It’s Wednesday, June 27th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the mid-week edition with Conn Carroll’s thoughts on Arizona v. United States, courtesy of the Morning Examiner:

Court rebukes Obama on immigration

Not so fast, Barack-breath!

Newspapers across the country are either split about which side prevailed in yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on Arizona’s immigration law, or they are calling it a split decision. But there is one easy way to tell which side actually won: only one party rushed to the microphones to announce new legislation overturning the Court.

Senate Democrats are considering introducing legislation that would prevent local law enforcement from checking a suspect’s immigration status when they are stopped for a different offense. “I’m greatly concerned AZ provision endangering innocent citizens of being detained —unless carrying papers – will lead to racial profiling,” Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said after the decision was announced.

More importantly, the Court affirmed that President Obama cannot rewrite our nation’s immigration laws simply by choosing not to enforce them. The Heritage Foundation‘s John Maclom explains:

In 1996, as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, Congress made it clear that states retain inherent authority to cooperate in immigration enforcement and to supplement federal resources with their own. Federal officials are required by law to respond whenever state or local officers request verification of an alien’s immigration status (Homeland Security operates a 24/7 hotline for exactly that purpose). As Justice Anthony Kennedy said for the majority, “Federalism, central to the constitutional design, adopts the principle that both the National and State Governments have elements of sovereignty the other is bound to respect.”

Today’s decision means that the Obama Administration may not, by executive order, prevent states like Arizona from participating in an immigration verification process set up by Congress. The President may disagree, but for his disagreement to actually have the force of law, he will have to persuade members of Congress—a refreshing change for a President who has seen fit to go it alone far too frequently.

Beyond immigration, yesterday’s Arizona decision should serve as a huge warning sign to Obama that this Court is not going to tolerate his many abuses of executive power.

In a related item….

Justice Department Sets Up Civil Rights “Violation” Hotline for Arizona

The Department of Justice just can’t help itself. Yesterday after the most important provision, or what Arizona Governor Jan Brewer called the “heart” of SB 1070 was unanimously upheld, which allows local law enforcement to inquire about legal status, the feds set up a hotline in the state for people to report “potential” civil rights violations.

1-855-353-1010 and online SB1070(at)usdoj.gov

And yes, the hotline was set up by the same Civil Rights Division within the Justice Department that refused to prosecute New Black Panther Party members for intimidating voters outside of a Philadelphia polling place in 2008. Also, according to the Washington Times, the Obama administration has ended the partnership between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the agency has been instructed not to return calls from local law enforcement regarding illegal immigration.

The Obama administration said Monday it is suspending existing agreements with Arizona police over enforcement of federal immigration laws, and said it has issued a directive telling federal authorities to decline many of the calls reporting illegal immigrants that the Homeland Security Department may get from Arizona police.

As long-time contributor and friend Bill Meisen noted:

“So let me get this straight: if you’re a member Arizona of law enforcement who has detained a suspected illegal immigrant, the federal government won’t even take your call. BUT, if you are an illegal immigrant wanting to report perceived mistreatment at the hands of Arizona authorities, there’s a federal government hotline set up to take your calls.“

As the legendary James Patrick Crilley would say, “Toyota”; you got it!

Meanwhile, in the “Your Tax Dollars at Work” segment, at the same Team Tick-Tock reveals more classified information than a gay Army PFC, the Washington Times tells us the most mundane of entitlement programs remains veiled in secrecy:

Top secret: $80B a year for food stamps, but feds won’t reveal what’s purchased

Gee….we wonder why?!?

Americans spend $80 billion each year financing food stamps for the poor, but the country has no idea where or how the money is spent. Food stamps can be spent on goods ranging from candy to steak and are accepted at retailers from gas stations that primarily sell potato chips to fried-chicken restaurants. And as the amount spent on food stamps has more than doubled in recent years, the amount of food stamps laundered into cash has increased dramatically, government statistics show.

But the government won’t say which stores are doing the most business in food stamps, and even it doesn’t know what kinds of food those taxpayer dollars buy.

Coinciding with lobbying by convenience stores, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program in conjunction with states, contends that disclosing how much each store authorized to accept benefits, known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), receives in taxpayer funds would amount to revealing trade secrets. As a result, fraud is hard to track and the efficacy of the massive program is impossible to evaluate.

As the House debates the once-every-five-years farm bill, the majority of which goes to food stamps, there is a renewed and fervent call from a broad spectrum of camps that the information — some of the most high-dollar, frequently requested and closely held secrets of the government — be set free.

“We can’t release it based on federal rules. If it were up to us, I wouldn’t have a problem releasing the information. It’s taxpayer money,” said Tom Steinhauser with the division of benefit programs for the Virginia Department of Social Services.

