Democrats should also understand that these public tantrums and other slights are simply bad politics. Voters don’t respond well to angry chanting losers harassing people, or to vulgar celebrities, or to threats verging on intimidation and violence. There is nothing inspirational about it, and it makes the targets of the anger look that much more reasonable. If Democrats think this crazed behavior will generate a “blue wave” in November, they are mistaken.
How did we get here? Two tracks converged to deliver us this dysfunction. The first is narrowly political. The Democrats, confident that they were on the right side of history, thought there was no harm in accelerating the rush to total victory. For years, Democrats practiced the rule that all is fair in judicial-confirmation battles, starting with the war on Judge Robert Bork in 1987. Then, under the leadership of Barack Obama and then–Senate majority leader Harry Reid, they did away with the filibuster on judicial appointments short of the Supreme Court, opening the door for Republicans to nudge it slightly more wide open.
The second track is longer. Starting over a century ago, progressives began emphasizing ends over means. If the Supreme Court could deliver wins unattainable at the ballot box and unsupported by the Constitution, so be it. Thus was born the “living Constitution” — the doctrine that holds that the magical parchment should mean whatever progressives need it to mean at any moment. This was how Anthony Kennedy became an (apparently temporary) gay-rights hero. After consulting his feelings, he found a constitutional right no one had found in the text before.
This idea that the Supreme Court is there to serve as a Praetorian Guard around progressive policies was on full display this week. Prior to Kennedy’s retirement announcement, the court issued a 5–4 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which held that public-sector unions can’t compel nonunion members to pay fees for union representation, thus violating the First Amendment.
Justice Elena Kagan caustically disagreed. For her, the problem with the decision was that “public employee unions will lose a secure source of financial support.”
“The First Amendment was meant for better things,” Kagan concluded in her dissent. “It was meant not to undermine but to protect democratic governance — including over the role of public-sector unions.”
In short: The Supreme Court isn’t there to protect the meaning of the First Amendment; the Supreme Court is there to protect a secure source of financial support for public-sector unions. If the First Amendment gets in the way, that’s okay.
The panic unfolding across the progressive landscape stems from the creeping fear that the Supreme Court might start doing its job — and not the job progressives have assigned it.
What will the #NeverTrump coalition in the Beltway (with an annex in New York) say now?
For a while, before tax cuts and regulatory reform boosted the economy, before defense spending increased, before Jerusalem was recognized as Israel’s capital, and before a “maximum pressure” campaign led to a detente with North Korea, #NeverTrumpers were fond of mockingly summarizing Trump supporters’ arguments as “But Gorsuch.”
This bit of childish taunting always struck me as an unknowing admission of ignorance about the role assumed by the Supreme Court in modern American governance. Even when 21 appeals court judges took their seats — orchestrated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues — still the one-note pundits played on, only louder: President Trump was so awful and evil, and conservatives who supported him had done so for one lousy seat on the Supreme Court.
The implication from all the noise and a thousands posts was that “Gorsuch” wasn’t worth it. Now, after Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s first year on the court, it will be impossible to overstate what his confirmation has meant.
While Justice Kennedy was usually a moderate conservative, there were areas of the law in which Justice Kennedy was not particularly moderate and others in which he was not particularly conservative. Particularly in areas touching on the freedom of speech and personal liberty, Justice Kennedy would swing for the fences. Justice Kennedy was easily the most speech-protective Justice on what was a quite speech-protective Court. Whether the speech at issue concerned political campaigns or product pricing, “offensive” messages or dishonest claims about military service, Justice Kennedy believed in uncompromising First Amendment protection. By some accounts it was Justice Kennedy who pushed the Court (and a reluctant Chief Justice) to invalidate the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and this would be entirely consistent with what we saw in his First Amendment opinions.
Speech was not the only freedom that mattered to Justice Kennedy. He had a deep concern for Due Process, as shown in his embrace of habeas rights for alleged enemy combatants, his concerns about the application of capital punishment to some classes of criminal defendants, and his embrace of constitutional limits on punitive damages. He also, perhaps most famously, believed that due regard for individual liberty barred the government from adopting laws prohibiting or disregarding same-sex relationships, as in Lawrence, Romer, Windsor, and Obergefell. In these areas, there was nothing modest, moderate, or minimalist about Justice Kennedy’s views or the doctrinal rules he would embrace.
Given the makeup of the Roberts Court, as went Justice Kennedy, so went the Court. Where Kennedy was a moderate conservative favoring a minimalist approach, the Roberts court would tend to adopt a moderate conservative opinion. Where Justice Kennedy favored a more muscular approach, on the other hand, there were almost always at least four votes to go along. (NFIB v. Sebelius being a notable exception.) If Justice Kennedy wanted to recognize same-sex marriage or preclude the use of the death penalty for those convicted of non-lethal crimes, the liberals would agree. If Justice Kennedy wanted to protect campaign-related or commercial speech, the conservatives were there. so the Roberts Court was generally as conservative and as moderate as Justice Kennedy wanted to be.
Kurt Schlichter on the insanity gripping the Democratic Party:
There’s no sign of sanity. This week they turned the hate up to “11,” then cranked it to “17.” There are not many places to go once you reach “You are real live Nazis murdering children by not letting aspiring Democrat voters flow into the country at will!” At some point, instead of a few wild-eyed randos with crummy aim trying to off libs’ political/cultural opponents, they are going to start collectively going to go for the throat.
