It’s Friday, July 7th, 2017…and here’s The Gouge!

First up, Keith Ellison gets a taste of his own medicine as a diehard Bernie backer, in the best tradition of contemporary Progressivism, seeks to dominate the debate to the absolute exclusion of other opinions:

Since we’re on the subject of the inevitable fruits of ill-advised Liberal policies, courtesy of Townhall.com, Ann Coulter offers up her nomination for…

Immigrant Of The Week: Henry Bello (Obotetukudo)

 

“Last Friday, Nigerian immigrant Henry Williams Obotetukudo, aka Henry Bello, opened fire with an AM-15 rifle at the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital, killing one doctor and injuring a half-dozen others. I would prefer to leap right in and offer my ideas for stopping these immigrant shooting rampages, but first I’ll have to tell you the facts the media won’t.

The New York Times, still unaware there’s an internet, is trying to pass off the Nigerian as a Californian, the non-doctor as a doctor, and Mr. Obotetukudo as “Dr. Bello.”

…But as we go to print, the Times still has not identified Bello as a Nigerian immigrant. It issued a “correction,” but only to clarify the exact street of a homeless shelter where Bello had lived. No correction to the “California” bit.

Having misled readers about Bello’s nationality, the Times professed utter bafflement about the shooter’s motive, saying it was “marked with as many questions as answers.” If the Times simply reported facts, instead of strategically constructing news stories to protect favored groups, it might have noticed that there have been a LOT of mass shootings by certain types of immigrants.

There are mental illness shootings, gangland shootings, still-angry-about-the-divorce shootings and so on. Some immigrant murderers are mentally ill or criminals — thanks to our excellent and extremely rigorous vetting system! But there are enough like Mr. Obotetukudo to qualify as their own category: the Disappointed Immigrant mass shootings.

The usual elements are: 1) immigrants from wildly different cultures, who have 2) unrealistic expectations about what their lives should be like in the U.S., combined with 3) an inability to achieve success in the U.S., and 4) a failure to grasp our customs — often, even our language, typically marked by 5) a particular rage at women.

The same way girls from the Midwest come to New York City expecting to live like Carrie Bradshaw in “Sex and the City” (she was paying $700 a month for a $2,700 per month apartment, plus $40,000 on shoes), some immigrants seem to expect their lives in the U.S. to be like something out of “Dynasty.” Bello, for example, declared bankruptcy in 2000 — from one of the priciest towns in the world, Santa Barbara, California. And he just kept failing. He was fired from the Bronx hospital. He lost his license as a “pharmacy technician.” (He was not a “doctor,” despite the media’s insistent reference to him as one.)

…Co-workers described him as “very aggressive, talking loudly, threatening people.” Once he was arrested for fare-jumping — just like your trusted family physician. Recently, he’d been living in a homeless shelter.

His Third World approach to meeting women resulted in his being arrested in 2004 for lifting a 23-year-old woman off the ground in Greenwich Village, while trying to penetrate her through her underwear and saying “You’re coming with me.” Although initially charged with felony assault, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor — otherwise he might have been deported and America’s beautiful mosaic would be diminished.

Apart from the turnstile jumping, all of Bello’s arrests involve similarly rom-com, meet-cute scenarios. In 2003, he was arrested for kicking in an ex-girlfriend’s door at 5:10 in the morning. In 2009, he was charged, in separate incidents, with harassing women by trying to look up their skirts.

All this insanely inappropriate behavior would have continued ad infinitum, with American women being sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism, but, finally, the Unstoppable Force of Diversity met the Feminist Immovable Object: He was fired from the hospital for sexual harassment.

In his revenge shooting, he killed one doctor: a woman.

Bello blamed his firing on “racism and discrimination,” so at least he was capable of assimilating to the American custom of immigrants being constantly aggrieved.

Close observers will notice the same basic pattern over and over again. Immigrants from backward cultures develop extravagant expectations about their lives in America, fail to master the most rudimentary civic habits, and then erupt in shooting rampages when their lives aren’t turning out as planned.

One will find similar elements in the many, many immigrant mass murders — Jiverly Wong (American Civic Association, Binghamton, New York); Nigerian immigrant Peter Odighizuwa, (Appalachian School of Law); Palestinian immigrant Ali Hassan Abu Kamal (Empire State Building), Bosnian immigrant Sulejman Talovic (Trolley Square Mall, Salt Lake City); Hmong immigrant Chai Soua Vang (hunters in Wisconsin); Mexican immigrant Salvador Tapia (Windy City Core Supply); Korean immigrant Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Poly Tech) and on and on.

