The Daily Gouge, Friday, January 4th, 2013

On January 4, 2013, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Friday, January 4th, 2013….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel predicts….

The Debt-Ceiling Fight Will Be Dirty

The GOP thinks it will win, but the party’s strategy is far from clear.

In the classic movie “The Untouchables,” the street-smart cop Jim Malone explains to his golden-boy partner Eliot Ness that things will have to get dirty if they intend to bring down Al Capone: “You see what I’m saying is, what are you prepared to do?” That’s the question for the GOP as it sifts through the ashes of this week’s cliff deal.

The tax-hike extravaganza that President Obama signed on Wednesday was Round One of a bigger deficit fight, and the GOP was battered badly. Poor messaging (coupled with a lack of trust in leadership), an internal tax feud, and a miscalculation of the president’s tactics—all combined to land the private economy with a monstrous tax bill, and the Republican Party with a black eye.

On to Round Two, which will center on the debt ceiling due to hit in February. Republicans are convinced they can win this one. Their thinking? The president can’t use the threat of higher middle-class taxes to force the GOP to yield. (Which has never stopped them before!) Without the middle class as a hostage in the negotiations, they believe, the debt-ceiling debate will be entirely on spending and Mr. Obama’s failure to confront the nation’s $16 trillion debt.

The White House feels this keenly, as exhibited by the ferocious threats the president leveled in the aftermath of his tax-increase victory. “If the Republicans think that I will finish the job of deficit reduction through spending cuts alone, that’s not how it’s going to work,” he said in a Monday press conference. Translation: He will demand more taxes.

The president is steeling himself for Round Two. Are Republicans? For all the happy talk about their leverage in the debt-ceiling fight, this is going to be dirty. What are they prepared to do? They face three big questions.

Question one: Do they mean it? In the abstract, the debt ceiling is a powerful tool for forcing the president to give in to spending cuts. The Obama Treasury can’t pay the bills without say-so from the Republican House, so the House holds all the cards.

In the non-abstract, failure to raise government borrowing limits means U.S. default—and with it potential credit downgrades, market panic and resulting economic distress. Is the GOP willing to inflict that on the economy? If Republican members instead run for cover, as they did with the cliff, the GOP will have been exposed as bluffers, and the administration will never again have to fear the debt ceiling. Republicans have to consider if they are willing to take that risk.

Question two: What do they want? Throughout the fiscal-cliff negotiations, the Republicans kept thinking Mr. Obama would sign on to entitlement reform, giving both parties political cover. In this vain hope, the GOP shrunk from laying out its specific demands on Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. President Obama didn’t bite, and he won’t in the future. The GOP must know by now that the president’s only goal is to water down any reform proposals. So their only chance of making a dent in the debt is to begin bold. (A strategy Boehner seems incapable of enacting.)

Do House Republicans have the courage to lay out big demands (say, premium support for Medicare or block grants for Medicaid), send a bill to the Senate, and sell entitlement reform to the public? If they can’t face the demagoguery that Democrats will use against them for making substantive proposals on entitlements, then they have already resigned themselves to piddling spending cuts that only nibble around the entitlement edges. Is that worth an epic showdown?

Question three: What other hostages are Republicans willing to see shot? Knowing he has lost his tax trump card, Mr. Obama seamlessly moved on this week to the defense budget. The cliff deal turns off the automatic sequester cuts to the military for only two months, and Mr. Obama intends to make further tax hikes the price for anything longer.

Are the GOP’s defense hawks willing to stomach those cuts as a price for entitlement reform? (They better be; as absent meaningful entitlement reform, there will be no money for defense in the very near future.) Having publicly campaigned against this slashing of the military, can the party stare down the president with a unified position? Mr. Obama is betting they can’t, which is precisely why he ensured in the cliff deal that the sequester kicks in at the very time of the debt-ceiling fight.

Only the GOP can answer these questions, but the point here is that Republicans had better have answered them—and clearly—before they step into the ring. The president has every intention of playing them exactly as he did in the cliff, and in 2011.

