The Leftist trust in coercion again

Democrats began obstructing Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing less than five seconds into it on Monday, and several protestors were physically removed by police for aggressively trying to shut it down.

According to The Washington Examiner, Democrats and liberal protestors made the hearing so contentious that Kavanaugh’s young daughters —  Margaret, 13, and Elizabeth, 10 — were rushed out of the hearing on Capitol Hill.

The Examiner reports that a source said the two girls were rushed out by their mother, Ashley Kavanaugh, “as the hearing got ‘hot.'” It was very heated with Democrats and protestors losing their minds over the thought of Kavanaugh serving on the Supreme Court. “It was very unpleasant for young children,” said the source.

Democrats literally began the hearing by interrupting Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, less than five seconds into the hearing, largely refusing to allow him to even begin the confirmation process.

The hearing began at 9 a.m. ET, and Democrat committee members spent the first few hours grandstanding about how Kavanaugh — President Donald Trump’s pick to serve on the Supreme Court — will end the world.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., kicked it off by raising objections to the committee receiving over 400,000 documents relating to Kavanaugh’s work with past administrations, claiming that “was not enough.”

“We cannot possibly move forward,” Harris theatrically claimed, likely using the hearing ahead of her potential 2020 Democratic presidential run.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., jumped in soon after, and was also rude to Grassley by demanding he be given time to voice his concerns about Kavanaugh.

After every single Democrat interrupted Grassley and another protestor was kicked out every 15 minutes or so, Grassley knocked Democrats for using the hearing as a political stunt to create drama.

“We have said for a long period of time that we were going to proceed on this very day and I think we ought to give the American people the opportunity to hear whether judge Kavanaugh should be on the Supreme Court or not.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, defended Grassley, and ripped Democrats for their childish antics. “Democrats would be held in contempt of court if they behaved that way in a court of law. We have rules in the Senate. We have norms for decorum. Everybody as you pointed out will get a chance to have their say.”

It’s unfathomable and downright disturbing that Democrats and their ilk were so raucous and hostile on Tuesday that Kavanaugh’s own children had to leave the room over concerns that the protestors may get so hostile that they wouldn’t be safe.

Liberals are so determined to oppose Trump that they are unbothered by intimidating and making children feel unsafe at their father’s confirmation hearing. That is unacceptable, many would agree, and should never be tolerated.

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Arizona Governor Announces Replacement for John McCain

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey named former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl as the late Sen. John McCain’s replacement on Tuesday.

Kyl served with McCain in the Senate from 1995 to Jan. 2013 before his retirement. Sen. Jeff Flake succeeded him. Kyl, 76, was the GOP minority whip before leaving office, which is the second-highest position in the Republican conference, the Arizona Republic reported.

Ducey made the announcement at a press conference from the Arizona capitol in Phoenix. “There is no one in Arizona with the stature of Sen. Jon Kyl,” Ducey said.

“I am deeply grateful to Sen. Kyl for agreeing to succeed his friend and colleague of so many years. Every single day that Jon Kyl represents #Arizona in the U.S. Senate is a day our state is well-served,” Ducey tweeted.
Kyl has agreed to serve out the remainder of the current session of Congress, which will conclude in December.

The governor expressed the hope that Kyl will stay on through the special election to fill McCain’s seat, which will take place in 2020. That election will be to fulfill the last two years of McCain’s term, which ends in 2022.

McCain’s wife, Cindy, expressed support for Ducey’s choice tweeting, “Jon Kyl is a dear friend of mine and John’s. It’s a great tribute to John that he is prepared to go back into public service to help the state of Arizona.”

Most recently, Kyl has been serving in the role of “sherpa” by guiding Trump’s Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh through the confirmation process in the Senate.

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Obama Prepares For The Campaign Trail, But Some Democrats Want Him To Back Off

Former President Barack Obama is preparing to stump for various Democrats as midterm elections near while some members of the party running for reelection are telling him to keep his distance.

Democratic Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota worry a surrogate like Obama could distract from focusing on their Republican opponents. Obama himself is keeping a wide berth from endorsing national campaigns in states President Donald Trump won in 2016.

“We’re not going to use any surrogates. Surrogates are fine but we don’t need them,” Tester told The Hill on Saturday.

Heitkamp was even more curt, saying “nope, no” to questions about the possibility of Obama visiting North Dakota. “He threatened to campaign against me once so I don’t think he’s coming out there,” she said.

