It’s Friday, December 21st….the first day of Winter, as well as the end of the world….

….though we’ve yet to change our plans for Christmas and New Year’s.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, we take a moment to mark the passing of a great American:

As a jurist and Conservative thinker, Bork was beyond brilliant:

“….Once the justices depart, as most of them have, from the original understanding of the principles of the Constitution, they lack any guidance other than their own attempts at moral philosophy, a task for which they have not even minimal skills. Yet when it rules in the name of the Constitution, whether it rules truly or not, the Court is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy. The combination of absolute power, disdain for the historic Constitution, and philosophical incompetence is lethal.

The Court’s philosophy reflects, or rather embodies and advances, the liberationist spirit of our times. In moral matters, each man is a separate sovereignty. In its insistence on radical personal autonomy, the Court assaults what remains of our stock of common moral beliefs. That is all the more insidious because the public and the media take these spurious constitutional rulings as not merely legal conclusions but moral teachings supposedly incarnate in our most sacred civic document.”

Rarely in our history has a man of such unimpeachable character and intellect been subjected to the unreasoned hatred and scurrilous attacks Bork endured.  And by individuals lacking the moral standards, personal integrity and brains….

….to stand in judgment of anyone.  He will be sorely missed.

Speaking of individuals lacking moral standards, personal integrity and brains….

Obama Taps Kerry for State Post

 

The Journal went on to note, “The Massachusetts senator’s decades of experience in America’s foreign-policy establishment has earned him praise from Republicans and he would likely face an easy confirmation process, the official said.”

“Praise”?  From Republicans?  Who,….

….Tweedledouche and Tweedledumb?!?

Here are some of Kerry’s greatest hits, which hardly qualify him for anything….

….let alone Secretary of State.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch with The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight, the WSJ finds America, as well as the GOP,…. 

 

Teetering on the Cliff

Boehner’s tax bill failure reflects Obama’s failure to negotiate seriously.

 

That….and the fact House Conservatives trust John Boehner about as far as they can throw Chris Christy.

Next up, it’s our “What the Senator MEANT to Say” segment, courtesy of Balls Cotton, Politico and one desperately back-peddling politician:

Joe Manchin: ‘I’m so proud of the NRA’

 

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who suggested earlier in the week that the time had come for some gun control restrictions, said on Wednesday that he’s “not supporting a ban on anything” and he repeatedly defended and praised the NRA. “I’m not supporting a ban on anything. I’m supporting a conversation on everything,” Manchin said on West Virginia MetroNews.

Manchin has an ‘A’ rating from the NRA, and applauded the group’s decision to hold a press conference Friday where they’ve promised to offer “meaningful contributions.”

“I can’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to any of the things,” Manchin added when asked if he would support restrictions on magazine size or an assault weapons band. “Because all I’ve asked for, I want the NRA to tell me why we have any weapon you might want. Is there any grounds or any changes or anything they would like to look at? I don’t know. I can’t even get a conversation to have responsible people at the party, if you will, or the table, to finally come out with a conclusion.” (?!?)

On Monday, Manchin drew notice when he said it was “time to move beyond rhetoric” on gun control in the wake of the killings in Newtown. “I don’t know anyone in the hunting or sporting arena that goes out with an assault rifle,” Manchin said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I don’t know anybody that needs 30 rounds in the clip to go hunting. I mean, these are things that need to be talked about.”

It’s not hypocrisy if you’re running for reelection!

President Barack Obama called Manchin on Tuesday to discuss the issue. Obama announced on Wednesday that Vice President Joe Biden would chair a working group on gun violence that would present recommendations by January. Manchin opened the interview Wednesday by declaring himself a “defender of the 2nd Amendment,” announcing he didn’t plan to sell his guns and said he had been discussing the issue with the NRA, a group he praised effusively.

“These are my friends,” Manchin, who previously served as governor, said of the NRA. “They’re good people. They’re hurting. They’re in pain the same way as every American about what happened to these twenty little children. And I’m not going to let anybody be villainized.”

“I’m so proud of the NRA,” Manchin said later. “I’m so pleased they agreed to be part of this.”

Sure, Joe….like you and your party are proud of coal!

In a related item, Ann Coulter suggests….