Mr. Obama will lay out tax-hike demands, give no quarter on spending, not waver and, as the deadline approaches, use his bully pulpit and the media to cow the GOP into the sort of wrangling that led to this week’s defeat. If the Republican strategy isn’t crystal clear, if the party is again fractured, then Round Two is already Mr. Obama’s. So once again: What, exactly, is the GOP prepared to do?

Based on historical precedence, and as far as the current congressional leadership is concerned….not very much.

But as The Washington Times reports, in the wake of the Boehner Betrayal, the Republican Rank-and-File appears spoiling for a fight:

GOP Members Threaten Debt Ceiling Shutdown

President Obama and congressional Republicans have learned sharply different lessons from the deal to avert the “fiscal cliff” as they prepare to battle again over the next two months on a series of budget deadlines that carry risks such as crippling defense cuts and a government default.

Mr. Obama, having won the first round by forcing congressional Republicans to accept a tax increase for the first time in 20 years, said the deal set a precedent for agreements on deficit reduction and federal spending. All deals, he said, must achieve balance by requiring wealthier individuals or corporations to pay more taxes. The agreement “enshrines…a principle into law that will remain in place as long as I am president: The deficit needs to be reduced in a way that’s balanced,” Mr. Obama said. “Everyone pays their fair share.” (Except, of course, the nearly 50% who pay nothing.)

But many Republicans said the agreement this week gave Mr. Obama all the tax increases he ever will get and that future deals must emphasize spending cuts. Some said they are willing to force a government shutdown to make their point in negotiations over raising the nation’s borrowing limit, which the president said he no longer will debate.

“We Republicans need to tolerate a temporary, partial government shutdown,” Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-PA), said on MSNBC. “It’s disruptive, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the path we’re on. We absolutely have to have this fight over the debt limit.”

Both sides will get the chance to test their principles soon. The bill approved by the House on Tuesday postpones steep, automatic spending cuts until March 1, giving the White House and Congress less than two months to agree on an alternative solution to reduce deficits.

That fiscal deadline will be followed by another on March 31, when temporary legislation to keep the government running is set to expire. Looming over both of those cutoff dates is the even more contentious question of raising the nation’s debt ceiling of $16.4 trillion.

Yo….Boehner! Four strikes and yer OUT!

In two related items, CNSNews details how the timing of the Boehner Betrayal bears a far more striking resemblance to the abortion of Obamascare than the GOP’s promise detailed in its Pledge to America:

Senators Got 154-Page ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Bill 3 Minutes Before Voting on It

The U.S. Senate voted 89-8 to approve legislation to avoid the fiscal cliff despite having only 3 minutes to read the 154-page bill and budget score. Multiple Senate sources have confirmed to CNSNews.com that senators received the bill at approximately 1:36 AM on Jan. 1, 2013 – a mere three minutes before they voted to approve it at 1:39 AM.

The bill is 154-pages and includes several provisions that are unrelated to the fiscal cliff, including repealing a section of ObamaCare, extending the wind-energy tax credit, and a rum tax subsidy deal for Puerto Rican rum makers.

House Vote on Fiscal Cliff Bill Breaks GOP 3-Day Pledge to Read the Bill

When the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass a Senate bill to avoid the fiscal cliff around 10:45 PM on Tuesday, it violated its pledge to allow three days for the public to read the legislation, a promise House Republicans made to voters before the 2010 elections. The House passed the bill with a vote of 257-167 in evening on Tuesday, less than 24 hours after the Senate had drafted and passed the bill close to 2:00 AM Tuesday morning.

In its Pledge to America document, House Republicans promised: “We will ensure that bills are debated and discussed in the public square by publishing the text online for at least three days before coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives. No more hiding legislative language from the minority party, opponents, and the public. Legislation should be understood by all interested parties before it is voted on.”

