It’s Tuesday, December 13th, 2011….but before we begin, two personal notes.  First, a very “Happy Birthday” goes out to our youngest son Travis (Age 22), who, incidentally, just received an internship at WBAL in Baltimore.  Travis is completing a BA in Communications Arts at Salisbury State and hopes to pursue a career in broadcasting.  We see him as a voice of Conservative reason in a desert of Liberalism.

Second, as our eldest son Jon recently asked for the hand of the girl of his dreams, one Elizabeth Corker, in marriage….and she accepted….congratulations go out to both Jon and Liz.  As we’ll likely say at the rehearsal dinner (which we hope Daniel F. and Ronda Feeney will attend!):

May God be with you and bless you.
May you see your children’s children.
May you be poor in misfortunes
and rich in blessings.
May you know nothing but happiness
from this day forward.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Harry Unhinged, courtesy of Guy Benson and Townhall.com:

 “It’s very clear that private sector jobs have been doing just fine.  It’s public sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers.”

 

 “Millionaire job-creators are like unicorns; they’re impossible to find and don’t exist.”

We don’t know what’s worse; that the citizens of Nevada see fit to reelect this bumbling boob….or that the only man in Washington dumber than Unhinged Harry is….

….115 grains away from the Oval Office?!?

Next up, as John Ransom notes, since he’s flat on his back, totally out of airspeed and ideas, when the class warfare speeches start losing traction,….

Obama Should Tell Us How He Killed Bin Laden

 

As Barack Obama resurrects his Osama-Bin-Laden-Is-Still-Dead reelection tour, he might want to sit down and tell the American people exactly how he got Bin Laden. Seriously: I’d love to hear the story of how he put together the operation that killed the world’s most dangerous man. He must have trained for a long time to pull it off.

Because one of the reasons Obama is using to argue for his reelection to the post of president of these here United 57 States of America is that he killed Bin Laden. Yeah. That’s right. And all this time you thought he was golfing?

Forget about the economy and jobs. According to Obama, the economy is the fault of George Bush and the Republicans who won’t raise taxes.

The budget? Oh, that’s the fault of the greedy economy that won’t allow him to raise taxes.

The debt? That’s the fault of greedy bankers and investors who expect to get paid back by the United States of America- and thus won’t allow, him, Barack Obama, president of the United 57 States of America, to raise taxes.

See the pattern here?

But Bin Laden: That’s all, one-hundred percent Barack Obama. Buy that man a Dos Equis…and another one. This is verging on a reality that could put Obama up there with The Most Interesting Man in the World.  Or at least make a great story for the J. Peterman catalogue.

Never mind that Afghanistan is coming apart. Never mind that Obama’s strategy to fire off missiles in Pakistan has damaged the relationship with our most important ally in fighting terrorists. Never mind that Obama’s unilateral decision to get American troops out of Iraq has ceded the area to Iran. Never mind that we have a better idea what we are doing on the budget than we do on foreign policy.

Blah, blah, blah.

Forget too about the breakup of Europe. Or that on Obama’s watch we have entered a dangerous new age with weakened allies, the US isolated from the community of nations in a way incomprehensible to any president since the Great Depression.

Forget all this, because we are going to hear tell how he, Barack Obama, president of the United 57 States of America, made like Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans and took Bin Laden off the field.

Tick-Tock would do well to heed a verse from Proverbs our dear, departed Mother was known to quote: Let another praise thee, and not thine own mouth”.  Then again, Proverbs is found in the Holy Bible and the Torah, not the Koran.

Meanwhile, rumors the REAL reason behind the bin Laden hit….

….remain unconfirmed!

But since we brought up the subject of religion, the WSJ details….

The Church of Kathleen Sebelius

A zealous administration wants to require all health insurance plans to cover contraception, sterilization and drugs known to induce abortion.

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203518404577094631979925326.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

And in International News of Note….

Obama calls on Iran to give back downed US drone

 

The Obama administration said Monday it has delivered a formal request to Iran for the return of a U.S. surveillance drone captured by Iranian armed forces, but is not hopeful that Iran will comply. President Barack Obama said that the U.S. wants the top-secret aircraft back. “We have asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said during a White House news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Monday.

