It’s Sunday, March 25th, 2012….and since TLJ is out of town celebrating her youngest sister’s birthday and masquerading….

….as Carolina Panthers’ cheerleader, here’s The Gouge!

First up on this special Sunday edition, more trouble in Obamaland, courtesy of the WSJ and another corrupt Dimocrat:

Email Ties Corzine to Missing Funds

Jon S. Corzine gave “direct instructions” to move $200 million from an MF Global Holdings Ltd. account containing customer funds three days before the securities firm collapsed, according to an employee email reviewed by congressional investigators. The Oct. 28 email was disclosed in a five-page memo released Friday afternoon by a House Financial Services subcommittee. The panel is investigating what caused an estimated $1.6 billion shortfall in customer funds at MF Global, which collapsed into bankruptcy Oct. 31.

Edith O’Brien, an assistant treasurer who was among the employees involved in moving money at MF Global, wrote in the email that the $200 million transfer to an MF Global account at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. in London was “Per JC’s [Jon Corzine’s] direct instructions,” according to the memo. The transfer was needed to fix a $175 million overdraft in the bank account that was making it harder for MF Global to buy and sell securities as it scrambled to survive in late October, according to the memo.

Customer accounts hold both firm money and customer money that isn’t supposed to be touched under federal regulations. In testimony to lawmakers in December, Mr. Corzine, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chairman and New Jersey governor who was MF Global’s CEO, said he never directed anyone to misuse customer funds.

….”He stands by that testimony,” a spokesman for Mr. Corzine said in a statement Friday. “He never directed Ms. O’Brien or anyone else regarding which account should be used to cure the overdrafts, and he never directed that customer funds should be used for that purpose,” the statement said.

Of course he didn’t; after all, assistant Treasurers take it upon themselves to make illegal transfers of large amounts of customer cash three days before their firm goes belly-up and then blame the boss all the time!

Yeah….

Since we’re on the subject of faults, enjoy the latest on Etch-a-Mitt from Jonah Goldberg as he recounts….

A Fawlty Slip of the Tongue

There’s a great old “Fawlty Towers” scene (if you’re unfamiliar with the 1970s British sitcom, hie thyself to YouTube!) in which Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), an innkeeper, welcomes some German patrons. He gives explicit orders to everyone: “Don’t mention the war!” He then proceeds to mention the uncomfortable subject of World War II over and over again.

In one scene, after blurting out references to the war a dozen times while seating the Germans at the restaurant, he says to his wife, “Listen, don’t mention the war! I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right.” He then returns to the Germans’ table to review their lunch order: “So! It’s all forgotten now, and let’s hear no more about it. So, that’s two egg mayonnaise, a prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Goering, and four Colditz salads.”

When one of the patrons begs him to stop talking about the war, Cleese responds, “Me? You started it!” The German retorts, “We did not start it!” Cleese answers, “Yes you did! You invaded Poland.”

The scene came to mind Wednesday when I saw an instantly infamous clip of Eric Fehrnstrom, Mitt Romney’s communications director, comparing his candidate to a children’s toy. Asked by a CNN anchor if the primaries had forced Romney to tack “so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election,” Ferhnstrom responded, “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

Of course, the gaffe was overhyped by the media and by Romney’s GOP rivals. And, yes, there’s a perfectly plausible defense of Fehrnstrom’s statement. Every presidential contest restarts once the nominee has been picked and the general election commences.

But Ferhnstrom should know that he shouldn’t say anything — and I mean anything — that reinforces the idea that Romney is a flip-flopper, a people-pleaser, a weather vane or, now, an Etch A Sketch. It’s less than a novel insight to note that Romney’s greatest vulnerability is that he seems insincere and that it appears his commitment to conservatism is entirely tactical. Ferhnstrom should know this. He’s the communications director, for Pete’s sake. He’s supposed to be the guy with the hose putting out fires, not throwing gas on them.

Fehrnstrom’s Etch A Sketch gaffe would be akin to Newt Gingrich’s communications director saying, “Who knows what Newt will actually do as president. If you haven’t noticed, he’s sort of crazy.” It would be like Rick Santorum’s spokesman saying, “Well, Rick’s just talking this limited-government stuff until he gets elected. Once he’s sworn in, he’s going to take care of the gays, Day One.” It’s like White House Press Secretary Jay Carney saying, “Well, of course in his second term President Obama won’t feel the need to hide his real socialist agenda — or his relationship with Bill Ayers.”