In all, the 154-page “fiscal cliff” bill was available for approximately 22 hours before the House voted on it Tuesday night. If a member of the public was awake when the bill first became available after the Senate vote, approximately 1:39 AM Tuesday, they would have to read an average of one page of dense legislative text every 8.6 minutes to finish reading the bill in the 22 hours between House and Senate passage.

The bill needed significant Democratic support to pass, which it received, along with 85 Republican ‘yea’ votes, including that of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Meanwhile, in the “Fool Me Once, Shame on You; Fool Me Twice, I Must Be John Boehner” segment, The Hill reports….

Boehner: No More One-On-One Talks with Obama

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is signaling that at least one thing will change about his leadership during the 113th Congress: he’s telling Republicans he is done with private, one-on-one negotiations with President Obama. During both 2011 and 2012, the Speaker spent weeks shuttling between the Capitol and the White House for meetings with the president in the hopes of striking a grand bargain on the deficit. Those efforts ended in failure, leaving Boehner feeling burned by Obama and, at times, isolated within his conference.

In closed-door meetings since leaving the “fiscal cliff” talks two weeks ago, lawmakers and aides say the Speaker has indicated he is abandoning that approach for good and will return fully to the normal legislative process in 2013 — seeking to pass bills through the House that can then be adopted, amended or reconciled by the Senate. “He is recommitting himself and the House to what we’ve done, which is working through regular order and letting the House work its will,” an aide to the Speaker told The Hill.

Does that include golf and grabbing a quick butt in the Rose Garden?

And in the “What’s Good for the Goose Ain’t Even An Option for the Gander” segment, we learn Affirmative Action is alive and well in the Greatest Debilitative Body on Earth, as the newest crop of….

Female Senators Say Testosterone Partly to Blame for Washington Gridlock

Imagine the row if any of their male counterparts had suggested some supposititious macho superiority inherent in not going off at the slightest provocation prior to bleeding 5 days out of every 30 or suffering massive hot flashes through most of their 50’s.

Moving on, Larry Elder provides an excellent commentary on the willful ignorance and uninformed idiocy that is….

Guns and Piers Morgan

His own show on CNN: not a bad gig for an acknowledged fraud fired from the BBC.

CNN’s Piers Morgan writes that the pro-gun crowd’s anger toward him stems from anti-British bias: “This gun debate is an ongoing war of verbal attrition in America — and I’m just the latest target, the advantage to the gun lobbyists being that I’m British, a breed of human being who burned down the White House in 1814 and had to be forcefully deported en masse, as no American will ever be allowed to forget.”

Scads of “in-sourced” Brits appear on our telly without us Yanks calling for their deportation. Hell, we just let a Brit play Abe Lincoln. Fox’s Stuart Varney seems to escape this anti-mother country xenophobia.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s the way Morgan — as well as much of the guns-kill-people-crowd — holds “debates” on the matter.

Take the treatment of Larry Pratt. Respected in circles that Piers “I-have- fired-guns-only-once-in-my-life” Morgan chooses not to hang out with, Pratt heads a pro-Second Amendment group called the Gun Owners of America. Pratt, on Morgan’s show, attempted to explain that the “gun control” big picture requires understanding something: Hundreds of thousand of Americans, every year, use firearms for self-defense.

Morgan’s response? He called Pratt “an incredibly stupid man” and denounced “idiots like you.” Then came this: “You don’t give a damn,” Morgan said, “do you, about the gun murder rate in America? You don’t actually care.”

Morgan offered no study, expert, number — nothing whatsoever — to counter the claim. That anyone with a moderately functioning brain could find an upside in owning, let alone using, a gun simply astonishes Morgan. Defies common sense!

Is it true, as claimed by Florida criminalist Gary Kleck, that 2.5 million Americans each year use a firearm for self-defense? Is it true that, of that number, 400,000 people believe that, were it not for the gun they used, they would have been killed? These are questions and answers the anti-gun crowd ignores, chooses not to think about or considers irrelevant.

“How many Americans are alive,” I once asked a pro-gun control police chief, “because they used a firearm in self defense?”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said.

