It’s Wednesday, January 18th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the mid-week edition, James Taranto marks the departure of Jon Huntsman from the 2012 GOP presidential race with what he terms a bit of “Bye-Ku” poetry:

Call me crazy, but
I think insulting voters
Will warm them to me

Or, as Huntsman inexplicable put it:

“To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

Okay….

….you’re crazy!

Next up, two items from the WSJ detailing the seriousness of the threat posed to America’s national security not only by radical Islam, but Team Tick-Tock’s increasingly inept response.  First, the Claremont Institute‘s Mark Helprin describes….

The Mortal Threat From Iran

Iran can sea-launch from off our coasts. Germany planned this in World War II. If cocaine can be smuggled into the U.S. without interdiction, we cannot dismiss the possibility of an Iranian nuke ending up in Manhattan.

To assume that Iran will not close the Strait of Hormuz is to assume that primitive religious fanatics will perform cost-benefit analyses the way they are done at Wharton. They won’t, especially if the oil that is their life’s blood is threatened. If Iran does close the strait, we will fight an air and naval war derivative of and yet peripheral to the Iranian nuclear program, a mortal threat the president of the United States has inadequately addressed.

A mortal threat when Iran is not yet in possession of a nuclear arsenal? Yes, because immediately upon possession all remedies are severely restricted. Without doubt, Iran has long wanted nuclear weapons—to deter American intervention in its and neighboring territories; to threaten Europe and thereby cleave it from American interests in the Middle East; to respond to the former Iraqi nuclear effort; to counter the contiguous nuclear presences in Pakistan, Russia and the U.S. in the Gulf; to neutralize Israel’s nuclear deterrent so as to limit it to the attrition of conventional battle, or to destroy it with one lucky shot; to lead the Islamic world; to correct the security imbalance with Saudi Arabia, which aided by geography and American arms now outclasses it; and to threaten the U.S. directly.

In the absence of measures beyond pinpoint sanctions and unenforceable resolutions, Iran will get nuclear weapons, which in its eyes are an existential necessity. We have long known and done nothing about this, preferring to dance with the absurd Iranian claim that it is seeking electricity. With rampant inflation and unemployment, a housing crisis, and gasoline rationing, why spend $1,000-$2,000 per kilowatt to build nuclear plants instead of $400-$800 for gas, when you possess the second largest gas reserves in the world? In 2005, Iran consumed 3.6 trillion cubic feet of its 974 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves, which are enough to last 270 years. We know that in 2006—generation exceeding consumption by 10%—Iran exported electricity and planned a high-tension line to Russia to export more.

Accommodationists argue that a rational Iran can be contained. Not the Iran with a revered tradition of deception; that during its war with Iraq pushed 100,000 young children to their deaths clearing minefields; that counts 15% of its population as “Volunteer Martyrs”; that chants “Death to America” at each session of parliament; and whose president states that no art “is more beautiful . . . than the art of the martyr’s death.” Not the Iran in thrall to medieval norms and suffering continual tension and crises.

Its conceptions of nuclear strategy are very likely to be looser, and its thresholds lower, than those of Russia and China, which are in turn famously looser and lower than our own. And yet Eisenhower and Churchill weighed a nuclear option in Korea, Kennedy a first strike upon the U.S.S.R., and Westmoreland upon North Vietnam. How then can we be certain that Iran is rational and containable?

Inexpert experts will state that Iran cannot strike with nuclear weapons. But let us count the ways. It has the aerial tankerage to sustain one or two planes that might slip past air defenses between it and Israel, Europe, or the U.S., combining radar signatures with those of cleared commercial flights. As Iran increases its ballistic missile ranges and we strangle our missile defenses, America will face a potential launch from Iranian territory.

Iran can sea-launch from off our coasts. Germany planned this in World War II. Subsequently, the U.S. completed 67 water-supported launches, ending as recently as 1980; the U.S.S.R. had two similar programs; and Iran itself has sea-launched from a barge in the Caspian. And if in 2007, for example, 1,100 metric tons of cocaine were smuggled from South America without interdiction, we cannot dismiss the possibility of Iranian nuclear charges of 500 pounds or less ending up in Manhattan or on Pennsylvania Avenue. (Not that we’d really miss Manhattan!)

The probabilities of the above are subject to the grave multiplication of nuclear weapons. Of all things in respect to the Iranian nuclear question, this is the most overlooked. A 1-in-20 chance of breaking a leg is substantially different from a 1-in-20 chance of dying, itself different from a 1-in-20 chance of half a million people dying. Cost drastically changes the nature of risk, although we persist in ignoring this. Assuming that we are a people worthy of defending ourselves, what can be done?

