† The Day Newt Gingrich’s Candidacy Died: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has sustained significant political damage after attacking Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget plan, Washington Post political analyst Chris Cillizza reports:

 

In a new Gallup poll, Gingrich’s favorable ratings among Republican voters have fallen to just 61 percent, down from a high of 75 percent in early April.

 

His positive intensity score - a measurement used by Gallup that takes the percentage of people who feel strongly favorably and subtracts the percentage who feel strongly unfavorably - is now at just six, the second lowest of all possible 2012 candidates. (The lowest? Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, who had a positive intensity score of just four.)

 

Compounding Gingrich’s political problem is the fact that, unlike Johnson or even former Utah governor Jon Huntsman (positive intensity score of eight), Gingrich is among the best-known candidates in the field - with 85 percent of GOP voters recognizing his name. …

 

Rich Galen, a former aide to Gingrich, says no. “No one’s even talking about him any more,” said Galen. …

 

That reality means that Gingrich has to find a way to re-introduce himself to GOP voters over the coming weeks and months, which is no small task for a man who was the face of the Republican party for much of the 1990s.

 

It’s an uphill battle, but time is on Gingrich’s side. The Iowa caucuses are still 251 days away.

 

Yes, but time wounds all heels, as it surely will in Gingrich’s case.

 

† Iraq Was Supposed To Become Like The USA - But The Reverse Has Happened: Part II: Waad Ramadan Alwan and Muhamad Shareef Hammadi, who came to the U.S. from Iraq in 2009 as refugees (second item), have been arrested in Bowling Green, KY, on a 23-count indictment that charges them with conspiring to provide money, weapons, and other support to Al Qaeda in Iraq, The Christian Science Monitor reports:

 

Mr. Alwan is accused of conspiring to kill US nationals abroad, distributing information on the manufacture and use of improvised explosive devices in Iraq, and plotting to transfer Stinger missiles to Iraq.

 

Mr. Hammadi is charged with attempting to provide material support to Al Qaeda in Iraq, and conspiring to transfer Stinger missiles.

 

“Over the course of roughly eight years, Waad Ramadan Alwan allegedly supported efforts to kill US troops in Iraq, first by participating in the construction and placement of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq, and, more recently, by attempting to ship money and weapons from the United States to insurgents in Iraq,” said Todd Hinnen, acting assistant attorney general for national security. …

 

The FBI began investigating Alwan five months after he arrived after being granted refugee status. A year later, in August 2010, the FBI began using a confidential human source who engaged in recorded conversations with Alwan.

 

The investigation of Hammadi began in January.

 

Alwan admitted in recorded conversations that from 2003 to 2006 he was an insurgent who used IEDs and sniper rifles to target US forces in Iraq, according to court documents. …

 

Later, Alwan allegedly recruited Hammadi to help in the effort.

 

Officials stressed that none of the money or weapons involved in the undercover operation in the US was actually provided to Al Qaeda in Iraq.

 

† Nationalized Healthcare Always Leads To Rationing: For three years, Sevan Hajinian has not been able to find a Canadian surgeon willing to perform a complex surgical procedure to relieve her debilitating back pain, and the Ontario Health Insurance Plan refuses to pay the $175,000 it would cost for a surgeon in NYC to operate on her spine. The 50-year-old, who was forced to quit her job as a manager of a dental office, is taking eight Percocet to blunt the pain, The Globe and Mail (Toronto, ON) reports:

 

Ms. Hajinian’s case raises the question of how many specialists a patient must contact before the province agrees to fund treatment outside of Canada. …

 

OHIP will pay for out-of-country treatment if it is deemed medically appropriate, is unavailable in Ontario and not experimental. It is also covered if it is available but the wait would cause medically significant irreversible tissue damage.

 

Ms. Hajinian has been diagnosed with pseudarthrosis, a failed spinal fusion characterized by movement at the fused site. She also suffers from nerve-root impingement. Almost three decades ago, a steel rod was placed in her back due to scoliosis, a curving of the spine. At least four Ontario surgeons have refused to operate on Ms. Hajinian for the pain she is experiencing now, saying it would not help; one said it was beyond his expertise. A Toronto surgeon initially offered to do it, and then declined. The family’s efforts to find a willing surgeon in Vancouver were futile.

 

Jean-Pierre Farcy, a clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at New York University and a world-renowned spine surgeon, has agreed to operate, which he said would improve Ms. Hajinian’s condition.

 

Without surgery, “she could end up with paraplegia, which, as a person of her age, is catastrophic,” Dr. Farcy testified by telephone last week during an expedited hearing of the Health Services Appeal and Review Board. …

 

When Dr. Farcy met Ms. Hajinian, in July, 2009, he recommended a decompression, which involves removing the source of nerve compression. She also requires a fusion – surgery to join two vertebrae in the spine, making it more stable.

