We can only assume since he still has two eyeballs and lungs…and obviously doesn’t need perfect vision and isn’t going anywhere…Wang will be able to afford an upgrade to the iPhone 10.
And if you thought the “I want it now!” and “Woe is me!” mentality of Millennials is restricted to Asia, one of Great Britain’s dimmest and most helpless bulbs would prove you wrong, as a…
“A mom in the U.K. called the police after Domino’s did not deliver the pizza she ordered, accusing the restaurant of letting her kids “go hungry.”
Clair, whose last name was not shared, said she ordered $48 worth of pizza from the chain restaurant for her family. However, an hour after placing the order, Clair said a Plymouth Domino’s employee called her and said the pizza oven had broken and that her order would be refunded — a process that could take up to an entire day.
The mom of three, ages 5, 13 and 15, said the nearly $50 pizza order had left her only $9 to live on for the next two days[,] and therefore unable to purchase her children food after the order fell through, so she called the police for assistance.
“I phoned the police to ask if they could help, I was nearly crying.They said there was nothing they could do and I had to phone Domino’s,” she told The Mirror. “The manager didn’t even offer for me to go to the other store.(We must note “Claire” never suggested this solution herself!) I said can I come and collect the money back from them and they said no they can’t do that.”
Clair said she fed her children “crisps and things” she had, but they were disappointed and hungry.
“I really, really wish I wasn’t there to see the disappointment onmy youngest son’s face, not to mention the fact that they were hungry and upset,” she said.”
Can people really be this helpless?!? As this edition of The Gouge will demonstrate, only if they accept Progressives’ desire for them to be so!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, courtesy of Brendan Clark, what’s grabbing the headlines: the latest move in the game of one-upmanship between two people used to having their own way…and who take great umbrage when they don’t get it:
Holy tit for tat…
…Batman!
One of our favorite freedoms as a Conservative is the right to disagree with our “leaders” on a given policy or action…but this ain’t one of them. Sure, Trump should never have boxed himself into a corner in the first place, anymore than Pelosi should have; but here we are. Fact is, when the inartful Irresistible Force at left matches negotiating skills with the imbecilic Immovable Object on the right…
Still, it was Pelosi who chose to raise the stakes by lowering the level of the discourse. And though some might term Trump’s riposte as juvenile or sophomoric, we’re firmly of the opinion, in the midst of a crisis she helped create, skipping town on a taxpayer-funded junket rather than remaining to negotiate a settlement is not only a misuse of government funds, but yet another example of the poor judgement Progressives have displayed…
…throughout the Shutdown. More importantly, were visiting members of our Military the real reason behind Pelosi’s boondoggle, we find it hard to believe she’d let the relative inconvenience of flying commercial shelve her plans. After all, given her wealth, it’s not like she couldn’t afford an upgrade to First Class!
Though we do have to question, even were her stated intention to see the Troops true, who the hell would want to seeher?!?
Now, writing at the WSJ, Kim Strassel details the story which SHOULD be the focus of the country’s attention:
“Everybody knew. Everybody of consequence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department understood fully in the middle of 2016—as the FBI embarked on its counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump—that it was doing so based on disinformation provided by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.That’s the big revelation from the transcript of the testimony Justice Department official Bruce Ohr gave Congress in August. The transcripts haven’t been released, but parts were confirmed for me by congressional sources.
Mr. Ohr testified that he sat down with dossier author Christopher Steele on July 30, 2016, and received salacious information the opposition researcher had compiled on Mr. Trump. Mr. Ohr immediately took that to the FBI’s then-Deputy Director Andy McCabe and lawyer Lisa Page. In August he took it to Peter Strzok, the bureau’s lead investigator. In the same month, Mr. Ohr believes, he briefed senior personnel in the Justice Department’s criminal division: Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz, lawyer Zainab Ahmad and fraud unit head Andrew Weissman.The last two now work for special counsel Robert Mueller.
More important, Mr. Ohr told this team the information came from the Clinton camp and warned that it was likely biased, certainly unproven. “When I provided [the Steele information] to the FBI, I tried to be clear that this is source information,” he testified. “I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware. These guys were hired by somebody relating to—who’s related to the Clinton campaign, and be aware.”
He said he told them that Mr. Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected,” and that his own wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, which compiled the dossier. He confirmed sounding all these warnings beforethe FBI filed its October application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page. We broke some of this in August, though the transcript provides new detail.
