It’s Thursday, January 10th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up….

Christie: ‘You’re Damn Right’ I’ll Be More Prepared to Run in 2016

As what….a Dimocrat?!?  As the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger details, given Christie’s behavior of late, the Dims may well be the only party which will have him:

Hurricane Christie

The governor howls at the Republicans who were trying to help him.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was on front pages and TV screens last week when he ripped House Republicans for not passing a Hurricane Sandy relief bill New Year’s Day, the same day they were engulfed with the fiscal-cliff tax bill.

“There’s only one group to blame for the continued suffering of these innocent victims,” said Gov. Christie, “the House majority and their speaker, John Boehner.” GOP Congressman Michael Grimm from Staten Island called the non-vote on Sandy “a betrayal,” and this being New York-New Jersey, Republican Peter King of Long Island invoked “a knife in the back.”

The spectacle was irresistible. The Republican Party, exhausted by the fiscal-cliff fiasco, was hanging on the ropes, and here was party hero Chris Christie flying off the turnbuckles to crush John Boehner.

The New York Times pumped the tale of betrayal to the top of its front page. “Fury in G.O.P. as House Stalls Hurricane Aid. Northeast Republicans Lash Out at Boehner.” Google searchers were directed to “watch Peter King explode at his own party.” Make no mistake, Gov. Christie has just delivered his second poison pill to a major GOP candidacy: Any Republican who runs in New York City’s mayoral campaign this November will have the governor’s GOP-sellout statements thrown in his face.

Problem is, in virtually every respect, the betrayal story is wrong. (And Christie knew it!) House Republicans on the Appropriations Committee have been working for weeks to move a ton of money to the devastated Northeast. Indeed, within a day of learning more about this effort, Peter King, no shrinking violet, walked back his initial comments about Mr. Boehner and the party.

But Gov. Christie was back for more Tuesday in his State of the State speech: “New Jersey, both Republicans and Democrats, will never stand silent when our citizens are being short-changed.”

How about some facts about politics, federal spending and Sandy relief.

Hurricane Katrina left the impression that the Federal Emergency Management Agency handles all federal disasters. But myriad federal agencies—from the Army Corps of Engineers to the Department of Housing and Urban Development—deal with post-disaster restoration. FEMA mainly addresses the immediate, post-storm needs.

On Dec. 4 the head of FEMA, Craig Fugate, told the House Transportation Committee that his agency had enough cash on hand to disburse aid until spring. If “the continued suffering of these victims” means New Jerseyans need FEMA-type aid yesterday and aren’t getting it, Gov. Christie’s complaint is with his friend, Barack Obama.

The bill before the House on New Year’s Day was for Sandy relief needs through 2013 and beyond. The amount in that bill was $60.4 billion. Short-changed? Some perspective: The Agriculture Department’s entire annual budget was $20 billion last year. For Justice, Commerce and Science it was $53 billion and for the State Department, $43.5 billion. Sandy’s $60 billion is bigger than an entire federal department.

In November, the Obama Office of Management and Budget sent a letter to the House asking for $60 billion in relief aid. As is its habit, the Obama letter included little guidance on how to allocate the $60 billion among myriad federal agencies. House Appropriations undertook the job of interacting with the Washington bureaucracies on precisely how to allocate all this money.

Republican Committee Chairman Harold Rogers of Kentucky produced a $27 billion supplemental bill of initial commitments, much of it for FEMA when it ran out of money. Republican committee member Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, serving as liaison to his region, amended the Rogers bill to add $33 billion for longer-term reconstruction. That’s $60 billion of relief assembled in good faith by Republicans for Gov. Christie and his “knife-in-the-back” political colleagues in the Northeast. The Sandy supplemental the House is scheduled to vote on Tuesday will be smaller; for example, it no longer includes the $9.7 billion flood insurance approved last week.

The federal government will spend billions repairing Sandy’s damage, as it did for the South after Katrina and for the Midwest after its floods and recent drought. And every politician from Cape May to Connecticut will take credit for obtaining those billions in federal aid.

But it’s hard to miss the irony of Sandy’s $60 billion getting tangled up in the fiscal-cliff vote, whose reason for being is the U.S.’s new annual deficits of $1 trillion, which equals nearly 17 Sandy bills. And fuhgeddabout the entitlements. Where does all this come from?

Chris Christie’s efforts to pull New Jersey back from its cliff and restore economic growth have been the basis for his aggressive governing style. Then Sandy hit New Jersey and New York, states whose public “commitments” could barely be supported on a sunny day. Now a widely admired governor’s politics is being transformed into something pretty run-of-the mill.