Obama endorsed Richard Cordray’s campaign for governor in Ohio, for instance, but he has not yet endorsed Sen. Sherrod Brown’s reelection campaign. Brown frequently paints himself as a Trump opponent but a senator who will nonetheless work with the president on certain issues.

The senator’s Republican opponent, Rep. Jim Renacci, meanwhile is trying to depict Brown as a bitter political partisan obstructionist who is out of step for a state that supported Trump in the 2016 election.

Obama gave Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey similar treatment. The former president announced his support for two Keystone State House candidates, Madeleine Dean and Susan Wild, but left Casey off his list.

One Democratic strategist told reporters that the list of endorsements is a strategy designed to allow Trump to create foils.

“Both of those senators are doing well their respective states and they don’t exactly need Obama’s seal of approval. In fact, it might do more harm than good,” the strategist said. “Obama is still popular with certain folks in those states but he’s not exactly popular with some others.”

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Sweden’s Universal Healthcare System Goes the Way of All Others

Sweden’s Universal Healthcare System Goes the Way of All Others
Proponents of socialized medicine like to remind Americans that the United States spends more per capita on healthcare than any other industrialized nation without necessarily getting the best results. Instead, they suggest emulating European welfare states with their national healthcare systems.

According to a report from Agence France-Presse, however, one of the crown jewels of the welfare state, Sweden, spends extravagantly on healthcare yet finds its prized universal healthcare system succumbing to the same forces that have doomed all other such programs, with waiting lists growing ever longer and doctors, nurses, and hospitals becoming ever scarcer.

Swedes, on average, pay over half their income in taxes, and their government’s healthcare spending is the third highest in the European Union. And what do they get for it?

AFP writes:

Swedish law stipulates patients should wait no more than 90 days to undergo surgery or see a specialist. Yet every third patient waits longer, according to government figures.

Patients must also see a general practitioner within seven days, the second-longest deadline in Europe after Portugal (15 days).

Try as they might, politicians cannot legislate away the law of supply and demand. With healthcare seemingly free, people tend to use more of it than necessary, driving costs up while failing to increase the supply of care. (In a free market, by contrast, higher prices would induce consumers to reduce their consumption and producers to increase their production, bringing prices back down.)

Thus, even the government’s seemingly modest goals for timely care, known as the “Healthcare Guarantee,” go unmet. As insurance executive Kent Andersson told the European news site The Local, “The Healthcare Guarantee isn’t a guarantee.”

Twenty-three-year-old Asia Nader, for instance, told AFP that she had to wait a year for surgery to repair a hole in her heart. A dental patient said he had to wait six months for a checkup. Prostate-cancer patients wait 120 days on average for surgery, but in one county the wait was as high as 217 days. Patients wait four hours on average to be seen in the emergency rooms of Stockholm’s major hospitals.

When patients do get to see doctors, they “complain about not being able to see their own regular general practitioner — and the ensuing lack of continuity — as a growing number of doctors and nurses are temporary hires employed by staffing companies,” notes AFP. Official numbers — which may understate the problem — suggest that 80 percent of the healthcare system is short of nurses.

Some hospitals are closing, while even new ones aren’t able to keep up with demand, reports AFP:

In Solleftea, the premier’s northern hometown with nearly 20,000 residents, the only maternity ward was shut down last year to save money.

With the closest maternity ward now 200 kilometers (125 miles) away, midwives offer parents-to-be classes on how to deliver babies in cars — which some have since done….

Frustrations peaked this year when it emerged that the bill for Stockholm’s over-budget state-of-the-art New Karolinska Hospital would tick in at 61.4 billion kronor (5.8 billion euros, $6.7 billion) — the most expensive hospital in the world.

And yet patients have had to be transferred to other overcrowded hospitals because some of the facilities are unusable.

Add to that the aging population and the recent influx of immigrants, and the cracks in the socialist edifice are becoming impossible to ignore, much to the chagrin of Sweden’s leftists. Lisa Pelling, chief analyst at progressive think tank Arena Ide, told AFP that Swedes’ lack of confidence in politicians’ ability to solve the healthcare system’s problems creates “a risk their faith in the welfare state will be eroded.”

Of course, governing parties, rather than admit socialism’s failure, are simply trying their same old tactics. The Social Democrats, who currently control the government, are promising to fix the system by spending even more money on it. Their main opponents, the Moderates, want to patch the system their own way by rewarding counties for reducing queues, a mandate that “critics say … just encourages doctors to prioritize easily-solved cases,” observes AFP.

