It’s Thursday, February 2nd, Groundhog Day 2012….and if we don’t want to see the same fours years played over and over and over again for the rest of our lives, someone in the GOP establishment needs to provide some adult supervision to this comedy of errors.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, breaking news from Capitol Hill:

House Votes to Repeal CLASS Act

 

What took them so long?!?

Going back to our opening comment, as the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger so aptly observes, while the GOP continues stumble along like the Green Bay defense, The Obamao’s criss-crossing the country on our nickel fine-tuning his central campaign theme.  Which is, as usual, one enormous pack of bald-faced lies:

Obama’s Maddening, Winning Speech

He will marginalize his opponents as the bloodless Numbers People.

 

Barack Obama’s poorly received State of the Union speech deserves a second look. Conventional wisdom pronounced the SOTU a relatively weak Obama effort. It was. Diffuse, filled with the usual enemies, it pulled together various back-filed policy ideas into a proposal he called, with a straight face, “An Economy Built to Last.”

Bemused election-year observers remarked that both ObamaCare and the nation’s entitlement bomb passed unmentioned. In his reply, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels noted that we are not going to be able to outrun the simple math on entitlement spending. That’s true. We can’t. But Mr. Obama just may for the next 10 months.

How? By exploiting political vulnerabilities in the Republicans’ case against his presidency. Republicans think it’s all about the bad economy. It is. But Barack Obama is going to do something his opposition wouldn’t think possible. He’s going to take ownership of the American economy. Not the real one, but the one he’s just made up, “the economy built to last.” It won’t last long, but long enough.

In the days after his Washington lecture, Mr. Obama took a shorter version of his SOTU speech on the road—to Colorado, Michigan, Iowa, Nevada and Arizona, states he needs in November. On the White House website, you can see him give this campaign tuneup speech at the new, $5 billion Intel chip-fabrication plant in Chandler, Ariz. It’s worth watching and pondering. You’d think the best and the brightest would be beyond Mr. Obama’s crude populist pitch. You of course would be wrong.

About 6,000 Intel employees—young, well-educated technology sophisticates—applauded and cheered Mr. Obama from start to finish. Even when he ripped into those awful American companies with factories overseas, such as their own employer. “An America where we build stuff and make stuff and sell stuff all over the world.” (Applause.)

A speech that flopped among Washington’s policy sophisticates is soaring out in the country. Republicans had better figure out why.

Reading through the White House’s text of “An Economy Built to Last,” any half-awake citizen will notice the words that fail to appear: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, entitlements and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The deficit is in the document’s last paragraph, three sentences long.

Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella famously said “Never mind,” and you would too if you had to run on this economy. Thus, the Obama solution: Run against the economy. This effectively means Mr. Obama is running against himself, but . . . never mind.

Mr. Obama may not know much about the private economy, but he knows a lot about the uses of human anxiety. Proposing to replace his own bad economy with a virtual substitute “built to last” allows Mr. Obama to place himself outside the White House and on the street making common cause with the genuine economic anxieties of the American people. It also lets this president put in motion what he thinks he knows best—empathy. In “The Audacity of Hope” he put empathy “at the heart of my moral code.” Practice makes perfect.

It is beyond audacious. How can a president simultaneously hammer real job creation with the Keystone XL pipeline decision, then go into the country and claim kinship with the anxieties of the jobless? No problem. Just do it.

It could work. (Then again, it might not!) If we know nothing else about Barack Obama it is that he can play “hope” like a Stradivarius. The version of “An Economy Built to Last” that he performed at Intel is his concerto for re-election.

The Obama-Axelrod-Plouffe team knows that the Republicans instinctively will respond by quoting, endlessly, the poor economic data of the Obama years. They plan to turn this reality on its head as well. In a down economy, Barack Obama is going to position his GOP critics as economic determinists. The bloodless Numbers People. The tea party, by its own admission, obsesses over “the deficit”—numbers. Mr. Obama’s likely opponent has self-defined as a competent manager, a numbers guy. That false Obama demagoguery about rules-free GOP Darwinians is just one piece of this unflattering portrait.

In Arizona he said, “An economy built to last also means we’ve got to renew American values: fair play, shared responsibility.” Wild applause. For those who think they have facts on their side, it will be maddening and enraging to watch other Obama audiences across the country cheer and applaud “An Economy Built to Last.” Get used to it.

The GOP is appealing, as its candidates so often do, to the American brain. Barack Obama is happy to be left by himself, going for their hearts. If he wins, the Republican will wail at the unfairness, irrationality and illogic of what beat them.

