It’s Friday, October 7th, 2011….and here’s the Gouge!

First up, another amazing example not only the ignorance of the Far Left, but….

….the MSM’s dogged determination to portray them in as positively as possible.  Meanwhile, here’s the juice on what these protestors, and for that matter, modern Progressivism is all about:

In a related item, Jonah Goldberg offers his two cents on where the Far Left’s latest misguided attempt to connect with Middle America is headed:

The Maw Pulls In Another One

Michael Tomasky (writing in the Daily Beast):

We’ll continue to hope….and pray….he’s right!

Speaking of the now-unbridled hate and discontent of the Left, here’s Victor Davis Hanson’s thoughts on the subject:

Democracy’s New Discontents

Once upon a time, loud dissent, filibustering in the Senate and gridlock in the House were as democratic as apple pie. A Senator Obama once defended his attempts to block confirmation votes on judicial appointments by alleging, “The Founding Fathers established the filibuster as a means of protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority.”

In 2005, progressives were relieved that a Democratic minority had just gridlocked Congress — ending recently re-elected President George W. Bush’s plan to reform Social Security. Gridlock, in other words, was a helpful constitutional tool when a minority party wanted to block a president’s legislative initiatives. A then-cool Senator Obama suggested Bush and his congressional supporters “back off” and “let go of their egos.”

How about loud opposition to a sitting president? Well, in 2003, Sen. Hillary Clinton unloaded on those she claimed had called for less dissent: “I am sick and tired of people who call you unpatriotic if you debate this administration’s policies.”

These examples could be multiplied. But they are enough to offer contrast with a suddenly much different attitude toward what was only recently seen as the wonderful complexity of American democracy.

Take Obama, now the president and apparently frustrated. He’s angry that his progressive efforts are facing legislative opposition: “We knew this was going to take time because we’ve got this big, messy, tough democracy.”

Obama expanded on “messy” to La Raza activists, who wanted amnesty for illegal aliens, by lamenting that he could not somehow “bypass Congress and change the laws on my own.” He later added for emphasis: “Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting.”

To quote former Sen. Clinton, many people are now “sick and tired” of the Obama administration’s efforts to silence critics. First, during the 2008 campaign, there was “Fight the Smears,” a website Team Obama started to monitor its critics. JournoList followed, with a liberals-only forum of influential media pundits venting their private anger over criticism of Obama. Now there is yet another version, AttackWatch.com, a creepy website — set up with melodramatic photos and “files” like an intelligence service’s red and black dossiers — that implores readers to scout around and send in examples of Obama criticism.

In fact, lots of liberal politicians and commentators suddenly do not like our ancestral “messy” democracy. North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue recently unloaded on the current gridlock over the president’s jobs bill: “I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years … I really hope that someone can agree with me on that.”

Former Obama budget director Peter Orszag is also angry about “the Civics 101 fairy tale about pure representative democracy.” Suddenly, after the 2010 midterm elections, he now wants “a new set of rules and institutions that would make legislative inertia less detrimental to our nation’s long-term health.”

Columnist Fareed Zakaria not long ago lamented the rigidity of the U.S. Constitution itself, and wants changed the “highly undemocratic” Electoral College and the method of electing senators.

Is this sudden liberal discontent with “messy” democracy just typical American politics evident in both parties — the “out” minority party praising obstructionism only to blast it when it becomes the “in” governing party? Of course.

But there is a deeper problem with the entire premise of Obamaism, which was not sold to voters as just another Democratic alternative, but rather as a holistic hope-and-change movement. Obamaism was to do everything from cool the planet to lower the rising waters, as giddy editors and historians compared its architect to a god, and pronounced a near novice the smartest man ever to be elected president.

If polls and the economy are any indication, that utopian dream is now mostly over. One way of explaining the unexpected Obama meltdown would be that a president with so little prior executive experience was bound not to be up to the job of administering the most powerful nation in history.

Another explanation would be the wrong agenda itself: Progressives finally got their long-awaited messianic messenger — so unlike the inept Jimmy Carter and the triangulator Bill Clinton — but his left-wing message turned off the people as never before.

But there apparently is a third and apparently more useful excuse. The American system itself — suddenly, around 2010 — simply became too rigid and obstructionist to appreciate Obama’s agenda, so now it must be changed.

How odd that some progressive thinkers forgot the age-old fallacy that supposedly noble ends can never justify questionable means. Or, to paraphrase the Bard, the problem is not in the stars, but within yourselves.

And as Conn Carroll details in the Morning Examiner, changing the system for short-term political gain now, without regard for how it impacts the future, is just what the Dims are about:

Obamacare Repeal Just Got Easier

At this week’s Take Back the American Dream conference, co-sponsored by Van Jones, progressive activists were already plotting how to maintain their policy victories after President Obama leaves office. One speaker said progressives must concentrate on electing 41 strong progressives to the Senate so they could filibuster any conservative attempts to roll back the size and scope of the federal government.

