It’s Wednesday, July 19th, 2017…but before we begin, a couple quick items we found of interest.  First, in case you didn’t catch it over the weekend, Scott McCarran was awarded the Marc Katz Cup:

Forgive the inside joke, but that’s our old buddy Marc at the far left applauding McCarron’s Senior Tour win this past Sunday at Caves Valley Golf Club.  Marcus, we always appreciate your kindness and hospitality.  Not to mention you’re sooo sensual!

Second, ICYMI, Stilton’s Place recently offered the first concrete proof of human impact on the environment:

Speaking of man-made disasters, while we wholeheartedly disagree with Jonathan Chait’s contention…

“…it was never possible to reconcile public standards for a humane health-care system with conservative ideology.“

…he’s got a point when he observes:

“The power to translate its ideological principles into practical government is (apparently!) utterly beyond its reach.“

As the WSJ notes:

“…this defeat had many authors, some of whom are pictured nearby and all of whom hope to evade accountability for preserving the ObamaCare status quo.

Top row from left: Sens. Dean Heller (Nev.), Susan Collins (Maine), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.). Middle row: Sens. Rob Portman (Ohio), Jerry Moran (Kansas), Gov. John Kasich (Ohio). Bottom row: Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), Mike Lee (Utah), Bill Cassidy (La.). With Republicans like these, who needs Dimocrats?!?

But this wasn’t the inevitable result of some tide of progressive history. These were choices made by individuals to put their narrow political and ideological preferences ahead of practical legislative progress. The GOP’s liabilities now include a broken promise to voters; wasting seven months of a new Administration in order to not solve manifest health-care problems; less of a claim to be a governing party; and the harm that these abdications will wreak on the rest of the Republican agenda and maybe their hold on Congress…”

We’ve said it before; we’ll say it again: principled opposition cannot make “perfect” the enemy of “good”, or ever “better”.  Whether Senate Republicans will yet rally round a bill to reform/replace Obamacare remains uncertain, but one thing’s for damn sure: they blow this…and yes, “they” includes Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz and the rest of The Right willing to take the country down with their ship of empty, self-serving standards…and they won’t have to worry “if” America will abandon the GOP…only how quickly.

And we’ll be at the head of the line.

Meanwhile, we’ll continue to pay 4X for health insurance with double the deductible and three times the out-of-pocket maximum than before Obamacare lowered our rates by $2,500/year…er,…allowed us to keep our health care plan…we mean, promised us we could keep our doctor. 

“Yeah,…whatever.”

Now, here’s The Gouge!

At the top of today’s order, writing at Townhall.com, Derek Hunter details how the only thing keeping Republicans in power is the utter ignorance of their opposition, as he chronicles…

HuffPo’s Progressive Safari Through Middle America

“It’s been a recurring theme of my columns that liberals are out of touch with what the average American believes and cares about. Since the 2016 election results were such a shock to their system, even the left is beginning to recognize flyover country isn’t interested in its snake oil anymore.

No group was hit harder than the left-wing media. As such, one outlet has decided to hit the road to see how the other half lives and why it has so roundly rejected them. It won’t end well.

The Huffington Post, now calling itself “HuffPo” after jettisoning its founder and namesake, has been a progressive activist masquerading as journalism kiosk on college campuses across the country since its founding. Leftists love having their beliefs of how “rigged” our country is in show up in blog entries written by celebrities who’ve made millions in that system, or so it seems.

But the new management at HuffPo is beginning to realize that preaching to the choir isn’t the key to growth, so it is looking to expand. Rather than do something crazy like cover news without bias or hire people with perspectives that are not exclusively progressive, they’ve decided to hit the road.

Showing just how insulated they are from people not currently living in New York, Washington or Los Angeles, HuffPo staffers are going on a progressive safari to Middle America to find out what matters most to the people they routinely deem inferior.

HuffPo staff will be embarking on a 23-city bus tour in September to “listen and learn what it means to be American today,” according to a story in Politico.

One would think the Americans on your payroll would know what it’s like to be an American, but progressive journalists apparently don’t, so they’re hitting the road. Politico described it as “a unique project for a media organization,” but this is the problem with hiring like-minded drones. With a parking lot full of Priuses, each with its own “celebrate diversity” bumper sticker, HuffPo is not a bastion of differing thought.

Admitting you have a problem is the first step toward recovery, so kudos to them for taking that first, long look in the mirror. But that look may not been enough.

