It’s Friday, March 15th, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!

We begin the day with the further adventures of The Man Who’s Never There:

Obama blames Secret Service for tour cancellation, met with skepticism by GOP reps

President Obama insisted Wednesday that the Secret Service was behind the controversial suspension of White House tours, a claim that was met with vocal skepticism during a closed-door meeting with Republicans.

The president, while leaving open the option of resuming tours for school children, explained to House Republicans during a meeting on Capitol Hill that “the Secret Service made the decision,” Fox News has learned. The claim, similar to one he made in an interview broadcast Wednesday morning, was met with a round of “ahaaaaas” by those in the room.

Obama, in response, told the lawmakers: “Hold on guys, we just talked about respect.”

Were we in attendance, we’d have been forced to respond, “First, respect is a two-way street, you lying, one-way piece of Socialist scum…er,…Mr. President.  Second, in the words of the immortal John Vernon…”

And then watched our poll number skyrocket in our congressional district!

In a related item, The Weekly Standard‘s Steve Hayes calls a spade a spade, relating what he terms…

Obama’s PR Stunt

Some eighteen hours before he was scheduled to meet with House Republicans on Capitol Hill Wednesday, ostensibly in search of a “grand bargain” that would reform entitlements and reverse the trajectory of US debt, Barack Obama declared three times that the U.S. does not have a debt crisis and accused opponents of wanting to “gut Medicare, gut Social Security and gut Medicaid.”

In a taped interview with ABC News, Obama told George Stephanopolous: “We don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt. In fact, for the next ten years, it’s going to be in a sustainable place.”

If it wasn’t already obvious that Obama’s “charm offensive” was merely a PR stunt – and I think it was – it’s clear now.

The main reason there will be no grand bargain: The president will not take the political risks necessary to address an issue that he doesn’t regard as urgent. His party opposes reforming entitlements. He apparently views Republican plans to address long-term debt as attempts to “gut” these programs. A grand bargain was never a possibility without entitlement reform. Why would the president challenge his party’s liberal base, a constituency his advisers believe is the key to winning back Congress in 2014, in order to implement policies he opposes to address an issue he doesn’t regard as urgent?

The simple answer: He won’t.

Would it be too much to ask of SnuffleupBO’sbutt, or perhaps some other, more enterprising journalist, to inquire of The Anointed One what level of debt will finally constitute a crisis?!?

Next up, courtesy of the AEI, Kevin Hassett details…

The wages of gamesmanship

President Obama employed an old weapon against Republicans in his State of the Union address: the minimum wage. The president’s humble objective was to make sure that “no one who works full time [has] to live in poverty.” That goal is very appealing, and likely explains why a majority of Americans support higher minimum wages.

But they should not. Indeed, President Obama’s own statement helps illustrate why. He begins with the phrase “no one who works full time”—giving the impression that the minimum wage will affect only full-time workers, whose lives will be improved by the increase. This phrase deflects listeners’ attention from the true economic consequences of the minimum wage by excluding from view those who lose their jobs because of the minimum wage, fail to be hired because of the minimum wage, or have their hours cut back because of the minimum wage.

The president was intentionally reinforcing the myth that minimum-wage workers are predominantly parents living close to poverty. But let’s look at the facts.

Liberal confronted with facts.

In 2012, almost two-thirds of workers making the minimum wage or less were part-time workers, and a bit over half of all minimum wage-or-lower workers were under the age of 25, many of them students living at home with their parents.

Those two pieces of information suggest that common political rhetoric about the minimum wage is misleading. An analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, represented in the nearby chart, gives a fuller picture of how an increase in the minimum wage would affect workers in the U.S.

In 2013, the U.S. federal poverty line, which varies according to family size, was $23,550 for a family of four and $11,490 for an individual. In the EPI analysis of workers who would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage to $9, only 25.7 percent live in households making under $20,000. Almost half belong to households making over $40,000, and almost 30 percent of workers who would be affected live in families with incomes above $60,000.

Simple economic logic, supported by most of the available research, suggests that the minimum wage reduces employment significantly. The wage increases take-home pay for those who do not lose their jobs, but reduces it to zero for those who do. In other words, it takes money away from some poor people (those who lose their jobs), gives money to some poor people (those who don’t), and gives money to some better-off people, too.

