It’s Friday, August 17th, 2018,…but before we begin, our good friend Tony “Super T” Walton forwarded this bit of buffoonery which bespeaks the wastefulness and over-regulation inherent in any bloated bureaucracy; in this case, the District of Columbia:

We’ve no clue what perceived threat required cordoning off a 2″ maple (rabid beavers or sapling thieves, perhaps), but we’d have thought a 3’x8’x4′ chain link enclosure sufficient, making the bilingual sign redundant if not rather expensive overkill.  As Super T observed at least 50 such enclosures along a stretch of Reservoir Road near Georgetown Hospital Center, the District’s budget woes are obviously not as serious as we’ve been led to believe.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Since we’re on the subject of over-empowered officials, writing at NRO, Michael Tanner accurately assesses…

The Dangers of Naïve Faith in Big Government

Voters are increasingly placing their trust in government to solve their problems, despite its endless record of incompetence.

“Last week the New York Times reported that Puerto Rican authorities had discovered at least ten trailers full of food, medicine, and baby supplies that were left to rot as a result of government ineptitude in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. At this point, news stories about such incompetence are so commonplace that the Times’s scoop barely elicited a yawn.

Yet it does — or should — raise a question. Given the ongoing evidence of government’s inability to carry out even its most basic tasks, why do so many Americans want to expand its control over our lives?

The democratic socialists who are all the rage in American politics at the moment have long since run out of foreign examples of socialist nirvana to point to. Venezuela is busy starving its children, while the Danish prime minister is scolding American liberals that “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Nor does the record of government in this country provide much more on which to hang faith in big government. Yet that doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. Indeed, every demonstrated government failure seems to lead inevitably to calls for…more government.

Has Obamacare driven up the cost of health care while driving down the quality of care? Is Medicare tens of trillions in debt? Has the VA delivered substandard care to American veterans? Well, then, the answer must be to put the government in charge of the entire U.S. health-care system.

Have our government-run schools left millions of poor and minority students behind, despite massive increases in spending? Well, then, the answer must be to spend still more, while attacking private alternatives.

Have more than 100 federal anti-poverty programs and roughly $1 trillion in anti-poverty spending failed to enable the poor to flourish or become self-sufficient? Well, then, we must immediately spend more money on ever-more-complicated schemes.

Is Social Security racing toward insolvency? Then we must expand benefits and impose more restrictions on private retirement options. Have government jobs programs failed to create meaningful and productive work? We’ll just have the government guarantee everyone a job. Have government subsidies and regulations driven up the cost of everything from college to housing? I guess we’ll have to regulate and subsidize more.

No matter how often government disappoints, the Left is ready to forgive and forget.

A naïve faith in big government isn’t strictly a phenomenon of the Left, of course — especially in the age of Trump. Conservatives who long decried government as unable to manage a two-car funeral suddenly argue that it should determine everything from whom we trade with to what parental-leave policies our employers institute. And when it comes to businesses hiring the best foreign talent, Trump-era conservatives increasingly embrace quotas and restrictions more akin to Soviet-style central planning than to the free-market economics that made this country prosperous.

Americans used to be suspicious of populists peddling government solutions to every problem. Not too long ago, even Bill Clinton was declaring that “the era of big government is over” in response to the government’s disastrous track record. But this healthy skepticism has waned in recent years. It is as if the politics of today are immune to empirical results.

Samuel Johnson once facetiously described second marriages as “the triumph of hope over experience.” Given the record of government failure, calls for a bigger more intrusive government might (Or, perhaps more accurately, should!) be described as the triumph of hope over common sense.“

Ronaldus Maximus would be in complete agreement.

Next up, also courtesy of NRO, David French suggests it’s time to…

End the Double Standards in Reporting Political Violence

The refusal by many media outlets to offer proportionate coverage empowers the worst elements of the radical Left.

“…It’s a simple fact that all too many members of the mainstream media have a soft spot for left-wing radicalism even as they remain convinced that right-wing violence represents a mortal threat to public safety. Since the rise of Black Lives Matter and the emergence of Antifa after Trump’s election, the riots and acts of political violence are almost too numerous to count.

We’ve seen buildings burn, cars burn, speeches blocked, and physical assaults, even against the most innocent bystanders. Yet instead of universal condemnation, we’ve seen nonsense like this:

Or this:

It’s part of human nature, but all too often when people believe that anger is justifiable, they see violence is excusable — or at least understandable. A member of the media may feel deep sympathy with protests against police violence or against family separation. (Even if such feelings failed to come to the fore under The Obmaoa!) They can therefore understand the rage of the protester. And that sympathy may lead to soft-pedaling or ignoring acts of violence, out of concern that reporting the facts — or especially reporting them with remotely the same prominence that they report riots or attacks from the other side — might make the movement suffer.

Contrast that with the response to right-wing violence. There is no sympathy for the underlying cause. Not only is there no disincentive to downplay violence for the sake of the larger cause, the incentives operate in reverse. One of the fastest ways to discredit any political movement is to associate it with threats and disorder. To broadcast the violence is to defeat the movement.

But the American choice isn’t between well-meaning violence and malicious violence. There is no excuse for downplaying threats and attacks to protect the larger cause. Double standards exacerbate existing tensions, and the refusal to offer proportionate coverage actually empowers the worst elements of the radical Left. Simply put, they (sometimes reasonably) believe they can enjoy the best of both worlds — intimidating their opponents while also enjoying a heroic public reputation.

