It’s Saturday, December 3rd….and we’re home in bed, deathly ill with a Man Cold….

….so since we can’t do much else, here’s The Gouge!

First up, a brief commentary inspired by a few recent headlines….

U.S. Military to Bans Bibles at Hospital

Seattle Bans ‘Buy American’ Ads

Senate Legalizes Sodomy and Bestiality in U.S. Military

and comedian Adam Corolla’s comments (CAUTION: contains terribly graphic, yet totally accurate language!) on the OWS bowel movement:

Here’s the juice: America is looking less and less like this….

….and more and more like THAT!

Sure, once these puerile policies saw the light of day, both the Navy and Seattle disavowed any knowledge or their earlier actions.  And while such stupidity from an Liberal enclave in the Pacific Northwest is to be expected, the continued “slouching towards Gomorrah” of our Armed Forces is, in our view, a cause for great alarm.

We’re second to none in our respect for the brave men and women serving in uniform; it’s their leaders we increasingly disdain.  In We Were Soldiers Once….And Young, Hal Moore relates an event that occurred on July 28, 1965:

“On that day, convinced that the President’s escalation [of the Vietnam War] without a declaration of emergency was an act of madness, General Harold K. Johnson, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, drove to the White House with the intention of resigning in protest.  He had already taken the four silver stars off each shoulder of his summer uniform.  As his car approached the White House gates, General Johnson faltered in his resolve; he convinced himself that he could do more by staying and working inside the system than by resigning in protest.  The general ordered his driver to turn around and take him back to the Pentagon.  This decision haunted Johnny Johnson all the rest of his life.”

And may well have cost ten thousands of young Americans their lives.  For whatever reason, at a critical juncture in America’s history, Johnny Johnson lacked either the discernment recognize what was right, or the moral courage to do it.

Some forty-six years later, things unfortunately haven’t changed.  In what is to a certain degree merely a reflection of America’s declining character and morality, our country’s military preparedness and national defense have been repeatedly and continually sacrificed on the altar of political correctness and “social change”.  Consider the following:

–  Hundreds of innocent officers are cashiered from the service following Tailhook, the scandal that never was.

–  A Islamic terrorist is able to claim the lives of 13 soldiers at Ft. Hood because of the Army’s obsession with diversity; as Chief of Staff General George Casey to eloquently put it: “….as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.“

–  Women are cleared to serve on Navy vessels, despite possessing the arm and upper body strength necessary to assist in firefighting and other damage control assignments.

–  Despite senior officers offering fifteen reasons why the rescission of “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell would materially and adversely impact force effectiveness and not one way it would improve it, JCS Chairman “Moonbeam” lends his full support to the first U.S. military policy that puts the personal desires of an individual over the needs of the service

In each case, senior officers KNEW political correctness had no place in a our Armed Forces, as well as that the civilian authorities, while bound to be obeyed, were acting not in the best interests of the country, but engaged in Liberal social engineering.  Yet not a single senior officer, not one, ever resigned in protest.

Think of it this way: bestiality….but not Bibles.  Sodomy….not the Sacraments.  Diversity….not defense.

We’re neither he-man woman haters nor homophobic; it’s just that serving in the military isn’t a job, nor is it intended to be an adventure.  It’s a deadly serious commitment requiring those willing to risk their lives on the altar of freedom subsume all semblances of self to the good of the service….which includes race, religion, gender and sexual orientation.

The only question is, do any of the Brass see this as a dire and deepening problem; or, more importantly, have the balls to do anything about it?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Next, in ” There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics” segment, John Lott relates the reality behind the latest unemployment figures:

What the New Unemployment Numbers Are Telling Us

The new unemployment numbers are a lot worse than the headlines indicate. The news media is breathlessly reporting today that 120,000 jobs were created in November. But with the working age population increasing by about 160,000 people each month, job creation isn’t even keeping up with the number of people entering the work force. So how is it possible for the unemployment rate to fall from 9.0 to 8.6 percent?