Every candidate has a weak spot, an inconvenient storyline he doesn’t want magnified. Fehrnstrom’s remark was simply malpractice, and while it would probably be unfair to judge the man by one misstatement, Romney would have been wise to fire him, or at least take him to the woodshed. Barring that, he could have tried to make a joke about it.

As NBC’s Chuck Todd suggested, he should have brought out a Magic 8-Ball and made light of the situation. Maybe he could have asked the toy, “Should I fire Eric?” Or he could bring out a Pet Rock and talk about how president Obama is about as useful in getting the economy going.

Every few years I write a column on one of my biggest peeves about GOP strategists and politicians: They read their stage direction, usually in an effort to suck up to political reporters. Some elder statesman-hack wonders aloud, usually anonymously, about whether the campaign will “go negative.” Here’s a tip: If you’re going to go negative, go negative. Don’t announce it.

Give the Democrats their due: They fake their outrage with more sincerity. Chuck Schumer never prefaces a comment: “I’m now about to make an entirely indefensible claim in order to trick the media into looking over there.”

Of course Romney — or any nominee — will pivot to the center in a general election. Obama’s been running for president as a fake centrist for almost two years now. He just doesn’t admit it.

Speaking of deliberate presidential lies and misrepresentations, despite all of the President’s patent prevarication to the contrary, as Bloomberg.com reports….

Obama’s Speedy Keystone Review Won’t Accelerate Cushing Pipe

President Barack Obama’s promise to expedite the review of the southern leg of TransCanada Corp. Keystone XL pipeline won’t speed up the project, which already is slated to start construction as soon as June. TransCanada is awaiting permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the last it needs to begin construction on the pipeline segment that will carry crude from the oil-storage hub at Cushing, Oklahoma, to Gulf Coast refineries, Terry Cunha, a spokesman for the Calgary-based company, said in an e-mail message yesterday.

TransCanada’s president of energy and oil pipelines, Alex Pourbaix, said in an interview March 6 that construction on the Cushing phase of Keystone may begin as soon as June. The company doesn’t expect the new review process to change that schedule, Cunha said yesterday. The Army Corps typically approves permits for this type of project within 60 days, according to Meg Gaffney-Smith, chief of the Corps’s regulatory program.

Obama appeared in Cushing today as part of a four-state tour to promote his energy policies as Republicans blame him for surging gasoline prices. He announced that the administration is designating the southern Keystone section an infrastructure priority, which will make the project eligible for accelerated review of permit applications. “We’re making this new pipeline from Cushing to the Gulf a priority,” Obama said today in prepared remarks. “We’re going to go ahead and get that done.”

Here’s the juice: the only credit The Obamao deserves in connection with the Keystone XL is killing the only segment of any real significance:

As regards anything you might hear from Team Tick-Tock or any other Liberal mouthpieces to the contrary….

Next up, we head back to the ranch and the latest advice for the would-be leader of The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight from the Journal‘s Kimberly Strassel:

Romney’s Health-Care Duck

He can reassure voters if he mans up to the failures of the health law he signed as governor of Massachusetts.

Illinois has come and gone, and Mitt Romney’s team is plotting how best to squeeze the magic number of delegates out of the remaining primary states. But the candidate’s real problem isn’t geography; it is history.

Friday is the two-year anniversary of Barack Obama’s health-care law. Republicans spent this week highlighting this legislation’s taxes, mandates, unintended consequences and partisan aims. On Monday the Supreme Court hears arguments about its constitutionality. Everywhere, the talk is ObamaCare.

Rick Santorum’s strongest argument is that Mr. Romney won’t provide a clear enough contrast with the president, and his strongest example is the Massachusetts health-care law Gov. Romney signed in 2006—which was a model for the federal law, and which he refuses to disavow. RomneyCare is why a significant contingent of Republican primary voters refuse to vote for (Or a terribly difficult time actively supporting….) the putative front-runner.

Mr. Romney had his chance to fix this via his big speech on health care at the University of Michigan in May, 2011. Yet fretful of furthering his reputation as a flip-flopper, he stuck by his law, hiding behind the 10th Amendment. “Our plan was a state solution to a state problem,” he said, meaning that while it might look like ObamaCare and walk like ObamaCare and quack like ObamaCare, it was really just a harmless Massachusetts duck.

Mr. Santorum has been nimbly skewering this argument, pointing out that just because a state may have the power to institute a program, that doesn’t mean it should. The law Mr. Romney signed, he says, is “government-run health care,” pure and simple. Forcing citizens to buy a product, imposing new mandates, creating new health entitlement programs—these, he notes, are mistakes at both the federal and the state level. That Mr. Romney would agree to them on any level suggests he either doesn’t understand health care or just does what is “fashionable.” Both charges tap into existing voter fears that he has no core convictions.

