Happy Friday the 13th! FBI “Partisan Weasel” Peter Strzok smirked and slithered his way through his capitol hill testimony. “That Strzok could huddle with FBI lawyers while stonewalling a Republican-led committee speaks to the corruption of official Washington and the comparative impotence of Republican administrations. Does anybody think an FBI agent who had vowed to “stop” the candidacy of Barack Obama would have lasted a week at his job, let alone over a year, after the discovery of his bias?”
The U.S. Army has announced that Austin will be home to its new Futures Command. “The Futures Command center will focus on modernizing the U.S. Army and developing new military technologies. It is expected to employ up to 500 people.” Cool. My only question is: How do I get a job there?
“MSNBC Does Not Merely Permit Fabrications Against Democratic Party Critics. It Encourages and Rewards Them.” Also: “Anyone who criticizes the Democratic Party or its leaders is instantly accused of being a Kremlin agent despite the lack of any evidence. And the organization that leads that smear campaign is the one that calls itself a news outlet.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Three Democrats: “Here’s a bill to abolish ICE.” House Republican leadership: “OK, let’s put it to a vote.” Three Democrats: “Never mind, we’ll vote against it.” Hypocrite much?
President Trump on NATO: “Europe needs to pay it’s fair share for defense.” Eurocrats: “We have no idea what he’s saying! Stop speaking in code!”
Remember how socialist darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated incumbent Joe Crowley in the 14th Congressional District Democratic primary? Surprise! Crowley is still on the ballot on the Working Families Party line. Read on for New York’s goofy third party rules (goofier than most). (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty.)
Problem: Residents of New Jersey are moving to Florida to escape high taxes. New Jersey’s solution: raise them even higher.
“Enough already!” Leonid M. Volkov, chief of staff for the anti-corruption campaigner and opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, wrote in a recent anguished post on Facebook. “What is happening with ‘the investigation into Russian interference,’ is not just a disgrace but a collective eclipse of the mind.”
What most disturbs Mr. Putin’s critics about what they see as America’s Russia fever is that it reinforces a narrative put forth tirelessly by the state-controlled Russian news media. On television, in newspapers and on websites, Mr. Putin is portrayed as an ever-victorious master strategist who has led Russia — an economic, military and demographic weakling compared with the United States — from triumph to triumph on the world stage.
“The Kremlin is of course very proud of this whole Russian interference story. It shows they are not just a group of old K.G.B. guys with no understanding of digital but an almighty force from a James Bond saga,” Mr. Volkov said in a telephone interview. “This image is very bad for us. Putin is not a master geopolitical genius.”
The European Union has always been sold, to its citizens, on a practical basis: Cheaper products. Easier travel. Prosperity and security.
But its founding leaders had something larger in mind. They conceived it as a radical experiment to transcend the nation-state, whose core ideas of race-based identity and zero-sum competition had brought disaster twice in the space of a generation.
France’s foreign minister, announcing the bloc’s precursor in 1949, called it “a great experiment” that would put “an end to war” and guarantee “an eternal peace.”
Norway’s foreign minister, Halvard M. Lange, compared Europe at that moment to the early American colonies: separate blocs that, in time, would cast off their autonomy and identities to form a unified nation. Much as Virginians and Pennsylvanians had become Americans, Germans and Frenchmen would become Europeans — if they could be persuaded.
“The keen feeling of national identity must be considered a real barrier to European integration,” Mr. Lange wrote in an essay that became a foundational European Union text.
But instead of overcoming that barrier, European leaders pretended it didn’t exist. More damning, they entirely avoided mentioning what Europeans would need to give up: a degree of their deeply felt national identities and hard-won national sovereignty.
Now, as Europeans struggle with the social and political strains set off by migration from poor and war-torn nations outside the bloc, some are clamoring to preserve what they feel they never consented to surrender. Their fight with European leaders is exploding over an issue that, perhaps more than any other, exposes the contradiction between the dream of the European Union and the reality of European nations: borders.
Establishment European leaders insist on open borders within the bloc. Free movement is meant to transcend cultural barriers, integrate economies and lubricate the single market. But a growing number of European voters want to sharply limit the arrival of refugees in their countries, which would require closing the borders.
This might seem like a straightforward matter of reconciling internal rules with public demand on the relatively narrow issue of refugees, who are no longer even arriving in great numbers.
But there is a reason that it has brought Europe to the brink, with its most important leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, warning of disaster and at risk of losing power. The borders question is really a question of whether Europe can move past traditional notions of the nation-state. And that is a question that Europeans have avoided confronting, much less answering, for over half a century.
