It’s Friday, March 8th, 2013….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, in the “Day Late and a Dollar Short” segment….

North Korea vows nuclear attack on US, saying Washington will be ‘engulfed in a sea of fire‘

 

Sorry Kim; but another America-hating Marxist….

….beat you to it.

And when he’s not otherwise engaged spoiling elementary school children’s plans to tour our White House and blaming in on budget cuts, The Dear Misleader’s busy taking 20-vehicle motorcades to a dinner he could easily have held in the White House:

Obama Pays Dinner Tab for a Dozen Republicans 

 

Lindsey Graham: I am NOT stupid!  John McCain: I am old and confused….as well as stupid!

President Barack Obama picked up the tab for a March 6 dinner with 12 Republican senators, winning himself some very cheap publicity for his new legislative strategy of outreach to swing-voting GOP lawmakers. Senators leaving the event were complimentary about Obama’s statements and responses to their views, despite the deep ideological differences over spending, guns, families and immigration.

The invited Senators were picked by Obama and by Sen. Lindsey Graham, the high-profile Republican senator from South Carolina. “I’m assuming the president wants to talk seriously about the issues of the day,” Graham told reporters prior to the dinner. (All of the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding!) “I’m encouraged by the president’s outreach [and] I hope it bears fruit,” he said, after telling reporters that the president had called him and Sen. John McCain “a few weeks ago.”

The White House dining room must have been booked for a private affair.  Think about it; the White House staff is on-call 24/7, so their services are paid for whether utilized or not.  The motorcade and extra security, however, cost extra; undoubtedly far more than the cost of the food for a White House dinner.  So while Barack gets the chance to appear magnanimous “buying” dinner, the American taxpayer is once again left footing the actual bill.

Well done….

….Tweedledum and Tweedledummer!

Since we’re on the subject of the Dimwitted Duo, having already played into The Obamao’s patent public-relations ploy, our two heroes thought to further damage their country’s cause by breaking The Gipper’s 11th Commandment:

Graham, McCain blast Paul filibuster

 

Graham offered this meaningless missive…

…while McCain displayed the searing intellect which put him at the bottom of his Naval Academy class…

…and gave The Obamao the White House.

Graham’s so tone-deaf he actually stated Paul’s filibuster led him to support Brennan’s confirmation, despite finding him “arrogant, kind of a bit shifty”.

Was Paul right on the either the issue or the law?  Probably not.  But not to the extent either McCain or Graham, who in reality represent no one but themselves, should use his theater as a pretext for attacking another Republican.

Marco Rubio, we’re pleased to say, stayed true to the cause:

For all their faults, which are continuous, at least the Dims have singleness of purpose and message.  Regardless of how egregious The Obamao’s missteps, no matter how vapid his reasoning, they’ve always got his back.  Sure, they’re accordance wouldn’t be possible absent the active assistance of the MSM; but at least they don’t eat their young.

As a a picture’s worth a thousand words, we’ll let the latest from Day by Day talk for us:

The WSJ offers a sample of what Lindsey Grahamnesty terms “the President’s outreach”:

Obama’s Not So Grand Offer

His budget details show how little reform he is really proposing.

 

Amid the sequester noncrisis, President Obama is attempting to revive political appetites for a grand budget bargain—and this time he’s even calling Republicans on the phone and asking for support. Maybe he’s finding that berating them in public as moral cretins doesn’t inspire trust. That’s progress, but what hasn’t changed is that the deal he’s offering as fair and “balanced” is neither grand nor a bargain.

Mr. Obama says he can support $930 billion in spending cuts over the next decade as long as Republicans reverse the sequester’s $1.2 trillion in cuts and raise taxes by another $680 billion. In other words, he is proposing to ratify the fiscal status quo with only token spending cuts and no major entitlement reform and selling it as the gift of the century.

If trimming $930 billion from the $46 trillion 10-year budget sounds less than impressive when Washington is running an annual $845 billion deficit despite a 17% surge in revenue this year, the details are even less of a concession.

• Health care, $400 billion. Mr. Obama says he’s prepared to make tough choices on Medicare and other entitlements, even though some Democrats “violently disagree” with his plan to save $400 billion. We doubt these liberal opponents, if they exist, are sincere, because his proposal would simply expand the failed cost-control methods of the last 30 years.

