The Daily Gouge, Thursday, December 29th, 2011

On December 28, 2011, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Thursday, December 29th, 2011….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, Thomas Sowell offers his….

Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene

– Talk show host Dennis Miller said, “I don’t dig polo. It’s like miniature golf meets the Kentucky Derby.”

– Nothing illustrates the superficiality of our times better than the enthusiasm for electric cars, because they are supposed to greatly reduce air pollution. But the electricity that ultimately powers these cars has to be generated somewhere — and nearly half the electricity generated in this country is generated by burning coal.

– The 2012 Republican primaries may be a rerun of the 2008 primaries, where the various conservative candidates split the conservative vote so many ways that the candidate of the mushy middle got the nomination — and then lost the election.

– Because morality does not always prevail, by any means, too many of the intelligentsia act as if it has no effect. But, even in Nazi Germany, thousands of Germans hid Jews during the war, at the risk of their own lives, because it was the right thing to do.

– In recent times, Christmas has brought not only holiday cheer but also attacks on the very word “Christmas,” chasing it from the vocabulary of institutions and even from most “holiday cards.” Like many other social crusades, this one is based on a lie — namely that the Constitution puts a wall of separation between church and state. It also shows how easily intimidated we are by strident zealots.

– If you don’t like growing older, don’t worry about it. You may not be growing older much longer.

– What do you call it when someone steals someone else’s money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else’s money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else’s money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.

– When an organization has more of its decisions made by committees, that gives more influence to those who have more time available to attend committee meetings and to drag out each meeting longer. In other words, it reduces the influence of those who have work to do, and are doing it, while making those who are less productive more influential.

– Anyone who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them — instead of answering their arguments.

– The wisest and most knowledgeable human being on the planet is utterly incompetent to make even 10 percent of the consequential decisions that have to be made in a modern nation (A segment of society which does not count B. Hussein among its number!). Yet all sorts of people want to decide how much money other people can make or keep, and to micro-manage how other people live their lives.

– The real egalitarians are not the people who want to redistribute wealth to the poor, but those who want to extend to the poor the ability to create their own wealth, to lift themselves up, instead of trying to tear others down. Earning respect, including self-respect, is better than being a parasite.

– Of all the arguments for giving amnesty to illegal immigrants, the most foolish is the argument that we can’t find and expel all of them. There is not a law on the books that someone has not violated, including laws against murder, and we certainly have not found and prosecuted all the violators — whether murderers or traffic law violators. But do we then legalize all the illegalities we haven’t been able to detect and prosecute?

– In the 1920s, Congressman Thomas S. Adams referred to “the ease with which the income tax may be legally avoided” but also said some Congressmen “so fervently believe that the rich ought to pay 40 or 50 per cent of their incomes” in taxes that they would rather make this a law, even if the government would get more revenue from a lower tax rate that people actually pay. Some also prefer class warfare politics that brings in votes, if not revenue.

– Can you imagine a man who had never run any kind of organization, large or small, taking it upon himself to fundamentally change all kinds of organizations in a huge and complex economy? Yet that is what Barack Obama did when he said, “We are going to change the United States of America!” This was not “The Audacity of Hope.” It was the audacity of hype.

Or, as we prefer to term it, the audacity of dopes!

Speaking of audacious dopes, Doug Powers writing in MichelleMalkin.com, courtesy of Walt Meisen, tells us how Nancy the Red spent her Christma….er,….Winter Holiday:

Pelosi Spends the Holidays Sacrificing on Behalf of Her Beloved 99%

Those who engage in tireless efforts to improve the lives of the working class and speak out in support of the 99 percent never really get a vacation. Nancy Pelosi is one example. As she did the previous two years as Speaker and now as House Minority Leader, Pelosi is once again working semi-undercover at a high-priced Hawaiian resort in order to observe the plight of the 99 percent from the top down:

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, who served as Speaker of the House and is now head of the House minority, is once again spending her Christmas at the exotic Four Seasons Resort Hualalai at Historic Ka’upulehu in Kona on the island of Hawaii.

