It’s Monday, July 16th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, her recent statement of disinterest notwithstanding, as Michael Rubin writes in CommentaryMagazine.com, true Conservatives have very serious….

Reservations About Rice

 

Speculation that Governor Romney will choose Condoleezza Rice as his running mate is all the rage right now in Washington and among political reporters. Dr. Rice evidently gave a bang-up speech in Park City at a closed-door fundraising retreat. Rice is poised and articulate; a huge contrast to Vice President Joe Biden, who often lacks both qualities. She also adds diversity to the ticket, not only in terms of race and gender, but also in terms of life story; she has perhaps the most compelling life story next to that of President Obama himself.

Rice also has much experience at the senior levels of government, serving both as George W. Bush’s national security advisor and also his second term secretary of state. Whether Rice would bring electoral benefit is an open question, especially because she has not held elective office and it is questionable, therefore, whether Californians would consider her native enough to call their own simply based on her tenure at Stanford. Nevertheless, she has a demonstrated ability to charm the press, and that is a quality that should not be dismissed. Like Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, she used it to great effect during the internecine wars that plagued the George W. Bush administration.

Rice’s record should raise various questions about her suitability to be vice president. As national security advisor, she presided over one of the most chaotic National Security Councils in recent memory. The job of the National Security Council (NSC) is first to coordinate policy between various bureaucracies and second to define policy and enforce decisions when disputes occur within the administration. Rice was a poor administrator. The meetings she chaired ran like college seminars and seldom reached a conclusion. This led to policy chaos and polarization, especially during the Iraq conflict. Many of her colleagues—on both sides of the philosophical debate—speculated that she was hesitant to present the president with decision memos until she could divine his thoughts on an issue. Hence, she let basic issues like pre-war planning and questions about whether the Iraq campaign was simply to unseat Saddam or whether the U.S. would rebuild Iraq’s government slip until just weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom began.

While Rice will be great at advocating for Romney’s record, behind the scenes she may once again sow the seeds of rebellion. Bush administration officials used to joke that Rice’s personnel picks represented 2004 Democratic challenger John Kerry’s farm team. She appointed a number of officials—Flynt Leverett, Hillary Mann, and Rand Beers, to name just a few—who may be very competent in their fields of expertise—but used the credibility gained from their perch in the Old Executive Office Building to work against the Bush agenda both privately and then publicly, often directly on behalf of Kerry.

So, Rice was not a great administrator, but the job of the vice president is not to run bureaucracy, so perhaps Romney will forgive her. He should, however, worry about her instincts given her lead on the North Korea issue. In the waning days of the Bush administration, with both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars going poorly, Rice was desperate to leave Bush with a foreign policy legacy about which he could brag. Somewhat arbitrarily, she chose North Korea to be that issue, and almost single handedly pushed reconciliation with North Korea through the bureaucracy, regardless of North Korean behavior. For example, she led the drive to lift North Korea’s state sponsor of terror designation, even though, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, Pyongyang was still aiding the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and Hezbollah in Lebanon (where North Korean engineers have helped Hezbollah build their network of underground tunnels and arms caches). Like Madeleine Albright before her, Rice’s outreach to the Dear Leader was poorly conceived and motivated, and did little but to cede America’s strategic leverage and make North Korea more dangerous.

This election will not be about foreign policy. The repairs Romney will need to make to the American economy and defense must begin on day one. Rice is a talented individual, and her voice as a senior statesman is one that should be listened to, but her track record of management, while at the National Security Council, and her policy decisions while secretary of state are both topics which she has never adequately addressed.

Not to mention she’s a RINO of the first order, hardly an attribute to inspire a GOP base already highly suspicious of Romney’s Conversative credentials.  Like Newt Gingrich, Condi Rice should stick to writing and talking; they’re the only real talents either one possesses.