We Know How to Stop School Shootings

 

In the wake of a monstrous crime like a madman’s mass murder of defenseless women and children at the Newtown, Conn., elementary school, the nation’s attention is riveted on what could have been done to prevent such a massacre. Luckily, some years ago, two famed economists, William Landes at the University of Chicago and John Lott at Yale, conducted a massive study of multiple victim public shootings in the United States between 1977 and 1995 to see how various legal changes affected their frequency and death toll.

Landes and Lott examined many of the very policies being proposed right now in response to the Connecticut massacre: waiting periods and background checks for guns, the death penalty and increased penalties for committing a crime with a gun. None of these policies had any effect on the frequency of, or carnage from, multiple-victim shootings. (I note that they did not look at reforming our lax mental health laws, presumably because the ACLU is working to keep dangerous nuts on the street in all 50 states.)

Only one public policy has ever been shown to reduce the death rate from such crimes: concealed-carry laws.

Their study controlled for age, sex, race, unemployment, retirement, poverty rates, state population, murder arrest rates, violent crime rates, and on and on. The effect of concealed-carry laws in deterring mass public shootings was even greater than the impact of such laws on the murder rate generally.Someone planning to commit a single murder in a concealed-carry state only has to weigh the odds of one person being armed. But a criminal planning to commit murder in a public place has to worry that anyone in the entire area might have a gun.

You will notice that most multiple-victim shootings occur in “gun-free zones” — even within states that have concealed-carry laws: public schools, churches, Sikh temples, post offices, the movie theater where James Holmes committed mass murder, and the Portland, Ore., mall where a nut starting gunning down shoppers a few weeks ago.

Guns were banned in all these places. Mass killers may be crazy, but they’re not stupid.

If the deterrent effect of concealed-carry laws seems surprising to you, that’s because the media hide stories of armed citizens stopping mass shooters. At the Portland shooting, for example, no explanation was given for the amazing fact that the assailant managed to kill only two people in the mall during the busy Christmas season.

It turns out, concealed-carry-holder Nick Meli hadn’t noticed that the mall was a gun-free zone. He pointed his (otherwise legal) gun at the shooter as he paused to reload, and the next shot was the attempted mass murderer killing himself. (Meli aimed, but didn’t shoot, because there were bystanders behind the shooter.)

In a nonsense “study” going around the Internet right now, Mother Jones magazine claims to have produced its own study of all public shootings in the last 30 years and concludes: “In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun.” This will come as a shock to people who know something about the subject.

The magazine reaches its conclusion by simply excluding all cases where an armed civilian stopped the shooter: They looked only at public shootings where four or more people were killed, i.e., the ones where the shooter wasn’t stopped.

If we care about reducing the number of people killed in mass shootings, shouldn’t we pay particular attention to the cases where the aspiring mass murderer was prevented from getting off more than a couple rounds? It would be like testing the effectiveness of weed killers, but refusing to consider any cases where the weeds died.

In addition to the Portland mall case, here are a few more examples excluded by the Mother Jones’ methodology:

— Mayan Palace Theater, San Antonio, Texas, this week: Jesus Manuel Garcia shoots at a movie theater, a police car and bystanders from the nearby China Garden restaurant; as he enters the movie theater, guns blazing, an armed off-duty cop shoots Garcia four times, stopping the attack. Total dead: Zero.

— Winnemucca, Nev., 2008: Ernesto Villagomez opens fire in a crowded restaurant; concealed carry permit-holder shoots him dead. Total dead: Two. (I’m excluding the shooters’ deaths in these examples.)

— Appalachian School of Law, 2002: Crazed immigrant shoots the dean and a professor, then begins shooting students; as he goes for more ammunition, two armed students point their guns at him, allowing a third to tackle him. Total dead: Three.

— Santee, Calif., 2001: Student begins shooting his classmates — as well as the “trained campus supervisor”; an off-duty cop who happened to be bringing his daughter to school that day points his gun at the shooter, holding him until more police arrive. Total dead: Two.

— Pearl High School, Mississippi, 1997: After shooting several people at his high school, student heads for the junior high school; assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieves a .45 pistol from his car and points it at the gunman’s head, ending the murder spree. Total dead: Two.