Political violence in the U.S. is criminal, not heroic. And no amount of media sympathy for underlying causes should influence the amount of the attention or the volume of the condemnation for actions that cross very bright legal lines. Let’s see every American movement for what it is — warts and all — and let sunlight cleanse the violence from public life before that violence escalates out of control.“

Call us a paranoid (are we really paranoid if they’re actually out to get us?!?) or a conspiracy theorist, but we’re of the opinion the powers behind Antifa…

…are truly hoping for a fatal confrontation along the lines of this memorable scene from Rules of Engagement:

Spoiler alert: what’s not shown until later in the movie is Colonel Terry Childers, played by Sam Jackson, only orders his troops to engage after observing the supposedly unarmed crowd of innocent civilians is possessed of firearms they were discharging at his Marines.

Substitute Antifa for the supposedly unarmed crowd of innocent civilians violently assaulting  either armed members of the Alt-Right or law enforcement for the beleaguered Marines and you catch our drift.  

It’s as Father John stated in his summary of The Communist Creed in The Enforcer:

As long as it’s not Father John…or Fat George…doing the sacrificing!

In a related item highlighting what Best of the Web terms Progressives’ “permanent campaign”, again courtesy of NRO‘s David French, we learn how…

“…Here’s what happened. According to a verified complaint filed today by my old colleagues at the Alliance Defending Freedom, on June 26, 2017 — the very day the Supreme Court granted Jack’s request to review his wedding-cake case — a lawyer named Autumn Scardina called Masterpiece Cakeshop and “asked Masterpiece Cakeshop to create a custom cake with ‘a blue exterior and a pink interior’ — a cake ‘design’ that, according to the lawyer,” reflected “the fact that [the lawyer] transitioned from male-to-female and that [the lawyer] had come out as transgender.”

Lest anyone wonder whether this request was made in good faith, consider that this same person apparently made a number of requests to Masterpiece Cakeshop. In September 2017, a caller asked Phillips to design a birthday cake for Satan that would feature an image of Satan smoking marijuana. The name “Scardina” appeared on the caller identification. A few days earlier, a person had emailed Jack asking for a cake with a similar theme — except featuring “an upside-down cross, under the head of Lucifer.” This same emailer reminded Phillips that “religion is a protected class.”

On the very day that Phillips won his case at the Supreme Court, a person emailed with yet another deliberately offensive design request:

I’m thinking a three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting. And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9″ black Dildo. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake. I can provide it for you if you don’t have the means to procure one yourself.

And finally, two days later, a person identifying as “Autumn Marie” visited Phillips’s shop and requested a cake featuring a pentagram. According to ADF, “Phillips believes that person was Autumn Scardina.”…”

Meet Autumn Scardina,…

…Esquire!  Any questions?!?  Ms. Scardina doesn’t need a cake…of any design; what she needs is serious psychiatric treatment.

And in the Environmental Moment, as this forward from Watts Up With That? via Jeff Foutch details, at least to Liberals, money’s thicker than oil, as…

Democrats Backtrack on Big Oil Campaign Contribution Embargo

“The Democratic National Committee passed a resolution Friday afternoon that activists say effectively reverses a ban on fossil fuel company donations.

The resolution introduced by DNC Chair Tom Perez states that the party “support[s] fossil fuel workers” and will accept donations from “employers’ political action committees.” It was approved by a 30-2 vote just two months after the committee adopted another resolution prohibiting donations from fossil fuel companies by a unanimous vote.

The new resolution nods to “forward-looking employers” that are “powering America’s all-of-the-above energy economy and moving us towards a future fueled by clean and low-emissions energy technology, from renewables to carbon capture and storage to advanced nuclear technology.”

“I am furious that the DNC would effectively undo a resolution passed just two months ago just as the movement to ban fossil fuel corporate PAC money is growing (and Democrats are winning),” said R.L. Miller, president of the super PAC Climate Hawks Vote, who co-sponsored the original resolution…”

Politics may make strange bedfellows, but a drastic drought in campaign contributions…

…makes for outright hypocrisy.

Besides, Big Oil doesn’t mind being bashed…provided they still rake in the cash.

Meanwhile, on The Lighter Side:

Then there’s this series of pointed memes forwarded by Balls Cotton:

And last, but certainly not least, two of our all-time favorites:

Finally, we’ll call it a week with two more sordid stories straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter.  Case #1: this torrid tale of a Welfare Queen from the still-hopelessly-misnamed City of Brotherly Love:

Philadelphia mom who shelled out $25K cash for lavish prom parties is charged with fraud

What a surprise!

And lastly, Case #2, as FOX News reports…

School ‘pooperintendent’ to receive $100G from district, reports say

“A New Jersey school superintendent, who was arrested in May for allegedly defecating on an athletic field in another district, stands to receive more than $100,000 after negotiating a separation agreement, reports said.

Thomas W. Tramaglini will be paid $61,458 of his remaining $147,500 salary through the end of September, along with severance and more than $20,000 in unused vacation days, NJ.com reported, citing a copy of the agreement the news outlet obtained.

…The former Kenilworth Public Schools superintendent, dubbed the “Pooperintendent of Schools,” was caught after school officials in Holmdel set up surveillance cameras to catch Tramaglini in the act, according to the New York Post. He was arrested May 1 for allegedly defecating in public, lewdness and littering. He was also suspended with pay from his job, according to the Post.

The former superintendent plans to sue the Holmdel Police Department for photographing him and “maliciously” circulating his mugshot for what his attorney called a minor offense, the paper reported. (Good luck with that!)

According to NJ.com, authorities have yet to release a motive behind Tramaglini’s alleged serial defecation.“

We guess they’ve ruled out, “When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.”

Magoo