It’s Tuesday, February 14th,….Valentines Day 2012….and in recognition of what has likely been the male condition ever since Eve first discovered the headache, Dan Feeney forwarded this photo that confirms little Ronda’s been into The Lovely Jenny’s cookbook:

Okay….this isn’t a photo-forward from Feeney….it’s our valentine!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

And in the spirit of our preface, the Washington Examiner‘s Conn Carroll exposes….

Obama’s Budget Lies

 

White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew appeared on all five Sunday talk shows yesterday to defend the budget President Obama will release today. On two of those shows, CNN’s State of the Union and NBC’s Meet the Press, Lew flat out lied about the Democrats’ failure to pass a budget since Obamacare became law. (Yes, he said it, and if you watch the video clips, there’s NO DOUBT AT ALL LEW LIED THROUGH HIS TEETH!)

First on Meet the Press, David Gregory asked: “Here’s a stat that a lot of people may not know, but it’s pretty striking. The number of days since Senate Democrats passed a budget is 1,019. Can you just explain as a former budget director, how do you fund the government when there’s no budget?”

Lew replied: “Well, you know, one of the things about the United States Senate that I think the American people have realized is that it takes 60, not 50 votes to pass something. And there has been Republican opposition to anything that Senate Democrats have tried to do.”

Later on CNN, Candy Crowley asked, “I want to read for our viewers something that Sen. Harry Reid, the Democrat Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, who said, ‘We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year. It’s done, we don’t need to do it.’”

Lew replied: “He’s not saying that they shouldn’t pass a budget. But we also need to be honest. You can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes and you can’t get 60 votes without bipartisan support. So unless… unless Republicans are willing to work with Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid is not going to be able to get a budget passed.”

Both Crowley and Gregory let Lew’s statement go by unchallenged. It fell to ABC News‘ Jake Tapper to fact check the White House. He reported, “That’s not accurate. Budgets only require 51 Senate votes for passage, as Lew — former director of the Office of Management and Budget — surely must know. White House officials did not dispute that Lew misspoke. When asked about the discrepancy, a White House official said ‘the chief of staff was clearly referencing the general gridlock in Congress that makes accomplishing even the most basic tasks nearly impossible given the Senate Republicans’ insistence on blocking an up or down vote on nearly every issue.’”

Maybe if Lew had made this statement on just one program, it would be believable that he “misspoke.” The fact that he made the statement on two programs, and that he is the former director of the Office of Management and Budget, shows that he both knew his statement was false, and he intended to make the false statement. This is not the first time Lew has made questionable factual statements about the budget. Last year, Lew also told the public: “Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt.” The White House made similar statements repeatedly.

This is also flat out false. The Congressional Budget Office found that Obama’s budget: 1) Never saw an annual deficit below $748 billion; 2) Doubled the debt in ten years; and 3) Saw annual interest payments on the debt approach $1 trillion. This administration simply cannot be trusted on the federal budget.

Or, as the WSJ terms it….

The Amazing Obama Budget

He’s proposing higher spending and deficits this year.

 

Federal budgets are by definition political documents, but even by that standard yesterday’s White House proposal for fiscal year 2013 is a brilliant bit of misdirection. With the abracadabra of a tax increase on the wealthy and defense spending cuts that will never materialize, the White House asserts that in President Obama’s second term revenues will soar, outlays will fall, and $1.3 trillion annual deficits will be cut in half like the lady in the box on stage.

All voters need to do is suspend disbelief for another nine months. And ignore the first four years.

The real news in Mr. Obama’s budget proposal is the story of those four years, and what a tale they tell.

• Four years of spending of more than 24% of GDP, the four highest spending years since 1946. In the current fiscal year of 2012, despite talk of austerity, Mr. Obama predicts spending will increase by $193 billion to $3.8 trillion, or 24.3% of GDP. The top chart shows the unprecedented four-year blowout.

• Another deficit of $1.327 trillion in 2012, also an increase from 2011, and making four years in a row above $1.29 trillion. The last time that happened? Never.

