It’s Friday, January 25th, 2013….and here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the last edition of the week with the Wonderful World of Science, and a story from Agence France-Presse, courtesy of Newsbusters.org‘s Tom Blumer, reporting….

Researchers grow kidney tissue from stem cells for first time

 

The really big news?  Growing the kidney tissue did NOT require embryonic stem cells.  As Blumer observes:

….Thus, we have a de facto acknowledgment by an establishment press outlet that stem cell research involving the killing of human embryos is irrelevant to medical advancement. Someone should tell the editorial board at the New York Times. On Sunday, they wrote that “Congress should lift virtually all restrictions on this promising area of research.”

Big news indeed, particularly coming on the eve of the 2013 March for Life; thus another of the Abortion Lobby’s justifications for their harvest of death bites the dust.

And in the “Better Late Than Never”, segment, there’s this headline from The Hill:

 

Boehner: Obama out to ‘annihilate’ GOP

 

And YOU, Mr. Speaker, are one of my most useful tools….though definitely NOT the sharpest!

Seriously….The Obamao’s into his second term and Boehner’s only now realizing what game’s afoot?!?

Next, we continue our coverage Benghazigate with Conn Carroll’s latest Morning Examiner:

What difference does it make?

 

I wanna be PRESIDENT, and I’m not gonna let the truth about 4 dead Americans get in my way!

 “With all due respect,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shouted at Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., at yesterday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Benghazi, “the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Yes, what difference does it make?

Was President Obama’s decision to go with a “soft footprint” in Libya the correct decision? Did it increase the chance that a tragedy like the killing of U.S. Ambassador Cris Stevens might happen? Was the Stevens killing just a freak occurrence due to a random YouTube video, or was the attack another piece of evidence that al-Qaeda is much, much stronger than the Obama administration and Secretary Clinton would like us to believe? Did the same terrorist militants that helped kill Stevens assist in the recent killing of 38 hostages in Algeria?

Hillary Clinton’s anger at being forced to answer any of these questions is completely understandable. She has been campaigning to become the first female President of the United States for over six decades now. The fact the first U.S. Ambassador to be killed in over 30 years happened on her watch cannot be allowed to get in her way.

Never mind that the State Department had $2.6 billion in unspent embassy security funds last year. Or that the 585 page 9/11 Commission report has a whole chapter on the perpetrators motivations. Hillary Clinton is running for office, for Pete’s sake, she can’t have the American people asking these kind of questions.

The 2012 presidential election is over. The 2016 Democratic primary is already upon us. It is pretty much guaranteed we will see video of Clinton’s, “What difference does it make?” outburst again soon.

In a related item, as Commentary Magazine‘s Jonathan Tobin submits….

“What Difference Does it Make?” Plenty 

 

What was I thinking….I coulda been a contender!

As Seth noted earlier, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began her long-awaited congressional testimony about Benghazi with excuses and an attempt to misdirect the public about what the administration knew about the incident and when it knew it. But while Clinton happily listened to fawning praise from the Democratic members of the Senate committee this morning, she lost her cool when one senator pressed her closely to account for the false story that had been put out in the days following the attack.

Senator Ron Johnson pointed out that accurate information about the assault that would have easily corrected the misconception, promoted by United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice and others, that the attack was merely a protest about a film rather than a terrorist attack was available at the time. Clinton not only refused to answer that question in a straightforward matter, but snapped, “What difference does it make?” about the whole matter of the false account. She then attempted to insinuate that there was still some doubt about the matter.

The answer to her question is clear. An administration that sought, for political purposes, to give the American people the idea that al-Qaeda had been “decimated” and was effectively out of commission had a clear motive during a presidential campaign to mislead the public about Benghazi. The fact that questions are still unanswered about this crime and that Clinton and President Obama seem more interested in burying this story along with the four Americans that died is an outrage that won’t be forgotten. (Not if the MSM has anything to say….or perhaps more appropriately, NOT say….about it!)

While Clinton gave, as she has before, lip service to the idea that she took responsibility for the tragedy, throughout her testimony she demonstrated that she regarded the whole idea of accountability as a detail to be shrugged off or pigeonholed along with internal government reports about the matter. Her attitude, when not listening to paeans to her service and frequent trips abroad, seemed to betray her belief that not only were questions about Benghazi unimportant but that she knew the mainstream press would continue to give her a pass for her failures.

