It’s Monday, May 23rd, 2016…but before we begin, another picture worth well over a thousand words courtesy of Chris Muir and Day by Day:
By the way, as Chris Muir is another celebrated Conservative cartoonists, we trust you’ll join us as we pass along our thoughts and prayers for his father, who is undergoing surgery this week.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
At the top of today’s order, courtesy of David French and unremitting Liberal ignorance, art once more imitates life. First, the art, in the form of an old SNL skit NBC wouldn’t dream of airing today:
Then there’s life, represented by a video we featured a week or so back featuring the delicate little educated idiots being produced by Seattle University…
…as well as most every other college in the country!
For those thinking a safe distance from the public sector provides them practical immunity from the ravages of such political correctness run amok, as this next item from TruthRevolt.org, via Jeff Foutch reveals, you got another think coming:
“This is the government as sovereign, threatening civil penalties… if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to.”
“Welcome to Obama’s America, where the government will provide you a list of approved words to speak and those you must never utter. Any violators will be punished and issued stiff fines.
It would sound like a conspiracy theory if it weren’t true, but it’s already happening in places like New York City and Chicago.
The following are legal requirements made by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights:
The NYCHRL [New York City Human Rights Law] requires employers[, landlords, and all businesses and professionals] to use an [employee’s, tenant’s, customer’s, or client’s] preferred name, pronoun and title (e.g., Ms./Mrs.) regardless of the individual’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual’s identification.
Most individuals and many transgender people use female or male pronouns and titles. Some transgender and gender non-conforming people prefer to use pronouns other than he/him/his or she/her/hers, such as they/them/theirs or ze/hir. [Footnote: Ze and hir are popular gender-free pronouns preferred by some transgender and/or gender non-conforming individuals.] …
Examples of Violations
a. Intentional or repeated refusal to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun or title. For example, repeatedly calling a transgender woman “him” or “Mr.” after she has made clear which pronouns and title she uses …
Covered entities may avoid violations of the NYCHRL by creating a policy of asking everyone what their preferred gender pronoun is so that no individual is singled out for such questions and by updating their systems to allow all individuals to self-identify their names and genders. They should not limit the options for identification to male and female only.
As Eugene Volokh explained:
[T]his isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak.
…And who gives his full blessing to the government forcing its ideology about gender on the rest of the country?
None other than President Obama himself, who recently gave his own decree to the nation’s public schools, threatening litigation and loss of federal funding if students aren’t allowed to enter the bathroom of their choice while under the care of the state.
This is no longer a plot from some fictional dystopia. It’s reality.“
Perhaps because, if the truth be told, this is reality:
We’d dismiss this as yet another blatantly unconstitutional Progressive power grab the courts are certain to overturn. But so was Kelo…Citizens United…and Obamacare. Friends, don’t be afraid; be prepared!
Which brings us to yet another item highlighting fiction-based feelings triumphing over fact…
“The Portland Public Schools board voted last week to ban any materials that cast doubt on climate change, the Portland Tribune reported. According to the resolution passed May 17, the school district must remove any textbooks and other materials that suggest climate change is not occurring or that says human beings are not responsible for it.
“A lot of the text materials are kind of thick with the language of doubt, and obviously the science says otherwise,” said Bill Bigelow, a former Portland public school teacher who worked to present the resolution. Bigelow says textbook publishers are yielding to pressure from fossil fuels companies. “We don’t want kids in Portland learning material courtesy of the fossil fuel industry.”
One commenter to the Portland Tribune story responded to the news, saying, “I have never seen a case for homeschooling more clearly put forward. This is further proof that public schools are not interested in education, only political indoctrination.”
A petition, meanwhile, circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) currently lists nearly 32,000 signers, including 9,000 Ph.D.s, who say, “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”…”
We refer you to our Quote of the Day from Jonah Goldberg. Yes, the science is soooo settled, the Environazis need to stifle all dissent…in any form or forum!
For more on The Left’s tenuous, tortured grasp of the truth, we turn to NRO and the latest from Kevin Williamson, who notes that in the Progressive Pantheon of the Pretend…
“…The gun-control policies favored by Democratic politicians and left-wing advocacy groups do almost nothing to address crime, because they are not intended to.Here the economist Tyler Cowen’s bleak take on politics — that the goal is not solving social problems but lowering or raising the status of certain social groups — is particularly relevant. The Left is primarily urban, dominated by academics and intellectuals, and culturally rooted in coastal cosmopolitanism, and, as such, it is composed of people who view with varying degrees of confusion and detestation American’s gun culture, which is rooted in rural life, particularly in hunting and in agriculture, and which is associated with a political culture that resents and resists domination and direction by coastal elites.
