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And rather blatant about it, too – they video’d themselves urging recent refugees to commit Voter Fraud by including voter registration forms.  Which, if they are really recent, deserving of a “Welcome to Nebraska, courtesy of the Nebraska Democrats.  Once again, proving to the rest of us, that the insurge of refugees and illegal aliens, does not come from the “goodness of their hearts”.  Nope, nosirree!  With these Progressives / incremental Socialists are all politics all the time – they DO see these folks as fresh meat for votes.  After all (reformatted :

The inclusion of a voter registration form in a “welcome” gift basket designed for refugee families is eyebrow-raising. Individuals with refugee status in the United States are only allowed to naturalize after they spend a minimum of five years in the U.S. and obtain permanent residence (a green card). But presumably, individuals who accept a “welcome” basket are new arrivals to the U.S. and have not met the requirements to become citizens. They would be ineligible to register to vote. Unfortunately, these requirements do not always stop voter fraud from occurring.

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The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.  To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order.  Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.

-Prof F.A. Hayek

In response, a bit of amplification by Prof. Boudreaux:

Hayek’s great lesson is that each of us, individually, can know only an infinitesimally small amount of the knowledge the full use of which is required for any great and prosperous civilization to exist – but

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Has the Left sprung its own trap on its own feet that it didn’t know it laid all by themselves?  Remember all of the angst when Obama’s HHS decided that an “essential healthcare plan” had to include free contraceptives which also includes abortifacients?  Several organizations sued that it violated their First Amendment rights including Hobby Lobby.  Yet, Obama persisted and went after a most Catholic organization that protested that their religious beliefs said that abortion was murder – and Obama said that was not a religious stance that mattered?

Back to the “hoisted on his own petard” phrase (even as I bet that new HHS ” the Secretary shall” Tom Price may decide that regulation be pulled (reformatted, emphasis mine)?

Liberal Judges Unwittingly Declare ObamaCare Religious Mandate Unconstitutional

They don’t realize it, but liberals have just declared that Obama’s HHS mandate — which forced Catholics to cooperate with providing abortion and contraception — is unconstitutional. The new interpretation of the Establishment Clause espoused by the activist judges who are striking down Trump’s EO is that anything that has a disparate impact on a religious group is unconstitutional.

The rulings by activist judges declaring Trump’s EO on immigration to be unconstitutional were based on arguments that if the EO/law had a disparate impact on any faith, or that if the person behind the EO/law ever said anything that could be construed to violate the new liberal interpretation of the establishment clause, then the EO/law in question was unconstitutional.

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This from the last of a post (“Why College Graduates Can’t Think”) sums up a lot:

More to the point, that explains why employers keep complaining that college graduates can’t think. They’re not being taught to think. They’re being taught, in too many of their courses, to “oppose existing systems”—without regard for any objective appraisal of those systems’ efficacy—and to demonstrate their opposition by emoting.

“Feelings, nothing more than Feelings” is that old song that became a parody of itself.  Now, a guide book? You’ve heard us all here at the ‘Grok make fun of all of the Precious Snowflakes on college campuses everything that just say the darndest things (and for you “of age” that recognize that line, it is not meant as a nicety).  But this is part of the Left’s rampage through the cultural ramparts of our society (aa, Cultural Marxism).  We all know that the educational quotient of a lot of our “students” is falling.

I can’t believe that it can’t just be the innate quality of the students – in a lot of cases, it is the quality of the teachers.  However, this post makes it clear it’s been done deliberately under the guise of “intellectualality” (to coin a word – hey, who are you to argue with my reality, huh???).  Reformatted, emphasis mine, but this is one of those posts that just abstracting out snippets looses the gestalt of what Rob Jenkins wrote:

In 2010, the Noel-Levitz Employer Satisfaction Survey of over 900 employers identified “critical thinking [as] the academic skill with the second largest negative gap between performance satisfaction and expectation.” Four years later, a follow-up study conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found little progress, concluding that “employers…give students very low grades on nearly all of the 17 learning outcomes explored in the study”—including critical thinking—and that students “judge themselves to be far better prepared for post-college success than do employers.”

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No vote today and not vote tonite on RyanCare, thus a few of the headlines du jour.  All because of having a bad assumption (or assumptions) as to what was minimally possible to pass and NOT DOING YOUR HOMEWORK!!!:

Chaos Inside GOP House Conference Forces Speaker Ryan to Cancel Thursday’s RyanCare Vote

…The HFC members accept that the RyanCare bill is not the repeal-and-replace of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that created Obamacare, but they insist that the speaker’s Obamacare rescue bill eliminate the Essential Health Benefits provision that requires a minimum of services in insurance policies, and they want to eliminate the Individual Mandate that RyanCare preserves as a program managed by the insurance companies, not the IRS.

