It’s Thursday, January 26th, 2012….and we begin this edition with a question: much as we appreciated the message, why was the Republican response to Obama’s Misstatement of Disunion delivered by Mitch Daniels, a speaker as exciting as drying paint, rather than the likes of Marco Rubio or Alan West?

Sometimes we wonder if the GOP isn’t trying to lose in November.  Or have the powers-that-be convinced Mitch to finally don the pants in his family and give the Republican race some….

….a dose of reality?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, two takes from the WSJ on what we will continue to term The Dear Leader’s Misstatement of Disunion:

The Buffett Ruse

Obama’s ploy means the highest capital gains tax rate since 1978.

 

Remember the moment in 2008 when Charlie Gibson of ABC News asked Senator Barack Obama why he would support raising the capital gains tax even though “revenues from the tax increased” when the rate fell? Mr. Obama’s famous reply: “I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” Well, we were warned.

Here we are four years later, and President Obama on Tuesday night linked the term “fair” to U.S. tax and economic policy seven times. The U.S. economy is still hobbling out of recession, real family incomes are falling and 14 million Americans are unemployed, but Mr. Obama declared that his top priority is not to reform the tax code to promote growth and job creation. His overriding goal is redistributing income.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577183250095478594.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Next,….

The State of His Policies

Obama has done nearly everything he wanted. That’s the problem.

 

President Obama delivered a State of the Union address Tuesday night that by the account of his own advisers is more campaign document than a plan for governing. He’s running against Republicans in Congress, Reaganomics, wealthy bankers and inequality.

Normally a President at the start of his fourth year would be running on his record, accentuating the legislation he’s passed. Mr. Obama can’t do that with any specificity because the economic recovery has been so weak and the legislation he has passed is so unpopular. So last night he took credit for the shale gas revolution he had nothing to do with (More on this below) and proposed new policies to “spread the wealth around,” as he famously told Joe the Plumber in 2008 before he took the words back. We thought he meant it then, and now he’s admitting it.

Perhaps this will work if Republicans nominate a standard-bearer who is damaged, or too cautious or guilty to challenge this politics of envy. Mr. Obama clearly has Mitt Romney and his 14% effective tax rate in his sights (see the editorial nearby). The President will try to portray Mr. Romney as Mr. 1%, and if the Republican settles for defending the current tax code, he will lose. He needs a tax reform proposal of his own, as well as the self-confidence to argue for it in the same moral terms that Mr. Obama will attack him.

Meantime, as Mr. Obama begins his fourth year in power it’s a good moment to recount the economic record that he’d rather not talk about. The President inherited a deep recession, but in political terms that should have been a blessing. History shows that the deeper the recession, the sharper the recovery, and Mr. Obama was poised to take credit for the economy’s natural recuperative powers. Instead, we’ve had the weakest recovery since the Great Depression and stubbornly high joblessness.

The nearby chart compares rates of quarterly growth during the Reagan and Obama economic recoveries. The comparison is apt because both recoveries followed deep recessions in which the jobless rate reached more than 10%. Once the Reagan recovery got cooking, in 1983, growth stayed above 5% for 18 months and never fell below 3.3% for 13 consecutive quarters.

In the Obama recovery, growth has never exceeded 4% in any quarter and fell off markedly in mid-2010 through the third quarter of 2011. For the first nine months of 2011, growth averaged less than 1.2%. The economy finally picked up again in the fourth quarter, but still at a rate that is subpar for a recovery that long ago should have become robust and durable.

As he runs for re-election, Mr. Obama is trying to campaign as an incumbent who is striving to help the economy but has been stymied at every turn by Congress. Not even MSNBC can believe this. For two years he had the largest Democratic majorities in Congress since the 1970s and achieved nearly everything he wanted.

The New Yorker magazine this week has posted on its website a 57-page memo that economic adviser Larry Summers wrote to Mr. Obama in December 2008. It lays out nearly his entire agenda for the “stimulus,” reviving housing, the auto bailout and saving the financial industry. If anything, the memo overstates what would be needed to stabilize the financial panic, but nearly all of the stimulus spending priorities that the memo deemed “feasible” made it into law. They simply didn’t work as promised. (And never COULD have worked!)

