It’s Friday, March 1st, 2013….and, belated though it be, here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the merry month of March, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger applies his amazing acumen in analyzing….

The Obamaian Universe

A place where everything revolves around the fixed planet of public spending.

It may be that we have to move beyond politics alone to explain events in Washington. We are in the fifth year of the Obama presidency, and Washington is still dead in the water. Four straight years in which the government of the United States of America fails to enact a budget is, well, amazing.

The sense is growing around Washington, and this increasingly includes Democrats, of living in an alternative universe. Barack Obama gives his State of the Union speech, the sequester looms, and the president flies around the country giving speeches. He’s had virtually no contact on the sequester with the legislative branch. Now he’s going to meet with them after the sequester happens. This is unusual. We need to look outside normal politics for explanations.

Mr. Obama likes to convey the impression that he doesn’t think or do business like other presidents. It’s time to take him at his word. If Washington is starting to look like an alternative universe, that’s because the president is creating an alternative universe, the Obamaian Universe. (Obamaian is pronounced Oh-buh-mayan, as in the recently famous calendar.)

The Obama administration is trying to pull us back into what astronomers would call the pre-Copernican world. Copernicus’ heliocentric system overthrew what was known as geocentrism—the belief that everything in the universe revolved around the earth. Beautiful maps exist depicting geocentrism.

Economic thinkers since at least the time of, well Copernicus, have understood that national well-being derived from private individuals going out into the private world to produce goods and trade goods, an activity that for centuries has created wealth for many nations. No longer. Mr. Obama and his circle divide the economy into separate parts. In the Obamaian universe, the units of the private economy—companies large or small—are satellites orbiting the great fixed planet of public spending. All material and economic life in the Obamaian model radiates outward from a central source of public spending. This is why spending in the Obama presidency abruptly jumped as high as 25% of GDP from a 40-year average of 20% of GDP.

In “Star Trek,” as I recall, its genius creator Gene Roddenberry routinely made clear that people living in an alternative universe always needed a “life force” unique to their planet. Something that kept the people on the planet going, like a magical green ooze. In the Obamaian universe, the life force is a fairly weird contraption known as the Keynesian Multiplier. As explained by its adherents, for every $1 of public spending, the whole economy will rise by $1.50 or even $2.

As life forces go, the Keynesian Multiplier would be really remarkable. Alas, Copernican economists such as Robert Barro have been asking repeatedly the past four years for the evidence that all this spending in Mr. Obama’s public universe has been expanding the economy at this rate. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office just said that in 2013, which will be the fifth year of Obama budgets that spend about $3.5 trillion annually, the economy is only going to grow 1.4%.

For that, Mr. Obama has an answer: more spending, which would be made possible by ratcheting up the volume of revenue flowing into the spending machine via whatever cats-and-dogs tax increase he can get through Congress. Maybe the Keynesian Multiplier, like green ooze, just doesn’t work.

It doesn’t matter. As with geocentrism, the president’s pre-Copernican political economy is based in religious belief. (see “warming, global”) This is why House Speaker John Boehner and so many others have never been able to get on the same page with the president about the upward slope of federal spending. He doesn’t want to cut spending. He wants more of it. Forever. Public spending is beyond ideology for Barack Obama. It’s the oxygen in his universe.

This explains Mr. Obama’s End-of-Days speeches the past week. Rationalists around Washington’s professional budgeting community have been trying to explain that this apocalypse is entirely avoidable. The bureaucracies can move spending under many shells. But Mr. Obama really believes the stars will fall from the sky if spending declines. (No, we don’t believe he does; he understands if the country comes to realize the stars won’t fall if spending declines, his gig is up!)

In Washington’s standard model, it’s all just politics. Mr. Obama is running an established strategy of driving public opinion to marginalize and ultimately defeat Republicans. Who could doubt it? But maybe it is also time to start taking Barack Obama at his word. Maybe it’s time to come to grips with the fact that he sees the public economy of federal spending as the life force of the nation as no president ever has, not even Franklin Roosevelt.

