It’s Thursday, May 3rd, 2012….and due to unfortunate technical difficulties, today’s edition will be somewhat shorter than normal.  We had the entire column prepped to publish, and somehow lost all of the changes we’d mad since early this morning.

So now, without further ado, here’s The Gouge!

First up, further evidence Newt’s always been about Newt:

Gingrich Drops Out, Delays Romney Endorsement

 

….But Messrs. Gingrich and Santorum have few firm plans. Consequently, say their advisers, they want a role in the Romney campaign that could provide them with a political future.

Mr. Gingrich had told Mr. Romney last week he would endorse him, Gingrich aides said. But they said he delayed his endorsement until he can announce it in a joint appearance. A Republican familiar with Mr. Santorum’s thinking said the candidate wants to preserve his status as a conservative leader, with an eye toward another presidential run…. (No egotist he!)

Political future….WHAT political future? Are these dopes on drugs?!?  If Romney’s elected, they have none.  If Romney’s defeated, four years from now they’ll both be yesterday’s news, particularly when compared with the GOP presidential prospects waiting in the wings.

As for their plans for the future, what about dropping out of politics and getting productive jobs….or would that be too tough?!?

Next up, courtesy of the Morning Examiner, Conn Carroll chronicles what he classifies as….

Obama’s desperate stunt

 

It’s time for the “Hail Mary”!

There are many phrases you could use to describe President Obama’s trip to Afghanistan yesterday. “The prudent act of a confident leader,” is not one of them. Just hours after Obama left six were killed in a car bombing outside compound housing Westerners in Kabul.

The trip started out as the worst kept secret in Washington, when a Huffington Post reporter spotted an Afghanistan television tweet that Obama had just landed in Kabul. The White House immediately moved to quash the story but it had already been picked up by BuzzFeed and The New York Post. The White House forced each outlet to remove their report, they even forced BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith to issue a tweet flatly denying the truth. But each step of the way, Drudge Report blasted the news at the top of its page, eventually relying on Xinhua, the official Chinese agency of the People’s Republic of China. No one was surprised by Obama’s trip.

It may have been expected, even justified for Obama to take some kind of victory lap on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s assassination by Navy SEALs. But at more than 14,000 miles round-trip, and considering that Obama had not visited a war zone once in the previous 17 months, the timing of the expedition smacks of desperation.

According to Gallup, “the possibility of a future terrorist attack” is the 13th most pressing issue on Americans’ minds behind even “hunger and homelessness,” “drug use,” and “the environment.” This is not an issue people care about.

But Obama must talk about something other than his economic record. This Friday, the Department of Labor will issue its monthly jobs report. If the rising numbers of unemployment claims are any indication, the report will not be good. Coupled with last week’s report showing weak gross domestic product growth, it looks like the economy may be stalling. If it does, the Obama recovery will be, by far, the weakest recovery since the Great Depression.

Killing ten bin Laden’s won’t help Obama get reelected then.

By the way, as Jim Gleaves questioned, why is it every one of The Obamao’s failures is Bush’s fault….but bin Laden he bagged totally on his own?!?

This next items, courtesy of Bill Meisen, can only add to The Obamao’s deepening despondency:

U.S. Added Only 119,000 New Jobs In April; Stocks Slump On Labor Worries

And to make matters worse, one of the most disparaging, damaging ads we’ve seen thus far in the campaign:

Meanwhile, the Man Who Lied To America’s Face attempts to once again rewrite history:

Bubba’s History Lesson

 

At a recent Democratic fundraising event, former President Bill Clinton did his level best to explain away the slow growth and high unemployment of the Obama era. “If you go back 500 years,” said Mr. Clinton, “whenever a country’s financial system collapses, it takes between 5 and 10 years to get back to full employment. If you go back for the last 200 years, when buildings had been widely owned by individuals and companies, if there’s a mortgage collapse it almost always takes 10 years.”

Therefore, Barack Obama is “beating the clock,” argued Mr. Clinton. “Don’t listen to those Republicans. We are beating the clock.”

Mr. Clinton may have trouble getting voters to accept the idea that they are destined to suffer for years and that things would be much worse if not for Mr. Obama. After all, Americans well remember the White House promise that Mr. Obama’s stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising above 8%. They also may remember that, even after the crisis, the economy was growing more rapidly in late 2009 and early 2010 than it is now.

Does Mr. Clinton have a point about history? It’s likely that the former president has been reading the work of economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. They find that recoveries tend to be slow after a major financial crisis.

But University of Chicago finance professor John Cochrane explains the limits of this research. Says Mr. Cochrane, “What neither Reinhart and Rogoff nor Clinton address is whether slow recoveries are something inevitable, and intrinsic about finance-induced recessions, or whether slow recoveries result from particularly stupid policies that governments tend to follow after financial crises.”