Since we’re on the subject of those of limited abilities, as Alana Goodman notes at CommentaryMagazine.com, a man with no discernible endowment other than duping the dimwitted demonstrates a disposition for self-deception:

Humblebrag: Obama’s Mistake Was Being Too Good at Policy

 

The first time I watched this, I thought it was just Obama trying to fudge his way out of a difficult question, the way people tend to spin the “what’s your biggest weakness?” answer during job interviews. (Nobody’s buying that claim you’re “sometimes too much of a team player.”)

But after watching a second time, I’m now wondering whether Obama actually believes his own fables. His political team is notoriously insular, and the cult of personality surrounding him would tell him that his biggest problem is he just hasn’t explained his policies to the American people well enough, goshdarnit. The scary news is Obama may truly be as out-of-touch as he appears in this CBS News interview:

“When I think about what we’ve done well and what we haven’t done well,” the president said, “the mistake of my first term – couple of years – was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”

Mr. Obama acknowledged the dissonance between others’ perception of his strength as an expert orator, and his own.

“It’s funny – when I ran, everybody said, well he can give a good speech but can he actually manage the job?” he said. “And in my first two years, I think the notion was, ‘Well, he’s been juggling and managing a lot of stuff, but where’s the story that tells us where he’s going?’ And I think that was a legitimate criticism.”

When did anybody ever criticize Obama for being a great policy wizard who just didn’t spend enough effort communicating his accomplishments to the American people? Can you name one serious pundit who has made this argument? (The White House cheering section at Think Progress and the New York Times editorial page don’t count.) If anything, Obama’s critics — the ones who rightly pointed out that cliche-riddled speeches don’t translate into good governance — have hammered him for a lack of leadership on policy issues. Even Obama’s legislative victories were based on policy drafted by congressional Democrats, not the White House. His budget plans have been voted down unanimously for the last two years by members of his own party in Congress.

And the notion that Obama hasn’t spent enough effort communicating his ideas to the American people is fantasy. This is a president who’s never missed an opportunity to give a speech. The problem is the lack of substance and follow-through. If this is really the Obama campaign’s assessment of its candidate’s weaknesses, then they have much bigger problems than previously thought.

Yeah….and the reason Little Johnny can’t read, write or arithmetize is insufficient education spending; or the dissolution of the Black family is due to the lingering effects White racism.

Regardless of whether The Obamao believes his own bullsh*t, we’d posit his problem is not one of substance or follow-through, though he’s woefully short on both.  Rather his ineffectiveness arises from an absolute absence of any practical policies conducive to economic growth.  Quite the contrary; each of the initiatives enacted during Team Tick-Tock’s undisputed control of Washington was deliberately designed not to boost America’s financial fortunes, but to line the pockets of Dimocratic political allies at the expense of the rest of the country.

Then again, that being the goal, one could say The Obamao’s been 100% effective.…though acting to completely contravene the contents of the Constitution he’s sworn to uphold.

Meanwhile, as Thomas Lifson reports in American Thinker, courtesy of Bill Meisen, B. Hussein once again demonstrates a regard for the Rule of Law second only to Bill Clinton’s respect for women:

Obama administration ‘guts’ welfare reform with new HHS rule

 

Yesterday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued guidance” to states that could undermine the work requirements introduced in the 1996 welfare reform. The HHS guidance explains how states can seek “waivers” of work requirements for recipients of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)program. But there has been no change in the TANF law, no proposal from the Obama administration to change policy, and no basis in statute for the changes.

The House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) and Senate Finance Committee ranking member Orrin Hatch (R-UT) have sent a letter to HHS Secretary Sebelius seeking an explanation for what appears to me to be a lawless power grab. Rep. Camp summed it up: “This is a brazen and unwarranted unraveling of welfare reform.  This ends welfare reform as we know it.”

There can be no mistake now: the Obama administration is seeking to create a permanent majority of Americans receiving money from taxpaying, working Americans. Food stamps are hyped through advertising, work requirements are being sabotaged (contrary to law),  unemployment insurance extended for years.

