The Daily Gouge, Monday, August 26th, 2013

On August 25, 2013, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Monday, August 26th, 2013…but before we begin, we must take exception to a headline recently featured in the Washington Examiner:

Army won’t pay for Bradley Manning’s sex change therapy

Au contraire, mon frere! Here’s the juice: by the time this White House is through strong-arming the Pentagon (which these days doesn’t require much if any effort), the Army will have paid not only for his hormone treatments and sex-change surgery, but a new orange dress with matching shoes and handbag.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, it seems the newest member of Team Tick-Tock, like most inexperienced juveniles wholly-unqualified for anything, learns by example:

New UN Ambassador vacationing during critical meetings; only 19 days on job

You’re gonna love this job, Sam; no responsibility and taxpayer-funded vacations whenever you want ’em!

By pulling an Obama, Powers has truly put the “a-s-s” in ambassador. Not only couldn’t she be bothered with jetting back from Ireland for a highly critical meeting, but yet another representative of “the most transparent Administration in history” refused to divulge her whereabouts, let alone the reason for her absence.

Can anyone ever remember the vacation plans of Jean Kirkpatrick, John Bolton or any other qualified American UN ambassador, whatever their political affiliation, being treated as a state secret?!? As Bill Kristol noted…

“Historians will look at this – the president’s statement a year ago, Samantha Power’s tweet yesterday, what’s happening on the ground – and say this is a very, unfortunately, really dark moment for American foreign policy.”

Since we’re on the subject of very, unfortunately really dark moments, the WSJ offers these comments on Der Obafuhrer’s latest attempt to rewrite history:

Obama State University

The President blames colleges for the result of government subsidies.

Suckers!

President Obama recently concluded a five-year campus speaking tour in which he explained to students how his financing programs were making college more affordable. Then on Thursday he kicked off a new campus speaking tour to tell students that college is unaffordable, and that the financing program he has championed faces increasing defaults.

“We’ve got a crisis in terms of college affordability and student debt,” said Mr. Obama, without a trace of irony at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The same man who three years ago forced through a plan to add $1 trillion in student loans to the federal balance sheet over a decade said on Thursday, “Our economy can’t afford the trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt, much of which may not get repaid because students don’t have the capacity to pay it.” Naturally, the President blamed somebody else and demanded more authority over higher education.

Mr. Obama specifically blamed colleges and universities for charging too much. “Not enough colleges have been working to figure out how do we control costs, how do we cut back on costs,” he said. His solution is for the federal government to rate colleges on their effectiveness and efficiency, and then to allocate federal subsidies to the schools that Washington believes are providing the best education at the lowest cost.

Particularly jarring for Mr. Obama’s fans in the faculty lounge, he talked about them on Thursday in the same disrespectful manner that he normally reserves for entrepreneurs. “And I’ve got to tell you ahead of time, these reforms won’t be popular with everybody, especially those who are making out just fine under the current system. But my main concern is not with those institutions; my main concern is the students those institutions are there to serve,” said the President.

Conservative readers may be tempted to chuckle here. And we concede that this latest Obama regulatory onslaught couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch than the university elite who did so much to elect him. But while shifting control of universities from lefty professors to the U.S. Department of Education may seem like a transition between six and a half-dozen, it is not.

What was once how kids worked their way through college is now their primary post-graduation employment option!

As maddening as it can be to see how liberal academics spend the wealth created by hard-working citizens, Americans should think long and hard before allowing the federal government to dominate a system of higher education that is still by all accounts the envy of the world. If the feds are deciding what a quality education is in order to dole out billions in annual aid—in an era when most students can’t afford to matriculate without some form of aid—Washington will certainly dominate. Tying aid to whatever the bureaucrats decide is the right tuition is a back-door form of price controls. Even more disturbing is the idea that a federal political authority will decide which curricula at which institutions represent a good educational value.

Lest taxpayers think that Mr. Obama is simply going to protect their investment in education by demanding more accountability from schools, he made it clear on Thursday that he is not driven by a desire to protect the public fisc. He also called for an expansion of his “Pay as You Earn” program, which caps student-loan payments at 10% of a borrower’s discretionary income, and then forgives the balance in 10 years if the borrower pursues a Beltway-approved job in government or a nonprofit.

Mr. Obama is trodding a well-worn political path. Politicians subsidize the purchase of a good or service, prices inevitably rise in response to this pumped-up demand, and then the pols blame the provider of the good or service for responding to the incentives the politicians created. Think housing finance and medical care. Now President Obama is attacking colleges for rationally raising tuitions and padding their payrolls in response to a subsidy machine that began in 1965.