What most surprises many conservative observers is that Mr. Romney hasn’t taken the obvious steps to fix this mess. While he is not likely to do a U-turn, long primaries do allow candidates to slowly adjust their positions until they arrive in a new place. And Mr. Romney is not lacking the skill, or the opportunity, for some RomneyCare damage control.

Instead of using the “state solution to a state problem” trope as an excuse, he could use it as his argument. The more conservatives have been forced to think about health care, the more they’ve understood the merits of state experimentation. Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute—a free-market think tank in Boston that has published a book on ObamaCare and RomneyCare titled “The Great Experiment: The States, the Feds, and Your Health Care”—argued in a recent conversation that the fundamental mistake of ObamaCare was in imposing a giant, untested law on an unwilling nation.

He contrasts this to the 1990s welfare reform, which came only after 20 years of state experimentation. By the time the federal law was passed, politicians on both sides of the aisle, he says, had come to a sort of “settlement” as to what generally worked. “The Great Experiment” argues that the GOP “alternative” to ObamaCare needs to be federal steps that give states the maximum flexibility to innovate and experiment with free-market health care.

Mr. Romney’s health-care proposals embrace some of this, in particular his Paul Ryan-like plan to send Medicaid funds back the states via block grants. What he has yet to do is embrace Massachusetts as a lesson for what other states ought not to do.

This needn’t be an exercise in humiliation. Mr. Romney can take credit for being a Republican willing to talk about health care when most of his party wouldn’t. He can argue the mistakes Massachusetts made were one consequence of it being early to experiment. He can note, as the Pioneer Institute book does, that several programs he had intended to improve choice and competition, were instead hijacked by his Democratic successor, Deval Patrick, for the opposite purpose.

Mostly, Mr. Romney can argue he is better qualified than most to say what doesn’t work. He can note that several of his vetoes in the bill that his legislature overrode—an employer mandate, expanded option benefits for Medicaid recipients—have been proven costly and counterproductive. He can say that, best intentions aside, his state is now living proof that individual mandates, health subsidies for the middle class, and government control over insurance plans, medical services, and prices (all hallmarks of ObamaCare) raise prices and squelch choice.

Mr. Romney has admitted that “our experiment wasn’t perfect—some things worked, some things didn’t, and some things I’d change.” Having acknowledged as much, he may as well embrace his duck, and use it to his advantage. If Mr. Romney is looking for a breakthrough with voters, this is the place to start.

Which we’ve been suggesting for months; but the longer he waits, the more difficult….and ineffective….his explanation becomes.

Meanwhile, further west, we learn the latest from the Land of Fruits & Nuts:

Police to ignore California impound law amid concern of fairness to illegal immigrants

The Los Angeles Police Department will soon start ignoring California state law, which requires police to impound the vehicles of unlicensed drivers for 30 days. The majority of unlicensed motorists in Los Angeles are immigrants who are in the country illegally and have low-income jobs. The LAPD says the state’s impound law is unfair because it limits their ability to get to their jobs and imposes a steep fine to get their car back.

As long as drivers can produce some form of I.D., proof of insurance and vehicle registration, they’ll be allowed to keep their car. Police Chief Charlie Beck insists that it’s simply leveling the playing field. “It’s about fairness. It’s about equal application of the law,” Beck told a Los Angeles TV station earlier this month.

Opponents of Beck’s decision are furious and refer to studies showing unlicensed drivers are among the most dangerous on the road. Indeed, a 2011 AAA study titled “Unlicensed to Kill” finds they are five times more likely to be involved in fatal crashes and more likely to flee the scene of a crime.

The decision has angered Don Rosenberg, a resident of Los Angeles County, who lost his 25-year old son, Drew, in a 2010 accident caused by an unlicensed driver in San Francisco, a city with lax impound policies. The driver, who tried fleeing the scene, had previously been pulled over but was allowed to retrieve his car after a short time, months before the accident. “It doesn’t matter to me who killed my son– what their nationality was. It was the fact that if the law were followed, he’d be alive today,” Rosenberg told Fox News.

Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley wrote Chief Beck, saying his policy would be “invalid” in light of state law, which states a vehicle “shall be impounded.” But supporters of Beck’s decision say, regardless of the law, he’s doing the right thing for illegal immigrants who cannot yet obtain driver’s licenses here. (Ahhh!  The old “our’s is a higher morality” ploy!)

