It’s Friday, March 30th, 2018…but before we begin, check out this tweet from an organization Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan just gave $500,000,000 of your hard-earned tax dollars:

An crime against humanity to which the incomparable Stilton Jarlsberg offered this pointed response:

Since we’re on the subject of those headed to Hell…

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, G. Trevor, Lord High King of all the Vietors, forwarded this article Charles W. Cooke penned at NRO back on August 27, 2015, and which is more relevant today than when he wrote it:

An Open Rant Aimed at Those Who Would Repeal the Second Amendment

Talk is cheap, but persuading Americans to surrender their rights will be expensive, difficult, and time-consuming.

 

“…you damn, dirty ape!”

“…When the likes of Rob Delaney and Bill Maher and Keith Ellison say that we need to get rid of the Second Amendment, they are not speaking in a vacuum but reflecting the views of a small but vocal portion of the American population. And they mean it.

That being so, here’s the million-dollar question: What the hell are they waiting for? Go on, chaps. Bloody well do it.

Seriously, try it. Start the process. Stop whining about it on Twitter, and on HBO, and at the Daily Kos. Stop playing with some Thomas Jefferson quote you found on Google. Stop jumping on the news cycle and watching the retweets and viral shares rack up. Go out there and begin the movement in earnest. Don’t fall back on excuses. Don’t play cheap motte-and-bailey games. And don’t pretend that you’re okay with the Second Amendment in theory, but you’re just appalled by the Heller decision. You’re not. Heller recognized what was obvious to the amendment’s drafters, to the people who debated it, and to the jurists of their era and beyond: That “right of the people” means “right of the people,” as it does everywhere else in both the Bill of Rights and in the common law that preceded it. A Second Amendment without the supposedly pernicious Heller “interpretation” wouldn’t be any impediment to regulation at all. It would be a dead letter. It would be an effective repeal. It would be the end of the right itself. In other words, it would be exactly what you want! Man up. Put together a plan, and take those words out of the Constitution.

…This will involve hard work, of course. You can’t just sit online and preen to those who already agree with you. No siree. Instead, you’ll have to go around the states — traveling and preaching until the soles of your shoes are thin as paper. You’ll have to lobby Congress, over and over and over again. You’ll have to make ads and shake hands and twist arms and cut deals and suffer all the slings and arrows that will be thrown in your direction. You’ll have to tell anybody who will listen to you that they need to support you; that if they disagree, they’re childish and beholden to the “gun lobby”; that they don’t care enough about children; that their reverence for the Founders is mistaken; that they have blood on their goddamn hands; that they want to own firearms only because their penises are small and they’re not “real men.” And remember, you can’t half-ass it this time. You’re not going out there to tell these people that you want “reform” or that “enough is enough.” You’re going there to solicit their support for removing one of the articles within the Bill of Rights. Make no mistake: It’ll be unpleasant strolling into Pittsburgh or Youngstown or Pueblo and telling blue-collar Democrat after blue-collar Democrat that he only has his guns because he’s not as well endowed as he’d like to be. It’ll be tough explaining to suburban families that their established conception of American liberty is wrong. You might even suffer at the polls because of it. But that’s what it’s going to take. So…

Start now. Off you go.

…And when you’ve done all that and your vision is inked onto parchment, you’ll need to enforce it. No, not in the namby-pamby, eh-we-don’t-really-want-to-fund-it way that Prohibition was enforced. I mean enforce it — with force.

…You’re going to need a plan.

A state-by-state, county-by-county, street-by-street, door-to-door plan. A detailed roadmap to abolition that involves the military and the police and a whole host of informants — and, probably, (undoubtedly!) a hell of a lot of blood, too. Sure, the ACLU won’t like it, especially when you start going around poorer neighborhoods. Sure, there are probably between 20 and 30 million Americans who would rather fight a civil war than let you into their houses. Sure, there is no historical precedent in America for the mass confiscation of a commonly owned item — let alone one that was until recently constitutionally protected. Sure, it’s slightly odd that you think that we can’t deport 11 million people but we can search 123 million homes. But that’s just the price we have to pay. Times have changed. It has to be done: For the children; for America; for the future. Hey hey, ho ho, the Second Amendment has to go. Let’s do this thing.

When do you get started?”

Here’s the juice: as Cooke alludes and as Trevor recently observed, what Progressives are really after is the enforced registration by law-abiding American citizens of something legal, while at the same time opposing the registration of non-citizens who are in the country illegally, and thus, by definition, criminals, as this next item by Lauretta Brown writing at Townhall.com details:

DNC Chairman Perez Says Putting Citizenship Question on 2020 Census Is for ‘Voter Suppression‘

 

“Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez joined his fellow Democrats  Tuesday in condemning the Trump Administration’s decision to reinstate the citizenship question on the 2020 census. Perez claimed it was a move aimed at “voter suppression.” (A rather curious argument, since by law non-citizens CANNOT VOTE!!!)