People knocked flat by natural disasters deserve support from citizens who’ve had no such misfortune. In the U.S., we assume that’s always possible. It still is. On current course, though, that assumption may start to break.

Conservatives have long memories; and Christie’s bona fides as one of us Conservative were already….

….highly questionable.  We know it’s early, but we’ll give our Garden State of Christie’s chances for the 2016 GOP slate:

And since we’re on the subject of the highly questionable, it’s the subject of this next item forwarded by Bill Meisen:

Bill Clinton to receive Father of the Year award

Father of the Year?  Slick Willy seems more like “Whose yo’ daddy!?!”

Former president Bill Clinton can add Father of the Year to the many awards he’s garnered in his decades of public service. The National Father’s Day Council, which has been giving out such an honor for 72 years, has named Clinton one of its recipients for 2013.

“With the profound generosity, leadership and tireless dedication to both his public office and many philanthropic organizations, President Clinton exemplifies the attributes that we celebrate through the Father of the Year award,” said Dan Orwig, chairman of the National Father’s Day Committee.

We’d suggest Mr. Orwig’s organization needs to reexamine their selection criteria.  There is, however, another award for parenting Clinton likely does deserve:

For more on politicians crookeder than a dog’s hind leg, we turn to this item from The Washington Times, courtesy of Brendan Clark:

Judicial Watch releases its list of Washington’s ‘most corrupt’ politicians

We did….and it’s well worth the time to review.

Next up, it’s the “Margaret Sanger Would Be SOOOO Proud!” segment, and another memorable milestone for the infanticide industry:

Planned Parenthood: 330,000 Abortions, 841 Adoptions, 0 Births

That’s 330,000 human beings who would unquestionably disagree guns pose the nation’s greatest threat to children.

Which brings us to this next headline, and the latest indication The Obamao’s intention for his 2nd term is rule by executive fiat:

Biden suggests White House could act without Congress as part of gun control plan

Vice President Biden suggested Wednesday that the White House could take unilateral action on gun control, as he kicked off a round of meetings aimed at finding ways to curb gun violence. The vice president met Wednesday with gun-safety and victims groups, saying he is “determined” to take “urgent action” to address gun violence. “This is not an exercise in photo opportunities or just getting to ask you all what your opinions are. We are vitally interested in what you have to say,” Biden said.

The White House has sought to avoid prejudging what Biden’s recommendations would be. But the vice president hinted Wednesday that executive action — action by the president in which Congress would not have a say — would indeed be involved. “Executive action … can be taken,” Biden said, adding “we haven’t decided what that is yet.” He also said separate legislative action would be “required.”

In a related item, here’s another pants-wetter from Hope n’ Change:

Gamechanger

Proving that there is always a “right man for the right job at the right time,”  Joe Biden – who is currently heading up the White House Task Force on Gun Violence – is going to cartoonland to begin disarmament talks with videogame characters. Revealing a shocking loophole in current gun laws, VP Biden has pointed out that videogame characters are currently able to obtain assault-style weapons with no background checks or psychological evaluations, in much the same way that Democrats select political candidates.

If negotiations with the videogame industry are successful, Joe Biden also hopes to create world peace by banning the boardgame “Risk,” straighten out America’s economic disparity by rewriting the rules of “Monopoly” so that everyone ends up with the same amount of money, and end our nation’s ugly history of racism by declaring that in checkers and chess, Black needs to win for at least the next 200 years.

In all seriousness, Hope n’ Change would actually like to see some voluntary restraint from the videogame industry and, especially, Hollywood when it comes to glamorizing violence and depersonalizing victims. Not because these things necessarily contribute to real-life massacres, but because they contribute to widespread moral decay.

Of course, some people might accuse the Obama Administration of extreme hypocrisy in their sudden push for gun control, considering that their “Fast & Furious” program gave free weapons to anyone who could prove that they were killers working for Mexican drug cartels…resulting in hundreds of real-life deaths.

But those people are forgetting the Whitehouse’s strongly voiced public outrage in 2011 when a videogame maker released “Tea Party Zombies Must Die,” which allowed Left-leaning players to invade the Fox News headquarters and use shotguns and automatic weapons to bloodily kill Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Brit Hume, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Michelle Bachmann, and a variety of Tea Party types like “old white men” and “rednecks.” Do you remember all the government outrage that game caused?!

Yeah, neither do we.

Then there’s this fact-check of Piers Morgan’s prima facie argument against guns from Ben Swann of the Cincinnati FOX affiliate:

As we noted in the narrative of our Video of the Day at our home page (www.thedailygouge.com), if only those so inadequately defending the 2nd Amendment in the MSM had Swann’s command of the facts.

And in the Environmental Moment, as the Washington Examiner reports….

