It’s Tuesday, February 19th, 2013….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, in the “How Far We’ve Fallen” segment, why we won’t be celebrating President’s Day until February 2017….at the earliest:

Why President Obama keeps the press away – playing golf with Tiger Woods doesn’t look good with 12 million Americans out of work and a $16 trillion debt

 

At the risk of appearing racist, we hearken back to the President’s own words from April 2o11 in a speech to students at Northern Virginia Community College:

“We are going to have to ask everybody to sacrifice.”  Yeah….

Everyone….that is, except him!  Ya gotta love the self-proclaimed champion of the American Woman jetting to Florida for the weekend to play golf with a serial misogynist.

In a related item, Jonah Goldberg offers the details of….

Operation Hubris

 

One of the great things about American politics is its capacity for punishing hubris. For the ancient Greeks, hubris didn’t merely describe god-like arrogance. It was a crime, usually defined as taking too much pleasure in the humiliation of your foes. In its modern usage it usually means the pride that comes before the fall.

In the wake of Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, both connotations seem at least a little apt. We are well into our fourth month of epidemic thumb-suckery over the question, “Are the Republicans doomed?” The latest New York Times Magazine asks, “Can the Republicans Be Saved from Obsolescence.” The wished-for answer doesn’t require much reading comprehension.

Since the election, a slew of political reporters and analysts — never mind the self-declared Obama boosters — have argued that Obama will, must or should crush his enemies (and by enemies, I mean the Republicans). Slate’s John Dickerson wrote that if Obama “wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat.”

“Obama’s only remaining option,” Dickerson continued, “is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents.”

Many conservative observers agreed. Michael Barone wrote, “Obama begins his second term with a strategy to defeat and humiliate Republicans rather than a strategy to govern.” Rich Lowry, my boss at National Review, wrote that Obama’s approach to the debt-ceiling fight should have been called “Operation Humiliation.”

That strategy worked for Obama, he figures, so why quit now? His second inaugural address was a frilly campaign stump speech, dividing fools and devils (Republicans) from the wise and the sainted (Democrats).

His State of the Union address, already fading from the mind’s eye like the afterglow of a flashbulb, showed that Obama remains committed to his hammer-and-tongs style. His ludicrous claims that massive new expansions of government won’t add a “single dime” to the deficit — technically true, since they would add trillions of dimes to the deficit — alone made it clear that he’s still in campaign mode. Obama and many in his chorus remain convinced that, after that momentary hiccup known as the 2010 midterm elections, America is finally on a glide path to the new progressive era they’d long been promised.

This is where the two meanings of hubris come together. Liberals panting after the transformative Obama presidency are only seeing what they want to see. The GOP suffered from the same sort of wishful thinking when Republicans believed that George W. Bush — and Ronald Reagan before him — signaled a partisan realignment.

Look closely at Obama’s State of the Union address, and you see not a progressive colossus poised to conquer all in his path, but a mostly spent force, desperately trying to figure out how to get anything done at all. His main policy ambition was to keep from getting the blame for his own idea: the sequester.

But the emotional heart of the State of the Union comprised three issues: immigration reform, climate change and gun control. Well, as Senate Democrats have made clear, the only way immigration reform passes is if Obama stays out of the process entirely.

On gun control, all Obama is asking for is a vote. He’s not even asking for passage of a largely ludicrous assault weapons ban. Why? Because gun control is a wedge dividing Democrats, not Republicans.

So is climate change. Liberal donors want Obama to kill the Keystone pipeline (which Obama failed to mention) and push a green agenda. The union and blue-collar base want good jobs and cheap gas. Indeed, while climate change and gun control may be imperatives for the editors of the New York Times, they are pretty low priorities for Americans growing increasingly nostalgic for economic growth Obama can’t deliver. How can it be springtime for liberalism when liberalism’s top priorities aren’t the public’s top priorities?

The remainder of Obama’s agenda was fairly pathetic boilerplate. Hike the minimum wage! Redesign America’s schools! Manufacturing hubs! Make-work programs! This is supposed to be liberalism reborn? Lame ideas cribbed from a playbook with 60 years of dust on it? Slogans hatched by pols who needed a few more nouns to round out Obama’s sentences? Legislative initiatives that will cost Democrats seats in 2014 and beyond?