The problem here is not just what she considers an irrelevant question from Johnson or a mere “difference of opinion”–as she characterized Senator John McCain’s scathing attack on her record on the issue–but a belief that four dead Americans in Benghazi was really not such an earth-shaking event. Her consistent talking point seemed to be that the committee shouldn’t bother itself trying to find out what happened and why and who was responsible for the mistakes that led to the deaths, but merely to “move on”—to steal a phrase made popular during her husband’s presidency. That’s why she still won’t say who changed the public talking points about Benghazi that led to Rice’s lies and why they were altered.

That’s been the key to understanding the administration’s desire to treat its lies about Benghazi as somehow unworthy of further investigation. In Hillary’s world, lies don’t matter as long as it’s her side telling them. That’s not a standard that she and other Democrats would apply to any Republican. As McCain pointed out, the American people deserve an honest account of events that gets the facts straight.

Senator Rand Paul rightly pointed out that her failure of leadership ought to have led to her dismissal. Saying that the State Department gets lots of cables and she can’t be expected to read them all is not the sort of arrogant answer a Senator Hillary Clinton would have accepted from a Republican administration.

“What difference does it make” is an answer that ought to hang over Hillary Clinton for the rest of her public career. It is just one more indication that what happened after Benghazi in the State Department was akin to a cover up. Should Clinton run for president in 2016, this is a story that won’t go away. Nor should it.

But only if the GOP isn’t willing to let it die; given Republicans’ lack of interest in highlighting Hillary’s past penchant for patent prevarication….

….we’re far from certain they will.

By the way, it’s worth noting how, when finally forced to address her….inconsistencies, just as in her Benghazigate testimony, Hillary never actually answers the questions, nor admits to having lied:

And is there ANY question, had this been Condoleeza Rice testifying about the death of 4 Americans during the Bush Administration, the resultant charges of cover-up would have made Watergate look like a simple burglary?!?

Wrapping up our Benghazigate coverage, here’s a particularly pointed piece of prose from Jim Geraghty, writing at NRO:

Benghazi Hearings Mark End of Accountability, Forever

 

At the end of a day of Senate and House hearings on Benghazi, we know . . . not much more than we knew the day before. Four Americans dead. Nobody brought to justice. The lone suspect in the attack was released earlier this month by the Tunisians, citing a lack of evidence.

The release dramatized the negligible progress in any investigation into the attack, which killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11 last year. The feebleness of Libya’s transitional government since the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi has stymied any progress, despite what Benghazi residents describe as an abundance of leads.

In fact, the perpetrators are up to new attacks:

Several Egyptian members of the squad of militants that lay bloody siege to an Algerian gas complex last week also took part in the deadly attack on the United States Mission in Libya in September, a senior Algerian official said Tuesday.

The Egyptians involved in both attacks were killed by Algerian forces during the four-day ordeal that ended in the deaths of at least 38 hostages and 29 kidnappers, the official said. But three of the militants were captured alive, and one of them described the Egyptians’ role in both assaults under interrogation by the Algerian security services, the official said.

If confirmed, the link between two of the most brazen assaults in recent memory would reinforce the transborder character of the jihadist groups now striking across the Sahara. American officials have long warned that the region’s volatile mix of porous borders, turbulent states, weapons and ranks of fighters with similar ideologies creates a dangerous landscape in which extremists are trying to collaborate across vast distances.

No one at the State Department fired for failing to heed the requests for additional security on the ground. And nobody can specify what the heck “administrative leave” entails:

Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Clinton “pledged not only to accept all 29 of the recommendations, but to have the implementation of those recommendations well under way before her successor took over. So I think she’ll want to give a status on that.”

Asked for the number of State Department employees fired for their handling of Benghazi, Nuland said four people were put on administrative leave. They included Eric Boswell, who resigned from the position of assistant secretary of diplomatic security.

But Nuland declined to say if Boswell and the others still are working for the department in some capacity. (Turns out all four still are.)

And no elected Democrat in Congress gives a hoot. Oh, they say they care, but every time their turn came in the Clinton hearings, they shifted the topic to House Republican proposals to limit the budget, as if we hadn’t just had this issue resolved, by State Department officials in October:

REP. DANA ROHRABACHER (R-CA): “It has been suggested the budget cuts are responsible for lack of security in Benghazi, and I’d like to ask Ms. Lamb, you made this decision personally, was there any budget consideration and lack of budget that led you not to increase the number of people in the security force there?”

