FLASH: Kim Jong Il Has Died

And with the most inexperienced, clueless captain in our nation’s history at the helm of the Ship-of-State, the world just became even more dangerous.

It’s Monday, December 19th, 2011….but before we begin, here’s a video clip from G. Trevor, Lord High King of All the Vietors that presents a simple, easy-to-understand and absolutely accurate depiction of the greatest crisis America’s faced since the Civil War:

Simple enough for even a Liberal to understand….which means Team Tick-Tock and their allies in Congress and the MSM are either willfully ignoring the facts or lying through their teeth.  In either case, they’re sacrificing America’s future purely in pursuit of power and an ideological agenda.  And they have to be stopped.  Not met halfway, not slowed down, but stopped.

Think of it this way; imagine you come downstairs to find an intruder intent on (a) stealing your every possession, then (b) incinerating your house to cover up any evidence of the crime.  Rather than doing everything within your power to eliminate the threat, would you consider yourself well-served with a compromise which still provided (a) or (b), just not both?!?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, in a related item….

House Balks at Payroll Tax Deal

Boehner Criticizes Senate Agreement

House Speaker John Boehner flatly ruled out approval of a Senate agreement to temporarily extend the payroll tax cut through February, leaving uncertain both the tax cut and other year-end business as Congress struggled to finish its work for 2011.

Mr. Boehner said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that a two-month extension was a sign of congressional dysfunction. “How can you do tax policy for two months?” Mr. Boehner said. “We really do believe it’s time for the Senate to work with the House to complete our business for the year. We’ve got two weeks to get this done.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204058404577106840693064580.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

Unfortunately for Republicans, Boehner initially expressed support for the Senate version….before he bothered checking with his own members in the House.  And we’re left wondering why Mitch McClueless ever agree to a compromise without checking to see if the more Conservative House would support it?  Who’s on first?!?

And since we’re on the subject, Jonah Goldberg opines on another fine mess The Obamao’s gotten himself into:

Wedging Both Ways

Wedge issues are back.

What are wedge issues? Well, a lot depends on whom you ask. Political consultants usually define them as issues that unite the base but split the opposition. The most familiar examples are guns, God and gays. But they can include everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to crime.

Traditionally, conservatives are cast as the villains in the wedge-issue story. And there’s some truth to the tale. What initially offended liberals was the way Republicans made race and civil rights issues for national discussion (ironic considering how liberals are always clamoring for a “national conversation” on race). Liberals will tell you that Republicans shattered the consensus on civil rights by running on racially charged issues. Conservatives will say that liberals invited a so-called “racial backlash” by going too far on issues like quotas and being soft on crime.

I think conservatives have the better argument in that fight, but that doesn’t mean Republican politicians were angels in every contest.

Regardless, it didn’t take long for Democrats to expand the definition of wedge issues to include pretty much any issue they didn’t want to talk about.

In his book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Thomas Frank insisted that Republicans only know how to win on divisive wedge issues that distract voters from their “real” interests. This amounted to McMarxism — a dumbed-down, mass-market version of the old socialist notion of “false consciousness.” Liberals like Frank assume voters are too dumb to know what they should care about.

President Obama subscribes to a similar view of the world, as when he explained that Democratic (!) voters in western Pennsylvania weren’t supporting him because they were too “bitter” and determined to “cling” to their petty bigotries and cultural prejudices.

Looked at from a broad historical perspective, complaints about wedge issues are really gripes about declining liberal power. Democrats take it as a given that the old New Deal-Great Society coalition is the natural order of things, and that members of that coalition — everyone from minorities and intellectuals to working-class whites and union members — belong in their column no matter what. Any effort to peel off any of those constituencies is therefore unfair or illegitimate.

This is ridiculous, of course. First of all, democracy itself is about disagreement, not agreement. Politics is about having arguments about what our priorities should be. It is inevitable that there will be winners and losers in those arguments.