That’s when the feds launched a program to make college “affordable” by offering a taxpayer guarantee on student loans. Federal grants and loans have been expanding ever since and it’s no coincidence that tuition prices have been rising faster than inflation for decades. This week the White House noted that since the academic year ending in 1983 tuition and fees at four-year public colleges have risen by 257%, while typical family incomes have advanced 16%.

The better answer is to stop the increases in grants and subsidized loans that Mr. Obama has so greatly accelerated. Let educators, students and their parents decide which courses and campus amenities provide the most educational value. As fervently as many professors abhor the idea of free people operating in a free market, they may decide it’s better than federal politicians running their universities.

2+2=5, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, Islam has always been part of America; whatever the source, it’s the SSDD. Only in this case, the “DD” stands for “Different Dictator”.

Speaking of those who would rewrite history, Jonah Goldberg offers a new nickname for MSDNC:

The ‘race conversation’ network

MSNBC has mastered the art of making unracial things racial.

“Why do they seem so determined to also make it racial?” So asks Joy-Ann Reid, the managing editor of The Grio, a web magazine owned by NBC News whose mission is to “focus on news and events that have a unique interest and/or pronounced impact within the national African Americans audience.” The “they” in question are conservatives and journalists asking, among other things, why President Obama hasn’t inserted himself into a new criminal-justice case the way he did in the Trayvon Martin tragedy.

The irony-impaired Reid was asking that question about a heinous murder in Oklahoma, where, according to police, an Australian student was shot by a black youth with the help of two friends (one of whom was white) “for the fun of it.” Police allege that the bored teens spotted Christopher Lane jogging and decided to follow him and shoot him in the back.

Reid asked the question while guest-hosting a show on MSNBC, a network that has mastered the art of making unracial things racial. Just two days earlier, Reid had insisted that there’s a “neoconfederate thread” running through the gun-rights movement. Whatever that means.

Then there’s MSNBC fixture Chris Matthews, who insists, with considerable regularity, that any criticism of Barack Obama is driven by “white supremacy.” Critics of Obamacare, Matthews claims, believe that “the white race must rule.”

Another MSNBC host, Martin Bashir, recently insisted that outrage over the ongoing scandal at the IRS is really nothing more than coded racism. The IRS is the new “N-word,” according to Bashir. “So this afternoon, we welcomed the latest phrase in the lexicon of Republican attacks on this president: the IRS. Three letters that sound so innocent but we know what you mean.”

Lawrence O’Donnell, another MSNBC host, assured viewers during the Republican National Convention last summer that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s joke about Obama’s playing too much golf was really a deliberate racist dog whistle. “These people,” O’Donnell insisted, “reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches.”

And that of course leaves out Al Sharpton, an MSNBC host who can best be understood as the racial equivalent of an ambulance chaser.

Against this backdrop, Reid’s asking why anyone would bring race into the discussion is a bit like a pornographer asking, “Why make this about sex?”

But let’s get back to her question. One high-minded response might be that conservatives are bringing race into this discussion because they are simply doing what has been asked of them by Reid and countless others, including the president and the attorney general: They’re trying to have that coveted “national conversation about race.” Of course, the conversation that the conversation-mongers want is entirely one-sided; they only want to talk about why their ideological enemies are racists. Any other discussion is an incomprehensible and unjustifiable tangent distracting us from what they want to hear and say.

But the truth is, that’s not what is going on. To the extent that people are bringing up race it is to turn the tables, rhetorically at least, on people like Reid and her MSNBC colleagues for their relentless — some might say shameless and disgusting — effort to exploit the George Zimmerman murder trial. Recall that there was no evidence Zimmerman was motivated by racial animus, a fact so inconvenient to NBC News that it unethically edited Zimmerman’s 911 call to make it sound like he was racist. (NBC later apologized and Zimmerman is rightly suing.) This inconvenient truth was also why numerous news outlets insisted on describing Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” — to bend the facts to fit the preferred narrative.

Australian and British newspapers — which do not care about imposing a monolithic liberal narrative on race — are reporting that Lane’s alleged murderers may have been driven by motives other than boredom. But even if the initial reporting proves accurate and these thugs were just trying to break the monotony of the dog days of summer, the lesson for the MSNBC crowd should be the same.

From Obama down to his cheerleaders in the press, liberals have declared unremitting war on their ideological opponents, cynically polarizing the country along racial — and, when possible, gender — lines. They, not conservatives, have been the ones dragging race into any and every political dispute they can. This disgusting strategy has worked well for them, galvanizing minority voters and tarring the Republican brand. I don’t particularly welcome the fact that conservatives are fighting fire with fire, but you can hardly blame them given how liberals like Reid have been asking for it for so long.

We respectfully disagree with Goldberg’s assertion “conservatives are fighting fire with fire”; we’re simply calling Progressive race-baiters out on the glaring hypocrisy evidenced by their selective “outrage”.