Pelosi spent the last two Christmas holidays in Kona at the same hotel in an elaborate suite that rents for $10,000 a night.
[…]
Pelosi has been escorted by local police during her last two holiday visits to Hawaii Island at a cost of $34,000 to local taxpayers.

In order to win any battle, it’s wise to closely study the ways of one’s opponent. Not unlike the way she’s waged a battle against the greed of Wall Street by taking part in the process, Pelosi has again selflessly decided to occupy the Four Seasons Resort Hualalai. The 99-percent should feel fortunate to have Nancy on their side. OWS looks forward to her report when she returns.

That’s “Liberal”, spelled H-Y-P-O-C-R….hell, you know how it’s spelled! Besides, Nancy was likely just checking on the condition of the waitstaff and chambermaids!

Shifting gears, in his latest column in the WSJ, Dan Henninger offers a warning Mitt Romney would be well-served to heed:

The Ron Paul Vote

It has little to do with the Texas congressman.

As if they didn’t have troubles enough, the Republicans have not one, but two Ron Paul problems. The first is a cranky congressman from Texas named Ron Paul who won’t disown a third-party spoiler candidacy. The second problem is the Ron Paul vote, which as we’ll see has little to do with Ron Paul.

The congressman named Ron Paul has served in the House off and on since the 1970s to no discernible effect. Every four years he runs for president, tapping into a vestigial base of Newsletter Libertarians, whose support qualifies him for the debates.

Let no one deny that swimming eternally amid the rightward waves of American politics is an ever-present school of fish that would solve Washington’s spending problem mainly with cuts in the defense budget (ending foreign “entanglements”), set a place at the nuclear table for Iran (“Who are they going to bomb?”), cut Israel loose, cut the Federal Reserve loose, and legalize many currently controlled substances.

The Ron Paul vote is a separate matter. In June, polling put the familiar Mr. Paul at about 5.5% for the Iowa caucus and 8% nationally. That would be his normal ceiling. Suddenly, Ron Paul is the Iowa front-runner at over 22.5% and is up to 12% nationally. Why?

Is this surge a vote for the congressman named Ron Paul? Impossible. It’s in fact the Republican Party protest vote. Since summer, this block of votes has jumped from one candidate to another, desperate for an anti-Obama champion whose anti-Washington intensity matches its own.

In July the Republican protest vote fixed on Michele Bachmann, who materialized in the No. 2 spot. In September it became the Perry vote, cresting at 31%. He couldn’t debate, so in October it became the Cain vote. When he collapsed, the “left for dead” Gingrich candidacy miraculously rose to 35%. With Newt carpet-bombed and again left for dead, the GOP protest vote mounted its last pony, the Ron Paul campaign.

The policy set of any of these candidates has been of minimal importance to voters who’ve boiled down their beef with Washington to one idea: Attack. Meanwhile Mitt the Whale swims serenely onward at 25%, month after month, dipping occasionally to feed on these pilot fish. But the whale should be worried. These Republican protest fish have sharp teeth. Unless fed something soon, they may tear the Romney campaign to pieces (And with it, any chance the GOP has to unseat The Obamao). And there are a lot of them.

Political commentary sometimes refers to one of these second-tier candidates as appealing to “the tea party vote.” This is intended as condescension—you know, it’s those people who gave the Republicans Christine O’Donnell, Joe Miller and Sharron Angle in 2010. Ah, yes, 2010.

In the no-longer-mentioned November 2010 elections, the often disrespected “tea party vote” handed the Republican Party a victory of historic magnitude and depth. Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives but also won state offices on a scale not seen since the Great Depression.

The 2010 election was the result of a coalition that extends well past the formal tea parties. It combines Republicans of all stripes, libertarians, independents and worried centrist Democrats. They all are “fiscally conservative” and socially all over the map. The Republican nominee, however, will be produced by only one part of this fiscal-conservative coalition—the angriest, most politically committed Republicans and libertarians.

The Paul candidacy is of course doomed. But the Paul vote won’t die. This vote has been building in the depths of the American political ocean since the spending spree of the second Bush term. These people see the upward spending trend in annual outlays and accumulated commitments not as a “problem,” as the Beltway prefers, but as a threat to their well-being.

