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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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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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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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British Lawmaker: London Terrorist’s Religion is ‘Utterly and Completely Irrelevant”

And when Khalid Masood, the Muslim that plowed into people on a London bridge and killed a policeman outside of Parliament,  says that he is a soldier of the Islamic State, I’d believe that Islam, a political system wrapped in religion, is completely relevant (reformatted, emphasis mine).

British Lawmaker Lord Digby Jones does not believe the religion of the London attacker is pertinent, The Washington Post reports. Jones comments come in the wake of a tweet by Donald Trump Jr. criticizing London Mayor Sadiq Khan for once telling citizens that terrorist attacks are “part and parcel” part of living in a big city. Some British lawmakers drew offense from the tweet, saying Trump was attacking the mayor in the midst of a terrorist situation.

“You’re safer in London than you’ve ever been,” Jones declared. He continued, “If this turns out to be an act of Islamic terrorism, I think the fact that the man is a Muslim is utterly and completely irrelevant.”

Umm, wanna run that past me again, for what Jones

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And yes, this one is on the Republican side of said political aisle (reformatted, emphasis mine) and we’ll report it:

Former Colorado GOP chairman charged with voter fraud, forgery

GREELEY, Colo. — The former chairman of Colorado’s Republican Party has been charged with voter fraud and forgery. Steve Curtis, 57, is accused of filling out and mailing in his ex-wife’s ballot for the 2016 presidential election. Curtis was the state’s GOP chairman from 1997 to 1999 and currently hosts a talk radio show on KLZ-560 AM. He made his first court appearance Tuesday morning in Weld County to be advised of the charges against him.

“We’re not going to talk about this,” Curtis said when asked if he voted for his ex-wife in November.

…His ex-wife, Kelly Curtis, was less shy when reached by phone in South Carolina.

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