If after all these years no one in Washington can cut a deal with Barack Obama on spending, taxes and economic growth, maybe it’s because he is in a place indeed occupied by no one else.

Only as regards the actual position of President; in the general sense of modern Liberalism, there’s plenty more….

….where this clown came from.

And for those who would argue against Henninger’s assessment, the The New Media Journal details a policy initiative so bizarre (or perhaps more aptly, bizarro) we wouldn’t have believed an Administration capable of promulgating it….at least prior to….

Bizzaro Barack

Obama Administration Launches 100-City Tour Promoting Spending

Just days from massive spending cuts known as the budget sequester, the Obama administration has launched a 100-city tour that has dispatched officials from multiple federal agencies to help communities tap into new government spending. The White House’s “Connecting Your Community” program launched in Oregon earlier this month, and so outraged a senator influential on spending issues that he wrote President Barack Obama’s top budget officials urging it be canceled immediately.

“If Washington is truly cutting spending on missions many consider vital, how can we at the same time promise and promote more financial assistance, much less afford this mammoth 100 city cross country tour?,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), wrote Thursday night in a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

“It is important that we as public officials lead by example, and I look forward to continuing to work with you to save taxpayers money and better prioritize government spending,” added Coburn, who was a key member of the so-called Gang of Six senators that sought bipartisan solutions to the nation’s debt crisis.

The Obamao’s idea of “leading by example”….not to mention shared sacrifice.

…“Much is being made about the possible impact of sequestration on government programs for the poor and middle class, food safety, and the defense of our nation. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, for the White House to be headlining a 100 city government spending tour, transporting representatives from multiple departments and various agencies around the country to promote federal largesse,” Coburn wrote Jeffrey Zienst, the OMB’s deputy director.

No Senator Coburn; not until Barry’s literally gone through every red cent….

….he can requisition from taxpaying Americans.

In a related item which further demonstrates public officials have yet to see any requirement to reign in runaway government spending, let alone eliminate fraud, waste and abuse:

The Attendance Justification Tool Kit

“Aloha” means both hello to good times and goodbye tax dollars.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323478304578332352488713198.html?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb_h

Hey; why not?  After all, it’s been working for any number of parasitic Progressives….

….so far!

Next up, in the “MSM Bias….WHAT Bias?!?” segment, two recent examples of more profligate fawning by the Fourth Estate, both courtesy of Best of the Web.  First, James Taranto reports how even recalcitrant reporters bullied by the White House extend the Threatener-in-Chief a benefit of the doubt they’d never have provided any of The Obamao’s Republican predecessors:

….What’s oddest about this piece is that Fournier goes out of his way to deny that Obama is responsible for his aides’ bad behavior. Fournier follows his description of his own tweet with this disclaimer:

Reporting by Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered Watergate misdeeds and led to the resignation of President Nixon. My tweet was not intended to compare Nixon to Obama (there is no reason to doubt Obama’s integrity–period) but rather to compare the attack to the press strategies of all the presidents’ men.

The distinction is fair enough, but that parenthetical is deeply weird. Above all, what kind of reporter would grant–or indeed even think it in his power to grant–a politician he covers blanket absolution from all doubt about his integrity? (The kind who invented “accountability journalism,” ironically enough.)

The tone of the parenthetical is oddly defensive. Maybe Fournier is just trying to protect himself from the sort of attacks leftist ideologues have waged against Woodward. (If so, good luck with that.) But if there’s no reason to doubt Obama’s integrity, why does Fournier need to say it so categorically and emphatically? Jimmy Carter never had to declare, “I am not a crook” (though CNN reports Obama said today, “I am not a dictator”). It’s as if it requires an exertion for Fournier to convince himself not to doubt Obama’s integrity.

The closing paragraph of Fournier’s column bolsters this hypothesis:

This can’t be what Obama wants. He must not know how thin-skinned and close-minded his staff can be to criticism. “I have the greatest respect and admiration for what you do,” Obama told reporters a year ago. “I know sometimes you like to give me a hard time, and I certainly like to return the favor, but I never forget that our country depends on you.”

