It’s Wednesday, October 12th, 2011….and this just in:

Senate Defeats Obama’s Jobs Bill

 

No….the DIMOCRATS defeated Obama’s jobs bill!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We kick off the mid-week edition with the “Remember Munich?” segment….

….courtesy of the brilliant foreign policy of the Dynamic Duo of Foggy Bottom….

I know it’s tough to believe, but you’ve got less of clue than I do!

 

 ….Tweedleditz and Tweedledumb….alias the Great Appeasers.

Like our current economy, this fiasco can be laid squarely at the feet of Team Tick-Tock and it’s Chamberlainesque diplomacy.  After all, be it Iran or any other of implacable enemy of freedom, it’s impossible to cross a line that’s never been drawn.

Next up, the WSJ‘s William McGurn provides a different perspective on….

The Cult of Anti-Mormonism

The faith of Romney and Huntsman is a target of liberals and conservatives.

 

 Here’s some advice for Republican candidates appearing at Tuesday’s presidential debate at Dartmouth College. When you are asked, as you will be asked, what you make of the Christian pastor who called the Mormon faith a “cult,” there’s only one appropriate answer.

It comes from the last sentence of Article VI of the Constitution, and it reads as follows: “[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” It doesn’t get any clearer than that.

The Mormon issue arose Friday, when a Dallas pastor introduced Texas Gov. Rick Perry to a gathering of social conservatives in Washington. Shortly thereafter the same pastor, Robert Jeffress of the First Baptist Church, told a group of reporters that Mormonism was a “cult” and definitely “not Christian”—a not so veiled reference to the GOP front-runner, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Since then, the press has had a field day trying to get the other Republican candidates on record whether they share Mr. Jeffress’s theological understanding.

This is not the first time Mr. Romney has seen his faith become an issue in a GOP presidential contest. In December 2007, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, the New York Times ran a story quoting Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, as asking, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” Mr. Huckabee went on to beat Mr. Romney in those caucuses, and some say Mr. Romney’s Mormonism cost him among the evangelicals who flocked to Mr. Huckabee.

This time around, Republicans have not one but two presidential candidates from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). The other, of course, is former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. Still, public allusions to the Mormon faith remain sensitive, as the media attention generated by the cult remark indicates.

Partly this has to do with white evangelicals, who are an important bloc in the Republican coalition. Thus many stories on the issue of Mr. Romney’s Mormonism invoke a striking May survey from the Pew Research Center. According to this survey, 34% of white evangelicals report themselves “less likely” to vote for a Mormon for president.

That’s fair enough as far as it goes. The same Pew survey, however, shows something much less reported. This is that, overall, more Democrats than Republicans are hostile to a Mormon candidacy (31% to 23%). More interesting still is Pew’s finding that when it comes to this particular animus, “liberal Democrats stand out, with 41% saying they would be less likely to support a Mormon candidate.”

As disappointing as these attitudes might be, far more alarming for Mormons are the attacks on Mormon property and Mormon livelihoods just three years ago that registered barely a peep among the same media now so obsessed with Mr. Jeffress. These attacks happened during the 2008 campaign in California over Proposition 8, a state referendum to ban same-sex marriage. When opponents of the measure found that Mormons had contributed heavily to its passage, ugly attacks followed.

LDS temples in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City received envelopes filled with white powder, provoking an anthrax scare. A Book of Mormon was burned outside an LDS chapel in Denver. Other Mormon chapels were vandalized.

Individuals fared even worse. The head of the Los Angeles Film Festival was forced to resign after his contribution was made public. Ditto for a fellow Mormon who ran the California Musical Theater. A former gold medalist who served as U.S. chef de mission for the 2012 Olympic Games in London likewise stepped down. A 67-year-old woman who had donated just $100 stopped working at the restaurant her mother owned to spare it further protest.

Hannah Smith of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty puts it this way: “At the heart of the First Amendment is the freedom to participate in the political process regardless of faith,” she says. “When people of any faith face retribution—either through violence or intimidation or loss of their livelihood—as a direct result of that participation, America has lost something.”

So it’s good to see Republican feet now being held to the fire on an issue the Founders resolved in 1787. Even more encouraging would be a press willing to give attention to very real concern among politically active Mormons: whether a Romney nomination would mean LDS members staying on the sidelines out of fear of the kind of attacks on their property and their livelihoods that their co-religionists experienced with California’s Proposition 8 and its aftermath.

So amid all the coverage given to Pastor Robert Jeffress, ask yourself this question. If you were a Mormon, which would you consider the real threat to your liberty: what some Dallas Baptist says about your faith—or organized attacks intended to intimidate and drive you off the public square?

Gee….let’s ask the Coptic Christians in Egypt!

