It’s Wednesday, October 10th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the mid-week edition with a follow-up to yesterday’s video clip where multiple Liberal pundits disparaged anyone calling The Obamao “lazy” or “unintelligent” as bigots:

Submitted for your approval, courtesy of Robin Mayer, straight from The Dear Misleader’s lips to your ears:

Which makes him, by his own words, both lazy and unintelligent.  He’s a bald-faced liar as well, but more on that later.

Seeing as we’re talking Liberal hypocrisy, check out Team Tick-Tock’s latest attack ad….

….and then you tell us:

Is this not precisely the style of campaign he was railing against back in 2008?  As he said, when all else fails, and you’re flat on your back, totally out of airspeed and ideas and Chicago’s growing awfully large in your windscreen….

….”You make a big election about small things”….like Big Bird!

Speaking of Big Bird, it appears The Obamao’s unauthorized use of a trademark-protected fowl has ruffled the feathers of a number of publicly-funded millionaires:

Angry birds on Sesame Street want Obama to take down PBS ad

 

As Katie Pavlich notes at Townhall.com:

The only grass, roots or otherwise, pushing Team Tick-Tock’s Big Bird campaign is the stuff they’re smoking.

As the WSJ notes:

Having been routed in the first debate, President Obama has found a comeback strategy: Fly Big Bird. Specifically, mock Mitt Romney’s call to cut federal subsidies for the millionaires at the Sesame Workshop and pledge to defend the Public Broadcasting Service no matter how much money the Treasury has to borrow.

At least he’s finally discovered a second-term agenda.

Turning now from rank hypocrisy to patent prevarication, as this latest offering from Thomas Sowell details, all America should hail the….

Phony in Chief

 

When President Barack Obama and others on the left are not busy admonishing the rest of us to be “civil” in our discussions of political issues, they are busy letting loose insults, accusations and smears against those who dare to disagree with them. Like so many people who have been beaten in a verbal encounter, and who can think of clever things to say the next day, after it is all over, President Obama, after his clear loss in his debate with Mitt Romney, called Governor Romney a “phony.”

Innumerable facts, however, show that it is our Commander in Chief who is Phony in Chief. A classic example was his speech to a predominantly black audience at Hampton University on June 5, 2007. That date is important, as we shall see.

In his speech — delivered in a ghetto-style accent that Obama doesn’t use anywhere except when he is addressing a black audience — he charged the federal government with not showing the same concern for the people of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina hit as they had shown for the people of New York after the 9/11 attacks, or the people of Florida after hurricane Andrew hit.

Departing from his prepared remarks, he mentioned the Stafford Act, which requires communities receiving federal disaster relief to contribute 10 percent as much as the federal government does.

Senator Obama, as he was then, pointed out that this requirement was waived in the case of New York and Florida because the people there were considered to be “part of the American family.” But the people in New Orleans — predominantly black — “they don’t care about as much,” according to Barack Obama.

If you want to know what community organizers do, this is it — rub people’s emotions raw to hype their resentments. And this was Barack Obama in his old community organizer role, a role that should have warned those who thought that he was someone who would bring us together, when he was all too well practiced in the arts of polarizing us apart.

Why is the date of this speech important? Because, less than two weeks earlier, on May 24, 2007, the United States Senate had in fact voted 80-14 to waive the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans, as it had waived that requirement for New York and Florida. More federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans than was spent in New York after 9/11 and in Florida after hurricane Andrew, combined.

Truth is not a job requirement for a community organizer. Nor can Barack Obama claim that he wasn’t present the day of that Senate vote, as he claimed he wasn’t there when Jeremiah Wright unleashed his obscene attacks on America from the pulpit of the church that Obama attended for 20 years.

Unlike Jeremiah Wright’s church, the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional Record for May 24, 2007 shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was one of just 14 Senators who voted against — repeat, AGAINST — the legislation which included the waiver.

When he gave that demagogic speech, in a feigned accent and style, it was world class chutzpah and a rhetorical triumph.He truly deserves the title Phony in Chief.

If you know any true believers in Obama, show them the transcript of his June 5, 2007 speech at Hampton University (available from the Federal News Service) and then show them page S6823 of the Congressional Record for May 24, 2007, which lists which Senators voted which way on the waiver of the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans.

Some people in the media have tried to dismiss this and other revelations of Barack Obama’s real character that have belatedly come to light as “old news.” But the truth is one thing that never wears out. The Pythagorean Theorem is 2,000 years old, but it can still tell you the distance from home plate to second base (127 ft.) without measuring it. And what happened five years ago can tell a lot about Barack Obama’s character — or lack of character. (As well as his Christianity….or lack of it!)

