It’s Thursday, February 16th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, it’s the “Your Government at Work” segment, courtesy of Bill Meisen, the Washington Examiner and DHS’ Customs & Border Protection home page:

CBP Stops Thousands of Unsafe Hair Dryers

 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized thousands of hair dryers recently that were determined to constitute a “substantial product hazard” under U.S. law, for failing to have adequate immersion protection. The potentially dangerous hair dryers were identified through a nationwide targeting operation by the CBP Import Safety Commercial Targeting and Analysis Center (CTAC).

As a result of the targeting operation, CBP officers in the port of Los Angeles seized an entire shipment of 9,768 hair dryers that lacked shock protection for consumers. Lack of proper shock protection could lead to an electrocution if contact is made with a water source. The port of Miami had a notable seizure of 3,614 hair dryers that also lacked proper shock protection for consumers. These two shipments, containing a total of 13,382 hair dryers, had an estimated domestic value of approximately $229,998 with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $2,506,517.

“Ensuring the safety of imported merchandise is a top priority for CBP,” said Allen Gina, CBP’s assistant commissioner for international trade. “The concerted targeting efforts of CTAC and the vigilance of CBP officers at our ports of entry will help ensure that products like hair dryers are safe for consumers and that substandard product from overseas does not reach store shelves.”

The joint targeting operation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) concentrated on identifying and stopping the importation of unsafe hair dryers intended for consumer use. CPSC reports that since adoption of industry voluntary standards for immersion protection in its regulations, there has been a significant decline in electrocutions or electrical shock incidents.

“This is another example of how U.S. consumers benefit from the close collaboration between CPSC investigators and CBP officers at some of the largest U.S. ports of entry,” said Carol Cave, CPSC’s Director of the Office of Import Surveillance. “Using data provided by CBP, CPSC is able to target and interdict dangerous and violative consumer goods before they enter the stream of commerce.”

Three thoughts come to mind: first, where on earth would we be without the protective umbrella of the DHS and CBP?!?  Obviously electrocuted, assuming we were stupid and clumsy enough to immerse our sub-standard hair dryer in our sink or bathtub.

Next, exactly how much did this collaboration cost the American taxpayer, and has anyone bothered to run a cost-benefit analysis of the operaton?

Finally, are we the only one left stunned anyone, even a government bureaucrat, would be senseless enough to actually advertise this operation, let alone on the department home page?!?

And since we’re on the subject of a federal government more than impressed by its less-than-noteworthy achievements, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger asks:

What Would Clint Eastwood Do?

Regarding the nation’s purpose, Clint Eastwood and Barack Obama couldn’t be further apart.

 

The Barack Obama budget document just released is not a budget. It is a work of literature. It is Barack Obama’s published apologia for a second presidential term, in which—as the budget and its tax proposals make clear—he will reset the historic balance in America between the public sector and the private sector. This reset will require large wealth transfers—from individuals and companies to the government, and from the government back to the people.

The Obama budget is described everywhere as a “political document,” but it is more than that. Mr. Obama hasn’t assembled these ideas just to get elected. This budget is a statement of belief. It is a road map of where he wants the country to go. (And it leads us straight to Progressive Perdition.)

This being so, it behooves us to revisit the most controversial political event of the past two weeks—Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl commercial for the Chrysler car company. This ad was widely viewed as an argument for a second Obama term. It is undoubtedly true that the pro-Obama admen who created the commercial embedded a pro-Obama spin. Asked about this afterward, Clint Eastwood said simply: “I certainly am not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama.”

No sensible person would try to disagree. When The Man With No Name looks at you dead on, as he did Super Bowl Sunday, and says it’s halftime in America and the country will come roaring back, you know the man speaking those words wasn’t talking about his embrace of the vision in Barack Obama’s 2013 budget.

In terms of the nation’s animating ethos, these two American icons could not be further apart. Clint Eastwood was talking about an America heading back up—”roaring” forward in the unpredictable, astonishing way it has since at least the days of the Wild West. The Obama budget is about an America whose path will be guided by the government far into the future. He is announcing that in his second term, the days of the private Wild West in America will come to a close.

There is no better way to discover this intent than in the president’s tax proposals. Taxes are a nation’s Rorschach test. In taxes you discover how a nation wants to be known to others. The burden of taxation may say that a nation more than anything wants to produce (say, Malaysia), or taxes may say that what a nation most wants is to be thought of as fair (Belgium).

What Mr. Obama wants, with the symbolic billionaire Warren Buffett propped at his side, is a wealth tax that redefines the U.S. Mr. Obama wants to enact the Buffett Rule to ensure that every “millionaire” pays at least a 30% federal tax on some definition of income. He would raise taxes on married couples making $250,000. The tax on capital gains would rise to 30% from 15%, and he would return the estate tax to 45%.