If you aren’t going to rip out the guts of Obamacare, you aren’t repealing Obamacare.  Otherwise Ryan is running a scam on both his Members and we who put the Rs in charge.

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“Hey, Pedro, nice to see that Puerto Rico is now willing to extort Florida (et al) because you folks haven’t been able to put a sane budget together for YEARS!”

My immediate thought was “Nice business ya got there – shame if something were to happen to it”.  The above was part of an email that I sent back to Pedro Cerame (Communications Director, Federal Affairs Administration, Office of the Governor of Puerto Rico, pcerame@prfaa.pr.gov,  (202) 394-1750).  You see, he sent out an email blast that the Puerto Rico Governor, Ricardo Rossello, signed.  In effect, the message was (my words) “help me persuade the Feds to forestall a cut in Medicaid or 10s of thousands of Puerto Ricans will move to Florida, wrecking your State budget”. And this guy, Pedro, thought that this was a great idea?  Here’s the letter (emphasis mine):

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Puerto Rico Governor Rosselló Requests Gov. Scott’s Assistance in Solving Puerto Rico Healthcare Crisis

(March 20th, 2017 – San Juan, Puerto Rico) The Governor of Puerto Rico, Hon. Ricardo A. Rosselló Nevares, has alerted Governor Rick Scott of Florida in a letter, calling his attention to the “rapidly approaching drop in federal healthcare funding for Puerto Rico, known as Medicaid cliff,” which will likely result in a substantial economic impact to the Florida budget. The full text of the letter is attached.

The ¨Medicaid cliff¨ is a scenario caused by funding shortfalls built in to the unique and inequitable healthcare funding mechanisms for Puerto Rico. If realized, tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans, all natural born citizens of the United States, will likely continue to relocate to Florida to qualify for Medicaid, costing Florida taxpayers $2.5 billion over the coming decade.

In the letter, the Governor states,

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This post title DOES says it all for me (sarcasm at all the other faux outrage):

How DARE House Freedom Caucus hold GOP accountable to its promises!?

End Result?  Republicans wasted seven years in uttering hot air instead of doing the actual work – this bill failed their rhetoric. This bill also failed the Trust factor – not enough Republican Trusted their own Party to do the right thing after this bill (I don’t Trust them either – past performance has proved it).  Previous versions of this (2010, 2015) would have worked FAR better but guess what – they knew that Obama would veto it.  They knew he’d cover their butts – pure political theater.  Now when it REALLY counted, they put their seats first and their campaign promise to repeal Obamacare WAAYYYY back in their rear view mirrors. The Democrats were willing (and did) to bet their seats – the Republicans were too scared to do it.

Betcha this will boomerang on them BIGLY come 2018 unless they actually take the time to craft a bill that rips the guts and heart out of Obamacare instead of just taking out taxes.

• Did they take out the “Essential Mandates”? No – they tried to outsource it off to the States and let them take the blame for doing the definitions.

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Tag teaming on Steve’s post breaking the news on the ‘Grok that US Intelligence operatives in “incidental” (read that like “mis-spoke” is really outright lying)

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes did not rule out Senior Obama administration officials being involved in “incidental” communications of President Donald Trump’s transition team that were “widely disseminated.”

When asked by Breitbart News if he could rule out any involvement of senior members of the Obama administration, Nunes replied, “No, we cannot.”

Don’t be surprised by the “surprised” look on my face.  Given all of the chatter about “The Resistance” and Obama

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And they are voting on this Obama-lite tomorrow?  This is amending around the edges; there is little “repeal” other than what I’ve written about earlier.  While killing taxes is always good, they haven’t touched the stuff (regs and mandates) that have made Obamacare so toxic politically and financially.  So how is this “better”?  This isn’t “Republicans Are Doing a Terrible Job Arguing for Their Health-Care Plan“, this is a “Failure to Plan Right” – and expecting us to accept it.  And no,  I disagree with this “Republicans Are Messing Up On Healthcare Even More Than You Thought” – they are proceeding EXACTLY as I thought: the dogs that caught the bumper.  Politically, they knew when they won the election, they lost it from the get go.

I just shake my head at these Bozos in Congress.  All we heard for the last seven years is “VOTE FOR US – we’ll get rid of Obamacare!!!”.  So after giving them the House, then the Senate, we put the Oval Office in their hands.  We shoulda known better because at every step, they said “well, thank you, but NOW we need” that next step.  Each and every time, all we got was excuses instead of promises. I DO wonder if they really meant what they campaigned on because I’m not buying what is being sold.  We didn’t put them in to nibble around the edges – it was supposed to be a clean sweep.  Instead of that clean sweep, all we’re getting is that broom putting up a huge dust cloud. And yet, the boom is being lowered as in “White House warns conservatives ‘no Plan B’ to nix Obamacare: ‘This is it“. It’s almost like “…Republicans never intended to repeal Obamacare“.

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