Obama’s State of the Union had the lowest ratings in 13 years for a reason — and it’s not that America is excited for a new golden age of liberalism. The momentum Obama feels is the pull of gravity, as he starts his fall.

While we understand Goldberg’s point, the MSM’s demonstrated willingness to pull out every possible stop, to the point of ignoring events (including the deaths of 5 Americans: Brian Terry, Chris Stevens, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith and Tyrone Woods) which would have spelled the end of any Republican President, leave us to conclude any fall will be of very short duration or impact.  Then again, for once, we hope we’re wrong.

And since we’re on the subject of Chicago politicians with a limited knowledge of the Constitution, as this forward from Bill Meisen reports:

Chicago Police Chief: Second Amendment Is A Danger To Public Safety

 

Garry McCarthy: I keep seeing a flashing red light.  Rahmbo: That‘s your career dissipation warning, bonehead!

Chicago’s Chief of Police, who previously blamed ”government-sponsored racism” and Sarah Palin for Chicago’s gun violence, declared that the law-ful exercise of the Second Amendment was a threat to public safety. From the Illinois State Rifle Association:

Chicago’s embattled police superintendent dug himself deeper into a pit of controversy today by claiming that lawful firearm owners are agents of political corruption.  Appearing on a Chicago Sunday morning talk show, superintendent Garry McCarthy expressed his conviction that firearm owners who lobby their elected representatives or who donate money to political campaigns are engaged in corruption that endangers public safety.  McCarthy went on to express his belief that judges and legislators should rely on public opinion polls when interpreting our Constitution.

After totally dismissing the citizen’s right to redress grievances, McCarthy trained his constitutional wisdom on the 2^nd Amendment.  Despite recent court decisions to the contrary, McCarthy opined that the 2^ndAmendment limits citizens to owning smooth-bore muskets.  McCarthy went on to say that he believes that the 2^nd Amendment supports mandatory liability insurance for firearm owners and the mandatory application of GPS tracking devices to civilian owned firearms.

“ Garry McCarthy ’s understanding of our Constitution barely qualifies him as a meter maid, never mind the chief of the nation’s third largest police department,” commented ISRA Executive Director Richard Pearson. “What on earth would possess McCarthy to assert that constitutional rights should be meted out based on public opinion polls?  Let’s not forget that public opinion polls once opposed a woman’s right to vote while it would be a safe bet that, at one time, polls would have shown lynching as an acceptable form of justice.  It has been said that our Constitution exists to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.  McCarthy’s view of our Constitution is dangerous and unbecoming of a civil servant.”

“McCarthy needs to understand that the lawful firearm owners of this state will continue to lobby their representatives and continue to support candidates who represent their interests,” continued Pearson.  “If Garry McCarthy doesn’t like that, well that’s just too bad.  If McCarthy is so interested in influence peddling, he should pop into some of the gin mills ringing the Illinois Capitol and count the ruddy red noses of taxpayer-funded lobbyists for the City of Chicago.”

….McCarthy has previously said that Illinois “does not have strict gun laws” and that stricter laws were needed in order to adequately combat crimes committed by those illegally possessing firearms. It’s a concerning prejudice against law-abiding citizens from an official who has the authority to arrest and give orders to fire at them.

Who McCarthy will blame next for Chicago’s skyrocketing homicide rate, other than of course the city’s own criminally-inept law enforcement policies, is….

….anybody’s guess.

Next up, a similarly useless exercise in Liberal ignorance, courtesy of contributor Bill Meisen and Progressive reporter Danny Westneat of The Seattle Times….along with a couple of the dimmer bulbs in the Washington state senate:

Misstep in gun bill could defeat the effort

 

Senators Murray and Kline: true Profiles in Stupidity

One of the major gun-control efforts in Olympia this session calls for the sheriff to inspect the homes of assault-weapon owners. The bill’s backers say that was a mistake. Forget police drones flying over your house. How about police coming inside, once a year, to have a look around?

