The Daily Gouge, Monday, February 20th, President’s Day 2012

On February 19, 2012, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Monday, February 20th, President’s Day, 2012….and here’s to the 44th never being the 45th. In any event, we’d be willing to bet, with the exception of the Roosevelts, Wilson, Johnson, Clinton and Carter, the other 43 are either personally aghast or rolling over in their graves he was ever elected in the first place.

And be sure to catch today’s Cover Story at www.thedailygouge.com.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Conn Carroll and the Morning Examiner portrays Team Tick-Tock in its totality, as Timmy the Tax Cheat tries to match wits with Paul Ryan:

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio., a former director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, released a study yesterday, showing that the United States Department of Treasury will reach its statutory borrowing limit well before election day.

Specifically, the study noted that President Obama’s budget projects total U.S. debt will reach $16.334 trillion by September 30, 2012. This is just $60 billion below the 16,394,000,000,000 debt limit set just last August. Since the federal government is adding to the national debt at a rate of $132 billion a month, the debt ceiling should be around October 15th. The $100 billion payroll tax cut set to be passed today will only accelerate this time-line.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will undoubtedly make every effort to bend the law so that Obama will not need to ask Congress to raise the debt limit before election day. But it will be close. More importantly, however, the speed with which Obama blew through this current debt limit should cause his administration to pause and think about our long-term debt crisis. Unfortunately, the opposite appears to be the case.

Testifying before the House Budget Committee yesterday, Geithner admitted that the Obama administration has no plan to control the debt. “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem,” Geithner told Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. “What we do know is we don’t like yours.”

That is Obama’s entire governing record in just one statement: we have no plan, we just don’t like yours. This kind of lazy and vindictive thinking is turning our country into Greece faster than anyone previously imagined possible.

Geithner’s words bear repeating….

“We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem;what we do know is we don’t like yours.”

….over….and over….and over again in Republican campagin ads from now until November.

And by the way, Timmy, tell your boss the CBO just stated for the record….

Real Unemployment Hits 15 Percent

“The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The official unemployment rate excludes those individuals who would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent. Compounding the problem of high unemployment, the share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six months—referred to as the long-term unemployed—topped 40 percent in December 2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began to be collected; it has remained above that level ever since.”

Just shy of a year since The Obamao was anointed.

In a related item, as detailed in a FOX News….

Report: Millions of jobless file for disability when unemployment benefits run out

Being unemployed for too long reportedly is driving people mad and costing taxpayers billions of dollars in mental illness and other disability claims. The New York Post reported Sunday that as unemployment checks run out, many jobless are trying to gain government benefits by declaring themselves unhealthy.

More than 10.5 million people — about 5.3 percent of the population aged 25 and 64 — received disability checks in January from the federal government, the Post wrote, a 18 percent jump from before the recession. Among those claiming disability, 43 percent are asking for benefits because of mental illness, the Post wrote. A growing number of those people are older, former white-collar workers.

Disability claims come from the Social Security Trust Fund, which is set to go broke in 2018. Congress last week agreed to dip into the revenue stream to give a 2-percentage point tax break to working Americans.

The Post noted that the more people file for disability claims, the better for the unemployment picture since those people are removed from the jobless rolls.

But as far as the MSM is concerned….

….nothing to see here folks; move along.

Then there’s this iota of insight into the mind of a Marxist, courtesy of Jonah Goldberg:

Obama’s Cynicism For Me, Not For Thee

“My rival in this race,” President Obama announced early in 2007, “is not other candidates. It’s cynicism.” It’s now clear that what he meant by this was other people’s cynicism — not his own.

As you may recall, Obama came into office a very inexperienced politician, spouting a lot of hopeful and idealistic rhetoric. He had made a name for himself by refusing to demonize conservatives and Republicans. For instance, during a Nevada Democratic debate, then-Sen. Obama told the late Tim Russert that, “My greatest strength, I think, is the ability to bring people together from different perspectives to get them to recognize what they have in common and to move people in a different direction.” (Yeah….and the greatest strength of our golf game is the accuracy of our tee shots!)