The Pelosi Congress also passed ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, cash for clunkers, the housing tax credit, and much more. The only Obama priority it didn’t pass was cap-and-trade, which was killed by Senate Democrats.

Mr. Obama’s regulators also currently have some 149 major rules underway, which are those that cost more than $100 million. The 112th Congress hasn’t been able to kill a single major rule. The most it has been able to do is extend the Bush tax rates—which helped the economy by avoiding a tax shock—and slow the rate of increase in federal spending. This President has been “obstructed” less than anyone since LBJ.

Mr. Obama clearly has a spring in his step these days, figuring that the public hates Congress and thinks Republicans run it, that the GOP will field a weak presidential candidate, and that he can fool the public into believing only Mitt Romney’s taxes will rise if Mr. Obama wins a second term. He has only one big obstacle: his record.

Then there’s this bit of observation from Jonathan Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com, courtesy of Speed Mach:

A Diminished Obama Strikes a Tepid Tone

 

President Obama launched his re-election campaign tonight with a State of the Union speech that attempted to conjure up the spirit of an earlier era of national unity even as he sought to focus national resentment on wealthy Americans and his political opponents in Congress.

With no record of accomplishment to his credit, other than the unpopular Obamacare and stimulus, Obama put forward a limited agenda of government intervention in the economy and the tax code in a laundry list of initiatives that did little to break new ground on any issue and was bereft of the passion and vision that drove his 2008 campaign for the presidency. All in all, it was 65 minutes that ought to worry Democrats more than it annoyed Republicans.

The president knows he will get nothing passed this year, and his speech reflected that reality. He began and ended with the killing of Osama bin Laden. In between he spoke of a peace dividend from the end of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that he would use on building projects and green energy production. He called for a massive bailout of homeowners even as he pandered to public opinion by saying there would be no more bailouts for banks. He vowed to prosecute those responsible for the mortgage crisis and said teenagers would no longer be allowed to drop out of high school, no matter how much trouble they were causing. No mention was made of either Obamacare or the stimulus. Nor did he speak of the Keystone XL pipeline project that he cancelled. He called for lower taxes, less regulation and more exploitation of our natural resources even though he has raised taxes, increased regulation and made it more difficult for the nation to use more of its oil and gas and that of our neighbor Canada.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/24/diminished-obama-state-of-the-union-tepid-tone/

Contemplating our response to The Great Prevaricator’s perjured proclamations, we thought it appropriate to paraphrase Cordell Hull’s reaction to Ambassador Namura’s letter belatedly delivered after the attack on Pearl Harbor:

In all my fifty-six years, I have never heard a speech that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions–infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any President of the United States was capable of uttering them.

Next up, taking Horace Greeley’s advice, we go West, courtesy of Bill Meisen, where Arizona Governess Jan Brewer obviously didn’t get the word….

Thou Shalt Not Write Bad Things About Obama

 

Drudge has a story about Obama getting off of Air Force One in Arizona, greeting Republican governor Jan Brewer, and immediately giving her a piece of his mind. Evidently our president did not appreciate something Brewer wrote about him. According to the pool report, they had a testy exchange from which the president walked away as Brewer was still speaking. (From the photo below, it appears Brewer gave Tick-Tock some of hers in return!)

Sound familiar? Bobby Jindal got the same treatment when Obama came to visit Louisiana and the governor met him on the tarmac. Jindal would later recount in his book:

I was expecting words of concern about the oil spill, worry about the pending ecological disaster, and words of confidence about how the federal government was here to help. Or perhaps he was going to vent about BP’s slow response. But no, the president was upset about something else. And he wanted to talk about, well, food stamps. Actually, he wanted to talk about a letter that my administration had sent to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack a day earlier.

The letter was rudimentary, bureaucratic, and ordinary. .  .  . We were simply asking the federal government to authorize food stamps for those who were now unemployed because of the oil spill. Governors regularly make these sorts of requests to the federal government when facing disaster.

But somehow, for some reason, President Obama had personalized this. And he was upset.

There was not a word about the oil spill. He was concerned about looking bad because of the letter. “Careful,” he said to me, “this is going to get bad for everyone.”

If only he’d be so assertive with America’s enemies. But then again, I suppose, an “enemy” is really in the eye of the beholder.