The explanation is actually pretty simple. People are only counted as unemployed as long as they are actively looking for work. It is good news when the number to falls if it means that Americans are getting new jobs. It is not so good if the number falls because people are simply giving up looking for work.

In November, the numbers could hardly have been worse — 487,000 people simply gave up looking for work and left the labor force. That is the 6th worst report since the recession started 48 months ago. Even more startling, 5 of those 6 worse reports have occurred since the “recovery” supposedly started in June 2009 (See this link here).

Having people giving up looking for work in such massive numbers probably isn’t too surprising. The average number of weeks that the unemployed are looking for work has reached record lengths – almost twice the previous record set during the Reagan administration. And things have only gotten worse: the longest job searches weren’t during the recession – the longest searches for jobs were taking place during 2011, two years into the “recovery.”

By the end of the recession in June 2009, 27 percent of the unemployed searched for work for over six months. In November, that stood at almost 43 percent.

The 120,000-job growth number only looks good in comparison to how bad things have been going. In normal times members of the media would regularly point out that you can’t lower the unemployment rate unless job growth keeps up with the growth in population. But even these 120,000 are likely to be revised downward substantially next month.

The 120,000 number is based on a survey by the Department of Labor of businesses (the so-called Establishment Survey), and these numbers will be adjusted over the next couple of months. A much more comprehensive measure that does an extremely good job of matching the final adjusted Department of Labor numbers is the daily income-tax deposits to the U.S. Treasury from all salaried U.S. employees. These deposits usually are within 10 percent of the final Department of Labor numbers, and they showed only 64,000 jobs being added in November.

The second concern is that a large number of the jobs being created are “temporary service sector” jobs. (i.e., the Christmas season?!?) Even accepting the 120,000-job growth number, fewer than 100,000 of them are permanent jobs. Firms have simply not been willing to commit to giving people long-term employment.

Again, this isn’t really very surprising. The massive number of regulations coming out of Washington DC these days make it hard for companies to plan for the future. (See George Will’s commentary immediately below.) If you don’t think the regulations are getting bizarre, take one proposed regulation that was just reveal this week. The Obama administration wants to ban many children under 18 from working on their family farms. And don’t even think of letting them try helping out on their grandparents’ or neighbors’ farms.

During the 2008 presidential campaign Obama promised to bring the country together, saying that he would “turn the page on the ugly partisanship in Washington.” Yet this week Obama told an audience in the battleground state of Pennsylvania that Republicans were trying to deal a “massive blow to the economy” by blocking the payroll tax extension.

The only problem is that even Obama knew that was false. Republican leaders in both the Senate and House supported the extension, they just objected to the higher income taxes that Obama wanted to impose on higher income individuals. Indeed, at another speech that same day to another audience Obama acknowledged that Republican House Speaker John Boehnerof Ohio and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell“have both indicated that it probably does make sense not to have taxes go up for middle class families.”

But with a staggering nearly 500,000 leaving the labor force in just one month, it is hard to get excited about 120,000 jobs being created, an increase that doesn’t even match the growth in the working age population. People are supposed to be entering the labor for, not leaving it, during a recovery.

Yes, in the finest tradition of other infamous totalitarian tyrannies, Team Tick-Tock continues to operate under the assumption it matters not is what true or false, but exclusively what is believed.  And following in the footsteps of Pravda and Der Sturmer, the MSM dutifully reports the State’s version of reality….without comment or question.

In a related item courtesy of George Lawlor, George Will provides irrefutable evidence of the insanity that characterizes this Administration’s “policies”:

Choking on Obamacare

In 1941, Carl Karcher was a 24-year-old truck driver for a bakery. Impressed by the large numbers of buns he was delivering, he scrounged up $326 to buy a hot dog cart across from a Goodyear plant. And the war came.

So did millions of defense industry workers and their cars. And, soon, Southern California’s contribution to American cuisine — fast food. Including, eventually, hundreds of Carl’s Jr. restaurants. Karcher died in 2008, but his legacy, CKE Restaurants, survives. It would thrive, says CEO Andy Puzder, but for government’s comprehensive campaign against job creation.