STATE DEPARTMENT DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS CHARLENE LAMB: “No, sir.” (U.S. House Of Representatives, Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Hearing, 10/10/12)

Well, at least we have an entire government agency dedicated to accountability….

….er,….never mind!

What we did learn is that Hillary Clinton thinks it is silly or unreasonable to ask why the administration kept talking about a video for five days, when everyone and their brother could have figured that the date of September 11 was pretty a key indicator that al-Qaeda-sympathizers or like-minded Islamists were out to mark the anniversary in their own murderous way.

“The fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest? Or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?” Clinton told Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. “It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, senator.”

What’s astounding are the number of folks on the Left who think this is a fantastic answer. For starters, if your assessment of why an attack happened is wrong, doesn’t that make it less likely you’ll be able to prevent another one? I’ll leave it to the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple to state the obvious:

No matter your view of the media’s role in Benghazi; no matter your take on whether U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice leveled with the country on the Sept. 16 talk shows; no matter your view of Fox News’s Benghazi campaign, it surely does make a difference whether it was “because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans.” It makes a difference to the media, the public, the government, everyone.

The trustworthiness of the administration’s version of events — even the early one — makes a difference. Whether it was hard-core terrorism or a spontaneous attack or something else — that makes a difference too, with strong implications for intelligence accountability. Goodness gracious, in her very own statement, Clinton herself even seems to acknowledge that it makes a difference, when she says, “It is our job to figure out what happened . . .”

Pardon me a comparison that may seem frivolous or silly, but I was reminded of a quite furious response from screenwriter Terry Rossio after he saw the 2006 movie Superman Returns. To say Rossio hated the movie was an understatement; on his web site, he laid out all the different ways in which the movie simply didn’t “work” given the characters and concepts the creators chose to begin with, and made it clear that as a professional, as someone who believes in aiming for the best in his craft, it deeply offended him that the movie could be made the way it did, with such disregard for quality and respect for the audience, and that the movie’s success illustrated something profound to him:

Okay, here’s the part about the profound effect it had on me. First off, I just felt really, really good that I worked on Pirates and had nothing to do with that movie. I know crap-plus-one is a mistake, but on an emotional level, I just felt genuine relief and contentment to bear no responsibility for that film.

But here was the epiphany. From Superman Returns on, I realized that there are truly no standards any more. The film got better reviews than Pirates, it got made, it’s going to make $190 million dollars. There are actually people in the world who enjoyed it. (We thought it one of the worst movies ever; then again, we didn’t care for any of the Superman films.)

The next time I get notes on a screenplay (‘’I think this main relationship doesn’t work,’ ‘this ending isn’t clear, etc.’) I can just point to Superman and say, “You may be right but so what? It’s better than Superman Returns.” It’s the ultimate, “Keep your notes to yourself and just tell me if you’re making the film” movie. Why would anyone, anywhere, even bother to attend a creative meeting on any project — after seeing that film?

Ultimately, stuff goes up on screen because somebody wanted it up there, not for any other reason. So it might as well be me who decides — right?

When we look at how our government has responded to the night of September 11 in Benghazi, Libya, we see there are truly no standards any more.

If the decision making before, during, and after the Benghazi attack is insufficient to get anyone fired, what decision in government will ever warrant that consequence? If Democrats on Capitol Hill can’t take off their partisan blinders for one day to attempt to hold people accountable for decision-making that resulted in American deaths at the hands of extremists, and then lying to the public about it, then when will they ever? If Hillary Clinton can exclaim that it doesn’t matter that the administration spent five days talking about a video when the video had nothing to do with it, and everyone on her side applauds, why should she or anyone else ever respond to an accusation with anything but audacious defiance?

This is it, folks. This is the government we have, and the lack of a public outcry about Benghazi ensures this is the government we will have for the foreseeable future.

Looking on the bright side, four more years….

….and these anti-American Marxists will be on permanent vacation….all expenses paid, of course!

As Comedy Central’s poet laureate, Stephen Colbert quipped, courtesy of Balls Cotton:

“There once was a man named Barack
Whose re-election came as a shock
He raised taxes I pay
And turned marriage gay
And now he’s coming after your Glock.”

And in the Environmental Moment, the Journal‘s Kimberly Strassel warns about the coming of….