Our collective throat. Which I do not anticipate us Normals responding to in a huggy, loving kind of way.
Snip.
We’re already seeing it play out. The mainstream media quit even pretending to be honest – it’s in full scale fib mode. Look at the Time magazine cover of the little girl whose scumbag mom dragged her across the desert to help her break our laws (apparently without daddy’s permission and not for the first time). That Time cover is a lie, but it’s no surprise. The only surprise is that Time magazine is still a thing.
In fact, the whole manufactured outrage over Democrat-preferred criminals being treated like every other criminal was a lie. And the media not only doesn’t care but actively and consciously supports lying to you to support its liberal allies. But no one cares anymore. They can lie and lie and lie, and do, and we just smile and buy more guns and ammo.
So the leftists attempt to intimidate us into submission, showing up at people’s houses and screaming at them in restaurants. Take that, Sarah! The idea is since the leftists can’t convince Normals with the power of their ideas – because leftists’ ideas inevitably involve Normals ceding more of their rights and money to leftists – the left wants to make submission and obedience the price for being able to participate in the culture. But what’s inevitable is that us newly militant Normals, whose power is political rather than cultural, are going to respond pursuant to the New Rules and demand that leftists bake us a cake.
The craziness among Democrats can be explained by the behavior of cultists after a prophecy fails: the moderates, the ones who were the biggest brake on untrammeled lunacy, are the ones out the door first.
The more lukewarm Democrats are either keeping their mouths shut or are disappearing from the Party. The ones who remain are the ones who are more committed (translation: barking mad moonbats) who are the ones we hear talking about impeachment, banishing Trump supporters from the public square, protesting at Republican’s houses, etc.
It also explains why Democratic Party big wigs are losing primary challenges to candidates of the more barking mad persuasion (e.g. Joe Crowley, one of the biggest of the Democratic House big wigs who lost to someone who can only be described as a commie).
Speaking of which, the House’s fourth-ranking Democrat just got knocked off by a woman who wants to abolish ICE. “The objection of the hard Left is not to the current style or kind of immigration enforcement; their objection is to the existence of immigration enforcement.”
Mega Turbo Democrat Dumbass: “I’m going to find the Congressman’s kids and kill them. If you’re going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids. Don’t try to find me because you won’t.” Yeah, that last bit turned out to not be the case: The FBI arrested him within hours.
A judge ordered a do-over of a contested Democratic primary runoff race in South Texas after invalidating the runoff results due to voter fraud. The runoff was decided by six votes.
Ofelia “Ofie” Gutierrez contested the results of the May 22 Democratic primary runoff for Kleberg County Justice of the Peace Precinct 4 after losing to incumbent Esequiel “Cheque” De La Paz by a vote of 318 to 312.
Gutierrez alleged that more than six illegal votes were counted, cast by people who didn’t reside within Precinct 4 and therefore weren’t eligible to vote in the election.
On Tuesday, visiting Judge Joel Johnson threw out seven of the 16 ballots Gutierrez challenged in court. All seven were cast by voters related in some way to De La Paz.
Speaking of Iran, protests there continued for a sixth day following a currency collapse. “On Sunday, the rial plunged 15 percent to IRR 89,000 against the dollar on the black market. Since the U.S. withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal on May 8, the rial has lost more than 40 percent of its value.”
The dumbasses at the Austin City Council approved building a soccer stadium. Because subsidizing a popular sport just wasn’t insulting enough to taxpayers…
What it’s like to service an SR-71. “Our last structural integrity review was in 1987, and it declared that the aircraft was about 180 percent stronger than the day it was made. The higher and faster you flew it, the stronger the titanium became.”
Black man being arrested for shoplifting calls police Nazis. So they charged him with a hate crime. All hate crime laws are stupid, but those that criminalize free speech are an order of magnitude stupider. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A Tweet with some numbers from the latest Harris poll:
Wow! Even after last week's fever pitch smear of the Trump administration, 70 percent say we need STRICTER enforcement of our immigration laws. Only 30 percent say looser.
When I realized that the left was trying to convince me that all my non-left family members were hateful, racist, sexist xenophobic bigots, I had to #WalkAway
Multiculturalism Watch: Excavating the Aztec’s ceremonial skull rack, which the Spanish conquistadors estimated as holding 130,000 skulls from human sacrifices. “Gomoz Valdas found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children. Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed.”
The whole “OMG, we lock up illegal alien kids!” panic the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have ginned up is a sign of just how good the economy is under President Donald Trump, and just how desperate Democrats are to find an issue to run on in November. Faced with the prospect of running on tranny bathrooms, gun control and calling ordinary Americans racists (yet again), they hit upon screeching about the fate of some 2,000 illegal alien minors as the only naked emotional appeal left in their arsenal.
Here it is, folks: the only tactic Democrats could agree to run on this fall.
So naturally, President Trump defused the issue he inherited from Obama with an executive order, causing Democrats to turn on a dime from “OMG, this is the most important moral crisis of our time!” to “That’s not good enough, you heartless monster, we want immediate full amnesty or we keep screaming our heads off!” Ditto for Sen. Ted Cruz’s legislative fix, which was instantly labeled a “cynical ploy.” You know, just like Democrats manufacturing the whole issue.