Mr. Cochrane adds that after a crisis hits, governments tend to prop up zombie banks, rack up huge debts that threaten sovereign crises, and impose large taxes that drive out wealth and investment. This will no doubt sound to many readers like a reasonable description of the Obama economic program.

“Would economies left alone recover much more quickly? The fact of many slow recoveries in the past doesn’t answer that question,” says Mr. Cochrane. “Bottom line, just because financial crises followed by ham-fisted polices have led to slow recovery in the past does not necessarily doom us to the same fate.”

Whether or not the Clinton argument will sell with voters, credit goes to the White House for not deleting awkward moments from its transcripts of fundraising events. Here’s the official account of Bill Clinton summing up his thoughts on Barack Obama: “So I think he’s done a good job. (Laughter.)”

Real funny; unfortunately, the jokes on us!

And since we’re on the subject of opportunists looking out only for themselves, here’s the latest from Thomas Sowell:

A Cynical Process: Part II

 

A small headline in the 2nd section of the Wall Street Journal last week told a bigger story than a lot of front page banner headlines. It said, “U.S. Firms Add Jobs, but Mostly Overseas.”

Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free class warfare. Some people may be inspired by President Obama’s talk about making “the rich” pay their undefined “fair share” of taxes, or taking away corporations’ “tax breaks.” But talk is not always cheap. It can be very costly to those working people who are looking for jobs that the Obama administration’s anti-business policies are driving overseas.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Thirty-five big U.S.-based multinational companies added jobs much faster than other U.S. employers in the past two years, but nearly three-fourths of those jobs were overseas.” All these companies have at least 50,000 employees, so we are talking about a lot of jobs for foreigners with American companies overseas.

If the Wall Street Journal can figure this out, it seems certain that the President of the United States has economic advisers who can figure out the same thing. But that does not mean that the president is interested in the same thing.

In this, as in so much else, Barack Obama is interested in Barack Obama. Whatever bad effects his policies may have for others, those policies have had a track record of political success for many politicians in many places.

To put it bluntly, killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, provided the goose doesn’t die before the next election. In this case, the goose simply lays its golden eggs somewhere else, so there is no political danger to President Obama.

Unemployment may remain a problem to many Americans, but that only provides another occasion for the Obama administration to show its “compassion” with extended unemployment benefits, more food stamps and various interventions to save home buyers from mortgage foreclosure. This can easily be a winning political strategy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt won his biggest landslide victory after his first term in office, during which the unemployment rate was never less than twice what it has been under Barack Obama.

The “smart money” inside the Beltway says that a high unemployment rate spells doom at the polls for a president. But history says that people who are getting government handouts tend to vote for whoever is doing the handing out.

The Obama administration has turned this into a handout state that breaks all previous records. Lofty rhetoric about “stimulus,” “shovel-ready projects,” “green jobs” or “investment” in “the industries of the future” all give political cover to what is plain old handouts to people who are likely to vote to re-elect Obama.

At the local level as well, history shows that some of the most successful politicians have been people who ruined the local economy and chased job-creating businesses away. Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s was not worried when affluent whites began moving out of the city in response to his policies, because they were people who were likely to vote against him if they stayed.

Of course they took their taxes, their investment money and the jobs they created with them. But that was Detroit’s problem, not Coleman Young’s problem. Barack Obama may win re-election by turning the United States into Detroit writ large.

Something similar happened in earlier times, when James Michael Curley served 4 terms as mayor of Boston, and 2 terms in prison. As the non-Irish left the city, in response to Curley’s policies, that increased Curley’s likelihood of being re-elected.

This kind of cynical politics is even more likely to succeed when political opponents fail to articulate their case to the public. And Republicans are notorious for neglecting articulation.

The phrase “tax cuts for the rich” has been repeated endlessly by Democrats without one Republican that I know of saying, “Folks, I don’t lie awake at night worrying about millionaires’ tax problems. Millionaires have lawyers and accountants who get paid to do that. But I do worry about jobs being lost to millions of American workers because we make the business climate here worse than in other countries. That’s a high price to pay for rhetoric.”

The case can be made. But somebody has to make the case.

Our concern?  To date, Romney’s trying to utilize the Marquis of Queensbury Rules in a street brawl; and he’s shown no ability to adapt to the realities of the contest.  Rumor has it he’s finally accepted some outside help; and if so, we’re glad, because playing nice ain’t gonna cut it in this campaign:

And despite another of The Dear Misleader’s broken promises to the contrary, it hasn’t changed in 90 years!

Moving on, here’s today’s “Pot Calling the Kettle Black” segment, courtesy of James Taranto and a bitter, Marxist dwarf:

Beware the Demagogues

They’re “already on the loose,” one warns.

