It’s Monday, March 26th, 2018…and here’s The Gouge!

After reading about and watching the mass display of ignorance and emotion which took Progressives by storm Saturday…

…we reacted much as the Organians did when confronted with the attitudes of Captain Kirk and Commander Cor in the first 15 seconds of this Star Trek clip:

What follows is a spoof…

…but it accurately represents the level of understanding the vast majority of those who marched possess of firearms.  As we’ve noted before, while everyone is entitled to their opinion, they are in no way entitled to their own facts…

Which rivals the rate of fire of a fully-automatic MP5; not hardly!

Most importantly, uninformed opinion, particularly when guided by raw emotion and utter ignorance, should never form the basis for public policy.

But neither “uninformed” nor “ignorant” even begins to describe the opinions the high-schoolers who, as you’ll recall, only…

Consider the following thoughts voiced by several Parkland students: first, the reaction of 19-year-old Tyra Hemans to the school’s new security requirement mandating all backpacks must be clear:

““I’m not happy with it. Why are you punishing me for one person’s actions? We know what the root of the problem is: lawmakers don’t want to make the gun laws strong enough.” Hemans believes a clear backpack violates students’ privacy…”

Media darling David Hogg offered a similar line of “thinking”, allowing his concern over the possibility female students might be embarrassed by the scrutiny of feminine products in their clear backpacks to trump his advocacy for meaningful measures to promote school safety:

“It’s unnecessary, it’s embarrassing for a lot of the students and it makes them feel isolated and separated from the rest of American school culture where they’re having essentially their First Amendment rights infringed upon because they can’t freely wear whatever backpack they want…”

Like his undoubted and similarly inexperienced idol, Hogg has, literally overnight, added a complete command of the Constitution to his firearms expertise.  We can only conclude the concept of irony…

…must have been dropped from the curriculum at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.

While no more informed or thoughtful than her compatriots, we at least have to give Parkland’s Delaney Tarr points for honesty:

“When they give us that inch, that bump stock ban, we will take a mile.“

And, as with his signing of what the editors at NRO accurately describe below as “the Omnibus disgrace”, The Donald’s more than willing to accommodate them.

In a related item, writing at Townhall.com, Kevin McCullough memorializes…

The Stupidity of the ‘March For Our Lives‘

 

Since Sandy Hook, 400 people have been killed in school shootings, while almost 2,000,000 babies have been aborted; so much for equal rights under the law!

“…Saturday’s march was to be the pinnacle of this outrage movement that has largely been propped up by false pretense. (In a fashion similar to the equally falsified Black Lives Matter movement.)

These young people—immediately thrown into one of the most manipulated controversies of our time—are angry, opportunistic and—just a month after their classmates were needlessly lost—now instant celebrities.

Even though they have little more than a junior high level of education under their belt. (C’mon, ignorance is bliss!) The political left, driven by a leftist media, and financed by uber-rich and hard-left celebrities are willing to use them, and to continue to use them to advance their socialist utopia ideals. (One of the primary ideas of which has always included disarming the masses.)

Even though first year grad school students have literally multiple times the actual knowledge on the issues pertaining to the social science of guns, their effects, and the good and bad attributed to their owners, the lazy media continue to treat these five kids as though they have PHD’s.

If anyone questions it, the virtue signaling begins.

But to what good?

The moralizing and lecturing from these manipulated teens has gone roughly as far as it will go. David Hogg doesn’t believe it of course. Hence his continued threats towards legislators in this election cycle promising to oust those who do “nothing.” (More on Mr. Hogg later.)

Catch Hogg in a more intimate setting (like the video that went viral late this week) and you see a much less measured maniac, cursing vulgarity with hubris unchecked basically advocating that teens shouldn’t just be in charge of gun policy, but even control of all internet devices. Because… parents are stupid. (Marxist much?)

