It’s Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012….but before we begin, a couple points. For those who don’t take the time to view all that’s available on our home page at www.thedailygouge.com, here’s the must-see Pat Caddell commentary we’ve had featured as our Video of the Day since Monday. It’s a bit lengthy, but well worth your time.
Next, though the previously unseen Obama video Sean Hannity aired at the top of his show showed The Obamao at his racially-divisive best, we doubt it will prove harmful….unless it’s featured in an effective campaign commercial.
Hannity provides what’s needed with a side-by-side comparison of the June 2007 speech with his infamous March 2008 “race” speech, and the contrasts are truly staggering; if only for the faux accent he employs in the earlier speech given before a Black audience. You can cut the fear-mongering race baiting with a shiv….er, knife.
Unfortunately, we sincerely doubt the Romney camp has the nerve necessary to produce it. The entire 40-minute speech, including the numerous off-teleprompter remarks, none of which were ever aired or reported, can be viewed in full at The Daily Caller website.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, if the economy, national debt, unemployment, Obamascare, soaring spending and Fast & Furious weren’t enough, The Obamao’s handed Mitt Romney the foreign policy debacle to take him down.
Obama Administration Denied “Repeated Requests” For Increased Security in Benghazi
Letters obtained exclusively by Fox News appear to show the State Department refused to get involved when the company tasked with protecting the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, raised security concerns, the latest indication that warning signs may have been ignored in the lead-up to last month’s terror attack.
The letters pertain to a dispute between Blue Mountain Libya, the security license holder in Libya, and its operations partner Blue Mountain UK, which trained and provided the local guards.A source with knowledge of two State Department meetings — one in June and a second in July — told Fox News that Blue Mountain Libya felt the security provided by the UK partner was “substandard and the situation was unworkable.”But according to the source, when the Libyans tried to bring in a third party — an American contractor — to improve security, a State Department contract officer declined to get involved.
“The U.S. government is not required to mediate any disagreements between the two parties of the Blue Mountain Libya partnership,” contracting officer Jan Visintainer wrote on July 10 to Blue Mountain Libya, adding that to date “contract performance is satisfactory.” (Except for those two bombings!)
Asked about that letter Tuesday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the department’s investigation likely would address the issue. “Presumably, those kinds of questions will have to be looked at in the context of the work that we’re doing,” she said.
Yeah; you know….like the Department of Injustice’s Fast & Furious investigation.
Here’s the bottom line on the entire Benghazi cover-up: President Obama sacrificed the lives of four Americans to maintain the myths of Muslim moderation and his personal popularity in the Arab world.Obama and his entire Administration have….
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Fred Barnes, writing at the WSJ, offers the leader of The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight some sage advice regarding….
Romney’s Dangerous Game of Playing It Safe
The Republican needs to tap into voters’ sense of urgency. Simply being Not Obama isn’t enough.
For his Wednesday-night debate with President Obama, Mitt Romney has been advised to be tough but affable. He should put his warm and caring side on display, while picking apart the president’s record and rebutting dubious statements by Mr. Obama. “I’d be tempted to go back to that wonderful line by Ronald Reagan, ‘There you go again,'” Mr. Romney said last week.
The advice is good, but even if Mr. Romney follows it scrupulously, he is not likely to dominate the debate. His performance won’t be commanding enough to give his campaign the momentum it needs. His chances of defeating Mr. Obama on Nov. 6 will suffer.
Mr. Romney should do in the debate what he hasn’t done in his speeches, media appearances or TV ads—in other words, in his entire campaign. He must make a forceful case that America’s survival as a prosperous and respected nation is at stake.(‘Cuz it IS!!!) In that context, the election becomes an urgent choice between a national turnaround and further decline. The Romney advertising has been especially sorry at drawing that distinction. The generally bland commercials feel like they could have run at any time in the past 40 years.
Voters understand that America is in trouble. For years, they’ve told pollsters the country is headed in the wrong direction. Today they’re even more gloomy. At every focus group I’ve heard about recently, they agree with the notion that their children will be worse off than they are. A Fox News poll in August found that by nearly a 2-1 ratio voters think American civilization is in decline. In short, faith in the American Dream has tanked.
According to a Rasmussen poll last week, 15% of likely voters are uncommitted or willing to change their vote. “One of the distinguishing features of those potentially persuadable voters is that they don’t see the choice between Romney and Obama as particularly significant,” Mr. Rasmussen said.“Just 28% say it will be very important which man wins.”
Like a wide receiver in football, Mr. Romney needs to create separation between himself and his opponent. If they’re quibbling over the legitimacy of Mr. Obama’s $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan or whether Mr. Romney’s tax proposal is revenue neutral, the advantage will go to the incumbent. Mr. Romney can prevail in those arguments without coming any closer to winning the presidency.
