It’s Friday, January 20th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up on the last Gouge of the week, Kimberly Strassel relates….

What Ron Paul Wants

He knows he can’t win, but he wants to use his delegates to hold the Republican Party hostage to his views on national security and presidential power.

 

Ron Paul didn’t win Iowa. He didn’t win New Hampshire. He won’t win here on Saturday, and he won’t win Florida. The Texas congressman will not likely be the first choice for Republican nominee in a single U.S. state.

For most politicians, the act of losing—again and again—is a sign that the majority of voters prefer something else. Yet Mr. Paul isn’t going anywhere. He’s suggested he’ll be in this primary until the last votes in June. Which raises the question: What does Mr. Paul want?

The answer is coming clear, and it ought to have the Republican voters who are hosting Mr. Paul in this primary unhappy. The speculation up to now has been that the Texan might launch a third-party run, but it seems he’s keeping that in his back pocket. His real aim is to take the party hostage, threatening to withhold his followers’ votes unless the GOP agrees to adopt positions that are anathema to most conservatives. Call it minority rule.

The Paul team keeps insisting they are in this to win. But if that were the case, Mr. Paul would have spent more than a few days in this state, and he would then be concentrating on Florida. His team is instead throwing its money and efforts at states like Nevada, Maine, Colorado and Minnesota, which are less expensive markets and where caucus systems are more open to Mr. Paul’s grass-roots troops.

The spin is that these smaller states could allow Mr. Paul to steadily assemble the 1,144 delegates necessary to clinch the nomination—even if he never wins a race. This is ludicrous. With most Republican primary and caucus states now awarding delegates on a proportional basis, and with Mr. Paul polling low in most delegate-rich states, he cannot hit that number.

The bullishness is designed to keep up turnout among Mr. Paul’s supporters and provide polite cover for the team’s real objective: running up delegate numbers. The goal is to collect enough delegates to make a statement at the Republican convention, where Mr. Paul will let it be known that the price of his support will be the adoption of his positions. “The more delegates I have, the more leverage I have,” said Mr. Paul, bluntly, this week. “We’ll go after delegates, and we have staying power.”

Mr. Paul isn’t losing this nomination because of his libertarian economic views, including his calls to slash spending. His criticism of big domestic government is what has earned him admiration from many Republicans. The GOP has long been the party of limited government, and were Mr. Paul to use his influence to push a nominee to focus more on that goal, many voters might appreciate the gesture.

Mr. Paul is losing this nomination because of his isolationist views on foreign policy and presidential power. As the voter boos at debates attest, his positions are decidedly not those of a Republican Party that has long believed in a robust projection of U.S. power.

And yet Paul advisers are now admitting this is the platform Mr. Paul is intent on foisting. The congressman wants to use his delegate power to pressure the party to reverse its support for, say, key sections of the Patriot Act (like roving wiretaps) since they offend Mr. Paul’s sensibilities. He also wants the GOP to end a president’s ability to take action against enemies without explicit congressional approval.

And he’s in no mood to negotiate. “I don’t how they’re going to handle it,” said Mr. Paul. “Because we’re very precise on what we would like. . . . We want to change things.”

Republicans should not be expected to handle it well. There is a certain hubris to the Paul campaign, the belief that because Mr. Paul makes appeals to the Constitution, his views are pure and right—and anyone who disagrees is a member of the “establishment.”

It seems not to matter to Mr. Paul that the complex issues on which he pronounces have in fact long been the subject of vigorous debate, and that the GOP has come by its positions honestly. It seems also not to matter that exit polls show that much of Mr. Paul’s support comes from outside the Republican party, from left-leaning independents or even Democrats. Mr. Paul will see his particular views adopted by the GOP, or he will rebel.

Perhaps the better question is not what Mr. Paul wants, but what he hopes to accomplish. In the unlikely event he is able to scare the ultimate nominee into adopting his demands, the subsequent revolt from conservative voters will only hurt the party. If, as is more likely, the GOP nominee refuses to renounce the Patriot Act or presidential power, and Mr. Paul defects for an independent run, that too would hurt the party.

Either way, the end result is a re-election boost to Barack Obama, whose views are as far away from Mr. Paul’s as any candidate now on the stage. And it’s hard to imagine how Mr. Paul could want that.

Unless of course, as we strongly suspect, Paul’s elevator doesn’t stop on every floor.