Obama’s true believers may not want to know the truth. But there are millions of other people who have simply projected their own desires for a post-racial America onto Barack Obama. These are the ones who need to be confronted with the truth, before they repeat the mistake they made when they voted four years ago.

Sniff….sniff….does anyone else detect the scent of an attack ad in the air?!?  With all due respect (which, as we’ve observed before is immense), Sowell is far too kind; this isn’t phoniness, it’s out-and-out deliberate deception.  Or, to be even more blunt, it’s just as Joe Wilson said:

No Barry, YOU’RE the liar….and frankly, not a very good one.

And since we’re on the subject of lies, damned lies and Dimocrats, Jack Welch, writing at the WSJ, confirms….

I Was Right About That Strange Jobs Report

The economy would need to be growing at breakneck speed for unemployment to drop to 7.8% from 8.3% in the course of two months.

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444897304578046260406091012.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Moving on, courtesy of the WaPo and AEI, Mark Thiessen chronicles Hairplug Joe….

Biden’s bin Laden hypocrisy

 

In the 2012 campaign, Vice President Biden has become cheerleader in chief for the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, while claiming that Mitt Romney would not have ordered the mission — which, in Biden’s telling, disqualifies Romney for the presidency.

One problem with that: Joe Biden opposed the mission that killed Osama bin Laden.

During his speech at the Democratic National Convention, Biden lavished praise on President Obama for the bin Laden raid: “Barack understood that the search for bin Laden was about a lot more than taking a monstrous leader off the battlefield; it was about righting an unspeakable wrong, healing a nearly unbearable wound in America’s heart.” He described firsthand how “[w]e sat for days in the Situation Room. He listened to the risks and reservations about the raid. And he asked the tough questions. But when Admiral William McRaven looked him in the eye and said, ‘Sir, we can get this done,’ I knew at that moment Barack had made his decision. His response was decisive. He said do it. And justice was done.”

Then, using an old, out of context Romney quote from 2007, Biden alleged that the GOP nominee would not have done the same. “He was wrong. If you understood that America’s heart had to be healed, you would have done exactly what the president did.”

It turns out, Biden left one important detail out of his account of the Situation Room deliberations — Biden counseled Obama not to do what he did. Alone among the president’s advisers, Biden opposed every option under consideration for killing of Osama bin Laden.

In the new issue of Vanity Fair, Mark Bowden — author of a new book “The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden” — writes: “It was widely reported in the weeks and months after the raid that most, or at least many, of the president’s top advisors opposed the raid. That is not true. Nearly everyone present favored it. The only major dissenters were Biden and [then-Defense Secretary Robert] Gates, and before the raid Gates would change his mind.”

According to Bowden, there were two options on the table for killing bin Laden: a drone strike and the special operations raid. Gates, National Counterterrorism Center director Michael Leiter, and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright argued for a drone strike. Everyone else favored the special operations raid (including Biden’s own national security adviser, Tony Blinken). But when it was Biden’s chance to speak, he turned to Obama and said: “Mr. President, my suggestion is: don’t go.”

Biden’s reasons were based not on national security, but on electoral politics. “The vice president was never shy about political calculations,” Bowden writes, citing exclusive interviews with Obama and other top officials. “Biden believed that if the president decided to choose either the air or the ground option, and if the effort failed, Obama could say goodbye to a second term.”

After the Situation Room meeting, Gates called the White House to tell the president he had changed his mind and supported the raid. “So in the end,” Bowden writes, “every one of the president’s top advisors except Biden was in favor of immediate action.”

Yet today it is Biden — the lone opponent of immediate action to kill bin Laden — who is painting Romney as unfit for office because he allegedly would have opposed it. There is, of course, no evidence that Romney would not have ordered the bin Laden raid. But we now know for certain that, were it up to Biden, the raid would not have gone forward.

Of course, Biden’s opposition to the bin Laden operation is not surprising. The fact is Biden has a near-perfect record of being wrong about almost every major foreign policy question that the United States has faced in the past three decades. He supported the nuclear freeze in the 1980s, opposed ballistic missile defense and warned of a new arms race if the United States withdrew from theAnti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (we did, and no arms race ensued). He opposed aiding the Nicaraguan democratic resistance that helped roll back communism in our hemisphere, the Reagan defense buildup that bankrupted the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War that liberated Kuwait, and the 2007 surge that turned back the insurgency and defeated al-Qaeda in Iraq.

With this record, it is no shock that Biden opposed the killing of bin Laden as well. But it takes chutzpah for Biden to publicly castigate Romney for his imaginary opposition to the bin Laden operation, when Biden actually opposed the bin Laden operation. (No, it only required knowledge that a completely compliant MSM would never report it.)