The District said it would be illegal to tell the newspaper how many food stamp dollars were flowing to each local vendor, but first offered to sell The Washington Times the information for $125,000. “Why don’t you just pay the charges? Your paper has a lot of money,” said David Umansky, spokesman for the District’s chief financial officer.

Told that the newspaper would not pay, the CFO’s office then said that only JP Morgan, to which it contracted out operations, had access to the store totals and that the office had never looked at them. After six months of the local government attempting to extract the information from JP Morgan, the District finally said that releasing the information would be illegal.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/24/top-secret-what-food-stamps-buy/?page=all#pagebreak

Not to beat a dead horse, but seriously….you simply cannot make this sh*t up!  Which begs the question how long this charade has been going on, and why Republicans would sign onto any legislation allowing it to continue?!?

Next up, as usual, Thomas Sowell’s latest column truly hits the nail on head:

A Political Glossary

Since this is an election year, we can expect to hear a lot of words — and the meaning of those words is not always clear. So it may be helpful to have a glossary of political terms.

One of the most versatile terms in the political vocabulary is “fairness.” It has been used over a vast range of issues, from “fair trade” laws to the Fair Labor Standards Act. And recently we have heard that the rich don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes. Some of us may want to see a definition of what is “fair.” But a concrete definition would destroy the versatility of the word, which is what makes it so useful politically.

If you said, for example, that 46.7 percent of their income — or any other number — is the “fair share” of their income that the rich should have to pay in taxes, then once they paid that amount, there would be no basis for politicians to come back to them for more — and “more” is what “fair share” means in practice.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

“Racism” is another term we can expect to hear a lot this election year, especially if the public opinion polls are going against President Barack Obama. Former big-time TV journalist Sam Donaldson and current fledgling CNN host Don Lemon have already proclaimed racism to be the reason for criticisms of Obama, and we can expect more and more other talking heads to say the same thing as the election campaign goes on. The word “racism” is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything — and demanding evidence makes you a “racist.”

A more positive term that is likely to be heard a lot, during election years especially, is “compassion.” But what does it mean concretely? More often than not, in practice it means a willingness to spend the taxpayers’ money in ways that will increase the spender’s chances of getting reelected. If you are skeptical — or, worse yet, critical — of this practice, then you qualify for a different political label: “mean-spirited.”

A related political label is “greedy.” In the political language of today, people who want to keep what they have earned are said to be “greedy,” while those who wish to take their earnings from them and give it to others (who will vote for them in return) show “compassion.”

A political term that had me baffled for a long time was “the hungry.” Since we all get hungry, it was not obvious to me how you single out some particular segment of the population to refer to as “the hungry.” Eventually, over the years, it finally dawned on me what the distinction was. People who make no provision to feed themselves, but expect others to provide food for them, are those whom politicians and the media refer to as “the hungry.”

Those who meet this definition may have money for alcohol, drugs or even various electronic devices. And many of them are overweight. But, if they look to voluntary donations, or money taken from the taxpayers, to provide them with something to eat, then they are “the hungry.”

I can remember a time, long ago, when I was hungry in the old-fashioned sense. I was a young fellow out of work, couldn’t find work, fell behind in my room rent — and, when I finally found a job, I had to walk miles to get there, because I couldn’t afford both subway fare and food. But this was back in those “earlier and simpler times” we hear about. I was so naive that I thought it was up to me to go find a job, and to save some money when I did. Even though I knew that Joe DiMaggio was making $100,000 a year — a staggering sum in the money of that time — it never occurred to me that it was up to him to see that I got fed.

So, even though I was hungry, I never qualified for the political definition of “the hungry.” Moreover, I never thereafter spent all the money I made, whether that was a little or a lot, because being hungry back then was a lot worse than being one of “the hungry” today.

As a result, I was never of any use to politicians looking for dependents who would vote for them. Nor have I ever had much use for such politicians.

Speaking of patent political bullsh*t, it’s the subject of today’s Money Quote, courtesy of James Taranto, who reveals the truth behind the push for gay “marriage”:

“Gays are interested in marriage for two reasons. The first is because it provides concrete benefits in areas such as health care and inheritance. The second–the reason why they have by and large rejected the compromise of “civil unions” and insist on the word marriage–is because it implies an affirmation that homosexual relationships are morally and socially equal to heterosexual ones.“

The former is already provided; the latter, like a woman’s mythical right to an abortion, is a blatant attempt to impose immorality via judicial fiat.

And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy of the WSJ, Matthew Sinclair offers a rare glimpse into the wonderful, wacky world of the Environazi by answering the question….