CKE, with more than 3,200 restaurants (Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s), has created 70,000 jobs, 21,000 directly and 49,000 with franchisees. The growth of those numbers will be inhibited by — among many government measures — Obamacare.

When CKE’s health-care advisers, citing Obamacare’s complexities, opacities and uncertainties, said that it would add between $7.3 million and $35.1 million to the company’s $12 million health-care costs in 2010, Puzder said: I need a number I can plan with. They guessed $18 million — twice what CKE spent last year building new restaurants. Obamacare must mean fewer restaurants.

And therefore fewer jobs. Each restaurant creates, on average, 25 jobs — and as much as 3.5 times that number of jobs in the community. (CKE spends about $1 billion a year on food and paper products, $175 million on advertising, $33 million on maintenance, etc.)

Puzder laughs about the liberal theory that businesses are not investing because they want to “punish Obama.” Rising health-care costs are, he says, just one uncertainty inhibiting expansion. Others are government policies raising fuel costs, which infect everything from air conditioning to the cost (including deliveries) of supplies, and the threat that the National Labor Relations Board will use regulations to impose something like “card check” in place of secret-ballot unionization elections.

CKE has about 720 California restaurants, in which 84 percent of the managers are minorities and 67 percent are women. CKE has, however, all but stopped building restaurants in this state because approvals and permits for establishing them can take up to two years, compared to as little as six weeks in Texas, and the cost to build one is $100,000 more than in Texas, where CKE is planning to open 300 new restaurants this decade.

CKE restaurants have 95 percent employee turnover in a year — not bad in this industry — and the health-care benefits under CKE’s current “mini-med” plans are capped in a way that makes them illegal under Obamacare. So CKE will have to convert many full-time employees to part-timers to limit the growth of its burdens under Obamacare.

In an economic climate of increasing uncertainties, Puzder says, one certainty is that many businesses now marginally profitable will disappear when Obamacare causes that margin to disappear. A second certainty is that “employers everywhere will be looking to reduce labor content in their business models as Obamacare makes employees unambiguously more expensive.”

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, by 2008 the cost of federal regulations had reached $1.75 trillion. That was 14 percent of national income unavailable for job-creating investments. And that was more than 11,000 regulations ago.

Seventy years ago, the local health department complained that Karcher’s hot dog cart had no restroom facilities. He got help from a nearby gas station. A state agency made him pay $15 for workers’ compensation insurance. Another agency said that he owed more than the $326 cost of the cart in back sales taxes. For $100, a lawyer successfully argued that Karcher did not because his customers ate their hot dogs off the premises.

Time was, American businesses could surmount such regulatory officiousness. But government’s metabolic urge to boss people around has grown exponentially and today CKE’s California restaurants are governed by 57 categories of regulations. One compels employees and even managers to take breaks during the busiest hours, lest one of California’s 200,000 lawyers comes trolling for business at the expense of business.

Barack Obama has written that during his very brief sojourn in the private sector he felt like “a spy behind enemy lines.” Puzder knows what it feels like when gargantuan government is composed of multitudes of regulators who regard business as the enemy. And 22.9 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to look for employment know what it feels like to be collateral damage in the regulatory state’s war on business.

And why, inquiring minds want to know, would the private sector cause The Dear Leader to feel like “a spy behind enemy lines”?  Because he’s not only antithetically opposed to the concept of private business, but against the very idea of personal responsibility and initiative that fuels it.

Then there’s this scorching snippet from BusinessInsider.com, which informs us:

Investor Leon Cooperman Sends Monster, Scathing Letter To Obama

Omega Advisors Founder Leon Cooperman sent a scathing letter to President Obama yesterday, and its contents are just short of being outright brutal. In the three page letter, Cooperman outlines his grievances with Obama’s administration, calling his policy decisions “profligate and largely ineffectual” and calling Obama out for using a political rhetoric that promotes the ideas of class warfare.

