It’s Wednesday, December 17th, 2014, and there are only 7 shopping days left until Christmas.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of Townhall.com, Conn Carroll recounts the…

Three Things We Learned From The CRomnibus

After a week of passionate debate and late night votes, the Senate passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill this Saturday that will keep the entire federal government, except the Department of Homeland Security, funded through September 2015.

Here are three lessons conservatives should take away from the ordeal:

1. Corporatism is King – Money talks and activists walk. That is the sad lesson from a $1.1 trillion spending bill that included huge payoffs to Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Citibank, and corporations that use taxpayer subsidized loans to invest overseas. Meanwhile, House leaders did nothing to stop President Obama’s executive amnesty other than offer up a show vote on a separate piece of legislation that had no chance of even being voted on in the Senate.
2. Republican Leaders Want To Cave On Amnesty – Not only did Republican leaders not even allow a vote on an amendment to defund Obama’s amnesty, even though they included plenty of other restrictions on federal spending in the omnibus, but they even included more than a billion in spending on programs to clean up Obama’s last amnesty, including $948 million for the Department of Health and Human Service’s unaccompanied children program and $260 million for the State to Department to spend on Central American countries.
3. Republican Leaders Lie – Not only did Republican leaders lie about Congress’s ability to defund the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office, the agency in charge of implementing Obama’s amnesty, but they also lied to Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) in order to get his vote on an early procedural matter, and they falsely claimed that Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) empowered Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to sneak more Obama nominees past the Senate.

None of these lessons are good news for conservatives. If anything they show that with Reid out of the way in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) are going to be very eager to cut big deals with Obama so they can prove to Washington elites that they can “govern.” These deals will all benefit large corporations almost always at the expense of small businesses and middle class Americans.

We’d go one giant leap further and suggest none of these lessons are good for the country.  As our old friend The Bossman observed earlier, the national debt just hit $18 trillion, and we’re still running annual budget deficits in excess of $500 billion.  This despite the fact the U.S. Treasury just took in a record level of tax receipts.

At the current rate of debt accumulation, by the time The Dear Misleader leaves office, he’ll not only have saddled America with a $20 trillion IOU, but when interest rates inevitably climb, the interest on the debt alone will consume approximately 1/3 of the total budget.  If Republicans don’t recognize both the necessity and opportunity to curtail spending now, then when?!?

Consider this: absent millions of voters, all of whom voted in 2008 for the lackluster John McCain, staying home because Mitt Romney excited them about as much as drying paint, the former Bay State governor would have been President.  Had George H.W. Bush not lied to the American people and broken his solemn promise…

…Ross Perot would never have mounted a third party campaign which siphoned off 19% of the Republican vote, and the world would have never heard of Monica Lewinsky…or Hillary Clinton.

If the GOP leadership believes they can lie to Conservatives’ faces and history won’t repeat itself, they need to think again.  If this part of some carefully considered plan, they need to communicate it.  Otherwise, they need to complete the tasks voters assigned them.

Next up, courtesy of our old buddy Breeze and Fred on Everything, in a column written back on October 30th, Fred Reed holds nothing back in an accurate assessment of the inordinate deference paid a certain segment of the American electorate:

Black Power

A Done Deal

“As I write America waits, again, to see whether blacks will riot, this time in Ferguson. Will they loot, burn, kill, and rape? The usual? The police in Ferguson prepare to protect stores from looters, as rioters seem to regard their insurrections as shopping opportunities. Will it come, we wonder tensely? Will the destruction get out of hand, spread to other cities?

It is curious that blacks, the least educated thirteen percent of the population, the least productive, most criminal, and most dependent on governmental charity, should dominate national politics. Yet they do. Virtually everything revolves around what blacks want, demand, do, or can’t do. Their power seems without limit.

Courses of instruction in the schools, academic rigor, codes of dress, rules regarding unceasing obscenity, all must be set to suit them, as must be examinations for promotion in fire departments, the military, and police forces. Blacks must be admitted to universities for which they are not remotely qualified, where departments of Black Studies must be established to please them. Corporate work forces, federal departments, and elite high-schools must be judged not on whether they perform their functions but on whether they have the right number of blacks.

