It’s Wednesday, March 6th, 2013….as we bid bon voyage to a dictatorial tyrant:

So as to avoid confusion, he’s the one on the right.  The best we can say is good riddance to bad rubbish; and express the hope all his friends enjoy the opportunity to join him soon.  Rumors pallbearers for Chavez’s funeral will include Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Don King and Benicio del Toro remain unconfirmed.  The Obamao said he’d fly in for the funeral….but only if he can tee it up with Jonathan Vegas.

Our feelings are pretty well summed up by one of our favorite 007 lines:

Hugo….meet Ernst Stavro.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, writing at The Weekly Standard Blog, Dan Blumenthal and Michael Mazza remind us….

National security trumps Smokey the Bear

 

A stark reminder what happened last time Der Obamao sacrificed national security for short-term political gain.

Which assumes, of course, The Obamao gave a tinker’s dam what the Constitution said in the first place.  He may be only half a dictator (the first half), but he likely remains the first President in American history who truly aspires to such power.

In a related item, courtesy of the Washington Examiner, Michael Barone explains why….

For Obama, politics always trumps governing

 

Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate? It’s not an entirely unfair question. Even as Barack Obama was warning of the dreadful consequences of the budget sequester looming on March 1, he spent days away from Washington, apparently out of touch with Democratic as well as Republican congressional leaders.

In the meantime, Obama fans were lobbing verbal grenades at none other than the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. His offense: He’s continuing to make it clear, as he did in his book “The Price of Politics,” that it was Obama’s then-chief of staff and now Treasury Secretary Jack Lew who first proposed the dreaded sequester. This inconvenient fact threatens to interfere with the ready-for-teleprompter narrative that the Republicans want to cut aid to preschoolers in order to save tax breaks for corporate jets.

It appears that Obama prefers delivering such messages to crowds of adoring supporters over actually governing.

His theory seemed to be that if he kicked his job approval rating up a few points, Republicans would agree to the revenue increases he is promoting, just as they agreed to a tax rate increase in the “fiscal cliff” showdown. But his job rating continues to hover just above 50 percent. That’s not nearly high enough to compel cooperation.

In addition, his campaign rhetoric undercuts his credibility with politicians of the opposite party and perhaps of his own. It’s not that these people resent being criticized. They understand that that is part of the game. But the substance of the criticism suggests the president is not serious about public policy.

Take that old chestnut about corporate jets. The actual issue here is about depreciation — over how many years can a purchaser deduct the cost of a corporate jet? Do you have to spread out the deduction over seven years? Or can you take it all in five? No doubt, serious arguments can be made for one view or the other. As they can for the depreciation schedules of hundreds or thousands of products. Lawyers and lobbyists can make a living doing this.

But the bottom line is that the amount of revenue at stake is small, pathetically small next to trillion-dollar federal budget deficits. Obama keeps talking about corporate jets because it tests well in polls.

And that’s the reason, I think, he keeps talking about universal preschool, not just for disadvantaged children. Polls show that large majorities of Americans would be willing to have more government money spent for preschool for disadvantaged children. The impulse to help adorable but needy little kids is very strong. Unfortunately, the evidence that preschool programs do any permanent good for such children is exceedingly weak.

Preschool advocates point to a 1960s program in Ypsilanti, Mich., and a 1970s North Carolina program called Abecedarian. Research showed those programs produced lasting gains in learning. But no one has been able to replicate the success of these very small programs staffed by unusually dedicated people. Mass programs like Head Start staffed by more ordinary people don’t work as well. Kids in such programs seem to make no perceptible lasting gains. That’s too bad, because disadvantaged kids need help. (Like, for example, school choice and education vouchers!)

So why is Obama emphasizing universal preschool, which would cost a lot more than preschool for the disadvantaged? The reason, I suspect, is that you would have to hire lots more credentialed teachers, which means you would get lots more teacher union members. Teacher union leaders would love to see more dues money coming in, and to channel more to the Democratic Party.

To my suspicious eye, the preschool proposal doesn’t make much sense as policy, but it makes a lot of sense as politics.

Demagoguery about preschool and corporate jets is not going to convince Republicans that Obama can be a reliable negotiating partner. Instead, it reinforces the evidence that he never will be. This is the president who, in his grand bargain negotiations with Speaker John Boehner, agreed on $800 billion in more revenue — and then, in a phone call, told Boehner he wanted $1.2 trillion instead.