For more on the Left’s increasingly visceral vitriol, we turn to Jonathan Gurwitz, courtesy of Speed Mach:

False racism charges reach ridiculous level

 

“You don’t get people to like you by attacking them or demeaning their success,” a critic of President Barack Obama said last week on “Fox News Sunday.” “I’ve earned my right to fly private if I choose to do so. And by attacking me, it is not going to convince me that I should take a bigger hit because I happen to be wealthy.”

Who was this member of the flying gentry ginning up a class warfare denunciation of the president on Rupert Murdoch’s network? Karl Rove? One of the Koch brothers? A white-robed leader of the tea party?

None of the above. It was Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television. In a 2008 profile, the Washington Post noted Johnson had made more than $2 million in campaign contributions since 1990, 99 percent of which went to Democrats.

Internet commentators labeled Johnson an “Uncle Tom” and “Oreo.” Reprehensible as that is, he is immunized against the accusation of racism that is routinely hurled at Obama critics. Not so long ago, criticizing the president was regarded as an admirable expression of political dissent and the highest form of patriotism. Now almost any untoward reference to Obama can be justification in polite society to label you a racist.

Slate’s Timothy Noah lambasted a Wall Street Journal story on Obama’s skinniness as a coded appeal to racism because “any discussion of Obama’s physical appearance is going to remind white people of the physical characteristic that’s most on their minds.”

Karen Hunter, a journalism professor and MSNBC analyst, said an Associated Press transcription of an Obama speech was “inherently racist” because it accurately recounted the president’s deliberate dropping of Gs —“Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’.” — a rhetorical device he frequently uses to sound more folksy. (No….to sound more Black!)

Melissa Harris-Perry, a Tulane professor who also does commentary for MSNBC, declared that a failure to re-elect Obama in 2012 would be proof of the irredeemable racism of even liberal America. “If old-fashioned electoral racism is the absolute unwillingness to vote for a black candidate,” she wrote in The Nation, “then liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.”

This is moonbattery. But nowhere is the racist calumny more cheaply employed than in the left’s ritual smearing of the tea party. And what did those alleged tea party racists just do? According to a new CBS poll, they put Herman Cainin a tie for the lead in the GOP presidential race. About which unfunny comedienne Janeane Garofalo quipped to the even less funny Keith Olbermann, “Cain is probably well liked by some of the Republicans because it hides the racist elements of the Republican Party.”

You see how this works. If you don’t vote for the son of a globetrotting couple — one of whom was white — who was raised in Indonesia, attended an exclusive private school in Hawaii and went to Columbia and Harvard, then you’re a racist. But if you do vote for the son of a chauffeur and a housekeeper who grew up in the Jim Crow South and went to Morehouse College and Purdue, you’re also a racist.

The latest racist accusation involves Rick Perry, for hunting on a lease on which sits a racist rock. If true, does it demonstrate the kind of insensitivity and poor judgment that renders him unfit to be president? Before you answer that question, ask yourself if sitting for 20 years in the pews of a church led by an anti-Semitic, conspiracy theorist should disqualify a candidate from being president.

Sadly, real racism and bigotry continue to exist. The desperate attempt to save a sinking presidency with despicably false accusations makes it harder to battle the real thing.

Which, quite frankly, increasingly exists within the ranks of contemporary Progressivism!

Speaking of racists, Bill Meisen forwarded us Marc Thiessen’s take on….

Eric Holder, Obama’s Albatross

 

President Obama says that he has “complete confidence” in Attorney General Eric Holder. That’s good news for Republicans. Pick almost any unnecessary, losing battle in Obama’s first term, and his hapless attorney general is at the center of it.

If not for the fact that so many of Holder’s decisions harm national security, he would be a political dream come true for the GOP–delivering up reliably disastrous controversies for the president every few months.

The latest controversy over whether Holder misled a House committee on “Operation Fast and Furious”–the botched federal gun sting that allowed hundreds of weapons to flow to Mexican drug cartels and resulted in the death of an ATF agent–is only the most recent of these debacles.

Holder’s bad advice began almost immediately after Obama took office, when he and White House counsel Greg Craig convinced the president to announce the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010–without even examining the feasibility of doing so. Not only did the president suffer the indignity of missing this deadline, public opinion turned against the decision so sharply that Democrats abandoned the president and joined Republicans in voting 90-to-6 in the Senate to block funds for the facility’s closure. Almost three years later, Guantanamo remains open and the administration has given up hope of closing it.

The next unneeded firestorm came with Holder’s decision to release classified Justice Department memos on the CIA terrorist interrogation program and reopen criminal investigations into the conduct of CIA interrogators. Holder overrode the objections of five CIA directors, including Leon Panetta. According to The Post, “Before his decision to reopen the cases, Holder did not read detailed memos that [career] prosecutors drafted and placed in files to explain their decision to decline prosecutions.” If he had bothered to do so, he could have predicted the eventual outcome: The special prosecutor he appointed came to the same conclusion as the career prosecutors under the Bush administration and found no criminal wrongdoing by the CIA officials involved in the agency’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. After two years of wasted resources and needless controversy, Holder came up empty.

