It’s Monday, June 25th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of Bill Meisen, no….this isn’t a joke:

As we noted in Friday’s Cover Story noted, what’s next: forty acres and a mule?  The only question now is how….

….loooowwwww can they go?!?

Victor Fiorillo, courtesy of The Weekly Standard and Carl Polizzi, conveniently provides the answer:

Activists Take Out Frustration on … Ronald Reagan

 

Last Friday, an attaché of important gay people from Philadelphia made a trip to Washington D.C. as invited guests of President Barack Obama for the White House’s first-ever gay pride reception. There, they danced to the sounds of a Marine Corps band; they dined on crab cakes and canapés….and some of them took advantage of photo opportunities to give the late President Ronald Reagan the middle finger.

“It’s not a gesture that I would use in the White House when representing our city and our community,” opines Philadelphia Gay News publisher Mark Segal (center), who opted for a sarcastic thumbs-up pose in front of the portrait of George W. Bush over the more vulgar one demonstrated by his Reagan-loathing peers, Matthew “Matty” Hart (left), the national director of public engagement at Solutions for Progress, and self-taught photographer turned toast-of-the-town Zoe Strauss (right).

“I have friends who work in that building,” Segal explains. “I’m not going to do something that could embarrass them or that could somehow damage a campaign that is so important. ‘Be on your best behavior,’ my staff told me.’ I think they know me too well.”

….But his counterparts couldn’t seem to care less. Hart posted his photo on Facebook with the caption, “Fuck Reagan.” Strauss simply posted hers without commentary. After all, the murderous facial expression and double-barreled bird-flipping seem to speak for themselves. Comments ranged from “you forgot to add with a chainsaw” on Hart’s “Fuck Reagan” note, to my personal favorite, “star wars … up yours,” on Strauss’s. …

“Yeah, fuck Reagan,” reiterates Hart one week after the reception. “Ronald Reagan has blood on his hands. The man was in the WhiteHouse as AIDS exploded, and he was happy to see plenty of gay men and queer people die. He was a murderous fool, and I have no problem saying so. Don’t invite me back. I don’t care.”

If we were running a Conservative Super Pac, the RNC or Team Mitt, we’d have had a commercial featuring those two cretins on the air in every battleground state in the country.  George W. Bush may not be popular with the average bitter clingers in the Midwest, Pennsylvania, Virginia or Florida, but the Dutchman sure as shootin’ is.  Identifying the bird-flippers as radical homosexual activists allowed their 15 minutes of shame by The Obamao would simply be sauce for the goose.

In other news of the Progressive politics, courtesy of the Washington Examiner and Bill Meisen, Joel Gehrke offers us the latest inanity from Nancy the Red:

Pelosi: Obama should unilaterally eliminate the debt ceiling

 

“I think he should [declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional],” Pelosi said, though she wouldn’t predict Obama’s move. “I’m in a different branch of government. In the minority, in the House. What do I know about what the president’s going to do?”

For once Nancy’s correct; she doesn’t know sh*t, from….

….or anything else.  As Gehrke goes on to report:

Pelosi is in a different branch of government — the only one that has the authority to “borrow Money on the credit of the United States,” as Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution establishes. And she is in the minority, which increases the likelihood that Obama will have to agree to spending cuts in order to get a debt-ceiling increase.

Who knows, though? Obama has already decided to “work his way around Congress,” as he did with last week’s illegal immigration enforcement maneuver. He has also declared that Congress is out of session, in order to make ‘recess’ appointments, even though Congress said it was in session. Maybe he’ll decide to “borrow Money on the credit of the United States,” too.

As we’ve often said, the dimmer his reelection prospects, the more desperate….and dangerous….The Obamao will become.  This is all about B. Hussein Obama; and just as Hitler dragged Germany down into the flames of defeat, Barry’s more than willing to take America with him.

And since we’re on the subject of educated idiots, aka, “Liberals”, the WSJ‘s Stephen Moore details yet another Dimocrat who, like Nancy the Red, doesn’t know….

Food Stamps Queen

 

Dimocratic finance: A dollar borrowed is a dollar earned.

This was a good week for the welfare state (and a bad one for taxpayers) as the Senate approved a farm bill that will spend over $750 billion in the next 10 years on food stamps. One of every seven Americans is on the food dole, and that depressing number isn’t likely to change much in the coming years.