— Edinboro, Pa., 1998: A student shoots up a junior high school dance being held at a restaurant; restaurant owner pulls out his shotgun and stops the gunman. Total dead: One.

By contrast, the shootings in gun-free zones invariably result in far higher casualty figures — Sikh temple, Oak Creek, Wis. (six dead); Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va. (32 dead); Columbine High School, Columbine, Colo. (12 dead); Amish school, Lancaster County, Pa. (five little girls killed); public school, Craighead County, Ark. (five killed, including four little girls).

All these took place in gun-free zones, resulting in lots of people getting killed — and thereby warranting inclusion in the Mother Jones study.

If what we care about is saving the lives of innocent human beings by reducing the number of mass public shootings and the deaths they cause, only one policy has ever been shown to work: concealed-carry laws. On the other hand, if what we care about is self-indulgent grandstanding, and to hell with dozens of innocent children being murdered in cold blood, try the other policies.

And as this Gallup poll clearly indicates, the public doesn’t share the Left’s belief guns and large-capacity magazines are the primary problem:

Moving on, the great Thomas Sowell observes how The Obamao’s taking us….

“Forward” to the Past?

 

The political slogan “Forward” served Barack Obama well during this year’s election campaign. It said that he was for going forward, while Republicans were for “going back to the failed policies that got us into this mess in the first place.” It was great political rhetoric and great political theater. Moreover, the Republicans did virtually nothing to challenge its shaky assumptions with a few hard facts that could have made those assumptions collapse like a house of cards.

More is involved than this year’s political battles. The word “forward” has been a political battle cry on the left for more than a century. It has been almost as widely used as the left’s other favorite word, “equality,” which goes back more than two centuries.

The seductive notion of economic equality has appealed to many people. The pilgrims started out with the idea of equal sharing. The colony of Georgia began with very similar ideas. In the midwest, Britain’s Robert Owen– who coined the term “socialism”– set up colonies based on communal living and economic equality.

What these idealistic experiments all had in common was that they failed.

They learned the hard way that people would not do as much for the common good as they would do for their own good. The pilgrims nearly starved learning that lesson. But they learned it. Land that had been common property was turned into private property, which produced a lot more food.

Similar experiments were tried on a larger scale in other countries around the world. In the biggest of these experiments– the Soviet Union under Stalin and Communist China under Mao– people literally starved to death by the millions. In the Soviet Union, at least 6 million people starved to death in the 1930s, in a country with some of the most fertile land on the continent of Europe, a country that had once been a major exporter of food. In China, tens of millions of people starved to death under Mao.

Despite what the left seems to believe, private property rights do not exist simply for the sake of people who own property. Americans who do not own a single acre of land have abundant food available because land is still private property in the United States, even though the left is doing its best to restrict property rights in both the countrysides and in the cities.

The other big feature of the egalitarian left is promotion of a huge inequality of power, while deploring economic inequality.

It is no coincidence that those who are going ballistic over the economic inequality between the top one or two percent and the rest of us are promoting a far more dangerous concentration of political power in Washington– where far less than one percent of the population increasingly tell 300 million Americans what they can and cannot do, on everything from their light bulbs and toilets to their medical care.

This movement in the direction of central planning, under the name of “forward,” is in fact going back to a system that has failed in countries around the world– under both democratic and dictatorial governments and among peoples of virtually every race, color, creed, and nationality.

It is one thing when conservative leaders like Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in Britain declared central planning a failure. But what really puts the nails in the coffin is that, before the end of the 20th century, both socialist and communist governments around the world began abandoning central planning.India and China are the biggest examples. In both countries, cutbacks on government control of the economy were followed by dramatically increased economic growth rates, lifting millions of people out of poverty in both countries.

The ultimate irony is that the most recent international survey of free markets found the world’s freest market to be in Hong Kong– in a country still ruled by communists! But the Chinese communists have at least learned, the hard way, a lesson that Barack Obama seems oblivious to.

We are going “forward” to a repeatedly failed past, following a charismatic leader, after a 20th century in which charismatic leaders led countries into unprecedented catastrophes.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s Sandy Martindale’s holiday work-out routine:

Finally, we’ll call it a week with a forward from TLJ detailing the realities of life for men and women:

As the Cowardly Lion observed….

Magoo