• Revenues at historic lows because of the mediocre recovery and temporary tax cuts that are deadweight revenue losses because they do so little for economic growth. The White House budget office estimates that for the fourth year in a row revenues won’t reach 16% of GDP. The last time they were below 16% for any year was 1950.

• All of this has added as astonishing $5 trillion in debt in a single Presidential term. National debt held by the public—the kind you have to pay back—will hit 74.2% this year and keep rising to 77.4% next year. The bottom chart shows the trend.

Economists believe that when debt to GDP reaches 90% or so, the economic damage begins to rise. And this doesn’t include the debt that future taxpayers owe current and future retirees through the IOUs in the Social Security “trust fund.”

But, lo, says the White House, all of this will change in 2013 if Mr. Obama is re-elected. Next year, revenues will suddenly leap to 17.8% of GDP thanks to tax increases on the wealthy, which we are supposed to believe will have little impact on growth.

Meanwhile, spending will fall by one percentage point of GDP to 23.3%, thanks to the automatic cuts in last year’s debt-ceiling bill. But more than half of those are scheduled to come out of defense, which even Mr. Obama’s Defense Secretary (A Socialist!) says are unacceptable. They will be renegotiated next year no matter who wins in November.

The cuts also include an estimated $1 trillion in savings in domestic discretionary programs that also won’t happen, especially because Mr. Obama’s budget proposes to add $350 billion to these programs. His budget also proposes no meaningful reforms in entitlements, which are the fastest growing part of the budget and will grow even faster once ObamaCare really kicks in.

The only thing that you can be certain will become law in this budget if Mr. Obama is re-elected is the monumental tax increase. His plan would raise tax rates across the board on anyone or any business owners making more than $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples. These are the 3% of taxpayers that Mr. Obama says aren’t paying their fair share, though that 3% pays more in income tax than the rest of the other 97%.

A central contradiction of this plan is that the White House predicts accelerating real GDP growth of 3% in 2013 and 4.1% by 2015 even as the economy is whacked by these tax increases. The President’s plan would also cancel the investment tax rate reductions that have been in place since 2003, impose a new investment income tax hike of 3.8%, and introduce the new “Buffett rule” on the rich.

Tax rates will rise as follows: capital gains to 30% from 15% today; dividends to 30% from 15%; the estate tax to 45% from 35%, and don’t forget the end to the temporary payroll tax cut that Mr. Obama is making such an issue of now. He only wants it to last for another 10 months.

And there will be more. Yesterday, Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, Gene Sperling, reported that the President wants a new “global minimum tax.”….

….Mr. Sperling said the new tax is necessary “so that people have the assurance that nobody is escaping doing their fair share as part of a race to the bottom or having our tax code actually subsidize and facilitate people moving their funds to tax havens.” He didn’t offer specifics but said the White House will be saying more, “perhaps not in gory detail, but in more detail,” by the end of the month.

You would think amid all of its other tax increases that the White House wouldn’t need another. But its problem is that other countries rudely compete for capital by keeping their tax rates low, so Mr. Obama wants to punish Americans who dare to take that advantage rather than cut the U.S. rate to 25% to make America more competitive.

Despite its tax increases, the White House still predicts that the annual budget deficit will be $901 billion in 2013 and never fall below $575 billion in any of the next 10 years. Democrats denounced George W. Bush for allowing so much red ink, but his deficits averaged only 3.5% of GDP if you don’t count 2001 but do include the 10.1% of 2009. Mr. Obama’s deficits have averaged 9.1% of GDP if you count 2009, as you should because his $800 billion stimulus passed that February.

The political reality of budgeting is that voters should only believe what they can see, which is what politicians are proposing now. Promises of future spending cuts are a mirage. Mr. Obama needs to point to the mirage because his fiscal record is the worst in modern American history.

Sorry folks, but The Obamao is the embodiment of 1 John 2:4: “The truth is not in him”.

In a related item, Bill McGurn offers the GOP another campaign focus:

The Do-Nothing Senate

Memo to GOP candidates: Make Harry Reid an issue.