But thanks to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., the filibuster may not be the weapon it once was if Republicans eventually recapture the Senate majority. Last night, in an effort to avoid an embarrassing vote on President Obama’s American Jobs Act, Reid changed Senate rules, by a bare majority vote, in order to shut down a Republican amendment to China currency manipulation. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who knew Democrats did not have 50 votes in their caucus to pass Obama’s second stimulus, offered the legislation as an amendment to the China bill that Reid has wanted to pass for months.

Reid then appealed to the presiding officer, Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, at the time, to rule McConnell’s motion out of order. Begich asked the Senate parliamentarian for his opinion, which is usually treated as the final word, and the parliamentarian said McConnell’s motion was in order. At this point, the Senate would normally have followed the parliamentarian’s ruling and proceeded to a vote on McConnell’s amendment. But Reid cut that short by calling for a simple majority vote to overrule the parliamentarian. Reid won that vote 51-48.

While Reid’s maneuver only dealt with the minority’s ability to force votes on amendments, the exact same procedure above could be used to do away with the 60 vote filibuster requirement for any other legislation. “We are fundamentally turning the Senate into the House,” McConnell told National Review. If McConnell is right, and Republicans win back the White House and Senate, the strongest 41 progressive senators in the world will not be able to stop Obamacare’s repeal.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch with The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight, an interesting bit of analysis by the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger on Chris Christie’s refusal to run:

Gov. Christie Rests His Case

Something purely political scared off New Jersey’s governor.

It was always easy to understand the case for Chris Christie. In an age of inescapable media, politics is the art of communication. Rick Perry tripped over his tongue in one debate, and the gods of polling cast him out. Tim Pawlenty mastered the details of national policy but missed the memo that modern politics is dancing with the stars.

What Chris Christie’s deeply disappointed promoters recognized is that the freshman governor is a great communicator, a rare gift. A short list of great political communicators would include New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Bill Clinton and Chris Christie—all super salesmen of retail politics.

The La Guardias, Clintons and Christies are merely the genius product of how people negotiate life where they grew up—La Guardia’s New York streets, Clinton’s slick Southern charm. It’s hard to overstate how New Jersey Chris Christie is. People compare Chris Christie to James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano. But it’s not Tony Soprano. It’s just James Gandolfini, a Jersey guy. Both emit a “Don’t b.s. me,” in-your-face bluntness learned living in a state filled with no-nonsense Italians and Irish. (Mr. Christie is both.)

Gov. Christie said repeatedly this year he didn’t think he was ready to run for the presidential roses. No matter. They told him this is an historically important presidential election in which the American people need to decide whether to go where Barack Obama’s wants to take them or choose the alternative that’s been best articulated by Rep. Paul Ryan. True. But those banking on a Christie run may have seen only a glass half-full.

Gov. Christie has come across the Hudson River a number of times to talk to the Journal’s editorial-page writers. We’ve heard a lot of his high-velocity rhetoric. Often overlooked when he’s performing this verbal magic is that about 80% of what Gov. Christie says is drab detail about New Jersey’s budget, pension crisis, schools situation, property taxes and the rest. He flat-out knows New Jersey.

The admired Christie persona isn’t just charisma, charm and smarts, attributes that adhere to many political rookies. Unlike rookies, almost all of the devastating punchlines Mr. Christie delivers are wrapped inside a substantive, detailed argument.

What Gov. Christie gives his audiences is the performance of a gifted federal attorney, which he was in New Jersey for six years. Prosecutors master facts and fashion them into a case for their side. No one in politics today matches facts to plain speaking better than Chris Christie. But with this stillborn presidential draft, Mr. Christie was being asked to perform without half his skill set, his mastery of facts.

When Mr. Christie said he wasn’t ready, he didn’t mean he wasn’t ready to be president. He meant he wasn’t ready to argue the case in front of a national jury. If Chris Christie knew as much as Paul Ryan does about entitlements, ObamaCare, the details of the U.S. budget and federal tax policy, he’d have rolled over the incumbent like a (insert your heavyweight metaphor here).

But Mr. Christie didn’t know enough about any of these national subjects, and in his first public events and debates it would have shown, as it has for the race’s other fully employed governor, Rick Perry. And when he didn’t perform the impossible miracle of downloading Paul Ryan’s brain for next week’s debate, the blogosphere and the conservative base would have whined disappointment. That in turn would have fed into a media narrative of another failed Republican high-flyer. The polls would mark him down, and the insatiable GOP beast would have gone back to prowling the streets for their next expendable leader.

This is the half-wit way we pick presidents now. All the serious people are saying, No thanks. The Pick-Seven presidential selection system isn’t working.

For all this, there were several good arguments against Mr. Christie’s no-go decision.

