It’s Monday, March 5th, 2012….and before we begin, we offer two seemingly unrelated articles which are in fact symptoms of a much larger national malaise; first, the WSJ details:

The 60th ObamaCare Vote

A soon-to-be released report shows how rogue prosecutors defeated Ted Stevens.

 

Mitt Romney recently argued that campaign rival Rick Santorum was responsible for ObamaCare because the former Pennsylvania Senator had, years before its passage, supported Arlen Specter, his home state colleague and one of the 60 Senators who later voted for the bill. Mr. Romney’s Massachusetts creation of the prototype for President Obama’s signature law appears to be the greater sin against free health-care markets. But after March 15, even Mr. Romney may agree that the blame for the 60th vote really belongs to the U.S. Justice Department.

That’s the day a federal court has ordered the release of an independent report on Justice’s “systematic concealment” of evidence. Specifically, the report ordered by Judge Emmet Sullivan found that federal attorneys prosecuting the late Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska hid “significant exculpatory evidence which would have independently corroborated [his] defense and his testimony, and seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness.”

That much we know from sections of the report already made public, but several of the offending prosecutors have been trying to prevent the release of the full 500 pages chronicling the extent of their misconduct. Judge Sullivan recently and to his great credit denied their requests and so Americans will see the panorama of abuse.

These prosecutors, working in Justice’s ironically named Public Integrity Section, trampled on Stevens’ rights by ignoring the Brady rule, which requires prosecutors to share exculpatory evidence with the defense. The feds then won a conviction on ethics charges less than two weeks before Election Day in 2008.

Stevens, a Republican who had been highly popular in Alaska prior to the prosecution, lost a close race to Democratic challenger Mark Begich. Mr. Begich went on to become, yes, one of the 60 Senate votes for ObamaCare in 2009.

Within months of the election, as the federal abuses came to light, Stevens’ conviction was set aside. But the election result, highly influenced by the bogus conviction, never was. As Judge Sullivan recently noted in explaining all the reasons that the report should be made public, the Stevens loss “tipped the balance of power in the United States Senate.” And in favor of ObamaCare.

Then there’s this sordid story from the Left Coast:

Mother launches Facebook campaign against former teacher moving in with teen

 

Were we this young lady’s father, this over-sexed, narcissistic pedophile would by now be eunuch.

A California school teacher has quit his job and left his wife and kids to move into an apartment with an 18-year-old student less than half his age. The Modesto Bee says the teen’s mother, Tammie Powers, has waged a Facebook campaign against the teacher since her daughter moved out of the family’s home last week and into a Modesto apartment with 41-year-old James Hooker.

Powers hopes the publicity resulting from the ‘James Hooker to Jail Page’ will put Hooker in legal jeopardy. Hooker quit his teaching job at Enochs High School last week and left his wife and children, one of them an Enochs student, to live with Enochs senior Jordan Powers.

Hooker first met Powers when she was a freshman in high school, but maintains that their physical relationship did not begin until she was 18. Power’s mother said she has evidence that the pair had inappropriate relations long before and she believes he abused his authority as a teacher. Modesto police are investigating whether there was inappropriate contact before the girl turned 18 last fall.

Hooker acknowledges the couple hurt a lot of people, but says they decided to follow their hearts.  Jordan said she knew that many people did not understand the nature of the relationship. (No Jordan….we get it; you’re an ignorant, inexperienced 18-year old and your boyfriend’s a lecherous old man who’s definitely being led by a part of his anatomy….but not his heart!) “[He’s] my best friend. I mean he’s more than just a lover,” she said.

For those of you old enough to remember, even in the 60’s and 70’s, this piece of human excrement would have been run out of town on a rail, and the only public statement he’d be making would have been in front of a judge following his conviction for statutory rape.

And the federal attorneys who railroaded Ted Stevens would have already suffered discharge and disbarment, the same fate which befell Mike Nifong, another prosecutor who willfully went after defendants he knew to be innocent.  We say this acknowledging Stevens was a man worthy only of contempt, representing as he did all that was wrong with Congress; and while we don’t doubt for an instant he was guilty of other undisclosed crimes, he was manifestly innocent of the charges in question.

No, both instances reflect the results of the Left’s decades-old war on America’s values, morality and sense of decency.  As Robert Bork so accurately observed, the country has slowly but surely been slouching towards Gomorrah.  The evidence is as plain as the ears on Obama’s head.

