California’s dead-ass broke, yet the bleeding hearts in Sacramento find this criminal cretin worthy of $100K of additional taxpayer debt; it’s easy when you’re spendin’ other people’s money!
“A 57-year-old convicted killer serving a life sentence has become the first U.S. inmate to receive state-funded sex-reassignment surgery, the prisoner’s attorneys confirmed Friday. California prison officials agreed in August 2015 to pay for the surgery for Shiloh Heavenly Quine, who was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping and robbery for ransom and has no possibility of parole.
…California was legally required to pay for the operation, corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton said.“The 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires that prisons provide inmates with medically necessary treatment for medical and mental health conditions including inmates diagnosed with gender dysphoria,” Thornton said in a written statement.
California corrections officials had fought in court for years to avoid paying for sex-reassignment surgeries. In one high-profile case, the state paroled Michelle-Lael Norsworthy in 2015, just one day before a federal appeals court was to hear her request for state-funded surgery.
Quine told a prison psychologist who recommended her for the operation that it would bring a “drastic, internal completeness.”
…Joyce Hayhoe, a spokeswoman for the federal court-appointed official who controls California’s prison medical care, said the cost of sex-reassignment surgeries could approach $100,000, including procedures and medications before and after the operation.
…A portion of the state’s expense generally is reimbursed by the federal government, Hayhoe said. The percentage varies depending on individual circumstances, but it can cover up to 95% of allowable charges.“
First, we couldn’t care less about what makes a convicted murderer serving life without possibility of parole feel complete. Second, that there are lawyers willing to represent this creature tells us all we need to know about a sizable segment of the legal profession. Third, the 8th Amendment (Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.) says nothing of the sort. Criminal-friendly state and federal courts may say it does, but no ruling which distorts the words and intent of the Founding Fathers beyond any reasonable reality can change the truth.
Is it any wonder America just elected, as Conrad Black so eloquently observed, “for the first time in the country’s history, a person who has never held a public office or senior military command” largely on his promise of ending such politically-correct insanity?!?
Now, here’s a somewhat abbreviated edition of The Gouge!
First up, courtesy of CNSNews.com via Drudge, it’s easy to paint a rosy economic picture when you don’t classify the record number of Americans who’ve stopped even looking for work as “unemployed“:
“…The final jobs report of the Obama presidency, released Friday, shows that the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased by 14,573,000 (18.09 percent) since January 2009, when Obama took office, continuing a long-term trend that began well before Obama was sworn in.
…People over age 16 who are no longer working or even looking for work, for whatever reason (retirement, school, personal preference, or gave up), are counted as not participating in the labor force.
When President Obama took office in January 2009, 80,529,000 Americans were not in the labor force, the highest number on record. That number rose steadily during his two terms, reaching a record 95,055,000 in November 2016, then setting another record (95,102,000) in December.
…During Obama’s two terms in office, the number of employed Americans reached its lowest point – 138,013,000 – in December 2009. Eight years later, in December 2017, 14,098,000 Americans have been added to the employment rolls.
The vast majority of which were either service jobs or part-time employment. With friends like Barry Obama, the American worker hardly need enemies.
Since we’re on the subject of those who don’t need enemies with friends like The Great Dividier, writing at Townhall.com, Mark Davis rightly concludes…
“…Even as they are forced to absorb a hate crime perpetrated by blacks against a white victim, with the additional layer of Trump hatred as a contributing factor, they [The Left] will say something like: “It is unfathomable how people can treat someone like this; there’s no understanding such an attack.”
Are they kidding?The toxic roots of this outrageous crime are on display every day.They are found in the sick and malicious rhetoric that filled the air in reaction to the Trump campaign, that has only intensified since his victory. And it wasn’t only from liberals.
How many people on TV, in elected office…
…, from the stages of shrill rallies, have spread the following damnable lies:
— Donald Trump is a racist.
— Our cops are racist.
— Our country is racist.
Pour this poison into the heads of kids already damaged by the societal dysfunctions around them, and we might wonder why we don’t get videos like this with nauseating regularity.