And since we’re on the subject of The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight, Ann Coulter objects that Mitt’s opponents are offering facts not in evidence:

Strongest Case Against Romney a Few Sheets Short of a Ream

 

Mitt Romney has spent more than 20 years in private enterprise, making thousands of business decisions affecting hundreds of companies that led to more than 100,000 new jobs and billions of dollars for employees and investors. So you can see why the left despises him.

Among Romney’s thousands of business decisions, the one I gather his opponents consider his absolute worst was the decision to close a paper plant in Marion, Ind. Which wasn’t his decision at all.

It was labor trouble at the Marion plant of a Bain-acquired company, Ampad, that formed the basis of Teddy Kennedy’s desperate 11th-hour attack on Romney in their 1994 Senate competition. Plant worker Randy Johnson was featured in Kennedy campaign commercials against Romney and disgruntled workers were lavished with Dickensian lachrymosity in The Boston Globe.

In the current presidential campaign, Democrats — and some Republicans — have returned to Ampad and the Marion plant as their case in chief against Romney.

The “King of Bain” movie that a pro-Newt Gingrich super-pac just bought with money donated by a gambling magnate cites only one company closed by Bain when Romney was even there.

Guess which one? That’s right: Ampad.

The Democratic National Committee has retained Johnson to go on tour in order to more fulsomely describe the horrors perpetrated by Bain Capital on workers at that plant. As salt-of-the-earth Johnson explains, he lost his job at Ampad because Romney “didn’t care about the worker.”

It is beyond journalistic malpractice for media outlets showcasing the bitter and lying Johnson to neglect to mention that he was the union president who led the strike that forced Ampad to close the plant.

And yet The New York Times, MSNBC and others who have publicized Johnson’s sob story regularly refuse to convey that crucial fact. This would be as if a judge excluded the fact that the defense’s principal witness is the defendant’s mother.

By 1994, the unionized Marion plant was becoming a losing operation to every company that owned it. It was a paper plant, and in the early 1990s, the paper business was beginning to go the way of the buggy whip, as the world became computerized. (Randy Johnson suffered? Paper magnate Peter Brandt nearly lost Stephanie Seymour over the collapse of the paper market.)

Bain Capital specialized in rescuing troubled companies, so in 1992, it bought the faltering paper-based office products business, Ampad, from the Mead paper company. Far from shutting down Ampad, Bain started buying up more firms in the industry to add to Ampad’s portfolio, hoping to create efficiencies and synergies.

In July 1994, Bain-controlled Ampad bought Smith-Corona’s struggling paper business — home to the famed Marion plant. (Despite shedding its paper business, Smith-Corona went bankrupt the next year. Nobody uses typewriters anymore. Ironically, a century earlier, people said Smith-Corona typewriters would never replace the pen. They probably railed against Smith-Corona as “vulture capitalists” destroying the pen industry.)

Seeking to succeed where Smith-Corona had failed, Bain’s Ampad sought to renegotiate a suicide pact-union contract at the Marion plant. But instead of renegotiating, union president Randy Johnson thought it would be a great idea to immediately go on strike.

As long as the nation is still in the fifth stage of grief over Steve Jobs’ death, with gushing tributes to his contributions to our wonderful new world of computerized books, letters, memos, newspapers, CDs and classified ads, ask yourselves: Would the mid-1990s have been a good time for workers in an industry made vulnerable by the new, paperless information age to stage a long, acrimonious strike?

Union president Randy Johnson thought it was. The Democrats (and some Republicans) apparently do, too.

Romney wasn’t even at Bain during Ampad’s acquisition of the Smith-Corona business, much less for the strike at the Marion plant. He was on a leave of absence from Bain to run against Sen. Ted Kennedy. Nonetheless, a dozen workers fired from Ampad’s Marion plant showed up in Massachusetts to bird-dog Romney in the final months of his campaign.

It worked. Romney’s lead disappeared and, after celebrating with a few cocktails, Kennedy returned to the Senate to continue wrecking the country.

About six months later, Ampad closed the Marion plant for good. As Ampad’s president, Charles Hanson, explained at the time, the company had “sustained severe economic damage as a result of our inability to manufacture products at our Marion plant.” Apparently, the only thing this ruthless capitalist lackey cared about was that the factory actually produce product!

In any event, it’s highly unlikely that Bain would have anything to do with a day-to-day management decision to close a plant, anyway.

Bain led Ampad to thrive over the next few years, buying up more companies in 1995, hiring more workers and making investors nearly $100 million. By 1996, Ampad was being described in Chief Executive magazine as “a stronger, profitable competitor in a consolidating — and reviving — domestic industry.”