Cooperman came from very humble roots (his dad was a plumber in the South Bronx) but is now worth around $1.8 billionafter rising through the ranks at Goldman Sachsin the 1980s and 1990s and starting Omega Advisors, a hedge fund sponsor.

The letter has clear and eloquent prose, but that only adds a sharper edge to the biting statements made by Cooperman. We picked out the best parts…

Cooperman’s biggest gripe with Obama is his policitizing of class division, which he feels exacerbates the problems facing Amercia.

I can justifiably hold you accountable for is your and your minions’ role in setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us that smacks of what so many have characterized as “class warfare”. Whether this reflects your principled belief that the eternal divide between the haves and have-nots is at the root of all the evils that afflict our society or just a cynical, populist appeal to his base by a president struggling in the polls is of little importance. What does matter is that the divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them.

He supports the policy debates and possible reforms going on in Capitol Hill, and says he doesn’t mind being taxed more to help get. Cooperman has also signed Warren Buffett’s giving pledge. Yet..

But what I do find objectionable is the highly politicized idiom in which this debate is being conducted. Now, I am not naive. I understand that in today’s America, this is how the business of governing typically gets done – a situation that, given the gravity of our problems, is as deplorable as it is seemingly ineluctable. But as President first and foremost and leader of your party second, you should endeavor to rise above the partisan fray and raise the level of discourse to one that is both more civil and more conciliatory, that seeks collaboration over confrontation.

And Cooperman keeps going back to Obama’s use of class division as a political strategy…

To frame the debate as one of rich-and-entitled versus poor-and-dispossessed is to both miss the point and further inflame an already incendiary environment. It is also a naked, political pander to some of the basest human emotions – a strategy, as history teaches, that never ends well for anyone but totalitarians and anarchists.

He ends the letter by using an anecdote from Obama’s past, saying Obama is now supporting the groups that he used to fight against in Chicago.

Rather than assume that the wealthy are a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot who must be subjugated by the force of the state, set a tone that encourages people of good will to meet in the middle. When you were a community organizer in Chicago, you learned the art of waging a guerilla campaign against a far superior force. But you’ve graduated from that milieu and now help to set the agenda for that superior force. You might do well at this point to eschew the polarizing vernacular of political militancy and become the transcendent leader you were elected to be.

We’re inclined to agree a number of voters were duped into electing The Obamao as a genuine agent of change.  But we believe a significant portion of his supporters knew what he was about, and are only disappointed he hasn’t been able to wreak more havoc on America.

Meanwhile, Katie Pavlich informs as Rome continues to burn, Nero’s off on another vacation:

Is This a Joke? Obama Off to Hawaii for Seventeen Day Vacation

Is it a joke?  Most certainly; but it’s on us!

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s these three beauties, courtesy of Chris Roth:

Finally, in another sign the Apocalypse is upon us, James Taranto reports….

Meanwhile, BusinessInsider.comreports that “a young New Yorker we’ll call Minerva McGonagall* was tired of dipping into her savings to keep up with her Manhattan lifestyle”:

She discovered Match.com–the perfect site for a broke 23-year-old. . . .

McGonagall started eating out five nights a week using a rotation of different guys she met through the dating site. McGonagall kept things simple–no more than five dates with the same guy.

The investment banker types were thrilled to woo her with extraordinary restaurants like the underground taqueria La Esquina and a Japanese restaurant, Megu, in Tribeca. One guy even took her to a champagne bar and purchased a $200 bottle.

McGonagall went from easily spending $500 a month on dinners alone to having someone else dole out an average of $60-plus per night. She also stopped eating lunch and opted for a light breakfast to save even more.

In case you have a date coming up, the New York Observerreports that “Minerva McGonagall’s” real name is Jessica Sporty (pictured above). Anyway, we know what you’re thinking, but hey, you can’t eat dignity.

To which we can only add….

Magoo