It’s Wednesday, May 15th, 2019…but before we begin, let’s all take a moment to honor a true American hero:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of NRO, John Fund relates how the heart of educated idiocy has had all they can stands, and they can’t stands no more, as even…

“The more that progressive policies have failed to address the homelessness problem in urban areas, the more that progressives are doubling down on bad solutions.

Take Denver. The Mile High City presented voters last week with Issue 300. It was placed on the ballot by advocates for the homeless who wanted to legalize “camping” in parks and in vehicles on city streets, including in front of homes and local businesses. This was too much for voters, even in a city that gave Donald Trump only 19 percent of the vote in 2016. The idea of legalizing vagrancy was shot down by a resounding 83 percent of local voters.

Liberal mayor Michael Hancock said the city had dodged making a bad situation worse. Noting that tent cities had already begun already sprouting up in parks and alleyways, he maintained that “300 would have created an unsanitary problem for the homeless and for Denver residents.”

…Every homeless person has a different story, and some are truly down on their luck through no fault of their own. But most (as in, the vast majority!) are mired in a cycle of behavior that they refuse to change. I once reported on an effort in San Francisco to encourage pedestrians and tourists to hand out coupons instead of money to the homeless. The coupons were redeemable for many things: a free meal, clothing, haircuts, and laundromat services. Over the course of several days, I tried to distribute such coupons myself and met rejection about 80 percent of the time. Cash was what homeless people wanted — and for you know what.

Allowing people to remain mired in problems involving mental illness, drugs, or alcohol affects the wider community. In Seattle, Scott Lindsay, a former public-safety adviser to the mayor’s office, has written a new report called “System Failure.” He found that a mere 100 “prolific offenders” among the homeless are responsible for more than 3,500 criminal cases. Often they are released from jail the same day they are taken in.

If, as we were taught to believe, there are truly none so blind as those who WILL not see, Progressive “advocates” for the homeless are stumbling around sightless as newborn puppies.  Which, in their pantheon of privilege, at least puts them on a level higher than unborn humans.

Next, also courtesy of NRO, Andy McCarthy details how Obama’s DOJ and FBI prostituted themselves in…

“…Understand: Congress does not need a prosecutable crime to impeach the president. If House Democrats believe the president has abused his powers so outrageously that he should be stripped of them, they have it within their power to file impeachment articles and trigger a trial in the Senate. Impeachment is a political process. It would be perfectly appropriate for all anti-Trump partisans to make the public case that the president should be removed from office.

But the anti-Trump partisans are not going that route. They know they’d lose by a humiliating margin that would strengthen the president.

Instead, they are perverting the criminal-justice process they claim Trump has obstructed. With the transparently eager cooperation of Mueller’s team, they intimate that the president could have been charged and would have been convicted. They suggest that, although not charged, he has not been “exonerated,” effectively imposing on him the burden to establish his innocence.

I don’t want the criminal-justice system to be the prism through which we conduct politics. But if you insist on evaluating the president’s conduct as a criminal-justice issue rather than a political impeachment issue, then he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He is entitled to have the evidence discounted (indeed, it should have been concealed) unless and until he is formally charged. He is entitled to have the burden of proof imposed entirely on the government. For current and former officials who have been involved in the investigation to refrain from charging him, publicize the evidence, and then suggest he is guilty is a willful undermining of the justice process.

That is, they are doing what they accuse Trump of doing.

They are too smart not to know this. So there is only one conclusion to be drawn: This grandstanding has nothing to do with the law. The point has never been to make a prosecutable legal case against the president. Nor is it to pursue impeachment, though there will be plenty of talk about impeachment. The point is to place the tools of the criminal-justice process in the service of the Democrats’ 2020 political campaign…”

And you can take this to the bank: absent significant time behind bars for some of the prime conspirators in this attempted coup, it won’t be the last time they try it!  Otherwise, every subsequent Republican President will face the same challenges to both the authenticity of their election and their fitness for office.

Trump is just a convenient excuse for an incredibly destructive Dimocratic device which needs to stopped, and needs to be stopped NOW!!!

Since we’re on the subject of Progressives purposefully peddling poisonous prevarications, NRO‘s David French relates the irrefutable truth behind yet another licentious Liberal lie:

No, Georgia’s Heartbeat Bill Won’t Imprison Women Who Have Abortions

“Last week Georgia governor Brian Kemp signed perhaps the most impressive and comprehensively pro-life “heartbeat bill” in the nation. The law (set to go into effect in 2020) not only bans abortion when the baby has a “detectable human heartbeat” it declares the scientific, philosophical, and theological truth that an unborn child is a “natural person” under state law. The law — like other state heartbeat bills — defies controlling Supreme Court authority, and expect pro-abortion activists to immediately challenge it in court.

I expected activist resistance and protest against the bill. I expected radical voices to urge corporate boycotts of Georgia. But I must confess that I did not expect to see a series of stories with lurid headlines and fundamentally mistaken premises to go viral — and to stay viral for days. Here’s a sampling:

Business Insider: “Women could get up to 30 years in prison for having a miscarriage under Georgia’s harsh new abortion law.”