That sounds like the kind of rationalization one invents to sustain a bad romance–specifically, a romance in which one is head over heels with an ambivalent or indifferent partner: I’m sure he doesn’t mean to hurt me. He once told me he has great respect and admiration for me.

And it’s not just Fournier. Here’s what Woodward had to say In his CNN interview:

I think if Barack Obama knew that was part of the communication’s strategy–let’s hope it’s not a strategy, that it’s a tactic that somebody’s employed–and said, look, we don’t go around trying to say to reporters, “If you, in an honest way, present something we don’t like, that, you know, you’re going to regret this.”

If only Barack knew . . . Try to imagine Woodward saying the same thing about Nixon–or about any other president from Gerald Ford to George W. Bush. What Woodward, Fournier and more than a few other Washington journalists ought to regret is the degree to which they have allowed themselves to become personally attached to the presidency of Barack Obama.

For more evidence of the undeniable, here’s Taranto’s comments on a recent AP article:

NRA Uses Justice Department Memo To Accuse Obama On Guns

Rush Limbaugh calls our attention to this Associated Press story from the other day:

The National Rifle Association is using a Justice Department memo it obtained to argue in ads that the Obama administration believes its gun control plans won’t work unless the government seizes firearms and requires national gun registration–ideas the White House has not proposed and does not support.

The NRA’s assertion and its obtaining of the memo in the first place underscore the no-holds-barred battle under way as Washington’s fight over gun restrictions heats up.

The memo, under the name of one of the Justice Department’s leading crime researchers, critiques the effectiveness of gun control proposals, including some of President Barack Obama’s. A Justice Department official called the memo an unfinished review of gun violence research and said it does not represent administration policy. (Why didn’t you say so in the first place?!?)

Imagine the situation in reverse: A left-wing group releases a Justice Department memo that, it argues, suggests a Republican administration intends to curtail civil liberties despite the White House’s public claims to the contrary.

Is it even imaginable that the AP would frame the left-wing civil-liberties group as the aggressor in a “no-holds-barred battle” the way it has here, or would flatly accept a Republican White House’s assurance about its own intentions, as it does in the very first paragraph of this dispatch?

Yeah….

And in the Environmental Moment, we learn not only is good to be The King….

….working on his pet projects pays pretty well too!

Secret energy lab spawns million dollar govt employee

Yeah….for energy technologies which have yet to make a profit, let alone offer even a scintilla of improvement in either the nation’s employment picture or air quality.  The only money renewables have ever “made” has gone directly into the pockets of Liberalism’s corporate cronies.

On the Lighter Side….

And in the Sports Section:

Pistorius to have service for Steenkamp

Yeah….and The Juice is still looking for Nicole’s killer, though his search is now limited by the confines of a cell rather than a golf course.

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with another titillating tale ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter:

Russian lawmaker found dead in barrel of cement

Russian police say they have discovered the body of a local politician reported missing last week, in a barrel of cement in a garage near Moscow. Another politician has been accused of ordering the murder, over an $80 million debt.

The Moscow Times is reporting that Lipetsk city council deputy Mikhail Pakhomov was believed to have been kidnapped on February 12. Pakhomov, 37, was last seen when three unidentified men pushed him into a car and drove away. After he disappeared, police stopped a car in the Moscow region where they found the victim’s personal belongings. Pakhomov’s badly beaten body was then found Sunday night in the barrel in a resident’s garage in the Noginsky district near the Russian capital city. The identity of that resident is not known.

“It has been confirmed that the remains found in the area of the Obukhov village in the Noginsky district belong to Pakhomov. The nature of the wounds suggests that he was killed,” police investigators told the Russian news agency Interfax. At least five people have reportedly been detained in connection with the crime, which police believe was murder.

Were this a Chicago alderman, Windy City authorities would be investigating his demise as a suicide.

Magoo