As Orwellian as that sounds, it isn’t hypothetical. The notion of police home inspections was introduced in a bill last week in Olympia. That it’s part of one of the major gun-control efforts pains me. It seemed in recent weeks lawmakers might be headed toward some common-sense regulation of gun sales. But then last week they went too far. By mistake, they claim. But still too far.

“They always say, we’ll never go house to house to take your guns away. But then you see this, and you have to wonder.” That’s no gun-rights absolutist talking, but Lance Palmer, a Seattle trial lawyer and self-described liberal who brought the troubling Senate Bill 5737 to my attention. It’s the long-awaited assault-weapons ban, introduced last week by three Seattle Democrats.

Responding to the Newtown school massacre, the bill would ban the sale of semi-automatic weapons that use detachable ammunition magazines. Clips that contain more than 10 rounds would be illegal. But then, with respect to the thousands of weapons like that already owned by Washington residents, the bill says this:

“In order to continue to possess an assault weapon that was legally possessed on the effective date of this section, the person possessing shall … safely and securely store the assault weapon. The sheriff of the county may, no more than once per year, conduct an inspection to ensure compliance with this subsection.”

In other words, come into homes without a warrant to poke around. Failure to comply could get you up to a year in jail.

“I’m a liberal Democrat — I’ve voted for only one Republican in my life,” Palmer told me. “But now I understand why my right-wing opponents worry about having to fight a government takeover.” He added: “It’s exactly this sort of thing that drives people into the arms of the NRA.”

I have been blasting the NRA for its paranoia in the gun-control debate. But Palmer is right — you can’t fully blame them, when cops going door-to-door shows up in legislation.

I spoke to two of the sponsors. One, Sen. Adam Kline, D-Seattle, a lawyer who typically is hyper-attuned to civil-liberties issues, said he did not know the bill authorized police searches because he had not read it closely before signing on. “I made a mistake,” Kline said. “I frankly should have vetted this more closely.”

That lawmakers sponsor bills they haven’t read is common. Still, it’s disappointing on one of this political magnitude. Not counting a long table, it’s only an eight-page bill.

The prime sponsor, Sen. Ed Murray, D-Seattle, also condemned the search provision in his own bill, after I asked him about it. He said Palmer is right that it’s probably unconstitutional. (There’s no “probable” about it!) “I have to admit that shouldn’t be in there,” Murray said.

“Mistake” our ass!

He said he came to realize that an assault-weapons ban has little chance of passing this year anyway. So he put in this bill more as “a general statement, as a guiding light of where we need to go.” Without sweating all the details. Later, a Senate Democratic spokesman blamed unnamed staff and said a new bill will be introduced.

Murray had alluded at a gun-control rally in January that progress on guns could take years. “We will only win if we reach out and continue to change the hearts and minds of Washingtonians,” Murray said. “We can attack them, or start a dialogue.” Good plan, very bad start. What’s worse, the case for the perfectly reasonable gun-control bills in Olympia just got tougher.

Keep in mind, this story was reported from the perspective of the LEFT; imagine the facts which might have come to light had Danny Westneat been a Conservative.  Yeah….a Conservative reporter from The Seattle Times….

Moving on to today’s Money Quote, here’s a little unintended bon mot the AP editor evidently overlooked in reviewing the story of a….

British couple on round-the-world cycling journey killed in Thailand road crash

 

“The trip was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the couple, who met in art school and spent six years saving money and planning their journey, Peter’s father Jerry Root told the Associated Press in an interview.“

Seriously; we might have opted for a….different metaphor.

Then there’s the latest from Hope n’ Change….

H2Obama

 

It’s no secret that the mainstream media carries water for Barack Hussein Obama, but in the wake of the State of the Union address and Republican rebuttal, they’ve hauled it farther than Gunga Din. Specifically, the Left-leaning media is apoplectic about Senator Marco Rubio pausing in his remarks for approximately a nanosecond to take a quick sip of bottled water before continuing with his on-target evisceration of Barry’s preposterous speech.