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204883304577221523379438502.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Meanwhile, even amid the endless lies, a brief snippet of truth:

Obama chief of staff: No more compromise, contraceptive rule is done deal

 

Yeah….no kidding….as Ed Haislmaier and Jennifer Marshall detail:

Nothing but Squid Ink

 

Proponents of Obamacare’s anti-conscience mandate on preventive care kept telling critics to wait and see what the final rules held. As of Friday afternoon, we now know. It wasn’t worth the wait.

If there was a question Friday morning whether the Obama administration might cede ground, there was no doubt at the end of the day. They haven’t budged.

Despite what President Obama said at his White House press conference, the actual regulations make permanent the “interim final regulations” issued August 3, 2011 — the ones that sparked the furor in the first place. Prefaced by 17 pages of the kind of rhetorical squid ink that President Obama defensively deployed at his press conference, the words that have the force of law appear on pages 18 to 20. That’s where the actual amendments to the Code of Federal Regulations are made by three departments — Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services — that Congress previously granted joint oversight of employer health plans.

The bottom line is this: “Accordingly, the amendment to the interim final rule with comment period amending 45 CFR 147.130(a)(1)(iv) which was published in the Federal Register at 76 FR 46621-46626 on August 3, 2011, is adopted as a final rule without change.” [Emphasis added.]

Translation: The Obama administration Friday afternoon put into federal law the very regulation that drew objections from almost 200 Catholic bishops, some 50 religiously affiliated colleges and universities, 65 North American bishops of Orthodox churches, numerous other Jewish, Evangelical and Lutheran leaders, and even some liberals — and without changing so much as a comma.

From this point forward, any changes to this regulation have to go through the formal regulatory process all over again. 

The administration admits as much in the preamble to these regulations when it states that Treasury, Labor, and HHS “plan to initiate a rulemaking to require issuers to offer insurance without contraception coverage to such an employer (or plan sponsor) and simultaneously to offer contraceptive coverage directly to the employer’s plan participants (and their beneficiaries) who desire it, with no cost-sharing. Under this approach, the Departments will also require that, in this circumstance, there be no charge for the contraceptive coverage.”

Thus, instead of delaying final regulations until they could be revised to reflect the prospective changes President Obama outlined Friday, the administration went ahead and locked into regulation its original position, accompanied by a (non-binding) promise to revisit the issue.

Furthermore, even assuming that the administration followed through in good faith on this promise, it still leaves the technical problems identified yesterday in a Heritage Foundation blog post — how to handle employers that “self-insure” and don’t buy coverage from an insurer — that make the president’s proposal unworkable.

Meanwhile, the administration simultaneously issued “Guidance on the Temporary Enforcement Safe Harbor for Certain Employers, Group Health Plans, and Group Health Insurance Issuers with Respect to the Requirement to Cover Contraceptive Services Without Cost Sharing . . .” (yes, the title keeps on going for another two lines).

Bottom line on the guidance: The administration has said it won’t enforce the new law on religious employers until after August 1, 2013. However . . . 

Let’s say you are one of those “certain employers” — e.g., the director of a Baptist food bank, headmaster of a Jewish school, or operator of a crisis-pregnancy center — and you wish to take advantage of this “grace period.” The guidance says that you not only have to certify to HHS that you are eligible, but you also have to include the following notice of contraceptive coverage in the information you distribute to your employees at their next health-plan enrollment:

NOTICE TO PLAN PARTICIPANTS

The organization that sponsors your group health plan has certified that it qualifies for a temporary enforcement safe harbor with respect to the Federal requirement to cover contraceptive services without cost sharing. During this one-year period, coverage under your group health plan will not include coverage of contraceptive services.

Meaning what? It means that religious institutions such as Colorado Christian University, Belmont Abbey College, and EWTN — all three of which are represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in lawsuits against the federal government over the anti-conscience mandate — must send this notice to their employees simply to be allowed the one-year reprieve.

The strong implication is that such religious employers will get that and no more. 

As for all the rest of what we heard in the Obama administration’s media blitz to fend off criticism, these final rules do not back it up. The rest of the content in these documents — about working over the next year to modify this regulation and accommodate objections — are just so many words: words that have no force of law, and are simply promises and obfuscating squid ink.

To borrow a phrase from the New York Slimes, “If you don’t get it….you don’t get it!”

