It’s Wednesday, September 7th, 2011….but before we begin, a brief comment on current events.

First, the only aspect of the Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. kerfuffle that even merits attention is the rank hypocrisy on display once again by the Left.

However, just as every cloud has a silver lining, Hoffa’s comments did give us pause to consider the source of the Dimocrats’ vitriolic hatred of Tea Partiers, thinking what anyone could possibly find so repugnant and hateful about a movement espousing smaller government, decreased spending, responsible budgeting and lower taxes.  After all, would such policies not benefit Americans of every socio-economic status?

Of course they would.  Which brings us back to the question at hand, as well as the answer.  Neither the Tea Party nor its goals threaten working and/or middle-class Americans in the least, regardless of union affiliation.  But effective fiscal conservatism would carry materially adverse consequences (spelled u-n-e-m-p-l-o-y-m-e-n-t) for every segment of modern Liberalism’s bureaucratic bourgeoisie, i.e, the Dimocratic Apparatchiks, including union bosses, “educators”, activists, government bureaucrats and politicians at every level of government.

Remember; self-preservation is the most basic of instincts.   And there is nothing as violently unpredictable and dangerous as a cornered animal….or someone being forced to seek gainful employment, never having worked a hard day in their life!

Now, here’s the Gouge!

We lead off the mid-week edition with a timely bit of prose from of Best of the Web in which James Taranto takes us….

‘To Heck and Back’

Obama’s model for America: Detroit.

“We are one nation. We are one people. We will rise and we will fall together,” President Obamadeclared in his Labor Day speech. “Anyone who doesn’t believe it should come here to Detroit. It’s like the commercial says: This is a city that’s been to heck and back. And while there are still a lot of challenges here, I see a city that’s coming back.” (Yeah….and the come next February, the Lions will be in the Super Bowl!)

We’ve heard that before. Sixteen years ago, when we were an editor at City Journal, we worked on an article by Julia Vitullo-Martintitled “Detroit Fights Back.” “No American city ever fell as far or as fast as Detroit,” Vitullo-Martin began. “But now Detroit is poised for a comeback. Every signal–economic, political, social–is positive.” One hopeful development was the retirement of five-term mayor Coleman Young, whose tenure had proved disastrous.

“By 1973, when Young was elected mayor, the population had fallen to 1.39 million from its peak of 1.85 million in 1952; it stood at 1.03 million in 1990,” Vitullo-Martin wrote. “The proportion of whites in Detroit dropped from 56 percent in 1970 to 22 percent in 1990–the smallest of any of America’s 150 largest cities.”

Those trends have only continued in the ensuing two decades, as the Southeast Michigan Council of Governmentsreported in April: “The total population in the City of Detroit declined from 951,270 in 2000 to 713,777 in 2010, a decrease of 237,493 or 25%. . . . Overall diversity in the city declined slightly, from 81% Black Non-Hispanic in 2000 to 82% in 2010. The White Non-Hispanic population dropped to 8% in 2010 from 10.5% in 2000.”

In 1995, when Vitullo-Martin wrote, unemployment was on the decline: “Detroit’s unemployment rate is down to 9 percent, far above the region’s 5.3 percent but well below the city’s 13.4 percent of April 1994 and way below 1990’s 16.1 percent. Home prices are soaring.” The average official city unemployment ratelast year was 22.7%, and regional unemploymentwas 13.7% as of June 2011.

As of 1995, Detroit ranked “11th among American cities in overall violent crime.” By 2010, according to a chart by CQ Press, Detroit had the country’s third-highest crime rate, lagging only St. Louis and Camden, N.J. “It has been a murderous summer in Detroit with some 254 shootings and 52 dead,” Henry Payneof the Detroit News reports:

[Obama] parachuted into this city’s sanitized, heavily-securitized [sic] downtown square-mile of corporate headquarters and Whole Foods markets – safe from the murderous streets of the city’s other 138 square miles that have claimed 250 lives already this year and put Detroit on path for a staggering 50 per 100,000 residents murder rate in 2011.

Obama saw “a city that’s coming back” because he avoided the vast majority of the city, which has “been to heck” and remains there. Actually, the TV commercial to which Obama alluded– a Chrysler adthat ran during this year’s Super Bowl–uses the word hell. The commercial aimed to cast the auto maker as a rugged survivor when in fact it is a welfare case, the recipient of not one but two federal bailouts.

Vitullo-Martin’s piece, sadly, proved not to be prescient, but it is very much worth rereading for its account of the decline of a once-great city:

Detroit’s economy unraveled most dramatically in the 1970s, as the auto industry made wrong decisions at every turn. . . . General Motors, much larger than Chrysler or Ford, set the terms for the whole industry–and they proved self-destructive terms. When GM signed an excessively generous labor contract with the UAW–as often happened in the days when U.S. companies could sell products as fast as they could make them and so kept their plants running at any cost–Ford and Chrysler meekly followed suit. The Big Three raised car prices as they liked, with little fear of being undercut by overseas competition. The industry had become a shared monopoly, with predetermined, protected market shares. Labor and management costs mushroomed, and the industry’s inbred culture stifled innovation.