Snip.
Perhaps the drive to restore European borders is, on some level, about borders themselves. Maybe when populists talk about restoring sovereignty and national identity, it’s not just a euphemism for anti-refugee sentiment (although such sentiment is indeed rife). Maybe they mean it.
Traveling Germany with a colleague to report on the populist wave sweeping Europe, we heard the same concerns over and over. Vanishing borders. Lost identity. A distrusted establishment. Sovereignty surrendered to the European Union. Too many migrants.
Populist supporters would often bring up refugees as a focal point and physical manifestation of larger, more abstract fears. They would often say, as one woman told me outside a rally for the Alternative for Germany, a rising populist party, that they feared their national identity was being erased.
“Germany needs a positive relationship with our identity,” Björn Höcke, a leading far-right figure in the party, told my colleague. “The foundation of our unity is identity.”
Allowing in refugees, even in very large numbers, does not mean Germany will no longer be Germany, of course. But this slight cultural change is one component of a larger European project that has required giving up, even if only by degrees, core conceits of a fully sovereign nation-state.
National policy is suborned, on some issues, to the vetoes and powers of the larger union.
Snip.
European leaders hoped they could rein in those impulses long enough to transform Europe from the top down, but the financial crisis of 2008 came when their project was only half completed. That led to the crisis in the euro, which revealed political fault lines the leadership had long denied or wished away.
The financial crisis and an accompanying outburst in Islamic terrorism also provided a threat. When people feel under threat, research shows, they seek a strong identity that will make them feel part of a powerful group.
For that, many Europeans turned to their national identity: British, French, German. But the more people embraced their national identities, the more they came to oppose the European Union, studies found — and the more they came to distrust anyone within their borders who they saw as an outsider.
European leaders, unable to square their project’s ambition of transcending nationalism with this reality of rising nationalism, have tried to have it both ways. Ms. Merkel has sought to save Europe’s border-free zone by imposing one hard border.
Sebastian Kurz, the Austrian chancellor, has called for ever-harder “external” borders, which refers to those separating the European Union from the outside world, in order to keep internal borders open.
This might work if refugee arrivals were the root issue. But it would not resolve the contradiction between the European Union as an experiment in overcoming nationalism versus the politics of the moment, in which publics are demanding more nationalism.
That resurgence starts with borders. But Hungary’s trajectory suggests it might not end there. The country’s nationalist government, after erecting fences and setting up refugee camps, has seen hardening xenophobia and rising support for tilting toward authoritarianism.
As the euro crisis showed, even pro-union leaders could never bring themselves to fully abandon the old nationalism. They are elected by their fellow nationals, after all, so naturally put them first. Their first loyalty is to their country. When that comes into conflict with the rest of the union, as it has on the issue of refugees, it’s little wonder that national self-interest wins.
Looking back through history, I can only think of two figures that have been mocked more than Trump, and they are Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ. So I say, give him a chance. How about a reality president for a reality world? Of course, this doesn’t sit well with people in New York I’m working with on projects, but, y’know, I would just withhold judgment on Trump. And it looks to me like he’s getting things done, and some of ‘em are pretty good things. And the last guy was a f*ckin’ Forrest Gump.
Trump has already done one thing that the previous three Presidents looked in our eyes and told us they were gonna do — and they knew the whole time they were never gonna do – which is move that embassy. He did it. Every expert told him that would result in the apocalypse coming…he did that. And that’s a big thing to do. And he’s done other big things. Pulling out of the Iran deal took Pawn Shop-sized balls when everybody else was telling him what a horrible mistake that was. And…we’ll see. He may be the guy who does get Kim to come along with him, that very well might happen. I follow what Billy Joe Shaver says, which is, Remember that Jesus rode in on a jackass.
No wonder Democrats never embraced him. Too much of a free-thinker… (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
LOL. Now this is funny. Remember the Hindenburg sized blimp of Trump over London that was going to rock his world?
This is it.
