It’s Monday, December 17th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, three pictures convey all that need be said about the monstrous evil which visited Newtown, CT last Friday:

Why the last?  Because if Liberals showed the same concern for the unborn they’ve expressed for Adam Lanza’s victims, some 50,000,000 innocent human beings would be alive today; particularly a former Illinois state senator who couldn’t see his way clear to extending basic medical care to infants lucky enough to survive partial-birth abortion.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, America; it tolls for thee.  The 20 innocent children slaughtered in Newtown are simply collateral damage.

Next up, courtesy of the WSJ, Peter Berkowitz offers some tips for.…

Conservative Survival in a Progressive Age

Big government and the social revolution are here to stay. The conservative role is to shape both for the better.

Political moderation is a maligned virtue. Yet it has been central to American constitutionalism and modern conservatism. Such moderation is essential today to the renewal of a conservatism devoted to the principles of liberty inscribed in the Constitution—and around which both social conservatives and libertarians can rally.

“It is a misfortune, inseparable from human affairs, that public measures are rarely investigated with that spirit of moderation which is essential to a just estimate of their real tendency to advance or obstruct the public good,” observed James Madison in Federalist No. 37. The challenge, Madison went on to explain, is more sobering still because the spirit of moderation “is more apt to be diminished than promoted by those occasions which require an unusual exercise of it.”

In a similar spirit, and in the years that Americans were declaring independence and launching a remarkable experiment in self-government, Edmund Burke sought to conserve in Great Britain the conditions under which liberty flourished. To this end, Burke exposed the error of depending on abstract theory for guidance in practical affairs. He taught the supremacy in political life of prudence, or the judgment born of experience, bound up with circumstances and bred in action. He maintained that good policy and laws must be fitted to the people’s morals, sentiments and opinions. He demonstrated that in politics the imperfections of human nature must be taken into account even as virtue and the institutions of civil society that sustain it must be cultivated. And he showed that political moderation frequently counsels rejecting the path of least resistance and is sometimes exercised in defending principle against majority opinion.

Madison’s words and example and Burke’s words and example are as pertinent in our time as they were in their own. Conservatives should heed them as they come to grips with two entrenched realities that pose genuine challenges to liberty, and whose prudent management is critical to the nation’s well-being.

The first entrenched reality is that big government is here to stay. This is particularly important for libertarians to absorb. Over the last two hundred years, society and the economy in advanced industrial nations have undergone dramatic transformations. And for three-quarters of a century, the New Deal settlement has been reshaping Americans’ expectations about the nation-state’s reach and role.

Consequently, the U.S. federal government will continue to provide a social safety net, regulate the economy, and shoulder a substantial share of responsibility for safeguarding the social and economic bases of political equality. All signs are that a large majority of Americans will want it to continue to do so.

In these circumstances, conservatives must redouble their efforts to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities. But to undertake to dismantle or even substantially roll back the welfare and regulatory state reflects a distinctly unconservative refusal to ground political goals in political realities.

Conservatives can and should focus on restraining spending, reducing regulation, reforming the tax code, and generally reining in our sprawling federal government. But conservatives should retire misleading talk of small government. Instead, they should think and speak in terms of limited government.

The second entrenched reality, this one testing social conservatives, is the sexual revolution, perhaps the greatest social revolution in human history. The invention, and popularization in the mid-1960s, of the birth control pill—a cheap, convenient and effective way to prevent pregnancy—meant that for the first time in human history, women could have sex and reliably control reproduction. This greatly enhanced their ability to enter the workforce and pursue careers. It also transformed romance, reshaped the family and refashioned marriage.

Brides may still wed in virginal white, bride and groom may still promise to love and cherish for better or for worse and until death do them part, and one or more children may still lie in the future for many married couples. Nevertheless, 90% of Americans engage in premarital sex, cohabitation before marriage is common, and out-of-wedlock births are substantial.

Divorce, while emotionally searing, is no longer unusual, legally difficult or socially stigmatizing. Children, once the core reason for getting married, have become optional. Civil unions for gays and lesbians have acquired majority support and same-sex marriage is not far behind.

These profoundly transformed circumstances do not oblige social conservatives to alter their fundamental convictions. They should continue to make the case for the traditional understanding of marriage with children at the center, both for its intrinsic human rewards and for the benefits a married father and mother bring to rearing children. They should back family-friendly public policy and seek, within the democratic process, to persuade fellow citizens to adopt socially conservative views and vote for candidates devoted to them.

Yet given the enormous changes over the last 50 years in the U.S. concerning the ways individuals conduct their romantic lives, view marriage, and think about the family—and with a view to the enduring imperatives of limited government—social conservatives should refrain from attempting to use the federal government to enforce the traditional understanding of sex, marriage and the family. They can remain true to their principles even as they adjust their expectations of what can be achieved through democratic politics, and renew their appreciation of the limits that American constitutional government imposes on regulating citizens’ private lives.

Some conservatives worry that giving any ground—in regard to the welfare and regulatory state, the sexual revolution, or both—is tantamount to sanctifying a progressive status quo. That is to mistake a danger for a destiny. Seeing circumstances as they are is a precondition for preserving one’s principles and effectively translating them into viable reforms.

Even under the shadow of big government and in the wake of the sexual revolution, both libertarians and social conservatives, consistent with their most deeply held beliefs, can and should affirm the dignity of the person and the inseparability of human dignity from individual freedom and self-government. They can and should affirm the dependence of individual freedom and self-government on a thriving civil society, and the paramount importance the Constitution places on maintaining a political framework that secures liberty by limiting government.

So counsels constitutional conservatism well understood.

