The Daily Gouge, Wednesday, June 5th, 2013

On June 4, 2013, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Wednesday, June 5th, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!

First up, we open the Sports Section with a brief personal recollection to mark the passing a true football great:

Deacon Jones not only anchored one of the greatest defensive lines in NFL history, he was among our earliest football idols.

Some years back, Jim Crilley and we played a round of golf at Landsdowne in Leesburg, VA on the heels of former-Redskin Bobby Mitchell’s charity tournament. We still remember the hoof prints NFL greats such as Chuck Bednarik, the man who took out Frank Gifford, left on the greens.

When we adjourned to the grill room to drown our sorrows in a little libation following yet another 18 holes of futility, the only other patron present was one David D. “Deacon” Jones, visionary inventor of the infamous head-slap.

Unwilling to let the opportunity of a lifetime pass by, we approached the Secretary of Defense and introduced ourselves, noting the respect and reverence with which we remembered him; whereupon the good Deacon invited us to join him, and for the next 45 minutes entertained Jimmy and us with stories of his football career and golf game.

Having had the opportunity to meet and spend time with both Deacon Jones and Bruce Smith, we feel privileged to have interacted with two of the three greatest defensive ends in NFL history…and two of the nicest human beings we’ve ever met.

RIP, Deacon.

Next up, in the “We Couldn’t Have Said It Better Ourselves” segment, Oklahoma congressman and former-Naval Aviator Jim Bridenstine tells it like it is:

Speaking of The Dear Misleader, Ramesh Ponnuru details…

Obama’s dangerous contempt for the rule of law

Whatever the investigation into misconduct at the Internal Revenue Service reveals, we already have all the evidence we need to understand President Barack Obama’s fundamental attitude toward the rule of law. That evidence is right there in the public record, and what it shows is indifference and contempt.

The Constitution gives the president the power to appoint officials to fill vacancies when the Senate isn’t in session. In 2012, Obama made such “recess appointments” to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — even though the Senate had stayed in session precisely to keep him from doing so. Obama’s lawyers argued that the Senate wasn’t really in session even though it claimed to be: It was going through the motions to block Obama, but it wasn’t taking up bills or nominations. No previous president had ever tried this maneuver, and an appeals court has just ruled that it was unconstitutional.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the sweeping health-care law that Obama signed in 2010, asks state governments to set up health exchanges, and authorizes the federal government to provide tax credits to people who use those exchanges to get insurance. But most states have refused to establish the online marketplaces, and both the tax credits and many of the law’s penalties can’t go into effect until the states act.

Obama’s IRS has decided it’s going to apply the tax credits and penalties in states that refuse, even without statutory authorization. During the recent scandal over the IRS’s harassment of conservative groups, many Republicans have warned that the IRS can’t be trusted with the new powers that the health law will give the agency. They are wrong about the verb tense: It has already abused those powers.

Overriding Objections

Another provision of the health law authorized the secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, to require employers to cover preventive services in their insurance policies. She decided that almost all employers would have to cover contraception, sterilization and possibly abortion-causing drugs, such as Ella, whether or not the employers objected on religious grounds.

That edict flew in the face of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which stipulated that the government can override religious conscience only when it is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling interest. Republican senators had warned Sebelius of this issue before she imposed the rule. She has admitted that even after their letter, her department imposed it without either requesting a legal analysis from the Justice Department or producing its own memo. Most judges who have ruled on this issue, including some Democratic appointees, have found that the regulation does violate the law.

Last summer, Obama directed immigration agencies not to deport some illegal immigrants who were brought to America as children, and to give them work-authorization permits. In effect, he implemented much of the DREAM Act that Congress has long debated, but never enacted. Defenders of this action said he was merely prioritizing scarce law-enforcement resources, but that excuse won’t wash: It would mean that a future Republican president could announce, for example, that he isn’t going to burden the bureaucracy with collecting capital-gains taxes.

Even if Obama were right about these policies — and I’m sympathetic to the goal of the DREAM Act — he went about them the wrong way, disregarding laws he swore to execute. Complaints about Republican obstructionism are no excuse. Even if the Republicans are behaving badly, they have at least acted lawfully in opposing the president.

Defying Constraints

Obama is not, of course, the first president to flout the law. His supporters will surely respond to this litany by repeating the charge that President George W. Bush “shredded” the Constitution. The Bush administration claimed that the Constitution gave the president powers as commander-in-chief, trumping laws that tried to restrict his ability to protect national security. It was a debatable, but not frivolous, argument.

Obama is making no similar constitutional claim, and his defiance of constraints on his power isn’t confined to one area of policy. Again and again, he has imposed liberal policy preferences rather than follow the law.

In 2011, Obama was asked why he hadn’t imposed the DREAM Act unilaterally. “America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the president, am obligated to enforce the law,” he responded. “There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.” That Obama was right.