And it’s the president who first proposed the sequester, then promised it would never happen and then denounced it when it seemed clear it would. We need serious changes in public policy, as Obama’s Simpson-Bowles Commission recommended. But this president doesn’t seem much interested in that kind of governing.

Truth is, he isn’t interested in governing.  Besides having no aptitude for it in the first place, it frankly bores him.  Most importantly, governance requires making decisions….meaning the assumption of ultimate responsibility for the results….an obligation the man who’s rarely voted anything other than present (unless, of course, it involved killing the unborn) has never been willing to assume.

Meanwhile, in the “Business as Usual” segment, as this forward from Bill Meisen and The Washington Times informs us, despite the dire Dimocratic forecasts of economic ruin to the contrary:

Feds keep hiring with sequesters in place: 400 jobs posted on first day back

 

The sequester cuts are now officially in place, but many government agencies appear to be hiring freely anyway. The U.S. Forest Service on Monday posted help-wanted ads for a few good men and women to work as “recreation aides” this summer, the Internal Revenue Service advertised for an office secretary in Maryland, the U.S. Mint wanted 24 people to help press coins, and the Agriculture Department said it needs three “insect production workers” to help grow bollworms in Phoenix.

Monday marked the first regular workday under sequestration, and federal agencies posted more than 400 job ads by 6 p.m. At a time when nearly all of those agencies are contemplating furloughs, the help-wanted ads raised questions about how agencies should decide between saving through attrition or letting people go.

“Every position you don’t fill that isn’t absolutely necessary is one less person that needs to be furloughed,” said Steve Ellis, vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense — though he said some positions that people leave need to be filled in order to meet agencies’ core missions.

Part of the problem is it’s often unclear exactly what those core missions are, said Paul C. Light, a professor at New York University who has studied government organization extensively. “When you say mission critical, it’s a phrase without meaning,” he said. “Everything’s mission critical. Therefore, we have no way of knowing what would be mission critical in a job description versus what is not.” He said agencies become “very artful” in writing job descriptions to justify why they are hiring.

Here’s the juice:

From the moment he could first talk!

But if you thought Washington has problems, check out the observations of Shawn Steel and K.E. Grubbs, courtesy of The Weekly Standard and the Morning Examiner:

Paradise Lost

California is not too big to fail.

 

Which brings us to today’s Money Quote, and Conn Carroll’s observations on the reality of the once-Golden State:

“….California is rapidly becoming a near-feudal society. On one side is an older, educated, landed, wealthy elite that lives on California’s beautiful coasts. Then there is a much larger, younger, less-educated, indebted mass living inland, many of them working farm jobs at subsistence wages.

The good news is that both of these groups seem content supporting a Democratic Party whose policies…reinforce these trends. And if any of the current Californians don’t like what the new California has become, they are free to leave. The bad news is that millions of middle-class families already have, and the trend is likely to continue.“

Next up, in International News of Note, at the same time America faces economic Armageddon….

Kerry says US releasing millions in aid to Egypt 

 

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday rewarded Egypt for President Mohammed Morsi’s pledges of political and economic reforms by releasing $250 million in American aid to support the country’s “future as a democracy.”

Which just goes to prove Dimocrats have a truly twisted vision of….

New Egyptian President Promises ‘Death in the Name of Allah is our Goal’

 

….the definition of “democracy”.

Since we’re on the subject of twisted visions….

Mark Kelly, Gabby Giffords’ husband, to testify in support of Colorado gun law

 

Face it Mark: you’re a has-been with no hair whose wife fortunately survived a shooting; be thankful she lived….and stop pretending to be an expert in areas in which you have absolutely no expertise.

And in the “Amazing Coincidences” segment, brought to us today by Carl Polizzi and Gateway Pundit, we learn….

Obama DHS Purchases 2,700 Light-Armored Tanks to Go With Their 1.6 Billion Bullet Stockpile

 

This is getting a little creepy. According to one estimate, since last year the Department of Homeland Security has stockpiled more than 1.6 billion bullets, mainly .40 caliber and 9mm.

Modern Survival Blog reported:

The Department of Homeland Security (through the U.S. Army Forces Command) recently retrofitted 2,717 of these ‘Mine Resistant Protected’ vehicles for service on the streets of the United States.

Although I’ve seen and read several online blurbs about this vehicle of late, I decided to dig slightly deeper and discover more about the vehicle itself.