In Georgia, Obama is winning the war on coal

Georgia Power, that state’s largest power company, announced this week that it is asking state regulators for permission to shut down 15 electrical generating units — the closure of four power plants in all. The utility company says new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency — known as the Utility MACT rule — will simply make the plants too expensive to run.

The regulations in question are intended to reduce the amount of mercury released into the air. But in fact, they have every appearance of being a back-door attempt to regulate carbon emissions — precisely the kind of scheme that then-Sen. Barack Obama had in mind when he acknowledged in 2008 that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under his energy plan.

The 15 units that Georgia Power wants to shutter — all but two of which are fired by coal or oil — have a combined capacity of 2,061 megawatts, or enough to provide power for roughly 1.5 million homes. The company plans to close 11 of them on April 16, 2015, the exact day the EPA’s new mercury regulations are scheduled to take effect. Georgia Power will seek waivers from the EPA to keep four of the others open for an extra year, and then it will shut those down on April 16, 2016. It is unclear how Georgia’s energy sector will make up the 2 gigawatts of capacity it is losing.

We know how they can cover the first 1.21 gigawatts.

The EPA has claimed that its new mercury regulation will produce $140 billion in annual economic benefits. Apparently, those benefits will not be going to the 480 power plant workers in Georgia who now stand to lose their jobs. Then there are the millions of Georgia energy consumers who will soon see higher rates and higher bills. More broadly, the National Association of Manufacturers estimates that this single rule will kill 1.65 million jobs nationwide through 2020 — in the utility sector as well as in other industries — especially manufacturing industries — which will now have to pay more to carry out their energy-intensive tasks.

Even taken at face value, the EPA’s claims of economic benefits are highly doubtful. In fact, the reductions to mercury are expected to produce only a tiny sliver of that $140 billion benefit — just $6 million of it, in fact. But it will cost so much money to comply with these rules and produce this miniscule benefit that many plants will simply be closed instead. According to Dr. Anne Smith, senior vice president of NERA Economic Consulting’s Global Environment Group, all of the EPA’s estimated benefits from the Utility MACT rule come from “coincidental reductions” of fine particulate matter, which is regulated by a totally separate section of the Clean Air Act. Diehard environmentalists will be pleased that the closures will cause other pollutants to disappear, but the general public will be deprived of the electricity that those plants produce.

Obama also said in 2008 that “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it’ll bankrupt them.” He seems to be making this come true, even without the carbon cap-and-trade system he once envisioned.

Amazing; even that lyin’, Socialist SOB can tell the truth once in his life!

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s these two pointed 2nd Amendment pictographs courtesy of Balls Cotton….

Next up, another sordid story ripped from the pages of The Crime Blotter:

Poisoned Lotto Winner’s Widow Didn’t Alert Police

The mysterious poisoning death of an Illinois lottery winner grew even more puzzling Tuesday, when the man’s widow revealed she has no idea who in her family asked police to further investigate her husband’s death. Shabana Ansari tells The Associated Press she didn’t make the request, which led to a homicide investigation into 46-year-old Urooj Khan’s death, and she does not know who did.

Ansari spoke to the press on the same day a Chicago medical examiner said he plans to exhume Khan’s body. Cook County Medical Examiner Stephen Cina said Tuesday that paperwork is being prepared for a judge to approve and he hopes to exhume Urooj Khan’s body in the next few weeks.

Khan’s death on July 20 was initially ruled a result of natural causes. But the relative’s request for a deeper look resulted in the startling conclusion months later that Kahn was killed with the highly toxic poison as he was about to collect $425,000 in winnings. Chicago police and the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office are investigating Khan’s death as a homicide, but they have not given any details or announced any suspects.

Finally, we’ll call it a day with our “If At First You Don’t Succeed” segment, brought to us today by a very determined resident of the Keystone State:

Pennsylvania man fails at 2 suicide attempts on interstate before work

State police say a man twice tried to kill himself on Interstate 79 in southwestern Pennsylvania before going to work. The Associated Press is not identifying the 22-year-old Washington, Pa. man because of the nature of the incidents, but police say he first tried to end his life by jumping out of a moving vehicle that was driving him to work in Canonsburg, about 15 miles south of Pittsburgh. That happened about 7:45 a.m. Tuesday.

About a half hour later, police say the man stepped over a guide rail into the path of a tractor-trailer which tried to avoid the man but knocked him out of his shoes. Troopers from the Washington barracks say the man jumped up, grabbed his shoes, slid down a hillside and walked to work. He was since been flown to a Pittsburgh hospital.

Then again, we’ve been to Washington, PA.  And if we had to live there….?!?

Magoo