Slate: “Georgia just criminalized abortion. Women who terminate their pregnancies would receive life in prison.”

The Week: “Georgia’s ‘heartbeat’ abortion bill could imprison women for life.”

Glamour: “Women who have an abortion in Georgia could be sentenced to life in prison.”

The stories are viral in part because they rely on facially-plausible reasoning. Since Georgia declared all unborn children to be natural persons, then — according to these articles — Georgia’s conventional murder statute must apply to women who “self-terminate.” If the woman has a miscarriage in part through her own neglect, then Georgia’s second-degree murder statute applies. If a person helps another person obtain an abortion across state lines, then they’re guilty of “conspiracy” under Georgia statutes.

But this is fundamentally wrong. The heartbeat bill did not repeal a number of Georgia criminal statutes that explicitly apply to abortions and unborn children, and it does not overrule controlling legal authority holding that these statutes bar prosecution of a woman for terminating her own pregnancy. Let’s walk through these statutes and the key case…”

Meanwhile, in what can only be described as an incredibly hypocritical comment, the hijab-sporting Linda Sarsour tweeted her two dinars on subject:

So, at least according to the creature wearing the Muslim head scarf, White women…which in Georgia means CHRISTIAN White women…are upholding the patriarchy.  Makes sense to us, as we all know how Islam empowers…

…the matriarchy!

Here’s the juice: this issue won’t ever be settled until what is perhaps the most tortured, twisted, convoluted decision in the history of the Supreme Court…

…is overturned, and decisions regarding abortion are returned to their proper venue: the individual STATES!  Case in point, as Alabama’s Senate just passed a bill banning nearly ALL abortions.

Not if John Roberts, another gift from the Bush family which keeps on giving…to Progressives…has anything to say about it.

Speaking of what was purported to be good somehow turning to evil, courtesy of The College Fix, we learn how a Dartmouth professor seriously believes the…

‘Magic’ of guns can turn good people evil

“A professor of anthropology from Dartmouth College claims the mere presence of a gun, especially if one makes physical contact with it, can transform a good person into a bad one.

Chelsey Kivland, who studies “street politics, insecurity, and social performance in contemporary urban Haiti,” makes use of an anecdote from that country in the Pacific Standard to establish a larger point about firearms: Three individuals who had owned a certain Smith & Wesson .38 Special all ended up being shot and killed…and not by that particular gun.

Community members attributed the deaths to “maji” — magic — which in Haiti means “an unethical use of spiritual power.”

“To many,” Kivland writes, “the men died because the occult forces they had been using for unethical gain had ultimately turned against them—opening them up to conflict and failing to protect them.”

Lest you guffaw at the notion that, yes, magic is behind all of this, well, then you’re racist:

“It would be shortsighted to dismiss these claims as the misguided logic of a ‘superstitious people,’” Kivland says. “That racially inflected trope, long used to marginalize and demonize Haitians, among others, blinds observers to the way in which guns do exhibit a power akin to magic: the power to create a change in someone’s state of mind.”…”

Yeah, and before guns, it was the “magic” of rocks which transformed good persons…

…into bad ones!  Sorry, professor, but ever since the Fall, the evil’s always been there; the only question is when, why and in whom it will most maliciously manifest itself.

Editor’s note: in Ms. Kivland’s defense, we did uncover one instance in which an otherwise peaceful cyborg (after all, the T1000 was triggered into ripping that guy’s heart out in Griffith Park!) turned into a maniacal killer after merely touching several firearms:

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

Then there’s this stream of memes forwarded by Balls Cotton:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the latest installment of our Life Imitates Art…or Is It the Other Way Around?!? segment, courtesy today of this item from Bill Meisen:

World’s most expensive coffee available in the US for limited time

“A roasting company in California is offering coffee lovers the chance to try the world’s most expensive cup of coffee for a limited time.

Klatch Coffee Roasters, which has several locations in California, will be serving up the Elida Geisha 803, coffee beans from Panama that cost $803 per pound and recently won first place at the Best of Panama coffee competition. The beans, a Kopi Luwak variety, are made by feeding the beans to cat-like mammals who then poop it out.

Each cup of coffee will cost $75.

“It’s a unique coffee that comes from Panama. It’s by far better than any of the coffee you hear about that comes from animals,” Bo Thiara, co-owner of Klatch’s location in San Francisco, told ABC7 News…”

We’ll let this scene from The Bucket List express our disdain for anyone stupid or rich enough to piss away $75 on a single cup of coffee:

Sorry, not when…

…that $75 can feed 150 starving, sickly Third World children per day.

Another Editor’s Note: We must observe, having UNICEF’s ambassador for disadvantaged, defenseless children in the Third World simultaneously and unabashedly advocate for their wholesale slaughter in utero in the First is nothing if not…incongruous…contradictory, as it were!

Then again, if every Third World mother aborted her unborn children, UNICEF wouldn’t require Alyssa services…and Californians could enjoy their cup of Elide Geisha 803 with a clear conscience.

Magoo