Expect Democrats to to start bloviating about something equally ludicrous but completely different with the same overheated emotional furor next week…
Rio Grande Valley Sector Chief Manuel Padilla says the entire problem stems from Obama-era laxness:
“It’s a very complex situation,” he told “CBS This Morning” co-host Gayle King. “When you have high levels of activity, and a lack of resources – personnel, technology, infrastructure – it creates this kind of chaotic environment.”
I know this is complicated for you and your team, but what people are talking about is cruel and inhuman behavior, is how it’s perceived,” said King. “Do you actually agree with this policy?”
“I do agree that we have to do something. We created this situation by not doing anything,” Padilla said. “So what happened with zero tolerance is, we were exempting a population from the law. And what happens when you do that, it creates a draw for a certain group of people that rises to trends that become a crisis.”
“I’m going to give you an example: Because we were releasing family units, May 2, just last month, we had a full-blown MS-13 (gang member) accompanied by his one-year-old child. He thought he was going get released into the community; that was not the case.”
Congressional Democratic candidates are more left-wing than ever. I’m sure a platform of repealing tax cuts will go over swell among ordinary voters… (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Actor Peter Fonda (who you may remember as The Devil in Ghost Rider) went off on an “unhinged even by the standards of blue checkmark liberals on Twitter” rant in which he called for Barron Trump to be raped by pedophiles. To which reporter Juan Williams said Fonda’s rant was “poorly worded.” Oh really? Just how should someone word an appeal that the children of one’s political opponents be raped by pedophiles? Where does Miss Manners stand on this vital issue of 21st century American etiquette?
Related tweet:
Within the last two days, the anti-Trump Resistance has endorsed the brutal murder of ICE agents, the stalking of their children, the public mobbing of a DHS official, and the doxxing of White House officials. And also they're very worried about civility and norms you guys.
Eric S. Raymond on the mathematics of gun confiscation. “The critical fraction of American gun owners that would have to be hard-core enough to resist confiscation with lethal violence in order to stop the attempt is lower than 1 in 317. Probably much lower. Especially if we responded by killing not merely the doorknockers but the bureaucrats and politicians who gave them their orders. Which would be more efficient, more just, and certain to follow.”
The Small Arms Survey estimates there are 393,300,000 civilian-owned firearms in the United States. The survey, performed by the Graduate Institute of Geneva, estimated the United States military has about 4.5 million firearms. It put the number of firearms owned by police throughout the United States at just over 1 million.
That means American civilians own nearly 100 times as many firearms as the U.S. military and nearly 400 times as many as law enforcement.
Federal Bureau of Investigation background check records suggest that civilians bought more than 2 million guns in May alone, which means civilians purchase more than double the number of firearms owned by police departments. The number of gun-related civilian background checks in May and April, at over 4.7 million, is greater than the number of firearms currently owned by the American military.
The FBI reported processing more than 25.2 million gun-related civilian background checks in 2017, which is more than the 22.7 million guns the Small Arms Survey estimates are currently held by every law enforcement agency in the world combined. Between 2012 and 2017, the FBI reported conducting more than 135 million civilian gun checks—more than the 133 million guns the Small Arms Survey estimates are in all the world’s military stockpiles.
The Small Arms Survey estimated there are about 1 billion firearms currently in circulation throughout the world. By its estimate, about 85 percent are owned by civilians and American civilians own nearly 40 percent of all the guns in the world. Researchers said worldwide firearms ownership was up since the last time they studied the issue about a decade ago.
“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “In light of the deeply revealing nature of CSLI, its depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach, and the inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact that such information is gathered by a third party does not make it any less deserving of Fourth Amendment protection.”
Roberts was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
This is the rare case where I side with the court’s liberal wing against its conservative wing. If there is a constitutional right to privacy, then surely metadata, which reveals your minute-by-minute physical location, among many other things, should be covered.
Federal court rules that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional for exercising executive authority but putting its director beyond the each of Presidential power.
Turkish jihadist scumbag president Recep Tayyip Erdogan calls a snap election, a tactic that could backfire.
Portland feminist bookstore closing. Naturally they blamed their poor business decisions on white male patriarchy. Insert your own Portlandia joke here.
Everyone’s talking about the the Inspector General Report on the Hillary Clinton email probe, which I’ve not only not been able to read, I haven’t even properly skimmed the summaries yet. But I was already planning to do a Clinton Corruption Update next week, so I’ll try to grapple with it then.
50 Media Mistakes in the Trump Era. Just 50? Here’s a taste: “June 4, 2017: NBC News reported in a Tweet that Russian President Vladimir Putin told TV host Megan Kelly that he had compromising information about Trump. Actually, Putin said the opposite: that he did not have compromising information on Trump.”
Samantha Bee has never to my knowledge said anything that is funny. Her business is the sort of thing that would be of keen interest to those monkeys in the Duke study: the ritual raising and lowering of status — which, as Tyler Cowen and Arnold Kling and others have argued, is what politics is mostly about. The same holds true for media criticism, which is of course only another form of politics. Professor Cowen: “I have a simple hypothesis. No matter what the media tells you their job is, the feature of media that actually draws viewer interest is how media stories either raise or lower particular individuals in status. . . . The status ranking of individuals implied by a particular media source is never the same as yours, and often not even close. . . . Indeed that is why other people enjoy those media sources, because they take pleasure in your status, and the status of your allies, being lowered.”
