It’s Friday, March 2nd, 2012….and before we begin, we take a moment to mark the passing of a man we greatly admired:

In Memoriam: Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012)

 

And marking his passing, we can think of no better epitaph than Breitbart’s own words, courtesy of the WSJ; they need no emphasis from us:

Make no mistake: America is in a media war. It is an extension of the Cold War that never ended but shifted to an electronic front. The war between freedom and statism ended geographically when the Berlin Wall fell. But the existential battle never ceased.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the battle simply took a different form. Instead of missiles the new weapon was language and education, and the international left had successfully constructed a global infrastructure to get its message out.

Schools. Newspapers. Network news. Art. Music. Film. Television. . . .

If the political left weren’t so joyless, humorless, intrusive, taxing, overtaxing, anarchistic, controlling, rudderless, chaos-prone, pedantic, unrealistic, hypocritical, clueless, politically correct, angry, cruel, sanctimonious, retributive, redistributive, intolerant—and if the political left weren’t hell-bent on expansion of said unpleasantness into all aspects of my family’s life—the truth is, I would not be in your life.

If the Democratic Party were run by Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, if it had the slightest vestige of JFK and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, I wouldn’t be on the political map.

If the American media were run by biased but not evil Tim Russerts and David Brinkleys, I wouldn’t have joined the fight. . . .

If America’s pop-cultural ambassadors like Alec Baldwin and Janeane Garofalo didn’t come back from their foreign trips to tell us how much they hate us, if my pay cable didn’t highlight a comedy show every week that called me a racist for embracing constitutional principles and limited government, I wouldn’t be at Tea Parties screaming my love for this great, charitable, and benevolent country.

I am a reluctant cultural warrior.

And one whose presence and efforts will be sorely missed.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner gives Steven Chu every opportunity to deny Team Tick-Tock’s purposefully raising the price of gas, but the Nobel Prize-winning PhD can’t see the forest for the Green:

Chu needs to go; and his boss needs to follow right behind him.

In a related item, Conn Carroll offers his insight into the Bizarro World of Team Tick-Tock’s enervating energy policies in the Morning Examiner:

Obama’s Energy Policy is Working

 

President Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu famously told The Wall Street Journal in 2008, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” (Confirming it to Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday barely a year later.)  At the time, a gallon of gas cost about $8 there. Fast forward to Tuesday when Rep. Alan Nunnelee, R-Miss., questioned Chu about how he was going about achieving this policy goal.

“The people of north Mississippi can’t be here, so I have to be here and be their voice for them,” Nunnelee said. “I have to tell you that $8 a gallon gasoline makes them afraid. It’s a cruel tax on the people of north Mississippi as they try to go back and forth to work. It’s a cloud hanging over economic development and job creation. … Is the overall goal to get our price of gas down,” asked Nunnelee. “No, the overall goal is to decrease our dependency on oil, to build and strengthen our economy,” Chu replied.

There you have it. Obama’ Energy Secretary has admitted before Congress that it is Obama administration policy to let gas prices rise as high as people so that Americans consume less gasoline. And it’s working. Under the headline, “Rising gas prices cause lower fuel use in California,” The Los Angeles Times reports today that gasoline consumption has fallen for the ninth month in a row in the Golden State.

While this may be music to environmental activist ears, real Americans are hurting. According to a CBS News poll released yesterday, two in three Americans say the hike in gas prices is causing them financial hardship at home. “Americans with lower household incomes are especially likely to feel pain at the pump. Forty-nine percent of those earning less than $50,000 say hikes in gas prices have caused them serious financial hardship,” CBS reports.

And what has the Obama administration’s response been? To plead ignorance. Questioned about Chu’s statement yesterday, White House spokesman Jay Carney replied, “I’m not aware of that statement or the characterization that you give it.”

Obama and Carney can only play dumb for so long. That same CBS poll also found that 54 percent of Americans believe a president “can do a lot about” gas prices. If Republicans are smart they’ll figure out how to get that 54 percent to the ballot box.

Yeah.  And if….

Then there’s this from the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel:

Gingrich’s Energy Charge

The candidate has recast an old debate in a way that the GOP can use to great effect against Obama.

 

There are few third acts in politics, but Newt Gingrich is giving it the old college professor’s try. And whether Super Tuesday proves the speaker’s comeback or his swan song, Mr. Gingrich is nonetheless bequeathing something to his party: energy.

Among Mr. Gingrich’s failings as a politician is his fascination with “big ideas,” an obsession that tends to lead him hither and thither into unproductive policy debates (see moon colonies). Among his successes as a politician is nonetheless his ability—when he lands on a policy issue that matters—to develop it, frame it, and use it to great purpose.

