “czars” never had to be confirmed by the Senate, and so had no public vetting before acquiring their powers. We had unknown and unaccountable rulers placed over us.

Another aspect of transparency was the Constitution’s requirement that Congress pass a budget every year. The Democratically controlled Senate during the Obama administration has not passed a budget for three consecutive years.

Passing a budget makes the administration tell the public what it will pay for, what it will have to cut to reduce the deficit — and how big the deficit will be if they don’t cut anything. By not even passing a budget, Obama 2 and his party are in effect saying to the public, “It is none of your business.” Transparency?

In his oath of office, Barack Obama swore to see that the laws are faithfully executed, as all Presidents do. But that was Obama 1. Once in the White House, Obama 2 proceeded to explicitly waive the enforcement of laws he didn’t agree with. The immigration laws are a classic example. Failing to get Congress to pass some version of amnesty, Obama 2 simply issued an Executive Order exempting certain classes of illegal immigrants from the immigration laws on the books.

Too many people have gotten sucked into a discussion of whether it is a good or a bad thing for people brought into the country as children to be exempted. But the whole reason for Constitutional government is to have all three branches of government agree on what the laws of the land shall be.

Obama 2 has decided instead that if Congress doesn’t do what he wants, he will do it by himself through Executive Orders.

If any President can unilaterally change the law, we are not likely to have the same freedom under rule by presidential fiat as under Constitutional government. This is especially dangerous in a President’s second term, when he need no longer have to consider what the voters want. With a couple more Supreme Court appointments he can permanently change the very nature of American government.

One of the most dangerous examples of a lack of transparency was inadvertently revealed last March when Obama 2, unaware that a microphone was on, told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that, after he is reelected, and never has to face the voters again, he will have the “flexibility” to make a deal with Russia on missile defense systems.

In other words, Obama will be able to make a deal with a country that has been America’s most implacable and most formidable adversary for more than half a century — a deal he couldn’t make if the voters knew about it before the election. Think about that chilling prospect, and what it reveals about the real Obama.

We won’t hold our breath waiting for The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight to air that campaign ad.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this instant classic from Paul Croisetiere:

Bumps in the road; you know….

….background noise.

Speaking of background noise, we turn now to the Sports Section, and this brief bit of commentary on the NFL’s replacement refs, a number of who we’ve learned were rejects from the Lingerie League:

It’s not only legit, it’s dead-on, balls-accurate.

And in the Wonderful World of Politicized Science….

NASA considering deep-space outpost on far side of moon

 

Will NASA’s next mission send its astronauts beyond the moon? The space agency is weighing a proposal to build a “gateway spacecraft”  that would hang in space about 277,000 miles from the Earth and 38,000 miles past the moon — more than a quarter million miles further into space than the orbit of the International Space Station.

….The new outpost — which may be built from parts leftover from the construction of the ISS — would be an ideal first mission for the heavy lift spacecraft dubbed Space Launch System that is being developed at NASA. That rocket is being designed to carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, a capsule that can hold crew on missions to the moon or beyond. It can also carry important cargo, equipment and science experiments to Earth’s orbit and destinations beyond, according to NASA.

In a statement to FoxNews.com, a NASA spokesman said the agency was evaluating several potential routes to Mars, an asteroid and elsewhere in space. “NASA is executing President Obama’s ambitious space exploration plan (Huh?!?) that includes missions around the moon, to asteroids, and ultimately putting humans on Mars. There are many options — and many routes — being discussed on our way to the Red Planet,”Trent J. Perrotto said.

….Paying for any such a project would be an immense challenge in itself. The Orlando Sentinel reportedly studied internal NASA documents on the project, which don’t include any sort of price tag. And NASA has been wrestling with budget cuts for years.

Funny; last we heard, the only segment of the space program The Obamao had interest in pursuing involved….

….Muslim outreach.

Finally, in an Islamic-related item….

Industry group: bacon shortage ‘unavoidable’

 

You can say THAT again!  Here’s hoping any actual shortage is as a result of bacon and other pork products now constituting only items on the menus offered Nidal Hasan and the Gitmo detainees.

Magoo