The FBI and Justice Department have gone to extraordinary lengths to muddy these details, with cover from Democrats and friendly journalists.
…This testimony has two other implications. First, it further demonstrates the accuracy of the House Intelligence Committee Republicans’ memo of 2018—which noted Mr. Ohr’s role and pointed out that the FBI had not been honest about its knowledge of the dossier and failed to inform the court of Mrs. Ohr’s employment at Fusion GPS. The testimony also destroys any remaining credibility of the Democratic response, in which Mr. Schiff and his colleagues claimed Mr. Ohr hadn’t met with the FBI or told them anything about his wife or about Mr. Steele’s bias until after the election.
Second, the testimony raises new concerns about Mr. Mueller’s team. Critics have noted Mr. Weissman’s donations to Mrs. Clinton and his unseemly support of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates’s obstruction of Trump orders. It now turns out that senior Mueller players were centralto the dossier scandal.The conflicts of interest boggle the mind. (Unless you’re a partisan Progressive dedicated to The Donald’s destruction!)
The Ohr testimony is evidence the FBI itself knows how seriously it erred. The FBI has been hiding and twisting facts from the start.“
Which makes Trump’s continued refusal to release the facts to the American public even more perplexing. Sorry, diehard Donald defenders: inquiring minds still want to know why!
Moving on, courtesy of EAGNews.org via Jeff Foutch, in the Education Establishment’s version of the perpetual funding machine…
“About 30,000 Los Angeles teachers and school employees are holding education hostage to demand higher pay and “smaller class sizes” – a popular phrase that equates to more dues paying union employees.
On picket lines across the district Monday, striking teachers toted protest signs in the rain as they swapped horror stories about classes with 40 or more students packed in “like sardines.” What they didn’t discuss: How the United Teachers Los Angeles union’s immigration policies contribute to overcrowded schools and its demands for more staff to handle the situation.
“It’s absolutely not about the pay raise. It’s about class size reduction. In other words, hire more teachers,” teacher Andrea Cohen told CNN.“We want to have fully staffed schools. That means librarians, nurses, psychiatric social workers and their interns. We have 46, 45, 50 students in a class. That’s unacceptable.” (Sorry, but how would more “librarians, nurses, psychiatric social workers and their interns” aid in “class size reduction”?!?)
UTLA doesn’t define its demand for “fully staffed schools.” Los Angeles Unified School District negotiators offered to add nearly 1,200 more educators, counselors, nurses and librarians, with hard limits on class sizes. The district also bumped up its previous offer by $24 million, with a proposed 6 percent raiseandback pay for the 2017-18 school year.
UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl described LAUSD’s latest offer as “woefully inadequate.”
Some have used the same phrase to describe the government’s response to illegal immigration and its impact on public schools, in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
…Keeping illegal immigrants in LA schools is likely a key to keeping UTLA members employed, as district enrollment data shows the overall number of students in district schools has declined every year 2002-03, when it peaked at 746,831 students.
And as student enrollment has steadily slid to about 600,000 students this year, an increasing percentage are also moving to independent charter schools, which are typically not unionized. Since 2002-03, the number of students attending charter schools increased from less than 50,000 to well over 100,000 for 2018-19, according to the superintendent’s final budget.
Illegal immigrants equal demand for teachers, which pay dues to the UTLA.It’s why the union focuses more on immigration rallies and contract demands than keeping students in class…”
In a related item, writing at Best of the Web, Jim Freeman asks the older among us to…
“Most Americans can’t remember a time when politicians weren’t claiming to make education more affordable by funneling more money to colleges. But after the latest surge in “affordability” policies, implemented over the last decade, the staggering costs are becoming clear.
Josh Mitchell and Laura Kusisto report in the Journal:
The Federal Reserve has linked rising student debt to a drop in homeownership among young Americans and the flight of college graduates from rural areas, two big shifts that have helped reshape the U.S. economy.
The effect of student debt on the economy has been debated in recent years, as the total has soared to $1.5 trillion, surpassing Americans’ credit-card and car-loan bills.
Expanding federal grants and loans to finance higher education has predictably given colleges the ability to raise prices, which in turn requires students to take on even more debt to pay the new higher prices. It’s not a new story. In 1965 Washington launched a program to make college “affordable” by offering a taxpayer guarantee on student loans. By an amazing coincidence college costs have been rising much faster than inflation ever since.
