It’s Monday, March 19th, 2012….Lehigh sent Duke home for a well-deserved sabbatical from the Big Dance, all’s right with the world….and here’s The Gouge!

First, up, Roger Hedgecock, writing at HumanEvents.com, details what we’ve been saying for years:

California’s Not Dreamin’: This Is the Nightmare of an Obama Second Term

I live in California.  If you were wondering what living in Obama’s second term would be like, wonder no longer.  We in California are living there now.

California is a one-party state dominated by a virulent Democratic Left enabled by a complicit media where every agency of local, county, and state government is run by and for the public employee unions.  The unemployment rate is 12%.

California has more folks on food stamps than any other state, has added so many benefits and higher rates to Medicaid that we call it “Medi-Cal.”  Our K-12 schools have more administrators than teachers, and smaller classes but lower test scores and higher dropout rates with twice the per-student budget of 15 years ago.  Good job, Brownie.

This week, the once and current Gov. Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown had to confess that the “balanced” state budget adopted five months ago was billions in the red because actual tax revenues were billions lower than the airy-fairy revenue estimates on which the balance was predicated.  After trimming legislators’ perks and reducing the number of cell phones provided to state civil servants, the governor intoned that drastic budget reductions had already hollowed out state programs for the needy, law enforcement and our schoolchildren.  California government needed more money.

Echoing the Occupy movement, the governor proclaimed the rich must pay their fair share.  Fair share?  The top 1% of California income earners currently pays 50% of the state’s income tax. California has seven income tax brackets.  The top income tax rate is 9.3%, which is slapped on the greedy rich earning at least $47,056 a year.  Income of more than $1 million pays the “millionaires’ and billionaires'” surcharge tax rate of 10.3%. Brown’s proposal would add 2% for income over $250,000.  A million-dollar income would then be taxed at 12.3%.  And that’s just for the state.

Brown also proposed a one-half-cent sales tax increase, which would bring sales taxes (which vary by county) to 7.75% to 10%.  Both tax increases would be on the ballot in 2012.  The sales tax increase proposal immediately brought howls of protest from the Left (of Brown!).  Charlie Eaton, a sociology grad student at UC Berkeley and leader of the UC Student-Workers Union, said, “We’ve paid enough.  It’s time for millionaires to pay.”

At least five other ballot measures to raise taxes are circulating for signatures to get on the 2012 ballot in California.  The governor’s proposals are the most conservative.

The Obama way doesn’t end with taxes. The governor and the state legislature continue to applaud the efforts of the California High Speed Rail Authority to build a train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco.  Even though the budget is three times the voter-approved amount, and the first segment will only connect two small towns in the agricultural Central Valley.  But hey, if we build it, they will ride. And we don’t want to turn down the Obama bullet-train bucks Florida and other states rejected because the operating costs would bankrupt them.  Can’t happen here—we’re already insolvent.

If we get into real trouble with the train, we’ll just bring in the Chinese.  It worked with the Bay Bridge reconstruction.  After the 1989 earthquake, the bridge connecting Oakland and San Francisco was rebuilt with steel made in China.  Workers from China too.  Paid for with money borrowed from China.  Makes perfect sense.

In California, we hate the evil, greedy rich (except the rich in Hollywood and in sports, and in drug dealing).  But we love people who have broken into California to eat the bounty created by the productive rich.  Illegals get benefits from various generous welfare programs, free medical care, free schools for their kids, including meals, and of course, instate tuition rates and scholarships too.  Governor Perry, California has a heart.  Nothing’s too good for our guests.

To erase even a hint of criticism of illegal immigration, the California Legislature is considering a unilateral state amnesty.  Democrat State Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes has proposed an initiative that would bar deportation of illegals from California.  Interesting dilemma for Obama there.  If immigration is exclusively a federal matter, and Obama has sued four states for trying to enforce federal immigration laws he won’t enforce, what will the President do to a California law that exempts California from federal immigration law?

California is also near fulfilling the environmentalist dream of deindustrialization.  After driving out the old industrial base (auto and airplane assembly, for example), air and water regulators and tax policies are now driving out the high-tech, biotech and even Internet-based companies that were supposed to be California’s future.  The California cap-and-trade tax on business in the name of reducing CO2 makes our state the leader in wacky environmentalism and guarantees a further job exodus from the state.

Even green energy companies can’t do business in California.  Solyndra went under, taking its taxpayer loan guarantee with it.