Samantha Bee does not sell humor or satire: She sells status adjustment. She got her start on The Daily Show, which of course is nothing more than an extended, tedious, witless exercise in concentrated status-lowering: hence all that chest-pounding excitement every time Jon Stewart destroyed! somebody or another, which is precisely the sort of thing that gets the ol’ chimp juices flowing.
Calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless c***” on television is a win-win for Bee et al.: One possibility is that Ivanka Trump offers no response, in which case her status is lowered by her being obliged to endure outrageous insults by a relative nobody on TBS; the second possibility is that she responds, in which case her status is lowered by her being obliged to condescend to respond to the outrageous insults of a relative nobody on TBS. The proverb holds that the problem with wrestling a pig is that you both get dirty but only the pig enjoys it. Samantha Bee is that pig.
Since Trump’s election victory in 2016, the left has lost their goddamn minds. The left has become a national freakout movement and they think that his election legitimizes their complete childish and vulgar meltdown on the national stage. On their side, there is no one telling them that they’ve gone too far- they will simply ramp up the violence all the way to the fall. There’s no one to stop their post-election temper tantrum.
Let’s be honest, though. This didn’t happen overnight. The left has absolved itself from any cultural responsibility the moment they gave Bill Clinton a pass for raping people. And then used cultural outlets like The Daily Show to mock everyone who isn’t on their side and delegitimize civil discourse.
Come the mid-term elections, the more crass and racist stunts that they pull (and get away with), the more people are going to drift into the right-of-center Trump camp. The Democrats were already demographically in trouble with 2018, but the further they push the cultural envelope with mean and childish antics (let alone actual political violence) they are going to get a cultural backlash that makes 1968 look like child’s play.
And what really is bad news for the left is that they’re already at peak jerk levels. What the heck will they do for an encore leading up to November?
If you had been making predictions based on these different movies, Movie 1, predicted that President Trump would not be popular with Israel, and he wouldn’t take the bold step of moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. But both of those outcomes are compatible with Movie 2.
Movie 1 would have predicted there is no way President Trump would grant a posthumous pardon of African-American boxer Jack Johnson because it wouldn’t fit the racist dog whistle script. But Movie 2 is compatible with the pardon. Same with the pardon of Alice Johnson.
Movie 1 would have predicted that President Trump would underplay the fact that black unemployment reached its best level in the history of America. That’s the sort of accomplishment that would make his racist supporters stop hearing the secret racist dog whistle. It doesn’t fit. But President Trump’s frequent highlighting of gains for African-American citizens fits Movie 2 perfectly.
I realize no one reading this post will change movies because of it. My only point today is that mainstream Trump supporters are not knowingly supporting someone they believe to be a racist. It only looks that way to the folks trapped in Movie 1.
Rozanna and Kate Lilley, the daughters of playwright and poet Dorothy Hewett, say they were forced into sex aged 15 by men including the late Bob Ellis and Martin Sharp, The Australian reports.
Sharp, Australia’s foremost pop artist, designed record covers and posters for Bob Dylan, Donovan and Eric Clapton and wrote songs for Clapton’s band, Cream.
Ellis was a political commentator, write and film maker who penned 22 television and screenplays.
And speaking of statutory rape, here’s the inside story of the night Roman Polanski raped a child. Includes details of just how he set about deliberately seducing a girl he knew went to middle school.
Mueller’s indictments not only don’t indicate Russian collusion on part of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, they actually indicate the opposite, says notorious right-wing shills at…The Nation?
AT&T/Time Warner merger approved. Can’t think that this is a good thing, given how much of the local broadband market are government-enforced monopolies…
The director of the American Civil Liberties Union has now acknowledged what should have been obvious to everybody over the past several years: The ACLU is no longer a neutral defender of everyone’s civil liberties. It has morphed into a hyper-partisan, hard-left political advocacy group. The final nail in its coffin was the announcement that, for the first time in its history, the ACLU would become involved in partisan electoral politics, supporting candidates, referenda and other agenda-driven political goals.
Important safety tip: If you’re a popular band, never play Indonesia. Among the worst incidents: multiple cases of death, and Deep Purple’s manager being dropped down an elevator shaft. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
In Austin news, Interim Police Chief Manly is no longer interim. Dwight thinks it’s a good move.
Speaking of basketball games no one will be willing to pay $99 a ticket for, Ted Cruz will play Jimmy Kimmel a one-on-one basketball game in Houston Saturday, with the loser coughing up $5,000 to the winner’s non-political charity of choice.
Somebody had a really shitty day:
Punchy punches Dem chances:
My 5 year old daughter heard Robert DeNiro say “Fuck Trump” and asked me what does “Fuck Trump mean daddy”? I told her it means the Republicans just won the 2018 mid terms and Trump will be President until 2024.
Like a dog returning to its own vomit, Republican congressional leaders just can’t stay away from illegal alien amnesty. Evidently because they love creating new Democratic voters, ignoring the rule of law and depressing their base.