If you work hard, pay taxes, and obey the law, you are a target. If you give up, call yourself a victim, and demand money that other people earned, you are part of the new dependant majority that will keep Democrats in power forever, or so they must hope.  

Update: Mickey Kaus has a long and clear explanation of the changes, and gets to the politics of the matter:

Obama’s given his opponents a huge opportunity to raise the “welfare” issue, to associate him with the unpopular idea of subsidizing women who have children they can’t support, usually out of wedlock-even giving them free community college training that hard-working people who don’t go on welfare can’t get! The GOPs don’t even have to move their heads into the 21st century by calling Obama the “food stamp President.” They can dust off their attacks on the old, hated AFDC program-the welfare part of the welfare state.

What’s the payoff for Obama ? When he took executive action to effectively impose the DREAM law that Congress wouldn’t pass, he was trying to mobilize a large, reliably Democratic constituency-Latinos. Cynical, maybe, but rational. What does he get for this move, in exchange for possibly getting hammered by the Republicans (and by some endangered Democrats)? Who supports it? Well, community colleges surely support it-they’re a powerful lobby, and they’ll get lots of subsidized students-on-welfare. Unions support it-they want public aid recipients to stay on the dole, or in training, lest they join the work force and compete for jobs. They especially don’t want them performing public “workfare” tasks that well-compensated, pensioned AFSCME workers might be performing.

Which makes this chart forwarded by David Drucker delineating “the misplaced incentives inherent in our current social welfare system” even more meaningful:

Speaking of, as Glenn Frey phrased it, “the payoffs and the rip-offs and the things nobody saw, the WSJ‘s Allysia Finley reports….

How Insider Politics Saved California’s Train to Nowhere

The high-speed rail line may never be built, but it will save a few Democratic seats.

 

Environmentalism may be religion to some on the left, but its high priests aren’t all pure and righteous. Consider the not-so-immaculate conception of California’s bullet train.

Last week, the state’s legislature authorized $4.7 billion in bonds to start construction on high-speed rail, which had been stalled in Sacramento for more than a decade due to logistical and political malfunctions. This train is now out of the station—though it’s almost certain to break down soon.

The project’s godfather is Democratic Congressman Jim Costa, who as a state senator in the 1990s wrote legislation creating California’s High-Speed Rail Authority and helped plan the 500-mile route between San Francisco and Anaheim. Before being elected to Congress (in 2004), he also authored a $10 billion state bond initiative to finance the project. Lawmakers in Sacramento postponed that initiative until 2008, fearing that California’s recurring budget crises would make it a hard sell.

But sell it they did. The rail authority promised voters that the train wouldn’t require a subsidy and that the feds and private sector would pick up most of the $33 billion tab. Expecting a free ride, voters leapt on board and approved the initiative in November 2008. Not long afterward, the authority raised the price to $43 billion.

Investors refused to plunk down money without a revenue guarantee—that is, a subsidy—from the state, which wasn’t forthcoming. California’s attorney general, whom we now call Gov. Jerry Brown, declined to investigate the bait-and-switch.

As soon as he took office, President Obama tried to help the state with $2.4 billion in stimulus money. A year and a half later—and two weeks before the 2010 midterm elections—the White House offered an additional $900 million, provided that the $3.3 billion sum be spent in the sparsely populated Central Valley. That is, in the congressional districts of Mr. Costa and fellow Blue Dog Democrat Dennis Cardoza, both of whom had provided critical votes for ObamaCare in March 2010 and were then in political peril.

The congressmen rode the subsidy train to re-election, flogging the 135,000 jobs that the construction would supposedly create in the Central Valley. To be sure, Mr. Costa denies trading his ObamaCare vote for high-speed rail money: “That’s not something I do,” he tells me. Besides, he says, the train “had already become unpopular by [the 2010 election],” so it couldn’t have accounted for his victory.