No more certain sign exists that a nation has chosen to step off its historic upward path than the creation of wealth taxes. A nation imposes a wealth tax when it wakes up one day to conclude that it has become embarrassed, rather than proud of, its wealth, which is to say, its national success. (Though like every other Limousine Liberal, the Obamaos have no problem living the high life on their unmerited wealth.)

We are not talking here about the vast wealth that closed, crony economies direct toward a small plutocracy and no one else, though this rigged scam seems to be Barack Obama’s understanding of the modern American economy. The reality is that since its inception the U.S. has been an open, free economy that let wealth, including vast wealth, flow to dreamers, geeks and college dropouts whose unpredictable success multiplied into greater wealth for others.

Henry Ford’s automated car-assembly line spawned a galaxy of parts factories filled with workers. Apple’s little machines brought forth a universe of devices and applications.

The timing of such productive explosions is mysterious. The Obama wealth tax will smother and stifle this mysterious force.

France has the world’s most famous wealth tax. They call it “the solidarity tax,” which is the Gallic equivalent of the Obama “fair share.” Today France is famous for the flight of its productive citizens to other countries. Spain abolished its wealth tax, but then-Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, a Socialist, re-imposed it last September. What these countries, and much of Europe, have in common are high rates of youth unemployment.

Youth unemployment is the disturbing symptom of an economy no longer dynamic or “young” in the sense of creating new wealth to replace old wealth. The United States lately has also developed relatively high youth unemployment, which suggests the problem here isn’t fairness, but fatigue.

The Obama budget says one reason for its wealth taxes is to provide sufficient revenue to protect “the investments we need to grow the economy and create jobs.” He does the investing, and the economy grows. (Smaller and smaller every day.)

The Obama budget is about national attitude. Before this presidency, the national attitude was indeed caught in the snarling, disgusted, refuse-to-lose tone of Clint Eastwood’s voice in that commercial. The new national attitude on offer is caught in the Obama voice: resentful, moody, looking for someone else to blame and then punish.

An American wealth tax will make us wimpy and whiny. That won’t be halftime. It will be the final whistle.

In a related item, Thomas Sowell offers….

The Progressive Legacy: Part II

 

“Often wrong but never in doubt” is a phrase that summarizes much of what was done by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the two giants of the Progressive era, a century ago.

Their legacy is very much alive today, both in their mindset — including government picking winners and losers in the economy and interventionism in foreign countries — as well as specific institutions created during the Progressive era, such as the income tax and the Federal Reserve System.

Like so many Progressives today, Theodore Roosevelt felt no need to study economics before intervening in the economy. He said of “economic issues” that “I am not deeply interested in them, my problems are moral problems.” For example, he found it “unfair” that railroads charged different rates to different shippers, reaching the moral conclusion that these rates were discriminatory and should be forbidden “in every shape and form.”

It never seemed to occur to TR that there could be valid economic reasons for the railroads to charge the Standard Oil Company lower rates for shipping their oil. At a time when others shipped their oil in barrels, Standard Oil shipped theirs in tank cars — which required a lot less work by the railroads than loading and unloading the same amount of oil in barrels.

Theodore Roosevelt was also morally offended by the fact that Standard Oil created “enormous fortunes” for its owners “at the expense of business rivals.” (Though again, TR had no problem spending his own fortune, which he undoubtedly deemed duly derived.) How a business can offer consumers lower prices without taking customers away from businesses that charge higher prices is a mystery still unsolved to the present day, when the very same arguments are used against Wal-Mart.

The same preoccupation with being “fair” to high-cost producers who were losing customers to low-cost producers has turned anti-trust law on its head, for generations after the Progressive era. Although anti-trust laws and policies have been rationalized as ways of keeping monopolies from raising prices to consumers, the actual thrust of anti-trust activity has more often been against businesses that charged lower prices than their competitors.

Theodore Roosevelt’s anti-trust attacks on low-price businesses in his time were echoed in later “fail trade” laws, and in attacks against “unfair” competition by the Federal Trade Commission, another agency spawned in the Progressive era.

Woodrow Wilson’s Progressivism was very much in the same mindset. Government intervention in the economy was justified on grounds that “society is the senior partner in all business.”

The rhetorical transformation of government into “society” is a verbal sleight-of-hand trick that endures to this day. So is the notion that money earned in the form of profits requires politicians’ benediction to be legitimate, while money earned under other names apparently does not.

Thus Woodrow Wilson declared: “If private profits are to be legitimized, private fortunes made honorable, these great forces which play upon the modern field must, both individually and collectively, be accommodated to a common purpose.”

And just who will decide what this common purpose is and how it is to be achieved? “Politics,” according to Wilson, “has to deal with and harmonize” these various forces.