Since we’re on the subject of outrage, in a related item, Hope n’ Change offers its unique brand of biting satire on the Left’s latest example of feigned fury:

Just Killing Time

Oh, they grow up and start having others do the killing for them so fast these days (sigh…). But years ago, living in the luxury of Hawaii and attending a private school, we can well imagine little Barry Soetoro longing to gain the acceptance of a peer group by murdering a tourist in cold blood (“That’s from the CHOOM Gang, Sucka!”)

Because he sure as hell doesn’t seem to be bothered about the story of Australian tourist and all around nice guy Chris Lane getting shot to death in Oklahoma by some black teens who were either “bored” or going for a gang initiation. Despite that fact that Obama deliberately injected racial discord into the Trayvon Martin story and said that it demanded soul-searching from our entire nation, he couldn’t care LESS about some dead white Aussie shot by young predators who – yes – look like they could be Obama’s sons. Or even Barry himself 35 years ago.

The White House even claimed to be unaware of the story because, face it, black hoodlums killing a nice white kid for no reason isn’t really news…and even noticing that the incident happened suggests that you’re probably some sort of horrible racist.

Meanwhile, noted race-monger, wife-cheater, and inventor of the frozen spermcicle Jesse Jackson Jr has boldly come forth to say that the cold-blooded murder of white people by young black thugs is “frowned upon.” Way to take a stand, you overpaid, wall-eyed, jive-talking jackass.

Simply put, Hope n’ Change Cartoons is tired of the Lefties trying to invoke race war, while simultaneously showing that they don’t care whatsoever about the very real dangers created by raising a generation of young black men who have reverted to ignorance, lawlessness, and savagery.

But Barry is right – it IS time for a national discussion on race, violence and racial politics. And we suggest that it be held in the streets of Chicago, at night, with NO security for any of the attendees.

Sad Update: This 89-year-old World War II veteran, wounded at Okinawa, wasbeaten to death (With flashlights, no less!) by two black teens yesterday. At the time of this writing, it’s unknown whether they killed him for the change in his pockets, because they were bored, or because the president of the United States strongly suggested that white people – all white people – should be held accountable for the death of Trayvon Martin.

The greatest danger of violence in our nation doesn’t come from guns or even terrorists – but rather from a feral population gone wild.

And an entire political party too terrified of the ignorant monster it’s created to even consider the truth, let alone speak it.

Meanwhile, out West, as Townhall.com reports, a…

NM Court Says Christian Photogs Guilty of Discrimination for Refusing LGBT Weddings

The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a Christian photographer who declined to photograph a same-sex union violated the state’s Human Rights Act and one justice warned the photographers were “compelled by law to compromise the very religious beliefs that inspire their lives.”

…Amber Royster, the executive director of Equality New Mexico, called the court decision a big victory. “What it came down to is this was a case about discrimination,” she told Fox News. “While we certainly believe we are all entitled to our religious beliefs, religious beliefs don’t necessarily make it okay to break the law by discriminating against others.”

In Freedom…but as in Oceania, only if you think the right thoughts!

…“It’s about discrimination,” she said. “It’s not religious rights versus gay rights. We have a law on the books that makes it illegal to discriminate against LGBT persons. It makes it illegal for business to do that and this business broke the law by discriminating against this couple.”

Ken Klukowsi, of the Family Research Council, called the ruling profoundly disturbing. “This decision may bring to Americans’ attention the serious threat to religious liberty posed by overbearing government agencies when it comes to redefining marriage,” he said. “Rather than live and let live, this is forcing religious Americans to violate the basic teachings of their faith or lose their jobs.”

Even though we’re not a constitutional law professor, nor ever pretended…

…to be one, even we grasp the concept that specific freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution trump state laws, no matter how well-intended. New Mexico loses on appeal.

Next up, writing at the WaPo, George Will details the latest setback to The Obamao’s repeated repudiation of the rule of law:

Court orders administration to follow nuclear waste law

Nowadays the federal government leavens its usual quotient of incompetence with large dollops of illegality. This is eliciting robust judicial rebukes, as when, last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia instructed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to stop “flouting the law.” Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh said: “It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case.”

For six decades the nation has been studying the challenge of safely storing nuclear waste from weapons production, Navy vessels and civilian power plants. So far, more than $15 billion has been spent developing a waste repository system (in the 1980s, a Nevada senator misnamed it a waste “suppository”) deep within Yucca Mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 says the NRC “shall consider” the Yucca Mountain application to become a repository, and “shall” approve or disapprove the application within three years of its submission. “Shall” means “must.” The application, submitted in June 2008, has not been acted upon, and the court said: “By its own admission, the Commission has no current intention of complying with the law.”