 

Her case is complex because previous operations have left scar tissue, and the steel rod in her back may have to be replaced. She sustained life-threatening complications in the previous surgery, including a cerebrospinal fluid leak, meningitis, a blood clot and an embolism. …

 

So Ms. Hajinian is again scrambling to find a spine surgeon, an onerous task given that waits for a first appointment are usually months to a year.

 

With huge demand for spine surgeons – many from patients who ultimately will learn they are not eligible for an operation – the system is in gridlock.

 

Hajinian’s brother, Aris Babikian, testified that his sister has developed suicidal tendencies, and disappeared several months ago, prompting her family to file a missing person’s report.

 

To her supporters, Hajinian’s ordeal has become a human rights issue, and they are petitioning the government to permit her to receive treatment in NYC.

 

† A Conservative Playwright Comes Out (And Lives To Tell About It): The Hollywood Reporter features a book by conservative wunderkind Ben Shapiro based on interviews he did with top TC industry executives, writers and producers admitting that conservatives are not welcome in Hollywood (the article includes short clips of these interviews):

 

Leonard Goldberg - who executive produces Blue Bloods for CBS and a few decades ago exec produced such hits as Fantasy Island, Charlie’s Angels and Starsky and Hutch - saying that liberalism in the TV industry is “100 percent dominant, and anyone who denies it is kidding, or not telling the truth.”

 

Shapiro asks if politics are a barrier to entry. “Absolutely,” Goldberg says.

 

When Shapiro tells Fred Pierce, the president of ABC in the 1980s who was instrumental in Disney’s acquisition of ESPN, that “It’s very difficult for people who are politically conservative to break in” to television, he responds: “I can’t argue that point.” Those who don’t lean left, he says, “don’t promote it. It stays underground.”

 

Another video rolling out soon has House creator David Shore acknowledging that "there is an assumption in this town that everybody is on the left side of the spectrum, and that the few people on the right side, I think people look at them somewhat aghast, and I'm sure it doesn't help them."

 

In the book, subtitled "The true Hollywood story of how the left took over your TV," Shapiro also tells anecdotes of bias against conservatives. One example is Dwight Schultz, best known for his roles as Murdock in The A-Team and Barclay in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

 

The late Bruce Paltrow knew that Schultz was a fan of President Ronald Reagan. When Schultz showed up to audition for St. Elsewhere, a show Paltrow produced, to read for the part of Fiscus, Paltrow told him: "There's not going to be a Reagan asshole on this show!" The part went to Howie Mandel.

 

"Most nepotism in Hollywood isn't familial, it's ideological," Shapiro writes in the book. "Friends hire friends. And those friends just happen to share their politics."

 

Another video Shapiro will release shortly has producer-director Nicholas Meyer being asked point-blank whether conservatives are discriminated against in Hollywood. "Well, I hope so," he answers.

 

Why were all these folks so candid with Shapiro? Obviously, they had never read his columns – which he began writing as a teenager -  and Shapiro admits, “I played on their stereotypes. When I showed up for the interviews, I wore my Harvard Law baseball cap - my name is Ben Shapiro and I attended Harvard, so there’s a 98.7 percent chance I’m a liberal. Except I happen not to be.”

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, BAM To DOJ: KSM In NYC Is DOA): The Obama administration has finally thrown in the towel in its efforts to bring Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four co-defendants from Gitmo to the U.S. mainland to face charges in a civilian court. Military prosecutors have re-filed capital charges against the five jihadis who orchestrated the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, “restarting a process that the Obama administration had halted as part of its failed effort to close the military detention center,” The Washington Post reports:

 

Charges against the five men were withdrawn without prejudice and dismissed in January 2010 in anticipation of a federal trial in New York City. Bipartisan opposition scuttled that plan, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced in April that the defendants would be returned to a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay.

 

Although the five defendants were first charged in 2008, and numerous pretrial hearings were held before the case was stopped, it must begin again with a fresh arraignment. Under military law, the defendants must first be referred for trial by a Pentagon official known as the convening authority, but that step seems certain in this case. …

 

The five men face multiple charges, including murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, hijacking aircraft and terrorism.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Employers Hiring Forged Documented Aliens Are Lawbreakers In Other Ways, Too): Obama administration officials are going after employers who hire illegals hammer and tong, with “long-running investigations of employers [that] have culminated in indictments, convictions, exponentially increased fines and jail sentences” The New York Times reports:

 

On April 20, immigration agents descended on 14 Chuy’s restaurants in coordinated raids in Arizona and California, detaining kitchen workers and carrying away boxes of payroll books and other evidence.

 

But at the arraignment days later in federal court here, no immigrant workers stood before the judge. The only criminal defendants were the owners, Mark Evenson and his son Christopher, and an accountant who worked with them, Diane Ingrid Strehlow. If the Evensons are convicted on all charges against them of tax fraud and harboring illegal workers, they each could face more than 80 years in jail.