The Romney campaign may assume that this vote must land by default in their man’s lap. By the relentless logic of the Romney camp, that’s true. But if we’ve learned anything the past several months, it’s that this is one of the most volatile Republican electorates in a long while.

Mr. Romney is running a campaign strategy indeed targeted at the broad fiscal conservative coalition that emerged in 2010: Hold the worried independents and centrist Democrats by avoiding what in his Dec. 24 Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview he called “incendiary things.” OK, we get that. Independent voters are easily flustered, dependent as they are on the policies of strangers.

But if the former Massachusetts governor doesn’t reach out pretty soon to the Paul-Perry-Bachmann Republican protest voters, he may never get them. The longer he waits, the more pressure will build for a third-party challenge that will cost him the election. That it would be led by a Ron Paul or Donald Trump is irrelevant to why these people would vote third party—or stay home.

Mr. Romney is going to have to take a risk with some piece of his locked-down strategy—the RomneyCare denial, the “middle-class” ceiling on his tax cut, naming a running mate who could have beaten him in the primaries (As long as his last name’s Rubio!).

Mr. Romney needs to give these Republicans a reason to come in his direction, before they walk away from him forever.

If elected, Romney will be one of the few Presidents we can recall who assumed office with neither the confidence of the majority of his party nor a mandate for enacting new policies. Mitt will have been placed in office only to undo what has already been done, i.e., repeal Obamascare, close the gaping holes in illegal immigration enforcement and dramatically shrink an dangerously bloated federal budget. It’s a mission, not a mandate.

And he needs to realize should he fail in his first term, like his predecessor, the audience won’t be offering a repeat engagement.

Then there’s the News of No Use segment, wherein we learn….

Gary Johnson says he’s leaving GOP for Libertarians

Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a longshot candidate for the Republican presidential nomination (No kidding; longshot?!? How ’bout NO shot!) , said Wednesday he is leaving the GOP in favor of running as a Libertarian. Johnson told a news conference at the state Capitol that the decision was difficult, but that he was “deeply disappointed” by the treatment he received in the Republican nomination process.

“I had hoped to lay out a real libertarian message on all the issues in the Republican contest. The process was not fair and open,” he said.

We can only assume had anyone other than Johnson’s wife, kids and relatives knew who he was or cared what he thought….about anything, the “process” might have seemed a titch more “fair and open”. Besides, since when has politics ever been open….

….let alone fair?

Since we’re on the subject of the prevaricating and unprincipled, NewMediaJournal.com offers the latest on Politics, Chicago-style:

Illinois County Registers 7,800 Voters in Population with Only 7,100 Eligible

It’s been more than a year since Alexander County, Illinois, learned it had more registered voters than voting-age residents, but local authorities appear to have taken no steps to remedy the problem.

Francis Lee, the top election official in the state’s southernmost county, said she has received no money to conduct a purge of her voting rolls, which show more than 7,800 registered voters in a county with a population of about 7,100 residents over the age of 18…Although Lee contends the situation has not led to any voting irregularities, the county has experienced voter fraud issues in the past.

“I am not at all surprised that nothing has been done to clean up the voter rolls,” said Curtis Miller, a Tamms resident who began raising red flags about the problem more than a year ago.

State election law requires county clerks to purge rolls of people who have died or moved out of the county. In September 2010, Lee vowed to fix the problem. “It is my intention to get it cleaned up,” she said at the time. Now, however, she said her request for an estimated $20,000 to conduct the review was turned down by the county board… State election authorities say they offer a reimbursement program that would offset the cost of a voter roll review.

Illinois State Board of Elections Director Rupert Borgsmiller said it’s not clear what else the state can do… Borgsmiller said he understands when cash-strapped counties don’t want to spend money on voting regulations, but state law requires counties to keep their voting lists updated. “They need to do this,” he said.

Despite allegations of corruption and voter fraud within county government, Lee said she believes election judges at polling places can weed out any potential voter fraud on Election Day.

Welcome to Illinois, where, as this next contribution from Stephen Cervieri details….

….in the last 40 years, almost 1 out of 2 governors left office via the federal pen! And what lies at the heart of Illinois politics? Chi-ca-go, Chi-ca-go, THEIR….