Case in point: abortion.  We have always been, and will continue to be adamantly opposed to abortion.  But there is no chance whatsoever….zero, zip, nada….Congress will ever….ever….a constitutional amendment banning abortion; or that the necessary 38 states would ever ratify it.  And if a President so inclined ever were able to place enough justices on the SCOTUS to reverse Roe v. Wade, it would only return the question to the individual states, where we doubt more than a literal handful would ever outlaw what has become a heinous method of birth control.

And while we would never advocate a GOP party plank advocating life and prohibiting the use of public funds for legalized infanticide, could not the pro-life cause have been far more effectively advanced with control of the White House….

….and Senate?  Mourdock is living proof one can be right yet still be wrong.  Akin is just wrong….and a total douchebag to boot.

And since we’re on the subject of The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight, as this headline from Speed Mach details, John Boner’s shot Conservatives in the foot yet again:

Boehner offers debt-ceiling increase in cliff compromise

House Speaker John A. Boehner has offered to push any fight over the federal debt limit off for a year, a concession that would deprive Republicans of leverage in the budget battle but is breathing new life into stalled talks over the year-end “fiscal cliff.” The offer came Friday, according to people in both parties familiar with the talks, as part of the latest effort by Boehner (R-Ohio) to strike a deal with President Obama to replace more than $500 billion in painful deficit-reduction measures set to take effect in January.

With the national debt already bumping up against a $16.4 trillion cap set last year, Congress risks a government default unless it acts to raise the debt ceiling in the next few months. Some Republicans had argued that party leaders should use the threat of default to demand additional spending cuts from Obama.

Boehner’s offer signals that he expects a big deal with sufficient savings to meet his demand that any debt limit increase be paired dollar for dollar with spending cuts. That would permit him to keep a key vow to his party — and head off a potentially nasty debt-limit fight — at least until the end of next year.

“Our position has not changed,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said Sunday. “Any debt limit increase would require cuts and reforms of a greater amount.”

Yes, Virginia; we were eyeball to eyeball….and our side just blinked!

Speaking of the looming “fiscal cliff”, it’s the subject of the latest installment from Hope n‘ Change:

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Cliff Mess

As the week draws to a close, there appears to be no new progress (or progress of any kind)  towards avoiding a headlong plunge over the fiscal cliff…and no suggestion that B. Hussein won’t be departing on his $4 million Hawaiian vacation on Monday while the country prepares to sink to a deeper level of Hell.

And why shouldn’t he? He isn’t adding anything to the negotiations while in Washington, and if any important agreements are reached in his absence,  he’s already set the precedent that his electronic auto-pen has the same authority to sign bills into law that he does. Assuming that his auto-pen isn’t vacationing at Martha’s Vineyard with the Kennedy family auto-pens.

Reports are already trickling in that all-important Christmas sales aren’t as robust as merchants hoped they would be, because consumers are concerned that there seems to be nobody really in charge in Washington who gives a damn about trying to save our economy. Which is why, at the Jarlsberg home (shown above), we’re displaying our holiday sentiments using energy-inefficient lights powered by nice, smoky coal plants.

Because we may have to go over the cliff, but we’re damn well not going to do it quietly in the dark.

Moving on, it’s the “MSM Bias….WHAT Bias?!?” segment, courtesy of Best of the Web, which confirms Liberals haven’t the faintest clue WTF they’re talking….or writing….about:

Selling Bonds to Avoid Debt

Sometimes we wonder if newspapers have editors. The Seattle Times reprints an essay from the Washington Post, in which Walter Pincus describes the financing of World War I:

America in 1917 did not fight on a credit card. In 1917, President Wilson, with Congress’ support, raised taxes and sold Liberty Bonds to cover costs. [In 2001 George W.] Bush, by contrast, had just lowered taxes and underestimated the costs of his military efforts. Borrowing to pay for the war helped lead to the current fiscal crisis.

It’s literally true that “America in 1917 did not fight on a credit card.” Credit cards didn’t even exist back then. But while some federal employees now use credit cards, we’re pretty sure the Pentagon doesn’t present a piece of plastic when it orders a new fighter jet or ship.

Pincus surely means “credit card” metaphorically, but he makes a head-scratching error that the Seattle Times compounds with its subheadline: “In 1917, President Wilson, with Congress’ support, raised taxes and sold Liberty Bonds–rather than allow the United States to become indebted–to cover the costs of fighting World War I.”

Don’t Pincus and the Times’s editors realize that selling bonds is the way in which the government takes on debt?

Then there’s a New York Times op-ed by David Crane and Robert Kennedy, which begins with a goof reminiscent of the famous New Yorker cover “View of the World From 9th Avenue”:

We don’t think much about pitch pine poles until storms like Hurricane Sandy litter our landscape with their splintered corpses and arcing power lines. Crews from as far away as California and Quebec have worked feverishly to repair or replace those poles as utility companies rebuild their distribution systems the way they were before.

“As far away as” Quebec. That would be a Canadian province that is contiguous with New York.

So maybe it’s not always bias; perhaps it’s oftentimes simply sheer ignorance!

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this biting bit of satire forwarded by Mark Foster:

And in the Entertainment Section, we learn….

Justin Bieber target of murder, castration plot

Despite having never listened to Justin Bieber, let alone being able to name even one of his songs, from what we’ve seen, we under the murder part; as for the castration….

….we’re relatively certain someone already took care of it….were it even possible in the first place.

Finally, we’ll call it a day with a related item, a poll which asks….

Is Jennifer Lawrence the ‘Most Desirable Woman’?

Being as we wouldn’t know Jennifer Lawrence dead in a ditch, we’ll vote “no” and stick with….

….TLJ!

Magoo