The senator most responsible for shielding the program from even modest cuts and reforms was Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democrat from New York, who is now Washington’s new queen of food stamps. Ms. Gillibrand recently declared that “food stamps are an extraordinary investment because for every dollar that you put into the SNAP program, you get out $1.71.”

When Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama had the temerity to challenge Ms. Gillibrand’s economic logic, she scoffed: “If he doesn’t understand what a return on investment means, maybe we can spend time explaining it to him.” And her explanation came down to this: “This is money that is literally going to feed children. And I don’t know if he’s ever heard a young child say to him: ‘I’m still hungry.'” Under Ms. Gillibrand’s economic thinking, if only we could double the number of Americans in the bread lines, the GDP would grow so fast we wouldn’t have any more unemployment in America.

Ms. Gillibrand not only blocked reforms, such as an asset test to make sure families who can afford to buy their own food aren’t scamming the system, she even sponsored an amendment to cancel $4 billion of savings reported out by the Democrat’s own Agriculture Committee. This would trim the program spending by 0.5%. Her amendment was too much for many Senate Democrats and it failed with only 33 yes votes.

Ms. Gillibrand even invoked the Bible in her plea to save the welfare program from cuts reminding her colleagues that God wants us to “feed the poor.” But she is opposed to any work requirements in exchange for the free food. The Bible also says “he who shall not work shall not eat,” but Ms. Gillibrand never mentioned that since it doesn’t support her argument that having more Americans on food stamps is great for the U.S. economy.

Let’s see; an Ivy League-educated ambulance chaser married to an evil venture capitalist.  Should it really come as a surprise her understanding of Scripture is as limited as her knowledge of economics?!?

Next up, courtesy of The New Media Journal, coming soon to a medical facility near you….

Britain’s NHS Kills Off 130,000 Elderly Patients Every Year

 

NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday. Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial “death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.

He claimed there was often a lack of clear evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway, a method of looking after terminally ill patients that is used in hospitals across the country. It is designed to come into force when doctors believe it is impossible for a patient to recover and death is imminent. It can include withdrawal of treatment — including the provision of water and nourishment by tube — and on average brings a patient to death in 33 hours.

There are around 450,000 deaths in Britain each year of people who are in hospital or under NHS care. Around 29 per cent — 130,000 — are of patients who were on the LCP. Professor Pullicino claimed that far too often elderly patients who could live longer are placed on the LCP and it had now become an “assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway’. He cited “pressure on beds and difficulty with nursing confused or difficult-to-manage elderly patients’ as factors.

Professor Pullicino revealed he had personally intervened to take a patient off the LCP who went on to be successfully treated. He said this showed that claims they had hours or days left are “palpably false’. In the example he revealed a 71-year-old who was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia and epilepsy was put on the LCP by a covering doctor on a weekend shift. Professor Pullicino said he had returned to work after a weekend to find the patient unresponsive and his family upset because they had not agreed to place him on the LCP. “I removed the patient from the LCP despite significant resistance,” he said. “His seizures came under control and four weeks later he was discharged home to his family.”

Professor Pullicino, a consultant neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Kent, was speaking to the Royal Society of Medicine in London. He said: “The lack of evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway makes it an assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway. Very likely many elderly patients who could live substantially longer are being killed by the LCP. Patients are frequently put on the pathway without a proper analysis of their condition. Predicting death in a time frame of three to four days, or even at any other specific time, is not possible scientifically. This determination in the LCP leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The personal views of the physician or other medical team members of perceived quality of life or low likelihood of a good outcome are probably central in putting a patient on the LCP.”

He added: “If we accept the Liverpool Care Pathway we accept that euthanasia is part of the standard way of dying as it is now associated with 29 per cent of NHS deaths.’ 

Only 29%….and they’re all elderly?  For Progressives, that’s a bargain at twice the price; besides, this way they can get you coming….

….AND going!

In a related item, the Empire strikes back:

Smearing Small Business

Liberals turn on NFIB for challenging ObamaCare in court.

 

On the eve of the Supreme Court’s ruling on ObamaCare, and with the Justices now presumably beyond political pressure, the liberal intimidation campaign has moved on to other targets. The latest is the small business lobby for having dared to join 26 states in challenging the law.