Biden is fond of pointing out Romney and Paul Ryan’s lack of foreign policy experience. And it’s true, Biden does have a lot more experience than the GOP nominees — experience at being wrong. Let’s see if in Thursday’s vice presidential debate, Biden dares to repeat his now famous line, “GM is alive, and Bin Laden is dead.” If he does, Ryan can simply answer, “Bin Laden wouldn’t be dead if you had your way, Joe.”

Next up, courtesy of Randy Jugs and NRO, Victor Davis Hanson relates why the world’s 8th-largest economy should already be declared….

Bankrupt California

No money for crumbling roads, but billions for high-speed rail. 

 

I thought of my fellow Californian Energy Secretary Steven Chu last week, when I paid $4.89 a gallon in Gilroy for regular gas — and had to wait in line to get it. The customers were in near revolt, but I wondered against what and whom. I mentioned to one exasperated motorist that there are estimated to be over 20 billion barrels of oil a few miles away, in newly found reserves off the California coast. He thought I was from Mars.

California may face the nation’s largest budget deficit at $16 billion. It may struggle with the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate at 10.6 percent. It will soon vote whether to levy the nation’s highest income and sales taxes, as if to encourage others to join the 2,000-plus high earners who are leaving the state each week. The new taxes will be our way of saying, “Good riddance.” And if California is home to one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients and the largest number of illegal aliens, it is nonetheless apparently happy and thus solidly for Obama, by a +24 percent margin in the latest Field poll. The unemployment rate in my hometown is 16 percent, the per capita income is $16,000 — and I haven’t seen a Romney sticker yet.

Shortly before taking office, Secretary Chu, remember, quipped that he would like to see American gas prices rise to European levels — presumably $9 or $10 a gallon — to discourage driving and thereby lower our carbon footprint. If $50 for half a fill-up is any indication, California is over halfway toward achieving Chu’s dream. If green bicycles are the ultimate aim of our central-planning regulators, then they are making headway. I’ve never seen so many new rural bike riders, though most of them out here in the San Joaquin Valley have a bad habit of riding on the wrong side of the road.

A refinery fire, a power outage, a uniquely Californian gasoline formula, years of regulating refineries into stasis — all that has finally caught up with the state, as prices soar at the pump. Yet what perplexes about California in extremis is the liberal ability for our state government simply to ignore its own regulations, which it has been using to paralyze businesses for years. For example, a panicked Governor Brown just asked the state air-resources board to suspend the law that requires gas stations to sell our special summer fuel formula through the month of October. The state asserted that a one-time suspension would increase supplies and yet not materially affect our air quality — which begs the question: Why, if that is true, would such a regulation have been passed in the first place?

California has the nation’s highest gas taxes and fuel prices, and the tightest supplies — and reputedly one of the worst-maintained infrastructures, with out-of-date, overcrowded, and poorly maintained freeways. When I head home each week from Palo Alto, I feel like an Odysseus fighting modern-day Lotus Eaters, Cyclopes, and Laestrygonians to reach Ithaka, wondering what obstacle will sidetrack me this trip — huge potholes, entire sections of the freeway reduced to one lane, or various poorly marked detours? If the nation’s highest gas taxes give us all that, what might the lowest bring?

Although the state is facing a $16 billion annual budgetary shortfall, Governor Brown is determined to press ahead with high-speed rail — estimated to cost eventually over $200 billion. Such is his zeal that he intends to override the environmental lawsuits that usually stymie private projects for years. The line is scheduled to pass a few miles from my farm, its first link connecting Fresno and Corcoran, home to the state prison that houses Charles Manson.

Yet a money-losing Amtrak line already connects Fresno and Corcoran. I often ride my bike near the tracks and notice the half-empty cars that zoom by. Most farmers here are perplexed about why the state would wish to borrow billions and destroy thousands of acres of prime farm land to duplicate this little-traveled link. Support for high-speed rail is strongest in the San Francisco Bay Area, but there is no support for beginning the project where the noise and dirty reality might be too close to home for green utopians.

California schools rate among the nation’s lowest in math and English, but our shrinking numbers of teachers are among the country’s highest paid. One-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California, and 8 out of the last 11 million people added to the California population are enrolled in Medicaid, but we are also the most generous state in sending remittances to foreign countries — we contribute a third to a half of the estimated $50 billion that leaves the U.S. each year for Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. It is puzzling in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley to see both federal and state medical centers and nearby offices that specialize in cash transfers to Mexico. But no one seems to see any disconnect between the public need for free health care and the private desire to send money to Mexico.