He wouldn’t comment on what the Iranians might learn from studying the downed aircraft. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said it’s difficult to know “just frankly how much they’re going to be able to get from having obtained those parts.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Panetta said they’re not optimistic about getting the drone back because of recent Iranian behavior that Clinton said indicated “that the path that Iran seems to be going down is a dangerous one for themselves and the region.” (“Recent behavior”; you know, “recent”….as starting back in 1979!) “We submitted a formal request for the return of our lost equipment as we would in any situation to any government around the world,” Clinton told reporters at a State Department news conference with British Foreign Secretary William Hague.

After all, diplomacy has served America well in any number of similar confrontations involving totalitarian regimes, including but not limited to incidents involving Francis Gary Powers, the USS Pueblo, the SS Mayaguez and the takeover of the U.S. embasy in Tehran.  Other than those….and more than a million like ’em, diplomacy’s batting 1.000!

Then there’s the Environmental Moment, brought to us today by the WSJ and Bush II:

The Cellulosic Ethanol Debacle

Congress mandated purchase of 250 million gallons in 2011. Actual production: 6.6 million.

 

‘We’ll fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years.”

—George W. Bush, 2006 State of the Union address

Years before the Obama Administration dumped $70 billion into solar and wind energy and battery operated cars, and long before anyone heard of Solyndra, President Bush launched his own version of a green energy revolution. The future he saw was biofuels. In addition to showering billions of dollars on corn ethanol, Mr. Bush assured the nation that by 2012 cars and trucks could be powered by cellulosic fuels from switch grass and other plant life.

To launch this wonder-fuel industry, the feds under Mr. Bush and President Obama have pumped at least $1.5 billion of grants and loan subsidies to fledgling producers. Mr. Bush signed an energy bill in 2007 that established a tax credit of $1.01 per gallon produced.

Most important, the Nancy Pelosi Congress passed and Mr. Bush signed a law imposing mandates on oil companies to blend cellulosic fuel into conventional gasoline. This guaranteed producers a market. In 2010 the mandate was 100 million barrels, rising to 250 million in 2011 and 500 million in 2012. By the end of this decade the requirements leap to 10.5 billion gallons a year.

When these mandates were established, no companies produced commercially viable cellulosic fuel. But the dream was: If you mandate and subsidize it, someone will build it.

Guess what? Nobody has. Despite the taxpayer enticements, this year cellulosic fuel production won’t be 250 million or even 25 million gallons. Last year the Environmental Protection Agency, which has the authority to revise the mandates, quietly reduced the 2011 requirement by 243.4 million gallons to a mere 6.6 million. Some critics suggest that even much of that 6.6 million isn’t true cellulosic fuel.

The EPA has already announced that the 2012 mandate of 500 million gallons is unattainable, so it is again expected to lower the mandate to fewer than 12 million gallons for next year.

One reason the mandates can’t be met is the half-dozen or so companies that received the first round of subsidies to produce cellulosic fuel never got off the ground. Some 70 million gallons, or 70% of the cellulosic supply to meet the 2010 mandate, was supposed to come from Alabama-based Cello Energy. Incredibly, those projections were made before Cello had built its plant to produce the fuel and before the technology was proven to work.

In 2009 a jury in a civil fraud case ruled that Cello had lied about how much cellulosic fuel it could produce. Some of the fuel that Cello showed to investors was derived from petroleum, not plants. The firm produced little biofuel and in October 2010 it declared bankruptcy.

It gets worse. Because there was no cellulosic fuel available, oil companies have had to purchase “waiver credits”—for failing to comply with a mandate to buy a product that doesn’t exist. In 2010 and this year, the EPA has forced oil companies to pay about $10 million for these credits. Since these costs are eventually passed on to consumers, the biofuels mandate is an invisible tax paid at the gas pump.

And for what? An October 2011 report on biofuels by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the mandates “may be an ineffective way to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.” Because production is so low, advanced cellulosic fuels also do very little to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. The report notes that “currently, no commercially viable biorefineries exist for converting cellulosic biomass to fuel.”

Why? Because of what the National Academy report calls “the high cost of producing cellulosic biofuels compared with petroleum-based fuels, and uncertainties in future biofuel markets.” The report does say that technological breakthroughs could make cellulosic fuels cost-competitive in the future, but that same leap of faith has driven subsidies to alternative energy for 40 years.