A leaked draft of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) amnesty deal could lead to the “biggest” amnesty for illegal aliens in United States history, experts tell Breitbart News.
Ryan’s immigration deal would go beyond giving amnesty to only the nearly 800,000 illegal aliens who are enrolled in the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
According to a leaked draft of the amnesty deal, obtained by Breitbart News, Ryan’s plan would allow the entire “DACA population” to be eligible for amnesty so long as they meet low educational, work and criminal requirements, prompting the amnesty to explode in size.
A draft of the leaked GOP amnesty deal
That DACA population could include the nearly 3.5 million DACA-enrolled and DACA-eligible illegal aliens, and even more illegal aliens who arrive in the U.S. to fraudulently obtain the amnesty.
NumbersUSA Governmental Affairs Director Rosemary Jenks told Breitbart News that Ryan’s amnesty will — at the least — allow 1.8 million illegal aliens to stay in the U.S.
“This has the potential to turn into the biggest amnesty we’ve ever had,” Jenks said.
The leaked amnesty deal reveals that Ryan and the Republican establishment may even be considering going beyond giving amnesty to DACA illegal aliens.
A second amnesty is included in the leaked draft, one that would allow the children of temporary foreign guest workers and “anyone who has a ‘contingent nonimmigrant status’” to apply for the amnesty.
How about “No”? Does “No” work for you? How about “Hell No!”?
What needs to be done is:
Increased border enforcement
Implement E-Verify
Build the wall
All that needs to be done before any sort of amnesty is even considered.
Why is this message so hard for congressional Republicans to understand?
Despite Obama’s recent projection that his eight-year tenure was “scandal-free,” along with the reality that the media’s biased compliance sought to make such a startling fantasy true, the Obama administration was in many respects lawless. It will eventually rank as the most scandal-ridden administration since Warren G. Harding’s.
The Fast and Furious scandal was, among other things, about deliberate government gun-running of weapons to Mexico, perhaps in a warped effort to discredit current U.S. firearms laws. The Benghazi debacle involved a cover-up of a preplanned terrorist hit on our consulate, an attack that was possible only because it was well known that the consulate’s security was lax. The Benghazi cover-up involved U.N. ambassador Susan Rice lying five times on national television in a single day, when she claimed that the terrorist operation was the result of a spontaneous riot over a video. And to justify that reelection-cycle concoction, the video maker, a foreign resident on U.S. soil, was summarily jailed on a trumped-up probation charge.
An IRS regional high official, and Obama partisan, Lois Lerner, weaponized and discredited the IRS, by hounding conservative groups that were seeking tax-exempt status. Lerner staged a self-serving public stunt to leak her misbehavior to friendly ears — she had a reporter ask her a planted question about targeting conservatives. At her later congressional testimony, Lerner invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination. She was never charged by the Obama State Department. Indeed, Obama himself, after expressing initial pseudo contriteness in the face of public furor, waited the public out before finally announcing that there was not a “smidgeon” of corruption in the IRS. Lerner, in effect, was rewarded for successfully neutralizing many conservative activist groups just months before the 2012 election. In October 2017, facing a lawsuit by conservative groups, the IRS admitted in court that it had unfairly targeted them during the Obama administration. It agreed to a multi-million-dollar settlement, and the current attorney general, Jeff Sessions, apologized to the more than 450 conservative organizations in question.
Nadine Strossen, a liberal and the former president of the American Civil Liberty Union, conceded — but only in hindsight when both Obama and she were out of their respective offices — that Obama was one of the most hostile presidents to civil liberties in history. Perhaps she was referring to the fact that Eric Holder’s and Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department had spied on Associated Press reporters, monitored the communications of Fox reporter James Rosen, and subpoenaed New York Times reporter James Risen to force him to reveal his confidential sources. Holder was also the first Attorney General in U.S. history to be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over subpoenaed documents.
But it was during the 2016 election cycle that the Obama administration descended to a level of corruption not seen in a century. Right in the middle of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server, Obama, as judge and jury, announced that candidate Clinton had violated no criminal law while secretary of state. Obama also lied when he stated that he’d known nothing about such an unlawful server, although emails prove that he himself had communicated over it on several occasions. His FBI director, James Comey, deliberately scrambled the law and exonerated Hillary Clinton from wrongdoing, not because she had not broken the law, but, according to Comey’s own invented interpretations of the statute, because she had not intended to violate the law. Comey also admitted to tailoring his circus-like investigation of Clinton around the assumption that she would soon be president.
We are slowly appreciating over the last year that lying under oath was an Obama-administration requisite for a high position in the intelligence community.
The most frustrating aspect of all is the lack of communication. If the goal is to create a better overall experience on the site, then it would make sense to tell people who have had their accounts restricted exactly why it happened so the problem could be avoided in the future.
The fact that they don’t do so really heightens the perception that it isn’t about anything other than punitively targeting accounts that don’t fit in with the hive mind. The appearance of deliberate censorship could be gotten rid of with a bare amount of transparency and communication from Twitter. That, sadly, does not seem to be a priority.
