It’s Monday, September 12th, 2011….and here’s the Gouge!

Leading off the week, two outstanding bits of commentary/analysis; first, Michael Barone in the Washington Examiner:

Obama Buys the Drinks That Other Guys Pay For

What is there to say about Barack Obama’s speech to Congress Thursday night and the so-called American Jobs Act he said Congress must pass? Several thoughts occur, all starting with P.

Projection. That’s psychologist-speak term for projecting your own faults on others. “This isn’t political grandstanding,” Obama told members of Congress, as Republicans snickered (but thankfully resisted the temptation to shout, “You lie!”). “This isn’t class warfare.”

These sentences came four paragraphs after Obama insisted that “the most affluent citizens and corporations” should pay more taxes (which spurs job creation how?) and not long before he promised to “take that message to every corner of the country.”

Lest there be an doubt about Obama’s real intentions, consider that his speech was obviously modeled on Harry Truman’s call for a special session of the Republican Congress in the summer of 1948 so he could campaign against it. And consider that Obama pointedly refused to rebuke Jim Hoffa’s “let’s take these sons of bitches out” — meaning Republicans — when he introduced him last Monday in Detroit.

Pragmatism. Perceptive writers like David Brooks of The New York Times told us in 2008 that Obama was basically a pragmatist, a slave to no ideology but simply a student of what works. Brooks was apparently impressed by Obama’s mention of Edmund Burke and the sharp crease in his pants.

But a pragmatist would probably not choose to call for more of the policies that plainly haven’t worked. Infrastructure spending (shovel ready, anyone?), subsidies of teachers’ salaries, fixing roofs and windows on schools — these were all in the 2009 stimulus package, which has led to the stagnant economy we have today.

A pragmatist doesn’t keep pressing the same garage door button when the garage door doesn’t open. He gets out of the car and tries to identify what’s wrong.

Paid for. “Everything in this bill,” Obama said in his eighth paragraph, “will be paid for. Everything.” By whom? Well, in the 24th paragraph he tells us that he is asking the 12-member super-committee Congress set up under the debt ceiling bill to add another $450,000,000,000 or so to the $1,500,000,000,000 in savings it is charged to come up with. The roving camera showed the ordinarily hardy super-committee member Sen. Jon Kyl looking queasy.

Obama is like the guy in the bar who says, “I’ll stand drinks for everyone in the house,” and then adds, “Those guys over there are going to pay for them.”

The Obamao: not pragmatic….just Progressive!

What’s fascinating (But not at all surprising!) here is that once again the supposedly pragmatic and sometimes professorial president is not making use of the first class professionals in the Office of Management and Budget to come up with specifics, but is leaving that to members of Congress, maybe in a midnight marathon session with deadlines pending. Same as on the stimulus package and Obamacare.

Pathetic promises. Perhaps he hoped people wouldn’t notice, but Obama did put in two words — “faster trains” — as a plug for his pet project of high-speed rail. Liberal blogger Kevin Drum calls California’s HSR project, the largest in the nation, “a fantastic boondoggle,” likely to cost three or four times estimates and with ridership estimates that are “fantasies.” “We have way better uses for this dough,” Drum concludes.

Political payoffs. Nearly one-quarter of this latest stimulus package — sorry, American Jobs Act — is aid to state and local government, to keep teachers and other public employee union members on the job and paying dues to the unions. (i.e., the jobs of unionized teachers, government bureaucrats and construction workers are inexplicably more important than yours and ours!) Altogether unions gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. Pretty good return on their “investment,” eh?

Pettifoggery. Obama impressed many conservative writers in 2008 with his ability to state their positions in fair terms — which led some to think that surely he must agree with them. But he seems to have lost this knack. Conservatives, according to this speech, want to “wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades” and “simply cut most government spending and eliminate most government regulations.”

“Most” means more than 50 percent. Does the White House have documentation for the claim that Republicans want to cut government spending by more than 50 percent? And what “basic protections” do they want to “wipe out”?

Barack Obama seemed like an unhappy warrior Thursday night, still unreconciled to the results of the 2010 elections, “seeming desperate and condescending at the same time,” in the words of maverick liberal blogger Mickey Kaus. That darn garage door just won’t open!