The main effect of our heavy regulation of firearms is to harass, inconvenience, and humiliate licensed firearms dealers and those who do business with them. That is fine by the Left, and it is fine by law-enforcement bureaucrats who enforce firearms regulations: A federally licensed gun dealership has a fixed address, regular hours of operation, and tons of paperwork, which makes policing it a heck of a lot easier than chasing some fleet-footed 16-year-old criminal through a neighborhood he grew up in and you didn’t. Thus we have the paradox of very strict enforcement of gun laws against the generally law-abiding while federal prosecutors (and locals, too) responsible for places such as South Chicago will rarely prosecute a straw-buyer case and lock up someone who is actually enabling violent street crime.
This occasions a familiar kind of progressive goalpost-moving: There is no evidence that gun-control laws contribute meaningfully to the reduction of violent street crime. (It matters whether you study “gun deaths” or gun-related homicides and assaults, because the large majority of gun deaths in the United States are suicides.)Our contemporary progressives like to posture as nonideological pragmatists who simply consider the evidence and pursue “what works,” right until the moment the evidence fails to support them, at which point doing what Democrats desire becomes a moral question instead of an empirical one. Once the evidence has been exhausted, we get: “It’s for the children,” “It is a moral imperative,” “If it saves one life,” etc.
Unless the question is stop-and-frisk…”
Or any other policy which has ever actually reduced crime! But never let it be said fact, truth or reality stops The Left from the swift completion of their Progressive policy pronouncements:
“You realize this has about as much chance of impacting gun-related crime as giving yourself a 9mm enema?!?”
In a related item of fraud, waste and abuse of the truth, writing at Best of the Web, James Taranto details another example of Progressives’ increasing detachment from reality:
Your Tax Dollars at Work
Members of the “University of Iowa community” gathered the other day “to discuss social justice issues” in the aftermath of the latest hate-crime hoax, reports the Cedar Rapids Gazette:
Georgina Dodge, UI chief diversity officer and associate vice president, opened the event by sharing her personal thoughts and feelings related to UI freshman Marcus Owens’ discredited report that he was attacked by three white men using racial slurs.
“When I heard that Marcus Owens had been attacked in an alley by three white men, it impacted by [sic] relationship with this community,” Dodge said. “Not in a good way.”
Dodge said she’s always felt relatively safe here. She would go running with her dog and never thought to look over her shoulder.
“But after that incident, I started looking over my shoulder a lot. A whole lot,” she said. “I found myself getting a little jumpy.”
Dodge said she’s been processing that change in her relationship with this community…
“Even though I have different news now, I’m still processing,” Dodge said. “Because I know what kind of world we live in.And I ask myself, ‘Wow, why did this happen?’ Sometimes I wonder, ‘What just happened?’”
The student newspaper, the Daily Iowan, reported in 2010 that Dodge had been hired at a starting salary of $200,000 a year. If anyone should be wondering what just happened, it’s the taxpayer.
Since we’re on the subject of your tax dollars at work…in direct contravention of the Constitution and common sense, the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel updates us on the latest developments in…
‘How much has really changed?’ a judge asks. Answer: not much. The scandal goes on.
“Amid the drama that is today’s presidential race, serious subjects are getting short shrift. No one is happier about this than Barack Obama. And no agency within that president’s administration is more ecstatic than the Internal Revenue Service.
That tax authority’s targeting of conservative nonprofits ranks as one of the worst federal scandals in modern history. It is topped only by the outrage that no one has been held to account.Or perhaps by the news that the targeting continues to this day.
That detail became clear in an extraordinary recent court hearing, in front of a panel of judges for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The paired cases in the hearing wereLinchpins of Liberty, et al. v. United States of America, et al. and True the Vote Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service, et al. They involve several conservative nonprofits—there are 41 in Linchpin—that were, as they said, rounded up and “branded” by the IRS. The groups are still suffering harm, and they want justice.
…The hearing also showed the degree to which the IRS has doubled down on its outrageous revisionist history, and its excuses. IRS lawyers again claimed that the whole targeting affair came down to bad “training” and bad “guidance.” They blew off a Government Accountability Office report that last year found the IRS still had procedures that would allow it to unfairly select organizations for examinations based on religious or political viewpoint. The lawyers’ argument: We wouldn’t do such a thing.Again. Trust us.
More incredibly, the IRS team claimed that the fault for some of the scandal rests with the conservative groups, for not pushing back hard enough during the targeting. In response to complaints that the groups had been forced to hand over confidential information (information the IRS now refuses to destroy), one agency lawyer retorted: “They didn’t have to give the information to the IRS if they thought it was inappropriate, they could have said so.”Really.
…At one point, an incredulous Judge Sentelle noted that the IRS might be more believable if it had ever shown “a bit more contrition.” He said: “The Court would have to be awfully ignorant not to recognize that there has likely been an egregious violation of the First Amendment rights of American citizens by the IRS, and the IRS to this day seems very resistant to acknowledgment of that.”
An IRS lawyer rolled out the defense used by former agency official Lois Lerner that the targeting was just the unfortunate use of “inappropriate” criteria, but Judge Sentelle reminded the lawyer of the IRS’s vindictiveness.He noted that on one occasion the IRS simply shelved the application of an organization that had sued it. The agency “came to Court not having done anything to eliminate” the problem, he said, so “It’s just hard to find the IRS to be an agency we can trust, isn’t it?”