Never mind that the March offered no concrete plan to make our schools safe. (To the contrary, as detailed above, it refused to even consider any!) It couldn’t. That would require a focus on the actual schools, their current security set-ups, and asking questions like, “In the side by side of two school shootings in Florida and Maryland, why were the outcomes so different?”

Instead Hogg and his belligerent band of media hyped know-nothings spout their misunderstood self-researched “facts,” lead chants of “enough is enough,” and then play the untouchables when someone calls them on their inaccuracies.

It is not a “personal attack” on these kids to say that they are “misinformed, arrogant, and misguided.” It’s a statement of fact. And the moment they accepted a litany of interviews for CNN their ideas became fair game…”

For more on the increasingly disturbing David Hogg, we turn to this recital of the most recent revelations regarding his rather curious past courtesy of Tim Hains and Real Clear Politics:

David Hogg: Parkland HS Has Become A Prison; “Hundreds” Of Racist Police

 

“Marjory Stoneman Douglas student and #NeverAgain activist David Hogg told Axios founder Mike Allen at an event in Washington on Friday that his high school feels “like a prison” since the shooting last month, with “hundreds of police officers” patrolling the campus.

He said this is a problem because the police are racist against black students: “What I’m very concerned about is the racial disparity between white and black students. For example, black students get suspended at a rate three times higher than white students.” (This couldn’t be because they commit suspension-worthy offenses at a rate three times higher than White students?!?)

“When you have all these new police officers and resource officers coming into schools, what I’m worried is going to happen is we’re going to increase the school-to-prison pipeline, which disproportionately affects students of color and lower social status,” Hogg warned…”

In the interest of full exposure, David Hogg just ain’t as he’s being presented:

Not to mention, were they at all honest, Hogg and his handlers would have to admit, as Bruce Bialosky records at Townhall.com…

Fake Crime Statistics Lead to 17 Murdered in Parkland

 

“…It seems that every day more revelations come out about the collapse of the system in Parkland that failed to stop the murderer from roaming the halls of a high school with a gun he should never have had an opportunity to legally acquire.  Yet the tale of failure starts way before the fated day he entered the school.

This starts with the Superintendent of Broward County, Robert Runcie, who arrived in his position from Chicago where he worked with Arne Duncan.  Mr. Duncan went from there to serve as President Obama’s Secretary of Education for seven years.  Runcie stated, in October 2011, “I arrived in the district and, shortly after that, began to dive into the data on student performance in the district.  We quickly recognized that Broward had a high number of arrests, suspensions and expulsions. In fact, the highest number in the state. We realized we were not going to be able to create equitable opportunities for success in our school system if our students are not in school.”

Runcie went about redesigning the system to reduce arrests and expulsions. By his own words they identified 13 violations of the code of conduct that were nonviolent, misdemeanor offenses. That is not the case as some of the crimes were violent misdemeanors like what is called “affray.”  The school system went about erasing these crimes from existing.  We all know what happens when individuals are not disciplined for low-level crimes.  They often move on to other low-level crimes or more aggressive anti-social behavior.

…How did Broward make it look like matters had improved under their new policy?  They were no longer reporting misbehavior and restricting suspensions; thus all the crime statistics fell.  It became a self-fulfilling prophecy – no crime reported; everything “improved.”

…Teachers were no longer reporting incidents because they were afraid of being branded as racist since many of these incidents involved minority students.

Matters are even worse than originally reported by Eden.  Paul Sperry, noted author and investigative journalist, reported just this week that Runcie and his team spent extensive school resources mainlining individuals of school age who had been convicted of violent misdemeanors and/or felonies back into the school system. As Sperry wrote: “Cassandra Evans, Broward County’s chief juvenile probation officer, has issued a general warning that juveniles transitioning out of secure detention have a high recidivism rate. This population is highly at risk of reoffending within the first 45 days [of release].”

…This Broward policy spread throughout the country.  Eden told me the suspension rate in Washington, DC, decreased by 40%.  Principals stopped even reporting suspensions to cook the numbers.