Liberals have a mystical idea that we can pluck people from the most discordant cultures, put them in middle-class houses in the suburbs and then, magically, primitive tribesmen will be imbued with the core beliefs of our republic and civilization, developed over centuries.

Instead, we have Aztecs getting loaded up on Tecate and hopping behind the wheels of cars; Nigerians demanding to be called “doctor” while picking up women on the street and trying to drag them home; and Hmong responding to the concept of private property by wiping out a pack of Wisconsin hunters.

The New York Times might even help their Muslim friends by reporting the truth! Perhaps some Muslim mass murders — Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon and the Orlando nightclub, for example –- aren’t problems of Islam, at all. Maybe the problem is assimilation.

It would be a major step forward if the media would just stop lying to us. Until then, Times reporters can still be issued badges, but they shouldn’t be press badges.

While Coulter’s comment about the motive behind Ft. Hood, the Boston Marathon and Orlando is unserious, she’s dead-on balls accurate about the unrealistic expectations The Left has for the successful assimilation of third-world citizens thrust into a culture they neither understand nor to which they can relate.

What’s truly maddening is the fact, as an immigrant, Henry Obotetukudo was permitted to remain in America after committing multiple offenses, regardless of the charges.  As soon as there’s a demonstrable dearth of Nigerian pharmacy technicians, we might reconsider our position on law-breaking guests which such a skillset remaining in the country.

But again, let’s be clear: Obotetukudo’s rampage was the inevitable result of counterproductive Progressive politics.

Speaking of counterproductive politics, the WSJ’s Dan Henninger provides a succinct yet revealing summary of…

The GOP’s Fatal Infatuation

Once the governors took expanded Medicaid payments, they were hooked.

 

Watching the Republican party self-immolate over the ObamaCare law, I’d like to shake the hand of whoever had the idea to plant the expansion of federal Medicaid payments inside ObamaCare.

Before this, Washington on average has been paying about 57% of Medicaid’s costs. ObamaCare expanded the federal payment’s share to 100% of newly eligible adults for any state that signed on, with the match “falling” permanently to 90% in 2020. That was political genius.

Maybe it was Jonathan Gruber, the ObamaCare architect vilified for admitting that the “stupidity” of American voters got the law passed. I’d say Mr. Gruber has the last laugh now on what people not long ago called the stupid party.

What an irony it is that one of the Republican arguments made now for preserving ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion is the opioid crisis. Even after the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that Medicaid’s expansion was optional, some Republican governors got hooked on the promise of federal cash flow to the horizon.

Now GOP governors in the Medicaid-expanded states of Ohio, Arkansas and Nevada are pushing their Republican senators to defeat any significant limitations on the nationalized funding of this entitlement. Other Republican-led states that took the expansion are Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, New Jersey, Iowa and Indiana (which to its credit extracted the Obama administration’s commitment to its Medicaid reform program).

Now the party’s fabled repeal-and-replace effort is threatened by a standoff between Medicaid’s new best friends—“moderate” GOP senators—and conservative colleagues who are trying to moderate the entitlement’s permanent expansion.

Add in Donald Trump criticizing the House bill as “mean,” and how can anyone fault the retired Barack Obama for golfing his way through the world’s resorts? He earned his victory lap. His people understood the iron law of political spending: Offer it, and they will come.

Like a gaffed grouper!

The structure of Medicaid always made the program a Faustian bargain for the states. Originating in the Great Society outpourings of the 1960s, Medicaid’s purpose was to ensure medical care for the disabled and women and children in poverty. Though the states and Washington split the costs, a political genius back then inserted this spending opiate: If states expanded their Medicaid populations, Washington would still send them at least half of the rising costs. Meaning, of course, that taxpayers in states with even a minimal sense of fiscal responsibility paid for open-spigot states like California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey.

Medicaid has become most states’ second biggest budget outlay, behind K-12 education. Even the feds have cut back federal grants on everything else to pay for Medicaid. Here’s the Government Accountability Office’s bloodless 2012 report of how that works:

The increase in federal outlays for Medicaid and other health-related grant programs was offset by an approximately equivalent decrease in grants to state and local governments targeted for other areas such as transportation, education, and regional development.”