Blimey… it's not even the size of a Bouncy castle. Trust the socialists to cock up everything. Mock them mercilessly over this. pic.twitter.com/Owo5zX1vep
Judge Kavanaugh is widely respected on the Supreme Court. Many of his clerks go on to clerk at One First Street. More importantly, his opinions attract notice from the justices. Several of his dissents have been vindicated by subsequent Supreme Court decisions. His dissents showed the way for the Court in Michigan v. EPA (White Stallion Energy Center v. EPA concerning mercury emissions), UARG v. EPA (CRR v. EPA concerning GHG emissions), Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB (concerning separation of powers), and D.C. v. Wesby (concerning qualified immunity). And even when certiorari was granted, Judge Kavanaugh’s dissents have been noted in subsequent Supreme Court cases (as in Lexmark International v. Static Control Components which favorably cited Kavanaugh’s dissent in Grocery Manufacturers Association v. EPA). This suggests other justices will take the new junior justice’s opinions quite seriously, especially on administrative law.
Second, Kavanaugh is also a strong believer in the Second Amendment. From his 2011 Heller v. District of Columbia (the follow-up lawsuit to the original Heller decision) dissent:
In Heller, the Supreme Court held that handguns – the vast majority of which today are semi-automatic – are constitutionally protected because they have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens. There is no meaningful or persuasive constitutional distinction between semi-automatic handguns and semiautomatic rifles. Semi-automatic rifles, like semi-automatic handguns, have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens for self-defense in the home, hunting, and other lawful uses. Moreover, semiautomatic handguns are used in connection with violent crimes far more than semi-automatic rifles are. It follows from Heller’s protection of semi-automatic handguns that semi-automatic rifles are also constitutionally protected and that D.C.’s ban on them is unconstitutional.
Respectable liberal Alan Dershowitz endorsed Kavanaugh as well: “He has a lot of support from centrist academics. He is regarded as a very scholarly, very smart person. I probably will disagree with many of his opinions, but it’s hard to question his qualifications for the job.” (Hat tip: BigGator5.)
To understand the madness gripping American leftists, try to see the world through their eyes. Presto, you’re now part of the raging resistance.
Like the Palestinians who mark Israel’s birth as their nakba, or tragedy, you regard Donald Trump’s 2016 victory as a catastrophe. It’s the last thing you think of most nights, and the first thing most mornings.
You can’t shake it or escape it. Whatever you watch, listen to or read, there are reminders — Donald Trump really is president.
You actually believe the New York Times is too nice to him, so you understand why a Manhattan woman urged a reporter there to stop covering Trump to protest his presidency.
And where the hell is Robert Mueller? He was supposed to save us from this nightmare — that’s what Chuck Schumer banked on. Well?
You spend your tax cut even as you rail against the man who made it happen. And you are pleased that cousin Jimmy finally got a job, though you repeat the daily devotional that Barack Obama deserves credit for the roaring economy.
And now this — Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring, and Trump gets another Supreme Court pick. The court might tilt right for the rest of your life. He’s winning.
NOOOOOOOOO!!!
In a nutshell, our visit to the tortured mind of a Trump hater explains everything from Saturday’s mass marches to why a Virginia restaurant owner declared No Soup for Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Their loathing for Trump is bone-deep and all-consuming. This is war and they take no prisoners.
For most marchers, border policies offer a chance to vent. They didn’t make a peep when Obama did the same thing.
Last week was especially glorious not just because we rejected the latest GOPe amnesty scheme, not just because we defunded the left’s union cash extortion machine with the Janus decision, and not just because Justice Kennedy is leaving to be the swing vote on his retirement community HOA. It was especially glorious because these enormous victories – these latest enormous victories – were the direct result of normal Americans giving the gimps, grifters, and geebos of Never Trump the George Costanza treatment by doing precisely the opposite of our alleged betters’ political instincts.
Everything they told us was wrong. If we had done what they demanded, we would not be revelling in the joy of conserva-victory. We would be resigned to yet another defeat. “But Gorsuch” indeed, you never-been-kissed band of losers.
If we had listened to Never Trump, we’d have voted for Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and we would not only have Merrick Garland (or worse) on the SCOTUS but now she’d be picking another pinko who agrees with the lib bloc that the First Amendment has hitherto unknown asterisks that prevent conservatives from using it, that a bunch of other rights that aren’t in the Constitution actually are, and that the Second Amendment stuff about not infringing on our right to keep and bear arms really means libs can totally infringe on our right to keep and bear arms. Let’s leave aside our booming economy and crushing ISIS and pulling out of the climate scam and maybe peace with North Korea. Just these two Supreme Court picks makes Trump the most important and successful conservative president since The Big R. And we wouldn’t have any of it if that nattering pack of insufferable sissies had had their way.
Snip.