One of the people impacted by this new policy was the murderer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.  Because of the new reporting (or non-reporting) system, the murderer had 21 incidents at the school that were not referred to the police.  The police then were called to his home 39 times. Not once was this person taken to the police station and charged with anything and kept overnight.  If just once he had been, he would not have passed his background check and he would never have been able to acquire a legal weapon of any kind. 

Long before the failures of the FBI and the sheriff’s department that have been so broadly reported, this incident could have been stopped — but Superintendent Runcie set off on his social engineering.  Given the opportunity he would certainly talk about all of those who have benefited from his program.

Here is the problem with that.  Every time people speak of issues like gun control, they will point to “if we can just save one life.” (Except for clear backpacks!) Here 17 lives were lost because of a failed social policy that has spread throughout the country.  Unfortunately, the current Department of Education has not reversed this letter like they did with the Dear Colleague letter to colleges on Tile IX. It is our understanding the matter is currently under review.

Quite evidently if the Parkland murderer had not acquired a long gun to kill the people at the high school, he would have acquired illegal weapons or built a bomb or driven a vehicle into a crowd of students.  He was a ticking time bomb that was left to fester by a school system and local law enforcement and thus never dealt with through the legal system.

This weekend, students from Parkland fanned out across the country to preach gun control and speak at gun control rallies.  Their ignorance of the policies that were put in place by social engineering bureaucrats that directly led to this massacre hovers over them as they preach of false gods.

The question becomes: Since the implementation of these policies and the issuance of the Dear Colleague letter to public school systems, how many other ticking time bombs are out there ready to explode? “

We wrap up our coverage of Saturday’s mass insanity with this set of memes forwarded by Balls Cotton:

Last, but certainly not least, there’s our personal favorite:

Next up, as mentioned earlier, the editors at NRO detail, in all its ignominy…

The Omnibus Disgrace

 

The omnibus spending bill was crafted in secret and will be passed under pressure; raises discretionary spending as the national debt grows; and fails to deliver on any major GOP priorities except increased defense spending. What might turn out to be the signature achievement of unified Republican government this year is the sort of legislation that would have been right at home in the Obama administration.

Start with the process. The 2,232-page bill was written in secret by leaders of both parties, unveiled Wednesday night, and passed by the House this afternoon. If the Senate doesn’t pass the budget by Friday, the government will shut down. So much for the 72-hour rule Republicans sought back during Barack Obama’s first term. The procedural abuse means that many lawmakers are voting up-or-down on a bill they didn’t write and had no opportunity to debate. (Or even read, let alone comprehend!) It adds up to a breakdown of the budgetary process, a particular embarrassment for Congress given that passing budgets is one of the few duties that it still discharges with regularity.

The massive, 13 percent increase in discretionary spending was prefigured by the agreement on budget caps that congressional leaders reached in February. It remains remarkable that, even with control over the branches of elected government, the GOP cannot secure funding for the military without dangling such unnecessary spending for domestic programs.

The specifics of the spending aren’t much better. The bill provides funding for immigration enforcement both internally and at the border, but the devil is in the details. Set aside that the dollar amount falls far short of what the Trump administration had requested: There are onerous restrictions even on the money that is appropriated, limiting, for instance, the number of illegal aliens that Immigration and Customs Enforcement can detain. Even with the leverage of DACA, Republicans failed to meaningfully tighten the immigration system.

On health care, the hope of deregulating the individual insurance market to counteract rising premiums has been dashed. It seems increasingly likely that the GOP has given up on repealing and replacing Obamacare and is unable even to reduce its continuing burdens on the public.

Meanwhile, the $21 billion in infrastructure funding is not offset with permitting reforms that could spur private investment. We welcome the defense spending, and the funds devoted to combating the opioid epidemic might make a difference. But if this bill winds up being the only major piece of legislation Congress passes in 2018, this year will be a legislative waste.