In other words, the government — politicians, bureaucrats and judges — are to intervene, second-guess and pick winners and losers, in a complex economic process of which they are often uninformed, if not misinformed, and a process in which they pay no price for being wrong, regardless of how high a price will be paid by the economy.

If this headstrong, busybody approach seems familiar because it is similar to what is happening today, that is because it is based on fundamentally the same vision, the same presumptions of superior wisdom, and the same kind of lofty rhetoric we hear today about “fairness.” Wilson even used the phrase “social justice.”

Woodrow Wilson also won a Nobel Prize for peace, like the current president — and it was just as undeserved. Wilson’s “war to end wars” in fact set the stage for an even bigger, bloodier and more devastating Second World War.

But, then as now, those with noble-sounding rhetoric are seldom judged by what consequences actually follow.

Those requiring proof of the inevitable perils of Progressivism need look no further than Detroit, as Jarrett Skorup writing at michigancapitalconfidential.com details:

Imagine a city where all the major economic planks of the statist or “progressive” platform have been enacted:

A “living wage” ordinance, far above the federal minimum wage, for all public employees and private contractors. A school system that spends significantly more per pupil than the national average. A powerful school employee union that militantly defends the exceptional pay, benefits and job security it has won for its members. Other government employee unions that do the same for their members. A tax system that aggressively redistributes income from businesses and the wealthy to the poor and to government bureaucracies.

Would this be a shining city on a hill, exciting the admiration of all? We don’t have to guess, because there is such a city right here in our state: Detroit.

Detroit has been dubbed “the most liberal city in America” and each of these “progressive” policies is alive and well there. How have they worked out?

In 1950, Detroit was the wealthiest city in America on a per capita income basis. Today, the Census Bureau reports that it is the nation’s 2nd poorest major city, just “edging out” Cleveland.

Could it be pure coincidence that the decline occurred over the same period in which union power, the city government bureaucracy, taxes and business regulations all multiplied? While correlation is not causation, it is striking that the decline in per capita income is exactly what classical economists predict would occur when wage controls are imposed and taxes are increased.

And for those who still can’t make the connection, perhaps this list of the poorest cities in America, along with the length of their uninterrupted Dimocratic control will help:

1. Detroit, 33.3% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 52 years
2. Cleveland, 30.5% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 20 years
3. Buffalo, 30.3% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 43 years
4. Newark, 26.1% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 102 years
5. Miami, 25.6% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 52 years
6. Fresno, 25.5% in poverty–Republican Mayor for the last 13 years
7. Cincinnati, 25.1% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 29 years
8. Toledo, 24.7% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 20 years
9. El Paso, 24.3% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 120 years
10.Philadelphia, 24.1% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 57 years
11. Milwaukee, 23.4% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 49 years
12. Memphis, 23.1% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 133 years
13. St. Louis, 22.9% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 60 years
14. Dallas, 22.6% in poverty–Republican Mayor for the last 2 years
14 New Orleans,22.6% in poverty-Democrat Mayor for the last 141 years
16. Atlanta, 22.4% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 130 years
17. Stockton, Calif., 21.6% in poverty–No info available–probably Libs
18. Minneapolis, 21.3% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 35 years
19. Pittsburgh, 21.2% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 21 years
20. Tucson, 20.9% in poverty–No info available–probably Libs
21. Chicago, 20.6% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 78 years
22. Columbus,Ohio 20.1% in poverty-Democrat Mayor for the last 9 years
23. Long Beach, Calif., 19.8% in poverty–No info available–probably Libs
24. Houston, 19.5% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 88 years
25 Los Angeles,19.4% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for “the last 8 years”
26. Baltimore, 19.3% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 42 years
27 San Antonio,19.2% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 38 years
28. Phoenix, 18.9% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 5 years
29. Boston, 18.7% in poverty–Democrat Mayor for the last 79 years
30. Denver, 18.4% in poverty—-DemocratMayor for the last 46 years

Nothing to see here folks….move along.

Moving to the Education Section, we learn yet again that when it comes to separation of church and state, Liberals educators only mean anything remotely Judeo-Christian:

Colorado student quits high school choir over Islamic song praising ‘Allah’

 

A Colorado high school student quit the school choir after an Islamic song containing the lyric “there is no other truth except Allah” made it into the repertoire. James Harper, a senior at Grand Junction High School in Grand Junction, put his objection to singing “Zikr,” a song written by Indian composer A.R. Rahman, in an email to Mesa County School District 51 officials. When the school stood by choir director Marcia Wieland’s selection, Harper quit.

“I don’t want to come across as a bigot or a racist, but I really don’t feel it is appropriate for students in a public high school to be singing an Islamic worship song,” Harper told KREX-TV. “This is worshipping another God, and even worshipping another prophet … I think there would be a lot of outrage if we made a Muslim choir say Jesus Christ is the only truth.”