Their safari of Middle America isn’t going to small towns and blue-collar enclaves; it is island-hopping from Democrat Party area to Democratic Party area in otherwise Republican states.

Politico reports “they’re not visiting ‘Trump country.’” Rather, they are traveling to visit an interesting community college system in Fort Wayne, Ind., and Detroit’s large Arab-American population. Only, having been born and raised in Detroit, the city doesn’t have a “large Arab-American population.” Dearborn and Hamtramck do. You’d hope someone involved would know that.

Second, once you admit you’re an alcoholic you don’t swear off liquor and just drink beer; you quit drinking. If HuffPo is simply going to travel from liberal city to liberal college campus, this safari will be a waste of carbon footprint.

If the staffers were to speak to hardworking Americans they’d discover average middle-class Americans are not interested in having a man who considers himself a woman using the bathroom with their daughter. They’re sick of being called racist for not being down with throwing bricks at police officers. They’re tired of seeing people who look down their noses at them telling them they’re “voting against their interests” when all they’re interested in is being left the hell alone.

Most of all, they love this country. They don’t think it’s perfect, but they know it is not the cesspool of hatred, bigotry and oppression progressives chant about. They don’t attend protests because they realize their lives are a direct result of the decisions they’ve made, and so are the lives of others…”

Not to mention, as these next items confirm, The Left’s thinking is as alien to most Americans as Einstein’s would be to Joe Biden.  First, writing at PJ Media, Tom Knighton records how two…

Professors Want Academia To Stop Citing Straight White Men

“If you’re writing an academic paper on any given subject, you need to do your research and get your facts straight. No, I don’t mean about the topic you’re writing about. You see, you’re not a good academic if you don’t discover who the authors referenced in your footnotes like to sleep with.

Think I’m making this up? I wish:

Geographers (Geographers, mind you!)  Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne argued in a recent paper that [citing the work of straight, white men] perpetuates what they call “white heteromasculinism,” which they defined as a “system of oppression” that benefits only those who are “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.” (Cisgendered describes people whose gender identity matches their birth sex.)

Mott, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Cockayne, who teaches at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, argued that scholars or researchers disproportionately cite the work of white men, thereby unfairly adding credence to the body of knowledge they offer while ignoring the voices of other groups, like women and black male academics. Although citation seems like a mundane practice, the feminist professors argue that citing someone’s work has implications on his or her ability to be hired, get promoted and obtain tenured status, among others.

“This important research has drawn direct attention to the continued underrepresentation and marginalization of women, people of color. … To cite narrowly, to only cite white men … or to only cite established scholars, does a disservice not only to researchers and writers who are othered by white heteromasculinism …,” they wrote in the paper published recently in the journal Gender, Place and Culture.

These two individuals actually want people to count up their citations, and then to calculate if “too many” reference white men who like women…”

Then there’s this, courtesy of Breitbart and noted anthropogenic global warming skeptic James Delingpole:

Academic Says Saving the Planet May Require the End of Property Rights

Only the abolition of property rights can save us now from the horrors of ‘climate change’, argues an Australian academic.

“Dr. Louise Crabtree, a researcher at the University of Western Sydney, makes her claim in a piece for the leftist academics’ favorite online watering hole, the Conversation, titled “Can Property Survive the Great Climate Transition?”

Her question is, of course, purely rhetorical. No, apparently, it can’t:

If our cities are to become more resilient and sustainable, our systems of property need to come along for the ride.

…We might also need to start thinking about our claims not being static but dependent on the web of relationships we are entwined in, including with non-humans. Some say that First Peoples might have a grasp of property dynamics that is more suited to the times we are entering.

So, making cities green might be the easy part. It remains to be seen whether property law and property systems are up to the task of transition.

This might sound like obscure, pseudo-academic, sub-Marxist gobbledegook. As indeed it is.

It would be nice to console ourselves that this dangerous thesis was written by a left-wing research student of no account. Unfortunately, as Eric Worrall points out at Watts Up With That? there are people who take this woman’s lunatic redistributionary jottings seriously.

…To most of us here, property rights are not negotiable, they’re one of the pillars of Western liberal democracy. But to many members of the green movement including this “sustainability” expert Louise Crabtree, they are negotiable. Indeed, that’s what UN’s Agenda 21 is about—wealth redistribution and the erosion of property rights in the name of saving the planet.

Climate for these people is just the pretext. Really it is—and always has been—about global governance.“

And this man’s agenda, from start to finish, was…

…living proof of it.