Turning now to International News of Note, coming soon to a town, city, county, state or country near you!

The Chaos of Greece

What happens to countries that choose economic decline.

 

Rioters torched shops and offices, with banks and foreign businesses the main targets. Pensioners wearing gas masks joined a blockade of Parliament and squared off against some 4,000 police officers. The city’s best-known cinema was burned to the ground, along with nine other national-heritage sites.

This was Athens on Sunday night as the Greek Parliament voted for austerity measures that are their only ticket to a €130 billion bailout. Don’t think these scenes can’t—or won’t—be repeated in other Western capitals.

When it comes to naming the bad guys in this Greek tragedy, the net can be cast very widely. Both leading political parties acquitted themselves dishonorably, one by lying about the country’s fiscal position, the second by failing to do much about it. The country’s government unions have resisted every serious reform and paralyzed the economy with strikes. An anarchist movement with an appetite for destruction rarely misses an opportunity to feast on mass discontent.

Greeks themselves seem unable to choose between taking another bailout and adopting austerity, or abandoning the euro and accepting the consequences of default. It’s so much more convenient to blame foreign creditors (“thieves”) for demanding repayment of loans that funded the lavish welfare benefits Greeks could never have afforded on their own. And when that fails, blame the Germans for being such demanding paymasters.

To top it off, the technocrats in Brussels and at the IMF have misdiagnosed the crisis from the beginning. First, they thought Athens had a liquidity problem that could be eased by large infusions of loans, rather than a fundamental solvency problem. Second, they believed that what Athens needed most was a balanced budget and a smaller debt load, to be solved arithmetically with less spending and higher taxes. But Greece’s real problem is the lack of economic growth, itself a product of policies that discourage private enterprise. That’s why Greece ranks 100th on the World Bank’s most recent rankings of “ease of doing business”—right behind Yemen.

In other words, the fires in Athens are the result of the combustible mix of a desiccated welfare state and the burning embers of Keynes’s cigarette. Don’t expect those fires to be put out by this latest round of austerity. In theory, Athens has agreed to carve €3.3 billion out of this year’s budget (including €300 million out of pensions), slash the minimum wage by 22%, and eliminate 150,000 government jobs by 2015.

These are necessary measures for a government sliding toward a debt-to-GDP ratio of 160%. But they do nothing to address the growth side of Greece’s problem. They will also create an intolerable political problem for Greece’s government as state workers are laid off into a shrinking economy. Expect a fresh exodus of Greek labor, along with increasingly powerless (and short-lived) Greek governments.

With Sunday’s vote, Greece has dodged a disorderly default, at least for the time being, and Greece’s private creditors can consider themselves lucky for taking only a 50% haircut under the latest proposed restructuring deal, when they might have had their heads shaved. But the crisis will not end until Greeks understand that they must live off what they produce, and adopt the policies that enable them to produce more. The larger question is whether the rest of Europe and America will learn from Greece’s chaos before they experience the same fate.

As our middle son Mike might say, not bloody likely!

Next we turn to Tales From the Darkside, courtesy today of the racist Samuel L. Jackson and his interview in Ebony.  FYI: Townhall.com bleeped what they deemed politically-incorrect terms; we believe in accuracy in reporting, and thus have restored the original verbiage immediately following the expletives:

“I voted for Barack because he was black. ‘Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people — because they look like them … That’s American politics, pure and simple. [Obama’s] message didn’t mean [bleep] [shit] to me.”

Ironically, in the same article Jackson accuses Americans of racism while using derogatory terms and saying they would never elect a black man to be president because that would be “scary.”

Jackson then went on to drop the N-word several times when discussing Obama, telling the mag, “When it comes down to it, they wouldn’t have elected a [bleep] [nigger]. Because, what’s a [bleep] [nigger]? A [bleep] [nigger] is scary. Obama ain’t scary at all. [Bleeps] [Niggers] don’t have beers at the White House (No….they generally enjoy malt liquor….preferably Colt .45!). [Bleeps] [Niggers] don’t let some white dude, while you in the middle of a speech, call [him] a liar. A [bleep] [nigger] would have stopped the meeting right there and said, ‘Who the [bleep] [f*ck] said that?’ I hope Obama gets scary in the next four years, ‘cuz he ain’t gotta worry about getting re-elected.”