Meanwhile, Coleman Young, who had been a civil rights hero, deliberately accelerated his city’s decline:

Middle-class citizens, white and black, sought the lower taxes and better services available right across Eight Mile Road, Detroit’s northern border. White flight escalated again during the court-ordered school busing efforts of the seventies. Mayor Young antagonized whites further by promoting a confrontational stance toward the suburbs–a stance that allowed him to consolidate his political base by fanning the resentments of an increasingly black Detroit. . . .

Many white Detroit business people, unwilling to be quoted by name, look back on the Young years with particular bitterness. Says one, who left the city in 1982: “Coleman was a racist, and he made it clear that white businesses were unwelcome, which meant to me that we would go unprotected. We could get robbed, burned out, preyed upon by city inspectors, and Coleman wouldn’t do anything. He encouraged attacks on us. There was absolutely no reason–not a one–to stay in Detroit.”

We heard echoes of Young’s confrontational approach in yesterday’s comments by Jimmy Hoffa Jr., head of the Teamsters Union, who was among the warm-up acts for the president’s Detroit speech. As the Associated Pressreports:

In addressing the crowd before Obama’s appearance, Hoffa said there has been a war on workers. “And you see it everywhere, it is the tea party. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war. The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what? They’ve got a war, they got a war with us and there’s only going to be one winner. It’s going to be the workers of Michigan, and America. We’re going to win that war.”

Hoffa added: “President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these son of a bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.” (Jimmy Jr. belongs in the Meadowlands….with his father!)

Hoffa describes the combatants in his “war” as “workers” on the one hand and “the Tea Party” on the other. But of course he isn’t interested in workers in general, only those who belong to unions–a group that, after decades of private-sector union decline, largely consists of employees of government, government contractors and government bailout beneficiaries such as General Motors and Chrysler. “The Tea Party,” meanwhile, is a dysphemism for taxpayers.

“Despite President Obama’s repeated claims to change the tone in Washington, the White House had no comment this afternoon” on Hoffa’s highly uncivil rhetoric, ABC Newsreports. Hey, give Hoffa credit. It isn’t easy to stop this president from talking.

In his own speech, the president made clear that he agreed with the substance if not the tone of Hoffa’s remarks. But turning America into Detroit may not be easy. After all, once Detroiters moved past Eight Mile Road, they were no longer able to vote against Coleman Young. Obama can’t shrink the electorate he will have to face next year.

The first 4 minutes of this Glenn Beck video details all one needs to know about the determinant of Detroit’s deterioration:

It’s spelled “D-I-M-O-C-R-A-T-S”….as in over 50 years of uninterrupted despotism.

Next up, Michael Barone details why the….

Obama Speech Fiasco Shows ‘Audacity of Weakness’

I can’t remember a more stunning rebuke of a president by a congressional leader than House Speaker John Boehner’s refusal to agree to President Barack Obama’s demand — er, request — that he summon a joint session of Congress to hear the president’s latest speech on the economy at 8 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Sept. 7.

Obama’s request was regarded as a clever move by some wiseguys in the left blogosphere because that was the exact time of a long-scheduled Republican presidential candidate debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Take that, you guys!

But Boehner smoothly responded that with Congress reconvening late that afternoon, the security sweep necessary for a presidential visit would be impossible and invited the president to speak Thursday. White House officials quickly agreed, scheduling the speech at 7 p.m. EDT to avoid overlap with the first game of the National Football League season.

Not such a big deal, some people are saying. I disagree. I think it illustrates several of the weaknesses of this presidency.

One is a lack of regard for the Constitution. Congress is a separate branch of government, set up by Article 1 of the Constitution, which is not about the executive branch as Joe Biden said in the 2008 vice presidential debate. (Media outfits that dispatched dozens of investigative reporters to Alaska were apparently incapable of discovering this obvious error.)

Before last week, presidents and congressional leaders always agreed privately on scheduling presidential addresses to joint sessions before any public announcement was made. But it appears that no such agreement was made here, just a brusque announcement that had to be retracted.

Another weakness on display was contempt for public opinion. White House press secretary Jay Carney said it was just “coincidental” that the president wanted to speak at the same time as the debate. It was just “one debate of many that’s on one channel of many.”

But those with memories that go back beyond last week may recall that in May 2009, Obama scrambled to find a venue for a speech at exactly the same time as former Vice President Dick Cheney was scheduled to speak at the American Enterprise Institute on detainee questioning issues. Cheney coolly watched Obama on television and then delivered his own speech.