How Cuba Became a ‘Happy’ Country

Citizens flee on rafts. But environmentalists know better.

In what league does Iraq beat Britain, Haiti beat the United States, and Afghanistan beat Denmark? Political corruption? Violent crime? Temperature? No, welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Happy Planet Index. It is a little window into the way many environmentalists think.

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) purports to “measure what matters: the extent to which countries deliver long, happy, sustainable lives for the people that live in them.” It beautifully illustrates the two great vices of environmentalist thought: fetishizing resource efficiency above everything else and treating happiness economics with far too much respect.

Countries with high living standards tend to use more natural resources. That’s why instead of being praised as having a dynamic economy and being the least corrupt country in Africa, Botswana comes at the bottom of the Happy Planet Index. It scores a pitiful 22.6, way below the Democratic Republic of the Congo (30.5) and Zimbabwe (35.3). Botswana’s people might enjoy a much higher standard of living, but that means a larger ecological footprint.

Of course I will use less oil if I walk to work instead of driving or even getting the bus, or if I bring in crops by hand instead of using a combine harvester. The price you pay for that is normally taking a lot more time and therefore being a lot less productive: That’s why we have to balance resource efficiency against other priorities. You might be able to consume fewer resources (and create lots of green jobs) by having people run in giant hamster wheels, but that doesn’t make it a sensible way to power a city.

Happiness economics has similar problems. It works by asking people how satisfied they are with their lives. To assess “experienced well-being,” the Happy Planet Index uses a question called the “Ladder of Life” from the Gallup World Poll. It asks respondents to imagine a ladder, where zero is the worst possible life and 10 is the best possible life, and report the step of the ladder on which they feel they currently stand.

The problem with a question like that is that your horizons might be a little more limited if you’ve grown up in a war-torn village in Afghanistan instead of prosperous, stable and connected Denmark. The average inhabitant of Copenhagen can probably imagine a more impressive life than the average inhabitant of Kabul, and that means a much higher bar for the real lives to meet.

It’s even worse if you’ve grown up on the American dream. Do we really want to give countries high marks because the people living there treat just scraping by as a real achievement?

The Happy Planet Index hasn’t been composed by some lonely obsessive living with his mother and boring a very small number of readers in a rarely visited corner of the Internet. No, the Happy Planet Index has been produced by the New Economics Foundation, a think tank with an annual budget of more than $3.9 million and a staff of more than 50. They may be as mad as a box of frogs, but these people are well-funded and influential.

They are also playing with taxpayers’ money. One of the New Economics Foundation’s biggest donors in 2010-11—giving them more than $155,000—was the British government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs paid more than $90,000 for another project in 2009 in which the New Economics Foundation produced a report—”Moments of change as opportunities for influencing behaviour”—which looked to Communist Cuba for an example of “mass efficiency improvement.”

Cuba, by the way, ranks 12th on the Happy Planet scale.

Reports like the Happy Planet Index claim to show us a different way of measuring success that “puts current and future well-being at the heart of measurement.” But there’s a reason Cubans regularly risk (and lose) their lives trying to escape their home country and make it to America, and there’s no waves of humanity flowing in the opposite direction. That the Happy Planet Index can’t capture those realities, or chooses to ignore them, suggests, well, that its authors are living on another planet.

If men are from Mars and women from Venus, we’ve no clue whatsoever from what alien world Liberals hail.

On the Lighter Side….

And in News of the Bizarre….

Mom given bill to clean street after son killed by illegal immigrant driving drunk

A grieving mother told a South Carolina court she was slapped with several bills, including one to clean the street after her son was killed by a drunken driver last year. Loretta Robinson spoke on June 19 of the emotional and financial toll her son Justin Walker’s death had on her as the driver Anna Gonzales, who is an illegal immigrant, pleaded guilty in the case.

Robinson told the judge she has been unable to work due to the emotional impact of her son’s death, and can’t pay the bills she keeps receiving from the accident even though her son was not at fault, WYFF reports. “I had to pay to have the vehicle towed,” she said according to WYFF. “I had to pay for the vehicle removed and to clean up the street from Justin’s blood on the ground.”

Robinson said the $50 bill to clean the street stung the most. “First of all, having to open the mail and look at the charge to the deceased, Justin Darryl Walker — the deceased! It’s just a hard thing to deal with in the context of your child,” she said according to WYFF. Robinson says she doesn’t expect to get any money from Gonzales. The state’s victim assistance fund has provided some money, but it primarily covers funeral, medical and counseling expenses.

Gonzales, an illegal immigrant who didn’t have a South Carolina driver’s license, was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

After which she’ll likely be eligible for Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and in-state college tuition rates.

‘Til Monday….

….don’t you go changin’!

Magoo