“They want to change it to count the number of U.S. citizens so that they can engage in very not subtle voter suppression,” he told MSNBC’s Katy Tur. “That is illegal and that is totally inconsistent with what the North Star of the census in Republican and Democratic administrations have been.”

“This is just another divide-and-conquer effort,” Perez emphasized. He called it “a first cousin of these voter ID laws sought to make sure that African Americans and Latinos can’t vote.”…”

Wake up and smell the hypocrisy, America.

Meanwhile, as Bill McGurn relates at the WSJ, the second-biggest threat to the Founders’ Republic is the party purported to be wearing white hats: 

Lois Lerner’s Last Laugh

If Congress did its job, nobody would be talking about another special counsel.

 

John Boehner had the power to imprison Lerner in the House jail in perpetuity, but…

…creatures of the swamp always protect their kin!

“Just after Labor Day 2016, when the U.S. presidential race was entering full swing, columnist George F. Will urged Congress to undertake a seemingly futile gesture: He wanted the House to impeach John Koskinen, commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.

Mr. Koskinen had taken over as head of the IRS after it had been exposed for singling out for mistreatment conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. He lied to Congress when he said he had produced all of Lois Lerner’s emails, allowed documents under subpoena to be destroyed, and generally behaved in a way that helped ensure there would be no hard consequences for the abuses. Though Mr. Koskinen had only a few months left on the job, Mr. Will argued that impeaching him might help Congress restore its much diminished standing as a coequal branch of government.

…Ask yourself this: Is it likely our federal agencies would be so haughty about Congress and its subpoenas if Mr. Koskinen had been impeached?

So instead of whingy calls for another special counsel, a Congress that behaved as a branch of government coequal to the presidency would use its own powers to force oversight on resisting federal officials. Even if this might ultimately include impeaching FBI Director Christopher Wray.“

Our criticism of John Boehner’s political cowardice is not misplaced.  As USA Today recorded after Congress found Lerner in contempt, the former Speaker did in fact possess the power to arrest, try and imprison her.  The only thing Boehner lacked was…

…the will to do so.

Instead, as the WSJ explains, on his last day in office, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and Obama acolyte Ron Machen “informed the House of Representatives that he would not file charges on its formal contempt citation” against Lerner.

The Journal‘s recounting of this Progressive parody of justice, which required Republican complicity, is worth recounting:

“To review: Ms. Lerner was summoned to the House on May 22, 2013, to answer questions about her role in the IRS’s politically biased review of Tea Party nonprofit group applications for tax-exempt status.

She began her testimony with a statement recounting her career, reprising the scandal and proclaiming her innocence. She ended by saying: “I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws, I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.” Only after she offered this long defense did she claim her right not to incriminate herself by citing the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer questions.

House lawyers determined that, in making that statement, Ms. Lerner had forfeited her right to remain silent. The House on May 7, 2014 held her in contempt of Congress and sent the citation to Mr. Machen.

The law clearly explains that the U.S. Attorney’s only “duty” “shall be” to “bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.” Mr. Machen instead sat on the contempt citation for 11 months, and on March 31 sent Speaker John Boehner a letter explaining he’d unilaterally decided not to investigate Ms. Lerner. 

According to Mr. Machen’s rationale, Ms. Lerner’s statement made only “general claims of innocence” that did not forfeit her Fifth Amendment rights to refuse to answer questions. To reach this conclusion, Mr. Machen had to willfully ignore that Ms. Lerner, in her statement, rebutted specific accusations against her.“

Are we the only one who’s beginning to sense…

…a pattern here?!?

Speaking of patterns, as Jim Freeman notes at Best of the Web, the recent omnibus funding abortion is yet another example of birds of a profligate feather flocking together:

The Trump-Pelosi-Ryan-Schumer-McConnell Spending Caucus

Does anybody in Washington understand what happens when interest rates rise?

 

“Per two senior administration officials, Trump continued to rail privately about the omnibus bill,” tweets Maggie Haberman of the New York Times today. If true, he’s certainly not the only one. But unlike most Americans, the President had the power to stop it.

Keep in mind, though our politicians, even those supposedly dedicated to draining the swamp don’t, a 2% increase in interest rates increases the federal deficit by $400 billion; and if rates were 5% higher, the annual federal deficit rises by a full $1 trillion per year.

In a related from NRO, just because Jonah Goldberg is a Never-Trumper doesn’t diminish the accuracy of his assessment that…

Trump Is Not Blameless in the Spending-Bill Disaster

It’s not true that Trump was tricked or betrayed into signing the omnibus.

 

“President Trump signed the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending deal on Friday, averting another government shutdown. Written largely in secret and passed without any time to read its 2,232 pages, the bill violated pretty much everything the GOP had promised about reforming the process of legislating.

But the sausage was even uglier than the sausage-making. For conservatives, with the exception of a large increase in defense spending, the bill is a hot mess. It raises discretionary spending 13 percent, advances almost no GOP domestic priorities while fulfilling many Democratic ones. There’s a pittance for border security and some new fencing, but nothing for the president’s coveted “big, beautiful wall.”