Ham-handedly trying to bigfoot the opposition is a habit with this president, not a coincidence.

A third Obama weakness is his propensity to charge his political opponents with playing politics when he is doing exactly that himself. In previewing this latest jobs-and-the-economy speech, Carney said that Obama will make the case “that politics is broken and that politics is getting in the way of the very necessary things we need to do.”

This from the president who has brushed aside one bipartisan initiative after another, from the health care initiative of Sens. Ron Wyden and Bob Bennett to the recommendations of his own deficit commission, headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson.

Instead, he has taken a purely partisan course on one issue after another — and heaped blame on Republicans. He invited House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan to his speech at George Washington University and then lambasted him harshly.

Obama has been so consistently blaming Republicans in recent months for not approving the free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama that it came as an utter surprise to his deputy press secretary, Josh Earnest, that he hasn’t sent them to Congress yet.

The fourth weakness is failure to come up with policies that address situations appropriately. Press briefings suggest that Obama next week will call for an extension of the payroll tax holiday and of unemployment benefits. A case can be made for both, but neither has invigorated the economy yet.

We also hear that he may call for more infrastructure spending. But as the president himself told us, laughing, there aren’t actually any shovel-ready projects.

The New York Times reports he may call for “school repairs and retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency.” This sounds suspiciously like the weatherization program under which Seattle got $20 million and produced just 14 jobs.

Democrats have criticized Obama on the speech-scheduling flap. James Carville said he was “out of bounds.” Salon.com’s Cenk Uygur sensed “the audacity of weakness.” It reminds me of a phrase describing a character in the 1980s TV series “Dallas” — “blustering, opportunistic, craven and hopelessly ineffective all at once.”

Any questions?!?

And since we’re on the subject of “blustering, opportunistic, craven and hopelessly ineffective all at once”, here’s the WSJ‘s take on….

Mitt Romney’s 59 Economic Flavors

A jobs plan that shrinks from some of the biggest issues.

Mitt Romney rolled out a major chunk of his economic agenda yesterday, and we’ll say this for it: His ideas are better than President Obama’s. Yet the 160 pages and 59 proposals also strike us as surprisingly timid and tactical considering our economic predicament. They’re a technocrat’s guide more than a reform manifesto.

The rollout is billed as Mr. Romney’s “plan for jobs and economic growth,” and it rightly points out that to create more jobs requires above all faster growth. This may seem like common sense, but it’s a notable break from the Obama Administration’s penchant for policies that “target” jobs rather than improving overall incentives for job creation. So we have had policies for “green jobs,” or construction jobs, or teaching jobs, or automobile jobs, or temporary, targeted tax cuts for jobs—even as the economy struggles.

Mr. Romney seems to understand that the private economy will inevitably produce millions of new jobs—in industries and companies we can’t predict—when it resumes growing at 3% or more. This is an important philosophical distinction that drives most of the Romney agenda.

So it’s good to see the former Massachusetts Governor endorse the House GOP effort to review and approve major new regulations that cost more than $100 million. Mr. Romney also joins the other GOP candidates in vowing to repeal ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank. He’d pull the Energy Department from the role as venture capitalist that it has pursued since the Bush Administration, re-focusing it back on basic research, rather than backing solar companies that go bankrupt.

His section on “human capital” is also laudable, pointing out how little sense it makes to educate the world’s smartest young people in our universities only to send them home after they graduate. He’d offer more visas to keep more of them here. The former Bain Capital executive would also apply his management skills to revamping the vast federal job-training archipelago, with its 47 programs. His proposal for “personal reemployment accounts” for laid-off workers isn’t a new idea but it is worth trying.

Where the Governor is less persuasive is on the larger issues of taxes, spending, entitlements and trade. Here he ducks and covers more than he needs to.

On taxes, Mr. Romney would immediately cut the top corporate income-tax rate to 25% from 35%. His advisers say there’s already a bipartisan consensus that the U.S. rate hurts American companies, and they’re right. Even Mr. Obama agrees.

But on other taxes, Mr. Romney shrinks from a fight. He says he favors tax reform with lower individual tax rates but only “in the long run.” His advisers say that means in the first two years of his Presidency, but then why not sketch out more details?

The answer may lie in his proposal to eliminate the capital gains tax—but only for those who earn less than $200,000 a year. This eviscerates most of the tax cut’s economic impact and also suggests that he’s afraid of Mr. Obama’s class warfare rhetoric. He even picked Mr. Obama’s trademark income threshold for the capital gains cut-off.

If Mr. Romney thinks this will let him dodge a class warfare debate, he’s fooling himself. Democrats will hit him anyway for opposing Mr. Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on higher incomes, dividends and capital gains in 2013. Perhaps Mr. Romney feels that his wealth and background make him especially vulnerable to the class charge, but if he won’t openly make the economic case for lower tax rates he’ll never get Congress to go along.