Whether that was a lie at the time or simply unwarranted self-confidence is unknowable. (Yeah….;-), ;-)!) What is plainly knowable is that it was untrue.

Among modern presidents going back to Eisenhower, Obama has proven uniquely incapable of working with his political opponents. (“Incapable”….or “unwilling”?) Even Jimmy Carter got his signature airline deregulation bill passed with whopping bipartisan majorities. Bill Clinton got NAFTA, welfare reform and some balanced budgets with Republican help. George W. Bush got Democrats on board for No Child Left Behind and the Iraq war. (Obama’s vice president and his secretary of state both voted for it as senators.)

There have been some bipartisan victories on Obama’s watch, but he’s often been the partisan loser in such fights. For instance, Congress extended the Bush-era tax cuts, much to Obama’s dismay. And even on more clear-cut bipartisan victories — say, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, or the trade deals Obama delayed unnecessarily — there’s little evidence that Obama brought any opponents around to his position. The man just isn’t very persuasive.

Now Obama’s defenders, starting with the man himself, insist this isn’t his fault. He’s actually super persuasive and bipartisan, he just suffers from the fact that the Republicans are the most unreasonable politicians ever, so he can’t be blamed for utterly failing to work with them. It’s like the guy who insists that he’s a real ladies’ man but can’t get a phone number because all of the hot women in the bar just happen to be gay.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Everywhere the president goes, he explains that he’s failed to get anything done either because the system is broken or because his opponents lack the honor and decency to work with him. Such arguments define cynicism.

But for Obama, cynicism is a vice for other people.

For instance, just this month, after five Democratic senators and several members of his own inner circle (including Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former Chief of Staff William Daley), not to mention the unified leadership of the Catholic Church, expressed profound dismay over Obama’s decision to force religious institutions to pay for contraceptive and “preventative” services in violation of their faith, Obama insisted that opponents of the move were “cynical.”

Also this month, the president proposed a budget that assumes everyone in this country is too stupid to understand what he’s up to. It simply pretends there’s no debt or deficit problem. It assumes that entitlement spending is nothing to worry about. It “saves” money by cutting spending no one ever planned to spend. And it proposes huge tax hikes nobody believes that even Obama wants.

Why? Because Obama expects Republicans to vote against the budget — as any responsible legislator of either party would — so he can then further demonize the “do-nothing Congress” while pretending to be serious about fixing our problems. (See Timmy the Tax Cheat’s comments above.)

By the way, the only part of Congress worthy of that sobriquet is the Democrat-controlled Senate, which hasn’t proposed a budget in over 1,000 days (longer than the entire run of the Kennedy administration). Why hasn’t it? To make it easier for the Democratic president to demonize his opponents.

Instead of fulfilling his promise to deliver a “new kind of politics” and a new era of idealism, he’s made politics more cynical than ever. The case for Obama has become the case against everyone and everything inconvenient to his success. Don’t agree with Obama’s policies? Well, you can’t possibly have a good reason to do that. So you must be racist, greedy, dumb or corrupt.

Meanwhile, Obama casts himself as the humble servant of the 99 percent, even as he forklifts cash from Wall Street into his campaign coffers and exploits the very sort of super PACs he not long ago claimed were a “threat to democracy.”

But to point that out is just cynicism.

The bottom line?

Obama LIES….every time his lips move.

Meanwhile, back in Detroit, courtesy of George Lawlor, we learn….

UAW Bonuses on Record GM Profit May Lift Economy

Mike Green says he already knows how he’s going to use a $7,000 profit-sharing check from General Motors Co. (GM): He’ll help his son buy a new car, throw him a graduation party and sock some money away in the bank. “A lot of people are going to catch up on stuff,” said Green, president of UAW Local 652 in Lansing, Michigan, where GM builds Cadillacs. “People haven’t really had a raise since 2005 It’s kind of nice we get to reap some of the rewards now.”

