It’s Friday, June 8th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!
Leading off the last Gouge of the week, the latest from Jennifer Rubin, courtesy of the WaPo and George Lawlor, relating how….
Obama is killing the Democratic Party
BO KNOWS!
President Obama, I have frequently argued, has been fabulous for the conservative movement.He spurred the creation of the tea party. He helped the GOP win the House majority in 2010 and make big gains in the Senate. His Obamacare has helped revive the Commerce Clause and given a boost to conservative jurisprudence. His refusal to support human rights has caused a bipartisan revulsion and reminded us that foreign policy must be girded by American values. He’s sent independents running into the GOP’s arms. He’s forced conservatives to think hard and express eloquently principles of religious liberty, limited government, free markets and Constitutional democracy.
Obama also has wrecked havoc in the the Democratic Party.He’s firmly affixed the “tax and spend” label to it after Bill Clinton declared that the era of big government was over. He’s made Clinton into a pitch man for Mitt Romney. His rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline has split the party. His refusal to adopt the Simpson-Bowles commission’s recommendations has turned Democrats into reactionaries, defending the status quo on entitlements. He’s alienated Jewish voters. He’s re-McGovernized the party, which now stands for appeasing despotic powers, turning on allies and slashing defense spending.
As Ross Douthat wrote, “House Republicans have spent the past two years taking tough votes on entitlement reform, preparing themselves for an ambitious offensive should 2012 deliver the opportunity to cast those same votes and have them count. The Senate Democrats, on the other hand, have failed to even pass a budget: There is no Democratic equivalent of Paul Ryan’s fiscal blueprint, no Democratic plan to swallow hard and raise middle class taxes the way Republicans look poised to swallow hard and overhaul Medicare. Indeed, there’s no liberal agenda to speak of at the moment, beyond a resounding ‘No!’ to whatever conservatism intends to do.”
Not even Jimmy Carter did this much, I would suggest, to jerk his party to the left and hobble its electoral prospects. No wonder Clinton is on a rampage.
Rather than spin endless excuses and blame it all on money, liberal elites might want to reconsider tying themselves too tightly to Obama’s mast. They have already become quite whiny and sacrificed a good deal of intellectual rigor in trying to defend every misstep as brilliant and every loss as a win.
They should take a page from the conservative playbook from the second Bush term. Then, conservatives stuck by their principles, criticized him where appropriate and maintained their integrity. That was a wise choice. Presidents, especially inept ones, come and go, but parties, journalists and political movements need to endure more than four years.
Then again, given Eric Holder’s inability to provide a straight answer to any but the simplest questions (i.e., his name and job title), BO ain’t the only member of Team Tick-Tock dragging the Dims to destruction:
Eric Holder: the Progressive equivalent of….
….Sergeant Schultz; except the good Sergeant wasn’t tasked with running Stalag Luft 13….let alone the U.S. Department of Justice.
Next, Thomas Sowell details….
The Real ‘War on Women’
Among the people who are disappointed with President Obama, none has more reason to be disappointed than those who thought he was going to be “a uniter, rather than a divider” and that he would “bring us all together.” It was a noble hope, but one with no factual foundation. Barack Obama had been a divider all his adult life, especially as a community organizer, and he had repeatedly sought out and allied himself with other dividers, the most blatant of whom was the man whose church he attended for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.
Now, with his presidency on the line and the polls looking dicey, President Obama’s re-election campaign has become more openly divisive than ever. He has embraced the strident “Occupy Wall Street” movement, with its ridiculous claim of representing the 99 percent against the 1 percent. Obama’s Department of Justice has been spreading the hysteria that states requiring photo identification for voting are trying to keep minorities from voting, and using the prevention of voter fraud as a pretext.
But anyone who doubts the existence of voter fraud should read John Fund’s book “Stealing Elections” or J. Christian Adams’s book, “Injustice,” which deals specifically with the Obama Justice Department’s overlooking voter fraud when those involved are black Democrats.
Not content with dividing classes and races, the Obama campaign is now seeking to divide the sexes by declaring that women are being paid less than men, as part of a “war on women” conducted by villains, from whom Obama and company will protect the women — and, not incidentally, expect to receive their votes this November.
The old — and repeatedly discredited — game of citing women’s incomes as some percentage of men’s incomes is being played once again, as part of the “war on women” theme. Since women average fewer hours of work per year, and fewer years of consecutive full-time employment than men, among other differences, comparisons of male and female annual earnings are comparisons of apples and oranges, as various female economists have pointed out. Read Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute or Professor Claudia Goldin of Harvard, for example.
When you compare women and men in the same occupations with the same skills, education, hours of work, and many other factors that go into determining pay, the differences in incomes shrink to the vanishing point — and, in some cases, the women earn more than comparable men.