The combination of political desperation (falling poll numbers) and political opportunity (rising gas prices) has in the past weeks landed Mr. Gingrich on the big idea of energy policy. Putting aside his poll-driven promises of cheap gas or “energy independence,” he’s on to something. He’s touching on a brand-new energy vision, as well as honing what ought to be one of the party’s most effective criticisms of Barack Obama this fall.

Rick Perry tried this, making energy his first big policy proposal, even as he lacked the skills to connect it to the wider economy. The other presidential candidates also sniff Obama blood in rising gas prices. Mitt Romney throws the need for more domestic energy production into every speech. Rick Santorum hoisted a piece of shale as a visual prop in his post-Michigan-primary speech.

Mr. Gingrich, for his part, is leading with it, framing his speeches around energy and running a half-hour video of his ideas in key Super Tuesday states. His plan is to inspire enough voters to win his home state of Georgia, and to do well in the neighboring states of Tennessee and Oklahoma, picking up enough delegates to justify continuing. While the headlines have focused on his silly promise of $2.50-a-gallon gas (no president can guarantee a world price), the speaker’s bigger contribution has come in his crystallization of two key arguments for the fall campaign.

The first is his point that this is not the usual, boring energy debate. For decades the nation has deadlocked over America’s supposedly limited natural resources, fighting over whether high gas prices made it worth touching, say, the supposedly pristine Alaskan wilderness. It’s been a debate in the context of scarcity.

Mr. Gingrich’s savvy has been to grasp that this is over, done, passé. America is embarking on a seismic energy shift. A decade of technological advances—from 3-D mapping, to fracking, to horizontal drilling—has turned this country into a resources monster in oil and gas and coal. The old, tired GOP argument is that we need to drill for energy security. The new, rebooted argument is that America is primed to become the largest energy producer in the world, with all the money, jobs and benefits that come with it. (i.e., bite us House of Saud!)

In the context of abundance, energy development is political gold for the GOP. As Mr. Gingrich notes: It is a winning economic argument, a shift that could create “more than a million new jobs.” It is a winning deficit argument, since royalties and profits become a new cash stream to the government. It is a winning little-guy argument, since the beneficiaries of fracking are “people who own the property,” like “farmers.” It’s a winning heartland argument, since cheap natural gas is the way to “increase our manufacturing base.”

Energy also becomes, and this is the speaker’s second point, one of the strongest contrasts with Mr. Obama. That is, if Republicans get it right. The temptation is going to be to hit Mr. Obama on gas prices, accuse him of not doing enough exploration. But if gas prices fall, that argument loses its punch. And Mr. Obama is already shamelessly taking credit for a production uptick on private lands.

The trick, which is what Mr. Gingrich is doing, is to instead cast energy policy as emblematic of the administration’s entire broken philosophy, the “fantasy world” where “everything that is good is done by the government.” This is the philosophy behind ObamaCare, behind entitlements, and all else.

Yet what is unique about energy is that it has already provided clear proof of failure, via Solyndra, EPA rules, the Keystone XL pipeline and more. A presidential mindset that believes government exists to remake the energy sector with high-cost green failures results in the exact opposite of the Gingrich proposition: fewer jobs, a higher deficit, calls for greater taxes, and declining manufacturing.

This is a contrast that has been gift-wrapped for the GOP, even if Mr. Gingrich isn’t necessarily the best messenger. The ethanol king feels even in these speeches the need to keep plugging an “all of the above” policy that presumably throws more dollars at renewables. But in the way Mr. Gingrich occasionally can, he’s outlining rich political arguments for his party. Whoever is the nominee could take some pointers.

Which is the role for which, we’ve maintained all along, Newt is best suited.  He’s like the Butch Cassidy of the GOP: “You just keep on thinkin’ Newt; that’s what you’re good at!”

Next up, the Washington Examiner‘s Timothy Carney suggests America wake up and….

Blame ‘moderates,’ not ‘wingers,’ for dysfunction

 

Among the biases of the mainstream political media, the most absurd is the adoration of the “moderate.” When Maine’s Olympia Snowe, the most liberal Senate Republican, announced her retirement Tuesday, it sparked an avalanche of lamentation and praise of this “dying breed” of moderate.

Praise for moderates these days typically goes hand in hand with cries that the GOP has been hijacked by conservative extremists. It’s enough to make you wonder whether our political journalists — either the liberals on the news pages or the “responsible” conservatives on the opinion pages — have been paying attention.