Though we fully agree with Barone’s analysis, there’s another “P” he failed to mention we believe even more accurately summarizes The Obamao’s agenda: Progressivism….patent, profuse and pandemic in its proportions (See “Insanity, Einstein’s definition of”)!

Next, Robert Tracinski writing at RealClearMarkets.com, courtesy of George Lawlor:

Obama: The Obsolete ‘Post Office President’

The preposterous irrelevance of President Obama’s jobs speechis summed up by the fact that he repeatedly urged Congress to “pass this jobs bill right away”–but there is no bill. By the admission of his own aides, Obama’s jobs bill is still being drafted. It won’t be submitted until next week, and his plan for how to pay for it won’t be submitted until the week after that. (Even then, the plan is mostly to pass the buck to the “super-committee” created by this summer’s debt ceiling compromise.) All of this gave his exhortations an air of “buy now!” hucksterism. For a moment there, I wasn’t sure whether he was selling us a jobs bill or the Slap Chop.

Have I got a jobs/healthcare/housing (insert other “free” but totally ineffective initiative here___________) program for YOU!!!

Except that Vince Shlomi is a much better salesman.

Yet there is a much deeper and more profound irrelevance to the president’s proposals. They are all based on the premise that the government can come up with a few targeted initiatives and select some worthy projects to fund through a federal “infrastructure bank,” and this will somehow press the magic levers that produce economic growth. None of this has any relation to the actual dynamism of a free economy, because Obama does not grasp the source of that dynamism.

We’re about to get a really big reminder of how the constant change and progress or a free society overturns the static calculations of government bureaucrats. The US Postal Service is bankrupt. At its current rate, it will have to shut down this winter because it will run out of cash to pay its bills. This has been coming for a long time, and not just because of a bloated union payroll. First-class mail is the core business of the Postal Service, and the Internet has simply made it unnecessary. From everyday communications to bills and bank statements, practically everything can now be done by e-mail or online. Even our junk mail is digital now. So while President Obama is talking about a jobs bill, an obsolete government-run entity is about to lay off hundreds of thousands of superfluous workers.

This is a monument to the folly that politicians and bureaucrats are able to make judgments about the most productive investments in infrastructure and economic growth. They can’t make these predictions because no one can. Recently Newsweek posted on its website on old article from its 1995 print issue informing us that this whole “Internet” thing is an overblown fad, because “no online database will replace your daily newspaper” and “the myopic glow of a clunky computer” can’t replace “the friendly pages of a book.” She’ll never fly, Orville.

But even those who got the predictions right didn’t get them right. Recently, a series of 1993 commercials for AT&T have been making the rounds on the Internet. The ads predict virtually every part of our current online existence, from e-books to EZ-Pass. But the details are a bit off: the ads predict tablet PCs, but assume they will be used to send faxes. Try not to giggle. And these old ads were sent out by Newsweek on a special CD-ROM edition, back when they were predicting that magazines would someday be delivered by CD-ROM. The most ironic twist is the ad’s tagline: “and the company that will bring it to you: AT&T.” In fact, these things were brought to us by everybody but AT&T.

AT&T’s actual role today is as one of a small number of major data-carriers, who transmit the information for all of those other functions. They have recently tried to improve their position against stronger competitors (such as Verizon, which stole a lot of iPhone traffic away from them) through a merger with T-Mobile. But just as with the Post Office, the federal government is not up to speed with the era of tablet PCs and e-mail and video teleconferencing. They’re trying to block the merger to keep AT&T from becoming a big, scary monopoly, as if we were still back in the age of Ma Bell.

These are the same people who, in 2005, blocked a merger between Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Video, because no one should be allowed to dominate the highly profitable business of retail VHS rental stores. This was only six years ago, when Netflix was already starting to destroy Blockbuster’s business, leading it to declare bankruptcy this year, long after the company ceased to be a presence in most of our lives. And now Netflix itself is in trouble, as more people are beginning to download movies over their Internet connections, where competition is plentiful and Netflix has no particular market advantage. Such is the frantic cycle of innovation in the private economy.