Moreover, Democrats have always used wedge issues just as much as Republicans. Indeed, the Obama administration is a round-the-clock wedge issue machine. Obama’s whole economic agenda at this point is hinged on dividing America between the haves and the have-nots. Rhetorically, he defines the haves as “millionaires and billionaires.” But his policies set the benchmark lower — households that make $250,000 a year. He makes it sound like all that’s keeping us from prosperity are tax loopholes for corporate-jet patrons. He insists that our unemployment crisis is really an inequality crisis, precisely so he can stoke the flames of populist resentment in the hope that the resulting smoke will conceal his manifest policy failures.

That’s why I love the Republican effort to turn the tables on Obama. The White House claims that the Republican plan to pay for extending the payroll tax credit will gut funding for education, veterans and clean energy. This, simply put, is a lie. Even the Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, says this spin is dishonest.

The White House opposes the House bill — the only legislation to extend the tax cut that actually exists — for two reasons. First, in order to have a theme for 2012, it desperately needs to maintain the fiction that Republicans don’t want to help the middle class. Second, House Republicans brilliantly included in their bill the requirement that the White House make a decision on green-lighting the Keystone oil pipeline from Canada. Labor unions support the idea because it will bring thousands of jobs to working-class Americans. Meanwhile, polls show that working-class Americans and independents are in favor of more oil development. But Obama’s real base of upscale liberals and petrophobic environmentalists hates it for all the usual reasons.

Tellingly, a senior White House official told reporters on background that the president will veto any bill that forces his hand on the issue. But the White House’s public statement didn’t even mention the pipeline for fear of signaling to working-class voters and independents that Obama is against it.

In short, Obama hates the pipeline deal because it is both symbolically and concretely an issue that drives a wedge straight through his base and his re-election spin.

Then there’s this on the MF Global scandal, courtesy of Holman Jenkins in the WSJ:

Corzine and the Missing Money

Senator Pat Roberts says what everybody else is thinking.

Where, oh where, did the MF Global customer funds go? The money probably did not walk out the door in a brown paper bag. If not, it either doesn’t exist—a distinct possibility if account liquidations by customers were not properly recorded in MF’s hectic final days—or it’s still in the hands of trading partners, who smelled MF’s impending bankruptcy and sat on money owed to the struggling firm.

A third scenario is sketched by Sen. Pat Roberts, in which MF misused customer funds to cover its own obligations. As he put it in a question to ex-CEO Jon Corzine in hearings this week: “By all accounts, on the Friday before bankruptcy, MF Global thought it had found a buyer to save you. It seems well within the realm of possibility . . . to use your customers’ segregated funds to cover the firm’s liquidity crunch, thinking that, by Monday morning, everything would be fine, the company would be bought out, an infusion of money from a new owner could replace the missing customer funds. Is this plausible, governor?”

Gov. Corzine declined to “speculate.”

The bombshell, of course, was Terrence Duffy’s claim later at the same hearing that somebody at his Chicago Mercantile Exchange was told by somebody at MF that Mr. Corzine had known about a particular transfer of customer money to MF’s own account. But this is not the same thing as stealing it. MF was authorized to borrow cash from customer accounts as long as it was replaced with bulletproof collateral like U.S. Treasury bills.

The trick is neither to minimize nor maximize the MF Global scandal.

For a brokerage firm to keep customer funds segregated from the firm’s own money is a “sacrosanct” obligation, to use the now-popular phrase. But guess what? All contractual and legal obligations are sacrosanct. That’s why we have a legal system.

Nor is it unusual for customers to find themselves among the claimants in a bankruptcy. Customers of regulated brokerage firms that go bust, however, are luckier than most. By law, they get first priority—at least that was the chapter-and-verse interpretation by Jill Sommers, point person for the MF bankruptcy at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Alas, in a bankruptcy everything must be litigated, since money given to customers is not money to make other creditors whole. But MF appears to have plenty of assets. It also follows that the bankruptcy trustee has every incentive to identify funds in the hands of other parties as possible “customer” monies to facilitate clawbacks. This may explain why, among various estimates of the customer shortfall, the bankruptcy trustee, James Giddens, has pushed the highest at $1.2 billion.

In fact, Ms. Sommers of the CFTC told Reuters this week that all MF funds have been accounted for; it’s a question now of sorting through each transaction to make sure it was “legitimate.” Likewise, Richard Heis, working with the administrator of MF’s British branch, says, “We know exactly where the money is.”