There is only one sure way to fix the healthcare system in Sweden or any other country: Get the government out of the way and let the free market reign.

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Reality



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Illegal immigrants who exploited Motor Voter to register in North Carolina still on rolls

Elvis David Fullerton has voted in 16 elections in North Carolina dating back nearly two decades. The only problem, authorities say, is he’s not a citizen and never should have been on the voter rolls, much less allowed to step into a polling booth to cast a ballot.

Mr. Fullerton, who is still a citizen of Grenada, is one of 19 North Carolinians the federal government indicted last month on charges of illegal voting. Yet even now, his name remains on the state’s rolls in Wake County, and local officials say there’s not much they can do about it.

“At this time I’ve not been made aware of any formal source to remove anybody,” said Gary Sims, elections board director in Wake, where five of the 19, including Mr. Fullerton, were registered. Three of them are still on his rolls.

Mr. Sims said an indictment or sworn affidavit isn’t even enough for him to begin an investigation, saying he needs a notification from an “official or formal source.”

Yet the indictments, which got only cursory attention nationally, do offer unprecedented insight into the contours of illegal voting in the U.S.

The first clear conclusion is that most non-citizens who sign up to vote appear to do so at motor vehicle bureaus. Of the 18 accused voters for which The Washington Times was able to find state records, all of them registered at North Carolina DMVs.

And of those 18, 13 were registered as Democrats, four as Republicans and one unaffiliated with a party. While a small sample, that does suggest Democrats may be benefitting more from illegal non-citizen voting than Republicans.

Mr. Sims, the elections official in Wake County, said he can’t begin a review of people the federal government says are voting illegally until a more “verifiable” source comes forward.

He said his main role in registration is to make sure people fill out their information correctly, and he said he relies on checks to clear his rolls of people who moved out of the area, or who have passed away. But Mr. Sims acknowledged none of those checks would catch non-citizens. “That really is managed by the North Carolina state Board of Elections,” he said.

Perhaps it’s time local officials take a more proactive approach, said Logan Churchwell at the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has done pioneering work in tracking down non-citizens on voting rolls, and which uncovered many of the names still registered in North Carolina last month.

“These are registrants facing federal indictments for election crimes. In the face of new law enforcement efforts, the standard operating procedure may not always apply,” Mr. Churchwell said.

He also said the fact that all of the registrants were listed as having signed up at motor vehicle bureaus pointed clearly at a flaw in the system: the Clinton-era National Voter Registration Act, more commonly known as the Motor Voter law, because it requires states to push voter registration on people who show up to conduct business at DMVs.

Non-citizens can easily sign up, either by accident or on purpose, and as Mr. Sims pointed out, there are no easy ways to skim them out of the pool.

“Incidents like this demonstrate why we need to put Motor Voter back on the table for reform — all of it,” Mr. Churchwell said. “Maintenance stagnation breeds voter roll bloat and can only harm confidence in the system as a result.”

The PILF released a report last week tracking 13 cities and counties with sanctuary policies, and counted more than 3,000 non-citizens who’ve been stripped from their voting rolls in recent years.

Those are usually people who either self-reported or were flagged as illegal voters, and it doesn’t capture the potentially hundreds of thousands of others who have not outed their unauthorized voting behavior, analysts said.

Federal officials declined to say how the 19 people in North Carolina came to their attention.

The court-appointed lawyer for Mr. Fullerton didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.

Others among the 19 include Alessandro Cannizzaro, an Italian, was granted legal permanent residence in the U.S. in 1985, and applied for citizenship in 2003 — but was denied four years later. Still, in 2008 he swore he was a citizen when he registered to vote in Wake County, and did in fact cast ballots in 2008, 2012 and 2016, according to state records.

His name has been dropped from the voter rolls.

Yet another of the 19, Ramon Esteban Paez-Jerez, of the Dominican Republic, was ordered deported in 1988 but never showed up for his deportation. Instead he adopted a fake identity and managed to win citizenship under that name in 1999, prosecutors said.

The government didn’t divulge the fake identity in court documents, and The Times was unable to track his voting history — though prosecutors said he, too, was registered in Wake County.

Patrick Gannon, spokesman for the state elections board, said the indictments presented “somewhat of a unique situation” to officials. “We do not have a regular voter list maintenance process to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls, at least partly because there is no comprehensive citizenship database to rely upon,” he said.

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