Some day, a few decades from now, someone will make a movie set in 2009, and one of the visual giveaways will be those little red envelopes arriving–by way of the Postal Service!–with silver discs inside of them. We will all chuckle with the recognition of a time gone by, while 15-year-old kids will snort and roll their eyes and wonder how their elders ever survived in such primitive conditions. Meanwhile, the federal government will still be trying to figure out how to subsidize the Postal Service and keep Netflix from becoming a monopoly.

The pace of commercial and technological innovation is not news. It is a daily reality that we take for granted. But the story underneath it is what politicians like Barack Obama refuse to acknowledge, and it is what makes all of their fake jobs programs and “infrastructure banks” so futile and destructive.

What they refuse to grasp is the root of America’s dynamism: the endless creativity of the individual human mind when it is left free to innovate. The government does not need to intervene to get people to come up with new ideas or to encourage entrepreneurs to grow and become successful. It only needs to get out of the way.

When, instead, geniuses like Barack Obama decided they are going to use the power of government to impose their ideas and grow only the kinds of enterprises they favor, the result is not brisk innovation but the dead hand of static ideas. That is the lesson of the government’s failed experiment with solar panel maker Solyndra, which President Obama touted last year as the wave of the future, and whose technology was rendered obsolete before they even finished building their gleaming new factory backed by $600 million in federal loan guarantees. And it’s not just Solyndra. The whole solar and “alternative” energy sector is crashing. These companies were not profitable and have not become profitable. The moment government subsidies and loan guarantees evaporate, so do they.

So much for Obama’s career as a high-tech venture capitalist. Too bad the money he’s risking is ours.

The whole “alternative energy” boondoggle is based directly on the failure to anticipate or acknowledge individual thinking and new ideas. The push for alternatives to oil and natural gas was based partly on the premise that we were facing an impending shortage of these resources. But breathless predictions of “peak oil” have been shattered by new techniques of exploration and extraction, such as “fracking,” that have opened up vast new reserves.

The other basis for “alternative energy” was the supposed need to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in order to avoid runaway global warming. But here, too, the federal government has stuck to a theory Al Gore glommed onto in 1988, while ignoring powerful new ideas that have superseded it. In this case, I am speaking of the truly path-breaking theories of Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark. Over the past 15 years, Svensmark has quietly made the whole global warming theory obsolete by developing a new theory about how cosmic rays–fast-moving charged particles from deep space–react with the atmosphere to create the “nucleation sites” that lead to the formation of clouds, cooling the Earth. Svensmark has begun to demonstrate in detail how this effect, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the mileage of your SUV, explains variations in cloud cover and variations in global temperatures.

Svensmark’s theory just passed a new milestone, with some of its key claims being demonstrated in a “cloud chamber” experiment at Europe’s CERN particle accelerator. This was not reported in the left-leaning media, but is extensively coveredby Daily Telegraph blogger James Delingpole and summarized in the Wall Street Journal. (and faithfully reprinted here in The Daily Gouge!)

Yet here is Barack Obama, our Post Office President, bitterly clinging to the theories of the past and doubling down his investments in failure, while new ideas and innovations pass him by. Such is the fate of anyone who presumes to place the static judgments of an entrenched bureaucracy over the rational thinking and creative efforts of free minds.

Particularly someone who, along with the vast majority of his closest advisors, possesses ZERO business or other practical real-world experience, and is acting not in the national interest, but in pursuit of a purely personal political agenda.

And for those still unclear that absent dramatic damage control to repair the havoc Team Tick-Tock’s already wrought on the nation, and that right soon, things can only get worse, we present today’s Jack Webb Memorial “Just The Facts” segment, and real-world story from a reader (we’ll call him John) who’s asked to remain monogamous….er,….mysoginist….er,….you know,….nameless!  His story provides not only insight into the nature of those who’ve chosen to act against the interests of their nation, but why the current 9.1% unemployment rate can only skyrocket if ObamaScare isn’t dismantled:

I have operated a hair salon franchise (TLJ used to work for this operation when we first moved to NAS Miramar back in ’79) since 1987.   Yea, I am one of the dumb ones (according to liberals) who has always lived BELOW my means and literally worked 2-3 jobs.   Opened my first salon in 1987 while I was a HS principal.   Staying in education, I eventually opened 9 salons between 1987 and 2001.