According to the smear campaign against the National Federation of Independent Business, or NFIB, small businesses are thrilled with the Affordable Care Act and the trade group betrayed the 300,000 companies it represents. Among the dozens of media outlets publishing anti-NFIB op-eds disguised as reporting, Reuters recently asked in a headline, “Who truly speaks for small businesses?” The question mark was superfluous.

The chairmen of the House Progressive Caucus, Democrats Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison, chimed in with a letter accusing the NFIB of acting against “the best interest of small business owners” and “the popular opinion of the American small business community.” They suggest Karl Rove is behind the suit, as he is everything else.

In the words of the immortal Mandy Pepperidge, “A wimp and a blimp!”

To the extent this passion play with the NFIB as Judas has any grounding in reality, the claim is that Mom and Pop shops will benefit from ObamaCare’s subsidies. But among the four million small businesses eligible for new tax credits if they provide health insurance for their workers, a mere 170,300 have signed up.

And if the NFIB is as unrepresentative as liberals claim, then why have its ranks grown by 5% since it became a plaintiff in the ObamaCare suit? The charge is especially rich because NFIB regularly polls its full membership to inform its Washington agenda, something few trade associations do.

NFIB’s members have ranked controlling health-care costs as their top priority every year since . . . 1986. Some 65% believe ObamaCare will do the opposite and 77% believe it will result in a higher tax burden, which are among the reasons the group joined the suit. One in five small businesses believes it’ll be forced to alter the benefits it offers employees.

For a look at what an interest group acting against the interests of its members actually looks like in practice, consult the AARP documents in the House’s investigation into ObamaCare log-rolling. On July 29, 2009, for example, an AARP functionary forwarded a memo to the White House explaining that callers were getting “very emotional and passionate.” The email notes that 4,210 seniors phoned headquarters that day about health care, with 4,174 opposed.

As one senior put it, “I am totally disgusted that AARP has chosen to endorse the government plan, using some of my membership money to do so!” But a White House staffer dismissed this collection of angry testimonies as “well scripted—very scripted.” Apparently the same script led to 60,000 seniors quitting AARP in summer 2009 alone, amid its multimillion-dollar pro-ObamaCare TV campaign.

In a June 11 interview with Iowa’s KTIV news station, President Obama was asked about a specific small business that was forced to close shop as a result of Affordable Care Act regulations. “Yeah, that would be kind of hard to explain,” he nonresponded, going on to claim that “the only folks that have been impacted in terms of the health-care bill are insurance companies.” The President may be in more denial than NFIB’s critics.

Meanwhile, across the Potomac, the WSJ brings us the latest on….

The Virginia Fracas

U.Va.’s faculty revolts when the trustees move against the status quo.

 

A few days ago thousands of student and faculty protestors swept the University of Virginia’s iconic lawn, demanding the return of former president Teresa Sullivan. A vandal painted the word “GREEED” [sic] across six pillars of the rotunda built by Thomas Jefferson. Ms. Sullivan gave a speech posing as a martyr to “corporate-style, top-down leadership.”

What inspired this campus—not to say Greek-style—spectacle? Why, U.Va.’s trustees dared to fire a president who was working against the priorities that it is ostensibly their job to set. In a word, the convulsions of Athens and Madison have arrived in Charlottesville, writ academic: An attempt to modernize a public institution and protect taxpayers is met by a revolt on behalf of a status quo that can’t last.

Two years ago the trustees, known as the board of visitors, hired Ms. Sullivan to rationalize U.Va.’s finances. Alumni giving had been crushed in the downturn, while funding courtesy of Virginia taxpayers has dropped to $8,300 per student from $15,300 in 2000.

But Ms. Sullivan—a sociologist by training—turned out to favor what she called an “incrementalist” approach. As late as this March, she said U.Va. was “pretty lean” and “I worry about getting leaner.” Yet administrative spending jumped 68.9% between 2003 and 2009, compared to spending on teaching that rose 42.4% over the same period.

The board and especially chairwoman Helen Dragas also asked Ms. Sullivan to undertake more sweeping reform. They worried U.Va. was falling behind in innovative digital technologies like online learning, and they wanted more accountability in faculty productivity and academic quality.

Here’s how Ms. Sullivan interpreted this mandate in a May 2012 memo to the board: “A key strategic initiative of my administration is to implement a budget system that enables multi-year academic strategic planning, incentivizes cross-Grounds activities that will pull together the collective strengths of our schools, and a model that will provide, to the extent possible, long term financial stability for the University.”