If you’re asking “what’s the big deal?,” Hope n’ Change Cartoons is forced to reply that we have no freaking idea. CNN, which to date hasn’t given a rat’s ass about Obama’s dereliction of duty in the Benghazi murders, actually asked “can a drink of water make or break a political career?” while running a slow-motion loop of Rubio’s sip, subtitled “Career-Ender?”

Frankly, we think this is about the least interesting water-related political scandal imaginable. Especially when certain others which spring to mind…

Let’s see, Teddy Kennedy drowned Mary Jo Kopechne in water. Jimmy Carter, while fishing in Georgia, spotted a bunny swimming in the water and beat the tar out of it with an oar.  Former and future presidents Bill and Hillary Clinton were neck deep in the Whitewater scandal. John Kerry’s lies about his swiftboating experiences (while on water!) were used to undermine our country and our armed forces. And even Barack Obama needs to answer for adding to the environmental damage from the BP oil spill because he insisted that the waters be cleaned only by union crews, thereby increasing both cleanup time and cost.

All of which makes us think that simply taking a sip of water during a brilliant speech isn’t much of a crime.

Maybe the mainstream media should actually try it sometime. It could make a nice break from the president’s Kool-aid.

And in the Environmental Moment, writing at Townhall.com, John Ransom details a report which, at least from the Environazi viewpoint….

Frickin’ Fracking Could Ruin Everything for Leftist Activists

 

No, but you can eat sh*t….and die; after all, better to decrease the Earth’s overpopulation….n’est-ce pas?!?

A new report from the UK research team at Price Waterhouse and Cooper confirms what we knew all along: We’re right and they’re wrong. Really wrong; once-in-a-lifetime, disastrously wrong if grading on the scale the rest of us are subject to.

Grading on the liberal scale, however, it’s just normal, everyday, run of the mill errors in judgment, math, worldview, physics and fluid mechanics that liberals deal with all the time in an effort to “wish” the world to Utopia while their leaders are busy creating Dystopia for all but a select few.

This latest discovery that we are right and they are wrong, shouldn’t shock us. It joins a long list of things liberals have been pantsed on. For example: We were right about Obamacare all along. It won’t decrease costs, it won’t cover all Americans and it won’t preserve the private insurance market. And with due respect to Justice John Roberts and the Supremes- do-whop, do-whop– it’s not even constitutional.

Oh, and that’s not all we were right about. We were right about the stimulus, we were right about jobs, we were right about Obama being a socialist of the Euro variety; we were right about Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Benghazi. We were right about Libya being a pretty bad idea; we were right about Dodd-Frank’s suckyness and the mortgage mess being caused by bad liberal policy; we were right about Obama wanting to raise taxes on everyone, taking guns from everyone and having contempt for the constitution.

But on this latest error, I say again: We are really right, and they are really wrong; once-in-a-lifetime, disastrously wrong.

The Celebrity Edition of “Idiots on Parade”.

The London branch of Price Waterhouse Cooper has released a report on shale oil and gas that has the Left afraid.

Here’s the frightening truth: “Shale oil (light tight oil) is rapidly emerging as a significant and relatively low cost new unconventional resource in the US,” writes PWC in its February, 2013 report Shale oil: the next energy revolution. “There is potential for shale oil production to spread globally over the next couple of decades. If it does, it would revolutionise global energy markets, providing greater long term energy security at lower cost for many countries.”

And of course the Left can not afford that kind of nonsense.  Jobs and economic growth? Where does it all end?

Oh, but it gets worse for the envro-whackos. PWC estimates that if shale oil is fully developed, US Gross Domestic Product could grow an additional 2-5 percent per year, greatly reduce the influence of OPEC, lower global energy prices, and with NatGas thrown in, add at least a million jobs to manufacturing that are now just going to energy costs.

That means- I’m saying this, not PWC- that we could significantly reduce the deficit, without drastically cutting benefits for a generation of Americans who have planned to count on it. It means- I’m saying this, not PWC- we don’t have to raise taxes. Actually it means we could go to some sort of a simplified tax code, like the fair or flat tax.

Yeah….just like alar, DDT, Sweet ‘N Low and genetically engineered foods.