To put $400 billion in perspective, Medicare’s long-term “unfunded liability“—the gap between promised benefits and the program’s ability to fund them—is roughly $42.7 trillion. When Republicans say they want to reform Medicare, they mean they want to make durable changes to the program’s structure and operations so that this gap narrows over time while achieving the same or better results. They don’t want to cut for the sake of cutting or “austerity.” They want to solve Medicare’s problems.

Mr. Obama’s definition of reform is different. Medicare would continue its current march into insolvency, but at a slightly slower pace: some nips and tucks, but nothing approaching the larger modernization that the health safety net needs to survive.

So Mr. Obama gets to his $400 billion bid by toting up many small items. Some $120 billion, or 30% of the package, comes from a catch-all category called “other health savings” filled with initiatives that are so micro the White House doesn’t itemize them.

More substantively, Mr. Obama endorses another round of arbitrary cuts for hospitals and other providers, to the tune of about $30 billion. He favors new price controls for the Medicare drug benefit for a $140 billion pop. He wants a new program to “encourage efficient care after a hospital stay,” as if the central planners can issue a decree and care will suddenly become more efficient. None of this will make a difference in practice.

Mr. Obama’s offer would ask the most affluent seniors to contribute more for benefits and tweak the program’s cost-sharing system for everyone else, but even this means-testing is very modest. The White House’s favorite health economist, Jonathan Gruber of MIT, estimates that better cost-sharing incentives for Medicare beneficiaries can save $125 billion. Mr. Obama’s version saves $35 billion.

• Social Security, $130 billion. Outside of the left-right fringes, there is broad bipartisan agreement about changing the consumer price index slightly to more accurately measure real inflation in the economy. This fix is a natural part of any bargain, since it reduces the growth of Social Security payments and increases revenue at the same time. But Mr. Obama can’t bring himself to support it, while pretending that he does.

Known as “chain weighted” CPI, this index reflects how consumers change their purchasing habits when prices change. The Congressional Budget Office says Social Security and other benefits would fall by about $216 billion over a decade. Chain CPI would also raise the tax brackets by less each year for inflation, which would introduce more “bracket creep.” Upper-income taxpayers would be docked an extra $123 billion as more of their real earnings were exposed to taxation. So while chain CPI is a small change that is better than nothing, it’s also less entitlement reform than meets the eye.

But Mr. Obama is not ready to take even this short walk on a long pier. The White House supports a similar but weaker index it calls “superlative CPI” that only takes $130 billion from Social Security, not $216 billion. It raises taxes by less too. So Mr. Obama has taken what would be a mere 0.03% cut to Social Security and converted it to a 0.02% cut.

• Discretionary programs, $200 billion. Half would come from unspecified savings from the domestic accounts. These are the same programs that Mr. Obama also says are so lean that the sequester is forcing him to furlough meat inspectors and White House tour guides. The other $100 billion is taken from the Pentagon budget, (Now there’s a surprise!) even as he is trying to peel off Republicans worried about the sequester harming defense.

• Odds and ends, $200 billion. Here Mr. Obama continues his approach of taking a bit of money out of this and that pot, instead of prioritizing. He won’t end a single program.

There is one USDA employee for every eight U.S. farmers and the government spends $140 billion on crop supports, but Mr. Obama can only countenance eliminating $30 billion in “certain subsidies” to farmers. He can save $45 billion in part by reducing “improper payments,” the Washington euphemism for cutting checks in the wrong amount, to the wrong person, for the wrong reason or all three.

It’s good to know the President is in favor of the bureaucracies not accidentally sending money to people who didn’t earn it, but what his grand bargain would really do is endorse the status quo—maybe stave off a crisis for a year or three, but nothing tangible that would put the fisc on a more sustainable path. His tax demands would damage economic growth even as they ensured revenue would continue to finance an explosion of federal spending.

If Mr. Obama is serious about a grand bargain, he’ll offer more than notional entitlement reforms and a grab bag of things his Administration ought to be doing anyway. There’s no harm in Republicans listening, but his actual proposals show he’s more interested in posing as a budget reformer than reforming the budget.

Listen, yes; trust for a minute?  HELL NO!!!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch with the Greatest Debilitative Body on Earth, Stephen Moore, writing at Political Diary, reports on what he terms Patty…

Murray’s Magic Act?

 

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington is attempting to do for Democrats what they haven’t accomplished in four years: pass an actual budget out of the Senate. And since Republicans can’t filibuster a budget resolution, Ms. Murray, who just took over as chairman of the Budget Committee, only needs 51 votes, not 60. (Notwithstanding Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s ignorant assertions to the contrary.)