If you can parse that, you may belong in the U.Va. faculty senate, which passed a no-confidence vote in the board shortly after Ms. Dragas asked for Ms. Sullivan’s resignation. Ms. Dragas—a Virginia Beach developer named to the board in 2008 by former Democratic Governor Tim Kaine—had the support of a supermajority of the 16 trustees. Don’t they know who really runs American higher education? The deans of 10 of the university’s 11 schools have signed a letter for Ms. Sullivan’s reinstatement.

Tellingly, the one dean who didn’t sign the letter runs Virginia’s graduate business school—perhaps because the protestors are vilifying the trustees as wealthy corporate scoundrels who shouldn’t have a say in how a public university is run. The academic establishment is happy to accept mammoth checks from alumni and make these endowment underwriters trustees or regents, but only if they serve as complacent rubber stamps.

None of this is to suggest that U.Va.’s trustees have done a good or even competent job defending their governance choices and the school’s long-run best interests. They were secretive and didn’t explain their decision in public, letting Ms. Sullivan pose as a surprised victim and critics define what happened. Mr. Kaine and even current Republican Governor Robert McDonnell have since criticized the board and ducked into the hedgerows.

But while more transparency might have helped with taxpayers, it never would have persuaded the faculty that wants an academic Green Zone separated from economic reality and will destroy anyone who attempts to exercise even modest oversight.

The board of visitors is reconvening Tuesday in a bid to quell the furor and reconsider Ms. Sullivan’s dismissal—and the ex-president says she’ll return on the condition that the board instead fires Ms. Dragas, the leading reformer. If the board capitulates to this top-down ultimatum, it ought to disband, drop the pretense of outside supervision, and turn the whole place over to the faculty that really runs it.

In other words, allow the inmates to operations of the asylum….oh,….and at taxpayer expense!  While you’re at it, why not name Bernie Madoff as UVa’s special financial consultant?

On the Lighter Side….

And in another startling story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter, courtesy of George Lawlor….

Florida man strips naked, bites off chunk of man’s arm

 

A Florida man was arrested Wednesday after stripping down, biting a chunk of flesh from another man’s arm and resisting repeated attempts by police to subdue him with a stun gun. Charles Baker, 26, went to his girlfriend’s home to visit his children Wednesday night while under the influence of an unknown substance, WFTS-TV reported. When Baker arrived, he barged in and began yelling, taking off his clothes and throwing furniture.

Jeffrey Blake, who lives in the home, attempted to restrain Baker, but Baker fought back by biting a chunk of flesh from Blake’s arm. Blake managed to restrain Baker until two police officers arrived on the scene, though Baker refused to respond to the officers’ orders. One deputy deployed his electronic control device after giving a verbal warning. But Baker resisted the shock, prompting the deputies to use the device three more times before several other officers arrived on the scene and were able to subdue and handcuff him.

Baker was taken to Manatee Memorial Hospital in Bradenton for evaluation before being transported to the jail. It was not immediately clear what substance Baker had ingested, but Florida has played host to a recent spate of bizarre behavior by people under the influence of synthetic drugs marketed as “bath salts.”

Gee….maybe Kirstin Gillibrand is right; there IS a hunger problem in America….at least in Florida.

Then again, as this related item from the Sunshine State, courtesy of Bill Meisen demonstrates, maybe not….

400 Pound Woman Arrested For Wearing Birthday Suit On Bus Bench

 

A 400-pound woman decided to strip down to her birthday suit while she sat on a bus bench in Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday afternoon. Patricia McCollum was arrested and charged with exposure of sexual organs in public and was initially held on a $100 bond, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

The 52-year-old, who is currently homeless, was sitting buck naked on a bus bench at 3900 N. Ocean Blvd. She claims she was only trying to put on a different outfit. “That’s why I was changing my clothes on the bus bench. I don’t have anywhere else to stay but bus benches,” McCollum said during a first appearance court hearing Thursday.

McCollum has a laundry list of petty offenses, according to documents. This doesn’t seem to be McCollum’s first offense of this kind either, several officers in the past have observed and warned her about similar behavior.

The impromptu nudist, who uses a walker to stand, currently collects Social Security disability checks, according to her statements in court.

Maybe if she spent a little less on food, and a little more on rent….?!?

Magoo