Still, the subsidies roll on. In August 2011 the Obama Administration funded a $510 million program in partnership with the Navy to produce advanced biofuels for the military. In September the feds loaned $134 million to Abengoa Bioenergy to build a cellulosic plant in Kansas. The optimistic forecast is that this plant will produce about 23 million barrels a year—a fraction of what Washington promised in 2006. In September the Department of Energy provided POET, which advertises itself as the “world’s largest ethanol producer,” a $105 million loan guarantee for cellulosic.

To recap: Congress subsidized a product that didn’t exist, mandated its purchase though it still didn’t exist, is punishing oil companies for not buying the product that doesn’t exist, and is now doubling down on the subsidies in the hope that someday it might exist. We’d call this the march of folly, but that’s unfair to fools.

Speak of the devil….

Michelle Obama Breaks Jumping Jacks Record

 

Michelle Obama is now a world record holder. The first lady announced in an email Monday that her October bid to break the record for the most people doing jumping jacks in a 24-hour period succeeded. Mrs. Obama says 300,265 people participated, shattering the old record.

In order to achieve her goal, Mrs. Obama led about 400 elementary and middle-school students from Washington in jumping jacks on the South Lawn of the White House. Other jumping jacks events were held around the world on Oct. 11.   

Just so we have this straight: she in no way, shape or form pulled this event together, PLUS….she had a little help!  Not to mention how ever many jumping jacks she performed….

We’d say she’s got quite a few more to do!

And just to demonstrate our disdain for hypocrisy is truly bipartisan, in a related item, courtesy of Bill Meisen….

Newt takes no-adultery pledge

 

That’s what….the 4th time he’s taken that pledge?!?

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s these two bits of biting satire from Todd Stollberg:

Finally, we’ll call it a day with what may truly be James Taranto’s Best of the Web:

Smart and Dumber

Why intellectuals love the president’s brainless rhetoric.

 

Republicans who favor Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney are making a big mistake, New York Times conservative Ross Douthat argues in an extraordinarily interesting column. Support for Gingrich, Douthat argues, arises from “a desperate desire to somehow beat Barack Obama at his own game, and to explode what conservatives consider the great fantasy of the 2008 campaign–the conceit that Obama possessed an unmatched brilliance and an unprecedented eloquence.” (As we’ve been saying for some time.)

That is a mistake, Douthat argues, because everybody has already figured out that the emperor is unclad:

It isn’t 2008 anymore, and conservatives don’t actually need to explode the fantasy of Obama’s eloquence and omnicompetence. The harsh reality of governing has already done that for them. Nobody awaits the president’s speeches with panting anticipation these days, or expects him to slay his opponents with the power of his intellect. Obamamania peaked with the inauguration, and it’s been ebbing ever since.

We’ve been sounding the theme of Obama’s intellectual inadequacy since at least October 2010. (As we’ve been since 2006!) Our colleague Bret Stephens was also ahead of the game with his August 2011 column titled “Is Obama Smart?” Lately, though, the subject has been much more widely remarked upon, especially after the president’s latest dreadful speech, last week in Kansas. The usually mild-mannered Peter Wehner of Commentary declared the president a “political hack”:

In his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama took another stab at summarizing the philosophy of the Republican Party. And this is the best Obama could do: “Their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

This is a silly and intentionally misleading statement–silly because it’s so transparently false and intentionally misleading because the president surely cannot believe his own rhetoric. The problem for Obama is it’s becoming a pattern. Earlier this year, he charged that Republicans want the elderly, autistic children and children with Down syndrome to “fend for themselves.”

After that, he told us the GOP plan is “dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance.” . . .

These are the kinds of things a politically desperate and intellectually bankrupt politician says. The president must believe he cannot win a debate on philosophy on the merits, so he instead employs the crudest caricatures he can.

The Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone:

Democrats like to think of themselves as the party of smart people. And over the last four years we have heard countless encomiums, and not just from Democrats, of the intellect and perceptiveness of Barack Obama. But a reading of the text of Obama’s December 6 speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, billed as one of his big speeches of the year, shows him to be something like the opposite.

