It’s Thursday, March 15th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, James Pethokoukis, courtesy of Conn Carroll and writing in The American, summarizes….

The entire Obama presidency, in one anecdote

One of my favorite moments from the new book The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery:

Energy was a particular obsession of the president-elect’s, and therefore a particular source of frustration. Week after week, [White House economic adviser Christina] Romer would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investments in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean, there are no jobs?” But the numbers rarely budged.

Now let’s fast forward to this past September:

A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show. The program — designed to jump-start the nation’s clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies.

So where are the new jobs coming from, at least the good-paying ones? From the industry Obama wants to replace as much as possible with “clean” energy: oil and gas. A new report from the World Economic Forum estimates the sectors “added approximately 150,000 jobs in 2011, 9% of all jobs created in the United States that year.”

Those numbers are even more impressive once you realize that some 40% of all new jobs are being added in low-pay sectors such as retailing and leisure. So nearly 20% of new “good jobs” are in oil and gas.

So much for those who so desperately wish, as does Steve Boss’ liberal friend, to crown The Obamao the world’s smartest man.  B. Hussein reminds us of the scene from Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain where Ludwig Donath says to Paul Newman, “You told me nothing….you KNOW nothing!”

Then again, he’s a community organizer from Chicago….how much can he really know?!?

For more on the arrogance of a man who knows nothing and has done nothing, check out the video clip #3 on our home page at www.thedailygouge.com.

In a related item, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger details the reincarnation of Harry Houdini:

The Magician

In a re-election year, the U.S. president is making the world and all its troubles . . . vanish.

Don’t get too distracted by the Republicans’ road-tour version of the 2012 presidential election as it hits theaters in the likes of Mississippi, Alabama, Hawaii and Illinois. The best show in town still plays daily at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If maestro Barack Obama wins re-election this fall, we will have watched one of the greatest magic acts in American history.

The new Obama magic show debuted in the State of the Union speech. Standing before Congress, Mr. Obama brought forth “An Economy Built to Last.” Not the real one we have now (Or anywhere close to reality!), but the one he’s going to conjure after he’s re-elected.

The way this works is the president breaks economic history into two parts. In his right hand are the awful policy mistakes someone else made before January 2009. In his left hand is the economy he’ll bring to life after November. In between is nothing. You think you’re looking at the Obama years from 2009 to 2012—8% unemployment, low growth, low investment—when whoa, it’s gone! Never happened.

The best was yet to come. The president of the United States is making the world itself and all its troubles . . . vanish.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea—one by one, Mr. Obama and his lovely assistants have methodically taken them all off the table. If he can make the world’s problems seem to go away until he gets re-elected, it will constitute his presidency’s greatest illusion.

Iraq went away in October, when Mr. Obama announced that all U.S. troops would be out of there by year’s end. Not most of them; all of them. This would be the first major war theater in modern times that the U.S. departed without leaving behind any presence. The argument in defense of this total troop wipeout is that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demanded the U.S. waive prosecution immunity for any of our forces still there. The counter-argument is that the U.S. lost all leverage with Iraq’s government because of Mr. Obama’s passivity toward the place and its problems. Iraq fell to next to nothing. Remarkable.

In December 2009, Mr. Obama announced that the U.S. would surge 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. In the real world this is known as a commitment. The strategy was succeeding in strategically important Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the South. Then this past June, Mr. Obama announced he would pull these troops out of Afghanistan by this summer, likely in time for his August renomination speech in Charlotte. The U.S.’s Afghan commitment has been polling poorly.

This of course doesn’t mean the Afghan Taliban will disappear. The magic stops at the water’s edge. The Taliban’s plans to re-overthrow the Afghan government in Kabul will go forward. But Afghanistan as an issue is sliding off the table.

One year ago, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad began to methodically kill anyone publicly opposed to his rule. Like the criminal warlord Keyser Söze in “The Usual Suspects,” Assad is killing them, their wives, their children, their relatives, demolishing their homes and razing their towns. The world wants to help.

Evoking the Libyan intervention, the Obama administration says we can’t help, because we don’t have a U.N. Security Council resolution. Russia and China won’t let that happen. Our hands are tied. Syria is off the table.