But why let mere facts spoil the emotional rhetoric or the political ploys to drum up hysteria and collect votes? The farcical nature of these ploys came out after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi declared that Congress needed to pass the Fair Pay Act, because women average 23 percent lower incomes than men. A reporter from The Daily Caller then pointed out that the women on Nancy Pelosi’s own staff average 27 percent lower incomes than the men on her staff. Does that show that Pelosi herself is guilty of discrimination against women? Or does it show that such simple-minded statistics are grossly misleading?
The so-called Fair Pay Act has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with election-year politics. No one in his right mind expects that bill to become law. It will be lucky to pass the Senate, and has no chance whatever of getting passed in the House of Representatives. The whole point of this political exercise is to get Republicans on record voting against “fairness” for women, as part of the Democrats’ campaign strategy to claim that there is a “war on women.”
If you are looking for a real war on women, you might look at the practice of aborting girl babies after an ultrasound picture shows that they are girls. These abortions are the most basic kind of discrimination, and their consequences have already been demonstrated in countries like China and India, where sexually discriminatory abortions and female infanticide have produced an imbalance in the number of adult males and females.
A bill to outlaw sexually and racially discriminatory abortions has been opposed and defeated by House Democrats.
The target of the REAL war on women
And since we’re on the subject of an issue, indeed a moral imperative which presents little if any middle ground, Jonah Goldberg suggests….
‘Compromise’ Is Not a Dirty Word
Compromise has always been a holy word for the Washington establishment. But against the backdrop of ever-increasing anxiety over our fiscal dysfunction, most particularly the next budget showdown, the word has taken on a tone of anger, desperation and even panic.
But in all its usages these days, “compromise” remains a word for bludgeoning Republicans. “Congress isn’t just stalemated, it’s broken, experts say,” proclaims the typical headline, this one in The Miami Herald. And the experts say it’s all the Republicans’ fault.
“The challenge we have right now is that we have on one side, a party that will brook no compromise,” President Obama explained at the Associated Press Luncheon in April. The Republicans’ “radical vision,” Obama insisted, “is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity.” The speech was hailed as a “thunderclap” by the editors of The New York Times because Obama signaled he was done asking Republicans to put their “destructive agenda” aside. “In this speech, he finally conceded that the (Republican Party) has demonstrated no interest in the values of compromise and realism.”
Now the standard Tea Party-Republican-conservative response is to note that Democrats didn’t care much for compromise when they ran Washington for Obama’s first two years in office. Moreover, what Democrats now mean by compromise is capitulation. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., summarized the attitude well during last year’s budget negotiations: “We’re recognizing that the only compromise that there is, is mine.”
Accept ‘half a loaf’
While I largely concur with that standard retort, it’s worth at least saying something nice about compromise. Conservatism, rightly understood, does not consider compromise a dirty word. “All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter,” observed Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism. A willingness to accept half a loaf when half is the best you can possibly get is the essence of wisdom.
Indeed, Obama is right when he says, “America, after all, has always been a grand experiment in compromise.” The Founders placed compromise at the heart of the Constitution — compromise between the state and the federal governments, between the different branches of government, even between the two houses of Congress. That is all well and good.
But let’s not go crazy here. The Founders didn’t fetishize compromise, either.When Patrick Henry proclaimed at the Virginia Convention in 1775, “Give me liberty or give me death,” even George Washington and Thomas Jefferson allegedly leapt to their feet to roar approval.Suffice it to say, the spirit of compromise didn’t fill the air.
And that’s a point worth keeping in mind. The merits of compromise depend mightily on direction. If my wife and I agree on moving to Chicago, then the opportunities for compromise are limitless. When we move, where we live when we get there, even how we get there: these are all reasonable subjects for negotiation. But if I want to move to Chicago and she wants to stay in Washington, D.C., then splitting the difference and moving to Cleveland would be absurd. But it would be compromise.
Right now, the two parties are split fundamentally on the issue of direction. The Democrats — not to mention the “experts” and so much of the political press — would have you believe it is a choice between forward and backward. Hence, Obama’s perfectly hackneyed slogan “Forward!” According to this formulation, reasonable compromise amounts to acquiescing to the direction Obama and the Democrats want to go, but demanding concessions on how fast we get there and by what means
Forward vs. backward
From the conservative perspective, this is madness. It is like saying Republicans must agree to let Obama drive the country off a cliff, but Democrats must be willing to negotiate how fast the car goes. And if a Republican counsels hitting the brakes or pulling a U-turn, he is dubbed “extreme” by the establishment cognoscenti.
Conservatives see it differently. Washington is aflame in debt; the national debt clock reads like a thermostat in an inferno. The annual budget deficit is approaching 10 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, the actual deficit is larger than our entire GDP. Under Obama, the deficit has grown by $5 trillion to more than $15 trillion (and as a headline in USA Today recently reported, “Real federal deficit dwarfs official tally”).
Hence, the Democratic insistence that Republicans enter negotiations about how much more gasoline we should throw on the fire is a non-starter, at least for conservative Republicans. As Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., likes to say, “Republicans and Democrats must start compromising over how much we have to cut, not how much we want to spend.”