Sharp-eyed readers will note that I referred to Robinson as an “activist” while Peter refers to him as “Alt-Right”. I used this journalistic technique intentionally, partly because it highlights what the left-wing media does all the time when referring to Left Wing terrorists like Earth First! and the like. But it also cuts to the heart of this question. If we don’t look at who the messenger is and whether we like him, and instead look at who is speaking the truth, things start to look grim for the UK establishment. The Government certainly did not speak the truth, and in fact covered up these crimes for decades. The media did at least publish the stories when they came out, but there is a strange soft peddling of the story.
The alleged perpetrators are described as “asian males”, as if some of them were from China or Korea. This leads to more questions, as we try to peel the onion to get to, you know, the truth.
Are the “asian males” actually Pakistani immigrants? Are they all muslim? Is their muslim identity a key factor in why they chose English girls as victims? To simply ask these questions is to answer them.
The Government officials damn themselves by their silence here. It’s actually worse – one single person in a position of power (a Shadow Cabinet Secretary – the Cabinet of the out of power party) actually did speak the truth here, and was promptly sacked.
It seems very unhealthy that the only people who appear to be speaking the truth here are what we’re told is an “Alt-Right” fringe.
Question 3: Is the root cause of all these crimes the fact that Europe is really bad at assimilating different cultures?
This is the Question That Must Not Be Asked, whether in Leeds Crown Court, in Cologne or Berlin, or in Paris. If Europe does a particularly poor job at assimilating immigrants from other cultures into a collective Body Politick, then the Europe-wide governmental policy of massive immigration from the 3rd World assumes a very different perspective.
You might get, you know, mass instances of gang rape.
This is a particularly ugly question, and it the question that all European governments (and their lap dog media) are trying desperately to suppress.
Because if the State will not protect the public, then the whole deal is off. Blood feud may be the only option.
On May 16, agents discovered 2,119 pounds of marijuana concealed in a commercial shipment of charcoal into the U.S. On May 20, agents discovered 56 pounds of cocaine, approximately $432,500 in street value, on a Mexican commercial bus on the McAllen-Reynosa International Bridge and another $1.4 million worth of cocaine at the Kingsville checkpoint. In the first week of May, $247,000 worth of methamphetamine was apprehended at the Falfurrias checkpoint. Over Memorial Day weekend, $2.2 million in marijuana was seized in Harlingen, another 300 pounds was confiscated in Roma, and another 90 pounds of marijuana along with 35 illegal immigrants were apprehended at the checkpoints.
Bonus: Seized baby tiger.
Charles Krauthammer is is dying of cancer, and is only expected to have weeks to live. There was probably no columnist or pundit more vital to holding Obama to account during the first year of his first term.
Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lupe Valdez has yet to run a single Facebook ad since she won the primary. It would be some kind of anti-miracle for Valdez to run a worse campaign than Wendy Davis ran in 2014, but thus far she’s been all but invisible. Also this: “The Valdez campaign was also recently ensnared in a bit of controversy after the Houston Chronicle unearthed public records showing Valdez, ‘owes more than $12,000 in overdue taxes on seven properties in two counties.’ Valdez had been ‘campaign[ing] to close loopholes in the state’s broken property-tax system,’ according to the report.” (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)
We told liberals they wouldn’t like the new rules being applied to them, but they didn’t listen. Liberals get Roseanne Barr fired, conervatives get Samantha Bee’s sponsors to pull out. (Disclaimer: I didn’t watch either of their shows.)
How #NeverTrump came to be a lifestyle choice: “These people aren’t operating from principle. The are operating from pique. Trump’s mere presence offends them because they just know they are his social and intellectual superiors.”
Indeed, how many of these widely accepted (sometimes downright cherished) assumptions can one man challenge (disrupt) in such a brief period of time? The answer is plenty. He does it by questioning what often goes unquestioned in Washington, D.C. He simply asks “Why?” Why help fund a Shiite crescent in the Middle East? Why send tax dollars to a terrorist-friendly PLO? Why support anti-American programs at the U.N.? Why a “One China” policy? Why placate deadbeat NATO partners? Why pay premium prices for the F-35 and a new Air Force One? Why force nuns to provide birth-control coverage? Why tolerate sanctuary cities and a porous border?
Five years ago, my husband and I bought a house in the emptiest county in America. We went there because the night sky is so dark, you can walk in the high desert by starlight and cast a shadow, so dark you can see distant galaxies and the zodiacal light. There are three types of people in our rural area: amateur astronomers, ranchers, and illegal aliens.
If you climb the mountains behind our house and look south, you look into Mexico. If you climb those mountains to the top, you are on one of the major drug trafficking routes into America. If you stay in the desert at the foot of the mountains, you are in rattlesnake country—the greatest biodiversity of rattlers in America, and the night path of illegal aliens.
It is not even a secret that the 60 miles between the border and Interstate 10 are treated as a no man’s land. We live and vote and pay taxes in America, but the government acts as if we are beyond the defensible perimeter of the country. Border Patrol is everywhere, but even with President Trump, they are just going through the circular motions of catch and release.
They have high tech listening stations in the mountains, trucks equipped with radar on the back roads. They know when drugs are moving through, know regular drop-offs, are adept at finding caches. But if they can’t secure the border, they can’t keep the families that live here safe—and they don’t even try.
We are the deplorables. All of my rancher neighbors have guns. Most are Evangelicals. To Democrats and open-borders Republicans, we are throwaway people. The Other. Disposable.