Judge A. Raymond Randolph’s concurring opinion said: “Former (NRC) Chairman Gregory Jaczko orchestrated a systematic campaign of noncompliance. Jaczko unilaterally ordered Commission staff to terminate the review process in October 2010; instructed staff to remove key findings from reports evaluating the Yucca Mountain site; and ignored the will of his fellow Commissioners.”

Jaczko resigned last year, leaving the NRC in demoralized disarray. The New York Times reported “charges of mismanagement and verbal abuse of subordinates” and that all four of his fellow commissioners, two from each party, complained about Jaczko to the White House and told a congressional committee that (the Times reported) he “unprofessionally berated the agency’s professional staff and reduced female employees to tears with his comments.”

If it looks like a tool, acts like a tool and worked for a tool…any questions?!?

To be fair to him, he was put there to disrupt. He was put there by Nevada’s Sen. Harry Reid (D), on whose staff he had served.

Reid seems uninterested in the metallurgy of waste containment vessels or the geology of the mountain’s 40 miles of storage tunnels where the waste would be stored 1,000 feet underground on 1,000 feet of rock. Rather, Reid, like almost all Nevadans, regards the repository as a threat to Las Vegas, a gambling destination that lives off tourists who are demonstrably irrational about probabilities. Reid prefers the status quo — more than 160 million Americans living within 75 miles of one or more of the 121 locations where more than 70,000 tons of nuclear waste are kept.

The court, which was concerned only with the law, not the mountain, said, “The President must follow statutory mandates so long as there is appropriated money available and the President has no constitutional objection to the statute.” He has none, and Reid has not yet quite succeeded in starving the NRC of funding for the Yucca licensing process.

The NRC said Congress has not yet appropriated the full amount required to complete the process. The court said Congress often appropriates “on a step-by-step basis.” The NRC speculated that Congress may not finish appropriating the sums necessary. The court said that allowing agencies to ignore statutory mandates based on “speculation” about future congressional decisions “would gravely upset the balance of powers between the [government’s] Branches and represent a major and unwarranted expansion of the Executive’s power at the expense of Congress.”

The NRC said small appropriations indicate Congress’s desire to stop the licensing process. The court responded that “Congress speaks through the laws it enacts” and “courts generally should not infer that Congress has implicitly repealed or suspended statutory mandates based simply on the amount of money Congress has appropriated.” The court noted that, “as a policy matter,” the NRC may want to block the Yucca project but “Congress sets the policy, not the Commission.” And the court said there is no permissible executive discretion to disregard “statutory obligations that apply to the Executive Branch.”

This episode is a snapshot of contemporary Washington — small, devious people putting their lawlessness in the service of their parochialism and recklessly sacrificing public safety and constitutional propriety. One can only marvel at the measured patience with which the court has tried to teach the obvious to the willfully obtuse.

No, what one can only marvel at is the fact the Administration will thumb its nose at this court decision just as it has every other which has gone against it. Why? Because no one’s taken any action to make them, which will, quite literally, need to be at the point of a gun.

And in the “Takes One to Know One” segment, Newsbusters.com‘s Noel Sheppard relates the latest self-assessment from Cokie Roberts:

‘What’s Going on About Voting Rights is Downright Evil’

Downright evil? Really?

Maybe Roberts should consult former President Jimmy Carter, who along with former Secretary of State James Baker co-chaired the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform which amongst other things recommended the following:

[T]o make sure that a person arriving at a polling site is the same one who is named on the list, we propose a uniform system of voter identification based on the “REAL ID card” or an equivalent for people without a drivers license. To prevent the ID from being a barrier to voting, we recommend that states use the registration and ID process to enfranchise more voters than ever. States should play an affirmative role in reaching out to non-drivers by providing more offices, including mobile ones, to register voters and provide photo IDs free of charge. There is likely to be less discrimination against minorities if there is a single, uniform ID, than if poll workers can apply multiple standards. In addition, we suggest procedural and institutional safeguards to make sure that the rights of citizens are not abused and that voters will not be disenfranchised because of an ID requirement. We also propose that voters who do not have a photo ID during a transitional period receive a provisional ballot that would be counted if their signature is verified.

Is Jimmy Carter evil, Cokie? Or how about the 74 percent of respondents to a 2012 Washington Post poll who said IDs should be required to vote in this country? Is 3/4 of the nation evil, Cokie? Because they disagree with you?

That Post poll also found that more people are concerned with voter fraud than voter suppression. As such, and not surprisingly, a liberal media member’s views are totally diametric to those of the majority of the nation. Maybe she should rethink her definition of evil!

Hells bells, we can’t get into the Planning & Zoning offices here in Howard County without showing a photo ID. And would Cokie and her Progressive brethren really have us believe minorities, the elderly and others supposedly impacted by voter ID requirements don’t do any of these?!?