The animus of the left is on constant display. Black Lives Matter tells America that waves of racist cops are out to kill our black youth. Democrat politicians have maligned Trump as a bigot for pure sport, joined by some unhinged NeverTrumpers.
Astride it all, we have had a President for eight years who has discouraged none of this, while adding his own winking double-talk that makes clear his belief that racism is still rampant in the nation that elected him twice.
So don’t let anyone get away with feigned bewilderment over how this barbaric cruelty happened. The responsibility for it is shared by anyone who has engaged in the slanders that fill the daily talking points of the left…”
The economy can recover, foreign-policy fences mended, Islamic terror more effectively combatted; but the racial divisions Obama-led Liberals have purposefully inflicted upon our country will be far more difficult to repair, particularly given the carefully calculated ignorance bequeathed a significant portion of those most adversely impacted…
…by the Dimocrats through their BLM disinformation and deliberate dumbing-down of our public education system.
Moving on, courtesy of NRO, Kevin Williamson reveals the dirty-little secret of…
“…If you want to keep the preexisting-coverage rule — and Republicans say they do — then you are going to end up with Obamacare, or at least a version of it. It might be a slightly better or slightly worse version, but that is what you will have. There are a few ideas for finessing that problem away, such as creating a series of “high-risk pools” or a single federal high-risk pool for sick people seeking health insurance. What this means is that the sick people without insurance who want it would go into a separate insurance pool full of other people likely to require lots of expensive medical care. Naturally, the premiums in this market would be much higher than in the regular market, meaning that state governments and the federal government would be expected to subsidize them heavily, lest sick people be entirely priced out of the market and we’re right back where we started. But this creates the same moral hazard as the familiar Obamacare system: Why not just wait until you are sick to buy insurance if government is picking up the economic penalty for being in the high-risk pool?
The way to cut this Gordian knot is to treat insurance like insurance. Insurance is not a way to pre-pay for health care, though we insist on treating it as though it is.
Properly understood, insurance is not a health-care product at all: It is a financial product, the purpose of which is to mitigate the risk of incurring large and unexpected costs, whether that is damage to an automobile (your car insurance does not pay for oil changes) or health-care costs. It is necessarily prospective, which is to say, forward-looking. No one can say whether you’ll have a heart attack tomorrow or get brain cancer in 20 years, though our actuaries are really very good at determining how many people out of a million will have a problem like that in any given year, and what it will cost to treat them. But we insist on trying to bend insurance into a retrospective product, as though it were possible to play the odds on something that already has happened. So long as we try to push off the obligation for paying for preexisting conditions onto financial firms — which is what insurance companies are — we are simply using those companies to launder health-care benefits that are in reality publicly financed, in part or in total.
It would make much more sense to do the opposite of what the pollsters would advise: Keep the unpopular mandate — strengthen it — and do away with the popular preexisting-conditions rule, replacing it with stronger regulation protecting people with insurance from losing their coverage once they become sick or grow old.For the people without coverage? Medicaid stinks, but in a reformed version it is the most obvious solution, a way to pay directly for health-care services rather than paying insurance companies to pay for services, as though putting a financial middleman in the equation were going to improve things.
Ultimately, health-care reform that treats insurance as insurance means that Americans will simply pay out-of-pocket for most of their medical needs, with insurance in most cases picking up the cost of catastrophic accidents and illnesses. Empowering consumers to do this means creating a real market with real prices, which simply does not exist now: Try getting three competing quotes on a 2017 Honda Civic and then do the same with an appendectomy and see which market has real prices. That will be a long and difficult reform project, one that will not be achieved through a single piece of legislation, or indeed through legislation alone.
Good health-care reform is not going to be popular, because paying bills is not popular.But so long as we are trying to pass the bill on to someone else, health care will remain a mess.“
Which is why entitlements should be banned as the highly-addictive drugs they are. Williamson makes a good point, one we can only hope isn’t lost upon Republicans looking to replace Obamacare’s unworkable policies and programs…though they likely lack the political courage to face this particular reality.
Meanwhile, on The Lighter Side…
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with some special satire forwarded by Shannon Wood:
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