The reason I am not naming names, even place names, is that these are my neighbors’ stories, not mine, and my neighbors—farmers, cowboys, and ranching families, strong, resourceful, tough people—my neighbors are wary and they are weary. They fear retribution by the drug runners and coyotes who bring the illegals across, because they have seen it happen.
All of my neighbors have had encounters with illegals. Every single family. Everyone knows dozens of families whose homes have been broken into and worse—loved ones tied up, kidnapped, threatened, shot, permanently crippled by a hit and run attack, when they made too much of a fuss to authorities.
Evergreen State College is eliminating dozens of staff positions as it struggles to cope with plummeting enrollment in the wake of the protests that engulfed campus last year.
John Carmichael, the chief of staff and secretary to the Evergreen State College Board of Trustees, announced in a memo to staff and faculty members on Tuesday that the school has already cut 24 faculty lines and eliminated 19 vacant staff positions, and warned that up to 20 additional staff members could soon be laid off.
“Over the past several days, 20 staff members have been notified that they are at risk for layoff,” Carmichael wrote. “These layoffs, although necessary to stabilize the college’s budget, represent a profound loss felt by many.”
The staffing cuts, which include not renewing contracts for several adjunct faculty members, come shortly after the college revealed that it would be cutting $5.9 million from the budget in anticipation of a shortfall in applications of up to 20 percent.
Twenty-five million dollars in investable wealth. The kind of money you could afford to see dip into the red for a quarter or three, maybe even a year or two, without breaking a sweat. With $25 million, maybe, just maybe, you’re starting to be rich.
Because in this era of hyper-wealth and hyper-inequality, that is simply where rich begins—a ticket, in truth, to the first, lowly rung of rich. For most of the planet, $25 million represents unfathomable wealth. For elite private bankers, it buys their basic service.
Call it economy-class rich. Business class? That’s $100 million. First class? $200 million. Private-jet rich? Try $1 billion.
I grew up thinking that rich was owning a two-story house, so I’ve got it made. Top of the world, ma! (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Texas Supreme Court strikes down short-term rental rule. The only surprise this time is that it was San Antonio rather than Austin making the stupid law.
Solo underperforms. I’m not sure there are any larger lessons to be drawn. For what it’s worth, I saw Deadpool 2 last Saturday, and recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the original Deadpool.
Are we supposed to have Strong Opinions and Takes of Elevated Temperature over the fact that President Donald Trump has cancelled the summit with North Korea? Because the MSM certainly seems to have no shortage of such takes, despite the fact that Scott Adams (who keeps explaining President Trump’s persuasion techniques again and again to a press that refuses to listen) called it a month ago:
It isn’t just that liberals, the MSM and #NeverTrump hate President Trump, it’s that they hate him with such a blinding, all-encompassing rage that they refuse to learn from their mistakes and keep making the same ones over and over again…
President Trump’s immigration crackdown is forcing companies to actually hire women.
The children of the ’60s — you know, the hippies — and their ideological offspring in academia, politics, and, most especially, the media, are now not only okay with a sitting president’s weaponizing the intelligence community against a rival presidential campaign; they are all rolling over like whipped dogs to believe everything the intelligence community tells them, most especially when it is coming from the CIA — the CIA! — and the FBI.
Basically, Trump has driven the hippies and their offspring so crazy they are not only A-okay with the CIA’s spying on American citizens, totally cool with FBI spies infiltrating a rival campaign, and feeling warm all over about wiretaps, unmasking, and lying to federal judges, they do not want any of this investigated.
The other day, Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame was on CNN fuming over the fact that there will now be an investigation of the Obama administration, the Department of Justice, the CIA, and the FBI, after it was discovered they are all guilty of spying on the political rival of a sitting president.
Carl freakin’ Bernstein does not want the watchmen watched. Carl freakin’ Bernstein is swallowing every treat being fed to him by the CIA — the CIA! — and the FBI. Carl freakin’ Bernstein does not want an investigation, does not want to learn anything more than what he is being told (by the CIA!), and does not want the public to know anything more.
Bird is an annoying “scooter sharing” startup plaguing a few cities. Turns out that a recharging reward makes it even more annoying than it sounds, with rechargers gaming the system for maximum rewards by hoarding scooters. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
It was common knowledge in Hollywood that my grandfather, the director John Farrow, was a notorious drinker and serial philanderer. There were numerous alcohol-fueled arguments between her parents, and Mia told me that she was the victim of attempted molestation within her own family. Her brother, my uncle John, who visited us many times when we were young, is currently in prison on a conviction of multiple child molestation charges. (My mother has never publicly commented on this or expressed concern about his victims.) My uncle Patrick and his family would often come by, but those visits could end abruptly as Mia and Patrick would often wind up arguing. Patrick would commit suicide in 2009.
My mother, of course, had her own darkness. She married 50-year-old Frank Sinatra when she was only 21. After they divorced, she moved in to live with her close friend Dory Previn and her husband André. When my mother became pregnant by André, the Previns’ marriage broke up, leading to Dory’s institutionalization. It was never spoken of in our home, of course, and not even known to me until a few years ago. But, as I look at it – as a licensed therapist as well as an eyewitness – it’s easy to see the seeds of dysfunction that would flourish within our own home.