The Obamao’s a Marxist; and as Lenin so often said, the INTERNAL enemy is always the most dangerous!

Speaking of enemies, as the WSJ notes….

With Friends Like Romney’s . . .

Norm Coleman tells voters the GOP won’t repeal ObamaCare.

 

Mitt Romney claims to favor repealing ObamaCare, full stop, which he says to all and sundry, but one of his campaign advisers has a better idea. To wit, Norm Coleman seems to think a Republican majority should bow to the status quo, fuss around the edges of the newest entitlement, and then try to convince the voters who elected them on promises like Mr. Romney’s that it’s the best they could do.

Over the weekend the former Minnesota Senator resurfaced for some reason on a panel on the public-affairs program “BioCentury This Week,” which airs in the D.C. market. “I’m saying you’re not going to repeal the act in its entirety but you will see major changes—particularly, by the way, if there’s a Republican President, you will see major changes,” Mr. Coleman said. “So you can’t whole cloth throw it out, but you can substantially change what’s been done.”

Judy Feder, a Georgetown health policy professor, chimed in to say that “I’m happy to hear Senator Coleman say, essentially, health-care reform is going to stick.”

It was a remarkable admission, especially given the aspiring Republican President whose ear Mr. Coleman happens to have. Then again, it may also be evidence of his kind of crack political thinking that couldn’t outwit Al Franken of all people in the 2008 race and again in the 2009 recount and thus provided the 60th Senate vote for ObamaCare.

The larger point is that the path of least political resistance for the GOP would be to revert to its historic minority role as tax collectors for the welfare state, and this temptation is especially strong for health care. No one doubts that repealing and replacing ObamaCare will be a hard slog if the party does take the White House and Senate in 2012, namely because the American political system is designed to make change hard (even if those controls failed in 2010 amid Democratic abuses). Mr. Coleman’s advice is, essentially, why bother trying.

The counselors of despair who want to sign a health-care armistice before the battle lines are even drawn are the sort of people who make the public cynical about politics. The entire GOP establishment claims in public it wants to scotch ObamaCare before the program is entrenched in 2014, because that is what the voters want. But if Mr. Coleman is any indication, some GOP elites will dump this political slogan when a faculty member shows up to vouchsafe her new respect for their moderation and realism.

As for Mr. Romney, a spokeswoman quickly disavowed Mr. Coleman’s words on Wednesday. And the former Governor has largely avoided culpability for his Massachusetts entitlement record by saying almost at the top of his lungs that he favors repeal.

But if his real ObamaCare convictions are akin to Mr. Coleman’s—if Republicans ought to “repeal the bad and keep the good,” as Mr. Romney once put it in 2010—then voters should know that now, before he becomes the nominee. If those aren’t his convictions, then Mr. Coleman shouldn’t be anywhere near his campaign.

Moving to Matters Military, if this next item by the Washington Examiner‘s Sara Carter, courtesy of David Drucker doesn’t get your blood boiling, you’re likely a Liberal:

Marine’s career threatened by controversial rules of engagement

 

Joshua Waddell, a first lieutenant in the U.S. Marines, appeared on his way to a stellar career as an American military officer. The son of a retired Navy SEAL commander, Waddell was awarded a Bronze Star during his first tour of duty in Afghanistan and had returned for a second. Then he made a decision in combat that military experts say has severely jeopardized his future in the corps.

But some military experts say the black mark on Waddell’s record was undeserved, that he and other young American officers are being put in a difficult, if not impossible, situation by unreasonable rules of engagement foisted upon the military by politically sensitive commanders in the Pentagon. (NO!  Not by a Military that increasingly cherishes diversity more than the lives of it’s troops!)

The facts in Waddell’s case are spelled out in Marine Corps documents. But how those facts should be interpreted is a matter of heated dispute.

On Nov. 1, Waddell, a 25-year-old executive officer with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Corps Regiment, was monitoring a surveillance camera in Sangin, Afghanistan, when he spotted a man who had been identified as a bomb maker working with area insurgents. Two days earlier, a sergeant from India Company had lost both legs and a hand when a bomb detonated in their area of operation. The man spotted on the camera was believed to be responsible.