None of this has a chance of being settled before the election in November, and even then odds are we’ll be having this argument for years to come. But you can be sure of one thing.If Republicans take over the White House and the Congress and start cutting, the same voices now championing compromise as a virtue in itself will be applauding the principled idealism of Democrats who refuse to compromise.
“Compromise”; you know,….like the public employee unions did in Wisconsin!
Speaking of the Wisconsin recall, these next three video clips perfectly portray the MSM’s repeated refusal to report anything remotely resembling reality; first, Jon Stewart on the increasingly-deranged Ed Schultz:
Lastly, the Republican Governors Association presents this compilation of the MSM’s amazing lack of political acumen:
No chance their unvarnished bias might have clouded their judgment!
And in the “Your Tax Dollars At Work” segment, courtesy of The New Media Journal….
Agriculture Dept. Slams Forest Service for Border Patrol Call
A federal department ruled last week that the Forest Service violated a Spanish-speaking woman’s civil rights by calling the Border Patrol to help translate during a routine stop, saying it was “humiliating” to Hispanics and an illicit backdoor way to capture more illegal immigrants. The ruling by the Agriculture Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights could change policies nationwide as law enforcement agencies grapple with how far they can go in trying to help the Border Patrol while not running afoul of racial profiling standards.
Assistant Secretary Joe Leonard Jr. said calling the Border Patrol automatically “escalates” encounters between Hispanics and law enforcement. He ruled that the Forest Service cannot routinely summon the Border Patrol for assistance and said the agency now must document suspected racial profiling nationwide. “Given the increased risk of being questioned about immigration status during an interaction with [Border Patrol], the policy of using BP for interpretation assistance is problematic in all situations because it places a burden on [limited English proficient] individuals that non-LEP individuals do not experience,” Mr. Leonard ruled.
The case stems from a 2011 incident in Olympic National Forest in Washington in which a Forest Service officer encountered a Hispanic couple who he said appeared to be illegally harvesting plants on the federal lands. The couple didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak fluent Spanish and, anticipating that situation, he called the Border Patrol for backup and translating.
But when a Border Patrol agent arrived, the couple fled. The woman was apprehended, but the man jumped into a river to try to escape and drowned. The Border Patrol took the woman into custody but released her several days later, reportedly on humanitarian grounds.
The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project complained to the Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service, and last week’s ruling was the result. Matt Adams, legal director of the project, said the Border Patrol has been expanding its reach in the Northwest and that has meant more encounters well away from the border. “They’ve got nothing to do out there as far as their traditional mission, that is enforcing people coming through the border. So in order to justify those expanded numbers, they utilize these other tactics,” Mr. Adams said. “At the end of the day, they can drag in bigger numbers, but it’s not focused on the border.” (Like this bleeding heart wants the Border Patrol focused anywhere!)
His group is challenging other federal agencies’ use of the Border Patrol for translation services, and has filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act seeking logs for how often agents are used for translation. Last week’s ruling relies in part on an executive order issued during the Clinton administration that says language is interchangeable with national origin, which is protected by federal law.
Groups that push for English-language policies in the U.S. called the new ruling illegal and said the government appeared to be granting special language rights to illegal immigrants. “The ACLU and illegal alien rights groups are well aware that American courts have never upheld their argument that language and national origin are equal, so they battle out these disputes in private between the agencies in order to come to a settlement where both the courts and the taxpayers are absent from the table,” said Suzanne Bibby, director of government relations for ProEnglish. “This is their new strategy because they know they will lose in the courts.”
A spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, said the agency is reviewing the ruling but is committed to civil rights.
Just so we have this right; according to Team Tick-Tock, calling in an interpreter from the Border Patrol….you know, the branch of the federal government required to habla Espanol….to assist with the questioning of non-English speaking individuals (not that someone lacking proper identification, a valid foreign passport and lacking a working knowledge of English in any way suggests someone might be in the country illegally!) is inherently racist and a constitutes a violation of civil rights….of criminal trespassers.
On the Lighter Side….
No doubt the parents of these youngsters….
….greatly appreciate the wisdom of such policies.
Finally, we’ll wrap up the week with News of the Bizarre, and this just in from Graz, Austria:
Obese woman’s body fat causes Austrian crematorium to burn down
A devastating fire which gutted a crematorium in southern Austria was caused by an obese woman’s excessive body fat blocking an air filter, Austrian public broadcaster ORF reported. The fire occurred at the facility in the city of Graz in mid-April. Firefighters had trouble extinguishing the blaze due to a thick layer of insulation lining the crematorium’s walls.
Austrian officials investigating the fire found that it was caused by the burning body of the 440-pound woman. The obese corpse reportedly led to overheating in the crematorium’s filter system, triggering the blaze.
Other recent fires caused by the burning of obese bodies were reported in Germany and Switzerland. Former Graz city fire chief Otto Widetschek said special crematoria for obese people should be set up in Austria to deal with the potential dangers of cremating obese bodies.“In Switzerland, there is now a special crematorium for XXL-bodies,” he told ORF earlier this week.
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