Like state-administered medicine everywhere, Medicaid “works” only if no one notices it’s robbing Peter to pay Paul. The Peters getting robbed to make Medicaid work include doctors who are supposed to serve this population.

A Pew report described the mechanics of this perpetual grinding wheel: “In 2012, for example, Medicaid paid physicians on average 66 percent of what Medicare paid for services, down from 72 percent in 2008. Furthermore, both Medicaid and Medicare pay providers significantly less than what they receive from private payers. Low reimbursement rates decrease the willingness of providers to treat Medicaid enrollees, which sometimes limits enrollees’ access to health care services.” (No sh*t!!!)

As to Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren charging that the Republicans’ attempted Medicaid reforms will kill people, those are crocodile tears. For years, states have tried to control Medicaid’s open throttle the only way they know how—with cuts. On Friday, a federal judge ordered Illinois to start paying a stunning $3 billion it has withheld from Medicaid providers, claiming it doesn’t have the money. But from a pro shop somewhere, Mr. Obama, who learned his politics in Illinois, says the GOP effort to fix his namesake would “ruin Medicaid as we know it.”

Medicaid is already a fiscal ruin and lowest-common-denominator medicine. Advocates say it’s better than nothing for the poor or uninsured, but well-controlled studies put even that claim in doubt.

Reform Republicans want to give states a shot at restructuring the albatross Medicaid has become. Some GOP governors, such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, are gamely trying to reform Medicaid without taking the federal payment expansion. But pressure on them to take the money will be intense if Senate Republicans fail or vote to repeal and revisit ObamaCare in two years.

Give credit: ObamaCare’s designers got this part right.

Which, as with every other Dimocratic initiative, means it’s wrong for the vast majority of the country.

Next up, writing at the Washington Examiner, Byron York wonders…

Why the rebellion over Trump voter commission?

 

“…For commission members, the responses are hard to understand. “The reaction to this has been absurd,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a former Bush Justice Department official, former member of the Federal Elections Commission, and head of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, who is now serving on the Trump commission. “The commission is asking for voter registration and other information that is publicly available. Not only do all of the political parties buy this information routinely from secretaries of states — so do candidates.”

It’s true. Just look at, say, the Department of Elections webpage in Terry McAuliffe’s Virginia. The department lists “client services” that include the purchase of voter lists. To candidates, parties, campaigns, and “members of the public seeking to promote voter participation,” the state of Virginia will sell:

Registered Voter List (RVL) and Newly Registered Voter List (NRV) — full name, residence address, mailing address, gender, date of birth, registration date, date last registration form received, registration status, locality, precinct, voting districts and voter identification number.

Want the data in slightly different form? Virginia also sells:

List of Those Who Voted (LTWV) — full name, residence address, mailing address, gender, date of birth, registration date, date last registration form received, registration status, locality, precinct, voting districts, voter identification number, election date, election type, and whether the voter voted in-person or absentee.

For another example, look at the state of Maine, which has also refused to cooperate with the commission, but which by law spells out the types of voter information it will sell:

The secretary of state or the registrar shall make available the following voter record information, subject to the fees set forth in subsection 2: the voter’s name, residence address, mailing address, year of birth, enrollment status, electoral districts, voter status, date of registration, date of change of the voter record if applicable, voter participation history, voter record number and any special designations indicating uniformed service voters, overseas voters or township voters.

Notice that much of the information for sale in Maine and Virginia is similar, if not identical, to the data requested by Kobach. Many states have similar provisions. Which raises the question: If voter information is for sale, why is it a matter of principle to refuse to provide it to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity?

“It’s silly,” said Chris Wilson, CEO of the political consulting group WPA Intelligence and former head of research and analytics for the Ted Cruz presidential campaign. “This is data that we can purchase online from multiple states and multiple sources.”

Von Spakovsky added that, if the fact that states sell voter information were not enough, federal law requires states to keep and give out the same information. The National Voter Registration Act, also known as the Motor Voter law, includes a provision saying, “Each state shall maintain for at least 2 years and shall make available for public inspection and, where available, photocopying at a reasonable cost, all records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters…” I asked von Spakovsky if that rather convoluted phrase covered voter rolls and information. “Yes,” he answered.