Actually, the train’s popularity didn’t plunge until 2011, when costs exploded to nearly $100 billion and the California Legislative Analyst’s Office (among others) warned that the first 130-mile segment would become a train to nowhere. Since congressional Republicans promised to zero out federal funding for high-speed rail, analysts noted, the state wouldn’t have enough money to electrify the tracks, let alone build out.

$33 billion….RIIIIIGGHHHHT!

Meanwhile, many parties—farmers in the Central Valley and governments in the Valley’s Kings County and the tony liberal cities of Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton—were suing the rail authority for not adequately addressing the train’s environmental impacts. Gov. Brown proposed shielding the train from such environmental lawsuits but abandoned the idea after the Sierra Club threw a tantrum.

The more people read and heard about the train, the more they disliked it. A string of Field and Los Angeles Times polls this year have shown that voters would block the train by a two-to-one margin if it were put up for a referendum. In 2008, 55% of voters approved the rail bond.

Souring public opinion started to give some Democratic legislators—particularly in the Bay Area and Los Angeles—cold feet. They threatened to waylay the train if their grievances weren’t addressed, chief among them that the rail authority and White House weren’t giving them their fair share. They wanted to milk the bullet train for whatever Democratic leaders thought their votes were worth.

But in Washington, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood had different plans. Two months ago, he threatened to claw back federal funding if Sacramento didn’t green-light construction before summer’s end. “We can’t wait,” he said. And why not? Because Republicans were threatening to claw back the money if they took the White House and Senate in November.

Mr. Brown used that threat to demand that legislators authorize $2.7 billion in state bonds before they adjourned this week. He sweetened the deal for Bay Area and L.A. legislators by adding $2 billion for regional rail projects. Included was $700 million to bail out—”modernize”—Silicon Valley’s insolvent Caltrain.

The governor rounded up just enough Democratic votes for passage. Four Democratic senators demurred, including Ventura County’s Fran Pavley, author of the state’s 2006 cap-and-trade law. She and two others faced tough re-election challenges.

The fourth nay vote came from Palo Alto’s Joe Simitian, who has sat on a high-speed rail subcommittee. He tells me he knew better since he “had ample opportunity to probe deeply” into the project. And other Democrats? “I’m sure they all felt fully informed,” he says unpersuasively.

“The whole thing was carefully staged to allow [dissenting Democrats like Mr. Simitian] to speak about their no votes just before their vote was taken. But Brown knew he had his 21 votes in his pocket,” says Bay Area economic analyst Bill Warren. Democrats gave their OK, he says, because they wanted money for local rail projects and construction jobs. “I doubt if any of them actually believe in their hearts that the rail system will ever be completed.”

Indeed, environmental lawsuits could block construction in the Central Valley or at least delay it for several years. The White House will no doubt send its regrets to Rep. Costa.

Regardless, the Bay Area and L.A. will likely get their pound of taxpayer flesh. Next year taxpayers will have to start paying interest on the rail bonds—about $380 million annually for the next 30 years—assuming investors bite. That’s nearly as much as the governor is proposing to cut from higher education if voters don’t approve his millionaires’ tax initiative in the fall.

This plundering of higher education should serve as a warning to voters who think that approving the millionaires’ tax will somehow save them from one day becoming sacrificial lambs on the government’s altar. Nothing is sacred.

While nothing, at least not any more, is s-a-c-r-e-d, plenty of Californians should be s-c-a-r-e-d; as, if you’ll pardon the pun, the state’s on the express train to insolvency.

In other news of Progressive monetary misconduct, The Washington Free Beacon, courtesy of Carl Polizzi, informs us….

U.S. Olympic Uniforms: Made in China by Democratic Donor’s company

 

Lawmakers were livid to discover that the United States’ Olympic team uniforms were made in China. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) even suggested “they should take all the uniforms, put them in a big pile and burn them and start all over again.”

The company who designed the uniforms, Ralph Lauren, has received less scrutiny. Few outlets have noted that Ralph Lauren himself is a prominent contributor to President Obama and the Democratic Party. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Lauren has given $7,300 to Obama since 2008, and more than $35,000 to the Democratic National Committee.