Rick Santorum, in his Tuesday night also-ran speech to what looked like a roomful of about 35 people at a Nevada Days Inn, spoke of couples “sitting around a kitchen table” to figure out what comes next. Whatever his campaign’s shortcomings, Mr. Santorum is the one man running who understands the Obama strategy to marginalize Republicans. At some point after the inevitable end of the nomination campaign, Mitt Romney should ask Rick Santorum to sit down with him to discuss the inner melodies of life in America these days. Barack Obama is the maestro of this music, and without it, you can’t win a presidency.

And Mitt’s apparently tone-deaf!  Only time will tell if The Great Prevaricator’s ploy plays in Peoria; frankly, we’re inclined to think Middle America’s tired of his tune.  Why?  The WSJ offers the answer:

$5 Trillion and Change

Obama’s four years have seen the four highest deficits since 1946.

 

“The political strategy behind Obamanomics was always simple: Call for “stimulus” to rescue the economy, run up the debt with the biggest spending blitz in 60 years, and then when the deficit explodes call for higher taxes. The Congressional Budget Office annual review released yesterday shows this is all on track.

….To sum it all up, CBO’s facts plainly show that Mr. Obama has the worst fiscal record of any President in modern times. No one else is even close.“

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577195352148844134.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

But if it does play, the Mitt we’ve witnessed to date will be like giving Albert Pujols a belt-high fastball right over the plate.

In a related item, the Journal tells us….

What Mitt Really Meant

This may become a long-running interpretive series.

 

Mitt Romney was a turnaround artist in business, which is in contrast to his artlessness when he departs from his political script. Today we’ll try to decode his latest adventure in spontaneous lingua franca, and if necessary we’re prepared to make this a long-running series right through November. Like Twain said of Wagner’s music, Mr. Romney is better than he sounds.

As everyone has by now heard, Mr. Romney celebrated his Florida primary victory Wednesday by offering a bouquet to President Obama’s re-election committee, declaring in a CNN interview that “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” He then added, “We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it,” and then, “I’m not concerned about the very rich,” and then, “I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90%, 95% of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Asked to elaborate, he continued, awkwardly, “You can focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus. The middle-income Americans, they’re the folks that are really struggling right now and they need someone that can help get this economy going for them.” So Mr. Romney finally got to his real point, which was about economic growth, but the wait was—how to put it?—excruciating.

Democrats have responded by invoking Dickens at the blacking factory and worse, and if Mr. Romney came across as a less than compassionate conservative he has himself to blame.

There’s a half-century of creative conservative thinking on antipoverty transfer programs, and it’s too bad Mr. Romney didn’t mention some of it. One note to strike is about growing dependency on government and its corrosive effect on human dignity. Refundable tax credits, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps and the like are almost 50% more generous than they were in 2007. That increase is for individual recipients, not the rise in overall spending (which tripled) due to more people caught in the recession.

As these means-tested subsidies phase out, they often lead to very high or even infinite marginal tax rates—i.e., the less well off can lose more than a dollar from the government if they earn an extra dollar. Thus can poverty become a trap. Mr. Romney might have said that his goal is to reduce these dependency rolls over time by removing the disincentives to work as the economy improves.

Mr. Romney’s larger mistake is to think and speak in “class” terms. He touts his concern for the “middle class” all the time, as if he’s trying to show that a rich guy can identify with average Americans. (He can’t….but neither can any other politician in Washington!) But this is a game that Democrats play better, and it leads Mr. Romney into cul-de-sacs like saying the poor are fine because they benefit from government, while the middle class don’t. Mr. Obama will turn this into an argument for hooking the middle class on more government.

Mr. Romney’s failures to communicate are common among businessmen and other normal people who have the right instincts but haven’t spent their lives thinking about politics. He also recently ran into trouble when he said he liked firing people, when he was really talking about the discipline of market competition.

Still, his business now is politics, and as the Republican front-runner he has an obligation to explain how conservative principles and policies can address America’s current problems. We’ll be happy to translate for him in these columns, but it would be less politically painful if Mr. Romney sat down for a week-long tutorial with, say, Paul Ryan, Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush and others who can help him avoid such obvious liberal traps.

For more on the kerfuffle resulting from this latest Mitticism, check on today’s Cover Story on our home page at www.thedailygouge.com.

And following up on Team Tick-Tock’s latest assault on the Constitution, Michelle Malkin makes a comparison, which may seem like a stretch to some, between the current Administration and an earlier regime of anti-religious zealots:

First, They Came for the Catholics

 

President Obama and his radical feminist enforcers have had it in for Catholic medical providers from the get-go. It’s about time all people of faith fought back against this unprecedented encroachment on religious liberty. First, they came for the Catholics. Who’s next?

This weekend, Catholic bishops informed parishioners of the recent White House edict forcing religious hospitals, schools, charities and other health and social service providers to provide “free” abortifacient pills, sterilizations and contraception on demand in their insurance plans — even if it violates their moral consciences and the teachings of their churches.