Judge Sentelle said there is a “pretty good case” that “egregious violations of the Constitution” had been committed, and he dared an IRS lawyer to “stand there with a straight face” and say otherwise. Judge Ginsburg, who spent the hearing catching out the IRS’s conflicting statements, at one point simply asked: “How much has really changed?”
Answer: not much. It was good news, then, that the House Judiciary Committee recently announced it will hold two hearings to examine the conduct of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen in this matter. Donald Trump, as the presumptive GOP nominee, could do worse than to use his megaphone to draw attention to the hearings. The IRS scandal needs to remain a story.“
House Oversight chair Jason Chaffetz (featured above in our Video of the Day ripping ICE director Sarah Saldana for releasing over 86,000 criminal aliens back onto the streets of America rather than deporting them) is threatening not only to impeach Lying John, but denying him his government pension. Now that’s hitting these lying bureaucrats where it hurts!
Had John Boehner the testicular fortitude to deal with Lois Lerner in a similar fashion, she’d have gone straight to the House jail…no passing “Go”, no $200…with no hope of seeing the light of day, let alone her retirement until she gave up her partners in corruption. Unfortunately for America, the Constitution and the truth, Boehner doesn’t have the balls God gave a beagle.
And in the Follow-Up segment, Breitbart‘s Milo weighs in on what essentially turned out to be political cover for Facebook and a photo-op for the…”Conservatives” who attended:
“A delegation of Establishment conservative types descended on Silicon Valley today to make Facebook look good.
…I’m sure it wasn’t these conservative figures’ intent merely to assist in Facebook’s marketing efforts, but at this point, if maliciousness is ruled out as a motivation, extreme stupidity is the only possible remaining explanation. (Or an insatiable desire for self-promotion!)
That, and perhaps a touch of pathetic egotism.I think many of those invited are a little starstruck by Zuck. After all, he’s the millennial billionaire CEO of the largest social network on the planet, and has spent the last decade making old media irrelevant, a point made plain by the amount of “I’m on my way!!!!!!” Facebook posts posted by attendees today.
It’s hard to imagine Truman posting selfies on the way to Potsdam, or really any serious person about to engage in an endeavour that might affect the course of the national election. But hey, it’s current year, and all bets are off.
A meeting where Facebook refuses to admit they did anything wrong, held purely to make the company look good? I’m not sure, but I can’t remember the last time it was an “honor” to be invited as window-dressing by a corporation’s public relations department. Cucked by Zuck. How embarrassing!
It just goes to show how far the media has fallen. I’ve written for years about how craven and credulous the tech press is. But I never imagined that the great and good of conservative media would be just as eager to pay obeisance to private companies.Sad!…”
And though Politico reports Tucker Carlson remembers…
“…“I went to that meeting expecting Beck to cry, rend his garments while quoting James Madison, but that’s not at all what happened. He began the most extended assiduous suck-up I think I’ve ever seen a grown man commit. He acted like he was auditioning to be Mark Zuckerberg’s manservant — it was awe-inspiring,’ Carlson said. “I don’t know what his agenda is; it’s either he’s looking to put his tanking Web properties up for sale or he just can’t help himself. There’s a billionaire there, so he sniffs the throne.”
In April, Beck’s company The Blaze laid off about 40 employees and announced that it was relocating its operations almost entirely to Texas, where it is headquartered.
…In a post after the meeting, Beck offered up high praise for Zuckerberg and his team, saying he “was convinced that Facebook is behaving appropriately and trying to do the right thing. They were humble, open, and listened intently to everyone in the room.”…”
…as evidenced by his post-meeting comments with Beck’s equally-starstruck female equivalent, Dana Perino…
…Tucker didn’t exactly take Zuckerberg and company to task for what was obviously political theater.
Here’s the juice: particularly in light of the following…
…it’s our opinion anyone who participated in Facebook’s fanciful farce is either a…
…or more concerned with personal profit, position and power than Conservative principles. Attendees can take their pick.
Speaking of suckers, one’s the subject of the first item on The Lighter Side…
We’re just not certain who’s the sucker: Obama…or the Kool-Aid drinking Americans who elected the Islamofascist liar twice!
Finally, we’ll call it a day with yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter:
Angry shoplifter told cops, ‘Everyone steals from this store. Why are you picking on me?’
After being arrested Friday for stealing items from a jeweler in a Florida mall, Prolancia Aquila Turner, 26, was pissed.(Hopefully at her mother…for her name!)
Not at herself, of course, for hiding earrings valued at $12.50 in the waistband of her pants.Instead, the “crying and angry” Turner, 26, was miffed because, as she told police, “Everyone steals from this store. Why are you picking on me?”
…Turner’s rap sheet includes two other theft arrests, both in 2015. It is unknown whether she considers those collars equally unjust as her latest bust.
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