Forget the unwashed, ignorant masses; we cringe listening to educated, Christian friends extol the virtues of Glee, as amoral and anti-Christian a show as contemporary television offers, the teachings of Oprah, Ellen and The View.  And after attending church Sunday morning, nothing beats wrapping up the weekend with the latest installment of Desperate Housewives, a show dealing exclusively with the adulterous liaisons of a coterie of suburban matriarchs.

Does this make them bad people?  Certainly not, and most assuredly no worse than we; they’re simply desensitized.  Progressives have patiently been pursuing a slow, inexorable death by a thousand cuts, none of which in isolation is even painful, but which collectively ultimately drains the body politic of its resistance to the disease of moral relativism.

Contraception as a “women’s health” issue?  Gay marriage?  The rescission of “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell?  The growth of Environmentalism and Earth worship?  PETA?  The normalization of giving birth out-of-wedlock?  They’re not goals; just desensitizing steps towards the ultimate end: the total subversion of the Judeo-Christian morals and ethics upon which our country was built.

Thus the married father of two can pursue personal gratification with a student with no sense of responsibility for the wife and children he’s abandoned.  Prosecutors can destroy the careers of innocent defendants for political gain and personal profit.  Men of any race or religion can father illegitimate children at will with no sense of shame.  Single women attending Catholic colleges can appear on Capitol Hill pleading for the provision of contraceptives….cost-free of course!  And Rush Limbaugh’s ill-advised use of the term “slut”, no matter how accurate, simply further evidences the issue, particularly coming from a man on his third wife.

And please don’t remind us of the Left’s hypocrisy; they’re Liberals: amorality and hypocrisy is what they’re all about.  The bottom line remains, we as Conservatives, be we Jews, Christians, Muslims, Mormons, atheists or agnostics, need to wake up and realize absent our willingness to watch the trash the Entertainment Industry touts, they couldn’t stay in business.

We need to be part of the cure, not carriers of the disease.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, it’s International News of Note, as James Taranto asks the White House….

Is That an Empty Promise or an Empty Threat?

 

With Anthony Weiner having been shamed out of public life, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg is the leading public example of Weiner’s awkward type: the fervent supporter of Israel who is also a fervent supporter of Barack Obama. It’s not surprising, then, that the president would choose an interview with Goldberg to deliver what is supposed to be a message of reassurance to the Jewish state:

In the most extensive interview he has given about the looming Iran crisis, Obama told me earlier this week that both Iran and Israel should take seriously the possibility of American action against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don’t bluff.” He went on, “I also don’t, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.”

Two points: First, How credible is it for Obama to say, “I don’t bluff,” when last summer he told the House majority leader: “Eric [Cantor], don’t call my bluff,” when he turned out to be playing an exceptionally weak hand?

Second, just how gullible is Goldberg? Does it not occur to him that “I don’t bluff” is exactly the kind of thing people say who do bluff?

C’mon….he’s a Progressive; don’t confuse him with the facts.

In a related item, the WSJ details….

Obama’s Hawkish Iran Turn

As he meets with Netanyahu, a striking rhetorical change.

 

As White House U-turns go, President Obama’s hawkish rhetorical shift on Iran in the last week has been remarkable. The question now is whether Israel, and especially Iran, will believe that he means it after three years of trying to woo the mullahs to the bargaining table with diplomacy.

Mr. Obama opened the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Sunday with a keynote whose strong talk on Iran kept the audience coming to its feet. The President took credit for isolating the Islamic Republic diplomatically and imposing a de facto oil embargo that has sent the Iranian rial tumbling.

His speech follows an interview last week with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in which Mr. Obama went out of his way to call a nuclear Iran “unacceptable.” He referred to the “military component” of U.S. policy and said that “I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as President of the United States, I don’t bluff.” As startling, he added that containing a nuclear Iran wouldn’t work because of near-certain proliferation in the region and that “the risks of an Iranian nuclear weapon falling into the hands of terrorist organizations are profound.”

The timing of all this is no accident as Benjamin Netanyahu meets Mr. Obama in the White House today amid intense speculation about an imminent Israeli strike on Iran. In an interview with Journal editors on Friday, Eyal Gabbai, the former director general of the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, said Mr. Netanyahu’s meeting with Mr. Obama “will be the last time they can speak face-to-face before a decision is taken.”

The Israeli military calculus toward Iran is driven largely by the perception that the regime’s nuclear programs will soon enter a “zone of immunity,” beyond which they may be effectively invulnerable to a non-nuclear Israeli strike. But also driving Israeli fears is the sense that the Obama Administration isn’t prepared to use military means if diplomacy, sanctions and covert acts don’t persuade Iran to stand down.