Let’s begin with the state of the GOP. Many Beltway Republicans suspect that Barack Obama will win re-election. There are many reasons for this, but for those conservatives who struggle every day to make conservatism more acceptable in the cocktail party circuit, there is only one explanation ever for Republican failure: conservative extremism. (Which means they have neither the courage nor command of their convictions.)

New York Times columnist David Brooks blames the Tea Partiers and other grassroots conservatives (“wingers,” he calls them) for making the GOP “more and more insular, more and more rigid” and being too intolerant of compromise. Someone should show Brooks the GOP presidential field. The ever-changing policy views of front-runner Mitt Romney can be derided in many ways, but never as “rigid.” Nor can the mercurial Newt Gingrich be pinned down as unbending.

And Rick Santorum embodies the Bush-era GOP, which was defined by unprincipled compromise for the sake of passing legislation — consider No Child Left Behind, the 2005 energy bill, the Medicare prescription drug law, and all of the appropriations bills of the day. “When you’re part of the team,” Santorum explained in the latest debate, “sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader.”

Santorum’s most famous team-player moment was his 2004 save of another vaunted moderate, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, who would have lost the GOP primary to conservative Pat Toomey that year if not for Santorum’s tireless campaigning. Specter, of course, left the party in 2009, giving Democrats the 60 votes they needed to pass Obama’s health care bill. (But it was RINO Olympia Snowe that provided THE KEY VOTE to end cloture and allow the bill to get to the Senate floor; after that, her vote against passage was as meaningless as a North Korean promise.)

While Romney used that history to try and pin Obamacare on Santorum, another “responsible conservative,” David Frum, pinned that 60th vote on the Right. “It was the Club for Growth’s 2009 threat to [defeat] Arlen Specter that enabled the passage of the Affordable Care Act in the first place,” Frum said.

Moderates are as guilty as anyone of being intolerant when faced with conflicts within the GOP. Frum blasted as “Unpatriotic” those conservatives who failed to support George W. Bush’s ill-considered invasion of Iraq, and urged all conservatives to “turn [their] backs” on these heretics. Brooks himself draws some pretty rigid boundaries of permissible dissent, excoriating as “nihilists” those who opposed the unprecedented and unfair Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008.

Specter’s career, meanwhile, is a good example of the rudderlessness of the standard moderate. Specter became a Republican in the 1960s because the GOP bosses in Philly promised him campaign cash, Specter tells in his memoirs. He became a Democrat in 2009 — again, in his own words — because he wanted to “get re-elected.” And in his whiny farewell address to the Senate complaining about how senators now occasionally campaigned against senators (in other words, the Senate was becoming “less and less insular,” as Brooks might put it), Specter praised a handful of the Rockefeller Republicans whom Brooks grieves. While Specter omitted the names of the disgraced moderate senators (Ted Stevens and Bob Packwood), he named a handful of men who turned their bipartisan pragmatism into a lucrative lobbying career, such as John Warner, Warren Rudman, Jack Danforth, and Slade Gorton.

Returning to Obamacare, a key architect of the bill was another vaunted moderate, former Rep. Billy Tauzin. Tauzin was a lifelong Democrat until Republicans took over Congress in 1995. Then he switched parties and got a committee chairmanship from which he helped shape the Medicare drug subsidy before cashing out the drug industry. From his perch as top pharmaceutical lobbyist, he helped write a pharma-friendly health care “reform.”

Olympia Snowe’s critiques this week of a dysfunctional Senate perfectly echoed similar complaints from a retiring Democratic Senate moderate last election — Evan Bayh, who has since cashed out to work for a hedge fund and a K Street lobbying firm.

Frum’s attempted purges, Specter’s naked self-preservation, and Tauzin’s and Bayh’s self-enrichment show moderates are no more tolerant or altruistic than the “wingers” Brooks fears. Moderates in both parties may be a dying breed, but maybe not one worth saving.

With friends like Olympia Snowe, who needs Democrats?

In a related item, there may well be more to Senator Snowejob’s early retirement than the “polarized politics” on Capitol Hill:

Did lawsuit factor in Olympia Snowe’s departure?

 

Last August, while Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was in the midst of an intensive round of fundraising for her 2012 reelection bid, a four-year-old civil lawsuit alleging fraud by an education company in which she and her husband are heavily invested became public.

Nationally, most of the coverage of Snowe’s decision to drop her reelection bid has focused on the centrist Republican’s frustration with the polarized politics on Capitol Hill. But in Maine, a few newspapers have speculated that her husband’s legal entanglements had a role in Snowe’s sudden and surprising decision, which left her with more than $3 million in her campaign coffers and her party without a Senate candidate less than three weeks before the filing deadline for Maine’s June 12 primary.

http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2012/snowe/

As Maggie so famously said in Caddyshack, “Tanks fur nuttin’!”