“A low-income person doesn’t have the ability to pay the fees after 30 days to get their car back,” said Cardinal Roger Mahony, former Archbishop of Los Angeles and an immigration activist. “Basically, we’re just creating more punitive problems for them.” (Which of course, they created by entering the country illegally in the first place.)

The L.A. Police Commission voted in favor of the new policy 4-1 last month. The LAPD says officers will begin implementing it in a matter of weeks. The city attorney has also sided with Beck’s decision.

Beck is a Dimocratic politician, and we can at least understand why he’s standing the law on its head: simple political gain.  Mahoney is different; he’s either ignorant or morally reprehensible; what is it about the term “illegal” these fools cannot comprehend?!?  All the while, law-abiding, tax-paying Californians reap the harvest power-hungry Progressive politicians continue to sow.

On the Lighter Side….

And turning to the pages of the Crime Blotter, we see a story from FOX News, forwarded by Carl Polizzi, none of the MSM news outlets have yet seen fit to print or air:

Witness: Martin attacked Zimmerman

A witness we haven’t heard from before paints a much different picture than we’ve seen so far of what happened the night 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed. The night of that shooting, police say there was a witness who saw it all.

Our sister station, FOX 35 in Orlando, has spoken to that witness. What Sanford Police investigators have in the folder, they put together on the killing of Trayvon Martin few know about. The file now sits in the hands of the state attorney. Now that file is just weeks away from being opened to a grand jury.

It shows more now about why police believed that night that George Zimmerman shouldn’t have gone to jail.

Zimmerman called 911 and told dispatchers he was following a teen. The dispatcher told Zimmerman not to. And from that moment to the shooting, details are few. But one man’s testimony could be key for the police.

“The guy on the bottom who had a red sweater on was yelling to me: ‘help, help…and I told him to stop and I was calling 911,” he said. Trayvon Martin was in a hoodie; Zimmerman was in red.

The witness only wanted to be identified as “John,” and didn’t not want to be shown on camera. (Imagine that….particularly if he’s not a person of “color”.) His statements to police were instrumental, because police backed up Zimmerman’s claims, saying those screams on the 911 call are those of Zimmerman.

“When I got upstairs and looked down, the guy who was on top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point,” John said.

Zimmerman says the shooting was self defense. According to information released on the Sanford city website, Zimmerman said he was going back to his SUV when he was attacked by the teen. Sanford police say Zimmerman was bloody in his face and head, and the back of his shirt was wet and had grass stains, indicating a struggle took place before the shooting.

If accurate….and we emphasize “IF”….the evidence as presented in this report would certainly have led the Sanford police to release Zimmerman.  But it begs two simple questions: first, why on earth didn’t Sanford police make this eyewitness account public before this firestorm had a chance to erupt?  Second, since the Injustice Department personnel investigating this as a hate crime would certainly have had access to “John’s” testimony, would they not have been duty-bound to use it to put the fire out?

This story literally raises more questions, at least in our mind, than it answers.

Finally, in the Wonderful World of Science, James Taranto details the latest efforts of Team Tick-Tock to institute the ultimate Nannystate; and in the process make certain YOU get….

Lost in America

You may want to hurry up and buy a new GPS for your car, because CNET news reports the devices may be about to go the way of the light bulb:

Last month, the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency published a dense document with guidelines for automakers on how to minimize the distractions caused by in-vehicle electronics. Buried among equations for determining optimal display viewing angles and testing procedures is the recommendation that navigation devices should only show static or near-static images, which would essentially eliminate their usefulness. . . .

Every current installed navigation system uses the car as a fixed point, and shows the map moving around it. NHTSA wants that changed so as to keep the map fixed. Even showing the position of the car moving on the map could be considered a dynamic image. The recommendation seems to suggest that the position of the car could only be updated every couple of seconds. Likewise, the map could be refreshed once the car has left the currently displayed area.

This is insane. When you look at a GPS device mounted on your dashboard or windshield, you see the image of your car move in sync with the car itself. It’s completely natural. Imagine how distracting it would be if you navigated by looking at a paper map hung in front of you rather than at a GPS.

Though perhaps the static image would work if accompanied by a mandate that windshields be replaced by landscape paintings.

It’s like we said in the conclusion to today’s Cover Story at www.thedailygouge.com: they want to control what and how you drive, what and how you eat.  Quite literally, they wish to dictate every circumstance of your existence.  All it will take is four more years of….

….HIM.

Magoo