Despite decades of data showing that colleges were simply pocketing the new subsidies by raising prices on students, many politicians have been unable to resist the urge to send more money to campus. In June of 2008, the Detroit News reported on a presidential candidate who just happened to be a former university professor…“I will make college affordable for every American. Period,” Obama promised…
He didn’t keep the promise because he didn’t make good choices.(AND because he had no intention to keep it!) In 2010 he enacted still another expansion of the federal role in financing higher education. More “affordability” initiatives followed. Speaking at the University at Buffalo in 2013, Mr. Obama had to acknowledge that his promise still hadn’t been kept:
This is something that everybody knows you need — a college education. Over the past three decades, the average tuition at a public four-year college has gone up by more than 250 percent — 250 percent. Now, a typical family’s incomehas only gone up 16 percent…
So the bottom line is this — we’ve got a crisis in terms of college affordability and student debt…The problem is, is that even if the federal government keeps on putting more and more money in the system, if the cost is going up by 250 percent, tax revenues aren’t going up 250 percent — and so at some point, the government will run out of money, which means more and more costs are being loaded on to students and their families.
Audience members might have hoped that Mr. Obama had finally learned that more government subsidies weren’t the answer. But in January of 2016 CNBCreported:
In his final State of the Union address, President Barack Obama touched on the student debt crisis and emphasized the problem with college affordability. “We have to make college affordable for every American, because no hardworking student should be stuck in the red,” the president said Tuesday night. (Sure they do; particularly when they overpay for something worthless as the day is long!)
“We’ve actually got to cut the cost of college. Providing two years of community college at no cost for every responsible student is one of the best ways to do that, and I’m going to keep fighting to get that started this year,” he added.
Has all of this taxpayer money and all of this student debt at least fulfilled the stated objective of allowing more people of modest means to earn degrees?This week the Journal’s Jason Riley reviewed the results:
In 1970, about 12% of recent college grads came from the bottom 25% of the income distribution. Today, it’s about 10%.
Education “affordability” is among the most expensive promises politicians have ever broken.”
The facts are undeniable, the dots there for the connecting: Obama and his fellow travelers just aren’t willing to admit either the accuracy of the facts or the connectability of the dots.
Liberals bitter clinging to increased funding for education as a means to reduce student costs is akin to their dogged defense of Socialism: the idea isn’t wrong; it just hasn’t been properly put into practice.
One might be tempted to term Progressives’ fixation on more funding as the solution to any and every problem…excepting of course border security and military preparedness…as the very embodiment of Einstein’s definition of insanity. Though we don’t know who’s crazier: those who do the same thing over, and over…and over, every time promising a different result…or them that believe them.
We view them rather as the deliberate dealers of an incredibly addictive drug whose sole effect is enslavement, and whose pushers are repaid with power and control.
Just sayin’!
Which brings us, somewhat incongruously, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s this classic from Speed Mach:
Finally, we’ll call it a week with two sordid stories straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter. First, Exhibit “A”…which we can’t compare to anything ‘cuz we’ve never read a story remotely like it:
“A jury on Tuesday awarded more than $495 million in damages to the family of a 20-year-old Florida woman who was murdered in 2011.Kalil McCoy, of Jacksonville, was shot in the head by Frederick Lee Wade, 19, while they rode in a car with four other friends, after an argument about opening a window, authorities have said. McCoy’s friends then dumped her body in a wooded area and lied about what happened.
…McCoy’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in 2013. The suit named Wade and two other men, Kennard Deshun Mahone and Jonathon Marichal Brooks, who were 18 and 19 at the time of McCoy’s death. A fourth man, Alfred Bernard Mears IV, 18 at the time, was least culpable and difficult to locate so he wasn’t named in the suit, family attorney John Phillips said.
The verdict marks “one of the largest” in Florida history for an injury or death case, Phillips told the Times-Union.However, he said it was unlikely the three men would pay the whole judgment…”
“Unlikely” our A*S! Here’s the juice: this verdict is worth about as much as the paper on which it was printed. ‘Cuz unless one of these Yos…
…is in possession of a winning lottery ticket…or a massive stash of easily salable or distributable dope…we’d put the chances of McCoy’s family recovering a dime at slim to none…with none being the odds-on favorite. As for the fourth man, we can only conclude his not being named in the suit had far more to do with his utter lack of greenbacks rather than any difficulty in locating him.
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.