The Real Obama Climate Deal

To approve natural gas exports and other energy projects, the president may demand a carbon tax

 

President Obama set off a guessing game this week as to what he intended with his inaugural promise to double down on climate change. There’s no need to guess. California Democrat Barbara Boxer, the Senate’s climate guru, was happy to fill in the gory details.

The president’s climate shout-out sent the green community into flurries of ecstasy, with grand hopes of a new push for cap-and-trade in Congress, or of a redoubled U.S. commitment to a global carbon pact. It fell to Mrs. Boxer to tamp down those ambitions, even as she reassured her devotees that there is more than one way to skin the climate cat. “A lot of you press me . . . on: ‘Where is the bill on climate change? Where is the bill?’ There doesn’t have to be a bill,” Mrs. Boxer explained in a briefing the day after Mr. Obama’s speech. “I’m telling you right now, EPA has the authority in the transportation sector, the electricity sector, and the industrial sector under the Clean Air Act” to do everything that legislation might otherwise do.

In other words, with the election over, all pretense is gone. Democrats won’t waste political capital on a doomed cap-and-trade bill. Yet they’ll get their carbon program all the same, by deputizing the EPA to impose sweeping new rules and using their Senate majority to block any GOP effort to check the agency’s power grab. The further upside? Brute regulation is not only certain and efficient, it allows vulnerable Democrats to foist any blame on a lame-duck administration.

Mrs. Boxer has spent years on climate, and she wouldn’t be surrendering her legislative ambitions without clear assurances the White House has her covered. Her words were a signal that the Obama EPA is about to re-energize the regulatory machine that it put on ice during the election. Republicans who hoped Lisa Jackson’s resignation signaled a more humble EPA approach should instead prepare for an agency with a new and turbocharged mission.

Just as notable, Mrs. Boxer gave the clearest sign yet that Dems intend to simultaneously pursue the new holy grail of climate control: a carbon tax. The left has been ginning up enthusiasm for this energy tax, not only as a means of cutting fossil-fuel use, but as a way of generating enormous revenue to cover their spending ambitions. The Democrats’ political problem, however, is that the tax remains hugely unpopular. (As well as ensure its impact falls only on America’s producers.)

Mrs. Boxer helpfully detailed Democrats’ new strategy for getting a foothold. Now that cars are so much more fuel-efficient, she explained, the gas tax isn’t bringing in enough revenue to cover highway needs. How to fix this? Easy! Just replace the gas tax with a carbon tax.

As strategy goes, this is clever. The gas tax itself is unpopular, so Democrats are betting on some public support for killing it. They figure at least some Republican porksters will salivate at more state highway money. Democrats can initially sell the tax as limited to covering infrastructure, knowing that once the principle is established, they can ramp up. And all this can be silkily pitched as part of “tax reform.”

The only thing Mrs. Boxer did not explain was how the administration intends to balance this climate crackdown with its position atop an American energy renaissance. Mr. Obama spent the past election year bragging that gas and oil production had risen on his watch, hoping to cadge some credit for the economic boom that has accompanied private-sector drilling advances.

The administration has kept open the possibility of approving the Keystone XL pipeline. It has hinted it will greenlight more export terminals for natural gas. It last week again delayed its fracking rules for public lands. These moves have encouraged the oil-and-gas industry, even as they have driven the environmental community nuts. The Natural Resources Defense Council this week declared that approving Keystone would be “fundamentally inconsistent” with Mr. Obama’s renewed vow to “address climate change.”

Or would it? Republicans might recollect that the Obama administration has a practiced method of winning controversial legislation like ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank. To wit, it uses a combination of bribes and threats to get pertinent sectors of the business community to back its efforts.

Consider what the mighty oil-and-gas lobby might be co-opted to do—either out of gratitude for the president’s backing or fear that he might turn on it. Consider how the political environment might change if the industry threw its weight behind a carbon tax or the EPA climate scheme. Consider that this might prove an easy call, given that a tax would be borne by its customers, while EPA regs will mostly crush coal. Consider that numerous Big Oil chieftains have already endorsed such a carbon levy. And who says Mr. Obama has to decide Keystone XL or anything else soon? He could hold out, to see what he can extract in return.

All this is food for thought for those conservatives who have been lulled into complacency by the stall of cap and trade. A big climate agenda is coming, only on very different terms. If Republicans hope to spare the economy that pain, it’s time to adapt.