The president’s routine violation of the law that he is supposed to uphold isn’t covered in the media as a scandal. It ought to be.

Like Keith Koffler’s list of the Top 20 Obama Administration scandals featured on our home page, what Ponnuru’s listed is just the tip of the iceberg.

And since we’re on the subject of contempt for the law, as Townhall.com‘s Katie Pavlich reports,…

Obama’s Top Brass Use Private Email to Avoid Turning Over Information to the Public

Former Obamao EPA Administrator, illegal email pioneer and current Google employee, the wholly-Dishonorable Lisa “Doughnut” Jackson

We’ve known for months now that former EPA Head Lisa Jackson used multiple non-governmental email accounts when doing government business:

Late last year, the EPA’s critics — including Republicans in Congress — accused former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson of using an email account under the name “Richard Windsor” to sidestep disclosure rules. The EPA said emails Jackson sent using her Windsor alias were turned over under open records requests. The agency’s inspector general is investigating the use of such accounts, after being asked to do so by Congress.

An EPA spokeswoman described Jackson’s alternate email address as “an everyday, working email account of the administrator to communicate with staff and other government officials.” It was later determined that Jackson also used the email address to correspond sometimes with environmentalists outside government and at least in some cases did not correct a misperception among outsiders they were corresponding with a government employee named Richard Windsor.

The same goes for former Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Tom Perez, who President Obama has nominated for Labor Secretary. Perez has used a non-government email account more than 1,200 times since 2009 for official DOJ business. His personal emails were subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee months ago and Perez has refused to comply:

Labor Secretary nominee Tom Perez used his private email account to leak information about official business while he was assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said in a Wednesday letter to Perez.

Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) said it appears Perez used his personal email account almost 1,200 times since 2009 to conduct official department business, including communicating with organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the New York Times, and Talking Points Memo.

Now, the Associated Press is out with a blockbuster report showing many of President Obama’s political appointees use personal email to avoid the Freedom of Information Act and other legal and transparency requirements on a regular basis:

Some of President Barack Obama’s political appointees, including the secretary for Health and Human Services, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press.

The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees’ email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email addresses.

The secret email accounts complicate an agency’s legal responsibilities to find and turn over emails in response to congressional or internal investigations, civil lawsuits or public records requests because employees assigned to compile such responses would necessarily need to know about the accounts to search them. Secret accounts also drive perceptions that government officials are trying to hide actions or decisions.

No sh*t! Particularly coming from…

…the self-proclaimed “most transparent Administration in history”!

Just so we understand the concept of transparency, first there’s this:

Then, as our friend Jeff Foutch noted, there’s the all-too cozy relationship between IRS Commissioner Doug “I Didn’t See A Thing!” Shulman…

…and his fashion-challenged ultra-Liberal wife…

…Susan Anderson. No conflict of interest here…move along.

In a related item, courtesy of The Weekly Standard and Hope ‘n Change, P.J. O’Rourke observes how The Obamao redefines…

“You’re stupid,” is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama. But on Friday morning I picked up the Wall Street Journal and learned that the president had given a speech about the war on terror saying, “This war, like all wars, must end.”

That story was at the top of the front page. Immediately below was a photograph of flowers being laid at a makeshift memorial near the Woolwich Royal Arsenal where machine gunner Lee Rigby was hacked to death by terrorists.

This war, like all wars, must end when someone wins it. The president—speaking at the National Defense University, of all places—said, “the core of al Qaeda . . . is on the path to defeat.” And so it may be. But meanwhile, the core of al Qaeda, its aims and its beliefs, is also on the path to Boston and London and any number of other places.

On page 7 of Friday’s Journal was the headline, “Suicide Bombings in Niger Linked to Mali Islamist Group.” On page 9 was a report of terrorist Hezbollah militias aiding the terrorist Assad regime in attacking the rebel-held Syrian city of Qusayr where the rebels themselves are allied with yet more Islamic terrorists. And on pages 4 and 8 were more bad tidings from that perpetrator, abettor, and friend of terrorism, Iran. Iranian fundamentalists, in the chokehold they have on the country’s political system, are improving their grip. And, “according to current and former U.S. officials,” Iran has “escalated a campaign of cyberassaults against U.S. corporations. . . . The hackers were able to gain access to control-system software that could allow them to manipulate oil or gas pipelines.”

All that on a slow news day.

In 2001 Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, a declaration of war on terrorists and nations that harbor them. In his speech the president said, “I look forward to engaging . . . in efforts to refine and ultimately repeal the AUMF’s mandate.”

