It’s Tuesday, September 24th, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!

First up, words of wisdom from the WSJ which will likely go unheeded by elements of the GOP seemingly hell-bent on a confrontation even Sarah Palin realizes they cannot win:

Carve-outs for Congress

An honest way to take on ObamaCare, if the GOP will give up its benefits and the White House’s special subsidy exemption.

Congress’s ObamaCare confrontation is quickly deepening into a Cuban missile crisis, albeit a version that ends with a mushroom cloud. Smarter Republicans know they might be nuked, which is why they want to back away from the “defunding” brinksmanship. There’s a better strategy if Republicans will put their own privileges in play.

On Friday the House passed a bill cancelling spending for the Affordable Care Act, but the GOP needs a realistic replacement short of a government shutdown once Senate Democrats restore the money. One option is the illegal ObamaCare exemption for Members and their staff. This dispensation is the only ObamaCare abuse that Republicans won’t criticize. Is that because it was perpetrated on their behalf?

The Affordable Care Act requires the 11,000 people who work on Capitol Hill to purchase their health insurance on its exchanges, but many of them earn too much to qualify for subsidies. That’s a financial hit worth about $5,000 for individuals and $11,000 for families. So in early August President Obama’s personnel team came to the rescue with a let-the-good-times-roll regulation that entitles Members and aides to their current premium contributions, on the basis of zero legal authority.

Liberals consider the income thresholds for ObamaCare subsidies to be important tools for their social engineering. Shielding the elites from those thresholds creates one set of rules for them and another for the rest of America. Among the many extralegal ObamaCare waivers and exemptions, carve-outs for well-connected, well-off Washingtonians are among the worst.

One of the few Republicans who is making himself a Senator non grata by pointing all this out is Lousiana’s David Vitter. He’s been shopping around an amendment that would overturn the opt-out legislatively.

But his colleagues haven’t taken too kindly to Mr. Vitter’s candor. First GOP staffers colluded with their counterparts across the aisle to prevent Mr. Vitter from attaching his measure to an unrelated energy bill. When their cloakroom mugging failed, Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled the whole thing from the floor in part to prevent an up-or-down vote.

Mr. Reid then held a tetchy press conference to denounce “these really juvenile political games” and claim that “we’ll be treated like the rest of the federal employees.” Yet Members are supposed to join the exchanges to experience ObamaCare first-hand like their constituents, not from the vantage point of a cushy federal job.

Mr. Reid’s defensive crouch shows that perks for the political class are impossible for the political class to defend in public. Me-thee favoritism resonates at a visceral level like few other issues, and while the press corps didn’t notice, the subject came up constantly at town halls over the recess. An August poll by the conservative group Independent Women’s Voice found that 92% of likely voters think the exemption is unfair, regardless of their view of ObamaCare. Even 88% of Democrats are opposed.

The larger mystery is the Republican cone of silence, unless this is merely a conflict between their wallets and their principles, and their wallets won. Advertising to voters that they’re for sale for as little as five grand isn’t the best way to win an election, but some Members really are that dumb. We hear at a recent House GOP business meeting one Congressman stood up and complained about the hardships of his $174,000 salary, as if he were a line cook at a fast-food restaurant.

We report the incident only to point out that if Republicans were shrewder, they’d try to ride this wave of voter revulsion. Add self-dealing to the rotisserie of ObamaCare grievances and force Democrats to either pass the Vitter amendment or mount a lengthy, embarrassing defense of why they deserve to be treated differently than everybody else.

Republican staffers feel chiselled on take-home pay, and most people understand that large employers sponsor health benefits as part of compensation. The solution is to make staffers whole honestly. Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn says any competently managed congressional office can scrape together the money for raises from its overall budget. This being Congress, maybe such thrift isn’t feasible. In that case, the House and Senate can negotiate a modest salary increase.

Until the GOP stampede, Democrats were the ones in a health benefits lather, and Nancy Pelosi lobbied the White House to improvise the subsidy fix. Public shaming combined with self-interest would be a powerful incentive for Democrats to give up something in return, even if they’ll never vote to defund the bill. Maybe they’ll agree to repeal the medical device tax, or delay the individual mandate, or help the real fast-food employees who can’t get a full-time job because of ObamaCare’s 30-hour workweek.

Thanks to Mr. Vitter’s persistence, some Senators and the House leadership seem to be warming to his strategy, and so much the better. Liberals define populism in terms of income, “the rich” against everyone else, but the real class conflict in America is between the government nomenklatura and the masses. Republicans are sitting on a potent theme, and if they hate ObamaCare as much as they claim, the least they can do is try to turn the Congressional carve-out to their advantage.

This is a position even America’s low-information voters can understand; and will likely support given the historically-low approval ratings of politicians in general, and Congress in particular.

Since we’re on the subject of low-information voters and representatives with historically-low approval ratings, we turn now to the Old Mother Hubbard segment, courtesy of the Washington Times, which reports…

Rep. Nancy Pelosi: Nothing left to cut in budget — ‘the cupboard is bare’

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says Republican-led efforts to rein in government spending are pointless because there is nothing left to cut in the almost $4 trillion-a-year federal budget.

“The cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make. It’s really important that people understand that,” Mrs. Pelosi, California Democrat, said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We cannot have cuts just for the sake of cuts.”

“The cupboard is bare”; yeah…

This is particularly rich, coming as it does immediately on the heels of this headline featured in yesterday’s edition:

House CR Forks Over $174,000 for Late Senator’s Wife

At the risk of sounding judgmental, we’d have to agree with Wolfgang Puck and say Mrs. Pelosi is a…

In a related demonstration of patent Progressive prevarication…

Obama: Raising Debt Ceiling Won’t Lead to More Debt

“It’s a math thing; you wouldn’t understand…particularly if you’re the recent product of a public school system!”