On spending, Mr. Romney joins the GOP’s “cut, cap and balance” parade, setting a cap on spending over time at 20% of GDP. What Mr. Romney doesn’t do is provide even a general map for how to get there, beyond cutting spending on nonsecurity domestic programs by 5% upon taking office.

He praises Paul Ryan for making “important strides” on Medicare but says his plan “will differ,” without offering details. He also says there are a “number of options” to reform Social Security without endorsing any of them. We are told those specifics will come later. It’s hardly unusual for candidates to avoid committing to difficult proposals, but it won’t help Mr. Romney contrast his leadership with Mr. Obama’s.

By far the most troubling proposal is Mr. Romney’s call for “confronting China” on trade. This is usually a Democratic theme, but Mr. Romney does Mr. Obama one worse by pledging to have his Treasury brand China a “currency manipulator” if it doesn’t “move quickly to bring its currency to full value.” He’d then hit Beijing with countervailing duties.

Starting a trade war is a rare policy mistake that Mr. Obama hasn’t made, but Mr. Romney claims it is a way to faster growth. His advisers say he doesn’t favor a 25% tariff on Chinese goods as some in Congress do, but once a President unleashes protectionist furies they are hard to contain.

His economic aides say this idea comes directly from Mr. Romney himself, which is even less reassuring. It looks like a political maneuver to blunt the criticism he’ll receive because some of Bain Capital’s companies sent jobs overseas, or perhaps this is intended to win over working-class precincts in Pennsylvania and Ohio. But giving Americans the impression that a trade war will bring those jobs back to the U.S. is offering false hope. It also distracts from the other fiscal and regulatory reforms that are needed to attract capital and create jobs.

The biggest rap on Mr. Romney as a potential President is that it’s hard to discern any core beliefs beyond faith in his own managerial expertise. For all of its good points, yesterday’s policy potpourri won’t change that perception.

The fact Mitt had over three years to fine-tune this….economic plan….leaves us (if his continuing defense of RomneyCare makes it possible) even less supportive of his candidacy than before.

Meanwhile, the FBI reports….

US Street, Prison Gangs Using Military to Train, Extend Reach

US criminal gangs have gained a foothold in the US military and are using overseas deployments to spread tentacles around the globe, according to the FBI. FBI gang investigator Jennifer Simon said in an e-mail to Stars & Stripes this week that gang members have been documented on or near US military bases in Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Iraq.

“It’s no secret that gang members are prevalent in the armed forces, including internationally,” Simon said, adding that the FBI is preparing to release a report on gangs in the military.

Soldiers are reluctant to talk openly about gang problems. However, Spc. Bautista Kylock, 21, of the 2nd Cavalry (Stryker) Regiment in Vilseck, Germany, said last week that there are gang members within his unit. Kylock blamed recent violence around Vilseck on soldiers affiliated with the Crips and Bloods street gangs.

Scott Barfield, a former Defense Department gang detective at 2nd Cav’s last duty station, Fort Lewis, Wash., told the Sun-Times earlier this year that he had identified more than 300 soldiers at the base as gang members…

There are no official statistics on gang membership in the military, (WTF NOT?!?) but some experts have estimated that 1 percent to 2 percent of the US military are gang members, Simon said. That compares with just 0.02 percent of the US population believed to be gang members, she wrote.

Soooo….despite knowing who they are, the Brass are unwilling to discharge them from the service?!?  Perhaps, given Gangbangers’ traditional intolerance of gays, our politically-correct Pentagon’s looking to solve this problem via the recent rescission of DA/DT.  After all, gangbanging is one thing….intolerance of homosexuality is quite another story!

And in the “Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Gloom Of Night” segment, Townhall.com relates this….

Shocker: Post Office Can’t Fulfill Healthcare Promises

It’s no surprise the Post Office showed a loss of over $9 billion last year and is on the same track to post a shortfall of at least $8 billion (No….make that $10B!) this year and today, the postmaster general will testify before Congress about how the government backed agency can’t pay its bills.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe is among the witnesses scheduled to appear Tuesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The Postal Service is facing a second straight year of losses of $8 billion or more. A decline in mail because of the Internet and the loss of revenue from advertising amid the economic downturn have taken a toll on the agency.

Oh and what’s this? Millions (Make that “billions”….with a “b”!) in unpaid pension/health care obligations?

Postal officials say they will be unable to make this month’s $5.5 billion payment to cover future employee health care costs because the agency will have reached its borrowing limit and doesn’t have enough cash.

Ready for the postal worker strike in 3…2…1…

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with another sign the Apocalypse is upon us:

Miss Colombia Reprimanded for Going Commando During Miss Universe Appearances