Since we’re on the subject of deliberate deception, in the “MSM Bias….WHAT Bias?!?” segment, Larry Elder reports how the….

‘Honest’ PBS Clinton Documentary Lies About the Economy

 

Public Television touted the Bill Clinton documentary as a long-awaited warts-and-all piece. USA Today called the two-parter a “solid and even-handed account … of a remarkably skillful politician with an immense intellect.” While calling it “tedious and predictable,” The Washington Post described the documentary as “honest.”

In the first hour, the documentary stumbled out of the gate. If it were a racehorse, they’d have to put it down. The whopper we get hit with right away and again and again is this: Clinton inherited a recession — not an economy that long ago came out of a recession. Never mind that 1993 — 19 years ago — is within the living memory of many Americans. Yet we are repeatedly told that Clinton entered office under a full-on economic meltdown.

The narrator says: “Heading into the fall (of l992) … with the economy still faltering. …”

The narrator later says, “As Clinton took office in the winter of 1993, the economic crisis that had propelled him into office showed few signs of abating.”

Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin adds: “We had had a recession. We had high unemployment. And it was a lot of uncertainty about whether the United States was going to get on its feet again or whether we could be in for a prolonged period of real difficulty. So he came into a very difficult environment.”

Journalist Joe Klein describes Clinton’s first budget battle, in the late summer of ’93, as a gamble “in the midst of a recession.”

And midway through the piece, the narrator informs us that “by the fall of 1994, the economy was growing again.”

This is simply extraordinary, mind-boggling. Whether Bill Clinton was a good president, whether he deserves the credit for balanced budgets and projected surpluses or whether he should have been impeached are matters about which reasonable people can and do disagree. (Uhhh….only if the “reasonable people” believe lying under oath acceptable behavior by a President, sitting or otherwise.)  But whether Bill Clinton entered office “in the midst of a recession” and whether, in the fall of ’92 and the winter of ’93, the economy was “still faltering” and “showed few signs of abating” — these are matters of fact.

The National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., is the official keeper of the U.S. business cycle. It defines a recession as “a period of diminishing (economic) activity.” It tracks when recessions begin (a “peak” — the month when a period of economic growth ends and a downturn begins) and when recessions end (a “trough” — the month when the downturn bottoms out and the economy begins to grow again).

Bill Clinton entered office in January 1993. According to the NBER, did he inherit a recession? Not even close. The recession began in July 1990 and ended eight months later, in March 1991 — a full 19 months before Clinton was even elected.

Let’s be charitable. Perhaps the documentary used a different definition of recession. True, some experts use another standard: two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. But during Bush-41’s last year in office — 1992, the year voters elected Clinton — the economy grew every quarter, averaging 3.2 percent.

But today, nearly two decades after the fact, the PBS narrator solemnly states that “as Clinton took office in the winter of 1993, the economic crisis that had propelled him into office showed few signs of abating” — even though the economy was then on its 22nd consecutive month of positive growth!

Really? “In the winter of 1993 … the economic crisis … showed few signs of abating”? Jan. 29, 1993, seven days after Clinton took office, The New York Times wrote, “U.S. Says Economy Grew at Fast Pace in Fourth Quarter: The economy grew at a faster-than-expected annual rate of 3.8 percent in the final quarter of 1992, the strongest performance in four years, the Commerce Department reported today.”

The confusion is understandable. Many in the media suffer from CRAP — Clinton Recession Amnesia Problem. CRAP spares few victims. Take MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who once said she knows little about economics and, bless her, seems determined to prove it. In January 2009, the month President Obama took office, Maddow said: “Clinton took the oath during an economic downturn, but that was a romper room compared to today’s down-crash.”

In October 1992, as President George Herbert Walker Bush ran for re-election against Bill Clinton, the economy was 18 months into a recovery. But as Investor’s Business Daily noted, 90 percent of the newspaper stories on the economy were negative. Yet the following month, when Clinton defeated Bush-41, suddenly only 14 percent of economic news stories were negative!

Given the media recitation of the false history of the state of the 1992-1993 economy — when Clinton entered office — why expect PBS to get it right?

Historical revisionism occurs when someone challenges a conventional point of view. But the Clinton documentary — as to the state of the economy he inherited — is not historical revisionism. This documentary simply recites the “facts” as the traditional media see it: Clinton inherited a recession left by his Republican predecessor — and that’s that.