Why argue when we can use his own words against him:

Sorry Sam; but the only racist motherf*cker here is….

….YOU!

In a related item, courtesy of the WSJ, Jamie Whyte offers the dichotomy of….

Judicial ‘Diversity’ and Justice

The diversifiers do not seek a remedy for partiality. They seek only a proportionate distribution of it.

 

In science-fiction movies, intergalactic justice is usually dispensed by a panel of strange but wise beings. They are very old, with pale skin, and resemble each other so closely that they must be drawn from a single race. This bothers no one. On the contrary, the judges’ otherworldliness is taken as part of what qualifies them for their job.

In the nonfictional world, we must make do with judges who are human, just like the rest of us. Or, as it has turned out in Western countries, we must mainly make do with judges who are humans like just some of us—specifically, those of us who are old white men.

This bothers some people, including British Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke. Appearing before a House of Lords committee on judicial appointments last month, he agreed with his questioners that the percentage of judges who are not men or white is increasing too slowly. He said he favors Britain using ethnicity and gender as “tie breakers” when appointing judges, under section 159 of the Equality Act of 2010.

But why are people bothered? What do they think is wrong with a predominantly white and male judiciary?

The answer is that they suspect human judges resemble their fictional intergalactic counterparts only insofar as they are old and white—not in the more important quality of impartiality. They doubt judges’ ability to transcend their demography, or “identity,” when making decisions about what is lawful. A white male judge, they believe, can see things only from a white male’s point of view, and his decisions will reflect his bias.

For the sake of argument, let us accept this pessimism about humans’ ability to be impartial. It does not follow that a diverse judiciary will deliver more justice. Even the advocates of judicial diversity do not suggest that partiality is a failing of white men alone. They believe it to be a common human failing. A Latin woman judge will make decisions that reflect her Latin woman’s biases, a Somali judge will make decisions of a Somali sort, a gay Teutonic judge will make gay Teutonic decisions, and so on for any “identity” you choose.

Now imagine a civil case involving a white female plaintiff and a black male defendant. How can justice be done? If the judge is a white woman, the defendant cannot receive a fair trial. If the judge is a black man, the plaintiff cannot have justice. If the judge is a white male who identifies more with his Y chromosome than with his skin, the plaintiff cannot receive justice.

You see the problem. The judge in any given case always has some particular “identity.” Justice can be done only in those vanishingly rare cases where all involved parties—plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses and lawyers—are of the same gender and ethnicity as the judge, and perhaps of the same social class, religion and sexual orientation too.

Once you believe that humans cannot achieve the degree of impartiality required to administer the law, it makes no difference if the judiciary is composed entirely of white men or perfectly reflects the mix of the population. Either way, the law will not be administered justly.

And if you think that humans can in fact achieve the required impartiality then, the demographics of the judiciary do not matter. If retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was right when she said that a wise woman and a wise man would make the same judicial decisions, then it does not matter if all judges are men, provided that they are wise.

Those who demand judicial diversity have implicitly given up on the rule of law. They see the law as a mere pretext for rule by judges, whom they not only expect but hope will use their power partially. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, for example, has said that judges who set aside their ethnic identity “do a disservice to society and the law.” The diversifiers do not seek a remedy for judicial partiality; they seek only a proportionate distribution of it.

This displays an alarmingly tribal view of the proper function of judges and a peculiar ignorance of legal history. From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, the legal rights of women and of blacks were dramatically extended in Britain, America and the rest of the West. During this period the vast majority of judges and legislators were white men. How could this have happened if humans cannot transcend their identity prejudices?

Those who deliberately misinterpret history are doomed to never profit from it.

And since we’re on the subject, here’s another in a seemingly neverending series of….