No job is too small to escape the regulators.  The state has even banned weekend amateur gold miners from the historic gold mining streams in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  In fact, more and more of California’s public land is off-limits to recreation by the people who paid for that land.  Unless you’re illegal.  Then you can clear the land, set up marijuana plantations at will, bring in fertilizers that legal farmers can no longer use, exploit illegal farm workers who live in hovels with no running water or sanitation, and protect your investment with armed illegals carrying guns no California citizen is allowed to own.

The rest of us only found out about these plantations when the workers’ open campfire started one of those devastating fires that have killed hundreds of people and burned out thousands of homes in California over the last decade.

It was said after California’s Proposition 13 in 1978 cut property tax rates and was copied in other states, that whatever happened in California would soon happen in your state.  You’d better hope that’s wrong.

Coming soon to a town, city, county….or state….near you; and all the sooner if, like we, you’re unfortunate enough to reside in the People’s Democratic Republic of Maryland.

And as Alan Blinder describes in the WSJ, regardless of the geographic separation, California’s closer to Washington, DC than ever before.

The U.S. Cruises Toward a 2013 Fiscal Cliff

As tax cuts expire and spending falls, the economy will be hit with a 3.5% decline in gross domestic demand.

At some point, the spectacle America is now calling a presidential campaign will turn away from comedy and start focusing on things that really matter—such as the “fiscal cliff” our federal government is rapidly approaching.

The what? A cliff is something from which you don’t want to fall. But as I’ll explain shortly, a number of decisions to kick the budgetary can down the road have conspired to place a remarkably large fiscal contraction on the calendar for January 2013—unless Congress takes action to avoid it.

Well, that gives Congress plenty of time, right? Yes. But if you’re like me, the phrase “unless Congress takes action” sends a chill down your spine—especially since the cliff came about because of Congress’s past inability to agree.

Remember the political donnybrook we had last month over extending the Bush tax cuts, the two-point reduction in the payroll tax, and long-term unemployment benefits? That debate was an echo of the even bigger donnybrook our elected representatives had just two months earlier—and which they “solved” at the last moment by kicking the can two months down the road. And that one, you may recall, came about because they were unable to reach agreement on these matters in December 2010. At that time, President Obama and the Republicans kicked one can down the road 12 months (the payroll tax) and another 24 months (the Bush tax cuts).

The result of all this can kicking is that Congress must make all those decisions by January 2013—or defer them yet again. If the House and Senate don’t act in time, a list of things will happen that are anathema either to Republicans or Democrats or both. The Bush tax cuts will expire. The temporary payroll tax cut will end. Unemployment benefits will be severely curtailed. And all on Jan. 1, 2013. Happy New Year!

There’s more. As part of the deal ending the acrimonious debate over raising the national debt ceiling last August, the president and Congress created the bipartisan Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, commonly known as the “super committee.” It was charged with finding ways to trim at least $1.5 trillion from projected deficits over 10 years. Mindful that the committee might not prove to be that super, Congress stipulated that formulaic spending cuts of $1.2 trillion would kick in automatically if the committee failed.

Sure enough, it failed. So those automatic cuts are headed our way starting Jan. 15, 2013. To make this would-be sword of Damocles more frightening, the formula Congress adopted aimed half the cuts straight at the Pentagon.

Now, you don’t really believe the defense budget will be cut that much, do you? Probably the rest won’t happen, either. But if it all did, the resulting fiscal contraction—consisting of both tax increases and spending cuts—would be in the neighborhood of 3.5% of gross domestic product, depending on exactly how you count certain items, all at once. That’s a big fiscal hit, roughly as big as what a number of European countries are trying to do right now, though with limited success and with notable collateral damage to their economies. An abrupt fiscal contraction of 3.5% of GDP would be a disaster for the United States, highly likely to stifle the recovery.

At this point, you are probably thinking: Well, of course Congress will find ways to wriggle out of its self-imposed budgetary corset. I agree. But the invisible hand won’t do it; someone needs to figure out how.

It is next to certain that nothing will be done about the fiscal cliff during the election season. In fact, some Republicans are now threatening to renege on the spending cap for fiscal year 2013 that they agreed to last summer. In the absence of progress between now and Election Day, Congress will have about eight weeks left—including Sundays, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve—to either (a) find a solution to the long-running fiscal battle or (b) kick the can down the road again.

Bet on (b). Also bet that the agreement will come just before the bubbly flows on New Year’s Eve. An outcome like that is far more likely than falling off the fiscal cliff. But my point is that finding a clever way to kick the can down the road again is becoming a bigger and bigger challenge. And Congress has barely coped with previous such challenges.