Those fears are far from groundless. Though Mr. Obama now takes credit for sanctions, his Administration fought Congress tooth-and-nail on sanctioning Iran’s central bank. The President only reluctantly signed the sanctions into law as part of a larger defense bill. His aides also worked to stop legislation to cut off Iran from making financial transactions via the Swift banking consortium.

As for military strikes, senior Administration officials have repeatedly sounded as if their top priority is deterring Israel, rather than stopping Iran from getting a bomb.

As recently as November, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said a military strike would have “unintended consequences” and wouldn’t necessarily result in “deterring Iran from what they want to do.” In the last two weeks, Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey said an Israeli strike would be “destabilizing,” while Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified that the Iranians haven’t decided to build a bomb. Little wonder the Israelis are nervous about U.S. resolve.

It’s welcome news if Mr. Obama is now trying to put those fears to rest, but he is also more outspoken than ever in trying to avert Israel from acting on its own. “Do we want a distraction in which Iran can portray itself as a victim, and deflect attention from what has to be the core issue, which is their pursuit of nuclear weapons?” Mr. Obama told Mr. Goldberg—the “distraction” here meaning an Israeli attack.

If the President’s contention is that an Israeli strike would be less effective and have more unpredictable consequences than an American strike, he’s right—and few Israelis would disagree. Israelis don’t have the same military resources as the U.S.

The question Mr. Netanyahu and Israeli leaders have to ponder is whether Mr. Obama now means what he says. The President has built up an immense trust deficit with Israel that can’t be easily dispensed in a week. All the more so when Israelis know that this is an election year when Mr. Obama needs to appear more pro-Israel than he would if he is re-elected.

It’s good to hear Mr. Obama finally sounding serious about stopping a nuclear Iran. But if he now finds himself pleading with Israel not to take matters in its own hands, he should know his Administration’s vacillation and mixed signals have done much to force Jerusalem’s hand. More fundamentally, a President who says he doesn’t “bluff” had better be prepared to act if his bluff is called.

Obama might as well be playing Texas Hold-‘Em with his hole cards face up.

And in the Economics Section, James Pethokoukis writing at American.com suggests America….

Forget the Laffer Curve; Meet the Krugman Curve

 

It’s just common sense, really. There are two tax rates that generate zero tax revenue, 0 percent and 100 percent. And in between, there is some tax rate which generates a maximum, non-zero amount of tax revenue. As tax rates rise from 0 percent toward that level, tax revenues increase both through higher economic growth and greater tax compliance. Once beyond that inflection point, higher tax rates generate less tax revenue.

This relationship is popularly known as the Laffer Curve, after economist Arthur Laffer, and stands at the heart of supply-side economics—or as I call it, “economics.” Economic historian Bruce Bartlett calls the Laffer Curve “a generally accepted analytical device … [that is] a widely discussed subject in respected academic journals.”

In 1980, the top U.S. marginal income tax rate was 70 percent; today it is 35 percent. Yet the share of total income taxes paid by wealthier taxpayers has risen sharply. That is powerful evidence that the United States was on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve back in 1980.

Yet many liberals think the United States should go right back to where it was three decades ago. After looking at some new research from liberal economists, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman concludes that the “optimal tax rate on the highest earners is in the vicinity of 70 percent.” A 70 percent top rate also sounds pretty good to liberal economist and popular blogger Brad DeLong. And, of course, many liberals think rates should never have been cut back in 1981 by President Reagan. (Indeed, many of these folks speak fondly of the 1950s, when the top marginal rate was as high as 92 percent!)

Is President Obama also a member of the 70 percent club? Does he believe in the Krugman Curve, where taxpayers ignore higher taxes, or the Laffer Curve, where taxes and tax rates matter?

Well, we know for sure that Obama wants the top rate back to 40 percent. And recall his populist speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, where he railed against the economic policy of the past thirty years, when tax rates were cut sharply:

… there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes—especially for the wealthy—our economy will grow stronger. … But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. … Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and it’s made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere they want in the world. … In the last few decades, the average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent to $1.2 million per year. … And if the trend of rising inequality over the last few decades continues, it’s estimated that a child born today will only have a one-in-three chance of making it to the middle class—33 percent. … And yet, over the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk.

As Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope: “The high marginal tax rates that existed when Reagan took office may not have curbed incentives to work or invest … but they did lead to a wasteful industry of setting up tax shelters.” So the only downside to a 70 percent top tax rate and a tax code not indexed to inflation was … excessive tax planning?