Even by the standards of campaign rhetoric, this is a shockingly shoddy piece of work. . . . What’s really staggering is the weakness of his public policy arguments. The long-term unsustainability of our entitlement programs he blames solely on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts–an explanation no serious observer regards as anything but incomplete, to say the least. He points to growing income inequality and to remedy it advocates policies that are utterly inadequate to the task. We need to be “making education a national mission,” he says, and in essence argues for channeling more money to teacher union members.

Douthat, however, deserves some special credit. Given the eagerness of New York Times liberals to find ways of charging conservatives with racism, it takes some courage for a New York Times conservative to disparage the intellect of the first black president.

“What we have here, it seems [is] a president who has no serious interest in public policy,” Barone concludes. “Those who pride themselves on belonging to the party of smart people should be embarrassed.”

A smart Democrat might observe that, unlike the children of Lake Wobegon, the American electorate includes many people who are below average. They’re entitled to a little representation, as Sen. Roman Hruska famously observed; and outside a few college-town districts, no politician will ever win election by appealing only to the far right of the bell curve. By this argument, Obama’s populist appeal has a practical justification, even if its content is embarrassing.

But the funny thing about “populism” is that it doesn’t seem to be very popular. As Mickey Kaus observes (ellipses in original):

So pro-business, centrist chief of staff William Daley is demoted, Obama moves to a feisty, fight back, progressive posture, casting Republicans as the party of the 1%, and . . . he loses three points in Ohio? Isn’t Ohio one of the states where populism is supposed to work? . . . The poll in question was taken before Obama’s big “inequality” speech in Kansas. Still . . . the shift’s been going on for weeks. . . . Look at this chart of the President’s national approval rating and tell me it’s working.

Yet it would overstate the case to say that Obama’s so-called populism, or “flopulism” in Kaus’s droll portmanteau, is completely without appeal. There is one group that just loved the Kansas speech. Among its members were journalists like E.J. “Baghdad Bob” Dionne, Joe Klein and the editorial board of the New York Times, along with academics such as Robert Reich, Geoffrey Stone and Michael Kazin.

There’s an irony for you. The one group to which the president’s brainless bashing of businessmen and conservatives appeals consists of . . . intellectuals. Or, as Barone puts it, “those who pride themselves on belonging to the party of smart people.” Obama’s appeal to these self-styled brainiacs is not reasoned but emotional: He taps into their resentments.

The lefty intellectual resents successful businessmen and conservatives because they threaten his own sense of superiority. Wealthy businessmen’s material success is a mark of higher status than the professor or journalist’s mere affluence. Conservative politicians act as if the lefty intellectual is not morally superior. In addition, conservative intellectuals challenge his sense of cognitive superiority. Within journalism and academia conservatives are smarter than liberals on average, because the former are those who have managed to succeed despite going against the grain ideologically.

Left-liberal intellectuals, then, fail to appreciate the intellectual shallowness of the president’s class-warfare rhetoric because it seduces them by reinforcing their own superiority over competing elites.

The Kleins and Dionnes, Reichs and Kazins are never going to be won over by Newt Gingrich, no matter how well he does in debate against Obama. Is anyone else? Douthat plausibly doubts it:

Gingrich might debate circles around Obama. He might implode spectacularly, making a hot mess of himself while the president keeps his famous cool. But either way, setting up a grand rhetorical showdown seems unlikely to supply a disillusioned country with what it’s looking for from Republicans in 2012.

Conservatives may want catharsis, but the rest of the public seems to mainly want reassurance. They already know Barack Obama isn’t the messiah he was once cracked up to be. What they don’t know is whether they can trust anyone else to do better.

This is the best argument against Gingrich that we’ve heard. Everyone old enough to remember the late 1990s is aware of his weaknesses. But Douthat raises a pertinent question about the former speaker’s greatest strength. Anyone who’s watched the Republican debates this year knows Gingrich is capable of performing dazzlingly. But if Douthat is right about the degree to which Obama’s intellect has already been discounted (except among lefty intellectuals), a dazzling debate performance may be neither necessary nor sufficient to defeat the president.

Another possibility occurs to us: What if Gingrich does get elected president after out-debating weak opponents, then proceeds to overread his mandate and overreach in ways that prove disastrous to his party? That pretty well describes what happened with the guy who won in 2008.

Magoo