While reading from the teleprompter in front of the Business Roundtable headquarters in Washington DC, President Obama suggested that raising the National Debt Limit would not increase the Nation’s Debt. Well – actually – he didn’t suggest that…He simply said it:

“Now, this debt ceiling — I just want to remind people in case you haven’t been keeping up — raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt.”

Um..Ok. I mean, well, it has increased our debt every other time it’s been raised…So, are we expected to believe that government intends to keep from issuing more debt this time? If that’s the case, why raise the limit? It almost seems like the President is using new Common-Core math standards in his explanation of the debt limit negotiations.

Of course he didn’t always think in such nuanced, and incorrect, ways. Back as a Senator from the great state of Chicago (No..That’s not a typo. I consider Chicago its own state.) Obama complained about having to vote for an increase in the National Debt to over $8 trillion dollars. Roughly $9 trillion dollars later our creditors might be wishing that anonymous senator from Chicago had remained anonymous.

Yeah…like the same thing won’t happen next year…and the year after…and the year after that!

After a 60-month stream of bald-faced lies of similarly epic proportions, is it any wonder, as Commentary Magazine‘s Jonathan Tobin suggests…

Partisanship Is All Obama Has Left

What was President Obama thinking when he chose to give a harshly partisan speech yesterday afternoon in Washington while part of the city was still shut down as police sought to ascertain the whereabouts of the lone gunman who had earlier killed 12 people at the capital’s Navy Yard? Though he paid lip service to the tragedy, he quickly switched back to his prepared remarks in which he used the fifth anniversary of the start of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown to bash his Republican opponents. The confrontational tone of the speech would have been problematic on any day, especially for the man who likes to claim he’s the only adult in the room and is ready to compromise with his opponents. But in choosing to stick to his script rather than to understand that this wasn’t the moment to lash out, the president demonstrated more than just bad timing or an inability think on his feet.

In a second term that has been largely characterized by scandals, fiascos, and gridlock, yesterday was another low point. As he settles into what will be an unusually long lame-duck period, Obama is forcing even many of those who voted for him to understand just how dysfunctional this White House has become. After the spectacle of indecision and retreat that was his Syria policy in the last month, and a year in which he proved again that he hasn’t the leadership skills to broker a deal with anyone but his sycophants, all Obama has left for us is anger at his political foes and a reflexive need to blame them for all of the country’s woes and his own failures.

As bad as things seem, the president should still be counting his blessings. Though even much of the liberal mainstream media has awoken to the impotence of this president, most of their main organs are still determined to minimize his shortcomings. Imagine if it was George W. Bush who had given an all-out attack on Democrats while a disaster unfolded in the vicinity, as Obama did yesterday. Compare yesterday to W’s decision not to bolt immediately from the elementary school classroom where he was reading to children when he learned of the 9/11 attacks. Bush was endlessly mocked for lingering until he had finished reading to the kids before assuming command. But Obama’s determination to ignore the circumstances of the moment and stick to his obsessive kicking of the GOP was far worse. Had Bush behaved as Obama did the anger, opprobrium, and invective thrown in his direction from the nation’s leading editorial pages and the talking heads on every network but Fox would have been the story for days. But since this is the president that liberals are still straining to rationalize if not defend, most pundits simply ignored it.

But, as with Syria, we can’t blame this on difficult circumstances, incompetent staff, or second-term blues in the West Wing. The problem in this administration is the man at the top of the pyramid. Though blessed with a still largely adulatory press, a formidable political machine, great rhetorical skills, and a historic status as our first African-American president that serves as a lifetime political get-out-of-jail free card, Barack Obama can only dictate, not persuade. When confronted with the fact that many Americans disagree with his ideological agenda, his only response is the same today as it was the day he arrived in the White House: to demonize his opponents and to attempt to beat them into submission.

All second terms are difficult, but this one is going to be worse than most because at its heart this presidency runs on vitriol rather than vision. If we are to believe spokesman Jay Carney, it never occurred to anyone to postpone the anti-Republican rant. But most of all it never crossed Obama’s mind that there was anything more important than venting his anger at Republicans and taking yet another opportunity to pass the buck onto the opposition for his own failures. If partisanship is all the president has to offer, it is because after repeatedly demonstrating his incompetence and with nothing to fall back upon but the same stale liberal patent nostrums, partisanship is all he has left in his bag of tricks.

Generous critics will put down yesterday’s speech as a moment of tone deafness. A media that is always willing to give this president the benefit of the doubt that they never extended to his predecessor will quickly move on. But the image of the president raging at his opponents should linger as an apt symbol of this presidency. Barack Obama is still the most powerful person in the world, but he is trapped by his own shortcomings into a posture in which all he can do is stumble from one crisis to another while blaming it all on others. How sad for the country. How pathetic for a man who was once thought to be a symbol of hope.

Not by us; not even for a moment.  The only thing The Obamao’s ever symbolized in our mind is Socialism, at it’s freedom-stifling finest; the ultimate triumph of feelings over fact, reaction over reality.

On the Lighter Side…

Next up, Hank Murphy shows us what part of Russia The Dear Misleader sees from his backyard…

…while Balls Cotton offers these views of what passes for American “policy” in the Middle East:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter:

Prosecutor: 3 Teens Charged In Beating Death Of Homeless Man In N.J.

2 13-Year-Olds, 14-Year-Old Remanded To Hudson Co. Youth Detention Center

No word yet whether Chicago’s police chief will call for a federal anti-beating statute.  Meanwhile, across the Pond, in an eerily similar story, Britain’s national prohibition against beatings apparently functions as well…

…as it’s gun ban. 

Magoo