Obama’s own ties to outsourcing have come under scrutiny of late. His much-vaunted green energy loan program awarded billions of taxpayer dollars to foreign-owned companies and firms that manufacture their products overseas. It is unclear whether the DNC will be returning Lauren’s donation. DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse did not immediately return a request for comment.

We’re with the WSJ on this one, as noted in today’s Money Quote:

“A half dozen Democratic Senators—led by Chuck Schumer, who else?—have introduced a bill to require that future uniforms be made in America. These are the same geniuses whose tax-and-spend policies make the U.S. economy less competitive. A country that worries about where its Olympic clothes are made has bigger competitive problems than those berets.“

Next up, it’s the “Do As I Say, NOT As I Do!” segment, courtesy of FOXNews.com and the Liberal penchant for rank hypocrisy:

Average teacher makes $44G while their top union bosses pull in nearly $500G

 

Teachers across the country face pay freezes and possible layoffs, but the heads of the two biggest teachers unions saw their pay jump 20 percent last year, to nearly half a million dollars apiece. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten’s pay jumped to $407,323 last year, while her counterpart at the National Education Association, Dennis Van Roekel, got a raise to $362,644. Factor in stipends and other paid expenses and Weingarten took in $493,859 and Van Roekel $460,060 for 2011.

The membership’s cratering, but our salaries soar; is this a great country or what?!?

The big salaries drew jeers from many educators and their advocates in the U.S., where the average nationwide salary for teachers is a scant $44,000 a year. By contrast, nearly 600 staffers at the NEA and AFT are raking in six-figure salaries, according to Association of American Educators Executive Director Gary Beckner.

“In terms of salaries, union executives rake in nearly 10 times the average household income and far more than any teacher,” Beckner told FoxNews.com. “Are teachers or anyone in the private sector experiencing those increases in times of financial hardship?”

The union bigwigs are well-insulated from the paycheck-to-paycheck lives of most schoolteachers, said Tracie Happel, a elementary school teacher in Lacrosse, Wisc., who has spoken out in the past against the practices of the unions. “It’s always about the union. It’s never about the teachers or students,” Happel said. “When you’re a teacher, you know you will not always be able to have the money for renovations on a house or go away on vacation, but it’s a tough pill to swallow when you can’t do those things when the people who are supposed to represent us get paid more and more every year.”

Here you thought it was all about the children; it is….Weingarten and Van Roekel’s children!

And in International News of Note, Jonah Goldberg tells a tale of….

Tilting at the UN Windmill

 

Those of us who believe the United States would be best served by pulling out of the United Nations and starting up a more morally and politically serious clubhouse for morally and politically serious nations are often accused of tilting at windmills.

The phrase “tilting at windmills” was inspired by Cervantes’ novel “Don Quixote,” and it means to fight something that doesn’t really deserve to be fought. Quixote mistook the windmills of the Spanish countryside for ravenous giants and set out to vanquish them. (“Tilting” is a jousting expression, in case you didn’t know).

Well, let’s review some recent evidence.

The U.N. has been working hand-in-glove with the Chinese government to make the Chinese one-child policy as efficient and ruthless as possible. “Our conclusion is that the (United Nations Population Fund) is directly responsible for forced abortions and forced sterilizations in China,” Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, recently told Congress in prepared testimony.

Of course, not everyone dislikes the one-child policy. Vice President Biden has supported it, and President Obama restored UNFPA’s funding when he took office. So let’s move on.

Lots of people like the Internet, right? Well, good news! The U.N. wants to take it over. The International Telecommunications Union, a U.N. organization, is secretly debating proposals to claim jurisdiction over the Web and take it out of America’s hands. The major forces behind this push: authoritarian regimes eager to censor their domestic Internet and monitor their citizens. Russia and some Arab countries, reports the Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Crovitz, want the power to read private email. Others want to tax cross-border Web traffic. And countries like China are working hard to bribe, bully or barter votes in favor of the U.N. takeover.