Alas, people kept using those damn computers and shopping for discount paper at Staples and similar stores, and in 1999, Ampad had to file for bankruptcy protection.

Contrary to every single news report on Bain’s involvement with Ampad, Bain did not drive the company to bankruptcy by looting it. To the contrary, Bain built up the company, added other companies to it, turned it into a “profitable competitor” that paid handsome dividends for a few years. (And by the way, the company would have gone bankrupt a lot sooner if it hadn’t closed down the non-producing Marion plant.)

But in the end, that wasn’t enough. If years of furious acquisition, followed by bankruptcy nearly a decade later had been Bain’s secret plan all along, Bain would be the most ham-fisted looter in history.

Politicians’ morbid fear of technological advances in the free market has real-world consequences. You will recall that the mainstream media-adored FBI agent Colleen Rowley’s main indictment of the bureau after 9/11 was that the FBI had really old computers, preventing it from anticipating the greatest terrorist attack in world history.

In response to Rowley’s charges, for example, the Times’ Maureen Dowd denounced federal law enforcement agencies for being “antiquated,” “inept” and “bloated.” (She also said: “I want to see some agents lose their jobs.” Maureen Dowd: Inadvertent Romney Supporter.)

Of course, if the Democrats, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry were running things, the FBI would still be using paper and pens — maybe quill pens — all in order to save Randy Johnson’s union job! Instead of a Xerox machine, they’d have a monk in the back room creating copies of documents by hand so as not to be accused of “vulture capitalism” for eliminating the monk’s job.

I don’t know how Mitt Romney is supposed to explain free market capitalism to career politicians, much less describe the intricacies of a thousand business decisions in two minutes during a debate. But we know that Bain’s acquisition of Ampad is the left’s best shot against Romney’s business career. We may presume they don’t have anything better, or we’d be hearing about it.

The anti-Romney hysterics don’t get to come back later with another company allegedly looted by Bain that I’ll have to spend another week researching. Henceforth, I shall refer you back to the Ampad example — their smoking gun — which, as we have seen, is not even a water pistol.

Meanwhile, the REAL “Party of No”….as in no economic growth….strikes again:

Dems propose ‘Reasonable Profits Board’ to regulate oil company profits

 

Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), want to set up a “Reasonable Profits Board” to control gas profits.

The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a “windfall profit tax” as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation. The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit.

Co-sponsoring the bill are five other Democrats: Reps. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), Bob Filner (Calif.), Marcia Fudge (Ohio), Jim Langevin (R.I.), and Lynn Woolsey (Calif.).

So John Conyers co-sponsored this brilliant piece of legislation; how appropriate.  After all, with his wife serving a 37-month sentence for accepting bribes, and his son having gone for a joy ride in a government SUV….

….he’s the perfect arbiter of what constitutes “reasonable” profits!

In a related item….

Illinois Debt Downgraded Again, Worst in Nation

 

Gee….

Topinka: Illinois’ Unpaid Bill Crisis Just Keeps Getting Worse

 

llinois keeps falling farther behind on its debt. As WBBM Newsradio’s Regine Schlesinger reports, officially, the state has a backlog of more than $4.25 billion in unpaid bills. But Illinois State Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka says when one factors in other bills, the figure is closer to around $8.5 billion. Those other outstanding bills include tax refunds, employee health insurance, and bills that have not yet reached her desk.

Topinka says this is extremely disappointing, since a year ago, the state sharply increased income taxes (by 67 percent) and corporate taxes. “After the largest tax hike in our history, the state continues to be in this precarious fiscal position with persistent payment delays, and frankly, the situation is unlikely to significantly improve in the near term,” she said.

Some state officials say the solution is more borrowing to pay the bills, but Topinka says the solution is to cut spending.

….wonder why?!?

Then there’s this from the “Pot Calling The Kettle Black” segment:

Old and busted — the “Bain mentality”:

 

President Obama’s chief campaign strategist David Axelrodtoday on “This Week” honed his two-pronged attack on GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney, insisting the former Bain Capital CEO’s record and shifting policy positionswill undermine his general election appeal.

“Frankly I don’t think bringing a Bain mentality to this economy — to running this economy — makes him a strong candidate,” Axelrod told me. “I don’t think shifting and moving around on positions – fundamental positions – is one that people are going to embrace.”

“Trust is a big issue in the presidency,” he said. “I think there’s a big trust issue here.”