Fast forward to December 2012. The lame duck Congress will have on its plate all the issues it had to deal with in the December 2010, August 2011, December 2011, and February 2012 budget battles, plus the automatic cuts mandated by the failure of the super committee, plus the legacy of whatever claims and promises are made during the campaign. We may also be bumping up against the national debt ceiling again. And who will have to sort it all out? A Congress whose days are numbered and whose complexion may have been altered dramatically by the election.

The current betting odds say that President Obama will be re-elected in November, (A conclusion which is far from certain.) with Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate. Does anyone think a mix like that will be less contentious than the one we have now? And does anyone think that Republicans, seeing control of both houses of Congress on the horizon, will be more compromising in the lame duck than they have been in the recent past? (Should they be?!?)

In sum, while we probably will not fall off the fiscal cliff in January 2013, there are ample opportunities for stumbles and slips between now and then. So wouldn’t it be nice if the two parties engaged on this issue prior to Election Day?

Yeah….about the same time….

In a related item which explains why we continue to disagree with the “common wisdom” cited by Alan Blinder above, courtesy of George Lawlor and USNews.com, Mary Kate Cary answers the question inquiring minds continue to ask:

Why President Obama’s Approval Ratings Are Going Down

This week might well turn out to have been the turning point in the 2012 election. It started out with both the Washington Post/ABC News and the New York Times/CBS polls showing significant drops in the president’s approval ratings. Both were statistically similar samples of Americans polled at about the same time—taken together, it’s hard to say either one was a fluke—and both were taken after the Health and Human Services contraception ruling controversy. Why would the president’s disapproval numbers be up? Some blame the rising price of gasoline; others say it’s because unemployment continues to remain above 8 percent.

I’ve got a different theory, one that’s a little more of a gut feeling. The people I’ve spoken with lately—both Republicans and Democrats—about the 2012 election have stopped talking about the president’s re-election chances, the horserace on the right, or even the latest primaries. They talk about being worried. (And they damn well ought to be!) They’re worried about the massive expansion and sprawling reach of the federal government over the last four years, which in many ways the contraception ruling brought to a head. When they think about it for a minute, I don’t believe that most Americans believe that mandating free contraception and morning-after pills for all women is a proper duty of the federal government. For that matter, neither is regulating the selection of snacks in school vending machines, or spending stimulus money on the “Weatherization Assistance Fund.”  You get the idea.

And they’re worried about the gridlock in Washington. (Then again, gridlock is infinitely preferable to Marxism.) Obama’s constant refrain of insults to Republicans is wearing thin, with this week’s “flat earth society” remark being only the latest example of his not reaching across the aisle. They’re worried about Americans being divided one against the other, as we’ve seen in the class warfare “Occupy” rhetoric, the assault on faith-based organizations, and the verbal attacks on women by both sides. Gone are the days when the president would say that we’re not red states, not blue states, but the United States. In fact, most people would agree he’s one of the most polarizing leaders we’ve had in a long time. And the divisiveness seems to be getting worse lately. (Only because the Left sees their window of opportunity to Marxify Amerika closing….and that right quick!)

There’s so much uncertainty about what the future holds right now—in terms of taxes, regulations on small businesses, the price of gas, what new rules and bureaucracies are in store under the new healthcare law. We all know people who have had someone laid off, or are struggling to keep their house, and worry if we’re next. We don’t know what’s going to happen with Social Security, Medicare, college tuitions—or even interest rates, if politicians in Washington don’t deal with the national debt soon. Whether one is Republican or Democrat, there’s a feeling that goes beyond ideology: a feeling that our country needs fixing, and no one in Washington is willing to fix it. I think most Americans thought Barack Obama would change things for the better, (Only the gullible!) and he has failed to do that. That explains why his disapproval ratings are so high, and why his campaign is struggling to raise money. It also explains why the president is trying so hard to keep the conversation away from the economy and on contraception.

That New York Times/CBS poll found that a whopping 80 percent of Americans said they are not better off financially than they were four years ago. That sounds about right to me. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called that number “so meaningless,” which says volumes. No one likes to say that they aren’t better off—everyone wants to be moving up the ladder in life—and for 80 percent to admit something like that is not “meaningless.” But I bet most people answered that question while thinking: But I want to be better off, and hopefully I will be soon. There’s a great can-do spirit among Americans these days—take a look at Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl ad and Bruce Springsteen’s “We Take Care of Our Own” anthem at the Grammy Awards and you’ll see what I mean—that the White House doesn’t seem to understand.