Do laws requiring identification to vote threaten to end multiple voting? The laws must go. Do blacks not like Confederate flags? Adieu, flags. Does Huckleberry Finn go down the Mississippi with the Nigger Jim, or Conrad write The Nigger of the Narcissus? These must be banned or expurgated to please blacks who haven’t read them or, usually, heard of them. Do we want to prevent people coming from regions infested with Ebola from entering the United States? We cannot. It would offend blacks.

We must never, ever say or do anything that might upset them, as virtually everything does. It is positively astonishing. One expects the rich and smart to have disproportionate power. But America is dominated from the slums…”

Case in point:

Any chance you can catch this insightful interlude on the Evening News?!?  None whatsoever.  You tell us where the author’s off-base, ‘cuz we sure as heck can’t see it.

Since we’re on the subject of authors whose conclusions we find uncommonly compelling, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens speak for us in his entirety: 

I Am Not Sorry the CIA Waterboarded

Dick Cheney says he would “do it again in a minute.” He’s right.

“I am not sorry Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times. KSM also murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl in 2002. He boasted about it: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew,” he said after his capture.

I am sorry KSM remains alive nearly 12 years after his capture. He has been let off far too lightly. As for his waterboarding, it never would have happened if he had been truthful with his captors. It stopped as soon as he became cooperative. As far as I’m concerned, he waterboarded himself.

I am not sorry the CIA went to the edge of the law in the aftermath of 9/11 to prevent further mass-casualty attacks on the U.S. I am not sorry that going to the edge meant, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein put it in 2002, doing “some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.” I don’t suppose she was talking about removing our shoes at airport security.

I am sorry we weren’t willing to do those “things” before 3,000 people had their lives unnaturally ended on Sept. 11, 2001…”

Not as sorry as the families of the 3,200 innocent Americans who were sacrificed on the altar of political expedience and correctness.

In a related item, Thomas Sowell details what passes for cogent thought in the Ivied Halls of Liberalism:

Tortured Reasoning

“Critics and defenders of the harsh interrogation methods applied to captured terrorists can argue forever over whether those methods were “torture.” But any serious discussion of a serious issue — and surely terrorism qualifies as serious — has to move beyond semantics and confront the ultimate question: “Compared to what alternative?”

If you knew that there was a hidden nuclear time bomb planted somewhere in New York City — set to go off today — and you had a captured terrorist who knew where and when, would you not do anything whatever to make him tell you where and when? Would you pause to look up the definition of “torture”? Would you even care what the definition of “torture” was, when the alternative was seeing millions of innocent people murdered?

…One of the most obscene acts of the Obama administration, when it first took office, was to launch a criminal investigation of CIA agents who had used harsh interrogation methods against captured terrorists in the wake of the devastating September 11, 2001 aerial attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon…”

Does anyone outside the crazed confines of Progressivism really think Al Queda would have have hesitated a nanosecond to murder millions on 9/11 if they’d been able?  Hells bells, a crazed Iranian jihadist just killed two innocent Australians, and Tony Abbott, though nominally conservative, can’t even bring himself to mention Islam in connection with the crime.  And MSLSD goes so far as to suggest he might have been a “phony” Muslim:

Yeah…’cuz true Islamists never commit acts of terror AND engage in criminal activity!  Though now that we think about it, MSDNC may have a point.  After all, authentic Muslims don’t…

…shoot their hostages.

Meanwhile, as Commentary Magazine‘s Max Boot relates, the willingness of the Taliban (You know; the guys B. Hussein claims to have defeated) to massacre some 126 innocent children isn’t the real threat signified by this latest Islamic atrocity: 

Pakistan: Incubator of Evil

“Jihadist terrorist attacks are, sadly, not a rarity these days. They are, in fact, a daily occurrence. So it takes a special kind of depravity to break through the numbness that repeated atrocities induce. The Pakistani Taliban have done just that by sending their gunmen into a military-run school for the children of Pakistani military personnel. The result was an eight-hour gun battle which apparently left 145 people dead, most of them school children. There are few parallels to such an atrocity beyond the Beslan school massacre in 2004 in which Chechen separatists struck a Russian school, leaving a reported 385 hostages dead, including 186 children.