District spokesman Jeff Kirtland rejected Harper’s analogy. “This is about bringing diversity to the students and showing them other things that are out there,” Kirtland told KREX. “The teacher was open with the parents and students do not have to participate in this voluntary club choir.”

Kirtland did not return multiple calls for comment from FoxNews.com….Grand Junction High School Principal Jon Bilbo did not return calls for comment.

That’s because their lying hypocrisy is showing.  In response, we turn yet again to the immortal words of Vincent LaGuardia Gambini:

Meanwhile Joel Pollack, writing in BigGovernment.com and courtesy of George Lawlor, tells us what the GOP presidential field SHOULD be stressing:

A Post-Obama Vision in 100 Words

 

With the exception of recognizing that no matter who is elected President, or how many Conservative justices sit on the SCOTUS, abortion will always remain legal in most of the country, he’s dead-on balls accurate.  So why is this so difficult for Romney, Gingrich and Santorum to grasp?  Simple: not one of them is an actual Conservative.  And which again demonstrates why, at least to date, we’re voting for: (d) None of the above.

And in today’s Money Quote, a snippet from the Washington Times‘ Emily Miller, courtesy of George Lawlor:

“Despite congressional opposition, Mr. Obama continues to ask for a 0.5 percent pay hike for government employees for 2013. The document then says this would “free up” $28 billion over 10 years to fund other government programs. Only fuzzy Washington math could explain how paying higher salaries creates more money to spend on other government programs.“

Speaking of fuzzy math, the WSJ comments on….

ObamaCare’s Non-Tax Tax

A who’s-on-first routine at the House budget committee.

 

The quicksilver qualities of the Affordable Care Act individual mandate penalties—what you pay if you don’t buy government approved health coverage—are something to behold. Does the Obama Administration think they’re a fine, a tax, or maybe something else? Well, that depends, as revealed in a telling exchange at a House budget hearing Wednesday.

New Jersey Republican Scott Garrett asked White House budget director Jeff Zients about his claim that no one earning under $250,000 will see a tax increase under his boss: “So if I am part of a family that does not buy health insurance in violation of the President’s health-care program and I got to pay because of that, that is not a tax increase—that is not a tax on me?”

Mr. Zients replied, “The Affordable Care Act saves money,” which is not merely irrelevant but false. Mr. Garrett tried again and Mr. Zients said “I’m not sure I’m following the question.” Mr. Garrett once more: “Is that a tax on me or is that not a tax on me?”

Mr. Zients: “Well, this is—” Mr. Garrett: “A moment ago you said there’s no tax increase.” Mr. Zients: “There aren’t.” Mr. Garrett: “So that’s not a tax?” Mr. Zients: “No.” Mr. Garrett: “That’s not a tax. Okay. I just want to be clear on that because that’s not the argument the Administration is making before the Supreme Court.”

Game, set, match. Mr. Garrett is better informed about the Obama legal team’s arguments before the High Court, which call the penalty a tax to try to better defend its constitutionality. What Mr. Zients’s confusion really shows is that what the President also once tried to define as a non-tax tax is indefensible.

Oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practice lying our asses off!

On the Lighter Side….

And in News of the Bizarre, another canine clipping catastrophe:

Lawsuit claims Oahu pet store cut dog’s ear, tail

 

Two dog owners filed a lawsuit claiming their pets were mutilated while being groomed at an Oahu pet store. The lawsuit filed in state court Monday said plaintiff Gladys Kapuwai dropped off her dog Dodo for grooming at the Petco store in Kaneohe in July, and that the pet was returned with its ear cut off. In addition, there appeared to be an effort to “reattach, glue or sew” the ear back on, the lawsuit states.

“I couldn’t believe what they did. I started crying because this is our baby, too, you know.” Kapuwai told Hawaii News Now. The plaintiffs claim they suffered serious emotional distress and anxiety, and said they are seeking unspecified damages.

Attorneys for Petco have suggested an alternative theory of the crime:

Honolulu police say they attempted to question the Dodo, but the dog was either deaf….

….or dumb as a Dimocrat.

Finally, in the “Just Desserts” segment, aka the “You Are What You Eat” section, courtesy of Bill Meisen, we learn….

Diner suffers cardiac arrest while eating a Triple Bypass Burger in restaurant called the Heart Attack Grill

 

The Triple Bypass Burger contains three slabs of meat, 12 rashes of bacon, cheese, red onion, sliced tomato and the Heart Attack Grill’s own ‘unique special sauce’. And that’s before taking into account the accompanying ‘Flatliner Fries’, cooked in pure lard, and a giant soft drink.

But what a way to go!

Magoo