Here’s what I wrote a year ago about US shale oil development in The GOP Can Add 10 Million Jobs and $15 Trillion to US Economy without Spending a Dime–kind of a prescient title if one considers the president’s SOTU message:

And along the way, the U.S. would create at least 10 million new U.S. jobs, keeping around $500 billion per year here at home. Over twenty years that would be an additional $12.5 trillion in GDP even at a modest 2 percent growth rate. At 4 percent the numbers are closer to $15.5 trillion.

PWC estimates the GDP increase to be between 2-5 percent in the US. Using today’s GDP figures that’s between $300 billion and $750 billion, with my estimate being a nice midway point in the PWC estimate.

As I have pointed out all along, the Keystone pipeline issue isn’t about the safety of a pipeline. Obama and enviro-whacko friends know that if they allow Canadian tar sands oil to be developed via the Keystone pipeline, that the US will also start to develop their own tar-sands and shale oil. The US contains well over 600 years of known reserves and that would allow the US to be a net exporter of oil. If that happens, the “green” economy ruse that the left has sponsored, already reeling from bankruptcies and cronyism, would collapse.

It would show that there is no shortage of oil and “green” energy can not compete with fossil fuels. From the UK’s left-wing Guardian:

“Digging up and burning new reserves of fossil fuels can only exacerbate the huge negative impact on the global economy of climate change,” said Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace, in an emailed statement. “Any short term price gains for consumers will ultimately be dwarfed by the impact of rising temperatures on every aspect of economic life.”

Tony Bosworth, energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth, similarly warned of the environmental problems increasing fracking could cause, adding that governments should instead focus investment on green technologies. “We’ve already got more than enough fossil fuels – more than we can afford to burn if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change,” he toldBusinessGreen. “The UK has a huge renewable resource and if we want [to meet climate targets] we should be investing in those.”

Because, yeah, that’s really working out well. The website Green Corruption lists 23 bankruptcies and 29 troubled companies that took advantage of Obama’s green energy financing schemes…and counting. None of those messy jobs, or economic growth there. Just the way liberals like it.

Yep, we can ruin that scheme.

Record cold/record heat; too much rain/too little rain; too much snow/too little snow; less ice in the Arctic/more ice in the Antarctic.  Whatever the circumstance, it’s ALL the fault of anthropogenic global warming, aka, climate change.  The facts don’t matter; only the conclusion is significant!

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s these two classic comic commentaries on current events courtesy of Bill Meisen….

….and Balls Cotton:

Finally, we’ll call it a day with two titillating tales ripped from the pages of The Crime Blotter.  First, in a particularly twisted tale of material excess, we learn….

Two Kansas brothers accidentally blow up house while celebrating lottery win, report says

 

Authorities said a man was taken into custody after he and his brother accidentally blew up their house in a drug-related explosion Friday while celebrating a winning lottery ticket CBS affiliate KWCH. Police said one of the brothers was taken to a hospital Friday evening with second-degree burns on his hands, arms and chest, the station reports. The 27-year-old man remains in serious but stable condition

Artist’s depiction of Tweedledum and Tweedledummer.

Authorities said the victim told them that he and his brother bought marijuana and meth to celebrate after winning $75,000 on a scratch lottery ticket, KWCH reports. Wichita police Sgt. Bruce Watts said the explosion happened after the victim went to the kitchen to refuel the butane lighters the brothers were planning to use to light their bongs. He emptied a couple large cans of butane lighter fluid, leaking butane into the air. Eventually, butane vapor reached the pilot light in the furnace, causing the blast, according to The Associated Press.

Officers returned to the home where the victim’s brother reportedly admitted to having drugs in the home. He was sent to jail.

What to us is tantalizingly absent from this report?  Either the names or photos of the men in question.  Call us racists, and we’ll be the first to admit our error if further details prove otherwise, but we’d be willing to bet the siblings in question are not only brothers, but “bruthas”.

Second, since we mentioned titillating tales….

Talk about sending shivers up one’s spine; as the great Walter Pigeon observed in the classic Forbidden Planet, “Man does not behold the face of the Gorgon and live!”

Magoo