NARAL, NOW, Ms. Magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation all cheered the administration’s abuse of the Obamacare law to ram abortion down pro-life medical professionals’ throats. Femme dinosaur Eleanor Smeal gloated over the news that the administration had rejected church officials’ pleas for compromises: “At last,” she exulted, the left’s goal of “no-cost birth control” for all had been achieved.

As always, tolerance is a one-way street in the Age of Obama. “Choice” is in the eye (and iron fist) of the First Amendment usurper.

Like the rising number of states who have revolted against the individual health care mandate at the ballot box and in the courts, targeted Catholics have risen up against the Obamacare regime. Arlington (Va.) Bishop Paul Loverde didn’t mince words, calling the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services order “a direct attack against religious liberty. This ill-considered policy comprises a truly radical break with the liberties that have underpinned our nation since its founding.” Several bishops vowed publicly to fight the mandate.

Bishop Alexander Sample of Marquette, Mich., asserted plainly: “We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law.”

It’s not just rabid right-wing politicos defying the Obama machine. Pro-life Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania denounced the “wrong decision.” (Big deal; like Bart Stupak, Casey’s all show, no go; when the rubber meets the road, Bob will nonetheless vote the party line.) Left-leaning Bishop Robert Lynch threatened “civil disobedience” in St. Petersburg, Fla., over the power grab. Lefty Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote that Obama “botched” the controversy and “threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus” by refusing to “balance the competing liberty interests here.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney blithely denied on Tuesday that “there are any constitutional rights issues” involved in the brewing battle.

Yet, the Shut Up and Hand Out Abortion Pills order undermines a unanimous Supreme Court ruling issued just last week upholding a religious employer’s right to determine whom to hire and fire. And two private colleges have filed federal suits against the government to overturn the unconstitutional abortion coverage decree.

Hannah Smith, senior counsel at the nonprofit law firm The Becket Fund, which is representing the schools, boiled it down for Bloomberg News: “This is not really about access to contraception. The mandate is about forcing these religious groups to pay for it against their beliefs.”

How did we get here? The first salvo came in December 2010, when the American Civil Liberties Union pushed HHS and its Planned Parenthood-championing secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions in violation of their core moral commitment to protecting the lives of the unborn.

The ACLU called for a litigious fishing expedition against Catholic hospitals nationwide that refuse to provide “emergency” contraception and abortions to women. In their sights: Devout Phoenix Catholic Bishop Thomas Olmsted, who revoked the Catholic status of a rogue hospital that performed several direct abortions, provided birth control pills and presided over sterilizations against the church’s ethical and religious directives for health care.

The ACLU and the feminists have joined with Obama to threaten and sabotage the First Amendment rights of religious-based health care entities. The agenda is not increased “access” to health care services. The ultimate goal is to shut down health care providers — Catholic health care institutions employ about 540,000 full-time workers and 240,000 part-time workers — whose religious views cannot be tolerated by secular zealots and radical social engineers. (Just as the ultimate goal of rescinding DA/DT had nothing to do with “fairness” for homosexuals.)

Is it any surprise their counterparts in the “Occupy” movement have moved from protesting “Wall Street” to harassing pro-life marchers in Washington, D.C., and hurling condoms at Catholic school girls in Rhode Island? Birds of a lawless, bigoted feather bully together.

And for the record, anyone who didn’t see this Mongolian Reversal coming wasn’t blind; they simply ignored the signs.

In a similar vein, here’s today’s “MSM Bias….WHAT Bias?!?” segment, Bret Baier details the WaPo‘s incredible ability to deny the obvious:

Friday, we told you about the lack of media coverage for the annual Washington D.C. March for Life rally.

Over the weekend, Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton generally defended his paper’s effort but noted there were no large crowd shots on the Post’s web gallery. A Post local editor added — quote — “In retrospect I wish we had given readers a better sense of the overall magnitude of the March.”

And in keeping with our Groundhog Day theme, next year they’ll be saying the same thing….always just after the fact.

Next we turn to the Environmental Moment, courtesy today of RealClearMarkets.com and AEI, where Ken Green relates the truth behind California’s latest Enviro-insanity:

Electric Cars: Doubling Down On Dumb

 

Once again, the regulators in California have decided to lead the nation in terms of vehicle emission standards, proposing to require that 15.4 percent of all vehicles sold by 2025 must be electric cars, plug-in hybrid cars, or (currently non-existent) fuel cell cars.

In case you’re wondering why this all sounds familiar, it’s because California is re-running the same delusional program that it ran in 1990 (Yes, 22 years ago) when “Specifically, the Air Resources Board (ARB) required that at least 2 percent, 5 percent and 10 percent of new car sales be zero-emitting by 1998, 2001 and 2003 respectively.”

