It’s Wednesday, August 8th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the mid-week edition, Wayne Root writing at TheBlaze.com, courtesy of Bill Meisen:

Obama’s College Classmate: ‘The Obama Scandal Is at Columbia’

 

I am President Obama’s classmate at Columbia University, Class of ’83. I am also one of the most accurate Las Vegas oddsmakers and prognosticators. Accurate enough that I was awarded my own star on the Las Vegas Walk of Stars. And I smell something rotten in Denmark. Obama has a big skeleton in his closet. It’s his college records. Call it “gut instinct” but my gut is almost always right. Obama has a secret hidden at Columbia- and it’s a bad one that threatens to bring down his presidency. Gut instinct is how I’ve made my living for 29 years since graduating Columbia.

Obama and his infamous strategist David Axelrod understand how to play political hardball, the best it’s ever been played. Team Obama has decided to distract America’s voters by condemning Mitt Romney for not releasing enough years of his tax returns. It’s the perfect cover. Obama knows the best defense is a bold offense. Just keep attacking Mitt and blaming him for secrecy and evasion, while accusing him of having a scandal that doesn’t exist. Then ask followers like Senator Harry Reid to chase the lead. The U.S. Senate Majority Leader appears to now be making up stories out of thin air, about tax returns he knows nothing about. It’s a cynical, brilliant, and vicious strategy. Make Romney defend, so he can’t attack the real Obama scandal.

This is classic Axelrod. Obama has won several elections in his career by slandering his opponents and leaking sealed documents. Not only do these insinuations and leaks ruin the credibility and reputation of Obama’s opponents, they keep them on the defensive and off Obama’s trail of sealed documents.

By attacking Romney’s tax records, Obama’s socialist cabal creates a problem that doesn’t exist. Is the U.S. Senate Majority Leader making up stories out of thin air? You decide. But the reason for this baseless attack is clear- make Romney defend, so not only is he “off message” but it helps the media ignore the real Obama scandal.

My answer for Romney? Call Obama’s bluff.

Romney should call a press conference and issue a challenge in front of the nation. He should agree to release more of his tax returns, only if Obama unseals his college records. Simple and straight-forward. Mitt should ask “What could possibly be so embarrassing in your college records from 29 years ago that you are afraid to let America’s voters see? If it’s THAT bad, maybe it’s something the voters ought to see.” Suddenly the tables are turned. Now Obama is on the defensive.

My bet is that Obama will never unseal his records because they contain information that could destroy his chances for re-election. Once this challenge is made public, my prediction is you’ll never hear about Mitt’s tax returns ever again.

Why are the college records, of a 51-year-old President of the United States, so important to keep secret? I think I know the answer. If anyone should have questions about Obama’s record at Columbia University, it’s me. We both graduated (according to Obama) Columbia University, Class of ’83. We were both (according to Obama) Pre-Law and Political Science majors. And I thought I knew most everyone at Columbia. I certainly thought I’d heard of all of my fellow Political Science majors. But not Obama (or as he was known then- Barry Soetoro). I never met him. Never saw him. Never even heard of him. And none of the classmates that I knew at Columbia have ever met him, saw him, or heard of him.

But don’t take my word for it. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that Fox News randomly called 400 of our Columbia classmates and never found one who had ever met Obama.

Now all of this mystery could be easily and instantly dismissed if Obama released his Columbia transcripts to the media. But even after serving as President for 3 1/2 years he refuses to unseal his college records. Shouldn’t the media be as relentless in pursuit of Obama’s records as Romney’s? Shouldn’t they be digging into Obama’s past–beyond what he has written about himself–with the same boundless enthusiasm as Mitt’s? (Shoulda….woulda….coulda?  Not a chance.)

The first question I’d ask is, if you had great grades, why would you seal your records? So let’s assume Obama got poor grades. Why not release the records? He’s president of the free world, for gosh sakes. He’s commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. Who’d care about some poor grades from three decades ago, right? So then what’s the problem? Doesn’t that make the media suspicious? Something doesn’t add up.

Secondly, if he had poor grades at Occidental, how did he get admitted to an Ivy League university in the first place? And if his grades at Columbia were awful, how’d he ever get into Harvard Law School? So again those grades must have been great, right? So why spend millions to keep them sealed?

Third, how did Obama pay for all these fancy schools without coming from a wealthy background? If he had student loans or scholarships, would he not have to maintain good grades?

I can only think of one answer that would explain this mystery.

Here’s my gut belief: Obama got a leg up by being admitted to both Occidental and Columbia as a foreign exchange student. He was raised as a young boy in Indonesia. But did his mother ever change him back to a U.S. citizen? When he returned to live with his grandparents in Hawaii or as he neared college-age preparing to apply to schools, did he ever change his citizenship back? I’m betting not.

If you could unseal Obama’s Columbia University records I believe you’d find that:

A)   He rarely ever attended class.

B)   His grades were not those typical of what we understand it takes to get into Harvard Law School.

C)   He attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student.

D)   He paid little for either undergraduate college or Harvard Law School because of foreign aid and scholarships given to a poor foreign students like this kid Barry Soetoro from Indonesia.

If you think I’m “fishing” then prove me wrong. Open up your records Mr. President. What are you afraid of?

If it’s okay for U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to go on a fishing expedition about Romney’s taxes (even though he knows absolutely nothing about them nor will release his own), then I think I can do the same thing. But as Obama’s Columbia Class of ’83 classmate, at least I have more standing to make educated guesses.

It’s time for Mitt to go on the attack and call Obama’s bluff.

As Mr. Spock would say, “Fascinating”; as we’ve said on numerous occasions (including a lengthy conversation today with G. Trevor, Lord High King of All Vietors), this issue has always posed significantly greater danger to The Obamao than his birth certificate.  Unfortunately, unless FOX News, Karl Rove or the Koch Brothers prove as adept at opening sealed records as Team Tick-Tock, we’ll likely never know.

But to Root’s point: not only should Romney focus on The Obamao’s unprecedented number of still-sealed records, but, as the WSJ relates, his fanciful tales of Sherwood Forest as well:

The Romney Hood Fairy Tale

The false, invented analysis behind Obama’s tax claims.

 

As he escalates his class war re-election campaign, President Obama has taken to calling Mitt Romney’s economic plan “Robin Hood in reverse” or “Romney Hood.” The charge is that even though Mr. Romney is proposing to cut tax rates for everybody across the board, Mr. Romney will finance this by imposing a tax increase on the middle class. His evidence is a single study by the Tax Policy Center, a liberal think tank that has long opposed cutting income tax rates. (Strikingly similar in substance to Hairball Harry’s evidence Romney paid no taxes for 10 years.)

The political left always says Daddy Warbucks gets all the tax-cut money. So this is hardly news, except that the media are treating this joint Brookings Institution and Urban Institute analysis as if it’s nonpartisan gospel. In fact, it’s a highly ideological tract based on false assumptions, incomplete data and dishonest analysis. In other words, it is custom made for the Obama campaign.

By the way, even the Tax Policy Center admits that “we do not score Governor Romney’s plan directly as certain components of his plan are not specified in sufficient detail.” But no matter, the study plows ahead to analyze features of the Romney plan that aren’t even in it. (Sorta exactly like the studies “proving” the theory of anthropogenic global warming!)

The heart of Mr. Romney’s actual proposal is a 20% rate cut for anyone who pays income taxes. This means, for example, that the 10% rate would fall to 8%, the 35% rate would fall to 28% and all the brackets in between would fall as well. The corporate tax would fall to 25% from 35%.

The plan says these cuts would be financed in a revenue-neutral way. First, by “broadening the tax base,” which means reducing or eliminating tax deductions and loopholes as in the tax reform of 1986. The Romney campaign doesn’t specify which deductions—no campaign ever does—but it has been explicit in saying that the burden would fall most on higher tax brackets. So in return for paying lower rates, the wealthy get fewer deductions.

Second, the Romney campaign says it expects to increase revenues by increasing the rate of economic growth to 4%, up from less than 2% this year and in 2011. (Separately from tax reform, but clearly relevant to budget deficits, Mr. Romney says he’d gradually reduce spending to 20% of the economy from the Obama heights of 24%-25%.)

The class warriors at the Tax Policy Center add all of this up and issue the headline-grabbing opinion that it is “mathematically impossible” to reduce tax rates and close loopholes in a way that raises the same amount of revenue. They do so in part by arbitrarily claiming that Mr. Romney would never eliminate certain loopholes (such as for municipal bond interest), though the candidate has said no such thing.

Based on this invention, they then postulate that Mr. Romney would have to do something he also doesn’t propose—which is raise taxes on those earning less than $200,000. In the Obama campaign’s political alchemy, this becomes “Romney Hood” and a $2,000 tax increase.

The Tax Policy Center also ignores the history of tax cutting. Every major marginal rate income tax cut of the last 50 years—1964, 1981, 1986 and 2003—was followed by an unexpectedly large increase in tax revenues, a surge in taxes paid by the rich, and a more progressive tax code—i.e., the share of taxes paid by the richest 1% rose.

For example, from 1980 to 2007, three tax rate cuts brought the highest marginal tax rate to 35% from 70%. Congressional Budget Office data show that when the tax rate was 70%, the richest 1% paid 18% of all federal income taxes. With the rate down to 35% in 2008, the share of taxes paid by the rich doubled to 40%.

The Tax Reform Act of 1986, which chopped the top income tax rate to 28% from 50%, was probably most similar to the Romney tax proposal because both were designed to lower rates and broaden the tax base. CBO and Martin Feldstein of the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the 1986 tax reform increased the share of taxes paid by the rich (to about 25% from 21% before the reform), in part because their reported taxable income rose as they lost tax shelters. Many businesses also changed their tax status from corporations to Subchapter S companies, thus paying taxes at the individual rate. This also increased the reported share of income declared, and tax paid, by the rich.

So on four separate occasions what TPC says is “mathematically impossible”—cutting tax rates and making the tax system more progressive—actually happened. Hats off to the scholars at TPC: Their study manages to claim that what happens in real life can’t happen in theory.

The TPC analysis also fails to acknowledge how highly dependent the current tax system is on the very rich. As the Tax Foundation explains in a recent report based on CBO data: “The top 20 percent of households pay 94 percent of federal income taxes. The bottom 40 percent have a negative income tax rate, and the middle quintile pays close to zero.”

This reality is treated as a state secret in Washington because it refutes Mr. Obama’s campaign theme that the rich are undertaxed. The same crowd that has been howling that the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes now touts a study concluding that cutting taxes will only benefit the rich. Well, which is it?

Another reality is that more than one-third of Americans pay no income tax. Many in this group contribute payroll taxes, but for most their only connection to the income tax is to receive refundable tax credits (in the form of a check) that are effectively government payments. This is the basis for the Tax Policy Center’s wild claim that the Romney plan raises taxes on those who earn less than $30,000—a group that now has a negative tax liability.

The claim is that reducing various refundable tax credits that are cash payments from the government are a “tax increase.” By this logic, reducing unemployment benefits or food stamps would also be a tax increase. Even the CBO and Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation acknowledge that refundable tax credits are government outlays not tax cuts.

The study’s claims also rest on the assumption that tax cutting doesn’t increase economic growth. The study’s authors expose their own bias on this point by asserting that “the effects of tax rate reductions are likely to be small or even negative” over 10 years.

It’s certainly true that not all tax cuts have the same economic impact. But nearly all economists save for the most partisan liberals agree that cutting tax rates at the margin has the most bang for the buck. So how can the Tax Policy Center claim that cutting tax rates to increase incentives to work and invest has a “negative” impact? Not even the Keynesian economists who gave us the failed stimulus plan argue that the effect of tax cuts is negative. Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson recently testified before the Senate Finance Committee that “a tax reform similar to the Reagan effort of 1986” would raise economic output over the long term “by $7 trillion in 2011 dollars.”

You can argue that Mr. Romney’s expectation of 4% GDP growth is too rosy, but the recent White House mid-session budget review predicts 4% growth in both 2014 and 2015 despite a huge tax increase next year. The Romney plan is far more realistic than that wish in the dark.

The Tax Policy Center’s claim that it’s impossible to make the numbers add up is also refuted by President Obama’s own Simpson-Bowles deficit commission report. The Romney plan of cutting the top tax rate to 28% and closing loopholes to pay for it is conceptually very close to what Simpson-Bowles recommended.

And here’s the kicker: Simpson-Bowles assumed that the top rate could be cut to 28%, loopholes could be closed, revenues as a share of GDP would rise to 20% and the deficit could be cut by close to $1.5 trillion. The difference is that the Romney plan caps tax revenues at about 18% of GDP so that taxes don’t have to rise on the middle class. If Mr. Romney’s numbers don’t add up, then neither do those in the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles plan that the media treat as the Holy Grail of deficit reduction.

What the Obama campaign and its acolytes at the Tax Policy Center are really saying is that tax reform that reduces rates and makes all income groups better off is impossible. This is a far cry from what Democrats used to believe, going back to Jack Kennedy in 1964 and in the 1980s when prominent Democrats Bill Bradley, Dick Gephardt and Don Rostenkowski helped to write the 1986 tax reform.

The Obama Democrats, by contrast, favor income redistribution and raising rates on the wealthy for their own partisan political sake, no matter the damage to growth, the cost in lost revenue, or a less progressive tax code as the rich exploit loopholes.

The great irony is that the candidate most likely to raise taxes on the middle class is Mr. Obama. He could raise every tax on the rich he proposes and still not come up with enough revenue to finance the increases in spending he wants in a second term. Where do you think he’ll turn then?

And even were Mitt the stuff of the Boy Blunder’s purported legends, Romney Hood would still be preferable to….

….the alternative.

Speaking of lies and the liars who tell them, the WaPo‘s Richard Cohen, courtesy of Conn Carroll and the Morning Examiner, has a rare epiphany regarding the prevaricating poltroons he routinely defends:

Harry Reid’s gutter politics

 

With all due respect to Cohen’s headline, Reid would need a ladder to reach the gutter.

In “The Godfather Part II,” a senator from Nevada is portrayed as corrupt. His name is Pat Geary. In real life, a senator from Nevada is a jerk. His name is Harry Reid.

Reid is where he loves to be: the center of controversy. He has accused Mitt Romney of paying no taxes for 10 years. Romney denies the accusation and challenged Reid to put up or shut up. In an apparent response, Reid repeated the charges on the Senate floor. Countless aides have echoed their boss. They and he attribute their information to a source they will not name.

Whether such a source exists, really, is beside the point. It could be that someone did indeed tell Reid that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. Journalists get that sort of tip all the time, and their responsibility is (1) to check it out and (2) identify the source. Reid has not done the latter and apparently has not done the former, either. The truth is that Reid doesn’t really care if the charge is true or not. He would prefer the former, but he’ll settle for the latter.

For Reid, this is yet another brazen and tasteless partisan attack. As majority leader, he has managed to sink the public image of the Senate even lower than it would otherwise be. He contributes to bad feelings, gridlock and the sense — nay, the reality — that everything is done for political advantage. Reid is a crass man, the very personification of the gaudy and kitschy Las Vegas Strip.

Still, he is not some backbencher, but the Senate majority leader. He is the face of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the ally of President Obama. Yet, not a single Democrat has had the spine to rebuke Reid. (Indeed, Nancy the Red has doubled down and joined with Reid.) The White House has been given the chance and explicitly ducked its duty. Other members of the Senate have run for cover. They fear Reid and, if truth be told, sort of like what he’s doing — constantly needling Romney, keeping him on the defensive about taxes and his insistence on releasing only two years of his returns.

The politics of this squabble are delightful. But Reid has managed to draw both his party and his president into the gutter with him. When Reid accuses the Republicans of being overly partisan, he now lacks all credibility. For a long time it’s been difficult to believe anything he says. Now, it’s impossible.

As for Obama, he is tarnished by this episode. The fresh new face that promised us all a different kind of politics is suddenly looking cheesy. The soaring rhetoric that Obama used in his first campaign has come to ground in the mud of Harry Reid’s latter-day McCarthyism.

What does it say when Richard Cohen’s had all he can stands….and can’t stands no more?!?

In a related item, The New Media Journal details another case of Dimocratic dissimulation:

Geithner, Treasury Drove Cutoff of Non-Union Delphi Workers’ Pensions

 

Timmy the Taxcheat, master of the Vulcan death grip….at least when it comes to killing the economy.

Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company. The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.

The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding the termination of those non-union pensions, and that administration figures violated federal law.

Delphi, a General Motors company, is one of the world’s largest automotive parts manufacturers. Twenty thousand of its workers lost nearly their entire pensions when the government bailed out GM. At the same time, Delphi employees who were members of the United Auto Workers union saw their pensions topped off and made whole.

The White House and Treasury Department have consistently maintained that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) independently made the decision to terminate the 20,000 non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan. The PBGC is a federal government agency that handles private-sector pension benefits issues. Its charter calls for independent representation of pension beneficiaries’ interests.

Former Treasury official Matthew Feldman and former White House auto czar Ron Bloom, both key members of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry during the GM bailout, have testified under oath that the PBGC, not the administration, led the effort to terminate the non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan… The emails The DC has obtained show that the Treasury Department, not the independent PBGC, was running the show.

Under 29 U.S.C. §1342, the PBGC is the only government entity that is legally empowered to initiate termination of a pension or make any official movements toward doing so.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for this story to gain traction prior to November 7th.

Then there’s quote from the WSJ of Jonathan Tobin writing in the August 7th edition of Commentary’s Contentions blog:

There may be some voters who are indifferent to the impact ObamaCare will have on the economy or even to the way it seeks to diminish religious freedom. But will they stand for an increase in the price of pizza? . . .

As Business Insider reports, [Papa John’s CEO] John Schnatter said the additional costs ObamaCare will burden his business with will result in his pies costing 11 to 14 cents more per pizza and 15 to 20 cents per order. Because it will cost his company more to operate, the ObamaCare government surcharge will, he promised, be passed on to consumers.

Papa John’s isn’t alone. . . . In its most recent earnings call, McDonald’s said the health care plan will cost their stores an extra $10,000 to $30,000. While the vast expansion of government power involved in the bill will result in more federal expenditures, the pizza magnate’s comment highlights the fact that it will create an across-the-board surtax on virtually all expenditures by families and individuals. This will mean an increase in the cost of living that will hit the poor a lot harder than the rich the president claims to want to tax.

Think about: Solyndra, Fast & Furious, “You didn’t build that”, the War on Coal, the refusal to prosecute the Philly New Black Panthers, more national debt in three years than the rest of U.S. Presidents combined and an economy in a bigger tank than one in which Michael Dukakis posed; were this the record Mitt Romney was running on for reelection, the GOP would have made history by throwing his wife’s horse and him over the side.

And since we’re on the subject of Ann’s friend Flicka, did you ever wonder how Mrs. Romney got her trusty steed over to London?

Moving on, here’s the latest from Michael Barone writing at the Washington Examiner….

Supporters of Ted Cruz and Chick-fil-A break news

 

Americans keep behaving in ways that baffle the liberal mainstream media. Two examples figured prominently–or should have–in last week’s news.

One is the runoff primary for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Texas. Former state Solicitor General Ted Cruz thumped incumbent Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, 57 to 43 percent. Cruz won even though the Texas Republican establishment, from Gov. Rick Perry on down, endorsed Dewhurst. So did the Austin lobbying community, since Dewhurst as lieutenant governor has run the state Senate for the last 10 years (and, having lost this race, will do so for at least the next two).

Dewhurst has had a generally conservative record and had no problem getting elected and reelected statewide four times. And he spent liberally from the fortune he made in the private sector. To be fair, some MSM outlets did run stories on Cruz’s rise in the polls since he ran behind Dewhurst by a 45- to 34-percent margin in the May 29 primary. And it’s not uncommon for a second-place finisher to overcome the primary winner in a runoff.

But there’s a pattern here that the big liberal press has been reluctant to recognize: Candidates from the GOP establishment are getting knocked off by challengers with less name recognition, far less money, and the support of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party was supposed to be dead and gone, you know.

There were two such victories in May, when six-term Sen. Richard Lugar was upset by state Treasurer Richard Mourdock in Indiana and when state Sen. Deb Fischer beat two well-known contenders for the open seat nomination in Nebraska.

Cruz, who is the odds-on favorite in Novermber, has the credentials and policy positions to be a figure of national importance for many years. At 41, he could represent the second-largest state in the Senate for decades. And there’s a tradition of Texas senators taking the lead in public policy, from the days of Tom Connally and Lyndon Johnson and including John Tower, Lloyd Bentsen and Phil Gramm.

Cruz has a fine legal pedigree. He was a law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and argued nine cases (and won five) in the U.S. Supreme Court representing Texas. As a teenager he memorized and gave lectures on the Constitution and on the stump he emphasized the founding document’s limits on the power of government.

The big media has assumed that Tea Partiers are potentially violent despite the lack of evidence of any violent behavior. That’s why ABC’s Brian Ross mentioned on air an Aurora Tea Partier with the same name as the movie theater murderer although it’s a common name and Aurora has 325,000 people. In contrast, the MSM has been happy to celebrate the much smaller and often violent Occupy movement and characterize it as “mostly nonviolent.”