How does it all balance out? A separate study by economists Joseph Sabia of San Diego State University and Robert Nielsen of the University of Georgia explored the impact of the minimum wage on the welfare of the poor. They concluded that the minimum wage is spread out so far up into the income distribution that there is “no statistically significant evidence that a higher minimum wage has helped reduce financial, housing, health, or food insecurity.” The authors couldn’t find a beneficial effect of the wage on the welfare even of those most likely to benefit from it.

If a higher minimum wage reduced poverty, one might still question the wisdom of asking some poor people to give up their jobs so that others may have their lot improved. Although that seems like an odd trade, there might be some defense of it. But since the higher minimum wage doesn’t reduce poverty, President Obama’s proposal is indefensible, and even a little bit sinister. He apparently thinks the increased suffering of those unfortunate enough to lose their jobs as the wage jumps is a small price to pay to make Republicans look heartless.

Turning from the heartless to the hopeless, we learn…

Biden’s office apologizes to student reporter for ‘unfortunate mistake’

The office of the vice president has apologized to a University of Maryland student after a member of Joe Biden’s staff confronted the college reporter and forced him to delete photos of an event.

Capital News Service reporter Jeremy Barr was covering Biden’s announcement of a new domestic violence initiative, he told Patch News, and accidentally sat in a section of the audience not meant for the media. He had identified himself as a member of the press upon entry and been directed to that area. Barr took a few pictures of Biden at the podium. After the event, a staffer for Biden confronted him and demanded to watch as he deleted the pictures from his camera.

“I gave her the benefit of the doubt that she was following proper procedures,” Barr told Patch. But Lucy Dalglish, dean of the University of Maryland’s journalism school, filed a formal complaint with the vice president’s office.

“It is our policy that all of our open press events are open press even if a reporter is not in the designated press area,” Biden spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff told The Washington Post. “This was an unfortunate mistake by a staffer who does not regularly interact with the press. Once we learned about it I immediately apologized to the Dean of the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, the reporter involved and to the newspaper. It will never happen again.”

Dalglish, a former media lawyer, called the staffer’s behavior “clearly illegal.” But she was impressed that the vice president’s press secretary called to apologize within five minutes of her complaint.

Any question Dalglish’s reaction would have been remarkably different had the staffer in question worked for a different Vice President; say…Dick Cheney?!?

Meanwhile, back in the Socialist Paradise, Ann Coulter senses…

Trouble in the nanny state 

Like the proverbial monkey typing for infinity and getting Shakespeare, Mayor Bloomberg’s obsession with reforming New Yorkers’ health has finally produced a brilliant ad campaign. Posters are popping up in subway stations and bus stops giving statistics about teen pregnancy that show cute little kids saying things like, “Honestly, Mom … chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?” and “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen.”

(Based on a recent CBS report, the kid could add, “Then again, I’m in the New York City public school system, so even if I graduate I won’t be able to read.”)

It’s one thing to stigmatize “Big Gulp” drinkers, but liberals are hopping mad at this attempt to stigmatize teen pregnancy, 90 percent of which is unwed. To put it another way, if you’re a New York teen with a distended belly these days, it had better be because you’re pregnant.

Planned Parenthood’s Haydee Morales complained that the ads are creating “stigma” and “negative public opinions about teen pregnancy.” (I’m pretty sure that’s the basic idea.) Instead, Morales suggested “helping teens access health care, birth control and high-quality sexual and reproductive health education.” Like the kind they got before becoming pregnant, you mean? Are you new here, Haydee?

Coincidentally, Planned Parenthood happens to provide reproductive health care! Liberals act as if gun owners, soda-guzzlers and smokers are innocent victims of the gun, food and cigarette industries, but the $542 million-a-year birth control industry is a quarry of angels.

The New York Times’ Michael Powell explained in a column that, as a parent of teenagers, he’s learned that the stupidest thing to do is resort to “the shame-and-blame game.” Teenage pregnancy, he states categorically, is a “problem of poverty.” I think we have a chicken-and-egg problem, but let’s stick to liberals’ newfound opposition to shaming campaigns.