Then came Holder’s order to read Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (who goes on trial this week) a Miranda warning after just 50 minutes of questioning–an order the attorney general gave without even consulting chief intelligence or national security officials. Holder’s administration colleagues were forced to argue (implausibly) that Miranda was really not an impediment to effective interrogation–only to have Holder undercut them few months later when he admitted that this was not true, and asked Congress to fix the Miranda law to allow longer interrogations. Not only did Holder’s Miranda decision cost America valuable intelligence, the ensuing controversy helped propel Scott Brown to victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, costing Obama his filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. According to Brown’s chief strategist, internal polls showed the treatment of enemy combatants was a more potent issue in the election than was health care.

Then there was Holder’s catastrophic attempt to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters in federal court in New York City. According to The Post, Holder made the decision alone, at 1 a.m., while eating Chips Ahoy cookies at his kitchen table. He did so without first consulting New York officials, who responded with outrage–as did the general public. In the face of the bipartisan backlash, the administration was forced to backtrack, and it soon announced the resumption of military commission trials at Guantanamo for Mohammed and other terrorists.

This only scratches the surface of ill-fated Holder initiatives. He also provoked a political firestorm by withdrawing a lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party for violations of the Voting Rights Act, over the objections of six career lawyers at Justice. And then there was his decision to sue Arizona over its popular immigration law, over the objections of three Arizona Democrats engaged in tough reelection fights (two of whom lost their seats).

Many of these debacles stem from Holder’s failure to do due diligence: He failed to consult the intelligence community before giving the Christmas bomber a Miranda warning; he failed to read the memos in which career prosecutors explained why CIA prosecutions were a legal dead end; he failed to consult New York officials about trying Mohammed in their city; he failed to conduct even a cursory review before pushing Obama to announce the closure of Guantanamo; he failed to read the Arizona immigration law before publicly opposing it. One such failure is a mistake; this many is a pattern of gross incompetence. (But no more incompetent than his boss!)

Given his record of stumbling into one foreseeable and avoidable controversy after another, it is amazing Holder is still at his post. Come January 2013, it is unlikely he will remain there–regardless of who wins the election.

We respectfully disagree with Thiessen on one point: it’s very doubtful Obama disagreed with any of the policies Holder promulgated.  Rather we find it highly likely Holder was taking positions as directed by his boss….not that he disagreed with any of them.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, another member of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight admits he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a bazooka:

In hindsight, Pawlenty regrets quick race pullout

 

….Pawlenty says he would have persisted in the race “if I would have known then what I know now.” He says his campaign was in debt and lacked, in his words, “additional chips to see the next card in the hand.”

No Tim….what you regret is not ripping Mitt up one side and down the other over Romneycare during that first debate….when you’re candidacy actually had a chance.  But that would have taken brains and balls, assets few politicians possess in appreciable quantities.

And in our continuing coverage of what we’d refer to as an occupation….if only any of the occupiers had one!….here’s the WSJ‘s Peter Wallison’s take on what he terms….

Wall Street’s Gullible Occupiers

The protesters have been sold a bill of goods. Reckless government policies, not private greed, brought about the housing bubble and resulting financial crisis.

 

There is no mystery where the Occupy Wall Street movement came from: It is an offspring of the same false narrative about the causes of the financial crisis that exculpated the government and brought us the Dodd-Frank Act. According to this story, the financial crisis and ensuing deep recession was caused by a reckless private sector driven by greed and insufficiently regulated. It is no wonder that people who hear this tale repeated endlessly in the media turn on Wall Street to express their frustration with the current conditions in the economy.

Their anger should be directed at those who developed and supported the federal government’s housing policies that were responsible for the financial crisis.

Beginning in 1992, the government required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct a substantial portion of their mortgage financing to borrowers who were at or below the median income in their communities. The original legislative quota was 30%. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development was given authority to adjust it, and through the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations HUD raised the quota to 50% by 2000 and 55% by 2007.

It is certainly possible to find prime borrowers among people with incomes below the median. But when more than half of the mortgages Fannie and Freddie were required to buy were required to have that characteristic, these two government-sponsored enterprises had to significantly reduce their underwriting standards.

Fannie and Freddie were not the only government-backed or government-controlled organizations that were enlisted in this process. The Federal Housing Administration was competing with Fannie and Freddie for the same mortgages. And thanks to rules adopted in 1995 under the Community Reinvestment Act, regulated banks as well as savings and loan associations had to make a certain number of loans to borrowers who were at or below 80% of the median income in the areas they served.

Research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae (now a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute) has shown that 27 million loans—half of all mortgages in the U.S.—were subprime or otherwise weak by 2008. That is, the loans were made to borrowers with blemished credit, or were loans with no or low down payments, no documentation, or required only interest payments.