François Hollande, the Socialist challenger for the French presidency, just proposed a marginal tax rate of 75 percent on incomes above 1 million euros a year. The Financial Times called it “a surprise offensive against top earners.”

I wonder if a second Obama term, especially if there were to be a debt crisis, would hold a similar surprise.

Not from the Administration that never lets a good crisis go to waste….no matter how much it costs American taxpayers.

Since we’re on the subject of Fuzzy Math….

Lawmaker wants answers after cost estimate for health insurance aid rises by $111B

 

Cost estimates for a key part of President Obama’s health care overhaul law have ballooned by $111 billion from last year’s budget, and a senior Republican lawmaker on Friday demanded an explanation. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., wants to know by Monday why the estimated ten-year cost of helping millions of middle-class Americans buy health insurance has jumped by about 30 percent.

Administration officials say the explanation lies in budget technicalities and that there are no significant changes in the program.

The revised numbers, buried deep in the president’s budget, stumped lawmakers and some administration officials for most of the week. At a congressional hearing Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who is in charge of carrying out the health care law, indicated she was unaware of the changes.

Yeah….and Bill Clinton never had sex with “that” woman, and Eric Holder can’t even SPELL “Operation Fast & Furious”!

Next, in a follow-up to the Video Clip of the Day posted last Friday at our home page (www.thedailygouge.com)….

….Jeff Foutch forwarded the following from Pete DuPont in the WSJ:

The Dependency Crisis

More Americans live off government, and the Obama administration is encouraging the trend.

 

For the past several years, America’s public policy has been changing, not by chance but by an intentional effort to reshape our nation. The goal of the current federal government, led by the Obama administration, is to expand its influence and control of everything. Its regulatory policies, unprecedented peacetime spending increases, and expanding influence over private decision-making serve to increase government’s reach into everything, from schools, businesses, banks, families and individuals, to cars, roads, and personal health care.

The continual push of the Obama administration toward government-centric policies and large spending increases has compounded the lack of control of federal spending during the Bush administration. As a result, more and more Americans are dependent on the federal government. But what may be even more surprising is the historic magnitude of this increase in dependency on government.

A study released by the Heritage Foundation earlier this month found that dependency on the federal government rose 23% in just the first two years of the Obama administration, with 67 million people now relying on some federal program. That is the largest two-year increase since the Carter administration. The “2010 Index of Dependence on Government,” written Heritage’s William Beach and Patrick Tyrrell, found that after two decades of slower growth in the dependency index in the 1980s and ’90s, dependency has picked up again since 2000 and has “recently been on an upward tear like never before.”

Of course, this increase in dependency has negative implications for our nation’s finance as well. Federal spending under President Bush grew faster than inflation, and in his last three years in office was between $2.7 trillion and $3.0 trillion per year. (Which is why, though we wouldn’t mind sitting down to some barbeque with Bush, other than photo-ops, we don’t want another one near the White House.) By the end of 2009, nine months into President Obama’s first term, federal spending had grown to $3.5 trillion. The last time America had spent that much as a percentage of GDP was in 1945, the last year of World War II, when this writer had just turned 10.

With the growth in dependency and the related growth in spending, the federal debt held by the public as a share of GDP was also growing: 40.5% in 2008, 54.1% in 2009, 62.8% in 2010, and 67.7 percent last year, adding more than $4 trillion to the debt in just three years.

Unfortunately the policies advocated by the Obama administration do nothing to reverse the growing dependency on government or to the fiscal calamity. Instead, the Obama policies push us in the wrong direction, with their focus on increasing taxes and government control of health care, energy and numerous other parts of our lives.

In 2009 the top 1% of Americans paid a higher share of income taxes (36.7%) than the bottom 90% (29.5%). At the end of the year the Bush tax cuts expire. Unless Congress acts, taxes will go up on everyone, including “millionaires and billionaires,” which the president defines to include small businesses earning as little as $200,000.

The president’s current taxing proposals would add $1.5 trillion of tax increases over 10 years, including smaller tax deductions for giving to charities, higher taxes on oil producers, penalties on jet plane owners, and billions more taxes on hedge fund managers.

As for health care, we have already begun to see the negative impact of this transfer of 17% of the American economy from the marketplace of decisions by individuals, families, and health care providers to federal control and management. Unless the Supreme Court rules against it, we will really begin to feel its full effects in 2013 (with additional tax increases of 3.8% of income on taxpayers making more than $200,000) and 2014, when the full brunt of its mandates begins to hit.