The first came from the lady who shouted at the Reagan Library, “Your country needs you.” In this field, there was a chance that enough Republican voters would have agreed, securing the nomination for Gov. Christie because the party believed he was the One. Organizational hurdles aside, in the months until next August’s conventions, the former prosecutor could have mastered the case against Barack Obama. An informed Chris Christie is a formidable opponent. Ask the Jersey teachers union.

This would have worked only if the Republican base had been willing to cut him slack on performance and ideology. Pickup-team campaign organizations make mistakes, but with our politics bordering on the tribal, there’s no patience for the merest whiff of heresy. Ask Rick Perry, now bogged down in the immigration quicksand. Some similar act of imperfection awaited Chris Christie. The purifying furies of the Web forest would have been on him in minutes.

Feel free to believe he said “No” only because of organizational challenges. I think something purely political scared him off. It might behoove the hyper-energized conservative base to look in the mirror and ask why Chris Christie is only the latest to take a pass on the gauntlet.

So, we guess with regard to Christie, we can….

But here’s a “no” that should really concern the Grand Old Party:

Rubio says he won’t be VP nominee

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio says he’s not going to be the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2012 because he’s focused on being a U.S. senator. Speaking at a political forum in Washington, Rubio said flatly on Wednesday: “I’m not going to be the vice presidential nominee.” He then repeated himself.

Rubio said he didn’t run for the Senate “to have a launching pad for another job.” The Cuban-American Rubio, who has been mentioned frequently as a vice presidential prospect, had been seen as a potential draw for the critical Hispanic vote.

Asked if he would turn it down, if asked, Rubio said: “Yeah, I believe so.” And he later said: “The answer’s going to probably be no” then amended himself, laughing. “The answer’s going to be no.”

Say it ain’t so, Marco!

Next up, today’s the Dan Rather Memorial “Other Than That, The Story’s 100% Accurate” segment, courtesy of Bill Meisen….

Obama Cites Employed Boston Teacher In Jobs Bill News Conference

President Obama used the story (“story” is right!) of a Boston teacher to push his jobs bill Thursday, even though the teacher has a job. At the beginning of his White House news conference, President Obama told a story of how he recently met Robert Baroz of Wellesley, an English teacher in the city.

“I had a chance to meet a young man named Robert Baroz. (“I had a chance to meet”?  Guess it depends on what the meaning of “meet” is!) He’s an English teacher in Boston who came to the White House a few weeks ago. He’s got two decades of teaching experience. He’s got a Master’s Degree. He’s got an outstanding track record of helping his students make huge gains in reading and writing,” the president said.

“In the last few years, he’s received three pink slips because of budget cuts. Why wouldn’t we want to pass a bill that puts somebody like Robert back in the classroom teaching our kids?” (Uhhh….because, as we don’t live in Massachusetts, their not “our” kids, and we don’t believe the funding of Bay State schools is the responsibility of taxpayers living in other parts of the country?!?)

But as with every other “real-life” policy poster-child The Obamao’s ever promoted, there’s a little bit more to the story:

But, Baroz is working in the Boston Public Schools this year as a middle school English teacher. “I’ve managed to land on my feet, but it’s sometimes at the last minute,” said Baroz, who is endorsing the President’s jobs bill.

Oh, and….

He did not meet directly with the President.

Otherwise, Tick-Tock’s gut-wrenching tale of woe is 100% accurate. 

And in the “What Won’t People Do To Get Noticed?!?” segment, here’s a desperate plea for attention:

Roemer Supports Occupy Wall Street

As I continue touring college campuses throughout New Hampshire, I am reminded of all the young Americans currently taking part in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Please know that I stand by you.

It is Main Street that creates the majority of jobs in America; it is Main Street that sends our brave young men and women to war; it is Main Street that hurts when another manufacturing plant closes only to be re-opened in China; it is Main Street that is being foreclosed on; and it is Main Street that is suffering while the greed of Wall Street continues to hurt our middle-class.

Too-big-to-fail banks have only gotten bigger thanks to government bailouts, and as president, I will end the corporate tax loopholes that un-American corporations take advantage of only to ship our jobs overseas. Fair trade not Free trade.

Money in politics has created institutional corruption. Both parties are guilty of taking the big check and are bought by Wall Street. My campaign is the only one that speaks out against this and I look forward to the day lobbyists are not allowed to donate to campaigns.

Wall Street grew to be a source of capital for growing companies. It has become something else: A facilitator for greed and for the selling of American jobs. Enough already.

For those as confused, as we were, regarding not only Mr. Roemer, but why we should care a fig what the thinks, he’s Buddy Roemer, former-Louisiana-governor-turned-presidential-wannabe….and running as a Republican!  We’d tell Roemer not to let the door hit him in the backside on the way out, but that would infer he ever got in to begin with.

On the Lighter Side….

Enjoy your weekend!

Magoo