It was important to my mother to project to the world a picture of a happy blended household of both biological and adopted children, but this was far from the truth. I’m sure my mother had good intentions in adopting children with disabilities from the direst of circumstances, but the reality inside our walls was very different. It pains me to recall instances in which I witnessed siblings, some blind or physically disabled, dragged down a flight of stairs to be thrown into a bedroom or a closet, then having the door locked from the outside. She even shut my brother Thaddeus, paraplegic from polio, in an outdoor shed overnight as punishment for a minor transgression.
Snip.
The summer between first and second grades, she was having new wallpaper installed in the bedroom I slept in, across the hall from hers on the second floor of the Connecticut house. I was getting ready to go to sleep, when my mother came over to my bed and found a tape measure. She gave me a piercing look that stopped me in my tracks and asked if I had taken it, as she had been looking for it all day. I stood in front of her, frozen. She asked why it was on my bed. I told her I didn’t know, that perhaps a workman had left it there. She asked again and again and again.
When I didn’t give the answer she wanted, she slapped my face, knocking off my glasses. She told me I was lying and directed me to tell my brothers and sisters that I had taken the tape measure. Through my tears I listened to her as she explained that we would rehearse what should have happened. She would walk into the room and I would tell her I was sorry for taking the tape measure, that I had taken it to play with and that I would never do it again. She made me rehearse it at least a half-dozen times.
That was the start of her coaching, drilling, scripting, and rehearsing – in essence, brainwashing. I became anxious and fearful. Once, when I was given a new pair of jeans, I thought they would look cool if I cut off a couple of the belt loops. When Mia saw what I had done, she spanked me repeatedly and had me remove all my clothing, saying, “You’re not deserving of any clothes” and making me stand naked in the corner of her room, in front of my older siblings who had just returned from dinner with their father André.
Plus how Farrow had drilled her children into reciting the details of the alleged “assault” over and over again.
Rachel Dolezal charged with welfare fraud. That’s taking your “I was born a poor black child” cosplay way too far…
One of those “Yeah, you just have to put it up” tweets:
Very cool. After spending all day in the Senate Armed Services Committee, I went to dinner & suddenly, in to the restaurant walked…@TheSlyStallone From Rocky to Rambo to a ton of other movies that I’ve watched over and over, really enjoyed the chance to meet him! pic.twitter.com/20s66XeGQP
At some point I will grapple with all the unraveling Clinton/Mueller/Fusion GPS/FISA/Brennan Scandularity…but not today.
Democrats, rather than maximizing their chance at a blue wave, have insisted on electing far left-wing candidates over more-electable party moderates. Those national results replicate what the Texas Democratic Party did to themselves: Push moderates out of the party. Result: More Republicans elected. They appear hellbent on replicating those results at the national level…
Former New York speaker of the House Sheldon Silver found guilty of a kickback scheme yet again. The first conviction was overturned on appeal over a technicality.
“The people who’ve lost their way are the liberals and civil libertarians, blinded by their rage for Trump, who have dropped their principles in a moment of political threat and are taking out their anger on a man who has been their staunchest ally. Maybe the question isn’t what happened to Alan Dershowitz. Maybe it’s what happened to everyone else.” Caveat: Writer suffers from usual “Fox News and Trump are the Devil” derangement. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
President Donald Trump: “Members of the violent MS-13 gang are animals.” MSM: “Trump just said all undocumented immigrants are animals!” Also: “Trump supporters are fleeing the media not because they want cheerleaders, but because they are tired of a secular, coastal, liberal press that not only cannot relate to heartland voters but thinks it is beneath them to even try.”
China, Russia and other scumbag authoritarian countries are lying about their GDP. This is my shocked face. This also why you should take all those “OMG China’s economy will overtake the U.S. in 20XX!” panics with several grains of sand.
Seattle thinks that golden goose would taste mighty fine cooked in a white wine reduction.
Class-action lawsuit filed against Facebook over revelations that the company logged users’ text and call logs using the Facebook smartphone app on Android phones. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
EU: here’s a statement condemning the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania: LOL, no. BLOCKED. (Hat tip: Pat Condell on Gab.)
Jason Shoumaker, the law school’s facilities director until November 2017, is the subject of an ongoing probe by the Travis County District Attorney’s Office and the Texas Rangers. Though Shoumaker was taken into custody Thursday over tampering charges, he is at the heart of a major fraud investigation – one that potentially involves “several million dollars of questionable expenses,” a source familiar with the probe said….During multiple pay periods, Shoumaker logged regular 8-hour days with the university while he was actually cavorting out of state, according to the affidavit.
I foolishly thought I would have time to get more done this week…
By the way, the Korean War is ending. Something that couldn’t be ended by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush41, Clinton, Bush43 or Obama is being ended by President Donald Trump. I look forward to Jennifer Rubin’s forthcoming essay on why this is actually a bad thing…
All about China’s aircraft carrier fleet. Interesting stuff, though I’d take the “OMG, China’s economy will be double that of the U.S. by 2030!” alarmism with several grains of salt.
Why you shouldn’t use your fingerprint as a password: “The first rule of passwords is that if you think it may have been compromised, you change the password. If you use your fingerprint as a password, you can’t change it.”