Great Moments in Public Education

 

In the wake of a much-publicized sex-abuse scandal at a California public elementary school, Slate’s Brian Palmer asks how common sexual abuse in schools is:

The best available study suggests that about 10 percent of students suffer some form of sexual abuse during their school careers. In the 2000 report, commissioned by the American Association of University Women, surveyors asked students between eighth and 11th grades whether they had ever experienced inappropriate sexual conduct at school. The list of such conduct included lewd comments, exposure to pornography, peeping in the locker room, and sexual touching or grabbing. Around one in 10 students said they had been the victim of one or more such things from a teacher or other school employee, and two-thirds of those reported the incident involved physical contact.

If these numbers are representative of the student population nationwide, 4.5 million students currently in grades K-12 have suffered some form of sexual abuse by an educator, and more than 3 million have experienced sexual touching or assault. This number would include both inappropriate romantic relationships between teachers and upperclassmen, and outright pedophilia.

These statistics are uncertain, however, because no one has ever designed a nationwide study for the expressed purpose of measuring the prevalence of sexual abuse by educators.

The AAUW numbers sound exaggerated to us, like those studies that purport to find some huge proportion of women have been raped, but “rape” turns out to be defined so broadly as to include a sexual encounter that occasioned later regret.

But Palmer cites other studies that put the figure closer to 4%, still enough to constitute a very widespread problem. Yet you hardly ever hear about the scandal of abuse in public schools the way you do about, say the Catholic Church. We guess this is one of those benefits the teachers unions would like to keep.

Nothing to see here, folks….please move along!

On the Lighter Side….

Turning now to the Wide, Wild World of Sports, we gain new insight into the cancer that’s killing professional sports:

Terrell Owens feels he’s been made into a villain

 

“….I feel I’m physically fit and can play at a productive level to where I can play a couple of more years in the National Football League. That’s what I’m pushing for. I’m not going to give up hope just because I’m 38 and just had a knee injury. I think a lot of why I probably didn’t play this year, everybody keeps talking about the ‘character’ issues. The last two or three years relatively I was quiet, knowing that everybody was saying that I had a character issue, I’m disruptive, there’s a lot of hype that comes with me, they’re saying I’m a distraction here and there. That’s all hearsay. If you ask a bunch of my teammates, a lot of it is basically blown out of proportion, the media making me into a fall guy. Overall, will I ever admit that I was a bad teammate? Never. I wasn’t a bad teammate. Was I disruptive. No I wasn’t disruptive. I feel like I have a lot of football left and I’m looking forward to getting back to playing. I think the thing … I didn’t get picked up was that a lot of general managers bought into the fact that the media thinks that I’m this bad guy, this rebel guy, this disruptive guy that divides and messes up team’s chemistry. They won’t allow me to turn over a new leaf. They won’t allow me to be a better person. Anytime anything is brought up about me, they keep talking about things that happened five, six, seven years ago. Why don’t I get a pass? I’ve kind of fallen into that villain category and I can’t get out of that box.”

If none of what’s been said of his cancerous nature was true, why the need to “turn over a new leaf”, become “a better person”, or stop referring to what happened “five, six, seven years ago”?!?  Whatever the box, it’s of TOwn’s creation!

Next up, all we have to say about the Whitney Houston tragedy, courtesy of FOX News’ version of Neville Chamberlain, “Doctor” Manny Alvarez:

Did drugs contribute to Whitney Houston’s death? If so, I’m shaken

 

Upon hearing the news of Whitney Houston’s death yesterday, I was deeply saddened.  In my opinion, Houston was the greatest singer who ever lived, and I, like many others, want to take a moment to mourn the loss of such an incredible musical talent.

Sooo….the Devil made her do it….even to the point of snorting coke with her daughter.

Finally, in News of the Bizarre….

Decomposing body of woman found 30ft up tree in Sydney identified as missing U.S. tourist

 

The decomposing body of a woman found 30ft up a tree in Sydney last month has been identified as a missing U.S. tourist. The remains of Melissa Joy Dietzel were found by a tree surgeon on January 12 in Prince Lane, Randwick, after reports of a foul smell coming from the tree. It is believed Ms Dietzel was homeless and had been living in the oak tree for some time before her death.

Now that, TRULY, is something you don’t see every day….even in the Lan’ Down Undah!

Magoo