The Republican challenger needs to go where Mr. Obama cannot go. What’s required are ideas, initiatives and policies commensurate with America’s moment of peril. This means, first of all, embracing the conservative reform agenda: entitlement reform, overhaul of the tax code, curbs on spending, an unhampered economy, regulatory relief, consumer-driven health care, a welfare state that doesn’t promote dependency, a revitalized civil society.
Mitt’s idea of putting his nose to the campaign grindstone.
Making such reforms the centerpiece of his campaign would no doubt give Mr. Romney pause. Ever cautious, he resisted for months the advice of economic advisers to champion a 20% across-the-board cut in income-tax rates. When he acquiesced, it was the boldest move of his campaign—until he selected Paul Ryan as his running mate. Now he needs to be bolder still.
Mr. Obama, Democrats and the mainstream media will insist that the conservative agenda is risky and radical. (Some Romney advisers may agree.) And they’ll be right. But Mr. Romney can argue credibly that he has big solutions for America’s big problems. Mr. Obama, with no serious alternatives, will be left behind.
So far, Mr. Romney’s extremely conventional campaign has failed to convince many voters that he has those solutions. The worsening debt crisis, slow economic growth, persistently high unemployment, millions of dropouts from the job market, more people seeking disability payments than finding jobs, 45 million now receiving food stamps—Mr. Romney talks about these national ills, but he does so without sketching out how he’d cure them. He focuses on ends—that is, goals—rather than means.
In his acceptance speech at the GOP convention in August, Mr. Romney listed five steps he’d take to create 12 million jobs. The steps consisted of vague promises, such as achieving energy independence and thwarting trade cheaters. Mr. Obama has had no difficulty neutralizing Mr. Romney with a TV ad citing his own vague steps for restoring a strong economy.
In August, a top adviser spelled out for me the strategy of the Romney campaign. It was simple. The economy, after fours years of Mr. Obama’s presidency, is in bad shape. Thus the incumbent loses. So long as Mr. Romney doesn’t cause himself trouble by giving the president easy targets, he’ll be elected.
But Mr. Obama and his operatives did not sit still. With help from the media, they leapfrogged the Romney strategy. For months, they trashed Mr. Romney in ads and personal attacks. And instead of being focused on the president’s record, the race was transformed into a choice between two candidates.
That choice favors Mr. Obama. He’s likable, gets credit for good intentions and an A for effort from the public. In Mr. Romney’s case, the relentless attacks from the Obama campaign have left him with a less appealing image. In the Battleground Brushfire poll conducted last week, he was viewed more unfavorably than favorably, 48%-46%.
Mr. Romney appeared to be changing his strategy when he picked Mr. Ryan. The election would be a choice, but between two agendas, not two individuals. Mr. Ryan, as the Republican Party’s foremost policy thinker, is the architect of the sweeping conservative reforms that passed the House this year. Mr. Romney, it was assumed, would take Mr. Ryan’s ideas and run on them. He hasn’t.The opposite has happened. Mr. Ryan now sounds more like Mr. Romney.
This was a mistake. But it’s one that can be reversed, beginning in the debate at the University of Denver. It won’t be sufficient for Mr. Romney to invoke the old Reagan line, “There you go again.” It worked for Reagan, but he was already identified with a set of striking conservative ideas that told everyone he and Jimmy Carter were miles apart.
Fred’s right. And if Mitt fails to heed his words of wisdom, come November 7th, he’ll still have his millions; while the joke….
….will be on the rest of us.
Next up, it’s the Follow-Up segment, and a WSJ editorial confirming Pat Quinn lining American taxpayers to cover Illinois’ overspending is just the tip of the state bailout iceberg:
Jerry Brown’s School Bailout
A state rescue in Inglewood, California helps unions, not students.
Have some more Kool-Aid, Jerry!
Democrats howl about bank bailouts, but then they also treat public schools as if they’re too big to fail. As a case in point, California Governor Jerry Brown is throwing the Inglewood school district in Los Angeles’s South Bay a $55 million lifeline in the name of “saving” 14,000 kids. But as with most government bailouts, the real intended beneficiaries are the unions.
Democrats in Sacramento rushed through legislation in August authorizing the state to take over and issue emergency loans to Inglewood district, which otherwise would have run out of cash by the end of the year. Unlike cities, school districts can’t declare bankruptcy. If a district can’t pay its bills, the state appoints a receiver to balance its books and run the schools in lieu of the superintendent and local school board.
The unions are blaming Inglewood’s shortfall on education cuts, but per-pupil spending is about the same as it was five years ago.The real problem (other than too generous benefits, which are an issue in most districts) is that enrollment has declined by more than 20% since 2006, which has shrunk the total pot of available money. Many of the city’s working class families have left. Meanwhile, about 10% of students have fled to charter schools—and for that the unions have only themselves to blame.