….In the battleground state of Ohio, David Green says he plans to pay off his 2011 Chevrolet Cruze sedan with his GM profit sharing. “I’m would think some folks are going to save it after being through some tough times, other people are going to use it to pay off bills and some are going to go out and buy stuff,” said Green, president of UAW Local 1714 in Lordstown, Ohio, which stamps metal parts for the Cruze.

Union workers at the Corvette factory in Kentucky will probably use their profit sharing checks to put a down payment on the $49,600 sports cars they build, said Eldon Renaud, president of United Auto Workers Local 2164 at the Bowling Green, Kentucky factory that builds the cars. “There are some people ready to put that toward a Corvette,” he said. “With all the concessions we gave during and after the bankruptcy, it’s an exciting time. Some of the money we lost will be made up with this profit sharing. ‘‘Morale is certainly quickly improving. Everyone is starting to feel like it was worth biting the bullet.’’

The rebound in carmaker profits is putting money into the pockets of U.S. workers after years of belt-tightening. GM yesterday reported a record $9.19 billion in net income for 2011, which will mean profit-sharing bonuses of as much as $7,000 for 47,500 eligible UAW members. That’s an all-time high for GM, and up from an average of $4,300 for the company’s U.S. union workers last year.

Ford paid out about $3,750 in profit sharing in December for the first half of 2011 and will pay out $2,450 more on March 14 as part of $6,200 in total payments on $20.2 billion profit last year. Chrysler paid out an average of $1,500 to about 26,000 union workers on Feb. 10.

With about a third of each bonus check going to state and federal taxes, governments are also gaining from the largess, said Sean McAlinden, a labor economist with the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. ‘‘Michigan tax revenues will certainly benefit: first income taxes, then sales taxes, then spinoff effect,’’ McAlinden said. ‘‘I wish I owned an appliance firm.’’

Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, said the economic bump from bonuses may not be as big as before the recession. ‘‘Most GM workers realize there still may be problems lurking and that they’re not out of the woods yet,’’ he said. ‘‘They’re not going to go out and buy a summer home or a new car. They’ll pay a large share in taxes and use the rest to pay off debts.”

The UAW’s Renaud isn’t among the cautious ones. He plans on using his $7,000 profit-sharing check to take his wife to Italy to celebrate her new doctorate and his survival at GM. “Things are finally starting to look up and we’re just excited that we still have jobs,” said Renaud. “I’m sure my wife will be excited. I owe her a trip to Italy.”

“Catch up on stuff”?!? “Tough times”?!? “Concessions”?!? “Things are finally starting to look up”?!? What drug are these union douche pumps smoking?!?

They benefited from an illegal and unconstitutional abrogation of accepted bankruptcy law that padded the purses of the Obama Administration the UAW while quite literally robbing legitimate bondholders. All the while, not a single UAW worker lost a paycheck, including the 20% paid for not working.

With some 15% of the country out of work, if uninterrupted employment constitutes “concessions” in the eyes of Big Labor, imagine what their reaction to even minimal decreases in real benefits.

Can you say “Greece”? We KNEW you could!

Since we’re on the subject of the absolutely illegal and unnecessary bailout of Detroit, here’s another factoid you won’t hear from either Team Tick-Tock, the UAW or their shills in the MSM:

Taxpayers Paying $73,000/Job Saved at General Motors!

http://pilogic.net/2012/01/28/update-general-motors-and-gmac-still-owe-taxpayers-37-billion/

And turning to the Energy Section, we see….

Domestic production eyed as gas prices head toward record-breaking height

President Obama’s re-elect team defended White House energy policy on Sunday as gas prices shoot toward the $4 mark and beyond, a level that could devastate voters’ pocketbooks as well as Obama’s chances for a second term.

Nationally, gas prices are $3.53 a gallon, up 25 cents since Jan. 1, and likely headed to $4.25 a gallon by late April. Republicans have demanded more oil production at home, as well as building the Keystone XL pipeline across the middle of the U.S. to allow oil from Canada to reach Texas refineries.