You see, that’s what dictatorships do at the U.N.: work to make the world safe for dictatorships. The most brutal regimes on the planet are constantly trying to get on or game the Human Rights Council so they can spend all of their time condemning Israel and blocking any attempts to censure their own regimes.

Not everything the U.N. does is evil. Some of it is just incompetent. The whole of what passes for the “international community” has been trying to enforce sanctions on Iran and North Korea. But nobody at the U.N.’s intellectual property agency told them so, it was revealed earlier this month, so they went ahead and gave North Korea and Iran computers and IT equipment.

A few days later, the invaluable human rights group UN Watch reported that Iran was elected to the U.N. Conference of the Arms Trade Treaty, despite having just been declared guilty — in a U.N. Security Council report! — of illegally shipping guns and bombs to Syria.

Speaking of Syria, which is currently violating agreements to not murder its own people, it recently had a big victory at the Human Rights Council. Syria co-sponsored and passed a resolution pushed by Cuba (and supported by the usual Legion of Doom nations) to establish a “Right to Peace.” The document is a lot of boilerplate until you get to the part where it says “all peoples and individuals have the right to resist and oppose oppressive colonial, foreign occupation.” This is Middle East-speak for “It’s OK to blow up Israelis.”

Now these are all just recent news items. But you can play this game any time you want because the U.N. always provides fresh hells for us to marvel and laugh at.

For example, the United Nations website tells us that there is something called the Open-ended Ad Hoc Working Group of the General Assembly on the Integrated and Coordinated Implementation of and Follow-up to the Major United Nations Conferences and Summits in the Economic and Social Fields. Who among us doesn’t sleep better knowing the OAHWGGAICIFMUNCSESF is working for us?

Alas, the U.N. website notes, “The Ad Hoc Working Group was last active during the 57th session of the General Assembly in 2003.” In other words, the ad hoc open-ended working group is so open-ended it hasn’t met in nearly a decade.

But that’s the great thing about the U.N.: It never fails to surprise us with its predictability. I’m beginning to think the U.N.’s defenders are the Don Quixotes, only in reverse. Where the critics see the reality of the ravenous giant, the U.N.’s defenders can only see a harmless windmill converting hot air for the good of all mankind.

That’s because their warped worldview is financed with YOUR money.

Moving on, the AEI‘s Danielle Platka sounds the clarion call:

Whiny women unite

 

 

President Obama recently signaled that he will take action to create ‘equality’ for women in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The Obama administration’s decision to push for more female representation in STEM coincides with the 40th anniversary of Title IX. Indications are that the Obama administration will implement a new Title IX quota through the Department of Education. Via the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

Quotas limiting the number of male students in science may be imposed by the Education Department in 2013. The White House has promised that “new guidelines will also be issued to grant-receiving universities and colleges” spelling out “Title IX rules in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.” These guidelines will likely echo existing Title IX guidelines that restrict men’s percentage of intercollegiate athletes to their percentage in overall student bodies, thus reducing the overall number of intercollegiate athletes.

Creating a new quota for STEM fields would do little do address the equality of result sought by Obama. In contrast to college athletics, college academics are co-ed. This new Title IX quota wouldn’t create any new opportunities for women, because they already have access to STEM courses. The quota would instead cap the number of males in these fields of study, and lead to fewer overall STEM graduates.

Not surprisingly, Obama is preparing to solve a problem that doesn’t exist with excessive federal intervention that we don’t need. We will wind up with fewer math and science graduates, and Obama will get one more misleading talking point to use on the campaign trail.

Seriously….if the MSM possessed even an ounce of neutrality, this election would make Nixon-McGovern look like a dead heat.

On the Lighter Side….

 

Finally, we’ll call it a day with another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter:

Teen who plotted attack on parents: ‘I regret all my decisions’

 

Yeah, everyone that is….except your father and mother.

Magoo