It was reportedly this fact that prompted Trump to tweet a veto threat on Friday morning, sending White House and Hill staffers scrambling.

Then, in a shambolic press conference cum signing ceremony later that day, he grudgingly said he’d sign what he called “crazy” legislation. But, he added, he would “never” sign another bill like this again. The key message of the day: It’s not my fault!

So whose fault was it? Those backstabbing blackguards of the Beltway.

“Total betrayal by the Senate and House leadership,” said Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, one of Trump’s most reliable unofficial spokeswomen. “The president and the people who voted for him have been betrayed by Speaker Paul Ryan and Leader Mitch McConnell. And the people in Kentucky and Wisconsin need to make sure that these guys are defeated in the next election so this president can carry on the agenda that we elected him to do.”

Pirro went on: “Folks, I want to be real clear. This is not on Donald Trump. This is on the leadership of the Republican party, the very people this president should be able to count on. In truth, the president is surrounded by inept, incompetent warriors. And this bill is a reflection of just that.”

It’s interesting when people who insist that Trump is the greatest negotiator in history and the most farsighted three-dimensional chess player since Commander Spock also insist that he got rolled.

There’s just one problem: It’s a lie. Or, to be more charitable, it’s untrue, even if those saying it believe it (in some cases, no doubt, because that’s what Trump tells them).

A source who was involved in drafting the bill tells me that the White House was in the loop on the negotiations. Trump’s legislative-affairs director, Marc Short, signed off on the deal — and seemed to be as surprised as anyone by the veto threat. The president was briefed on the major pieces all along. And let’s not forget: Trump agreed to, lobbied for, and signed into law the budget framework for the legislation in February.

Why the lie? Undoubtedly for some people, it’s too hard to process the idea that the president deserves blame or is out of his depth. Many of the same people decrying all the wasteful spending in the bill haven’t noted that Trump’s stated reason for threatening a veto was that it didn’t spend more on a wall or include a fix for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

But cognitive dissonance is only part of the story. This stabbed-in-the-back narrative — Dolchstossin German — is not merely a cynical excuse for letting Trump off the hook. It also lays essential groundwork for Trump to escape blame if the GOP loses the House in the 2018 midterms…”

Yeah,…

Only if you’re totally intoxicated on the Trump Kool-Aid.

But if Jonah and we are wrong, and The Donald’s truly interested in a do-over, Kimberly Strassel offers an alternative:

“…Under the Impoundment Act, a simple majority is enough to approve presidential rescissions—no filibuster. It’s a chance to take a hacksaw to the $128 billion by which the omnibus exceeded the 2011 domestic-spending caps—everything from carbon-capture technology to pecan producers to the Gateway Tunnel Project to the Environmental Protection Agency. (AND Planned Parenthood, though the GOP’s razor-thin majority in the Senate and the presence of Feminazi warriors Linda Murkowski and Susan Collins make such an eventuality highly unlikely!)

The political danger here rests in Mr. Trump moving unilaterally, with a rescission package that shames his fellow Republicans in Congress and puts them at greater risk in the midterms. The trick is instead for House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to request Mr. Trump go the impoundment route, or for the White House and congressional leaders to make a joint announcement.

Which gets to the other trick—getting congressional Republicans to come on board and take credit for spending cuts. The GOP is correct that most of the spending hikes were at Democratic demand, but many Republicans used that as an excuse to stuff in their own pork. Messrs. Ryan’s and McConnell’s job is to explain that, with midterms at stake, the party needs to prove it can do a better job with the federal fisc…”

Let’s see if Trump and the GOP leadership act on Strassel’s advice.

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s this incredibly appropriate photo from Speed Mach…

…and this meme from Mark Tapscott:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Pure Panhandle segment, and this just in from the Redneck Riviera:

Pensacola woman mistakes 37-week pregnancy for bad Chinese food

 

“A Pensacola woman gave new meaning to the term “food baby” over the weekend. Crystal Gail Amerson, 29, said she woke up around 4 a.m. Sunday with stomach pains that had her running back and forth between the bathroom and bedroom for more than an hour.

“I had Chinese food the night before and I kind of figured maybe I had food poisoning or something like that,” Amerson said. But it turned out there was nothing wrong with the General Tso’s chicken Amerson ate the previous night. Unbeknownst to her, she was actually 37 weeks pregnant and was on the verge of giving birth to her second son.

…At 6:59 a.m. Sunday, Oliver James was born in the back of an ambulance, a short way from the home of Amerson and her fiance, Brian Westerfield. Oliver was 18.9 inches and 5.27 pounds.

…Regardless, Amerson said she thinks she’ll lay off the Chinese for a while. “That’s what I was telling my mother-in-law, I think I’m traumatized from Chinese food,” Amerson said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at it the same way again.”“

We’d suggest trying something other than General Tso’s next time, but we’ve a feeling difficulty deciding on one from Column A versus one from Column B or one from Column C is the least of the this young lady’s problems.

Magoo