Much easier before Iran recently began to burrow into bedrock, it is still possible for the U.S., and even Israel at greater peril, to halt the Iranian nuclear program for years to come. Massive ordnance penetrators; lesser but precision-guided penetrators “drilling” one after another; fuel-air detonations with almost the force of nuclear weapons; high-power microwave attack; the destruction of laboratories, unhardened targets, and the Iranian electrical grid; and other means, can be combined to great effect.

Unlike North Korea, Iran does not yet possess nuclear weapons, does not have the potential of overwhelming an American ally, and is not of sufficient concern to Russia and China, its lukewarm patrons, for them to war on its behalf. It is incapable of withholding its oil without damaging itself irreparably, and even were it to cease production entirely, the Saudis—in whose interest the elimination of Iranian nuclear potential is paramount—could easily make up the shortfall. Though Iran might attack Saudi oil facilities, it could not damage them fatally. The Gulf would be closed until Iranian air, naval, and missile forces there were scrubbed out of existence by the U.S., probably France and Britain, and the Saudis themselves, in a few weeks.

It is true that Iranian proxies would attempt to exact a price in terror world-wide, but this is not new, we would brace for the reprisals, and although they would peak, they would then subside. The cost would be far less than that of permitting the power of nuclear destruction to a vengeful, martyrdom-obsessed state in the midst of a never-subsiding fury against the West.

Any president of the United States fit for the office (Aye, THERE’S the rub!) should someday, soon, say to the American people that in his judgment Iran—because of its longstanding and implacable push for nuclear weapons, its express hostility to the U.S., Israel and the West, and its record of barbarity and terror—must be deprived of the capacity to wound this country and its allies such as they have never been wounded before.

Relying solely upon his oath, (Aye, there’s ANOTHER rub!) holding in abeyance any consideration of politics or transient opinion, and eager to defend his decision in exquisite detail, he should order the armed forces of the United States to attack and destroy the Iranian nuclear weapons complex. When they have complied, and our pilots are in the air on their way home, they will have protected our children in their beds—and our children’s children, many years from now, in theirs. May this country always have clear enough sight and strong enough will to stand for itself in the face of mortal threat, and in time.

Second, the Daily Telegraph‘s Con Coughlin, offers his observations on The Great Appeaser….

Talking to the Taliban

In their view, Obama has already run up the white flag by ordering the withdrawal of American forces to begin this summer.

The announcement by the Taliban that it is setting up an office in the Gulf state of Qatar to facilitate peace talks with Washington over the future of Afghanistan has inevitably raised hopes that a negotiated settlement of the decade-long conflict is possible.

Getting the Taliban to the negotiating table was, after all, one of President Obama’s key objectives when he set out his comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan in his speech at West Point in December 2009. Mr. Obama aimed to intensify the pressure on the Taliban by deploying an extra 30,000 U.S. troops. By undertaking extensive “kill or capture” missions against key Taliban leaders, U.S. military commanders believed they would force the Taliban to negotiate.

But even though thousands of Taliban fighters have been removed from the Afghan battlefield, serious doubts remain about whether the Taliban’s leadership, which is mainly based in Pakistan, is really serious about engaging in meaningful peace talks with the U.S. and Afghan governments.

The Taliban claim that the new Qatar office is being established for precisely this purpose. During the latter part of 2011, however, they engaged in a campaign of violence whose sole purpose was to destroy any prospect of a negotiated peace deal with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

By far their most effective action to date has been the murder last September of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Mr. Karzai’s chief peace negotiator. He was killed by a Taliban suicide bomber who concealed an explosive device in his turban.

The assassination of Mr. Rabbani, the head of the Afghan government’s High Peace Council, effectively ended the tentative talks that had been taking place between the Taliban and Mr. Karzai. When the U.S. hosted a peace conference in Bonn last month to address some of the Taliban’s longstanding grievances, the Taliban leadership simply boycotted the event.

The other factor that stands in the way of an effective peace dialogue is the role of Pakistan in Afghanistan’s turbulent political landscape. The official position of Pakistan’s government is that it supports the U.S.-led NATO effort to defeat the Taliban and restore political stability to Afghanistan, but many senior Pakistani security officials continue to support radical elements of the Taliban, many of whom have a long-standing relationship with Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency.

Shortly before his retirement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last fall, Adm. Mike Mullen vented the frustration of many senior Pentagon officials by openly accusing the ISI of supporting the Haqqani network, the Taliban-linked Islamist group responsible for a string of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan—including the September attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

Like the Taliban, Pakistan also boycotted December’s Bonn conference, and many Western officials believe it would be virtually impossible to negotiate a lasting peace settlement for Afghanistan without Pakistan’s involvement.