And how did the past exercise in planner’s conceit work out? As one of the first studies I directed in the think-tank world pointed out (1995), “EVs [electric vehicles] will be expensive, yet short on what consumers prize most: range and power…. Massive subsidies and/or cost-shifts would be required that would have depressive effects on the California economy (including higher energy costs statewide). Taxpayers and/or utility ratepayers would also have to pay for new refueling infrastructure. In addition, it is not clear that EV maintenance costs will be below that of conventional autos. If consumers avoid EVs for any of these reasons, and keep their old cars longer, air quality gains will be lost.”

Or, as I wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed in 1995, “Our state’s pollution control authority has to stop thinking of itself as some kind of homespun Japanese MITI that can pick and promote winners in the automotive marketplace. It isn’t, and it can’t. Conspiracy theories aside, the simple fact is that if Detroit’s big three could make a profitable electric vehicle that consumers wanted to buy, they’d be making it at the behest of their own stockholders.”

At the time, battery-car rent-seekers were putting out the same propaganda that they are today: that electric cars will produce jobs, and that mandates can “force” technology to evolve exactly as planners want it to. Responding to my op-ed, Malcolm Currie, former CEO of Hughes Aircraft Company, which created the EV-1 technologies (and where, amusingly enough, I did my doctoral internship while he was CEO), argued “In addition to encouraging the development of new technologies, the mandate has also stimulated enormous entrepreneurial activity and private investment in California, which will have a significant impact on our economy and jobs in the years ahead…out of a total potential of some 400,000 new jobs in California that will be created in advanced transportation by the year 2010, Project California anticipates that as many as 70,000 of these can be in EV-related industrial clusters, as a result of building on the large anchor market in our state.” We know how that worked out: currently, 98% of advanced battery production is in Asia.

Starting in 1996, the Zero-Emission Vehicle mandate was watered down, and General Motor’s first attempt at electric car rent-seeking died when they discontinued the EV-1 in 2003 for lack of sales, recalled the whole lot and junked them. But before that happened, California taxpayers subsidized the well-off eco-conscious people who leased the EV-1 for both vehicles and charging stations. (And those people had to have incomes over $100K, and own a second, conventional vehicle to qualify for the lease. They were the 1%).

But, surely you would say, things must have changed in 22 years, right? Surely developments in technology have made these vehicles competitive in performance and pricing! Alas, no.

The GM Volt sells for a non-competitive $40,000, and is barely selling despite federal tax subsidies up to $7,500, and some state subsidies that further sweeten the pot. Plug-in hybrid technology is more expensive to manufacture, more expensive to repair, more expensive to insure, and, after 22 years, they still have overheating and fire problems.

As Robert Bryce points out in his book Power Hungry, electric cars are the “Next Big Thing. And they always will be.” Bryce observes that EV-boosters have been flogging electric cars since 1911, when the New York Times declared that “the electric car “has long been recognized as the ideal solution” because it “is cleaner and quieter” and “much more economical.”

And fuel-cell vehicles? In 2007, Ballard Power Systems, a leader in fuel cell research terminated its vehicle-fuel-cell research, and sold the program off to Daimler AG and Ford.

Of course, then they’d have to find a real job.

Look….we live in the People’s Democratic Republic of Maryland (for NOW!); so we’re certainly no stranger to incredibly asinine Liberal policies.  Thus we know our many brothers in the formerly Golden State will understand our meaning when we say Californios get the government they deserve.

Which brings us to what can only be considered the logical conclusion to misguided Liberal policies in what was once the Empire State, courtesy of George Lawlor:

Sneering thug charged in Brooklyn cop shooting

 

If one of these emasculated union-lackeys-in-blue had an ounce of testosterone coursing through their veins they’d have double-tapped this douchebag in the head, pleaded temporary insanity and been soaking up rays in sunny South Florida living off the proceeds of their book in a little less than 24 months.

Another reason our affinity and sympathy for cops grows less with every passing day; they’re too devoted to their unions to differentiate between friend and foe.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this bit of pointed humor from Fielding Cocke:

And in another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter, here’s something you don’t see every day….

Connecticut cannibal suspect to appear in court

 

A Connecticut man accused of hacking a homeless man to death and eating part of his brain was due to be arraigned Wednesday on a murder charge, the Connecticut Post reported. Tyree Lincoln Smith, 35, is accused of killing Angel “Tun Tun” Gonzalez with an ax last December and removing the man’s eyeballs and part of his brain. Smith, of Ansonia, is said to have consumed the dismembered organs in a local cemetery at the site of his cousin’s grave.

Zombies: they’re a Feminist’s dream date:

Magoo