After receiving permission from his battalion commanders, Waddell ordered Marine snipers to open fire on the man, and he was hit. A group of Afghans rushed to the man, put him on a tractor and attempted to flee. Waddell ordered the snipers to hit the engine block of the tractor, disabling it so the man believed to be a bomb maker would not escape. The tractor was hit but no civilians were injured.

Then, about three weeks later, the civilians who helped remove the wounded man from the area were found to be teenagers. As a result, Waddell was demoted from executive officer, and the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Seth Folsom, determined he had violated rules of engagement that governed when Marines could fire, and at whom. Folsom said Wadell “is not recommended for promotion” and “in violation of [combat rules] during an engagement.” The report stated that “noncombatant local nationals” were in the area of direct fire and that “the engagement resulted in a damaged local national vehicle.” (How on earth do you determine a noncombatant local national, particularly when they’re rescuing a know terrorist?!?  You couldn’t MAKE this sh*t up!)

A Marine brigadier general who reviewed the case was sympathetic to Waddell, whom he described as a “superb and heroic combat leader. But the general said the decision on whether Waddell should be promoted was “the commander’s prerogative,” noting that the battalion commander on the scene had lost “confidence in [Waddell’s] abilities.”

Marine Maj. Shawn Haney, spokesman for Marine Corps Manpower and Reserve Affairs, said Waddell’s fitness report will go before a review board at the time of any promotion “and everything is under scrutiny, so Waddell will have a chance to defend himself against the accusations.” Still, Haney conceded, Waddell’s fitness reports play a “significant role in future promotions.”

The upshot is that Waddell’s career has been effectively blunted, his chance for promotion blocked. Waddell is just one of hundreds of cases of troops who have suffered under stringent rules of engagement, said Jeff Addicott, a former senior legal adviser to U.S. Army Special Forces.

“We have hamstrung our military with unrealistic ROEs that do more harm to our soldiers than the enemy, and now a Marine’s career is on the line because he disabled a tractor,” Addicott said. “In many ways our military is frozen in fear of violating absurd self-imposed rules on the battlefield, How can you tell if it’s a teenager or a man, a farmer or an enemy when you’re fighting an insurgency?” (For Heavens sake, they strap bombs to women and children!)

A Marine stationed in Afghanistan who does not know Waddell, but who has operated under the same rules, said, “The rules of engagement are meant to placate [President Hamid] Karzai’s government at our expense. They say it’s about winning the hearts and minds, but it’s not working. We’re not putting fear into the enemy, only our troops.”

Waddell’s father, Mark Waddell, who served more than 25 years in the military and retired as a commander of a Navy SEAL team, said his son and other Americans fighting in Afghanistan are being victimized by these rules. “I feel what’s happened to my son is a complete betrayal, and he isn’t the only one,” said Waddell, of Fort Worth, Texas. “Josh is a hero. We expect them to go out and make instantaneous combat decisions, then we Monday-morning quarterback their decisions. It’s an outrage.”

Meanwhile, on the Domestic Front….

Issa cries foul after key player in Fast and Furious scandal refuses to testify

 

As Arizona state officials open their own probe into Operation Fast and Furious, the head of the House panel investigating the gunrunning scandal is crying foul over a key player’s move Tuesday to assert his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions.  Patrick Cunningham, the chief of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Arizona, was excused from a deposition after refusing to give more than his name and title, Fox News has learned.

Cunningham informed the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee through his attorney that he would use the Fifth Amendment protection after being subpoenaed last week to testify in front of congressional investigators regarding his role in the operation that sent more than 2,000 guns to the Sinaloa drug cartel. Guns from the failed operation were found at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in 2010.

Committee Chairman Darrell Issa called the decision a “startling development” and in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder wrote that the refusal to testify implies that “Mr. Cunningham may have engaged in criminal conduct with respect to Fast and Furious is a major escalation of the department’s culpability.” (Excuse us….”MAY“?!?

Issa said Justice Department officials claim Cunningham misinformed them about Fast and Furious as the department prepared its initial response to Congress’ inquiry into the failed program. Cunningham’s lawyer denies those allegations. Cunningham was excused from the deposition, but may be called again later, according to the letter. The committee may also issue additional requests or subpoenas for Cunningham’s associates in the U.S. Attorney’s office.