I like the president’s use of the word “efforts” here, as though he’s merely trying to be stupid. He doesn’t need to try. Earlier in the week he signed new policy guidance for drone strikes. In the future we will use lethal drones only on terrorists who are a “continuing and imminent threat to the American people” and not on terrorists who are a “significant threat to U.S. interests.” Although, assuming tremendously stupid efforts will be made to tell the two kinds of terrorists apart, maybe I’m wrong about the president not needing to try. The policy guidance also stipulates that there “must be a near certainty” that civilians won’t be killed or injured in a drone strike. Imagine how stupid a WWII Army Air Corps briefing officer would have had to be to say that to his B-17 pilots.

Maybe we pundits don’t tell President Obama, “You’re stupid,” because we are proudly showing off our sensitivity to the negative stereotypes that hurtful language engenders in a way that we didn’t feel was necessary when we were telling Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush, “You’re stupid,” even though actors, WASPs, and Texans are burdened with their fair share of negative lamebrain stereotypes.

More likely it’s because we pundits prize signs of intelligence. We take every opportunity to display our own signs, and President Obama exhibits the same wordy, wonky, academic intelligence indicators that we do, so we don’t call him stupid.

As if the two things were mutually exclusive. I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius. And yet, if we pundits were to gather together our sons and daughters, during their teenage years, and close them for a night in a dimly lit room full of beer and drugs and comfy futons, I can assure you that evidence of stupidity would be found the next morning.

But the most likely reason that we don’t call President Obama stupid is that it’s such a cul-de-sac of a word. Stupid gives the pundit nothing to perform punditry upon. Call a man ignorant and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up. Call a man misguided and you transform your column or blog post or TV appearance into a valuable and beneficent German shepherd with a handle on its back and you lead the poor soul in his blindness. Call a man, best of all, wicked and you get to don the sacramental vestments, climb into the pulpit and thunder forth with such a sermon as to bring him weeping to the font of righteousness or cause the Lord God Almighty to strike him with a thunderbolt in his pew or something fun like that. But call a man stupid and . . . there it is.

And there it is: Dopey stimulus, obtuse bailout, noodle-headed Obamacare, half-wit Dodd-Frank, damfool IRS Tea Party crashers, AP and Fox News beset by oafish peeping Toms and the Benghazi tale told by an idiot. One could go on. Stupid is a great force in human affairs. And the great force has a commander in chief.

Not only a Commander-in-Chief, but a…

…President to boot!

Turning now to Military Movements, we learn the…

West Point rugby team benched over emails deemed derogatory to women

The U.S. Military Academy men’s rugby team is temporarily disbanded after cadets forwarded emails that were derogatory to women, a West Point spokesman said Monday. The 60 cadets on the club-level team violated the academy’s conduct codes through an email chain that included content that was immature, unprofessional, disrespectful and unacceptable, Lt. Col. Webster Wright said.

“It was locker room trash,” said Wright, who would not detail the contents of the emails.

You know, “locker room trash”…like one would expect in a men’s locker room!

General Dempsey obviously prefers his soldiers less resemble Chesty Puller, and more the Nihilists from The Big Lebowski:

Today’s Pentagon Brass: just an updated version of Benedict Arnold.

Turning to the Religion Section, as the AP inaccurately informs us…

Jury sides with Ohio teacher who was fired after getting pregnant via artificial insemination

A Catholic school teacher who was fired after she became pregnant through artificial insemination was awarded more than $170,000 Monday after winning her anti-discrimination lawsuit against an Ohio archdiocese. A federal jury found that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati discriminated against Christa Dias by firing her in October 2010.

The jury said the archdiocese should pay a total of $71,000 for back pay and compensatory damages and $100,000 in punitive damages. Dias had sued the archdiocese and two of its schools; the jury didn’t find the schools liable for damages.

Dias’ attorney, Robert Klingler, had argued she was fired simply because she was pregnant and unmarried, a dismissal he said violated state and federal law. He had suggested damages as high as $637,000, but Dias said she was satisfied with the jury’s award. “It was never about the money,” she said. “They should have followed the law and they didn’t.”

Steven Goodin, the attorney for the archdiocese and the schools, had argued Dias was fired for violating her contract, which he said required her to comply with the philosophies and teachings of the Catholic church. The church considers artificial insemination immoral and a violation of church doctrine. “We gave always argued that this case was about a contract violation and should never have been allowed to come to trial,” Goodin said after the verdict.

…Dias, who is not Catholic, testified she didn’t know artificial insemination violated church doctrine or her employment pact. She said she thought the contract clause about abiding by church teachings meant she should be a Christian and follow the Bible.

What the AP doesn’t deem newsworthy until the very end of the article is that not only was Dias unmarried, but a lesbian. What does it say about our justice system when a Roman Catholic institution is prevented from terminating a pregnant lesbian?!?

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to today’s entry in the “What Do You Call 100 Lawyers Driving Off A Cliff In A Bus?” segment, courtesy of Drudge: