It’s Thursday, August 9th, 2012….but before we begin, meet Tyler Lester (kneeling left), United States Marine Corps,….

….and son of Tim Lester, a very proud papa.  Tyler is currently training on the Big Island prior to returning to Twenty-Nine Palms and eventual deployment to Okinawa, where he may well run into our nephew Paul.  Semper Fi, boys, and God bless you all!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, it’s the “Oh, What Tangled Webs We Weave” segment, in a follow-up to yesterday’s video clip highlighting the latest deliberate misrepresentation by an Administration who’s made lying an integral part of its everyday operations, Townhall.com‘s Guy Benson reports The Dear Misleader and his minions are….

Busted: Team Obama Caught in Blatant Lie About ‘Cancer’ Ad

No more boring white guys for the GOP

This is the last presidential election in American history in which the GOP will benefit from having such a person as its presidential nominee.

“A friend of mine, a Hispanic entrepreneur, asked me a question some time ago. He said, ‘When is the last time you saw an Hispanic panhandler?’ I think it’s a great question. I’ll tell you, in my life, I never once have seen an Hispanic panhandler because in our community; it would be viewed as shameful to be out on the street begging.”

That was Texan Republican and Senate nominee Ted Cruz on “Fox News Sunday.” He went on to make the case that Latinos are culturally conservative and economically entrepreneurial.

Just for the record, I’ve seen a Latino panhandler or two. Or at least I think they were: I don’t usually quiz panhandlers about their ethnic backgrounds. But Cruz is right that there do seem to be fewer Latino beggars than other ethnicities, and I think his pride in this fact is refreshing – and helpful.

This is the last presidential election in American history in which the GOP will benefit from having a boring white guy as its presidential nominee. This is not a point about racial animosity toward Barack Obama. The key, as it relates to 2012, is not the white part of that formulation; it’s the boring part. The operatic nature of Obama’s campaign in 2008 and his inability to live up to the expectations he set for himself have created a market for a bland Mr. Fixit type.

But going forward, the GOP needs to figure out a way to become more appealing to new constituencies, particularly younger voters and Latinos. Boring white guys aren’t great for that project. But candidates such as Cruz are.

It is hardly a novel insight that the GOP needs to deal with America’s changing demographics. Inside the Beltway, the conventional explanation for how Republicans should do that tends to boil down to pandering and capitulation. For instance, Latinos care about immigration, we’re told, therefore Republicans should adopt the same policies as the Democrats.

The substance of those policies aside, there are political problems with this thinking. First, Republicans rarely, if ever, win such bidding wars.

Second, there’s a faulty assumption here – that various ethnicities and young people generally are monolithic and hard-wired to support certain policies, and are therefore immune to persuasion. But young people almost by definition believe in things they eventually grow out of. The same goes for Latino voters, who are not monolithic racially, ethnically, religiously or ideologically.

For instance, the Latino vote has been growing less Democratic over the last 30 years, according to Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics.com. Moreover, illegal immigration is nowhere near as important to Latinos (as opposed to Latino activists) as the media make it sound. In 2008, less than half (46%) of Latino voters who said they voted Democratic also told exit pollsters the issue was “very” or “extremely” important to them. And nearly a third of Latinos who considered illegal immigration “very” or “extremely” important voted Republican.

Trende argues that most of the Democratic advantage among Latinos can be explained by income. Poor people tend to vote Democratic. There are a lot of poor Latinos in the U.S. Still, if you control for income, the Latino voter becomes less distinct from the average voter.

In short, Latinos lean decidedly Democratic (particularly in presidential elections), but they are decidedly persuadable as well. And young politicians like Cruz – and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, also of Cuban descent – have a better shot at persuading them.

White GOP politicians tend to be terrified of racial and ethnic activists and the journalists who empower them. This results in many sounding condescending, pandering or dull when they try to reach out to minorities.

Young, energetic, whip-smart and philosophically coherent politicians like Cruz and Rubio can confidently appeal to Latinos without sounding condescending and without caving to liberal assumptions about how to win over Latinos. They’re also harder to demonize. I mean, just imagine if Romney had mused about the dearth of “Hispanic panhandlers.”

Cruz’s point is well-taken.  We serve lunch once a month in the winter with our church in a homeless shelter down in Baltimore.  But despite The Peoples Democratic Republic of Maryland being home to one of the largest illegal populations on the East Coast, we rarely see Hispanics in the shelter, and those we do are never there the next month.

There is however, one supposedly homeless lady we see regularly at the bottom of the exit ramp onto Connecticut Avenue exit off the inner loop of the Beltway….though watching her talk the entire time/every time we sit waiting for the lunch calls into question her true level of need.

We would also suggest the fat Cruz and Rubio are harder to demonize than Romney has less to do with their ethnicity and far more to do with the fact they’ve worked far harder to achieve what they have.

In a related item, Thomas Sowell describes….

Harlem Then and Now

Books about the history of Harlem have long fascinated me — my favorite being “When Harlem Was in Vogue” by David Levering Lewis. However, a more recent book, titled simply “Harlem” by Jonathan Gill, presents a more comprehensive history — going all the way back to the time when the Dutch were the first settlers of New York, and named that area for the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands.

Most of us today think of Harlem as a black community, but it was not that for most of its 400-year history. John James Audubon, famed for his studies of birds, was among the many people who at various times organized efforts to keep blacks from moving into Harlem — efforts that, in the long run, met with what might be called very limited success.

Among the many well-known people who were not black who were born in Harlem were Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, Arthur Miller and Bennett Cerf.

Like other communities, Harlem held many very different kinds of people at the same time, both before and after it became predominantly black.

There was an Italian community in East Harlem, but it was not just an undifferentiated Italian community. People from Genoa lived clustered together, as did people from Naples, Sicily and other parts of Italy. Jews from Germany lived separately from Jews who originated in Eastern Europe, who in turn lived in separate enclaves of people from different parts of Eastern Europe.

Harlem had the highest crime rate in New York before blacks moved there, and a photograph in this book, taken a hundred years ago, showed the worst housing conditions I have ever seen in Harlem. In some of the poorer Italian neighborhoods in East Harlem, people went barefoot in the summer and lived on one meal a day, consisting of thin soup.

There were also more upscale areas of Harlem, and different classes of people sorted themselves out, both when Harlem was white and after it became black. During the early era of black Harlem, as author Jonathan Gill notes: “Observant subway riders could see the porters and domestics get off at West 125th Street, the clerks and secretaries depart at West 135th Street, and the doctors and lawyers leave at West 145th Street.”

By the time I was growing up on West 145th Street in the 1940s, its inhabitants were by no means limited to doctors and lawyers, or even clerks and secretaries. But the pattern of internal self-sorting continued. With the later breakdown of racial barriers in housing, many of the black middle class and those aspiring to be middle class moved completely out of ghettoes like Harlem. It became a much worse place, for that and other reasons.

Complaints that the old neighborhood is going downhill have been made by people of all races. Even though that may be true, it can be misleading when the people who lived in those neighborhoods have moved up economically, and now have more upscale housing in more genteel neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the newcomers in their old neighborhoods may likewise be living in better housing than they had before. People moving up often means neighborhoods moving down.

Nevertheless, it is painful for me to realize that youngsters growing up in the same places in Harlem where I grew up more than 60 years ago have far less chance of rising economically, educationally or otherwise. Harlem youngsters today undoubtedly have more material things than I had in my day. I was 23 years old, and living in Washington, before I had a television set, given to me by my sister when she bought a new television set for herself.

But what I got growing up in Harlem was an education that equipped me to go on to leading colleges and universities, long before there was affirmative action. That is what youngsters growing up in Harlem today are very unlikely to get — and affirmative action in college admissions is no substitute, if you come in unequipped to make the opportunity pay off.

People didn’t live in fear of drive-by shootings, in the Harlem of my day, if only because we had nothing to drive by in. Old photographs of Harlem show ample parking space on the streets. It was not an idyllic community, by any stretch of the imagination, but it had values that mattered in our daily lives, and common decency was in fact common. No material things can substitute for that.

Then there’s this headline, which we found rather intriguing….until we saw the author:

Romney needs to pick his running mate, right now

Juan Williams.

Thanks Juan; next time Republicans need campaign consultation from a dimwitted Dimocrat, you’re tops on the list….right above Joe Biden and Al Gore.

Next up, in Tales From the Darkside, Thor Halvorssen and George Ayittey, writing at the WSJ, offer yet another example of the curious moral blindness, unique to the Left, which seems to have become de rigueur for so many supposed Bleeding Hearts:

A Human Rights Toast for an African Tyrant

Equatorial Guinea brutalizes its people like North Korea and Syria. So why is a prominent U.S. foundation cozying up to its dictator?

In the campaign for human rights and justice in apartheid South Africa, black American civil rights leaders were instrumental. One was Leon H. Sullivan, who enunciated the “Sullivan Principles” guiding multinational firms toward treating blacks fairly while doing business in South Africa. Why, then, is the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation today celebrating the exploits of a brutal African tyrant?

On Aug. 20, a plane-load of lobbyists, civil rights leaders, entertainers and former government officials will land in the West African nation of Equatorial Guinea for the Sullivan Summit IX. The summit’s stated objective is to “create an atmosphere of open dialogue about the state of human rights and the interconnected issues of modern Africa.” Seldom has so much dishonesty fit into one sentence.

Equatorial Guinea is home to Africa’s longest-ruling dictator, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who seized power in a military coup by executing his uncle 33 years ago. Freedom House ranks the country among the “worst of the worst” human-rights abusers, along with North Korea, Syria and Somalia. Yet the Sullivan Foundation is celebrating its Obiang-hosted summit as a milestone for human rights, part of its “unwavering commitment to democratic ideals.”