I completed my career in education as a superintendent from 2000-2006.  I had two MILITANT unions (teachers and non-certifieds- bus drivers, etc).   I could tell you some stories!  I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the superintendency, especially taking on the unions.  I had a supportive board and I loved applying private sector business principals to the public sector – you should have seen them in contract negotiations.

Mention the word work and they would squirm.   Once I offered them an incentive for better staff attendance (theirs was worse than the students); my offer would have rewarded them financially to increase attendance (and would have paid for itself with less spent on substitutes, etc.   A win-win).   The union would NOT agree to put it in the contract.

Another time the STATE rep for the non-certified union was in my office and I told her that a preview to negotiations was that they would have to pay more for their health insurance package.   She scoffed and said, “if Hilliary’s health care plan had passed we wouldn’t even be discussing this.”   I said, “why”?   She said, “because health insurance would be FREE”!   “Free”, I said, ” who would pay the bills to Drs and hospitals”?   She said, “the government”.  I said, “where do you think the gov’t gets its money”?   She stammered and said, “well they just have it and it would be free”!   Thom, she was dead serious and didn’t have a clue, nor did she care, that all gov’t money comes from taxpayers.  She readily dismissed my explanation of such.   This is a classic example of what we are dealing with.

Sorry for the digression. (No apology necessary!)  I employ about 75-80 cosmetologists in the 9 salons.   If Obamacare stays in effect the IRS 50 employee rule (since I am one corporation) will kill me as I will have to pay $2000/employee or provide mandated health insurance.   My salons are mostly in small cities/towns and each competes in a separate market.   My competition will not have have to do this.  The gov’t will have effectively unleveled the playing field.   So if the big O’s plan stays I will close my least profitable salons and keep the best ones, staying UNDER the 50 employee limit.  If I were a minority person I would sue them for discrimination and probably win.  I have not received a waver like the other 1700 plus FOB’s.

Last year I opened a pizza business.   We employee 20 or so.   I did this (well it was really a bucket list thing) to diversify and try to protect myself from the Obamacare deal.    It is tough in business in this economy (although people still get haircuts) as costs go up (especially utilities) and you can’t pass it along because of people’s economic situation.

THIS is the America for which THIS….

stands; NOT a country which seeks, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill”, because, Jefferson continues, to do so “is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”

Meanwhile, at the same time hard-working small businessmen like John work to make a future for themselves, their families and their employees, their own government is doing its damnedest to villify their enterprise and nullify their efforts.  But trust him….

….he’s all ABOUT jobs; unfortunately, only those he can skim for contributions to his continuous campaign!

In another Team Tick-Tock related headline:

Report: DHS Has Number of ‘Gaps’

The largest of which lies directly between its Secretary’s ears!

And in the Environmental Moment, great news for insomniacs world-wide, courtesy of Bill Meisen and the biggest bore since the Chunnel:

Al Gore in 24-hour broadcast to convert climate skeptics

Former Vice President Al Gore will renew his 30-year campaign to convince skeptics of the link between climate change and extreme weather events this week in a 24-hour global multi-media event.

“24 Hours of Reality” will broadcast a presentation by Al Gore every hour for 24 hours across 24 different time zones from Wednesday to Thursday, with the aim of convincing climate change deniers and driving action against global warming among households, schools and businesses.

On the Lighter Side….

And in Mutually-Exclusive Medical News, consider these….

9 Ways to Live Longer

1.  See your doctor regularly.

2.  Get a pet.

3.  Get married.

4.  Decrease you stress level.

5.  Have more sex.

6.  Spend more time with friends.

7.  Get more sleep.

8.  Think positive.

9.  Drink red wine regularly.

Sure, #1 and #2 make sense; but are we the only one thinking #3, while certainly creating the necessity for #9….

….conflicts with #’s 4-8?!?

Finally, we’ll call it a day with News of the Bizarre:

Drug Cartel Extortion Attempt Sacks High School Football Game

A high school football game between a Mexicohigh school team and U.S. high school team was reportedly scrapped after an extortion attempt by a Mexican drug cartel. The cartel demanded $30,000 from the Monterrey,Mexico football team in order to cross the border to Texas, reports MyFoxAustin.com.

Monterrey officials decided that it was not in their best interest to travel to Texas and canceled the game.

Which just goes to prove discretion IS the better part of valor, however one hablas!

Magoo