Since we’re on the subject of how The Left never speaks truth to power, consider this August 2016 Townhall.com column by Matt Barber:

The Entire ‘LGBT’ Narrative Just Crumbled

“If your daughter, sister, mother or friend “identified” as a fat person trapped in a perilously emaciated body – if she truly believed she was obese, but, in reality, suffered from anorexia – would you affirm her “fatness” and get her liposuction, or would you go to the ends of the earth to help her bring her subjective (and mistaken) identity into alignment with objective reality? When someone is engaged in demonstrably self-destructive behavior, it is not loving, but hateful, to encourage persistence.

It was, ironically, lesbian activist and writer Dorothy Allison who once wrote, “Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.” In validation of this truism, a series of new peer-reviewed studies have just been released that serve to utterly debunk and deconstruct key “progressive” homosexual-activist talking points.

…This study, conducted by world renowned Johns Hopkins University scientists Dr. Lawrence S. Mayer and Dr. Paul R. McHugh, is a meta-analysis of data from over 200 peer-reviewed (and left-leaning) studies regarding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” It was published in the fall 2016 edition of The New Atlantis journal and is, far and away, the most objective, exhaustive and comprehensive study on the topic to date.

The research established, among other things:

• “The understanding of sexual orientation as an innate, biologically fixed property of human beings – the idea that people are ‘born that way’ – is not supported by scientific evidence.”
• “Sexual orientation” in adolescents is “fluid over the life course for some people, with one study estimating that as many as 80 percent of male adolescents who report same-sex attractions no longer do so as adults.”
• “Compared to heterosexuals, non-heterosexuals are about two to three times as likely to have experienced childhood sexual abuse.”
• “Gay”-identified people are “at an elevated risk for a variety of adverse health and mental health outcomes.”
• “Gay”-identified people experience “nearly 2.5 times the risk of suicide.”
• “The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex – that a person might be ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body’ or ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ – is not supported by scientific evidence.”
• “Studies comparing the brain structures of transgender and non-transgender individuals … do not provide any evidence for a neurobiological basis for cross-gender identification.”
• “[S]ex-reassigned individuals [are] about five times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.”
• “[T]he rate of lifetime suicide attempts across all ages of transgender individuals is estimated at 41 percent, compared to under 5 percent in the overall U.S. population.”
• “Only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.”

Lest you buy the liberal talking point that so-called “homophobia” leads to high rates of suicide and other devastating consequences of the “LGBT” lifestyle, a recent study from “gay”-affirming Sweden dispels this myth. The research, published in the May issue of the European Journal of Epidemiology, found that people entering into a “gay marriage” were, as mirrored above, nearly three times as likely to commit suicide than their heterosexual counterparts.

“Even in a country with a comparatively tolerant climate regarding homosexuality such as Sweden,” observed the researchers, “same-sex married individuals evidence a higher risk for suicide than other married individuals.”

To borrow from James Carville: It’s the lifestyle, stupid…”

There’s stupidity, there’s ignorance…and then there’s the deliberate misrepresentation of the facts in furtherance of a purely political agenda without any regard whatsoever for the truth.  And Jim Carville’s expert at the third.

Next up, writing at Forbes, Paul Gregory correctly concludes…

Russia Didn’t Interfere In U.S. Election To Help Trump, But To Destabilize America

 

“I can’t believe these finger-pointing gullibulls took my bait!”

“A still unidentified Democratic Party donor paid for the factually challenged dossier that almost sunk the Donald Trump campaign. The dossier was created (and perhaps written) with the support and assistance of unregistered foreign agents of the Russian government, according to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The offer by an obscure music publicist to Donald Trump Jr. to share compromising information on the Clinton campaign was, as will be shown below, most likely a Russian operation. I conclude that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was not to help Trump but to throw the American political system into chaos and threaten its foundations.

Russia boasts one of the most effective and ruthless political operations in Washington. A flamboyant man-about-town ambassador sits at the top hobnobbing with the American political aristocracy. Russia’s diplomats, spies, and PR experts lobby Russian interests and recruit the powerhouses of American political influence to plead their cases and use hired guns to sling dirt and promote “disinformation” about opponents.

…The US and world press are celebrating the aborted meeting as proof of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia. More sympathetic media outlets call the Trump Jr. fiasco a farce or argue that Trump Jr. was set up.