According to the agenda posted online, summit attendees will lounge at a five-star resort for a week discussing human rights and economic development, all between black-tie dinners and champagne. They may toast to the petroleum-rich country’s staggering per capita income of $36,515 (according to the World Bank), but outside the resort the people of Equatorial Guinea will continue to toil in poverty. Sixty percent live on less than $1 a day, the majority don’t have access to clean water or electricity, and nearly one in eight children die before their fifth birthday.

Since his 1979 coup, Mr. Obiang has rigged every election to give himself more than 95% of the vote. He has criminalized dissent, tortured or disappeared his opponents, and killed tens of thousands (as documented by historian Randall Fegley, among many others). Under his iron first, Mr. Obiang siphons billions of dollars in oil revenues into his family coffers. (Do a quick internet search on his son.) Still the Sullivan Foundation’s marketing materials praise him for a “tremendous emphasis on social development and good governance.”

Nor is this month’s summit the first time the Sullivan Foundation has cozied up to Mr. Obiang. Last December it bestowed on him its “Beacon for Africa” award for “exemplary contributions to improving the lives of Africa’s most vulnerable citizens.” When news of the award first leaked, the foundation initially denied that Mr. Obiang was honored, tweeting that a horrible mistake had been made. It then pretended that it was honoring only the rotating presidency of the African Union, which happened to be held at the time by Mr. Obiang.

It doesn’t end there. In June, foundation President and CEO Hope Sullivan Masters—daughter of Leon Sullivan, who died in 2001—hosted a private reception for Mr. Obiang at her Maryland mansion. As for criticism of the upcoming summit, Ms. Masters wrote on her foundation’s website this week that it is “yellow journalism,” “salacious and blasphemous.” She added: “If these critics wish, they are more than welcome to attend the Summit and see for themselves the advancements made by President Obiang for his country.”

(Gee…who shall we believe; a privileged porker whose never missed a meal, or….

….the evidence of our own eyes….

….along with the opinion of almost everyone else in the civilized world?!?)

The dictator has made a practice of linking himself to international organizations. This year he paid Unesco, the U.N.’s cultural and educational arm, $3 million to establish the Unesco-Equatorial Guinea International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences. Unesco’s executive board agreed to sponsor the prize over objections from its own lawyers, the U.S. government and others.

The Sullivan Foundation’s chairman is Andrew Young, a former mayor of Atlanta and U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and its board of directors includes former President Bill Clinton. If Messrs. Young, Clinton and their colleagues want to help Africa and Equatorial Guinea, they should be on the side of the people, not the dictators. They might support EG Justice, which promotes human rights, rule of law, transparency and civic participation in Equatorial Guinea. (EG Justice is based in the U.S. because human-rights groups can’t operate in Equatorial Guinea.) Perhaps the Sullivan Foundation could host gatherings for EG Justice’s founder, Tutu Alicante, instead of the murderous dictator who has long immiserated his country.

The summit begins in a few days without any hope of achieving its supposed objectives: “to protect the infirmed, the poor, the defenseless, and the isolated,” “to explore how the public and the private sectors can manage a changing society while not leaving our most vulnerable members behind,” and to “drive a world economy that will benefit all.” Gathering under Mr. Obiang’s banner will undermine those goals in Equatorial Guinea by lending support to a repressive, exploitative system that benefits an elite few who remain in power through crime and violence. It is an appalling swindle.

As Liberals apparently only hurt the ones they love, it’s no wonder Equitorial Guinea, Haiti and so many other nations in the Third World remain mired in poverty while Dimocrats fete their robber-baron rulers.  Look at how they interface with union fat-cats here at home; it’s their nature.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this from George Lawlor….

And in the Fuggedaboudit Section, more positive press for New Jersey:

Tiki Barber’s mistress-turned-wife strips down for sexy spread, bemoans her ‘haters’

Appearing on the magazine “Metropolis Nights,” which boasts the honor of being “New Jersey’s Nightlife and Entertainment Magazine,” Johnson says “I have a lot more haters than I do lovers.”

The 23-year-old former ‘Today Show’ intern, who reportedly hooked up with Barber in his agent’s attic while his wife and the mother of his two children was expecting twins, says she was shocked by the negative attention her relationship with Barber received.

“I was shocked by all the media attention my relationship with Tiki got,” she tells the mag in the cover story and accompanying bikini spread. “The tabloids love to write about celebrity divorces. Everyone else in the country gets divorced of breaks up with their boyfriend and nobody cares. When things bad happen, they love to exploit us.”

Barber filed for divorce from his ex-wife Ginni in April of 2010. She gave birth to their twin daughters the next month.

Wow….New Jersey’s Nightlife and Entertainment Magazine”; sorta like claiming  the title of Monogamy Magazine of the Clinton White House.

And in the “Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Get Back In The Air” segment….

Alaska Airlines says plane with maintenance message on wing is safe, note not appropriate

Finally, in the Sports Section, courtesy today of Balls Cotton, a fascinating look at the evolution of the Fastest Human:

Magoo