Of these, over 70% were held or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie or some other government agency or government-regulated institution. Thus it is clear where the demand for these deficient mortgages came from.

The huge government investment in subprime mortgages achieved its purpose. Home ownership in the U.S. increased to 69% from 65% (where it had been for 30 years). But it also led to the biggest housing bubble in American history. This bubble, which lasted from 1997 to 2007, also created a huge private market for mortgage-backed securities (MBS) based on pools of subprime loans.

As housing bubbles grow, rising prices suppress delinquencies and defaults. People who could not meet their mortgage obligations could refinance or sell, because their houses were now worth more. Accordingly, by the mid-2000s, investors had begun to notice that securities based on subprime mortgages were producing the high yields, but not showing the large number of defaults, that are usually associated with subprime loans. This triggered strong investor demand for these securities, causing the growth of the first significant private market for MBS based on subprime and other risky mortgages.

By 2008, Mr. Pinto has shown, this market consisted of about 7.8 million subprime loans, somewhat less than one-third of the 27 million that were then outstanding. The private financial sector must certainly share some blame for the financial crisis, but it cannot fairly be accused of causing that crisis when only a small minority of subprime and other risky mortgages outstanding in 2008 were the result of that private activity.

When the bubble deflated in 2007, an unprecedented number of weak mortgages went into default, driving down housing prices throughout the U.S. and throwing Fannie and Freddie into insolvency. Seeing these sudden losses, investors fled from the market for privately issued MBS, and mark-to-market accounting required banks and others to write down the value of their mortgage-backed assets to the distress levels in a market that now had few buyers. This raised questions about the solvency and liquidity of the largest financial institutions and began a period of great investor anxiety.

The government’s rescue of Bear Stearns in March 2008 temporarily calmed the market. But it created significant moral hazard: Market participants were led to believe that the government would rescue all large financial institutions. When Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail in September, investors panicked. They withdrew their funds from the institutions that held large amounts of privately issued MBS, causing banks and others—such as investment banks, finance companies and insurers—to hoard cash against the risk of further withdrawals. Their refusal to lend to one another in these conditions froze credit markets, bringing on what we now call the financial crisis.

The narrative that came out of these events—largely propagated by government officials and accepted by a credulous media—was that the private sector’s greed and risk-taking caused the financial crisis and the government’s policies were not responsible. This narrative stimulated the punitive Dodd-Frank Act—fittingly named after Congress’s two key supporters of the government’s destructive housing policies. It also gave us the occupiers of Wall Street.

Continuing the history lesson, the WSJ presents….

Economist Lawrence Lindsey on Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts.

 

Ronald Reagan . . . ran for president largely on a promise of dramatic reductions in personal tax rates, which he promised would revive first the American spirit of enterprise and then the American economy. And it was largely for those promises that he was elected.

The campaign called for a reduction in rates and in rates alone. Reagan’s speeches included no complicated lists of minor adjustments; exemptions; loopholes; or subsidies for the poor, the powerful, the rich, or the well connected. Yet by the time the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (ERTA) became law, it seemed to address nearly every social wrong or economic woe known to the nation.

The final bill not only cut tax rates but extended the tax incentives for charitable deductions to all taxpayers, increased the subsidy for child care, provided a deduction for adoption expenses, increased the tax-free profit a retired couple could realize from the sale of their home, and made dozens of other major and minor adjustments to the tax code. . . .

ERTA did not pay for itself as some of the most enthusiastic supply-siders claimed it would. Personal income tax collections were lower under ERTA than they would have been had tax rates never been cut. . . . However, the reductions in very high tax brackets easily paid for themselves and produced a rather sizable increase besides. This increase helped finance a large part of the reduction in taxes from lower- and middle-class taxpayers. Though this is not what some enthusiastic supply-siders predicted during the political fight for the tax cuts, it is what basic supply-side theory would predict. . . .

Putting theory to one side for a moment, were the Reagan tax cuts a good idea? More specifically, could the country afford them? By 1985, at a revenue cost in that year of $33 billion, economic output was between 2 and 3 percent higher than it would have been without the tax cut. That extra growth stands for millions of new jobs and a higher standard of living. Moreover . . . the tax cuts had salutary effects on inflation, investment, and savings and contributed only marginally to the deficit.

By the standards of government programs this one would have to be judged a bargain.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this pearl of truth wrapped in a humorous shell:

As the Cowardly Lion said, “Ain’t it the truth….ain’t it the truth!”

And from G. Trevor, Lord High King of All Vietors….

We can only hope she showered before she dressed!

Finally, we’ll call it a day with the “Look At Me!” segment of the Wide, Wild World of Sports:

Report: T.O. OD’s, hospitalized last Thursday

 

T….who?!?

Magoo