….kinda town!

Next up, Lenore Skenazy, founder of FreeRangeKids.com opines on….

Boozy Babies and Other Overhyped Panics

Some threats are real and need a response. Others are anomalies that are hardly relevant to our daily lives.

Perhaps 2011 will be recalled as the year that a toddler accidentally got served an alcoholic drink at a Michigan Applebee’s. Not the biggest news this year, but the fact that it was a national story at all shows that we can’t seem to tell the difference between one stupid accident and a terrifying trend that we must do something about immediately.

The Applebee’s saga, back in April, was just this: Some waiter grabbed a mislabeled container and poured the 15-month-old a very potent cup of juice. The parents noticed something was wrong when, the mother reported, the boy started saying “hi” to the walls.

Applebee’s went apoplectic with proactiveness, declaring that not only would it retrain its entire wait staff that instant, but from now on it would only use single-serve juices. Which is not an evil response, of course (except environmentally), but it sure is overkill. Applebee’s reacted as if serving toddlers stiff drinks had been company-wide policy.

The child’s parents, meanwhile, reacted as if the kid had been deliberately served a plateful of steaming plutonium. Their “emotional distress” was so great that they—this will shock you—sued. Whether the individuals are mirroring corporate hysteria or vice versa, the final score was: Overreaction: 2. Common sense: 0.

This collective decision not to distinguish between rare screw-ups and systemic dangers is turning us into neurotic Nellies who worry about, warn against and, finally, outlaw very safe things. My favorite recall from the Consumer Product Safety Commission a few years back concerned a chair that had a screw protruding from the underside. While the commission reported that there had been “no reports of injuries to humans,” there had been “one report of a dog’s fur becoming entangled in the screw.”

Call my lawyer! When a twisted tuft is enough to prompt a 20,000-chair recall, that’s setting the safety bar pretty high.

The bar gets set even higher when a human being is hurt. Consider the fact that this past year a Toronto grammar school outlawed all balls on its playground except the soft Nerf kind, after an adult was hit in the head by an errant soccer ball and suffered a concussion.

Concussions are nothing to sneeze at. Neither is the idea of kids standing around during recess. You could argue that if kids don’t get the chance to toss a ball around, they themselves are at risk of everything from depression to obesity to Kinetic Fun Deficit Disorder. (Okay, I made that one up.)

Play, like life, comes with the possibility that someone may get hurt. When we overreact to that possibility, the only acceptable activity left is to sit on a chair and wait to die. And let’s just hope that chair that doesn’t have a screw protruding underneath.

The Toronto school eventually got its balls back after parents protested. But there are schools around our country that do not allow running, or tag or playing in the snow, for the same reason: Something terrible once happened to someone doing that somewhere on Earth, and that’s enough to spook us.

As usual, the media are at least partly to blame because they are the ones bringing us these awful anomalies and acting as if they’re relevant to our daily lives. The 2011 story that best illustrates this was the case of Carlina White, a 23-year-old woman finally reunited with her birth mom after being abducted as a 19-day-old baby from a New York hospital.

Despite the fact that baby abductions are exceedingly rare—last year CNN reported a single baby was abducted from a health-care facility—CNN felt compelled to give its viewers tip after tip on how to make sure this does not happen to them. Overreaction or ratings grab? Same thing.

“Know who wants to steal your baby,” warned a CNN.com article that went on to explain that most baby-stealers on the maternity ward are women in their mid-20s to mid-30s—as if that doesn’t describe almost every non-baby-stealer there, too.

The piece also stated that, “The single most dangerous time is when mom goes to the bathroom,” so “Put your baby in a bassinet and roll it into the bathroom with you.”

I’m sorry, but if the chances are about one in four million that a baby is going to be abducted, the idea that a mother who has just gone through childbirth now has to drag her bassinet into the bathroom to be safe from a nearly nonexistent threat is more than ridiculous. It’s cruel. (Not to mention just plain stupid!)

So if you want to enjoy a happier, healthier 2012, it’s very easy. Just ignore the temptation to overreact to minuscule threats . . . and have a shot of whatever that toddler was drinking.

Which quite appropriately leads us to the Lighter Side….