One reason the Taliban and Pakistan are unwilling to invest much political capital in peace talks is that, so far as they are concerned, Mr. Obama has already run up the white flag in Afghanistan by ordering the withdrawal of American forces to begin this summer—in good time for November’s presidential election contest. By setting a 2014 deadline for the complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces, Mr. Obama has completely undermined the effectiveness of the strategy he set out at West Point. Instead of intensifying the military pressure on the Taliban, the president has signaled that he is more interested in bringing the U.S. troops home.

Consequently, Taliban leaders know that, rather than being forced to negotiate, all they have to do is wait for the Americans to leave before they make their next move.

“Despite the opening of the Qatar office, we have received no indication that the Taliban are serious about engaging in serious peace talks,” a senior Western intelligence official involved with NATO’s Afghan mission recently told me. “So far as we can tell, the Taliban is simply playing a waiting game. Any conversations we do have with the Taliban are about their role in Afghanistan after NATO troops have left, rather about how they reconcile their differences with the Karzai government.”

If that remains the case, and the decision to open the Qatar office is nothing more than a stalling tactic on the part of the Taliban, then Mr. Obama will have no one but himself to blame for failing to achieve a peace settlement in Afghanistan. If he were really serious about winning the war, then he would keep the troops deployed until their mission had been achieved.

Fish may rot from the head, but this entire Administration, indeed, the entire Dimocratic leadership….

….has stunk to high heaven from the git go.  We only hope and pray more innocent Americans won’t pay the price for their folly and ineptitude.

Moving on, words of wisdom from Thomas Sowell Juan Williams would do well to heed:

An Ignored ‘Disparity’

With all the talk about “disparities” in innumerable contexts, there is one very important disparity that gets remarkably little attention — disparities in the ability to create wealth. People who are preoccupied, or even obsessed, with disparities in income are seldom interested much, or at all, in the disparities in the ability to create wealth, which are often the reasons for the disparities in income.

In a market economy, people pay us for benefiting them in some way — whether we are sweeping their floors, selling them diamonds or anything in between. Disparities in our ability to create benefits for which others will pay us are huge, and the skills required can develop early — or sometimes not at all.

A recent national competition among high school students who create their own technological advances turned up an especially high share of such students winning recognition in the San Francisco Bay Area. A closer look showed that the great majority of these Bay Area students had Asian names.

Asian Americans are a substantial presence in this region but they are by no means a majority, much less such an overwhelming majority as they are among those winning high tech awards.

This pattern of disproportionate representation of particular groups among those with special skills and achievements is not confined to Asian Americans or even to the United States. It is a phenomenon among particular racial, ethnic or other groups in countries around the world — the Ibos in Nigeria, the Parsees in India, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Germans in Brazil, Chinese in Malaysia, Lebanese in West Africa, Tamils in Sri Lanka. The list goes on and on.

Gross inequalities in skills and achievements have been the rule, not the exception, on every inhabited continent and for centuries on end. Yet our laws and government policies act as if any significant statistical difference between racial or ethnic groups in employment or income can only be a result of their being treated differently by others.

Nor is this simply an opinion. Businesses have been sued by the government when the representation of different groups among their employees differs substantially from their proportions in the population at large. But, no matter how the human race is broken down into its components — whether by race, sex, geographic region or whatever — glaring disparities in achievements have been the rule, not the exception.

Anyone who watches professional basketball games knows that the star players are by no means a representative sample of the population at large. (But as Newt noted, the politically-correct are notorioulsly unreceptive to inconvenient facts!) The book “Human Accomplishment” by Charles Murray is a huge compendium of the top achievements around the world in the arts and sciences, as well as in sports and other fields.

Nowhere have these achievements been random or representative of the demographic proportions of the population of a country or of the world. Nor have they been the same from one century to the next. China was once far more advanced technologically than any country in Europe, but then it fell behind and more recently is gaining ground.

Most professional golfers who participate in PGA tournaments have never won a single tournament, but Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods have each won dozens of tournaments. Yet these and numerous other disparities in achievement are resolutely ignored by those whose shrill voices denounce disparities in rewards, as if these disparities are somehow suspicious at best and sinister at worst.

Higher achieving groups — whether classes, races or whatever — are often blamed for the failure of other groups to achieve. Politicians and intellectuals, especially, tend to conceive of social questions in terms that allow them to take on the role of being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.