 

“It’s a combustible concoction wherever it occurs: increasing productivity, widening inequality, and rising unemployment create tinder-box societies,” writes Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, in the Puffington Host. A conflagration can easily be sparked by “demagogues that turn people against one another”:

Demagogues use fear and frustration to advance themselves and their own narrow political agendas–scapegoating immigrants, foreigners, ethnic minorities, labor unions, government workers, the poor, the rich, and “enemies within” such as communists, terrorists, or other conspirators.

Be warned. The demagogues already are on the loose. . . . In America, politics has turned especially caustic and polarized.

Caustic and polarized–just like an alkaline battery! But actually, Reich has a point. All over the country, dangerous demagogues are inspiring acts of politically motivated violence.

Dimocratic demagogues; they come in all shapes, sizes and colors!

“Thousands of protesters converged on Lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon in the culmination of May Day demonstrations organized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, resulting in occasionally bloody clashes,” reports the New York Times. PJMedia.com has video showing several dozen so-called protesters surrounding two counterdemonstrators, chanting dehumanizing slogans, throwing liquids at them, and physically attacking them.

It’s possible that the Times exaggerated the number of people involved in New York’s so-called protests. The Associated Press counted only “hundreds” nationwide. But they managed to do considerable damage.

“Protesters wearing black clothing and masks used flag poles as weapons to damage cars and shop windows in the downtown Seattle shopping district,” reports blogger Jim Hoft. In a later post, Hoft notes that Seattle police “seized bombs, rocks, pry bars and bags of [excrement] from these far left goons.”

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that so-called protesters “traveling down 18th Street and onto Valencia Street . . . smashed windows with crowbars and signs, threw paint and eggs on buildings and spray-painted anarchy symbols on the hoods of parked cars. . . . The vandals damaged restaurants, bakeries and clothing stores, along with at least 17 cars.”

And in Cleveland, Reuters reports, “U.S. authorities announced the arrest of five self-described anarchists . . . on suspicion of plotting to blow up a four-lane highway bridge over a national park. Occupy Cleveland said in a statement the men arrested were associated with their movement.” But the Occupy Cleveland statement-writers stated in their statement that the Occupy Cleveland alleged bridge bomb plotters “were in no way representing or acting on behalf of Occupy Cleveland.”

One of those demagogues must’ve gotten to them. Maybe they read the new book “Beyond Outrage,” which, as CNSNews’s Dan Gainor reports, is dedicated “to the Occupiers, and all others committed to taking back our economy and our democracy,” and which urges readers to “organize against the regressives.”

The author of “Beyond Outrage” is Robert Reich. Be warned. The demagogues, once locked in the cabinet, are on the loose.

Robert Reich: positive proof of the powerful potential of transference.

And in a related item, it’s time for Tales From the Darkside, courtesy of Michelle Malkin and….

“Sacaja-Whiner”: Elizabeth Warren and the Oppression Olympics

 

Elizabeth Warren is the Harvard law professor running for Senate in Massachusetts as a Democratic populist-progressive champion. But don’t call her “Elizabeth Warren.” Call her “Pinocchio-hontas,” “Chief Full-of-Lies,” “Running Joke” or “Sacaja-whiner.”

Warren has claimed questionable Native American minority status for years to reap career “diversity” benefits. Now, Cherokee leaders, campaign rival GOP Sen. Scott Brown and an army of Twitter detractors have called her out for gaming the racial-preference system. Live by identity politics, die by identity politics.

The Boston Herald reported last Friday that Harvard administrators “prominently touted Warren’s Native American background … in an effort to bolster their diversity hiring record in the ’90s as the school came under heavy fire for a faculty that was then predominantly white and male.” When asked for proof of her tribal heritage, Warren’s campaign first denied that she had ever bragged about it. But from 1986 to 1995, Warren listed herself as a minority professor in a professional law school directory.

While the Democrat’s team scrounged for evidence over the weekend, Warren stalled for time by asserting that she didn’t need to provide documentation because family “lore” backed her up. Someone told her a story, you see, and magically conferred native status upon her. Through narrative, all things are possible! (Notorious “fake Indian” Ward Churchill is wondering why he didn’t think of this alibi first before the University of Colorado at Boulder fired him for academic fraud.)

On Tuesday, Warren finally discovered a great-great-great-grandmother supposedly “certified as Cherokee” and a random cousin somehow involved with a museum that preserves Native American art. There’s also a great-great-grandfather somewhere in Warren’s dusty genealogical records who spent time on a Cherokee reservation. Because walking a mile in someone else’s moccasins is now just as good as being born in them.

Native American officials aren’t buying Warren’s 1/10,000th Cherokee claim. Suzan Shown Harjo, a former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, told the Herald: “If you believe you are these things then that’s fine and dandy, but that doesn’t give you the right to claim yourself as Native American.”