Combine the impact of this potential tax-and-spend bonanza with the economic disaster of Obamascare and you’ve got a….

….third-world America….permanently.

In a related item, the WSJ‘s Allysia Finley details another environmental scam….with a more subtle sports twist:

Caught Doping? Blame Climate Change

 

A putative doping scandal has besmirched Kenya’s reputation as the world’s most fertile training grounds for runners. Naturally, the country’s track and field officials blame climate change. “Our country is known for its high performance around the world in middle and long distance,” David Okeyo, the Secretary General of Athletics Kenya, told Reuters Foundation’s AlertNet. “However, climate change associated with hot weather spells is bringing a lot of complications.”

To wit, Kenyans won just two gold medals in the London Olympics, a disappointing haul compared to the six the country lugged home from Beijing four years earlier. Mr. Okeyo attributes the subpar performance to warming in the country’s Rift Valley where the athletes train. Over the last 11 years, the average annual temperature has risen to 58.1 degrees Farenheit from 55.4 (These temperatures are considered to be ideal for running). Kenya’s gold medal count last summer, however, was no worse nor better than at the 2000 Olympics.

Foreign athletes that once trained in Kenya apparently are also now flocking to better climes. The real reason though likely has to do with a doping scandal exposed last fall by German journalist Hans-Joachim Seppelt. According to Mr. Seppelt, doctors (or those posing as doctors) were “investing” in athletes by selling them EPO at below-market prices in return for a share of the athletes’ prize money.

The report came not long after distance runner Mathew Kisorio failed a drug test at the country’s running championships. He subsequently accused other Kenyans of doping. Athletics Kenya adamantly denied that doping was widespread and blamed foreign doctors for trying to taint their athletes.

This explanation didn’t go over well in the West. So now the Kenyans are using climate change as a red herring to deflect and defuse the scandal. Why didn’t Lance Armstrong think of this?

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, courtesy of Bill Meisen, we’ll call it a week with another sordid story ripped from the pages of The Crime Blotter:

D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges

City wants to know if gun he used was legal

 

D.C. police are investigating whether a man will face criminal charges for shooting a pit bull that was attacking a child in his neighborhood. The incident unfolded Sunday afternoon, after three pit bulls attacked an 11-year-old boy as he rode his bicycle through the Brightwood neighborhood of Northwest, according to a police report.

When the man, a neighbor, saw the boy being mauled by the dogs, he went inside his home and got a gun. The man killed one of the dogs. The gunfire attracted the attention of a police officer in the area near Eighth and Sheridan streets, where the attack occurred. The officer responded and shot the other two pit bulls as they continued to attack the boy.

The police report, which did not identify any of the people involved, said the boy suffered severe lacerations. The Washington Post, which first reported the details of the shooting, quoted the boy’s uncle as saying the boy was also shot in the foot. Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump said Wednesday that the entire case, including whether the man legally owned the gun he used to kill the dog, is under investigation.

While public opinion might be supportive of the man’s actions, he could still face significant charges depending on the outcome of the investigation, criminal defense attorney Daniel Gross said. “I’ve seen cases where people used weapons in defense of others, but the U.S. attorney’s office is not always so understanding,” said Mr. Gross, who represents many clients charged with firearms-related crimes in the District. “There are certain defenses one could try, like self-defense or defense of others, but that wouldn’t really go to whether they charge you.”

The man could face a host of charges depending on the specifics of the case, including whether the gun used is a registered firearm that the man was legally permitted to own, Mr. Gross said. Possession of an unregistered firearm or ammunition is punishable by up to one year in prison and a $1,000 fine, and determining whether the man legally possessed the gun used will likely have greater bearing on the way the case is handled, Mr. Gross said.

Low-level unregistered firearms and ammunitions charges generally are prosecuted by the D.C. office of the attorney general, but additional charges could mean the case is bumped up to the U.S. attorney’s office. “In this case, it would likely be the U.S. attorney’s office, and their discretion is sometimes less than local prosecutors,” Mr. Gross said. Also to be taken into consideration is whether the man was within his property line when he fired the weapon — a small but significant distinction. Mr. Gross said it could mean the difference in whether he could be charged with carrying a pistol without a license.

We can only hope the hero in question can afford David Gregory’s attorney….

….or that his kids attend the same elite prep school as the President’s!

Magoo