“You know the exact number of people murdered because of guns,” I said, “but you don’t know how many people are alive because of them?”

“No, I don’t.”

“What if I told you of a study that said 2.5 million people use guns every year for self-defense — and that of that number 400,000 believe had they not had the gun, they would have been killed?”

“I don’t believe that.”

“What’s your number?”

“Don’t have one — and it doesn’t matter. We have too many guns in this country. “

At least the police chief admitted that however many more people are alive than dead because of guns, he nevertheless wants guns even more restricted. What’s Piers Morgan’s excuse? He simply refused to believe the data.

What about the 2.5 million number? Pro-gun-control law professor and criminologist Marvin Wolfgang, of Northwestern University, examined Kleck’s data and methodology. Just how pro-gun control is Wolfgang? He wrote: “I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country. If I were Mustapha Mond of ‘Brave New World,’ I would eliminate all guns from the civilian population and maybe even from the police. I hate guns — ugly, nasty instruments designed to kill people.”

But of Kleck’s claim that 2.5 million Americans yearly use guns for self-defense? Wolfgang wrote: “What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator. … I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology. They have tried earnestly to meet all objections in advance and have done exceedingly well.”

The Oscar-winning Michael Moore says America possesses “too many guns” because of racism. For my pro-Second Amendment documentary, “Michael & Me,” I “ambushed” Moore. The anti-gun Moore, by the way, was surrounded by security and coming into a venue a back way to avoid the very “ambush interviews” in which he specializes. Three times I asked Moore how often Americans use guns to defend themselves. Three times Moore deflected the question, merely repeating “we have too many guns.”

Morgan is right. Per capita, we have nearly 50 times the gun murder rate compared to the gun murder rate of England. But look at all murders, whether by knife or baseball bat. Rather than 50 times the rate, it is less than five — not 50 — times higher than the murders committed by any means in England. For my documentary, I interviewed Joyce Lee Malcolm, author of “Guns and Violence.” She said the same murder rate discrepancy — five times the British rate — existed between New York City and London for two centuries, and during most of that time neither city had any gun control laws.

This must make Malcolm “an incredibly stupid woman.” Debate over.

A contention confirmed by the FBI’s own data, as supplied by our old pal Joe Flood:

And speaking of stupid, though we’re certainly no fan of Sean Hannity, check out his guest seeking the last refuge of a Liberal with no facts to offer in evidence:

And since we’ve mentioned the intellectually and testicularly challenged, they’re the subject of today’s Money Quote, as the WSJ offers this snippet from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy; Joseph Schumpeter’s thoughts, circa 1942, “on members of the middle class who lose faith in the system that makes their existence possible”:

“Perhaps the most striking feature of the picture is the extent to which the bourgeoisie, besides educating its own enemies, allows itself in turn to be educated by them. It absorbs the slogans of current radicalism and seems quite willing to undergo a process of conversion to a creed hostile to its very existence. Haltingly and grudgingly it concedes in part the implications of that creed. This would be most astonishing & indeed very hard to explain were it not for the fact that the typical bourgeois is rapidly losing faith in his own creed. This is verified by the very characteristic manner in which particular capitalist interests and bourgeoisie as a whole behave when facing direct attack. They talk and plead—or hire people to do it for them; they snatch at every chance of compromise; they are ever ready to give in; they never put up a fight under the flag of their own ideals and interests—in this country [the U.S.] there was no real resistance anywhere against the imposition of crushing financial burdens during the last decade [the 1930s] or against labor legislation incompatible with the effective management of industry. . . .

Means of defense were not entirely lacking and history is full of examples of the success of small groups who, believing in their cause, were resolved to stand by their guns. The only explanation for the meekness we observe is that the bourgeois order no longer makes any sense to the bourgeoisie itself and that, when all is said and nothing is done, it does not really care.“

The fact close to 50% of the voting citizenry takes “free” money from the federal government only exacerbates the problem.

On the Lighter Side….