There is one thing that Kobach asked states for — and it is important to note that Kobach’s letter is a request, specifically asking only for information that is publicly available under state law — that is not for sale, and that is the request for the last four digits of a voter’s Social Security number. Even though having the last four digits might be useful to researchers trying to distinguish between voters with the same names, it might be that states could reasonably refuse to give the commission that one bit of information. But that doesn’t account for the across-the-board denials from so many states…”

ONE thing’s for certain: whatever the reason, as with Obamacare, it ain’t in the interest of hard-working, taxpaying citizens!

And in the Environmental Moment, The Daily Caller provides more evidence which clearly indicates the entire “science” of anthropogenic global warming is an enormous scam:

Study Finds Temperature Adjustments Account For ‘Nearly All Of The Warming’ In Climate Data

 

A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.

Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published [global average surface temperature (GAST)] data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming,” according to a study published June 27 by two scientists and a veteran statistician.

The peer-reviewed study tried to validate current surface temperature datasets managed by NASA, NOAA and the UK’s Met Office, all of which make adjustments to raw thermometer readings. Skeptics of man-made global warming have criticized the adjustments.

Nearly all of the warming they are now showing are in the adjustments,” Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, a study co-author, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “Each dataset pushed down the 1940s warming and pushed up the current warming.”

Their study found measurements “nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history,” which was “nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern.”

“The conclusive findings of this research are that the three [global average surface temperature] data sets are not a valid representation of reality,” the study found. “In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

Based on these results, the study’s authors claim the science underpinning the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate greenhouse gases “is invalidated.”

The new study will be included in petitions by conservative groups to the EPA to reconsider the 2009 endangerment finding, which gave the agency its legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

…D’Aleo and Wallace filed a petition with EPA on behalf of their group, the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC). They relied on past their past research, which found one of EPA’s lines of evidence “simply does not exist in the real world.”

Their 2016 study “failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important temperature time series data analyzed.”

“In sum, all three of the lines of evidence relied upon by EPA to attribute warming to human GHG emissions are invalid,” reads CHCC’s petition. “The Endangerment Finding itself is therefore invalid and should be reconsidered…”

Along with every single other tenet of contemporary Progressivism…in their entirety!  But seriously, how many more times must adherents of human-induced “climate change” be confronted with falsified “evidence” before they conclude the concept is completely fanciful?!?

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: as soon as Al Gore explains to us why, if the Laurentian Ice Sheet melted…

16,000 years ago, forming the Great Lakes and the Missouri-Mississippi-Ohio River system without the benefit of the Industrial Revolution and the internal combustion engine, a negligible temperature increase today is somehow the result of human activity, we’ll give his theories serious consideration.

Meanwhile…

Coldest July Temperature Ever Recorded In The Northern Hemisphere

 

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s this pearl of wisdom forwarded by TLJ:

While we’re certain Golding, better known for writing Lord of the Flies, uttered the first two sentences, we’ve no proof the rest of the quote should be attributed to him…which in no way lessens its accuracy. 

Finally, we’ll call it a week with a real shocker in the Who Didn’t See THAT Coming segment, courtesy today of Bloomberg and the well-meaning but overly-optimistic government of Norway:

Norway’s ‘Voluntary’ Tax Plan Brings In Just $1,325

 

“Ur yu nootz? U der ferk wernts do pey mur tacksis?!?”

“Eager to pay more taxes? Then look no further than Norway. Hammered by the opposition for slashing taxes and going on a spending spree with the country’s oil money, the center-right government has hit back with a bold proposal: voluntary contributions.

Launched in June, the initiative has received a lukewarm reception, with the equivalent of just $1,325 in extra revenue being collected so far, according to the Finance Ministry. That’s not much for a country of 5.3 million people, many of whom are already accustomed to paying some of the highest taxes in the world (the top rate of income tax is 46.7 percent).

“The tax scheme was set up to allow those who want to pay more taxes to do so in a simple and straightforward way,” Finance Minister Siv Jensen said in an emailed comment. “If anyone thinks the tax level is too low, they now have the chance to pay more.”

Jonas Gahr Store, the wealthy Labor Party contender who is leading in the polls ahead of the September 11 elections, has so far refused to take up the government’s offer. Ironically, it was Store, whose net worth is $8 million, who prodded the government into action by complaining earlier this year that he had ended up paying less taxes under the current administration…”

“Ironically”?  No,…how ’bout “incredibly hypocritically”?!?

Gee…

…who’da thunk it?!?

Magoo



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