Texas showed once again that many voters are eager to turn out and vote for Tea Party-backed candidates. Cruz won by about 2-1 in fast-growing exurban counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and metro Houston.

The MSM could hardly avoid reporting Cruz’s victory Tuesday. But many news outlets ignored Chick-fil-A appreciation day Wednesday.

There were big crowds, long drive-up lines and record sales at the chain’s stores, in response to the declarations by the mayors of Chicago, Boston and Washington that they would keep the restaurant out because of its owners’ opposition to same-sex marriage.

That’s not “Chicago values,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel, although there are many Chicagoans on both sides of this issue, just as many are on both sides, in varying proportions, throughout the country. But even many supporters of same-sex marriage like me were appalled at the spectacle of public officials barring businesses because of the religious or political beliefs of their owners.

In Huntsville, Alabama, YouTube celebrity Antoine Dodson, who is openly gay, dined at Chick-fil-A on Wednesday. “That’s what freedom is. We don’t all have to believe in the same things,” he told a Huntsville Times reporter. “We all have our different beliefs and can still come together and still be friends and be cool with each other,” he said. “So I’m here to be in support of the employees and I’m also coming to get that spicy chicken sandwich.”

Dodson presumably is not an expert on the Constitution like Ted Cruz. But he has something to teach the liberal mainstream media about the spirit of the Founders.

Not that any of them seem to know the first thing about it.

And in the Follow-up Segment, courtesy of Bill Meisen and BusinessInsider.com, the guy who thought he’d vent his hate on a hapless Chick-Fil-A employee has joined the ranks of the recently employed:

Exec Bullies Chick-fil-A Worker, Then Promptly Gets Fired For It

 

Adam Smith, former CFO and treasurer of medical supplies manufacturer Vante, caused quite a stir when he put up a video of himself bullying a Chick-fil-A drive-thru employee in Tucson on YouTube. Smith berates the worker about her company in the video, which was initially titled ”Reduce $’s to Chick-Fil-A’s Hate Groups.” It has since been taken down (though others have uploaded it too).

“I don’t know how you live with yourself and work here,” he tells the employee at the window. “I don’t understand it. This is a horrible corporation with horrible values. You deserve better.” ”I’m a nice guy, by the way … totally heterosexual,” he continues. “Not a gay in me, I just can’t stand the hate.”

Vante didn’t approve of Smith’s behavior, and he’s no longer working there. Here’s the press release from Vante announcing that Smith is “no longer an employee of our company,” effective immediately:

Frankly, if we needed what Vante’s selling, they’d have a customer for life.  We’d be tempted to crow about Mr. Smith’s predicament, but it’s, no pun intended, not the Christian thing to do.

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the “If You’re Gonna Go, Go Big!” segment, courtesy of two Buckeyes and they’re mother’s misplaced emotions:

13-year-old boys drive more than 650 miles to Kansas City in parent’s stolen car

 

Two 13-year-old boys stole a parent’s car in Ohio and drove it hundreds of miles to Kansas City, Mo., where they were found sleeping in it in a downtown alley on Monday, police said. The runaways, from the Columbus area, were taken into custody by officers investigating a suspicious vehicle that matched the description of the BMW taken early Saturday from the mother of one of the boys, Kansas City police said.

Police there had known the boys might pass through the area because of information posted to Facebook, Capt. Steve Young said. “They were fine, fortunately,” Young said. “I think there are definitely a whole lot of things that could have gone wrong for them, and having the police find them probably would be one of the better outcomes.”

Catherine Johnson said her son Cole had wanted to go to California and she believes that’s where he and Raheem Harris were headed. Johnson said she was surprised that the boys took off in her vehicle — for a trip that likely amounted to more than 650 miles — but was relieved to learn they were safe. “How it went on for two days and no one noticed boggles my mind,” Johnson said Monday by phone from Chicago as she waited for a flight to Kansas City to retrieve the boys, who had been turned over to the Jackson County Family Court.

Johnson said authorities told her the boys would not be charged in Kansas City. The car was towed.

Johnson said she has submitted a complaint over how Columbus police initially handled the case because she believes they took hours too long to get it filed and alert other authorities.

Yeah; after all, it had nothing to do with your idiot offspring boosting your car and taking off for The Coast with his buddy Raheem.  Other than with Thelma and Thirteen, any question where the real blame for this little excursion lies?!?

Magoo