The new DHS sanctioned ‘Street Sweeper’ (my own slang due to the gun ports) is built by Navistar Defense (NavistarDefense.com), a division within the Navistar organization. Under the Navistar umbrella are several other companies including International Trucks, IC Bus (they make school buses), Monaco RV (recreational vehicles), WorkHorse (they make chassis), MaxxForce (diesel engines), and Navistar Financial (the money arm of the company).

The MRAP featured in this video is was in Albuquerque, New Mexico for Law Enforcement Day which was held at a local area Target Store. This MRAP is stationed in El Paso, Texas at The Homeland Security Investigations Office. MRAP is a Mine Resistant Armor Protected Vehicle.

Anyone care to hypothesize who….or what….they’re planning to fight?!?  Other than, of course, an armed citizenry….or tens of millions of….

….modern Liberalism’s finest.

And in the Environmental Moment, as the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel informs us….

Greens Bash Energy Choice

 

The environmental community is throwing a fit over President Obama’s nomination of nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz to run the Department of Energy. Their protests are primarily a comment on just how radicalized the green movement has become in recent years.

Mr. Moniz, after all, is exactly the sort of true-believer environmentalist that one would expect Mr. Obama to nominate to follow Steven Chu. The physicist is a huge supporter of throwing taxpayer dollars at renewable energy projects, which has unfortunately become one of DOE’s core functions. (See Solyndra, and other bankrupt grant recipients.) Mr. Moniz helped write a 2010 report from his perch on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that recommended dumping $16 billion a year into renewables)—or three times the previous amount.

He has warned about climate change, and complained that there hasn’t been enough action to combat it. The MIT Energy Initiative, which he directs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has studied natural gas and fracking, and it has led Mr. Moniz to parrot the usual environmental lines about water contamination and methane leaks. In Senate testimony two years ago, he suggested regulation would be best if “applied uniformly to all shales,” which suggests he is in favor (as most greens are) of the feds taking over regulation of fracking from the states.

And yet the left is up in arms. “At a time when the last thing we should be doing is undermining our progress against climate change, Moniz is the wrong choice to head one of the most important agencies in the fight for a sustainable energy future,” complained Elijah Zarlin, who works at progressive activist group CREDO Action. Food and Water Watch, an anti-fracking outfit, declared that his nomination “could set renewable energy development back years.” Greenpeace moaned that Mr. Moniz was a “strange choice to pair with the president’s choice to fight global warming.”

Mr. Moniz’s sin, it would seem, is in favoring natural gas as a “bridge fuel” until such time as the greens’ vision of all-renewable world comes to pass. This is hardly controversial, and was in fact exactly the view of nearly every environmental group not so long ago. Green outfits pushed and praised natural-gas as a low-carbon alternative to oil and coal, and liked especially that dwindling natural-gas supplies (at that time) kept gas prices high and closer to the cost of renewables.

But as the fracking breakthrough has produced a gush of natural gas, lowering prices and creating a jobs boom, green groups have violently turned against the fuel and declared anyone who continues to support it a heretic. This would include Mr. Moniz, for daring to suggest, as he did at the Senate hearing, that “natural gas can indeed play an important role in the next couple of decades (together with demand management) in economically advancing a clean energy system.” Even though Mr. Moniz wants to further regulate fracking, and ultimately phase gas out, this is still too much for a green movement that, under Mr. Obama, has developed zero tolerance for fossil fuels.

Mr. Moniz is also under attack for holding the view that nuclear should remain part of the energy mix—an uncontroversial view among most policymakers but a new bright line for a growing number of greens. And the physicist gets rapped for the fact that the MIT Energy Initiative has accepted some money from fossil fuel companies. Not that.

What makes these complaints odd is that Mr. Moniz has the potential to be a bigger thorn in conservatives’ sides than Mr. Chu. A former Clinton administration official, Mr. Moniz is likely to be more Beltway savvy than his predecessor. And while Mr. Chu largely focused on renewable investment, Mr. Moniz’s wide range of interests could signal that he’ll drag Energy into bigger fights over fracking and climate.

And here we thought it was his….

….haircut!

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, in the Business Section, another rather incongruous bit of “good” news in an otherwise bleak economic forecast:

Dow closes up 126 points for record high in five years

 

Great news indeed….

….assuming you have a job!  Lest you become too excited over the headlines from Wall Street, as our old friend Arthur Santry observed, peaks in the Dow preceded every major economic crisis….

….in the last hundred years.

Magoo