Amid informed fears that Iran’s nuclear program is moving close to weapons-producing capability and a pre-emptive strike by Israel, President Obama gave a hawkish speech on Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, told a reporter “I don’t bluff,” and met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Watching from the pundit gallery, writer Vali Nasr concluded on Bloomberg News: “Last week, President Barack Obama skillfully shifted the debate on Iran, pushing back against ‘idle talk of war’ and making the case for diplomacy.” The centrifuges are still spinning, but Iran is off the table.

Earlier this month, North Korea, the ever-volatile nuclear power, said it would suspend its uranium-enrichment program and missile tests in return for the Obama administration’s decision to deliver 240,000 metric tons of food aid. China’s government praised the food package as a prelude to resuming the stalled six-party talks.

Specialists noted that this was the first time the U.S. has ever linked humanitarian assistance to inducing North Korean participation in talks. No matter. This should take North Korea off the table until November.

It’s an amazing feat. At home and overseas, Barack Obama has just erased three years of rough spots from the hard disc of politics. It will be more remarkable still if the Republicans, amid a war-weary public, go along with the illusion. The world, alas, may not. For America’s onlooking competitors and adversaries in Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang and Waziristan, a U.S. president’s magic act is for them a very real opportunity.

But let’s be honest; none of Tick-Tock’s sleight-of-hand….not ONE trick….could have been successful without the complete complicity of a MSM willing to sell its soul to ensure their divinity a second term.

Next up, courtesy of Speed Mach, when even the New York Times‘ Joe Nocera’s asking the question, you KNOW the Dims ain’t gonna like the correct answer:

Is MF Global Getting a Free Pass?

It’s sure starting to look as if Jon Corzine is going to get away with it.

By now, it has been well established that Corzine’s former firm, MF Global, committed the sin of sins for a broker-dealer. In late October, during the final, desperate days before it entered bankruptcy proceedings, its executives took money from segregated customer accounts — money that belonged not to MF Global but to the farmers and commodities traders that were its clients — and used it to prop up its rapidly collapsing business. Nor was this petty cash: of the $6.9 billion in customer assets that MF Global held, a stunning $1.6 billion is missing. There is virtually no chance that the full amount will ever be recovered.

Let’s not mince words here. These executives committed a crime. Virtually every knowing violation of the Commodities Exchange Act is a crime, but taking money from segregated customer accounts is at the top of the list. And for good reason. Customer money is supposed to be sacrosanct. If a broker-dealer goes bankrupt, the segregated accounts are supposed to remain safe, a little like the way bank deposits remain protected if a bank goes under. Indeed, customers need to be able to trust the fact that their money is segregated and protected at all times. Otherwise, the markets can’t function.

As Jimmy Malone said in The Untouchables, “Welcome to Chicago; this town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.”  Things haven’t changed.

In a related item from “Economics in One Lesson”, circa 1946, Henry Hazlitt confirms Liberals know as little now as they knew then:

There is a strange idea abroad, held by all monetary cranks, that credit is something a banker gives to a man. Credit, on the contrary, is something a man already has. He has it, perhaps, because he already has marketable assets of a greater cash value than the loan for which he is asking. Or he has it because his character and past record have earned it. He brings it into the bank with him. That is why the banker makes him the loan. The banker is not giving something for nothing. He feels assured of repayment. He is merely exchanging a more liquid form of asset or credit for a less liquid form. . . .

Now it is to A, let us say, who has credit, that the banker would make his loan. But the government goes into the lending business in a charitable frame of mind because, as we saw, it is worried about B. B cannot get a mortgage or other loans from private lenders because he does not have credit with them. He has no savings; he has no impressive record as a good farmer; he is perhaps at the moment on relief. Why not, say the advocates of government credit, make him a useful and productive member of society by lending him enough for a farm and a mule or tractor and setting him up in business?

Perhaps in an individual case it may work out all right. But it is obvious that in general the people selected by these government standards will be poorer risks than the people selected by private standards. More money will be lost by loans to them. . . . [T]he recipients of government credit will get their farms and tractors at the expense of what otherwise would have been the recipients of private credit.

And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy today of Jeff Foutch, another example of why, as The Obamao promised, the cost of energy would necessarily rise under his Administration:

Government-subsidized green light bulb carries costly price tag

The U.S. government last year announced a $10 million award, dubbed the “L Prize,” for any manufacturer that could create a “green” but affordable light bulb.

Seriously….a less than 20% energy savings for 200% the price; this is a product only an Environazi….or government bureaucrat….could love.

In a related story, Jonah Goldberg details….

Obama’s pump debacle

The president’s energy policies have been a failure.