California has built the nation’s largest prison system, but there is no room left in either state or county facilities for an increasing number of dangerous felons. The same day last week that I emptied my wallet for gas, my 15-hp ag irrigation pump simply quit during the night. Nocturnal copper-wire thieves had come into the vineyard and yanked out the electrical conduit. That’s the third theft of pump wire I’ve had this year — and it costs $1,500 each time to repair the damage. I’m told that Mexican national gangs go down to Los Angeles with their stolen copper to sell it to mobile recyclers. No one calls the sheriff any more. Instead, we swap stories about protective wire cages, spikes, cameras, lights, and booby traps. Barack Obama once thundered, “Rich people are all for nonviolence. . . .  They don’t want people taking their stuff.” I plead guilty to his writ, at least for a while longer. But I don’t agree that copper conduit is mere “stuff” or that stealing it counts as social protest or that the thieves are necessarily poor.

The criminals have a sophisticated modus operandi, with lookouts who drive around and report by cell phone when the coast is clear — green-lighting comrade thieves who in a matter of minutes ride into the farm alleyways on bicycles, cut and pull the wire, and pedal out with little noise and no headlights. Two nights ago, when I returned to my farmhouse, an odd couple was sitting in a car — each one on a cell phone — next to my mailbox. They claimed they did not speak English, but after some harsh words they left — surprised and angry that I had dared to ask them to leave my property.

It’s a veritable war these days in rural central California — as copper-wire thieves, gangs, drug lords, and fencers run amuck in a bankrupt state that can no longer afford to keep its felons incarcerated. President Obama soars with talk of amnesty and the DREAM Act. But if we are going to waive federal statutes for each illegal alien who we feel may some day become a neurosurgeon or an experimental chemist, can’t we at least enforce the law against those not in school and up to no good in the here and now, like the two sitting in my driveway phoning directions for local thieves to yank out copper wire?

Open borders, redistributionist socialism, therapeutic and politicized public schools, and public-employee unions finally are proving a match even for Apple, Google, Facebook, the Napa Valley wine industry, Central Valley agribusiness, Hollywood, Cal Tech, Stanford, and Berkeley. In California, it is a day-by-day war between what nature and past generations have so generously bequeathed and what our bunch has so voraciously consumed.

On any given day, beautiful weather, the Pacific Coast, and the majestic Sierra Nevada are trumped by released felons, $5-a-gallon gas, and a 1970 infrastructure crumbling beneath a crowded 2012 state. There are many lessons from California. One is that the vision of the present administration is already here — and it simply does not work.

California, the once-Golden State; where almost half of the population doesn’t speak English….and significant portion of the remainder….

….really doesn’t understand it.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this instant classic, courtesy of Paul Croisetiere….

….along with this easy-to-understand definition of the differences between the two political parties from Wally “Gator” Tart:

Finally, we’ll call it a day with the “MSM Bias….WHAT Bias?!?” segment, courtesy of Newsbusters.org and Nickelodeon:

TV Columnist Bashes Romney for Not Pandering to Children

 

Citing time constraints, Mitt Romney has declined to participate in Nickelodeon’s upcoming “Kids Pick the President” special that is scheduled to air on Oct. 15. In her latest TV Column, the Washington Post’s Lisa de Moraes groused about the decision, considering it a snub and quoting the reaction from the Obama campaign at length.

“First Big Bird, now Nickelodeon,” she began. “What’s up with Mitt Romney and kids?” By contrast, President Obama — who is known to skip daily intelligence briefings often (Not to mention snubbing Netanyahu and the UN confab for The View and Letterman!) — couldn’t be praised enough for taking time out of his own busy schedule to take part in the cable TV show.

….While acknowledging that Sen. John Kerry was the only other candidate to turn Nickelodeon down, de Moraes seemed to think Romney’s snub is unacceptable — going on to quote Obama’s antagonizing campaign statement.

It’s no surprise Romney decided to play hookey. Kids demand details, and I’m sure they want some answers on why Romney could increase their class sizes, eliminate their teacher’s jobs, raise taxes on their families and slash funding for Big Bird. Unfortunately for Mitt Romney, ‘The dog ate my homework’ just doesn’t cut it when you’re running for president.

….Regardless of why Gov. Romney couldn’t make it, it’s notable that although Kerry did the same thing in 2004, a Nexis search revealed no complaint from de Moraes or anyone else at the Post for that matter about him skipping out on a chance to discuss the issues with kids.

MSM bias….WHAT bias?!?  So Lisa de Moronaes, in recognition of what can only be described as your slavish stupidity in the service of The Anointed One, we offer our heartfelt….

Magoo