New hotness — trusting people from … Bain:

 

Jeffrey Zients will serve as President Obama’s new acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but the president’s decision might undercut attacks on Republican Mitt Romney’s career as a venture capitalist, because Zients and Romney are both alumni of Bain & Company.

“I’m pleased to designate Jeff Zients to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Since day one, Jeff has demonstrated superb judgment and has provided sound advice on a whole host of issues,” Obama said in a statement accompanying the announcement today. Zients previously served as Deputy Director of OMB under Jack Lew, who became Obama’s chief of staff with the departure of Bill Daley.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney might also be pleased at Zients’ promotion, given that they have a common professional background; Zients worked with Bain & Company as early as 1988, according to the Bain website.  Romney worked at Bain & Company, first from 1977-1984, and then again from 1991 and 1992, when he was the Bain & Company chief executive officer.

So did Barack Obama bother to tell his re-election campaign that he was going to appoint a budget director who worked at the very same firm that his campaign was demonizing less than ten days earlier?  Heck, at least no one can accuse the White House of coordination these days.

Next up, Thomas Sowell and….

An Ignored ‘Disparity’: Part II

 

One of the ways of trying to reduce the vast disparities in economic success, which are common in countries around the world, is by making higher education more widely available, even for people without the money to pay for it.

This can be both a generous investment and a wise investment for a society to make. But, depending on how it is done, it can also be a foolish and even dangerous investment, as many societies around the world have learned the hard way.

When institutions of higher learning turn out highly qualified doctors, scientists, engineers and others with skills that can raise the standard of living of a whole society and make possible a better and longer life, the benefits are obvious.

What is not so obvious, but is painfully true nonetheless, is that colleges and universities can also turn out vast numbers of people with credentials, but with no marketable skills with which to fulfill their expectations. There is nothing magic about simply being in ivy-covered buildings for four years.

Statistics are often thrown around in the media, showing that people with college degrees earn higher average salaries than people without them. But such statistics lump together apples and oranges — and lemons.

A decade after graduation, people whose degrees were in a hard field like engineering earned twice as much as people whose degrees were in the ultimate soft field, education. Nor is a degree from a prestigious institution a guarantee of a big pay-off, especially not for those who failed to specialize in subjects that would give them skills valued in the real world.

But that is not even half the story. In countries around the world, people with credentials but no marketable skills have been a major source of political turmoil, social polarization and ideologically driven violence, sometimes escalating into civil war. People with degrees in soft subjects, which impart neither skills nor a realistic understanding of the world, have been the driving forces behind many extremist movements with disastrous consequences. (i.e., LIBERALS!)

These include what a noted historian called the “well-educated but underemployed” Czech young men who promoted ethnic identity politics in the 19th century, which led ultimately to historic tragedies for both Czechs and Germans in 20th century Czechoslovakia. It was much the same story of soft-subject “educated” but unsuccessful young men who promoted pro-fascist and anti-Semitic movements in Romania in the 1930s.

The targets have been different in different countries but the basic story has been much the same. Those who cannot compete in the marketplace, despite their degrees, not only resent those who have succeeded where they have failed, but push demands for preferential treatment, in order to negate the “unfair” advantages that others have.

Similar attempts to substitute political favoritism for developing one’s own skills and achievements have been common as well in India, Nigeria, Malaysia, Fiji, Sri Lanka and throughout Central Europe and Eastern Europe between the two World Wars.

Such political movements cannot promote their agendas without demonizing others, thereby polarizing whole societies. Time and again, their targets have been those who have the skills and achievements that they lack. When they achieve their ultimate success, forcing such people out of the country, as in Uganda in the 1970s or Zimbabwe more recently, the whole economy can collapse.

Against this international background, the current class warfare rhetoric in American politics and ethnic grievance ideology in our schools and colleges, can be seen as the dangerous things they are. Those who are pushing such things may be seeking nothing more than votes for themselves or some unearned group benefits at other people’s expense. But they are playing with dynamite.

The semi-literate sloganizing of our own Occupy Wall Street mobs recalls the distinction that Milton Friedman often made between those who are educated and those who have simply been in schools. Generating more such people, in the name of expanding education, may serve the interests of the Obama administration but hardly the interests of America.

Which should come as no surprise, for based on what we’ve seen, the two are mutually exclusive!