Far from opposing stigmas, liberals are the main propagators of them – against cigarettes, guns, plastic bags, obesity, not recycling, Fox News, racist “code words,” not liking “Lincoln” and junk food. The stigma against smoking has gone so swimmingly that you can’t enjoy a little tobacco pleasure 50 yards from another human being without some bossy woman marching over and accusing you of poisoning her.

California is currently running a series of “Reefer Madness”-style anti-smoking ads, including one that shows cigarette smoke going from a woman outside on her porch, up a story, through the door of another apartment, across the living room, down the hallway and into a room where a baby is sleeping. That would be the equivalent of the Bloomberg ads claiming teen pregnancy causes genocide.

And what exactly was the purpose of the Journal-News publishing the names and addresses of every legal gun owner in various counties in New York state a few months ago? To congratulate them? To start a hunting club? No, I believe it was to stigmatize legal gun owners. The fact that we didn’t already know who they were proved that the problem isn’t legal gun ownership. All those legal guns – and no rash of drive-by shootings!

Los Angeles has banned plastic bags at supermarkets, even though reusable canvas bags are portable bacterial colonies. But a little ad campaign describing the downsides of teenage pregnancy – which is still subsidized – and liberals howl in protest.

One begins to suspect that liberals aren’t as interested in stopping teenagers from having illegitimate kids as they claim. Do they believe a teenager who gets pregnant out of wedlock is harming herself and her child as much a teenager who smokes? How about an unwed teen who smokes at a landfill? It’s only a “shame-and-blame game” when liberals secretly approve of the behavior they pretend to oppose.

“Julia decides to have a child”…husband clearly optional!

Unwed mothers have been the perennial excuse for big government, going back to Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who plotted in the 1960s to create broken families, welfare dependency and urban riots to pave the way for socialist revolution. That’s why single mothers are revered victims – victims in need of an ever-expanding social safety net, staffed with well-pensioned government workers. As described in that great book, “Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America,” liberals concoct fake victims in order to victimize the rest of us.

The only thing single mothers are “victims” of is their own choice to have sex with men they’re not married to. Liberals seem to believe that drinking soda is voluntary, but getting pregnant is more like catching the flu.

It would be hard to make the case that fast food, plastic bags and cigarettes do more damage than single motherhood.

• Controlling for socioeconomic status, race and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single mother.
• At least 70 percent of juvenile murderers, pregnant teenagers, high school dropouts, teen suicides, runaways and juvenile delinquents were raised by single mothers.
• A study back in 1990 by the Progressive Policy Institute showed that, absent single motherhood, there would be no difference in black and white crime rates.

So liberals don’t try to make that case. They just say they’re against “shaming” and then go back to shaming gun owners, non-recyclers, smokers and “Big Gulp” aficionados – while subsidizing illegitimacy.

And concurrently, an endless cycle of both crime and poverty.  But at least Liberals sleep better at night.

On the Lighter Side…

And in another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter, we present the dark side of the internet: the dumbing-down of America:

Teens accused of ‘gallon smashing’ at local store

Some Butte teens may be crying over spilled milk. That’s because they face possible charges for imitating an Internet prank known as “gallon smashing” that has gone viral recently. Butte police say one 15-year-old boy was cited with misdemeanor criminal mischief and theft for intentionally destroying two one-gallon cartons of milk in Walmart Friday evening. Police suspect three other teens may have been involved and charges were pending Monday.

The teen grabbed two one-gallon jugs of milk and threw them on the floor in Walmart at about 6:30 p.m., police reported. The jugs ruptured and spilled milk all over the floor; the juvenile then fell to the floor and rolled in the spilled milk, according to the police report. Another teen allegedly recorded the incident with his cell phone, according to Undersheriff George Skuletich. Employees detained the teen accused of smashing the jugs, while the other teens managed to get away.

The boy allegedly told police his friends wanted to record him smashing the milk and then post the video on YouTube, Skuletich said.

The “gallon smashing” prank appeared on the Internet last month. Three teens in Virginia who recorded themselves smashing gallon jugs of milk and juice are said to have started the prank. The videos received national attention after they were posted on YouTube and other teens around the country started making their own gallon-smashing videos.

The perfect poster-children for the eugenics movement.

Finally, in the Sports Section, Mike McKee forwarded a headline which can only be described as frank…and accurate:

Now THAT had to hurt!

Magoo