The remaining rump of Never Trumpers is here to lose. That’s their goal. Team Muh Principles always intended to lose. Oh, they try to play off their objections to the president as purely one of style. It’s because Donald Trump is so…so…so…oh well I never. But their displeasure with Trump’s aesthetic deficiencies is not the sole, nor even the most significant, reason for their fury at the orange-y interloper. They are really mad because, under Trump, these dorks can’t get the White House to return their calls.
Trump threw the Fredocons out of the family business. They are nothing to us. They are not brothers-in-arms and they are not friends. We don’t want to know them or what they do. We’d take them out in a figurative row boat onto Lake Tahoe but we don’t want to be seen hanging around with them.
We ruined their scam. They miss the cruise ships, filled with marks handing over cash to mingle with second-tier scribes from magazines put out by lesser sons of greater fathers that we stopped reading when they stopped mattering. Never Trump wants to once stand on a sold-out cruise ship’s bridge, pale puny arms spread wide, shouting, “I’m a minor duke of the world!”
They’ve been stripped of their silly status, but that silly status – “Oh, I am an assistant fellow at the Institute to For Conservative Studies and Mailing List Compilation” – was all they had. In the DC milieu they want to return to, they were never kings, or even princes (though they sure dig the hereditary titles vibe), but just minor royalty jealously guarding their little, tiny fiefdoms. Sure, the liberal establishment ran things, but the Professional Cons had their own petty gigs pretending to resist, pretending to care, all the while treading water in a sea of mediocrity and ineffectuality.
My father always thought it was remarkable how, despite the bias against Jews in higher education, so many Jews of his generation, and the generation before his, still managed to go to college and become doctors and lawyers. Why did it happen? Because it was a cultural imperative imposed at the family level. If Harvard wouldn’t take you, try Yale. If Yale said no, try Cornell. If none of the Ivies wanted you, try the University of Michigan (my Dad’s alma mater). The stereotype of Jewish families placing an enormous emphasis on education is a stereotype for a reason.
Asian Americans have a similar stereotype, and it too has a basis in reality.
Anyway, here’s my theory. According to reports, Harvard discriminated against Asian applicants because they had “bad” personalities. Wesley Yang has a moving op-ed in the New York Times today on the subject. He recounts how Casey Pedrick, an assistant principal at (the ruthlessly meritocratic) Stuyvesant High School in New York City was brought to tears by the evidence that Harvard discriminated against high-scoring, high-achieving, Asian-American students. Yang writes:
Ms. Pedrick knows that her Asian students believe they have to earn their admission to Stuyvesant in the only way anyone has for more than four decades: by passing a rigorous entrance exam. Their parents will often invest a major share of the family income into test preparation courses to help them pass — this despite the fact that more Asians live in poverty than any other group in New York City.
Asian students come from families that put an enormous emphasis on education as a bulwark against poverty and as a ticket to economic prosperity (not always the same thing). Contrary to some reporting, this doesn’t mean they don’t spend time on extra-curricular activities. The Asian students had more extra-curricular activities than white applicants. But, I would bet that the Asian kids were more focused on education as high-end vocational training. The white kids come from a milieu where college is seen as a place for making social connections and a rite of passage. The Asian kids want careers, specifically careers in STEM professions.
So here’s my theory: It’s not that these kids don’t have good personalities, it’s that they don’t have fully “woke” personalities. They don’t speak the language of cosmopolitan, secular noblesse oblige that so often takes the form of political correctness — at least not with sufficient fluency. They don’t know the shibboleths that demonstrate they understand what higher education is really for.
Moreover, their inability or unwillingness to care enough about such stuff is an indication of what they want out of college. Perhaps there are a bunch of Asian-immigrant parents out there who would be perfectly happy to have their kids go to Harvard and major in gender theory or some such. But I suspect not.
As I recently recounted, my father-in-law had the kind of practicality that comes from being a refugee. His favorite response to self-indulgent ideas about what to do for a living was, “Yeah, but can you eat it?” What he meant was that careers, education, and business ideas should be grounded in something real, something useful. I suspect that there are many Asian-American Paul Gavoras out there.
If Harvard lifted its anti-Asian criteria, Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research said the share of Asian students at Harvard would more than double, from 19 percent to 43 percent. But that 43 percent wouldn’t be distributed equally among all courses and disciplines. It would be a boon for computer-science and biology classes, but even more seats would go empty in women’s history or poetry courses. And I can’t help but think that the faculties in the humanities and the softer social sciences have disproportionate sway on the cultural and political assumptions of the school’s administration. They are, after all, the talkers.
“The Left is turning against the First Amendment because absolute respect for freedom of speech is not consistent with tearing down capitalism.”