We hear that Ms. Murray’s blueprint could include tax hikes of as much as $2.5 trillion over a decade. Unlike her committee chair predecessor, the now-retired Kent Conrad of North Dakota, we’re told by senior Senate aides, “Harry Reid trusts Murray. She’s not a deficit hawk, like Conrad. She’s a taxer.”

So are most of her Senate Democratic colleagues, who will insist on more revenues to feed the beast in any budget blueprint. Politico reported this week that Ms. Murray may blow the unions a kiss and load the budget with more “investment/stimulus” spending to, as she puts it, “create jobs and a stronger economy in the future.”

Ms. Murray and her Democratic colleagues are also test driving a new public relations ploy to sell voters on their latest tax hike. They want to count the $2.5 trillion in budget cap “cuts” over 10 years as savings already in the bank. Then they want at least another $1 trillion or more in new revenues to offset those spending caps that no one believes will ever happen. So the same people who are collectively wailing and grinding their teeth over a measly $50 billion in cuts this year are good for cutting $2.5 trillion more over the next decade.

For Ms. Murray to pull off her budget miracle, she needs almost all Democratic hands on deck. Her blueprint will almost surely include higher taxes on the oil and gas industry. And while liberals like Chuck Schumer of New York are chomping at the bit, red state Democrats are worried. We can’t wait to see how Virginia’s Mark Warner, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, Alaska’s Mark Begich, Arkansas’ Mark Pryor and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin—who all sell themselves as pro-business, pro-energy moderates—line up on this one.

For the latest iteration of the Left’s Tax-and-Spend philosophy, we go West, young man, as a…

Berkeley Councilman Proposes Email Tax To Fund Postal Service 

 

Somewhere in La-La Land a village is missing its idiot.

Rumors Wozniak will next propose an automobile tax to fund the nation’s blacksmiths remain unconfirmed.

And in today’s Money Quote, as quoted by the AP, General Jose Ornelia recounts the last words of former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez:

“He couldn’t speak but he said it with his lips: ‘I don’t want to die. Please don’t let me die,’ because he loved his country, he sacrificed himself for his country,….“

Color us skeptical any zeal for Venezuela was behind Hugo’s pleading:

Wethinks he smelt sulpher.

By the way, speaking only for ourselves…

Citgo flies flags half staff in Texas, Louisiana for Chavez

 

…regardless of whether it hurts the local dealer, Citgo’s seen our last buck.

On the Lighter Side….

Next up, another titillating tale ripped from the pages of The Crime Blotter:

Loaded gun found in woman’s private parts

Baggies of meth also found in Oklahoma woman’s buttocks, police say

 

Not to mention a number of serious personal hygiene violations.

In a related item….

New Anne Arundel Co. Executive Probes Suspicious Cameras In County Council Offices

 

Soooo….if we understand the new County Executive correctly, as long as the cameras are monitored by the police, that makes the surveillance….okay?!?

Finally, in the Sports Section, we learn….

Fight On: Battle Over Redskins Name Goes Before Federal Board

 

The long-running battle over the Washington Redskins name gets a restart Thursday, when a group of Native Americans goes before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board to argue that the franchise should lose their federal trademark protection, based on a law that prohibits registered names that disparaging, scandalous, contemptuous or disreputable.

Redskins general manager Bruce Allen said last month that it is “ludicrous” to think that the team is “trying to upset anybody” with its nickname, which many Native Americans consider to be offensive. (“How” many? ;-))

….As someone who has spent nearly a third of her life fighting the Redskins nickname, Suzan Shown Harjo had a good laugh when asked about the team’s latest line of defense. That’s beside the point, according to Harjo. She’s never suggested that the Redskins deliberately set out to offend anyone. But that doesn’t mean that people aren’t offended. (especially the Professionally Sensitive)

Suzan Harjo, aka “Woman Need To Get A Life”

“It’s just like a drive-by shooting,” Harjo said Wednesday. (Yeah….just like it!) “They’re trying to make money, and not caring who is injured in the process — or if anyone is injured in the process. I don’t think they wake up or go to sleep dreaming of ways to hurt Native people. I think they wake up and go to sleep thinking of ways to make money — off hurting Native people.”

Harjo found a number of alternative names the Redskins front suggested, including “Ruthless Red Devils”, “Bloodthirsty Savages”, “Sadistic Scalphunters” and “Can’t Hold ‘Em Firewater”, equally offensive.

Magoo