When Lehman, Refco or Drexel went belly-up, customer funds were safe. Customer funds are surely safe at Fidelity, Vanguard and other top-quality firms. So don’t shoot yourself just yet.

An unbelted MF Global was not careening down the New Jersey Turnpike at twice the legal speed limit. It was, however, a fading firm, still taking most of its trading orders over the phone, according to Mr. Corzine. In the end, MF appears to have blown itself up, as it had every right to do, through old-fashioned miscalculation. Mr. Corzine’s leveraged bet on European bonds, however profitable it might eventually prove, spooked the clients, regulators and rating agencies whose backing MF needed to remain a going concern.

That miscalculation now echoes through its bankruptcy and may play a role in the missing funds fiasco.

At Goldman Sachs, Mr. Corzine was a risktaker, one whose coolness was not always comforting. But at Goldman he operated under the watchful eye of his fellow Goldman partners. At MF, he was monitored only by distant shareholders and the part-timers who made up MF’s board. Goldman, over many profitable years, had earned the confidence of the larger financial world. At dinky MF, nobody outside MF had much stake in standing by the firm when a cloud appeared.

The famous “missing funds” may yet turn out to be mostly a bureaucratic snafu. But don’t be surprised if some of the shortfall is due to more respectable firms being in no hurry to honor their own obligations to MF as it was failing.

We’ll only be surprised if this entire issue isn’t swept under the rug as quickly and quietly as possible.

And in International News of Note:

U.S. Official Says Iran Will Find it Difficult to Exploit Intel in Drone

A U.S. official says Iran will find it hard to exploit any data and technology aboard the captured CIA stealth drone because of measures taken to limit the intelligence value of drones operating over hostile territory.The official also said Saturday that despite Iran’s latest claims to have hijacked the RQ-170 Sentinel and brought it down near the eastern Iranian city of Kashmar, the U.S. is convinced that the drone malfunctioned. “The Iranians had nothing to do with it,” the official said….

True.  Unfortunately, it’s not the Iranians….

….who are going to be exploiting and reverse-engineering it!

Meanwhile, the….

Defense Asks Army Why Manning Knew So Much

Finally, in another story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter, if you thought football was tough, try out for the Florida A&M marching band:

Autopsy: Champion beaten to death

A medical examiner ruled Friday that a Florida A&M University drum major was beaten to death in a hazing incident. Robert Champion, 26, died Nov. 19 on a charter bus outside a hotel in Orlando, where the school’s football team had just played rival Bethune-Cookman in the Florida Classic.

Officials had said at the time that hazing was a suspected cause of Champion’s death. The Orange County Medical Examiner’s Office said Friday that Champion collapsed after “multiple blunt trauma blows to his body” and ruled the death a homicide. “Immediately after the hazing incident, he complained of thirst and fatigue; minutes later, he noted loss of vision and soon after had a witnessed arrest. These symptoms are consistent with hypotension or shock,” the release stated.

Earlier this week, police arrested three FAMU band members for a hazing incident in which they allegedly broke a female band member’s thigh during a severe beating.

Champion’s family filed a lawsuit against the university Nov. 28, claiming school officials did nothing to stop a “culture of hazing” within the famed “Marching 100.” The band director, Julian White, was dismissed by the university soon after Champion’s death. On Thursday, Florida Gov. Rick Scott “strongly recommended” that the university’s president, James Ammons, be suspended while authorities investigate the hazing incidents.

FAMU’s Board of Trustees publicly reprimanded Ammons last week, but chose not to fire or suspend him.

Homicide?  Don’t think so.  Hazing?  Get real!  Manslaughter?  You bet your ass.  Not only does anyone connected with this plainly preventable perversion deserve prosecution to the fullest extent of the law, i.e., jail time, but the entire A&M Administration requires a complete and thorough house cleaning.  Had Mr. Champion been attending anything other than an “historically black university” and suffered his fate at the hands of a Marching White 100, can there be any doubt the outcome would have been unmercifully swift and harsh?

Magoo