As gasoline prices climb, President Obama’s poll numbers plummet. In February, a Washington Post/ABC poll had Obama up 6 points against Mitt Romney. Monday’s poll has him down 2. According to the polls, gas prices are a huge part of the story, particularly given how the last 30 days or so have not exactly been great for the GOP.

No wonder Obama is desperate to get out in front of the issue. The dilemma is that he’s invested so much of his prestige in his energy policies that he can’t admit those policies have been an abject failure. But he also can’t have people thinking his policies are responsible for the energy price Americans care about most: gasoline.

“Despite the gains we’ve made, today’s high gas prices are a painful reminder that there’s much more work to do to free ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil and take control of our energy future,” the president declared Monday in a statement on the one-year anniversary of his “Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future.”

Let’s take the second proposition first. Obama often says, “Under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years.” That’s true: It’s also true that under Obama’s administration, Snooki from “Jersey Shore” got pregnant and Charlie Sheen lost his job. And he can take about as much credit for those developments too.

Never mind that if he’d gotten the cap-and-trade proposals he campaigned on, energy prices would be even worse. (He once acknowledged that under his proposals, electricity prices would “skyrocket” and coal companies would go bankrupt. His Energy secretary, Steven Chu, admitted he wanted America to emulate European gas prices, when they were about $8 per gallon.)

The boom in oil production has taken place almost entirely on private and state lands, while on federal lands it’s dropped (11% from 2010 to 2011 alone). The administration has also slowed the permitting of offshore oil and gas development to a trickle.

Another major factor is the development of new technologies that make it possible to extract ever-more fuel from domestic sources. Instead of words of support, Obama keeps telling those companies they need to be taxed more and have their subsidies yanked.

Ending subsidies to business entirely, including oil companies, is a good idea. But Obama’s policy is completely different. He thinks he’s smarter than the market and can pick winning industries and products. (Although neither he, nor anyone in his Administration, possesses the experience or expertise necessary for the task.)

It’s an ugly record. Forget Solyndra — and other solar and wind firms that have been going belly up like birds around a windmill — that’s old news. So is his decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline.

Last year, the Energy Department awarded a $10-million “L Prize” for development of an affordable and eco-friendly light bulb. Phillips just put its winning model on the market, for $50 apiece. Meanwhile, GM has temporarily suspended production of the Volt because of lack of demand for the “affordable” electric car.

On the unaffordable end of the market, things are even worse. Consumer Reports tried to test drive the new $107,850 Fisker Karma, but it couldn’t. “We buy about 80 cars a year, and this is the first time in memory that we have had a car that is undriveable before it has finished our check-in process.”

There’s actually plenty Obama could do to help with gas prices, but he’s right not to do some of them. He shouldn’t release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, nor should he appease Iran on its nuclear program. But he could suspend the Jones Act, which requires that all ships carrying goods between American ports be U.S. flagged. Doing so would dramatically lower the cost to distribute oil and gas.

Obama was recently asked by Fox News’ Ed Henry whether high gas prices are a deliberate result of White House policies. His response was telling. “From a political perspective, do you think the president of the United States going into reelection wants gas prices to go up higher? Is there anybody here who thinks that makes a lot of sense?”

In other words, Obama desperately wants people to think he’s against higher gas prices — at least until he gets reelected.

Bottom line?  Obama and everyone one of his minions lie like a….

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this next photo taken this morning by G. Trevor, Lord High King of All Vietors:

Thanks a lot, Barack!

And that’s only for 89 octane!

Finally, we’ll call it a day with News of the Bizarre, and this tidbit from the Cornliquor….,er,….Cornhusker State:

Nebraska mom arrested after daughter, 11, pulled over

Norfolk police say a 32-year-old woman was arrested after she had her 11-year-old daughter drive her and two friends after a night of drinking. A Madison County jailer said Jennifer Etgen, of Tilden, remained in custody on Tuesday….

Police Chief Bill Mizner says an officer saw a pickup driven by the girl almost hit a curb just before 3:15 a.m. Tuesday. After pulling over the truck, the officer was told the girl was driving because her mom and two friends had been drinking alcohol.

The girl’s mother, Etgen, was arrested on suspicion of child abuse, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and for having an open container of alcohol in a vehicle. The girl was taken into protective custody.

Then again, depending on how you look at it, Ms. Etgen was damned if she did, damned if she didn’t!

Magoo