Merkel blinks, to set up immigration screening centers on border to keep her coalition together.
Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, and six of his followers were executed in Japan for their role in the sarin gas attacks against the Tokyo subway system in 1995 that killed 12, in addition to another 24 or so victims of other cult attacks. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Federal agents arrested a legal permanent resident from Mexico who bought 5,000 rounds of ammunition for smuggling into the Mexican border city of Matamoros — the scene of large-scale internecine Gulf Cartel gun battles.
The arrest took place over the weekend when 48-year-old Ruben Ramos Beltran went to a local gun store and bought 5,000 rounds of ammunition, a criminal complaint obtained by Breitbart Texas revealed. Authorities describe the man as a Mexican national who is a legal resident in Texas. Homeland Security Investigations was carrying out a surveillance operation at the local gun store and spotted Ramos pick up an order of 5,000 rounds of 7.62×39 ammunition, a type typically used in AK-47 type rifles which are heavily favored by cartel gunmen.
5,000 rounds is not a small amount, and at current prices that works out to a bit over a grand. On the other hand, if that’s your primary gun, and you’re a “100 rounds at the range every week” sort of guy, that’s not that far off the curve… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Rolling Stone writer gets trolled into wearing MAGA hat in search of an interview. “I directed Ms. Robb up the hill and to a pleasant location near the lake in the nearby State Park where I imagine that I might have waited, had I actually left my house, which I hadn’t.”
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.
Nancy Pelosi says she wants to be Speaker again. How nice of her to fire up the Republican base for midterms…
Democratic advantage on generic congressional ballots down to 1.2%. And that’s from Reuters, which is not known to be particularly Republican or Trump friendly…
I’m thinking that the Democrats who are making such a big deal out of these ads really don’t themselves believe in democracy. They have been going on and on for a year and a half about how Donald Trump shouldn’t be President. Personally, I want to believe in democracy, and what I saw back in November 2016 is that the American people voted Donald Trump into office. I accept that he is rightfully President because he won the election. It bothers me tremendously that so many people won’t do that. I think they do not believe in democracy. And I know they are leaning very hard into the argument that what happened wasn’t real democracy. Look at those stupid ads they’ve made such a big deal about!
AND: Please don’t tell me about Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote. What if Donald Trump had held rallies in upstate New York and various places in California, etc. etc.? He won the election that was held. She won an imaginary election that he wasn’t competing in.
Baghdad now has thriving night life and bars again. Plus men sport hairstyles that look like they’re auditioning to play the next alien race on Star Trek. Also this: “As the war against ISIS wound down, [Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-]Abadi began removing the drab, ugly concrete blast walls that once divided neighborhoods. The government is moving many of these barriers to the Syrian border, where it is creating a wall to keep out ISIS militants.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Bret Easton Ellis on Kayne West’s redpilling: “As someone who considers themselves a disillusioned Gen-X’er, I think there IS a backlash brewing against leftist hysteria…What I used to semi-align myself with has no answers for anything right now, just constant bitching and finding ways to delegitimize an election.” And if you can’t trust the author of American Psycho to offer unbiased political commentary, who can you trust?
“Cultural appropriation is not a glitch of American life. It’s a feature. It’s part of what makes the country great. We take your culture, we get rid of the oppression, the mass murder, the slavery, the intransigent poverty and the endless internecine wars. We keep the pasta and the funny hats.”
Uber software decided pedestrian was a false positive. Result: Dead pedestrian.
Since Dick’s Sporting Goods has decided to lobby for gun control (just how does that increase shareholder value for a sporting goods company?), Springfield Armory has cut ties with them.
Now some links from the “Old News Is So Exciting!” file:
Since I was distracted primary week by a dying dog, this bit of news slipped under the radar and I only recently realized I forgot to report it: Democratic State Rep. Dawnna Dukes went down in flames back in March, along with fellow Democratic state reps Roberto Alonzo of Dallas, Tomas Uresti (brother of convicted felon and former state senator Carlos Uresti) of San Antonio, and Diana Arevalo of San Antonio.
From 2015: “Police find 3,700 knives, satanic shrine in mobile home of Florida woman who tried stabbing an officer.” I think that’s taking your cosplay too far. Also, unless your ID card says “Sarah Kerrigan,” you don’t get to be the Queen of Blades…
This Penny Arcade post is actually from several years ago. I thought it was a swell piece of writing then, and since Tycho relinked to it recently, I read it again, and still think it’s a swell piece of writing. I commend it to your attention.