During the Obama administration, we argued that the federal budgetary process had become an exercise in reckless liberal overreach. The federal government was abusing the budgetary process, we said, wasting money and expanding itself at the expense of civil society. The hope was that once the GOP gained power, it would act with procedural integrity, begin to try to return the government to its proper role, and deliver significant conservative victories on budgetary policy.

Instead, Republicans are poised to pass an omnibus bill that, with the exception of the defense spending, is an embarrassment and a disgrace.

As Laura Ingraham noted, “This was Christmas for Democrats“.

Unfortunately, as this headline from the WSJ indicates, the Tweeter-in-Chief was also AWOL:

Donald Trump Signs Spending Bill After Threatening to Veto It

The $1.3 trillion measure passed Congress this week

 

“…“As a matter of a national security, I’ve signed this omnibus budget bill,” Mr. Trump said, before quickly adding that there were “a lot of things I’m unhappy about in this bill.”

Apparently, as the Journal also reported…

“The bill passed the House on Thursday and the Senate early Friday. Most lawmakers then left Washington for a two-week recess, operating under the assumption that he would sign the bill before the government’s funding expires at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.“

So get their useless, lazy, overspending asses back in town and back to work!

Here’s the juice: if you’re reading this blog, you likely realize the stakes in November, as well as understanding the realities of Washington.  But John Q. Trump-supporter…not the true Trumpeteers, but the average Joes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and similar environs who ensured The Donald’s margin of victory in the Electoral College, doesn’t!

He and/or she is going to look at the results of giving Trump and the Republicans a chance and see not…

…not tens of thousands of retracted regulations, but rather surrender on almost every front: from ObamaCare to gun control; from putting the brakes on completely out-of-control government spending to controlling our southern border.  Sorry, but tax cuts and an increase in funding for America’s Military only goes so far in getting out the vote.

As Chris Muir notes, apparently we’re back to us…

…versus them, as Trump is so loose a cannon one cannot depend upon which direction he will fire.  And yes, given the same choice, we would again vote for him over Hillary.  But Hillary won’t be on the ballot in 2018…or 2020!

Meanwhile, writing at his Private Papers, Victor Davis Hanson offers his thoughts and wisdom regarding…

Our Long History of Misjudging North Korea

 

“…What have we learned about North Korea in the past 65 years? North Korea’s cunning usually trumps America’s ideals of fair play and self-confidence. Empty threats do not work. Appeasement with infusions of food, cash, and fuel makes things worse.

China finds its North Korea client useful. Russia is usually against anything we are for. South Korea appeases North Korea when it senses U.S. weakness. It stands firm only when America does.

What should Trump do after seven decades of North Korean aggression?

Ratchet up the embargo of North Korea. Do not give it any aid — no matter the pleas and threats. Put more pressure on China. Do not barter with Pyongyang until it is proven that it has no more nukes.“

Though we’re happy to report with a high level of certainty John Bolton agrees with Hanson on every point.  Now, if only Trump will heed his advice.

And on The Lighter Side…

Finally, we’ll call it a day with another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter:

Indiana police catch ‘Hellcat’ speeder doing 160 mph

 

“The Indiana State Police this week arrested a man who was driving like a bat out of hell…in a Hellcat. Trooper Dustin Egger spotted the bright red Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat speeding and weaving through traffic on the Indiana State Toll road near LaPorte, and engaged it in a pursuit.

According to the official report on the incident, Egger quickly reached his Dodge Charger Pursuit car’s restricted top speed of 150 mph, but still couldn’t catch up to the 707 hp Hellcat, which can hit 199 mph. Eggert radioed for help intercepting it, but before anybody arrived, the Hellcat got stuck behind two semis that were driving side by side on the two-lane highway and finally pulled over for him.

…The driver was from Wisconsin and identified as J. Jesus Duran Sandoval. He reportedly had an expired driver’s license and admitted to Eggert that he was going a little over 160 mph and “just trying to get to Maryland,”…”

“Trying to get to Maryland“?!?  That makes him crazy, to boot!

Magoo