This can be a huge disservice to those individuals and groups who are lagging behind, for it leads them to focus on a sense of grievance and victimhood, rather than on how they can lift themselves up instead of trying to pull other people down.

Again, this is a worldwide phenomenon — a sad commentary on the down side of the brotherhood of man.

Yet despite the facts, in the face of mountains of evidence which belie the efficacy of their initiatives, Liberals remain unwilling to admit their error.  Why?  Because, like requiring photo ID’s as a prerequisite to voting, the truth would likely preclude their preservation of power.  And this isn’t about the poor; this isn’t about the downtrodden; this isn’t about the country; it’s all about a continuation of control….and always has been!

Which brings us to today’s installment of the Environmental Moment, courtesy of the WSJ:

A Tale of Two Pipelines

Canada and the U.S. trade economic places.

Oh, for the bad old days, when Americans could poke fun at Canada for its economic policies. Nowadays, Canada has it all over the U.S.

Take the contrasting political reaction to proposed pipelines to carry oil from Alberta’s oil sands. In the U.S., the Obama Administration has sat on a permit for the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline that would create thousands of jobs, break a supply logjam in Cushing, Oklahoma, and carry the oil to refineries along the Gulf Coast. President Obama may soon kill the Keystone XL now that Congress is forcing him to finally make a decision.

Then there’s Canada, where private companies want to invest $5.4 billion to build a Northern Gateway Pipeline that would carry Alberta oil to ports in British Columbia. Joe Oliver, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, recently blasted the “radicals” trying to block the project.

Mr. Oliver said the green movement’s “goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydroelectric dams.” He said the greens “attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources.” These groups are willing to “sue anyone and everyone to delay the project even further” to the point it becomes “economically unviable.” Sounds right, if a tad understated.

Canadians are at least as environmentally sensitive as Americans, but they realize the economic folly in failing to exploit abundant their national energy resources. They also realize it’s possible to balance energy production for economic growth with environmental protections.

The Northern Gateway Pipeline is especially important for Canada given Mr. Obama’s hostility to the Keystone XL. If the U.S. shuns Alberta oil, apparently preferring imports from Venezuela, then Canada needs to reach export markets in Asia. “I think it is essential,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said recently, “based on what’s happened with Keystone XL.” Whoever thought the day would come when Ottawa would be more pro-growth than the U.S. government?

We did….the day The Obamao took office.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this disturbing story forwarded by Carl Polizzi….

VA AG Fears DC Law May Relocate Rat ‘Families’ to Virginia

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/va-ag-fears-dc-law-may-relocate-rat-families-virginia

Hopefully in late January, 2013!

And in News of the Bizarre, another classic contribution from Bill Meisen….

Cops Believe North Carolina Inmate Hid 10-Inch Revolver In His Rectum

A man arrested this week in North Carolina may have stashed a .38 barrel revolver in his rectum, according to police, who reported that the unloaded 10-inch weapon was not discovered until after the suspect had been booked into a cell in the county jail.

Michael Leon Ward, a 22-year-old Georgia resident, was arrested Monday after a trooper spotted him speeding. Ward, who resisted arrest, was subdued with the help of a stun gun. A subsequent search of his vehicle resulted in additional charges for possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia.

But it was only after Ward–who is a fugitive on a murder warrant out of Atlanta–entered the Onslow County jail that sheriff’s investigators discovered what else he possessed. According to cops, Ward….

….summoned jailers to his cell, claiming that someone was trying to kill him, and that he discovered a gun inside his cell. The weapon was found in the toilet, where Ward claimed he tossed it after finding it in his bunk.

Sheriff’s investigators say they are investigating how Ward got the weapon into the jail, since he had been “strip searched prior to being booked into a cell block.” The inmate, a press release notes, was taken today to a local hospital “for possible injuries that may have occurred to Ward’s rectum where it is believed Ward may have concealed” the revolver.

The gun, deputies reported, was test fired and found to be operational.

Which brings new meaning to the phrase, “That be in the butt, Bob!” And that, as TLJ noted, includes handle and all!

Finally, we’ll call it a day courtesy of George Lawlor, and another sordid tale ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter:

Police say woman offered sexual favors for chicken McNuggets

A Los Angeles woman was arrested last week for offering sexual favors in exchange for chicken McNuggets, according to Burbank police. Khadijah Baseer of Los Angeles allegedly opened customers’ car doors while they were in the drive-thru of a Burbank McDonald’s.

A witness reported Baseer’s activity to police and she was arrested on suspicion of prostitution.

Now THAT’S a happy meal!  Rumors “Gramps” Stavert went through this particular drive-thru five times in one day remain unconfirmed!

Magoo