And for today’s Money Quote, we turn to journalist Asra Nomani writing in the January 19th Daily Beast:

“At this week’s Republican presidential debate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry talked about the recent video of U.S. Marines urinating on the dead bodies of alleged Taliban fighters in Afghanistan: “Let me tell you what’s despicable,” he said, “cutting Danny Pearl’s head off.” . . .

[A]s a friend and former colleague of Danny’s myself, I must admit that I, too, watched the video of the Marines and thought of the horrific video the terrorists had shot of Danny’s murder. At that moment I thought to myself: You want to see horrible? Watch the video of Danny’s death. I know that, in principle, there is no comparative analysis to be done on abuse, horror, or crime. But the truth is that we are engaged in a very ugly war, and the ruthlessness with which Danny was murdered is an expression of the extent to which our enemies will express their brutality. It was so horrible that a guard in the video, holding Danny down, retched and was thrown out of the room. Such brutality does not sanction abuse of the Geneva Conventions or other codes of military justice, but Perry, a man with whom I agree on not much, is right that the Marines’ conduct should be discussed in the context of the larger war. . . .

As a society, we shouldn’t seek moral equivalency, because we are then doomed to live according to the lowest standards of humanity. But we also don’t live in a moral vacuum. We don’t live in a utopia. We’re in a war.

What was done to Danny is an indicator of the kind of war we’re in. That is why I was particularly disturbed, as an American Muslim, to see national American Muslim organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Islamic Society of North America fire off press releases of condemnation for the Marines’ video. There are so many outrages inside our Muslim community—from honor killings to honor assaults, including the cutting off of the noses and ears of girls and women in Pakistan and Afghanistan—on which these organizations aren’t so rabid.

To suggest we violated cultural norms in a way that the people of the region don’t do is to give the people of the region a pass. The legacy of the degradation of bodies in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region is historical. When the Taliban laid siege to Kabul in 1996, they dragged a former Afghan leader, Dr. Mohammad Najibullah, from a United Nations compound, cut off his penis while he was still alive, stuffed it into his mouth, and hung him from a lamppost to send a message to the community about the new sheriffs in town.”

Call us callous, but somehow, compared to the atrocities Muslims have made the norm wherever Islam holds sway, the sight of four Marines urinating on the bodies of those who mere minutes earlier were trying to kill them and their comrades leaves us nonplussed….at worst!

On the Lighter Side….

And in another sign the apocalypse is upon us, we present News of the Bizarre, courtesy of Bill Meisen:

Utah School Board Says Cougar Mascot Too Offensive To Women

 

One Utah school district believes a cougar mascot would be insensitive to women. The Canyons School District overrode the students top choice of a cougar mascot for their high school that is to be completed in 2013.

Would-be Corner Canyon High School students chose the Cougars as their mascot — a name principal Mary Bailey said carries an ugly connotation that is disrespectful to women. In popular culture, the cougar is a sexually aggressive middle-aged woman who attracts younger men.

The school board, which consists of six men and one woman, thought the Charger would be more appropriate, which was on the ballot but failed to appeal to students as the cougar had. Cougars — the large mountain cats — are popular in Utah. Brigham Young University, considered conservative, uses the cougar for its mascot.

Bailey said Corner Canyon’s close proximity to BYU was another reason to use the Charger. She said the cougar was popular enough, while the charger gave the school an opportunity to have a unique mascot in Utah.

Soooo….tell us again why you gave the students a choice in the first place?!?  Proof positive (yet again) the systemic problems in public education have NOTHING to do with inadequate funding!

Finally, we’ll call it a week with another titillating tale ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter, brought to you by Bill Meisen:

Police hunt Alabama fan over crude sex prank on LSU fan

 

New Orleans police are calling on the public to help identify an Alabama fan filmed draping his genitals on the head of a passed-out LSU fan for a vile prank. The cell phone video of the incident, which took place after the Jan. 9 national title game, went viral over the past week.

The male LSU fan had passed out with his head on a table inside the Krystal Burger eatery in New Orleans. Other Alabama fans taunted him, took pictures with him, and placed food cartons on his head. A man wearing an Alabama jacket then is seen pulling out his genitals and simulating a sexual act on top of the LSU fan’s head.

The New Orleans Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit has failed to see the funny side and is investigating the incident as sexual battery. An all-points bulletin calls the Alabama fan a “person of interest” in the case.

Having watched the video, two thoughts occur to us; first, we’re happy to hear the crime rate in New Orleans has fallen to the point Crescent City cops can focus on such falderal.  Second, the cops are definitely looking for an Irishman!

Enjoy the weekend!

Magoo