More government, more uncertainty, and more divisiveness are not a winning formula. I think this week marked the beginning of people wising up to it all.

Which brings us to the latest on The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight, courtesy of Speed Mach and Michael Walsh writing at National Review Online‘s The Corner:

Well, Why Isn’t He Running for President?

Paul Ryan that is. While the Romney forces cling to their “he’s a mathematical lock” mantra, do they ever stop to wonder whether Mitt, for all his manifest good qualities, is the right man at the right time for the job? Or does his campaign war chest, with which he’s able to train many multiples of resources against his conservative opponents, mean that might makes right? And does the electoral calendar — a perfectly arbitrary and changeable set of rules — outweigh (as the Democrats might say) the fierce urgency of now? In other words, is process more important than principle? Given that we’re dealing with the Stupid Party, the answer at this point is obviously yes. 

Ryan may not be the perfect answer, but if any of these four are better….

….we don’t understand the question.

Turning now to the “If At First You Don’t Succeed….” segment, we learn Team Tick-Tock’s decided the best defense is a new one….particularly when the original plan never had a snowflake’s chance in Hell:

Obama shifts healthcare defense

The Obama administration has shifted its legal arguments as it prepares to defend the president’s healthcare law before the Supreme Court. Written briefs in the landmark case increasingly have focused on a part of the Constitution that didn’t get much attention in lower courts. Some legal experts say the shift could steer the case in a direction that would make Justice Antonin Scalia more likely to uphold the healthcare law’s mandate requiring individuals to purchase health insurance. Oral arguments are set to begin March 26, and the justices are expected to give a ruling in June, just months before the presidential election.

A ruling that the mandate is unconstitutional could make it nearly impossible to implement other parts of the healthcare law — which is exactly the point the Department of Justice is highlighting in its most recent briefs. Justice has aggressively defended the mandate as its own regulation of economic activity, but is now stepping up a separate argument emphasizing that the mandate is part of a broader regulatory scheme.

The shift moves the focus of Justice’s argument from the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to the Necessary and Proper Clause, which says Congress can make laws that are necessary for carrying out its other powers. The briefs give a long history of failed efforts to expand healthcare coverage and say the new law’s purpose was to reform the overall system. “The minimum coverage provision is … necessary to achieve Congress’s concededly valid objective of reforming the interstate market in health insurance,” the Justice Department said in its first Supreme Court brief on the merits of the mandate.

Yeah….good plan; that oughta fool that dumb old dago Scalia!

Speaking of ploys intended to delude the dimwitted….

White House organizes prayer vigil for Obamacare

As the White House struggles to garner support for Obamacare as it approaches Supreme Court arguments on the new health care law, the administration is not leaving anything to chance — not even forces from heaven above.

Yes, on Wednesday, White House officials reportedly called on dozens of nonprofit leaders to aid them in organizing a prayer vigil outside the court – right when justices plan to hear arguments for three days beginning March 26.

This brings to mind another virulently anti-Christian Socialist government who invoked the name of God whenever they needed to sway the gullible to their cause:

 On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with News of the Bizarre, courtesy today of

Mom and kids arrested after stripping naked outside Pennsylvania high school

Joanne Butler, 23

A mother and her three children were arrested after stripping off and running stark naked around a Pennsylvania high school parking lot, while chanting and praying to Jesus, WTXF reported. Sarah Butler, 44, daughters Joanne, 23, and Bessie, 22, and her 14-year-old son were taken into custody Friday afternoon after the bizarre incident unfolded in front of shocked students at Upper Darby High School, just outside Philadelphia.

The incident was sparked after Sarah Butler repeatedly tried to take another one of her sons out of the school but was refused. The boy is her biological son, but she does not have legal rights to him, sources told the TV station. After the mother was turned away three times, the Butlers were filmed by students taking off their clothes, chanting and scuffling with security guards.

Upper Darby Police Department superintendent Michael Chitwood said that the family members were screaming, “Praise the Lord, Jesus Christ is good,” while they ran around nude. The family faces charges of indecent exposure, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. The mother and one daughter were later admitted to a psychiatric hospital for assessment.

While exhibiting behavior which, to say the least, is more than a bit strange, we find the Butler family’s antics infinitely preferable to fanatics another faith running into the school wearing suicide vests and yelling “Allahu akbar!”

Magoo