These three basic changes—raising government spending, raising taxes, and taking over 17% of the economy through health care control—are the serious changes to increase the scope, power, and regulation of our government, all of which will continue this administration’s push to make more and more Americans dependent on the government.

This failure to address the increase in dependency is disappointing. Especially given some of the alarming statistics in the 2012 Index of Dependency on Government that show where America and the American people are going if we don’t change course:

• In the late 1960s, 12% of Americans paid no income taxes. By 2000 it was 34%, and in 2009 it had reached 49.5%.

• In the late 1960s, federal housing assistance was about $2 billion of 2005 dollars. It got to some $43 billion in the Bush administration and in 2010 it reached $59 billion.

• The proportion of births out of wedlock in 1960 was 5.3%, but by 2009 it was up to 41%.

• Social Security needs 2.9 workers to pay taxes for each retiree receiving benefits. The current ratio is 3.3 workers per retiree, but it will reach 2.9 in 2015 and drop to 2.0 in the 2030s.

• One in 5 Americans (not including government employees) depend on government aid. Per capita dependence spending—in 2005 dollars went shot up from $7,500 in 1962 to $32,748 in 2010, which includes federal spending on health care, welfare, college education, housing, retirement and agricultural outlays. In 1962, 33.6 million Americans (including government employees)—about 18%of the population— depended on government; in 2010 it was 91.2 million—29.5% of the population.

All of these data suggest that difficult times are ahead of us unless we are more careful about what we do, what it costs, and who is responsible for it. (“Careful”?!?  What America needs is a 180-degree course correction.) That is why it is so important for Americans to debate the dependency-increasing policies pushed so far by the Obama administration and embodied in his current budget and other proposals. In this vein the Heritage Foundation puts forth a serious question for today: “Are Americans near a tipping point in the nature of their government and the principles that tie it to our civil life?”

Heritage also asks: “Are Americans ready for the new class warfare, the battle lines of which are drawn by theses dividing lines? These are questions increasingly in need of urgent answers. How Americans answer them may well (No….most definitely WILL!) determine the ultimate fate of their political system—and society.” Americans will have a chance to start answering these questions this November.

It may well be the LAST time anyone gets to do so.

And in the “Your Government at Work” segment, courtesy of Townhall.com‘s Helen Whalen Cohen, we learn….

Ray LaHood, Distracting Other Drivers

 

If you drive in the DC/Northern Virginia area, you had better not talk on your cell phone while doing it. You may find yourself being tailed by our Transportation Secretary. Ray LaHood recently told local DC radio station WTOP that he likes to drive around DC on the weekends and honk at distracted drivers:

By the way, remember; this is Ray’s Ride:

Then again, maybe on weekends he borrows The Obamao’s Volt!  (As detailed two items below)

And since we mentioned the Volt, we turn now to the Environmental Moment, courtesy today of Bill Meisen:

GM laying off 1300 due to low Volt sales

 

General Motors Co. announced the temporary suspension of Chevrolet Volt production and the layoffs of 1300 employees, as the company is cutting Volt manufacturing to meet lower-than-expected demand for the electric cars.

“Even with sales up in February over January, we are still seeking to align our production with demand,” GM spokesman Chris Lee said. The car company had hoped to sell 45,000 Chevy Volts in America this year, according to the Detrot News, but has only sold about 1,626 over the first two months of 2012.

“GM blamed the lack of sales in January on “exaggerated” media reports and the federal government’s investigation into Volt batteries catching fire, which officially began in November and ended Jan. 21,” the Ann Arbor (Mich.) News reported.

The laid-off employees will be rehired April 23rd, when GM resumes production of the Volt.

So, inquiring minds want to know, exactly how many Volts did GM sell in the same period last year….BEFORE the “exaggerated” media reports?  Oh….about 602.  We’re gonna go out on a limb here and say GM’s problem has far less to do with adverse media reports than offering an enormously-subsidized, over-priced and under-performing product no one wants except….

Obama Says He’ll Buy Chevrolet Volt

 

….GM’s principal stockholder wants to buy.

Speaking of the Devil….or, at the very least, the anti-Christ:

Obama: Fuel efficiency an answer to rising gas prices

 

Yeah….along proper tire inflation, regular tune-ups….and algae!

On the Lighter Side….

Which finally brings us to the Muslim Minute, courtesy today of our middle son Mike and the Religion of Peace:

Further evidence, as if any were needed, that the only functioning democracy in the Middle East (with less than 1/649th the land area, 1/49th the population and 1/11th the GDP of the combined Arab world) is decidedly NOT the impediment to peace in the region.

Magoo