 

Of 42 illegal immigrants caught in the Chuy’s sweep, only one was charged with a crime, and it was not related to the raid. Thirteen workers were processed for immigration violations - which are civil offenses - and detained or deported. The others remained in this country as witnesses or to seek legal status through the immigration courts. …

 

Charged with evading more than $400,000 in taxes on wages for some 360 unauthorized immigrant workers, the Evensons together face more than $10 million in fines if convicted on all counts. They have pleaded not guilty, and their lawyers declined to comment, saying they awaited evidence from prosecutors. …

 

The severe charges against the Evensons registered broadly with Arizona executives, business leaders here in Tucson said. But they said the case was mainly a cautionary lesson for managers who knowingly hire unauthorized immigrants.

 

“If companies are paying workers under the table,” said Glenn Hamer, president of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, “we encourage the federal government to throw the book at them.”

 

"Trust, but E-verify," advises New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who thinks that AZ’s 2007 law requiring businesses to confirm their employees’ legal status with the federal E-Verify database will become a model for other states now that it has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court:

 

According to a recent study from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, the legislation reduced Arizona’s population of working-age illegal immigrants by about 17 percent, or roughly 92,000 people, in just a single year. (This effect was entirely distinct from the Great Recession’s broader impact on immigration, the study argues.) And the swift attrition was mainly achieved through voluntary compliance: the number of employers prosecuted under the law can be counted on one hand.

 

These results suggest that maybe - just maybe - America’s immigration rate isn’t determined by forces beyond any lawmaker’s control. Maybe public policy can make a difference after all. Maybe we could have an immigration system that looked as if it were designed on purpose, not embraced in a fit of absence of mind.

 

At least in the short term, there’s no good reason for such a system to include any kind of amnesty. This was a dubious idea even during the last decade’s economic boom. It would be folly (and a political nonstarter) in this economic climate, which has left Americans without high school diplomas (who tend to lose out from low-skilled immigration) facing a 15 percent unemployment rate.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Only The Little People Pay Taxes): Tens of thousands of federal government employees nationwide – amongst them 22 librarians and an interior designer - earned more than the governors of the states in which they work, according to a Congressional Research Service report requested by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), The Washington Times reports:

 

CRS reviewed 2009 salary figures, the most recent available, and found 77,057 employees who earned more in annual pay than their respective governors. Of those workers, 18,351 were doctors - the highest percentage. The second-highest total was for 5,170 air traffic controllers - likely both front-line controllers and their supervisors. …

 

"Across America, governors are being asked to do more with less, often at lower pay than federal employees in their states. The pay gap between governors and federal employees should prompt Congress to take a closer look at federal salaries," Mr. Coburn said. "With our debt and deficits spiraling out of control, now is the time to ask agencies - not just governors - to do more with less." …

 

For individual occupations, the CRS report did not break down the states where they worked, so it was impossible to determine where the one interior designer who made more than the governor was employed.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, 10 Reasons Michelle Obama Should Be Proud – Really Proud – Of America): This latest installment in The Stiletto Blog’s ongoing series meant to help instill the necessary pride of country in Michelle Obama’s consciousness to enable her to serve as an unofficial ambassador focuses on rape survivor Natasha Alexenko, who founded Natasha's Justice Project to push for law enforcement agencies nationwide to clear a backlog of tens of thousands untested rape kits so that sexual predators can be caught and convicted. The Washington Times reports:

 

A sexual assault survivor who waited 15 years to see her assailant brought to justice, Alexenko - who is featured in an upcoming HBO documentary on sex crime prosecutions - insists authorities often have the evidence to convict predators, but it goes untested for years. It happened to her. …

 

"You'd be surprised how many people are not aware of the fact that an individual is sexually assaulted, we have the DNA evidence, and yet the kit sits on a shelf going absolutely nowhere," said Alexenko, 38, who recently resigned as head of the Long Island Maritime Museum to support the foundation. …

 

Alexenko was a 19-year-old college student from Ontario when she was raped and sodomized at gunpoint in the hallway of her Manhattan apartment building in 1993. She immediately reported the assault to police and went to a hospital, where authorities collected physical evidence, including DNA samples.

 

But Alexenko's rape kit sat on a shelf in an evidence room for nearly a decade. Only months before the 10-year statute of limitations was to expire, New York City prosecutors seeking to clear its backlog of rape kits had the evidence analyzed. …

 

In 2007, authorities arrested a suspect who was eventually convicted in Alexenko's sexual assault; he becomes eligible for parole in 2057. Alexenko, who testified at the trial, said afterward that she felt an obligation to help other victims.

 

The documentary in which Alexenko is interviewed, "Sex Crimes Unit," will air on HBO on June 20^th.