When Brown raised the issue, Warren and her progressive strategists traded in the candidate’s Native American blanket for a War on Women victim’s mask — because asking a privileged Harvard prof to verify her minority claims is sexist, of course.

“If Scott Brown has questions about Elizabeth Warren’s well-known qualifications,” her campaign manager railed, “he ought to ask them directly instead of hiding behind the nasty insinuations of his campaign and trying to score political points. Once again, the qualifications and ability of a woman are being called into question by Scott Brown, who did the same thing with the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan. It’s outrageous.”

Once again, the left’s incurable love affair with oppression chic is on naked display. It’s an Olympic competition of the haves to show their have-not cred. Just a few weeks ago, it was the White House tokenizing Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor — the “wise Latina” — as “disabled” in an official graph promoting the administration’s minority hiring practices. What’s her disability? She has diabetes. No, it’s not debilitating, nor does it fall anywhere near the definition of disability under federal law.

But like their friend Elizabeth Warren, the Ivy League social engineers at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. just couldn’t help embellishing their “diversity” record to score political correctness points. Birds of a manufactured feather flock together.

Reports Warren has been a life-long supporter of Florida State and Redskins football remain unconfirmed.

Predictably, the MSM has circled the wagons around their Socialist soulmate:

First, the Boston Globe:

Unless evidence emerges to suggest otherwise, Warren doesn’t need to explain herself any further. There’s nothing untoward about citing one’s actual ancestry in a professional directory. Warren, like everyone else, has a right to her own background. (Really?!?  Ward Churchill and George O’Leary might disagree!)  It’s only in the freighted world of academic diversity that these questions become more complicated. As of now, the only apologizing should be done by Harvard Law School.

Next, the WaPo:

The Harvard Law professor challenging Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown is facing increasing scrutiny over use of Native American heritage in her legal career. But it’s not Warren’s family tree that’s really at issue — it’s her ability to fight back … The fact that this story has dribbled on for days shows how aggressive Brown has been, and raises questions about Warren’s ability to respond in kind … The most recent polling shows a dead heat in the race, with about a third of the crucial conservative and moderate Democrats still undecided. If Brown successfully defines Warren as untruthful and hypocritical while remaining well-liked himself, it could go a long way.

So, by the WaPo‘s current standards, Watergate shouldn’t have been an issue of the White House cover-up of a bungled burglary, but whether Richard Nixon had the ability to fight back.

Yeah….right.  MSM bias….WHAT bias?!?

On the Lighter Side….

And for Thursday’s entry in the Barry Sanders Memorial “Act Like You’ve Been There Before” segment, aka “Heroes Don’t Spike the Football, let alone Osama bin Laden’s Head”, we turn to Best of the Web:

The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker name-drops that at the White House Correspondents Dinner she was seated next to “a military officer who introduced himself as ‘Bill.’ ” He turned out to be Adm. William McRaven, “leader of the Joint Special Operations Command that oversaw the raid to kill Osama bin Laden”:

I asked McRaven what it’s like to wake up every day and know that you’re the one who brought down bin Laden. Does he open his eyes and think, wow, I did that?

No, he smiles and shakes his head. “It’s our job. It’s what we do.”

….If a young Barack Obama had been given that advice, it’s possible that he would now be on the road to a second term as president.

We had occasion to enjoy the company of a Lt. Col. Walt Boomer at the Quantico Officer’s one evening.  We were on PROTRAMID summer training between our youngster and 2nd-class years at the Naval Academy (that’s “sophomore” and “junior” to you landlubbers!), where we spent a week each at Pensacola, FL (Navy Air), Quantico, VA (Marine Corps), Groton, CT (Subs) and Newport, RI (Surface) learning about the various branches of the Service.

Having spent two days and a very long night in the field, we were enjoying libations in the O Club when yours truly noticed Lt. Col. Boomer, the officer in charge of the midshipman detail, sported not one but THREE Silver Stars, an award for valor second only to the CMoH.

Being a wide-eyed but bold young fire-eater, we inquired as to how Lt. Col. Boomer had earned the first of his Silver Stars; “Well….we had little trouble one day” was the laconic and wholly unsatisfying reply.  “Well then”, we asked, “How’d you get the second one?” “We ran into a little more trouble”, he replied.  Hungry though we were for stories of daring-do, even we knew enough not to request details regarding the third.

THAT, my friends….

….is a true hero

This….

….is a fraud, the rightful subject of abject scorn and derision.

Finally, we’ll call it day with another Sign the Apocalypse is Upon Us:

‘The Scream’ Fetches Record $119.9 Million in New York Auction

 

As TLJ so eloquently stated, “There are starving children in the world.”  As we put it, “A kindergartner could have drawn it!”

Magoo