…Sooner or later the Pakistani army must learn that it cannot fight some Islamist extremists while making common cause with others. My fear is that after decades of cooperation with these fanatics, the army itself may be so sympathetic to this extremist ideology that significant elements of it have essentially gone over to the enemy. Aside from an Iranian nuke, it is hard to imagine a scarier scenario in the world today than these Pakistani extremists-in-uniform getting access to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal…”

Here’s the juice: unreasoned, unrelenting hatred and an unquenchable thirst for blood are as much a part of Islamic fundamentalism as the Koran; and the fundamentalist branch of Islam IS Islam.  The sooner the West recognizes it the safer the rest of us will be.

Moving on, a different aspect of the latest act of Muslim mayhem from Seth Mandel, again courtesy of Commentary Magazine:

The Sydney Siege and the Lone-Wolf Copout

“The phenomenon of “lone-wolf” terrorism is vexing to policymakers because it is so hard to predict and prevent. But it also has too often provided an excuse–a way for the political class or security forces to avoid any blame for a successful domestic attack. Even worse, anti-anti-terrorism commentators use lone-wolf attacks to cast doubt on the whole war on terror enterprise as doing more harm than good, or at least not doing much good. Something similar seems to be taking shape in the wake of the Sydney, Australia siege this week.

…So here’s what we have: a Muslim extremist whose current charge sheet includes accessory to murder and more than forty counts of sexual assault who was granted bail. He was free until trial, despite all this. So here’s one obvious measure the authorities could have taken: deny him bail, or even rescind bail once the assault charges started getting counted by the dozen. You shouldn’t have to wave the ISIS flag to get attention; murder and sexual assault over a period of more than a decade should be enough.

According to the L.A. Times, Australia’s bail laws were amended to make such action easier, but not in time to stop Monis. That may or may not be a dodge, but it certainly makes clear that there is something that could have been done to keep Monis off the streets. Throwing up your hands and sighing “lone wolf” is just a copout…”

And in the Environmental Moment, Reuters reports…

U.N. talks agree building blocks for new-style climate deal in 2015

“About 190 nations agreed on Sunday the building blocks of a new-style global deal due in 2015 to combat climate change amid warnings that far tougher action will be needed to limit increases in global temperatures…”

As James Taranto so eloquently observes:

Great news! Negotiators in Lima, Peru, have reached a landmark “climate change agreement that would, for the first time, commit every nation to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions”! Well, maybe it’s not such great news. Here are some details from the New York Times:

By requiring action from every country, the Lima framework will fundamentally change the old world order that stymied earlier climate change talks. But on its own, that political breakthrough will not achieve the stated goal of the deal: to slow the rate of global emissions enough to prevent the atmosphere from warming more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the preindustrial average. That is the point at which scientists say the planet will tip into dangerous and irreversible effects, such as melting sea ice, rising sea levels, increased flooding and droughts, food and water shortages, and more extreme storms.

Speaking to delegates here on Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry said, “We’re still on a course leading to tragedy.”

There are a couple of dubious premises here: that scientists can predict future temperatures to an accuracy of 0.1 degree—despite the weather’s failure over the past quarter-century to conform to their past predictions—and that adjusting “global emissions” will affect those temperatures as surely as setting your home thermostat.

And even the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who by the way served in Vietnam, who has no doubt these premises are true, says that even if the promises of reduced emissions are kept, “we’re still on a course leading to tragedy.” So what’s the point?

As for limiting “increases in global temperatures”, increases?  Sorry…

……WHAT increases?!?  Not to mention some might take the climate scammers a little more seriously had they opted to conduct their meeting via a video conference rather than leaving the largest carbon footprint of any UN climate confab to date.

On the Lighter Side…

Sure, Frank was cool.  But if Frank was cool, landing an F-14 at night, in a blinding snowstorm, backwards while sipping a martini makes us absolutely frigid, baby!

Okay, okay…it was during the day.

Magoo