We love Larry Elder; but like so many commentators, he seems afraid to use the “L” word when detailing Progressive prevarication, i.e.:

Don’t be afraid to say it guys and gals; after all….it’s the truth.  And the truth is definitely NOT in them!  Liberals say loved to chant “Bush lied, people died”.  We don’t believe it to be true; but even if it were, it would have been the only time he did so.  If lies are addictive, the current Administration is on a mixture of crystal meth and crack.

Turning to today’s installment of the Stork Memorial “Watcha Want Us To Do Ya Moron?!?” segment, a….

Federal judge blocks Arizona’s day laborer restrictions

 

A federal judge blocked police in Arizona from enforcing a section of the state’s 2010 immigration enforcement law that prohibited people from blocking traffic when they seek or offer day labor services on streets. U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled Wednesday that groups seeking to overturn the law will likely prevail in their claim that the day labor rules violate the First Amendment.

The ban was among a handful of provisions in the law that were allowed to take effect after a July 2010 decision by Bolton halted enforcement of other, more controversial elements of the law. The previously blocked portions include a requirement that police, while enforcing other laws, question people’s immigration status if officers suspect they are in the country illegally.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Gov. Jan Brewer’s appeal of Bolton’s decision to put the most contentious elements of the law on hold. Another appeals court has already upheld Bolton’s ruling. Three of the seven challenges to the Arizona law remain alive. No trial date has yet been scheduled in the three cases.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other opponents had asked the judge for a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the day labor rules, arguing they unconstitutionally restrict the free speech rights of people who want to express their need for work.

Brewer’s lawyers had opposed attempts to halt enforcement of the day labor restrictions. They argued the restrictions are meant to confront safety concerns, distractions to drivers, harassment to passers-by, trespassing and damage to property. Brewer’s lawyers have said day laborers congregate on roadsides in large groups, flagging down vehicles and often swarming those that stop. They also said day laborers in Phoenix and its suburbs of Chandler, Mesa and Fountain Hills leave behind water bottles, food wrappers and other trash.

You can depend on one thing: Judge Bolton won’t be the unfortunate citizen who clips one of these illegals and ends up spending their life’s savings defending a frivolous lawsuit filed by someone who shouldn’t have been here in the first place.

And in today’s Muslim Minute, as this snippet from World Net Daily forwarded by Bill Meisen details….

….It appears that the soldiers may not have violated Islamic law at all by their burning of the Qurans.

In a PBS interview, Imam Jihad Turk, director of religious affairs at the Islamic Center of Southern California, said it was acceptable to burn the Quran if it was in a state of “disrepair.”

“When Muslims want to respectfully dispose of a text of the Quran that is no longer usable, we will burn it. So if someone, for example, in their own private collection or library had a text of the Quran that was damaged or that was in disrepair, so the binding was ruined, etc., or it got torn, they might bring it by to the Islamic Center and ask that someone here dispose of it properly if they were unsure how to do that,” Turk said. “And what I’ll do is I’ll take it to my fireplace at home and burn it there in the fireplace. So I sort of take the pages out and then burn it to make sure that it gets thoroughly charred and is no longer recognizable as script.”

Spencer added, “You are supposed to burn a Quran that is worn out and you are not to write in it. Do they have a problem with the burning of the Quran? No, they do it all the time.”

Which makes this entire episode one enormous, deadly farce.

Meanwhile, just as Der Obamao claims he’s settled the Afghan unrest with the mere power of his voice….

Obama: Apology ‘calmed things down’ in Afghanistan

 

….reality rears its ugly head:

2 more US troops killed by Afghan partners

 

“Partners”?  Yeah….like Dimocrats are America’s “partners”.  One might be tempted to say, “Obama lied, troops died”.

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, in an item near and dear to his heart (note we said heart….as opposed to some other part of his royal anatomy!), we close with this forward from G. Trevor, Lord High King of All Vietors:

DUI driver with sex toy in tush rear-ends other driver, Martin deputies say

 

What could be called the case of the soused driver with the sex toy in his hindquarters happened about 11:20 a.m. Feb. 24 as Martin County Sheriff’s investigators went to a two-vehicle crash at U.S. 1 and Seabranch Boulevard in Hobe Sound.

.409; VERY impwessive….particularly as Phoenix House’s Facts on Tap states:

BAL .40%: You are probably in a coma. The nerve centers controlling your heartbeat and respiration are slowing down, s-l-o-w-i-n-g d-o-w-n, s-l-o-w-i-n-g d-o-w-n. it’s a miracle if you’re not dead.

Rumors Mr. Brann was heading home from a night of partying with Bawney Fwank and David Brock remain unconfirmed….but a distinct possibility!

Magoo