Obama rejected the plan, but one of his spokesmen, Robert Gibbs, said the president is looking to increase domestic energy production. “Just on Friday, the Department of Interior issued permits that will expand our exploration in the Arctic. (“Exploration” permits mind you, NOT “drilling” permits!) The president has increased our fuel efficiency and energy efficiency standards so we do use less energy, which will help drive down the price,” Gibbs said. “Our domestic oil production is at an eight-year high, and our use of foreign oil is at a 16-year low. So we’re making progress.”

But John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell Oil and founder of Citizens for Affordable Energy, told Fox News that oil production today is only 7 million barrels per day when it used to be 10 million per day. Hofmeister warned that the global economy is in “the crosshairs” of a precarious situation in which China is growing its demand for oil each year by millions of barrels per day and turmoil in the Middle East is creating “some of the most unpredictable, volatile, geopolitical situations” in the world.

Global oil demand, meanwhile, is expected to increase by another 1.5 percent to 89.25 million barrels a day in 2012, according to the Energy Information Administration. “The failure of the United States of America, the world’s largest consumer, to adopt government policies to enable domestic production to increase and meet these conditions has been nil, nada, nothing, and that is unfortunate for American consumers,” Hofmeister told Fox News.

Not unfortunate….unconscionable….and quite deliberate!

Speaking of the deliberate destruction of America’s domestic fossil fuel supplies, the WSJ‘s Mary Anastasia O’Grady relates to the connection between the….

Keystone XL and National Security

Who gains the most from Obama’s rejection of a new oil pipeline?

With gasoline prices hitting $4 a gallon in some parts of the country even before the summer driving season has started, President Obama’s decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline is looking more and more foolish on economic grounds alone. But Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar wants Americans to pay attention to the matter for a different reason: national security. (Nothing like a Tea Party primary challenge to rouse a slumbering RINO!)

In an op-ed penned in the Miami Herald this week, Mr. Lugar, who is the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, points out that Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez has cultivated a cozy relationship with Iran and that means Iran now has a Western Hemisphere ally that may be ready to act on its behalf. The latest manifestation of that alliance: “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a five-day visit last month to Venezuela and three other Latin American countries, his fifth trip to the region since 2005.”

With the increase in Iranian belligerence, Washington had better focus, Mr. Lugar warns. “The administration’s neglect of the dangers in the Iran-Venezuela bonds assumes greater importance against the backdrop of the rising tensions in the Middle East.”

One of those dangers, in Mr. Lugar’s view, is U.S. dependency on Venezuelan oil supplies to Gulf Coast refineries. If Iran closes the Straits of Hormuz and wants to really tighten the screws, it could get Venezuela to shut off those crude supplies at the same time.

Numerous sources in Venezuela say Mr. Lugar has this problem backward. His logic, which has dominated thinking in Washington since Chávez first came to power, is that Chávez has an “oil weapon” that he can use against the U.S. by cutting off supplies. But the Venezuelan strongman needs the U.S. more than it needs him. He is heavily dependent on the greenbacks he receives for his oil, and the authoritarian populist is unlikely to walk away from them in an election year in Venezuela.

That doesn’t mean Venezuela is not a threat. As Mr. Lugar rightly points out, Iran has shown that it is eager to practice terrorism in the West if given the chance, and Venezuela provides a trampoline to plan and launch attacks from nearby.

With this in mind, the U.S. should be seeking to defund the Chávez machine, and there is no better way to do that than with approval of the Keystone XL. The Alberta crude that will travel through the XL is of a similar quality to Venezuelan oil, and the U.S. could begin buying from Canada instead of from Venezuela if a pipeline were put in place.

There is one thing that Mr. Lugar and Venezuelans who don’t believe that Chávez has an oil weapon agree on, and that is the Venezuelan dictator’s vulnerability. “Divisions in Venezuela’s Russian-armed military, an inflation rate over 30 percent, a dilapidated oil infrastructure, widespread food and energy shortages, and soaring crime rates are all putting heavy pressure on [him],” the senator writes. Losing a customer like the U.S. might just push him over and with him, Iran’s strongest base of support in the hemisphere.

Now who in America would be sorry to see….