Seven charters have sprouted up within the last five years as alternatives to Inglewood’s failing schools, which are among the worst in the state. Only 30% of seventh graders meet state math standards while merely a quarter of 11th graders are proficient in English. The charters outperform traditional schools by 100 to 200 points on the state Adequate Performance Index (which ranges from 200 to 1000). Most charters also operate at lower cost.
The district intends to float bonds to renovate facilities in order to draw back students, but energy efficient buildings and a spiffy, new athletic center won’t make up for a poor education. And they sure won’t help close the district’s $10 million structural deficit.
The district recently trimmed employees’ salaries by 15% to keep schools open, but the soon-to-be-appointed state receiver will likely rescind the pay cut. More ominously, the receiver has the power to reject new charter applications and limit existing charter schools’ growth. State superintendent Tom Torlakson is a union pal, and the fear among reformers is that he’ll use the bailout to create a kind of Berlin Wall to keep students from fleeing Inglewood’s second-class public schools.
The bailout’s legislative sponsor Roderick Wright says that more districts will likely importune the state for emergency loans. Likely?According to the state’s calculations, 178 districts will be running deficits within the next three years—and that doesn’t count higher pension bills that will have to be phased in to pay down a $65 billion unfunded liability.
Democrats may invoke Inglewood’s fiscal crisis in their campaign to pass a tax hike on the November ballot. But Inglewood’s bailout reveals something that Democrats would rather voters not know. To wit, new tax revenues will merely prop up failing schools and the unions that control them.
Yo! Just put it….
….on their tab!
Moving on, here’s the latest installment of Tales From the Darkside, brought to us today by Jason Riley writing at Political Diary:
Love Story
Last week Mother Jones magazine was accusing Utah congressional candidate Mia Love of making up stories about her family history. This week the liberal publication is eating crow.
The magazine took Ms. Love, a Republican, to task for claiming that her birth in the U.S. on Dec. 6, 1975, allowed her Haitian-born parents and older siblings to become American citizens under a law that was set to expire on Jan. 1, 1976. “My parents have always told me I was a miracle and our family’s ticket to America,” Ms. Love told the Desert News last year.
In an article last week, Mother Jones suggested that Ms. Love’s story was untrue. “It’s an uplifting story, but there’s one problem with this account,” said the magazine. “According to immigration lawyers and U.S. officials, there doesn’t appear to have been a law of the kind described [by Ms. Love] . . . that would have conferred citizenship on Love’s parents, let alone her siblings, by simply having a baby in the United States.”
But it turns out that the reporter didn’t do enough reporting. Stuart Anderson, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service official who currently runs the National Foundation for American Policy, did some digging of his own. He described his findings in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week and then elaborated on them in a column for Forbes.com.
“Such a law did, in fact, exist, although it did not give citizenship to the parents of U.S.-born children but rather the ability to obtain legal residency,” he wrote. Mr. Anderson quoted Margaret Stock, an immigration attorney who has written extensively on birthright citizenship, as well as immigration lawyers who were practicing in the 1970s. “Stock points out that the State Department’s Foreign Affairs manual describes the law that Love’s family may have used, which expired in 1977, a little more than a year after Mia Love’s birth on U.S. soil.”
To its credit, Mother Jones has corrected the original story. Now it can focus with equal zeal on fact-checking Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry.
Not to mention The Dear Misleader’s almost totally unknown….
….personal history.
And in the Environmental Moment, brought to us today by Jeff Foutch, we learn that a recent….
USGS Report Shows No Evidence Linking Hydraulic Fracturing to Water
The two reports released by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Wednesday provide no evidence that hydraulic fracturing has created impacts to groundwater, an EnCana Corp. spokesperson told Rigzone Friday. “Furthermore and more importantly, [Environmental Protection Agency] has provided no sound scientific evidence that drilling has impacted domestic drinking water wells in the area,” said spokesperson Doug Hock in an email statement.
Which means, notwithstanding anything and everything said by the Environazis to the contrary….
….it’s not a frackin’ problem!!!
On the Lighter Side….
Finally, we’ll wrap up the day with the “Party Like It’s 1999” segment, courtesy of Bill Meisen, the Washington Guardian and….well,….the American taxpayer:
VA employees turned Orlando conferences into taxpayer funded vacations
Its budget and facilities already stretched thin, the Veterans Affairs Department wasted money on two summertime training conference to the vacation hot spot of Orlando, Fla., that cost taxpayers more than $6 million and let federal employees collect freebie gifts like meals, helicopter tours, limo rides, massages and show tickets from contractors, an internal investigation has found.
The VA’s inspector general concluded top agency officials failed to be good stewards of taxpayer money throwing conferences last year, including spending nearly $50,000 to create a parody video featuring the late Gen. George Patton.
In all, federal investigators concluded about $762,000 of the money spent on the two events in July and August 2011 was wasteful, undercutting their legitimate human resources training mission for the conferences.
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