In my personal view, the whole story smells of a Russian planned operation that required a political novice on the receiving end. Is it credible to think that Russia’s holding of top-secret Hillary Clinton information (perhaps from hacked “personal” e-mails) would be made known to a Russian rock star to pass on to the campaign of a US presidential candidate? Simple logic tells us that this meeting was not intended by the Russian side to be helpful to the Trump campaign. The disclosure of such an e-mail chain could be used either to harm the Trump campaign or come back to haunt him during his presidency.

…We have reached the stage I warned about three months back. Vladimir Putin is now in a position to destroy the Trump presidency and wreak untold havoc on the American political system. His disinformation specialists can make up virtually any story they wish of Trump’s cooperation with Russia, and the anti-Trump media will accept it as gospel truth. Putin will get his wish of a weakened and embattled American president and an American political system in paralysis. He will continue to feed the story to make sure no resolution is possible.

The ironical outcome is that the real collusion may be between the enemies of Trump making an alliance with Putin to weaken their own country, all in order to overturn an election outcome they despise.“

In other words…

For more on The Despised, in today’s installment of the Environmental Moment, like a bad penny, he’s back:

Recycled Gore

The former vice president resurfaces, with another round of familiar apocalyptic predictions.

 

“At least one environmentalist is capitalizing on President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord: Al Gore.

The former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner is back in the public eye whether you like it or not. Since Trump’s announcement last month that the U.S. would pull out of the Paris climate pact, Gore has been on a media blitz to reprise his role as the prophet of planetary doom. The timing couldn’t be better for him. Next week, Gore’s new film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, will debut. It’s the follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth, his 2006 documentary that won two Oscars and became the rallying cry for climate-change activists around the world.

…In excerpts from the book that will accompany the film’s premiere, Gore ranks climate change among the great moral causes of our time — equating it with abolition, suffrage, and gay rights — a claim with more than a tad of self-serving interest. Gore (again) says that we are at a tipping point and that “every day now, millions more are awakening to the realization that it is wrong to destroy the future of the human race.” He promotes a so-called sustainability revolution that purports to both solve climate change and create “hundreds of millions of jobs” now threatened by automation and a stagnant global economy. In perhaps the scariest of all prospects, Gore says that today’s youth will play a special role in “focusing the attention of their elders on the clear distinction between right and wrong.”

If we don’t act now, Gore warns, our children will inherit a world of “stronger storms, worsening floods, deeper droughts, mega-fires, tropical diseases spreading through vulnerable populations in all parts of the earth, melting ice caps flooding coastal cities, unsurvivable [sic] heat extremes, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.” Apparently neither age nor inaccuracy has mellowed Gore’s penchant for the apocalyptic.

In many ways, Gore is the perfect archetype of the modern-day climate movement: monotonous, hyperbolic, and opportunistic. For the first time in a decade, the climate crusade is on its heels and desperate for a cogent message and strong leadership. We’ll see if recycling Gore as the hero will work.“

Oh,…and don’t forget “unerring only in his constant incontrovertible incorrectness”.

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

Then there’s this photo of Anthony Weiner’s therapy dog forwarded by Bill Meisen, who informs us Weiner’s instructions are to…

…pet the pooch at least three times per day!

Finally, we’ll call it a day with yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, as we present the story of a honeymooning couple running amok in Florida:

Honeymooning couple kidnapped woman from grocery store and raped her at motel, police say

 

Newlyweds honeymooning in Florida kidnapped and raped a woman at a motel and then got naked the following day inside a nearby convenience store and stole a couple of sodas, police said Friday.

Miami-Dade police said Rashada Hurley and Timothy Lowe kidnapped a 27-year-old woman at a Publix in Hialeah as she was pulling out of her parking space. Police said Hurley got out of her vehicle and hit the woman over the head with something rendering her unconscious, according to the Miami Herald.

The woman told police that when she woke up Hurley, 32, was choking her as Lowe, 37, was driving her car. They all arrived at a Motel 6 and Hurley used the woman’s credit card to purchase a room, police said. An affidavit added that the woman was raped and forced to perform oral sex on Hurley. She then escaped when the couple was distracted, according to the Herald.

Police arrested Hurley and Lowe after a convenience store employee called 911 about a naked couple who poured themselves some sodas and left without paying. Investigators linked the couple to the alleged assault and the woman identified one of her captors out of a lineup, the Herald reported.

Hurley and Lowe were jailed on kidnapping, carjacking, robbery and sexual battery charges and were denied bond on the kidnapping charges.

To borrow a phrase from Ma Kelly in Johnny Dangerously:

Or, as John Winger might have put it:

Magoo