The Justice Department declined to comment. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, said that while he is “disappointed” Cunningham would not testify before the committee, “I respect his constitutional rights. It is inappropriate for Chairman Issa to engage in wild and unsubstantiated speculation about why he did so.”

Something tells us the Dishonorable Mr. Cummings would shown less respect had Cunningham acted under the orders of the previous Administration.

And since we’re on the subject of deliberate Dimocratic distortion….

National Park director defends Occupy DC campsite at congressional hearing

 

The head of the National Park Service defended his decision to let Occupy protesters camp out in a park in the middle of Washington, D.C., though he said Tuesday the group will be given one last warning before being evicted. NPS Director Jonathan Jarvis testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on the District of Columbia that protests are a right under the First Amendment, although he acknowledged that some homeless people “have taken advantage of the situation.”

He added that this is not the first time the Park Service has allowed protesters to remain for weeks at a site. “Whatever they are protesting is irrelevant to our decisions. Our decisions are based on the totality” of the circumstances, he said.

But Republican lawmakers, who questioned whether Jarvis’ decisions were politically motivated, said an exception had been made for a group that for all intents and purposes is camping, not protesting, and contended that the National Park Service was unequally enforcing the law.

“It’s not your job to determine which protest group, how to treat protest groups differently. They are breaking the law. Why aren’t you enforcing the law?” asked Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill. “Camping is not a First Amendment activity. It is a violation of law. Sleeping (in a national park) is not a First Amendment activity, it is a violation of law,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Relations Committee.

Issa, who noted that park police in other sites are permitted to remove trespassers at gunpoint if they have to, said NPS has a clear requirement to prohibit camping on federal property. He said he was disappointed that the agency was ignoring its own rules. “I believe the National Park Service has allowed the protesters to camp indefinitely for ideological reasons,” he said.

The is a ban on camping in the park, but Jarvis suggested there is a gray area between constitutionally protected protests and illegal camping. Jarvis, who testified that he regularly briefs Interior Secretary Ken Salazaron the decisions being made about the campsite, insisted none of his decisions are imposed from above. “Absolutely not,” Jarvis said. “I am not taking direction on this (or) on how the site should be handled.”

Noooo….

….of COURSE not!

And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy today of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Jeff Foutch, William O’Keefe offers the truth about fracking….The Obamao’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding:

Fear-mongering used against fracking

 

Thus The Obamao took credit for a technology developed decades before either the Department of Energy….or HE….existed.  This is like Tick-Tock congratulating Leon Panetta for the SEALS rescuing the hostages in Somalia; Panetta contributed as much to that operation as Obama, or the federal government, has to fracking.

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, in the Just Desserts segment….

Woman Claims Neighbor’s Energy Efficient Windows Are Melting Her Toyota Prius

 

A SoCal woman says the energy efficient window installed in a neighbor’s condominium is melting the plastic components on cars parked in her carport. Heather Patron of Studio City was dealing with a mystery regarding her Toyota Prius. “The side view mirrors were melting,” says Patron. “Anything that was plastic on the car was melting.”

Toyota told Patron nothing was wrong with the car. After having the mirrors replaced, she noticed the mirrors on the car parked next to hers were also melting. Patron then observed a powerful beam of light that was reflecting off the window of a next door condominium, casting a concentrated beam over her carport.

CBS2’s Randy Paige placed a thermometer in the pathway of the beam on a partially cloudy day. The temperature registered over 120 degrees in less than five minutes. “I’m positive that this window is what is causing the damage to my car,” says Patron.

Patron is not alone. Reports across the country have alleged damages brought on by concentrated sunlight reflected off of energy efficient windows. The National Association of Home Builders is now conducting a study on the matter. “I just don’t feel like it’s fair,” says Patron. “I feel like it needs to be known that this is happening. And a lot of people probably have damage out there, that they aren’t aware that it’s the windows that are causing this.”

The Los Angeles City Department of Building and Safetysays even if the window is the source of the damage, there are no code violations involved. The department says it’s not against the law to install a window that reflects sunlight.

We love it; energy-efficient windows melting the mirrors on a hybrid automobile.  It’s the Environazi-equivalent of the irresistable force meeting the immovable object!

Magoo